![]() By midnight the populace has had a fair amount to drink and that makes the discussions in the piazza even more heated. The noise is terrible, grows louder as the day darkens into evening, and continues late into the night. It appears there is nothing that unites our people except their love of the quarrel itself, the quarrel understood as a public art form, as the defining heart of our culture. If they have read novels by writers who are also, or were at one time, married couples, then they vehemently take the side of one author or the other and will not be persuaded to change their minds. They disagree about the best flavors of ice cream, and have strong and irreconcilable opinions concerning the beauty of film actresses. They dispute the flatness of the earth and the efficacy of vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella. They quarrel about the likelihood of hurricanes, about the scandal of bribery behind the contentious awarding of the Summer Olympic Games to a city in the Arctic Circle, about the impossibility of love and the futility of politics and the secret illegal affections of eminent Catholic priests. CREAKS AND SHRIEKS CROSSWORD FREESalman Rushdie on being free to disagree. CREAKS AND SHRIEKS CROSSWORD WINDOWSIf they are arguing while in adjacent motorcars with the windows down, they toot like the motorcyclists but also rev their engines and, when they are irritated beyond the point of endurance, they roll their windows up. If they sit astride motorcycles they sound their horns in frustration, or to drown out their adversaries. They raise their voices they pound their right fists into the palms of their left hands they stamp their feet (doesn’t matter which foot-both are stamped equally). They drive fifteen kilometres from the big city to express their bad moods. It’s as if people came here, to this peaceful little square in this peaceful little town, to get into fights. On most of these days there are more people in the piazza than live in the locality. All around the piazza you can hear the loud sounds of people quarrelling, six days a week. It should be a quiet place, a sleepy provincial square, but it is not. It is a piazza into which seven narrow roads debouch, one at each corner and one each at the midpoint of three of the piazza’s four sides only the side with the church is uninterrupted by a cobbled street. Everything of any significance in his life has happened and will happen right here, in this little piazza. M., he rises, wipes his lips, and shuffles away, presumably to his home. He goes to the only café in the piazza, the Café of the Fountain, and sits on a wooden chair at a wooden table and orders a small, strong coffee. His hair is white, and there is a beret on his head. He is wearing, most days, a dark-blue jacket buttoned all the way up to the neck, and navy pants that fasten with a drawstring at the waist. He walks slowly, shuffling his feet, which are encased in dusty brown loafers. Every day, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, when the sun’s heat has begun to diminish, the old man comes into the piazza. ![]()
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