San Pietro is an urban extension of the sheepfold, and the smell of sheep and goats is in the air. The evening is all a clatter of hoofs on the cobblestones, for the masters, muffled up in costume, come home with saddlebags full (their employees return only once every two weeks to change their clothes and lay in a stock of bread). In the shadows two hands reach out and take the saddlebags, and the door swings shut behind the master.
The houses are large, because masters and servants all live together, eat at the same table, and warm themselves at the same fire; and this makes the servants more servants and the masters more masters. Once the door has closed behind the master, it is unlikely to open again. The sound of knocking in the night bodes no good: anyone who wants the door opened has no need to knock. If in his remote hut the shepherd has a thousand eyes fixed on the unsuspecting wayfarer, in town there are a thousand eyes fixed on him, whether he be servant or master, for all are subject to the same destiny. And then, there is Justice, which it is better not to get involved with, Anyway, what is Justice? Justice is authority, the power someone wields over someone else, and authority does not discuss matters: if it condemns you, you are condemned, and that’s that. But for this reason it is also justice to escape from authority if possible, exactly as it is also justice to bump off a possible witness, if necessary. (If he has already given his testimony, then he himself has become Justice). In short, whenever someone knocks by night, the door that opens is the door to the back yard and the open country. The shepherd knows he is always innocent in his own eyes, but not in those of the authorities.
San Pietro is the base—and no other base is possible—for the Corrales dynasty. There are four or five branches, descending from the founder of the family, Bainzu, whom they called Deus (God) on account of his majestic bearing in the saddle. They used to ride into their houses, just as they would into the sheepfold. The houses are high, with three or even four floors, even though life was still essentially nomadic, and took place entirely on the ground floor. As it did in Don Sebastiano’s house, though the company was different. The Corrales, like the other shepherds, had walked and walked behind their sheep, and still walked behind their sheep, and like the rest they had gazed on that boundless landscape with the eyes of pirates gazing at the sea. And their gaze had turned into action, the mysterious act of theft that is at the root of all property. Theft, what we call theft on the artificial assumption that there is such a thing as “yours” and “mine,” the kind of petty attitude we take toward a ring or a wallet, in Sardinia, or rather in Nuoro, or better still in San Pietro, consists of stealing a flock of a thousand sheep and making it disappear into thin air. The impoverished owner goes on foot around the entire island, sends out his minions left, right, and center, follows all the tracks he sees in the soil and at the fords: nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing. That flock does not exist, but above all, it has never existed. Obviously the Corrales do not have a magic wand, and a thousand sheep (which in the final assessment become a hundred or two hundred thousand, not to mention the cows and oxen) cannot be stolen unless they are stolen by Sardinia as a whole. But this is the magic of the Corrales: they have made thieves of all Sardinians, or at least all the Barbaricini.*2 Other Sardinians don’t count anyway. The newspapers in Sassari and Cagliari, and even those from the Continent, cried scandal, the ruin of the island; or rather of the island’s economy, which was based on sheep-raising. The authorities intervened with savage laws against rustling, making an inventory of the livestock and describing it in a “bulletin” which every shepherd had to carry with him. But what did they gain by this? A wretch who had stolen a pair of oxen from a peasant was thrown into prison for five years. I say wretch because one does not steal a peasant’s oxen. No laws are needed to prevent this. On one occasion they stole the oxen from Ziu Cancarru, father of five children. Bainzu Corrales at once started a collection, and the whole of San Pietro bought the poor peasant from Sèuna another pair, even finer than the first.
In the course of time (and meanwhile the houses of the Corrales were growing floor by floor, and along with them many of the lesser houses, and the whole of San Pietro) the sheep began to leave tracks. The unfortunate owners from Ozieri, from Pattada, even from Campidano, followed a million meanderings from one end of the island to the other, staying overnight with their amico de posada (for, as there were no hotels, in each village one had a house that offered hospitality, with reciprocal rights), and after going here, there, and everywhere, the tracks led to the houses of the Corrales. Those peaceful sheep farmers from the Logudoro would enter, in their black, funereal costume, their stocking caps pleated on top of their heads, their trousers as tight as bandages, and the long staff polished by time grasped in their hands like an ineffectual scepter.
“Bonas dies, ziu Bainzu [Good day, Uncle Bainzu].”
“Bene bénniu [Welcome]. What’s the news from Ozieri [or Pattada, or Buddosò, or Bonorva]?” replied Ziu Bainzu.
“We’re empty-handed,” the other replied.
“What do you mean, empty-handed! The pastures at Ozieri are among the best in Sardinia. It’s not like here, all stones! And drought, drought all year round. It’s eight months since we had a drop of rain. And then in the winter, snow and ice. Even the sheep bells freeze. When I was a young man I was drafted to Ozieri. I felt like going on hands and knees and cropping the grass myself. And your livestock is all hale and hearty. Your land is worth three times what ours is.” Then, lowering his voice and talking as if to himself, though with a hint of reproof: “I’d even have liked to buy something from you myself, but you don’t want to sell to us Nuorese. You say we bring robbery and plunder... Ah well...” Then, after a pause: “And how is Don Bustiano? He must be getting on in years by now.”
“He died this year. Didn’t you know?”
“What a shame. He was a good man, God bless him. And what about Zaime, Gianuario’s son?”
“It was he who told me to come to you, Ziu Bainzu.”
Ziu Bainzu, of course, knew this perfectly well.
“Ah well, in that case—Mariangela, bring some coffee and biscuits. Zaime is a friend, and I am godfather to his son, who must be grown up by now.”
And Mariangela, Ziu Bainzu’s wife and the mother of all those children, came in with the tray and the coffeepot, which was always ready on the hob. She did not glance at the guest, deaf-mute witness that she was, because she knew how to stick to the basic rule of life, for herself and for others: What the master does is right.
“Zaime himself is one of my amicos de posada, and told me, ‘Put your trust in him, and if he doesn’t take care of things, then no one can.’”
Ziu Bainzu scratched his forehead. “I see. You’ve got yourself in trouble.”
“No, no, not at all! But a terrible thing has happened. They’ve stolen my sheep. They were all I had.”
“Well, not exactly all... But what am I supposed to do about it?”
“Zaime told me to come to you, because you have influence.”
In a word, it was no easy matter, with all the riffraff there was around. And, worse luck, money would have to change hands, because men would have to be sent out to scout, and you don’t get anything for nothing. A livestock merchant had said that he had seen a flock without a shepherd out around Mamojada. How many head? Two or three hundred? Many more? There’d be a lot of work to put in, but Ziu Bainzu would have done a lot more than this for Zaime. Let’s see. In the meantime, put down a thousand or two thousand lire and he would see what he could accomplish for the price.
A couple of days later the flock suddenly sprang out of nowhere, as if the clouds had opened and gently rained it down into the fertile tanca at Ozieri. And the fame of Ziu Bainzu spread the length and breadth of Sardinia.
There is the other side of the coin, and things are easier said than done. Because the carabinieri could not possibly turn a blind eye to Ziu Bainzu Corrales, or to his children or his employees, and a hundred times the great door of the Rotunda, th
e circular prison that met your eye as soon as you emerged from the station, had closed behind him... behind them. But it was like the door of his own house closing, and never did he feel more sure of his innocence than when they put him inside. So much so that after two or three months they were forced to fling him out, because the news of his arrest spread over the countryside like the beating of a tom-tom, and in as little as two days he was supplied with so many alibis that it seemed he must have the power of being everywhere at once. And then, and then... When the shepherd thinks of the land, the flocks, and the property of others as belonging to himself, even the lives of others become his. Killing and stealing are not all that different, except in the Penal Code. Certainly no one kills without a reason, but if the reason is there, it will not be the fragile existence of man that will stay the killer’s hand.
Why did they bump off Banneddu Zucca? No one will ever know. He was a peaceful young man without any enemies, and even a bit townified, though he rode every day to Lardine to help his father with the milking. There must have been some reason. The same applied to so many others. But no one would have dared to suspect Ziu Bainzu’s hand in this—or the hand of any of his children. On those long summer evenings, after eating a bit of bread and cheese, because he was thrifty, he would sit himself down at the foot of an elm that had grown at the far end of the corte, and read. For, though no one knows where, he had learned to read and write.
The dynasty of the Corrales was by no means an isolated phenomenon, as might have been the case with a feudal lord immured in his castle. Ziu Bainzu was the embodiment of San Pietro’s will to live: the very thing that was lacking in the inhabitants of Sèuna. In his unpolished way, he could be said to resemble those lawyers from the villages who had, or thought they had, conquered Nuoro. But there remained the usual unbridgeable gulf, that Ziu Bainzu was Nuorese and the others were not.
The boundaries of San Pietro were a little vague, unlike those of Sèuna, which were marked by the Iron Bridge. I would say they ran more or less along the dotted line that starts at the old carabinieri barracks, turns toward the Piazza di San Giovanni (which is outside San Pietro), reaches the opening to the tiny alley where Maria Pisu lives—always seated in the center of the patio surrounded by the swirls of her scarlet-bordered skirts—and finally dwindles away at Montelongu, which is already in the country, within sight of the Mountain. Briefly—and this is the important point—San Pietro ends where the long, newly paved Corso begins. The Corso is the symbol of the third part of Nuoro, the Nuoro of the law courts, the town hall, the schools, the bishop’s palace; the Nuoro of Don Sebastiano, of Don Gabriele, of Don Pasqualino—in a word of the “gentry,” whether rich or poor.
If the boundaries of San Pietro were not geographically certain, the people of San Pietro knew them to perfection, and no one from up there would ever have dared to cross the threshold of the Corso (formerly Via Majore). One of the Corrales clan might happen to go there, if he had dealings with a lawyer, either on his own account or for one of his servants or friends. But not one of those shepherds who stank of cheese, not one of those youths who behaved like drunken hooligans at night, while waiting to grow up and become robbers, and meanwhile didn’t have two pennies to rub together—not a single one of them would have mixed with the gentry in the Corso, or would have entered one of those shops where the “Cagliaritano” (whose real name no one knew) measured the cloth he sold by so many handsbreadths, or where Marianna Zedda weighed pasta or rice on her lever scale, or the istancu (tobacconist’s) where Don Gaetano sold cigars and official stamped paper, though he was an aristocrat, as one could see from his long beard. Nor would they have sat down at the caffè where “the gentry” exercised their right to do sweet nothing, or shown their faces on the barandilla (veranda), against which the more staid and elderly gentlemen would lean to enjoy the cool air coming from no less than the public gardens, which most people still called sa tanca, the pastures; and indeed it became pastureland immediately beyond the acacia trees which some mayor from the Continent had planted in orderly rows. The gap between the three Nuoros was far greater than between the first, second, and third classes on the little train that linked Nuoro to Macomer and to the world. And even that gap was far greater then than it is today, because Don Sebastiano, for example, who was an aristocrat and by now almost a rich man, would never have traveled either in first class or in third, since second class was his natural place. It was the result of a tribal feeling, of a choice as free as whether or not to be baptized.
The Corso sloped slightly downhill from the Piazza di San Giovanni, where the market was, to the Iron Bridge. Halfway down, just before a wide curve and after the little piazza of the barandilla, there was a flat stretch containing the houses of some consequence, the house of the “Registry” (which Don Sebastiano had bought in order to rent it out), the house of Bertini, who was one of the Continentals who turned stones into gold and ended by being Sardinianized (except for the tall figure typical of Northerners, which they passed on to their bastard children), and the house of Tettamanzi, another Continental, of whom there remains no memory except the name of the caffè on the ground floor. It was an elegant caffè, with little rooms with red sofas around the walls—rather like the caffès in Venice, if I may make so bold as to say so. The owner of the caffè and of the whole building was now Giovanni Maria Musiu, who had perhaps inherited it through his mother, but there was nothing in the least Continental about him. He was short and fat, with dark eyes and a pointed beard, and he had nothing but an accursed will to live; that is, to play cards in the little rooms of his caffè. The whole of Nuoro, of course, gathered in this flat stretch of the Corso. Here the lawyers met their clients; the small landowners in the dazzling costumes of the villages eyed the merchants, on the lookout for good deals for their produce, oil and almonds from Baronia, wine from Oliena, cheese from Mamojada and Fonni. And this was the route followed perforce, in the morning, by all those on their way to that earthly god—the law courts—or to that equivocal god that was the vast, badly proportioned church erected by some rich bishop who on the cornice of the façade had carved the words DEIPARAE VIRGINI A NIVE SACRUM, which not even the priests succeeded in translating. Santa Maria della Neve and the law courts stood opposite each other, and to get there one had to go up a broad, well-paved thoroughfare and through the archway of the seminary, beyond which soared the great rock of one of the peaks of Monte Ortobene, like a petrified giant. On days of the Assizes, or on some major religious festival, there was a colorful procession, each person climbing up with his own secret load of sins.
Santa Maria was perhaps the original nucleus of the “historic center,” as they say nowadays, meaning the part where the gentry lived. The word “gentry” does not mean “rich”; it is merely the opposite of rustic, and the difference—a great one—is embodied in the wearing of ordinary clothes, which have replaced local costume.
How many people lived in this area, what with the paved Corso, the road to the station with its two parallel strips of granite in the cobblestones, and the jumble of streets just off these, not very different from the streets of San Pietro but with very different inhabitants? I think that if we made a count it would not be more than about 1,500 to 2,000. That is not many in the abstract ocean of life; but it is a lot in the material space in which people take on a face and a name. Then they are not a thousand, but one plus one plus one, and so on, and every one of them has to live, to live on his own and at the same time live with his neighbor. This was at bottom the great problem in Nuoro. There were priests, there were lawyers, doctors, professional men and merchants; there were poor laborers, the cobbler and the builder (the “master of shoes” and the “master of the wall”); there were the idle, the penniless, the wealthy, the wise men and the madmen; and there were those who felt a commitment to life and those who did not feel it. But the problem they all had in common was that of living, of enabling their being to come to terms with the extraordinary and lugubrious fresco of a t
own that has no reason to exist. Of a town as of the world at large, perhaps. Therefore there was no hatred, and there was no love either. There was the struggle with others, which became a struggle with themselves. Love and hate balanced each other out, and converged in the need to preserve others in order to preserve themselves.
No one could escape this destiny (not even Don Sebastiano, although he was an honest spider spinning his web, and knew other people solely by the signatures which they put to legal documents). Divided from Nuoro by insurmountable barriers, maybe San Pietro had another life. With its patriarchal crimes San Pietro was building a bridge toward the future, while Sèuna was nothing but a cart and a yoke of oxen, and did not know it existed, or care about it.
The Day of Judgment Page 4