Ludovico had opened his law office purely and simply because it enabled him not to leave the house in Via Asproni, not to put his own personality to the test of the world. He was already twenty-seven, and the books he had accumulated had remained uncut, waiting for him to start the first of them. This was his vocation: to be forever waiting to begin, standing apart from real life, as if beginning things had nothing to do with this and did not depend on us. At bottom it was the attitude of the ancients who studied the phases of the moon or consulted soothsayers. And in fact, when anyone demanded action from him he would gaze into the distance and solemnly declare, “Everything in its own time.” This had become the motto of his life. It is hard to say how much of it was spontaneous and how much was studied. It is certain that he knew himself extremely well, and knew that he was not equal to action, and therefore circled around it, carefully avoiding any confrontation. But long practice, carried out (as I said before) since childhood, led him to deceive himself rather than others, or else to deceive others in order to deceive himself. In any case the danger was other people, who might force him to show his cards, or even lay him out stark naked on the table. Therefore, he had instinctively woven a cocoon around himself, had succeeded in surrounding himself with an aura of respect, veiling himself in mystery. And it must be admitted that he was seconded in this by the environment, because the enraptured town of Nuoro had a need for idols (like all other towns in Sardinia, if it comes to that), and by backing Don Sebastiano’s son the Nuorese felt they were acquiring a bit of nobility.
When I was a boy there was a certain Don Antioco Mores, who lived in Orotelli. He was an old “doctor of law,” and like the rest of them lived off the rents of his tanche. Always wrapped up in his own thoughts, if he happened to have any, as a young man he had taken out subscriptions to two magazines, one German and the other English. Every month for twenty years the postman faithfully delivered them, and he stacked them up unopened in his room. But the citizens of Orotelli, to whom the postman showed these strange stamps that came from distant worlds, or more simply, from the world, had conceived a high opinion of the “doctor,” and had credited him with a knowledge of languages, which is the height of knowledge. Don Antioco accepted his fame in silence, so his fellow townspeople made much of him, as if they themselves knew the language through him. So much so that on one occasion, when one of those Germans with a passion for digging up stones turned up at Orotelli, and went to visit Don Antioco, and talked to him, leaving him quite bewildered, they were furious with the stranger and nearly beat him up, because he didn’t make himself understood.
This sort of idolatry was not, as it might appear to be, in conflict with the destructive spirit that set the Nuorese against one another. In the bottom of their hearts they did have some hope in life; it was just that individually and collectively they felt incapable of making it come true. This same hope led them to create phantoms for themselves to cling to, as in the case of Don Antioco and Ludovico; but the real hopeless cases were the very idols whom fantasy or hallucination had brought into being, so that they sought salvation in an artificial solitude. In short, it was a reciprocal metaphysical deception. Except that Ludovico’s law office was a reality he had to measure up to, all the more so because in the shadow of Don Sebastiano clients began to flood in; and clients mean action, whether it is a question of a neighbor who crosses a field when he ought not to, or a window made without respecting the legal distances, or a property hemmed in by others: the petty lawsuits of a rural economy in the Sardinia of those days. But the man who had discovered that “everything has its own time,” and had made it his rule of life, lost no time in discovering that “there is no such thing as a petty suit.” The fear of living provided his eyes, as it were, with two magnifying lenses that enabled him to move with circumspection. Those modest women in costume, who were dotted about on the staircase, would wait to be received for hours and hours, if not days; and then, if they succeeded in getting into the office, they were confronted with a thin face that emerged from a row of books, and a pair of eyes that looked at them as if with their complaints they were the bearers of mysterious messages that it was up to him to decipher. In a husky voice he would expound on the theme of justice, leaving the poor things speechless, since for them justice or injustice was the rainwater that ran off the neighbor’s roof into their courtyard. “Servitude of stillicide,” Ludovico would thereupon exclaim in Italian, and these difficult foreign words really impressed the women, who went away convinced that they had found their messiah; and they spread his renown in the outside world. But it may be that this episode is not true, and that it was invented as a caricature by Avvocato Meleddu (one of those from the villages), whose office was a table at the Caffè Tettamanzi, where he raked in the vagrant clients by sniffing the odor of the cheeses they carried in their haversacks.
Don Sebastiano, with the optimism that came naturally to him, was overjoyed to see his stairs crowded with people sitting waiting, and things seemed to have gone back to the old days, before Giovanni had dethroned him. But Donna Vincenza suffered agonies, partly because the women who came into the kitchen to unload their country offerings of eggs, or honey, or lambs and kids in season, would beg her to persuade her son to receive them. She had tried once, and been told: “Everything in its own time.” It would have been such a simple thing to deal with the clients and make some money. But it was this very simplicity that had no place in the life-scheme of a man who, as a boy, had waited forever to read his first book. Even now it could be said that he was waiting for his first client. And in the meantime he “organized” the office, creating a thoroughgoing bureaucracy and filling it with registers and forms; which was also a way of avoiding action. In the very room where in the course of fifty years Don Sebastiano had accumulated a fortune, with all those morocco-bound notary deeds still lined up behind the glass panes of the bookcases, his son had stopped time, and was waiting for the pendulum that had measured out so many hours over the bent head of Don Sebastiano to start swinging again. His vocation was orderliness, which is the basis of creation. Accordingly, when a letter came he would turn it over in his hands for a long time, gazing at it meditatively; then he would put it away in a file without opening it, because everything had its own time. And so, it seems, he behaved with the people who came to him to talk of their troubles: he succeeded by magic in always putting them off until tomorrow, a tomorrow that never came.
It has to be said that he was aided and abetted in this by the Nuorese themselves, who in him had at last found their perfect lawyer. The most important thing in their lives, and in those of the villagers who gravitated toward Nuoro as the seat of the law courts, was to have a lawsuit going. It was not a question of winning or losing it, and indeed it was vital to do neither, for otherwise the suit would be over and done with. A lawsuit was part of the personality, if not the only visible sign of it, to such an extent that there was often no real animosity between the litigants, because they both needed each other. The Nuorese had immediately felt a profound fellow-feeling for this young lawyer, and they came in hordes, only too eager to sit on the stairs and wait for the sanctuary to open. When it did open, and one of the faithful succeeded in penetrating that paper world, he went back home proud of himself and full of faith in the future. And as I think I have suggested, this enchantment also worked within the family. Don Sebastiano had to all intents and purposes handed over the reins to this son possessed of such wisdom, his brothers tacitly recognized him as the center of the family, and scattered here and there as they were, they thought of him as the guardian of the deserted house. Only Donna Vincenza, among the shadows crowding before her faded sight, saw this son as far from her as the ones whom the dispersal had dotted around on the Continent, or even farther. Lacerated by loneliness, she shouted out to him ten times a day from her chair under the pergola, and either he would not answer at all or he would be huffy about it.
Ludovico was incapable of responding. He was like a man walkin
g a tightrope over an abyss, and could not distract his attention for one moment without falling. That business of his waiting to read his first book was not a joke, any more than was Don Antioco Mores’s subscription to magazines in languages he did not understand. It was a vocation for knowledge without a corresponding ability to learn, and it therefore led to these ridiculous cover-ups. It is, in any case, a relatively common thing in life in the provinces, and I think it is the reason why magnificent libraries may even today be found in towns at the back of beyond. In the end, what is at work is always the dream. The Nuorese were ignorant, but they did not dream. Even when they were getting drunk or sitting at the tables in the Caffè Tettamanzi to while the hours away, they were functioning, not dreaming. Ludovico’s trouble was that life would not allow him to dream; it urged him to take part in reality; it exposed him to an exhausting risk, exactly like that of the tightrope walker. He could get away with making no response to Donna Vincenza when she called him, but how could he avoid responding to the demands of others, which are constant, continuous, and inexorable?
The first such demand arrived one April evening from the windows of Don Gabriele Mannu, the house just across the street from that of Don Sebastiano’s. The Mannu family, against which, if you remember, Don Ricciotti Bellisai vented his spleen, was certainly the oldest in Nuoro, and indeed in both the people and their belongings there was a touch of archaism, which kept at a distance those who were aware of being fated to a brief, anonymous journey on earth, which is to say all the Nuorese. There were various branches, nearly all of them stemming from women, and therefore with different names; but they were all closely connected. The result was that as the relatives were so numerous at least one died every year, so that the Mannus were always dressed in black mourning. Perhaps this explains the reputation for stinginess that had accompanied them down the centuries. I do not know if they were stingy toward others, but they certainly were toward themselves—unless this is the only true way of being stingy. From the tables of the Caffè Tettamanzi one looked across at the row of balconies on the first floor of their “palace” (the only one in Nuoro remotely worthy of this name, even though the stucco was falling to pieces), with the windows always closed and the shutters nailed fast. These were the windows of the great salon, and they had not been opened for years, because no one except a farm manager ever entered the Mannu front door, and their mourning would not have permitted them to receive guests, even if they had wanted to. Within those walls the Nuorese seated at the caffè saw Don Gabriele’s wife and daughters moving around like ghosts, and being either bachelors or unhappy husbands, as they all were, they talked sneeringly of them, imagining them intent on counting money, and yawning with hunger.
But Don Gabriele’s daughters were by no means ghosts. Life, which knows no barriers, filtered through those walls of stone and mud, and pierced the patina of pride that covered women of marriageable age like a breastplate; and if this left the windows giving onto the Corso closed, it opened another which overlooked Via Asproni, and from which Ludovico could be seen bent over his registers or stamped official paper. At that window it was, though standing back a little, as befitted her position, that the eldest daughter Celestina stood looking out, and so it came to pass that one day Ludovico raised his head and their eyes met. This also was a very simple thing, but Ludovico felt himself already lost. The summons was peremptory, for one could not speak to Donna Celestina Mannu as one spoke to the country women from Oliena who came to complain about the water dripping from their neighbor’s roof. For the first time he felt that life was getting out of hand, that he was unable to program it, because someone was pushing him violently into the abyss. Closed in on himself, in the contemplation of his ailments, he had never thought about love, nor had love ever thought of him. Now everything was crumbling.
He spent sleepless nights questioning his mind and his senses, but he got no answer. He felt that his true calling was that of a bachelor, like so many Nuorese who lived and died like mushrooms. Getting married meant entering the life of another person, and having this other person as part of one’s own life. An insane undertaking, or indeed simply an undertaking, which required a decision, and he could not decide without having the necessary data in his hands. If it had been a question of the marriage between Zio Priamo and Zia Franceschina, who joined their two lives purely so as not to die alone, it would have been an easy matter. It was a question of living, and this was not easy: it was impossible. Punctually at seven she would appear in the window embrasure, with her slender, elegant figure and the pallor of one who has grown up in shadow. Instinctively he would look up and meet her gaze, which excited and depressed him at the same time.
He decided to make a profound study of the physiology of marriage, and he got hold of the books then in circulation, looking either for some advice or an escape route in science. But in his heart of hearts he felt that the ineluctable was bound to happen. One could not say no to Don Gabriele’s daughter; and then, he was secretly flattered at being singled out. When he thought the time was ripe he wrote a letter, which he sent the maid to deliver, based on the style used in concluding a law case, except that it concluded nothing. It was an extremely long message in which he spoke of himself, of his attitudes with regard to life and, since he knew that the women of the Mannu family were intensely religious, of God as well. But he talked about himself even when talking of God. It was one of the theses he had worked on at school, which had gained him the reputation of being learned and a thinker. Celestina interpreted the letter according to her own wishes, and the following day she made a beckoning sign from the window. He stepped nearer, and she asked if he would allow her to talk to her father about the matter. Drawn on by the train of events, he said yes, and so it was that a few days later in the pharmacy Don Gabriele spoke to Don Sebastiano, asking him to make the request official. The days and the times of day on which Ludovico could visit Celestina (Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday from five until seven in the evening) were agreed on. This was the ancient custom. And indeed it was a reasonable custom, since it is not right for an engaged couple to disturb the whole household.
Don Sebastiano was all too glad to make a family connection with the Mannus, who were no more aristocratic than he was, since all the noble families of Nuoro had the same beginnings, but they had enhanced their nobility with long centuries of inertia, being careful not to work, but to keep their lands, collect their rents, and invest them in other properties. This was how they had amassed their sullen wealth.
But Donna Vincenza was not happy. Not, of course, that she could have asked for better. All the same, for fifty years she had lived opposite those people, and not once had they sent across the maid with a shovel to ask for a few embers. Nothing. And then there was Ludovico. His poor mother had no illusions. Her mind was unable to comprehend this son, who had remained close to her but only in appearance, and made no response to her appeals. To her he seemed alien to everything, intent only on hiding from others and from himself. Some obscure feeling warned her that this marriage would never take place, and for this reason, using her health as an excuse, she refused a meeting with the future daughter-in-law. Furthermore, the visit could not take place except in the presence of Sanna, and she would be unable to put up with the idiocies to which her delighted husband would no doubt abandon himself.
Meanwhile Ludovico busied himself with his new role as a fiancé. On the eve of each day fixed for meeting he would prepare a subject for discussion. It might be the family, politics, or philosophy, and since he was very careful not to exceed his limitations the discussion came down to a monologue in which he rehearsed general ideas, accompanying them with a smile and a slight intake of breath, as if to surround them with mystery.
The presence of Donna Sabina, the future mother-in-law, helped to maintain the iron conventionality of these encounters. For Ludovico this was providential, because it enabled him to avoid effusions that in a tête-à-tête would have seemed only right. He spoke only
in Italian, even when the women tended to reply in Sardinian, because the remote, recherché language made things more abstract. When the last ray of sunshine filtered through the firmly closed shutters, he would rise and take his leave. This was the only moment at which their eyes met, but Ludovico lowered his at once, fearful of that arcane communication which so brusquely thrust him into the real world. He went down the steep granite steps without looking back, and crossed the road hurriedly, eager to be alone with himself.
The Day of Judgment Page 29