Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories (21 page)

‘Luckily he relied on you to tell me.’

‘Yes, and I love you as well, I really do!
Shall we leave here tomorrow?’

‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’

‘Don’t you want to?’

‘It’s not that I don’t want to.
It’s just the sudden way you ask me that takes me by surprise, as though it were a play that was written by a pair of young women who have drafted a romantic novel.’

‘I’m sorry, I was just asking whether you would come with me.
But if you prefer to stay…’

‘No, I want to come too.
Only we must think of a plausible pretext, so as to prevent our inquisitive fellow-residents from thinking about the novel when they see us packing our cases in such a hurry.’

‘We already have the perfect excuse, especially because it happens to be true.
I’m going to meet my mother-in-law who arrives tomorrow from Florence, and you naturally are coming with me, so as not to be left here by yourself at the Villa d’Este.’

‘Excellent!
Since leave we must, the sooner we leave the better.
I want to go by the first train.’

They left the hotel, in fact, early next morning.
Her heart was pounding as she passed by the shuttered windows, on which the shadow of the tall trees was still asleep, and as she left behind the now-deserted avenue through which she had wandered so often, dreaming her dreams.

In the still of the early morning, the lake had a singular magic about it, and the surrounding landscape came alive down to the tiniest detail as though it were a living part of her own being, leaving a lasting
impression in the depths of her heart.
As soon as she was settled in the railway carriage, she opened the book she had brought along on purpose, and hid her face and tear-filled eyes behind it.
Erminia pretended not to notice, and had the good sense to leave her to luxuriate blissfully in the sorrow of the parting.

They found Erminia’s carriage awaiting them at the station, and Erminia insisted on taking her friend with her back to her house.

‘Rinaldi is not in Milan,’ she said, in response to Maria’s look of surprise on finding nobody there to meet her.
‘He’s gone to Rome.’

‘Without writing to tell me!’ Maria murmured.
‘Without sending me any word!’

‘He did write.
His letter will be with my husband.’

She suddenly broke off, as she was beginning to grow alarmed at the concern becoming evident on Maria’s face.

‘Oh, very well,’ she said, ‘you’ll have to be told sooner or later.
Rinaldi’s hurried off to Rome to put his affairs in order.
You know how it is.
When you’re doing business at a distance it doesn’t always go as it should.
Your husband was worried.
By going to Rome he’ll put everything right.’

‘What’s it about?’ whispered Maria, who was now even more concerned because, coming at that moment, the news had taken her by surprise.
‘What’s happened?’

‘Don’t be alarmed.
Your husband is fine.
It’s just that one of his debtors has gone into liquidation.
It’s a question of funds.’

‘Ah!’ said Maria, with a sigh.
Her face betrayed a hint of the irony of it all.

It looked as if her husband was deliberately doing all he could to justify her bitter little smile.
He was so worried about his business that nothing else in the world could penetrate his thoughts.
Several days went by without any further word from him.
Then finally a telegram arrived that filled his business partner with great consternation, and he left at once for Rome.

‘Oh!’ exclaimed Maria, in the worried tone of voice that had become habitual with her over the previous week.
‘It really must be a serious business!
But then, to my husband all business is serious.
At a time like this, my place must be at his side.
He doesn’t write to tell me anything,
of course, because he doesn’t want to upset me.
But now that his partner has gone to see him, I must go as well.’

Although Erminia put on an air of nonchalance, Maria was surprised to find that she approved of her decision, which made her feel uneasy.
For a moment a black thought crossed her mind, draining her face of its colour, but she soon recovered her composure and gave another of her nervous little laughs.

‘If my husband hadn’t trained me never to interfere in his business, I really would have reason to be alarmed.’

‘Alarmed over what?
Making a journey to Rome?
At the best time of year, and through such wonderful countryside?’

‘You’re right.
It’ll be like going on holiday.
Whether Rome or Brianza, they’re both the same to me.
What about you?
Will you be going back to the Villa d’Este?’

‘No.’

‘Oh…!’

‘I shall take my mother-in-law back to Florence.’

‘What a shame!
I mention the Villa d’Este, because there must be a lot of interesting people staying there just at present.
Your mother-in-law will be telling you what a wonderful young woman you are.’

That same evening, she left for Rome, but she was filled with an unaccountable state of anxiety, and her agitation increased as she neared the end of a journey that seemed to be going on for ever.
When she first caught sight of her husband, she found that such a change had come over him in so brief an interval that she almost died of fright.
Rinaldi took her hands affectionately into his own, but seemed to be taken aback by her sudden arrival.
He was so flustered that he did nothing but ask her over and over, ‘Why did you come?
What brought you here?’

Poor Maria!
She too was very different now.
The faintest of wrinkles had appeared above her eyebrows, delicately lining the clear pure white of her forehead, at times spreading like a shadow across the whole of her face.

‘Yes, they were terrible times, and they still affect me like a black cloud, a painful memory to which I’ve almost become attached because it has rooted itself so deeply within me.
It left so indelible an impression that I could never erase it without doing harm to myself.
What a moment that was, when I saw my husband with the revolver in his hand, and I found the strength to cling on to him, to prevent him from killing himself!
What a moment!
He really did want to kill himself; he told me so afterwards.
He couldn’t bring himself to tell me he could no longer buy horses for me, or a box at La Scala, or jewellery, or anything!
There he was, crying as certain men cry who have never cried before, with tears that drive an arrow clean through your heart.
I can’t begin to tell you how many thoughts flashed through my mind at that moment, when I pressed my heart close to his own, that was beating still, for me alone, and he buried his head against me, burning with affection!
It was good of you to climb all those stairs to the fourth floor to pay me a visit.
You’ve done so much for me!’

‘You’re not doing a great deal for me, my dear Maria, by paying me all these compliments.
You must have had a low opinion of me!’

‘Of course not!
But what can you expect, when you’ve been through all the things that I have?
Besides, the worst thing about falling on hard times is that it makes you distrust people.
You can just imagine what an effect it had on me when the rumour got about that I’d been left a widow, and it never occurred to anybody that I was down there in Rome, all alone, with no one to come to my aid, not even a single one of those who claimed to be such good friends!
Mind you, I’m not complaining.
I hadn’t been altogether honest with you.
I still love you!’

She hesitated for a moment, then rushed up to Erminia and threw her arms round her neck.

‘Forgive me!
Forgive me!
I was mistaken about you, and about everyone else!
I’ve been wrong so many times!’

Erminia returned her embrace.
She too was greatly moved, but uttered no word in reply.

‘It was foolish of me!’ Maria murmured, after hesitating once again, her face buried in Erminia’s bosom.
‘I never even think about him any more.’

‘And I never thought about him at all,’ said Erminia, laughing as broadly as ever, but in tones and appearance of utter sincerity.

Maria suddenly raised her head and looked her straight in the face, her eyes blazing with astonishment.

‘Never, you say?
Never?’

‘Never.’

‘But in that case… In that case, I never loved him either!
No, really!
Never!’

But if, out of charity, they had not taught him to say Mass and to read and to write, he would not have managed to worm his way into the leading families of the district, or to fill his ledgers with the names of all those tenants who worked for him and prayed God to send him a good harvest, and who cursed like troopers when the time came for him to settle their accounts.
‘Judge me by what I am, not by the one who bore me,’ says the proverb, and everybody knew who had borne him, because his mother still swept his house for him.
The Reverend had no sense of family pride, not he, and whenever he called on the baroness for a game of cards, he would get his own brother to wait for him with a lantern in the ante-room.

For the Reverend, charity began at home, as Heaven decrees it should, and he had taken into his house a niece, good-looking but poor as a church mouse, who would never have found a scrap of a husband.
Not only did he maintain her, but he set her up in a splendid room with glass panes in the window and a four-poster bed, and she was not required to work, or soil her hands performing any humble service.
Hence everyone took it to be God’s judgement when the poor girl came over scrupulous, as happens to women who have nothing to occupy their minds, and spent her days in church beating her breast over living in mortal sin – but not when her uncle was there, for he was not the sort of priest who likes to show himself off at the altar in all his pomp and glory to his mistress.
As far as women were concerned, outside his own house it was enough for him to tweak them paternally on the cheek between forefinger and thumb.
And he did the same through the window of the confessional after they had cleared their conscience by unloading their own and other people’s sins, for there is always something useful to be learnt, by imparting blessings, for anyone who speculates in country affairs.

The Lord be blessed!
He never claimed to be a saintly man, not he!
Saintly men died of hunger, like the parish priest who went on celebrating Mass even when they left nothing in the plate, and who dragged himself round the houses of the poor in a threadbare cassock that was a scandal to religion.
The Reverend was determined to move forward, and that was what he did, with a fair wind in his sails, after being side-tracked to begin with by that blessed habit that was such a hindrance that in order to leave it behind in the monastery garden he pleaded his case before the royal law-courts.
His fellow-brethren had helped him to win the case so as to be rid of him, because ever since he had joined the monastery, benches and soup-bowls went flying round the refectory whenever a new provincial was elected.
Father Battistino, a true servant of God who was sturdy as an ox, had almost been decapitated, and Father Giammaria, the sacristan, had lost a whole row of teeth.
The Reverend, who had stirred it all up, retired to his cell and stayed there quiet as a mouse, which was how he managed to retain all the teeth a Reverend required, while everyone told Father Giammaria, who had set this scorpion in their midst in the first place, ‘Serve you right!’

Father Giammaria, being a decent sort of fellow, rubbed his toothless gums over his lips, and replied, ‘What do you expect?
He was never made out to be a Capuchin.
He’s like Pope Sixtus, who started out as a swineherd and became the man he was.
Don’t you remember the promise he showed as a boy?’

No wonder Father Giammaria had simply remained a sacristan of
the Capuchins, without a shirt to his back or a penny to his name, listening to people’s confessions out of the love of God, and cooking minestra for the poor and the needy.

When the Reverend was still a boy, and saw his brother, the one with the lantern, breaking his back digging, and his sisters unable to find a husband even if you gave them away, and his mother spinning in the dark to save the oil for the lamp, he had said, ‘I’m going to be a priest!’ They sold their mule and their tiny bit of land to send him to school, hoping that once they had a priest in the house, it would more than compensate for a mule and a bit of land.
But more than that was needed to maintain him at the seminary!
So the boy started hanging round the monastery so that they would take him on as a novice, and one day when the provincial was expected and there was work to be done in the kitchen, they invited him in to lend a hand.
Father Giammaria, who was a kindly soul, said to him, ‘If you like the job you can stay.’ And Brother Carmelo, the warden, in order to while away the time as he sat on the low wall of the cloister, idly flapping his sandals one against the other, ran up a bit of a scapular for him with pieces of sackcloth draped over the fig tree to scare away the sparrows.
His mother, brother and sisters protested that if he became a friar they were finished, and their investment in his schooling was wasted, as they would never get a penny back.
But being a friar to the very core, he shrugged his shoulders, saying, ‘Do you mean to say a man can’t follow the vocation God has called him to?’

Father Giammaria had taken him on willingly because he was quick as lightning, whether in the kitchen or performing any other menial task, and he would even serve Mass as if he had never done anything else in his life, with his eyes cast downward and his lips sealed like a seraph.
Now that he no longer served Mass, he still had those downcast eyes and those sealed lips whenever he was negotiating some shady deal with the local bigwigs, or bidding at auction for common land, or swearing on oath before the chief of police.

As to oaths, in 1854 he was forced to swear a real whopper at the altar, as he was reciting Holy Mass in front of the ciborium, when people were accusing him of spreading the cholera, and threatening to beat him up.

‘By this consecrated Host that I hold in my hands,’ he said, to the kneeling faithful, ‘I am innocent, my children!
Moreover, I promise you that within a week the scourge will come to an end.
Be patient!’

They were patient, right enough!
They had no option, because people said he was hand in glove with the judge and the army commandant, and that King Bomba
¹
not only sent him capons at Easter and Christmas to pay him off, but had also sent him an anti-cholera remedy, in case anything went wrong.

An elderly aunt of his, whom he had been forced to take into his house to stop people talking, and who was good for nothing except to steal the food from his mouth, had uncorked a wrong bottle, and caught a real dose of cholera.
But her own nephew, so as not to allow anyone to suspect him, refused to give her the antidote.
‘Give me the antidote!
Give me the antidote!’ pleaded the old woman, already black as coal, paying no attention to the doctor and the notary who, also present, were exchanging embarrassed glances with one another.
The Reverend, pretending bare-faced that it was none of his business, shrugged his shoulders and muttered, ‘Take no notice, she’s delirious.’

If he really did have the antidote, the king had sent it to him in the strictest confidence, forbidding him to pass it on to a living soul.
The judge had called round in person and pleaded with him on bended knee to give him some for his dying wife, only to be told, ‘Ask me to lay down my life for you, dear friend, but in a matter of this sort I’m powerless to help.’

All of this was common knowledge, and because everyone knew that his intrigues and his cleverness had won him the intimate friendship of the king, the judge, and the army commandant, who controlled the police, and whose reports arrived in Naples without passing through the hands of the provincial governor, nobody dared to argue with him.
And whenever he set his sights on a farm that was up for sale, or a plot of common land that was up for auction, even the local bigwigs, if they ventured to bid against him, bowed and scraped to him as they did so, and offered him a pinch of snuff.
He once spent a whole morning playing cat and mouse with the baron himself.
The baron was the soul of amiability as the Reverend, seated opposite him with his cloak
gathered up between his knees, kept offering him his silver snuffbox every time he raised the bidding, sighing,

‘What else are we to do, my dear baron?
If the donkey drops, one has to help it to its feet.’ And when the time came for the lot to be knocked down, the baron raised the pinch of stuff to his nose with bile coming out of his ears.

The villagers were quite content about all this, because the big dogs will always fight one another over a juicy bone, and the poor never get a smell of it.
But what caused them to mutter was that this servant of the Lord would milk them dry worse than the Antichrist whenever they had any dealings with him, and he had no scruples about seizing his neighbour’s goods, because he was holding the confessional reins in his own hands, and if he committed a mortal sin he could give himself absolution.

‘It all comes from having a priest in the house!’ they sighed.
And the ones who were better off starved themselves so as to send their sons to the seminary.

‘When you depend on the country for your living, you have to give the whole of your time to it,’ the Reverend would say, which was his excuse for never considering anyone except himself.
As to the Mass itself, he only celebrated it on Sundays, when there was nothing else to do.
He wasn’t one of those petty priests who ran after three
tarì
just for saying Mass.
He could do without it.
And that was why the Lord Bishop, after arriving at his house on a pastoral visit, and finding his breviary covered in dust, wrote ‘Deo gratias’ on it with his finger.
But the Reverend had too many other things on his plate to waste his time reading the breviary, for he was not one of your petty priests who recite Mass for a handful of coppers, and he laughed off the Bishop’s reproof.
His breviary might have been covered in dust, but his oxen were gleaming, his sheep were thick with wool, and his crops were taller than the top of a man’s head.
His farmhands could revel in the sight of the crops and build castles in the air; until, that is, their master came along to settle up.
The poor fools opened their hearts out to him.
‘The crops have grown like magic!
The Good Lord’s been passing over them in the night!
They belong to a servant of God, no mistake about it.
We’d be a right set of fools not to work for the farmer with Mass and benediction at his fingertips.’

In May, the time of year when they were looking up at the sky to exorcize every passing cloud, they were happy with the thought that their master was saying Mass for a good summer, which would do more good than all the images of saints, or the sanctified bread left lying around to ward off the evil eye and a poor harvest.
The Reverend did not, in fact, want sanctified bread scattered about his fields, because it merely attracted sparrows and other birds to come along and damage the crops.
And as for images of saints, he had his pockets full of them, being able to pick up as many as he wanted in the sacristy to hand them out to his peasants.

But at harvest time he rode up on horseback with his brother, who, acting as his watchman, had a shotgun slung over his shoulder.
He never moved from the spot, bedding down with all that malaria around to keep a close watch on his affairs, without a care for anyone, not even Christ Himself.
Those poor devils, who in the balmy days of summer had forgotten the hardships of the winter, stood open-mouthed to listen to him reciting the litany of what they owed him.
‘Your wife borrowed so many kilos of beans when it was snowing.’ ‘Your son was given so many kilos of firewood.’ ‘So many kilos of seed-corn advanced at so much a month with interest.’ ‘Reckon it up for yourself Some sort of reckoning!
In the year of the famine, Zio Carmenio had slaved away and ruined his health in the Reverend’s fields, and when the harvest came he had to hand over his donkey to pay off his debts and went away empty-handed, yelling such a stream of foul-mouthed abuse as to shake Heaven and earth.
The Reverend, not being there to listen to confessions, let him get on with it and led the donkey away into the stable.

After becoming a wealthy man he discovered that his family, which had always gone hungry, held certain rights to a benefice that was rich as a canonry, and at the time when mortmain
²
was abolished, he applied for the land to be released, and grabbed the farm in perpetuity.
The only thing that annoyed him was the fee one had to pay for the land to be released, and he called the Government robbers for not allowing people to take over gratis a benefice that belonged to them anyway.

He had almost had a fit over this Government earlier on, in 1860, when the revolution took place,
³
and he had been forced to take refuge
in a cave like a rat, because all the villagers who had been in dispute with him wanted to polish him off.
Then later on came the rigmarole of the taxes, that he was forever having to pay, and the very thought of it turned his wine at table into poison.
And now they were laying siege to the Pope, and wanted to strip him of his temporal power.
But when the Pope excommunicated everyone who had taken over its mortmains, the Reverend completely lost his temper, and spluttered, ‘Who does the Pope think he is?
What belongs to me has nothing to do with his temporal power.’ And he went on celebrating Holy Mass more boldly than ever.