The Day of Judgment
Page 30
Donna Celestina had the traditional chastity of the Mannus in her veins, and would have felt that love implied a lack of respect. But she had grown up in solitude, which had brought her close to God while at the same time making her long for the outside world. She also had the morose intelligence typical of the Mannus, and this made her diffident. Furthermore, she was educated, because in that desolate house someone had once accumulated some books, and she had read them all, those she understood and those she did not understand. Therefore, after the first period of expectation, she found herself entangled in a net of doubts, and the first doubt concerned the very existence of the person who was to become her husband. What did this man, who was so refined, so handsome, and spoke as if he were quoting from an invisible book, have in common with other men? Those generalizing discourses that he started on as soon as he sat down in the drawing room, still lit by candlelight alone, might deceive Donna Sabina, but not her: she emerged from them exasperated. Had it not been for her upper-class pride she would have offered herself to him, just to see what he ultimately wanted. But she was sure that the result would be to give him a pretext for escape, and she did not want Ludovico to escape her. And so, little by little, she found herself trapped, resigned to going along with the wishes of a man who had no wishes whatsoever.
This was the beginning of an engagement destined to last twelve years. It would be more correct to say a marriage that ended in engagement, because on the day when Celestina asked Ludovico never to show his face again, in those two houses that stood facing each other the doors and the windows closed on their life, but both of them carried their own chastity away with them like an everlasting bereavement. For each of them it would have been impossible to marry, and in fact the rumor went around Nuoro that every Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday a shadow passed through Don Sebastiano’s door, arrived in front of Don Gabriele’s, lingered a little, and then, sadly, withdrew.
21
After many months I once more take up this tale, which perhaps I should never have begun. I am swiftly growing old, and feel that I am preparing a sad end for myself, because I have chosen not to accept the first condition for a good death, which is forgetfulness. Maybe it was not Don Sebastiano, Donna Vincenza, Gonaria, Pedduzza, Giggia, Baliodda, Dirripezza and all the others, who begged me to set them free from their lives: it is I who have called them up to rid me of mine, without calculating the risk to which I was exposing myself, in making myself eternal. And then today, outside the windows of this remote room where I have taken refuge, it is snowing: a light snow that settles on the streets, and the trees, as time settles upon us. In a little while everything will look the same. In the cemetery of Nuoro one will not be able to tell the old from the new, and “they” will have some fleeting peace beneath the cloak of whiteness. I was a little boy myself once upon a time, and I am assailed by the memory of watching the swirl of the snowflakes with my nose pressed against the windowpane. We were all there then, in the room enlivened by the fire, and we were happy since we did not know ourselves. To know ourselves we must live our lives right to the end, until the moment we sink into the grave. And even then we need someone to gather us up, to revive us, to speak about us both to ourselves and to others, as in a last judgment. This is what I have done myself these last few years, which I wish I had not done yet will continue to do, because by now it is not a question of the destiny of others, but of my own.
[Salvatore Satta died on 19 April, 1975, without having completed his fresco of Nuoro as he would have wished.]
We hope you enjoyed this book!
More classics from Apollo:
Find out More
Find out more
Find out more
For more information, click the following links
Translator’s Note
Historical Note
About Salvatore Satta
About the Translator
Endpapers
About the cover and endpapers
More from Apollo
About Apollo
Translator’s Note
“Nuoro was nothing but a perch for the crows”, writes Salvatore Satta of the scene of the events in his book, with its “7,051 inhabitants at the last census”. He is writing about the last years of the 19th century and the first quarter of the present one, but then as now, though with a fifth of today’s population, Nuoro was the urban centre of the wildest and most isolated part of Sardinia. Good modern roads now writhe their way between villages once “as remote one from another as are the stars”, and the shepherds no longer spend night and day with their sheep, coming to town “once every two weeks to change their clothes and lay in a stock of bread”. They sleep in the villages and get to their flocks by car. But have a breakdown on one of those roads on a January evening, at 3,000 feet, in a mist, with a milestone reading “Fonni 13” and the first flakes of snow on the sightless windscreen, and you still have every reason to feel lonely. There are limits to what can be done to alter the bleak, awe-inspiring grandeur of that landscape: right below Nuoro the “fearsome valley of Marreri, haunt of footpads”, is so steep and deep that you don’t notice that in the bottom of it, infinitely distant, there is a motorway.
At the time of which Satta is writing, the roads were rocky tracks negotiable with difficulty even on horseback or by the Sardinian carts designed specifically for them. There was, of course, the little train, like a bus on rails, that wound through the mountains to link Nuoro to “Macomer and the world”, but the place remained a fastness. “The people of Nuoro”, writes Satta, “are like the garrison of a sinister castle: close and taciturn... intelligent and treacherous”. At an advanced age, one of the main characters, Zia Gonaria, though middle-class and a schoolteacher, “had not seen many roads in the course of her life”, while Zio Priamo, who had been mayor of the town, left Nuoro and its immediate surroundings only once, on horseback. The 120 kilometers to Sassari and school (Nuoro had no secondary school) was “the equivalent of 12,000 today”, while the diocese of Nuoro (which seems to have been the sole reason for the existence of the town) “was the least in Sardinia, and therefore in the world”. The whole island, in short, was cut off and antediluvian, but even in Sardinian terms Nuoro was the back of beyond. It was to the world as the world is to the galaxy, a place and a people under siege by outer darkness and, for both body and soul, dreadful in its solitude.
If Satta had cast around for a microcosm of human life, of what is called the “human condition”, he could scarcely have chosen a better one for his purpose. But he did not choose it; or rather (to apply a phrase of his own to a different context), it was “the result of a tribal feeling, a choice as free as whether or not to be baptized”. He was born there in 1902, and his childhood and youth was Nuoro, nothing but Nuoro, with its streets, its people, its mighty, pagan landscapes, and its skies pellucid or wrathful. The things of Nuoro were what he carried with him into his later life, “and felt himself still bound to them, among people who had never seen those things, and were therefore unable to understand him”. At least on one level we feel that he tells us all these things lest they should perish. For his later life he spent on the “Continent”, where he had a most distinguished career in law, acknowledged as the great authority on Italian legal procedure.
The author is, in fact, a thinly disguised character in his narrative, but he several times enters it in the first person present tense, notably in Chapter 7 on a visit to the Nuoro cemetery. “I have come here between ferry boats”, he says, “to see if I can put a little order in my life, join the two halves together, re-establish the dialogue without which these pages can go no further...”. This dialogue takes place not only between his present and his past, but between himself and the dead of Nuoro. Priests and notaries, gamblers and prostitutes, bishops and beggars, peasants and shepherds and rogues of every description, they are all his dead, the characters in his book, and all of them ghosts. Some at length, others in a few brief words, he calls t
hem up “as on the day of judgment”, and they all act out the meaning of their lives. And each life is a ferocious question about the worth and purpose of it all. This is what gives Satta’s book its “metaphysical dimension”, and explains why, when published in 1979, four years after his death, it struck the Italian literary world with the impact of myth, or of truth; or rather, as a work in which the two are indivisible.
Moreover, just as this all-pervading “dimension” is not abstraction, but embodied in one life-story after another, so the peculiar, obsessive intensity with which the inquiry is pursued may be traced to concrete facts. Salvatore Satta, with all his long-remembered material to hand, began to write The Day of Judgment when he was nearly seventy, knowing that death was almost upon him. It is the work of a man driven to come to terms with his destiny while he still had time. He died before he finished it.
Historical Note
Though technically a kingdom since the 11th century A.D., Sardinia suffered the fate of so many islands, that of being constantly dominated by foreign powers: Carthage and Rome in ancient times, Pisa and Spain in more recent ones. In the early 18th century it came into the possession of the dukes of Savoy, who were forced to accept it in exchange for the far richer prize of Sicily. They thereupon became kings of Sardinia. Satta calls this kingdom “a joke”, and indeed, with their capital at Turin, the Piedmontese paid little heed to their backward island, except to exploit it. Clumsy legislation during the 19th century led to the increasing enclosure of land, which in a largely pastoral community led inevitably to privation, discontent and lawlessness. When Victor Emmanuel of Savoy, King of Sardinia, was proclaimed king of united Italy in 1861, the island became part of the new kingdom. Naturally enough Italians (“Continentals”) were for a long time thereafter regarded as foreigners, and the laws were considered as “imposed from outside” Sardinia.
About Salvatore Satta
SALVATORE SATTA (1902–1975) was born in Sardinia. During his lifetime he was known as one of Italy’s foremost jurists and the man who rewrote the Italian Penal Code after the Second World War to rid it of its Fascist aspects. Among the papers found after his death was the manuscript of The Day of Judgment, with evidence showing that he had been working on it for more than thirty years.
About the Translator
PATRICK CREAGH (1930–2012) was the award-winning translator of Antonio Tabucchi, Salvatore Satta, Italo Calvino, Flavio Conti, Gesualdo Bufalino and Claudio Magris.
Endpapers
About the cover and endpapers
Pirari Piero (1886–1972), Fonni, the Feast of the Martyrs, c. 19--. Photograph. Piero Pirari was a painter and photographer who was born and lived in Nuoro. His photography focused on Sardinian society, capturing shepherds and farmers, women and men in traditional dress, and groups of people gathered for the holidays.
Courtesy of Istituto Superiore Etnografico della Sardegna
More from Apollo
Find out More
Find out more
Find out more
Find out More
Find out more
Find out more
Coming soon…
Find out more
Visit Apollo now
About Apollo
The Apollo list reflects in various ways the extremity of our time, and the ways in which novelists responded to the vertiginous changes that the world went through as the great empires declined, relations between men and women were transformed and formerly subject peoples found their voice.
Selected by the distinguished critic, poet and editor Michael Schmidt, in conjunction with Neil Belton, editorial director at Head of Zeus, Apollo makes great forgotten works of fiction available to a new generation of readers. Apollo will challenge the established canon and surprise and move readers with its choice of books.
Get in touch: apollo@headofzeus.com
Visit Apollo now
Find us on BookGrail
Apollo Librarian | Michael Schmidt || Series Editor | Neil Belton
Text Design | Lindsay Nash || Artwork | Jessie Price
www.apollo-classics.com | www.headofzeus.com
First published in Italy as Il giorno del giudizio by Adelphi Edizioni, 1979.
This paperback edition published in the United Kingdom in 2016 by Apollo, an imprint of Head of Zeus Ltd.
Copyright © Adelphi Edizioni SpA, Milano 1979
Introduction © Mark Thompson, 2016
The moral right of Salvatore Satta to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (PB) 9781784975708
ISBN (E) 9781784975715
Apollo
Clerkenwell House
45-47 Clerkenwell Green
London EC1R 0HT