T hen he turned on his heel and marched away, followed by his gang. And Roldo dei Prati was shaking with fever and could scarcely remain on his feet, but he held his head erect, and the crippled Bile as he passed Don Camillo stamped his wooden leg defiantly in perfect step with his comrades.
When Don Camillo went to the Lord to show Him the basket containing the money and told Him that there was more than enough for the repair of the tower, Christ smiled in astonishment.
“I guess your sermon did the trick, Don Camillo.”
“Naturally,” replied Don Camillo. “You see You understand humanity, but I know Italians.”
U p to that point Don Camillo had behaved pretty well. But he made a mistake when he sent a message to Peppone saying that he admired the military smartness of the men but advising Peppone to give them more intensive drilling in the right-about-face and the double, which they would need badly on the day of the proletarian revolution.
This was deplorable and Peppone planned to retaliate.
* * *
D on Camillo was an honest man, but in addition to an overwhelming passion for hunting, he possessed a splendid double-barreled gun and a good supply of cartridges. Moreover, Baron Stocco’s private preserve lay only three miles from the village. It presented a permanent temptation, because not only game but even the neighborhood poultry had learned that they were in safety behind the fence of wire netting.
It was therefore not astonishing that on a certain evening Don Camillo, his cassock bundled into an enormous pair of breeches and his face partly concealed beneath the brim of an old felt hat, should find himself actually on the business side of the Baron’s fence. The flesh is weak and the flesh of the sportsman particularly so.
N or was it surprising, since Don Camillo was a good shot, that he brought down a fine rabbit almost under his nose. He stuffed it into his game bag and was making a getaway when he suddenly came face to face with another trespasser. There was no alternative but to butt the stranger in the stomach with the hope of knocking him out and thereby saving the countryside the embarrassment of learning that their parish priest had been caught poaching.
Unfortunately, the stranger conceived the same idea at the same moment. The two heads met with a crack that left both men side by side on the ground seeing stars.
“A skull as hard as that can only belong to our beloved Mayor,” muttered Don Camillo, as his vision began to clear.
“ A skull as hard as that can only belong to our beloved priest,” replied Peppone, scratching his head. For Peppone, too, was poaching on forbidden ground and he, too, had a fine rabbit in his game bag. His eyes gleamed as he observed Don Camillo.
“Never would I have believed that the very man who preaches respect for other people’s property would be found breaking through the fences of a preserve to go poaching,” said Peppone.
“Nor would I have believed that our chief citizen, our comrade Mayor—”
“ Citizen, yes, but also comrade,” Peppone interrupted, “and therefore perverted by those diabolical theories of the fair distribution of all property, and therefore acting more in accordance with his known views than the reverend Don Camillo, who, for his part . . .”
This ideological analysis was suddenly interrupted. Someone was approaching them and was so near that it was quite impossible to escape without the risk of stopping a bullet, for the intruder happened to be a gamekeeper.
“We’ve got to do something!” whispered Don Camillo. “Think of the scandal if we are recognized!”
“Personally, I don’t care,” replied Peppone with composure. “I am always ready to answer for my actions.”
The steps drew nearer, and Don Camillo crouched against a large tree trunk. Peppone made no attempt to move, and when the gamekeeper appeared with his gun over his arm, Peppone greeted him:
“Good evening.”
“What are you doing here?” inquired the gamekeeper.
“Looking for mushrooms.”
“With a gun?”
“As good a way as another.”
T he means whereby a gamekeeper can be rendered innocuous are fairly simple. If one happens to be standing behind him, it suffices to muffle his head unexpectedly in an overcoat and give him a good crack on the head. Then advantage can be taken of his momentary unconsciousness to reach the fence and scramble over it. Once over, all is well.
Don Camillo and Peppone found themselves sitting behind a bush a good mile away from the Baron’s estate.
“Don Camillo!” sighed Peppone. “We have committed a serious offense. We have raised our hands against one in authority!”
Don Camillo, who had actually been the one to raise them, broke out into a cold sweat.
“ My conscience troubles me,” continued Peppone, watching his companion closely. “I shall have no peace. How can I go before a priest of God to ask forgiveness for such a misdeed? It was an evil day when I listened to the infamous ‘Muscovite doctrine’, forgetting the holy precepts of Christian charity!”
D on Camillo was so deeply humiliated that he wanted to cry. On the other hand, he also wanted to land one good crack on the skull of his perverted adversary. As Peppone was well aware of this, he stopped talking for the moment. Then suddenly he shouted, “Accursed temptation!” and pulled the rabbit out of his bag and threw it on the ground.
“Accursed indeed!” shouted Don Camillo, and hauling out his own rabbit he flung it far into the snow and walked away with bent head. Peppone followed him as far as the crossroad and then turned to the right.
“By the way,” he said, pausing for a moment, “could you tell me of a reputable parish priest in this neighbor hood to whom I could go and confess this sin?”
Don Camillo clenched his fists and walked straight ahead.
W hen he had gathered sufficient courage, Don Camillo went before the main altar of the church. “I didn’t do it to save myself, Lord,” he said. “I did it simply because, if it were known that I go poaching, the Church would have been the chief sufferer from the scandal.”
But Christ remained silent. Now whenever this happened Don Camillo acquired a fever and put himself on a diet of bread and water for days and days, until Christ felt sorry for him and said: “Enough.”
This time, Christ said nothing until the bread and water diet had continued for seven days. Don Camillo was so weak that he could remain standing only by leaning against a wall, and his stomach was rumbling from hunger.
Then Peppone came to confession.
“I have sinned against the law and against Christian charity,” said Peppone.
“I know it,” replied Don Camillo.
“What you don’t know is that, as soon as you were out of sight, I went back and collected both the rabbits. I have roasted one and stewed the other.”
“ Just what I supposed you would do,” murmured Don Camillo. And when he passed the altar a little later, Christ smiled at him, not so much because of the prolonged fast as because Don Camillo, when he murmured “Just what I supposed you would do,” had felt no desire to hit Peppone. Instead he had felt profound shame, recalling that on that same evening he himself had had a momentary temptation to do exactly the same thing.
“ Poor Don Camillo,” whispered Christ tenderly. And Don Camillo spread out his arms as though he wished to say that he did his best and that if he sometimes made mistakes it was not deliberately.
“I know, I know, Don Camillo,” replied the Lord. “And now get along and eat your rabbit — for Peppone has left it for you, nicely cooked, in your kitchen.”
The Treasure
O ne day Smilzo came to the rectory. He was a young ex-partisan who had been Peppone’s orderly during the fighting in the mountains and now worked as a messenger at the Town Hall. He was the bearer of a handsome letter, printed on handmade paper with the Party heading in Gothic lettering, which read:
Your honor is invited to grace with his presence a ceremony of a social nature which will take place tomorrow at ten o'clock
A.M. in the Piazza della Libertà. The Secretary of the Section, Comrade Bottazzi, Mayor, Guiseppe.
Don Camillo looked severely at Smilzo. “Tell Comrade Peppone Mayor Guiseppe that I have no wish to go and listen to the usual imbecilities against reaction and the capitalists. I already know them by heart.”
“No,” explained Smilzo, “there won’t be any political speeches. This is for patriotism and social activities. If you refuse, it means that you don’t understand democracy.”
Don Camillo nodded his head slowly. “If that’s it,” he said, “then I have nothing more to say.”
“Good. And the Mayor says you are to come in uniform and to bring all your paraphernalia.”
“Paraphernalia?”
“Yes — a pail of holy water and all that stuff; there is something to be blessed.”
Smilzo got away with talking this way to Don Camillo precisely because he was Sm ilzo, that is, the lean one. He was so skinny and quick that during the fighting in the mountains he had been known to slip between the bullets. Therefore, by the time the heavy book Don Camillo hurled at him reached the spot where his head had been, Smilzo was already on his bike pedaling away for all he was worth.
Don Camillo got up, rescued the book and we nt to the church to let off steam. When he reached the altar he said, “Lord, I must find out what those people are planning to do tomorrow. I never heard of anything so mysterious. What is the meaning of all those preparations? All those branches that they are sticking into the ground round the meadow between the drugstore and Baghetti’s house? What kind of devilry can they be up to?”
“My son, if it were devilry, first of all they wouldn’t be doing it in the open and secondly they wouldn’t be sending for you to bless it. Be patient until tomorrow.”
That evening Don Camillo went to have a look around but saw nothing but branches and decorations surrounding the meadow, and nobody seemed to know anything.
When he set out next morning, followed by two acolytes, his knees were trembling. We felt that something was not as it should be, that there was treachery in the air.
An hour later he returned, shattered and with a temperature.
“What happened?” asked Christ from the altar.
“Enough to make one’s hair stand on end,” sta mmered Don Camillo. “A terrible thing. A band, Garibaldi’s hymn, a, speech from Peppone, and the laying of the first stone of ‘The People’s Palace’! And I had to bless the stone while Peppone chuckled with joy. And the ruffian asked me to say a few words, and I had to make a suitable little address because, although it is a Party affair, that dog dressed it up as a social undertaking.”
Don Camillo paced back and forth in the empty church. Then he came to a standstill in front of Christ. “A mere trifle,” he exclaimed. “An assembly hall, reading room, library, gymnasium, dispensary, and theater. A skyscraper of two floors with ground for sports and bowling. And the whole lot for the miserable sum of ten million lire.”
“Not bad, given the high cost of building today,” observed Christ.
Don Camillo sank down in a pew. “Lord,” he moaned, “why have You done this to me?”
“Don Camillo, you are unreasonable.”
“No, I’m not unreasonable. For ten yea rs I have been praying to You on my knees to find me a little money so that I could build a library, an assembly hall for the young people, a playground for the children with a merry-go-round and swings and possibly a little swimming pool. For ten years I have humbled myself to bloated landowners when I would have preferred smacking them between the eyes every time I saw them. I must have organized two hundred bazaars and knocked at easily two thousand doors and I have nothing at all to show for it. Then this excommunicate dog comes along, and behold ten million lire drop into his pockets from Heaven.”
Christ shook His head. “They didn’t fall from Heaven,” He replied. “He found them underground. I had nothing to do with it, Don Camillo. It is entirely due to his own personal initiative.”
Don Camillo spread out his arms. “Then the obvious deduction is that Iam a poor fool.”
He went off to stamp up and down his study in the rectory, roaring with fury. He had to exclude the possibility that Peppone had got those ten million by holding people up on the roads or by robbing a bank.
He thought of the days of the liberation when Peppone came down from the mountai ns and it seemed as if the proletarian revolution might break out at any moment. “Peppone must have threatened those cowards of gentry and squeezed their money out of them,” he said to himself. Then he remembered that in those days there had been no landowners in the neighborhood, but that there had been a detachment of the British Army which arrived simultaneously with Peppone and his men. The British moved into the landowners' houses, replacing the Germans who had stripped them of everything of any value. Therefore, Peppone couldn’t have got the ten million by looting.
Maybe the money came from Russia? He burst out laughing; was it likely that the Russians should give a thought to Peppone?
At last he returned to the church. “Lord,” he begged, from the foot of the altar, “won’t You tell me where Peppone found the money?”
“Don Camillo,” repl ied Christ with a smile, “do you take Me for a private detective? Why ask God to tell you the truth, when you have only to seek it within yourself? Look for it, Don Camillo, and meanwhile, in order to distract your mind, why not make a trip to the city?”
The following evening, when he got back from his excursion to the city, Don Camillo went before Christ in a condition of extreme agitation.
“What has upset you, Don Camillo?”
“Something quite mad,” exclaimed Don Camillo breathlessly. “I have met a dead man! Face to face in the street!”
“Don Camillo, calm yourself and reflect. Usually the dead whom one meets face to face in the street are alive.”
“This one cannot be!” shouted Don Camillo. “This one is as dead as mutton, and I know it because I myself carried him tothe cemetery.”
“If that is the case,” Christ replied, “then I have nothing more to say. You must have seen a ghost.”
Don Camillo shrugged his shoulders. “Of course not! Ghosts don’t exist except in the minds of hysterical women!”
“And therefore?”
“Well . . .” muttered Don Camillo.
Don Camillo collected his thoughts . The deceased had been a thin young man who lived in a nearby village, and Don Camillo had seen him from time to time before the war. He had come down from the mountains with Peppone and his men and had been wounded in the head. Peppone put him up in the house which had been the German head quarters and which that day became the headquarters of the British Command. Peppone had his office in the room next to the invalid. Don Camillo remembered it all clearly: the villa was surrounded by sentries three deep and not a fly could leave it, because the British were still fighting nearby and were particularly careful of their own skins.
All this had happened one morning, and on the same evening the young man died. Peppone sent for Don Camillo toward midnight, but by the time he got there the young man was already in his coffin. The British didn’t want the body in the house and so, at about noon, Peppone and his most trusted men carried out the coffin, covered with the Italian flag. A detachment of British soldiers had kindly volunteered to supply military honors.
Don Camillo recalled that the ceremony had been most moving. The whole village had walk ed behind the coffin which had been placed on a gun carriage. He himself had officiated, and his sermon before the body was lowered into the grave had people actually weeping. Peppone in the front row had sobbed.
“I certainly know how to express myself, when I put my mind to it!” said Don Camillo to himself complacently, recalling the episode. Then he took up his train of thought. “And in spite of all that, I could swear that the young man I met today in the city was the same one I followed to the grave.”
He sighed. “Such is life!”
The
following day, Don Camillo paid a visit to Peppone at his workshop where he found him lying on his back underneath a car.
“Good morning, Comrade Mayor. I want to tell you that for the past two days I have been thinking over your description of your ‘People’s Palace’!”
“And what do you think of it?” jeered Peppone.
“Magnificent! It has made me decide to start wo rk on that scheme of a little place with a bathing-pool, garden, sports ground, theater, et cetera, which, as you know, I have planned for the past ten years. I expect to lay the foundation stone next Sunday. It would give me great pleasure if you, as Mayor, would attend the ceremony.”
“Willingly — courtesy for courtesy.”
“Meanwhile, you might try to trim down the plans for your own place a bit. It looks too big for my taste.”
Peppone stared at him in amazement. “Don Camillo, are you crazy?”
“No more than when I conducted a funeral and made a patriotic address over a coffin that can’t have been securely closed, because only yesterday I met the corpse walking about in the city.”
Peppone sneered, “What are you trying to insinuate?”
“Nothing. Merely that the coffin to which the British presented arms was full of what you found in the cellars of that villa where the German Command had hidden it. And that the dead man was alive and hidden in the attic.”
“A-a-h!” howled Peppone, “the same old story! An attempt to malign the partisan movement!”
“Leave the partisans out of it. They don’t interest me!”
And he walked away while Peppone stood muttering vag ue threats. That same evening, Don Camillo was reading the paper and waiting for Peppone. He arrived accompanied by Brusco and two other prominent supporters — the same men who had acted as pallbearers.
“You,” said Peppone, “can drop your insinuations. It was all of it stuff looted by the Germans: silver, cameras, instruments, gold, et cetera. If we hadn’t taken it, the British would have. We took the only possible means of getting it out of the place. I have witnesses and receipts: nobody has touched so much as a lira. Ten million was taken and ten million will be spent for the people.”
Giovanni Guareschi Page 3