And so Maestro Mossa went on his way, without realizing that the world also went on its way. And in the next-door classroom Maestro Manca realized it even less than he did, but for different reasons. The fact is that he did not go straight to the Monastery, bowling along over the cobblestones when he left the house in the morning, but made a tour of the milesos, which is what they called certain little shops where the merchants from Milis, a village in the Campidano district, came during the season to display luminous piles of oranges and little bottles of their Vernaccia wine. So when he crossed the threshold of the school he already had four or five glasses of Vernaccia in him. He was a small man, with blue-green eyes, a pointed beard, and a head crowned with a top hat, as the fashion then was. His perfectly round belly atop his skinny little legs had—I seem to remember having said this already—earned him the nickname of Pedduzza, the Pebble, by which he was known throughout his life. On entering the classroom he adopted the stratagem of exuberance, which he sorely needed, for he was a trifle overawed by the boys, who looked at him with some curiosity and did not understand—especially to begin with—why the Rubicon tended to come out as the Buricon. The master had a skinful, as the saying goes, and as the day went by it caught up with him, and the lesson ran the risk of turning into a circus. But not to the extent that the master, in a sudden reawakening of conscience, did not utter a shriek and, before the eyes of the dumbstruck children, bring Julius Caesar and Augustus back into the limelight.
Maestro Manca had this drinking problem, which was not entirely his, since he shared it with his whole family. But he was the first to take it to heart, to the extent of asking himself in his lucid intervals where that blemish had come from, and attributing it to his mother, who (he said) had a passion for Fernet when she was pregnant. But he was a kind man, and also extraordinarily gifted: he played the guitar, wrote poems that were gay and bitter at the same time, and was incredibly good at mimicry, which implies the ability to see the essence of people in their acts and gestures. These were all things that set him apart from the rest of the Nuorese drunkards, who were legion. And on top of this he was cultured, which meant that he had gone right through school; but what he had learned of Homer, Dante, and others had sunk in and become part of his nature, so that he had his classical quotation or nickname for everyone; and this too was a kind of mimicry. His misfortune, he was wont to say, was that of having married a Continental. And maybe this was true, though perhaps he ought not to have said so to the boys who, according to the academic rote, came his way.
Maestro Mossa would never have done it, but Maestro Mossa would never have done a lot of other things. In the little room in the Monastery where Maestro Manca taught, there was a fireplace, which the last of the monks had left burnt out; and in the hard Nuoro winters one shuddered with cold. So Maestro Manca had thought up a perfectly simple solution: he made a bargain with the boys, that in the morning each of them was to bring a piece of wood hidden under the loden coat which they used to wear in those days. But they should tell no one, not even their parents. Involved in this secret task, the boys arrived, walking stiffly, and in this way the first rite of the school day was lighting the fire. The master did not do it himself, since his legs and belly did not permit him to bend down, but in the back rows sat the sons of shepherds, destined to remain shepherds themselves, and they knew all about such things. Thus, while Maestro Mossa was dying of cold, and accepting death, Pedduzza was happily snoring in the chair which he had transported from his useless desk to the corner of the fireplace, while the boys took turns fanning the flames. It therefore occasionally happened to him, as in a twilight, to see his wife riding astride a bottle of Vernaccia, but he immediately roused himself, grabbed the boy nearest the fire by the collar, scolded him for his way of life, his parents, and his grandparents, and kicked him out of the door. He turned purple in front of the silenced student body, and began to talk about geography.
The boys were accustomed to these outbursts of rage, and had even organized themselves so that they all took turns at being the victim. They realized that their master, long since exposed to the jests of the ignorant gentlemen of the Caffè Tettamanzi, who nonetheless sought him out and encouraged him to drink because he amused them, found in them a refuge, and thought of them as the only friends he had. One morning they saw him arrive with a large bundle under his arm. They all crowded around him, and out came a guitar. He sat down as usual beside the fire, and very softly, because of the headmaster, who was none other than Maestro Fadda, the teacher of the fourth and fifth grades, whom the boys called Porsena because of his extraordinary resemblance to this Etruscan king as pictured in the history book, he plucked the strings. From them came a melancholy sound that tamed even the back-benchers; then the teacher’s voice intoned a song in praise of wine, which he had composed during the night, a parody of hymns to Jesus that would have been blasphemous had it not been a lament for himself, for the misery into which he felt himself falling.
Benitu siat su frore
frutto de puru sinu
became (atrociously enough) in the parody:
Benitu siat s’acriore
fruttu de puru binu*1
while in the chorus, instead of the name of Jesus, came those of the worthless characters of the low life of Nuoro.
Maestro Fadda threw open the door at the very moment when Maestro Manca’s voice was beginning to ring out. He too, like Don Priamo, was one of those men who never laugh, and he differed from Maestro Mossa only in two respects of equal importance: he taught the more advanced classes, and he didn’t much believe in God. There was nothing human in his voice now; it was a bleat, the wheeze of someone who feels he is choking, while his eyes rolled as if to pop out of their sockets—Maestro Fadda, who never got flustered, never left his seat at the desk, and gave his lessons with his bowler hat on his head because he was bald.
“Very good, very good!” his expression said. “We’ll see about this in the records.” And he vanished. Maestro Manca had leaped to his feet in terror. He was not worried about the “records,” because he knew that Maestro Fadda was kind, and when it came down to it would not ruin him, No, it was the terror of finding himself unexpectedly faced with a man who made sense, who didn’t reel on his feet and didn’t sing. He put down the guitar, so near to the flames that it all but caught fire. Then the boys, and not just the sons of the rich, of Don Pasqualino and Don Sebastiano, but also the lanky fellows on the back benches who already had a few bristles on their spotty faces, ran up to the teacher, tugged at his jacket and clung to his knees, shouting and singing. They all but danced around his belly. The master wept.
Was Maestro Manca right? Or was Maestro Fadda? If we were to put it in educational terms, I would be tempted to say that under the influence of his addiction Maestro Manca was a forerunner of the education of today, which puts the teacher in the place of the pupils and the pupils in the place of the teacher, only that it does so in complicated terms. Perhaps it is more correct to say that education has dethroned Maestro Fadda without putting any Maestro Manca in his place, because Maestro Manca was a phenomenon of nature, and nature is not made of theories. In any case, there were many more people at Maestro Manca’s funeral than at Maestro Fadda’s (and I saw them both); and this also counts for something. When he returned to his classroom, this same Maestro Fadda appeared calm behind his beard, which was reddish, partly because it really was so and partly because he took snuff, for which he was avid. But from the way he took out his snuff box, and the wide sweep he made with his hand to take a pinch, the boys understood that he was inwardly upset, or at least pensive. He resembled Maestro Mossa in knowing exactly where his duty lay, only there was more dignity in his behavior, and even a kind of haughtiness, because he taught the advanced classes and had married a woman with a bit of property. The boys liked him, because they were older, and felt his studied speech was a sort of introduction to life, while the first three school years had been a joke. The ages of the three of them—
Mossa, Manca, and Fadda—totaled at least a hundred and sixty years, which at that time was an enormous amount. And for at least a hundred of these they had been plowing ahead in the gloomy classrooms in the Monastery, without realizing that the world was also plowing ahead.
They became aware of this, or at least had a vague inkling of it, on the day that a new master appeared in the old home of the monks. He was young, but not very young, because he came from the village schools, where he had taught for a number of years. He was Sardinian, but with a non-Sardinian name, which was Marinotti. He was short, and ugly to boot, and he aroused some suspicion, particularly on account of two things: he was immediately assigned to the advanced classes, and he at once teamed up with the most discredited of the teachers, Ricciotti Bellisai. The latter claimed to be a nobleman, and even a relative of Don Sebastiano, and it is possible that he was. What is sure is that his father, Don Missente, had been very rich: the house at Loreneddu, rented out to the carabinieri, was once his; Isporòsile, the sunny, fertile holding between the Mountain and Nuoro, was his; so were a lot of tanche in the Serra and orange groves around Orosei, and heaven knows what else. And if Don Missente had continued to spend his life stroking the long side whiskers that distinguished him from his peers, all would have gone well. The trouble is that money has the tendency to multiply in the heads of those who have it, especially if they have not earned it penny by penny like Don Sebastiano, and Don Missente amused himself by going to the Caffè Tettamanzi and lighting a long Virginia cigar (the only kind a person of his sort could smoke) with a hundred-lire note—at the rate going then. One night, for fun, he played cards for Isporòsile (which today in fact belongs to Giovanni Maria Musiu, the owner of the caffè). At least, this is what they said. What is certain is that shortly afterward Loreneddu passed into the hands of Don Sebastiano, who did not really want it, faithful to his principle that one ought not to profit from the misfortunes of others; and similarly all the rest was frittered away. When Don Missente had nothing at all, he at last seemed content, and went on stroking his whiskers without any longer going near the caffè, where no one noticed his absence. He was left, to use a French word, with this rejeton Don Ricciotti, who maintained himself, his father, and his family with his teacher’s diploma. But just as his father was sunny and smiling, he was gloomy and glum, with drooping bluish cheeks; and he did not deign to notice the Mossas, Mancas, and Faddas of this world. He thought of himself as still owning the properties his father had dissipated, and if the law was not on his side, then he was dead set against the law, or against those who profited from the law to deny him what was his. Nor did he hesitate to say as much at school, where he also taught the sons of the usurpers, though they understood none of it. For this reason, when Maestro Marinotti came on the scene, expounding certain new ideas, talking about identity of thought and action, of education as the very act in which the personality is made, of the synthesis of pupil and teacher, and other complicated matters, Don Ricciotti at once saw the newcomer as an ally. The three old teachers held more than one secret meeting. “What is the meaning of this kind of talk?” asked Maestro Fadda, who because he taught the fourth and fifth grades imagined himself to be closer to knowledge than the others. “Could we have got everything wrong?” asked Maestro Mossa humbly. “It seems to me that’s what we’ve always done,” replied Maestro Manca, as his understanding unclouded for an instant. Maestro Fadda wanted to scold him for his drunken binges, as being to blame for everything, all the more so because, as far as he could make out, according to the new theories, the headmaster was quite separate from the teachers, and he would lose this small sign of distinction between himself and his colleagues. In reality, all three of them had an obscure foreboding of their own decline. Don Ricciotti, on the other hand, knew that behind incomprehensible words there always lurks a will to power, and he needed this man, not those three mummies who played at being children with the children. He therefore immediately supported the new master’s aims, began to talk in the same manner, and thought he should be appointed headmaster. He even went so far as to disregard his own corpulence and adopt a swaggering gait, as if the school had become his property.
Maybe those incomprehensible words were what might enable him to force Don Sebastiano to give him back the house at Loreneddu.
*
The new master was of course a decent man, and if he had suspected that Don Ricciotti was out to exploit his philosophy for shady purposes, he would have avoided him like the plague. His greatest ambition was one day to become a school inspector, a job instituted recently, when the schools passed from the jurisdiction of the communes to that of the state; this would give him authority over the old schoolteachers in the area. At any rate, he behaved affably, and they seemed reassured. Maestro Manca reached such a point that one evening, when he had drunk more than usual, he included him among the saints in one of the hymns of praise which he improvised while accompanying himself on the guitar, and which soon became the common property of all the drunkards, who made the heavens ring with it in late-night choruses in the abandoned streets. The new master accepted the joke for a number of reasons: first, because he was Sardinian, and knew how to keep his mouth shut; then, because a joke, if it is not malicious, always bestows a degree of useful popularity; and finally because he had guessed that, beneath the bad habit that was destroying him, Maestro Manca was more intelligent than himself. And the habit made him harmless.
The first sign that something was changing, or had changed in the world, came one morning when Maestro Mossa, bowling over the cobblestones with the swarm of boys in his wake, noticed that his steps were not accompanied and almost measured out by the little Monastery bell. He thought that lazybones Ziu Longu must have overslept, although he took pride in opening up the school on time, with the huge key which he took home with him every evening; but all the same his heart missed a beat. It seemed to him that a vast silence was spreading throughout the town, and that everyone ought to just stop, as in mechanical puppet shows, depicting the various trades, when the spring runs down. At the Monastery he found Ziu Longu wide awake, his face as black as thunder and the veins in his neck fit to burst.
“What about the bell?” asked Maestro Mossa.
“He said that from now on it won’t be rung.” There was no need to ask who “he” was.
In the entrance hall he found Maestro Fadda and Maestro Manca talking in low voices. “We must appeal,” said Maestro Fadda. “The headmaster can supervise the running of the school, but not change things.”
“Who do we appeal to?” replied Maestro Manca, who was already planning one of his poetic vendettas. Maestro Mossa was on the point of saying that he would come down every morning and ring the bell himself, when Don Ricciotti passed nearby without even glancing at them, and they realized there was nothing to be done. The bell was dead forever.
It was no small matter. The Monastery bell had nothing in common with the bells of Santa Maria. These, with their various accents, were a voice of command, whether they called the Nuorese—frankly, not great churchgoers—to their Sunday obligations, or packed off the dead to the cemetery, or announced that Christ had risen or that the bishop had crossed the threshold of the palace on his way to Pontifical Mass. The Monastery bell made no demands. It had a voice—ding, ding, ding—sent forth by Ziu Longu’s long tugs at the rope, as formerly by those of some sleepy monk or lay brother; if indeed, after so many years, it did not ring all by itself. But this voice climbed up the long road past the gardens, met with boys who were coming skipping down to the Monastery, made its way into the Corso and the hidden streets, and hovered in the limpid air of Nuoro. It was one of the two voices of Nuoro. The other was the drumroll of Ziu Dionisi, the town crier; and this was the evening voice, as the bell was the morning voice. Duradum-duradum-duradum: Ziu Dionisi appeared at about sunset, when the streets and the houses were rousing themselves from their sunstroke, with a drum hanging on his belly by a worn strap, to announce that the wine of Oliena
was now available at Mucubirde’s cellar at twenty centimes a liter, or that a stranger had “come down” to the house of Peppedda e’ Maria Jubanna to buy fox skins, or that there was a new program at the Olympia Cinema. Sometimes there were so many announcements that Ziu Dionisi reached into his pocket and pulled out a text written in Sardinian, and each announcement was preceded by a drumroll that kept the women, who had run to their doors, glued there with their hearts in their mouths, because it seemed as if Ziu Dionisi had gone to sleep over his drum.
These were the two voices of Nuoro, and now one of them had been silenced forever. The other would soon follow, because Ziu Dionisi was old, and it would not be easy to find him a successor. And so Nuoro would be left dumb, like any city, like any town, and the Nuorese would no longer recognize themselves in these little things that were unimportant, but were the sign of that mysterious communion that grows up among men who live beneath the same sky. From then on, to know if it was time, everyone would look at his watch, as after all is only natural.
The old teachers had all this bitterness in the bottom of their hearts, even if they were unable to translate it into words. But in Maestro Mossa there was another feeling, one which he would not have dared to show his colleagues, for they would have ended by quarreling among themselves. He was, as we have said, very religious, and that still bell was not the voice of Nuoro: it was the voice of God that had fallen silent. This was not a fixation, nor was it the superstition of a bigot. Maestro Mossa was not a bigot: he had let the Lord walk with him all his life, and in his modest labors he had walked with the Lord; and the prayer he recited with the boys before lessons was a kind of agreement which he made with Him every day. It was all very well for him to pray himself, but the point was to get the boys to pray, so that they were at least for a moment delivered from evil. Everything had always gone smoothly. But for some time now he had noticed that certain youths would hang about outside the ex-church or ex- refectory that was his classroom, first singly and then in larger and larger groups, at first silent but later noisier and noisier, making fun of his prayers. They were the young men from the teachers’ college, the schoolmasters who would take his place, the ones from the floor above. He had taken a long time to understand, because he had no idea what was going on in the world while he was teaching the children of Nuoro to make the sign of the cross. But then they had begun to whistle and catcall and make noises even more obscene, and his boys had got frightened. Why, why? This had been his custom all his life. But all his life, also, he had heard the voice of that bell, guiding him to the Monastery. Now the bell rope hung sadly above Ziu Longu’s bench, like the rope after a hanging.
The Day of Judgment Page 12