translated by
Christine Donougher
Epistolary preface to the first edition of Storia di una Capinera, written by Francesco Dall’Ongaro and addressed to Caterina Percoto.
My dearest friend,
A year ago, a young Sicilian, of gentle manner and demeanour, entrusted me with some pages, asking me to read through them, and to offer an opinion on the sad story they contained.
They were the letters of a young Sicilian nun, written to a friend and companion. I thought at first of sending those pages, telling of a life of sorrow and abnegation, to you with your knowledge of this subject. But then I was so moved by the letters, or rather by the facts they vividly describe, that I couldn’t put them down until I’d read them all, the last one causing even an experienced writer like me to shed genuine tears.
This was how I expressed my opinion: instead of sending you the manuscript as it was, I gave it to our friend Lampunani to print, and in order that he might give the widest circulation to the emotion that had overwhelmed my own heart at that first reading.
Now you can read the letters, published in this handsome volume that you might wish to preface with your good wishes to the author, who joins forces with us.
Francesco Dall’Ongaro
Rome, 25 November, 1871
Caterina Percoto’s response and verdict, expressed in a letter to Verga dated 2 March 1872:
Dear Sir,
Your lovely Sparrow owes her success to the skill of your pen, which makes me feel I’m in Sicily, and deals so compassionately with one of the worst afflictions suffered by those of my sex in our society. Here, in the Veneto, thanks to the Code Napoleon, the dismal practice of sacrificing our poor young girls to monastic life has ceased for some time now, but the barbaric custom of raising women for enclosed orders still continues.
You, who are young and blessed with a gift for words so engaging, so true, so effective, will be our champion. Italy will be grateful to you, and Dall’Ongaro and I will be very happy to have been among the first to recognize you as one of our most talented writers.
Caterina Percoto
I had seen a poor songbird locked in a cage: it was fearful, sad, ailing, with a look of terror in its eye. It cowered in a corner of its cage, and when it heard the cheerful song of the other little birds twittering in the green meadow or the azure sky, it watched them with what seemed a tearful gaze. But it dared not rebel, it dared not break the wire that held it captive, poor creature. Yet its captors loved it – they were sweet children, who toyed with its sorrow, and recompensed it for its melancholy with breadcrumbs and kind words. The poor songbird tried to resign itself. It was not ill-natured, it did not even mean to reproach them with its sorrow, for it tried to peck sadly at the odd seed or breadcrumb; it could not swallow them. After two days it tucked its head under its wing and the next day it was found stone-dead in its prison.
The poor songbird had died! Yet its bowl was full. It had died because within that tiny body was something that needed not only grain to live on, and that suffered from something other than hunger and thirst.
The mother of those two children that had been the poor little bird’s innocent but merciless executioners told me the story of an unhappy girl whose body had been imprisoned within the walls of a convent, and whose spirit had been tortured by superstition and love – one of those intimate stories that pass unnoticed every day – the story of a shy and tender heart, of one who had loved and wept and prayed, without daring to let her tears be seen or her prayers heard, who had eventually withdrawn into her sorrow and died. And I thought then of the poor songbird that would gaze at the sky through the bars of its prison, that would not sing, that would peck sadly at its grain, that had tucked its head under its wing and died.
That is why I have called it Storia di una Capinera – The Story of a Songbird.