Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories (25 page)

With him it was different.
He had neither the harvest nor anything else to look forward to, and nothing to sing about.
The evening brought an air of great sadness to the empty stables and the darkened inn.
Mommu stood by his box, waving his flag as the train came whistling through from the distance, and after it had vanished into the night, even from where he was standing, in the doorway of the dark and deserted inn, Wifekiller could hear the idiot Cirino shouting, ‘Hey!’ as he ran along in its wake.
And he muttered to himself that for some people there was no such thing as malaria.

In the end, no longer able to pay the rent for the inn and the stables, the landlord sent him packing after he had been there for fifty-seven years, and Wifekiller too was forced to take a job on the railway, and wave his flag when the train came by.

When he grew tired of running up and down the railway tracks all day, exhausted by his age and his misfortunes, he watched twice a day
as the long line of carriages stuffed full of people came to a halt: bands of hearty huntsmen who would spread out over the plain, the occasional peasant playing a mouth-organ huddled up in the corner seat of a third-class carriage, fine ladies with veiled heads leaning out of carriage windows, the silver and burnished steel of their travel-bags and suitcases glittering in the light of the frosted lamps, the high, lace-topped backs of the padded seats.
What a marvellous way to travel, taking forty winks when you felt like it!
It was like seeing a part of the city going by, with its street lighting and its shops all aglitter.
Then, as the train disappeared into the thick evening mist, the poor devil would take off his shoes for a moment and sit there on the bench, muttering, ‘Ah!
For these people there’s no such thing as malaria!’

And in fact, being as sharp as a tack, he had piled up all that property, where once he had slaved his guts out from morning till night, digging, pruning and harvesting in the sun and the rain and the wind, with no shoes on his feet and not a rag on his back.
Everyone could remember kicking him in the pants, the same people who now called him milord and spoke to him cap in hand.
Nor did this cause him to put on airs, now that all the milords in the area owed him money, because, according to him, a milord was simply a poor devil who never paid his debts.
He went on wearing a cap, except that it was made of black silk, this being his only luxury, and just lately he had taken to wearing a trilby because it cost less than a silk cap.
The property he owned extended as far as the eye could see, and he had long eyesight.
Everything belonged to him, to the right, the left and the centre, up hill and down dale.
There were more than five thousand mouths feeding off his land, not to mention the birds of the air and the beasts of the field.
He himself ate less than any of them, being content with a hunk of bread and a piece of cheese that he bolted down in a great hurry as he stood, faintly visible through the clouds of dust from the sacks of corn being laid in by the farmworkers, in a corner of the barn as big as a church.
Or else he would eat as he leant against a haystack, with an icy wind roaring across the fields in the sowing season, or poking his head inside a skep in the sweltering days of the harvest.
He never touched a drop of wine, nor
did he smoke or take snuff, even though his gardens along the river bank produced tobacco leaves, tall and broad as a strapping youth, of the sort that fetched the highest prices.
Gambling and chasing after women were no vices of his, the only woman he ever spent money on being his mother, who set him back twelve
tarì
when he had to have her carted off to the churchyard.

What it meant to own property was the one thing that had occupied his mind during all the years when he went around barefoot working on the land that was now his.
He had known what it meant to earn three
tarì
a day, bending his back for fourteen hours in the heat of midsummer, with the foreman behind him on horseback, ready to give him a hiding if he stood upright for a single moment.
That was why he had never ceased for a minute in his whole life from the business of expanding what he owned.
And now his ploughs were as numerous as the long lines of crows that turn up in November, and there were mule trains winding endlessly across the land, and as many women trudging through the mud from October to March gathering his olives, as the magpies that came to steal them from him.
At the grape harvest whole villages came swarming into his vineyards, and wherever you heard people singing on the land, they were singing as they picked Mazzarò’s grapes.
As for the corn harvest, Mazzarò’s reapers spread out across the fields like a whole army, and to provide for all those people, with their early-morning biscuit, their bread and Seville orange for breakfast, their picnic lunch, and their lasagne in the evening, you needed fistfuls of money.
The lasagne had to be served up in bowls as big as wash-basins.
All of which meant that when he rode up and down on horseback behind the lines of his reapers, flourishing his whip, he kept a close watch on every one of them, and never stopped calling out, ‘Put your backs into it, lads!’ He was having to fork out good money the whole year round; in land tax alone the king was taking so much that Mazzarò broke out into a sweat every time he paid it.

But year after year all those barns as big as churches were so full of corn that their roofs would have had to come off to squeeze any more in, and every time Mazzarò sold off his wine he needed a whole day to count the takings, all made up of
12-tarì
silver coins because he would have nothing to do with dirty paper.
Dirty paper was something
he only bought when he had to pay the king, or anyone else, and at the country fairs Mazzarò’s herds filled whole fields, having cluttered up the roads so heavily en route that they took half a day to pass by, and sometimes the saint’s procession, with the brass band, had to get out of the way and take a different route.

All those possessions he had got through his own efforts, with his own hands and his own brains, going without his night’s sleep, breaking into many a sweat from palpitations and malaria, labouring away from dawn till dusk, and driving himself on in all weathers.
He may have worn out his boots and tired out his mules, but he never tired himself of thinking about the property he owned, which was all he had in the world, for he had no children or grandchildren or relatives to occupy his thoughts.
All he had was his property, and if that’s the way a man is made, it means he’s made for property.

Property came to him as though it were drawn towards him with a magnet, because property likes to be with people who know how to hold on to it, not people who waste it like that baron who first took Mazzarò on out of charity as a penniless drudge on his lands.
The baron was the owner of all those fields, all those woods, all those vineyards, and all those flocks of sheep and herds of cattle, and whenever he turned up on horseback with his farm watchmen bringing up the rear, you would have thought he was the king.
They had his lodging and his dinner waiting for the stupid ass, because they all knew the exact time he was due to arrive, and made sure they were not taken by surprise with their hands in the till.
‘That fellow’s just asking to be robbed!’ Mazzarò laughed to himself, as he rubbed his hands over his backside where the baron had given him a good kick, and murmured, ‘If you’re as brainless as that you should stay at home.
Property goes to the ones who know how to look after it, not to the ones who have it.’ With him it was different.
Once he had property of his own, he certainly never told anyone how and when to expect him to come and cast an eye over the harvesting of the corn or the gathering of the grapes.
He would turn up unannounced, on foot or astride a mule, with a hunk of bread in his pocket and not a single watchman to accompany him.
And he would lie down to sleep beside his hayricks, keeping his eyes open, with a shotgun between his knees.

That was how Mazzarò steadily took over all the property owned by the baron, who first of all gave up his olive groves, then his vineyards, then his grazing lands, then his farmhouses and finally the very palace where he lived.
Not a day went by without his having to sign some legal document or other on which Mazzarò inscribed his splendid cross.
The baron was left with nothing except the stone coat of arms that once stood over his front door, which was the only thing he was determined not to sell, saying to Mazzarò, ‘Of all the property I owned, this is the one thing you are not the person to have.’ He was right.
Mazzarò had no use for it, and would not have given twopence for it anyway.
The baron still looked down on him, but he no longer kicked him in the seat of his pants.

‘What a fine thing it is to have the fortune of Mazzarò!’ people said, unaware of what it had cost him to build such a fortune: all the thought, the labour, the lies, the risks of going to jail, and how, being as sharp as a tack, he had put his nose to the grindstone and worked day and night to amass all that property.
Whenever a neighbouring smallholder refused to surrender his land, and vowed to wring his neck, Mazzarò would always find a way to disarm his peasant pride, bring him down a peg, and force him to sell.
He would go along to him and boast, for instance, about the richness of a farm of his that would not even support a row of beans, get him to think it was the promised land, and persuade him to rent it by way of a good investment.
And when the fellow could no longer pay the rent, Mazzarò would lay hands on his cottage and his smallholding for no more than it cost to buy a loaf of bread.
But then, what about all those tiresome complaints that Mazzarò had to put up with?
What about the tenant farmers who came and moaned about the poor harvests, the debtors who sent their womenfolk one after another to tear their hair out and beat their breasts, begging him not to turn them out on the street and take away their mule or their donkey, saying they had nothing to eat?

‘Do you see what I eat?’ he would answer.
‘A crust of bread and an onion!
And my storehouses are filled to overflowing, and I own all this property.’ And if they were to ask him for a handful of beans from his enormous stockpile, he would say, ‘Why?
Do you think I stole them?
Do you have no idea how much it costs to sow them, to dig out the
weeds, and to harvest them?’ If they asked him for a
soldo,
he told them he didn’t have one to give.

It was true, because he never kept more than 12
tarì
in his pocket.
He needed the rest to make all that property pay, and money flowed in and out of his house like a river.
Besides, he was not interested in money, because he said it wasn’t property.
As soon as he put together a certain amount of it, he spent it on a piece of land, because he was determined to own as much land as the king, and be better off than the king, since the king can neither sell his land nor call it his own.

The only thing that troubled him was that he was growing old, and would have to leave the land where it was.
That goes to show that God is unjust, because you spend your whole life collecting property, and when you manage to get hold of it, and want more, you have to leave it all behind!
He would sit for hours on a skep, cradling his chin in his hands, casting his eyes over all those flourishing green vineyards of his, and the fields of corn shimmering in the breeze like the sea, and the olive groves veiling the mountainside like mist.
And if some half-clothed youngster were to pass that way, bent double like a tired mule beneath the burden he was carrying, he would hurl his stick between the boy’s legs out of sheer envy, and mutter, Take a look at that fellow!
He has nothing, and his whole life ahead of him!’

So when they told him it was time to forget about what he owned and think about his soul, he staggered out into the farmyard like a madman, and went round killing his ducks and his turkeys with blows from his stick, yelling, ‘You’re all mine and you’re coming with me!’