"R. A. MacAvoy - Damiano's Lute" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacAvoy R A)

understand Lappish.
"Haven't you ever been a mother before?" continued Saara. "I have. A mother
has to be more careful than other people. A mother has to think ahead."
The goat made the rudest of noises, and with one cloven hind hoof she scraped
off a wad of musty belly hair, along with some skin. Then she bleated again
and rolled over, exposing that unkempt abdomen to the sun.
"I could sing you a song that would make you eat every leaf off every tree in
the garden—or at least as high as you could reach," the woman murmured,
yawning. "But then you'd explode, and that, too, would be bad for the baby."
Saara, like the goat, was made lazy by the sun. She turned over and watched
her blue felt dress, freshly washed and dripping, swinging from the branch of
a flowering hops tree. The wind played through the hair of her head, and
through her private hair as well. She chewed a blade of grass and considered.
The goat bored her, though there was a certain satisfaction in helping the
beast produce a sound lad. But
4 Damiano's Lute
Saara came from a herding people, and did not regard livestock with
sentimentality.
No, it was not Saara, but the child-voiced presence within her that wanted to
talk to the goat. She could isolate this presence from hersetf-proper and feel
its warm edges. It was a bundle of visions, memories, instincts and,.. and
fire. It was a shadow with dark eyes and skin: a guest in her soul. It was
young, eager, a bit temperamental....
And undeniably full to bursting with sentiment. It liked to talk to goats.
Its name was Damiano Delstrego—or at least the presence belonged by rights to
this Damiano, who had left it with her, like seme foundling at a church door,
and not part of his own being.
It was wearisome that he should do this, wearisome in the extreme. Sprawled
flat on the sunny lawn, Saara let her song die away. Then, for an instant, she
had the urge to rush at the sad, partial spirit she harbored, dispossessing it
and recovering die unity of her own soul. But if she did that, she knew that
Delstrego himself, wherever the fool had wandered (west, he had said,), would
be half dead, instead of only divided in two.
Despite the passage of seasons and the bitterness with which Saara and the
Italian had fought on this very hill one day, killing two loves together (or
maybe three), Saara remembered Damiano as he had knelt in the snow before her,
weeping over the body of a little dog, and so she refrained.
Besides, the dark immaterial eyes with their sad questions trusted her and
depended upon her, and Saara had been a mother.
And the most important reason that Saara did not evict her strange tenant was
the same reason for which she courted the attentions of this unmannerly goat.
She was lonely. For the first time in twenty years and more Saara was lonely.
She flipped onto her belly again and used her hands to thrust herself off the
earth, snapping her feet up under her. The goat also sprang up with a startled
bleat, flailing her broomstick legs in all directions. Sunlight kissed the
Damiano's Lute 5
top of Saara's nose—already slightly burned with such kisses—and polished her
shoulders.
Once upright she stood still, panting. Suddenly she flinched, though nothing
but sun and soft wind had touched her. At the peak of her irritation with the