If you don’t die, you live. And this truth, which seems obvious, is on the contrary pregnant with consequences, because life transforms everything, and nothing resists its implacable will. The years that followed (I have to hasten to the end, for brief is the time remaining to me) saw the death of the only one who ought not to have died, Giuseppina, the busy bee of the house. She went off just like that, of a banal attack of influenza, and her end was peaceful, because she said she didn’t know why she had come into the world. This event, which should have caused even worse disaster, turned out to be the salvation of the household, because Tommasina began to get better. She started to say that it was all nonsense, that they were all in the best of health, and that she was the healthiest of the lot. And in fact she began to put on weight, regained her ruddy complexion, and stopped disinfecting and burning things; except that whenever someone came she would rush to shake their hand before anyone else did. In compensation, she went back to the old folie de grandeur: “We’re rich, we’re rich.”
The fated victim was, naturally, Gonaria. Since Ciriaco’s death, Gonaria had never been to church, and had a horror of seeing a priest’s cassock or hearing a priest’s voice. Tommasina put down her return to health to a very special act of Grace conceded to her, and she therefore felt it her duty to safeguard the rights of God, or at least those of the Blessed Virgin. “Traitor to the Church, traitor to the Church,” she would bawl at the poor creature who had not so much abandoned God as she had been abandoned by Him (if indeed it doesn’t come to the same thing). “Traitor!” And that poor creature, who by this time lived on nothing but air, took refuge in front of the door of the room where Ciriaco had died—the key to which she jealously guarded. Perhaps God still existed there within.
But Gonaria’s crimes were not committed only against religion, which had been the salvation of Tommasina. For some time the latter had started complaining again about the ridiculous penny-pinching which Gonaria had forced her into with her ninety-three lire a month. They were rich, because they owned the house they lived in, and the house was too big for them. It would be no trouble to rent out a room—the room that Gonaria had insisted on keeping locked ever since Ciriaco died. All that was needed was to open it up and disinfect it from top to bottom, because it was still full of microbes. There was no need even to furnish it, because everything was already there. They had done it up completely when he was made a canon. What were they waiting for? That would be at least forty lire of income to add to the paltry ninety-three.
Gonaria saw the danger at once, and withdrew into her shell and prepared to defend herself. No one would ever get into that sanctuary as long as she lived. She said she would give her ninety-three lire to her sister, and she herself would eat only a sliver of bread, and not every day at that. For some time, in any case, she had suffered from a constriction in the throat that prevented her from swallowing food.
But Tommasina would not let go of her prey. It was not a question of eating. Those forty lire represented an income and therefore a sign of that wealth with which she had nourished her imagination. As her sanguine constitution made her an extrovert, she began to tell the neighbors who had started to call again that Gonaria was mad, and that she was leaving her in poverty after turning her back on the Church. Only a madwoman could lock up a room—which after all was hers as well—for ten or fifteen years. And those women thought she was right, and since they also gossiped and spread Tommasina’s complaints the length and breadth of Nuoro, all Nuoro began to take her side. Even the bishop put his oar in, though he was not Monsignor Canepa and had therefore never known Canon Sanna. To persuade Gonaria he sent his secretary, who found himself face to face with such a minuscule creature that he was at a loss to understand how she could have caused such a to-do. But he was quick to realize that that birdlike frame contained an immovable will, though it was uncertain whether this had its roots in hope or in despair. He returned to his superior saying that in any case they were dealing with a madwoman, so the bishop thought no more about it.
Gonaria was mad, but not so mad as to be unaware that the writing was on the wall. Beneath her white kerchief her brain was at work. It would have taken an angel with a flaming sword to guard that door. But not even he would have been capable of it, faced with human needs. And then... If the God she had lost had really remained within, unchanged by the passage of time, and if when the door was opened He re-entered her soul... Several times she caught herself thinking such things. She was getting old, even though time had left no mark upon her person, and perhaps she felt weary of living without the One who had sustained the purity of her youth. In any case, it was the beginning of surrender.
*
Seated on the bed, she listened to the night sounds of Nuoro. Ever since she had stopped praying she would spend the nights like this, without sleeping, without even getting undressed, as if waiting for a sudden summons. This night she was living through might be the last one of her life, because the next day she had to open that door. After exhortation they had turned to threats, and it was obvious that she could hold out no longer. She still expected the night to give some mysterious sign. Who knows, the song of a bird that in her superstition she could interpret, the wail of an infant that would take her out of time, or the rumble of a cart to give her courage to pursue her destiny. The reveries of one forsaken, who will not yield to necessity, who forgets that night is the sequel to day, and that if the day has been cruel the night also cannot fail to nurture cruelty in its shadows.
The first sign (though she could not understand it) came from the street in the early hours of the night. It was as if a fleeing army was pounding past on the cobblestones: not a voice, not a cry broke the silence, which the rattle of footsteps made even more sinister. What could have happened, at an hour when the Nuorese are shut up in the caffè or the drinking dens, finishing a binge or starting out on one? She went to the window, trembling, and someone excitedly told her that Maestro Manca was dead.
In these last months his terror of death had become even more acute. He kept his finger constantly pressed against the swollen vein in his temple, and could not stay on his feet without a glass of wine in him. “Portantina che porti quel morto...” The lugubrious song that the youths would chant whenever he appeared, drove him out of his mind. To escape from this teasing he had taken refuge that evening in a dive in San Pietro, and there, while reaching out a trembling hand toward his glass, he had slipped out of his chair and under the table. If only he could have imagined that dying was such a simple thing! The news spread through Nuoro like lightning: it entered the Caffè Tettamanzi and interrupted the games of “tresette,” it entered the low pothouses and froze the blood and wine in the veins of the drinkers, it entered the houses of the rich and the poor, of all those who had made judgments on Maestro Manca during his lifetime. At once the great cavalcade began through the deserted streets. They dashed to San Pietro and did not find him; they dashed to the cemetery and no one was there; they dashed to the hospital, and there they found him lying on a iron bedstead in a room as bare as a warehouse, unmindful of himself and free at last of his vicious habit. A hundred, a thousand eyes gazed at him with fear, as if Pedduzza had skipped out on them, and with the mystery of his death had squarely faced each one of them with the mystery of his own life. “Portantina che porti quel morto...”
Gonaria went back to the bed and lost herself in the far-off years when she had so happily begun work at the school. Maestro Manca was young in those days, like her. He had a little pointed beard, with a little curl at the tip of it, and mocking blue-green eyes. He was short and already tubby, and it was then that they called him “Pebble,” the nickname that stuck forever; but he was a merry soul and amused himself by teasing her about her nunnish calling:
Butta alle ortiche il soggolo
e parlami d’amor...*2
He wrote his verses in Italian, for he had not yet acquired the drinking habit, and she must have felt flattered by them, since she still
remembered the ridiculous doggerel of youthful days that maybe had never existed. Later on, what had happened had happened, and now Maestro Manca lay motionless on a bed in the hospital, as she lay on hers. What message came to her from that sinner? Both in their different ways had destroyed their lives, and there was precious little to choose between them. The destination was nothingness, the void, the longing for death... There was only that key which she fingered in her pocket, and to which she clung as to an anchor. Perhaps it held the secret, for her, for Maestro Manca, for everyone...
In her wearied mind her thoughts ran wild. The night seemed to have reabsorbed that sudden burst of activity into its silence, when from the top of the street she heard the howling of a dog. But it was not a dog, because as it came closer the cry split up into incoherent words, becoming the lament of a human creature. The lament poured down the street, but awakened no echoes around it: no one opened a window and no footstep sounded on the cobblestones. Everyone knew what it was. Do you remember Giggia, who when she was young and beautiful was the girlfriend of the woodcutters who came from the Continent and had her naked serving them at table? I also told how when she was old and alone she worked as a prostitute in San Pietro, without being aware of it. And this is the truth. When the woods had been destroyed and those gentlemen had gone away, Giggia had no choice but to continue in public with the way of life she had begun in private. But if reverential awe of the bosses had rubbed off on her, making her respected and maybe even envied, once she was left to herself she became the laughing-stock of all Nuoro. It has to be said that it is hard to be a prostitute in Nuoro without going mad. With the passing of the years, in fact, Giggia seemed to lose all awareness of herself. The mature bachelors of the Caffè Tettamanzi, who perhaps in early days had gone to find relief with her, as if stepping into the shoes of the Continentals, seeing her so lost and unthinking when she meekly yielded her body, had made her up a nickname that became popular: “Giggia the guileless whore of fifteen,” They were of course unable to imagine the profound truth embodied in this phrase. They laughed, and the whole of Nuoro laughed with them. The young lads and even the small boys would run after her shouting these words, but she noticed nothing. In time she grew old, and was covered with sores, and became a specter frightful to behold. But she was still a woman, and as she left the door unlocked the night-prowling drunkards would reel in and possess her in her sleep. Anyone who remembered left two lire in a dish on the bedside table.
Now Giggia, the guileless whore, lived in a hole in the wall without windows or anything else, but to her it was immensely valuable because it gave her shelter from the wind and the rain and enabled her to feel alive, to feel that she was herself, even in her infinite poverty. Except that this hole in the wall, like everything else in this world, had an owner, and he was an illustrious lawyer who, in spite of being a big property owner, professed to be a socialist. But socialist or not, the word “owner” meant that the house or the hole in the wall was his, and anyone in it had to pay rent. Giggia did not know what rent was, or even remember how she had come to occupy this cavern. So one day, when she received a sheet of paper covered with all sorts of stamps and seals, she simply put it on the bedside table, partly for the very good reason that she couldn’t read. Then came another, and then a third, which suffered the same fate. Nor indeed could she have imagined for a moment that the avvocato needed his cavern. And so it came about that eventually a person turned up brandishing yet another sheet of paper, with two porters who without so much as a why or wherefore carried the bed and the bedside table and the other few sticks of furniture out into the street, fastened the door with a padlock, and went away. Giggia can’t have realized what had happened, because she sat down on the bed as if in expectation. Out in the open or in her cave made very little difference to her. But when night began to fall, and she saw the door tight shut, she felt the enormous emptiness of the world all around her, and she was afraid. In desperation she grabbed the padlock and tried to wrench it away, but not even the doors of the nearby prison were so unyielding. So she gave up hope, and wept, her face buried in her loathsome pillow. Then suddenly she stood up like a robot, and clad in her few rags started on her wanderings through the deserted streets of Nuoro. Aimlessly she walked howling down the alleys of San Pietro, turned into the Corso, where by this time there was not a soul, and passed in front of the Caffè Tettamanzi, where the clients had already retired inside because of the chill. Only Giovanni Maria Musiu went to the door, but when he saw Giggia he blushed, because he had been a client of hers, and he pulled in his head at once. “What have they done to me tonight,” she wailed. “They’ve ruined me. They’ve taken away my home. Carabinieri, help me! I’m a dead woman...” Her cry broke against the shuttered windows, and the Nuorese turned over in their beds. “Help me, help me! Tonight they’ve killed me...”
Her wail lay upon Nuoro like a cloak of lead. Instead of wandering around the streets, Giggia would have done well to go to the cemetery and dig her grave with her own hands. She was bound there anyway. In the meantime it was her howling, echoing down the narrow street, that Gonaria heard as she sat on her bed. It was the second message brought to her by the night. If she went downstairs, she could open the room that had been shut for twenty years, and put that luckless creature into it... But one cannot even consider such things. Perhaps that drunkard Canon Mocci would have done it. Her hands clasping the white kerchief binding her head, Gonaria nonetheless had enough sense to understand what Giggia, the guileless whore, was telling her with her cry. It was not a question of human nastiness; it was not a question of that socialist lawyer, who was probably already peacefully asleep. Whether him or somebody else, it would have come to the same thing. What that poor woman was giving voice to was the sense of the ineluctable. What has to happen happens inevitably, and God can do nothing to help us. In the morning she would open the room, and destiny would be fulfilled.
*
Crouched in front of the door (she had insisted that Tommasina should go into the dining room), she gripped the key in one small hand and rocked her body, almost transparent from perpetual fasting, with the rhythm of women at wakes. How many hours had passed, how many were passing, in her solitude? Even if she was not mad, the stakes were high. Twenty years earlier she had stopped time in that room at the hour when Ciriaco had died. In her mind’s eye she saw things one by one, just as she had arranged them: the pillow, the breviary, the hat with the red cord. It was all there... on the other side... But stopping time means stopping God, fixing Him eternally in one of the countless moments into which life is divided. This was her terror and her hope: that the God to whom she had entrusted the whole of herself, and who in an instant had cruelly withdrawn Himself from her, had remained there within, so that when the door opened He would come back into her soul, and all the pain of all these years would prove to be a dream. It was fear even more than hope that had driven her to the absurd decision to keep the door locked, and so it would have remained if they had not used violence against her, if Tommasina, who had God within her, had let her alone. The truth would have been known after her death, which by now could not be all that far away. But now...
The bell of Santa Maria struck the hour. It must have been late afternoon, because the shadows were growing longer. She had refused all food, and not even wanted the cup of coffee that had become her only sustenance. She had to act, because at any moment Tommasina might appear, or some neighbor, and smother her with insults, or even snatch away the key. Slowly she rose, and put her knees to the ground, as if in a sudden spasm of prayer. Then she drew the key from the pocket of her skirt, and inserted it in the lock.
A stuffy smell, that seemed to her the smell of death itself, assailed her nostrils and offended her sharp senses. Stifling, she ran to the window, through which a dust-laden light filtered in, and tried to open it. The frame jammed, as if nailed shut. Then she turned, and looked around, and the first thing she saw was a mouse nest dug through the bedspread, whic
h had housed who knows how many generations over the years. She would have let out a shrill cry, because she had a horror of all creatures that live in the dark, but she was afraid that people might come running. She approached the bed. Of the breviary nothing was left but a scrap of the spine, and the bed itself was just barely balanced, for as she leaned on it the thing collapsed without so much as a creak. The woodworm, undisturbed, had eaten the thing away from inside, as termites do. Here and there she saw the little holes that were the doorways to their interminable catacombs. From the vaulted ceiling hung great bunches of spiders’ webs, which looked untenanted, while the flowers around the Madonna beneath the glass bell had fallen into dust. On the peeling wall almost nothing remained—no more than a faraway shadow—of the portrait of the canon, that once had so proud a look. Dumb with terror, she looked at last toward the cupboard, where she had devoutly hung the hat with the red cord. Through the sagging door nothing was left to see. The mice and the moths (and what other horrors?) had eaten everything. In the inch-deep dust were a few woven threads, to bear witness to a past that might never have existed.
Then she knew for certain that she had made her bet and lost. She left the room slowly, closed the door but left the key in the lock, and went downstairs. She was overwhelmed by the notion of running away. She could stay no longer in the house where God had died. When she reached the street she felt like a dog without a master. Next door to her house was an old olive press, and the low rumble of the millstone, the muffled voices of the owners and workers, had at one time accompanied and punctuated her nightly ecstasies. Only on midwinter nights, when work was at its heaviest, did one hear the noisy bourgeois who met to eat bread moistened with oil straight from the press. But they did not disturb her, and in fact were a help to her visions, because the press, with the horse going round and round to turn the great millstone, with the men intent on their work by the light of a lantern, used to remind her of the manger at Bethlehem.
The Day of Judgment Page 26