Enormous guffaws rose from one end of the caffè to the other. Robertino Caramelli, Francesco Casu and Don Gaetano Pilleri laid down their cards—one can’t say more than that—and came up to the table. For you should know that if Don Pasqualino was the god of Nuoro, Carolina was a goddess in paradise, so lovely was she in her eighteen years. These three joined in the general chorus, and the cackles rose to the skies above. Fileddu was in his seventh heaven. That Homeric laughter seemed to him an indication of love, as if someone were urging him to venture along unknown paths. But were they really unknown? Had he not always thought of this marriage, as a dream within a dream, and today these gentlemen had made him aware of it? Tomorrow he would begin to walk beneath her windows, and would wait for the moments when she left the house. And in the meantime he was dazed with gratitude, while the gentlemen, all crowding around him (except for the glowering Don Ricciotti, in a corner), improvised an engagement party and ordered cakes and sweet wine, which he drank, though not much, because long fasting had shrunk his stomach, while the others raised their glasses in a toast to the bride and groom, Carolina and Fileddu.
Everything would have been fine if Fileddu’s mother, who was also half-witted, had not been standing in rags in the wintry street, following the scene through the glass panes of the door, her eyes as pallid as a blind woman’s. The same old story. She would certainly not have dared to go into the caffè, for she was afraid of those gentlemen, and was in awe of them, but she instinctively felt the injustice that was being done in there, and that she had to save her son. She waited for hours, until everyone had gone home, to collect this son of hers and take him protectively back to the hovel, where at least she would know he was safe until morning came.
*1 I profess my faith in a demijohn of that [i.e., wine] of Zia Tatana [Sebastiana] Faragone, etc., she being the owner of one of the hillside vineyards below Locoi.
12
In the depths of her heart Donna Vincenza was alone, but she was not alone in her kingdom in Via Asproni, in the house which Don Sebastiano had built and left in her hands. The family was growing and taking on the form it would maintain forever, even when internal trouble undermined its existence, and in a material sense dissolved it, as with all the things of this world. But a family, this mystery in which our own person is multiplied, does not overcome solitude, but increases it. Donna Vincenza was not alone simply because other solitary lives gravitated around her, forming her little court.
The humble house in which she had lived before Don Sebastiano bore her off to the Santa Maria district was surrounded by even more modest dwellings, where poor women lived their lives and earned their bread by performing age-old tasks: making cakes to order, weaving cloth, grinding corn. Zia Isporzedda, whom we met on the occasion of my ghostly return to the cemetery, did indeed own a grindstone, and Parlamento, her blindfolded donkey, had been circling around it for five hundred years before Don Pasqualino stopped him with his steam mill. All these people looked with respect, and indeed with love, on the daughter of Monsù Vugliè, that Piedmontese who had died so unexpectedly. They were touched by her charm, and when Don Sebastiano wanted to marry her, and bestowed a title on her, they gathered around her as if she were a daughter or a sister before whom a luminous future is opening up. And with the passing of the years they did not forget her. In fact, because of the changed circumstances, they almost felt themselves to be her satellites, and used to visit her in the immense house, bringing her their little gifts. Zia Isporzedda especially, who while sitting on the ground beside her donkey had learned to meditate, understood—although she understood nothing—the price Donna Vincenza paid for her riches, and whenever she could used to lend her a hand. While helping to shell peas or broad beans, she would tell her what was new at Sa bena so that, although she lived a cloistered life, Donna Vincenza was always up to date with events. Even the poor can give of their charity to the rich.
Don Sebastiano did not even spare a glance for these poor faithful creatures of his wife’s when he passed them in the huge hallway of his house, while they drew back against the whitewashed wall with the broad black wainscot that typified the dwellings of the rich. On the other hand, though without halting in his stride, he used solemnly to greet Zia Gonaria, Donna Vincenza’s poor cousin, who would come in with a smile and a greeting every day on her way to and from school. Gonaria (also named Sanna but not related to Don Sebastiano) was “Aunt Gonaria” to the family, because the children called her that, especially the youngest, who was her godchild; and she used to tell how at baptism the infant had reached out to touch the flame of the candle she was holding. This was not true, of course, though she had most certainly seen it, because she lived passionately in a world of dreams. The dream was not only of the child reaching out of the swaddling clothes with his tiny hand, like a latter-day Hercules. No, it was the flame itself, in which the spirit was incarnated as in the Host: she saw it, and in a supreme hallucination saw her godchild take hold of the spirit between his little fingers, without getting burned. She had told the story many times in her life, even more frequently now that her godson was growing up, and already stood head and shoulders above her. For Zia Gonaria was a tiny little person, and would have seemed tinier still but for the perfect figure beneath her black dress, and the face of an angel under the big white kerchief that she bound tightly around her head like a bandage.
Donna Vincenza awaited her cousin’s visit with a feeling of mischievous affection, because they were in a mysterious way complementary to each other. Gonaria knew all about God and nothing whatever about life. A virgin by absolute vocation, like the three sisters with whom she lived in a house rescued from past disasters (the memory of which was the pride of their solitude), it was with a joyful heart that she entered the house of a cousin who had brought forth so many creatures to the glory of the Lord. There she found, and as it were absorbed, the need for motherhood which every woman carries within her, and which every day she exercised on her pupils; for she was a teacher, and all the various generations of girls in Nuoro had come under her care. Mothers and daughters and even grandmothers had taken their turns for thirty years on the benches of that school, where those who had it in them learned to write, but all who left her were in love with God. Donna Vincenza knew all about life, and she amused herself by opposing it to the God of her cousin who, herself being nothing but love, was proof against all ironies; which in any case were good-natured enough, for Donna Vincenza also needed God, and for this reason was fond of her bizarre relative. Anyway, these innocent disputes ended with a cup of coffee, the only thing Gonaria was really insatiable for.
Gonaria, Zia Gonaria, was a saint. Her name, naturally, does not appear in the calendar. No one can become a saint without the backing of an organization, and so her spirit still drifts about the cemetery of Nuoro, like the souls of the sinners, and mingles with them. There she came to me and clasped my knees, as I would clasp hers as a child; and she begged me desperately for love.
That sullen God who had made Don Pasqualino and Dirripezza, Don Sebastiano and Boelle and Bartolino live on the soil of Nuoro, along with a hundred others whom we have met or will meet, in a moment of joy, with His own hands, had molded Zia Gonaria. Without doubt He had created her for her to adore Him, and in fact ever since she was a child He had made Himself known to her, in the form of a firefly entering a dark room, in the form of a newborn lamb that the shepherd carried by the feet, with its umbilical cord still attached, in the form of an egg laid in the strawstack, in the form of the sun or of the infinite stars that glittered in the sky. The house where God decreed she should be born was large and affluent, but in a few years it became small and impoverished. Her father (the usual story) had seen the Continentals amassing money by cutting down the forests, and although he had a university education, he thought he could do the same thing, and to start with he did quite well. But then, one time in the month of August, there was a storm that lasted for three days, in a part of the country where rain is u
nknown. The bark that he had stacked in the open, waiting for the buyer to collect it, rotted away completely. Her father trudged in dismay from stack to stack, staring at the red rivulets of tannine flowing down the hillside. In desperation he took ship to Leghorn, center of the trade, and never returned. He was carried off by a stroke as soon as he got there.
This at least was the tale passed down the generations. Her mother died shortly afterward, and Gonaria, Battistina, Tommasina, and Giuseppina, four little sisters, with a brother named Ciriaco, were left on their own. That God who had created Gonaria for His joy, or for His sport, entered and became used to the little house where they were forced to shelter, left with nothing except the brazier in winter, on the lid of which the cat with singed fur used to purr. And this also was God. Supper was meager, but the young girl found her nourishment elsewhere, and it may have been then that by an unconscious vow she got used to doing without food, aided in this by continuous headaches, which were also a manifestation of God, and which as a grown-up she symbolized by the white kerchief binding her hair. But God manifested Himself when she was a young woman, for—endowed with intelligence as she was—she soon managed to become a schoolmistress, with a salary of ninety-three lire a month, on which the little family’s new home was built.
Gonaria would not for the life of her handle the money, because the devil was hidden in every coin, and just as she saw God, she also saw the devil. Her ninety-three lire ended up in the hands of Giuseppina, the sister who by vocation had taken on the role of Martha, and looked after the cooking and other small expenses. The other two sisters, Battistina and Tommasina, lived in the past, that is, on the memory of their lost wealth, which meant that Gonaria and Giuseppina did all their work as well. But there was no harm in this, because each in her own way followed her destiny, which the others accepted. In any case, they were very different from one another, because Battistina to some extent shared the ecstatic soul of Gonaria, while Tommasina was sanguine and fat, and perhaps she underwent, rather than underwrote, the vocation of celibacy which they all shared. No one could then have known that God would make use of Tommasina for the trap He was preparing for His creature.
They all slept in the same room, because they were scared. The “butterfly” (the wick that circled continuously in its dish of oil) attenuated the darkness of night, and helped Gonaria to remain awake, because sleeping seemed to her to be time stolen from God. The shouts of the drunkards reached her every so often from the street, and more than once she had recognized the voice and the curses of her colleague Maestro Manca, hunted down by the savagery of those townspeople who kept him in terror of death. Then she would pray for him, even though at school in the morning, when the fumes of alcohol had abated, he would make dirty remarks to her, teasing her for her chastity; but he did it affectionately, and as if to make a display of his baseness. When exhaustion silenced the street noises, from the room on the other side of the corridor she heard a gentle snoring sound that filled her with consolation; for it was the breathing of her brother the priest, sleeping soundly until dawn broke and summoned him to say Mass.
Ciriaco (which was his name, if you remember) was the only man in that household of women who had an instinctive horror of men. What could he do but enter the seminary and take orders? It was the only way for him to live with his sisters—to become half woman himself. It is doubtful that he had a real vocation, but that was of little importance. What is certain is that in the dedication of her brother, her only brother, to the priesthood, Gonaria saw the sign of Grace. God had come in person to live in her house. With ecstatic eyes she looked upon those hands which had the magic power of touching the untouchable, the sacred Host in which the body of Our Lord was hidden—but not so hidden as to be invisible to her. And she surrounded him with attentions, put up with his quirks, and accepted the unkind words that he sometimes answered back with. Ciriaco was a simple man, had studied only to a very limited extent, and understood little about those sisters of his, who lived like nuns without taking the veil. On the other hand, there was nothing worse than seeing himself surrounded by a love that transfigured him, because when it comes down to it everyone wants to be himself with his familiar mediocrity. What he was interested in, and rightly, was that Gonaria should get a good hot cup of coffee to him in the sacristy when he came out from Mass, having had nothing since the evening before; a service she performed lovingly, with the help of a small girl, a little pupil of hers from a very poor family, but full of intelligence, who came to do little chores for her teacher out of gratitude. Her name was Peppeddedda, which means Giuseppina.
A house with four unmarried sisters is never lonely. With unflagging constancy the other unmarried old women would come in from the neighborhood, dressed in local costume. At a certain hour they would lock up their little houses, put the key into their large red-bordered pocket, and enter the living room without knocking. They would all sit motionless in the evening that filled the room, saving on lighting, and eventually they were reduced to shadows, mute witnesses to meaningless vigils. Gonaria, back from school, was the only one who would wander around, complaining about her headache, which no one believed in any longer. The priest would sit in the corner between the sideboard and the door onto the terrace, his biretta on his head. Occasionally he would lose patience and shout at his saintly sister, “Can’t you ever keep still? Anyone would think you were a top!”
A light arrived when darkness had eliminated the shadows, and nothing was left alive except the glow of embers, if it was winter. From time to time Gonaria would throw a lump of sugar into the brazier, because it gave off a good smell, but also because she could think of the smoke it produced as incense. The priest lost his temper every time, as he had quite enough of incense in church; and anyway, he was a man, and had no truck with these hallucinations. In the lamplight the visitors began to stir, and one by one they went away for the same reason they had come: they had used up two hours of their lives, and had helped others to do so. Tomorrow would be the same. They did not know it, but this also was an exchange of charity.
The greatest difficulty I find in this return to the past is keeping things in perspective. And one can see why. Each of us, even if he confines himself to looking within, sees himself as if in a fixed portrait, not in the successive pictures of real existence. This movement is a continuous transformation, and it is impossible to grasp and stop the individual instants of this transformation. From this point of view we may doubt our very existence; or else our reality resides only in death. History is a waxworks. I have just halted the four sisters in the immobility of a single twilight, because that is how I see them after so many years. But in fact they used to move, and indeed to become agitated, since their secluded life was not peaceful. The family had become more prosperous because Gonaria’s earnings had been swelled by those of the priest, but nature reacted differently in each of them; and then, one cannot live on memories as Tommasina did while (apart from Battistina, who was a mere shadow) the others were working. Therefore storms erupted from time to time, but died down at once, because those who go humbly to work have far more sense of the past than those who sit and contemplate it in idleness. And then there was the priest, who when things went wrong would retire to his room, the only real room in the house, lovingly prepared for him by Gonaria with a large crucifix surrounded by wreaths of artificial flowers. When this happened they all fell silent, or blamed one another in low voices, almost in whispers. They never ate together, because each would go and help herself to a ladleful of the soup which Giuseppina had made, while Gonaria would walk around nibbling a piece of bread. Only the priest used to sit at table with everything laid out in front of him. Tommasina and Battistina always wanted to use the same plate, and sometimes hid it without even washing it. These were signs of the sickness which lay smoldering in them, and which later burst out most terribly.
Gonaria and Ciriaco left home early in the morning, one to go to school and the other to go to Mass. Tommasina grumb
led that they were running away, for it did not occur to her that the little money that enabled them to live came from there, because in her dream she obtained her riches from the coffers of the past. “We are rich, we are rich,” she would say in her powerful voice to the poor women who came to visit Gonaria (for no one would have bothered to visit Tommasina). She was also quite capable of taking the money from the pot where it was kept and distributing it to the poor, throwing Giuseppina into desperation, since she had only this to count on to keep the wolf from the door. She boasted about her riches as she prided herself on her health, or as she would say it was not Gonaria but she and she alone who believed in God, because she surrounded herself with holy pictures and in her chest of drawers kept a piece of wood from the true cross of Jesus, brought to her by a missionary from Jerusalem. The world revolved around her, in fact, and with the world turned everything else, her sisters, her brother, the neighbors; because as everyone knows, one mustn’t wake sleepwalkers on the edge of a precipice.
My problem is, whether there is any sort of connection between these women and the drinkers in the Caffè Tettamanzi, regarding them both as I do, from my old age. They lived beneath the same sky, and they sleep, in the same grave. This is all I can say, and it is something they have in common, quite independently of whether God or the devil took their souls. In any case the priest, their brother, kept himself apart from his sisters’ way of life, even though he profited from the comforts they procured for him. In his simple heart he cherished a great dream, the dream of becoming a canon. For this reason he steered clear of his underprivileged colleagues, and frequented the curia instead, gaining the trust of the bishops as they came and went one after the other. One day his hat would be adorned with the red cord, and a new life would start in the poor house that it had taken so much to rebuild.
The Day of Judgment Page 17