Chapter XXII
HE loved the market. A great part of it was close-packed and crowded into several side streets, and it was so concentrated that it was difficult not to jostle people, unintentionally, and each time you stopped to look, to buy, or to admire, you formed an îlot de resistance against the flow of the morning attack of the purchasers.
The Colonel liked to study the spread and high piled cheeses and the great sausages. People at home think mortadella is a sausage, he thought.
Then he said to the woman in the booth, “Let me try a little of that sausage, please. Only a sliver.”
She cut a thin, paper thin, slice for him, ferociously, and lovingly, and when the Colonel tasted it, there was the half smokey, black pepper-corned, true flavor of the meat from the hogs that ate acorns in the mountains.
“I will take a quarter of a kilo.”
The Barone’s lunches for the shooting blinds were of a
