“How’s that?”
“Twenty-five lire.”
“What?” I said. “You could have read it. It’s only dirty from the state
of the roads.”
“You don’t like Italian roads?”
“They are dirty.”
“Fifty lire.” He spat in the road. “Your car is dirty and you are dirty
too.”
“Good. And give me a receipt with your name.”
He took out a receipt-book, made in duplicate, and perforated, so one
side could be given to the customer, and the other side filled in and
kept as a stub. There was no carbon to record what the customer’s ticket
said.
“Give me fifty lire.”
He wrote in indelible pencil, tore out the slip and handed it to me. I
read it.
“This is for twenty-five lire.”
“A mistake,” he said, and changed the twenty-five to fifty.
“And now the other side. Make it fifty in the part you keep.”
He smiled a beautiful Italian smile and wrote something on the receipt
stub, holding it so I could not see.
“Go on,” he said, “before your number gets dirty again.”
We drove for two hours after it was dark and slept in Mentone that
night. It seemed very cheerful and clean and sane and lovely. We had
driven from Ventimiglia to Pisa and Florence, across the Romagna to
Rimini, back through Forli, Imola, Bologna, Parma, Piacenza and Genoa,
to Ventimiglia again. The whole trip had only taken ten days. Naturally,
in such a short trip, we had no opportunity to see how things were with
the country or the people.