But this was Ziu Poddanzu’s frivolous life, just as the pine tree, the clearing, the vines, the chats, were the frivolous, or at least the superficial, life of the vineyard. In that rectangle of land, above that rectangle of land, beneath that rectangle of land scarcely bigger than a handkerchief, mysterious things happened, perhaps the invisible things we read about in the Creed; or at least tokens of them. In the perfectly limpid sky, when everything was calm, a cloud of starlings suddenly appeared out of nowhere, hovered for an instant, then vanished back into nowhere. The mongrel dog, which Ziu Poddanzu talked to as if it were human, once near the hedge found a hare with young, and the dog, instead of behaving like a dog, began to lick the young hares, which wriggled with delight. A grass snake had crossed the clearing and dragged its slow length all the way to Ziu Poddanzu’s feet, and stayed there staring at him, with its shiny little head, darting its tongue out in rapid signals. From the depths of their hiding places the crickets communicated with the stars. And one afternoon in August (to this I can myself bear witness), while all around was silent, with not a leaf moving, and the sun-chariot high above the vineyard, Ziu Poddanzu and the boys were in the stall spreading straw for the two oxen which were grazing in a paddock some way off, when they saw their heads appear through the half-door, like two enormous, sad beggars. Ziu Poddanzu was staggered. Quickly, quickly! He let the animals in, barred the doors and windows, and began to wait. Half an hour later the devil lashed at the landscape, uprooted twenty or thirty trees, and carried sheep and dogs hunting for shelter up into the air. Ziu Poddanzu then reopened the doors, and everything was as before.
This was the hidden life of Locoi, the pagan mystery of nature that accompanies the Christian mystery: the oxen, the asses, the sheep, the kings led by a star gathered around the cradle of a child fated to die. In Don Sebastiano’s house they made no Christmas crib, as no one paid attention to these follies, and in fact they were not great believers, even if Don Sebastiano was never missing on the last day of the year at the Te Deum in the cathedral, and Donna Vincenza, in her blackest moments of solitude, would tell her beads and utter distrait prayers. But without knowing it the boys found the crib in that vineyard, and that rectangle of earth, with its people, its buildings, its myth, opened their hearts to mystery. If Don Sebastiano had been able to imagine such a thing, maybe he would not have planted the vineyard.
*1 Phylloxera is a disease, originating in America, which killed all the vines in Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century. All vines are now grafted onto American stock, because some of these proved immune to the disease.
6
The ring which Donna Vincenza, in spite of her troubles and fits of rage against Don Sebastiano, still wore on her finger bore the date May 5 1883 engraved on the inside. This was the date of the birth of the new family (called the Sanna-Vugliè, according to custom), and Donna Vincenza had brought to this family little or nothing apart from herself: the memory, faded by time, of a father who was an outsider and practically a foreigner, and a Sardinian mother, Signora Nicolosa, clad in the costume of eternal mourning for a husband who had died more than twenty years earlier. (God alone knows, of course, what she brought in terms of the world of the invisible.) After a while, with the growth of his fortune, Don Sebastiano had taken his mother-in-law into the house, and there she had lived long years, conscious of being an outsider, and therefore an impassive witness of her son-in-law’s cruelty toward her daughter during the birth and growth of her grandchildren. In any case, if Don Sebastiano had been the sort of man to allow his wishes to be questioned, she would have taken his side.
Late one May evening, when the house was swathed in silence, Peppedda the maid took the hand of the youngest of the boys, Sebastiano, who was not yet six years old, and led him furtively up the stairs to the top floor. In one of those small inner rooms there was something large laid out on a bed, with four big candles around it. The darkening sky entered through the wide-open window, and magnified the scene. The maid knelt down and told the child to do likewise; he did not know what had happened, because he knew nothing of death. He would think of it many years later, and it could even have been a far-off dream. As usual, there remained no trace of Signora Nicolosa, not even the memory. Or rather, there remained a large portrait of her, painted who knows when or by whom, but this was immediately buried in an old cupboard and no one set eyes on it again.
Don Sebastiano, on the other hand, carried with him the gloomy presence of the family to which he belonged, those Sanna Carboni from which he had sprung, who had their progenitor in Don Ludovico, the first of that name, and the husband of the Carboni woman who also had vanished into nothingness. Don Ludovico was still alive, and was destined to live—or to survive—until the age of ninety-four, when he went quietly to sleep on a bench in the garden of his house at Santa Maria. His youngest grandchildren, Peppino and Sebastiano, in their pristine innocence, used to go to visit him from time to time. His house was on one floor, and on one side it rested directly on a great boulder, which is the cheapest way of laying foundations. I think it dated back to the times of Monsignor Roich, because the front was covered with moss, and in short it was little more than a hovel. But at a corner near the faded red door there was still the ring to which the judge of the Royal Assizes used to tie his horse when he came up from Cagliari—a sign that this was the most important house in town. When he recognized the timid knocking of the boys, Don Ludovico would open the door from his armchair by pulling at a bit of cord, and they would clamber up the sacred stair that led directly into the main room. The floorboards at a slight slope, the doors that swung shut by themselves, time measured by the bells of the church that loomed above, the dominion of shadows in which moved a large white blotch, which was Grandfather’s beard... Tall and bony, with his hat on even in the house, he did not say much to the boys, but he went with firm steps to the chest of drawers, pulled open a drawer full of those reddish, slightly wrinkled berries which I think are the fruit of the jujube tree, and stuffed his grandsons’ pockets with them. Don Ludovico was a landowner on a small scale and had an estate called Sa ’e Masu, between Nuoro and Orgòsolo. There, at the top of the hill, he had planted this wonderful tree, the only one in the district, and everyone remarked on it. The berries are fruits only in a manner of speaking, and in fact are nothing but skin and pips, rather like those of the arbutus, which at least are wild. But the old man and the children communicated by means of those berries, and the tree was a coat of arms like the pine at Locoi. When Don Ludovico died, and Don Sebastiano came into the property, he decided that this was a useless tree; and he had it cut down.
I think I already mentioned that Don Ludovico had fathered quite a number of sons, and it is here that the mystery begins. For these sons were all alive and all getting on in age, and though when he married Don Sebastiano seemed to have said, “Enough of all that,” though they were ignored in his family and not a word was said about them, one could not erase them from the face of the earth, and in fact this silence made their presence more felt than ever. The boys did a lot of whispering among themselves, feeling that there was a shady something in their father’s clear, unblemished life, but they got nowhere, and each of them had to carry it as a secret to the grave. It was useless to ask Donna Vincenza, who knew less than they did about “those Sannas,” as she called them.
The one known fact was this: Don Ludovico’s eldest son, Zio Matteo, when he was twenty years old, when others are scarcely more than children, had left the house one morning, and when he got as far as Montelongu, where the road falls away toward Orosei and the sea, had turned back toward Nuoro, made the sign of the cross in the air, and said, “Goodbye, Nuoro, you’ll never see me again.” From that moment on, he had become a ghost. It was not that he had had a spirit of adventure and had begun roving around the world. They said he had joined the carabinieri, and in the course of time had been sent to Samughèo, an obscure village near (I think) Oristano, and there he had stayed, take
n a wife, and had children. It was certain that he lived there, but the point is that after the day of his departure seventy-five years were destined to pass (for he lived to be ninety-five), and for seventy- five years he kept his word. His father, his mother, his brothers, and his nephews died off, but he never showed his face. Toward the end of his life—so many things had happened, including the two great wars and the Russian Revolution, which had its repercussions even in Sardinia—one of Don Sebastiano’s older sons, Gaetano, who was also getting on in years, happened by chance to be at Samughèo (the miracle of the motorcar) and was curious to meet his phantom uncle. He saw approaching him an old man with an enormous beard, frighteningly like his grandfather, who appeared glad to welcome this first comer among the new generation of Sannas. Zio Priamo, Don Sebastiano’s brother, had recently died, and Gaetano was unwary enough as to mention him with respect. A spark came into the old man’s eyes, already slightly dimmed by cataract. “Gaetà,” he said, “you’ve come here to pull my leg. Priamo is in hell, and there he is waiting to be joined by his wife Franceschina.”
This hatred locked up in a heart for seventy years could find no expression but in silence; that is, in the most terrible way of fuelling it, because it renders it futile. But it hovered around the house, goaded the imagination of the boys, and cast a shadow of mystery over the house of Sanna, and therefore over their father. In all families, if one goes back far enough, one finds someone who is a blot on the escutcheon. But the dead are dead, and death confers a kind of respectability even on the worst scoundrels. The old Sannas were all alive, and they were all solid folk; as far as was known not a soul had anything to say against them. If there was something wrong it was in their own hearts, for in that tiny town they lived in isolation, as far from one another as are the stars. And then, what wrong could have been committed against someone at the age of twenty to make him reject a society, a father, a mother, a home, and in the last resort himself? The mystery thickened. Unless at twenty years old—an age at which the new Sannas were little more than children, dominated by that instinct for poverty for which their father set the example—the old generation were already vigilant enemies, aware that the model for brotherhood is Cain and Abel, and already counting the stones which one day would divide them. Everything is possible, though later on there must have been other things to put even more tangles into that nest of vipers—and over these also hung a funereal pall of silence.
There was, just for a start, the enigma of Zio Goffredo. The boys knew him because they saw him in the street from time to time. Never had he crossed the threshold of their house, either because he didn’t want to or because he had been turned away. He was a tall, strongly built man, and his face had a stupefied expression, quite untypical of the old Sannas. Behind him he had an obscure history of financial difficulties, that had completely estranged the family from him, and all the more so because he had earlier had a period of great prosperity. It seems that he had devoted himself to the accursed products of the Sardinian soil. But nothing was known for sure. Don Sebastiano and Don Priamo (the other brother, Don Domenico, counted for nothing—he was one of those innumerable provincial lawyers who live off procedure) simply ignored him. Don Goffredo in his prime had also fathered a number of children, who were intelligent and hardworking, and side by side with Don Sebastiano’s sons they would have formed another branch of the Sannas—the poor relations, of course, but one never knows what life holds in store... One by one these children died of consumption and their uncles did not even notice. Don Sebastiano’s boys accepted all this naturally, because they were embedded in history and could not but be at one with their history. But in the evening (especially the two youngest, who slept in the same room), they would talk for a long time, in low voices, and the sense of the enigma of life entered into them. Or else, which is the same thing, the incomprehensible sense of evil.
To complicate matters, there was also Don Priamo, whom we have already met as the mayor of Nuoro, in the famous affair of the street lighting which certain witless councillors had wished to limit to moonless nights, and the very one whom Don Matteo had for his part consigned to hell. Zio Priamo was the only one who had kept up relations with Don Sebastiano, if one can call them relations. Of all the brothers, he was the only one who had been faithful to tradition. He was born in the little house in Santa Maria, ennobled by the presence of Don Ludovico, and in the house at Santa Maria he was destined to die. He had seen the other brothers leave home one by one, and had paid no heed. He stayed on with his father, and one being a widower and the other a bachelor, they supported each other, not with love but by combining their two solitudes. He looked after his father’s interests, of course, for they were also his own interests, and nearly every day he rode down to the little farms with strange names, that had come into the family who knows how, who knows from whom. But he was not like Don Sebastiano, who created his cultivated land and made a business of it. He merely looked after “his own” like a proper landowner, and therefore he was infinitely more down-to-earth than Don Sebastiano. On the whole he succeeded in doing nothing without being idle, and this had gained him that reputation for wisdom which had taken him for a while to the town hall. When, many years later, he found he had a hernia, he stopped going into the country; but this did not alter his life—he continued to do nothing, only he did it with more commitment than before.
He was tall and thin and always dressed in black (if indeed it was not the same suit, worn for thirty years), and when his beard became long and flowing he was well on the way to being a repetition of his father. In the dark rooms the two old men (for Don Priamo also was already well on in years) rarely met, and even then only to talk business. The son respectfully addressed his father as lei, but this did not prevent him from imposing his will when need be. Thus, when the insignificant lawyer Don Domenico conceived the notion of marrying a certain woman (a senseless thing, rather than a mésalliance), Don Ludovico was annoyed, and said to Don Priamo, “I’ve got to tell him he mustn’t do it.” “You won’t tell him anything,” replied Don Priamo. “Isn’t he old enough to know his own mind?” And that was that. There was in this an unconscious philosophy, or more simply, a rule of life: Everyone has to make his own mistakes. A very just and terrible rule, which took it for granted that communication was impossible.
Then it was his turn. He had already reached fifty and the idea of marriage had never entered his head. Womankind had no place in the strict commitment of life. The women whom he saw around him were farmers’ wives, or grape harvesters, or olive pickers, and as such he viewed them. In town he had no connections of any kind. On his rare outings, the only house he visited was that of Canon Murtas, an old priest who had come from Olzai (one of the villages that center on Nuoro), and who lived in a little house near the Corso with his decrepit mother and a niece of mature years named Franceschina. Franceschina was unmarried, but not what one would call a spinster. A spinster is a woman rejected by love, and love had had no more dealings with her than it had had with Don Priamo. She had simply stayed as she was, in the same way as so many others had got married: that is, secure in her uncle the priest, the old granny, and herself. Above all in herself, because within her tranquil horizons, and perhaps merely because there was a priest in the house, she felt the eternity of her journey through this life, and of every such journey, and the eternity of the little things one does, preparing lunch or dinner, knitting, or conversing on the sofa in the sitting room, with the Madonna and saints under their glass bells. And those who are eternal do not marry. Almost every day for at least twenty years Don Priamo entered that eternity. He came down at dusk from Santa Maria and went and sat on that sofa, immersing himself in those silent colloquies. He was the only acquaintance she had, and he was always welcome, because he was of good family and, when asked for it, would give good advice. Both he and Canon Murtas took snuff, and they exchanged pinches of it from mother-of-pearl snuff boxes.
Now (and this was told twenty years lat
er by Don Priamo himself to his youngest nephew, one winter evening by the fireside), during one of the countless days spent in the house at Santa Maria, Don Priamo happened to look at his father, who had fallen asleep while eating, and he realized that Don Ludovico was an old man. He was already over eighty. One thing then seemed to him abundantly clear: that his father might die. And if his father died he would be left completely alone, at the mercy of a maid, and he himself so advanced in years. That solitude frightened him. Whereupon he picked up his hat (which had retained the shape it had when it came from the hatter’s, with a small dent on one side) and crossed the threshold of the canon’s house. It was a day exactly like any other. The canon was not yet home, and Franceschina was waiting for him, seated on the sofa. On that occasion Don Priamo did not sit down, but turning toward her he said, “I am here to ask if you wish to come to my house, to be mistress of it.” Then, without giving her time to recover: “I add one thing. Don’t answer at once. And if you say no, don’t think I’ll take it badly. We will remain friends as before.” And he went off home, without so much as a goodbye.
Franceschina must have said yes, because now there were three of them in the house at Santa Maria. Nothing was changed, either within her or without; only that she now said “Priamo” to the man whom she had looked up to for twenty years, and who had made her into Donna Franceschina, a title somewhat at variance with the country dialect that she had never managed to replace with the austere parlance of Nuoro. No marriage was ever happier, for all Franceschina did was extend her own confidence to her conjugal relationship. No children came, but this did not matter. Neither of them felt the need to perpetuate themselves, because neither had a sense of his own incompleteness. As for the property, there was plenty of time to think about it, and even that was merely part of their existence, about which they were quietly confident. The change that had come into Don Priamo’s life was that in the evening, when he was due to return on horseback from the country, Franceschina would stand at the white-framed window no bigger than a loophole, and wait for her husband. Don Priamo would see her from afar off, and the shadow of a smile would light up his dark, almond-shaped eyes. The Nuorese had noticed all this, and used to leave their homes to witness the scene.
The Day of Judgment Page 9