For those two, the books had crept into the house on the sly, as if the books were seeking them out, rather than the other way around. Perhaps it was love, or perhaps it was a game, if indeed it is possible to tell the two apart. One day Peppino came back with something he could scarcely keep a grip on, his hands trembled so. He was a boy who looked as if he was going to be tall, with a long, slightly irregular face lit up by youthful hope, and by nature he sought out his younger brother, whom he thought of as more lively than himself, even though he was scarcely out of the cradle. On his way back from school he had stopped in front of the tobacconist and newsagent’s kiosk (opened by a Sicilian who had turned up from God knows where) at the point at which the Corso widens out, right on the border of San Pietro. His name was Tortorici, and the children drove him to distraction by calling him Tortorella (turtledove). He conducted the town band, or to put it more exactly he conducted the rehearsals, because with those blockheaded Nuorese, who insisted on seeing sharps and flats where there were none, he had not yet been able to give a public concert. Tortorici saw the world from the little window of his kiosk, and so it was that he noticed a small boy gazing at a little book which had arrived at some unknown date and which he had displayed outside that very morning, along with a handful of schoolbooks. Not even he knew what it might be. It was the Lives, by a certain Plutarch, in the Sonzogno Series of cheap classics, which along with the Universal Library and the Popular Library, left its stamp on past generations. “Plutarch” in itself meant nothing; it was a name like any other. It meant nothing to Tortorici, it meant nothing to Peppino, except that it was a different way of meaning nothing. To Tortorici it was unsold stock, while for Peppino it was a mystery. He gazed and gazed at that book with the light-blue cover, without daring to touch it. “Translation from the Greek by Girolamo Pompei,” he read. Viewed on the same level, Plutarch and Pompei, along with Sonzogno, and along with Milan where the book had been printed, revealed a world so vast and different that it might well have been infinite. From his little window Tortorici saw no one but the few yokels who bought half a Tuscan cigar or the occasional gentleman who bought a newspaper; and he was not happy with his lot. For this reason he was sometimes given to sudden impulses, which in a sense were protests against life; and that morning he had an incredible one, for when he saw the boy entranced by that old book, he thrust out his bearded face and shouted in his Sardinianized Sicilian: “If you like it, take it!” And this in spite of the fact that he didn’t much care for boys, because they made fun of him. But it could be that he had recognized the son of Don Sebastiano, toward whom he had some obligations (and who didn’t?). Peppino had grabbed the book as in a trance and run for it, fled down the Corso, climbed the three stories all a-tremble, and now the heads of the two boys, leaning one against the other, were bent over the pages covered with print too dense for them to read. The house was filled with a deep silence.
The Sonzogno Classics had blue covers and cost one lira each; the Universal Library had yellowish covers with a picture of an angel blowing a trumpet, and in a hundred pages at the price of thirty centesimi offered a staggering list of ancient and modern writers already denizens of the Hall of Fame; the Popular Library had black-and-white covers, and its small volumes of not more than fifty pages each contained everything there is to know. They were ten centesimi worth of history, mathematics, philosophy, literature, and everything that might come under the heading—so elastic and so fascinating—of knowledge. Even today there are collections such as these, which are well produced, wide-ranging, and less expensive in view of their size, though I myself would not venture to say in what respects they differ from the Sonzogno Classics, which have vanished into thin air. (However, in an antiquarian bookseller’s catalogue yesterday I found a Sonzogno Polybius, an Appian, and a Diogenes at appalling prices: they must all be there in Don Sebastiano’s old house.) There is nothing I detest so much as the past; but I must say that today’s editions smack of commerce and supermarkets. Perhaps it is the usual trouble: everyone can read these days. Or perhaps... perhaps so that a book may become a book, and be transformed into a dream, perhaps one needs the carpenter, the “master of wood,” such as there was then in Nuoro and in all the villages; and in Nuoro he was called Zerominu (Gerolamo), though this may have been a nickname, and at two o’clock in the afternoon on summer days he would lay down his saw and his plane and start playing the cornet; and the sound flowed into the scalding alleyways, crept into the houses, and the whole of life hung on those notes. Even the dogs, stretched out like corpses in what little shade the houses gave, would twitch their tails. In the stuffy room Peppino and Sebastiano would read to the accompaniment of that voice, and they read for the same reason that Zerominu played the cornet, that is, for no reason at all; for people had a little chink through which the mystery entered. Also a mystery were the pink pages they had discovered at the end of the volume, which contained the complete list of the Sonzogno Classics and revealed the wondrous abundance that was life. Was there here perhaps a pinch of that feeling that brought tears to Don Sebastiano’s eyes? I think not. In any case, Don Sebastiano was a little worried by these books piling up in the tiny room, which seemed to him to be too many; and he was even more concerned about the youthful industry they had created around the books themselves. For they had learned to make covers for the books with newspaper (taking a sheet, making two oblique cuts to fit the spine, folding in the little flap thus formed, making two further cuts at the corners of the cover, and then folding in the edges on either side); and—an even more marvelous thing—they had learned to bind them. They had built a small sewing bench (where on earth had they seen such a thing?) and for the most part they bound together the booklets of the Popular Library, which were too thin to stand upright on the shelf, in batches of six or seven according to subject. Don Sebastiano thought of all this as a game, and he did not care for games. No such thing as a toy had ever entered his house, except for one or two for the girls who had died; and these had died with them. Luckily he almost never went up to the floor above, and he was becoming less and less aware of what was going on around him.
An absent father in the house is a terrible presence. But on the day of judgment I don’t think I could blame Don Sebastiano, or at least I would not blame him altogether. All those things written about fathers and sons, all those dramas, are just literature as far as I am concerned, and all that famous theorizing is stone-cold fatherhood and nothing more. Don Sebastiano had seven sons, and seven sons are to a father more than to a king are all his people. And his dream of them all achieving university degrees, which incredibly enough seemed possible, because his sons were intelligent, began to come true with the terrible diaspora of the eldest ones. As I think I have said, to go on with their studies they had to face the adventure of the distant city, of Sassari or even Cagliari. For Don Sebastiano this meant sending a hundred lire a month to each son, and for the notary of Nuoro this was a big strain on his resources. It seemed to him that his wealth was now measured by a new yardstick. That a fifteen-year-old boy should he catapulted out of the house and out of the town into a distant city, a real city, where he had neither friends nor contacts, except perhaps for some important notary whom it would not do to disturb; and that arriving there after a day’s journey he should have to busy himself finding lodging with some old spinster, and live on a shoestring; that in the course of this impact with the world he might suffer: these were not things that worried Don Sebastiano or even entered his head. Really, this was nothing more than a stage in the great game of his life, a game he was playing without even being aware of it. The grief was all suffered by Donna Vincenza, who saw her sons leaving her bosom, who got up before dawn to prepare provisions for the journey (the things each of them liked, or she thought they liked), and who knew that this was not a beginning but an ending. At Christmas and Easter (the long journey and the expense did not make it possible to come home during the year) she would be sending them those good sweetmeats of
sugar and almonds, the culurjones of marzipan enveloped in a disc of bread and fried, which she herself made with the help of Peppedda and a few female dependents of the household, who lent a hand in a spirit of devoted and sorrowing friendship. But she felt that when they came home for the long holidays they would no longer be her children.
Donna Vincenza looked with love on the books that her boys collected with love, and that she would never read. Sebastiano, who still used to bounce onto her lap, sometimes wanted to read her a page or two, but first she asked him if they were “true things.” This ingenuous question had a profundity of its own, because it was the unconscious rejection of the imagination. In this there was a point of contact with Don Sebastiano, because he also lived on the truth and only the truth, and indeed his whole job was simply to record the truth. But in fact, imagination crept into that austere house by way of the books, and silently it went to work, touching both people and things with its magic wand.
5
But if the “little door,” as they called the double door that gave almost onto the Corso, was never opened except in answer to the sound of one of the brass knockers (and whoever was knocking could only be one of Don Sebastiano’s clients), the “great door” behind the house was always open to the vast breath of the countryside, because it gave onto the corte, and through it came the fruits of all that the notary had sown with such skill; and their variety announced the variation of the seasons. And so the house had two faces, one sad and the other joyful, and the inhabitants seemed to have two faces also, even Don Sebastiano, who was prouder of those triumphant arrivals than of his pen, even though it was his pen that earned them for him.
Everything was brought to the house and everything was prepared there, and for this reason around the courtyard there was a series of outbuildings, each named after the particular gift of the soil stored in it: the oil house, the granary, the fruit store; and in addition there was the bake-house, which was like an altar, or an Etruscan tomb, with sieves, riddles, and baskets (sas canisteddas) both large and small, woven from palm leaves and hanging on the walls. Women came in from the neighborhood to bake the bread, because it was a big job. They had to knead the dough and roll it out into large round sheets, hand these one by one to the woman sitting at the mouth of the oven, with the corners of her kerchief tied on top of her head, and her face glowing red in the shadows. She laid the sheet of dough on a smooth, flat shovel of the kind made by shepherds in Tonara when they were marooned by snow in winter, which they came down to Nuoro to sell in the springtime, riding their skinny nags. She then thrust the shovel into the oven, and if it was properly made the dough would swell into an enormous balloon, which was then passed to another woman seated cross-legged at a low bench. She sliced it around the edges with a knife, making a pair of steaming hot discs that gradually hardened, became crisp, and went to build those tall stacks that were later stored away in the sideboard. God only knows from the depths of how many centuries this bread has come down to us. Maybe the Jews brought it when they were driven out of Africa in the ancient of days. The making of it had all the solemnity of a ritual, partly because the work went on until morning, and the small hours brought a hush with them. The boys would slip in through the narrow doorway, become flushed from the heat, intoxicated by the smell of the bread and glowing mastic wood, entranced by the flickering of the flames over the smoky walls; but they were also a little intimidated by those industrious women who were, after all, servants. The women were glad to see the master’s children, and hey presto! in a matter of seconds they prepared a round, ring-shaped loaf, which they quickly immersed in water, where it hissed like red-hot iron, and then came out as polished and shiny as a mirror; and in fact they called it “glazed.” It was a joyful moment for them and for the boys, who felt that they had all been brought together by that ineffable thing called life, which has no masters.
But I really must restrain these waves of memories rolling in one upon the other in absurd disorder, as if the whole of existence had taken place in a single instant. The most eagerly awaited arrival at the great door was that of the grapes, during the crystal-clear October days. The approach of the carts, lined for the occasion with canvas mats, was mysteriously felt in the house from the very moment they entered the town. Led by swarms of small children, the carts climbed the almost-country road through the “gardens” (those rows of acacias planted by the mayor from the Continent), then struck thunder out of the cobblestones, interrupted only for the width of the Corso, which they had to cross. It was the triumphal moment in their long journey, because the pharmacist, the shopkeepers, and the gentlemen at the caffè all followed with their eyes the slow pace of the oxen, and made a count of the number of carts, and in their heads translated the grapes into liters of wine. That is, they totted up Don Sebastiano’s profits. But more than this, what may have been unconsciously at work in those sedentary gentlemen undermined by arteriosclerosis was the message that came to them from the countryside, which was no less distant and unknown for being close by and around them on all sides. The peasant, standing upright on the tailboard of the cart and wholly taken up with his work, goaded the oxen on up the last incline, and that was the moment when the great gates opened wide, in austere expectancy.
On account of the antediluvian construction of the place it was not easy to get in, partly because just inside the threshold the courtyard was nothing but a steep, narrow slope down toward the main house, where it widened out barely enough for them to turn the cart and start work. The peasant went ahead of the oxen, deafening them with his yells and curses. “You’re blind! Can’t you see where to put your feet?” And maybe the great eyes of oxen truly are blind. Manservants and maidservants alike followed this difficult maneuver with bated breath; then, when at last the turn had been accomplished and the oxen were unyoked and sank in exhaustion, with the cords of the harness still hanging from their backs, everyone besieged the cart and began to unload, as in a well-disciplined ship.
This was the urban sequel to the grape harvest then going on in the vineyard in the valley or on the hilltop. The question of whether to tread the grapes in the country or bring them into town for treading had been talked over at length between Don Sebastiano and Ziu Poddanzu, his trusty alter ego, and the decision was made in favor of the town by a wretched ox that slipped on a rock and spilled a river of grape-must all over the road. From that year on, the right wing of the house had been converted into a wine cellar, with long oaken beams laid down to support the vats and barrels; and the mysterious life of wine began to be a part of the life of the family.
Don Sebastiano, like every other man of his time, knew nothing of the State, because he himself was the State. Whatever he did, he did at his own risk, and he did not expect anyone else to pay the bill in whole or in part. So it was with his own money, and not that of the benefits now assured one by the State, that he bought a mechanical grape presser which, to the great astonishment of everyone, put an end to the age-old practice of treading with the feet; just as later, on the threshing floor, he replaced the oxen and the winnowing fan with a brand-new machine. (He did not know that in this way he was working toward his own destruction, in the same way that he was destroying himself by not wanting to recognize his title of nobility, even though it had been earned, as we have said, by the toil of his distant ancestors. And maybe this responsibility for his own actions—upon which, incidentally, all eyes were fixed—was what gave him such a severe expression, and why his world was so withdrawn and isolated.) On top of one of the vats they placed the rollers, which were rotated one against the other by turning a handle, making a din that reached even the most distant rooms. And of course the ones who turned the handle, until they got tired, were the boys.
The making of wine (vinification, as Don Sebastiano called it, using a fancy word that he had learned from catalogues of agricultural machinery) turned the house into something like an enormous cradle. Wine is not like wheat, that heaped up in its barn is like a golden du
ne, and needs only to be defended from the devilish weevil; nor is it like oil, that, emerging from the night-working millstones and the presses, sleeps quietly in great oil jars old as time. Crushed by the rollers, the bunches pile up at the bottom of the vat, with their stalks and their innocent juice, rise slowly toward the rim, and there they lie, pouring out their perfume, which is still the perfume of flowers or of fruit. But in that many-colored mass there is a hidden god, for not many hours will pass before a liquid purple fringe will appear all around the edge, and then the mass will heave up as if taking a giant breath, and will lose its innocence, and a low gurgling sound will betray the fire that is devouring it. An earthy odor, like the one the soil breathes forth after the first rains, will rise from its very bowels, and during those days this will be the odor of the house, of the courtyard, of all the neighboring streets; and maybe it will reach the sky. Everything happens at night, because both life and death are daughters of night, and the boys will be asleep. But Don Sebastiano will not sleep, and neither will Ziu Poddanzu, who will have taken up residence in the house; for they know that in this mysterious birth every hour is vital. And it will be Ziu Poddanzu who at a certain point (and only he knows it) will catch Don Sebastiano’s eye, and this means that the moment has come.
The Day of Judgment Page 7