Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories (15 page)

On Saturday evenings, once he had arrived home with his ugly, freckled face spattered with red sand, and his tattered clothes hanging shabbily from his frame, his sister would grab the broom-handle if he attempted to show himself at the front door in that pickle, afraid that her fiancé would run a mile if he saw what kind of a brother-in-law he was letting himself in for.
His mother was always round at one of her neighbours, so he sloped off and huddled up on his straw mattress like a sick animal.
Then, on Sundays, when all the other boys of the neighbourhood put on a clean shirt to go to Mass or run about in the playground, the only way he seemed capable of amusing himself was to go wandering along the garden paths throwing stones at lizards and the other wretched creatures that had never done him any harm, or hacking gaps in the cactus hedgerows.
At all events he was in no mood to expose himself to the taunts and the stone-throwing of the other boys.

Misciu’s widow was in despair at having such a problem child, as they all described him, which in fact is what he had become.
He resembled one of those dogs that have been kicked and stoned so often that they end up with their tails between their legs and run away as soon as any living soul comes near them, turning all skinny and mangy like a wild wolf.
At least when he was below ground in the sand mine, no matter how ugly and ragged and filthy he was, they could no longer taunt him, and he seemed to be cut out on purpose for that sort of job even down to the colour of his hair and his piercing, cat-like eyes, that blinked in the light of the sun.
There are mules in that same condition, that work in the caves for years and years without ever coming out again, and because the pit-shaft is vertical, they are lowered in on ropes and remain down there for the rest of their lives.
True enough, they are old mules, bought up for twelve
lire
or so on their way to be strangled at the Plaja,
²
but still good enough for the work they have to do below ground.
Malpelo, certainly, was no better off than they were,
and although he came out of the pit on Saturday evenings, that was only because he had hands to haul himself up the ropes and because he had to take his week’s wages home to his mother.

Without a doubt he would have preferred to earn his living as a builder’s labourer like The Frog once had done, singing as he worked high up on scaffolding with the sun shining down on his back from the clear blue sky, or as a cart-driver like Gaspare, who came to collect the sand from the pit, nodding off to sleep over the shafts of his cart with his pipe in his mouth as he drove the whole day long through the quiet country lanes, or better still, he would have liked to be a peasant spending his life in the heart of the green countryside, with the densely wooded carob groves to retire to, the dark blue sea in the background, and the song of the birds overhead.
But his father had been a sand-miner, and he too was born to ply the same trade.

As he thought about all that, he told The Frog about the pillar that collapsed and how his father had been buried in the fine, scorched sand that was still being carried away by the driver with the pipe in his mouth who nodded over the shafts of his cart, and he told him that when they had finished digging they would find his father’s body, wearing the corduroy trousers that were still as good as new.
The Frog felt frightened, but not Malpelo, who was thinking that he had spent his whole life there ever since he was a small boy, and had always been familiar with that black hole plunging into the depths to which his father used to lead him by the hand.
He spread out his arms to the right and the left, and described how an intricate maze of tunnels extended far and wide below their feet in all directions under the whole of the black, deserted volcano
³
with its dried-up clumps of gorse bushes.
And he told him about all the men who had been buried or lost their way in the dark, who had been wandering about for years down there and were wandering yet, unable to find the vent of the shaft by which they had entered, and unable to hear the desperate cries of their children searching for them in vain.

But once, as they were filling up their sand-baskets, they came across one of Misciu’s shoes, and Malpelo was overcome with such a fit of trembling that they had to bring him up on ropes to the fresh air, like a mule about to breathe its last.
There was no sign of the other shoe,
however, or of the trousers that were as good as new, or the rest of Misciu for that matter, even though the experts affirmed that it was the very spot where the pillar had toppled over on him.
One of the workers, who was new to the job, made the curious comment that the sand must be very fickle, since it had tossed Blockhead this way and that, leaving his shoes in one place and his feet in another.

From the moment the shoe was found, Malpelo was so terrified of seeing his father’s bare foot coming into view in the sand that he refused to dig any further with his spade, saying he would rather they hit him over the head with it.
He went to work in another section of the mine, and refused to come back to the place where the shoe had turned up.
Two or three days later, in fact, they discovered Misciu’s body, lying flat on its face, trousers and all, looking for all the world as if it had been embalmed.
Old Mommu remarked that he must have taken a long time to die, because the pillar had bent over in an arc above him and buried him alive.
And you could still see the proof that Blockhead had tried instinctively to escape by scraping away at the sand, because the nails were broken on his lacerated hands.
Just like his son Malpelo!’ The Cripple kept repeating.
‘He was digging on this side and his son was digging on that.’ They said nothing to the boy, however, for they knew exactly how malign and vindictive he was.

The carter cleared the mine of the corpse in the same way that he cleared it of the sand that had fallen and of dead mules, except that this time he was dealing, not only with the smell of a carcase, but with the carcase of a baptized fellow worker.
Misciu’s widow shortened the trousers and the shirt and altered them to fit Malpelo, who thus went about in clothes that were almost new for the first time in his life.
The shoes were put away for when he had grown up, because you can’t make shoes any smaller than they already are and also because his sister’s fiancé was not going to wear the shoes of a dead man.

Malpelo ran his hand over the good-as-new corduroy trousers on his legs, thinking to himself they were as soft and smooth as the hands of his father when he used to stroke his hair, rough and hardened as they were.
He carefully hung the shoes on the same nail where he kept his pallet, as though they were the Pope’s slippers, and on Sundays he would take them down, polish them and try them on.
Then he would
place them on the floor, one beside the other, and stare at them for hours on end with his elbows on his knees and his chin resting in the palms of his hands, and it was anybody’s guess what ideas were running through that calculating little head of his.

He had some strange ideas, did Malpelo.
He had also inherited his father’s pick and spade, and insisted on using them, even though they were too heavy for a boy of his age.
When they asked him if he wanted to sell them and offered him what they would have cost if they were buying them new, he turned them all down.
His father’s hands had left the handles so smooth and shiny that he would never have been able to create the same effect with a new pick and spade if he worked with them for a hundred years or more.

Around that time the grey mule died from exhaustion and old age, and the carter arrived to take away the corpse and dispose of it miles away in the
sciara
.
⁴
‘That’s what they always do,’ muttered Malpelo.
‘When tools have served their purpose, they’re taken miles away and dumped.’

He went to have a look at the carcase of the grey mule lying in the ravine, and forced The Frog to go along with him, although he didn’t want to.
Malpelo told him that in this world you had to get used to looking things squarely in the face, whether they were beautiful or ugly, and he stood there gazing with the eager curiosity of a street-urchin at the dogs that had rushed to the scene from all the farms in the neighbourhood to vie with one another for the grey mule’s flesh.
When the boys came into view, the dogs ran off whining, and they circled round, howling, on the other bank of the ravine.
The Frog started throwing stones at them, but Malpelo restrained him, saying, ‘Don’t you see that the black bitch is not afraid of your stones?
She’s not afraid because she’s hungrier than the others.
Do you see how the grey’s ribs are sticking out?
At least he’s not in pain any more.’

The grey mule lay still on its back with its four legs sticking up in the air, letting the dogs gorge themselves as they emptied out its deep eye-sockets, and stripped the flesh off its milky-white bones.
The teeth tearing away at its innards could never have made it bend down an inch, as it used to do when they hammered it on its back with their spades to force enough strength into its body to climb the steep incline.

‘That’s the way things go in this world!’ said Malpelo.
The grey took some blows from spades in his time, and suffered from the sores on his back.
And when he bent double under the blows, or couldn’t summon up the strength to go on, he seemed to be saying: “That’s enough!
That’s enough!” as they kept on beating him.
But now that his eyes are being swallowed up by the dogs, he can laugh at all those blows and the sores he had on his back, lying there with his teeth sticking out from a mouth that’s been stripped of its flesh.
But it would have been better for him if he’d never been born at all.’

The
sciara
spread out as far as the eye could see, deserted and melancholy, black and wrinkled as it rose and fell in ridges and ravines, with not a cricket that was chirping or a bird that was singing.
Not a sound could be heard, not even the sound of the mineworkers’ picks as they toiled away below the ground.
Malpelo kept repeating that the ground underneath was hollowed out with tunnels running in every direction, both towards the mountain and towards the valley, so much so that one miner had entered them once as a young man and come out with grey hair.
And another, whose lamp had gone out, had been shouting for help in vain for years on end.

‘He’s the only one who can hear all the shouting he’s doing!’ he said, and the idea of it made him shudder, though his heart was as hard as the
sciara
itself.

‘The pitowner regularly sends me to some distant part of the tunnels, where the others are afraid to go.
But I’m only Malpelo, and if I never come back, nobody will go looking for me.’

On clear summer nights, the stars shone no less brightly over the
sciara
than they did elsewhere.
The surrounding countryside was just as black as the
sciara
itself, but Malpelo, tired from his long day’s work, would lie down on his pallet, looking up at the sky, enjoying the stillness and the luminous majesty of it all.
He hated the moonlit nights, when the sea is swarming with sparks of light and here and there you can vaguely pick out the shapes of the countryside, because then the
sciara
seems even more barren and desolate.

For people like us who are born to live underground, he thought, it should always be dark everywhere.

An owl would screech above the
sciara,
swooping this way and that,
and he thought to himself, Even the owl knows there are dead men under the ground in these parts, and it’s crying with despair because it can’t go down there and find them.

The Frog was afraid of owls, and of bats too, but Malpelo told him not to be so stupid, because nobody who has to live alone should ever be afraid of anything, and not even the grey mule was afraid of the dogs that were stripping away his flesh, now that he no longer felt any pain from being eaten.

‘You used to crawl about like a cat when you worked on the roofs,’ he told him, ‘but then it was totally different.
Now that you have to live underground like a rat, you shouldn’t be afraid of either rats or bats, which are only old rats with wings.
They love to keep company with the dead.’

The Frog on the other hand was dying to explain to him what the stars were doing up there in the heavens, and he told him that Paradise was up there, where the dead go if they have been good and not annoyed their parents.
‘Who told you that?’ Malpelo asked, and The Frog replied that his mother had told him.

At this, Malpelo scratched his head, and with a mischievous smile he peered at him sideways like a street-urchin who thinks he knows everything.
‘Your mother told you that because you should be wearing a skirt instead of trousers.’

He thought about it for a while, then added, ‘My father was good, and never did any harm to anybody, and they called him Blockhead.
But he’s finished up down below, and they even found his tools and his shoes and these trousers I’m wearing.’

Shortly afterwards, The Frog, whose health had been failing for some time, was taken so poorly that he had to be carried from the pit on the mule’s back, straddled across the sand-baskets, shaking with fever like a drowned rat.
One of the miners said the boy would never develop a thick enough skin for that job, and to work in a mine without dropping dead you had to be born to it.
Hearing him say this, Malpelo came all over proud at having been born to it, and remaining so strong and healthy, despite having to face so many hardships in that unwholesome atmosphere.
He lifted The Frog up on to his shoulders and tried to force some life into him in his own fashion, by hitting him and shouting
at him.
But on one occasion, after striking him on the back, The Frog started bleeding from the mouth.
Malpelo was alarmed, and tried his best to find out what he had done, by looking into the boy’s mouth and up his nostrils.
He swore that he could not have done him any great harm by hitting him as he did, and just to prove it he beat himself severely about the chest and the back with a large stone.
A workman who happened to be present gave him an almighty kick in the back that made a noise like a drumbeat, yet Malpelo never budged an inch, and after the workman had gone he added, ‘You see?
He never hurt me in the least!
And he hit me twice as hard as I hit you, honestly he did!’