‘It happened over a month ago,’ added the clerk, closing the register. ‘At Lissa; didn’t you know?’
They took la Longa back home on a cart, and she was ill for several days. From then onwards she was seized with a great devotion for Our Lady of Sorrows, on the altar of the little church, and it seemed to her that that long body stretched out on his mother’s knee, with its black ribs and knees red with blood, was the image of her Luca, and she herself felt all those silver swords of the Madonna planted in her own heart. Every evening, when they went to benediction, and as compare Cirino rattled the keys before shutting up, the old women saw her still there, in the same spot, having fallen to her knees, and they called her Our Lady of Sorrows, too.
‘She’s right,’ they said in the village. ‘Luca would soon have been back, and he would have worked for his thirty soldi a day. It never rains but it pours.
‘Have you seen padron ’Ntoni?’ added Piedipapera; ‘after that tragedy with his grandson he looks just like an owl. Now the house by the medlar tree is letting in water from all sides, like an old boot, and every decent man has to look to his own.’
La Zuppidda was in a permanent sulk, muttering that now the whole family would be dependent on ’Ntoni! Now a girl would think twice before taking him as a husband.
‘What have you got against that poor man?’ asked mastro Turi.
‘You keep quiet, you understand nothing,’ his wife shrieked at him. ‘I don’t like such messes. Go and get working; this isn’t your business,’ and she sent him out of the door with his arms dangling at his side and his great caulker’s mallet in his hand.
Sitting on the parapet of the terraces and stripping the dry leaves off the carnations, with her mouth set, Barbara proferred the comment that ‘married couples and mules like to be alone,’ and that‘there’s little love lost between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law.’
‘When Mena is married,’ answered ’Ntoni, ‘grandfather will give us the upstairs room.’
‘I’m not used to being in an upstairs room, like the doves,’ Barbara snapped back, so that her father, who after all was her father, said to ’Ntoni, looking around him while they walked down the little street: ‘She’ll become just like her mother, Barbara will; you’ll have to be firm with her right from the start, otherwise you’ll end up with the pack saddle on, just like me.’
But comare Venera had pronounced. ‘Before my daughter goes to sleep in the dovecote we’ll need to know who the house is going to, and I want to see how this lupin business will end.’
How it ended was that this time Piedipapera wanted to be paid, by Christ! St. John’s Day had come, and the Malavoglia started to talk again of giving part payments, because they hadn’t got all the money, and they hoped to get together the sum with the olive harvest. He had taken that money out of his own mouth, and he had no bread to eat, as sure as God exists! He couldn’t get by until the olive harvest.
‘I’m sorry, padron ’Ntoni,’ he had said; ‘but what can I do? I have to consider my own interest. Charity begins at home.’
‘The year will soon be over,’ added zio Crocifisso, when he was alone grumbling with compare Tino, ‘and we haven’t seen a ha’porth of interest: those two hundred lire will barely cover expenses. You’ll see, when the olive harvest comes they’ll tell you to wait till Christmas, and then till Easter. This is how families meet their downfall. But I’ve earned my property with the sweat of my brow. Now one of the family is in heaven, the other wants to get his hands on la Zuppidda; they can’t keep that shattered boat afloat, yet they’re trying to marry off the girl. All they think about is marriage; it’s an obsession, like with my niece la Vespa. Now that Mena is getting married, you’ll see how comare Mosca will come back, to grab la Vespa’s smallholding.’
Finally they blamed the lawyer, who persisted in writing endless letters before sending in the bailiff.
‘It must have been padron ’Ntoni who told him to go slow,’ added Piedipapera; ‘you can buy ten rotoli of lawyers with one rotolo of fish.’
This time he had broken in earnest with the Malavoglia, because la Zuppidda had gone to remove comare Grazia’s washing from the side of the wash place and had put her own there; the sort of offensive behaviour which makes your blood boil; la Zuppidda dared to do this because she was backed up by that goon ’Ntoni Malavoglia, who was a noted bully. A pack of swine, those Malavoglia, and she didn’t want even a distant glimpse of those mugs of theirs that that other mug don Giammaria had christened with his damned holy water.
Then the red tape began to fly, and Piedipapera said that the lawyer couldn’t have been sufficiently satisfied with padron ’Ntoni’s present to allow himself to be bought, and that proved what a stingy band they were, and whether you could believe them when they promised to pay. Padron ’Ntoni started rushing to the town clerk again and to Scipioni the lawyer; but the lawyer just laughed in his face, and told him that ‘fools should stay at home,’ that he shouldn’t allow his daughter-in-law to ‘set her mind to it’ and that he had made his bed and now he would have to lie on it. ‘The stumbler may not call for help.’
‘Now you listen to me,’ don Silvestro put it to him. ‘You’re better off giving him the house, otherwise you’ll lose the Provvidenza too in expenses, let alone your peace of mind; and you’ll waste your earning time too, coming and going to that lawyer.’
‘If you hand over the house without a fuss,’ Piedipapera said to him, ‘we’d leave you the Provvidenza, so you’ll always be able to earn your bread, and you’ll be self-employed still, and there won’t be any bailiffs with documents.’
Compare Tino hadn’t an ounce of gall in him, and he spoke to padron ’Ntoni as if it were nothing to do with him, putting his arm around his neck, and saying: ‘Look, my friend, I feel worse about this than you do, throwing you out of your own house, but what can I do? I’m just a poor devil; I took those five hundred lire from my own mouth, and charity begins at home. In all conscience, if I were rich like zio Crocifisso I wouldn’t so much as mention it.’
The poor man didn’t have the courage to tell his daughter-in-law that they should go without a struggle, after they had been there so long, and it was almost as if they were having to leave the village, and go into exile, or were like those who had left and had been supposed to come back, but then hadn’t, and Luca’s bed was still there, and the nail where Bastianazzo used to hang up his jacket. But in the end they had to take all those poor household belongings down from their places and go off with them, and each one left a mark where it had been, and the house seemed a different place, without them. They took their things away at night, to the little house which they had rented from the butcher, as though the whole village didn’t know that the house by the medlar tree belonged to Piedipapera now, and that they had had to leave it; but at least no one saw them with their belongings in their arms.
When the old man pulled out a nail, or took a small table from its usual position in the corner, he gave a little shake of the head. Then they all sat down on the mattresses which were piled up in the middle of the room, to rest a little and they looked around to see if they had forgotten anything; but padron ’Ntoni soon got up and went into the courtyard, into the open air.
But there was straw scattered everywhere there too, and broken pieces of pot, shattered lobster pots and, in one corner, the medlar tree, and the vine over the door, all tendrils. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘Let’s go, children. What difference does it make whether it’s to-day or tomorrow! …’ and still he didn’t move.
Maruzza was looking at the courtyard door through which Luca and Bastianazzo had gone, and the little street down which her son had walked with his trousers tucked in, while it was raining, and then vanished from sight under his oilskin. And Alfio Mosca’s window was closed too, and the vine was hanging from the courtyard wall, tugged at by every idle passer-by. Everyone had something to look at in that house, and as he was leaving the old man put a surreptitious hand on the battered do
or which, as zio Crocifisso had said, needed a couple of nails and a solid bit of wood.
Zio Crocifisso too had gone to have a look, along with Piedipapera, and they were talking out loud in the empty rooms, so that the words could be heard as though they were in church. Compare Tino had been unable to survive by living on thin air until that day, and had had to sell everything back to zio Crocifisso, to get his money back.
‘What can I do, compare Malavoglia?’ he said to him, putting his arms round his neck. ‘You know I’m a poor devil, and five hundred lire means something to me. If you’d been rich I would have sold it to you.’ But padron ’Ntoni couldn’t bear going round the house like that, with Piedipapera’s arm around his neck. Now zio Crocifisso had come with the carpenter and builder, and all kinds of people who were sauntering hither and thither through the rooms as though they were in the square, and saying: ‘You could do with some tiles here, a new beam here, the shutter needs mending here,’ as though they owned the place; and they also said that the house should be whitewashed, and then it would look like another house altogether.
Zio Crocifisso was scuffling through the straw and broken shards, and even picked up a piece of what had been Bastianazzo’s hat, and threw it into the vegetable patch, where it might serve as manure. Meanwhile the medlar tree still rustled gently, and the garlands of daisies, shrivelled by now, were still hanging at the door and windows, as they had been hung on Ascension Day.
La Vespa had come to see too, with her knitting at the neck of her dress, and was poking through everything, now that it all belonged to her uncle. ‘Blood is thicker than water,’ she said loudly, so that even the deaf man might hear. ‘I care about my smallholding.’ Zio Crocifisso let her speak on and didn’t seem to hear, now that compare Alfio’s door was there for all to see, with its great bolt. ‘Now that compare Alfio’s door is bolted, you can set your heart at rest, and I’m not thinking of him, as you can imagine,’ said la Vespa into zio Crocifisso’s ear.
‘My heart is at rest,’ he answered. ‘Don’t you worry.’
From then onwards the Malavoglia didn’t dare show themselves in the streets or in church on Sundays, and they went all the way to Aci Castello for mass, and no one greeted them any more, not even padron Cipolla who went round saying: ‘Padron ’Ntoni shouldn’t have played that trick on me. It’s tantamount to deceiving your neighbour, if they involved his daughter-in-law’s affairs in the lupin debt.’
‘Just what my wife says,’ added mastro Zuppiddo. ‘She says that now even dogs avoid the Malavoglia.’
But that bird brain Brasi stamped his feet and wanted Mena, whom he had been promised, like a child at the toy stand in a fair.
‘Do you think I stole your property, you blockhead’, his father said to him, ‘to be willing to throw in your lot with someone who has nothing?’
They had even taken away Brasi’s new suit, and he gave vent to his feelings by going and digging out lizards on the sciara, or sitting astride the wall at the wash place, and swore not to lift a finger again, not even if they killed him, now that they wouldn’t give him his wife, and they had even taken away his wedding suit; luckily Mena couldn’t see him dressed as he was, because the Malavoglia too were always behind closed doors, poor things, in the little house belonging to the butcher which they had rented, in the strada del Nero, near the Zuppiddos, and if he chanced to see them in the distance, Brasi ran to hide behind the wall, or among the prickly pears.
Cousin Anna, who saw everything from the beach where she would lay out cloth, said to comare Grazia: ‘Now that poor St Agatha will stay at home, like a pot hanging on the wall, exactly like my daughters who have no dowry.’
‘Poor thing,’ replied comare Grazia, ‘and they had even parted her hair.’
But Mena was quite happy, and she had put the little silver sword back into her hair of her own accord, without saying anything. Now she had so much to do in the new house, where everything had to be found a new place, and you could no longer see the medlar tree and the door of cousin Anna’s and Nunziata’s kitchen. Her mother feasted her eyes on her, while she worked beside her, and seemed almost to caress her with the tone of her voice, when she said: ‘Pass me the scissors,’ or ‘hold my skein,’ because she felt for her daughter in her very bowels, now that everyone was turning their backs on them; but the girl sang like a starling, because she was eighteen years old, and at that age if the sky is blue it shines through your eyes, and the birds sing right in your heart. In any case she had never had any feeling for that fellow, she told her mother in a low voice, while they were laying out the threads. Her mother was the only person who had seen into her heart, and who had let a kind word fall amidst all that distress. ‘If only compare Alfio were here, he wouldn’t turn his back on us. But when the new wine is ready, he’ll come back too.’
The neighbourhood women, poor things, hadn’t turned their backs on the Malavoglia either. But cousin Anna was so busy, with all she had to do to keep her head above water with her daughters, who were still on her hands just like unused saucepans, and comare Piedipapera was ashamed to show herself because of that trick that compare Tino had played on the poor Malavoglia. She had a good heart, gnà Grazia, and she didn’t go along with her husband when he said that she should leave them be, because they had neither king nor kingdom, and anyway what were they to her? The only person they saw from time to time was Nunziata, with the little one in her arms, and all the others trailing behind; but even she kept herself to herself.
And that is how the world goes. It is each man for himself: as comare Venera said to padron ’Ntoni’s ’Ntoni, charity begins at home. ‘Your grandfather gives you nothing, what obligation have you towards him? If you marry, you’ll set up on your own, and what you earn will go towards your own home. ‘God blessed a hundred hands, but not all in the same dish’.’
‘That’s a fine way of looking at things,’ answered ’Ntoni. ‘Now that my family is in trouble, you tell me to desert them along with the rest! How will my grandfather keep the Provvidenza going and find food for them all, if I leave him?’
‘Then sort it out among yourselves,’ exclaimed la Zuppidda, turning her back to him to go and poke around in the drawers, or in the kitchen, throwing things into confusion in order to seem to be doing something, so as not to look him in the eye. ‘My daughter’s not stolen property! One could turn a blind eye if you had nothing, because you’re young, and you’ve always got your health, so you can work, and you’re in a good line of business, especially since husbands are scarce now, with that fiendish conscription which whisks all the young men out of the village; but if the dowry you’re given has to be pocketted by your whole family, that’s another matter! I only want one husband for my daughter, not five or six, and I don’t want to make two families dependent on her.’
Barbara, in the other room, pretended not to hear, and carried on firmly with her woolwinding. But as soon as ’Ntoni appeared on the threshold she lowered her eyes to the spools, and her face lengthened too. So that the poor lad went yellow and green and a hundred colours, and didn’t know what to do, because Barbara had him ensnared like a sparrow with those great dark eyes of hers, and she said to him: ‘That means that you don’t love me as much as you love your own family!’ and began to cry into her apron when her mother wasn’t there.
‘Hang it all,’ exclaimed ’Ntoni, ‘I’d rather go back to soldiering!’ And he tore his hair and pummelled his head, but he couldn’t resolve himself to take the right decision, like the real oaf that he was. ‘Well then,’ said la Zuppidda, ‘birds of a feather must flock together.’ And her husband repeated: ‘I told you to steer clear of the whole thing!’ ‘You go and get on with your work,’ she replied, ‘because you know nothing about it.’
Everytime he went to the Zuppiddo’s house, ’Ntoni found long faces, and gnà Venera continued to reproach him for the fact that the Malavoglia had invited Grazia Piedipapera to comb Mena’s hair — ‘and a fine job she made of it!’ — in orde
r to lick compare Tino’s boots, because of those few pennies owing on the house; but he’d taken the house all the same, and had left them stripped to their undergarments like the infant Jesus.
‘Do you think I don’t know what your mother Maruzza said all that time when she had her nose in the air — that Barbara wasn’t right for her son ’Ntoni because she had been brought up as a lady, and didn’t know what was needed to be a good sailor’s wife. They told me at the wash place, comare Mangiacarrubbe and gnà Cicca.’
‘Comare Mangiacarrubbe and gnà Cicca are two old gossips,’ answered ’Ntoni, ‘and they were just irritated that I didn’t marry the Mangiacarrubbe girl.’
‘You can have her as far as I’m concerned. And what a bit of luck for her!’
‘If you say that to me, comare Venera, it is tantamount to telling me not to set foot in your house again.’
’Ntoni wanted to act the man, and didn’t show himself around there for two or three days. But little Lia, who knew nothing of such chatterings, continued to go and play in comare Venera’s courtyard, as they had accustomed her to doing, when Barbara gave her prickly pears and chestnuts, because she loved her brother ’Ntoni, and now they didn’t give her anything any more; and la Zuppidda would say to her: ‘Is it your brother you’ve come looking for? Your mother is afraid they’ll steal him from you!’
And comare la Vespa would go into the Zuppiddos’ courtyard too, with her knitting at her neck, saying inflammatory things about men, who were worse than dogs. And Barbara would say pointedly to the little girl: ‘I know I’m not as good a housekeeper as your sister!’ and comare Venera would conclude: ‘Your mother is a washerwoman, and instead of twittering about other people’s doings at the wash place, she would do better to give a rinse to that few ha’porth worth of a dress you’ve got on.’
I Malavoglia Page 14