Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories (11 page)

‘It’s like Christmas night!’ Jeli was saying to the boy helping him drive the herd.
‘They’re celebrating and letting off fireworks on all the farms, and the whole of the countryside’s dotted with bonfires.’

The boy made no reply, as it was all he could do to push one leg in front of the other to prevent himself from nodding off to sleep.
But Jeli’s whole body tingled with excitement at the sound of the church-bell, and he couldn’t stop talking, as though every one of those rockets flashing up silently through the dark beyond the mountain was blossoming forth from his soul.

‘Mara will be there, too, at the gala of San Giovanni,’ he said.
‘She goes every year.’

Unperturbed at the lack of any reply from Alfio, he went on, ‘D’you know what?
Mara’s really grown up now, taller than her mother who brought her into the world.
When I saw her again I could hardly believe she was the same girl I went gathering the Indian figs with, and beating down the walnuts.’

And he started singing all the songs he knew, at the top of his voice.

‘Hey there, Alfio, have you fallen asleep?’ he shouted at him when he’d finished.
‘Make sure the grey stays behind you the whole time.
Watch what you’re doing!’

‘No, I’m not asleep,’ Alfio replied, in a sullen tone of voice.

‘Do you see
Puddara
³
winking at us up there, over towards Granvilla, as though they were firing off rockets as far away as Santa Domenica?
It’ll soon be dawn, but we’ll arrive at the fair in time to find a good place.
Hey, Blackie, my pretty one, you’ll have a nice new halter and little red tassels for the fair!
And you too, Star, my beauty!’

He went on talking like this to each of the ponies in turn, so that they would be comforted by hearing his voice in the dark.
But it made
him sad to think that Star and Blackie were going to the fair to be sold.

‘Once they’re sold, they’ll go off with their new owner, and be seen no more in the herd, just like Mara, when she went to Marineo.
Her father’s doing well down there at Marineo.
When I called to see them they filled me up with all the fruits of the earth, bread, wine, cheese, everything you can think of, because he’s almost the head farmer now, and has the keys to everything, and I could have eaten the whole farm if I’d wanted to.
It’s such a long time since we saw one another that Mara had a job to recognize me, and she cried out, “Oh, look!
It’s Jeli, from Tebidi!” It was like someone coming back from faraway places, when the sight of a hilltop is enough for him to recognize the village where he grew up.
Lia, her mother, didn’t want me to call Mara by her Christian name, because people are so ignorant and they start gossiping.
But Mara laughed, and turned so red in the face that she looked as if she’d just been putting bread in the oven.
The way she spread out the tablecloth and laid the table, she seemed a different girl altogether.
“Do you still remember Tebidi?” I asked her as soon as her mother went out of the room to pour fresh wine from the cask.
“Of course I remember,” she said.
“I remember the church-bell at Tebidi, and the campanile shaped like a saltcellar, and the music from the veranda, and the two cats carved in stone that seemed to be purring away on the garden gate.” I could picture all these things in my mind as she was talking about them.
Mara looked me up and down goggle-eyed, and she said, “My goodness, how you’ve grown!” Then she started laughing again, and gave me a slap on the side of the head.’

That was how Jeli the horsekeeper lost his job, because just at that moment a carriage, which no one had heard coming as it made its way slowly up the hill, came over the brow and rushed suddenly past with a great commotion of horse-whip and bells, as if it had the devil inside it.
The ponies, terrified out of their wits, scattered in a flash as though an earthquake was happening, and it took a great deal of shouting and calling and
whoas!
from Jeli and the lad before they managed to round them up around the grey, which was also rearing up a little as she trotted on with the cowbell round her neck.
As soon as Jeli had taken stock of his animals, he saw that Star was missing, and started tearing his hair out because at that point the road ran alongside a ravine, and
it was in the ravine that Star lay badly smashed up, a pony worth all of twelve
onze,
a king’s ransom!
Weeping and shouting, Jeli went round calling out ‘Ho there!
Ho there!’ to the colt, but still no sign of him, until finally Star responded from the foot of the ravine with a pathetic whinny, as if the poor beast was actually able to talk.

‘Oh, my God!’ cried Jeli and the lad.
‘My God, how terrible!’

On hearing them wailing so loudly in the dark, people on their way to the fair stopped to ask them what they had lost, but once they were told what the trouble was, they just carried on along the road.

Star was lying motionless where he had fallen, his legs in the air, and as Jeli gently prodded him all over, crying and talking to him as though he could understand his every word, the poor beast twisted his head round with an effort and turned it towards him, gasping for breath in his agony.

‘He must have broken something!’ Jeli wailed, in despair at being unable to see anything in the dark, and the colt, dropping its head again like a stone, lay there lifeless.
Alfio, who had stayed behind on the road to look after the herd, was the first to calm down, and took some bread out of his bag.
The sky had now begun to turn a pale blue, and the tall, black outlines of the surrounding hills seemed to steal into view one after the other.
From the bend in the road you could begin to pick out the village, with Calvary and Windmill Hill silhouetted against the dawn, still in dark shadow, flecked with the white dots of the sheep.
And as the oxen grazing on the ridges moved this way and that against the blue of the sky, it seemed that the profiles of the mountains themselves were coming to life and swarming with activity.
From the foot of the ravine the church-bell could no longer be heard, fewer people passed by along the road, and those who did were hurrying to get to the fair.
Poor Jeli couldn’t think what saint to commend himself to in that wilderness.
As for Alfio, he was unable to lend a hand by himself, so he simply went on chewing his hunk of bread.

Eventually they caught sight of the bailiff in the distance galloping up on horseback and yelling and swearing so loudly to see the animals standing still on the road that Alfio took to his heels up the hillside.
But Jeli stayed where he was by the side of Star.
The bailiff left his mule on the road and descended into the ravine, where he tried to
encourage the animal to stand up, pulling it by its tail.
‘Leave him alone,’ said Jeli, turning so white in the face that you would have thought it was he who had broken his bones.
‘Leave him alone!
Don’t you see the poor beast can’t move?’

In fact, with every movement and every effort he was forced to make, Star let out a piercing cry that sounded almost human.
The bailiff took it out on Jeli with a barrage of kicks and blows to the body, cursing and swearing till he was blue in the face.

Meanwhile Alfio, slightly reassured, had returned to the road to keep an eye on the animals, and tried to defend himself by calling out, ‘It wasn’t my fault.
I was walking on ahead with the grey.’

‘There’s nothing we can do about it,’ said the bailiff, by now convinced that it was all a waste of time.
‘The only thing it’s good for now is its hide, while it’s still fresh.’

Jeli began to tremble like a leaf when he saw the bailiff go and collect his shotgun from the pack-saddle of his mule.

‘Get out of the way, you useless idiot!’ roared the bailiff.
‘I don’t know what stops me from laying you out as well alongside that colt, which was worth a lot more than you are.
The devil take the robber of a priest who baptized you!’

Star, unable to move, turned his head and stared at them with his great, wide-open eyes, as though he had understood every word, and his coat bristled in waves along his ribs as though he was shuddering all over.
The bailiff destroyed Star on the spot for his hide, and the dull thud of the shot at point-blank range into his living flesh gave Jeli the feeling it was all happening to him.

‘If you want my advice,’ the bailiff put it to him, ‘make sure you don’t go near the master for the wages he owes you, or you’ll get more than you bargained for!’

The bailiff rode off with Alfio and the rest of the ponies, which didn’t even look round to see what had happened to Star whenever they paused to take up a mouthful of grass from the verge.
Star was left all alone in the ravine, waiting for them to come and peel his hide, with his eyes wide-open as ever and his four legs in the air, at peace with the world because at last he was out of his suffering.
Now that Jeli had seen the bailiff take deliberate aim at the pony and pull the
trigger as the beast turned its head pathetically towards him, he stopped crying and sat on a boulder staring intently away at it until the men came to strip the carcase.

After what had happened to Star, he was free to wander at will, enjoy himself at the fair, or hang around for the rest of the day in the village square, watching the playboys at the gaming house for as long as he liked.
But because he was without any means or a place to live, he also had to find out if anyone had a job to offer him.

That’s the way things happen in the world.
While Jeli, with his bag slung over his shoulder and his stick in his hand, went looking for a new employer, the band played merrily away in the square in their plumed hats, amid a crowd of white-capped people swarming about like flies, and the playboys sat enjoying themselves in the gaming house.
Everyone was dressed up, like the animals at the fair, and in one corner of the square there was a woman in a short skirt and flesh-coloured stockings that made her legs look bare, beating away on a large chest in front of a painted sheet depicting Christians being put to the torture, with blood running in rivers.
One of the crowd of people gaping open-mouthed was Massaro Cola, who had known Jeli when he was at Passanitello, and who told him he would find him a new employer, because Isidoro Macca wanted someone to look after his pigs.
‘But don’t tell him anything about Star,’ Massaro Cola warned him.
‘That’s the sort of accident that can happen to anyone.
But it’s best not to talk about it.’

So they went off in search of Isidoro Macca, who was dancing at the wine-cellar, and while Cola went in to make inquiries Jeli waited outside in the street, surrounded by the crowd looking in at the doorway.
The dingy room was filled with an enormous crowd of people leaping about and enjoying themselves, all red-faced and out of breath, making such a clatter with their boots on the tiled floor that you couldn’t even hear the steady beat of the double-bass.
As soon as one tune was finished, for which they’d paid five pence, the dancers shot up their fingers to demand another, whereupon the double-bass player made a cross on the wall with a piece of coal to keep the record straight, then started up all over again.
‘These people spend money like water,’ Jeli kept saying to himself.
‘Their pockets must be full of it.
They’re not penniless
like me, or out of a job, the way they’re sweating buckets and jumping about all over the place as though they’re being paid to do it!’ When Massaro Cola came out and told him that Macca needed nobody, he turned round and walked sadly away.

Mara was living down towards Sant’ Antonio, where the houses sprawl over the bridge, facing the Canziria valley, with its rich green carpet of cactus and its watermills stirring up the stream at intervals lower down.
But now that he was not even wanted to look after the pigs, Jeli hadn’t the courage to go near the place, and as he wandered through the crowd, with people mercilessly pushing and shoving him this way and that, he felt more lonely than he ever did on the uplands of Passanitello, and wanted to burst into tears.
In the end Massaro Agrippino, who was striding around all over the place swinging his arms and having a good time at the gala, came up behind Jeli in the square, shouting ‘Hey, Jeli!
Hey there!’ and took him back home with him.
Mara, dressed up to the nines, with huge ear-rings flapping against her cheeks, was standing in the doorway with her hands spread out across her belly to show off all her rings, waiting for it to grow dark so that she could go and see the fireworks.

‘Oh!’ said Mara.
‘Are you here as well for the feast of San Giovanni?’

Jeli really didn’t have the courage to enter because he was so poorly dressed, but Massaro Agrippino gave him a shove from behind, telling him he was an old friend of the family, and that they knew he had come to the fair with his master’s ponies.
His wife Lia poured him a generous glass of wine, and they insisted on taking him with them to see the illuminations, along with their friends and neighbours.

On arriving in the square, Jeli was struck dumb with amazement.
The whole place was a sea of fire, like burning stubble fields, because of the huge number of rockets being set off by his devotees in the presence of the saint, who was standing there at the entrance to the church, a figure draped in black beneath his silver canopy.
The devotees were running in and out of the flames like a pack of devils, and there was even a woman, half undressed and dishevelled, her eyes popping out of her head, and a priest, hatless, with his cassock round his ears, who seemed to be possessed by the zeal of his devotion.