Monsignor Dettori did not, of course, reduce his ministry to a love feast with the middle classes. He was charitable, and he exercised charity with kind words and with alms. As time went by, he even instituted a dispenser of alms, in the person of Brother Giossanto. Every Friday the beggars, so abundant in Nuoro, came up from Sèuna or down from San Pietro to the bishop’s palace. From Sèuna came Poddanzu, who was an old peasant, short and rotund, and he might have seemed normal if his brain had not forgotten to grow. He had simply remained a child at seventy years of age, and as his people were dead, he was left alone in the world. He had therefore entered into the vast sea of charity and hatred that was the town, for there were those who gave him five coppers and those who just laughed at him and scared him. He lived in a hovel right on the edge of the Corso, and went to do his business behind the Workers’ House, which was at the far end of the tanca, the gardens planted by that mayor from the Continent, but already a dungheap. On one occasion snow had fallen for three or four days, and Nuoro was almost obliterated. But Poddanzu still had his needs, and when evening came he set out for the usual spot. At that point the habitués of the Caffè Tettamanzi thought of a new game. The best shot among them, a keen hunter, took aim with a snowball and hit the bull’s-eye... Yes, the bull’s-eye. The terror-struck Poddanzu brushed off the mush with his cold hands and shouted aloud for justice, which meant the carabinieri on foot and on horseback, who were stationed in Nuoro. “Carabinieri on foot and on horseback, help me, help me, they want to kill me!” What a lark! This bit of bravura became part of the history of Nuoro, and maybe it is still remembered. At any rate, it came down to me.
From San Pietro came Zesarinu, who was not Nuorese but from Dorgali, so that the little he said, he said in the aspirated, almost Arabic, idiom of those people. If Poddanzu was short and round and dressed in local costume, Zesarinu was tall and skinny and dressed as a cosinu, which was the name then given to those who wore town clothes without being middle-class. In fact he was not just tall but enormous, and his arms, legs, and head were all uncoordinated. He did not live alone, because he would have been absolutely unable to survive on his own. He found shelter with two old Sardinianized Continental women, who put him in a hut at the far end of the yard, and he was of some use to them, because in the evening he shouldered a tin can containing those poor women’s rubbish (no one knew exactly what they lived off either) and went down to the dump at Mughina—since each quarter of town had its own—to empty the rubbish. The boys knew this, and waited for him at the entrance to the gardens, and threw stones at the can, with a battering clang. Zesarinu did not retaliate, because he was afraid of children. Only once did he chase after one, making a fearful grimace. The boy was frozen with terror and peed in his pants, but Zesarinu did him no harm. Perhaps in the darkness of his mind he realized that if he struck him the whole town would blame him. On another occasion, the Chiseddos, who were shepherds from San Pietro, took him to their sheep pen and roasted him a lamb. Zesarinu had a meal once a week, and he hurled himself upon this gift of God. After a few mouthfuls he was stuffed, but they forced him to go on eating, until at a certain point Zesarinu collapsed like a corpse. The shepherds were scared, but when he recovered his senses he began to sing their praises all over Nuoro, saying: “What good people those Chiseddos are! They kept urging me to eat more, and I nearly died of it!” And this, too, went down in history.
Another one who came was Dirripezza, who lived at the end of the Corso, near the Iron Bridge, and it seemed that he came of good family, and had been (so he said) at Custoza,*2 but now his arms were no longer capable of work, and he sat on the paved roadway without ever asking for anything. If someone gave him a coin, he kissed it and put it in a leather bag he had hanging around his neck. With him one could even converse. Yet another was Sa Tataja: the word means wet-nurse, which implies that she had had children and nursed those of others; she had been three or four times to Tunis, where the working-class women escaped when they were pregnant, to “have their bastards.” So she must have been quite beautiful, not as she is today, with a nose so hooked it seems keen to get into her toothless mouth. She was shaky on her pins, and leaned on a long staff shiny from use. And Baliodda would come, the one who always dressed in mourning, no one knew for whom. Another regular was the jest of all and sundry: Raffaele, a well-set fellow who had once been a stable boy, and at a certain point started trotting like a horse up and down the Corso. He had been doing this for years and years, and always won his races.
All these folk, and who knows how many others, made their way to the bishop’s palace every Friday, which was the day Our Lord died. Brother Giossanto gave each of them a specially baked loaf and a little money as well. And they all sang the praises of Monsignore, and the fame of this rich monsignore spread far and wide. Even the priests (and I can’t say more than that) looked more relaxed, and scowled at each other less. There was enough proof of miracles for a canonization. Monsignor Dettori naturally did more substantial things, such as beginning the construction of the seminary, restoring the Chiesa del Monte, which was starting to collapse on account of the devilish storms up there on the heights, welcoming the nuns whom the French had thrown out of Corsica, and lodging them at his own expense in the large house belonging to the Mastino family (the mother of whom was a Mannu). These were the sisters who, expelled by the Revolution, had brought revolution into the feudal life of Nuoro, because they had begun teaching French to the buried young ladies, thereby compelling them to emerge into the sunlight. These were the rich sisters, as they were dubbed at once, in contrast to the local sisters who lived on air, bits of embroidery, or the income from a funeral or two, and who therefore became the poor sisters.
In short, Monsignor Dettori did everything that any bishop would have done for the Church Militant, but, to an extent no one could have imagined, it was the Church Triumphant. His Pontifical Masses bore no resemblance to those of his predecessors, and not only the canons but the priests also, even those without cure of souls, and therefore without money, walked more briskly, and were regarded indirectly with a certain respect. I do not think it impossible that from time to time the good bishop gave a helping hand to some of the more contentious priests. Certainly under his rule there was not a squabble between the hierarchies, and not so much as a complaint.
Instead, every evening unless it was raining, the doors of the palace opened, and Monsignor Dettori and the whole chapter, he with a green cord on his hat and the canons with red ones, came out and set off for the broad walks of the gardens, for a two-hour constitutional beneath the shady trees. It was a custom which he had introduced, or had come about of its own accord, because he was bishop. They walked at a staid pace, in a half-moon that stretched the whole breadth of the avenue, with himself towering and masterful in the middle, laughing rather than smiling, among the children running up from all directions to kiss his ring, and beneath the severe and respectful gaze of the watchers on the veranda of the pharmacy. And he would talk to his traveling companions, who listened in silence to his tranquil words. What did he talk about? It must have been about God, but it might also have been about the vineyard, or the harvest, or the marvelous things he had seen on the Continent; or it might even have been a soundless movement of the lips, since his majestic presence needed no words. Thus, for an hour or two hours, as in a mystical glass window, up and down the public gardens which, not many years earlier, before the usurpation, had been Church land, and now for those two hours became so again, because of his presence there.
*
The Lord called Monsignor Dettori to Him on a certain day in a certain year. And it was certainly a mistake, for the bishop took his myth with him, and the priests of Nuoro started scowling at each other again.
The new pastor (the historical pastor, one might say) was Monsignor Canepa, who had a Continental name but was in fact from Cagliari, so that he was already off to a bad start. He had the typical look of a priest aged by his sedentary life, the face like curd
led milk (the expression was Father Mele’s), the cassock falling at an obtuse angle over his protuberant belly, the nasal voice, slow and apathetic. The cross did not simply precede his name (which was Luca), as is usual with the names of bishops, but his very person, whenever he went unannounced by bells up the slope to the church, or to kneel before the tombs where the diocesans who had preceded him now rested. For he was incredibly pious, and had a special cult of the Madonna, to whom every year, on the feast day at Gonare, he devoted a long homily. He would work on this for months, rising early in the morning, in a small room giving onto a dense hedge of prickly pear, and in which he had neatly arranged the theology books he had brought with him.
Monsignor Canepa had a single fault: that of not being rich. Worse: he had a dense swarm of nephews and nieces left him by a brother and a sister who had died on him. When he was prefect of the seminary in Cagliari, he had had to provide for them by giving Latin lessons. Many of them he had arranged for as best he could, but he was left with four, the youngest; and it was with them, rather than with Brother Giossanto and Brother Baingio, that he had alighted from the carriage at the Quadrivio of Nuoro. He made the mistake of being poor in comparison with Monsignor Dettori, of venerated memory; and in the eyes of the chapter and the priests, and also the whole of Nuoro from Don Pasqualino to Dirripezza, because even to receive charity from a poor man is less of an honor than to receive it from a rich one.
The episcopal revenue was perfectly wretched, the fault of those priests who at the time of the expropriation had set a modest value on the properties of the Church, thinking thereby to avoid robbery. Instead, their salaries had been fixed according to that assessment. And on that revenue, apart from the character of Monsignor Canepa, who “embroidered homilies,” as Canon Floris said scornfully, there was little holding of banquets and also little to distribute in charity. And thus the bishop’s palace, with its red walls and waving palm trees, once more became the Sèuna shanty that it had always been before Monsignor Dettori reconsecrated it. One thing only was retained from the happy times: the canons’ evening walk, in the long half-moon with the bishop in the middle.
The truth is that it was no easy matter to be bishop in Nuoro. The holy city contained a dozen canons who comprised the chapter, and six or seven priests scattered in San Pietro and Sèuna. There was one single parish, and the parish priest was Canon Monni, who since time immemorial had been verging on ninety, with his tiny, transparent, almost albino body. He had wealthy connections in the villages, who all came together in his presbytery clinging to Santa Maria, as if on neutral ground. Old Camilla, her eyes devastated by trachoma, served God by way of her master, and kept up contact for him with the rest of the world, bringing him all the news, which he then sifted through in the silence of his mind. For Canon Monni never left his house, no longer even for the funerals of the rich, but he kept in constant communication with the outside world.
Canon Monni in fact had a mission to perform. Although for fifty years he had not been back to his village, lost among the mountains of Barbagia, he held the threads of the destinies of all his nephews and nieces and the nephews and nieces of his nephews and nieces. As soon as they were born, they were brought to Nuoro for his blessing, and a grand long blessing it must have been, to have sent them out from their villages to shine in the “capital,” to become, or attempt to become, Nuorese. How many of them he had borne in his frail hands! And now that he was old he had to face the biggest challenge of all, something he would never have meddled in, had he been able to think any task beyond his powers. The problem was this: Dr. Porcu, one of his great-nephews on his mother’s side and the showpiece of the family, or at least of its educated members, was presenting himself as a candidate in the political elections. That blessed man the pope, there in Rome, had at last decided to shut an eye to the political itches of the Catholics, and Dr. Porcu, already well on in years, at once joined the race for a single-member constituency on a ticket which used the symbol of the plow for the benefit of illiterates. But it was not easy to get one’s hooks into those miscreant Nuorese, even with powerful friends, and Canon Monni needed all the feelers of his housekeeper, who from the market or the water fountain brought him far more of the hidden secrets of souls than he could glean in the confessional. The whole business was shaky, very shaky...
Far more fortunate was the other doyen among the canons, Dean Pirri, who lived in a wing of the vast Corrales possessions in the heart of San Pietro, at the top of the short slope up from Santa Croce, one of the semi-rustic little churches in Nuoro, with the plain façade, and the bell-cote above, like the Grazie in Sèuna, and as the Monastery once had been. Canon Pirri was fat, and resigned to it, with drooping cheeks on a large, ill-shaven face and eyes still dark in the pallor yellowed by the years. He, also, no longer left home. His daily constitutional was from the bed to his armchair, in which he sat, with his feet on the wood for the brazier and his biretta on his head. One knew at a glance that in all his long life he had never once smiled. Every morning, from nine to ten, his nephews and great-nephews who were not at the sheepfold would pass before him, striving to guess his thoughts. For from his room, bare except for a single crucifix, he ruled the entire dynasty of the Corrales, and like Canon Monni he had a mission to fulfill. But this was not concerned with elections or trifles of that sort. The Corrales, his nephews and the sons of his nephews, were, as we have said, a band of predators, and their fierce instincts had been retained by other descendants, many of whom had taken degrees and become middle-class. Some had even abandoned the nest in San Pietro and infiltrated the Corso. For this reason he had become a priest, because men need a law, and the law is not a written sheet of paper, which is a joke, but a man who does not judge you, but shows you the limits imposed on your actions. Canon Pirri, an honest priest and a man incapable of evil, had well understood his function, and had fulfilled it with simple dignity, gaining the respect of all his relatives; partly because he was very rich in his own right.
The dean was not a man of wide reading, but between the lines of the breviary he was apt to meditate deeply, and came early to the conclusion that free will does not exist. It was not a question of philosophy: he perceived as much in every one of his people, and perhaps even in himself. Those nephews and great-nephews had no need to confess; it was enough for them to file before him, as they did every morning, for him to know what they had done during the night. But he also knew that it would have been useless, or even downright imprudent, to give advice. On the other hand, there were the fruits of their robberies; for he saw the family—or rather, the network of families that had formed, and that recognized him as their protector, because he was close to God—buying houses and tanche and herds, and in a word growing rich; and this too had its mysterious justification. What he personally had to do was avoid scandals. More than once he had paid off some wretch, who had come with threats, out of his own pocket. But above all it was internal relations that had to be swathed in silence, and here it really came home to him that he was a priest.
Seated with his feet resting on the wood for the brazier, undermined by the heart condition that prevented him from lying down, Canon Pirri stroked the cat with the singed fur, and thought with terror of the danger that the entire family had been exposed to during the murky business of Avvocato Orecchioni’s will. That had been his masterpiece, the justification of his whole life, even if from that day on he had suffered from this dreadful breathlessness that deprived him of sleep. Avvocato Orecchioni, Zio Mario to the nephewry of the Corrales, was a lawyer only in a manner of speaking, because in ancient times he had taken a degree in law, which had enabled him to dress like a gentleman and do nothing from morn till eve. This was not an unusual thing in Nuoro, which was full of lawyers who had never set eyes on a codex, so that it was not clear what they lived on. In this case, Avvocato Mario possessed some very fine tanche, which were the envy of all his relatives, and he got conspicuous rents for them. But his degree had had the singular effe
ct of estranging him from his relatives, and practically turning him into a misanthrope. He still lived in San Pietro, in a rustic house that bore the traces of his shepherd ancestors, looked after by a maid inherited along with the house. She had once been young, and had borne an illegitimate girl, who was now a young brunette full of innocent promise, and she was the only person the lawyer would allow into the house, to give a hand to her mother. In any case, her employer appeared not even to notice her, although little by little the girl had become more familiar, and went so far as to call him “uncle.” He continued to read the newspaper, seated on the granite bench under the great fig tree that shaded the whole courtyard, and continued to take his walk around sunset, along the dusty road to Orosei, bordered with prickly pear, without exchanging a word with the peasants returning on horseback from the fields, their saddlebags laden with baskets of fruit. So every day was the same as every other. But one day cannot have been the same, because the girl disappeared. No one paid attention to it, the more so because at seventeen or eighteen all the girls in Nuoro disappeared, and went to Tunis where the wages were higher, though in reality to give birth to their bastards without being shamed. After a while, in fact, the girl returned with a baby boy, to whom she had given the name of her old employer, as the custom was. But big Mario did not want either little Mario or his mother in the house, and so it all ended. Old tales, old tales... In the meanwhile, time had passed and the lawyer’s little goatee was tinged with white. The boy’s mother had worn herself out, like all the women who went to the river down at Caparedda or Mughina, doing the washing and carrying it in baskets on their heads, while little Mario had become a builder, or a blacksmith, like so many others. Anyway, they had all grown old, in Nuoro, and no one remembered anything any more, partly because there was nothing to remember.
The Day of Judgment Page 14