Gonaria was waiting for the day, because a canon is closer to God than an ordinary priest. She had confided in Donna Vincenza, who teased her about it but promised that when the day came she would make her a great cake studded with chocolates. For it would be a grand occasion.
*
Donna Vincenza knew nothing about philosophy, and indeed she had never heard it mentioned. But she lived nailed to her chair, and this led her to meditate. When at the other end of the courtyard Don Sebastiano mounted his horse and left through the gateway without saying a word to her, a scene that occurred daily immediately following the afternoon siesta, Donna Vincenza was left alone, and sank into the abyss of time, which was as motionless as herself, hanging over her comfortless figure like the grapes on the pergola, which her shortsighted eyes saw forming and growing every year, enormous stalactites in a lightless cavern. She would count them one by one, ten times or a hundred times over, to keep at bay the ghosts that assailed her on all sides. But there were certain fixations that some malicious being had driven into her head. Over the boundary wall she could hear the voices of her neighbors, who at one time had been friends, and then had let her down, because they had not been prepared to give up a right of way. Don Sebastiano held all the cards, and could have forced them to give it up. But as usual, because she wanted it, and because he was accommodating toward outsiders, he had done nothing. She had been left with the fierce smart of a defeat, which still persecuted her. But what did she really care about a right of way? The truth of the matter was that those neighbors were content with their little lives, and she measured her unhappiness against their contentment. At one time, when old Donna Angelina was alive, they used to come and visit, and in fact they were distant relatives. Their house was small, rather like a Sèuna house, although it was in the middle of town. There was the courtyard and the well, and beside the well stood a fabulous bush of lemon verbena, which spread its perfume in all directions. Don Sebastiano, who never set foot in any house, felt drawn toward the scent and occasionally asked if he could pick a sprig of it. Then Donna Angelina had sent to Oliena for a girl to keep her company, and Donna Vincenza also had welcomed her as a daughter, and there were no secrets between them. But in fact there was a secret. For the girl, who seemed destined to remain a spinster, at a certain point gave them all the slip and attached herself to a ludicrous “master of cloth,” alias a tailor, who married her. As he had money, he turned the cottage into a miniature palace, with a smart shop on the ground floor. The dispute over the right of way started at that time, because in order to do the construction work, they were obliged to carry lime across a piece of Don Sebastiano’s land, thereby giving him the upper hand. Donna Vincenza understood the whole business clearly, but she raised her voice in vain. The end of it all was that she lost the company of the girl and was left saddled with the right of way.
These things might seem absurdities, and maybe they were, but they ceased to be so the moment they filled the life of a lonely woman tied to her chair. Don Sebastiano had none of these nightmares, because he lived for the future. He was not even really interested in the present, meaning this woman from whom he had already harvested all he could, but who on the other hand was as concerned as he was, and more so, with the conservation of what he had built up; and in those sons who were destined to grow like the vines he had planted in arid soil, each with his own character, and all of them in awe of his example. For them he had done what he had to do, had watched over them, and straightened them up like young vines. Now they formed a small community, in which they taught each other, and he could keep his distance. And in fact they were almost grown men. They attended school, and some of them went to Sassari or Cagliari, the unknown, distant cities, because at that time Nuoro offered only five years of secondary school—the world had not yet turned upside down. Everyone in Nuoro envied Don Sebastiano his children, especially those shepherd families who thought that it was enough to send one’s children to school for them to escape from the tribe. His sons grew up bound to one another by the most intense bond of love, well aware of their responsibility, and therefore organized on the basis of a law (even if it was only that of becoming lawyers or doctors or engineers) that none of them could fail to observe. The most interesting moment in the life of a family is when the children, as they grow up, recognize each other, discover diversity in unity, like the figures in a picture composed and held together by a strong frame. Each of these young Sannas seemed to bear the stamp of the destiny that awaited him, but whatever it might be, none of them would ever be able to erase the mark he had received at birth, the physical resemblance he shared with the others, and would never be able to be just himself and nothing more. The real mystery of the family lies here, in the relationships between the children, more than in the one between the parents and the children. Nor is it only a question of the people involved but also of the property, because the brothers possess nothing but are mystically invested with property, with Isporòsile, with Locoi, with Lardine, an investiture that has roots deeper than in the Civil Code, because it is a spiritual thing destined never to perish.
With her intelligence heightened by solitude, Donna Vincenza transferred the distresses of the past into the present, which was the future. In her hallucinations she saw her grown-up sons as they were when she held them in her arms, or laid them in their cradles, when with her body she shielded them from harm. These boys existed solely because she had created them, and the family would hold together as long as she and Don Sebastiano were there. Even Cain and Abel, she told herself wildly, had grown up together. As long as Don Sebastiano held the reins, even slackly, the unity would be preserved. But for how long? For this reason she harbored none of the sugared illusions of Don Sebastiano. For her nothing existed but the boys, one by one, and they were as the day they were born. From the armchair she had been reduced to, she anxiously watched over the character and tendencies of each one of them, and first and foremost she kept an eye on their health, because some of them were delicate. Peppino, for example, who had had typhus as a child and had survived by a miracle—so much so that in gratitude they had dressed him in a tiny Franciscan habit for a whole year—seemed never to have recovered, with that pinched nose and those frail hands of his; and Ludovico, the constant invalid, the wise man of the family, who had trouble with his intestines and had to be cossetted with bowls of broth which she prepared with her own hands. What would have become of them without her? And the time would come for them to choose careers. Would they succeed? Everyone said they would, but she had her eye on Giovanni, the eldest, who had some odd ways. Unlike the others, who were unpredictable but merry, he took advantage of the difference in age to isolate himself, to shut himself in his room, and to sink into terrible silences that turned to yells if anyone, even his father or mother, asked him why. Even worse, it seemed that he suffered from the same thing at school as well, for he was no longer the steady-going student he had once been. There was a rumor that he was in love with Don Pasqualino’s eldest daughter, who was wonderfully beautiful but incurably sick. Donna Vincenza had learned this from Gonaria, who, like all saints, had a nose for this sort of thing. And then, for some time he had poured scorn on the house, finding everything wrong with it, and it seemed he was even ashamed of his mother, because of her great fat legs, deformed by arthritis and childbearing. One had to be blind, like Don Sebastiano, not to see it. And then there was Pasquale, the third from youngest, who had never had a passion for study like the other brothers, who punished him in vain, hiding his shoes or shutting him up in the loft. And Michele... And Gaetano... There was only the youngest, the one she loved, who still clambered onto her lap, and would have covered her with kisses if she had allowed it; but he was little, and troubles had not yet touched him.
These were the envied children of whom Don Sebastiano was so proud. But she knew that the touchstone for children is not the family, but outsiders; it was this Nuoro, populated largely by drunkards, but also by forceful people ready t
o fight and to conquer. She thought about them one by one, these lawyers who triumphed in the tribunal, for they were all a bunch of pettifoggers and the tribunal was like the town gym. She had never seen them because she did not leave the house, and her eyes were as if covered with a veil, but word reached her from the law courts, passing by way of the Caffè Tettamanzi. The prince of the tribunal was Paolo Masala, a slightly hybrid offspring (since his father was not Nuorese) of the Mannu clan. Every delinquent in Nuoro, and many from Sardinia at large, had been through his hands. His voice was like a song, and he cast a spell on the judges and the carabinieri so that they let the accused go free, accompanying him to the door with a thousand apologies. Naturally, Donna Vincenza had never been in the tribunal, but she had heard him, because he nourished political ambitions, and so every now and then would give a speech in the little piazza near her house. Her heart was full when the echoes of the applause had died away. This was not due to envy, but to fear. She realized that to speak like this, and to act like this, one had to have immense, hidden powers, which her sons could not possess, because neither she nor Don Sebastiano, with his pen and his notary’s deeds, could have given it to them. The world seemed to her to be hostile, a stage where only a handful of initiates were able to perform. And her sons were certainly not among this number.
Sunset often found her wrapped in these thoughts. Don Sebastiano was in his study, lost behind the headlines. She was waiting for the boys to return. What should be done? What should be done? She needed a loving voice to persuade her that in this world there is something else, something outside reality, in which we must believe so as not to die. But Donna Vincenza transferred her past into the future, and in her past there was no place for Providence. Meanwhile, the days passed, slowly, inexorably, over her immobile form. As winter set in, at sunset she would rise very very slowly from her chair, and walk unsteadily over the cobbled courtyard toward the dining-room fire. There she knew she would find Don Priamo, that brother of Don Sebastiano’s whom we already know, and who was already well on in years. He would appear with the first cold days, sidle into the room, and sit at a corner of the fire, which shed light on his great beard. He stayed there for hours and hours without uttering a word. When he was well warmed through, he would go away exactly as he had come. This was why Donna Vincenza hated him.
13
Don Ricciotti, alias Maestro Bellisai, was sitting by himself, his bottom overflowing from the wicker chair in the Caffè Tettamanzi, but his brain was working with the feverishness of someone who feels that he is on the point of achieving the aim of his whole life, but also knows that his life is near its end. With his eyes he poured disdain on all those revelers, and with words as well on feeble Maestro Manca, who sold himself for a glass of wine. In fact he wouldn’t have gone to the caffè at all if his home, his wife included, hadn’t turned his stomach. His mind was paying close attention to certain scraps of information that were going the rounds. Apart from the business of teaching and Maestro Marinotti, and apart from the boys scoffing at Maestro Mossa’s Lord’s Prayer, on the previous day a gang of youngsters had poked fun at the priests who, with the bishop in their midst, were taking their evening walk through the gardens. Worse still, the youngsters—recognized at once—came from San Pietro, and within living memory no one had ever dared to cross the frontier of the middle-class town, the district of Santa Maria. At the estanco, Don Gaetano’s tobacco kiosk, there were newspapers never seen before, such as Avanti! And more than one student flaunted them in the caffè, as if to challenge Boelle and Bartolino. He had cautiously sounded the students out, and had heard them talk of a certain Marx, and of revolution and socialism, but he had realized at once that these were indolent dreamers, useless in the struggle to force Don Sebastiano to give up the house at Loreneddu. All the same, there was something in those ideas, something that had not existed before. It was just that it had to be translated into Nuorese; that is, by replacing the ideas with the facts and personalities of Nuoro, leaving out the rest of the world. He began to rave, to stay awake all night. And thus it was that troubled times began for Nuoro.
This joyless town in which it had been his fate to live, which was indifferent to everything, which had turned a blind eye to all the pillages inflicted on him, slept the sleep of centuries, and was only a town in a manner of speaking; because a town is a place where you have a neighbor, not one where everyone goes through the motions of living, in houses as impregnable as castles, or at the pharmacy, or at the caffè. The only meeting point is the cemetery. The essential was to awake these dead and set them against Don Sebastiano. In the course of the year there were going to be political elections. He would put himself up as a candidate. It was an insane idea, because the deputies from Nuoro had always been lawyers, and the Nuorese would be ashamed to be represented by an elementary-school teacher. On top of this, the perpetual deputy was that same Avvocato Paolo Masala, the formidable orator whose speechifying Donna Vincenza had heard with her heart in her boots. Who cared? Times were changing. It was a question of knowing where and how to start.
With San Pietro, clearly, there was nothing to be done. Those people were either rich or robbers, or both at the same time. They did not need him. The town center, Santa Maria, was the stronghold of the enemy: Don Sebastiano, Don Pasqualino, Don Gabriele, Don Serafino, and all the others of Don Sebastiano’s ilk. There remained the peasant suburb of Sèuna, that small group of harmless souls whose houses hung in the air, with the cart and the yoke for the oxen in front of the house. They all lived hand to mouth, and did not know they were poor because they did not know what wealth was. The landowners of Santa Maria, and even a few individuals from San Pietro, used to go there to search them out whenever they needed a day’s work done, and were respectfully received in the room with the fireplace in the middle and the smoke that went up through the roof and was lost in the blue. This was the defenseless place he could put pressure on. He mentioned the idea to a few of those fops who were flashing Avanti! around, but needless to say, they took fright. It was easier to say boo to the priests when they were taking their walk. He swore to himself that the peasants of Sèuna would get him back his house at Loreneddu, with its garden, its orchard, and at the far end, the copse of laurel that his father had planted (or so he imagined).
Sèuna was the home of many of his old pupils, who had failed at school and gone back to wearing local costume. They had taken up the reins of the oxen which their aged fathers, now seated on the stone “street” outside their doorways—if they were alive at all—had let drop from their hands. He made up his mind to pay them a call.
He arrived toward evening, when they were coming home after their long day’s work and getting ready for a supper of barley bread moistened with oil. At first they were astonished, because although he was a schoolteacher he was by birth a gentleman. Then little by little they got used to seeing him, and offered him bread, which he declined. It was like being back at school, after so many years, except that now it was not a matter of that incomprehensible alphabet, but of simpler things more accessible to their simple minds. It was a question of the injustices that they suffered without knowing it, of God who had created the earth, and of those who owned it and those who scratched at it with their rudimentary plows; and of some possible resurrection. His speech was soft and gentle, because he knew that those numbskulls were satisfied with their lot, and would never have dreamed of rebelling against Nuoro and its laws. His aim was merely to open a door to hope in their hearts. Later on they would come to hate Don Sebastiano, Don Serafino, Don Pasqualino, the natural obstacles standing in the way of hope, both for them and for him.
There was great talk in the cottages about this man who spoke like a messiah. In vain did Father Porcu, whose heart was brimful of rancor, declare that this petty schoolmaster was as false as the dean himself, and he could scarcely say more. People were becoming excited, and toward twilight, when Don Ricciotti arrived along with the cooler air, he began to be greeted by swar
ms of barefoot children who escorted him as far as the forecourt of the Grazie, where he now made it his habit to address the throngs. Even Ziu Poddanzu, who had his fixed abode at Sèuna although he spent his life at Locoi, grew pensive once he had heard him, and among the undulations of the vines that he had planted with his own hands he put in a bit of thinking. He decided to set the matter before Don Sebastiano the next time he came, for he was at that time busy making new embankments for the torrent at Isporòsile. When he came, Don Sebastiano said, “Friend, by the holy bond that there is between us, I tell you that this Ricciotti Bellisai is a load of rubbish.” Ziu Poddanzu accepted the description, and thought no more about it. But he was alone in this, not only among the people in Sèuna, but also in San Pietro, and indeed in Santa Maria, for word had spread to such an extent that certain landowners informed the police. An officer was sent down to take a stroll among the boulders of Sèuna, but he found nothing irregular.
With an infallible finger on the pulse of his listeners, Don Ricciotti measured the growth of hope. He had nothing to offer, but there was no need to offer anything. He had set their imaginations in motion and that was enough, at least for the moment. To coax them toward his own purpose, that is, to get them used to the idea of individual injustice, the injustice of Don Sebastiano, who was usurping his house at Loreneddu, he thought that the easiest and least dangerous way would be to act through the res publica. Public business and no one’s business come down to the same thing. And Nuoro, the town that belonged to them as well as to others, possessed immense pastures which those rogues in San Pietro rented for a song, just as it possessed the endless plain of the Prato, grazed over by the sheep of a few privileged persons, but which in their hands would have produced mountains of wheat. Why should Nuoro, which meant the mayor and the aldermen, have its hands on all that property, which belonged to God and therefore to the poor? Maybe in law this argument was a bit oversimplified, but the law was an invention of the rich. The idea he put forward—rather in an undertone, since he didn’t want to run into trouble—was in fact nothing new. Many years before, no one remembered when, they had divided up the vast plateau of Sa Serra between the families of Orune, and at Nuoro itself the Mountain was the property of the commune, and had been split up. It is true that the result was that the poor got nothing and the rich grew richer, so that the Mountain, with its gigantic oaks and crystal springs, was today part of the Corrales estate, and all the poor could do either at Orune or Nuoro was get it off their chests by setting fires every now and then. In fact at Orune, where people are more unruly, as soon as they realized they had been tricked, they went rushing around the streets yelling, “A su connottu” (“Back to what we know”), in an effort to destroy what was already law, and therefore indestructible. This act of daring, which ended in exchanges of musket fire with the carabinieri, gave an undying name to that year (s’annu e su connottu), but the tanche remained in the hands of those who had managed to grab hold of them. Ah, but in those days Don Ricciotti had not been there, and if land were to be divided up today, things would be done properly, and every man in Sèuna would plow his piece of land, would plow his own. It was in the midst of such speeches that he launched the idea of forming an association, one that would lend substance to their demands and direct them toward their common goal, with himself, Don Ricciotti, at the head, but purely as a brother and a guide. At the next election (though this he did not say) the association would automatically be transformed into a party. The following day he sent Dionisi, the town crier, out with his drum (duradum duradum duradum) to announce throughout the length and breadth of Sèuna (but also in San Pietro and Santa Maria) that whoever wanted to join Don Ricciotti’s association should come and sign his name or make his mark the next Sunday in the storeroom on the ground floor of his house. There was nothing to pay.
The Day of Judgment Page 18