Pietro Catte was not seen at the Caffè Tettamanzi for a week. When he reappeared he was wearing a black suit bought from Carobbi, the Tuscan tailor (who had three assistants), with the cash he had found in one of his aunt’s drawers. When he was dressed in all that mourning, his cross-eyes looked more pronounced than ever, but you could bet that they had shed not a tear. Zia Mariantonia had in any case been in two minds whether to leave her all to the hospital rather than to that nephew, who had never managed to master more than the alphabet, and who had been ignominiously sacked from his job as bus conductor. Then the memory of her only brother had prevailed, and perhaps some hidden maternal feeling. Francesco Casu, the one whose means of livelihood was so mysterious, went right up to him and said loudly, “Pietro, your aunt is dead, and good health to us until she comes back again! But now that you’re rich, don’t turn your back on your old pals. Stand us all a drink!” Pietro was a trifle nettled by this familiarity, but he didn’t mind standing a round, because for the first time it gave him a chance to show off his altered circumstances. Everyone crowded to the bar, and when the time came he reached into his waistcoat pocket and pulled out a silver scudo, a coin that the war had swept away, and everyone was left gasping. He pocketed the change with perfect sangfroid and left the bar.
After that, Pietro Catte never missed an evening in the caffè, and even joined in “tresette” with Bartolino and Robertino Caramelli. But it was easy to see that he was not the same person as before, and that sudden wealth had put a barrier between himself and ordinary people, whose jokes at his expense he did not appreciate. The fiend was beginning to whisper in his ear. Unlike Don Sebastiano, who said that only the cemetery is rich, Pietro went around saying “I am rich,” and he said it so often that he ended by becoming a kind of myth. Who would have thought that Zia Mariantonia had so much money? And it can’t have been an old wives’ tale, because he even went so far as to give a lira to Poddanzu or Dirripezza, when everyone could see him do it. “St. Peter the Rich,” Maestro Manca called him in one of his blasphemous ballads, invoking his intercession with the Lord. In a word, Pietro Catte was on everybody’s lips. But the trouble was that at a certain point, as his folly progressed, he got bored with the Caffè Tettamanzi, he got bored with Bartolino, he got bored with the useless life of the Nuorese, and he began (but it was the devil still whispering in his ear) to conceive a grandiose scheme. A man of his stature could not stay in Nuoro, and his wealth ought not to remain inert. The fame of Milan, where money multiplied if you only looked at it, had reached as far as Nuoro. There he would go and start a good business, and after a few years he would return with one of those automobiles that were beginning to be seen around even in Sardinia, and he would buy a house in the Corso and a tanca like Don Pasqualino’s. One evening (it was in early autumn) he knocked at the “little” door of the house of Don Sebastiano, who had been a friend of his father’s, and offered to sell him his house, his land, his whole inheritance. Don Sebastiano was getting ready to read the newspaper, but nevertheless listened patiently to the other’s plans.
“You are looking for bread made from better things than wheat,” he told him. “Swallows leave the nest because God urges them to, but the man who leaves his home is egged on by the devil.”
It was ancient wisdom speaking in him, but it was also reading the newspapers that informed him of the hell caused by the war in those distant cities, quite apart from the fact that he thought of Pietro Catte as subnormal, a “minus habens,” as he was accustomed to say.
“You have been fortunate in that your good aunt left you a roof over your head. There are jobs here to give you enough to live on.”
Don Sebastiano knew that madness is always lying in wait, and had not forgotten that early in the war he had been on the point of selling all his land to buy pieces of paper that today would have been practically worthless.
“So you don’t want to buy?” asked Pietro Catte.
“No,” replied the notary, “because your property does not interest me, and I do not wish to suffer from remorse.”
The house and land were sold to someone who had come back from the war with a pile of money: rumor had it that he had rifled a shop during the retreat. And so Pietro Catte found the incredible sum of a hundred thousand lire in his hands, in glowing thousand-lire notes. The deed was drawn up by Don Sebastiano, who never once raised his eyes from the desk while he was writing it.
Pietro Catte was not an emigrant. He was a rich man in search of a world worthy of his enterprise. For this reason he traveled second-class, among the real gentlemen, whom he did not hesitate to inform that he had received a large legacy and had a hundred thousand lire in his pocket. Everyone listened with curiosity to his broken Italian, but one gentleman in particular, with the pince-nez fashionable at the time and a very distinguished air about him, seemed to take to him particularly, and asked if anyone in Milan was expecting him. Well, actually no, he hadn’t thought of that. And it seemed strange to him that he had overlooked such a basic thing, what with all the Continentals who came to Nuoro and frequented the Caffè Tettamanzi. But no matter: the gentleman had a little place which he never used. He would be only too glad to put it at his disposal. It was just a stone’s throw from the Duomo. Pietro Catte relished this kindness as the first taste of the El Dorado that awaited him. He thanked him very much, and went to his suitcase for the casadinas he had been given before he left, which he offered to all present. Everyone had a taste, and sang the praises of the distant country which the war had brought into the limelight because of the Sassari Brigade. He ate his fill of them, because he had had nothing for twenty hours, and then went noisily to sleep, among the ironic whispers of the gentlemen. Finally he was awakened by a big jolt, amid a babble of voices, like the one on the Feast of the Redeemer. Everyone got out, and the kind gentleman remained behind for a moment as if he had lost something. When they were alone, he wrote down the address of the house and gave him the keys. He told him to make himself at home, as there was no one else there. He would call on him the next day.
Deeply touched, Pietro Catte made a mental comparison with the presumptuous antagonism of Don Sebastiano, and set off toward the exit with his suitcase, making his way with difficulty through that sea of people who seemed to be constantly celebrating something. In the station square Milan met him like an immense wall, closing in to suffocate him. For a moment, but only for a moment, he thought of his aunt’s little house with its flowering balconies, all sold now. Even the air was different from the air of Nuoro. Luckily a yellow vehicle drew up beside him, and the driver asked if he wanted to be taken anywhere. He produced the paper with the address, and the chauffeur, as they were called in those days, told him to get in. They went around in circles like people with nowhere to go (or so it seemed to him) until the taxi stopped outside a little low house, such as then still existed in the heart of Milan. Twenty lire! He thought it an enormous sum, because in Nuoro he lived for a month on twenty lire. His hundred thousand lire shrank. But perhaps he was tired; he hastened to let himself in. In the first room he saw a divan; he threw himself on it and fell into a deep sleep.
The next morning he was awakened by the presence of someone in the room. He roused himself at once. It was the kind gentleman from the train. Why ever had he slept on the divan? He must have a shower and a shave. And as he had never seen a shower, the gentleman showed him how it worked. That rain falling on his tubby body, and on the almost African face which he saw reflected in the mirror, at once restored his faith in Milan and the world. The gentleman told him his name: Ingegner Ambrogio Fappala. And he made an appointment for midday, in the Galleria. They were to lunch together at Savini’s.
He immediately regained his euphoria. With confident steps he left the house and set off at random along one of the innumerable streets which spread before him. The buildings made him dizzy to look at, but the wallet with his money in it, which he constantly patted with his hand, gave him a sense of security, as if he were not
excluded from so much grandeur. People turned around to stare at this strange wild man of the woods, but he proceeded firmly on his way until he found himself in an immense nave, full of a gaily colored throng. At first glance he reckoned it could contain the whole Corso of Nuoro, and it was covered with panes of glass that glittered in the sunlight. He felt more and more excited and sure of himself. At a certain moment, in the midst of all that bustle, he heard his name called. He turned in amazement. It was Ingegner Fappala calling to him, though how he had managed to recognize him in that crowd was more than he could understand. With him was an elderly gentleman whom the engineer lost no time in introducing. He was Dr. Rossi, an important businessman who was keen to make his acquaintance. They all went into Savini’s through a door that revolved without stopping, and in which he got stuck. In the thousand mirrors all around him he saw his own grotesque figure, almost as if it wished to stay his steps on the fatal path.
However, I must hurry on, because by now the reader will have understood everything. It was one of the usual confidence tricks that the papers are full of, but with this very relevant difference: that it was Pietro Catte who was tricked. Perhaps if those gentlemen had known this, they would not have done it. As soon as he became aware of the deception, the ground began to spin dizzily under his feet. In this terrifying maelstrom there was only one fixed point, and that was Nuoro. Nuoro was the reality of the world, and his bulging eyes were riveted on it and saw nothing else. It was the moral reality, the place and the day of judgment: the conscience that resides in the stones and in the people. All the good or ill that you do, you do for Nuoro. Wherever you go, Nuoro follows you, waits like a brigand at the corner of the street, or like a tax man demanding his taxes. “You are looking for bread made from better things than wheat...” The old notary’s words roared in his ears, and deafened him, and prevented him from hearing the din of the city in whose streets he groped like a blind man. At this time of day Bartolino dealt the cards for “tresette” in the Caffè Tettamanzi. But it was not a question only of the living, of that handful of beggars in San Pietro or Sèuna; there was also Sa ’e Manca, the cemetery watched over by that granite crag resembling a mourning woman; and there were all the dead of all the generations crying out to him, “Pietro Catte, what have you done?” And one of these was Zia Mariantonia, who had left him the house so that it should rest firm on its foundations, not for him to take it to Milan in a wallet.
Pietro Catte, Pietro Catte, Pietro Catte... One morning they found him in a faint on the steps of a church where he had sat down to rest his swollen feet. He was unable to say what had happened to him, because he remembered nothing. All he could see was a white something, dazzling and distant. And toward that something he was sent back, either with a travel order or with the paltry sum left in his pocket.
*
At midnight the thunders of Corrasi, of Supramonte, of Sa Serra, of Montalbo, the four cardinal points which had arranged to meet above the Corso in Nuoro, burst forth in a single, terrifying roar. However, they did not succeed in drowning the bell of Santa Maria, which was chiming either the time or the slow knell, su toccu pasau, that announces the death of the rich. From the open hatchways of the skies the rain came down on the rooftops as if to crush them. The people of Nuoro hid their heads under the blankets, thinking that the end of the world had come.
And in fact it had.
At the top of the Corso, where the road from Orosei and the sea comes in, and right at the spot where Tortorici’s kiosk at one time stood, the bus that brings passengers and mail from the Continent had stopped. How it had got there, at that hour and in that weather, it was impossible to tell. The first to get out was the driver. It was the devil in person, with his horns and pointed beard and twisted tail, surrounded by a fiery nimbus on which the water hissed as it fell from the sky. He stood still a moment, then grabbed a flute out of thin air and started down the road. In answer to a long note, the next off the bus were sas surbiles, the witches who live in the mountains of the Gennargentu. No one has ever seen them, but I can assure you they exist. With sneers and with cackles they followed the devil, who continued his darksome summons. Four Furies then obeyed the call and joined the procession, howling and gnashing their teeth. The wind roared in the Corso as if in an enormous tube, and Don Pasqualino’s lamps jumped around like maddened things. Many of them smashed, casting the world into darkness. As in the funerals of the rich, the procession made a pause, and lo, from the flute (or perhaps it was no longer a flute) there came a lacerating note, and at that note Pietro Catte fell headlong from the bus as though someone had pushed him out. Of what he had once been there remained nothing but a death’s head, the eyes more asquint than ever, the fleshy lips frozen in a grimace. His black coat hung on him like a sack, and his trousers were held up by a belt fastened at the tightest hole. Like an automaton he joined the procession, and at once a gap appeared between him and the others before and behind, so that he was seen to be what he was: the king of the feast. The devil had now thrown away his flute, and as he walked he put two fingers crosswise in his mouth, as Sardinian shepherds do; and he emitted piercing whistles. Then out of the bus came a countless swarm, more numerous than it seemed capable of holding. The first was Boelle, who had died most recently and who watched the scene with a sneer. He was followed by Fileddu, ever faithful, with his jacket hanging from his skeletal shoulders. The entire cemetery appeared to have emptied out to join the procession. Zia Mariantonia was dragging herself along, and would have liked to turn off and see her house again, but that was not possible. Dirripezza was there, and Baliodda, and there were also important skeletons, who could be distinguished by their solemn gait. But not all of them were dead: there were all the tavern keepers in Nuoro, with their retinue of puce-faced drinkers; there were the cardplayers; and there was Bartolino, impressive as ever. Last of all came Don Sebastiano, scattering wheat on the flagstones of the Corso; and the wheat grew tall at once and produced ears. Another stop was made in front of the Caffè Tettamanzi. The din of the thunder seemed to redouble. Pietro Catte opened one eye, and when he saw that as usual the tables had been left outside for the night, he felt like crying. The rain was coming down in sheets, but the strange thing was that it seemed he was the only one getting wet, while all the others were left immune, in the dry. Or maybe it was sweat that was streaming out of his hair. They passed over the Iron Bridge and through the trees of the Alberetti, which the wind seemed likely to uproot. Then came the Quadrivio, and then the great tanca of Biscollai, the one which he had been going to buy when he came back from Milan—that, or another like it.
At the top of the hill there was still the huge oak under which he had so often had a picnic as a child, on Easter Mondays, with Zia Mariantonia and friends from the neighborhood. In fact, it seemed to have got even bigger, to have grown out of all proportion, and as the crazy procession approached it, the hurricane seemed to hoist it upward, as if about to tear it from the centuries-old roots resembling veins that gripped the ground all around it. The living and the dead arranged themselves in a circle, sas surbiles and the Furies intoned a funeral dirge, and Pietro Catte stepped up to the trunk. Here the devil grabbed hold of him, ripped the belt from his trousers, wound it around his neck, and then flew up to a branch, from which he left him hanging with staring eyes.
Dawn was beginning to whiten the sky, when a young shepherd roused the sheep which were still in the fold and drove them out onto the hillside, where they started to graze once more to the tinkle of sheep bells. The boy, too, took a bit of bread and a piece of cheese from his bag and set off toward the oak, where he was going to wait until the sun was high, and then take the sheep in for the first milking. The morning, as happens in Sardinia in late summer, was as clear as crystal. Every blade of grass was beaded with that wholesome dew that makes up a little for the drought. As he neared the tree, he saw the hanging body slightly swaying in the morning breeze, and he stood speechless. Then he threw away the bread, abandoned the she
ep, and ran madly toward the town, which was just awaking.
“Pietro Catte has hanged himself! Pietro Catte has hanged himself!”
From every window tousled heads poked out. Pietro Catte has hanged himself! Then the procession began. The magistrate, the carabinieri, Father Delussu still stunned by wine... they all followed the shepherd. Everyone recognized him. What should be done? Father Delussu declared that he was mad, and so it came about that Pietro Catte, who had chosen to look for bread made from better things than wheat, was buried in the consecrated ground where all the other Nuorese sleep, or lie awake.
18
With the return of the fine weather, Donna Vincenza had her big wickerwork chair carried out under the pergola in the corte, and there, motionless, she would spend her day. What she had been afraid of all her life, with the birth of one boy after another, had come to pass. She was left alone in the great tomb of the house. Boredom began to engulf her. The mulling-over of memories that had filled her existence—the recollection of a brief, happy past, the slow destruction of her being—had become quiescent, just as her eyes had clouded over. The house of which, by some supreme irony, she had been the mistress, began to suffer for it. Peppedda the maid, on the threshold of old age, had been discovered by a smallholder who had lost his wife, and she had married him. Since then there had been a string of healthy, happy, lively girls on whom Donna Vincenza vented her resentment, so that after a little while they would leave. The rooms were no longer swept, and there was a film of dust on the furniture. One day Don Sebastiano had warmed up the coffee, the only thing he was particular about, and had tasted something unfamiliar. “This coffee’s made of barley!” he yelled, loud enough for Donna Vincenza to hear him. It was true... or rather, it was not true, because she had simply forgotten to add the fresh coffee to the boiled dregs. In former times her rancor would not have prevented her from reddening to the roots of her hair, but now she listened to her husband’s complaints with indifference, almost with pleasure. In fact, it had come about that Donna Vincenza, in her infinite misery, had realized that time was on her side. The difference of ten years between herself and Don Sebastiano now began to make itself felt, and her husband, though still in good health, gave many signs of feeling the weight of age. The scepter was at last handed to her, and she used it to wreak the cruelest revenge; that is, pretending not to notice him, not answering when he addressed a word to her, refusing his overtures of kindness and forgiveness. The poor old fellow did not understand it; he aired his grievances to his sons (when he saw them) and let off steam at Locoi with Ziu Poddanzu, who would shake his head and (out of respect) say nothing. “Vincenza is mad, she’s mad,” Don Sebastiano would say, “and if she goes on like this she’ll ruin the family.” He did not realize that for all of us the time comes when we are in the world just because there is room for us, and the moment had now come for him.
The Day of Judgment Page 24