The Day of Judgment

by Salvatore Satta

  Dionisi’s drum caused consternation among the people of Nuoro. In the old monastery Maestro Mossa and Maestro Fadda wondered whether an elementary teacher was allowed to “go public” in such a way, setting the boys a bad example. But in the houses of the nobility and the middle classes they trembled, thinking that no good could come of that loafer, a worthy son of his father. That evening Don Pasqualino, Don Gabriele, Don Sebastiano, and the rest of them met earlier than usual in the pharmacy for a consultation. It was perfectly clear that that hothead wanted to turn the place upside down. But why? Each of them felt under attack, and Don Sebastiano felt (though he did not show it) that this scum-of-the-earth was plotting to get his hands on Loreneddu. At the caffè Maestro Manca coined a nickname for his colleague: “the unquiet king.” It became popular at once. But Boelle and Bartolino and the other gamblers just wrote him off as a buffoon, worse than Fileddu. Giovanni Maria Musiu (who in the depths of his heart was thinking about Isporòsile, although on that result of his father’s gambling Don Ricciotti had never made any claims) said that he wouldn’t allow him to sit in the caffè any more, especially as he never ordered anything. Anyway, everyone was unanimous about one thing: that this association (to which some attached the term “criminal”) was a storm in a teacup and wouldn’t last more than three days. The only ones who in their sneaky way kept an eye on the agitated citizens of Nuoro were the youngsters who made catcalls at the priests, and were waiting to see how the wind blew before joining in the game.

  Meanwhile, in Sèuna, in the house of the Perra sisters, the only one with two rooms one above the other, and flowers on the balcony, they were working on the great surprise. On Sunday, when the Seunese went to sign up, they would deliver the banner of the association to Don Ricciotti. They had scraped together a bit of money and bought some red, white, and green material, and now they were sitting up till all hours embroidering in large gold letters the motto which Father Porcu (swallowing his own repugnance for Don Ricciotti) had dug out of a schoolbook: “Ascend the mountain gazing upon your sun.” The letters sprang into place very quickly indeed, because all the neighbors took turns, and on Saturday evening the work was ready. Nuoro stood at the threshold of its great awakening.

  The bells rang madly that Sunday, because—though by sheer coincidence—it was the day of Pentecost. The caffè was already full first thing in the morning. Don Ricciotti had set up a table in his storeroom, with a register and a pencil on it, and sat down to wait, full of good spirits. The Sèunese would turn up one by one, and would fill the book with their crosses, because most of them were illiterate, even those who had been in his class. Suddenly Maestro Manca, who already had two glasses of wine inside him and lived in fear of hallucinations, saw advancing from the bottom of the Corso a Sardinian cart all bedecked with flowers, and drawn by two vast oxen with wreaths of flowers around their necks. It could only be Buziuntu’s cart, because he had the finest yoke of oxen in the whole of Sèuna; and indeed, there he was walking beside them, with his goad bedecked with ribbons. Maestro Manca beckoned to Robertino Caramelli, who had started his everlasting game of “tresette” with Bartolino and Boelle, and they were already quarreling. All eyes turned toward the Iron Bridge. “St. Isidore is here early this year,” said Maestro Manca, raising a laugh. And in fact, after Buziuntu’s cart, which was laden with people in special feast-day costume, came Torroneddu’s cart, also decked out; then the cart of Ziu Seddone, who was old but still full of spirit; then the cart of Peditortu, who limped along solemnly; then the cart of Palimodde, who was cross-eyed; and then all the rest of the carts, with the whole of Sèuna on top, followed by a rabble of barefoot children yelling, “Hooray for Don Ricciotti!”

  This strange procession passed in front of the caffè, dotting the Corso with the odorous leavings of oxen. Everyone was struck dumb. It was Bartolino, who was Continental though Sardinianized, who shouted the first insult: “Louts!” Among the herd of them he had recognized some of his day laborers, to whom he never failed to give a cigar with their pay. And his shout prompted an outbreak of rude noises and gestures. “Buffoons, boobies, bumpkins!” they shouted, and a few voices taunted them with “Seunese!’ accompanied by a cackle. On the other hand, the free-thinking youths began applauding, and it was a miracle that the tables didn’t start flying. In the nearby pharmacy the gentry had retired to the inner room, to avoid the sight. The Seunese continued unruffled on their way, filed in front of Don Ricciotti’s store (and he was the most astonished of all), and stopped at the far end of the little piazza, where they climbed down from their carts.

  Not one of them knew why they were forming this association, but on the other hand no one asked. They were associated in a mysterious hope which the schoolmaster cherished in the tabernacle of his heart. One by one they stepped up to Don Ricciotti’s table, were greeted by their names or nicknames (for the nickname was not considered offensive), and there they made their mark in the book as best they could. Many of them left a lira on the table, as they did in church. They are children, he thought, but I will make them into men. At the end, when he was asked to come outside and see “something,” and they showed him the banner with the golden writing on it, he was truly moved, and plunged his face into the flag to hide his emotion. At that point he felt that he ought to speak, to say in public what he had so often whispered in the houses in Sèuna and in the forecourt of the church. So, mounted on the table which he had carried outside, he spoke as follows. (The news that this unimportant schoolmaster was making a speech spread like wildfire the length and breadth of Nuoro, and people of all sorts and stations came running breathlessly from every direction. Don Sebastiano’s children were among the first to get there, because their house was not far off.)

  “People of Nuoro, my brothers,” he began, and it was enough to hear that first apostrophe to realize that he was a great orator, and so a vast wave of applause greeted it. “Ascend the Mountain gazing upon your sun. Yes, that Mountain that is no longer ours, that until yesterday you climbed with your eyes turned to the ground, backs bent with toil, from now on you will ascend with heads held high, for you are no longer the forsaken peasants of Sèuna or the minion shepherds of San Pietro. With your bedecked oxen, anticipating the day of St. Isidore”—the same idea that Maestro Manca had expressed as a joke—“you have come to found your association, the association that will set you free from slavery forever.” The cheers and the clapping rose to the skies. “Yes, because until today you have been slaves, though you have never known it. It is not true that slavery has been abolished. No one without his own land is free; he is not even a man: he’s just a hand, a laborer. This is what they call you.”

  The peasants of Sèuna hearkened to that resounding voice, which filled all the neighboring streets. They did not know that they were slaves, or even what slavery was, and were therefore dumbfounded. Don Ricciotti saw that he would have to tread carefully, and above all make himself clear to these overgrown children. “We, joining together in poverty, wish to become men, and men we shall be, without harming anyone else. We want the drops of sweat that drip from our brows to fall on soil we can call our own, and to achieve this aim I will lead you to victory. Peditortu, Palimodde, Buziuntu, all of you, brothers and sisters alike, have made a cross as your mark in the first register of the association. This mark is a symbol, and this cross will shortly make you masters of your own destinies. Follow me then, and together we will reach the summit of the Mountain, where the sunlight strikes!”

  And he kissed the banner. An immense shout rose from the far end of the piazza. However, it was not the peasants of Sèuna who were frantically applauding the speaker, but the children of Don Sebastiano, of Don Pasqualino and the other bourgeois gentlemen of Nuoro.

  *

  After this no one talked about anything else. At table, Don Sebastiano would “chew his soup,” as he was wont to say to his boys when they were eating too slowly; and family meals became gloomier and gloomier. He could have imagined almost anything,
but not that that good-for-nothing Ricciotti Bellisai could gain credence in his own family. At last one day, as if talking to himself, he spluttered, “We’ve come to this then, that a downright degenerate comes and upsets the peace and quiet of the community with his politics.” He then added that it was not correct to call Don Ricciotti a degenerate, because he was nothing but his father’s son. This started an argument in which the boys went so far as to question the legitimacy of their father’s possession of Loreneddu; at which Don Sebastiano rose, left his half-eaten plate of boiled meat, and went out, banging the door behind him. Donna Vincenza had not opened her mouth. She was following another train of thought. The way her boys reacted in favor of the poor she saw as yet another sign of their inability to face up to life, and she withdrew into gloomy forebodings. It was not that the poor ought not to be helped; what frightened her was the weakness of character, the inability to stand up to others. Ricciotti was certainly a scoundrel, for she had known his father well, and knew all the stories about him. But he was a man of some force of character, and a clever speaker, and this worried her for the sake of her sons; all of them, but especially Ludovico, who was so delicate in health and so sententious in his manner of speech. Loreneddu was important for this reason, and not because of the four walls that she had never seen, or remembered only as in a dream: it was important because her sons were prepared to renounce it after hearing half a dozen words. As if Giovanni, the eldest, wasn’t enough, getting more sullen day by day, avoiding everyone, and constantly bickering with his brothers, who poked fun at him. What next?

  But family dissension was widespread, and the Sèuna movement came close to becoming the movement of the sons of the rich, who joined the association en masse, not without causing Don Ricciotti some alarm. As for him, he went on giving speeches, each more successful than the last. Even at the caffè they no longer knew what to think, and began to regard him with a certain preoccupied admiration, all the more so because the priest-taunting youths, who had swelled in numbers, had already joined his ranks and set him up in their midst. The chaos was at its height when news arrived from Rome that the Chamber of Deputies had been dissolved and that new elections were announced for November 23. Everyone held his breath and waited; Don Ricciotti sensed that his moment had come.

  In the caffè they all swore that he would never have the nerve to stand as a candidate, not only against Paolo Masala, but against those eternal rejects Avvocato Orrù and Avvocato Corda. The vicar, who you will remember had the mandate of all his relatives from Orune and Olzai in supporting the candidature of his nephew Dr. Porcu, the first Catholic candidate in all Sardinia, from the depths of his presbytery leveled curses against this paltry schoolmaster who had come and upset his plans. Don Ricciotti went twice as often to Sèuna to sound out his faithful flock, who were expecting the distribution of land on the Prato. He calculated the risks, and decided that if he lost it would be the end of him. Perhaps it was worth making one last bid.

  It was late at night, an almost winter’s night such as you get in Nuoro at the end of the summer, when the skies break open and rain ravages the fields. The roads were deserted and the first rolling mists shrouded the town. Don Ricciotti, who had spent four sleepless nights, approached Don Sebastiano’s front door and raised the brass knocker. He paused a moment with hand uplifted, and then left destiny to take its course. A sound that seemed to him funereal boomed in the immense hallway.

  “Who is it?” said a woman’s voice.

  “Friend,” he replied. A crack of light showed, and the maid recognized the tubby dark figure of the teacher.

  “Wait a moment.” With her heart in her mouth she entered the dining room, where the master of the house was reading the paper, surrounded by his sons doing their homework and Donna Vincenza in her corner.

  “Don Ricciotti is here, and wants to speak to the master.”

  There was a moment of panic. But Don Sebastiano, who knew no such thing as fear, said at once, “Ask him in and send him up to the study, where I am now going.” Declining the presence of his sons, he went to the bedroom next to his study, opened a drawer and took out a pistol, which he hadn’t touched since the days when he used to ride all over the countryside to draw up deeds. He slipped off the safety catch and hid the gun under a sheet of official paper on his desk. Then he said, “Come in.”

  The flabby figure of Don Ricciotti entered, and Don Sebastiano at once realized that he was in no danger. “What is it, then?”

  “Sebastiano,” he said, “we have known each other for a long time. We were boys together.”

  “True.”

  “You have seen what has happened. I am only an elementary-school teacher, but in a few months I have managed to bring the whole of Nuoro to my feet.”

  “So I have seen. You are good at talking and even better at making promises.”

  Don Ricciotti did not catch on, and proceeded: “Now I am running for deputy. I have nearly three thousand members in my association and am sure to win. And do you know what? If I become a deputy you will all live to regret it. You have no idea what I am capable of.”

  “And so?”

  “So, I have no wish to fight, whatever they may say. I am old and tired. The Seunese don’t matter a fig to me. I have come for reasons you very well know. Once again I ask you to give me back the house at Loreneddu, before I take it by force.”

  Don Sebastiano glanced at that sheet of stamped paper covering the pistol, and decided to give him rope. “Listen here,” he said. “If you give me a single reason why I should give it to you, I’m prepared to do so.”

  The rain was lashing against the windowpanes; the light of the oil lamp fell on the teacher’s white face, and seemed to put new life into it.

  “You bought that house at auction,” he replied.

  “And so?”

  “So it means that my father didn’t sell it to you. You bought it without his wanting you to. It’s as if you had stolen it.”

  “You’re mad.”

  “No, I’m not mad. Listen to me. My father gambled away Isporòsile, and that land, worth a million, is in the hands of Giovanni Maria Musiu. But from him I don’t ask anything. So much the worse for my father, who threw it away. But your case is different.”

  “Why is it different? Your father was up to his neck in debts to the bank, and no one wanted to buy the house when it was put up for auction. He came to me in tears and begged me to bid for it, otherwise they’d have had the shirt off his back.”

  “I know that perfectly well, and it’s exactly what condemns you. If no one had made an offer, he would have kept the house.”

  Don Sebastiano was on the point of telling him that he was as mad as his father. But he held back a moment.

  This man’s madness had a germ of truth in it, one that he, as a notary who had attended so many auctions, had never thought of. A debtor who does not pay is subject to the confiscation of his property. This was written in the Civil Code that lay before him (an old miniature edition with yellow-blotched pages, which he never opened because he did not need to), and it was more than just: it was the very basis of living. But it was also true that the debtor had no part in the matter: his property returned, so to speak, to the community from which it had come, and which saw to the sale. From this point of view every confiscation was a theft, and for this reason people who bid at auctions were frowned upon. No friend would ever take part in the bidding, and he too had always respected this prejudice. This was even a cause of disagreement with his wife.