Don Priamo’s smile was not ridiculous. It was the symbol of the infinite that entered into that finite conjugal communion, made up of little daily tasks, of modest accomplishments, so perfect that it had no need even of God. The bells of the church looming above rang out the passing hours in vain: in the house of Priamo and Franceschina time did not pass at all. The only novelty was that, in marrying Franceschina, Don Priamo had discovered space, because he had been obliged for the first time to venture outside Nuoro, to Olzai, to meet his wife’s relatives. It was twenty kilometers on horseback, an undertaking never to be repeated. Franceschina had a few little bits of property in her village, but he was to administer them scrupulously without having to budge. The tenants themselves would come at the proper time, with money for the rent; and in their saddlebags they carried cheeses that smelled of mint and myrtle. If occasion arose, they too would ask Don Priamo for good advice.
And this same Don Priamo had been consigned by his brother Matteo to hell, in the expectation that Franceschina would join him.
7
I have been, in secret, to visit the Nuoro cemetery. I arrived early in the morning, wishing to see no one and not to be seen. I got out at Montelongu, the point where Nuoro in my day began and ended, on the edge of San Pietro, and I started off along the little streets of my long-lost childhood. In spite of the efforts of recent administrations, the traces of them still remain in the low houses, with a few dusty relics of pergolas, a few neglected courtyards. They have given names to the streets. These are written in blue on white ceramic plaques with a thin blue line around the edge, and are the names of forgotten splendors—Canon Fele must have had a hand in this business. I am sure that Don Priamo would have disapproved of them. “What do you need plaques for,” he would have told the council in memorable words, “when everyone knows where they have to go?” And he would have been right, for in fact most of them, now chipped and cracked, have been used as targets by boys who have made them illegible. The rivulet of sky above the streets is slashed across by the electric wires, forever in a tangle.
Electric light came to Nuoro incredibly early on. Someone back from the Continent talked about these cities that suddenly came alight, of lamps that went on of their own accord: not one here, another there, but all at once, as if from San Pietro to Sèuna. But this was just talk. Maestro Ferdinando, who was called “maestro” because he was a builder, but who had taken on the task of lighting the oil lamps every evening, went on with his task. He was a tall, thin man, and wore local costume, in spite of the fact that because of his trade he was somewhat townified. The streetlights were like iron urns, with long brackets embedded in the corners of the houses, and they had a massive elegance all their own. When the first star appeared, Maestro Ferdinando picked up the tall, tall ladder that in the daytime lay on its side against the red wall of his house, and started on his rounds with it over his shoulder. The children ran along with him, all wrapped up in that solemn public ceremony; and not just the barefoot children of the poor, but also those of the rich, with their shoes hobnailed to preserve the soles. Maestro Ferdinando, without looking around, hoisted the ladder and leaned it against the lamp bracket, opened the little glass door, struck a wooden match on the iron, then let it fall. This was what the children were waiting for, because they hurled themselves with shouts upon the useless prey, of which all of them had a collection. The one who amassed more than anyone else, because he was the nimblest, was Don Sebastiano’s youngest, who took them to Donna Vincenza and asked her to keep them safe for him.
Donna Vincenza kept her son’s burned-out matches in the big sideboard set into the wall—the keys of which were in the bunch attached to her belt—along with the small change left her by Don Sebastiano. In her ignorance she knew what Don Sebastiano, for all his studies, could not have understood: that is, that behind those dead things there was immense life, an endless world of love, far more than behind any toy, if such a thing as a toy could be conceived of in Don Sebastiano’s house. There was the idea of an earth, the earth that for us is dry and miserly, abounding in wondrous gifts. There was the fantasy of what is ours for nothing, of what moved the Creator to His creation, and the joy of feeling that one shares in this creation and this gift. The sense of what is useful or otherwise is foreign to God and to children: it is the diabolic element in life, and it may be that Don Sebastiano felt this, with his response to those who told him he was rich—that only the cemetery is rich. But this was not an awareness of grace, but rather a kind of curse. Grace had remained in the spirit of Donna Vincenza, because Don Sebastiano, intent on what was useful or useless, had locked her up in her childhood memories; and perhaps for her, too, these spent matchsticks symbolically fell from heaven, albeit only the heaven of a rusty street lamp.
But the fact is that the days were numbered for the oil lamps and Maestro Ferdinando, for the matchsticks and the dreams. Don Priamo and Donna Franceschina still had supper by the restless flame of a tallow candle, and copper lanterns still filled the servants’ rooms with light and shadow. But Pasqualino knew what he was doing when he intrigued with the Continent to blow out all those prehistoric flames with one mighty puff. Handsome, tall, and possessed of immense riches (he owned whole mountainsides of pasture in every village round about), Don Pasqualino Piga had a vocation for industry, almost alone among the Nuorese, who did not even know what industry was. On the outskirts of Sèuna he had set up a steam mill, with a baker’s shop attached to it, and it filled the whole neighborhood with its pulsations, like the beating of an enormous heart. The millstones worked day and night, and in a fine mist of flour groped the shadows of Don Pasqualino’s sons, who toiled away like workmen, or even harder than workmen, with that frenzied dedication that always comes over the gentry when they discover work. To maintain tradition, the women stayed at home (old Donna Rina, Don Pasqualino’s mother, who was like a kind of banner; suffice it to say that a Nuoro shepherd who had been taken off to Rome, and had new experiences, came back saying, “They’re not like Donna Rina, those whores on the Continent!”—his wife, Donna Angelica, and his three splendid daughters, one more lovely than the last), surrounded by a nimbus of riches new and old. The sacks of grain piled up in the immense warehouse, as was only right and proper. The only trouble was that up until yesterday the wheat in Nuoro had been milled by grindstones like those owned by Zia Isporzedda, a tributary of Donna Vincenza, turned by a donkey perpetually circling in a tiny windowless den. The women used to bring the bushels of wheat, balanced on their heads, in brimful baskets bordered with red, and this was not only a chore like any other, but also an act of charity. Don Pasqualino’s mill had at a single blow halted all the donkeys and snuffed out the charity. And now he was preparing to blow out all the little flames in Nuoro, to abolish the ritual of lamplighting in the houses of rich and poor alike, and to change people’s faces by showing them in a different light. It was his destiny. It was destiny itself. The streets of the town, all of them still cobbled except for the long Corso, became cluttered with wires, which looked purely ornamental. Who knows where from, but Don Pasqualino had succeeded in importing a weird sort of ladder, composed of several ladders fitting one inside the other, and he hoisted it up to unbelievable heights. Maestro Ferdinando, incredulous, continued to do the rounds with his humble equipment; but the children no longer followed him.
The electric light arrived one freezing October evening. Nuoro was covered over as with a spiderweb; the wires ran the length of all the streets and alleys, and the owners of houses which had no iron bar with little porcelain cups attached to the wall felt diminished, because the sense of the novel and the unknown was stronger than the sense of property. But in the Corso, in the former Via Majore, Don Pasqualino’s sons had strung the wires crosswise, and every thirty meters, in the middle of the roadway, light bulbs hung in enameled iron shades. The whole town had left home in good time to witness the event, full of mistrust and even hoping for the worst. The women of good family peeked out through
the windows, and everyone kept his thoughts to himself. Only Signor Gallus, who was the gymnastics instructor, and was from some other town, said what he thought out loud to a group of listeners, “I’d just like to see these candles burn upside down!”
And all of a sudden, as in an aurora borealis, the candles did light up, and light flooded every street, all the way from San Pietro to Sèuna, a river of light between the houses, which remained immersed in darkness. An enormous shout arose all over the town, which in some mysterious way felt that it had entered history. Then, chilled through and with eyes weary from staring, people gradually drifted back to their houses or their hovels. The light stayed on to no purpose. The north wind had risen, and the bulbs hanging in their shades in the Corso began to sway sadly, light and shadow, shadow and light, making the night-time nervous. This had not happened with the oil lamps.
These stayed fixed to the walls, fixed and dead, and they posed a great problem that no one had thought of. What should be done with them? They had cost about twenty lire each, as Don Priamo still remembered. The electric lighting was, as they say nowadays, an irreversible fact, meaning that the old lamps would never come back into their own. Then something occurred that I think has never been recorded in any newspaper in the world. Nuoro, in its nimbus of light, looked like a great ship in the darkness of the ocean. The nearby villages continued in their black of night. The nearest of all, just on the other side of the valley, was Oliena, as the maps say, though its real and more poetic name is Ulìana, with the accent on the i.*1 It is a marvelous village, at the foot of the most beautiful mountain that God ever made, and it produces a wine into which all the aromas of our countryside have crept: myrtle, arbutus, cistus, lentisc. The mountain is calcareous, and is therefore starred all over with white dots, which are the lime kilns. They say that every Olienese owns “a bit of vineyard and a bit of kiln,” and therefore they are all both rich and poor; and they are happy, the only happy Sardinians, in their gaudy costumes. Every Sunday they do a round-dance in the odd-shaped piazza outside the church. They even dance when they walk, especially the women when they return from Nuoro, with bare feet and their shoes hung around their necks, almost floating over the white road grooved by the rains. The Nuorese are a little contemptuous of them, or think of them merely as grown-up children. Now from the piazza of Oliena, Nuoro looks like an immense fortress, with the apse of the church perched high above the valley, the red mill, and the tall houses of San Pietro. Only a corner of Nuoro, because (as I think I have said) most of it slopes down on the other side. But that October evening all the Olienese, men, women and children, had gathered together, looking upward, because word had got around. And that luminous magic suddenly appeared in the immense void, and Oliena also gave forth a shout of joy. What concern it was of theirs, except as a miracle, which is a miracle for everyone, is not clear. But it did concern them—very much so. No one knows exactly who first had the idea, but the fact is that the dead street lamps of Nuoro took the road to Oliena. They were sold along with the lamplighter’s ladder to Nuoro’s poor neighbors, and the mayor in a brand-new costume and the town secretary came from Oliena to draw up the deed. The Nuorese secretly rubbed their hands with glee, and in the evening went to Sant’Onofrio to see Oliena light up, one lamp after another, so that one could count them. And who knows whether the children didn’t run after the lamplighter there as well, picking up the spent matchsticks.
But here I am on my way to the cemetery, and my thoughts go wandering off in this fashion. I have come here between ferry boats to see if I can put a little order into my life, join the two halves together, re-establish that dialogue without which these pages can go no further, and here I am meandering among the electricity wires, a prey to empty memories. I am walking in the middle of the road, without turning my head; but I can hear that doors are opening as I pass, and curious, distrustful eyes are scrutinizing the stranger venturing through the outskirts at this early hour. Soft whispers reach me, and I realize that no one recognizes me. What would happen if I stopped and turned to that middle-aged woman with the pot belly, who is eyeing me keenly, and said, “You are the granddaughter or great-granddaughter of Peppedda ’e Maria Iubanna”? Or, if I said to the one, who has just appeared with a folded kerchief on her head and a ladle in her hand: “You are the granddaughter or great-granddaughter of Luisa ’e Maria Zoseppa”—using the matronymic which is the mark of the ancient race we have in common. As in a photographic print as it develops, remote faces reappear in those around me: people vanished from the earth and from memory, people dissolved into nothingness, but who on the contrary are repeated without knowing it down the generations, in an eternity of the species; of which we are uncertain whether it be the triumph of life or the triumph of death. I feel I am already inside the cemetery I am heading for; a cemetery of living beings, of course. But is it not the living I have come to seek in Sa ’e Manca, in the graveyard dominated by the crag that looks like one of the Fates? And here I am, already in the square in front of the Rosario, the church on the edge of town where the dead used to pause as if to draw breath, before the fatal five hundred meters, between meadows and low walls, that led them to be dead with a vengeance. The surroundings of the Rosario were part of San Pietro, no doubt about it, but the church’s particular mission gave it a metaphysical stamp, which San Pietro was careful not to acquire. Strictly speaking, the officiant was Father Delussu, the blacksmith’s brother, who limped along with his heavy body full of blood and wine; but in fact it was the whole quarter that received the dead man. At the hour fixed for the burial, the bells of Santa Maria sent forth those great, rocking notes that made people stop in the street and ask, “Who’s dead?” Unless it was a well-known person, of course. These continued for a quarter of an hour, and then that austere bell suddenly broke into a kind of gallop, pouring down the steep slope. This was the moment at which the priest in his black cowl, a sacristan before him with the processional cross and another beside him with the censer, emerged from the cathedral (for everything started from there) to fetch the dead man. There might be three priests, also in black cowls, if the family wanted them and paid them, and this was always a hurried scene that put heaven and earth into a sulk. But there might even be the entire chapter, with the canons in a double line and the ermine and the red-braided birettas. Then everything proceeded with gainful slowness, amid hymns of death and glory for which the detested dean signaled the start and beat out the time. A burst of color, a spectacle which the family offered (and was bound to offer if it was rich) to the common people, who emerged from house after house as the coffin passed, and followed along behind it. The procession of canons wended its way along the Corso and between the rows of little low houses, and in the solemnity of the singing one could tell that they were listening to their own voices, and not one, for sure, thought of putting himself in the place of the poor fellow in the coffin, But these are things of small importance. The fact is that as soon as the bell started galloping, the women poured out of the houses near the church, roused Father Delussu, forced him to hand over the keys, threw open the russet-colored door, and dragged an old table out of the sacristy, setting it up in the middle of the rough-cast nave. One of them gave a quick sweep around, raising a cloud of dust; another cleaned the saints frozen in their niches, or straightened the garland of stars around the blue-and-white Madonna, or laid out the utensils for the benediction or the lighting of the candles. Then they all crowded to the doorway in eager expectation, for they were hostesses to the newcomer, and kept a close lookout for his arrival. When they saw him coming, borne on the devout shoulders of the confraternity, they called Father Delussu and ushered the dead man to him; and he received him, had the coffin put on the table, and there recited the prayers in a low voice, as if he were having a chat with the corpse.
Now they have restored the façade of the Rosario with little cement blocks, and it is clear that they no longer take the dead there, either because they have no need for rest or because no on
e dies any more, which seems more likely. But that also is of small importance. When it really comes down to it, the characteristic of our time is to have made things unimportant. I leave the piazza and the new streets that I do not recognize, I leave the last houses facing with indifference onto the cemetery (for the very first time I think I understand the hidden meaning of the pomerium), and I have arrived at the place which is the object of my journey, or the reason for it.
Fanciulla, attorno al tuo bianco recinto
Prono è un bifolco sulla stiva, ed ara.
La lodoletta con sua voce chiara
L’accompagna dai cieli di giacinto.
Maiden, round the white wall of your graveyard
The farmer strains over the shaft, and plows.
The Day of Judgment Page 10