Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories (7 page)

Meanwhile she waited for her fiancé to return from La Piana, where he had gone reaping to scrape together the money they needed to set up some sort of home together, and pay the parish priest.

One evening, as she was spinning, she heard an ox-cart coming to
a halt at the end of the lane, and saw Janu coming towards her, looking pale and strange.

‘What’s the matter?’ she said.

‘I’ve been ill.
The fever took hold of me again, down there in that accursed Piana.
I lost a full week’s work, and spent what little money I’d earned on food.’ She led him quickly into the house, unfolded the straw pallet, and tried to give him the small amount she had tucked away there in the foot of a stocking.

‘No,’ he said.
‘Tomorrow I shall go to Mascalucia for the pruning of the olives, and that’ll keep me going.
When the pruning is over we’ll get married.’

He had a troubled air about him as he made this promise, and stood leaning against the doorpost, with his scarf wound over his head, looking at her with eyes that were close to tears.

‘But you’re not well!’ said Nedda.

‘I know, but I’m hoping to get better now that I’m here, and in any case the fever only comes on every three days.’

She looked at him without saying a word, and felt as if her heart was breaking to see how pale and thin he looked.

‘Will you be able to keep your balance up there on the high branches?’

‘With God’s help!’ Janu replied.
‘Goodbye now, I can’t keep the carter waiting after giving me a lift here from La Piana.
I’ll soon be back!’

It was some little time before he could drag himself away from her, and when he finally did, she went along with him to the main road.
She stood and watched him disappearing into the distance without shedding a tear, even though she felt she would never see him leaving her again.
Her heart missed another beat, like a sponge being squeezed just one more time, and he waved and called out her name as he passed from view round the bend in the road.

‘You knew in your heart what would happen!’ he murmured, with a sad smile on his lips.
She was wide-eyed as she listened, holding him by the hand, her face as pallid as his own.
On the following day he died.

As she felt the sad legacy of her dead companion moving about inside her body, Nedda hurried off to the church to pray for his soul to the Holy Virgin.
But in the churchyard she came face to face with the priest, who knew of her shame, and, hiding her face in her mantilla, she turned back again in utter despair.

From then on, whenever she went looking for a job, they simply laughed in her face, not so much to pillory the girl for her sins as because she could no longer work as diligently as before.
After being rejected and laughed at so many times that she no longer dared show her face, she stayed inside the house, like a bird that has retired wounded to its nest.
The few
soldi
she had put away in the foot of the stocking were spent one after the other, to be followed by her fine new dress, and the fine silk scarf.
Zio Giovanni gave her what little help he could, drawing on that sense of tolerance and reviving charity without which the moralizing of a parish priest is barren and unjust, and so prevented her from dying of hunger.
She eventually gave birth to a rickety and stunted baby girl, and when they told her it was not a boy she wept in the way she had wept on the evening when she had closed the front door of the cottage behind her in the wake of the coffin, and realized she no longer had a mother.
But she refused to let the baby go to the Sisters of Charity.

‘You poor little child,’ she said.
‘If you have to suffer, let’s at least delay it as long as possible!’ The neighbours called her a shameless hussy because she had not acted the hypocrite and abandoned her child.
But the baby went short of milk because the mother couldn’t get enough to eat.
It was wasting rapidly away, and in vain did Nedda try to squeeze into its hungry little lips the very blood from her breast.
One winter’s evening, at sunset, while the snow fell thickly on the cottage roof and the ill-fitting door rattled in the wind, the poor infant, its whole body
purple with the cold, its tiny fingers clenched tightly into the palms of its hands, fixed its lifeless eyes on the fervent eyes of its mother, let out a sob, and breathed its last.

Nedda shook it, hugged it madly and savagely to her breast, tried to give it warmth with her breath and her kisses, and when she realized it was really dead, she laid it on the bed where her mother had slept, and knelt beside it, her eyes quite dry and popping out from their sockets.

‘Ah!
Blessed are you that are dead!’ she exclaimed.
‘Ah!
Blessed Holy Virgin, who has taken away my child so as not to let it suffer as I have suffered!’

‘Doesn’t Gnà Nunzia’s Turiddu have anything better to do,’ the villagers were saying, ‘than to spend his nights singing away like a thrush without a mate?’

He eventually bumped into Lola on her way back from the shrine of Our Lady of Peril, and when she saw him she didn’t turn a hair, as though he was none of her business.

‘Nice to see you!’ he said.

‘Ah, Turiddu, I did hear you’d come back on the first of the month.’

‘I heard one or two other things as well!’ he replied.
‘Is it true you’re going to marry Alfio, the cart-driver?’

‘If that’s the will of God!’ Lola replied, drawing her neckerchief up over her chin by its two corners.

‘You play around with the will of God in whatever way it suits you!
It was the will of God that made me come all that way back to be faced with a fine bit of news like this, Lola!’

The poor wretch tried again to put a brave face on it all, but his voice trailed off, and he doddered along behind her with the tassel of his cap swinging from side to side across his shoulders.
To be honest, the girl was feeling sorry to see him pulling such a long face, but she had no wish to encourage him with a lot of fine words.

In the end she turned round and said, ‘Look here, Turiddu, leave me alone so I can go and catch up with the other girls.
What would people say in the village if they were to see me with you?’

‘Fair enough,’ replied Turiddu, ‘now that you’re marrying Alfio, with four mules in his stable, we mustn’t start people’s tongues wagging.
My poor old mother, on the other hand, was forced to sell our own bay mule and that patch of vineyard along the main road while I was away in the army.
Times have changed, and you no longer remember standing at the window to chat with me down in the courtyard, or when you gave me that handkerchief, just before I went away.
God knows how many tears I’ve shed into it since I wandered off so far from home that our village had never been heard of.
Goodbye then, Lola, let’s forget we were ever friends with one another.’

‘I’m going to teach that bitch a thing or two,’ he muttered.

Opposite Alfio’s lived Massaro Cola, the vine dresser, who was said to be as rich as a pig, and had a daughter in the house.
Turiddu said and did all the things required to worm his way into Massaro Cola’s
good books, and began to hang around the house and fill the girl’s ears with sweet nothings.

By way of reply, Santa would say, ‘Why don’t you go and say these fine things to that Lola girl?’

‘Lola’s a great lady!
Lola’s married now to a big wheel!’

‘Big wheels are too good for me.’

‘You are worth a hundred Lolas, and I know someone who wouldn’t even look at her or anybody else, if you were around.
Lola isn’t worth as much as your little finger, that she isn’t.’

‘When the fox couldn’t get at the grapes…’

‘He said: what a lovely girl you are, my currant bun!’

‘Hey, Turiddu!
Keep those hands to yourself!’

‘Are you afraid I’m going to eat you?’

‘I’m not afraid of you or anyone else.’

‘Ah!
Your mother came from Licodia, and don’t we know it!
You’ve got fiery blood in your veins!
Oh, I could eat you up simply looking at you!’

‘Keep on looking, then, and we shan’t leave any crumbs lying around.
But, for the time being, just pick up that bundle for me, would you?’

‘For you I would pick up the whole house, honestly I would!’

So as to save herself from blushing, she hurled a log at him that happened to be within her reach, missing him by a hair’s breadth.

‘Let’s get on.
Fine words butter no parsnips.’

‘If I were a rich man, I’d be looking for a wife like you, Santa.’

‘I won’t be marrying any big wheel, the same as Lola, but I do have a dowry of my own when the good Lord sends me the right man.’

‘We all know you’re rich, we know that.’

‘Get moving then, if you know it, because my father’s due any minute, and I don’t want him to find me out here in the courtyard.’

Her father began to turn up his nose at the affair, but the girl pretended not to notice, because the tassel on the sharpshooter’s cap had begun to tickle her fancy, and kept on dancing up and down in front of her eyes.
When the father showed Turiddu the door, the daughter opened the window for him, and stayed there chatting away to him every evening, so that the whole neighbourhood talked of nothing else.

‘I’m crazy about you,’ said Turiddu.
‘I can’t sleep and I can’t eat.’

‘Rubbish!’

‘If only I were the son of King Victor Emmanuel, I’d be able to marry you!’

‘Rubbish!’

‘By all that’s holy, I could gobble you up like a loaf of bread!’

‘Rubbish!’

‘I really could, honestly!’

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’

‘Hey there, Turiddu, don’t you ever say hello to your old friends any more?’

‘Ah!’ sighed the young fellow.
‘It would be a happy man who could say hello to you!’

‘If you want to say hello to me, you know where I live!’ Lola replied.

Turiddu called to say hello to her so often that Santa took notice, and slammed her window in his face.
The neighbours gave each other a nod and a wink whenever the sharpshooter passed down the street.
Lola’s husband was away with his mules, doing the rounds of the country fairs.

‘On Sunday I’m going to confession.
I had a terrible dream last night!’ said Lola.

‘Don’t worry about it!
Don’t worry!’ Turiddu pleaded.

‘No, now that Easter’s coming, my husband will be wanting to know why I haven’t been to confession.’

‘Ah!’ murmured Cola’s daughter Santa as she waited her turn, kneeling in front of the confessional where Lola was laundering her sins.
‘I swear I won’t let you get away with it by crawling to Rome!’

‘You do well to bring her presents,’ his neighbour Santa told him, ‘because while you’re away your wife dresses up your home with a pair of horns!’

Alfio was one of those cart-drivers who take offence easily, and when
he heard his wife being talked about in that fashion his colour changed as though he’d been knifed.

‘By Almighty God!’ he exclaimed.
‘If you haven’t been seeing clearly, you’ll have no eyes left to cry with by the time I’ve finished with you, and that goes for all your family as well!’

‘I don’t do much crying!’ Santa replied.
‘I didn’t even cry when I saw Gnà Nunzia’s son Turiddu going in to your wife’s house every night.’

‘Right,’ Alfio replied, ‘and thank you very much.’

Now that the cat was back, Turiddu no longer hung about the street every day, but filled in his time at the tavern, with his friends.
On the evening of Holy Saturday, they were sitting round one of the tables with a dish of pork sausages.
As soon as Alfio came in, Turiddu knew, simply from the way he stared at him, that he had come to settle the unfinished business of theirs, and put his fork down on his plate.

‘Can I do anything for you, Alfio?’ he said.

‘I don’t need any favours from you, Turiddu.
I haven’t seen anything of you for a while, and I just wanted a word on that matter you know about.’

Turiddu began by holding out a glass of wine to him, but Alfio brushed it aside with a sweep of his arm.

Then Turiddu got up and said, ‘If you want me, Alfio, here I am.’

The cart-driver flung his arms round Turiddu’s neck.

‘If you’d like to come down to the cactus grove at Canziria tomorrow morning, we can talk the thing over, my friend.’

‘Wait for me at dawn on the main road, and we’ll go there together.’

With these words they exchanged the kiss of the challenge.
Turiddu took the tip of the cart-driver’s ear between his teeth and bit it, by way of a solemn promise to keep the appointment.

His friends left the sausages where they were without uttering a word, and took Turiddu home.
Poor Gnà Nunzia had been waiting up for him till a late hour for nights on end.

‘Mamma,’ Turiddu said, ‘do you remember when I went off to the army, and you thought I would never come back?
Give me a big kiss like you did then, because tomorrow morning I’m going on a long journey.’

Before dawn he dug out the flick-knife that he’d hidden under a pile of straw before going off as a conscript, then he set off for the cactus grove at Canziria.

‘Oh!
Jesus, Mary and Joseph!
Where are you off to in such a hurry?’ wailed the terrified Lola, as her husband was about to leave.

‘I’m not going very far,’ Alfio replied, ‘and it would be better for you if I never came back.’

Lola, in her nightdress, knelt down to pray at the foot of the bed, pressing to her lips the rosary that Brother Bernardino had brought back for her from the Holy Land, and she recited as many Ave Marias as there were beads on it.

‘Listen, Alfio,’ Turiddu began, after walking a fair stretch of the road alongside his companion, who remained completely silent, his cap pulled down above his eyes, ‘as God is my witness I know I did wrong and I’d be glad to let you kill me.
But before coming to meet you I caught sight of my old mother, who had got up to see me leaving with the excuse of cleaning out the chicken run, looking as though her heart was breaking, and as God is my witness I’m going to kill you to stop my mother shedding any tears.’

‘That’s all right,’ Alfio replied, stripping off his jacket, ‘let’s give it all we’ve got.’

They both knew how to use a knife.
Turiddu took the first blow, stopping it with his arm just in time.
He gave back as good as he’d got, striking Alfio in the groin.

‘Ah, Turiddu!
So you really do want to kill me!’

‘Yes, I already told you.
After seeing my old mother with the chickens, my eyes can see nothing else.’

‘Open them wide, those eyes of yours!’ roared Alfio, ‘and I’ll give you something to do them a bit of good.’

Keeping up his guard, hunched up in pain, clutching his wound with his left hand, and crawling over the ground with the use of his elbow, he suddenly grabbed a handful of dust and hurled it into the eyes of his opponent.

‘Ah!’ yelled Turiddu, blinded by the dust.
‘I’m a dead man.’

He tried to escape, leaping backward in desperation, but Alfio struck him another blow in the stomach and a third in the throat.

‘That’s three!
For dressing up my home.
Now your mother can stop bothering about the chickens!’

Turiddu pawed the air for a while amid the cactuses, then dropped to the ground like a stone.
The blood foamed up with a gurgling sound into his throat, and he couldn’t even get out the words, ‘Ah, mamma mia!’