Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories (17 page)

It all arose from the envy of the people living in the San Pasquale parish, because that year the devotees of San Rocco had spent a small fortune to put on a grand spectacle.
The municipal band had turned up from the city, over two thousand firecrackers had been let off, and there was even a new standard, all embroidered in gold, that was reckoned to weigh a quarter of a ton, and in the midst of the crowd it looked like a splash of real gold.
All of this had a diabolic effect on people’s nerves in the San Pasquale parish, and in the end one of them lost his patience, turned pale with fury, and began to shout, ‘Long live San Pasquale!’ That was when the fists started flying.

There can be no doubt about it, to go shouting ‘Long live San Pasquale!’ right under the nose of San Rocco in person is an act of extreme provocation.
It’s like someone coming and spitting in your
own house, or someone who thinks it amusing to pinch the bottom of the girl you have on your arm.
At moments like that, you forget about Christ or the Devil, and abandon even the modicum of respect that you have for the other saints who, after all, are no different from your own.
If it happens in church, pews are hurled into the air.
If you are in a procession, oaths rain down on you like bats.
If you are at table, dishes go flying all over the place.

‘Holy Mother of God!’ shouted Nino, who was battered and bruised all over.
‘I’d just like to see anyone else having the nerve to come along here shouting “Long live San Pasquale!”’

‘I will!’ screamed Turi the leatherworker, whose sister was engaged to Nino, and who was quite beside himself because of a punch he had picked up in the mêlée, leaving him half-blind.
‘Long live San Pasquale to the death!’

‘Oh, for the love of God!
For the love of God!’ shrieked Saridda, Turi’s sister, flinging herself between brother and fiancé, who until that moment had always gone about together as the best of friends.

Her fiancé Nino cried out derisively, ‘Long live my boots!
Long live Saint Boot!’

‘Take that!’ shouted Turi, foaming at the mouth, his eye swollen and black as an aubergine.
‘Take that and put it in your boots.
And that for San Rocco!’

The pair of them went on exchanging punches that would have felled an ox until their friends managed to kick and hammer them apart.
But by that time Saridda was no less worked up, and shrieking ‘Long live San Pasquale!’ so loudly that she and her fiancé almost started hitting one another, as if they were already husband and wife.

On these occasions parents come to blows with their children, and wives leave their husbands if a woman from the San Pasquale parish has had the misfortune to marry a man from San Rocco, or vice-versa.

‘I never want to hear that fellow’s name ever again!’ Saridda bellowed, her fists clenched on her hips, to the neighbours who were asking her why the marriage had been called off.
‘Not even if they hand him over to me dressed in silver and gold!
Do you understand?’

‘As far as I’m concerned Saridda can rot in Hell!’ Nino said for his
part while they were wiping all the blood off his face at the tavern.
‘Those leatherworkers are nothing but a gang of beggars and layabouts!
I must have been drunk when I took it into my head to go over there to look for a girl-friend.’

‘If this is what’s going to happen,’ the mayor had concluded, ‘and people can’t carry a saint into the square without coming to blows, which is an absolute disgrace, I want no more festivals and no more forty-hour vigils!
And if I hear so much as a single curse being uttered, I’ll have them all arrested.’

The situation was in any case building up to a crisis, because the bishop of the diocese had granted the privilege to the canons of San Pasquale of wearing the
mozzetta,
²
and the parishioners of San Rocco, whose priests had no
mozzetta,
had sent a delegation to Rome to kick up a fuss at the feet of the Holy Father, carrying a petition on official paper and all the rest of it.
But it was totally in vain, because the new leather industry had made their opponents from the lower quarter as rich as pigs, although they could remember them going around without any shoes on their feet, and as everybody knows, in this world justice is bought and sold like the soul of Judas.

At San Pasquale they were awaiting the arrival of the bishop’s delegate, a man of some importance who, according to those who had seen him, wore silver buckles on his shoes weighing half a pound at the very least.
He was bringing the
mozzetta
with him to hand over to the canons; the San Pasquale folk had also hired a band to go and meet him three miles out from the village, and rumour had it that there would be fireworks in the square that evening, with ‘Long live San Pasquale!’ repeated over and over again in block capitals.

The people living in the upper quarter were thus in a state of considerable unrest, and some of the more excited amongst them fashioned cudgels out of pear or cherry branches as big as ten-foot poles, muttering, ‘If there’s going to be any music, they’ll need someone to beat out the rhythm!’

The bishop’s delegate was running a serious risk of ending up with broken limbs from his triumphal entry into the village.
But the Reverend was a crafty old bird, and left the band waiting for him outside the village whilst he made his way quietly on foot, using shortcuts, to the
house of the parish priest, where he called a meeting of the leaders of the two factions.

When these gentlemen found themselves face to face after quarrelling for so long, they stood there staring at each other as if they had a great longing to tear one another’s eyes out, and it required all the authority of the Reverend, who was wearing a new silk hood for the occasion, to arrange for the ice-creams and the other refreshments to be served without incident.

‘That’s the way to behave!’ purred the mayor, with his nose in his glass.
‘If you want me to attend a peace gathering, you’ll always find me ready and willing.’

The delegate said, in fact, that he had come to reconcile the two parties with the olive twig in his mouth, like Noah’s dove, and, entreating them all to keep the peace, he went round handing out the smiles and the handshakes, saying, ‘Do come and join me in the sacristy for cocoa, gentlemen, on the day of the festival.’

‘Cancel the festival altogether,’ said the magistrate, ‘otherwise it’ll lead to more trouble.’

‘What leads to trouble is when they go pushing people around, and nobody is free to do what he wants to do with his own money,’ exclaimed Bruno the coachbuilder.

‘I shall have no part in it.
The Government’s instructions are quite clear.
If you go ahead with the festival I shall call in the carabinieri.
I want public order.’

‘I shall answer for that!’ exclaimed the mayor, tapping his umbrella on the floor and casting his eyes round the assembly.

‘That’s a good one!’ the magistrate responded.
‘As if we didn’t know it’s Bruno, that brother-in-law of yours, who dictates everything you decide on the Council!’

‘You’re just making a fuss because you couldn’t stomach the fine we slapped on you for hanging out the laundry!’

‘Gentlemen!
Gentlemen!’ the delegate implored.
‘If we go on like this we can’t start anything.’

‘We can start a riot, that’s what!’ shouted Bruno, waving his arms in the air.

Luckily the parish priest had seen to it that the crockery and glasses
were swiftly moved out of harm’s way, and the sacristan had left at breakneck speed to pay off the members of the band, who had learnt of the delegate’s arrival and were hurrying in to the village to give him a rousing welcome, blowing away on their horns and their clarinets.

‘We shan’t get anywhere like this!’ complained the delegate, who was also annoyed because from his own point of view everything was cut and dried, and yet there he was, wasting his time trying to stop Bruno and the magistrate from killing one another.
‘What’s all this about a fine for hanging out the laundry?’

‘The usual bullying tactics.
You can no longer hang out a handkerchief to dry at the window without someone slapping a fine on you.
Until now people have always treated authority with respect, and the magistrate’s wife, knowing her husband held the office that he did, felt it was safe to hang out the week’s washing on the terrace as she always had done.
All she needed was a little sympathy, but now, under the new by-law, it’s become a mortal sin.
I can tell you with the greatest respect that you’re not even allowed to keep dogs or chickens or other animals, that up to now have kept our streets free of rubbish.
When we get the first rains, may God preserve us all from being drowned in the filthy mess.
But the fact is that Bruno has got it in for the magistrate on account of a judgment he gave against him.’

In trying to reconcile the various parties, the delegate was stuck all day long in the confessional like an owl.
All the women wanted to be confessed by him because he could give plenary absolution for every kind of sin, as though he were the bishop in person.

‘Father!’ said Saridda, with her nose right up against the grille of the confessional.
‘That Nino makes me sin in church every Sunday.’

‘And how does he do that, my daughter?’

‘The fellow was to have been my husband, before all these arguments started in the village, but now that the marriage is off, he plants himself near the main altar, staring at me and laughing with his friends the whole time during Holy Mass.’

When the Reverend tried to make Nino see the error of his ways, he replied, ‘She’s the one to blame.
She turns her back on me every time she sees me, as if I were some sort of beggar.’

But the fact was that, whenever Saridda passed through the square on Sundays, he pretended to be a great friend of the police sergeant and various other notables, and never even cast a glance in her direction.
Saridda was very busy making fairy-lamps out of coloured paper, and she set them out on her window-sill under his very nose, with the pretext of drying them out.
On one occasion when they were both attending a christening, they never even acknowledged each other’s presence, as though they were total strangers, and, in fact, Saridda made eyes at the fellow holding his baby girl over the font.

‘A fine fellow to be ogling!’ sneered Nino.
‘All he can do is produce a girl!
It’s a sure sign when a girl is born that the roof of your house is going to collapse.’

But Saridda, pretending to speak to the mother, said, ‘Every cloud has a silver lining.
Sometimes, when you think you’ve lost a treasure, you should be giving thanks to God and San Pasquale.
We all have to eat a peck of dirt before we die.’

‘That’s true.
You have to take misfortunes as they come, it’s no use crying over spilt milk.
When the Pope dies, they make another one.’

‘Children are fated to be born the way they are, and marriages are the same.
That’s why it’s better to marry a man who really loves you rather than for some other reason, even if he has nothing, neither mules, nor land, nor property.’

A drum-roll was sounding in the square, summoning the populace.

A whisper went through the crowd.
‘The mayor says the festival is going ahead.’

‘Over my dead body!
I’ll spend every penny I possess and end up like Job in nothing but my shirt.
And I won’t pay that fine, even if I have to lay it down in my will!’

‘Bloody hell!’ Nino exclaimed.
‘What sort of a festival do they think they’re going to have when we’re all going to die of starvation before the year is out?’

Not a drop of rain had fallen since the month of March, and the crops, all yellow and tinder-dry, were dying of thirst.
Bruno the coachbuilder ventured the opinion that once San Pasquale came out in procession it would start raining for certain.
But what did it matter to him, a coachbuilder, whether it rained or not, or to all those
leatherworkers on his side of the argument?
All the same, they did carry San Pasquale in procession to all points of the compass, and even took him to the top of the hill to bless the countryside.
It was a sultry day in May,
³
overcast with dark clouds, one of those days when the farmers tear their hair out as they survey the parched fields, and the ears of the crops droop low as if they are dying.

‘A curse on San Pasquale!’ Nino cried, spitting into the air, and running through the cornfield like a madman.
‘You’ve ruined me, San Pasquale!
All you’ve left me is the sickle to cut my throat with!’

The upper quarter was in despair.
It was one of those years when the hunger begins in June, and the women stand about in their doorways doing nothing, their hair in disarray and their eyes staring out in bewilderment.
When Saridda heard that Nino’s mule was up for sale in the square, so that he could pay the rent for the land that had yielded him nothing, she immediately flew into a rage and sent Turi, her brother, running off to help him out with the few
soldi
they had saved up between them.