Two women who had come to their doorways saw her pass, but they said nothing. Basket in hand, they watched her for a long time, until she vanished on the other side of the Corso, which she crossed with bowed head. The lane on the other side, the one (for clarity’s sake) where Marianna Secchi’s shop was—a sort of combined dive and caffè—divided in two, one branch leading to the church and the other, through a maze of alleys, to the open country. She started along the latter, groping like a blind woman, and found herself at last on a broad dirt road which zigzagged steeply down into the valley. She recognized it at once, partly because she had not seen many roads in the course of her life. It was the one that led to the sea, to Orosei, to Gonone, to the villa of the Mariani sisters, which had remained in her memory like a dream or a fairy tale. She remembered that beneath it there was a beach of sand so mellow and fine that they called it Palmasera. It seemed to her that she had found, in all the earth, a place to make for. It did not occur to her that it was a vast distance away, something over thirty kilometers, and she started on the descent as if chasing a mirage. The important thing was not to look back. At first there seemed to be signs of life to keep her company: the carts, the oxen, the men who had stopped work, had left traces on their way back from their day in the fields in the valley. Tomorrow, for them, would be another day. Then, suddenly, solitude.
The road descended from the crest of the Mountain, which at that point loomed over the valley with enormous crags, and like a swelling serpent it engulfed her in its spirals and held her paralyzed against a low wall that she had leaned on because her feet were hurting. She had never been alone before, and from the depths of her being came the specters, the monsters, and the demons that had peopled the nights of her childhood. Coeddu came in person, and he was the Devil, so named because of the tail that was his symbol. In her terror a cry burst from her: “Help me, help me! They have killed me! They have chased me away from home tonight!” It was the same cry as Giggia’s, and in the same way it was launched into the void, to a sky without stars or God. Then she was ashamed of herself, and started walking again in silence, treading carefully, because her feet were swollen. Utter darkness, and each step could easily take her into a chasm, but she went ahead, and passed the turning for Oliena, which she recognized by its streetlights, and these, in spite of herself, gave her a feeling of comfort. Her brow was running with sweat, and the white kerchief binding her head squeezed it like a vise. Her greatest fear was of losing hope. What time could it be now? Increasingly unsteady on her feet, she reached a place where the road ran flat, or was gently undulating. She was already in the warm lands, which get sun from Baronia, though Baronia is a long way off; and indeed she thought she smelled the odor of myrtle. She thought she recognized the place, though for thirty or forty years she had not passed by that way; and she felt like crying. But almost at the same moment the miracle happened: an enormous radiance spread from Monte Corrasi, and distant, inaccessible, yet close at hand, the moon appeared. The entire plain was drenched in its light, and as if in answer to a mysterious signal, the crickets began to sing, the myrtles to give forth perfume, the oleanders along the dry streambeds to sway with joy. It was a chorus led by God, the God of the woods, the God of the lentisc and of the arbutus, of the nightbirds already giving forth their melancholy song; but a God who lives not in the hearts of men, who dies with those to whom He brings death, who allows Himself to be devoured by mice and woodworm in a room under lock and key for twenty years. This joy at night increased her pain. What time could it be? She would willingly have stretched out on a heap of gravel, if she had been able to stop. But she had to get there. The animals are eternal, because they do not hope. Her feet were bleeding. Maybe she would die before she got there. But death also was an arrival. A faint light tinged the mountain of Galtellì, its dovelike form. It might be the herald of dawn, and this frightened her. She would hide, for they would certainly come looking for her. But it might be just an illusion. The birds fluttered in the hedgerows all around her, and began to twitter. She, who had never slept, then realized that she had never seen the reawakening of nature. If only she could have a sip of water. She dragged herself up a short slope and saw a faint light farther down the road. It could not be a shepherd’s hut: shepherds do not keep fires burning at night, because they too are children of the dark. It turned out to be a roadman’s house, one of those red buildings that punctuated the wilderness in those days. She knew that there was one of them every nine kilometers, which meant that in the entire night she had not walked more than nine kilometers. In great surprise, she went up to the door and knocked. In answer came a silence charged with fear. She knocked again. A window opened and a woman’s face looked out. Gonaria asked for a drop of water, for the love of charity. The house at once filled with noise, and a pregnant woman, followed by a string of children excited at this unexpected event, opened the door.
“Oh, ma’am!” she cried. “You here? But how on earth? What has happened?” It was an old pupil of hers, one of the hundreds whom she had brought up in the love of God.
“Give me a little water. Help me... It’s nothing... I have to get to Gonone.”
The woman thought she was delirious. Her hands were hot, too. Maybe she had a fever. A solemn-faced man, yellow with malaria, arrived with a lamp in his hand.
“Come,” he said, “come upstairs and rest a little. Your shoes are all gone to pieces. We’ll see if we can find a pair of the girls’ that will fit you. Then you can go on.”
She let them lead her. They laid her down on the double bed, which was still warm, in a room full of tools. She could not imagine poverty worse than this, but it was a house full of human lives, which gave her a feeling of peace. Thinking that she was asleep, the pair of them left the room on tiptoe. She could hear them talking in low voices. A little later she heard the sound of a light cart fading into the distance. She at once realized what was happening. She cried out, “I want to go to Palmasera. Let me go!” She tried to get up, but fell back exhausted. It was the end of her flight from life and from death.
The last message came with a ray of light filtering through the ill-fitting shutters, slashing sideways through the shadows, and ending in a broad cone on the head of the bed. It was the ray of a dying sun, as if that night had turned back on its tracks, and it brought with it a restless dust, or perhaps it was wisps of cloud, slowly growing and taking on form and substance, until she saw (or did she see?) the shade of a girl seated on the bed beside her.
“Teacher, dear teacher! Don’t you recognize me? I have come to get water from Obisti—I am dying of thirst. Why didn’t you send it to me?”
She shook herself free from the nightmare of it, and recognized Peppeddedda. You will certainly not remember her, but she was the girl whom Gonaria used to send to the church in the morning, to take coffee to her brother when he came into the sacristy after Mass. Scarcely more than a child, the daughter of very poor parents, who lived in one of the many hovels to be found even in the center of town, she was intelligent and hardworking, but above all devoted to her teacher, who in return for little kindnesses would teach her some of next year’s work, because she was ahead of the others. She was a happy soul, who brought light to all she saw, and even managed to bring a smile to the lips of those mournful women perched on chairs like hens roosting, so as not to let their feet touch the floor. She would come in with a jaunty step and a singsong greeting, and was ready at once to help her teacher get lunch for her godly brother. Gonaria would sometimes send her to Donna Vincenza’s when her godson Sebastiano was there, bringing cakes she had made with her own hands—and she sent word that they were very clean hands indeed. There Peppeddedda would meet the lad, who was only a little older than herself, and they would talk, brought together by the mystery they shared. The poor girl even put light into the face of Donna Vincenza, who never failed to drag her limbs over to the huge sideboard, where she kept the change received from the trifling sales that Don Sebastiano allowed her to ma
ke, and give her a soldo. And let there be no mistake about it, a Sardinian soldo, which was ten centimes of copper bearing the image of Vittorio Emanuele II, with his long neck.
The appearance of the girl who took the canon his coffee struck her as a good omen. But as she went on crying “Teacher, teacher” in a voice that grew weaker and weaker, a wave of terror swept over Gonaria. Her mind went back to the day when Peppeddedda had left Nuoro for Genoa. It was snowing, but she skipped over the snow like a sparrow, delighted with the unknown world that was beckoning to her. The child had an aunt in Genoa, in service for years with a well-to-do family, and hearing that she was clever they had offered to pay for her education. Gonaria had made all the arrangements. The parting was a heartbreak, and even those two poor madwomen, who had grown accustomed to her voice, if they did not go so far as to take her hand, wept as they gave her their blessing. The house seemed empty, because nothing fills a house more fully than a young girl alive to her own poverty. She embraced her teacher, above whom she already towered, and swore that as soon as she became a teacher herself she would come back and work at her side.
So off she went along the path of dreams. Each week she wrote, ever more wonderful letters, because those schools had far better teachers than Gonaria. And Gonaria would read them in class, holding up the example of this poverty-stricken girl who was building her future with her own hands. Then, all of a sudden, silence. No one knew what had happened. Two months later a letter came from the aunt, saying that Peppeddedda had felt poorly, because she had been working too hard, the schools were tough, and the climate in Genoa was not as good as in Nuoro. The doctor had ordered her to be sent to Santa Tecla, and now she was a bit better. No one knew what this “Santa Tecla” was, but in fact it was the tuberculosis sanatorium, where in those days you went to die. From time to time letters would arrive from the girl, but they were increasingly rare and brief. She would tell them she was not too bad, and that she was still pursuing the dream that had taken her that far. If she hadn’t had a touch of fever in the evenings she would have gone back to school, but the doctor said she should wait. In about October, after a summer of silence, came a short note in which she said that she had a terrible thirst, and begging the teacher to send a bottle of the water of Obisti, but that she should go herself, so that it would come directly from the source. Only that water could quench her thirst. Those were her last words. Not even the echo of her singsong voice was left. A meaningless journey through the world. Don Sebastiano would have said that she too had gone “to look for bread made from better things than wheat.”
Gonaria roused herself suddenly. Perhaps her head had slumped down in her sleep. But dream and reality make no difference. The little girl who eternally carried with her the mirage of that water was none other than herself, with the thirst that had devoured her all her life. The water of Obisti, of that unassuming village spring, would have been able to bring about the miracle. It was only that no one had offered her the cup, as she had not offered it to Peppeddedda. What has to happen happens inevitably, and God can do nothing to help us. In the morning she would unlock the room, and her destiny would be fulfilled.
*1 “O litter bearing that dead man...”
*2 “Throw your wimple into the nettles / and speak to me of love...”
19
Summer that year arrived in the month of May. It was announced by gusts of scorching wind, a wind blown forth from Africa over the whole of the Tyrrhenian Sea, halted neither by hills nor by mountains. Nothing like it had been seen since the time of the locusts. It swept over the flowering tanche, over the fields where the wheat was already high, and at its passing everything appeared to curl up and roast, as when forest fires broke out in August. A dense rain of sand fell in the desolate town, forcing people to shut themselves up indoors. The ominous lowing of bewildered cattle could be heard from the countryside. Only toward evening, when the sun set, could a few shadowy forms be seen in the pharmacy or the caffè: Don Sebastiano, Don Serafino with a handkerchief between neck and collar, Bartolino and the others with open necks, all of them resigned to fate. Bustianu Pirari said it was the fault of those whores who had gone to Tunis to have their bastards.
The wind lasted four days. The first to give signs of life were the stray dogs, which had mysteriously disappeared at the first gusts. Then human beings began peeping out, with the air of having survived the Flood. The streets filled up and everyone—or at least all those who had property—set off for the fields to see the damage which that scourge had caused. Don Sebastiano mounted his horse and rode down to Isporòsile. The bramble hedges on either side of the road to Mughina seemed turned to stone, such was the sand piled upon them. The little scattered vegetable gardens, which inveterate peasant idleness had already left neglected, looked like battlefields just abandoned by contending armies, for here and there one could see animals that had died of starvation or the intense heat. Lower down in the valley the olive leaves had all curled up, and Don Sebastiano thought gloomily that the next two years’ harvests could be reckoned as lost. He was not given to meditation, nor did he concede too much to Providence, but that sight made him grieve inwardly, and the idea that crossed his mind was as old as the world: the idea of castigation. Personally he had nothing to reproach himself for, but a few months earlier they had killed Recotteddu, who was a good soul, and no one had got to the bottom of it. Not to speak of Francesco Mattu, whom they had reduced to beggary by hamstringing his cows for some unknown reason. It could be that everything is paid for, and that all must pay for the sins of one.
The horse had reached the end of the road, and was making its way toward the ford across the stream that bordered Don Sebastiano’s enclosure. As you may remember, he had quite literally built this stretch of country, and not once but twice, three times, as often as there had been floodwaters to devastate it. For this reason he loved the little property as a child of his own, and he trembled at the thought of the destruction he would find there. Between the gate and the farmhouse was a dense olive grove, and he rode through it unable to believe his eyes. The trees were burgeoning forth luxuriantly, the soil was carpeted with grass, and the oxen were peacefully grazing on it. In a word, there was not a sign of the recent blight. He was astounded, and would have been beside himself with joy, except that the anguish of what he had seen along the way was still in his heart. By what privilege had his place been exempted from the slaughter? He thought of an interplay of airstreams that had pushed the harmful winds toward the north, or of the protection of Father Antonio’s hillside, which shut the valley in. It was possible or probable that a vacuum had been formed at the bottom, and that this had meant salvation. He tried to remember one of the few scientific articles he had read, and was wrapped up in these thoughts when, almost under the belly of the horse, there appeared a spectral figure, followed like a dog by a youth of about fifteen, also looking wretched and with signs of malaria in his face. While dwelling upon his good fortune he had forgotten the sharecropper Nanneddu Titùle (which means Squalid Johnny, though it was of course a nickname), who had been working the farm for about a year. Seen from above in this way, it was as if the baleful wind had struck him and him only.
“Master,” he said, “you are wondering how we have escaped the plague. Come and see.”
Don Sebastiano dismounted. He detested this sharecropper, sent to him by a friend from Barbagia because labor was short in Nuoro. He had arrived with his load of penury and children, of whom that fifteen-year-old was the eldest. He didn’t even have health to recommend him. Don Sebastiano had helped him, but could not disguise the fact that he didn’t like him. He felt that he demeaned the farm, and on top of that he wanted to do things his own way. Poddanzu had been right in putting him on his guard. They went down the short slope under the oak, and stopped in front of the house. On the closed half of the double doors hung a dog crucified with its front legs stretched apart and nailed to the wood, and its head hanging slantwise on its chest.
“Th
at’s what saved the farm!”
Don Sebastiano stood as if turned to stone. His mind went back to the ritual sacrifices that, without really believing it, he had read about in the encyclopedia, or those crucified figures with asses’ heads which the pagans used to paint to make fun of the Christians.
“He howled for three days, then he died, and the wind that was bending the trees double on the far side of the priest’s hillside stopped at once.”
Don Sebastiano would have liked to hurl him over the sustaining wall of the vegetable garden, but the peasant’s eyes had a visionary look in them, which almost frightened him, though he could have squashed him with one finger.
“Take it down at once and bury it, and don’t tell anyone about it. Just remember that!”
“Just as you say, master.”
Don Sebastiano was not squeamish, but he was upset by superstition, as a denial of the faith he placed in reason. He really had to get rid of this savage.
But the latter, accompanying him with a disappointed face to his horse, lowered his eyes and said, “There’s Ziu Merriolu, who works Pascale Martis’s land above here. He doesn’t let the water run on after he’s used it for his vegetables. For the moment there’s enough water, but in summer there’s a chance of it running out. What should we do?”
“Work it out between you,” said Don Sebastiano irritably.
Later on, he was to remember these words.
The Day of Judgment Page 27