But the infinite poverty of Sèuna had one advantage over the potentates of San Pietro. When someone died, he had inevitably to pass along the flagstoned Corso, from end to end, because the cemetery, Sa ’e Manca, was on the other side of town, beyond San Pietro, near the Chiesa della Solitudine. And when the dead man passed by, the gentlemen in the Caffè Tettamanzi rose to their feet and bared their heads.
*1 A tanca is a piece of enclosed land of any size, from a small field to a vast pasture. The nineteenth century saw progressive enclosure of land on the island, leading to brigandage, rebellion, and events such as are referred to in Chapter 13.
*2 The people of Barbagia, the wild central area of Sardinia, of which Nuoro is the provincial capital.
3
I am writing these pages that no one will read, because I hope to be lucid enough to destroy them before I die, in the little loggia of the house that I have built for myself in the course of the long years of a hardworking life. It is dawn in mid-August, an hour of day when summer, though still at its height, gives way to the passion of autumn. In a few hours’ time all will be otherwise; but in the meanwhile, I am living out this foretaste of a season that more properly befits me. The house is large, and beautiful, and comfortable: I tried to recapture the lines of the old Sardinian houses, which I have been carrying in my heart for fifty years; but naturally the architect understood not a thing. It doesn’t matter. The house would not have been mine in any case, because “our” house is not the one we build for ourselves, but the house that is passed down to us by our forefathers, the one we appear to get for nothing, but in fact acquire by means of the labor, honest or otherwise, as the case may be, of generation after generation.
In front of the loggia is a short stretch of garden, which I have filled with oleanders. They are still in flower, and in the moist air they seem to be listening to the song of the birds, which God has made such early risers. One of them darts among the branches, the leaves quiver, but only for an instant. I have always thought that there is a secret relationship between plants and animals and the wind. A bird does not alight in vain among the foliage, not for nothing does the wind sway the great leafy crests of the trees, that only we think of as immobile, classifying them under the horrible, unjust heading of “vegetable.” Their motion is certainly not like ours, but it is like the motion of the sea, which it is senseless to call immobile, just as it is senseless—with apologies to Homer—to call it infertile. And then, trees have a rising motion, in a joyous conquest of the sky that to us animals (or, as the laws on livestock rustling put it, self-propelled beings) is denied.
Enough of this. Even in the corte of Don Sebastiano’s house there was an oleander. Rather than being a single corte, it was a series of courtyards, obtained from a succession of little houses bought and demolished, at the end of which a narrow passage led on one side to the stable and on the other widened out into a space that was called the garden, and would indeed have been a garden if Don Sebastiano had cared for flowers. This man had created several little farms, down in Isporòsile with its robust soil traversed by a mountain stream that was always in a bad temper, and on the hill at Locoi, with its fine dry soil, beneath the nuraghe*1 that in the course of centuries had come to resemble a vast bowl containing an oak tree. And these farms he had created practically with his own hands, for he knew how to prune and graft vines and olives. But he understood nothing about flowers. Admittedly, when he mounted his horse before dawn so as not to keep his clients waiting, leaving his household asleep, and set off for his fields, and saw the meadows smiling with dew, or rode beside hedgerows snowy with blackthorn, or saw the shiny lentisc berries and the elegant asphodels among the hardy cistus and the melancholy Saint John’s wort, he would feel a slight pang, a nostalgia, a vague remembrance. He was also sensitive to smells, and sometimes he would break off a sprig of wild thyme, and put it in the pocket of his fustian jacket. But odors have more in common with fruits than colors have; they are more concrete, easier to grasp. Once, however, on the descent into the valley of Marreri and its rugged solitudes, he was left, as it were, enthralled by the sight of those rivers of oleander that groove the sides of the whole valley, and cascade toward the bed of the main stream, which is itself an even broader river of oleanders, till all flow down together, soft and voluptuous, toward the sea. First light was in the sky, but it was also there in those vermilion flowers emerging from the night. Dismounting, he tore off a branch; and he planted it at the far end of the corte, beside the well; and the branch put down roots and grew prodigiously, maybe because it had struck water, and in a short while it stretched like a canopy over the well. It was a marvel, with its mass of vivid red above the dead things that accumulated in that lost corner, above the few vegetables cultivated in the kitchen garden (since greenstuff never flourishes in towns), and the children loved to climb onto its whitish boughs, which were as sturdy as tree trunks. The trouble was that the oleander is a poisonous plant, or at least so they thought in Nuoro, and so thought Donna Vincenza, who as the years went by began to hate that single tree which her husband had planted in his corte, evidently to spite her. Every day, while her husband was busy sorting out the troubles and wrangles of his vociferous clients, she would take a pot of lye and pour it over the plant, in the vain hope of burning its roots and killing it. It was a senseless thing to do, purely symbolic; but what could this fifty-year-old woman do that was not a symbol? Before very long her legs would be completely crippled by arthritis, and she would be unable even to reach the vegetable garden; she would be confined to a chair in the first corte, with her hands clasped over her breast as if in prayer. But she did not pray.
Donna Vincenza was not entirely Sardinian. Like Don Sebastiano she had been born in the Kingdom of Sardinia, but the idea of that kingdom being Sardinian was simply a joke, while in Turin there was no Sardinian to be seen. On the other hand, a few Piedmontese came to Sardinia, either to trade or to command, and among them, from the very frontiers of France (two steps in that direction and destiny would have been completely different), there came a certain Monsù Vugliè, of whom absolutely nothing is known. Rumor has it, as a sort of echo, that he was an architect, but who knows what architect meant in those days, seeing that we are not sure even now. The old people still remember a tall man, evidently the commonplace notion of a Continental, who rather impressed them—and this is a commonplace too. It was also remembered that he had been carried off in his prime by a stroke. That is all that was known of a life which must have been an intense one, since in a few years he acquired two houses and an orchard that was practically a garden, just outside Nuoro. Until yesterday it was still called after him. Now they have built a local government office on the site. During those years he met a girl who wore costume, but was of good family, and who became Signora Nicolosa, the mother of Donna Vincenza. The latter’s golden hair revealed some trace of her father, which she then passed on to her eldest son, but nothing more, at least in a physical sense; and in fact though she could understand Italian she couldn’t speak it, like so many people in the smaller villages even today. Ten years her senior, the young Don Sebastiano fell for this lass, who in her girlish costume was like a flower. How could Signora Nicolosa, alone with so many children and so little luck, have said no to a qualified notary, full of promise and a nobleman to boot? So it was that Monsù Vugliè’s daughter laid aside the costume and became Donna Vincenza, as glad to be married as was consonant with modesty. Don Sebastiano was a just man, and married on the principle of equal shares between partners. In this way, every acquisition he made would be the property of both of them.
It is hard to say how great a part love played in this marriage. In fact we know nothing of the sort of love that leads to marriage, or even if love has anything to do with marriage. I am inclined to believe that the marriages arranged by parents for children who saw each other for the first time at the altar were perfectly within the bounds of logic, even if naturally we cannot accept this today, just as we
cannot accept so many other things. It is not that love is a frivolous thing, far from it: for love is marriage, and on this is based its indissolubility. However this may be, Don Sebastiano called his wife Vincenza, but Donna Vincenza called her husband by his surname. “Tell Sanna that,” or “I’ll tell Sanna that,” she would reply to those who came to her about something involving the family. In this way the family was founded, practically on paper, because there was no property on either side, or precious little, and what is a family without property? In the Civil Code, which Don Sebastiano kept on his table, the family was considered as distinct from property, but in real life the family that has nothing is an abstraction, a mere pompous way of talking, rather like an individual without property, whom professional jurists refer to as a “subject of law.” There was once someone (this comes back to me from the days when I myself studied law) who said that each and every man possesses a patrimony. Good stuff! He had never clapped eyes on Fileddu, the village idiot of Nuoro, who followed the gentry around like a dog, and like a dog lost his head if they left him on his own, until his starving mother came and dragged him home to her hovel, protecting him exactly as a bitch protects her pups. We will come across him again in the course of this story. And anyway, aren’t the really grand families called “houses”? It is true that the essence of the Gospels lies in having made every man a “subject of law,” but in the other world, not in this one. Don Sebastiano owned no property, but he knew he had it in the pen which scratched across the stamped official paper, and that the family would come into being by means of that stripling girl with whom he had gone to live in the shadow of Santa Maria.
Donna Vincenza was too young to carry off the aristocratic title so suddenly bestowed on her. Her neighbors called her by it at once, because it was hers by right, but also because they were proud of her and happy at her good luck. And she was too young to have the thoughts that we mentioned above, thoughts which Don Sebastiano nourished without knowing it. Signora Nicolosa had brought her up in the only way a woman can, if she has lost her husband too soon, and if she feels, or once felt, that she must do her duty by him. But even without this, young girls in those days were made for the future, and therefore not only did they have to have no “past,” which is only too obvious, but no present either. There were no problems. Problems, of whatever kind, arise when the simple, humble certainties of life begin to fail, the certainties one carries from birth; and no one needs a priest to help him recognize them. Donna Vincenza vaguely realized that she was destined to take a husband, but her imagination did not go beyond that. Hers was the state of mind of a madonna who knows that the angel is bound to come, who understands his words at once, and who welcomes them with serenity, as in the myth, or the fact, as may be. Many, many years later she said that when she was expecting her first baby she thought they were going to cut open her belly to get it out; but she said it with rancor, she said it against Don Sebastiano, to get back at him for the havoc he had made of her life. These, however, are sorrows still to come. At that time Donna Vincenza was happy, because she had been blessed with a simple soul, and everything had a value for her. She had finished the first years of school, had learned to read and write as well as was necessary (and in fact one needs so little), and her life revolved around the people and the things she saw; all the more so because that Piedmontese who had died early, whom she herself had never known, had bequeathed to the family a stamp of modest refinement which attracted the neighboring women and made them obsequious.
The women seldom left the house, so every time they did it was a fabulous adventure. Donna Vincenza’s adventure was her outing to the Vugliè garden at Istiritta. There would be no point in mentioning it, except that she still thought back to that garden, seated in her chair in the first corte at the back of the house, all but motionless by this time. There was a great big red gate that creaked on its hinges, and was hard to open because of the clumps of mallow and wild cardoons invading the threshold (though mallow has an edible little lump in the middle and cardoons, under the spikes, have a soft green layer that tastes a bit like artichoke). And then, at the top of a short path, one could see the crest of a palm tree, which was a rare thing, because Nuoro is high up, almost in the mountains. The peasant’s house smelled of bread and cheese, that is, of his daily fare, and it was a wholesome country smell, like the smell of the spade, the mattock, the saddlebag hanging on the wall, and even of the cat asleep in front of the dead fire. They were all living things, belonging to a life that was new every time for her. She would chat with the peasant who had known her from birth and therefore addressed her familiarly as tu, while in the presence of Signora Nicolosa he took off his cap. And the garden itself, the garden with its lettuce and celery and tomatoes and cucumbers... A kitchen garden is a peasant’s masterpiece of orchestration, for he creates it day by day, following his instinct, opening up the long channels flowing with water, which he skillfully controls. There is a long ditch down one side of the garden, running with water from the well, which he deviates into smaller cross-channels with a shovelful of earth, one for each channel. It is an ancient method, perhaps man’s first attempt at making an aqueduct. But the peasant does not know that it is ancient, because time for him has neither past nor future: this is simply the way it has always been done. Slightly less ancient, perhaps, was the ingenious contraption Monsù Vugliè had installed above the well, with a lot of square tin cans that went down empty and came up full, leaking because the rust had corroded them. The machinery turned at the ambling pace of a blindfolded horse which needed no encouragement from voice or goad. They had only to harness it up and it started off.
Donna Vincenza ran, she practically flew, in this world just beyond which there was nothing; or if there was something it didn’t matter. She was happy, and this was only right. When it comes down to it, what does a woman need, if we want to be honest at a time like this, when it is so hard to be honest? Nothing but love, and the ability to love. All the rest will be added unto it, as it said in that little book she sometimes used to open at Mass. The trouble is that loving is a difficult thing, and it is easier to be a great woman scientist or writer, such as indeed there have been. Because love is not willpower, or study, or what we call genius—it is intelligence, the only true measure of a woman, and of a man too. Donna Vincenza was highly intelligent, even though she scarcely knew how to read and write, and for this reason she overflowed with love, without knowing it. She loved the humble furniture in her house, the embroidery on the pillowcases, which she used to work on with her mother all day long (because Signora Nicolosa did this work on commission, as the meager income from the property left her by Monsù Vugliè was far from sufficient). She loved the cortita of the house, with figs and tomatoes laid out on boards to dry amid the eager buzzing of bees and wasps. And above all, she loved the garden, where she still went to pick flowers and fruit, even though her swollen legs bore her up less and less well. And she had loved Don Sebastiano, the man who had come to ask for her hand and was destined to take her to live in another house.
Perhaps their quarrels had really begun with the sale of this garden. It is all but impossible to know why two married people quarrel, and why the source of life changes so soon into a source of hatred... Come to think of it, maybe just because it is the source of life... but let that pass. The fact is that at a certain time, when some of the children were already quite big, Don Sebastiano forced Donna Vincenza to sell that garden, along with the few other things she had inherited from Monsù Vugliè. Donna Vincenza, a grown woman by this time, resisted tooth and nail. She yelled, she wept, and went so far as to insult her husband, to throw all the pride and arrogance of the Sannas in his face. But Don Sebastiano didn’t even listen to her, as indeed he never did, and the garden passed into other hands for a song. Why did he do it? God alone knows, but my explanation is this: from the scratching of his pen, Don Sebastiano was beginning to earn himself houses and fields; in the terms of his time and place, he was becoming a r
ich man. His wife’s few possessions now began to upset him. It seemed to him that he might begin to suspect that his wealth came at least in part from there and not from his own hard work, and that above all he would be the first to suspect this. It was an insane thing to do, if we bear in mind that Don Sebastiano had deliberately married, as we said, on the principle of property-sharing. That is, all acquisitions made during the marriage by one partner or the other would be held in common (though one partner, his wife, was a silent partner, to say the least). What interested Don Sebastiano was not property or the enjoyment of it, but the actual acquisition of it, the building of a fortune. For this reason he did not allow Donna Vincenza to stick her nose into the administration of things, except for selling off the superfluous goods that accumulated in the house. Indeed, and worse still, she only had to express an opinion or offer some advice for it to be turned down, and the more reasonable it was, the more this was bound to happen. And maybe, since sons are also part of one’s fortune, this was why he made her bear him a son almost every year, without thinking that each child shortened her life, and little by little reduced her to a mere encumbrance.
But it could be that I am wrong about this, because Donna Vincenza was the mother of her children even before they were conceived. Equally, the reason might be the deeper and more general one: that in Sardinia women do not exist. I will explain myself. In Sardinia there is no jealousy, there are no crimes of “honor,” as they are called: there is simply nothing. Unlike in the rest of southern Italy, and in many other countries as well, a woman does not follow her husband on foot while he straddles the ass on the way down to their little farm. She rides on the cart with him, and when they are on the steep road back, and the oxen are lowing with the strain, the wife stays on the cart, and it is the husband who gets down and toils even harder than the oxen. In the house she is in charge of the household goods, she gives orders to the maids and even the manservants, she keeps the keys and sells off produce for petty cash (for every house is like a shop, equipped with all the weights and measures, the scales and the bushel measures for wheat). But she never appears when there are guests, not even if they are amicos de posada. The reason is, as I said, that women do not exist. For the Sardinian—and I speak of the Sardinian of those days of course, before he became the mere tenant of his island, as he is now—a woman, a wife, was the object of a tacit cult, exposed to the ups and downs of life, a slave to life’s demands, and therefore also to the needs of her husband and family; but all this in a rarefied way, quite separate from the realm of the male, the government of the miniature “state” of the family. Into this government she could not and should not enter, any more than a queen can enter into the government of the king. It is conceivable that in this set-up there lurked an inferiority complex on the part of the husband, but the fact is, this is simply the way things were. Once again, in a word, what the master does is right. If one therefore wants to think of the wife as a slave, then the queen is a slave as well. Anyway, the difference between queen and slave is no more than a hairsbreadth.
The Day of Judgment Page 5