Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories (12 page)

‘That fellow over there is the son of Massaro Neri, the farm-bailiff
on the Salonia estate.
He spends a small fortune on fireworks!’ said Mara’s mother, Lia, pointing towards a young man who was going round holding a firework in each hand like a pair of candles.
All the women gazed admiringly at him, with shouts of ‘Viva San Giovanni!’

‘His father’s a rich man,’ Massaro Agrippino added.
‘He owns more than twenty head of cattle.’

Mara also knew that he had carried the main standard in the procession, and that he held it up straight as an arrow because he was so strong and handsome.

Massaro Neri’s son seemed to hear what they were saying, and lit a pair of Roman candles for Mara, dancing round her in a circle.
And when the fireworks had died down he came over and joined them, and took them to the dance, and to the cosmorama, where you could see the old world and the new.
He paid for everyone, of course, including Jeli, who brought up the rear of the party like a dog without a master, only to see Massaro Neri’s son dancing with Mara, who skipped around him and curtsied like a lovesick dove, prettily holding a corner of her pinafore at arm’s length.
As for Massaro Neri’s son, he leapt this way and that like a pony, causing Gnà Lia to weep with ecstasy, while Massaro Agrippino nodded his head in approval and expressed his satisfaction at the way things were turning out.

Eventually they grew tired, joined the people walking up and down the street, and were drawn bodily along by the crowd as though caught up in a strong current, past the illuminated screens showing a beheading of San Giovanni that would have even brought tears to the eyes of the Saracens themselves, with the saint gambolling about like a goat under the executioner’s axe.
Nearby, the band was playing under a great wooden canopy dotted with lanterns, and the square was packed with more Christian souls than any fair had ever witnessed.

Mara was walking along on the arm of Massaro Neri’s son like a young woman of the quality, whispering in his ear and laughing so much you could tell she was enjoying every minute of it.
Jeli by this time was utterly exhausted, and he fell asleep sitting on the pavement, until he was suddenly woken up by the first bangers of the firework display.
Mara was still at the side of Massaro Neri’s son, leaning up against him with her arms entwined round his shoulders, and in the
light of the coloured fireworks, in turn she appeared white then red all over.
When the last salvo of rockets burst in the sky, Massaro Neri’s son turned towards her, his face lit up in green, and gave her a kiss.

Jeli said nothing, but at that moment the whole gala, which until then he had been enjoying, turned into poison for him, and he began to reflect once more on his misfortunes, which had completely disappeared from his mind.
He remembered that he had no job, no prospects, nowhere to go, nothing to eat and no roof over his head; in other words it would be better to go and fling himself into the ravine like Star, who by that time was being eaten up by the dogs.

Meanwhile the people around him were in high spirits.
Mara was singing as she skipped along the stony path with her companions on their way back home.

‘Good night!
Good night!’ her friends called out as they left the group one by one along the road.

When it came to Mara’s turn to bid them good night, her voice had such a contented ring about it that she seemed to be singing, and Massaro Neri’s son had got so worked up about her that he didn’t want to leave her, as Massaro Agrippino and Gnà Lia stood there arguing before opening the front door.

Nobody was taking any notice of Jeli, until Massaro Agrippino remembered he was there, and asked him, ‘And where will you go now?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Jeli.

‘Come and see me tomorrow, and I’ll help you to look for somewhere to stay.
Just for tonight, go back to the square where we listened to the band playing, and find yourself a place on one of the benches.
You must be used to sleeping out in the open.’

Used to it he certainly was, but what distressed him most was that Mara never said a word to him, and left him standing on the doorstep like a beggar.
So next day, as soon as he was able to find her alone for a moment in the house, he said to her, ‘What’s got into you, Mara?
Don’t you remember your friends any more?’

‘Don’t be silly, Jeli!’ said Mara.
‘I haven’t forgotten you.
It’s just that I was tired out after the fireworks!’

‘Do you mean to say you’re not in love with Massaro Neri’s son?’ he asked, twirling his stick between the palms of his hands.

‘What nonsense you do talk!’ Mara replied in a brusque tone of voice.
‘My mother’s in the next room, listening to everything.’

Massaro Agrippino found him a place as a shepherd on the Salonia estate, where Massaro Neri was the head farmer, but since Jeli had little experience in the job he had to content himself with a very low wage.

So now he tended his sheep, and learnt how to make different kinds of cheese, from ricotta to Sicilian hard cheese, and all the other products that a flock can provide.
But when evening came, and the other shepherds and the peasants started chatting among themselves in the farmyard while the women were shelling beans for the minestra, if they happened to mention Massaro Neri’s son who was going to marry Mara, Jeli shut up like a clam, not even daring to open his mouth.

Once, when the watchman made fun of him by telling him that Mara had dropped him like a hot potato after everybody had been saying they were going to be husband and wife, Jeli, who was busy warming up the milk in the pot, replied as he slowly separated the curds from the whey, ‘The older she gets, the more beautiful she becomes.
Mara looks like a real lady nowadays.’

Being so patient and hard-working, he soon learnt to do his job better than people who had done nothing else for the whole of their lives, and since he was accustomed to being with animals, he tended his sheep with all the loving care of a father, so that on the Salonia farm there were fewer deaths from the sickness, and the flock came on so well that whenever Massaro Neri visited the farm he was delighted with it.
As a result, when new year came along he decided to persuade the landowner to increase Jeli’s wages, so that he was now getting almost as much as he had earned when tending the horses.
It was money well spent, because Jeli was prepared to wander for miles and miles to find the best grazing lands for his flock, and if they were lambing or feeling out of sorts he would get them to eat from the donkey’s hay-bags, and he would carry the lambs with their heads popping out of a sack round his shoulders in such a way that they bleated into his face and sucked the tips of his ears.
During the famous snowstorm on St Lucy’s night, the snow fell so thickly over Salonia that by daybreak it was lying
four palms deep over the lower valley, and nothing else could be seen for miles in the whole of the countryside.
Neri would have been ruined on that occasion, as so many other farmers were, if Jeli hadn’t got up three or four times in the night to drive his flock into the fold so that the poor sheep could shake the snow off their backs and save themselves from being buried like so many in the neighbouring flocks.
‘They would have been buried up to their ears,’ Massaro Agrippino said when he called later on to take a look at a small field of beans that he had on the estate, and he also said that all that talk about Massaro Neri’s son marrying his daughter Mara was a lot of nonsense, and that Mara had different ideas in her head.

‘But everyone said they were going to marry at Christmas,’ said Jeli.

‘It’s completely untrue, no one had any intention of marrying.
It’s all gossip put about by envious busybodies meddling with other people’s affairs,’ Massaro Agrippino replied.

But after Massaro Agrippino had left, the watchman, who was better informed because he had heard people talking about it in the square during a visit he had paid to the village on the previous Sunday, explained how matters really stood.
The marriage was off because Massaro Neri’s son had got to know that Massaro Agrippino’s daughter, Mara, had formed a close relationship with Don Alfonso, the young gentleman, who had known Mara ever since she was a child, and Massaro Neri had declared that his son wanted to be respected like his father, and that he was having no horns in his house except the ones his oxen were carrying.

Jeli was present as he was saying all this, sitting in a circle with the others over the midday meal, and just at that moment he was slicing the bread.
He said nothing, but lost his appetite for the rest of the day.

As he was leading his sheep to pasture, he began to think again about Mara, when she was a little girl, and how they used to keep one another company the whole day long in the Jacitano valley and on the Hill of the Cross, and how she would sit watching him with her head held high as he climbed to the tops of the trees to bring down birds’ nests.
And he thought about Don Alfonso, too, who would come and see
him from the big house nearby, and of how they would lie face downwards on the grass poking at crickets’ nests with a small twig.
All these things he turned over in his mind for hour after hour, sitting on the bank of the torrent with his arms clasped round his knees.
And then there were the tall walnut trees at Tebidi, and the thick scrub of the valleys, and the hill-slopes clad in the green of the sumacs, and the grey olives piling up like mist, one on top of the other, and the red roofs of the tenement block, and the bell-tower ‘shaped like a saltcellar’ in the middle of the orange grove.
But here the countryside stretched out barren and deserted before him covered in patches of parched grass, silently fading away into the sultry haze of the distant horizon.

In spring, as soon as the bean-pods began to droop their heads, Mara turned up at the Salonia farm to pick the beans with her father and mother, and the boy and the donkey, and they all bedded down at the farm for the two or three days the harvest lasted.
So Jeli was able to see the girl morning and evening, and they would often sit with one another on the low wall of the sheepfold, talking to each other while Jeli counted the sheep.

‘It’s like being at Tebidi,’ said Mara, ‘when we were small, and we sat on the little bridge down the lane.’

Jeli could remember it all just as clearly, but being such a pensive sort, never having much to say, he offered no reply.

When the harvest was over, on the eve of their departure Mara came to say goodbye to the young man, just as he was making the ricotta, intent on skimming off the curds with his ladle.

‘I just came to say goodbye,’ she said.
‘We’re going back to Vizzini tomorrow.’

‘How did the bean-picking go?’

‘Badly!
They were all eaten up by the mildew this year.’

‘That’s because we haven’t had much rain,’ Jeli said.
‘You wouldn’t believe it, but we even had to kill the lambs because there wasn’t enough for them to eat.
There’s been no more than three inches of grass on the whole of the Salonia estate.’

‘I don’t suppose that worries you.
You always get your wages, whether it’s a good or a bad year.’

‘That’s true,’ he said, ‘but it makes me feel sad to hand those poor beasts over to the butcher.’

‘Do you remember coming to the feast of San Giovanni, that time when you’d lost your job?’

‘Yes, I remember.’

‘It was my father who found you a job here, with Massaro Neri.’

‘Yes, but how is it that you and Massaro Neri’s son didn’t get married?’

‘Because it wasn’t God’s will,’ she replied.
She paused a little, then continued, ‘My father’s been unlucky.
Ever since we moved to Marineo everything has turned out badly.
It’s not just the beans, it’s the main crop, even the vines on that little patch of land we have up there.
And then my brother was called up into the army, and we even had a mule that died on us that was worth forty
onze
.’

‘I know,’ said Jeli.
‘The bay mule!’

‘Now that we’ve lost everything, who do you think is going to marry me?’

As she spoke, Mara was idly snapping bits off a blackthorn twig, staring at the ground, her chin tucked tightly in, and she accidentally poked Jeli on the arm with her elbow.
Jeli, his eyes fixed on the churn, offered no reply, so she continued, ‘Do you remember how the people at Tebidi said we would be husband and wife?’

‘Yes,’ said Jeli, hanging the ladle on the rim of the churn.
‘But I’m only a poor shepherd, not good enough to marry a farmer’s daughter like yourself

Mara remained silent for a few moments, then she said, ‘If you love me, I’ll be happy to take you.’

‘Do you really mean it?’

‘Yes, of course I do.’

‘But what will your father say?’

‘My father says you’ve learnt your job now, and you’re not the sort of man to spend all your wages, but you make them stretch twice as far, and because you don’t eat for the sake of eating you’ll have sheep of your own one day, and become a rich man.’