With his clear voice, the lark
Accompanies him from skies of hyacinth.*2
Why do these old lines come welling up in my memory? It is as if the first dawn of the world were rising again before my eyes. These costly walls, that have replaced and swallowed up the old cemetery and made it too large for the living and the dead alike, now vanish (and whatever would Don Priamo say, if he were to wake in there?): the plowman has grasped his plow again, and the labor of life that furrows the soil is matched inside the enclosure by the labors of Milieddu, the sexton of all the Nuorese; which is also a labor of life. And the skylark soars for all of us into the skies, and sings. It is a moment of poetry, such as occurs from time to time, and my secret anxiety gives way to a mood of inward joy. I approach the gate, which they have substituted for the rust-eaten door, and I get ready to search for Milieddu, without thinking that he would be at least a hundred years old by now. He had a long, reddish beard, and red also was his face, grooved by the wind and the sun. He might have been that very plowman, who had left his plow for a moment, and in truth he was nothing but a peasant, even if freed from the risks and storms. He was a kindhearted man, and seemed to ask forgiveness of each dead man for having to bury him, though the fact is that he did bury them, and without caring whether they were rich or poor, if they were Fileddu or Don Sebastiano. This earned him neither love nor hatred, but made him in a sense the master of them all. It was as if everyone had a second self, himself and Milieddu: and in conversation, when someone was asked if he was really sure of what he was saying, the answer was: “A man’s sure only of Milieddu’s shovel.” In Nuoro death had a name.
I cross the threshold. Inside are two strapping young fellows in black uniforms, seated idly, like bodyguards. (Who knows how Milieddu managed to bury himself?) They eye me with complete indifference. The cemetery has spread to the very foot of the Mountain, reminding me of those displays of plaster or terra-cotta statuettes one comes across on the outskirts of towns. I make my way along prim avenues full of names that mean nothing to me. I am about to succumb to the terrible anguish of nothingness, as when crossing a square or wandering through a deserted house; and at last, at the end of an avenue of dusty cypresses, I see a cement church resembling the Rosario. I realize at once that they have built it on the site of the crumbling little chapel in which the bishops of Nuoro lay quietly in a row, waiting for the inevitable resurrection. This is the place. There are the two marble angels, one bent mournfully above the other, eternally lamenting the proud dead of the Mannu family. Here is the tombstone of Boelle Zicheri, the pharmacist, who left everything to the hospital out of hatred for his relatives, and that of Don Gaetano Pilleri, who unceasingly pursued his loathing for the priests; here are the first graves of the families of shepherds, with their nicknames that became surnames and the haughty portraits in costume, framed in little enameled ovals; here is the broken pillar commemorating a young man, with the inscription—“You weep, and I sleep far off in the graveyard”—that used to trouble my nights; here is the modest iron railing that encloses Maestro Manca, preventing him from turning back into Pedduzza (the Pebble) and going back to the low dive where he slid under the table, dead while imbibing his last glass of wine... Within a radius of a hundred meters from here I could trace the limits of the old, damp walls. I would only have to follow everything that is black with age, chipped, forgotten—everything that has died for the second time. And beyond these poor tombs there is still a short stretch of ground, short and infinite, with the remains of a few slanting crosses, and others overturned, as if they had exhausted their function. I wonder whether there is more hope in all those tombs where the dead lie alone, or in this bit of earth beneath which the bones of infinite generations are heaped up and mingled together, being themselves turned to earth. In this infinitely remote corner of the world, unthought of by anyone but me, I feel that the peace of the dead does not exist, that the dead are released from every problem except for one only, that of having been alive at all. In Etruscan tombs the oxen now chew the cud, and the largest have been turned into sheepfolds. On the stone beds lie pans and wicker baskets, the humble implements of the shepherd’s life. No one remembers that they are tombs, not even the indolent tourist who climbs the path cut into the rock, and ventures into the dark depths where his voice resounds. Yet they are still there, after two thousand, three thousand years; for life cannot conquer death, nor can death conquer life. The resurrection of the flesh begins the very day one dies. It is not a hope, it is not a promise, it is not a condemnation. Pietro Catte, who in the tanca of Biscollai hanged himself from a tree on Christmas night, believed he could die. And now he too is here (because the priests made him out to be a madman and buried him in consecrated ground), along with Don Pasqualino and Fileddu, Don Sebastiano and Ziu Poddanzu, Canon Fele and Maestro Ferdinando, the peasants of Sèuna and the shepherds of San Pietro, the priests, the thieves, the saints, the idlers from the Corso... All in an inextricable tangle beneath my feet.
As in one of those absurd processions in Dante’s Paradiso, but without either choruses or candelabra, the men of my people file by in an endless parade. They all appeal to me, they all want to place the burden of their lives in my hands, the story, which is no story, of their having been. Words of supplication or anger whisper with the wind through the thyme bushes. An iron wreath dangles from a broken cross. And maybe while I think of their lives, because I am writing their lives, they think of me as some ridiculous god, who has summoned them together for the day of judgment, to free them forever from their memory.
*1 The people of Oliena still put the accent on the i.
*2 These lines of verse come, slightly misremembered, from L’allodola (The Lark), a poem by Satta’s relative, Sebastiano Satta (1867–1914).
8
Every morning at half past eight (except for Thursdays and Sundays, which were holidays at that time) Maestro Mossa would leave his little house on the edge of San Pietro, near the station. He emerged by stepping over the base of a large, useless carriage-door, through an opening made in one of the sides of the door and scarcely larger than a hole for a cat; then it swung to after him. What he left behind him, what kept his home life going, was not a question that occurred to the four little local boys who were waiting anxiously for him in the still-leaden light of winter mornings. He was their teacher, and they followed him all the way down to school. Maestro Mossa went frisking down the alleyways, bouncing over the rough cobblestones. Out of each doorway came a schoolboy, who joined the others, so that before long the whole student body was behind him, as if attracted by a magic flute; and as his step was still long and agile, their walk broke into a run, faster and faster, and stopped at the door of the Monastery.
The school was, in fact, the Franciscan monastery that at some long-forgotten time had been suppressed and confiscated, along with all Church property, on account of some law or other imposed from abroad. The name had remained (like that of the huge tract of land adjoining it, which they still called the “monks’ tanca”); and to be at the Monastery, or to go to the Monastery, was the same as saying to be at school, to go to school. In fact nothing had changed, either inside or out, because people were content with little; or rather, the very concept of “little” did not exist. Even the bell was still there in its bell-cote perched on the top of the yellow-painted wall, as in all the little country churches in Sardinia, which have no bell towers, and Ziu Longu, the caretaker, used to pull the rope at nine o’clock on the dot, just as the sacristan did in the time of the monks. The selfsame sound announced the beginning of the sacred office and of the lay office, as if nothing had happened; and in point of fact nothing had happened. It was not like the other Church property, which had ended up for a song in the hands of the least scrupulous or least superstitious private citizens, who were nearly all from San Pietro. Of anything else to do with the monks there was not the least trace, except for a few mastic bushes pushing up here and there in the playground.
Inside, there remained the huge entrance hall paved with slate crumbling from the damp, and leading off it were two large rooms with vaulted ceilings. The one on the left must have been the monastery chapel, because through the keyhole one could catch a glimpse of some empty niches, and in one of them there was even a saint with raised hand, who persisted in giving his blessing in the midst of filth. Mysteriously enough, the door was always locked, but it may have been that the roof was collapsing on that side. Just as it might have been a kind of sacristy or refectory or meeting place, while on the contrary the chapel had been the right-hand room, which was the schoolroom where Maestro Mossa taught, because to get to his desk, which was nothing but a simple table, you went up four steps, obviously the steps to an altar. The master, who was deeply religious, never climbed those steps, but sat right in front of the children as if he were one of them. Anyway, prayers were still said in that room, because before starting lessons every morning the master made the children stand up, and they all made the sign of the cross and said the Lord’s Prayer.
A short flight of steps led down from the entrance hall to what must have been the monastery proper. It was a sort of quadrangle, with a yard too small to be a cloister, and two long corridors on opposite sides leading to the classrooms, which in fact were nothing but the monks’ cells. In those cells, lit more by loopholes than by windows, and so high up that the monks could see God but not the world, an incredible number of boys were jammed in, as if some fresh miracle had multiplied the space. The cells in the opposite corridor, on an upper floor, were used by the so-called normal school, alias the training college in which young men studied to become teachers in accordance with the new rules, which aimed at producing educated teachers, not pathetic wretches like Maestro Mossa.
The schools were organized in such a way that one master taught the children from the first grade to the third, and another master took over for the fourth and fifth. But it worked out so that the second teacher was determined by the first, and anyone who went into the first grade with Maestro Mossa found himself in the fourth with Maestro Fadda; whoever started with Maestro Manca, known as Pedduzza, went to Maestro Piras, and so on. This is not without its importance, because education had not then made the progress that we see today. It was not even a science, which is to say that each master created an educational system of his own, if indeed he did not carry it with him from the day he was born. Anyway, the same was true of the boys, who were receptive only to what they wanted or what they were born to; and the result was that a human relationship was established between master and pupil, a thing justly condemned by modern doctrines, which within the metaphysics of the state or of society could not, for example, allow Maestro Mossa to begin his teaching in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, or Maestro Manca to hymn the praises of the wine that since first thing in the morning had pervaded his veins, or Maestro Murru to let off steam with the boys about his wife making life difficult for him on account of his modest resources. They all knew, not least because they hid around nearby corners, that when he left home to go to the Monastery, after the first squabbles of the morning, he would turn around and shout from the doorstep, as if delivering the Parthian shot: “Money grubber!”
But in any case, the same applied to the boys, for each one of them, rich or poor, brought into class his own particular world, which had made him what he was, and teaching was the experience of two individuals face to face, of two lives revealing themselves reciprocally in the interstices of mathematics, Italian, and history. The school that resulted from this was the most multicolored imaginable. Maestro Mossa was short, like most Sardinians, but this was disguised by the thinness of his body, which was still lean and wiry in spite of his fifty years. He had a white beard and mustache, which grew at their own sweet will, though they were clean and combed, around a gentle mouth into which neither smoke nor wine had ever entered, and from which only kind words had issued forth. He was not from Nuoro, but from a tiny village in the district of Logudoro, whose manner of speech he had retained, which made him slightly ridiculous at school; and he came of peasant stock. When he became a teacher he had naturally given up the local costume of his forefathers, but he had kept his faith in God, which he based on the very simple argument that one day he had been born and one day he must die; and on close scrutiny this is at bottom the only unexceptionable proof of the existence of God. Unless an objection might be raised by the brass tacks of living: but this was too difficult a matter for him, or it implied a judgment, both of himself and of others, such as he could not make. It was the same faith and the same reasoning that guided him in his work as a teacher, preventing him from realizing that his wage was miserable, because it is life that has to adapt itself to the wage and not the wage to life. In any case, on big feast days the parents of the well-to-do boys did not fail to let him have a bit of pork or a quarter of lamb, which cheered his family up—for he was married to a good woman and had fathered two children.
In the classroom that had been the church (or the refectory or the monks’ meeting place, it doesn’t matter) the generations of Nuoro passed before the little master, and many of today’s children were the sons of yesterday’s. His own sons had grown up too, but the miracle that had delivered him from the land was not repeated, for they were not very intelligent, and he had to find them work, which was no easy matter. It worried his wife, and was an affliction to his life, because a father ought to think of his own children before those of others, This is what that poor woman told him when he left the house in the morning and began his descent toward the Monastery with his swelling retinue of schoolboys. Was she right? Was she wrong? But there were the eighty lire a month in wages, and this put her clearly in the wrong, even though (to avoid argument, a thing he feared like sin) he didn’t have the courage to tell her this outright. From time to time he was tempted to ask for help for his sons from one of his old students who had become a prominent lawyer, but he had an obscure feeling that this would have made his miserable life more miserable still. When it came down to it, why couldn’t they straighten themselves out? The birds of the air get by, while we don’t, he said to himself, recalling his ancestral links with the soil, while he lengthened his stride and forced the boys to run to keep pace with him.
Once they were at school, praying together kept master and pupils united for an instant, as in a chorus, and the word of God filtered through the door into the entrance hall full of other schoolboys making an uproar as they waited for their own teacher. It took a good quarter of an hour before everyone was in his place, and there fell that mysterious silence that occurs in school corridors when all are intent on their work. This was the time of day when Ziu Longu, the caretaker, also set to work, which meant keeping his eyes open in case some boy spent too long in the lavatory, or getting mad at the idlers whom the master had sent out of the classroom. That day Maestro Mossa had begun to talk about the kings of Rome, who were seven in number, and had got as far as Tarquin the Proud. It was an old story, one that he had been telling over and over for twenty years, but it was always new because there were always new children listening, while on the other hand he knew, and was obliged to know, not a word more than he said. The boys’ eyes sparkled, especially those in the front rows, because these were the boys of the elite, since the selection of men occurs automatically as early as elementary school, and Tarquin’s pride became for them a moral fact.
Then Maestro Mossa said: “Pietro Catte, tell me who the last king of Rome was.” Pietro Catte, who had the fleshy lips of a Mauretanian and a bovine eye that roved around of its own accord, rose from one of the back benches and said, “The Quirinal...” Naturally enough there was a great burst of laughter from the front benches, but Maestro Mossa did not know how to laugh. He seized the boy by the back of the neck, turned him around, and gave him a good thrashing; then, having regained control of the Sardinian language, he ordered him back to the fields from which he had come, and meanwhile to get out of the room—a
nd be quick about it. Pietro Catte, who was used to such things, left the room willingly and fell into the arms of Ziu Longu, who had been listening at the keyhole. “Shame on you,” he said, “to confuse the kings of Rome with the hills, and not to know who Tarquin the Proud was.” For he also was halfway to being a teacher, having learned to read and write; and then, everyone knew about Tarquin the Proud. The fact was that Pietro Catte (a child only in a manner of speaking, because the pupils in the back benches were ten or even twelve years old) lived in a small house near his own, with an old aunt who had no one in the world but him, and she used to give presents to Ziu Longu to propitiate him, as if destiny lay in his hands.
Maestro Mossa’s whip was nothing more than the flat calibrated ruler which the school supplied, along with ink and an inkpot—and they were all it did supply. This man, whose hair was already flecked with white, was the mildest person imaginable. And how could he have been other than mild, with that frail body rescued from the plow, and that mind which had undergone, and one might say daily underwent, the adventure of the alphabet? For a time, when he had begun to teach, he had believed that with him a new era would open for his family; but now, as he looked at his sons, who repeated the old generations, and in addition had grown lazy in the city, he realized that his experience had been a parenthesis, and would soon come to an end. But he did not grumble about it. There were all those lads who waited for him every morning outside the house, and it was clear that he had studied for them, that God might put them in his hands; and it seemed as if they knew it. He returned their childlike love with his own love, which was that of a schoolmaster, and part of the job. He knew each and every one of them better than they knew themselves. He knew which of them would go back to the land, and which of them in a few years would know more than he did; and among the latter was Don Sebastiano’s youngest son, who hung on his lips, and already talked to him about Plutarch, forcing him to pretend he had read him, so as not to lose face. But in one respect all these boys were equal, and that was in the Original Sin on which his teaching was based. This was the reason for the ruler: it punished Adam and Eve, who still existed. The master was extremely skillful at discovering traces of the first evil; he sniffed it even on the breath that came from those innocent small bodies, and he rose up like a terrible, pedagogical God when he made a fool of someone in front of the class and yelled at him, “Watch your step!” accompanying the yell with a blow from his ruler.
The Day of Judgment Page 11