The Day of Judgment

by Salvatore Satta

  The tragic thing was that the boys, those who were left, and those who came back increasingly rarely to the old home, all took their mother’s side; and the most hostile to him was that “filthy puppy,” as Don Sebastiano called his youngest son in moments of rage, that same Sebastiano who had nonetheless broken his mother’s heart by refusing the food she had so carefully prepared for his journey. Ludovico, who had finally opened his law office and knew his Civil Code, said that when two married people cannot get along together they should separate; and it was the only thing he could say, seeing that in the law he had discovered the self-confidence that eluded him in life, and was naturally led to mistake the law for life itself. One had to make allowances for him because he was a bachelor, and perhaps had never loved anyone, and could therefore not understand that hatred makes marriage more indissoluble than love. Also against Don Sebastiano, of course, were those impoverished satellites of Donna Vincenza’s who occasionally—though less and less often—were around the house doing little jobs for her.

  But in Donna Vincenza’s long day there was one hour of joy which the Lord had not deprived her of. This was when, at about five o’clock on summer evenings, her cousin Gonaria would call in on her way back from school. Being in love with God, Gonaria respected Don Sebastiano, who in her eyes had something of God in him, if only the fact that he was a man. But for Vincenza, whom she thought of as far more important than she was herself, because she was a mother, she had the ecstatic feeling that comes of a common frailty: they were both frail because they were women and therefore by nature subject to the dominion of others. Gonaria came from a house of sorrow and entered a house of sorrow, but her simple faith transfigured everything, cheering even that cousin of hers who did not grumble about her woes. She would come into the great hall without knocking, hurry straight through to the pergola, sit down practically at Vincenza’s feet, and speak at once of the only thing she knew about, which was God. I am sure that God, there above the pergola from which the milky bunches of grapes hung down, would listen to these monologues which directly concerned Him, and forgive Donna Vincenza if she followed them with a smile on her lips.

  That day, however, Gonaria had arrived almost at a run, enveloped in her black skirts, because she had more substantial things to tell her venerated cousin. This was the news that had been so long expected, the event for which Vincenza had promised a cake covered with chocolate. It now seemed certain that within the week the bishop would announce her brother Ciriaco’s appointment as a canon. The hat with the red cord would enter their resurrected house; that is, there would be more of God in it, because there is no doubt that the presence of God increases with a rise in rank. Immense was her joy. Ciriaco was becoming more and more demanding and intolerant at home. He especially had it in for her, because she used to pray out loud; or sometimes out of absolute silence, with her eyes raised to heaven, she would cry out, “Where is God?”

  “Stop it!” he would yell. “This place is a madhouse!”

  He had become difficult about his food as well, so that she, Gonaria, would see to making him the choicest delicacies, biscuits to dip in his milk, lighter than the sacred Host. But what did it matter? When the red cord came, all troubles would fade away, she would serve him with greater faith, and she would make his very room into a tabernacle. Donna Vincenza was pleased, too. Gonaria’s family were the only relatives she had left, and she remembered the precise day on which the catastrophe had occurred, leaving the little girls and their brother in the direst poverty. Now everything was back together again, thanks to the work of this gentle creature who sat at her feet and who had never known what evil was. Although Ciriaco was grumpy, and took no notice of his sad cousin (perhaps he had enough on his plate, with all those sisters), his appointment as a canon crowned the hard-won resurrection of the household. And then, even she needed to give herself to some dream, and having none of her own, she welcomed Gonaria’s. This was why she repeated her promise of a cake studded with chocolates. Who could tell if Sebastiano, the youngest, who had gone off to study and was Gonaria’s godson, would come for the celebration. He never wrote, and they had no news of him except from the tales of schoolfellows who came home, and she no longer even dragged herself to the door, as she had done for so many months, to wait anxiously for the postman.

  *

  The red cord arrived a little later than Gonaria had said, but arrive it did; and for three days the house was full of people. The relatives from Galtellì came on horseback, and from Dorgali came the Mariani spinsters, owners of that fabulous villa with a loggia looking right onto the sea, that was called La Favorita, where Gonaria had once been, and had remembered like a lovely dream. The canons of Nuoro came, of course, and also the parish priests from Orune, Oniferi, Oliena, and the other nearby villages, and each of them brought nougat, or a lamb, or bread glazed with egg, like they make at Easter. The parish priest of Oliena arrived, needless to say, with a demijohn of wine, saying: “With Oliena wine you can say Mass, even though it’s as black as sin.” And the neighbors who called every evening came, and they were welcome although they brought nothing, because they were poor. Of the sisters, Battistina and Tommasina were already in the grip of their affliction, and withdrew into a corner, in almost total darkness, because they were afraid of having to shake hands with anyone. Ciriaco sat with his hat on his head, his cassock trimmed with red, and his feet on the pan of the brazier, which contained last year’s ashes because it was never removed from the room.

  Toward evening the bishop was announced. They opened up the room they called the sitting room, which no one ever entered. Here were the portraits of their ancestors who had known prosperity, and here also was a large portrait of Ciriaco, which Gonaria had hung among the pictures of the saints. On the few pieces of furniture saved from the shipwreck glittered wreaths of artificial flowers with a baby Jesus in the middle. From the permanently closed windows came a long ray of dusty sunlight. Gonaria did the honors, neatly serving the cordial she had made herself and Donna Vincenza’s cake. Ciriaco had risen to his feet beside the brazier, and the bishop went over to him and embraced him. He complimented him on the honor that he had so well deserved, and finally dropped a hint that things would not end there, even though only heaven can appoint bishops. The new canon held up his hands in a modest gesture, Gonaria kissed the bishop’s ring three times, and then it was all over. A new life was beginning, and one had to make ready for it.

  Night enveloped the house and cut it off from the world. Gonaria alone remained awake, as if suspended between heaven and earth. God had come nearer to her. From the canon’s room from time to time she heard the sound of a rasping cough, but she thought nothing of it. Outside, the youths of Nuoro were serenading Maestro Manca, chanting, “Portantina che porti quel morto.”*1 And Maestro Manca, scared out of his wits, threw open the window and swore to high heaven.

  *

  The months went by. The canon continued to spend his life between the church and the curia, as he had done as a priest. While Giuseppina looked after the rest of the family, Gonaria had taken her brother into her care, and made him those delicate sweetmeats as only she knew how.

  Everything seemed to be set fair for a happy future, but the cough did not go away. It tormented him when he said Mass, and in the choir stalls, annoying the other corpulent clerics who took advantage of the monotony of Gregorian chant to take a short nap. He came home in the evening worn out, paler and paler, until one day he started to run a fever. In the house of the four women, still full of the celebrations, madness broke out. No one had any illusions: the terrible disease that at that time had no cure had seized hold of Ciriaco; but no one wanted to admit it. Tommasina, who had a phobia about microbes, rose up like an angry serpent, shouting that it was nothing, that he, like her, was perfectly healthy, that none of the Sannas had ever been sick, and that but for that catastrophe their father would still be alive. At the same time, behind his back in the kitchen, she scorched all the plates he ate
from, while Giuseppina, the busy bee of the household, who if she had been strong enough would have torn them from her hands, wept. Battistina had withdrawn even more into her dark corner, and there would keep her hands in the air so that they touched nothing; but she was no trouble to anyone. Gonaria, who was in constant touch with God, spoke of a neglected cold, and strained every fiber to care for the invalid. Her tiny body hovered in the room in search of some comfort, while she cried out that the patient was getting better every day, and prepared him concentrated broth that gave nourishment without lying heavy on the stomach. For the first time in his life Ciriaco looked kindly on this winged sister whom he had always thought of as mad, even though with her ninety-three lire a month she had been able to put the house back on its feet. He stroked her hair and told her that they would take his first outing together, and that they would go to church to give thanks to the Lord. As on the day of the celebrations, he was sitting in the small space between the sideboard and the French windows which opened onto the balcony, with his feet on the pan of the brazier and his biretta on his head. And between one fit of coughing and the next, he was saying litanies. The neighbors no longer came to visit the sisters, because they were afraid of letting out what everyone was thinking and saying. And in fact when Dr. Manca, whom you will remember as a good doctor when he wasn’t drunk, put forward his first suspicions, Gonaria turned on him like a scorpion and chased him out ol the house, yelling after him that he was a drunkard, that Ciriaco was in the best of health, and that the fever would go away when the fine weather came.

  The truth was that for Gonaria Ciriaco could not die, because he was a priest, and indeed a canon, which meant that he was the very presence of God in the house, the proof that God, to whom she had offered her whole life like a burning candle, did indeed exist. With her frail body she engaged in ferocious combat with something incomparably stronger than herself. She was always at his bedside, she soothed his cough with an infusion prepared with her own hands, she held it to his lips, and at times when he felt better she read him the breviary, and as he listened his eyes grew huge. The days passed and the nights passed, and in the whole of Nuoro, in the whole darkened world, there was nothing but the little flame of her ludicrous hope. She did not know that the Nuorese had already condemned Canon Sanna to death, and therefore scoffed at her faith. Death was bound to come. And in fact it came, one evening as dark was falling, while she was talking to him and telling him that the next year they would go to the Madonna del Monte together. With the reed of a voice remaining to him he asked her forgiveness, then turned away his face.

  *

  Contact with real life began at once, because she wanted the whole Chapter at the funeral, which had always been the right of canons, but Father Medde, who was the accountant of the confraternity, said that it had been decided that no funeral should be free of charge any longer, and asked her to put down a deposit for the expenses, which were not small. Where could she find the money, when what little was left had been thrown away by Tommasina because it was infected? She sent to Donna Vincenza to ask for some, but Donna Vincenza told her not to be silly and not to waste money on absurd displays. Well, Ciriaco was buried somehow or other, and then, when even as a corpse he was not there to keep the sisters in check, Tommasina’s madness flared up. Those microbes that she had kept at bay with a thousand stratagems, not shaking anyone’s hand, not turning door handles except with a cloth which she always kept in her pocket, even avoiding washing her face with the tap water that came from heaven knows where, had entered the house victoriously and had brought death. Some of them were as big as oxen running around the room, others were as small as scorpions, and were the most frightening, and came in black, red, and violet; her pupils dilated as she stared at them. Battistina saw them too, but confined herself to holding up her bony hands to ward them off, almost as if resigned to perish. But Tommasina, with her sanguine temperament, did not intend to go down without a fight. She began by smearing her hands with soap, rubbing it into the dining table, especially where Ciriaco had always sat, and then went on to alcohol, to terrible disinfectants that polluted the air and cracked the skin on the fingers; and finally she resorted to fire. She lit pages of newspaper and rubbed the floor with them, she scorched the soles of their shoes, and would have set fire to the house if—as happens with such diseased minds—she had not had some sense of where to stop. In a short while, through wanting to become too clean, she became filthy, because she never dried her skin, and soaked her clothes ten times in the same water. Giuseppina, busy bee, wept over the ruin of the family, over their shame in the eyes of all Nuoro. “Ghettadommos, ghettadommos” (home wrecker), she would say to her between one sob and another, but it was like talking to the wall. What she could not understand was how so much grief could be heaped up on one tiny corner of the world, and so much suffering overwhelm creatures as insignificant as they were.

  When Ciriaco was taken away, and the sisters fled from the plague-stricken room, Gonaria crouched down in a corner with her eyes fixed on the bed, enormous in its emptiness. She thought she saw his form impressed on a shroud. She made up her mind that this was a temple, and that no one would ever again enter the room where the sacrifice had been consummated. Her task was now to adore the God who lived hidden in the room, to prevent anyone from defiling it and making it what in fact it was, a place for the use of the living.

  She tidied the bed, destroyed the medicines which were still on the bedside table, dusted off the hat with the red cord, put it in the cupboard, and laid the breviary on the pillow. Then she tiptoed out, and turned the double lock of the door. As soon as she got outside she felt herself falling into a great pit: she was without God, God had been left inside, in the empty bed, in the hat with the red cord hanging on a hook, in that death without resurrection. She had loved the Creator in the person of one of His creatures, and now His creature proved to be a phantom, or worse, a cruelly real thing. Suddenly she felt the unimaginable smallness of her body, the uselessness of her hands joined in prayer. She thought of her big cousin Vincenza’s smile, when she was talking to her about God. Like herself, though in another way, Vincenza had sacrificed her life, and only to be rewarded with a body that was scarcely less than deformed. She thought for a moment of reopening Ciriaco’s room, but had an instinctive fear that God had gone away even from there. She went into the room they called the dining room, and thought she must be seeing things. Tommasina was circling around the table with a burning paper brand, Battistina was raising her arms, useless as stumps, to heaven; Giuseppina was in tears.

  Had a day passed, or a month, or a year, when she came to herself on the bed where they had placed her? Eternity had passed. She listened carefully, but she heard no cough from the room across the passage. Automatically she rummaged in the pocket of her wide skirt, and felt the bulk of a big key. At that she jumped up from the bed, went into the dining room, and found Tommasina asleep in a chair, curled up so as not to touch the floor with her feet. The chair beside the brazier, where Ciriaco had sat waiting for death, was still in its place, and not only was it empty but half burned. At that precise moment she realized that God did not exist. God did not reach that little town where the seed of her being had been sown, He did not reach her tiny person, and the Nuorese, who all lived without God, were right. Except that she had had Him in the house, first as a priest and then as a canon, and in her house He had died. There remained that locked room that would never again be opened, the very room where God had died, or where perhaps she could persuade herself He was still living. But meanwhile, what was to be done? She could not die, because her ninety-three lire were now all her unfortunate sisters had to depend on. She had to go back to school. But what would she teach, since what had she ever spoken about to those girls except God, even when explaining arithmetic or history? It did not occur to her that God was her suffering, and also the suffering and madness of Tommasina and Battistina, or even the very sickness and death of Ciriaco. Yet she had read it in
the book, she had said it so often to her pupils, to bring them hope, to the point of being reproached and laughed at by the new headmaster.

  The first time she left home to go to the monastery she took the hem of her outermost skirt (in those days there were lots of skirts, with a mass of pleats, as there are still petticoats today) and pulled it over her head, so that nothing could be seen but her waxen face and her glistening eyes. At school the girls had prepared her a huge bunch of wildflowers, which she hugged to her breast as she fought down tears. Then she spoke, and she seemed the same person as ever, the teacher who had known and loved the mothers and grandmothers of the girls now sitting on the benches. The only difference was that she didn’t want anyone to see her home after school, nor did she call on Donna Vincenza, whom she never saw again.