Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories (10 page)

Later, when the Indian figs were in season, they settled down together in the dense thicket, peeling figs the whole day long.
They wandered about together under the ancient walnut trees, and Jeli beat the branches so vigorously that the walnuts came raining down like hailstones.
Shrieking with joy, the girl tried her utmost to gather up as many as she could, then ran off holding on tightly to the corners of her apron, and staggering from side to side like an old woman.

During the winter it was so cold that Mara never dared poke her head out of doors.
Towards evening, you could sometimes see smoke rising from the sumac fires lit by Jeli on the high plateau or in the hills near Macca, to prevent himself from freezing to death like the great tits he would come across next morning behind a rock, or in the shelter of a mound of earth.
Even the horses liked to dangle their tails a little around the fire, huddling close together to keep warm.

In March the larks returned to the high plateau, the sparrows to the cottage roofs, the leaves and the nests to the hedgerows, and Mara ventured out again to go walking withjeli over the tender grass, through the flowering scrub, beneath the trees, still bare, that were just starting to be dotted in green.
Jeli poked around in the brambles like a bloodhound, to go uncovering the broods of blackbirds, that peered out at him in bewilderment with their tiny peppercorn eyes.
Often they would pick up baby rabbits, driven out of their burrows half naked but already with long twitching ears, and tuck them into their shirt fronts.
And they would run about the fields behind the horses, and drive them step by step across the stubble in the wake of the reapers, pausing every
so often whenever one of the herd stopped to take up a mouthful of grass.
By the time evening came they were at the bridge, where they went their separate ways without so much as saying goodbye to one another.

In that way they spent the whole summer.
Meanwhile the sun began to set behind the Hill of the Cross, and the redbreasts flew after it towards the mountain as the light began to fade, pursuing it across the cactus scrub.
The crickets and the cicadas fell silent, and at that hour of the day an air of great sadness seemed to spread itself over the whole of the countryside.

It was then that Jeli’s father, the cowherd, who had caught malaria at Ragoleti, arrived at Jeli’s hut, almost falling off the donkey that was carrying him.
Jeli very quickly lit a fire, and ran over to the farm to find a few eggs for him.
‘Don’t bother with all that,’ said his father.
‘Just spread a bit of straw close to the fire.
The fever’s coming over me again.’

The shuddering effect of the fever was so strong that the father, Menu, buried as he was under his own big cloak, the donkey’s saddle-bag, and Jeli’s knapsack, was trembling all over like leaves in November, and in the light of the fire his face was a deathly white all over.
The peasants came across from the farm to ask him how he was feeling, but all the poor wretch could do by way of reply was to yelp like a puppy taking suck from its mother.
‘It’s the kind of malaria that kills you quicker than a shot from a gun,’ said his friends, warming their hands at the fire.

They even called the doctor, but it was money entirely wasted, because all he said was that the illness was so well known and straightforward that even a child could treat it, and that if the fever was not of the lethal variety, a course of sulphur would clear it up in no time.
They filled old Menu up to his eyebrows with sulphur, but for all the good it did him they might have thrown him down a well.

‘Take a good dose of
ecalibbiso.
¹
It doesn’t cost anything,’ Massaro Agrippino suggested, ‘and if it does no more good than the sulphur, at least you won’t be crippling yourself with the expense.’ So he took a dose of eucalyptus, but the fever kept coming back, even stronger than before.

Jeli did all he could to look after his ailing parent.
Every morning, before leaving with his ponies, he left him his medicine in a bowl, sticks close at hand for the fire, eggs in the warm ashes, and he came back early in the evening with more wood to keep the fire going overnight, and a flask of wine, and one or two bits of mutton he had run as far as Licodia to buy for him.
The poor lad saw to everything conscientiously, like a good housewife, and his father, following his every movement with his tired eyes as Jeli went about his various tasks in the hut, smiled to himself from time to time with the thought that the boy would know how to look after himself when he was left all alone in the world.

On the days when the fever let up for a few hours, Menu staggered to his feet, tightened the scarf round his head, propped himself in the doorway while the sun was still shining, and waited for Jeli to come back.
Once Jeli had dropped his bundle of firewood at the door and laid the wine-flask and the eggs on the table, his father would say, ‘Go and boil up the
ecalibbiso
for tonight,’ or ‘Remember, when I’m not here any more, your mother’s gold is with your aunt Agata,’ to which Jeli would nod his head to show he had taken it in.

‘It’s no use,’ Massaro Agrippino kept repeating every time he called again to see how the old man was coping with his fever.
‘Your whole system’s racked with it.’

Menu listened without batting an eyelid, his face whiter than the scarf round his head.

In the end he could no longer get up, and Jeli started crying when he found his strength was insufficient to help him turn over from one side to the other.
Gradually Menu lost the power of speech altogether.
The last words he spoke to his son were these:

‘When I’m dead, go to the man who owns the cows at Ragoleti, and get him to hand over the three
onze
and twelve sacks of grain owing to me from May up to the present.’

‘No,’ Jeli replied, ‘it’s only two and a quarter, because you left the cows over a month ago, and you mustn’t steal from the hand that feeds you.’

‘That’s true!’ Menu declared, as he closed his eyes for the last time.

Now I really am alone in the world like a lost foal, ready to be eaten
up by the wolves!
Jeli thought to himself after they had taken his father away to the cemetery at Licodia.

Mara, too, had come to have a look at the dead man’s house, spurred on by the restless curiosity aroused in people by frightening events.

‘You see what’s happened to me?’ said Jeli.
The girl drew back from him in alarm, worried in case he got her to enter the house where the corpse had been lying.

Jeli went and collected his father’s money, then set off with his herd for Passanitello, where the grass was already tall on the fallow land, and the grazing was good, so that the ponies had no reason to move on.
Meanwhile Jeli had grown up, and he often thought to himself, as he played on his whistle, that Mara must have grown up as well.
And when he returned after a long absence to Tebidi, driving his horses slowly along the slippery lanes around Cosimo’s Spring, he kept looking out for the bridge over the river, and the tenement block in the Jacitano valley, and the roofs of the big houses where the doves were always flying back and forth.
But just at that time the landowner had given Massaro Agrippino notice to quit, and Mara’s whole family was moving.
Jeli came across the girl, now a pretty young woman, at the farmyard gate, keeping an eye on her belongings as they were being loaded on to the removal cart.
Their empty room now seemed more drab and blackened with smoke than he remembered.
The table, and the bed, and the chest of drawers, and the images of the Virgin and St John, and even the nails for hanging up pumpkins for seed, had left their mark on the walls against which they had rested for so many years.
‘We’re leaving,’ Mara told him, as she saw him looking all about him.
‘We’re going to Marineo, where the big tenement block is, down in the valley.’

Jeli gave a hand to Massaro Agrippino and his wife Lia in loading the cart, and when there was nothing left to take away, he went and sat with Mara on the edge of the trough.
‘Even the houses,’ he said, when he saw that the last of the baskets had been loaded on to the cart, ‘even the houses look different once everything has been taken out.’

‘At Marineo,’ Mara replied, ‘my mother says we’ll have a nicer room, bigger than the store where the cheeses are kept.’

‘Now that you won’t be here any longer, I don’t want to come back.
It’ll feel like winter again, seeing that door locked and bolted.’

‘At Marineo we’ll get to know a lot of new people, like Pudda the redhead and the gamekeeper’s daughter.
We’ll be happy there, and at harvest time over eighty reapers will come with bagpipes, and we’ll go dancing on the threshing-floor.’

Massaro Agrippino and his wife had set off with the cart, and Mara was running happily along behind them, carrying the basket with the pigeons in it.
Jeli decided to go with her as far as the bridge, and when Mara was about to disappear down the valley he called out to her: ‘Mara!
Hey, Mara!’

‘What do you want?’ said Mara.

He no longer knew what he wanted.

‘You, Jeli, what are you going to do here, all by yourself?’ the girl continued.

‘I’ll be staying with the ponies.’

Mara went skipping off, and he remained rooted to the spot for as long as he could hear the sound of the cart trundling over the stones.
The last rays of the sun were touching the high rocks on the Hill of the Cross, the grey foliage of the olives was fading in the dusk, and the whole of the countryside was immersed in silence except for the sound of the grey mare’s cowbell.

Once Mara had gone to Marineo and found new friends, and the grape harvest came round, she forgot about him.
But Jeli thought about her the whole time, because he had nothing else to occupy his mind during the long days he spent with only the tails of his animals to look at.
Moreover, he no longer had any reason to descend to the valley on the far side of the bridge, and he never set foot inside the farm any more.
That was the reason he took so long to find out that Mara was engaged to be married, because so much water had passed under the bridge since their last meeting.
He only saw the girl again at the feast of San Giovanni, when he took his ponies to be sold at the fair.
The gala turned into a real nightmare for him, and cost him his living, God help him, when one of his master’s ponies was involved in an accident.

On the day of the fair the farm-bailiff was waiting from dawn for the ponies to arrive, striding up and down in his well-polished boots behind the cruppers of the horses and the mules lined up on each side of the road.
The fair was nearly over, and there was still no sign of Jeli
coming round the bend of the road.
On the parched slopes of Calvary and Windmill Hill, one or two flocks of sheep with lacklustre eyes lingered in compact groups nuzzling the earth, and a few pairs of oxen of the sort that a farmer sells to pay his rent stood motionless under the baking rays of the sun.
Further down the valley, the church-bell of San Giovanni began to ring for High Mass, as fireworks crackled away in the background.
Suddenly the fair seemed to come alive, and a shout went up from the people milling round the tented stalls along the side of the road, that echoed down the valley to the church itself: ‘Viva San Giovanni!’

‘Holy Mother of Christ!’ screamed the bailiff.
‘That idiot of a Jeli is going to cost me the fair.’

Startled by the noise, the sheep raised their heads and began to bleat in unison, and even the oxen took a languid step or two, looking round with their great, attentive eyes.

The reason the bailiff was so angry was because that was the day (‘on the advent of San Giovanni neath the elm’ as the contract was worded) when the rent for the main enclosures was due, and to make up the sum that was owed he was counting on selling the ponies.
But there he was, surrounded by as many ponies, horses and mules as the good Lord ever created, all of them combed and gleaming, and tricked out in their bows and their tassels and their bells, shaking them merrily away to relieve the tedium, and turning their heads towards every passer-by, as though waiting for some charitable soul to make up his mind to buy them.

‘He must have fallen asleep, that blockhead!’ the bailiff kept roaring.
‘And now he’s left me with a bellyful of ponies!’

In fact, Jeli had been walking all through the night so that the ponies would arrive fresh at the fair and take up a good position when they got there, and had reached Piana del Corvo when the stars known in those parts as the Three Kings were still twinkling on the horizon above Mont’ Altore.
²
Carts and people on horseback kept overtaking him along the road on their way to the fair, and the young fellow was keeping a careful watch in case the ponies took fright at the unusual comings and goings and ran off in all directions, making sure they kept in line along the edge of the road behind the grey, that ambled calmly
ahead with the cowbell strung round her neck.
Every so often, when the road ran over the crest of a hill, you could hear the church-bell of San Giovanni in the far distance, breaking the nocturnal silence of the countryside with its festive sound, and all the way along the road, wherever there were people on foot or on horseback going to Vizzini, you could hear shouts of ‘Viva San Giovanni!’ And you could see rockets lighting up the sky on the far side of the Canziria hills, like shooting stars in August.