The usual story. And the house that might have been happy, since nothing was lacking, because of this woman’s stubbornness was the most unhappy of all. Don Sebastiano felt himself to be innocent. In the oncoming night he heard confused, excited voices from the caffè in the Corso. It was the Nuorese finishing off their idle day, in idleness. If he listened carefully he could recognize the guffaws and the sneering laughter of every one of them. No doubt they had put Maestro Manca in the midst of the company and were buying him drinks; or Fileddu, that troglodyte who had the mania (though perhaps it was necessity) of attaching himself to the gentry, and who therefore had become the laughing-stock of Nuoro. At that hour they must have been a bit high already, perhaps on his very own wine, which the caffè proprietor had bought from him. Never had he been tempted to set foot in that gentlemanly pothouse, nor had he ever wished to rub shoulders with such people. His brief relaxation was at the nearby pharmacy in the hour before dusk; but that was like never leaving home, because as he chatted with Don Pasqualino or Don Serafino, he would keep an eye on the “little door,” and see who went in and out. He did not notice a sad figure leaning on the windowsill of the dining room, immersed in her black garments, peering shortsightedly at the passers-by on the cobbles of Via Asproni. This was the recreation that Donna Vincenza allowed herself every evening. Or rather, it was her way of taking part in life.
*
The exit of the head of the household from the dining room had left the nestful of fledglings, and Donna Vincenza herself, as if in the dark. However violent, and however unjust, the father has on his side some arcane legitimacy that throws all hearts into confusion. The two youngest, who were clinging to their mother, were crying. Each of the others went on silently with his homework, without a word to his brothers. Donna Vincenza slowly told a string of rosary beads that she had been given on her wedding day, but her eyes, staring into the void, did not see God. It was doubtful in any case, with all her toils and troubles, if she had ever seen Him.
While Don Sebastiano on the floor above was searching for his innocence among the red volumes of deeds that were the fabric of his life, Donna Vincenza, as in a last confession, was looking back at herself in each of the many years she had spent with this man; and every year, every day, was an indictment that she would face him with in due time. She had married him when she was twenty and he was ten years older. He had taken her from the house at Sa bena where she lived with her mother, and she was so naïve that when she became pregnant she thought that they would have to cut her belly open to get the baby out. This memory, so far in the past, and even ridiculous after all the children she had borne, gave her a feeling of elation. It seemed to her that she had wasted an enormous gift, and that that supreme innocence, even today, gave her an edge over him. What had happened after that? Her gaze rested on the unlovely shapes of a woman already old at forty, on her enormous body, on her knees swollen with arthritis: all that was left was her face, her brow both high and unfurrowed. But she had not always been like this, for she had once been beautiful, with the fair hair of a Continental, with slender limbs, with the great joie de vivre that was part of her nature.
When she became a Sanna, she had had to lay aside local costume, and this had been the beginning of her misfortunes. For it is not a simple matter of changing one’s mode of dress. It is a whole world which one accepts, with its laws and its people, with its pretensions and its prejudices, even in a little town like Nuoro. Moving from Sa bena to Santa Maria, which was no more than eight hundred meters, or perhaps a kilometer, she had passed from one world into another. And in that world she needed his help, because she was poor, and alone, and scared of everything. She remembered the first time she had gone to church with her mother, who still wore costume. She got the impression that everyone was looking at her, that the cheap dark dress with the white dots had all eyes fixed upon it. She had told Sanna (this is what she called the man she had married, according to the custom of the time) that she needed another dress, and he, between one deed and the next, had replied, “The money’s there. Go and buy it.” It was the first slap in the face she had ever received. How can an inexperienced girl take the money and just go and do it without some help from her man, even if only to cross the threshold on the way out?
After her first pregnancy she told him, “The veins in this leg hurt me.”
“Then call the doctor. The money’s there,” was the reply.
The usual story. It was true that he worked all day long, that he never allowed himself the least pleasure, that if he picked some fruit at Isporòsile or Locoi he did not dare to eat it, because he had to take it home to the family. But one simply couldn’t leave a woman on her own like this, on the edge of an abyss; for that was what the doorstep meant to her, in the house where little by little she was walling herself up. For this is exactly what happened, that when she was still young and full of life she no longer set foot outside, and immersed herself in a desperate solitude, which only the endless task of looking after her children, and the house that after all she was mistress of, enabled her to bear. But the worst of it was that her immobility began to undermine her health. Her legs swelled up and she became deformed; and so her natural shyness was aggravated by the embarrassment of being seen in the outside world, which is composed of nimble people who can walk. He, he could have rescued her. And he wanted to do so, and gave her money to go and take a cure. But where, and how, and with whom, if she found it impossible even to cross the threshold?
The flame was slowly dying in the fireplace. The approaching night dispersed the phantoms that the onrush of rage had dredged up from the bottom of her heart, where they lay hidden. Maybe the time for hating would come, but in a family with so many sons who have to build a future for themselves, who have to survive, such soliloquies could not last long. And in fact the two youngest, Sebastiano and Peppino, who had run to her in tears when tempers flared up, had gone to sleep with their heads on her lap. She must put them to bed. Gently she woke them up and, taking each by the hand, started up those grandiose, useless stairs that were the pride and joy of Ingegner Mannu, alias Don Gabriele. It was a trial for her poor legs, and every so often she had to pause. On the second floor, passing the study, she saw a light filtering under the door. She was dumbfounded. Sanna, who went to bed with the hens because he got up before dawn, was still awake.
11
Don Ricciotti spent his life at the Caffè Tettamanzi, the very place where his father had gambled away his whole fortune. But he neither ate nor drank, and still less did he allow these pseudo-gents to get him drunk, like that imbecile Maestro Manca. He spent his time there, when school was out, because the house he had been left with was unbearable to him, denuded as it was of everything; and the sight of his spectral wife, and his children playing among rubbish (for such appeared to him the niggardly furnishings and scanty decorations), made his life intolerable. But also, his suffering was of the kind that required witnesses, and above all people whom he could involve in the hatred bottled up in his heart for so many years. He brooded over calling on Don Sebastiano and asking him to give back Loreneddu—in return, of course, for the sum paid by him at the auction twenty years ago. Some reaction was inevitable. In the meanwhile there he sat, on the cast-iron chair from which his enormous rump overflowed, looking daggers at the people crowding the tables, as if spoiling for a fight. But no one paid him any attention.
And who could be expected to do so when all the customers were crowding around Maestro Manca, with Boelle Zicheri and Paolo Bartolino goading him on to amuse them with one of his improvised ballads, tempting him with the mirage of a glass of wine that he could no longer do without? If Don Ricciotti had approached Boelle Zicheri and Paolo Bartolino with the notion of retrieving Loreneddu, that is, of simply putting the clock back, they would have laughed in his face, and so would all the others who paid court to them. And they would have been right, unless the world turned upside down.
Boelle (which is short for Raffaele)
and Paolo Bartolino were the outstanding characters in the life of the caffè, because they were well off and, as their names showed, of Continental origin. Boelle was a pharmacist, but this means little, for so was Signor Piga, who owned the pharmacy frequented by Don Sebastiano and the other bourgeois bigwigs, and who was fit for nothing except grumbling about the doctors, who sent him illegible prescriptions. In Boelle’s pharmacy stood a glass-fronted cabinet with POISONS written on it in huge letters, and word went around that he kept his thousand-lire notes in it.
Paolo Bartolino we already know. He was that two-meter-tall Piedmontese, or half-Piedmontese, of whom a few old men used to say that they had seen him as a child chiseling the grooves in the granite flagstones of the Corso, along with his father. But if this was the case, he had left it far behind, for he had scarcely set eyes on the stinting soil of Sardinia but he had entered the contracting business and built himself a Venetian-style house right next to the caffè. It towered above all its neighbors; but most of all, it was not gloomy (like Don Sebastiano’s house almost opposite), because it had red shutters and a few flowers on the balcony.
As bachelors, both these men had pasts shrouded in a veil of myth woven by the fantasies of the faithful husbands of Nuoro, and perhaps even more by the disappointed hopes of the womenfolk. It was said, though in hushed tones, that when the men who wrecked the woods came over from Tuscany, when Nuoro was scarcely more than a den, these two used to give banquets in their houses and were served by Giggia with not a stitch on. Giggia was the lovely creature, now reduced to penury and halfway to madness, who almost without knowing what she was doing worked as a prostitute in San Pietro. There was also a rumor that they had caught syphilis, which was then more of a sin than a disease. I think this was true. But now their stage was the caffè, where they flaunted their mature years, as well as their superiority over those swarms of Nuorese who had no life to live, and who became ever more numerous as the town grew larger. These abandoned the drinking dens which their fathers continued to frequent, because inwardly they felt they were becoming gentlemen, going up a rung on the social ladder and entering a world which they thought was more respectable, while in fact it was only less arduous and more fatuous. There was no doubt that those dead-ended old cellars, or pothouses, or however one wants to describe them, with the casks up on trestles, the waxen-faced man opening and closing the spigot behind the bar, chalking the number of swilled-down glasses on the staves of the barrel, and toting up the damage when the binge was over—and with the washed-out flag above the doorway—were very like catacombs, and getting drunk in them was a silent, solitary business. Those bearded fathers came and went in long lines like ants, with the blue faces of candidates for cirrhosis of the liver, which among the sneers of the survivors reaped a couple of them each year. Late at night the last glimmer of reason, or perhaps just instinct, led them back home, weaving along the alleyways like blind men. Their Sardinian wives heard their steps and hiccups in the distance, and opened the door for them like nurses, because the drinking habit is a calamity, and calamities must be accepted.
That evening Maestro Manca was the butt of the company. Since we first met him he had gone a long way—downhill, of course. Half a glass of wine was enough to make him drunk, and his hands were beginning to shake. In moments of euphoria he would play the braggart with himself. “Will I kill this vice?” he would shout in the middle of the caffè. “No, the vice will kill me!” But in fact he had a terrible fear of dying, and because the vein in his temple had swollen up, he had got it into his head that it was going to burst, and that death would come that way, all of a sudden. Therefore he went around pressing the vein with his fingers, while everyone laughed madly. “Maestro, how goes it with the vein?” they would ask. He would fly into a rage and shout, “Go shove it up your ass!” And the laughter redoubled. In ruins as he was, he still retained his gift for comedy, or what seemed comic to others, and therefore they sought him out, and he was surrounded by the fine gentlemen of the caffè, who egged him on to improvise his ballads.
Sa fide la professo
chind’una timinzana
de’ cussu e zia Tatana
Faragone...*1
It was a hymn both sacred and profane, in praise of life, and at the same time in praise of death. Boelle, Bartolino, and their whole court laughed fit to bust. He knew he ought not to sing, and had an unconscious yearning for a more serious life, but at bottom he was afraid of all those people who made the next wineglass sparkle, as if tempting a child. Every so often he would recognize the face of one of his ex-pupils in the crowd, and then he would stop suddenly and reprimand him, including his father and grandfather in the most atrocious insults. “So this is what I gave you an education for, you son of a whore, you jailhouse jackass! Just for you to end up at the bar and poke fun at your teacher!” But these were storms in a teacup, and no one took them seriously. In any case, that thoughtless laughter was better than Don Ricciotti’s sulk, as he sat endlessly in his corner, watching the scene with loathing, and planning his revenge.
Don Sebastiano, like Don Pasqualino and Don Serafino, had never and would never set foot in the Caffè Tettamanzi, but this simply meant that they were behind the times, thinking of nothing but penny-pinching. Like all growing cities, Nuoro daily spawned forth more and more people who had nothing to do, or rather, could not possibly have anything to do. The shepherd community continued to live its murky life in San Pietro, and the peasant community of Sèuna remained immobile in its aquamarine light. But these new people belonged neither to the one nor to the other, and the infallible sign of this was that the local costume was beginning to disappear. “Insignoriccati,” or “money- gentrified,” as they called those who had turned their backs on their own origins, they were attracted to the caffè because there they could stand shoulder to shoulder with Boelle and Bartolino, with all those lawyers who had never opened a law book, with whom Nuoro was crammed; and the caffè helped them to disguise their own poverty. No one, in any case, asked anyone else about their business.
Among the novices who had drifted in was Pietro Catte, whom we met as a boy in Maestro Messa’s class; the one, you remember, who confused the seven hills with the Etruscan kings. Now, of course, he was a grown man, corpulent, with eyes more bovine than ever. His misfortune was that he had ever learned to read and write, because he had been given a job as conductor on the first bus to be seen in Nuoro, and he had got caught taking the money without giving the tickets. Well, they gave him the sack, and now, still living on that aunt of his, he had found the only position he was suited to occupy; that is, the caffè table. He was boisterous and jocular, and as a cardplayer he could beat the lot of them at “tresette.” For this reason Boelle always wanted him as a partner. I remember now that I talked to him in the cemetery where they buried him, although he came to a bad end. But at that time he was full of life, and liked his glass of wine as much as Maestro Manca, although he could hold it better.
*
It is two weeks now since I broke off this narrative. It was Pietro Catte, and no other, who made my pen run dry. Boss-eyed Pietro Catte, bloated with wine, with his blubbery lips, appeared before me in all his utter fatuity. As futile as Boelle and Bartolino, as futile as Don Sebastiano and Don Pasqualino; as futile as Nuoro itself. Could I be wasting my time (and these indeed my last few years) in bestowing some substance on people who never had any, and could never have had any, who cannot be of interest to anyone, since their very existence dwindles down to a birth certificate and a death certificate? I have suffered terribly because of the sudden void that has formed around me. There is not the least doubt that Pietro Catte in the abstract has no reality, any more than any other man on the face of the earth. But the fact remains that he was born and that he died, as those irrefutable certificates prove. And this endows him with reality in actual fact, because birth and death are the two moments at which the infinite become finite; and the infinite can have no being except through the finite. Pietro Cat
te attempted to escape from reality by hanging himself on that tree at Biscollai, but his was a vain hope, because one cannot erase one’s own birth. This is why I say that Pietro Catte, like all the hapless characters in this story, is important, and ought to be interesting to everyone: if he does not exist, then none of us exist.
And the same goes for Fileddu. Fileddu (the meaning of the word is “string”) might be considered the jester to the “court” of the Caffè Tettamanzi, not to say the buffoon of the larger court of Nuoro. In effect, he was a peaceable simpleton who had taken it into his head to attach himself to the gentry, imagining that he was himself a gentleman. Life is a dream, and he was not awakened from his dream by the howls and catcalls that greeted him when he made his appearance at the top of the Corso, after emerging from the hovel where he lived in conditions that for others would have been those of the direst penury. He tended to weave as he walked, perhaps because of some defect in his sense of balance, but he always wore dark clothes, clothes that might have been considered elegant if they had not been four times his size: the size, let us say, of Boelle Zicheri, whose faithful spaniel he was. Every now and then Boelle gave him the job of putting up the shutters over the pharmacy windows, but this was simply an excuse for slipping him a little spare change, because hunger was sapping his strength. There were a few people, off in the wings, who took this middle-class calling of his in all seriousness, and therefore hated him (and I am thinking particularly of Casizolu, a simpleton like him, but who thought of himself as worse off). However, the gentlemen of the caffè took him into their circle, and with them he could live out his dream to the full. Who cared if the rascally boys, lying in wait at the corners of the alleyways, caught him as he passed and chanted, “Ting-a-ling-a-ling” and “Bottom of a slop pail!” which were two of the many taunts that the local genius for nastiness invented daily for his torture. He would sit at the same table as Boelle and Bartolino, being (gentleman that he was) on equal terms with them, with his beady little eyes, listening to the praises they heaped on him. Really a decent lot, the boys in the bar. And one evening it was Bartolino himself (or at least so I seem to remember) who gave him a great thump on his bony shoulder and said, “Francesco”—(this was his real name, which was thrown away on him—“you can’t go on living alone like this, you’ve got to get married! We’ll find you a wife. You must pay court to Carolina, Don Pasqualino’s daughter!”
The Day of Judgment Page 16