Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories (23 page)

The town hall paid Zio Masi
50 centesimi
for chickens and 3
lire
for every pig he caught breaking the law.
He preferred pigs, and when he spotted Comare Santa’s piglet, peacefully sticking its snout into the mud outside her front door, he whipped his slipknot round its neck.

‘Holy Mother of God!’ cried Comare Santa, turning pale as death.
‘What are you doing, Zio Masi?
For pity’s sake, Zio Masi, don’t slap a fine on me, or you’ll ruin me!’

So as to give himself time to haul the piglet over his shoulders, that rat of a Zio Masi laid on the charm, saying, ‘What can I do, my love?
I’m only carrying out the mayor’s orders.
He doesn’t want pigs on the streets any more.
If I don’t take your piglet, I lose my job.’

Comare Santa ran after him like one possessed, tearing her hair out, and screaming, ‘Hey!
Zio Masi!
Don’t you know it cost me 14
tarì
at the San Giovanni fair, and it’s all I have in the world!
Leave me my baby pig, Zio Masi, in the name of your dead mother’s soul!
God willing, it’ll be worth two
onze
by the end of the year.’

Zio Masi had a heart of stone, and, saying nothing, he simply kept his head down to see where he was placing his feet, so as not to slip in the mud, with the piglet across his shoulders grunting and staring into
space.
In order to save her piglet, Santa in desperation aimed a solid kick at his backside and sent him tumbling.

When the women saw the pig-snatcher sprawling in the mud, they set about him with their clogs and their distaffs, determined to make him suffer for all the pigs and chickens he had on his conscience.
But at that moment they were seen by Don Licciu Papa, swaggering about with his sabre dangling over his belly, who started shouting like a madman, keeping well out of range of the distaffs, ‘Make way for the Law!
Make way for the Law!’

The Law sentenced Comare Santa to a fine and payment of damages, and she only escaped going to prison by the skin of her teeth through the intervention of the baron, whose kitchen window faced on to the street.
He proved to the Law that there was no question of an insurrection, because on that particular day the pig-snatcher was not wearing his official town-hall cap with the braid round it.

‘You see!’ the women exclaimed in chorus.
‘It takes a saint to get into Heaven!
None of us knew anything about that cap business!’

But the baron also added a word of warning.
‘The mayor was quite right to order pigs and chickens to be cleared from the neighbourhood.
It was beginning to look like a pigsty.’ From then on, the baron’s servant emptied the refuse over the women’s heads without a word of complaint.
But they grumbled that the chickens confined to the house laid fewer eggs, and the pigs, tethered to the bedposts, seemed like so many souls in purgatory.
‘At least they kept the streets clean before this happened!’

‘All that manure would be like gold for the Grilli Fields
¹
!’ Massaro Vito sighed.
‘If I still had the bay mule, I’d sweep up the streets with my bare hands.’

Don Licciu Papa played a part in that business, too.
It was he who had come with the bailiff to seize the mule, because Massaro Vito would sooner have died than allow the bailiff to take it from the stable by himself, he would have gobbled the fellow up for breakfast.
And when Massaro Venerando took him to court for what was owing from the tenancy, with the magistrate sitting there on the bench like Pontius Pilate, Vito was completely tongue-tied.
That piece of land was only good for breeding crickets, it was his own fault if he was left emptyhanded
at harvest time, and Massaro Venerando was right to demand payment instead of all these promises and delays, causing him to bring along a lawyer to speak on his behalf.
When the judge finished, and Massaro Venerando strode happily away in his big boots, swaying from side to side like a bloated duck, Vito simply had to ask the clerk of the court whether it was true they were going to sell his mule.

‘Silence!’ bawled the judge in the middle of blowing his nose before passing on to the next case.

Don Licciu Papa, asleep on a bench, suddenly woke up and shouted, ‘Silence!’

‘If you’d brought a lawyer along,’ Compare Orazio said to Vito to cheer him up a little, ‘you’d be allowed to go on talking.’

In the piazza, below the town-hall steps, the auctioneer was selling his mule.
‘Fifteen
onze
for Vito Gnirri’s mule!
Who’ll bid me fifteen
onze
for this fine bay mule?
Fifteen
onze!’

Compare Vito sat on the steps, cradling his chin in his hands, unwilling to tell anyone it was an old mule he had been working with for over sixteen years.
She was standing there with her new halter, happy as a bride.
But once they led her away, it made him furious to think that for a single year’s tenancy Massaro Venerando had swindled him out of 15
onze,
which was more than the land was worth.
Now that he had no mule he would not be able to work it, and at the end of the year he would be in debt up to his ears all over again.
He began yelling like a madman to Massaro Venerando’s face, ‘What’ll you take from me when I have nothing, you Antichrist!’ And he would have knocked him senseless then and there except that Don Licciu Papa, who was close at hand with his sabre and his braided cap, pulled him away, shouting, ‘Stop in the name of the Law!
Stop in the name of the Law!’

‘What law?’ Vito yelled, as he returned home with the mule’s halter.
‘There’s one law for the rich and one for the poor.’

Arcangelo the shepherd was another who knew all about that.
When he took the Reverend
²
to court over his cottage because the Reverend was trying to force him to sell it, everyone told him, ‘You must be mad to be picking a quarrel with the Reverend.
You’re hammering your head against a brick wall!
With all the money he’s got, he’ll hire the best lawyer for miles around and you’ll end up poor, ready for the funny farm.’

After he became rich, the Reverend had enlarged the family house in different places, like a hedgehog growing fat and pushing the others out of the nest.
Once he had widened the window overlooking Arcangelo’s roof, he said he needed the cottage to build a kitchen on top of it and turn the window into a doorway.
‘You see, Arcangelo my friend, I can’t do without a kitchen!
You must be reasonable.’

Arcangelo was nothing of the sort, and insisted on claiming he was going to die in the house where he was born.
True, he was only there once a week on Sundays, but he knew every inch of the cottage walls, and whenever he thought of the village, as he wandered over the pasture lands above Carramone,
³
in his mind’s eye he could see that rickety front door and the window without any glass.
Very well, thought the Reverend to himself, in that case, if these yokels can’t see reason, we’ll have to knock some of it into their heads.

From then on, out of the Reverend’s window on to Arcangelo’s roof there poured a shower of broken pots, stones, and dirty water, turning the corner of the cottage where Arcangelo had his bed into a pigsty.
If Arcangelo complained, the Reverend stuck his head out and complained even louder, shouting, ‘Is no one allowed to keep a pot of basilica on his window-ledge?
Does no one have a right to water his own plants?’

Arcangelo the shepherd was more obstinate than one of his rams, and he went to law over it.
The judge came along, with the clerk to the court and Don Licciu Papa, to see whether the Reverend had a right to water his own plants, which were not in the window that day, and all the Reverend had to do was remove them every time the law people were due to turn up, and put them back again as soon as their backs were turned.
The judge could not very well keep passing up and down the road to keep an eye on Arcangelo’s roof.
Every visit he made was costing good money.

They were left with the question of deciding whether the Reverend’s window should have a grille or not, so the judge, the clerk to the court, and everyone else went over the place with optical gear, taking so many measurements you would have thought it was a baron’s roof rather than the simple, mould-covered, tiny roof of Arcangelo’s cottage.
The Reverend also dug up certain ancient rights to a window without a
grille and tiles jutting out over the roof, and poor Arcangelo just stood there looking up and wondering how his roof could possibly be to blame.
He was unable to sleep at night and was no longer his normal, cheerful self.
The expense of it all was bleeding him to death, and he had to leave a shepherd-boy in charge of the flock so that he could run after the judge and the justices’ clerk.
Not only that, but his sheep were dying like flies in the early winter frosts, and people started saying the Lord was punishing him for arguing with the church.

In the end he told the Reverend to go ahead and take it, because after so much litigation and so much expense he could no longer afford a rope to hang himself with from one of the beams.
All he wanted was to sling his rucksack over his shoulder, take his daughter to live with him alongside his sheep, and never set eyes on that blasted house for the rest of his life.

Then battle was joined by his other next-door neighbour, the baron, who also had windows and tiles overlooking Arcangelo’s roof, and since the Reverend wanted to put in a new kitchen, the baron claimed he needed to enlarge his pantry, so the poor shepherd no longer knew who his own house belonged to.
The Reverend discovered a way to settle his dispute with the baron by dividing Arcangelo’s house between the two of them, and because of this second easement, Arcangelo got at least a quarter less for it than it was worth.

When they were about to leave the house and go away from the village, Nina, Arcangelo’s daughter, was in floods of tears, feeling as though her very heart was permanently nailed to those walls.
Her father, poor fellow, tried to comfort her as best he could, telling her they would be living like royalty down there in the Carramone caves, with neither neighbours nor pig-snatchers to worry about.
But the women of the village, who knew how matters stood, winked at one another and whispered among themselves, saying, ‘There’ll be no young man to call on her every evening at the Carramone caves when Arcangelo is minding his sheep.
That’s why Nina’s shedding so many tears.’

When Arcangelo discovered what had been going on, he began swearing and shouting, ‘You wicked hussy!
Who d’you think is going to marry you now?’

But Nina had no thought of getting married.
She simply wanted to
stay in the same place as the young man she saw every morning from her window as soon as she got up, giving him a signal to show whether he could call on her that evening.
That was how she had fallen from grace, by looking out of the window every morning at the young man, who at first smiled back at her, then blew her kisses along with the smoke from his pipe, while her neighbours were dying of envy.
After that their love had grown so strong that the girl was blind to everything else in the world, and she told her father bluntly and clearly, ‘You can go where you like, but I’m staying right here.’ And the young man had given her a promise that he would look after her.

Arcangelo the shepherd was having none of that, and wanted to call in Don Licciu Papa to take his daughter away by force.
‘At least when we get away from here, nobody’ll know about what’s happened to us,’ he said.
But the judge told him that Nina had reached the age of consent, and was her own mistress to do whatever she pleased.

‘Her own mistress, eh?’ Arcangelo muttered.
‘Well, I’m my own master!’ And as soon as he came face to face with the young man, who blew smoke in his face, he split his head open like a walnut, with a single blow of his club.

Once they had him securely tied up, Don Licciu Papa came running up, shouting, ‘Make way for the Law!
Make way for the Law!’

At the trial they even gave him a lawyer to put up a defence.
‘At least the Law doesn’t cost me anything this time,’ Arcangelo said.
And it worked out well for him.
The lawyer managed to prove that two and two make four, that Arcangelo the shepherd had not tried deliberately to kill the young man with his wild pear cudgel, because it was part of his stock in trade, and he used it to give the rams a clout on their horns when they wouldn’t listen to reason.

The result was that he was sentenced to only five years, Nina stayed behind with her young man, the baron enlarged his pantry, and the Reverend built a fine new house over Arcangelo’s old one, with a balcony and two windows full of greenery.