The Day of Judgment

by Salvatore Satta

  Zia Luisa, by this time the grandmother of all the Corrales, who had once been young and beautiful, sat at the corner of the carriage-gate with a kerchief pulled forward over her head and her enormous breasts overflowing from her corset. On her knees she had a flat basket, and with skilled hand was separating the wheat from the little stones that had got mixed in on the threshing floor. But her thoughts were elsewhere. Her brother-in-law Mario’s tanca at Lardine was next door to their own tanca (that is, her husband’s), and in fact the lands of all the Corrales were near one another, since they all sprang from the same stock. That tanca was a perfect wonder, even if she had never seen it. Mario was already old, as in those days one was old when past sixty. What was he going to do with it? He was as lone as a mushroom, and solitude is a bad counsellor. He would be quite capable of leaving all his belongings to the hospital—a gross betrayal. Unless perhaps... but this was impossible. There had, of course, been that gossip all those years ago about the girl who had gone off to Tunis, but it had come to nothing, and Mario was too stingy to give away his property, even after death. Maybe one ought to keep an eye on that maid he had had with him for all too many years. She was a sphinx, that one. There was no way she would open her mouth, and she did not even give a greeting when they met. Her thoughts took wing, while the basket of grain lay inert on her lap. Well, Mario was luckily still in good health, and there was time to think about it.

  But on the contrary, Mario’s death was right beside him, as it is with us all, and it came one evening as it was growing dark, due to an attack of pneumonia, which in those days, without penicillin, left one with little hope. The news spread at once, and at long last the various generations of Corrales were able to get into the house. The maid could not prevent them, because without her master she counted for nothing. Never were so many grieving figures seen, as there were around that useless dying man. Natale Cherchi, known as Bersagliere, since nicknames proliferated within the already vast Corrales clan, was the most heartbroken of all. The sound of the death rattle passed out through the window, poured down into the yard among the yellowed leaves of the fig tree, meandered among the little houses in the alleyway, where the shepherds sitting on their doorsteps heard it impassively. At last it stopped, and Avvocato Orecchioni left his house and his tanche without a master.

  An enormous silence filled the dingy room, and the dead man was not the most silent among them. At last Pilime Corrales, who was one of the oldest, regained his voice enough to call the maid. She emerged from the shadows, her eyes shining with tears, but hard and malevolent. The old man seemed to avoid her gaze, feigning some inner commotion. “Your master is dead,” he told her, “and we remain. He is now atoning for... We will add that you have been a faithful servant, and you will not be forgotten, whatever arrangements he has made.” Then, after a long pause: “By the way, you don’t happen to know if he left anything?”

  The old woman froze. She felt alone and defenseless, and she had to be careful what she said. “I know,” she began slowly, “that before he fell ill he went looking for a pen and an inkwell, and began to write, upstairs, on the parlor table. I don’t know what he wrote, because I can’t read.”

  Those people were too used to lies not to know that she was lying. But it was Bersagliere who saved the situation. “This is not the moment to think about tomorrow,” he exclaimed, leaping to his feet. “Now we must think of paying homage to the dead man, who deserved it. Poor Zio Mario! In fact... excuse me for a moment. I must go and put on a tie, because I rushed here like a mad thing as soon as I heard he was ill.” He went out, shutting the door behind him, climbed noiselessly up the wooden steps, and found himself in the parlor. On the table there were in fact some yellowed papers, but they were old account sheets. He quickly leafed through them and came across a sealed envelope marked My Will. His heart was beating hard. He opened it and read: “I leave everything to my natural son Mario, grandson of my maid.” That was all, but it was enough. Slowly he folded the envelope and put it in his pocket, from which he had pulled out an old tie, placed there before leaving home. And decked out in this tie he re-entered the other room, flung himself on his knees before the dead man, and wept desperately.

  Canon Pirri stirred the charcoal with a long poker. The memories assaulting him beaded his brow with sweat. For the old woman had not stayed there mourning over the corpse, but had hurried upstairs herself to look for the will. There and then she was too afraid to speak, but after the funeral she began to spread the rumor that there was a copy of the will, though unsigned, and that several people had seen the envelope on that table. Soon the whole of Nuoro rang with the story of the tie, and in Nuoro there were not only shepherds, but also the authorities, and there was that round building overlooking the town, which the Corrales knew very well, since they had spent many years of their lives inside it, and ought to have stayed there forever. The dean saw the mire rising up to his knees. For one can do anything—rob, plunder, even kill—but deny the last wishes of the dead, no. If these nephews of his had evil in their veins, he had to exorcise it.

  He summoned them one by one, threatened them that he would leave all his property to the Church, and made them hand over the will. Then he sent for the old woman and said: “What are all these rumors you’re spreading?”

  “It’s the truth,” replied the maid. “I saw the will with my own eyes, and I have the unsigned copy.”

  “Well then, let’s suppose that this is true, and that you can prove what you say. What do you hope to gain? The taxes would eat up the lot of it, let alone the legal costs.” And he made an estimate of what that desperate undertaking would cost her. Then, looking her straight in the eye (and his were still the eyes of a Corrales, even if he was dressed as a priest): “Look here,” he said. “You know how fond I was of Mario. He was a good soul. I’ll speak to you as he would have spoken himself. Wouldn’t it be better”—and here there was a long pause—“better for you to let the properties go where they have to go, and take what they are worth instead? I have made a calculation, and it comes to two hundred thousand lire, which would be paid to you at once. Two hundred thousand lire,” he repeated. “With this money your grandson would be able to find a good job on the Continent and would not have to slave away in the tanche, which is not the sort of work for him. Think it over carefully.”

  The woman at once came to the conclusion that there was nothing to think over, after those prudent words. And so, without a word in writing, as in the confessional, for the first time in their lives the Corrales handed over money instead of raking it in, and the family bastard vanished from Nuoro. But the tanche remained in the family, and Zia Luisa felt that the one at Lardine, now all of a piece, must be the grandest tanca in all Nuoro, even though she had never seen it.

  But Canon Monni and Canon Pirri, although the bishop went to call on them once a week and set great store by their advice, were by this time extraneous to the church, and their stalls in the choir behind the high altar were always covered with dust. The boss of the curia, destined to become dean when Canon Pirri died, was Canon Floris, a man as vigorous as Monsignor Canepa was frail; he therefore played it both ways, not turning up his nose at social life, but frequenting the pharmacy, and occasionally even sitting down at a table in the Caffè Tettamanzi. He was also the master of ceremonies at religious functions, the “director,” as one might say today, because when Pontifical Mass was celebrated he moved the other canons and priests around like puppets, and the bishop himself moved at a nod from him. His baritone voice floated down the aisles, hovered motionless over the bent heads of the faithful, and then dispersed in the blue skies of Nuoro and reached God. The other canons detested him, but they felt his superiority. No one in any case would have been able to do what he did, not even Canon Fele, the scholar of the diocese, whom we already know. The dean-to-be called Fele “the reptile,” because he walked in that spindly way, always rubbing his hands together, and was suspected of being the author of certain anonymous lette
rs which the bishop had received—some, it appeared, had even reached Rome. Canon Fele had taken on the task of visiting the rich widows, and had procured a number of good bequests for the Church, which gave him quite a few points over his colleagues. The latter, in any case, preserved an attitude of neutrality toward the two rivals, satisfied with the red cord that hung from their hats and with the ermine that distinguished them from the ordinary run of priests.

  The six or seven priests constituted a kind of fourth estate. Since there was only one parish, they lived virtually on charity. Some had a small field which they still cultivated, but most suffered from hunger, and if they did not drown it in wine, they sated it with hatred for the canons. Father Delussu was better off than the others because he was assigned to the Rosario, where the dead paused on their way to the cemetery. But he, as his name betrayed, was a Continental in origin, and was good-natured.

  In the evening, after the meager supper, everyone in the quarter would hear the stroke of a bell. It was not a dead man who was delayed, or who had retraced his steps. It was Father Delussu telling his brother, who lived on the other side of the piazza, that the bottle was ready on the table for them to get drunk together in silence.

  The black-hearted priest, the one who lived at the far end of Sèuna and never ate, firstly because he had nothing to eat, and then because he was anxiously awaiting the day of judgment, was Father Porcu. Gloomy and spectral, he spent his time sending off exposés of Canon Floris, the rubicund dean-to-be who was the incarnation of the Church Triumphant. His complaints suffered the fate of all complaints, and this fueled the fire of his hatred. A ray of light seemed to creep in on the day when, following Monsignor Canepa, a Continental bishop arrived. Fame with its fanfares preceded the advent of this pastor, and in his hallucinations Father Porcu had no doubt that he had been sent entirely for him. And in fact after a few days the bishop sent for him, because the canons had told him about this contentious priest, who should be suspended a divinis. He tidied up his clothes as best he could and set out for the palace in trepidation. The bishop, who had a kind heart, was struck by how thin the priest was, and he addressed him in loving words, in the name of their common Lord.

  “All right,” replied the priest, “but Canon Floris is a scoundrel and you have to get rid of him.”

  “What are you saying, my son? How can you be so lacking in respect toward a superior?”

  “I understand,” said Father Porcu, getting to his feet. “You are a racketeer like the rest of them.” The conversation had lasted five minutes.

  Father Porcu grew more and more spectral, and they say that little by little he fell ill. One morning, when he felt close to death, he got up, and he dressed with difficulty, and then with halting steps started off toward Santa Maria, up the endless slope, along the flagstoned Corso. Followed by stares of curiosity, step by step he reached the cathedral. He wanted to cry out a last prayer to God, there in His house. He knelt down before the high altar, and his weary voice resounded in the stillness.

  “Lord, you see how old I am and ill. Take me to you. I can no longer say Mass to you, as I can’t stay on my feet. Lord, take me to you. And for the good of the Church, take Canon Floris as well. Then all will be at peace.”

  *1 I am alone / poor me / with incessant / sorrow.

  *2 A village in the Veneto where the Austrians defeated an Italian army in 1866.

  10

  Don Sebastiano had no wish to go down that evening into the room cheered by the firelight, and would willingly have gone to bed without saying good night to anyone. He had been working all day, and when it was getting late a couple came in to draw up a marriage contract. They came from a village in the Costera, he being well over seventy while she was a young thing of twenty. She was accompanied by her parents, who were much younger than the groom, and their shabby clothes revealed their modest means. Don Sebastiano had listened to the declarations on both sides, and had begun to write. Just as usual. But his hand was heavy, and his pen unwilling. He was anything but a sentimentalist, and had seen a thing or two in his time. At a certain point he got to his feet, called the parents into the next room, which was his bedroom, and said, “I am prepared to pay for the stamped paper if you will not sell your daughter.”

  “You do your duty” was their reply. “First the white wedding, then the widow’s weeds.”

  And he had done his duty, as he always did. Like the time that poor fellow had died on him when he had just taken down his last wishes in favor of a penniless woman who had lived with him all her life. He had died before he had finished reading over the document, and Don Sebastiano had not felt equal to making a small false statement, even though it would have saved the woman from penury. He was not a cruel man: it is life that is cruel, and the law expresses all the cruelty of life.

  Bent over the newspaper, Don Sebastiano, perhaps for the first time since he had sat at that desk, reviewed the events of his life. Along the walls, in cupboards with glass doors, stretched the hundred or more morocco-bound volumes of documents, each with its registry number printed in black on the spine. It was his library, the only books he possessed, and he had written them all himself, day after day. He thought back to the early ones, the enormous efforts undergone when, as the only notary in the whole district, he had to do tens of kilometers on horseback, fording rivers, with his official stamped paper in tin tubes, which he still preserved. A pity that these volumes were dependent on his own existence, for when he died they would come and take them away, because notarial deeds end up in the public archives, just as their authors end up in the cemetery.

  Don Sebastiano was not a man to live in the past, or to waste his time in useless sentiment. The fact was, that day there had been the umpteenth quarrel with Donna Vincenza, brought about by one of those bits of advice of hers which hurt her husband in proportion to how judicious they were. Don Sebastiano had thought he could cut things short with the usual terrible phrase: “You’re only in this world because there’s room for you,” but this time his sons had rebelled and sprung to their mother’s defense. So he had got to his feet and left, slamming the door behind him.

  It was the first time he had found himself exposed to the judgment of his children. Or maybe it would be more correct to say that it was the first time he had really encountered them, after devoting his entire existence to them. But what did they expect from him? What did they know about life, about that invisible web which one blunders into like a fly and then does nothing but struggle to escape the spider scuttling out from its ambush in the center? What did their mother know about it, after twenty years of not leaving the house? And why did they need to defend her, when he himself had always defended and protected her? That day she had broached the old topic of the pastureland at Orotelli, which was up for sale and which she wanted her husband to buy, while he, on the contrary, was negotiating in favor of a third party. It was one of the bees in her bonnet that afflicted her life. What did she know about that land, which she had never seen and never would see? The soil was poor and stony, and it was even dangerous to compete against the local people. This was what he thought. Could she not be content with the vineyards he had created with his own hands, and with this house, which for Nuoro was a palace?

  The truth that Don Sebastiano did not want to admit was that the family to which he had given the whole of himself had always been alien to him. Anyone who works as he had worked has the right to be loved, but has no time to love in return. This was the root of it all. He had demanded only one thing of his family: that they should not disturb him in his work, and that each should therefore do his duty, as he had done. From this sprang that preference for outsiders which Donna Vincenza had reproved him for, his tendency to put his children in the wrong in their childish squabbles, and his susceptibility to the charms of others, especially those cunning rogues from San Pietro who were beginning to become urbanized, and therefore used to flock around him, convivial and fawning. Donna Vincenza seemed to loathe everyone who came
near him, and who wrapped him round their little finger. She had even got to the point of turning them out of the house when they came to call, putting him in the position of having to apologize and make his wife out to be mad. And now, over this matter of the Orotelli pastures, it seemed that it was Giovanni Maria’s turn. He was the son of that Matteo, the eldest brother among the old Sannas, who (as I have related) left Nuoro and his family with curses at twenty years old, and at ninety expressed the certainty that his brother Priamo, who had died earlier, was already in hell and waiting for his wife. No one had ever had word of him again. But one day thirty years later, there turned up in Nuoro a sturdily built young man with a broad face, untypical of Nuoro, and not even speaking the Nuorese dialect correctly. He introduced himself to Don Sebastiano, calling him “uncle.” He was Matteo’s son, and wanted to settle in Nuoro and start in business. Had his father sent him there to wreak his revenge? Everything is possible. At any rate, he asked for help from his all-powerful uncle, and the latter gave him so much that in a short time he became really rich in the almond trade, and his wealth turned to fat, for he weighed little less than four hundred pounds. He was cheerful, expansive, and liked a good time, and he occupied Don Sebastiano’s house as if it were his own, smothering the boys with toys and tidbits. Donna Vincenza had dubbed him Milord, and the name had spread all over town. Then, suddenly, hatred and fury. She realized that he had become a rival to herself and her children, and that Don Sebastiano, bewitched by his blandishments, was negotiating the pastures for him. At that point she set the whole family against him, so that he was forced to leave, and not to set foot in the house any more.