The Day of Judgment

by Salvatore Satta

  From the hospital he wrote home and told them about the slight ailment that was keeping him out of the front line. But he would soon be better, and would come home on leave. Donna Vincenza told Gonaria that she was very uneasy in her mind, but Gonaria, who spoke with God, reassured her. At the arrival of each letter Don Sebastiano would ride off, Ludovico would say that it was all nothing in comparison with what he was suffering, and Sebastiano would look at the books that Peppino had left in his keeping, and weep. At last a telegram arrived from Peppino, saying that he would soon be back on long leave.

  Dawn illumined Donna Vincenza’s harrowed face. She summoned all those women, witnesses of her childhood and her happy days, and threw them into preparing all manner of Nuorese delicacies: sas casadinas and sas sebadas, the traditional sweetmeats made with carefully worked fresh cheese; sos culurjones, made of almonds and lemon; sos maccarrones cravàos, which are little gnocchi pressed flat with the fingernail... For the day of his homecoming Gonaria had promised one of the sweetmeats for which she was famous. For a week the whole house smelled of dough and honey. And at last the waiting ended.

  It was an April morning, so mild that the war became a bad dream dissolved in the clear air. Borghesi’s orchard, where the offices of the province now stand, was all a cloud of almonds in blossom. Don Sebastiano set off in good time for the station, dressed in black and wearing a gold chain across the front of his waistcoat, something he had never done before when his sons came home. But this one was returning from the war. When the train stopped he stood rooted to the spot when he saw a sort of specter emerge from the single rust-red carriage and stagger toward him. But he pulled himself together at once and realized that the boy could never make the short distance home on foot. So he sent to Giovanni Maria, the same nephew whom Donna Vincenza had turned out of the house, asking him to send a carriage, and Giovanni Maria could scarcely believe that he was back in his uncle’s good graces.

  In Don Gabriele Mannu’s ridiculously immense entrance hall Peppino appeared even more spectral to his mother as she came, almost nimbly, to meet him. There was nothing for it but to put him to bed, carting him up the stairs and into the room he had shared since childhood with his younger brother. Ludovico put in a moment’s appearance to say that it was nothing serious, and that the real invalid was himself. And there he was, left alone with little Sebastiano, who seemed not to have noticed anything, and was proud of this playfellow and fellow student who had been to war. In the kitchen, which was piled with the cakes prepared for the homecoming, Don Sebastiano said that as far as he could see there was no hope. Donna Vincenza replied with some violence that he knew nothing of hope except concerning himself.

  And so began the gradual descent toward death.

  In the dismissal form issued by the hospital they had written: “Fever caused by over-exertion in an already delicate organism.” Dr. Manca, Pedduzza’s brother, who when he was not drunk was an excellent doctor, said that he would soon be cured, but he did not say from what disease, and this remained forever a mystery. In the first month it really seemed that he was getting better. The air of home, the constant presence of Sebastiano and of his mother, who had in his case returned to the caresses of earlier days, twice a day climbing the terrible stairs (and with bated breath he listened to the thud of her feet on step after step) had restored some measure of strength to him; so much so that, though unsteady, he was able to get down to the courtyard, where he rediscovered the little things of his childhood and looked at them with fresh eyes. He leaned on his brother as on a young sapling. Sometimes, in the small room where they had set up their little laboratory, he took delight in looking at the books that they had bound up when they were boys, and managed to follow Sebastiano when he read passages from his Oriental poets. How far away the war was, and the trenches, and the mud... All would have been well if the fever had not returned with dreadful regularity every evening. At such times Sebastiano, who suspected nothing, stayed on at his bedside as if to help him fight it. “When I get better,” Peppino told him, “I want to buy you a lovely present.”

  July arrived, punctiliously withering every blade of grass in the landscape and covering Nuoro with its dusty skies. Dr. Manca, who understood less and less, however good he was at his job, advised a change of air for the patient. For those times this was an almost inconceivable idea, because everyone, rich and poor alike, accepted the seasons as they came. They thought of Locoi, where there was that locked room which I spoke of before. They cleared out all the equipment and put in two camp beds, and there the two children (for Peppino’s illness had taken them both back to childhood) lived out their last fairy tale, in the shadow of the great pine tree, amid the waving vine leaves, and in the company of lizards which Ziu Poddanzu amused himself by taming. The old peasant, whose face was now completely framed in white, was always at the invalid’s side, and told him about the times when he himself had been a soldier. They were simple, happy days, except for that inexorable fever. Ziu Poddanzu laughed, and made the others laugh. But one evening (it was already late September) he announced that he was going to Nuoro and would be back a little late. The boys were left alone, mournfully waiting. Ziu Poddanzu went to Nuoro to tell his employer that his son was in a bad way and should be taken home. This is what he thought, in his ignorance. Don Sebastiano, who had not forgotten his first fearful diagnosis, once more asked for a carriage from Giovanni Maria, and so they returned home. The patient was put to bed at once, still side by side with his younger brother, to whom he had promised a lovely present when he got well. The next day Don Sebastiano went to the post office, where Peppino had deposited his paltry earnings as an officer, and by asserting his authority he had them transferred to his own account. When the boy died it would be impossible to cash them without paying the death duties, and there would have been a thousand difficulties because of the heirs.

  October passed. Peppino by this time never left his bed. Clear signs were in the air that the war was about to end. Drop by drop there still came news of the dead, but people felt that these would be the last. On the night between the third and fourth of November Sebastiano, still uncomprehending, was told by Ludovico to leave the invalid’s room, and Don Sebastiano and Donna Vincenza sat themselves down on either side of the bed. The sick boy’s breathing was already a deep rattle. Suddenly, from the Piazzetta Mazzini, where the town band assembled, the patriotic notes of the “Hymn of the Piave” struck up amid the yelling crowd. The war had ended in victory. “Listen to the music!” These were Peppino’s last words. No one knew whether he meant the hymn, or his own labored breathing.

  16

  So death first entered Don Sebastiano’s house, for time had swept away the memory of the two little girls who had died thirty years before. A wave of panic seemed to strike the whole family. Don Sebastiano’s withdrawing the savings from the post office was held against him by his sons as an act of betrayal; but Ludovico, who in the meantime had taken his degree, silenced them all by enumerating the laws and regulations governing post-office deposits, which seem expressly designed to take your money and not give it back again. Donna Vincenza had no need to add still more black to the black garments that already enshrouded her. Her childhood friends had come to see her, in their Sunday best and with long faces, and they told her she ought to thank God it had been possible to “layout” her son, whereas all the others had been dumped heaven knows where. Donna Vincenza put up with this for a little while, and then got tired of it and returned to her solitude, clinging to her youngest, who was to live with the shadow of that loss all his life long. What is more, so harsh was the nature of the old Nuorese that not a Mass was said, not a cross was raised over the grave; and Peppino was left alone forever.

  The end of the war brought the return of the survivors, and naturally posed many problems. Basically, the families who were mourning dead sons were better off than those who were expecting them back alive. Among the latter was Don Sebastiano’s family, expecting and fearing the home
coming of Giovanni. As a matter of fact, the latest news from him had given rise to some hopes, since he had managed to take a degree, albeit in a more or less improvised university for military personnel; nonetheless, he had taken it. When at last he arrived, without so much as a word of warning, he was clearly a radically changed man. He had become stout and loud-mouthed, and what struck them most was that he had become slovenly in his dress. All that tramping from barracks to barracks, living shoulder to shoulder with people whom the call to arms had provided with a profession, who swore and talked about women from dawn till dusk, had weaned him from the rarefied atmosphere of home, and dispelled the phantom of the dead girl which had formerly conditioned his existence. Not that he had changed his attitude toward the family, for whom—and especially the ruin that was Donna Vincenza—he appeared to nourish inexplicable rancors; but at least he did not stay bottled up in the house. On the contrary, he seemed driven to continual escape, to mingling in that bastard world that had emerged from the war. For those migrations of peoples which wars always produce had their reverberations even in Nuoro, and if the Jewish internees, and the white-collar workers who had stayed on in order to escape the stringencies of life on the Continent, had by now departed, hordes of adventurers had drifted in, not only from remote parts of Sardinia, but also from various regions of Italy, especially from the south; and no one knew what they were after. Nuoro impassively absorbed them all, cut them to its own cloth, and after a while they forgot their own way of speech, like immigrants in America. The Caffè Tettamanzi had been refurbished and “improved.” Maestro Manca began to include the newcomers in his melancholy clowning. It was into the midst of this crowd that Giovanni had plunged, and he seemed to get a kick out of cheapening himself. But when he got home he grew surly again, and shut himself up in his room. Ludovico said that it was another form of neurasthenia, a manic one, just as the previous form had been depressive. Indeed, since in order to cultivate his own neurosis he had amassed books on medicine, he explained that there was a typically family form of neurasthenia, meaning that it was not shown in front of outsiders but only in the family, where there was less opposition. In short, he advised them not to make an issue of it, to pretend not to notice him. There was no other remedy.

  But Donna Vincenza did not let things ride. This son, who had come home so noisy and boisterous, frightened her even more than the one who used to languish in the solitude of the house. When evening came she would grope her way up onto the platform that enabled her to get to the dining-room window, and there she would wait for hours, hidden by the shutters, listening for the voice or footstep that announced his return. The frivolous noises from the caffè, among which one could always distinguish the voice of Bartolino above the others, surrounded her shadowy figure like the buzzing of a beehive; but she was deaf to them. As soon as she recognized his step she climbed down into the darkness and obliterated herself in her armchair. She knew her son would go into the kitchen, because neurasthenia does not abolish hunger, and she always arranged the leftovers from supper for him on one corner of the table. He would eat, he would take his fill, and when she heard him hurrying up the stairs she would come out from the shadows and start the ordeal of the steps which she had to conquer, one by one, to get to her room.

  It was like this every evening, with the other boys protesting against this absurd privilege. And the brothers were right to protest, because brothers are like the sailors in a ship: whoever does not pull his weight on board is a traitor. But it was also right for Donna Vincenza to live in trepidation about this son who ignored and maltreated her, because her eyes saw what the others did not see; and it may have been that in the destiny of someone chasing after the shadow of a dead girl she saw her own destiny. Maybe... for Donna Vincenza certainly did not reason about these things. It is I who am reasoning, now that the earth covers them all, and they are all condemned or absolved together.

  In fact, this process of debasement that Giovanni was undergoing was the inevitable outcome of his previous way of life. The stakes are always life and death. That long-lost girl whom no one remembered, not even her parents, had for a long time beckoned Giovanni to follow her; and one way of following her was the vacuum in which he had confined himself, the desperation he had inflicted on himself and others. Life in the barracks had stripped him of his personality as a snake loses its skin, but it had prevented him from dying. There was nothing for it but to live; that is, to brutalize oneself with work, which gives one a carapace of money that ghosts cannot penetrate. This is what he had done, for without breathing a word to anyone he had taken his exams to become a notary. He saw that Don Sebastiano was getting old and needed an assistant. Later on, he would step into his shoes. Suddenly coming to his senses again (Ludovico had been right), he went around the place with his clothes covered with stains and his beard unkempt, indifferent to himself and others. He still retained his tall figure, his aristocratic features, and the slender hands which now wielded the same pen as Don Sebastiano. In the evening he would count up the money earned, before locking it in the safe. This did not assuage Donna Vincenza’s fear of him, for when some client came she had to send someone to look for him all over Nuoro, which made him fly into a rage. One fine day he announced that he was going to marry. There was a lot of grumbling in the family, because his brothers thought of this also as an imposition. Don Sebastiano, who was an upright man, went to the bride and told her what his son was really like. But she, who was getting on in years, said she would marry him all the same.

  *

  This marriage of Giovanni’s might have been a liberation for Donna Vincenza, as the cross passed out of her hands into another’s. But Donna Vincenza, whose blind eyes saw what Don Sebastiano did not see, immediately understood that Giovanni’s departure was the beginning of the end. The house in which her husband had shut her up was nonetheless still a house. The war (which had virtually not been felt in Nuoro) had emptied it out, and it would never fill up again. It was not simply a matter of Peppino, for the dead never leave home. No, it was a question of all the other boys, whom the war had not restored to her, even though they had survived, because she now had to measure up to the enormous events they had witnessed, and she did not feel equal to the task. They were different people, in short, as Nuoro was different, launched as it was toward the absurd adventure of becoming an overpopulated provincial city, where people were beginning not to recognize one another in the street. A gulf of solitude opened before her. If only she still had one of those dead girls... Or (for Michele also had married, far from Nuoro) if her daughters-in-law had not started having children... One of them might have helped her to bear the weight of the house, the weight of life. Ludovico, after consulting his oracle, thought of starting a law firm. Pasquale, the only one who had seen the war from beginning to end, because he had been due for call-up anyway, had now returned and, after giving vent to his joie de vivre in all the drinking dens, seemed to want to go into business. She was left with her youngest, who was still at the local school but in the autumn would be off to study in Sassari or Cagliari. How she dreaded the approach of that day! And she was right, for when the day came, she prepared him food for the journey, with tender meat coated with bread crumbs, and pancakes sprinkled with sugar. Sebastiano left it all behind, ashamed of his mother although he adored her, and left home in the darkness as if anxious to belong to the outside world.

  Don Sebastiano went to the station with the last of his sons, as dawn was barely beginning to tint the sky. He had noticed nothing. Donna Vincenza was left with the maid in the kitchen, staring at all those good things to eat. She would have to unwrap them from the package she had made. Someone would eat them. But this was not the problem. The problem was the refusal of an act of love. Her son would understand it many years later, and remember it all his life. But Donna Vincenza did not know this. She felt the void surrounding her. The old wound began to bleed again. Once more she became the young girl whom Don Sebastiano had taken as a bride, who
was unable to step out of the house because there was no hand to help her.

  17

  The news had spread in a flash among the habitués of the Caffè Tettamanzi. In the old-fashioned rooms, with mirrors on the walls and sofas covered in red velvet, between one game of “tresette” and another, they would now discuss politics; not because the priest-eating youngsters with Avanti! in their pockets had turned up again, but because the war had somehow brought the town closer to things, and one heard the echo of what was happening in Sassari and Cagliari, and of certain new ideas that were in the air, the most bizarre of which was the notion of making Sardinia into a republic, separate from Italy. Maestro Manca said that they ought to nominate Don Ricciotti as President, while Don Ricciotti thought that if there was a republic it would change the laws and he might at last lay his hands on Loreneddu.

  But there was only one piece of news that day, and it was this: after years and years of being confined to an armchair, Pietro Catte’s aunt had died and left him heir to all her properties. These consisted of the two-story house (two up, two down) where she lived, and of a piece of “open land,” meaning an unfenced strip of grazing land that must have been what was left over after the building of a road. And in fact it bordered the dirt road to Locoi, and the vagrant shepherds used to drive their sheep in there at night. The total value, with the inflation produced by the war, was a hundred thousand lire.