But there was another component to Don Sebastiano and his vacuous discourses, and this was democracy, also unconscious of course, but indisputable. By this time Don Sebastiano could consider himself a rich man, or at least on the way to wealth, but he felt that his gains were legitimate because they were the fruit of his labors, accumulated according to the orderings of Providence, and if of necessity he had left behind crowds of poor people, in Nuoro and in the world at large, this had no effect on his intrinsic humanity. The poor could be and should be the rich of tomorrow. It is doubtful whether he dispensed charity, but he provided work for numerous people in his little improvement schemes, and the workmen would ask him as a favor to be godfather to their children, which he granted very willingly, thus becoming their relative and (as the custom was) addressing them as voi rather than using the more formal lei. Hence his emotion over the King, or the minister he had read about in the paper; but there was also something more serious. It was a kind of nostalgia for poverty, a concept of poverty as a spiritual experience or exercise, a glorification of manual labor as opposed to work with the pen or the mind, which could not satisfy his profound humanity because it was profit-making. His dream, as his sons grew up and went ahead with their studies, doing extremely well, would have been for them to devote themselves to some trade out of school hours. He did not say so openly, but every evening (and that evening was no exception) he would tell them how the sons of American millionaires earned a living selling newspapers. This he had learned from the paper, and his voice would take on a lecturing tone, and one of obscure reproof. It was then that Donna Vincenza emerged from her silence, lost all restraint, and became her true self. For she it was who worked in the kitchen, with the help of one poor woman who came in for the price of her food. She it was who saw her sons wasting away over books, while one in particular, Ludovico, worried her a great deal because he was growing up thin and delicate, with constant stomach trouble, and she could never stop him from studying.
“But those people,” she cried, “have every comfort. They’re not like us.”
His dream in ruins, Don Sebastiano rose to his feet, took up his lamp, and turning toward that shapeless mass forgotten in a corner, said solemnly: “You’re only in this world because there’s room for you.”
And off he went without even saying good night.
So that evening ended, one of many evenings of family life, in the family that Don Sebastiano and Donna Vincenza, over so many hard years of quarreling, had nonetheless created. The boys went up to their freezing bedrooms on the top floor, Ludovico helping his mother out of her chair and supporting her on her way up the stairs, which were becoming difficult for her. Sebastiano, named after his father, was responsible for securing the window giving onto the street. In thinking only of the façade, that beast of a Don Gabriele Mannu had set the window so high that they had to have two wooden steps made in order to look out. Sebastiano climbed up as best he could, and paused a moment before pulling the shutters to. Nuoro lay spread out in the deep night, racked by a bitter wind. Far off, a cart trundled over the cobblestones. Not a voice was heard. Two carabinieri on patrol, stiff and bored, came up the main street. It was almost frightening.
*1 Contraptions for attaching the yoke to the shaft of a Sardinian cart.
2
Nuoro was nothing but a perch for the crows, yet like all Gaul, and even more so, it was divided into three parts. The history of Nuoro did not go back further than two or three hundred years; that is, if we can give the name of history to the scraps of information collected in the archives of the bishop’s palace by Canon Fele, who had a reputation for learning. Anyway, Canon Fele was not from Nuoro but from Dorgali, and this you could tell without even hearing him speak; you had only to see his long, thin face, his shrewd, washed-out eyes, his long chin beneath two bright-red, feverish-looking lips. Whenever he saw him passing by, Canon Floris would describe him, almost out loud, as a reptile. Though it now seems impossible, the real capital in those days was not Nuoro but Galtellì, a village in Baronia beside the river Cedrino, not very far from the sea. Some trace of this is left in the name of the diocese, which is not “Nuoro” but “Galtellì and Nuoro,” Galtellì coming first. In fact, it seems that it was a certain Bishop Roich (evidently Spanish or half-Spanish) who had the bishop’s seat transferred thirty kilometers farther inland, to the site where Nuoro was destined to arise.
In wintertime Baronia was a garden. And if from time to time the river went mad and overflowed its banks, flooding the fields and isolating the absurd little villages which—heaven knows how or why—had come into being on the vast plain, when it withdrew and composed itself into a gentle stream, remaining here and there in blue pools that looked like patches of sky, it left among the stones, by way of compensation, a fine damp soil that in an instant became wheat or barley, or above all the broad beans or the melons with the bluish flesh that had made the name of Baronia famous throughout Sardinia. What fragrance there was among the cane brakes, and in the underbrush populated by hares and partridges, when the sun returned to revive the dead, abandoned stumps of the low-growing vines. The trouble was that paradise in Baronia lasted three months. After that the sun became spiteful, began to repent for the joy he had brought to men, and went mad in his turn. It took him a week to create a desert. And what is worse (for the heat can be borne), from the marshy patches among the oleander shrubs, bogs into which the Cedrino had dwindled away, there emerged whole armies of death-dealing mosquitoes. The peasants collapsed with scythe in hand, the doors and windows closed as if in the face of an invader, the women were reduced to skeletons, the children of the poor wandered the roads, with shriveled skins and bellies like nine-months-pregnant women. The curse had fallen on Baronia. So Monsignor Roich, who was a practical man like all outsiders, had scarcely arrived before he decided to take his miter and carry it up into the fresh air.
I believe that this story (or another like it—it doesn’t matter) is the truth. Galtellì today is nothing, a mere wrinkle, a scab on the ferocious limestone of Monte Columbu. But anyone who manages to fight his way through the swarms of flies, and the clouds of dust, finds himself before a church and a church tower that have remained even though the bishop has departed; and they are in the pure Romanesque style. He will find wretched, filthy hovels, but beside them, still standing, certain crumbling, deserted houses of some substance, now with two crossed planks where the windows once were, but with carved doorways, or at least a lintel of volcanic stone, on which with a bit of effort he can decipher an ancient date. And through a rusty iron grating he can see or imagine what in better days was a patio. Not to mention the fact that in some of these old houses, or their outbuildings, he may catch a glimpse of the faint shadows of women who are or were of the Sanna or Bellisai families, and may be the true descendants of that stock, even though now impoverished and resigned. One of these women, indeed, recently had a modest reflowering, because a petty local landowner, dressed in costume, had the temerity to knock at her door, and she had the wisdom not to say no.
Nuoro, for all the pretentiousness of its big public buildings, cannot hold a candle to the church, the grand houses, or the ruins of Galtellì. So what they say must be really true. And yet a mystery remains. Two or three centuries ago Nuoro did not exist even as a group of huts. None of the old maps of Sardinia, which include the now modest names of Ollolai, Orani, or even Orzullè, records the name of Nuoro. This means that Monsignor Roich laid the first stone, just as they did at Brasília or Canberra, and peopled the new capital with his priests and his parishioners from Galtellì. If I look today at the people of Galtellì (and they are the vestiges of the people of those times); if I see those lean, wiry men with their red jackets fastened at the shoulder and buttoning down the side, and their light, almost dancing way of walking; if I listen to their soft, almost aspirated way of speaking—God forgive me if I give offense—they seem like marionettes, and if I were a musician, far from writing this book I would produce a b
allet. On top of this they are good-natured and mild, and in their brief youth their women have breasts that burst forth to such an extent that they bridle them in with a pair of slender cords. The people of Nuoro are like the garrison of a sinister castle: close and taciturn, men and women alike, dressed in a severe costume that yields as little as possible to the allurement of color, with an eye always on the lookout for offense and defense, immoderate in eating and drinking, intelligent and treacherous. How can those carefree marionettes have produced these dramatis personae of a tragedy? My own explanation of the mystery is to think that it happened as it still does today, when social structures violate the laws of nature, creating provinces, regions, and other administrative devilries; that at the advent of the bishop’s seat the forests of the surrounding Barbagia poured forth those uncouth men who, according to the poet, feed on meat and honey, and that they installed themselves around the prelate and his capital, with their huts and their physical strength. The fact is that in the immediate environment of Nuoro there is more than one domus de jana (fairy house), while near Balubirde (which the Italians have translated as Valverde, which has nothing to do with it) there is a hillside perforated with these little fairy houses, which by a splendid analogy are called Sas Birghines (the virgins). In the forests on those heights there might therefore have been a prehistoric settlement that had fled the terrible coastal areas before Monsignor Roich, and which the curia settled next door to in peaceful cohabitation. And from this marriage Nuoro emerged. In short, all hypotheses are possible; either that Nuoro was born yesterday or that it is more ancient than Rome, with Monsignor Roich acting only as the modest and predestined best man to history. But maybe the most correct hypothesis is that Nuoro is the bureaucratic outcome of a series of overlords who carved up Sardinia; and in fact and in truth, even until the descent of the barbarians of our own day, there were three Nuoros, the “three parts” which we mentioned above.
Nuoro is situated at the point where Monte Ortobene (more simply known as the Mountain) forms something approaching an isthmus, which becomes a plateau. On one side is the fearsome valley of Marreri, the haunt of footpads, and on the other the gentle valley of Isporòsile (if anything can be gentle in Sardinia). This extends down to the plain, and under the imposing guardianship of the mountains of Oliena stretches as far as Galtellì and the sea. Protected by the hill of Sant’ Onofrio—goodness knows who he might have been, since he left no trace of himself, even as a Christian name—Nuoro begins at the little Chiesa della Solitudine on the isthmus, slopes gently downward as far as the Iron Bridge, and appears to stop there. But in fact it starts again immediately after a short rise and finally dies in earnest a little before the Quadrivio, an intersection from which the dreaded roads branch out toward the interior.
In this last stretch rises the first section of Nuoro. It is called Sèuna, and it “rises” purely in a manner of speaking, being a huddle of low houses arranged without any order; or rather with that marvelous order that emerges from disorder. All are on one floor, with one or (the richest) two rooms, with a roof of rust-colored tiles sloping toward the cortita, a courtyard with a floor of earth just as God made it, surrounded by a dry-stone wall such as they build to enclose tanche,*1 and an opening toward the road barred by a tree trunk. In front of this strange doorway is that masterpiece of abstract art, the Sardinian cart.
The Sardinian cart becomes a cart when the oxen are yoked to it, oxen that are now asleep, drooping on their weary legs along the roadsides or, if there is room for them, in the cortita. Then indeed it is more than a cart, it is a weapon of war on the incredible little lanes out in the country, which the water has been eroding for centuries, laying bare granite boulders like great steps. The Sardinian cart climbs creaking up onto those humps, sways like a ship in a storm, balances for a moment, then crashes down on the other side, only to face more stones, more massive boulders. It is specially made for this, and indeed in the course of centuries, of millennia, it has left the roadway grooved by the iron hoops of its wheels. These grooves are like the scars of its toil, the toil of the oxen that haul it, straining on their short legs; and also the toil of the drovers who goad them on, so that they seem to be pushing and pulling as well, calling the beasts to task by name (boe porporì, boe montadì!) in voices that resound at evening the length and breadth of the valley. The town councillors are justified in saying “Why mend the roads?” But when the oxen are unyoked, and the cart is left there for the night in front of the sleeping dwellings, it no longer looks anything like a cart. It leans at an angle on its long shaft, raises heavenward two useless arms polished by the friction of the ropes; it breaks up into absurd vertical and horizontal lines, and lets the moonlight in through the cracks in the tailpiece. It might be an invocation and a prayer, it might be a curse or an enchantment, or it might be nothing. In fact it is nothing, absolutely nothing. On summer nights the peasant stretches out on the sun-scorched planks, with his stocking cap folded under his head, and sleeps.
Had Sèuna been the objective, Don Gabriele Mannu need not have gone to Rome to get his degree in engineering. The builder in Sèuna (the “master of walls,” they call him) obtains his sense of perspective and proportion from poverty, to the extent that when someone comes home after making a fortune, and has a plushy house built for him, the result is a false note; like a woman who has given up the long skirts of the local costume and displays her shapeless legs. The Seunese are peasants to a man. They make a town within the town, and it is said that they are the original nucleus of the settlement. Nuoro, in a word, was born out of Sèuna; and I am inclined to believe it, because in Sèuna we find the oldest church in Nuoro, Le Grazie, which is scarcely more than one of those same little houses, but with a gabled front and a bell in a kind of dovecote. The priest who officiates there is himself a peasant, and lives off the four or five turnips which he grows in the kitchen garden, and (believe it or not) off a little charity, since he does not have cure of souls.
In any case, it is certain that no shepherd would ever think of living in Sèuna, where he would feel degraded and out of his element. The shepherds all gather at the opposite end of Nuoro—the other town within a town, which is called San Pietro, although the place has no church of this name. San Pietro, Santu Predu, is the black heart of Nuoro. Sèuna is a painter’s palette transformed into a picture. With its windows picked out in white and the calm clear skies above it, it could well be a seaside village. All it needs is the sea. San Pietro has no color. The houses here are tall, giving onto narrow streets, not alleyways, and to see the sky you have to look up. Here Don Gabriele Mannu might well have left his mark, and made those huge cement entrance halls, the kitchen immediately to the right as you go in, the useless dining room, the stone staircase, the rooms that stand empty even when there is company, with the chairs lined up against the walls. In the cortite, and here they are genuine courtyards, instead of the cart there is the horse waiting to be mounted and the saddle resting on a peg under the archway: the very horse that announces dire homecomings in the dead of night. The fact is that the shepherds are a race apart from the peasants. The shepherd belongs to the dynamic side of life, the peasant to the static. The difference between the shepherd and the peasant is that the first runs a household on the move while the other’s is fixed. If, for the one, the land where he plows and harvests grapes is the end, for the other it is only the means. If the peasant, when he has dug and pruned the vines and olives, sits down at the foot of a tree and eats his bread sprinkled with olive oil, he rests; when the shepherd sits down in the fierce heat of noon he is not resting, because his whole life is without repose. He watches the sheep resting in the noonday shade, but he knows that at a certain moment they will move off at their slow dawdle, that no one will be able to stop them, that they will lead and he must follow, aided only by the dogs, which he has trained for war. And then, even when seated, he cannot but see those immense pastures that stretch from Monte Spada to Corte, to Lardine, to Sa Serra, where there a
re other flocks, other shepherds like him, and his thoughts run on and run on, and the devil knows where they end up. Virgil, a servant of the sovereign, could with indifference write both the Bucolics and the Georgics, without distinguishing herdsmen and farmers. But what a shepherd has is quite different from what a peasant has. The latter, in any case, is confined to certain valleys and certain plains, divided into so many parcels of land, each one different from the next. A man has to ask permission even to cross them. The other is everywhere, and is of course divided up and registered, but law is law and fact is fact, and no law can prevent the shepherd from thinking of everything as his property as far as the eye can see. And not just the land but the flocks as well, which are only yours as long as you are able to defend them. God is on the peasant’s side, not on the shepherd’s.
The Day of Judgment Page 3