Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories (16 page)

Meanwhile The Frog was getting no better and continued to spit out blood, and every day he was just as feverish.
So Malpelo set aside some money from his weekly earnings to buy him wine and hot soup, and gave him his good-as-new trousers to cover up his legs.
But The Frog kept on coughing, and at times he seemed to be choking.
When evening came there was no way to stop him shaking from his fever, no matter how much they covered him with sacks or layers of straw, or how close to the fire they settled him down.
Malpelo bent over him, silent and motionless, with his hands on his knees, staring at him with those huge eyes of his bulging out of his forehead, as though he was going to paint his portrait, and when he heard him moaning softly away and saw him gasping for breath with a glassy look in his eyes, exactly like the grey mule panting on its last legs as it tried to climb up the tunnel, he murmured, ‘It’s best for you to drop dead now and be done with it!
If you have to suffer like this, it’s best for you to drop dead!’

The pitowner said Malpelo was capable of smashing the boy’s head in, and they should all keep an eye on him.

Then, one Monday morning, The Frog failed to turn up at the mine, and the pitowner washed his hands of him, because by now his state of health was so poor that he was more of a hindrance than anything else.
Malpelo found out where he lived, and on the Saturday he went to see him.
The Frog was more dead than alive, poor wretch, and his mother was weeping and wailing as if her son were somebody earning ten
lire
a week.

All this was quite beyond Malpelo, who asked The Frog why his
mother was making such a fuss, when for two months he had been earning less than it cost to feed him.
But The Frog paid no attention to him, and simply seemed intent on lying there in his bed.
So Malpelo came to the conclusion that The Frog’s mother was screaming like that because her son had always been weak and sickly, and she had coddled him like one of those youngsters who had never been weaned.
He, on the other hand, had always been strong and healthy, and his mother had never wept over him, because she had never been afraid of losing him.

Shortly after that, they heard at the mine that The Frog was dead, and he thought to himself that the owl was now screeching for him as well, and he went back to take a look at the fleshless bones of the grey, in the ravine where he and The Frog had gone together.
By now, all that was left of the grey was the skeleton, and The Frog would end up in the same state.
His mother would dry up her tears as his own mother had dried up hers after Misciu had died, and she had now remarried and gone to live at Cibali with her married daughter, where they kept the door securely locked.
From now on they no longer cared if he was beaten, and he didn’t care either, because when he had got to the same state as the grey or The Frog, nothing would hurt him any more.

Around that time a man turned up to work in the mine whom nobody had ever set eyes on before, and who kept himself concealed as much as he could.
The other miners whispered among themselves that he had escaped from prison, and that if he was caught they would take him back and throw away the key.
Malpelo found out on that occasion that prison was a place where they kept thieves, and scoundrels like himself, and that they kept them locked up and guarded them the whole time.

From that moment on he was filled with an unhealthy longing to find out more about the man who had been in prison and escaped.
But after a few weeks the fugitive declared in no uncertain terms that he had had enough of living like a filthy mole and would rather go back to prison for the rest of his life, because prison was like Paradise in comparison, and he preferred to crawl back to prison on his hands and knees.
‘In that case,’ Malpelo asked, ‘why doesn’t everyone who works in the mine get himself put in prison?’

‘Because they’re not
malpelo
like you!’ The Cripple replied.
‘But don’t worry, you’ll end up there sooner or later!
And that’s where you’ll end your days.’

Instead of which Malpelo ended his days in the mine like his father, but in a different fashion.
One day it was decided to explore a passage that was supposed to connect up with the main shaft, over to the left towards the valley, and if all went well, half at least of the labour cost would be saved in excavating the sand.
On the other hand, there was a danger that whoever went in would lose his way and never come back.
So none of the men with families would take the risk or put his life in jeopardy for all the money in the world.

But even if his life was worth all the money in the world, Malpelo had no one left to collect it for him, so he was the obvious choice.
As he was about to set off, he thought about the miner who had been lost for years and was still wandering about in the dark, calling for help with nobody to hear him.
But he said nothing.
Anyway, what was the point?
He collected his father’s tools, the pick and spade, the lantern, the bag with some bread in it, the flask of wine, and off he went.
He was never heard of again.

So Malpelo met his end down there as well, and the boys working at the mine lower their voices when they mention his name below ground, because they are afraid he might step out in front of them any minute, with his red hair and his grey, deep-set eyes.

The events in people’s lives will always arouse curiosity, because they have actually happened, bringing the tears or the excitement or the many other sensations those people have experienced for themselves.
The mysterious process through which human passions become entangled and interwoven as they ripen and develop in their hidden course, in their often contradictory meanderings, will long continue to form the powerful and fascinating basis of the psychological phenomena that underlie the plot of a story, which modern critical analysis takes so much trouble to follow with scientific precision.
As for the story I narrate to you today, I shall merely tell you how it began and how it ended, which is all you need to know.
Perhaps one day it will be all that anyone needs to know.

At the present day we are renewing the artistic process to which we owe so many of our glorious monuments of the past, using a different method, more precise and more intimate.
We gladly sacrifice the narrative’s climax and its psychological effect, grasped through a kind of divine instinct by the great artists of the past, to the logical and
necessary development of the passions and events leading up to the climax, which is thereby perhaps rendered less startling and dramatic, but no less inevitable.
We are more modest in our ambitions, but no less humble, believing that the discoveries we make about psychological truths will certainly be no less valuable to the art of the future.
Will the study of human passions ever reach such a degree of perfection that it becomes pointless to persevere in the analysis of the inner life of the characters?
Will the science of the human heart, around which all contemporary art is based, exhaust so completely the writer’s powers of imagination that in future the only novels that are written will be chronicles of various events?

For the time being I believe that the triumph of the novel, which of all works of art is the most complete and most closely related to the human condition, will come about when the affinity and cohesion of all its separate parts are so entire that the process of its creation remains as much a mystery as the unfolding of the human passions, and the harmony of its forms is so perfect, the sincerity of its reality so obvious, its manner and
raison d’être
so assured, that the hand of the artist will remain completely invisible.
When that happens it will carry the imprint of the real event, the work of art will seem to have created itself, to have grown spontaneously and come to fruition as though it were a part of nature, without preserving any point of contact with its author.
In its living contours, it will preserve no imprint of the mind that brought it to life, no shadow of the imagination that first conceived it, no trace of the lips that murmured its first words in a stroke of the creator’s pen.
It will stand on its own account, simply because it is what it has to be out of necessity, throbbing with life and unchangeable as a bronze statue whose author has had the godlike courage to allow himself to be eclipsed and to disappear within his immortal work.

Peppa, one of the prettiest girls in Licodia, was due to be married around this time to Finu, known as Tallow-Candle, who owned sunlit lands and had a bay mule in his stable.
He was a big, strong, handsome young fellow, who carried the standard of Santa Margherita in procession as straight as a pillar, without bending his back.

Peppa’s mother was positively weeping with joy over her daughter’s good fortune, and spent her time turning the bride’s trousseau over and over again in the trunk, so white and pure it could have belonged to a queen, and there were ear-rings that came down to the shoulders, and enough gold rings for every one of her ten fingers.
She had as much gold as you could see on Santa Margherita in the fresco, and in fact the wedding was arranged for that very saint’s feast day in June, after the haymaking.
Every evening, when he returned from the fields, Tallow-Candle tied up his mule at Peppa’s front door, and came to tell her how marvellous the crops were going to be if Gramigna didn’t set them alight, and how the big wicker basket in front of the bed wouldn’t be big enough to contain all the grain from the harvest, and how he couldn’t wait to lead her back home as his bride on the cropper of his bay mule.

But one fine day Peppa said to him, ‘You can keep your mule.
I don’t intend to marry you.’

Poor Tallow-Candle was struck dumb with amazement, and Peppa’s mother began tearing her hair out when she heard that her daughter was turning down the most eligible man in the whole village.

‘The man I love is Gramigna,’ her daughter told her.
‘I want to marry him and nobody else!’

‘Ah!’ Her mother rushed shrieking through the house, her grey hair trailing behind her, making her look like a witch.
‘Ah!
That demon has been here and cast a spell on my daughter!’

‘No!’ replied Peppa, with a look of steel in her eyes.
‘No, he never came here.’

‘Where did you see him then?’

‘I’ve never seen him.
I heard about him.
I just feel him here, burning inside me!’

The news caused a stir in the village, even though they tried to keep it quiet.
The women who had been envying Peppa over the rich cornfield, the bay mule, and the handsome young fellow who carried the standard of Santa Margherita without bending his back, went around telling all sorts of fancy stories about how Gramigna came to see her at night in the kitchen, and how they had seen him hiding under the bed.
Her poor mother had lit a lamp for the souls in Purgatory, and even
the parish priest called at Peppa’s house to touch her breast with his stole, so as to exorcize that demon of a Gramigna who had taken possession of her.

However, she continued to maintain that she did not know the man even by sight, but that she dreamt about him at night, and when she got up next morning her lips were parched, as if she too had known the thirst from which he must have been suffering.

Her mother then locked her inside the house so that she would hear no more of Gramigna, and she blocked all the cracks round the front door with pictures of saints.
Peppa listened to what people in the street were saying on the other side of the holy images, and turned hot and cold as if all the fires of Hell were being blown into her face by the Devil himself.

Eventually she heard them saying that Gramigna had been run to earth in the cactus scrub at Palagonia.
‘He fired away at them for two hours!’ they were saying.
‘There’s one carabiniere dead and at least three soldiers injured.
But they peppered him with such a hail of bullets this time that they found a pool of blood at the spot where he’d been shooting from.’

Peppa made the sign of the cross at the bedside of her mother, and escaped through the window.

Gramigna was still lying low in the rabbit warren of the cactus scrub at Palagonia, where they had not yet managed to dig him out.
He was wounded, bleeding, pale and weak from two days of going without food, feverish, and levelling his gun at his pursuers.

When he saw her approaching with such a resolute air through the thick scrub, in the dim light of dawn, for a moment he was undecided whether to pull the trigger.

‘What do you want?’ he asked her.
‘What are you doing here?’

‘I’ve come to be with you,’ she said, fixing her eyes on him.
‘Are you Gramigna?’

‘Yes, I am Gramigna.
If you’ve come to collect money, you’ve made a mistake in your calculations.’

‘No, I’ve come to be with you!’ she insisted.

‘Clear off!’ he said.
‘You can’t stay here.
I don’t want any company!
I’ve already told you, if you’ve come looking for money you’ve come
to the wrong place, because I don’t have any.
See for yourself!
It’s two whole days since I last had even a crust of bread to eat.’

‘I can’t go back home now,’ she said.
‘The road is swarming with soldiers.’

‘What do I care?
Clear off!’

He aimed his gun at her, but much to Gramigna’s amazement she stood her ground.
So he went up to her and started to rain punches on her, saying, ‘What is this?
Are you mad?
Are you a spy or something?’

‘No!’ she said.
‘No, I’m not a spy.’

‘Right you are, then, go and fill up this flask with water for me down at the stream.
If you want to stay with me, you have to put your life at risk.’

Peppa went without saying a word, and when Gramigna heard the sound of rifle shots he burst out laughing, and said to himself, ‘That was meant for me.’

But shortly after that, when he saw her coming back carrying the flask, pale and bleeding, he first of all pounced on her to seize the flask, and after he had drunk so much that he was out of breath, he said, ‘You got away with it, then?
How did you manage that?’

‘The soldiers were on the far bank, and the scrub was thick on this side of the stream.’

‘All the same they hit you.
There’s blood on your clothes.’

‘Yes.’

‘Where are you wounded?’

‘On the shoulder.’

‘That’s nothing.
You can still walk.’

He let her stay with him, and she followed him everywhere, feverish from her wound, ragged and barefoot, and she risked her life to go and fetch him flasks of water and crusts of bread.
Whenever she came back empty-handed through the rifle fire, her lover, dying of thirst and hunger, gave her a good thrashing.

Finally, one night when the moon was shining brightly over the cactus grove, Gramigna said to her, ‘They’re coming!’ And he got her to stand at the foot of a wall of rock while he ran off in the opposite direction.

Rifle shots rang out amid the cactus scrub, and here and there brief
flashes of flame penetrated the darkness.
Suddenly Peppa heard someone coming and turned round to see Gramigna dragging himself back with a broken leg.
He steadied himself against the cactus stumps to reload his rifle.

‘It’s all over!’ he said.
‘Now they are going to get me.’

What caused her blood to run cold more than anything else was the glassy expression in his eyes, that made him look like a madman.

When he dropped to the ground like a bundle of sticks, the soldiers piled on to him in a flash.

Next day they dragged him on a cart through the village, all bedraggled and covered in blood.
Everybody rushed to see him, and they began to laugh when they saw how tiny he was, as pale and ugly-looking as a doll in a peep-show.
So this was the man Peppa had deserted Finu Tallow-Candle for!
Poor Tallow-Candle stayed out of sight as if he was the one who ought to feel ashamed, while Peppa was led away in handcuffs by the soldiers as a common thief, Peppa who had as much gold as Santa Margherita!

Peppa’s poor mother had to sell all the white linen of the trousseau and the gold ear-rings, and all the ten rings for her fingers, so as to pay her daughter’s lawyers and bring her back home, penniless, ill, put to shame, as plain-looking as Gramigna, with Gramigna’s child clinging to her neck.
When they handed her daughter over at the end of the trial, surrounded by carabinieri in the bleak and gloomy barracks, she recited an Ave Maria.
The poor old woman, who had lost everything she possessed, felt they were giving her a treasure, and she wept like a fountain from the sheer relief of it all.
Peppa, on the other hand, seemed to have no tears left, and she said nothing, nor was she ever seen again in the village, although the two women earned their living with their own hands.
People said that Peppa had learnt her trade out there in the woods, and went out at night to steal.

The fact was that she stayed curled up in a corner of the kitchen like a wild animal, and only reappeared after her mother died from her labours, and the house had to be sold.

‘You see!’ said Tallow-Candle, who was still in love with her.
‘I could kill you with these two hands for all the wrong you have done to yourself and to others.’

‘It’s true!’ Peppa replied.
‘I know!
But it was the will of God.’

When the house and its few remaining bits of furniture had been sold, she left the village by night just as she had entered it, without bothering to turn round and look for the last time at the roof under which she had slept for so long, and went to pursue the will of God in the city with her child, near the prison where Gramigna had been put away.
All she could see were the sinister peepholes lining its mute façade, and the sentries drove her away if she lingered to pick out the cell where he might be lying.
Eventually they told her he had left some time before, to be taken away in handcuffs and transported across the seas with his wicker bag slung over his shoulders.

She said nothing, simply staying where she was because she had nowhere else to go, with nobody to wait for her to come any longer.
She scraped a living for herself working for the soldiers and the prison warders, as though she felt that she herself was a part of that huge, silent edifice, and also for the carabinieri who had seized Gramigna in the heart of the cactus grove after shooting him and breaking his leg.
For them she felt a kind of tender admiration that was akin to the deference shown by an animal to brute force.
On public holidays, when she saw them standing stiffly to attention in their dress uniform with their plumes and their shining epaulettes, she eyed them longingly, and she was to be seen so often around the barracks, sweeping out their sleeping quarters and polishing their boots, that they called her The Carabinieri’s Duster.

But every time she saw them loading their weapons at night and going out in pairs, with their trousers turned up and their revolvers strapped to their waists, or when they mounted their horses in the light of the lamp that gave a sheen to their carbines, and when she heard the sound of the horses’ hooves and the rattling of their sabres receding into the darkness, she turned a deathly pale, and trembled all over as she closed the stable-gates after them.
And whenever her little boy was playing with the other boys on the esplanade in front of the prison, running in and out among the soldiers’ legs, and the other boys shouted ‘Son of Gramigna!
Son of Gramigna!’ at him, she flew into a rage and pelted them with stones until they ran away.