Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories (24 page)

The fact is that malaria enters your bones with the bread that you eat and whenever you open your mouth to speak, as you make your way on foot along paths that are choking with dust and the heat of the sun, and you feel your legs giving way under you.
Or else you collapse in a heap over the pack-saddle of your mule, that hangs its head low as it ambles along.
In vain do Lentini, and Francofonte, and Paterno attempt to climb like lost sheep over the first hills to escape from the plain, surrounding themselves with orange groves, with vineyards, with
evergreen gardens.
The malaria fells the townspeople in the deserted streets, it pins them down in the doorways of houses whose plaster is peeling in the sun, as they shudder from the fever, wrapped up in their overcoats, and with all the blankets from their beds round their shoulders.

Down below, in the plain, along lanes devoured by the sun, the few scattered houses stand melancholy-looking between two heaps of steaming manure, alongside crumbling stable roofs where relief horses wait with lifeless eyes, tethered to empty mangers.

Or cast your eyes down there to the shore of the lake, at the inn with its tattered old bush hanging on the door,
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its empty reception rooms, and its innkeeper huddled up asleep on the doorstep, his head bound round in a handkerchief, waking up from time to time and surveying the deserted landscape to see if any thirsty traveller should be coming his way.
Or see those objects like white wooden boxes, framed by a few slender, grey eucalyptus trees, beside the railway line that splits the plain in two as though by a blow from an axe, where the locomotive flies whistling along like the autumn wind, and fiery sparks coruscate through the night.
Or lastly, here and there you will come across an occasional farm, its boundaries marked by rickety posts, with the shored-up roof, shutters dangling loose, and the threshing-yard riven with cracks.
In the shade of tall haystacks, chickens sleep with their beaks tucked under their wings, the donkey hangs its head, still with a mouthful of straw, and every so often the dog springs warily up to growl at a stone detaching itself from the pebble-dash, a darting lizard, or a leaf that stirs in the dormant farmland.

The sun no sooner goes down in the evening, than sunburnt men under straw hats appear at the doorway in loose canvas shorts, yawning and stretching their arms.
And women too appear, half-dressed, their shoulders black from the sun, suckling babies already so pale and wasted in appearance that you wonder how they are ever going to grow up tall and dark-skinned, and whether they will even survive to play on the grass next winter, when the farm turns green again, and the whole of the land comes joyously back to life in the sunlight, beneath a deep blue sky.
Nor can you tell where or how all those others live, who on Sundays flock to Mass in secluded chapels bordered by hedges of
prickly pear within a ten-mile radius, drawn by the feeble sound of the church-bells ringing out across that endless open plain.

Yet where there is malaria, the land overflows with God’s blessings.
In June, the ears of corn droop low beneath their weight, and when the plough comes along in November, the furrows will steam as though they have blood in their veins.
But then, both the sowers and the reapers will fall like the ripe ears of corn, because as the Lord said, ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.’
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And when the sweat of the fever leaves a body stone dead on a straw mattress, and the sulphur or eucalyptus remedies are of no further use, it is laid on the haycart or across the donkey’s saddle or sometimes set on a ladder, with a sack over its face.
Then it is taken away and set down in the secluded churchyard beneath the prickly pears, whose fruit no one ever eats for that very reason.
The women huddle together in tears, and the men stand and watch, smoking their pipes.

That was how they carried off Massaro Croce, the watchman from the farm at Valsavoia, who had been dosing himself for thirty years with sulphur and eucalyptus.
He had been feeling better in the spring of that year, but in the autumn, when the wild ducks were passing over again, he wrapped his head in his handkerchief.
He was such a bag of bones that he only appeared on his doorstep every two days.
His belly had swollen up like a drum, and because his eyes had turned lifeless and were popping out on sticks, and also because he was such a wild and coarse-looking creature, people called him The Toad.
Before he died he kept saying, ‘Don’t worry, the master will take care of my children!’ And on the last evening, he fixed those ghostlike uncomprehending eyes of his on the faces of the people standing round his bed, as they held the candle one after another under his nose.

The goatherd, Zio Menico, who was no fool, said his liver must have been hard as a rock and weighing a good kilo and a half.

And someone else said, ‘He doesn’t give a damn any more, after growing so fat and rich at the master’s expense and seeing that his children no longer have need of anyone!
Do you reckon it was on account of the master’s good looks that he swallowed all that sulphur and all that eucalyptus for thirty years?’

The landlord of the lakeside tavern, Compare Carmine, had lost all
five of his children in the same way, one after the other, three boys and two girls.
It was not so much the girls that bothered him, but the boys died just at the very age they were old enough to earn a living.
By the time it came to the last one, he had learnt a thing or two, and when the fever took a real hold on the boy after tormenting him for two or three years, he spent not a penny more on sulphur cures or any other medicines, but poured out quantities of good wine and prepared every fish stew he could think of, so as to stimulate the invalid’s appetite.
He would go out fishing on purpose every morning in his boat, return with a load of mullet and with eels as long as your arm, and stand there in front of his son’s bed, with tears in his eyes, saying, ‘Go on!
Eat!’ The rest of the catch was taken away by Nanni, the carter, to be sold in town.

‘The lake giveth and the lake taketh away!’ Nanni told him, whenever he saw Carmine crying his eyes out in secret.
‘There’s not much we can do about it, brother.’ And in fact, the lake had been generous to him.
Around Christmas, when eels fetch high prices, in the house by the lake they would settle down to a hearty supper in front of the fire, with macaroni, salami, and all the good food you can think of, while the wind howled away outside like a cold and hungry wolf.
That was how the survivors consoled themselves for the ones who had died.
But as their numbers dwindled one by one, the mother broke her heart so often that her body was bent over like a hook, and the father would set his big, burly frame in the doorway so as to turn his eyes away from the large, empty rooms where his children used to sing as they went about their work.
His last child was utterly determined not to die.
When the fever struck him he wept out of sheer despair, and he even went and threw himself in the lake because the thought of dying frightened him so much.
But his father, who knew how to swim, fished him out again and talked to him severely, telling him that his cold bath would bring on his fever worse than before.
‘Ah,’ the young man sobbed, running his fingers through his hair, ‘there’s no hope left for me!
I’m finished!’

‘Just like his sister Agata, who didn’t want to die because she was going to be married!’ remarked Compare Carmine to his wife, who was seated on the opposite side of the bed.
And she, who was able to cry no longer, just nodded her head, her body curved over like a hook.

For all that she was reduced to such a sorry state, she and her big, burly husband were tough-skinned, and they continued to look after the house by themselves.
Not everyone goes down with malaria.
There are people who survive for years and years, like Cirino the local idiot, for whom neither king and country, nor trade and spade, nor mother and father, had any meaning whatever.
He had nowhere to sleep, nor bread to eat, yet everyone knew him for forty miles around, because he would forever be going from one farm to the next and taking on menial jobs, helping to look after the oxen, or to shift manure, or to skin carcases, in return for which he would be given a few kicks and a hunk of bread.
He would sleep in ditches, on the edge of fields, behind hedges, or under stable roofs.
He lived on charity, wandering about like a dog without a master, in shirt sleeves, barefoot, with the legs of his shorts secured to his thin black legs with pieces of string.
He would go around singing at the top of his voice, with the bright yellow sun beating down on his hatless head.
He took neither sulphur nor medicine, and caught no fevers.
They had picked him up countless times as he lay stretched out on the road like a corpse, and in the end the malaria had left him alone, not knowing what to do with him.
After eating away at his brain and the flesh of his legs and puffing out his belly like a water bottle, it had left the local idiot happy as a sandboy to sing away like a cricket in the rays of the sun.
His favourite place to stand was in front of the stables at Valsavoia, because there were people passing up and down, and he would run after them for miles, crying out, ‘Hey!
Hey!’ until they threw him a few coppers.
The innkeeper relieved him of the coppers and took him in to sleep in the stable on the straw put down for the horses.
Whenever they started kicking, Cirino ran to wake the master, shouting, ‘Hey!’ and next morning he currycombed and groomed them.

Later on he took an interest in the railway they were building nearby.
The coach-drivers and wayfarers were becoming a rare sight on the roads, and the idiot was unable to understand the reason.
For hours on end, he would gaze up at the swallows flying through the air, blinking his eyelids in the sun to try and work it out.
The penny seemed to drop for the first time when he saw all the people packed inside the railway carriages as they passed through the local station.
Every day
from then on he waited for the train at the exact time it was due, as though he had a clock in his head, and when it steamed past, engulfing him in its smoke and its noise, he flung his arms in the air and ran after it, bawling, ‘Hey!
Hey!’ in the most angry and menacing tone he could manage.

The innkeeper too, every time he saw the train passing in the distance, puffing its way through the malaria, shook his head and silently cursed it for ruining his business, as he stood there in front of the deserted stables and the empty wine-jugs.
In the past, he had done such a brisk business that he had married four separate women one after the other, earning himself the nickname of ‘Wifekiller’.
People said he was hardened to it, and he would have taken on a fifth except that Massaro Turi Oricchiazza’s daughter put a stop to the rumours by saying, ‘God forbid!
Not even if the fellow was made of gold!
He eats up wives like a crocodile!’

It was not true that he was hardened to it, because from breakfast-time on the day his third wife, Santa, had died on him, not a crust of bread or a drop of water passed his lips, and he stood there shedding real tears behind the bar of the inn.
After that happened, he said, ‘Next time I’ll be taking a wife who’s immune to the malaria.
I won’t go through all this again.’

The malaria killed off his wives one after the other, but left him the same as ever.
Old and wrinkled as he was, you could never have imagined this man too could go the same way as his three wives, as he went about taking on a fourth.
But he always wanted a wife who was young and attractive-looking, because nobody can run an inn without a wife, which was why, in the end, his clientele dwindled away.
The only customer now left was Mommu, the permanent way inspector, who never uttered a word, and who came in to drink his glass of wine between trains, settling himself down on the bench by the door, and taking off his shoes to rest his feet.
Wifekiller said very little either, but thought to himself that this fellow would never catch malaria, because if the people on the railway went down with it like flies there would be nobody left to run the trains.
One of his customers had always made his life a misery, and once Wifekiller had seen the last of him, the poor wretch had only two enemies left to worry about: the
railway that had stolen his business, and the malaria that had taken away his wives.
At least all the other people in the plain, for as far as the eye could see, had something to look forward to, even if they had someone either breathing his last on his straw bed, or floored by the fever on the doorstep, wrapped up in his cloak, with his head covered in a handkerchief.
They at least had the consolation of watching the sown fields coming up lush and green like velvet, or the corn ears undulating like the sea, and they could listen to the never-ending chanting of the reapers, strung out across the fields like lines of soldiers.
And all along the country lanes you could hear the sound of bagpipes, followed by swarms of peasants arriving from Calabria for the harvest, covered in dust from head to foot, bent low beneath their heavy backpacks, the men in front and the women behind, their eyes fixed on the road winding endlessly ahead, their tired-looking faces burnt by the sun.
And along the banks of all the ditches, beyond every thicket of aloe bushes, at the time when evening descended like a grey veil across the countryside, you could hear the watchman’s whistle amid the silent ears of corn, now motionless in the still air, they too enveloped in the silence of the night.
‘There!’ thought Wifekiller to himself.
‘If those people manage to survive and return home, they go back with money in their pockets.’