``But she shouldn't have come here in the first place,'' the women had said.

``No, no. Not that one. She thought she was bigger than we are because she came from Torino.''

``Eh, Torino! She gave herself fancy airs! Just because she had a part on the stage in the old country, she thought she could carry her head higher than ours.'' They had slapped their thighs.

``It's not for making pretty speeches about Dante those actresses get paid so good.''

``Henh!'' Calloused fingers, caressed only by the smoothness of polished rosaries, had swayed excitedly beneath puckered chins where tiny black hairs sprouted, never to be tweezed away. Mauve colored mouths that had never known anything sweeter than the taste of new wine and the passion of man's tongue had not smiled, but had condemned again and again. ``Puttana!''

But if the Old Man even thought about his wife now, nobody cared a fig. It was enough for people to know that at one time he had looked down the street at the fleshy suppleness of a woman he had consumed -- watching her become thinner and thinner in the distance, as thin as the seams on her stockings, and still thinner. His voice had not commanded her to stop. It had not questioned why. The women said they had seen him wave an exhausted farewell; but he might have been shooing away the fleas that hopped from his yellow dog onto him. (He was never without that dog.) And his eyes -- those miniature sundials of variegated yellow -- had not altered their expression or direction. The Old Man's very soul could have left him and flown down that street, but he wouldn't have had anyone know it.