Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories (5 page)

‘I’m not complaining,’ said Nedda, timidly pocketing the few
soldi
the steward had counted out for her coin by coin to make it look bigger.
‘It’s the bad weather that’s to blame, for taking away from me nearly half of what I could have earned.’

‘Complain to the Lord God then!’ bawled the steward.

‘Not the Lord God!
If anyone’s to blame, it’s myself for being so poor!’

‘Pay the poor girl for the whole week,’ the steward was told by the master’s son, who was there to supervise the olive-gathering.
‘You only lose a few
soldi.’

‘I can only give her what’s right and proper!’

‘I’m telling you to pay her for the whole week!’

‘All the landowners for miles around will be up in arms against both of us if we go changing the rules.’

‘You’re right,’ replied the son of the employer, who was a rich landowner with a fair number of neighbours.

Nedda gathered up her rags and tatters and bade farewell to her companions.

‘You’re not going back to Ravanusa at this hour, are you?’ some of them asked her.

‘My mother’s ill in bed!’

‘Aren’t you afraid?’

‘Yes, I’m afraid about having so little money in my pocket.
But my mother’s ill, and now that I don’t have to work tomorrow, I wouldn’t be able to sleep if I stayed here overnight.’

‘Shall I come along and keep you company?’ the young shepherd asked, in a jesting tone of voice.

‘The only company I need is God and the Virgin,’ she replied simply, bowing her head as she set off across the fields.

The sun had set some little time before, and the mountain-top was casting its shadow ever more deeply across the valley.
Nedda quickened her step, and when darkness fell completely she began to sing like a bird to keep up her courage.
After every dozen steps she turned round in alarm, and whenever a stone was dislodged from the wall alongside her by the rain, or the water lying on the leaves of the trees was driven like hailstones into her face by a sudden gust of wind, she stopped dead and trembled all over like a lamb that has strayed from the flock.
An owl pursued her from tree to tree hooting a mournful lament, and every so often, glad of its company, she whistled back at it as the bird never grew tired of following her.
As she was passing a shrine by the gate of a farm, she stopped for a moment to recite a hurried Ave Maria,
on the alert in case the guard-dog that was baying furiously leapt on her over the boundary wall, before hurrying on and looking over her shoulder two or three times at the tiny lamp burning in homage to the Virgin that lit the way for the farmer whenever he came back late in the evening.
Its light strengthened her courage, and prompted her to pray for her poor mother.
From time to time a sharp pain would pierce her heart as she recalled how ill her mother was, whereupon she would begin to run, singing at the top of her voice to drown her sorrows.
Or she would try and remember the carefree days of the wine harvest, or those wondrous moonlit summer evenings when they all flocked back from La Piana
²
to the joyful sound of the bagpipes, but in her mind’s eye all she could see was the wretched pallet on which her sick mother was lying.
She tripped on a jagged chip of lava and gashed her foot, the darkness was so complete that at almost every turning of the path she stumbled against the wall or the hedge, and she began to lose her nerve and think she had lost her way.
But suddenly she heard the church clock at Punta booming out nine strokes, so close at hand that they seemed to be falling on her head, and she smiled as if a friend had called to her by name in the midst of a crowd of strangers.

She turned happily down the village street, singing her enchanting song at the top of her voice, and holding on tightly to the forty
soldi
in her overall pocket.

As she passed by the chemist’s shop she looked inside and saw the chemist and the notary, wrapped up in their cloaks, playing at cards.
A little further on she came across the poor village idiot of Punta, who was going up and down the street with his hands in his pockets singing the same old song he had been singing night and day, in the cold midwinter and hot midsummer, for twenty years.
On reaching the first trees of the avenue leading in a straight line to Ravanusa she met a pair of oxen, lowing peacefully as they ambled slowly towards her.

‘Hey!
Nedda!’ shouted a familiar voice.

‘Is that you, Janu?’

‘Yes, it’s me, with the master’s oxen.’

‘Where are you coming from?’ Nedda asked, without stopping.

‘From La Piana.
I called at your house.
Your mother’s expecting you.’

‘How is she?’

‘Still the same.’

‘God bless you!’ the girl exclaimed, as if she had been expecting the worst, and she began to run on again.

‘Goodbye, Nedda!’ Janu called after her.

‘Goodbye,’ Nedda responded from the distance.

And she thought the stars were shining like so many suns, that all the trees, every one of which she recognized, were spreading their branches over her head to protect her, and that the stones of the road were caressing her aching feet.

There followed another sorrowful event when the parish priest arrived in his rochet,
³
accompanied by the sexton with the extreme unction, and two or three parishioners mumbling various prayers.
The sexton’s bell jingled out keenly across the fields, and the cart-drivers halted their mules along the road when they heard it and raised their caps.
When Nedda heard it coming up the stony path leading from the road to the house, she pulled the tattered blanket up to the invalid’s chin so that no one would notice the absence of any sheets, and spread her best white pinafore over the rickety table, which she had levelled up with the aid of one or two tiles.
While the priest was carrying out his office, she went and knelt outside the front door, muttering her prayers mechanically, staring with a faraway look at the boulder beside the doorway where her old mother used to sit and warm herself up in the April sun, bending an inattentive ear to the customary sounds of the neighbourhood and the bustling of all the people going about their business without a care in the world.
The priest went away, and the sexton paused in the doorway, vainly waiting for them to offer him the usual alms for the poor.

Late that evening Zio Giovanni saw Nedda hurrying down the road towards Punta.

‘Hey there!
Where are you going at this hour?’

‘I’m going for the medicine the doctor ordered.’

Zio Giovanni was a thrifty man, who liked to grumble.

‘More medicines!’ he muttered.
‘Wasn’t it enough for them to order the medicine of the holy oil?
They’re all in league with the chemist to drain the blood from the poor!
Take my advice, Nedda, save your money and go back and stay with your poor mother.’

‘You never know, it could do her some good!’ the girl replied, lowering her eyes sorrowfully and quickening her step.

Zio Giovanni moaned, then called after her, ‘Hey, Varannisa!’

‘What is it?’

‘I’ll go to the chemist’s.
Don’t worry, I’ll be back sooner than you would have been.
And you won’t have to leave your poor mother alone.’

The girl’s eyes filled with tears.
‘God bless you!’ she said, as she tried to hand him the money.

‘You can pay me back later,’ growled Zio Giovanni, and he sprinted off as though he were a twenty-year-old.

The girl returned to her mother, saying, ‘Zio Giovanni’s gone for us,’ in an unusually tender sort of voice.

The dying woman, hearing Nedda replacing the handful of coins on the table, gave her a questioning look.

‘He told me we could pay him back later,’ said her daughter.

‘God bless him for his charity!’ murmured the sick woman.
‘So you’ll still have something to spend.’

‘Oh, Mother!’

‘How much do we owe Zio Giovanni?’

‘Ten
lire.
But don’t worry, Mother!
I shall carry on working!’

The old woman gazed at her at length through half-closed eyes, then embraced her without a word.

A robin, the bird of cold November mornings, began to sing in the bushes and the brambles that hung above the wall opposite, and from time to time, as it hopped among the thorns and the brushwood, it fixed its mischievous eyes upon her as though it had something to tell her.
Nedda thought to herself that her mother, the day before, had heard it singing.
In the garden next door magpies were still pecking away at the olives strewn about the ground.
She had driven them off by throwing stones at them, so that the dying woman would not have to listen to their funereal croaking.
But now she watched them impassively, without making a move, and as the lupine-seller or the vintner or the carters made their way down the neighbouring street, shouting so as to be heard above the noise of their cartwheels and the bell-collars of their mules, she said to herself, ‘That’ll be so-and-so, that’ll be whatsisname.’ When the Angelus rang, and the first stars appeared in the evening sky, it struck her that she no longer needed to go to Punta to buy any more medicines, and as the noises gradually subsided in the street, and darkness descended on the garden, she thought to herself she no longer needed to light the lamp.

Zio Giovanni found her standing in the doorway.

She had got to her feet on hearing footsteps approaching along the path, because she was not expecting anyone to call.

‘What are you doing there?’ Zio Giovanni asked.
She shrugged her shoulders, without bothering to answer.

The old man sat down beside her on the doorstep, and asked no further questions.

‘Zio Giovanni,’ said the girl, after a long pause, ‘now that I have no one else to care for, and I don’t have to look for work nearby, I’ll go to Roccella where the olives are still being harvested, and when I return I’ll pay you back the money you lent us.’

‘I didn’t come here asking for the money!’ Zio Giovanni gruffly replied.

She said no more, and they both sat there in silence listening to the hooting of an owl.
Nedda thought perhaps it was the one that had kept her company coming back from Piano, and her heart swelled with emotion.

‘Do you have work to go to?’ Zio Giovanni asked her finally.

‘No, but I’ll always find a charitable soul to offer me something to do.’

‘I heard that over at Aci Catena they pay good women workers about a
lira
a day to pack oranges, no minestra of course, and I thought of you at once.
You did that sort of job last March, so you must know what it’s all about.
Do you want to go and see?’

‘Of course!’

‘In that case, you must turn up at dawn at Merlo’s orchard, on the corner of the lane that leads to Sant’Anna.’

‘I can even go tonight.
My poor mother made sure she wouldn’t leave me doing nothing for long!’

‘Do you know the way?’

‘Yes.
But if I get lost I’ll inquire.’

‘Ask the innkeeper on the main road to Valverde, just beyond the chestnut copse to the left of the road.
Find Massaro Vinirannu, and tell him I sent you.’

‘I shall go,’ said the girl, delighted at her good fortune.

‘It occurred to me you wouldn’t have enough bread to last the week,’ said Zio Giovanni, pulling out a huge black loaf from his deep coat pocket, and placing it on the table.

Nedda turned red with embarrassment, as though she were the one doing someone a favour.
Then, after a moment, she said, ‘If the priest were to say Mass for my mother tomorrow, I would give him two days’ pay when the bean harvest comes.’

‘I’ve already had him say Mass for her,’ Zio Giovanni replied.

‘Oh!
My poor dead mother will be praying for you in return!’ the girl murmured, huge tears filling her eyes.

When Zio Giovanni finally left, and she heard his footsteps trailing away into the distance, she closed the door and lit a candle.
She now felt all alone in the world, and afraid to sleep in the little bed where she had always lain down beside her mother.

The girls in the village spoke ill of her for going to work the very next day after her mother’s funeral, and for not wearing mourning.
The parish priest gave her a sound telling off when he caught sight of her the following Sunday in her doorway sewing up her overall, which she had dyed black, the only sign of mourning the poor girl was able to display, and he took all this as his text for preaching in church against the evil habit of failing to observe feast days and the sabbath.

So as to requite her dreadful sin, the poor girl went and worked in the parish priest’s field for two days to persuade him to say Mass for her dead mother on Sundays and the first Monday of the month.
The girls in their Sunday best drew away from her in the church pew or giggled behind her back, and when the young men shouted coarse witticisms at her as she came out of the church, she wrapped her tattered mantilla tightly round her head and hurried off, fixing her eyes on the ground and allowing no bitter thought to disturb the serenity of her prayer.
Sometimes she would tell herself she deserved their contempt because she was so poor, at others, holding out her two strong arms, she would say to herself, ‘Blessed be the Lord that gave them to me!’ and she would go on her way with a smile.