Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories (28 page)

But Lucia turned sometimes red and sometimes pale, and sometimes her eyes filled with tears, and she hid her face in her apron.
After a while she no longer set foot outside the house, and never went to Mass or confession, not even at Easter or at Christmas.

In the kitchen she settled down, her head bowed, in the darkest corner, wrapped around in the new dress given her by the master, with its loose waist.

Brasi comforted her with a stream of fine words.
He put an arm round her neck, he fingered the fine fabric of her dress and told her how much he admired it.
Those golden earrings seemed to have been made for her.
There was no need to feel ashamed and lower your eyes when you were well dressed and had money in your pocket, especially when your eyes were as beautiful as Lucia’s.

The poor girl, though still upset, recovered her composure sufficiently to raise those eyes and look him in the face, murmuring, ‘Is it true then, Brasi?
Do you still love me?’

‘Yes, yes of course, I want to love you,’ Brasi replied, hand on heart.
‘But how can I help it if I can’t afford to marry you?
If you had a dowry of 20
onze
I’d marry you with my eyes shut.’

Don Venerando had by this time taken a liking also to Brasi, and gave him his cast-off clothes and old boots.
Whenever he came down to the kitchen he would pour him a large glass of wine, saying, ‘Take this and drink to my good health!’

And his fat belly shook with laughter on watching Brasi turn pale as death, pull a long face and turn to Lucia, muttering, ‘The master’s a real gentleman, Lucia!
The neighbours can talk as much as they like, they’re all jealous and starving to death.
They’d like to be in your place.’

Santo, her brother, heard about it in the piazza a few months later, and ran back breathless to tell his wife.
Poor they had always been, but at least they were respected.
The Redhead, no less appalled at the news, rushed off to her sister-in-law in such a state of shock that she could hardly utter a syllable.
But by the time she returned home to her husband, she’d calmed down entirely, and was all smiles.

‘I wish you could see it!
A chest, so high, full of white linen!
Rings, pendants and necklaces, all in fine gold.
Then she has 20
onze
for her dowry.
A real godsend!’

‘It makes no difference!’ said Santo, who was unable to come to terms with what had happened.
‘She might at least have waited for our mother to close her eyes!’

When people at Lamia, and on the hillside of Santa Margherita, saw the evening sky turning so dark with ominous thick clouds that the oxen turned round in distrust and began to low, they all came out of their cottages and peered silently into the distance towards the sea, shielding their eyes with their hands.
The bell of the old monastery, at the top of the village, tolled to exorcize the Stygian gloom, and women, dark against the pale horizon, swarmed up the hill to the castle to view the Dragon’s Tail
⁸
as it swept across the sky in a vortex black as pitch.
They said it smelt of sulphur, and foretold an evil night.
The women pointed their fingers at the dragon to ward him off, they spat in his face, they bared their breasts to display their scapulars
⁹
and dragged their crucifixes down to their navels, and they prayed to God, the souls in Purgatory, and St Lucy,
¹⁰
whose vigil it was, to protect their fields, their beasts, and those of their menfolk who were away from the village.

Carmenio had gone with his flock to Santa Margherita at the start of the winter.
His mother was unwell that evening, and lay restless on the bed, her eyes wide open, no longer content to remain quiet, wanting one thing, then another, wanting to get up, wanting to be turned on to her other side.
Carmenio ran around for a while, paying attention to her, trying to do what he could.
Then finally he planted himself in front of the bed, not knowing what to do, with his head between his hands.

Their hut was on the far side of the stream, at the foot of the valley, between two enormous boulders that towered above its roof.
The barren hillside, ascending steeply on the opposite bank, and strewn with black rocks among which the white trail of the footpath was lost, began to disappear from view as the darkness rose from the valley.
Their neighbours from the flock by the cactus grove called at dusk to see if
the invalid was in need of anything.
She no longer moved on her pallet, but lay face upwards, her nostrils the colour of soot.

‘Bad sign!’ said Decu the shepherd.
‘If I hadn’t left my sheep up there, with the weather that’s coming, I wouldn’t leave you here by yourself this night.
Call out, if you need me!’

Carmenio, resting his head on the doorpost, said he would do as Decu had suggested.
But as he watched him walking gradually away and disappearing into the night, he longed to run after him, to start shouting, tear out his hair, or do something, anything.

‘If anything happens,’ Decu the shepherd shouted from the distance, ‘run up to the flock by the cactus grove.
There’s always somebody there.’

By the little that was left of twilight as it penetrated the cactus groves and lit up the peaks of the mountains, the flock could still be seen high up on the rock.
Suddenly, from the far distance, down at Lamia and towards the plain, the sound of howling dogs drifted up and made the blood run cold.
The sheep, terrified, started running round in circles, as if they sensed that a wolf was coming for them, and at the jingling of their bells it seemed that a thousand eyes glittered forth all around from the darkness.
Then the sheep stopped and huddled together motionless with lowered heads, and the sheepdog ceased its barking in a long, mournful howl, seated on its tail.

‘If only I’d known!’ thought Carmenio.
‘It would have been better to tell Decu not to leave me here alone.’

Every so often, the sound of sheep-bells pierced the darkness outside as the flock took fright.
Through the crack inside, all that could be seen was the pitch-black outline of the doorway.
The hillside opposite, the lower part of the valley, the plain of Lamia, all were engulfed in a blackness so profound that the roar of the swollen stream below seemed to take shape within it and hover menacingly above the hut.

If only he had known about this also!
Before dark he would have run back to the village to summon his brother, who would be there with him now for sure, along with Lucia and his sister-in-law.

At that moment his mother began to say something, but you couldn’t tell what she was saying, as she groped around the bed with her hands, all skin and bone.

‘Mamma!
Mamma!
What do you want?’ Carmenio asked.
‘Tell me, I’m here beside you!’

His mother made no reply, but simply waved her head from side to side as if to say she wanted nothing.
Carmenio held the candle up to her face, and burst into tears with alarm.

‘Mamma!
Mamma mia!’ wailed Carmenio.
‘I’m here on my own and can’t help you!’

He opened the door to call up to the shepherds at the cactus grove, but nobody heard him.

The hillside, the valley, the plain below, everywhere was silent, wrapped in a dense grey light like cotton wool, when suddenly the muffled sound of a church bell, tolling in the distance, came on the ears as though half-frozen in the snow.

‘Holy Mary, Mother of God!’ sobbed Carmenio.
‘Who’s the bell tolling for?’ Then he shouted, ‘You up there at the cactus grove, help!
For God’s sake, come and help me!’

Then at last the people at the cactus grove on the mountain-top, hearing a voice in the distance mingling with the sound of the bell at Francofonte,
¹¹
called out, ‘Halloa… What’s up?
What’s the matter?’

‘Help, for the love of God!
Help, down here at Decu the shepherd’s!’

‘Halloa… Bring in the shee… eep…!
Bring ‘em in…!’

‘No, it’s not the sheep!
Not the sheep!’ At that point an owl settled on the roof of the hut and began to hoot.

‘There!’ Carmenio murmured, crossing himself.
‘Now the owl’s caught the scent of the dead!
Now my mother’s going to die!’

Alone in the hut with his mother, who no longer uttered a word, he wanted to cry.

‘What is it, Mamma?
Say something, Mamma!
Mamma, are you feeling cold?’

Her face now dark, she showed no sign of life.
Carmenio lit a fire between the two hearth bricks, then watched as the sticks burned, forming a tongue of flame, that hissed as if to tell him something.

When he tended the sheep at Resecone, there was a fellow from Francofonte who, after dark, came out with tales of witches riding round on broomsticks and casting spells above the flames of the fireplace.
Carmenio could still remember how the farmhands, their eyes popping,
gathered round to listen below the lantern hanging from the pillar in the vast, dark winery, and how, that evening, none had the courage to return to his own sleeping place.

True, he was wearing the medallion of Our Lady round his neck and St Agrippina’s ribbon, blackened by time, around his wrist.
In his pocket he still carried the reed pipe that reminded him of summer evenings, ‘Whoo!
Whoo!’ when the sheep are released to roam at will through the golden-yellow stubble, and noon is filled with the chirruping of crickets, and dusk with the warbling of larks as they descend to their nests in the earth, and the air is heavy with the scent of rosemary and calamint.
‘Whoo!
Whoo!
Infant Gesú!’.
When he went back to his village for Christmas, that was the tune they always used to play around the crib, all lit up and bedecked with orange branches, and outside every cottage the children would be playing pitch-and-toss, with the warm December sun on their backs.
Then they would all set off in a big crowd with their neighbours to midnight Mass, joking and jostling as they made their way along the village streets in the dark.
Ah!
Why should his heart be aching so, with his mother no longer uttering a word?
There was still some time to go before midnight.
From every fissure between the stones of the unplastered walls, hundreds of eyes, ice-cold and black, seemed to be peeping out into the room towards the hearth.

In a corner of the room, a coat had been flung full length on his straw mattress, and now the arms seemed to fill out as the picture of the Archangel Michael that hung on the wall behind the bed came to life, and the devil tore his hair and bared his white fangs as he came bursting forth from the zig-zag flames of Hell.

Next morning, Santo arrived with The Redhead followed by the children, and Lucia, who in her distress did nothing to hide her condition.
All looking pale as death, they gathered round the dead woman’s bed, with no other thought but to tear their hair and beat their heads with their fists.

Then, catching sight of his sister’s big belly, which was a disgrace to the family, Santo spluttered amid the weeping and the wailing, ‘At least she might have waited until this poor old woman closed her eyes!’

For her own part, Lucia murmured, ‘If only I’d known!
If only!
I
would’ve seen she had a doctor and medicine, now that I have 20
onze.’

‘She’s up there in Heaven praying to God for us sinners,’ concluded The Redhead.
‘She’s quite content, poor soul, because she knows you’ve got your dowry.
Brasi’s bound to marry you now.’

‘You still owe two bushels of corn from last year.’

‘But, sir, the harvest was poor!’

‘Is it my fault if it didn’t rain?
Was I supposed to give the fields something to drink?’

‘I sweated blood on that land of yours, sir!’

‘That’s what I pay you for, you rogue, to sweat blood!
I sweat blood paying you to farm the crops, and when the harvest is bad, you quit the tenancy and sneak off with your sickle under your arm!’

They even pretend it’s better to be poor than rich, because if you’re poor you can’t be skinned alive for what you owe.
When you have no belongings you pay more for your land, because the owner is taking a bigger risk, and when the harvest is poor, the tenant is sure to be left with nothing, and go off with his sickle under his arm.
All the same it’s a nasty way to leave, after a year’s hard work, and a long winter ahead of you without food.

The fact is that a poor harvest brings out the devil in everybody.
Once, when the harvest seemed to be under a curse, the mendicant friar called around midday at Don Piddu’s farm, spurring on his fine
bay mule by digging his sandals into its belly, and calling out from the distance, ‘Jesus and Mary be praised!’

Don Piddu was seated on a worn-out mule-pannier in the deserted farmyard, gloomily surveying the parched stubble that lay all around.
He could not even feel the scorching sun as it beat down on his bare head, consumed as he was by despair.

‘That’s a fine mule you have, Fra Giuseppe!
It’s worth more than all four of these skinny jades of mine, with nothing to thresh or to eat!’

‘It’s the collection mule,’ Fra Giuseppe replied.
‘The charity of our neighbours be praised!
I’ve come to gather alms.’

‘It’s lucky for you that you can gather without sowing, and amble down to the refectory when the bell tolls, to fill your stomach with your neighbours’ charity!
I have five children to think about feeding!
You see what a fine harvest!
Last year you collared a couple of acres of grain from me for St Francis to send me a good harvest, and what did I get in return?
Three months of burning sun and not a drop of rain.’

Fra Giuseppe stood mopping his brow with a pocket handkerchief.

‘Feeling hot, Fra Giuseppe?
I’ll give you something to cool you down!’

Whereupon he got some of his farmhands, seething with rage like himself, to pull the friar’s sackcloth over his head and soak him with buckets of filthy green water from the horse pond.

‘By all that’s wicked!’ shouted Don Piddu.
‘If giving alms to Christ doesn’t help, next time I’ll give them to the devil!’

From then on he banned Capuchins from entering the farm, and only allowed the Minim Friars to come near the place.

Fra Giuseppe tied a knot in his handkerchief.
‘So!
Wanted to inspect my underpants, did you, Don Piddu?
You’ll have neither shirt on your back nor underpants by the time I’ve finished with you!’

He was a giant of a friar with a huge beard, and shoulders as broad as an ox, so that in the streets and the courtyards the peasants and their wives looked upon him as an oracle.

‘Keep well away from Don Piddu,’ he told them.
‘Remember he’s a heathen, and his land has a curse on it!’

When, towards the end of Carnival, the missioners came to conduct the Lenten spiritual exercises and preach on the doorsteps of sinners or
street girls or people enjoying life too much, Fra Giuseppe joined them as they went along in procession, scourging themselves for the sins of others.
He pointed towards the house of Don Piddu, who was suffering the torments of the damned: poor harvests, dead livestock, a sick wife, unmarried daughters, all dressed up and ready to leave the nest.
The eldest, Donna Saridda, was nearly thirty, but she was still called Saridda so as to stop her growing up.
¹
According to Pietro Macca, a servant at the town hall, she had finally grabbed a husband at the Mayor’s ball on Maundy Thursday, because he’d seen her holding hands with Don Giovannino as they flung themselves about in the square dance.
Don Piddu had starved himself for months so as to take his daughter to the ball in a silk dress with a plunging neckline.
You never know!
At that moment the missioners came to the Mayor’s front door and started preaching against temptation and all the sinning that was going on inside, and the Mayor had to have all the shutters closed, otherwise the people in the road would have hurled stones and broken the windows.

Donna Saridda returned home in high spirits, as though she had the winning lottery ticket in her purse.
She never slept a wink that night for thinking about Don Giovannino, unaware that Fra Giuseppe was about to tell him, ‘Are you mad, young man, to be marrying into the household
of Don
Piddu, when the bailiffs are due there at any moment?’

Don Giovannino was not concerned about a dowry.
But calling in the bailiffs was another kettle of fish!
The shame of it!
People crowded round Don Piddu’s doorway to see them taking away his wardrobes and his chests of drawers, leaving white patches on the walls where they had been standing for years, while his daughters, pale as death, were doing everything they could to hide what was happening from their mother as she lay there on her sickbed.
She, poor woman, pretended not to notice.
She had gone with her husband to plead with the notary, with the judge, swearing they could pay the next day, or the day after that.
But they returned home with bowed heads, she concealing her face in her shawl.
After all, she did have barons’ blood flowing through her veins!
On the day the bailiffs came, Donna Saridda had gone round with tears in her eyes closing all the shutters, because people born with a Don to their name feel the disgrace of it all.
When they took him on out of charity as a watchman at the Fiumegrande
farmlands, at harvest time, when malaria was killing people off like flies, Don Piddu was not bothered about the malaria.
What bothered him was that whenever the peasants got into an argument with him, they dropped the Don and addressed him as though he were one of themselves.

At least other poor devils, as long as they have strong arms and good health, can find ways of earning a crust, which is what Don Marcantonio Malerba said when he fell on hard times.
He had loads of children, his wife was forever pregnant, and he had to make the bread, prepare the minestra, do the laundry and sweep out the rooms.
Bigwigs are brought up differently, and need a whole lot of things that others can do without.
The children of Don Marcantonio would go the whole day on empty stomachs without a word, and if the eldest was sent by his father to buy a loaf or some fresh salad on credit, he would go after dark, hiding his head beneath his patched-up cloak.

His father did all he could to make ends meet, either by renting a piece of land or taking up a tenancy.
He would return from the fields on foot, later than everyone else, when nobody was passing down the lane, wrapped in what his wife called the plaid, her tattered shawl, having put in a hard day’s digging like the rest.

Then on Sundays he would go and join the other bigwigs at the gentlemen’s club, where they would stand around exchanging gossip among themselves, hands in pockets, noses tucked into the lapels of their overcoats, or else they would sit playing cards, wearing their hats, with their sticks between their knees.
On the stroke of noon they would scatter like the wind in various directions, and he would go back home pretending that, like the others, he too had a meal waiting for him.
‘What else can I do?’ he would say.
‘I can’t very well take on daywork with the children.’ And whenever the father sent the boys to Zio Masi, or Massaro Pinu, to ask for the loan of a quantity of spelt for sowing a couple of acres, or a bushel or two of beans for making soup, they turned red in the face, and mumbled as though they were already grown up.

When Mongibello
²
spat out fire, destroying vineyards and olive groves, at least the workers with a pair of strong arms were in no danger of dying of hunger.
But the bigwigs who owned the land would have
been better off buried under the lava, with their farms, their children and everything else.
The people with nothing to lose went out from the village to stand watching the fire, hands in pockets.
Today it had overrun so-and-so’s vineyard, tomorrow it would get into so-and-so’s field, now it was approaching the road-bridge, tomorrow it would surround that cottage on the right.
The ones who were not gawping were darting to and fro removing tiles, shutters and furniture, emptying the rooms and saving whatever they could, driven out of their minds by their haste and despair, like ants in an upturned nest.

They brought Don Marco the news while he was at table with his family, tucking in to a plate of maccheroni.
‘Don Marco, sir, the lava’s turned in your direction.
The fire’ll be in your vineyard very soon now.’ The wretched man was so alarmed that the fork dropped from his fingers.
At the vineyard the watchman was carrying away the wine-making gear, barrel-staves, and everything else that could be moved to safety, while his wife went round the edge of the vineyard, planting canes with images on them of the saints who were supposed to protect it, mumbling Hail Marys.

The great dark cloud was raining down ash on Don Marco as he arrived, gasping for breath, driving his donkey ahead of him.
From the yard in front of the winery one could see the huge black wave, smouldering as it piled up round the vineyard, crashing forward here and there with a clatter like a pile of dishes being dropped, and splitting open to reveal the red fire seething inside it.
In the distance, before it reached them, the tallest trees rustled and quivered in the still air and then began to smoulder and to crackle.
Then they suddenly burst into flame, like torches lighting up one after another across the silent countryside, in the path of the lava.
As the canes with the holy images caught fire one by one, the watchman’s wife retreated and replaced them with new ones, weeping in terror at the destruction all around her, and thinking that the master would no longer need a watchman and they would be out of a job.
The guard dog, too, was howling as it faced the burning vineyard.
Even the winery, roofless and open to the elements, with all its bits and pieces being piled in the courtyard, seemed amid the cowering farmland to be shaking with fear as it was emptied before being abandoned to its fate.

‘What are you doing?’ Don Marco asked the watchman as he tried to save the barrels and the contents of the winery.
‘Save your breath.
I’ve lost everything now, and there’s nothing to put in the barrels in any case.’

He kissed the vineyard rake for the last time before casting it aside and going back by the way he had come, leading his donkey by the halter.

In God’s name!
The bigwigs have their troubles too, they’re made of flesh and blood like the rest of us.
Take Donna Marina, for instance, Don Piddu’s other daughter, the one who threw herself at the stable-boy after giving up hope of ever getting married when they fell on hard times and had to live in the country, and her parents kept her with not even a shred of a new dress, and not so much as a dog would come near her.
One afternoon, on a hot day in July, while the horseflies were buzzing round the deserted farmyard, and her parents were taking a siesta behind closed doors, she came across the lad as he lay behind a haystack.
He turned bright red and mumbled to himself as she fixed her eyes on him, then she seized him by the hair to get him to kiss her.

Don Piddu would have died of shame.
After the bailiffs and the poverty, he would not have believed he could sink any lower.
The poor mother heard about it at communion on Easter Sunday.
That woman was a saint!
Don Piddu was in retreat at the monastery, doing his spiritual exercises along with all the other bigwigs.
The bigwigs joined up with their farmhands to confess their sins and listen to the sermons.
In fact, they paid to maintain them there in the hope that if they’d stolen anything they would repent, and hand back their ill-gotten gains.
During those eight days of spiritual exercises, bigwigs and villagers returned to the Garden of Eden and treated one another as brothers.
The masters served the farmhands at table with their own hands in such a spirit of humility that the peasants’ food went down the wrong way in their embarrassment, and with all those jaws munching away the refectory sounded more like a pig trough while the missioners were preaching about hell and purgatory.
That year Don Piddu would have preferred not to go as he was unable to pay his share, and besides, there was nothing left for his farmhands to steal.
But the magistrate had him called, and forced him to go and purify himself, so as not to set a bad
example.
Those eight days were a godsend for anyone with business to attend to in some poor devil’s house, without fear that the husband would return suddenly from the fields and ruin the party.
The door of the monastery was locked for everyone, but as soon as night fell the young men with anything to spend sloped off and stayed out till dawn.