Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories (4 page)

‘I’m over here,’ a voice replied from the darkest corner of the room, where a girl was squatting on a bundle of firewood.

‘What are you doing there?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Why weren’t you dancing?’

‘I’m too tired.’

‘Sing us one of those lovely songs of yours.’

‘No, I don’t want to sing.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing.’

‘She’s got her mother dying,’ said one of her companions, as though she were saying she’d got toothache.

Crouching there with her chin over her knees, the girl raised her big, black eyes, shining but tearless and seemingly impassive, towards the young woman who had spoken, then lowered them again to stare down towards her bare feet, without uttering a word.

Most of the girls turned away, all chattering at once, like magpies making merry over rich pickings, but two or three of them turned towards her and said, ‘Why have you left your mother on her own, then?’

‘To find myself a job.’

‘Where do you come from?’

‘From Viagrande, but I’m staying at Ravanusa.’

The steward’s goddaughter, who was due to marry the third son of Massaro Jacopo at Easter, who wore a fine gold cross round her neck, and who thought she was very clever, said as she turned her back on her, ‘That’s not far!
If the news is bad, they can send it by pigeon.’

Nedda shot her retreating figure a glance similar to the one that the dog curled up by the fire had been shooting at the clogs threatening its tail.

‘No!’ she exclaimed, as though replying to herself.
‘Zio Giovanni would come and tell me!’

‘Zio Giovanni?
Who’s he?’

‘Zio Giovanni of Ravanusa.
Everyone calls him that.’

‘You should have got Zio Giovanni to lend you something instead of leaving your mother alone,’ said another girl.

‘Zio Giovanni isn’t rich, and we already owe him ten
lire!
What about the doctor’s bill?
And the medicines?
And the bread we have to eat every day?
Oh, it’s easy for you to talk,’ Nedda added, shaking her head and allowing for the first time a more sorrowful tone to creep into her coarse, almost savage voice, ‘but as you stand in the doorway and watch the sun go down, knowing there’s no bread in the
cupboard, no oil in the lamp and no job to go to next day, it leaves a bitter taste in your mouth when you have a poor old woman lying ill in bed!’

She fell silent, but continued to shake her head without looking at anyone, her eyes dry and expressionless except for a hint of benumbed sorrow such as eyes more accustomed to tears would be incapable of betraying.

‘Your soup plates, girls!’ shouted the steward’s wife, raising the lid from the pot with an air of triumph.

They all crowded round the fire, where the steward’s wife was ladling out the beans with the parsimony of long experience.
Nedda, her soup bowl under her arm, was last to come forward, and when she finally found a place, the flames lit up her whole person.

She was dark-skinned and poorly dressed, with that air of coarseness and timidity brought on by poverty and loneliness.
She might have been beautiful, if toil and hardship had not profoundly altered not only whatever delicate womanly features she had possessed but also the very shape of her body.
Her hair was black, thick, unkempt, and tied up with string, her teeth were white as ivory, and there was something attractive about her coarse features that became more evident whenever she smiled.
She had big black eyes, moistened with tints of blue, that would have aroused the envy of a queen for that wretched girl curled up on the lowest rung of the human ladder, had they not been overlain by the shadow of timidity that comes with poverty, or rendered so lacklustre through her unchanging air of sorrowful resignation.
Her limbs, whether because they had suffered so much beneath enormous burdens, or because they had been forcibly wrenched into shape through painful exertions, had lost their natural form, but without becoming sturdy.
She worked as a builder’s labourer whenever she was not clearing rocks from ground being broken up for ploughing, or carrying other people’s heavy goods into town, or attending to one of the many demanding tasks that in those parts are considered too demeaning for any man to perform.
As for the jobs women normally undertake in farming areas, harvesting the grapes and the corn and gathering the olives, they were like holidays to her, a time for merrymaking, a genuine pastime rather than hard work, though on the other hand they brought
in less than half the amount she could earn – thirteen
soldi!
–
as a builder’s labourer for a good day’s work in the summer.

The rags that covered her person by way of clothing served only to distort what otherwise might have been seen as delicate womanly beauty.
It would have taken a vivid imagination to think that those hands, condemned to a daily round of unrelenting toil in burning heat and freezing cold and scratching a living through dense brambles and jagged fissures in the rock, or that those feet, accustomed to tramping bare in the snow and over rocks seared by the sun, torn by the thorns and hardened by the rocks, could ever have been beautiful.
It was impossible to guess the age of this derelict human creature; poverty had crushed her from infancy with all the trials that harden and deform the soul, the mind and the body.
It had been just the same for her mother and her grandmother, and it would be just the same for her daughter.
The only trace that remained in her of her brothers was a sufficient amount of intelligence to understand their orders and carry out the hardest and most menial of tasks on their behalf.

Nedda held out her soup bowl, and the steward’s wife poured into it the miserable helping of bean soup left in the pot.

‘Why do you always come last?
Don’t you realize that the last ones only get the leftovers?’ said the steward’s wife in an effort to make amends.

The girl lowered her eyes towards the steaming black soup in her bowl as though to acknowledge the reproof, then walked away very slowly so that none of it would be spilt.

‘I’d gladly let you have some of mine,’ said one of Nedda’s more charitable companions, ‘but if it goes on raining tomorrow I shall have to eat the rest of my bread as well as losing my day’s wages.’

‘No fear of that for me,’ said Nedda, with a sad little smile.

‘Why not?’

‘Because I have no bread of my own.
What little I had I left with my mother, along with the few coppers I had in my pocket.’

‘Are you living on soup and nothing else?’

‘Yes, I’m used to it,’ Nedda replied simply.

‘A curse on this foul weather that robs us of our wages!’ swore another of the girls.

‘Come on, then, take some of mine.’

‘I don’t feel hungry any more,’ Varannisa retorted briskly, thanking her for the offer.

‘You there, who curse the rain of the good Lord, don’t you ever eat bread like the rest of us?’ said the steward’s wife to the girl who had sworn at the foul weather.
‘Don’t you know that autumn rain means a good harvest?’

Her words were greeted with a general murmur of approval.

‘Yes, but it also means that your husband will be docking three half-days from our week’s wages!’

This brought another murmur of approval.

‘What work have you done in those three half-days that needs to be paid for?’ replied the old woman triumphantly.

‘That’s true!
That’s true!’ the other girls responded, with the instinct that ordinary people have for justice, even if it causes someone to suffer.

The steward’s wife recited the rosary, and the monotonous mumbling of the Ave Marias ensued, accompanied by one or two yawns.
After the litany came prayers for the living and the dead, at which point the eyes of poor Nedda filled with tears, and she forgot to say her Amen.

‘What are things coming to when you don’t say your Amen?’ said the steward’s wife in a severe tone of voice.

‘I was thinking about my poor mother so far away,’ Nedda replied, putting on a serious air.

The steward’s wife bade them goodnight, took up the lantern, and went away.
A picturesque array of pallets was made up in different parts of the kitchen or around the fire, the dying flames of which cast their flickering light over the various groups and the postures of the sleepers.
It was a good farm, whose owner, unlike many others, spared no effort to provide a sufficiency of beans for the minestra, wood for the fire, and straw for the pallets.
The women slept in the kitchen, and the men in the barn.
But when you have a miserly owner or a small farm, men and women bed down wherever they can find a space, in the stable or anywhere else, on straw or a few rags, children alongside their parents, and if the father is well off and has a blanket of his own, he spreads it over his family.
Anyone feeling cold will huddle up against his neighbour, or settle down with his feet in the warm ashes, or cover himself with straw
as best he can.
After toiling away for a whole day, and before beginning all over again on the next, sleep comes easily, like a benevolent despot, and the owner turns a blind eye to everything except for denying work to the girl who is about to become a mother, and unable to complete her ten hours of back-breaking labour.

Before dawn the early risers had gone out to see what the weather was doing, and the kitchen door banged and swung continually back and forth, allowing rain and an icy wind to sweep in over the slugabeds who were still asleep.
At first light the steward had come and flung the door wide open so that even the laziest would wake up, for it is not right to cheat your master out of a single minute of the ten-hour day that he pays you so handsomely for, sometimes as much as three
carlini
as well as the minestra!

‘It’s raining!’ The dread words were on everyone’s lips, repeated here and there in tones of sullen resentment.
Nedda leant against the door-post, gazing sadly out on the enormous, leaden clouds that suffused her figure with the grey tints of the dawn.
The day was cold and misty.
Leaves curled up and separated from the trees, slithering along the branches, then fluttering for a while in the air as they fell to the muddy earth, and rivulets spread into puddles where the pigs rolled about in ecstasy.
The cows pressed their muzzles against the gate of the shed, fixing their sorrowful eyes on the falling rain.
From their nests below the tiles of the gutter, sparrows chirruped an endless mournful lament.

‘There’s another day wasted!’ muttered one of the girls, as she sank her teeth into a loaf of black bread.

‘Look, the clouds are separating from the sea over there,’ said Nedda, raising her arm in that direction.
‘Perhaps the weather will change before midday.’

‘Even if it does, that swindler of a steward will only pay us a third of a day!’

‘That’s better than nothing.’

‘Yes, but who’s going to pay us back for the bread we’re having to eat?’

‘What about the losses the owner has to bear on account of the olives going bad, and the ones he’s losing in the mud out there?’

‘That’s true!’ said another of the girls.

‘But just you go and pick up a single one of those olives that in half an hour’s time will be no good to anyone, to go with your dry bread, and see what the steward has to say about it.’

‘He’ll be quite right, because the olives don’t belong to us.’

‘Nor do they belong to the ground that’s making a meal of them!’

‘The ground belongs to the owner, doesn’t it?’ Nedda replied, her eyes aglow with pride in the force of her logic.

‘That’s very true,’ said another girl, who could think of no better way to reply.

‘If you ask me, I’d rather let it rain all day than spend half a day crawling through the mud in this weather for three or four miserable
soldi.’

‘Three or four
soldi
mean nothing to you, I suppose!’ Nedda retorted sadly.

On the Saturday evening, when it was time to settle the week’s accounts, and the steward’s table was littered with papers and little heaps of
soldi,
the men with the loudest voices were the first to be paid, then the most quarrelsome of the women.
The last of all, and those who were paid the least, were the timid and the weak among the women.
When the steward had made up her account, Nedda discovered that after her wages had been docked for the two and a half days of forced inactivity, she was left with only forty
soldi.

The poor girl dared not open her mouth, but simply stood there, her eyes filling with tears.

‘You can shed as many tears as you like, you crybaby!’ yelled the steward, who was always shouting to show how dutifully he was safeguarding the owner’s money.
‘I pay you the same as the others, even though you’re weaker and smaller than they are!
The wage you get from me for a day’s work is higher than any other landowner pays in the whole of Pedara, Nicolosi and Trecastagni put together!
Three
carlini,
as well as the minestra!’