The Day of Judgment

by Salvatore Satta

  *1 “Blessed be the flower / fruit of a pure womb” became “Blessed be the belch / fruit of pure wine.”

  9

  That Bishop Roich who, in flight from the scorching sun and the mosquitoes, had moved the episcopal seat to the high ground and the site on which Nuoro was to rise (assuming Canon Fele’s fairy tales to be true) had unintentionally stamped the appearance of a holy city on the little town. The Church of Santa Maria, with its Latin inscription which not even the priests could understand, dominated it from the brow of the hill, a bell tower to the right and a bell tower to the left, like an immense snail. Nor were the bells just any two bells, because they had names (one was Lionzedda, the other Lollobedda) and they told different tales, according to the service, or even according to the mood of the bell-ringer, which, it was said, people claimed to recognize. Chischeddu (which was his name, meaning Franceschino) must have quarreled with the vicar, they thought at San Pietro and Sèuna when the tolling for a funeral was too hurried or a note rang false. Chischeddu was one of those wrecks who for some unknown reason drift into churches, and are allowed by God or the vicar to take part in the life of the spirit as vergers or sacristans, or to take the collection, or—if they have a decent ear, as was the case with Chischeddu—as bell-ringers.

  Rejected by what is finite, they are attracted by the infinite, an empty church, a priest in skirts, two arms opened in broad gestures of benediction; and this they serve from the outside, in the little things and the little people needed even by the infinite. Halted on the threshold, they live the mystery more fully than their masters, and you should have seen Pozeddu, the sacristan of the Grazie, when after the collection he emptied the bag with the long handle onto the sacristy table. The small coins scattered like mad things over the worm-eaten wood, flashing in the meager light that made its way through the dusty windowpanes; and from time to time a silver lira would tumble out among them, and Pozeddu would swear he knew who had given it, although he did not satisfy the curiosity of the celebrant. Those little coins were the tangible signs of God, the service which he rendered to Him every day, but especially on Sundays, at the “rich people’s Mass.” In any case, although he was on the edge of things, he had more faith than the priest, and while he unfailingly helped him on with his surplice, it was as if he were putting it on himself. Even after years he had not ceased to be unctuously respectful, because between the priest and himself there was the barrier of the impossible; but he had drawn nearer to the priest, was the recipient of his outbursts and his confidences, and measured his yawns. Nor was there a Mass or church service that he would not have been able to celebrate, and in perfect Latin, although he could neither read nor write. If he had had less self-respect he would have accepted the priest’s invitation to play cards on occasional summer evenings, while they waited in the cool of the deserted church for the sun at last to make up its mind to go away.

  But let us leave Pozeddu, who is not relevant at the moment, because we are in the Church of Santa Maria with Chischeddu, whose bells regulated the life and death of the town, from the silver ave of the morning to the resonant ave of the evening, which made the peasants doff their caps as they came home on their carts, and the middle-class children stop their play in the piazzetta. Even Don Sebastiano rose from the bench in the Piga pharmacy (which had nothing to do with Don Pasqualino’s family) and went up the short cobbled stretch that led him home, where the study, the newspaper, and the oil lamp awaited him. Life, at a certain point, must stop, at least for the middle classes. But the great outpouring of the bells, in which Chischeddu sounded not a note wrong, even if the vicar had given him what-for a few minutes earlier, was not that of Holy Saturday, at exactly ten o’clock in the morning, when Jesus rose from the dead (and everyone stood and waited, gazing upward) but the peal that announced that the bishop had left his palace with his suite of canons in ermine, for the celebration of Pontifical Mass. Santa Maria awaited him with its immense doors flung wide, and the dean on one side, ready to give the note to the chorus of seminarists, was a splash of violet in the dark interior of the church. In his embroidered shoes, and with his long train held by two young deacons, the bishop went up the gentle, oak-shaded slope that divided (or united) the cathedral and the palace, and upon that psalm-intoning cortege there fell the gigantic chimes of Chischeddu’s bells, which came no longer from the bell towers but from the blue sky, from all the blue skies of the island, that arched themselves above the fleeting scene.

  It is likely that at the time of Monsignor Roich the church and the forecourt and the bishop’s palace formed a single unit. There was no other reason for the granite walls surrounding the tree-lined slope outside the church as in an embrace, and open only onto the vast steps leading to the recently made cobbled roadway that borders the bishop’s palace. It is true that the tall, severe, disproportionate cathedral has nothing in common with the dwelling of the bishops, that earthly dwelling reminiscent on a larger scale of the peasant houses of Sèuna. Rather than actually seeing it, one senses it through the palm trees rising above the red-tinted wall. Come to think of it, it might well be the summer residence of a minor provincial landowner, with its shady patio, and indeed a place of pleasure, had it not been for those gaunt black priests who came and went when on duty. The bishops would arrive, would take up their abode, and then be carried off by death like the popes in Rome; and each of them was like a little pope in that town of 7,051 inhabitants, which had at least forty canons and priests, two convents of nuns (the rich nuns and the poor nuns, as they were called), and a seminary that was the first glimmer of hope for peasants from the villages, who even then were longing to move to the towns. And all this in the midst of a population that was pagan by instinct, as in fact the canons and priests were half-pagan, not acknowledging each other and acknowledging the bishop only because he was an outsider.

  But it had not always been this way. Like Rome, even Nuoro had known its golden pontificates, shall we say its Julius II or its Leo X. A dark Middle Ages endured for two centuries after the phantasmagorical Monsignor Roich. The first real bishop of Nuoro, the one destined to leave people’s minds stamped with an image of himself and his times more durable than the wordy memorial tablet dedicated to him in Santa Maria (which no one succeeds in reading because it is written in Latin), was Monsignor Dettori, who came with the cultured manners of Gallura to the wilds of Barbagia. Here I have to warn you in all honesty that what I say might be entirely a fantasy, because I learned it as a child from Don Sebastiano’s stories, if indeed I didn’t dream it myself; for the figure of the first bishop is surrounded by an aura of myth. The fact is that he was a rich man, and from Gallura to the little red-painted bishop’s palace he had brought his wealth along with him.

  When he arrived—and it must have been in the last quarter of the nineteenth century—the Chischeddu of the time filled earth and sky with his peals of bells, and Don Priamo, who as we have said lived right in the shadow of the church, would have been deafened by it, had he not gone with all the prominent citizens to meet him at the Quadrivio, the crossroads that formed the terminus of all the roads coming from the grim interior, before they amalgamated into the single highway that, when paved, was to become the Corso. Both peasants and gentry always used to go to meet the bishop when he “took possession of the diocese,” as the pompous phrase goes, but in substance he was an honored guest and nothing more. Then everyone returned to living his own life. But this time the little aborigines of Nuoro saw a tall, strongly built man getting out of the coach, blessing them from on high, caressing rich and poor alike with a celestial look, and smiling. Even the canons in their ermine and the priests in their slightly dingy surplices were surprised. And they were even more so when they saw that the bishop had not come alone, but had brought with him two humble friars with white cords around their waists. Friars or lay brothers, no one could say for sure.

  Monsignor Dettori was a bishop just like all those others of whom no trace remained even in the cemetery,
but he had a kingly air. This stemmed from his own personal wealth, naturally, but even in Nuoro there were a lot of rich men; it was just that solitude had made them anarchical and close-fisted. Having spent his life not in the depressing parishes of the interior, wasting time on people’s sins, but in the secretariat of the Archbishop of Cagliari, he had naturally found himself on the highroad to honors, and the honor of a bishopric was the most exalted open to him, the one he would have aspired to as soon as he had taken the tonsure, if the priest with a true calling did not, almost by an act of exorcism, refuse himself any aspiration whatever. The bishopric of Nuoro was the least in Sardinia, and therefore in the world, but apart from the fact that the unit of measurement in Sardinia and in the world is not the same, all bishoprics are kingdoms for those who have a vocation for ruling. And in that remote place, devoured by crags and bandits, Monsignor Dettori made the bishop’s dwelling into a royal palace, where he held his picturesque court, with Pontifical Masses and banquets; these always in the name of God, which was not a mere pretext, but sure faith, founded on long-standing custom, and gratitude.

  The two friars or lay brothers (but to simplify matters we will call them lay brothers from now on) were basically two cooks. They turned their hand to everything, needless to say, but above all else they catered for the bishop’s services of the mouth, as they used to say in the days when kings were kings. That is, they were responsible for the kitchen and the table. Monsignor Dettori was a person of blameless habits, but he understood why, at the archbishop’s school, they had taught him the boundaries between the human and the divine. He kept his excellent table within these boundaries; and not only that, he made them more flexible, because good food sweetened and conciliated souls. When he received the news that the distant pope had deigned to provide for the diocese of Nuoro in his modest person, he knew very well that he would be going to a desolate place where there were none but poor people, since the rich were even poorer than the poor, among people ruled by their passions, with contentious, fanatical priests who were therefore far from God. But this very contrast with his own civilized Gallura had awakened his interest. And then, if you really want to know, every Sardinian, however superior he thinks he is, even the pompous asses of Sassari and the grandiloquent grandees of Cagliari, look to Nuoro as to their second home. Therefore, when he alighted at the Quadrivio and crossed the threshold of his kingdom, and was confronted with the sea of little houses in Sèuna, which we have already described, with the carts before the doorways and the oxen garlanded in his honor, he left the procession and set off, escorted only by the two lay brothers, over the rocky country roads among the odoriferous droppings of animals. He towered head and shoulders over the wretched hovels, and had to stoop down to talk to the Seunese. But his manners were so strange, that is to say, so kindly, that to the poor people he seemed a messiah.

  “Ah, I see,” said Canon Mocci, who was a pious soul but always a bit tipsy. “This monument has a mania for popularity.”

  “Keep a civil tongue in your head,” replied Canon Mura, of whom Canon Mocci said it was doubtful whether he could read and write.

  The dean, who was Canon Pirri, and came from San Pietro, where he worked at tempering the thievish spirits of his rich relatives, watched the flies forming haloes around the heads of his brother clerics. But he was nearest in rank to the bishop, and this prevented him from allowing the least expression to cross his dewlapped face.

  The bigwigs, with the mayor in the vanguard, felt that with this Galluran bishop something was about to change in the life of Nuoro.

  And in fact, a few days later they saw a message delivered to their fortresses by one of the lay brothers. In it Monsignor Dettori invited them to luncheon the following Sunday, after the sung Mass.

  The Nuorese were by nature laymen, not least on account of the Church property that many of them had bought up at the time of the abolition of the monasteries, not so long ago in those days; but above all because they knew each and everyone of the priests, and esteemed them little, though preserving their respect for extreme unction. They therefore received this strange invitation with distrust. That Sunday Don Gabriele and Don Serafino, who lived across the street from Don Sebastiano, settled down at the window to watch what he would do, and when they saw Don Sebastiano, who was by nature sensitive to flattery, setting off up the slope to the bishop’s palace in his best suit, they rushed downstairs. And Don Pasqualino must have done the same thing, because a little while later he was seen hobbling up the slope on the stick he used to help his gout. The gout (the ailment of the rich) forced him to be sober, while the terrible swellings on the knuckles of his hands took away his appetite. But the bishop’s invitation had intrigued him, and he was unable to resist the offer. Anyway, by midday, when the last echo of the ite missa est, drawn out in the celebrant’s throat by at least ten meters, was well and truly dispersed in the lofty skies of Nuoro, twelve of them were standing by a table as decorative as an altar, beneath a pergola from which hung stalactites of grapes still blue with copper sulphate. It was in the open, but it could have been an annex to the long priestly rooms because the doors were flung wide. Unknown bishops looked down from the walls, and seemed to screw up their eyes in the unaccustomed light. Along the wall the huge palm trees displayed great eagerness to mature their dates, and from the orchard below (the Monsignor’s Orchard, as they called it) came a pagan scent of honey, and the buzzing of bees at work in the glory of noon.

  When Monsignor Dettori appeared in his long, spotless cassock and red skull cap, they were already a little exhilarated. This man, so different from them, nonetheless spoke their language, because the Archbishop of Cagliari loved to travel in the Barbagia when he could, and used to take the monsignor with him, knowing him to be loyal. He spoke with simplicity and learning at the same time, since a bishop could not allow himself to speak with simplicity alone, and he stuck to earthly matters, well knowing that especially with these ultra-shrewd provincials it would not do to name God in vain. And so it came about that before seating themselves at table they all made the sign of the cross, if only so as not to displease him. While waiting to be served, he told them that he had loved Nuoro ever since, at the seminary in Sassari, he had known a pale, melancholy lad who sang of his distant homeland in sorrowful verses, and he recited some of his poems.

  So solu

  mischinu

  chin dolu

  continu.*1

  “That was Canon Solinas,” Canon Sanna almost shouted out (for a few canons had joined the notables. This one was related to Donna Vincenza on her mother’s side). “I used to know him very well.”

  “And where is he now?” asked the bishop.

  “He’s dead, poor chap. He was only twenty-nine, although he was already a canon.”

  A brief, imperceptible silence disturbed the serenity of the occasion, as in a drawing room when someone makes a gaffe at the expense of the hostess. But luckily, at that very moment, a lay brother arrived with a huge dish, which everyone turned to look at.

  “This is Brother Giossanto,” said the bishop. “He has been with me for twenty years. He’s not the cook, though. The cook is Brother Baingio, who traveled all around the world before coming to the curia. He has even been in America, and has cooked in the houses of kings. But now I shall never let him go again.”

  The dish that Brother Baingio had prepared was a chicken. But it was an odd sort of chicken, which lay like a cushion on the huge silver oval. This was placed in the middle of the table (because the luncheon of a Sardinian bishop, however refined, always retains something countrified) and Giossanto served it around, starting with his bishop. The guests then realized that the chicken was boneless, but with its skin intact. Don Pasqualino, who was the most traveled of those present, having been in Turin when it was the capital, and then in Rome, said out loud what everyone was thinking: that he had never seen a chicken prepared like that. At this there was a chorus of praise, and Brother Baingio had to be sent for to explai
n to those lamb-and-piglet eaters how one removes the skeleton of a chicken from its sheath.

  There were six courses. Then coffee was served, the canons drinking it from the saucer, where they poured it to let it cool. When the bishop stood up he said grace, which everyone echoed. Then off they all went, and each one became himself again. But at the same time they obscurely felt that life could have a certain grandeur and sweetness, and that Monsignor Dettori combined this grandeur and this sweetness in his own person. For the very first time those Nuorese barbarians became aware that they had a bishop. And the trouble was, he was destined to become the model for all bishops.