Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories (8 page)

In the village they called her the She-Wolf because, no matter what she had, she was never satisfied.
The women crossed themselves whenever they saw her coming, lone as a stray bitch, with the restless and wary appearance of a starving wolf.
She would gobble up their sons and their husbands in the twinkling of an eye with those red lips of hers, and draw them to the tail of her skirt and transfix them with those devilish eyes, as though they were standing before the altar at St Agrippina’s.
Luckily the She-Wolf herself never set foot inside the church, either at Easter or at Christmas or to hear Mass or to go to confession.
Father Angiolino of St Mary of Jesus, a true servant of God, had lost his soul on her account.

Maricchia, poor girl, a good and worthy soul, shed tears in secret because she was the She-Wolf’s daughter and nobody would ever want to marry her, even though she too had a fine trousseau tucked away in a chest and a patch of decent land in the sun, like any other girl in the village.

Then it happened that the She-Wolf fell in love with a handsome young fellow back from the army, when the two of them were haymaking on the notary’s farm.
She’d fallen for him lock, stock and barrel, her flesh burning beneath her thick cotton bodice, and, staring into his eyes, she was overcome with the kind of thirst you would experience down in the valley on a hot midsummer day.
But he just kept scything
calmly away, head down over the hay, saying, ‘What’s the matter, Pina?’ In the vast expanse of the fields, where all you could hear was the chirping of the crickets as they leapt, with the sun beating straight down, the She-Wolf tied up sheaf after sheaf, bundle after bundle, showing no sign of fatigue, never looking up for an instant, never putting her lips to the flask, just as long as she could be there behind Nanni, while he scythed away, asking her every so often, ‘What is it you want, Pina?’

One evening she told him, while the men, exhausted from their long day’s labours, were nodding off to sleep in the barn, and the dogs were filling the dark air of the countryside with their howling, ‘It’s you I want!
You that are beautiful as the sun, and sweet as the honey!
I want you!’

‘It’s that unmarried daughter of yours that I want,’ Nanni replied, laughing.

The She-Wolf thrust her hands into her hair, tearing at the sides of her head without uttering a word, then strode off and stayed away from the barn.
But when the olive-crushing season came round in October, she set her eyes on Nanni again because he was working next door to where she lived, and the creaking of the press kept her awake the whole night long.

‘Pick up that sack of olives,’ she said to her daughter, ‘and come with me.’

Nanni was pushing the olives under the mill wheel with his shovel, and shouting ‘Gee up there!’ to the mule to keep it moving.

‘Do you want my daughter Maricchia?’ Pina asked.

‘What are you going to give her?’ Nanni replied.

‘She’s got the things her father left, and she can have my house into the bargain.
All you need to leave me is a corner of the kitchen to spread out my palliasse.’

‘In that case we can talk it over at Christmas,’ said Nanni.

Nanni was covered in grease and sweat from the oil and the fermenting olives, and Maricchia wanted nothing whatever to do with him, but when they got home her mother grabbed her by the hair and said to her through clenched teeth:

‘If you don’t take him, I’ll kill you!’

‘Wake up!’ said the She-Wolf to Nanni, who was lying asleep in the ditch under the dust-laden hedgerow, resting his head between his arms.
‘Wake up, I’ve brought you some wine to wet your throat.’

Nanni opened his eyes wide, stupefied, still half-asleep, to find her standing over him, white-faced, thrusting her breasts towards him and fixing him with her coal-black eyes, and he stretched out his hands, groping the air.

‘No!
No good woman’s abroad from dusk till dawn!’ bewailed Nanni, pressing his face down again into the dry grass of the ditch as hard as he could, with his fingernails tearing at his hair.
‘Go away!
Go away!
Keep away from the barn!’

She did go away, did the She-Wolf, tying up her splendid tresses as she went, staring ahead of her towards the hot fields of stubble with her coal-black eyes.

But she kept going back to the barn, and Nanni said nothing.
In fact, whenever she was late arriving, in hours that run from dusk till dawn, he would go and wait for her at the top of the ashen-white, deserted lane, with beads of sweat standing out on his forehead.
And
afterwards he would thrust his hands through his hair and repeat every time, ‘Go away!
Go away!
Don’t come back to the barn!’

Maricchia wept day and night, and stared at her mother with tear-filled eyes aflame with jealousy, looking like a wolf-cub herself, every time she saw her returning pale and silent from the fields.

‘You wicked slut!’ she cried.
‘You wicked slut of a mother!’

‘Shut up!’

‘You thief!
Thief!’

‘Shut up!’

‘I’ll tell the police sergeant, that’s what I’ll do!’

‘Go ahead and tell him!’

She did go ahead, with her children clinging round her neck, totally unafraid, and without shedding a tear.
She was like a mad woman, because now she too loved the husband they had forced upon her, all greasy and covered in sweat from the fermenting of the olives.

The sergeant had Nanni called in, and threatened him with prison and the gallows.
Nanni stood there sobbing and tearing his hair.
He denied nothing, and didn’t even try to make excuses.

‘I was tempted!’ he cried.
‘I was tempted by the Devil!’

He threw himself at the sergeant’s feet, pleading with him to send him to prison.

‘For pity’s sake, sergeant, take me out of this hell on earth!
Have me killed, send me to prison, never let me set eyes on her again, ever!’

But when the sergeant spoke to the She-Wolf, she replied, ‘No!
I kept a corner of the kitchen to sleep in, when I gave him my house as a dowry.
The house is mine.
I don’t intend to leave it.’

Shortly after that, Nanni was kicked in the chest by a mule, and was at death’s door.
But the parish priest refused to bring him the bread of Christ until the She-Wolf left the house.
The She-Wolf went away, and her son-in-law could then prepare to take his leave of the world as a good Christian.
He confessed and made communion with such an obvious show of repentance and contrition that all the neighbours and onlookers were in tears at the bed of the dying man.
And it would have been better for him if he had died then and there, before the Devil returned to tempt him and to take him over body and soul as soon as he recovered.

‘Leave me alone!’ he said to the She-Wolf.
‘For God’s sake, leave me in peace!
I stared death in the face!
That poor Maricchia is in despair!
The whole village knows all about it now!
It’s better for both of us if I don’t see you…’

He would have liked to tear out his eyes so as not to see the eyes of the She-Wolf, who made him surrender body and soul when she fixed them upon him.
He no longer knew what to do to release himself from her spell.
He paid for Masses for the souls in Purgatory, and asked the parish priest and the sergeant to help him.
At Easter he went to confession, and did penance in public by crawling on his belly for six feet over the cobblestones in front of the church.
After all that, when the She-Wolf returned to torment him, he said to her:

‘Listen!
Just you stay away from the barn, because if you come looking for me again, I swear to God I’ll kill you!’

‘Go ahead and kill me,’ replied the She-Wolf.
‘It doesn’t worry me.
I can’t live without you.’

When he saw her coming in the distance, through the sown fields, he stopped digging at the vine with his mattock, and went and wrenched the axe from the elm.
The She-Wolf saw him coming, pale with frenzy, the axe glittering in the sun, but she never stopped for a moment or lowered her gaze as she carried on walking towards him, with her hands full of bunches of red poppies, devouring him with her coal-black eyes.

‘Ah!’ Nanni stammered.
‘May your soul roast in Hell!’

We went back there and spent, not a month, but forty-eight hours.
The villagers who stared in disbelief at your enormous trunks must have thought you would be staying for a couple of years.
On the morning of the third day, tired of seeing nothing but green fields and blue sea, and of counting the carts as they trundled up and down the street, you were at the station, fiddling impatiently with the chain of your scent-bottle, and craning your neck to catch sight of a train that couldn’t arrive too soon.
In those forty-eight hours we did all it was possible to do in Aci Trezza.
We walked down the dusty street and we scrambled over the rocks.
Under the pretext of learning to row you got blisters beneath your gloves that had to be kissed better.
We spent a marvellously romantic night at sea, casting nets so as to do something to convince the boatmen it was worth their while to be catching rheumatism.
Dawn came upon us at the top of the beacon rock.
I can still see that dawn – pale and unassuming, with broad, mauve-coloured shafts of light playing across a dark green sea, caressing the tiny group of cottages that lay huddled up asleep on the shore, while above the rock, silhouetted against the dark and cloudless sky, your tiny figure stood out clearly in the expert lines designed for it by your dressmaker, and the fine, elegant profile of your own making.
You were wearing a grey dress that seemed to have been specially made to blend with the colours of the dawn.
A truly pretty picture!
And you certainly knew it, to judge from the way you modelled yourself in your shawl and
smiled with those enormous, tired, wide-open eyes at that strange spectacle, and at the strangeness, too, of being there yourself to witness it.
What was going on at that moment in your little head, as you faced the rising sun?
Were you asking it to tell you where in the world you would be, a month into the future?
All you said, in that ingenuous way of yours, was, ‘I don’t understand how people can spend the whole of their lives in a place like this.’

But you see, the answer is easier than it looks.
For a start, all you need is not to have an income of a hundred thousand
lire,
and to take comfort in suffering a few of the many hardships that go with those giant rocks, set in the deep blue sea, that caused you to clap your hands in wonder.
Those poor devils, who were nodding off in the boat as they waited for us, need no more than that to find, in among their ramshackle, picturesque cottages, that seemed to you from a distance to be trembling as if they too were seasick, everything you search for high and low in Paris, Nice and Naples.

It’s a curious business, but perhaps it’s better that way for you, and for all the others like you.
That cluster of cottages is inhabited by fishermen, who call themselves ‘men of the sea’ as opposed to your ‘men about town’, people whose skins are harder than the bread that they eat, when they eat any bread at all, for the sea is not always as calm as it was when it was planting kisses on your gloves.
On its black days, when it roars and it thunders, you have to rest content with standing and gazing out at it from the shore, or lying in your bed, which is the best place to be on an empty stomach.
On days like that, a crowd gathers outside the tavern, but you don’t hear many coins rattling on the tin counter, and the kids, who throng the village as if poverty was a good way to multiply their numbers, go shrieking and tearing around as though possessed by the devil.

Every so often typhus, or cholera, or a bad harvest, or a storm at sea come along and make a good clean sweep through that swarm of people.
You would imagine they could wish for nothing better than to be swept away and disappear altogether, but they always come swarming back again to the very same place.
I can’t tell you how or why they do it.

Did you ever, after an autumn shower, find yourself scattering an
army of ants as you carelessly traced the name of your latest boyfriend in the sand along the boulevard?
Some of those poor little creatures would have remained stuck on the ferrule of your umbrella, writhing in agony, but all the others, after five minutes of rushing about in panic, would have returned to cling on desperately to their dark little ant-heap.
You wouldn’t go back there, certainly, and neither would I.
But in order to understand that kind of stubbornness, which in some respects is heroic, we have to reduce ourselves to the same level, restrict our whole horizon to what lies between a couple of mounds of earth, and place their tiny hearts under a microscope to discover what makes them beat.
Would you, too, like to take a look through this lens here, you who contemplate life through the other end of a telescope?
You’ll think it a curious spectacle, and it might amuse you perhaps.

We were very close friends (do you remember?), and you asked me to dedicate a few pages to you.
Why?
à quoi bon,
as you would put it.
What value does anything I write possess for anyone who knows you?
And to those who don’t, what are you anyway?
But never mind all that, I remembered your little whim, on the day I set eyes once again on that beggar woman you gave alms to with the pretext of buying the oranges she’d laid out in a row on the bench outside the front door.
The bench is no longer there, they’ve cut down the medlar tree in the yard, and the house has a new window.
It was only the woman that hadn’t changed.
She was a little further on, holding out her hand to the cart-drivers, crouching there on the pile of stones blocking the entrance to the old outpost of the national guard.
As I was doing the rounds, puffing away at a cigar, it struck me that she too, poor as she is, had seen you passing by, fair of skin and proud of bearing.

Don’t be angry if I’ve remembered you in such a way, and in such a context.
Apart from the happy memories you left me, I have a hundred others, indistinct, confused, all different, gathered here, there and everywhere – some of them mere daydreams, perhaps – and in my confused state of mind, as I walked along that street that has witnessed so many happy and painful events, the frail-looking woman crouching there in her mantilla made me somehow feel very sad, and made me think of you, glutted with everything, even with the adulation heaped at your feet by the fashion magazines, that often splash your name in
the headlines of their elegant feature articles – glutted to such a degree as to think up the notion of seeing your name in the pages of a book.

Perhaps, when I have written the book, you won’t give it a second thought.
But meanwhile, the memories I send you now, so far away from you in every sense, inebriated as you are with feasting and flowers, will bring a refreshing breeze to play upon the feverish round of your endless revelry.
On the day you go back there, if you ever do go back, and we sit together again, kicking up stones with our feet and visions in our thoughts, perhaps we shall talk about those other breezes that life elsewhere has to offer.
Imagine, if you like, that my mind is fixed on that unknown little corner of the world because you once stepped into it, or in order to avert my gaze from the dazzling glare of precious stones and fevered expectation that accompanies your every movement, or because I have sought you out in vain in all the places smiled upon by fashion.
So you see, you always take the lead in my thoughts, as you do in the theatre!

Do you also recall that old man at the tiller of our boat?
You owe it to him to remember, because he saved you a dozen times from soaking your fine blue stockings.
He died down there, poor devil, in the town hospital, in a huge white ward, between white sheets, chewing white bread, assisted by the white hands of the Sisters of Charity, whose only weakness was their failure to comprehend the string of woes that the wretched fellow mumbled forth in his semi-barbaric dialect.

But if there was one thing he would have wanted above all else, it was to die in that shaded little corner beside his own hearth, where he had slept for so many years ‘below his own roof, which is why, when they carried him away, he was in tears, whining as only the old are able to.

He had spent his whole life between those four walls, looking out on that lovely but treacherous sea with which he had had to wrestle every day of his life to extract what he needed to survive without coming to a watery end.
And yet for that brief moment in time when he was silently relishing his place in the sun, huddled on the thwart of the boat with his arms round his knees, he wouldn’t have turned his head to admire you, and you would have looked in vain into those spellbound eyes for the proud reflection of your beauty, as when so
many of the high and mighty bow their heads as they make way for you in the fashionable salons, and you see your reflection in the envious eyes of your best women friends.

Life is rich, as you see, in its inexhaustible variety, and you can enjoy that part of its richness that has come your way, just as you please.

Take that young woman, for instance, who peeped out from behind the pots of basilica when the rustling of your dress set off a clamour in the street.
When she espied your famous face in the window opposite, she beamed as though she too were dressed in silk.
Who knows what simple joys filled her thoughts as she stood at that window behind the fragrant basilica, her eyes fixed intently on the house opposite, bedecked with branches of vine.
And the laughter in her eyes would not have turned later into bitter tears in the big city, far away from the four walls that had witnessed her birth and watched her grow up, if her grandfather hadn’t died in the hospital, and her father hadn’t drowned, and her family hadn’t been scattered by a puff of wind that had blown right through it – a puff of ruinous wind, which had carried one of her brothers off to prison on the island of Pantelleria, or ‘into trouble’, as they say in those parts.

A kinder fate lay in store for those who died, one in the naval battle of Lissa.
He was the eldest son, the one you thought resembled a David sculpted in bronze, as he stood there clutching his harpoon, with the light from the flame of the lanterns playing about his features.
Big and tall as he was, he too glowed with pleasure whenever you darted your brazen eyes in his direction.
But he died a good sailor, standing firm at the rigging of the yardarm, raising his cap in the air and saluting the flag for the last time with the primitive shout of the islander bred and born.
The other man, the one who was too timid to touch your foot on the island to free it from the rabbit trap where you got it caught in that heedless way of yours, was lost on a dark winter’s night, alone at sea amid the raging foam, when between his boat and the shore, where his loved ones awaited his return, rushing here and there as though possessed, there lay sixty miles of storm and darkness.
You would never have guessed the amount of sheer dauntless courage that man was capable of, who allowed himself to be overawed by the handiwork of your shoemaker.

The ones who are dead are better off.
They are not eating ‘the king’s bread’, like the poor devil locked up on Pantelleria, or the kind of bread his sister is eating, nor do they go around like the woman with the oranges, living on the charity of God, which doesn’t flow too freely in Aci Trezza.
At least the dead need nothing any more!
That’s what the son of the woman who keeps the tavern said, the last time he went to the hospital to inquire about the old man and smuggle in some of those stuffed snails that are so good to suck for anyone who has no teeth, and he found the bed empty, with the blankets neatly folded up on it.
He crept out into the hospital yard and planted himself at a door with a lot of waste paper piled up against it, and through the keyhole he spied a large empty room, hollow-sounding and icy even in summer, and the end of a long marble table, with a thick, starched sheet draped over it.
And thinking to himself that the ones inside no longer needed anything, and the snails were of no use to them any more, he began to suck them one after the other to pass away the time.
It will comfort you to think, as you hug your blue fox muff to your bosom, that you gave a hundred
lire
to the poor old fellow.

Those village kids who followed you like stray dogs and raided the oranges are still there.
They are still buzzing round the beggar woman, pawing at her clothes as though she’s hiding a crust of bread, picking up cabbage stalks, orange peel and cigar stubs, all the things thrown away in the street but obviously still having some value because the poor live on them.
They live so well on them, in fact, that those starving, blown-out ragamuffins will grow up in the mud and the dust of the street, and turn out big and strong like their fathers and grandfathers.
Then they in turn will populate Aci Trezza with more ragamuffins, who will cling on to life as long as they can by the skin of their teeth, like that old grandfather, wanting nothing else but simply praying to God they will close their eyes in the place where they opened them, attended by the village doctor who goes round every day on his donkey, like Jesus, to succour the departing ones.

‘The ambition of the oyster!’ you may say.
Exactly, and the only reason we find it absurd is that we were not born oysters ourselves.