THEY were ringing sunrise mass at San Giovanni; but the village still slept heavily, because for three days it had been raining, and on the plough-land you sank half up to your knees. All of a sudden, upon the silence, there was an uproar, the shrill bell of Sant’ Agata ringing for help, doors and windows banged open, people running out in their shirts, crying: ‘Earthquake! – Saint Gregory the Great!’
It was still dark. Far off, in the wide, dark expanse of the Alia, blinked only a light from the charcoal burners, and more to the left the morning star, over a big low cloud that cut across the dawn of the long tableland of the Paradiso. From all the open country came a lugubrious howling of dogs. And suddenly, out of the lower quarter struck up the heavy sound of the big bell of San Giovanni, giving the alarm as well; then the cracked bell of San Vito; then another from the mother church, further off; then the one from Sant’ Agata which seemed to fall right on the heads of the inhabitants of the little square. One after the other the bells of the monasteries had also aroused: the College, Santa Maria, San Sebastiano, Santa Teresa; a general clanging which ran frightened over the roofs, in the darkness.
‘No! No! It’s a fire! … Fire in the Trao house! … Saint John the Baptist!’
The men came running, shouting, with their trousers in their hands. The women put a light in the windows; all the village, on the hillside, swarming with lights, as if it were the Good Friday eve, when they ring the second hour of the night; something to make your hair stand on end, if you saw it from a distance.
‘Don Diego! Don Ferdinando! – ‘ you could hear them shouting at the bottom of the square, and somebody banging at the entrance door with a stone.
Out of the street up from the big square, and from the other alleys, people arrived continually; a continual clatter of heavy boots on the cobblestones; from time to time a name called from the distance; and always that insistent banging at the big entrance door at the bottom of Sant’ Agata Square, and that voice calling:
‘Don Diego! Don Ferdinando! Are you all dead?’
From the house of the Traos, above the dilapidated cornice, you could now actually see in the paling dawn globes of dense smoke billowing up, sprinkled with sparks. And a ruddy reflection, showered down from above, lit up the anxious faces of the neighbours gathered in front of the battered door, their noses in the air. All at once you heard a window rattle, and a shrill voice crying from above:
‘Help! – Thieves! – Christians, help!’
‘The fire! Your house is on fire! Open the door, Don Ferdinando!’
‘Diego! Diego!’
From behind the frantic face of Don Ferdinando Trao now appeared at the window the dirty nightcap and the flying grey hair of Don Diego: And then the hoarse consumptive voice also shrieking:
‘Help! – Thieves in the house! Help!’
‘What thieves? Why, what would they want up there?’ jeered somebody out of the crowd.
‘Bianca! Bianca! Help! Help!’
At that weary moment Nanni l’Orbo appeared, swearing he had seen the thieves, in the Traos’ house.
– ‘With my own eyes! One of them trying to escape out of Donna Bianca’s window, and he had to climb in again, seeing the people coming!’
‘The mansion is burning, do you understand! All the neighbourhood will be in flames. And I’ve got my house next here, by God!’ began to shout Mastro-don Gesualdo Motta. The others, however, pushing and prising at the doorway, succeeded in penetrating into the courtyard, one after the other, and the grass in there half up to their knees, shouting, brawling, armed with buckets, with pitchers full of water, neighbour Cosimo with the wood-axe; Don Luca the sexton wanting to ring the bells once more, to call to arms; Pelagatti as he was when he ran up at the first alarm, with his rusty pistol which he had rushed to fish out from under the straw.
From the courtyard the fire was not yet to be seen. Only, from time to time, as the wind blew from the northwest, great waves of smoke rose up, passing away behind the dry-stone wall of the little, shut-in garden, between the branches of the flowering almond trees. Under the lean-to shed was piled the chopped firewood; and at the far end, right against the house of the neighbour Motta, was more, heavier timber, flooring planks, rotten joists, a mill-post which they had never been able to sell.
‘Worse than tinder, look you!’ exclaimed Mastro-don Gesualdo. ‘Stuff to set fire to all the neighbourhood! – Saints and blessings! – And so they put it against my wall; because they’ve got nothing to lose, saints and blessings! –’
At the top of the stairway, Don Ferdinando, bundled in an old greatcoat, his head tied up in a rag of a kerchief, unshaven for eight days, rolling his greyish eyes, which looked like a mad-man’s in that parchment face of an asthmatic subject, kept on repeating like a duck:
‘Quick! Up here! Quick! Up here!’
But nobody dared risk himself on the shaky stairs. A perfect hole that house; the walls broken, corroded, the plaster fallen; cracks which ran from the eaves right to the ground; the windows off their hinges and without glass; the worn-out coat-of-arms, battered at the corners, hung from a rusty hook over the door. Mastro-don Gesualdo wanted first of all to pitch out all that wood piled up in the courtyard, throw it into the square.
‘It would take a month,’ replied Pelagatti, who stood there yawning, his pistol in his hand.
‘Saints and blessings! Piled against my wall! – Will you hear, or won’t you?’
Giacalone said, ‘Better knock down the shed’; Don Luca the sexton assured them that for the moment there was no danger; a tower of Babel!
Also other neighbours had come running. Santo Motta with his hands in his pockets, his face jovial, always ready with a joke. Speranza, his sister, green with bile, pressing her flabby breast in her baby’s mouth, spitting poison against the Traos. ‘My sirs! – just look! – We’ve got our stores next here! – ‘ And she turned on her husband Burgio, who was there in his shirt-sleeves: ‘You don’t say anything! You stand there like an owl! What have you come for then?’
Mastro-don Gesualdo was the first to dash yelling up the stairs. The others behind like so many lions through the dark, empty rooms. At every step an army of rats scaring the people. ‘Look out! Look out! The garret is coming in! – ‘ Nanni l’Orbo, who had still got that fellow at the window on his mind, shouting every time: ‘There he is! There he is! – ‘ And in the library, which was falling to pieces, he was within a hair’s breadth of massacring the sexton with Pelagatti’s pistol. Always in the darkness you could hear the hoarse voice of Don Ferdinando calling: ‘Bianca! Bianca!’ And Don Diego was knocking and storming at a door, catching everybody by the coat as they passed and screeching the same: ‘Bianca! My sister!’
‘What are you playing at?’ replied Mastro-don Gesualdo, red as a tomato, ripping himself free. ‘I’ve got my house next door here, see? The whole street is going in a blaze.’
There was a wild running in the big dismantled old house: women carrying water; children running about rowdily in all the confusion, as if it was a feast; inquisitive creatures who wandered round open-mouthed, tearing the rags of stuff which still hung from the walls, touching the carvings of the door-frames, shouting so as to hear the echo of the big empty rooms, lifting their nose in the air to look at the gilding of the mouldings and at the family portraits; all these smoky Traos who seemed to peel their eyes, seeing such a mob in their home. A come-and-go that made the floors dance.
‘There you are! There you are! At this minute the roof is going!’ jeered Santo Motta, tramping about in the water; wells of water at every stride, between the displaced tiles or the missing tiles of the floor. Don Diego and Don Ferdinando, shoved about, dazed, upset in the midst of the crowd which ransacked every corner of misery in their house, continued to cry:
‘Bianca! My sister!’
‘Your house is on fire, do you know?’ Santo Motta shouted in their ears. ‘It’ll be a fine flare-up, with all this old stuff!’
‘Over here! Over here!’ a voice was heard from the alley. ‘The fire is upstairs in the kitchen.’
Master Nunzio, the father of Gesualdo, clambering up a ladder, was making signs in the air, from the roof of his own house, there opposite. Giacalone had fastened a pulley to the rail of the balcony to draw up water from the Motta’s cistern. Master Cosimo the joiner, mounted on the eaves, was giving furious blows with his axe at the skylight.
‘No! No!’ they shouted from below. ‘If you give the fire air, the whole mansion will go in a minute.’
Don Diego then struck his forehead with his hand, stammering: ‘The family papers! The papers of the law-suit!’
And Don Ferdinando went running off, clutching his hair in his hands, shouting also.
At the windows, at the balcony, as the wind blew, whirl-winds of thick smoke billowed in making Don Diego cough as he kept on crying outside the door: ‘Bianca! The fire!’
Mastro-don Gesualdo, who had rushed furiously up by the kitchen stairs, came back blinded with smoke, pale as death, his eyes almost out of their sockets, half suffocated:
‘Saints and blessings! – You can’t get from this side. … I am ruined!’
The others shouted all together, each one saying his say; a row enough to daze you: ‘Chuck the tiles down! – Lean the ladder against the chimney flue! – ‘ Master Nunzio, standing on the roof of his own house, capered like one obsessed. Don Luca, the sexton, had now really run to hitch himself on to the bells. The people in the piazza thick as flies. From the corridor mistress Speranza succeeded in making herself heard, raucous with screaming, tearing the clothes off the backs of people to make way for herself, her nails unsheathed like a cat and scum at her mouth: ‘From the staircase down there, at the end of the corridor!’ – Everybody ran there, leaving Don Diego to call at his sister’s door: ‘Bianca! Bianca!’ A confused noise was heard behind that door; a wild running as of folks who have lost their head. Then the sound of a chair thrown over. Nanni l’Orbo began to shout again from the bottom of the corridor: ‘There he is! There he is!’ And the explosion of Pelagatti’s pistol sounded like a cannon going off.
‘The authorities! Hey, here are the police!’ came the voice of Santo Motta shouting from the courtyard.
Then the door opened unexpectedly, and Donna Bianca appeared, her dress not fastened, pale as death, waving her hands convulsively, without offering a word, fixing on her brother her eyes mad with terror and with anguish. All at once she dropped on to her knees, clutching the doorpost, stammering:
‘Kill me, Don Diego! – Kill me then! But don’t let anybody come in here.’
What happened then, behind that door which Don Diego had shut again, pushing his sister back into her little room, no one ever knew. Only his voice was heard, a voice of desperate anguish, stammering:
‘You? … You here?’
Came running the Captain, the fiscal attorney, all the authorities. Don Liccio Papa, the chief of the police, crying from a distance, brandishing his unsheathed sabre:
‘Wait! Wait! Stop! Stop!’ – and the Captain with his stick: ‘Make way! Make way! Make way!’ behind him, fatigued like Don Liccio, beating his way for the Law! – The fiscal attorney gave orders to have the door beaten down. ‘Don Diego! Donna Bianca! Open! What has happened?’
Don Diego appeared, having aged ten years in a minute, embarrassed, rolling his eyes, with a terrible vision in the depths of his grey pupils, a cold sweat on his brow, his voice choked with an immense grief:
‘Nothing! – My sister! – Frightened! – Nobody must come in!’
Pelagatti furious with Nanni l’Orbo:
‘A nice thing he made me do! – As near as nothing I was to murdering Neighbour Santo!’
Then the Captain gave him a dressing down:
‘With firearms, eh! – What are you playing at! – You beast, for you are one!’
‘Oh, Captain, sir, I thought it was the robber, down there in the dark. I saw him with my own eyes!’
‘Shut up! Shut up! You drunken lout!’ chimed in the fiscal attorney. ‘Anyhow: let’s go and see the fire.’
And now, in the corridor, on the stairs to the kitchen-garden, everybody carrying water. Neighbour Cosimo had climbed on to the roof and was hacking away at the cross-beams with his hatchet. From every side they showered tiles, stones, broken pots on the smoking ceiling. Burgio, on the ladder, firing shots upwards, and Pelagatti on the other side, ambushed beside the chimney-flue, loading and discharging his pistol mercilessly. Don Luca ringing the bells full clang; the crowd in the square yelling and gesticulating; all the neighbours at their windows. The Margarones stood on their terrace above the roofs opposite to look on, the daughters with their hair still in curl papers; Don Filippo giving advice from the distance, directing the operations of those who were busy extinguishing the fire, with his malacca cane. Don Ferdinando, returning at that moment with his arms full of old papers, bumped his nose against Giacalone, who was running in the dark passage.
‘Beg pardon, Don Ferdinando. I’m just going to fetch the doctor for your honour’s sister.’
‘Fetch Doctor Tavuso!’ screamed Aunt Macrì after him; she being a relation poor as they were themselves. She had been the first to come rushing. ‘Near here, at Bomma’s pharmacy.’
Bianca had gone into convulsions; a terrible attack; four people couldn’t hold her down on the bed. Don Diego, also beside himself, was trying to drive the people back, with his bony, trembling hands.
‘No! – It’s nothing! – Leave her alone!’
The Captain began to land out right and left with his stick, hitting at haphazard the neighbours who crowded inquisitively round the door.
‘What are you looking at? – What do you want? – Clear out! – Good-for-nothings, vagabonds! You, Don Liccio Papa, keep guard at the street-door.’
Baron Mendola came a moment later, for the look of the thing, and Dame Sarina Cirmena poking her nose in everywhere; and the canon-priest Lupi, sent by the Baroness Rubiera. Aunt Sganci and the other relatives sent servants to inquire about their niece. Don Diego, hardly able to stand on his feet, put his head out of the door and replied to everyone:
‘She is a little better! – She is quieter! – She wants to be left alone.’
‘Eh! Eh!’ murmured the canon-priest, shaking his head and looking around the squalid walls of the drawing-room. ‘I remember how it used to be! Where are the riches of the house of Trao gone!’
The Baron also shook his head, stroking the bristles of his stiff-bearded chin with his hairy hand. Aunt Cirmena let out:
‘They are mad! Ought to be in a madhouse, the pair of them! Don Ferdinando always was wanting … and Don Diego – you remember? When Aunt Sganci had got him that job in the mills? – No-thank-you! – a Trao couldn’t take a wage! – Charity, yes, they can take that!’
‘Oh! Oh!’ interrupted the canon-priest, with the malice laughing in his little rat’s eyes, but shutting tight his flexible lips.
‘Yes indeed! What else would you call it? All the relations crying out about what they have to send at Easter and at Christmas, wine, oil, cheese – corn as well. … And the girl is absolutely dressed in what her Aunt Rubiera gives her.’
‘Eh! Eh!’ The canon-priest, with an incredulous smile, kept nudging first Dame Sarina and then the Baron, who for his part bent his head and continued to scratch his chin discreetly, pretending to look this way and that, as if to say:
‘Eh! Eh! – so it seems to me!’
At that moment appeared Doctor Tavuso, in a hurry, with his hat on his head. Saluting nobody, he went into the sick chamber.
A little while after he came out again shrugging his shoulders, swelling out his throat, accompanied by Don Ferdinando, who looked so thin he was like an old stick. Aunt Macrì and the canon-priest Lupi ran round the doctor. Aunt Cirmena wanted to know everything and fixed you in the face with her two round spectacles worse than the fiscal attorney.
‘Eh? What is it? – Do you know? They talk about nerves nowadays – fashionable to have nerves. They send for you for every trifle – as if they could afford to pay for doctor’s visits! – ‘ replied Tavuso churlishly. And then, fixing Donna Sarina back again with his eyeglasses:
‘Do you want me to tell you? Girls when they get to a certain age ought to be married!’
And he turned aside hawking loudly, coughing, and spitting. The relations looked from one to the other. The canon-priest, to appear discreet, began to turn it off with Baron Mendola, giving his snuff and making chatter, and spitting all over the place, wanting to ferret out what was happening behind that closed door, compressing his parched lips as if he was swallowing every moment.
‘Yes, of course! – She was frightened! – They’d made her think there were thieves in the house! – poor Donna Bianca! – So young too! – and so delicate!’
‘Hark here, Cousin!’ said Donna Sarina, drawing Dame Macrì aside. Don Ferdinando, crazy-like, wanted to get near to hear as well.
‘Just a minute! – What manners!’ cried Aunt Cirmena to him. ‘I’ve just got a word to say to your aunt! – you go and get a glass of water for Bianca, it will do her good –’
Santo Motta came climbing down from overhead, rubbing his hands with a smiling air.
‘The kitchen’s absolutely ruined! There isn’t place to cook an egg in! It’ll have to be built all afresh.’
As nobody took any notice, he stared first one and then the other in the face, with his foolish smile.
The canon-priest Lupi, to get rid of him, said at last:
‘All right! All right! We’ll think of that later.’
Baron Mendola, when Santo Motta had gone, burst out at last:
‘Think of that later! If there’ll be any money to think of it with! I’ve always told them – Sell half the house, cousin – even one or two rooms – something to be going on with! – But oh dear no! – Sell the house of the Traos? – They’d rather fasten up the doors of the rooms as they fall into ruin, and make shift in the ones that are left. – And that’s what they’ll do with the kitchen. – They’ll cook their eggs here in the drawing-room – when they’ve got any to cook. Sell a room or two! – Not for the world – and they couldn’t if they wanted to – ! The room of the archives? – where all the family papers are! – The room with the balcony on to the square? – and nowhere to stand and look when the Corpus Domini procession passes! – The cuckoo chamber? – For they’ve got a room for the cuckoo-clock, and all, if you please! –’
And the baron, having let off that little tirade, departed leaving them all fit to split themselves with laughter.
Donna Sarina, before leaving, knocked once more at her niece’s door, to ask how she was. Don Diego opened slightly and put his nose through the crack, repeating from his cardboard face:
‘Better! She is quieter! She wants to be left alone.’
‘Poor Diego!’ sighed Aunt Macrì. Dame Cirmena took a few steps across the antechamber, out of hearing of Don Ferdinando, who was coming to shut the door, and added:
‘I’ve known it for quite a bit now. … You remember the evening of the Immaculate Conception, when there was such a fall of snow? I saw the young Baron Rubiera going down the alley two strides from here – muffled up like a thief –’
The canon-priest Lupi, as he crossed the courtyard, lifting his cassock above his thick boots in all the weeds, turned round to the dilapidated house to see if they could hear him, and then, in front of the street door, looking uneasily this way and that, he concluded:
‘You heard what Doctor Tavuso said? We can speak, because we are all intimate friends and relations – Girls when they get to a certain age ought to be married!’