Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories (9 page)

But in any case, the tenacious clinging of those poor souls to the rock on to which fortune decreed they should fall, as it scattered princes
here and duchesses there, their brave resignation to a life full of hardships, their religion of the family, reflected in their work, their homes, and the walls that surround them, seem to me, for the time being at any rate, deeply serious and worthy of respect.
It seems to me that the anxieties of our wandering thoughts would find sweet solace in the tranquil calm of those simple, uncomplicated feelings that are handed down, serene and unchanging, from one generation to the next.
It seems to me that I could watch you passing by, to the sound of your horses’ trotting hooves and the merry jingling of their brasses, and greet you without a care in the world.

Perhaps because I have tried too hard to penetrate the whirlwind that surrounds and pursues you, I have now learnt to understand the inevitable need for that solid, mutual affection among the weak, for the instinct of the underprivileged to cling to one another to survive the storms of their existence, and I have tried to unravel the humble, undiscovered drama that has dispersed to the four winds its plebeian actors whom we once got to know together.
The drama of which I speak, which perhaps one day I shall unfold to you in its entirety, would seem to me to depend essentially on this: that whenever one of the underprivileged, being either weaker, or less cautious, or more selfish than the others, decided to break with his family out of a desire for the unknown, or an urge for a better life, or curiosity to know the world, then the world, like the voracious fish that it is, swallowed him up along with his nearest and dearest.
From this point of view you will see that the drama is not without interest.
The main concern of oysters must be to protect themselves from the snares of the lobster, or the knife of the diver that prises them from the rock.

As for Jeli, he didn’t suffer from those feelings of sadness.
He would simply crouch there on the hillock, puffing out his cheeks, all intent on blowing those two notes from his whistle.
Then he would round up the animals by shouting and aiming stones at them, and drive them into the stables, on the other side of the Hill of the Cross.

He would pant his way up the hill on the far side of the valley, and sometimes he would call out to his friend Alfonso, ‘Call the dog!
Hey there, call the dog!’ or ‘Aim a good big stone at the chestnut that’s playing me up and dawdling by the bushes down there in the valley’ or ‘Tomorrow morning bring me one of Gnà Lia’s big needles.’

He could do all sorts of things with a needle, and in his canvas bag he had a bundle of rags to patch his breeches and the sleeves of his jacket whenever the need arose.
He could also make plaited cord from the manes of the horses, and he could use pumice from the valley to launder the scarf that he wore round his neck when he was feeling cold.
In short, as long as he had his shoulder-bag with him, he had no need of anyone to keep him company, whether in the woods of Resecone, or miles from anywhere in the open country round Caltagirone.
Gnà Lia used to say, ‘You see Jeli the herd-boy?
He’s spent his whole life alone out there in the fields as though his mares had given him birth, which is why he can cross himself with either hand!’

True though it is that Jeli had no need of anyone, all the same everyone at the farm would gladly do him a favour, because he was an obliging sort of lad, and there was always the possibility of getting something out of him.
Gnà Lia would bake bread for him out of
neighbourly love, and he would return the compliment with one or two fine wicker egg-baskets, cane spools for winding her wool, and other little things of that sort.

Gnà Lia put it this way: ‘We scratch one another’s backs, like his horses.’

Everybody in Tebidi had known him since he was a tiny child, lost among the tails of the horses as they grazed on the high plateau, and they had watched him grow up, so to speak, though nobody ever actually saw it happen as he wandered from one place to another with his animals.
‘He fell from the sky to be caught by the earth!’ as the proverb goes, and he was truly one of those people without either home or close family.
His mother worked as a housemaid in Vizzini, and only saw him once a year when he took his ponies to the fair of San Giovanni.
On the day she died, they came to collect him on a Saturday afternoon, and on the Monday he was back with his herd, so that the peasant who’d stepped into his place to look after the horses missed not a single day’s work.
But the poor boy came back so upset that he sometimes allowed the foals to stray into the sown fields.
‘Hey, Jeli!’ Massaro Agrippino would yell at him from the barn.
‘Are you looking for a sound flogging, you son of a bitch?’

Jeli would start running after the foals that had strayed, and gradually force them back up the hill.
But in his mind’s eye all he could see was his mother, with a white scarf wrapped round her head, no longer uttering a sound.

His father worked as a cowherd on the far side of Licodia, where malaria was so rife it could be harvested, as the peasants in those parts used to say, but in the malaria regions the pasture lands are good, and cows don’t catch any fevers.
So Jeli was in the fields all year round, either at Donferrante, or in the enclosures at Commenda, or in the Jacitano valley, and he could always be seen, wandering about like a dog without a master here, there and everywhere, by hunters or by people taking shortcuts through the fields.
He had no complaints, because he was used to being with the horses as they ambled along in front of him and paused every so often to munch the clover, and to the flocks of birds that circled around him the whole day long, as the sun inched its way across the sky till the shadows lengthened, then
disappeared.
He had all the time in the world to watch the clouds as they piled up gradually one on top of the other, and to pick out the distant hills and the valleys.
He could sense a thunderstorm in the air from the way the wind was blowing, and a snowstorm from the colour of the clouds.
Everything had its own shape and its own meaning, and there was always something to look and listen out for at every hour of the day.
That was how it was at the setting of the sun, when the herd-boy would begin to play on his whistle, and the black mare would come lazily up chewing the clover, and stand there watching him with her huge, contemplative eyes.

Where he did feel rather sorry for himself was in the deserted plains of Passanitello, where not a bush or a hedgerow can be seen, and in the hot summer months not a bird is flying.
The horses would gather round in a circle, hanging their heads so as to shade each other from the sun, and throughout the long days of the threshing season that intense silent light bore down in a steady, oppressive stream for sixteen hours at a time.

But since the fodder was plentiful, and the horses were in no hurry to move on, the boy turned his attention to other things.
He made reed cages to catch crickets, he carved pipes, he fashioned wicker baskets from a handful of rushes.
And he could knock up a shelter for himself when the north wind whirled long lines of crows down the valley, or when the cicadas clapped their wings under the sun that was scorching the stubble.
He roasted acorns from the oak woods in the embers of sumac twigs, imagining as he ate them they were roast chestnuts, or toasted over the fire thick slices of bread that had started to grow a beard of mould, because at Passanitello in the winter, the roads were so bad that sometimes you could spend a whole fortnight without catching sight of a single living soul passing by.

Don Alfonso, whose parents kept him wrapped in cotton wool, envied his friend Jeli with his canvas bag containing all his things: his bread, his onions, his flask of wine, his winter scarf, his bundle of rags with the reel of thread and the big needles, and the metal box where he kept his bait and his flintstone.
Another thing he envied was his splendid mare with ears of different colour, that animal with wicked eyes and a tuft of hair standing up on her brow that blew out her nostrils
like a bad-tempered mastiff when anyone tried to mount her.
But she allowed Jeli to mount her and tickle those ears of hers, of which she was so proud, and sniffed at him to hear what he had to say to her.

‘Keep away from the mare,’ Jeli warned him.
‘She’s not a bad creature, but she doesn’t know you.’

Once, when Scordu, the trader from Buccheri, took away the Calabrian mare he had bought at San Giovanni and asked Jeli to keep with his herd till the grape harvest, its chestnut foal, being left an orphan, couldn’t be consoled, and ran off up into the mountain crags, whinnying endless sad laments and puffing its nostrils into the wind.
Jeli ran after it, calling out loudly to it, and the foal stopped to listen, stretching out its neck and twitching its ears, swishing its tail against its flanks.
‘It’s because they’ve taken away its mother, and it doesn’t know where to put itself,’ said the herd-boy.
‘We’ll have to keep an eye on it, otherwise it could let itself go over the precipice.
I felt the same when my mother died, and I couldn’t see a thing in front of my eyes.’

Later, when the foal began to sniff once more at the clover, and reluctantly chew off a mouthful or two: ‘You see!’ he said.
‘It’s gradually beginning to forget.
But it’ll only be sold off.
Horses are made to be sold off, as surely as lambs are born to go to the slaughter-house, and clouds bring rain.
Only the birds have nothing else to do but sing and fly about the whole day long.’

Ideas never came to him in an orderly row one after the other, because he’d seldom had anyone to talk to, and so he wasn’t very quick to dislodge them and dig them out from the depths of his mind.
Instead he was accustomed to let them come into being and blossom gradually, like the buds on the branches in the warmth of the sun.
‘But even the birds,’ he added, ‘have to find things to eat, and when the snow covers the earth they die.’

Then he thought a little more about it.
‘You are like the birds, but when winter comes you can stay by the fire and do nothing.’

However, Don Alfonso replied that he also went to school, to learn things.
Whereupon Jeli opened his eyes wide, and he was all ears if the young gentleman began to read to him, and he looked at him and the book suspiciously, listening with that slight blinking of the eyelids that marks intense concentration in the animals closest to man.
He liked to
listen to verses that caressed his ears with the harmonies of a song that was beyond his understanding, and sometimes he knitted his brows, stuck out his chin, and felt that something was busily working away inside him.
Then he would keep on nodding his head with a knowing smile, scratching his head as he did so.
Again, when the young gentleman started to write so as to show him how many things he could do, Jeli would simply stare at him for days on end, then suddenly screw up his eyes with a look of distrust.
He was quite unable to come to terms with the fact that one could put down on paper the words that he or Don Alfonso had spoken, and even the things he hadn’t let fall from his lips, so that in the end he drew back, incredulous, with that same knowing smile.

He treated with suspicion every new idea that knocked on his head to be admitted, and seemed to sniff away at it with all the distrust of his wild mare.
Yet nothing in the world ever seemed to amaze him.
If anyone had told him that in town the horses went round pulling carriages, he would have remained impassive, with that mask of oriental indifference that marks the dignity of the Sicilian peasant.
He seemed to entrench himself instinctively in his ignorance, as though poverty forced him into it.
Whenever he was short of an answer, he always replied, ‘I don’t know anything.
I’m poor,’ with that stubborn smile of his that had a hint of mischief about it.

He had asked his friend Don Alfonso to write the name Mara for him on a scrap of paper he had picked up somewhere, just as he collected everything he saw lying about, and had stuffed into his bundle of rags.
One day, after saying nothing for a while and looking absent-mindedly this way and that, he said to him in a really serious tone of voice, ‘I’ve got a girl-friend.’

Although he could read well enough, Alfonso opened his eyes wide.
‘It’s true,’ said Jeli.
‘Mara, the daughter of Massaro Agrippino who used to live here.
She’s living in Marineo now, in that big tenement block in the valley that you look down on from the high plateau.’

‘Are you going to marry her then?’

‘Yes, when I’m grown up and earning six
onze
a year in wages.
Mara knows nothing about it yet.’

‘Why haven’t you told her?’

Jeli shook his head and stopped to think.
Then he unwrapped his bundle and spread out the piece of paper he’d got his friend to write on.

‘It really does say Mara, I know it does, because Don Gesualdo, the gamekeeper, read it, and so did Brother Cola, when he came down here looking for beans.’

‘Anyone who knows how to write,’ he went on, ‘is like a person who stores his words in a steel safe, and who could carry them around in his pocket, and even send them wherever he wants.’

‘So what are you going to do now with that piece of paper, when you can’t read what’s written on it?’ asked Don Alfonso.

Jeli shrugged his shoulders, and continued to roll the sheet of paper carefully up in his bundle of rags.

He had first met Mara when she was a little girl, and they had begun to pitch in to one another down in the valley, as they were both picking blackberries along the hedgerows.
The girl, who knew she was on her own land, grabbed Jeli by the neck and called him a thief.
They stood there, pummelling away at one another’s backs like the cooper hammering the metal rings of a cask, but once they grew tired they gradually calmed down, still holding on to each other.

‘Who are you, anyway?’ asked Mara.

And since Jeli, being the wilder of the two, wouldn’t tell her who he was, ‘I’m Mara,’ she said, ‘the daughter of Massaro Agrippino, who’s in charge of all these fields around here.’

Jeli then let go of her without saying a word, and the girl began to gather up the blackberries that had fallen on the ground, every so often stealing inquisitive glances at her adversary.

‘On the other side of the bridge, in the hedge alongside the orchard, there are lots of big blackberries,’ added the little girl.
‘The chickens feed on them.’

Jeli sloped off quiet as a mouse, and Mara, after keeping him in sight until he reached the oak wood, turned her back on him and ran off, heading for home.

But from that day onwards they began to make friends with one another.
Mara would go and sit on the parapet of the bridge, spinning tow, and watching as Jeli drove his herd very slowly towards the lower
slopes of Bandit Hill.
At first he stayed away from her, hanging round and eyeing her warily from a distance, then he gradually came closer with the watchful air of a dog grown accustomed to being stoned.
When they finally came side by side, they would remain for hours at a stretch without opening their mouths, Jeli staring in fascination at the intricate knitting that Mara’s mother had given her to get on with, whilst she watched him carving neat zig-zag patterns on walking-sticks fashioned out of almond wood.
Then they would go their separate ways without uttering a word to one another, and the little girl, once in sight of home, would start to run, lifting her petticoat high to reveal her rosy little legs.