Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories (13 page)

‘If that’s what he says,’ Jeli concluded, ‘I’ll be just as happy to take you.’

‘There!’ said Mara, now that it was dark, and the sheep were beginning to quieten down.
‘If you want a kiss now I’ll give you one, because we’re going to be husband and wife.’

Jeli was at a loss for words, but accepted the kiss like a lamb, then added, ‘I’ve always loved you, even when you wanted to leave me for Massaro Neri’s son and…’ But he hadn’t the courage to name the other.

‘You see?
Fate intended us for one another!’ Mara concluded.

Massaro Agrippino duly gave his consent, and his wife Lia rapidly made up a new overcoat and a pair of velvet breeches for her son-in-law.
Mara was fresh and lovely as a rose, looking like an Easter lamb in her white bridal gown, and her neck glowed white beneath her amber necklace.
As Jeli walked stiffly down the street at her side in his new jacket and velvet breeches, not daring to blow his nose into his red silk handkerchief in case anyone was looking, the villagers and everyone else who knew about the business of Don Alfonso were making fun of him behind his back.
When Mara had said ‘I will,’ and the priest had joined them in holy matrimony with a great big sign of the cross, Jeli led her proudly back home with the feeling that they had given him pots of gold and all the lands he had ever set eyes upon.

‘Now that we’re man and wife,’ he said to her when he brought her home and sat down facing her, making himself look as tiny as he could, ‘believe me, now that we’re man and wife, I can’t understand why such a beautiful woman as you should have chosen to marry me, when you could have had any number of men who are better than I am!’

The poor wretch could think of nothing else to say to her, but was simply bursting out of his new clothes with contentment as he watched Mara going about the house as its mistress, arranging everything with her own hands.
When Monday came, it was all he could do to drag himself away from her in the doorway to return to the Salonia farm, and he lingered at length as he fixed the bags on the donkey’s pack-saddle, along with his cloak and his waterproof clothing.

‘You should come too to Salonia!’ he said to his wife as she stood watching him at the front door.
‘You ought to come with me.’

But the woman began to laugh, and replied that she wasn’t cut out to be a shepherdess, and there was nothing for her to do at Salonia.

Mara was not in fact cut out to be a shepherdess, and she was not accustomed to going about in the north winds of January, when your hands freeze up on your shepherd’s crook and you feel as if your fingernails are dropping off.
Nor was she accustomed to being caught in the violent downpours that soak you to the skin, or to choking in the clouds of dust along the roads, when the sheep are moving on under the baking sun, or to lying on a hard pallet, or having nothing but mouldy bread to eat.
Not for her the long, silent, lonely days, when you see nothing in the whole of the burnt-up countryside except occasionally in the distance some peasant or other, blackened by the sun, silently driving his donkey forward along the white and never-ending road.
At least Jeli knew that Mara was tucked up warm under the bedcovers, or spinning in front of the fire with a few of her neighbours, or enjoying the sun on the veranda, as he made his way back from the pasture, tired and thirsty, or wet through from the rain, or when the wind blew the snow into his hut, dousing the sumac fire.

Every month, Mara went and collected his wages from his master, and she never went short of eggs for the brooding, or oil for the lantern, or wine for the flask.
Jeli came home to see her twice a month, and she would wait for him on the veranda, holding her spindle.
Then, when he had tied up the mule in the stable and removed its saddle-pack and put down fodder for it in the manger, he would stow away most of the firewood in the lean-to shed in the yard and bring the rest into the kitchen.
Mara would hang up his cloak on the nail and help him off with his damp leggings in front of the fire, then pour him out some wine while the minestra simmered merrily away.
Then she would quietly go about laying the table like a dutiful housewife, chatting away to him on this, that and the other as she did so, telling him about the hen that was brooding, the cloth on the loom, the calf they were rearing, and every little thing that had happened, so that Jeli had the feeling he was living like a prince.

But on St Barbara’s night he came back home at an unusual hour, when all the street lamps were already out and the town clock was ringing midnight.
It was the sort of night when wolves go on the prowl, and one of them had got into his house while he was away earning his living in the wind and the rain.
His reason for coming back was that
he urgently needed the vet to come and tend to his master’s mule, which had fallen sick.
He knocked and hammered away at the door, calling out to Mara at the top of his voice, while the water poured down on him from the broken gutter, soaking him from head to foot.
Finally Mara came and opened up, and began to swear at him, looking daggers at him as though she were the one who had been roaming through the fields in that awful weather.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.
‘What’s got into you?’

‘You put the fear of God into me, that’s what, knocking on the door at this time of the night!
Is this the hour for any honest man to be coming home?
I’ll be catching my death of cold!’

‘Go and lie down, leave it to me to light the fire.’

‘No, I’ll have to go and fetch the wood.’

‘I’ll
go.’

‘No, you stay here!’

When Mara returned with the wood in her arms, Jeli said to her, ‘Why did you open the back door?
Wasn’t there any wood left in the kitchen?’

‘No, I had to go and fetch it from the shed.’

She stood there stiffly, turning her face the other way, and allowed him to kiss her.

‘His wife leaves him on the doorstep getting drenched,’ the neighbours said, ‘when she has a songbird in the house!’

Although he was a cuckold, Jeli knew nothing about it, and the others didn’t bother to tell him because he never worried about anything, and he only had himself to blame for taking on the woman after Massaro Neri’s son had ditched her on hearing about the Don Alfonso affair.
But Jeli carried on, happy as a sandboy and blissfully unaware of his dishonour, because as the saying goes, ‘Though the horns may be spindly, they fatten up the home!’

In the end the boy who helped him tend his flock told him everything to his face when they were having an argument over certain bits of cheese that were missing.
‘Now that Don Alfonso has taken your wife,’ he said, ‘you treat him like a brother-in-law, and you walk around with your nose in the air like a crowned prince, with those horns on your head.’

The farm-bailiff and the watchman were expecting to see blood flow any minute when they heard these words, but Jeli remained silent as though none of it concerned him, with an ox-like expression on his face that seemed to fit his horns to perfection.

As he left the church he sought out the boy who’d turned nasty on him and flung his arms round his neck, saying, ‘The father confessor told me to forgive you, but I’m not angry with you for saying what you did, and as long as you stop filching my cheese I don’t care about what you said to me in the heat of the moment.’

It was from that day forth that they gave him the nickname Goldhoms, and the nickname remained with him and all his family, even after he had washed away his horns in blood.

Mara too had gone to confession, and as she made her way home, casting her eyes downward with her mantilla wrapped tightly round her head, she looked like St Mary Magdalen.
Jeli was waiting for her silently on the veranda, and when he caught sight of her returning in that fashion, as though her whole body was filled with the grace of the Lord, he turned pale all over, feeling as if he was seeing her for the first time, or that his Mara had been changed into another woman.
He never even dared to raise his eyes towards her, as she went about unfolding the tablecloth and setting out the plates, calmly and daintily as ever.

After thinking for a long time about it, he asked her in a very cold sort of voice, ‘Is it true that you’re in love with Don Alfonso?’

‘What are you trying to do?
Turn me into a sinner on this of all days?’ she exclaimed.

‘I never did believe it, because when we were small boys Don Alfonso and I always went about together, and when he was staying nearby in the country he never let a day pass without coming over to see me.
Besides, he’s a wealthy man with pots of money, and if he wanted a woman’s company he could marry and still have all the things he wanted, and plenty to eat.’

Mara was working herself up into a rage, and began to shower him with so much abuse that the poor wretch didn’t dare to raise his nose from his bowl of soup.
But in the end, to prevent the food they were eating from turning into poison, Mara changed the subject and asked him whether he had found the time to dig round the patch of flax they had sown in the bean field.

‘Yes,’ Jeli replied, ‘and we’re going to have a good crop.’

‘In that case,’ said Mara, ‘I’ll make a couple of new shirts to keep you warm this winter.’

The fact is that Jeli didn’t know the meaning of the word cuckold, and it never entered his head to act the jealous husband.
It was difficult for him to grasp anything that was unusual, and this business seemed to him so extraordinary as to throw his mind into total confusion, especially when he could see his Mara there in front of his eyes, so beautiful and pale-complexioned and neatly dressed.
Besides, it was she who had told him she wanted to marry him, and ever since he was a child he had loved her so much and thought about her for so long over so many years that when he heard she was going to marry someone else he could neither eat nor drink for the rest of the day.
And it was just the same when he thought about Don Alfonso, and all the days they had spent together, and how he had brought him sweets and white bread every time he came.
He could picture him now in his pretty new clothes, with his curly hair, and his face as smooth and pale as a girl’s.
That was the way he still remembered him, because being a poor shepherd who spent the whole year out in the wilds, he had never come across him again.
But the first time he had the misfortune to see Don Alfonso again, after all those years, Jeli felt as if a fire was raging inside his body.
Now that he had grown up, Don Alfonso no longer seemed the same person, with his fine bushy beard as curly as his hair, his velvet jacket, and a gold watch-chain dangling across his waistcoat.
He recognized Jeli, though, and slapped him over the shoulders by way of greeting.
He had come with the farm’s owner and a party of friends on a trip to the country at the sheep-shearing season, and Mara had turned up as well under the pretext that she was pregnant and wanted some fresh ricotta.

It was a fine, hot day in the sun-blanched fields, with the hedges in
bloom and the long green rows of vines, the sheep were bleating and gambolling about from the joy of finding themselves short of all that wool, and in the kitchen the women were building a big fire to cook all the good things the owner had brought along for the meal.
While they were waiting, the gentlemen sat in the shade of the carob trees, or relaxed by dancing with the farm-girls to the sound of tambourines and bagpipes.
As Jeli went on shearing the sheep, without knowing the reason for it he felt a sharp pain, like a thorn or a nail or the tip of his shears, working steadily away inside him, as though he had been poisoned.
The owner had given orders for two sucking kids to be slaughtered, along with a yearling bullock, and chickens and a turkey.
He was putting on a big party, in other words, sparing no expense to entertain his guests, and while all those beasts were writhing in pain, and the sucking kids were squealing under the knife, Jeli felt his knees start to tremble, and little by little it seemed that the wool he was shearing and the grass where the sheep were gambolling became awash with blood.

‘Stay where you are!’ he said to Mara, when Don Alfonso called her over to dance with the others.
‘Stay where you are, Mara!’

‘Why should I?’

‘I don’t want you to go.
Stay where you are!’

‘Don’t you see they’re calling me?’

Nothing more that he said had any clear meaning, as he remained bent over the sheep he was shearing.
Mara shrugged her shoulders and went to join in the dance.
She was flushed with joy, her dark eyes lit up like two stars, her teeth shone white through her laughter, and all the gold trinkets she was wearing tinkled and glittered on her cheeks and her breast so that she looked like a painting of the Madonna come to life.
Jeli stood up straight, with the long shears in his hands, and turned as white in the face as his father the cowherd once had turned when he was shuddering in the hut from his fever beside the fire.
Suddenly he saw that Don Alfonso, with his fine curly beard and his velvet jacket and his gold watch-chain, had taken Mara by the hand to dance with her, and at the very moment he saw him touch her, he leapt on him and cut his throat with a single slash of his shears, just like a sucking kid.

Later, when they brought him up, a broken man in handcuffs before the judge, without having offered the slightest resistance to his arrest: ‘What!’ he said.
‘Didn’t I have every right to kill him?
He took away my Mara!’