Don Sebastiano’s silence had lit a small flicker of hope in the schoolteacher’s sullen spirit. “Well?” he asked.
Don Sebastiano’s face regained its confident look. “You might have some vague right on your side,” he answered. “But sitting on that very chair where you are sitting, and at this same time of day, your father implored me to put in my bid, as I told you. I didn’t want to, and in order to oblige him I had to get into debt in his place. This happened twenty years ago. Your father is still alive, so why doesn’t he come and ask me himself?”
“My father is an imbecile,” replied the other. “This matter must be arranged between the two of us.”
“As far as I am concerned, it is already arranged,” said Don
Sebastiano, casually eyeing the sheet of stamped paper.
“Is that your last word?”
“The very last.”
“I’ll make you weep tears of blood,” said the schoolmaster, rising to his feet. And he went out into the night.
*
“I speak to the poor, the poor of Sèuna, the poor of San Pietro, the poor of Santa Maria.” These were the opening words of Don Ricciotti’s first electoral speech after his nomination. The Piazza del Plebiscito was like a tanca in flower, for everyone was wearing the red jerkin of the local costume and had come swarming to hear the “speechifying” as soon as Dionisi had announced it. Don Ricciotti felt like a hunted boar. He had therefore reduced the political problem of Nuoro to the simplest possible terms: to defend himself by goring, one by one, those savage hounds, those vile plutocrats fat with the spoils of thievery, who lived by sitting on the money they and their ancestors had stolen; to hurl the poor of every district against them like stones from a sling; and to reduce the political struggle to the struggle of one man against another, the only kind that the Seunese, and all the poor in town, were capable of understanding. In fact, it was the only kind he could understand himself; though who knows if all disputes are not based on hatred. The only danger was that the poor were dependent on the rich, as ever; but it was here that he had to strike, if he wanted the rich to come begging for mercy.
“Hear me, poor people of Nuoro. The day of your redemption is at hand. Until now you have lived in darkness, but now together we shall ascend the Mountain, gazing upon our sun, for it is written here, on the banner of our association. They have cast a spell on you, these moldering misers, these retired robbers, and you are unable to walk. So it is my task to raise you; like Jesus I tell you: Rise and walk. See there the Mountain, the divine Ortobene! It abounds in oak trees—And you? You cannot gather one acorn for your pigs. It abounds in water, but you cannot stoop there to quench your thirst! Yet no more than fifty years ago that Mountain was yours, and you were rich and free. Who took it from you? Mayor Mereu was full of good intentions, and wanted to give each man a plot; but the Corrales, who lived like hermits in those days, very well knew how to shuffle the cards, and the Mountain, the whole Mountain, now belongs to those bandits, and you have to ask permission to cross the tanche. As for the Prato and the pastures of the Serra, they were even more cunning. They prevented them from being shared out, and rented them from the local government for next to nothing, making it impossible for you to cultivate them.”
This, of course, was merely the preamble. Don Ricciotti cared nothing for the Mountain or the Corrales, apart from the fact that the Corrales were people who handled rifles like toys and were crack shots. “When you have given me your vote,” he continued, “I will repair the injustices which you have suffered and which your fathers suffered. But”—and here his voice took on a note of profundity—“the masters of Nuoro are not at San Pietro and they are not on the Mountain. They do not wear costume. No! they are gentlemen. It is they who exploit your labor and live on your backs. They keep you hidden under a bushel lest you should realize that the sun shines on all alike. Look at them there, all together!”
And with a gladiatorial gesture he stretched out his hand toward the pharmacy, where Don Serafino, Don Gabriele, Don Pasqualino, Don Sebastiano and the others were innocently seated. The excommunication of the Corrales had given them some amusement. When it came down to it, he was not altogether wrong, and ifhe got his teeth into San Pietro, so much the better. When they saw him taking a new tack, they stiffened.
“That smoky old lamp, Gabriele Mannu,” he shouted, raising a great laugh, especially from the nearby caffè. In fact, Ingegner Mannu was about five feet tall, hid his hairless pate under a sweat-stained bowler, and had eyes as yellow as his wrinkled skin; but no one had ever thought of him as being an exact replica of an oil lamp, one of the brass kind, with the blackened wick, still used in kitchens to save money. “That old oil lamp, Gabriele Mannu, is the owner of the house across the road, with its crumbling walls and windows that are never opened. You, Cosimo Marche, pace out the front of this house and tell me how many times it is bigger than the hovel where you and your family take refuge from the rain. Inside that house, where a lamp is never lit, between collapsing walls, on floors that have never known a broom, wander this man’s two children, whom he has driven out of their wits, being a half-wit himself, by giving them nothing to eat. Peasants of Sèuna, answer for yourselves: have you ever got a day’s work out of Don Gabriele? But leave work aside! You, Dirripezza, or you, Baliodda, or you, Poddanzu, have you ever had a penny from him when you stretched out your hand?”
Don Gabriele Mannu, whose only fault was to have designed Don Sebastiano’s house in the manner which we already described, curled up like a frightened wood louse. Don Sebastiano ostentatiously shook him by the hand. As the crowd was laughing, they were helpless. And then, unfortunately, what Don Ricciotti was saying was true; or rather, it was false only because it came from his mouth. The stinginess of the Mannus was not of the usual sort, because we are all stingy. There was something dark and sorrowful about it. For those who take my point, it was a Nuorese stinginess, the stinginess of people born without hope. There are so many poor wretches who hoard up rags and empty cans, the refuse of the world, and live among this in their dens, clasp it to them and gloat over it, because they are without hope. Don Gabriele was one of these wretches, even if his rags were worth millions; and so were his brothers, his cousins, and everyone of his relatives. But did he therefore deserve to be stripped bare and thrown to the wolves of Nuoro by this third-rate intriguer, whose own character could more justly have been pulled to pieces by anyone having such power of brazen speech? I find it unjust, even apart from penal law, because a man’s private life is a matter between himself and God.
“But you, Predu Fois,” continued Don Ricciotti as soon as the roar of the crowd broke off, and remained suspended between heaven and earth, “you, Predu Fois, you see that other one over there with the little white beard, enjoying the cool air in the pharmacy? That is Avvocato Porru, the glory of Nuoro, whom we all revere. But you, who are a blacksmith, did you know that your father, God rest his soul, owned the farm at Monte Jaca which produces the wine you pay through the nose for in Mucubirde’s cellar? That farm would have been yours, yours! And instead it belongs to Avvocato Porru, because your father had a little lawsuit, and this generous lawyer not only caused him to lose it, but made him hand over the house in lieu of fees, as your father didn’t have a penny to pay him with. All this gentleman’s properties came to him that way, and this is the gentleman whom you all respect and honor because he wears a hat.”
The hubbub was now at its height. “Don Pasqualino, they say you are my blood relative. But your only relatives are the electricity bills you sting the poor of Nuoro for, and the profit on flour that like a feudal overlord you collect from the luckless women who come to your mill with bushels of grain on their heads. And you, Pascale Gurture, an honor to your name, always in a bowler hat as if you were a minister, what do you do with the enormous tanche of Su Grumene, grazed over by thousands of sheep that you do not own, since you would never risk a single penny? Are you keeping the money for the crows to eat?”
>
All this was a facile play on words, because the name Gurture means “vulture,” but there was also an allusion to the fact that, like so many Nuorese, Pascale Gurture was a bachelor and kept a woman at home, whom he called his housekeeper, by now an old stick like him, and he fed off her carcass. The tension of the audience therefore burst out in a great yell of laughter, much to the relief of everyone.
Everyone laughed, but not Don Sebastiano, who knew very well that his own turn was coming soon, and that all these infamies were nothing but an excuse to commit the greatest infamy of all, the one against himself. If he could have left, he would have done so, but the crowd was so thick he could not reach his house, although it was only a step away. And sure enough: “All these parasites, poor people of Nuoro, I will sweep away as soon as you have elected me your deputy. But from one of them I wish to exact justice in a more entertaining way: from the most upright, the most honored of all, the diligent worker called Notary Sanna, the noble Don Sebastiano. All of you honor and esteem this man, because he has reclaimed tracts of land with the sweat of your brows, paying you a miserable daily wage. Well then, I will tell you how he made his money, because it concerns me personally. You are aware that he is the owner of Loreneddu, the great domain which now houses the barracks of the King’s carabinieri. Well then, what you don’t know is that that house belonged to my father, and was put up for auction on account of the debts he had with the usurers. Not a soul in Nuoro would have acted as an accomplice of the usurers, and in fact no one turned up at the auction. Only this hypocrite, cloaked in virtue, had the nerve to exploit the misfortunes of others. I offered to buy back my house and give him the miserable sum that he had paid, but he laughed in my face. Don Sebastiano, today you must tremble! The whole people of Nuoro will take revenge on you, because the whole people of Nuoro has until today been victimized by you and your worthy friends; but now at last it has learned that justice can be obtained in this world.”
Such was the speech with which Don Ricciotti opened his electoral campaign. No one noticed the fact that Boelle Zicheri and Paolo Bartolino and Giovanni Maria Musiu, about whom there was also much to tell, were spared his cannonades. Don Ricciotti, for all his ranting, did not lose his sense of what was prudent, and knew that he had to keep his place at the table in the Caffè Tettamanzi, from which he would otherwise have been ignominiously expelled.
*
Canon Pirri, the dean, who was also the uncle of the Corrales clan, called his oldest nephews to his bedside—the ones whom he knew to be most quickly roused to anger and unthinking acts. There were no loudspeakers in those days, but Don Ricciotti’s voice had nevertheless, word for word, reached the stuffy room where for a hundred years he had been waiting for death. With his prodigious gift for reading the minds of his nephews, he realized at once that they were not going to stand for the insult, and that Don Ricciotti’s days could be said to be numbered.
“You will do nothing,” he said, wasting no time in getting down to business. “Your father might have been able to do it, but you have children who will be going to school and will give up wearing costume, and you cannot send them into the world as the sons of murderers, even if the hand of justice does not reach you. In Nuoro, everyone knows everything. Get this into your heads: the Corrales are finished, and the time has come for the Faddas of this world, who will be lawyers and doctors, and will go and live in Santa Maria. Our race must be forgotten. As for Ricciotti, leave him to me.”
That morose company decided that tittiu (for so the family called their priestly uncle) had gone gaga, but there was the matter of his fortune, which was considerable, so they had to resign themselves. They would get to Don Ricciotti all the same, by roundabout routes.
In his solitude the dean possessed a redoubtable informer, Dr. Nurra, or more simply, Zizitu (that is, Franceschino) Nurra. He was one of those innumerable doctors of law who made up the fresco of Nuoro, and who, once they had qualified, never looked at a law book again. Like the late Avvocato Orecchioni, simply in remembrance of him now that he is dead. I believe that he didn’t even know when and where he had qualified, but he had exploited his degree in order to marry a rich, ugly spinster and live in comfort. A fate common to many, after all. For a reason that I have never been able to understand, these Nuorese graduates became misanthropic. Dr. Nurra had only one friend, and this was the old dean, and every evening as twilight was falling he would go to visit him, sidling along near the walls, ready to dart around the corner if he saw some acquaintance approaching. He was a handsome man, with long gray whiskers, and he always dressed in black, as the fashion then was. Dr. Nurra never spoke to a soul, but he had a lot of curiosity in his temperament; and as he lived on the top floor of the house above the caffè, toward evening he would open a tiny window, stick out his head, cup his hand behind his ear, and listen to the conversation of the customers seated at the tables.
In this way the dean came to learn that Don Ricciotti—who was piling speech on speech and no longer sparing anyone at all, even reaching the point of having himself carried in triumph on the shoulders of those creatures from Sèuna—had been dubbed “the honorable member” by the habitués of the caffè, though he did not know whether in earnest or in jest. Fear had certainly lodged in the hearts of everyone who had anything to lose, partly because by this time Don Ricciotti was talking openly of revolution, backed by the youths who read Avanti! The upper and middle classes had vanished from the nearby pharmacy and withdrawn to their homes. Canon Pirri listened gravely to these accounts, without asking for advice, which Dr. Nurra would have been powerless to give him. He had to find the way out of it, but without noise or fuss, because there might be some truth in Don Ricciotti’s slanders.
The following day, summoning up his scant remaining strength, he sent a message to Canon Monni, the parish priest, assuring him that San Pietro would vote en bloc in favor of his nephew Dr. Porcu. Then, one by one, he began to send for all the shepherds of San Pietro, masters and minions alike. In the course of sixty years he had heard the confessions of the grandfathers, the fathers, and the sons, and held weapons more powerful than anything Ricciotti had, which for the most part was nothing but gossip. What he said will never be known, but it was most certainly a procession such as had never been witnessed, even on the Day of the Redeemer.*1 As regards the Seunese, he could do nothing, since they went to confession with Father Porcu, who had sided with Don Ricciotti. But the dean knew them well: they were like straws that the wind blows where it listeth. Then he had an idea. He sent for Paolo Masala, the formidable orator, who was also a candidate, and who had defended so many Nuorese in court—for the Seunese were also Nuorese, and were constantly entangled with the law. After reproving him for his indifference toward the Mannus, whose relative he was, he arranged for him to make a counterspeech. The following Sunday Ricciotti would throw open the window of his house on the Piazza del Plebiscito and would vomit forth his remaining hatred in front of the applauding crowd. After the last word, Masala would appear at the window of Maria Sechi’s house immediately opposite, and throw Ricciotti’s whole life in his face. The dean, who knew his people, was certain this would do the trick.
And it so happened that on Sunday, when Don Ricciotti was mopping his brow and rejoicing in the sound of the applause of his electors, whose eyes he had finally opened to the crimes of the landowning classes, another window was flung open, and Paolo Masala shouted in his full-throated voice, “Stay where you are! Now it’s my turn to speak.”
It was like a thunderclap. In one hour Don Missente Bellisai lit himself a hundred cigars with a hundred hundred-lire notes, this paltry schoolteacher had neglected his duties toward his pupils in order to follow the promptings of insane revenge, had promised the impossible to poor people who were happy in their work, and had neglected his duties to his own family, who were languishing in poverty because of him. The winged words entered at once into every heart. In vain did Don Ricciotti, withdrawing to the back of his balcony, put two fi
ngers in his mouth to incite his loyal followers to whistle. The Seunese applauded Paolo Masala for the same reasons that they had applauded him: because what counts is the gift of the gab, something not one of them could have achieved, the very voice that issued from those robust chests. All the same, Don Ricciotti lost the election not because Paolo Masala had overwhelmed him with his eloquence, but due to a simpler thing, which not even the dean would have credited.
The news that that “load of rubbish” had insulted Don Sebastiano had even reached Ziu Poddanzu at Locoi among the vines. He was Seunese, even though he went home only two or three times a year. The day before the election he set off on foot for Nuoro, and when he got to Sèuna he grabbed the first man he met by the jerkin and put him to shame in front of everyone. He threw in his teeth the days of work that Don Sebastiano had never failed to give him, and the festive grape harvests in his vineyards, with meals of macaroni and roast lamb, and he threw in his teeth the humility of his old companion, who was closer to the poor than anyone had ever been. And now he and the others were allowing Don Missente’s son to spit on him.
It was Ziu Poddanzu who really won the election, not Paolo Masala. Don Ricciotti got 290 votes. The members of his association numbered more than 3,000.
The year of troubles was over.
*1 August 29; celebrated with processions, dancing, etc., throughout Sardinia.
14
The hands of the clock on Santa Maria turned inexorably slowly, while Don Sebastiano drew up his deeds, Don Pasqualino did the accounts for his scores of firms, Don Ricciotti ate his heart out pursuing the dream of Loreneddu, Poddanzu and Dirripezza waited for charity, the peasants of Sèuna rolled their carts over the stones stripped bare by the rains, the thieves of San Pietro followed the tracks of flocks among the unguarded tanche, and Monsignor Canepa composed his homilies. If in place of the enormous clockface that Bishop Dettori had had hoisted up the bell tower at around the end of the century there had been a great mirror, then the Nuorese would perhaps have measured time better by the ruin of their bodies; for there is no doubt that all the characters in this story were getting older. But it is possible that the life of a town occurs in a unity of time and place, like the ancient tragedies, and that the succession of events possesses the mysterious immutability of the cemetery. Seen by God, on the day of judgment, I think life surely must appear like this.
The Day of Judgment Page 20