Pescara Tales

by Gabriele D'Annunzio

  Luca leaning on his elbows listened to the sound of the blows, encouraged his mother:

  ‘Again! Again!’

  Under that storm, in time Ciro fell silent. Restraining his crying he descended to the street. He was ravenous, had eaten almost nothing for two days and now had hardly the strength to drag himself about on his crutches.

  A train of urchins ran past him, following the flight of a kite that was dipping and rising on the wind like some pecking bird. A couple of them collided into him and shouted:

  ‘Hey, here’s Wry-bones!’

  Others jeered:

  ‘Are you going to the race track, Four-legs?’

  Others, alluding to his head, taunted him:

  ‘Just how heavy’s that brain in there, Bonsey?’

  One of them, exceptionally callous, wrenched a crutch from the cripple and then fled, leaving it on the ground. Ciro swayed, picked up the crutch with difficulty, and went on. The squeals and laughter of the urchins faded in the direction of the river. The kite rose like a bird from some strange country, in a sky all rosy and soft. Somewhere near the Bagno squads of soldiers sang together. It was the fairest season, the time of the Easter feast.

  Ciro, feeling the bite of hunger in his viscera, thought:

  ‘Now I’ll beg.’

  From the direction of the bakery the fragrance of new bread came floating to him on the springtime breeze. A man garbed in white went by, supporting on his head a wide board on which were arrayed in order the forms of golden loaves, still steaming. Two dogs followed the man, their noses held vertically and their tails in agitation.

  Ciro felt himself failing, falling into torpor. He thought:

  ‘Now I’ll beg; if I don’t I’ll die.’

  The day faded slowly. The diaphanous sky was scattered with kites that were now beginning one by one to dip their way downwards to the ground. Bells broadcast on the resonant air a deep and continuous hum.

  Ciro thought:

  ‘Now I’ll go and stand at the door of the church.’

  And he dragged himself there.

  As it happened, the church was open. The altar, illuminated by a constellation of trembling flames, was visible a long way within the nave’s depths. A faint aroma of spent benzoin and sandalwood issued through the door. From time to time the organ sent out into the air a great sheaf of chords.

  Ciro suddenly felt his eyes veiling with new tears. He prayed in his religious heart:

  ‘O Lord, my God, help me thou!’

  The organ uttered a thunderous peal that made the pilasters vibrate like the bass resonators of a gargantuan instrument; then it grew merrier by a progression of clear single notes. The voices of singers lifted in unison; worshipers of both sexes entered in twos and threes through the door beside Ciro. He still did not dare to extend his hand. A street beggar stationed on the other side of the door pleaded in a pathetic tone:

  ‘Charity, for the love of God!’

  At hearing that, the mute felt ashamed and drew away. Looking back, he saw his stepmother, wrapped in a black mantle entering the church, and he thought:

  ‘What if I went into the house while stepmother is out?’

  The longing for food stabbed him so deeply that he could delay no longer. He flew on his crutches, pursuing the hope of bread. A young woman laughed at his passing and shouted behind him:

  ‘Are you galloping for a trophy, Bonsey?’

  He arrived at the house in a short time, breathless and with a beating heart. He rose on the stairs with infinite caution, noiselessly, and groped for the key in a cavity in the wall where his stepmother always put it when she went out. He found it, but before opening the door he bent and looked through the keyhole. Luca appeared to be asleep on his bed.

  Ciro thought:

  ‘Oh, if I could reach the bread without waking him!’

  And he fitted the key and turned it, slowly, slowly, holding his breath, fearful of waking his brother with his heartbeats. It seemed to him that his heart’s drumming filled all the house with peals like thunder coming down from the highest regions.

  The door opened. ‘And what if he wakes?’ thought Ciro with a tremor which he felt must have surged up from his very marrow.

  But hunger overcame his fear. He entered, putting the points of his crutches down delicately, not taking his eyes off his brother. The dread returned again:

  ‘And what if he wakes?’

  His brother, supine, breathed shallowly in sleep. From time to time something like a light whistle passed between his lips. A sole candle burned on the table, throwing on a wall large variable shadows. At the bread crock Ciro stopped to calm his tremor, looked again at the sleeping figure, then, immobilising the crutches under his armpits to free his hands, he began lifting the lid of the crock. The crock opened with a single loud scrape.

  Luca sat up suddenly, awakening fully on the way, saw his brother poised over the crock, and he shouted at him, waving his arms like someone frenzied.

  ‘Oh, you thief! Oh, you thief! Help!’

  But his passion suffocated his voice for a moment. While his brother, blinded by hunger, bent over the crock and sought with trembling hands for a piece of bread, Luca threw his legs down from the bed and ran at him to prevent the act.

  ‘Thief! Thief!’ he renewed his shouting, beside himself.

  And he dragged the heavy lid away from Ciro, lifted it and brought its edge down heavily on Ciro’s neck. The cripple protected himself desperately, like a victim under the knife; but Luca had lost all awareness of reality and with every fibre of his body was intent only on overcoming his brother’s resistance and in some manner decapitating him. The sharp-edged earthenware cover crunched as it penetrated bone and the living flesh of his brother’s neck, crushing the windpipe, shredding veins and nerves. Ciro’s body fell across the crock and lay motionless.

  Then, in the presence of the slain cripple, a mad dismay invaded his brother’s brain.

  Twice, thrice, staggering, he crossed the room, which the unsteadiness of the candle-flame populated with frightful images, until coming to the bed he pulled from it the bedclothes and muffled his whole body in them, even his head, then crouching down he retreated under the bed, cowering. And in the silence his teeth made a strident noise, the sound of their crepitation so even that it seemed like the rasp of a file rubbing iron.

  MUNGIÀ THE MINSTREL

  Throughout the rural surrounds of Pescara – and in San Silvestro, in Fontanella, in San Rocco, even as far as Spoltore and the manor estates of Vallelonga beyond the Alento River, and especially in the small hamlets of the mariners near the mouth of the river and in their houses of clay and wattle where the cooking fires are made from the sea’s rejections – there has flowered over a long course of time the fame of a certain Catholic rhapsodist with the name of a Barbary corsair, and who in the likeness of Homer is blind.

  Mungià starts his peregrinations at the beginning of spring and ends them in the month of October with the arrival of the first frosts. He travels conducted about the country by a woman or a child. Among the great spaces and masculine serenity of the cultivated landscape he brings the lamenting chants of Christianity, the antiphons, invitatories, responsories and the psalmodic offices for the dead. His figure is so familiar that even the dogs squatting on the threshing floors do not bark at his arrival. He announces himself by a trill on a clarinet, and at that well-known signal the old wives come out on their doorsteps to give the singer an honest welcome, place a chair for him in the shade of a yard-tree and inquire about his health. The peasants leave their work and come to form a circle around him: men still breathing heavily and wiping their sweat away with a simple gesture of the hand. They stand immobile, in attitudes of reverence, holding in their hands the various implements of agriculture. In their arms, their legs, their bare feet, are visible the deformities which long and patient toil effects upon those members. Their gnarled bodies, whose skin too has assumed an earthen appearance, seem, rising from the soil in
the light of day, almost to be of a common substance with the trees and the roots of trees.

  A Christian solemnity expands from the blind man to encompass that gathering, and then to embrace the countryside around. Neither the sun, nor the immediate fruits of the soil, nor the contentment of activities that anticipate future nourishment, nor the chants of distant labour, suffice to defend their humanity from the congregating need and the sadness of religion. One of the mothers pronounces the name of a dead parent to whom she would offer canticles for the soul’s repose. Mungià uncovers his head.

  His wide, shining cranium is bordered with white hair; his face, which in that prologue of silence resembles a weathered old mask made of wood, now wrinkles and comes alive as he puts the clarinet to his lips. On his temples, beneath the cavities of his eyes, about his ears and his nostrils and from the corners of his mouth a thousand fine or deep lines meet and part according to the rhythmic muse that rules his exhalations through the instrument. The cheekbones remain tense and shiny and salient, criss-crossed by sanguineous veins like the patterns that form on autumn vine leaves, and all that can be seen of the components of his eyes are the rosy lines of the lower, out-turned lids at the base of the invisible balls. And over all that scabrous skin, all that marvellous work of incision and relief effected by emaciation and age, and through the tough, short, badly-barbered whiskers, and in the cavities and cords of that long and rigid neck, the leaf-filtered sunlight falls, fractures, one might say distils into drops, like dew on a warty, musty pumpkin: sunlight that frolics in a thousand ways, vibrates, goes out and then returns to hesitate, giving at times to that humble head unexpected graces of nobility and mystery.

  His fingers press the unsteady keys of the boxwood clarinet, and sounds escape. The instrument has a life and that inexpressible suggestion of auxiliary humanity which objects by man’s assiduous use so often acquire. The tube is unctuously bright; the holes in winter become nests of small spiders and are in spring still occupied for some time by cobwebs and dust; the keys, grown sluggish, are stained with verdigris; here and there beeswax, pitch, or paper wound about with thread has been employed to seal the cracks; trinkets from a long-gone youth still ornament its bell-shaped mouth. But its voice now is weaker and uncertain. The blind man’s fingers move mechanically, merely searching to reawaken this prelude or that interlude long known to them.

  The elongated hands, deformed by great swellings at the first joint of the ring finger and the middle finger, the thumbnails curved down and gone violet, resemble the paws of a decrepit simian; their backs show the hues of certain decaying fruit: unhealthy and degraded tones of rose, yellow and blue; the palms are laborious networks of furrows; the skin between the fingers peels and blisters.

  With the end of some preliminary melody, Mungià lowers his instrument and takes up the hymns Libera me Domine and the Ne recorderis, singing them slowly in a modulation of five sole notes, the Latin endings often conforming to some vernacular turn of speech. From time to time, almost in metric reprise, some common adverbial suffix enables a drumbeat of solemn ensuing rhymes; and then his voice ascends in pitch. But soon those waves diminish again and pass to less fatiguing lines. The name of Jesus recurs often in such fervent passages. The Passion is narrated in erratic strophes of five and seven feet, not unassisted by certain appropriately theatrical gestures.

  The peasants around him listen with devoted attention, looking the singer in the mouth. Sometimes, according to the season, the choiring of grape-pickers or of reapers is carried on the wind to contend with the Deity’s praise, and the tree above, strummed through by the wind, becomes a musical competitor as well; but Mungià is hard of hearing, and he sings on of the mysteries of death. His lips adhere to the deserted gums, and some saliva seeps down his chin. He returns the clarinet to his mouth and sounds an intermezzo, then revisits the strophes. And so he goes on to the end. His pay is a small measure of grain or a carafe of new wine or a string of onions. Sometimes even a hen.

  He rises from the chair, a tall and emaciated figure with a curved spine, the knees bent inwards a little. On his head he wears a wide green beret; whatever the season, a cloak hangs down from his shoulders half-way to the knees; two copper clasps enclose it at the throat. He walks with difficulty, at times stopping to cough.

  When in October the vines are picked bare and the roads are all mire or water-borne gravel, he retires to an attic; there he lives with a tailor who has a paralytic wife, and a sweeper with nine scrofulous and rickety children. On mild days he has himself conducted to the arch of the Portanova and assisted to sit in the sun on a certain massive stone, where he softly sings the De profundis. He does it as a vocal exercise. Usually the town beggars come around him: men with dislocated members, hunchbacks, cripples, epileptics, lepers; old women covered in sores, scabs and scars, toothless, without eyebrows, without hair; children grey-green as locusts, emaciated, with the feral eyes of predatory birds, with mouths whose smiles have already withered, taciturn, gestating in their blood some hereditary disease. All those monsters of poverty, all those miserable remnants of a defeated race, those ragged creatures of Jesus, come to stand about the singer and to address him as an equal.

  Then Mungià raises his voice and directs it upon his listeners as if it were in blessing. Chiachiù, a native of Silvi, arrives, punting himself laboriously over the ground on palms fortified with discs of leather, and he stops there, holding in his hands his right foot twisted on itself like the root of a tree. Strigia arrives, an ambiguous figure, repugnant, turned hermaphroditic by senility, with a neck covered in vermilion carbuncles, on her temple some tended grey locks that seem to be her last, small vanity, and the back of her head enclosed in fine down like a vulture. The Mammalucchi brothers arrive, three idiots who seem to be the product of couplings between man and ewe, so manifest in their appearance are the ovine features. The elder’s weeping, degenerate eyeballs protrude from their sockets, the pupils bluish like the oval sack of a putrefying octopus; the youngest has a monstrously swollen ear-lobe, multi-coloured, resembling a fig. They wander about the streets and the country together, each with a plaited cord knapsack on his back.

  L’Ossesso arrives, possessed by some uncertain influence, a thin and serpentine man with turned up eyelids like those of mariners who sail stormy seas. His complexion is olive, he has a squashed nose, and a singularly malicious and deceitful aspect reveals his gypsy origin. The Catalan from Gissi arrives, a female of indeterminate age, with long rosy locks and on her forehead stains that look like copper coins, in her movements strengthless and exhausted as a bitch after parturition. She is the Venus of the beggars, the fountain of love to whom go any who seek to slacken their thirst. And Jacobbe from Campli comes, the great ancient, all of whose hair has turned verdant like that of certain workers in copper. Comes the industrious Gargalà in his vehicle joined from the timbers of wrecked boats and still streaked with tar. Comes Costantino from Corrópoli, the cynic, who from the great tumour on his lower lip seems to keep ever between his teeth a piece of raw meat. Others come too. All the helotry, whose migrations from the highlands to the sea have followed the course of the river, gather around the rhapsodist, under the communal sun.

  Mungià sings then with a variety of untried modes, attempting unusual heights. A kind of pride, an aura of glory invades him, because at such times he practices his art liberally, without recompense. A clamour of applause lifts periodically from the beggars, but he barely listens to it. At the end of the singing, as the mild sun in abandoning the area ascends the Corinthian columns of the Arch, the mendicants salute the blind man and disperse into the neighbourhood. Only Chiachiù from Silvi, with his broken foot in his hands, and the Mammalucchi brothers habitually stay on. Those beg in loud voices for alms from any who pass through the old portal, while Mungià sits silent, perhaps recalling the triumphs of his youth, when Lucicappelle, Golpo di Càsoli, and Quattòrece still lived.

  Ah, that blessed crew of Mungià!

  The litt
le orchestra had won an illustrious name in almost all the lower reaches of the Pescara.

  Golpo di Càsoli played the viola. He was a tiny man, grey as a roof lizard, his face and neck creased like parchment, like the skin of a boiled tortoise. He wore a sort of Phrygian cap, its sides resting on his ears, used his bow with quick gestures while pressing his sharp chin on the base of the instrument, his curved fingers hammering the strings. When his whole body swayed in extravagant union with his music, it brought to mind the contortions of those monkeys that itinerant quacks carry about.

  Next was Quattòrece with his bass viol slung across his stomach by a strap of ass hide. Tall and thin as a wax candle, he collected in his person all the predominantly orange hues of nature, looking like one of those monochromatic figures depicted in rigid attitudes on certain rustic vases from Castelli. His eyes shone like those of shepherd dogs, with a transparent glint somewhere between chestnut and gold; his great ears, protruding bat-like, glowed rosy-yellow whenever their cartilages were seen against the light; his clothes were made of cloth the colour of pale tobacco, the kind of tint preferred by hunters. His old viol, ornamented with feathers, silver thread, tassels, small images, medals and beads, had the aspect of some hand-made barbaric device that could be expected to produce indescribable sounds.

  But then came Lucicappelle, across his chest his immense guitar, double-strung and tuned to diapente intervals, came with a sinuous step transmitting exuberant self-confidence, like a musical Figaro. He was the jocund figure of the crew, the freshest and greenest in years, the most mobile, most ingenious. Beneath a scarlet brimless cap a great lock of curly hair fell over his forehead; he affected shining silver earrings like a woman; and the lines of his face met and combined frequently in a natural smile. He loved wine, musical toasts, serenades in honour of pulchritude, dances in the open air, all possible large and clamorous revelries.