Don Sebastiano was no exception to the rule. At the times of the most obstinate disagreements, there was no danger that he would help himself first at table. For according to tradition the main dish was given to him for carving and distribution, and the first mouthful was Donna Vincenza’s. He would have left the table if she (as she was sometimes tempted to) had refused it, though this did not prevent him from shrugging his shoulders or, when she opened her mouth, silencing her with those terrible words that we have already heard: “You’re only in this world because there’s room for you.” The fact is that Don Sebastiano, for all his culture and perspicacity, had not understood one thing, probably because he was incapable of understanding it. This was that Donna Vincenza was half Piedmontese, and though as we have seen she was Sardinianized to the point of not knowing any other language, that blood, or the admixture of that blood, worked on her willpower and prevented her from not existing. And—what was worse for Don Sebastiano—it was at work in her intelligence, which was superior to that of the ancient, worn-out race of the Sannas and the Sardinians in general. She therefore saw things more clearly, kept her feet on the ground, felt that destiny was in her hands as well, and gave such shrewd and reasonable advice that Don Sebastiano flew into a rage as soon as he heard it, and always did the clean contrary of what she said. The only advantage Don Sebastiano had over Donna Vincenza was power. Shared property or no shared property: these are mere legal figments. Power was the money Don Sebastiano earned in his profession (and with his ability, and the trust he inspired, this was becoming more and more considerable). Without that money Donna Vincenza’s intelligence counted for nothing. Even the petty cash was passed to him by ancient custom, so that she had to go to him to beg for small change to cover the most trifling household needs. Not that he begrudged her anything. Had she asked, he would have given her even a thousand lire, almost without bothering to find out why. But beg she must, because the government was in his hands.
It was a small thing, let’s admit it. What does it cost one to ask a husband for a few pennies for the housekeeping, which amounted to a little meat, and not even every day at that, since everything else came in from the country or in gifts from clients? But those few pennies were the terrible price she was made to pay, just to admit her own nonexistence, and she would never have stooped to this. He could claim anything but this. Indeed she gave him everything, for not only did she run the house shrewdly and thriftily, but she took loving care of him when he happened to fall ill, and made him broth or milk puddings while he was convalescing. In the early years she had begged him to give her some housekeeping money, but he had answered with a shrug, and said there was no need, that everything was hers in any case. As time went by this clash of wills took on far more serious aspects, as we shall see, for they are a large part of our story. In the meantime Donna Vincenza got by as best she could. At night, when her husband was asleep (for being an early riser he went early to bed), with steps that were light enough, though already slow, she entered his room, leading her youngest son by the hand. There she rummaged in his waistcoat pockets, where in those days men used to keep their silver coins—their small change, in fact.
She was not stealing: it was her money, with which life began again each morning. Then she vanished into the silent house. Don Sebastiano did not notice, or pretended not to notice, because she was always careful to leave something. Anyway, with so much to do, Don Sebastiano would not have counted the copper soldi, or even the silver lire.
*1 Circular, towerlike structures built of massive stones, a familiar feature of the Sardinian landscape. Reckoned to be two to three thousand years old, they are in all respects a complete mystery.
4
After an interval of some days (for writing is not my trade, and then I have so many small things to do, now that I have been admis à la retraite, as the French so kindly put it), I have reread what I jotted down without thinking too deeply, and realized how difficult, if not downright impossible, it is to write a history. In what I have written there is not an untrue word, and it has been really painful to reread it. Yet the true story of Don Sebastiano and Donna Vincenza is not, or not wholly, to be sought in these gloomy pictures. The fact is that between Don Sebastiano and Donna Vincenza, as with every person, obscure or celebrated, there was life itself, and life is never reduced to a portrait or a photograph. Not even movies reproduce life, because even though they move they are nothing but one photograph after another. Now, the lives of Don Sebastiano and Donna Vincenza were not simply their own. They were also the big house in which they lived together, they were the children who inhabited it and the people who went there for a thousand reasons; they were the whole of Nuoro, to which the two of them belonged and which belonged to them, as in some mysterious communion. Perhaps only music in all its abstractness could represent this communion of angels or devils, as the case may be, and perhaps the only true history is the day of judgment, which is not called “universal” for nothing.
The truth is that the family had attained its fulfillment with the birth and growth of seven children, all of them boys. There had been two girls as well: the first (and their firstborn) was so long ago that she was a vague memory, but the other had died recently, and that memory would never, ever fade from Donna Vincenza’s mind. She had a vague feeling that among all those males she would come to miss that girl’s support. Her daughter would have adored her, would have talked to her, and would not even have married, or at least not until she herself was dead. Instead, the child had gone off just like that, at three years old, without a word, and Donna Vincenza was left with the modest frocks of a little girl of good family, the straw hat with a bow, the little white shoes. She had arranged all those senseless, useless things in the bottom drawer of the cupboard in her room, and she kept them there like little relics. Don Sebastiano had discovered them, and had said nothing. However, he had complained about it to other people, as an eccentricity, something he absolutely failed to understand.
It is a solemn, almost religious moment, when according to the laws of nature the formative cycle of a family comes to an end; or, to put it bluntly, when the wife ceases to bear children. I am speaking, you understand, of the ideal family, of which Don Sebastiano and Donna Vincenza’s was a model. That in practice things go differently, and a thousand terrible things occur, as we read in the papers or in novels or see at the cinema, does not concern me. Let everyone do as he sees fit. At the birth of that son who could only be the last, to such an extent that they gave him his father’s name and called him Sebastiano, Donna Vincenza and Don Sebastiano took to separate beds. He stayed in the room next door to his office (as we have said, Don Gabriele made the rooms leading one into the other), while she emigrated to the third floor, with two extra flights of stairs to negotiate, and took the room directly above Don Sebastiano’s, the only difference being that the one next door, giving onto the staircase, was not an office but a bedroom for two of her sons.
They slept in pairs, according to the elective affinities that form in large communities (and a family of seven sons is already a large community). Sleeping next door to Donna Vincenza at the time I am thinking of were the two youngest, Sebastiano and Peppino, who had four years between them (the girl who died had been born in the middle). Another four slept on the same floor, in the rooms opposite; Pasquale and Ludovico in the first room and Michele and Gaetano in the room off it. The other boy, the eldest, slept alone on the floor below, in the room opposite Don Sebastiano’s. He was called Giovanni, like his Piedmontese grandfather (or so they say), and he slept alone partly because the numbers were uneven. Very well, but between him and the youngest there was sixteen years’ difference; he was almost a grown man and had some grown-up characteristics that seemed very strange to the others. For example, he was finicky about how his shirts were ironed, and about the untidiness of the house, and he went so far as to criticize his father’s country shabbiness. There may have been something behind this that the others did not under
stand, and that produced in them a mixture of awe and anger. Anyway, that distribution of rooms, that crib-like image we have given of the house, was purely formal.
In fact, in the house which was beginning to belong to the children, even if Don Sebastiano continued to hold the reins just as he held the reins of his horse, everything belonged to everyone and no one. Each one of them, with the possible exception of Giovanni, might try at times to lock himself away, but two seconds later the door was off its hinges. War and peace traded places every minute in that way of living. But these are things that happen in every family. What is important, however, is that the house, slowly and unnoticed, began to wear a new face, the one it was destined to keep for a long time, and the one that would be remembered. It was still the ungainly house built by Don Gabriele, but in the imagination and the actions of the children it was changing. Don Sebastiano had a single ambition: to keep his sons studying. Seven sons, seven university degrees. And for each of them he built a future, as he had built one for himself, in that town of Nuoro, where there was room for everyone. His sons measured up miraculously to his dream, because they were intelligent and worked hard. Don Sebastiano, bent over his pen, kept watch over his dream without intervening, because there was no need to. They all got up early on freezing winter mornings, had a wash outside in the first courtyard, sometimes having to break the ice in the tub, and then ran to school. Donna Vincenza got up even earlier than they did, and heated the milk with the help of the maid, who had been there for countless years, forever in fact, and who took care of the house as if it were her own. And in effect it was, for she was already well on in years and where would she have gone had she not been there? But apart from this, both maidservants and manservants had a feeling of possession toward the houses and places in which they lived, and in any case, people’s lives were infinitely closer to one another than they are today. What did Donna Vincenza possess more than Peppedda (this was the maid’s name), except for the bunch of keys hanging at her side? Keys that she didn’t know what to do with anyway. And as for Don Sebastiano’s country servants (Ziu Poddanzu, for example), what did he have that they didn’t? Ziu Poddanzu had no idea of what it might be. He lived permanently out at Locoi, and was more of a father to the boys than Don Sebastiano himself, so much so that the youngest ones thought that he was the owner. There was the money, of course, the produce that went to Don Sebastiano while the others only gathered it for him. But what is the meaning of money when everyone suffers the selfsame heat in summer (because it does not even occur to one to take a holiday) and in winter the same cold; when no one travels or buys expensive things, or even eats meat every day? There was the “caste,” that’s it: that mysterious membership of a caste that one can see in the face and hands, and that one cannot purchase with money, or even with the passing of generations. The country people, who had become the masters of Nuoro because of their vitality, had also become gentry, but they had not infiltrated the caste. The servants saw and felt this dimly, accepting it as a thing that was both right and good. And maybe it was.
The boys had brought books into the house. Let us not speak of Donna Vincenza; but even Don Sebastiano, who was an educated man, had never read a book. His book was the newspaper, and occasionally the Medicina delle passioni, which was fashionable at the time and had come into his possession by some unknown means. He would read a few of its yellowed pages from time to time, because it was full of snippets of information that amazed and moved him, which he then poured forth at table to the boys, who would wink at one another. (One example is the story of a big dog, who when attacked by a little whelp had simply lifted its leg and pissed on it.) It was one of those well-meaning books written by learned persons to educate a society they firmly believed to be unshakable, books inspired by a sincere spirit of enlightenment, by an almost religious urge to help people to live, as one who knows is honor-bound to help those who do not know. The priests looked askance at them, because they had not been approved by the Church; and they may have been right, for when it comes down to it they were the unconscious heralds of all that bogus knowledge that now swamps the booksellers’ windows (which in those days didn’t even exist) and arouses the instincts, rather than educating them. But the irony of it is that the books of today do get approved by the sacristy, and as likely as not are written by the priests themselves. Perhaps the trouble today is that everyone can read and write. In any case, Don Sebastiano had never read a real book, for the simple reason that he had never felt the need. Books for him were schoolbooks, to be studied, not read, and he himself had studied them in his time, and with what profit was plain to see.
Whether for his sons or from his sons, Don Sebastiano asked nothing but this: that they should study and more or less repeat his own life, building their own for themselves as he had built his. The trouble was that, like everyone else, he did not know what his life was, or which of the myriad seeds within him, which of course he was unaware of, would begin to germinate in each of his sons. There was, for example, that tenderness and sympathy that he, who was so coarse and almost violent in his active life, felt toward people and things, toward life in general, to the point (as we have seen) of bringing tears to his eyes. Was this not the real Don Sebastiano, or at any rate, might this component not prevail in his offspring? We shall see. In the meantime, his sons were bringing home this novelty, which was books. And each one brought them in his own way.
It was, in fact, the two youngest, Sebastiano and Peppino, who had founded that enormous library of about a hundred books that occupied two shelves of a bookcase set into the wall of a tiny room of about three square meters—the result of Don Gabriele’s absurd design and apparently destined for no purpose. The others, already getting quite big, had commitments at school; and some would soon be starting the great exodus toward Sassari, the fabulous city 120 kilometers away (the equivalent of 12,000 kilometers today). For in Nuoro school stopped at fourteen. Of the older boys only Ludovico collected books, but he did it by himself, according to ideas and choices that astonished the two young ones and filled them with awe and respect. Ludovico was already in the senior school, and unlike the others he was delicate in health. This acted as a slight screen between him and life, an unconscious shelter behind which his already complex personality was at work. He was just a young fellow, of course, but he was also, without knowing it, an inveterate invalid, and his illness, partly real and partly imaginary (but intensely worrying to Donna Vincenza), bred in him a scrupulous introspection and gave him a studied judiciousness that created around him an aura of great things to come. He took part in family life, of course, and made himself well loved, for after all, that age has its needs... But at the same time he did not entrust himself to the simplicity of things, which seemed to him, as in fact it is, brutal; but, even though in embryo, he planned his existence, for without a plan it would have had no meaning for him. One might think that he was inclined to take himself very seriously, which was true. But maybe this was merely the result of the seriousness with which he regarded life in general, which he never managed to feel at home with, perhaps because he did not want to, even unconsciously. He was like someone obliged to run a race, who stops to measure the miles before he runs them—and not just the miles but the feet and the inches. When he was still little more than a child, this led him to make judgments, and to give advice, and enabled him to gain ground on his brothers, even the older ones. Don Sebastiano paid no attention to the dangers that might arise from this in the future, and indeed was incapable of imagining them. The important thing was that his delicate son was doing better at school than the others. Naturally enough, because the development of a thesis was right up his alley, since a thesis is a kind of programming, precisely that of a racetrack on which he could measure his steps before taking them.
Now, the books which Ludovico brought home, and kept rigorously separate from those of the others, were not really books so much as the objects of a cult, like everything else. He had a sort of abstract int
uition that human knowledge was potentially infinite, that beyond the narrow streets of San Pietro or the low houses of Sèuna there lay the universe, and that this universe lay open before him. This was an extraordinary thing for a boy, at that time and in that place. However, knowledge could not be acquired by groping around with one’s hands as blind men do, nor did it proceed from modest, familiar things and then extend outward, like the ripples in a pond. One had to grasp it in its entirety, practically all at once, which could obviously not be done except by methodically arranging all the means to that end, which is to say the books in which knowledge is contained. One had to start with books of grammar, in particular Italian grammar, because that was his own language; then collect dictionaries, and there were so many of them, unfortunately very expensive; then the glossaries of names, instigators of ideas, which were much in use at that time; then Latin grammar, and then Greek; then anthologies, that is, the books read by others, because one had to learn from those who already knew; then a few samples of absolutely incomprehensible things, such as philosophy; then... In a word, his was a genuine encyclopedic calling, which would be fulfilled on the day he was able to read all the books he had collected. Meanwhile, the pages remained uncut, waiting for that day. Sebastiano and Peppino opened them secretly, when Ludovico was at school, and they were dazzled by the words they glimpsed there, and proud that all that wisdom would one day enter the mind of one of their brothers, and in fact had already entered it, simply because he had collected those books.
The Day of Judgment Page 6