LITTLE Isabella, even before she was five years old, was put in the Maria College. Don Gesualdo, now that he had his own property under the sun, and was on a level with the best people in the place, wanted his daughter to be on the same level: to learn fine manners, and reading and writing and embroidery, and the Church Latin as well, everything like a baron’s daughter; the more that, thanks to God, she wouldn’t be lacking in dowry, as Bianca did not seem as if she would give him any other heirs. She had never been well after her baby was born, and seemed to decline from day to day, gnawed by the same worm that devoured all the Traos, so that it was certain she would have no more children. A real chastisement from God. A failure, the marriage, although the gentleman himself was careful not to complain even to the canon-priest. When you’ve made a mess of something, better keep still and say nothing of it, so as not to show yourself beaten before your enemies.
Nothing, nothing had that marriage brought him, neither dowry, nor male child, nor the help of the relations, nor even that which Diodata gave him formerly, a moment of happiness, an hour of pleasantness, such as a glass of wine brings to a poor man who has worked all day! Not even that! – A wife who wasted away between your hands, who made your caresses go cold, with that face and those eyes and that being frightened, as if you were going to make her fall into mortal sin, every time; as if the priest hadn’t made the sign of the cross over you both, in the beginning, when she had said yes. It wasn’t Bianca’s fault. It was the blood of her race which refused. You can’t graft peaches on an olive tree. She, poor thing, inclined her head, and even went so far as to offer herself, all blushing, so as to obey the commandment of God; as if she was paid to do it –
But he wasn’t taken in, no. He was a peasant, but he had the subtle shrewdness of a peasant too! And he had his own pride, even he. The pride of a man who has managed to earn with his own hands, and his own work, the fine linen sheets in which they both slept turning their backs on one another, and those good meals which he had to eat on the end of his fork, finicking, under the eye of the Trao wife –
At least he wanted to order the feast in his own house. And if the Lord God had punished him precisely in that matter of the children he wanted to put into the world according to His law, giving him a girl instead of the legitimate heir he wanted, Isabella at least should possess everything he lacked himself, she should be a lady in name and reality. Bianca, as if she felt she had not long to live, didn’t want to be separated from her daughter. But the master was he, Don Gesualdo. He was good, loving in his own way; he let her lack for nothing: doctors, drugs, exactly as if she had brought him a big drowry. – Bianca hadn’t words good enough to thank God, when she compared the house in which the Lord had set her with that in which she was born. There her brother himself lacked bread by day and covering by night. – He would have died of want if his relations had not helped him well, without letting him know it. Only from her, Don Ferdinando wouldn’t accept anything whatsoever, while Don Gesualdo would not have let him go short of anything, with a heart as large as the sea, that man! Her own relations said of him:
‘You haven’t words good enough to thank God and your husband. Let him do as he will, for he is the master, and you do your best for your child.’
Then she considered that it was the Lord who punished her, that He did not want that poor innocent to be in her husband’s house, and at night she soaked her pillow with tears. She prayed God to give her strength, and consoled herself as best she could, thinking that she suffered in expiation of her sins. Don Gesualdo, who had so many other things on his mind, such weighty affairs on his shoulders, and who was used to seeing her like that, with that face, didn’t even notice. Sometimes, seeing her rise more deathly pale than ever, more haggard than usual, he said to her to encourage her:
‘You will see that when you’ve sent your child to college, you’ll be more contented yourself. It’s like pulling a tooth out. You can’t look after your child, when you are so poorly in health. And when she’s big she’s got to know all the things that plenty of other folks know, who aren’t so rich as she is. Children must get used to the yoke while they’re young, each one according to his own estate. – I know it, I do. – And I’ve had nobody to help me myself! That child is born ready clad.’
Nevertheless at the last minute there were tears and laments, when they took Isabella to the parlour of the convent. Bianca had been to confession and to communion. She heard mass kneeling, feeling herself fail, feeling her child torn once more from her bowels, as the little creature hung round her neck and didn’t want to leave her.
Don Gesualdo did not mind any expense to keep Isabella content in her college; sweets, books with pictures, images of the saints, walnuts with the wax Infant Jesus inside, a manger of Good Saint John which took up a whole table; everything that the children of the leading gentry had, his little girl had the same; and the nicest things to eat, the first-fruits of the whole country, cherries and apricots brought specially from a distance. The other girls stared with all their eyes, and stifled such great sighs. The youngest of the Zacco children, and the Mendolas of the second marriage, who had to be satisfied with the onion and black olives which passed at the convent for lunch, saved their faces by talking of the riches which they had at home and on their lands. Those that had neither riches nor lands made the most of their noble relations, the Civic Captain who was mamma’s brother, the baroness aunt who had the chasseur with the feathers, Daddy’s cousin who had five estates touching one another, in the district of Caltagirone. Every holiday, every New Year, when the little Isabella received still more costly presents, a silver crucifix, a rosary with the glory-be-to-the-father beads made of gold, a mass book with a tortoise-shell back for her to learn to read from; new little wars arose, new little slights, alliances made and unmade according as a sweet or a saint’s picture was given or not given. There were young eyes glittering with haughtiness and jealousy, little faces flushed red, tears, and afterwards everything poured into the ears of the mammas, in the convent parlours. Between all the little girls of all the families arose the same devilment which Don Gesualdo had aroused among the grown-ups in the village. You didn’t know any more who could spend money and who couldn’t. A competition between all the parents as to who could throw away most money in ridiculous trifles, a general confusion among those who had always formed the front rank and those who ought to come second. Those who really couldn’t, and those who couldn’t find in their hearts to spend their precious money to suit Mastro-don Gesualdo, let fall certain allusions and remarks about him which fermented in the heads of the little scholars. The nuns also took part in this internecine warfare, according to their relationship or their sympathies, and the party which triumphed even wanted to overthrow the Mother-Superior. They took sides even down to the portress, even to the lay sisters who felt themselves humiliated at having to serve without any extra pay the daughter of Mastro-don Gesualdo, a creature who had sprung from nothing, like themselves, and who had only got rich yesterday. The outside enmities, discords, strife of interests or of vanity passed right into the cloister, and occupied the hours of recreation, and broke forth inside the sacred precincts in small spite and small reprisals, and in ugly words.
‘Do you know what they call your father? – Mastro-don Gesualdo.’
‘Do you know what you have to do at your house? – You’ve had to sell a pair of oxen to be able to get the ground sowed.’
‘Your aunt Speranza spins thread for anybody who will pay her for it, and her children go barefoot.’
‘The bailiffs have been to your house to make a mortgage inventory.’
Little Alimena even hid herself on the tower stairs on Sunday to see if it was true that Isabella’s father wore the peasant’s stocking-cap.
He found his daughter still flushed, her breast heaving with sobs, looking timorously behind her lest she should see the malicious eyes of the other little girls glittering behind every grating, staring at his hands to see if they were really dirty with lime, drawing back instinctively when his rough skin pricked her as he kissed her. Just like her mother.
‘You can’t graft peaches on an olive tree –’
So many pin-pricks; the same evil fate which had always poisoned everything for him every day; the same implacable warfare which he was forced to wage all the time against everybody, and everything; and it wounded him even there, in the quick of his love for his child. He held his peace, he did not complain, for he wasn’t a baby and he didn’t want to set his enemies laughing; but meanwhile his own father’s words came back into his mind, the same rancours, the same jealousies. It had to be so. He stilled his own heart, but in that heart the thorn remained always. All that he had done and did for his daughter only removed her further from him: the money he had spent to educate her like a lady, the company among which he had her brought up, the extravagance and luxury which sowed pride in the heart of the little girl, the very name he had given her by marrying a Trao – a fine prize he had won! The child always said:
‘I am a daughter of the Traos. My name is Isabella Trao.’
The war burst out more fiercely, between the girls, when Don Ninì Rubiera got married:
‘If it’s true that you are relations, why didn’t your uncle send you any sweets? That’s because they don’t want you for relation.’
Isabella, who already replied like a grown-up, returned:
‘My father will buy me sweets. We’ve fallen out with the Rubieras because they owe us so much money.’
The daughter of the wax-chandler, who was on her side, added many other stories:
The young baron had been thrown over. Fifì Margarone wouldn’t have any more to do with him. He had married Donna Giuseppina Alòsi, who was older than himself, because he couldn’t find anybody else and must have money: – all the gossip that went on in her mother’s shop, in every café, in every druggist’s, and from door to door.
In the village they talked of nothing but the marriage of Don Ninì Rubiera.
‘A marriage of convenience,’ said the Captain’s lady, who always talked in such a mincing fashion. As years went on the Captain’s lady had also fallen into the vices of the place; she busied herself with other people’s affairs now she had none of her own to hide. When she met cavaliere Peperito she made a malicious little face at him that made her look twenty years younger, smiles which wanted to find out so many things, shaking her head, offering so graciously to listen to his confidences and his jealous outpourings, threatening the cavaliere with her fan, as if to tell him he’d been a terrible rake, and that if he’d let another man carry off his mistress now, it showed that he must have had his own good reasons for so doing. – Sooner or later –
‘No!’ retorted Peperito, who was beyond all grace. ‘Neither sooner or later! You can go and tell Donna Giuseppina so! If I couldn’t have her and be her master, I’m not going to be there for her when it suits her, you understand! – play the stud-cock. – You understand? Donna Giuseppina can rest quite assured about that.’
And now he was spreading all the dirty stories about Dame Alòsi in the square: if for a miracle she sent you a basket of grapes she asked you to send the basket back; and she sold on the sly the stockings she knitted, servants’ stockings as thick as your finger – yes, and she had showed him these stockings when she’d got them on also, just in order to rouse him – to get out of him just what suited her. – But no, he wasn’t having any! –
In fact, he went round saying things hot and cold. There were some nice talks at the Café of the Gentry. Ciolla followed him round to pick up all the bits of spite and carry them further on his own account. One day there was a real treat for him when Signora Aglae was seen to arrive in the village along with Signor Pallante, to make a scandal against Baron Rubiera, and to take what belonged to her if her seducer was not ready to go to the altar with her. She came on purpose from Modica, spitting bile, waxed, painted, loaded wih cock-feathers and bits of glass, trailing along with her the innocent proof of Don Ninì’s villainy, a real love of a little girl. And so folks said that Don Ninì had always been one for the fair sex, and that if he’d married Madam Alòsi, who was old enough to be his mother, it meant that there must have been some serious money interest. The matter was threshed out in one way and another. The young baron stopped the mouths of those who came to congratulate him in order to get the truth out of him, with a few words. Madame Sganci, who had arranged the marriage, held her tongue when her friends went to visit her. Don Gesualdo perhaps knew more than most, but he shrugged his shoulders. All they could get out of him was answers like this:
‘Well, what would you? Everybody minds his own business. Baron Rubiera will have found that it suits his own advantage to marry Madam Alòsi, that’s all.’
The truth was that Don Ninì had had to take the Alosi woman so as to save that bit of a house which Don Gesualdo wanted to turn him out of. It is true that he’d become wise now, given over altogether to money; but his mother, buried alive in her arm chair, didn’t leave him master of a farthing; she made him give account of everything: everything had to pass under her eyes; without being able to speak, without being able to move, she succeeded in making her own people obey her even better than before. And she stuck like an oyster to her belongings, forcing herself to live so as not to have to hand over what she’d got. Meanwhile the debt increased from year to year; so that poor Don Ninì spent whole nights without being able to close his eyes, sometimes; and when the money fell due, with capital and interest it amounted to a considerable sum. The canon-priest Lupi, who went in the young baron’s name to ask for an extension of time for payment, found Don Gesualdo worse than a wall.
‘What are we playing at, my dear Canon? I’ve neither seen interest nor capital for more than nine years. My money is useful to me just now, and I want to be paid.’
Out of sheer necessity Don Ninì was reduced to going to plead with his Cousin Bianca, after so many years. He started with her from a distance: – Such a long time since they had seen one another! He hadn’t had the face to call on her, to tell the truth. He didn’t want to excuse himself. He had been a young scamp. Now he had opened his eyes, too late, when there was no help for it, when he found on his back all the burden of his own mistakes. But absolutely he couldn’t pay just then. ‘I am a gentleman. And in the end I’ve got the wherewithal to pay. But at this moment I absolutely can’t! You know what your aunt is! What a stubborn head! You and I have had to suffer for her stubborn head. But anyhow she can’t last forever, in the state she’s in –’
Bianca had scarcely been able to breathe at first when she saw him, going white and red in turns. She didn’t know what to say, she stammered, broke into a cold sweat, had a convulsion of her hands, and so tried to hide them, smoothing the two corners of her apron mechanically. All at once there was blood in her mouth.
‘What’s the matter? What’s the matter? Something the matter with your gums? Have you bit your tongue?’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘I have it sometimes. Don Diego had it as well, you remember. It’s nothing.’
‘Good, good. Then do me a kindness; speak a word for me to your husband. At this moment I absolutely can’t. – But I am a gentleman, I believe! – My mother hasn’t got anybody else to leave everything to, between now and a hundred years hence –’
Bianca tried to excuse herself: – Her husband was the master. He did everything according to his own mind, he did. He didn’t like anybody poking their nose in his affairs –
‘Then what are you his wife for?’ retorted her cousin. ‘It’s a nice thing! A fellow who wasn’t fit to look you in the face! – He ought to thank God and my mother’s obstinacy that he’s been so lucky! – You’ll do all you can to persuade him to grant me this extension, won’t you then?’
‘And you, what did you say to him?’ asked Don Gesualdo, finding his wife still upset, after that visit.
‘Nothing – I don’t know – I felt ill –’
‘Good! You did well. Don’t you bother, I’ll look after things. Serpents in your sleeve, are relations. – What, did you see! Coming round you, now that they want to make use of you; the rest of the time he doesn’t care whether you’re alive or dead. Leave him to me, I’ll send him his answer by the police bailiffs, that cousin of yours –’
So that marriage had come to pass, after the baron had turned heaven and earth to find the money to pay Don Gesualdo; and at last Donna Giuseppina Alòsi, who had fine property in land, had given him a mortgage. Don Gesualdo, having got hold of that fine inscription on her land, said no more about needing money.
‘Give them time,’ he confided to his wife. ‘Leave them alone. They pay neither interest nor capital, and in time that land will come in for Isabella’s dowry. What do you think of it? Couldn’t you laugh! Uncle Rubiera scheming to get together the dowry for your daughter – !’
He had these outbursts of humour at times, when he was alone with his wife, and pleased with his day, before going to bed, while he was putting his night-cap on, in his shirt-sleeves. In private with her he showed himself as he really was, rough and not ill-natured, with his wide laugh showing his big white teeth, and afterwards passing his tongue over his lips as if he already tasted the taste of something good, like the man greedy for possessions, which he was.
When Isabella had grown up a bit she was sent from the Maria College to the first convent-school in Palermo. Another blow for the poor mother, who feared she would never see her again. Her husband, in order to comfort her, in the state that she was in, said:
‘Look you, we’re killing ourselves to do our best for her, each of us as we can, and the day will come when she’ll never even think of us. That’s how the world is. And so you’d better get it into your head that you can’t have your daughter for ever with you. When she marries she’ll go somewhere else, away from here. Here there’s nobody to marry her, with the dowry she’ll have. If I’ve done so much for her, I want at least to know who I’m giving my own flesh and blood to. At this minute the man is already born, somewhere or other, who will enjoy the fruits of all my labours, without even saying thank you to me –’
He had his heart full also, poor devil, and if he let himself go sometimes, all alone with his wife, just by way of talk, still he did not shrink from doing his duty. He went to see his girl in Palermo, when he could, when he was able to leave his business, that is once a year. Isabella had grown into a beautiful maiden, a little frail still, rather pale, but with a natural grace in all her subtle person; the delicate skin and the aquiline profile of the Traos; a flower from a rare plant, in short; fine, well-bred stuff she was, so that even her father himself when he went to see her felt shy in front of the girl, who had now the same bearing as her companions among whom she was educated, all girls of the first families, each one bringing into the school all the baronial haughtiness of every corner of Sicily. In the parlour they called him Signor Trao. When he wanted to know why, Isabella blushed red. The same tale here as at the Maria College. And his daughter would have had to suffer the same humiliation here again, on account of her parentage. By good luck Signorina di Leyra, whose affection Isabella had won with presents, had taken up the sword vigorously on her behalf. She knew the Trao name, one of the first families of the South, down there where her brother the duke had his estates. The little duchess had a high name and a high-handed manner of speech, even though she was there in the college without paying, so that the companions let the Trao pass. But Don Gesualdo also had to let it pass, and have himself called by that name, out of love of his daughter, when he went to see her.
‘You’ll see how lovely she’s grown, your daughter,’ he came back to say to his wife, who was always ailing.
The mother saw her at last when she left her college in 1837, when the first rumours of cholera began to spread already in Palermo, and her father hurried to fetch her away. It was like a blow in the breast for the poor mother when, after so long a time, she heard the mule-litter stop before the big door.
‘My child! my child!’ – with her arms stretched out and her legs shaky, rushing down the stairs. Isabella coming up also at a run, with her arms also open.
‘Mamma! Mamma!’
And they clung round each other’s necks, the mother rocking her child from side to side again, as she had done when Isabella was tiny.
Then came the visits to the relations. Bianca had got her strength back, to carry her child round in triumph, to the Sganci house, to the Marchese Limòli, to all the houses where she had gone as a child, before she had been sent to college; and now she was already a big girl, with a straw hat and beautiful blonde tresses – a flower. Everybody came out to see her go by. Aunt Sganci, who had grown deaf and blind, touched her face so as to know her again.
‘A Trao! You can’t be anything else!’
Her uncle the marchese praised her eyes, eyes blue and bright as two stars.
‘Eyes which could see sin coming,’ said the marchese, who had always got his little jest ready.
Then when they took her to see Uncle Don Ferdinando, Isabella, who had always been recalling to her school companions her mother’s home, in her outbursts of ingenuous ambition, felt a sense of surprise and depression, disillusion, seeing it again. Anybody who liked could now enter the collapsed great door. The courtyard was mean, cumbered with stones and rubbish. You came by a path through the nettles to the dilapidated flight of steps, shaky, also stifled in weeds. At the top the falling door was hardly held shut by a rusty latch; and the moment you entered, a heavy, humid atmosphere took hold of you, a smell of mould and of cellars rose from the floors of glazed tiles blazoned with coats-of-arms and historic scenes, and littered with stubble and broken bits fallen from the vaulted ceiling whose plaster was all dropping off, a thick air came from the corridor that was dark as a tunnel, and from the dark rooms which you could just make out stretching in a long row, empty and abandoned, revealed by strips of light which wavered in through the dilapidated windows. At the end was her uncle’s little room, sordid, smoky, with the ceiling coming undone and ready to fall, and the shade of Don Ferdinando coming and going like a spectre.
‘Who is it? – Grazia – come in –’
Don Ferdinando appeared on the threshold, yellow and lean, looking at his sister and his niece in stupefaction through his spectacles. On the unmade bed still lay Don Diego’s old great-coat, which he was just patching. He rolled it up hastily, along with a bundle of other old rags, and thrust it in a drawer.
‘Ah – is it you, Bianca? – What do you want?’
Then realizing that he still had the needle in his hand, he put it in his pocket, ashamed, always moving with the same mechanical movement.
‘Here is your niece come to see you,’ stammered his sister with a tremor in her voice. ‘Isabella – you remember her? – She has been away at school in Palermo.’
He turned on the girl those blue, bewildered eyes of his, which shifted all the time from side to side, and murmured:
‘Ah! – Isabella! – My niece!’
He looked uneasily round the room, and from time to time, as he caught sight of some forgotten object lying on the table or on the lame chair, a knot of dirty thread, or a cotton handkerchief put in the sun to dry, he ran quickly to hide it. Then he sat down on the edge of the little bed, staring at the door. While Bianca was speaking, her heart wrung inside her, he kept looking round with suspicious eyes, thinking of something else. All at once he went to lock the writing-desk.
‘Ah! – My niece, do you say?’
He looked at the girl once more with the same hesitating look, then turned his eyes to earth.
‘She is like you – the very image – when you lived here – ‘ He seemed to be trying to find something to say, his eyes wandering round, avoiding the looks of his sister and his niece, his hands trembling slightly, his face colourless and blank. For a moment, while Bianca was whispering in his ear, begging something of him, as if she was going to break into tears, he suddenly straightened his bent back so that he seemed very tall, a shadow in his light-coloured eyes, a wave of the Trao blood colouring his pallid cheek.
‘No – no –I don’t want anything. I have no need of anything. – Go away now, go away – you see – I’ve got such a lot to do –’
It fairly wrung your heart. A ruin and a state of want that humiliated her ambitious memories and her fantastic romances born during imaginative confidences made to her school-friends, the illusions that the maiden’s little head was full of, now she had come back to her home village intending to play the leading role there. The paltry luxury at Aunt Sganci’s, her own cold and melancholy home, the tumble-down mansion of the Traos, which she had so often recalled with childish pride, while she was away, all had now dwindled, gone black, poor, sad. There opposite was the Margarone’s terrace, which she had so often remembered as vast and full of sun and flowers and happy girls who dazzled her with the display of their elegant clothes, then, when she was a child. And how little and squalid it was in fact, with the leprous wall that gloomed above it! – and how old Donna Giovannina had become, always seated smiling in the midst of the dusty flower-pots, knitting, in a black dress, enormous! At the bottom of the little road squatted the little house of Grandfather Motta. When her father took her there they found Aunt Speranza spinning, grey-haired, with disagreeable wrinkles in her face. There were loose tiles to stumble over, a lad in his shirt-sleeves who lifted his head from a pack-saddle he was mending, without greeting her, Master Nunzio moaning with rheumatism in bed under a dirty coverlet:
‘Oh, you’ve come to see me! Did you think I was dead? No, no, I’m not dead. Is this your girl? Have you brought her to show her off to me? – She’s a young lady, you can’t say anything else! You’ve given her a fine name! Your own mother was called Rosaria! Wasn’t she? Excuse me, my dear niece, if I receive you in this hovel – I was born here, so what’s the odds! I hope I shall die here – I wouldn’t change it with the fine house where your father wanted to shut me up. I’m used to going into the street the minute I get up. No, no, better think about it in time. Everybody as he is born.’
Speranza grunted out something which one couldn’t hear. The lad followed them with his eyes as far as the door, when they left.
Meanwhile rumours of cholera began to go around. At Catania there had already been an upheaval. Arrived Don Bastiano Stangafame, from Lentina, along with Donna Fifì, who looked as if she had the sickness already on her, green, lean, telling tales that would turn your hair grey in a day. At Syracuse, a young woman as lovely as the Madonna, who did dances on the backs of trained horses in the theatre and went spreading the cholera in that way, had been killed by the enraged people. Uneasy people waited to see, making all preparation for decamping from the village at the first sound of alarm, and spying at every new face that passed.
Just then there appeared two pedlars selling ribbons and silk handkerchiefs. They went from house to house selling their things, and looking in at the doors and courtyards. Dame Margarone, who was always ready to spend money to deck herself out, as if she was still a young chicken, made many purchases; however, as she hadn’t got any change, those gentlemen said they would call for it next day.
Instead the Judgement Day dawned, Ciolla ran to the justice of peace to complain that his hens had been poisoned; he took them with him in his hands as a proof, still warm. Don Nicolino went back home beside himself, ordering his sisters to bar the doors and not to open to any living soul. Doctor Tavuso even had the door of the village draw-well closed. The gentry, remembering what a doubtful subject that Ciolla was, since he had been handcuffed and put in the castle sixteen years before, armed themselves to the teeth and prepared to scout the country, ready for if he took it into his fancy to go fishing in troubled waters again. The order was, fire without mercy at the first alarm. The two pedlars were seen no more. Before evening loaded carriages began to pass, fleeing into the open country. After vespers not a living soul went into the streets. Quite late arrived a litter bringing Don Corrado La Gurna, dressed in black, his handkerchief at his eyes. The dogs barked all night long.
The panic knew no bounds when they saw Baroness Rubiera, paralysed, escaping carried in an armchair, because she couldn’t get into the sedan-chair, she was so enormous: four men struggling to carry her, with her head hanging on one side, her great face livid, her purple tongue coming half out of her slavered lips, her eyes alone alive and anxious, her dead hands troubled by a continual trembling. And following after, the young baron looking twenty years older, bent, grey, burdened with children, with his wife beside him again in the family way, and the children of the first marriage going along with them. They filled the road wherever they passed: something terrifying. The poor people who were forced to remain in the village stood watching overwhelmed. In the churches they had exposed the Holy Sacrament. Old rancours were now forgotten, and labourers were seen restoring to their masters the things they had stolen. Don Gesualdo opened his arms and his barns to the poor and to his relations; all his houses in the country, at Canziria and at Salonia. At Mangalavite, however, where he had vast establishments, he talked of gathering the whole family together.
‘Now I’ll run to my father to try and get him to come with us. And you go to your brother,’ he said to Bianca. ‘Make him understand that these are times when you must bury the past, even with somebody who has betrayed you. – We’ve got the cholera on top of us. – Blood isn’t water, when all’s said and done! We can’t leave that poor old fellow alone in the middle of the cholera. People would have some right to talk against us then, I’m thinking –’
‘You’ve got a good heart,’ stammered his wife, feeling her heart go tender. ‘You’ve got a good heart.’
But Don Ferdinando was not to be persuaded. He was terribly busy sticking strips of paper on all the cracks in the window-frames, with a little pot hung round his neck, perched at the top of a ladder.
‘I can’t leave the house,’ he replied. ‘I’ve so much to do! – See how many holes? – If the cholera comes – I must stop them all up –’
In vain his sister prayed and implored him again.
‘Don’t leave me with this remorse, Don Ferdinando! – How am I going to close my eyes at night, knowing you’re alone in the house?’
‘Ah! Ah!’ he replied with a silly smile. ‘They won’t give me the cholera in the night! – I shall stop up all the cracks – look!’ And he began reiterating again:
‘I can’t leave the house by itself – I’ve got to look after the family documents –’
The sexton’s wife, seeing Bianca leave the door in distress, ran after her, weeping:
‘We shan’t see one another any more! – Everybody is going. – There’ll be nobody to ring the mass for and the matins –’
Master Nunzio also had refused to go with his son.
‘I eat with my fingers, my son! You’d blush for your father at table – I’m a boor, I am – I’m not fit to mix up with your gentry! No, no, better think in time! Better be finished off with cholera than with spleen! – And then you know I’m used to being master in my own house – I’m a country fellow – I’m not used to lying down and letting my wife walk over me, I’m not!’
Speranza pointed to Burgio, who was also in bed with malaria.
‘It’s not like us to fly from danger! – My husband can’t move, and so we shan’t move! – That’s how we’re made, we are! – And you know what it takes to keep a whole family, with your husband fastened to his bed – !’
‘But I’ve always told you you shall be mistress! – Everything you want! – ‘ exclaimed Don Gesualdo at last.
‘No – I’ve not come begging from you! – We shan’t take a thing from you, unless we’re forced to – thank God! – And then you’re giving us charity. We shall go to Canziria. Don’t be frightened, people won’t be able to say you left your father in the middle of the cholera! – You can think of sending us some provisions. – We can’t live on grass, like cattle! – But here – If you happen to have a frock that your daughter has left off, that she absolutely can’t wear any more. – She’s a lady, I know, but it would come in useful for poor folks like us –’
The Margarones left at once for Pietraperzia; all still in mourning for Don Filippo, who had died of heart-troubles brought on by his son-in-law Don Bastiano Stangafame every time he beat Fifì when her father didn’t send money. They darkened a whole street. Baron Mendola, who was paying court to Aunt Sganci, took her to Passaneto, where she caught malarial fever, poor old woman. Zacco and lawyer Neri left for Donferrante. All the village was in squalor. At eleven o’clock there was nobody to be seen down the Street of San Sebastiano except Marchese Limòli, taking his usual little walk after dinner. And they let him know that even he aroused suspicion by his movements, and they were going to let him see something the first case of cholera that occurred.
‘Eh?’ said he. ‘See something? You’d better think about it first, you lot, because you’ll have to pay for the show. I shall do what I’ve always done, even if I die for it.’
And to his niece who begged him to go with them to Mangalavite:
‘Are you frightened I shan’t be here when you come back? – No, no, don’t be frightened; the cholera won’t bother itself about me.’
While Bianca and her daughter were just getting into the litter, arrived Aunt Cirmena, desperate.
‘Do you see? Everybody’s going. The relations have turned their back on me! – And I’ve even got that poor orphan of a Corrado La Gurna saddled on me. A tragedy in his home – Father and mother in one night – struck down by cholera. – Nobody else has the heart I have! – A poor woman without help and with nowhere to go! Won’t you give me the keys of the two rooms you’ve got out there at Mangalavite, near to your villa! – the rooms of the mill. You are the only relation I can turn to, you are, Don Gesualdo!’
‘Yes, yes,’ he answered. ‘But don’t tell the others.’
‘I shall tell them, indeed! – I want to throw it in every one of their faces, if I live!’