Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories (29 page)

One night it was the turn of Don Piddu, after coming to hear a piece of gossip put about by Fra Giuseppe, to slip quietly away as if he were a lad of twenty with a girl-friend waiting for him, and goodness knows what he stumbled across when he let himself into his house.
When he returned before dawn he was certainly as pale as death, and seemed to have put on a hundred years.
This time the escape had been discovered, and the lady-killers returned to the monastery to find the mission father on his knees behind the door, praying to God to forgive them for the sins they had committed.
Don Piddu, too, flung himself down on his knees to confess into the missioner’s ear, shedding buckets of tears.

Ah!
What a terrible thing to discover!
In his own home!
In his daughter’s bedroom, where not even the sun ever entered!
The stable-boy jumping out of the window!
And Marina, pale as death, not daring to look him in the face, clinging desperately to the doorposts to defend her lover.
At that moment he had a vision of himself standing with his other daughters, and his sick wife, and the magistrates and the police, in a river of blood.

‘You!
You!’ he murmured.
The sinner trembled all over, but offered no reply.
Then she fell to her knees, hands clasped in an attitude of prayer, as though she could read murder in his eyes, whereupon he turned and fled, clutching his head between his hands.

The priest confessor advised him to offer up his suffering to God, but instead he should have told him, ‘You see, sir, when ordinary folk face this kind of trouble, they say nothing because they’re poor, they can’t read or write, and the only way they can think of to put things right lands them up in jail!’

Like the sea in a storm, the crowd foamed and heaved in front of the bigwigs’ club, outside the town hall, on the steps leading up to the church: a solid mass of white headscarves, axes and sickles flashing in the sun.
Then they burst into a narrow street.

‘You, baron, for a start!
That’s for getting your farm-watchmen to beat up the people!’ At the head of the mob, a harridan with ancient hair sticking straight up, armed only with her fingernails.

‘You next, priest of the devil, for sucking away our souls!’

‘That’s for you, rich pig, who grew so fat on the flesh of the poor that you can’t even run away!’

‘That’s for you, constable, for prosecuting no one except the penniless!’

‘And that’s for you, woodkeepers, for selling the body and soul of yourselves and your neighbours for a couple of
tarí
a day!’

The smell of blood made them drunk.
Sickles, hands, rags, stones were all dripping with it.
‘Get the bigwigs!
Get the felt hats!
²
Kill ‘em!
Kill ‘em.
Get the felt hats!’

Don Antonio was slipping off home through the back streets.
The first blow floored him, face bleeding, on to the pavement.
‘Why?
Why d’you want to kill me?’

‘You as well!
The devil take you!’ A crippled street urchin grabbed his filth-covered hat and spat into it.
‘Down with the felt hats!
Hooray for freedom!’

‘Take that!
You too!’ This to The Reverend
³
who preached that anyone stealing bread would go to Hell.

He was on his way back from saying Mass, with the consecrated Host in his belly.
‘Please don’t kill me!
I’m in mortal sin!’ Gnà Lucia was the mortal sin he meant.
Her father had sold her to The Reverend when she was fourteen, the winter of the famine, and she’d been filling the Cloister Wheel
⁴
and the streets with starving brats ever since.
If all that dog’s meat were worth anything to them that day, they could have stuffed themselves with it as they went about carving it up with their sickles in the doorways and the cobbled streets.
The same thing happens when a starving wolf turns up in a flock of sheep: it doesn’t think of filling its belly, but just slaughters everything in sight from pure rage.
First, the Grand Lady’s son, who had rushed out to see what was happening; then the chemist, as he was shutting up shop in a tearing hurry; and then Don Paolo, who was riding back from the vineyard on his donkey with a couple of saddlebags that looked half-empty.
And he was even wearing an old cap that his daughter had embroidered for him ages ago, before the disease struck the vineyard.
She saw him fall at the front door, as she was waiting with her five children for the few vegetables he had in his saddlebags to make the minestra.
‘Paolo!
Paolo!’

One of them struck him in the back with a blow from an axe.
Another fell upon him with a sickle, and ripped him open as his bloody arm was reaching for the door-knocker.

But the worst moment of all was when the notary’s son, an eleven-year-old with a head of golden blond hair, managed somehow to fall in the midst of the crowd.
His father had raised his head two or three times and called out, ‘Neddu!
Neddu!’ before dragging himself to die in the gutter.

Neddu was running away in absolute terror, eyes and mouth wide open, unable to utter a sound.
He took a tumble, and raised himself on one knee, like his father.
The torrent poured over him.
One of them put the boot in and smashed his cheek, and the boy still pleading for mercy with clasped hands.
No, he didn’t want to die in the way he’d seen his father killed!
It was heartbreaking!
The woodcutter, out of pity, landed him a massive blow with his axe using both hands as if he were felling a fifty-year-old oak, as he lay there shaking like a leaf.

Another one cried out, ‘What the hell!
He would only have grown up a lawyer!’

What did it matter?
Now they had their hands covered in so much blood, they had to spill all the rest.
Get them all!
All the felt hats!
It was no longer the hunger, the bullying, the beatings, that were fuelling their anger.
It was innocent blood.
The women were even more ferocious, waving their skinny arms, shrieking with anger in high-pitched voices, their tender flesh showing beneath the rags they were wearing.
‘So much for you, that came praying to the good Lord in your silk dress!
And you, that loathed having to kneel alongside the poor!
Take that!
Take that!’ Into the houses, up the stairs, into the bedrooms, tearing up the silk and the fine curtains.
No end of ear-rings decorating those bleeding faces!
And what a collection of gold rings on the hands trying to ward off the blows from the axes!

The baroness had ordered a barricade of wooden beams, country carts, and casks full of wine to be placed behind the main entrance.
Her watchmen were firing away from the windows to sell their lives dearly.
The crowd kept their heads down against the shotgun pellets, having no weapons of their own to fire back.
Before all this, anyone carrying firearms faced the death penalty.
‘Hooray for freedom!’ Once they broke down the door, they charged into the courtyard and up the steps, trampling over the wounded.
They left the watchmen alone.
‘We’ll get the watchmen later!’ First of all they were after the flesh of the baroness, flesh fattened on partridges and precious wines.
She was running from one room to the next with a suckling at her breast, hair dishevelled, and there were plenty of rooms for her to run through.
You could hear the crowd yelling along the corridors, closing in on her like a river in spate.

Her eldest son, a boy of sixteen with a body still as pale as his mother’s, propped up the door with his trembling hands, shouting, ‘Mother!
Mother!’ At the first push, they crashed the door down on top of him.
He clung on to legs stamping over it, but soon stopped shouting.
His mother had taken refuge on the balcony, clinging frantically to the baby with a hand over its mouth to stop it bawling.
Staring wildly around him, her other son was trying to shield her with his body, grabbing all those axes by the blades as though he had a hundred hands
to do it with.
They were separated in a flash.
One of them took her by the hair, another by the waist, another by her dress, and they lifted her in the air above the balcony rail.
The charcoal-burner seized the suckling baby from her arms.
The other brother could see nothing of all this, only black and red everywhere.
They were stamping on him and breaking every bone in his body with their hob-nailed boots; he had sunk his teeth into a hand that had him by the throat and refused to let it go.
The throng was so tightly packed that they were unable to strike with their axes, that were glistening in the air.

And in that raging carnival of the month of July, amid the drunken shouting of the ravenous mob, the church bell went on tolling furiously away until evening, without either noon or Angelus, as if in the land of the Turks.
Eventually they began to split up, weary of the slaughter, and crept slowly away, each avoiding his companion.
By nightfall all the doors were closed out of fear, and in every house a lamp kept vigil.
In the narrow streets all you could hear were the dogs, rummaging in the corners, gnawing hungrily away at the bones by the light of the moon, which washed over everything and cast its glow over the wide-open doorways and windows of the empty houses.

Daylight came.
It was Sunday, with nobody in the square, and no bell ringing for Mass.
The sexton had made himself scarce, there was not a priest to be found anywhere.
The first group of people to form in front of the church looked suspiciously at one another, each wondering what his neighbour had on his conscience.
Then, once a tidy number had turned up, they started to grumble, saying, ‘People can’t go without their Sunday Mass, like a pack of dogs!’ The bigwigs’ club was boarded up, and no one knew where to go to take the masters’ orders for the week to follow.
From the campanile the tricolour streamer still dangled flabbily in the stifling midsummer heat.

As the shaded area in front of the church grew gradually smaller, they all crowded together in a corner.
Between a pair of shabby-looking houses, at the foot of a narrow lane that sloped down steeply from the square, you could see the parched fields of the plain, and the dark woods on the slopes of Mount Etna.
Now it was time for them to share out those woods and those fields.
Everyone was adding up on his fingers how big his own portion ought to be, and casting hostile glances at his neighbour.

‘Freedom meant there was going to be enough for everyone!’ they were saying.
‘That swine of a Nino, and that Ramurazzo, would like to take over from the felt hats, and carry on the bullying where they left off!
With no surveyor left to measure out the land, and no notary to put it down in writing, it’s everyone for himself, and the devil take the hindmost!’

‘And what if you guzzle up your own share in the tavern?
Do we have to divide everything up all over again?’

‘You call me a thief, and I’ll call you a thief.
Now there’s freedom, anyone can go for a double helping and live it up like the bigwigs!’ The woodcutter waved his arm in the air as if he were still wielding his axe.

Next day they heard the general was coming, the one who frightened the life out of people, to deal out justice.
You could see the red shirts of his soldiers making their way slowly up the ravine towards the village.
All that was needed was to roll boulders down on them and wipe out the lot.
But nobody moved.
The women were screaming and tearing out their hair.
The men, black as coal and with long beards, waited on the hillside, dangling their hands between their thighs, and watched the young soldiers arriving, bending exhausted beneath their rusty old rifles, with that tiny general on his big black horse riding alone ahead of them.

The general had straw brought into the church, and put his boys to bed like a father.
In the morning, before dawn, if they failed to get up at the sound of the trumpet, he would ride into the church on horseback, swearing like a Turk.
That was the sort of man he was.
The first thing he did was to order five or six to be shot: Pippo, the cripple, Pizzanello, whoever happened to come within reach.
The woodcutter, while they were making him kneel against the wall of the cemetery, was crying like a child because of something his mother had said to him, and because of the scream she had let out when they tore him away from her arms.
From a distance, in the remotest lanes of the village, behind closed doors, that series of rifle shots sounded like rockets going off at festival time.

Afterwards the real judges arrived, bespectacled gents perched on mules, travel weary, who were still complaining about being over-worked
as they were questioning the accused in the convent refectory.
They were seated side by side on the bench, and letting out a groan every time they changed position.
The trial went on and on for ages.
The ones they found responsible were led away to the city on foot, chained together in pairs, between two lines of soldiers with muskets at the ready.
Their womenfolk ran after them beside the country lanes, across plough-land, through cactus groves, vineyards and golden cornfields, staggering along out of breath, calling out to them by name every time the road turned a corner, and they could see the prisoners’ faces.
On reaching the city they were locked up in the great, tall prison, huge as a monastery, dotted all over with tiny barred windows.
If the women wanted to see their menfolk, it was Mondays only, in the presence of warders, behind the iron gate.
The poor wretches inside became more and more pallid-looking in that eternal half-light, never catching a glimpse of the sun.
Monday after Monday they became more reticent, hardly giving an answer, complaining less and less.
On the other days of the week, if the women were to buzz around the square by the prison, the sentries would threaten them with their rifles.
They had no idea what to do for the best, where to find work in the city, or how to get themselves something to eat.
The bed in the stable cost two
soldi,
the white bread was no more than a single mouthful and never filled their stomachs.
If they huddled down to spend the night in the doorway of a church, the police arrested them.
Gradually they returned to the village, first the wives, then the mothers.
One fine-looking young woman disappeared in the city and was never heard of again.
All the rest of the villagers had returned to what they were doing before.
The bigwigs couldn’t work their lands by themselves, and the poor couldn’t live without the bigwigs.
They declared peace.