SIX months had hardly gone by when new troubles came for Don Gesualdo. Isabella threatened to commit suicide; the son-in-law had taken her travelling outside the Kingdom of Naples, and talked of appealing for a legal separation, on grounds of incompatibility of temper. Other gossip reached the poor father, in secret, and he set off hot-foot to the Villa di Carina, where the duchess was kept for reasons of health. He came back looking ten years older, and quarrelled with his wife, who never understood a thing, and cursed Aunt Cirmena and all the relations with all his heart, because they had brought him nothing but bitter vexations, and was forced to rush to the lawyer to settle the business with his genteel son-in-law by dint of money and more money. It was a great blow for the poor fellow. He hid the real trouble from his wife, so as not to distress her uselessly; – he kept everything to himself; but he had no peace; it seemed to him that people were pointing the finger at him; he felt the blood come to his face as he went alone, thinking, or if he met that infamous creature Cirmena. He was a peasant; he wasn’t used to such shame! And his daughter the duchess cost him the eyes out of his head, moreover. The Canziria estate to start with, and Alia and Donninga which he had assigned to her as her dowry, and which made his heart bleed every time he saw them now, let out to anybody, and everybody, divided again into bits and scraps after he had struggled so hard to put them together, badly kept, badly worked, far from the master’s eye, as if they belonged to nobody. From time to time also other bad news reached his ear, giving him no peace, tormenting him like horse-flies or like stinging wasps; they said in the village that my lord duke was sowing debts with both hands, thick as hail, the same wild oats that devoured his own property and spread over his wife’s possessions worse than locusts. That poor Canziria which had cost Don Gesualdo so many labours, so many privations, and where he had felt his blood stir as he set his foot for the first time upon his own soil! Donninga for the sake of which he had brought down on himself the hatred of all the village! the good lands of Alia, which he had brooded over, coveting them with his eye for ten years, morning and evening, good sunny land without a stone, loose and soft so that you could push your hands in and it felt warm and fat like living flesh – all, all was going in this gangrene! How could Isabella have held the pen in her hand and put her signature to so many debts? Cursed the day in which he had let her be taught to write! He seemed to see the shadow of mortgages stretching over the lands which had cost him so much sweat and blood, like a hoar-frost in March, worse than a heavy spring mist that blackens the young corn like fire. Once or twice, in serious circumstances, he was forced to let himself be bled in other ways. All his savings bled away from this open vein, all his toil, his sleep at nights, everything. And yet Isabella was not happy. What a state he had found her in, in the sumptuous Villa di Carina! He guessed what there must be underneath it all, when she wrote letters to him which set him in a fever, and which poisoned him with the delicate scent of those crested sheets, him who had thickened his own skin labouring even under malaria. The lord duke, however, conducted all this sort of business through the lawyer Neri – because they weren’t his forte. And when at last Mastro-don Gesualdo really turned, refusing to go any further, rearing and shying, he was told that his son-in-law said:
‘It is obvious my father-in-law, poor man, doesn’t understand what is needed for my wife to keep up the name she bears in decency.’
‘Decency? – I black my boots with decency! I eat bread and onions to keep the duchy going. Tell my noble son-in-law that! In a few years he has wasted a whole patrimony.’
There was the devil of a row. Donna Bianca, who was already ill enough, spitting blood morning and evening, had a relapse which brought her to the grave’s brink in a fortnight. In the village they all knew she had consumption: like all the Traos! a family which was dying out of exhaustion, said the doctor. Only her husband who was always out, busy with his own business, so many thoughts and troubles in his head, deluded himself thinking she’d be better as soon as he could take her out to Mangalavita, into that balsamic air, that would really bring the dead back to life. She smiled sadly and said nothing.
She was reduced to a skeleton, gentle and resigned to her fate, expecting nothing and desiring nothing. Only she would have liked to see her daughter again. Her husband had promised it her. But since they were at outs with their son-in-law he had said no more about it. Isabella was always promising to come, from one autumn to another, but she could never finally make up her mind to it, as if she had sworn to herself never to set foot in that accursed village again, as if she had plucked it from her heart entirely. And Bianca, as her strength ebbed, felt this hope also fade, as her life was fading from her, and wasted herself in ruminating on future projects, day-dreaming, her face flushing up with the last flames of her life, her eyes veiled with tears which might have been tears of tenderness and were really tears of discouragement.
‘I’ll do this! I’ll do that!’
She was like those caged birds who try over their song for the spring they will never see. The bed in which she lay seemed to eat away her flesh; the fever consumed her with a slow fire. Now, when she was seized with a fit of coughing, she was left gasping, spent, with her mouth open, her eyes delirious in the depths of the sockets which seemed so deep, so deep, clutching with her poor wasted arms as if she wanted to hold on to life with all her might.
‘All right!’ sighed Don Gesualdo at last, seeing his wife in this state. ‘I’ll do this as well, then! – I’ll pay the noble duke to let you see your daughter again! – I’m made to carry the load, as I always was.’
The doctor came and went, and tried all the remedies and all the nonsense he read in his books; there was a frightful bill at the druggist’s.
‘Anyhow it’ll help some way or other,’ grumbled Don Gesualdo. ‘I don’t mind what is spent for my wife; but I want to spend my money so that she can get some good by it and I can see it in her face – not so that they can try all the new medicines on her like at the hospital! – Now they’ve got it into their heads that I’m rich, they all want to make what they can out of it! – ’
But the first time he ventured to make a veiled complaint to the doctor himself, Saleni, another of these medical fellows, this one worse even than Tavuso, rest his soul, the man looked straight at him with his impudent eyes and said rudely:
‘Then why do you send for me?’
And he had to beg and pray him to continue to do as he liked, although it wasn’t the slightest good actually. On the eve of the Immaculate Virgin it looked as if poor Bianca was really going to yield up her soul to God. Her husband, who had gone to wait for the doctor on the stairs, said to him immediately:
‘I don’t like her, doctor! I don’t like the looks of my wife tonight.’
‘Eh! have you only just found it out? I haven’t liked the looks of her for some time. I thought you’d have realized it.’
‘But isn’t there anything we can do, your honour? Do all you can. Don’t mind the expense. – Money is meant to be spent for these things – ’
‘Ah, you tell me so now? Now you realize? Well I’m glad to hear it, I must say!’
Saleni began the comedy all over again; the pulse, the tongue, a bit of a chat seated at the bed-foot, with his hat on his head and his stick between his legs. Then he wrote the usual prescription, the usual rubbish which was no good to anybody. and departed leaving husband and wife to their miseries. The house had become a forsaken cavern. Everybody gave it a wide berth. Even the servants were afraid of the infection. Zacco was the only relation who remembered them in their trouble, since he and Don Gesualdo had formed a company together for the contract for the high-road, and so were friends again. The baron came every day with all his family, the baroness lean and obedient, her daughters filling the room, so over-ripe, fat and bursting, that they made you expect a cannonade. –
He wasn’t afraid of infection! Lot of rubbish! – And then, when it’s one’s own relations – ! He’d heard that evening in the town that his cousin Bianca was worse, so he had come sooner than usual. To take Don Gesualdo’s mind off his troubles a bit, he drew him into the balcony opening and began to discuss their business with him.
‘What do you say to this? Cousin Rubiera is going to bid at the auction for the other two sections of road. – Yessir! that fool! – Eh? Eh? What do you think of it? – Him who’s not been able to pay you back that money for the leading lady yet! – There’s hell to pay with his wife, about you, because she won’t settle it with her money! – She brought him her children, for a dowry! – but she wants to keep her money for herself! He’s fated, is that poor Don Ninì! – And do you know who else is coming in at the auction? Do you want to know? – Canali, just think of it! – Canali playing at being a joint contractor along with Baron Rubiera! – They’ve all got hungry for making profit nowadays! – Eh? – Wasn’t I right to tell you? – Doesn’t it make you laugh?’
But his friend was not really heeding him; he was uneasy, keeping his ear listening in another direction. Then he got up and went to see if Bianca was wanting anything. She didn’t want anything, as she lay staring in front of her with those eyes of an innocent creature, putting her handkerchief to her mouth sometimes, and then hiding it again, along with her wasted hand, under the pillow. The Zacco girls were sitting round the bed, with their hands in their fat laps. Their mamma stammered timidly, in order to break the silence:
‘She seems a little calmer – since we came – ’
At those words the daughters all looked at one another and nodded approval.
Then the baron went up to the bedside, showing a great deal of interest in the sick woman.
‘Yes, yes, there’s no comparison! – her eye is more alive, and her countenance is more animated. – Naturally! – hearing some talk going on round her. She needs to be livened up, to have a bit of conversation. For a blessing you’re in good hands. The doctor knows what he’s doing. And then when you’ve got the means! – when you lack for nothing! I know plenty of others where it’s different – well born too – of good family – and they want bread by day and covering by night! – old and ill, without doctor or druggist – ’
He leaned to Don Gesualdo and twaddled out the rest in his ear. Bianca either heard or guessed, with her shining eyes which fixed people in the face, and she drew her white, wasted hand that was like a child’s from under the pillow to make a sign to her husband to come near. Don Gesualdo had bent over her and was nodding Yes. The baron, seeing there was no longer need for mystery, spoke up.
‘He won’t come! Don Ferdinando has become a regular child. He doesn’t understand a thing, poor fellow! – We must be sorry for him. We can say it here, among us relations. – He needn’t lack for anything. – A brother-in-law with such a good heart as this one here! – ’
The sick woman waved once more that hand that spoke by itself.
‘Eh? What does she say? What does she want?’ asked the baron.
Donna Lavinia, the eldest of the daughters, had risen, anxious to do for her anything she might require. Donna Marietta, the other daughter, for her part pulled her father’s coat-tails. But Bianca had closed herself in a silence which sharpened her worn face like a knife, so that even the baron noticed it and changed the subject.
‘The Lord God sometimes lengthens our days to try us with fresh troubles – I speak of the Baroness Rubiera, poor thing! Eh? – To live to see the property she’d got together go to pieces under her own eyes! – and not to be able to say a word or to move a finger – eh? eh? Her son is a fool. Her daughter-in-law grudges her the mouthful of food she eats! – As true as God’s above! – She can’t wait to be rid of her! – But she doesn’t want to go! She wants to live just to see how her son will get out of that debt to Don Gesualdo. – Eh? – I’ve been telling your husband just now of the great schemes Don Ninì has got in his head – ’
Don Gesualdo was silent, plunged in thought. Then, seeing that the baron was expecting his cousin Bianca to answer, waiting with that fixed little smile on his mouth, he growled:
‘No, there’s not so much to laugh at – I’ll wager the canon-priest Lupi is at the back of it.’
Zacco was staggered.
‘That rascal? that trickster? – How do you know? – Who told you?’
‘Nobody. It’s my idea. But he won’t take me in, you’ll see. – Besides, I don’t care. I’ve got something else to think about now!’
But the baron would give him no peace.
‘What? You don’t care! Thank you for that! You know what they’re saying, don’t you? That they want to take the communal lands away from us! – They say they’ve found the way and means this time – and that neither you nor me can help ourselves, do you know!’
Don Gesualdo shrugged his shoulders. It seemed as if really he didn’t care a single straw about it now. The baron gradually calmed himself down, in the midst of the chorus of his women who were murmuring abuse against the canon-priest.
‘A trickster! – a swindler! – You can’t stir in the village but what he has to poke his nose in – ’
Donna Marietta, more prudent, pulled her father’s coat-tails once more.
‘Excuse me! Excuse me!’ added he. ‘One chatters to say a bit of something – to liven up the sick woman. One doesn’t know what to talk about. – Do you know though what the malcontents like Ciolla are going round saying? – that they’ll be making the revolution in eight days’ time – to frighten the gentlefolks. – You remember, in twenty-one, eh, Don Gesualdo?’
‘Ah! – What’s the good of talking! – I’ve got a revolution in the house now!’
‘I know, I know. – But then, it doesn’t seem to me – ’
The baroness, who could speak when necessary, turned to Don Gesualdo with that ill-omened face of hers to ask if they had written to the duchess to tell her what a state her mother was in. – Bianca had the sharp ear of the very ill.
‘No, no, there’s no danger!’ interrupted Zacco. Meanwhile Donna Lavinia had risen to fetch a glass of water. As the door-bell was heard to ring she wanted also to run and see who it was.
‘A two-handed sword!’ exclaimed the baron sotto voce, as if he was saying something in confidence, smiling complacently. ‘A real treasure of a girl to have in the house. – So sensible! – And she’d throw herself in the fire for her cousin Bianca! – ’
The mamma also smiled discreetly. At that moment appeared the servant girl announcing Baron Rubiera and his wife.
‘Him? Well, it takes a cheek like his!’ burst out the baron, jumping up and looking for his hat which he’d got on his head all the while. – ‘You’ll see he’s come to talk about what I was telling you! Isn’t there another way out? – not to meet him face to face, the fool! – ’
His family was taking leave as fast as ever they could, rushing round like him, looking for shawls, upsetting chairs, bumping into one another, as if Don Ninì was going to burst into the room with a drawn dagger. The poor ill woman, overcome by all that turmoil, let herself sink into unconsciousness, saying with a thread of a voice:
‘For the love of God! – I can stand no more!’
‘No. – But there’s no help for it, cousin! – They’re relations, as well! – You’ll see they’ve come for their own purpose, to seize the opportunity. – Pretending to be coming to see you. – We’d better be going, we had. – That’s the way. – First come first served – ’
But the Rubieras did not put in an appearance as yet. Don Gesualdo went into the anteroom, where he learnt that they were waiting in the parlour, as they had heard that the Zaccos were there –
‘All the better!’ observed the Baron. ‘That means he wants a private talk with you, does Don Ninì! – So we won’t stir. We’ll stop and keep our cousin company, while you talk business. – And then we shall hear what that ninny has come to ask you!’
The servant had taken a little light into the parlour, and in the semi-obscurity Don Ninì looked really enormous, muffled in his greatcoat, with a woollen scarf right up to his ears, in his neck a mane of hair that hadn’t been cut since May. Donna Giuseppina on the other hand, had gone round-shouldered, her face was flabby and wrinkled in her round hood, her hair, of a dirty grey, was ill-combed, rolled up in a hurry with one hand and then held in place by the silk handkerchief that she had tied under her chin. Her hands were cracked and black, the hands of a good housewife, as she now gesticulated to defend her husband’s interests; agitating herself inside her mud-splashed cape that covered her all over; showing in all her person the slovenliness and neglect of a rich lady who had no need to dress herself up, a wife who has left off bearing children and hasn’t to trouble any more about pleasing her husband. And on her toothless mouth she kept all the time the smile of a poor person, the humble smile of one who comes to beg a favour. While Don Ninì fumbled for his words, turning his old hat in his hands, with that scarf up to his nose giving him a threatening look. His wife encouraged him with a look and began herself:
‘We heard that cousin was worse. – We came at once with Ninì. – We’re relations when all’s said and done – the same blood. – There are differences – and different interests – there must be, in all families. – But everything goes under when certain things happen. – Ninì as well – poor fellow, he couldn’t rest – always saying – I’d really like to know why – ’
Don Ninì agreed with gestures and with all his person, which he had let sink on to the sofa, making it creak loudly. And quickly he broached the matter he had come for – his wife insisting absolutely that their cousin should sit down between the two fires –
‘We’ve got that business of the new contract to consider, dear Don Gesualdo. Why should we fight amongst ourselves, say I? – for some outsider’s benefit? – since we really are relations! – ’
‘Of course!’ interrupted the wife. ‘That’s what we came about – How is our poor cousin?’
‘As God wills she should be! – So that I’ve got the punishment of God on my shoulders! – I haven’t got the head for business now – ’
‘No, no, I don’t want you to bother. – I was just saying – you ought to trust yourself to a reliable person. – Not that it’s anything to do with me, of course – ’
All at once Don Ninì’s face went dark, as he seemed to withdraw, watching the other man with suspicious eyes.
‘Tell me though, do you trust Zacco, really? Eh? Do you trust him?’
Don Gesualdo, in spite of all he was feeling, twisted his mouth to a smile, as if to say he trusted nobody.
‘Good! If you knew the sort of fellow he really is! – All the things he used to say about you once! – before he was hand and glove with you! – The talk he used to let out! – ’
Donna Giuseppina had her cheeks pursed out and her lips nipped together as if to keep in all she might say.
‘Anyhow, we won’t bother! Talk won’t grind us any corn. He’s a relation as well! So let’s come back to ourselves. – What have we to keep on falling out about? Why should we keep a lot of lawyers and judges at our expense? What is the trouble between us relations? Is it all for that trifle which I owe you? – For you it’s no more than a pinch of snuff.’
‘Oh well, excuse me, so it is for you – ’
Then chimed in Donna Giuseppina, telling over her troubles, her large family, her mother-in-law the baroness, who while she lived –
‘Excuse me! – She doesn’t come in. – It’s the money that matters, you know. And I lent my money to your husband.’
Don Ninì began to excuse himself, there in front of his wife. – Yes, he had borrowed the money – at a moment when he had lost his head. – When you’re young – you’d better cut your head off, sometimes. – He would pay – in time – the last farthing – without law-suits or any more expense – as soon as his mother had closed her eyes. – But was it right to make him feel bitter against the baroness, good God? To make her do something foolish? –
‘Ah?’ said Don Gesualdo. ‘Ah?’ – And he looked at Donna Giuseppina as if to ask why she didn’t pay.
Don Ninì, embarrassed, looked from one to the other. She at last put in, cutting her husband short with a wave of the pocket-handkerchief she had taken from her satchel:
‘It’s not only that. – The affair of the lands. – You haven’t mentioned that yet to Cousin Don Gesualdo, have you?’
‘Yes – the affair of the communal lands – ’
‘I know – ’ replied Don Gesualdo – ‘The lease expires in August. Whoever wants to come in at the auction, can then – ’
‘No! no! – Neither you nor I will get them this time.’
‘A new law,’ interrupted Donna Giuseppina with a sour smile. ‘The lands aren’t going to be leased out any more! The parish is going to rent them – to the poorest people – a little bit for everybody. – Everybody in the village will be a landowner in a little while! – Didn’t you know?’
Don Gesualdo pricked up his ears, putting aside his own troubles for a moment. Then he gave a weary smile.
‘It’s as true as God’s above!’ added Baron Rubiera. ‘I have seen the project at the Town Hall! They say the parish will be the gainer, and everybody will have his own piece of land.’
Then Don Gesualdo took out his snuff-box, smelling a trap.
‘That is to say? That is to say?’
‘Don Gesualdo!’ called the servant from the doorway. ‘Just a minute, your honour!’
‘Do go, never mind us,’ said Donna Giuseppina. ‘Don’t you bother. We’ll wait.’
‘It’s the mistress. She wants to speak to your honour!’
‘Eh? What do they want? What do they say?’ The Zaccos fell upon Don Gesualdo the moment he entered the sick room.
‘It was I who sent for you,’ said the Baron with a sly smile.
But the other didn’t answer, bending over his wife. Making her eyes and her poor, wasted white hand speak for her, she said:
‘No! – Don’t have anything to do with him – if you want just for once to listen to me. – Don’t join with my cousin Rubiera, don’t do it! – Mind, I speak to you on my deathbed – ’
She had a toneless voice, and eyes which penetrated into him, so fixed and shining. Zacco, who had also bent over the bed to hear, exclaimed triumphantly:
‘Bless her! She speaks as if she could see beyond. You’ll never do any good with that man! A fool! A weathercock! What your wife says to you at this moment is gospel, Don Gesualdo! Don’t forget it. I’d be very careful before I disobeyed what she says, on my word I would – !’
‘And Donna Giuseppina! Deceitful, spiteful!’ put in Madame. ‘She has shortened her mother-in-law’s days! She can’t wait to be rid of her!’
‘Go then, go and face the music. We are here. Go along, else they’ll be there till tomorrow.’
Don Ninì was still seated on the sofa, puffing with the heat of his woollen scarf, his hat on his head; and Donna Giuseppina had got up to look in the obscurity at the ornaments and things arranged carefully on the tables and stands: the coffee-service, the paper flowers under the glass dome, the clock which always pointed to the same hour. Seeing Don Gesualdo return she said immediately:
‘Baron Zacco sent for you, didn’t he? There was no need – We don’t make any mystery – ’
‘We don’t make any mystery – ’ repeated her husband. ‘It’s only a question of coming to an agreement – all those that are well-disposed to one another. – If he’s well-disposed himself – that gentleman! – ’
‘But,’ observed Don Gesualdo, ‘if the thing is as you say, I don’t know what’s to be done. – What do you want of me?’
Donna Giuseppina had also changed her face, darting her eyes like needles first to this one, then to that, chewing a smile with her black mouth. She put her husband altogether in the background, and took up the cudgels herself with her Cousin Motta.
‘Yes, there is help for it! – there is! – ’ And she kept still for a moment, staring fixedly at him, to impress him more. Then, holding her purse tight between her hands, she came up to him with a peculiar motion of her hips, in confidence.
‘We’ve got to get our own people to take the lands – on the quiet – ’ said the baron.
‘No! no! – let me explain. – The communal lands are to be rented out in lots, aren’t they? in bits and scraps so that every land-labourer can have his share. All right. Let them do it. And then, we’ll put forward other applicants, on the quiet – shopkeepers, people who don’t know what to do with land and haven’t even the money for the rent. Everybody has the same right to apply, haven’t they? Well then, with a bit of foresight, advancing a small sum to this one and the other. – They will be in debt to us at the New Year, and we’ll take the land in payment. Do you see what I mean? We’ve got to prevent as much as ever we can the real land-labourers from getting hold of it. Because once they do they’ll never let go of their bits again They’d die rather.’
Don Gesualdo got up suddenly, his nostrils dilated and his face all at once reanimated, and began to walk up and down the room. Then, turning round to face the other two, who had also risen startled:
‘You didn’t think of this!’ he exclaimed ‘This is a good one. I know where this comes from!’
‘Ah! Ah! You know? You see?’ replied the baron triumphantly. ‘First of all you’ve got to stop Nanni l’Orbo’s mouth. – With caution – and a little money – without doing anybody any hurt, of course! – The authorities – ’
‘You who’ve got a hand in the affair. – The fellow is a ring-leader, an agitator – capable of rousing the whole place against you. You who’ve got a hand in the affair, you must stop his mouth.’
Don Gesualdo went to sit down again, repenting of having let himself be carried away by the first emotion, scratching his head.
But Baron Zacco, who was on the other side of the door listening with all his ears, could not contain himself any longer.
‘Excuse me. Excuse me, gentlemen,’ he said, entering. ‘If I disturb you – if you have something to talk about in secret – I’ll go – ’ And he straightway took a seat, with his hat on his head.
They were all silent, each one glancing furtively at his neighbour, Don Ninì with his nose in his scarf, his wife with her lips compressed. At length she said she was so sorry about Bianca’s illness.
‘Really! mourning in the whole village. Ninì has been preaching at me for a while now – Giuseppina dear, we must go and see how my cousin is. – Money is one thing, and relationship another – ’
‘Well now,’ resumed Don Gesualdo. ‘This fine idea of taking the communal lands on the quiet – who is responsible for it?’
It was no use pretending after that. Donna Giuseppina began to talk again about the ferment there was in the village, and of the revolution that was threatening. Baron Zacco fidgeted, making signs with his head to Don Gesualdo.
‘Eh? Eh? What was I telling you just now?’
‘When all’s said and done,’ concluded Donna Giuseppina – ‘it’s better to speak out plainly and shake hands with one another, all of us who have something to lose.’
And she returned to the subject of that scoundrelly chopping up of the communal lands for the benefit of the poorest people, into so many morsels, a crumb for everybody, so as not to wrong anybody. She laughed till her stomach shook, with venom.
‘Ah? ? ?’ exclaimed the Baron, purple in the face, his eyes starting out of his head. ‘Ah? ? ?’ And he said no more.
Don Gesualdo was also laughing.
‘Ah? It makes you laugh? ah?’
‘What do you want me to do? It matters nothing to me, I tell you.’
Donna Giuseppina was staggered.
‘How? – You! – ’
Then she drew him aside, near to the corner where was the stopped clock, and was talking to him softly, with her hands over her eyes. Don Gesualdo said nothing, but stroked his chin, and with that calm little smile that made people wild. From the distance the two barons kept their eyes fixed on him like two mastiffs. At last he shook his head.
‘No! no! Tell the canon-priest Lupi that I’m going to find no money for these dodges. They can have the lands who like – I’ve got my own – ’
The others turned on him one and all in one accord, shouting, exciting one another. Zacco, now that he understood what was going on, raved worse than any of them.
‘A genuine good idea! Coming from a man who knows what’s what! The best way of getting out of that rascalry of dividing the communal property among a lot of good-for-nothings – Don’t you understand? – What they mean is that what’s mine isn’t mine, and everybody wants his share of it! – ’
Don Gesualdo, obdurate, only shook his head and kept repeating:
‘No! No! – They don’t catch me!’
All at once Baron Zacco seized Don Ninì by the scarf and pushed him towards the sofa as if he wanted to devour him, whispering in his ear:
‘Do you want to hear? Should I tell you? What it amounts to is that he’s got his own idea for making a fool of us all! – I know him! – ’
At the commotion the Zacco cousins had appeared in the doorway of the anteroom. There was a moment of embarrassment among the relations. Zacco and Don Ninì calmed themselves suddenly, becoming ceremonious again:
‘Excuse me! Excuse me! I don’t know what cousin Bianca will think, hearing all this shouting – and all for nothing! – ’
Zacco smiled good-naturedly, his face still kindled. Don Ninì wrapped his scarf up to his nose again. His wife, also with an amiable smile, took her leave.
‘My best wishes to Donna Bianca. – We won’t disturb her. – Let us hope the Madona will perform a miracle – ’
Don Ninì also growled out some inaudible word from under his muffler.
‘Just a moment. I’ll come with you,’ exclaimed Zacco. And pretending to look for his hat and cane he came near to Don Gesualdo in the antechamber.
‘Listen – You’re wrong, upon my word you are! It’s a serious proposition! – You’re wrong not to join in with Baron Rubiera!’
‘No, I don’t want the bother! – I’ve got so many other things on my mind! – Then my wife said no. You heard her yourself.’
The baron was really getting into a rage at this.
‘Ah! – your wife? – You attend to her when it suits you!’ But he suddenly changed his tone:
‘Well then – do as you will! – Do as you will, my dear friend! – Wait a minute, Don Ninì. We’re coming now.’
His wife couldn’t get away. She seemed as if she couldn’t tear herself from the bedside of the sick woman, straightening the bedclothes, smoothing the pillow, putting the glass of water and the medicine within reach, making a long face, sighing, and mumbling Ave Marias. Then she wanted her daughter to stay and sit up for the night, at least. Donna Lavinia consented heartily, also busying herself doing things, anxious to help, already taking possession of the keys, watching over everything, like a mistress.
‘No!’ murmured Bianca with her hoarse voice. ‘No! – I don’t want anybody! – I don’t need anybody!’
She followed them round the room with an anxious eye, suspicious, diffident, with a peculiar note of rancour in her hollow voice. She forced herself to appear stronger than she was, struggling to rear herself up on her trembling elbows, with her shoulders so sharp that they seemed as if they would pierce through her nightdress. Then as soon as the Zaccos had gone she dropped exhausted, making a sign to her husband to come near.
‘Listen! – Listen to me! – I don’t want them any more! – Don’t let those women come here any more. – They want you to marry one of them – as if I was dead already.’
And she kept on nodding her head, saying yes, yes, that she was not mistaken. her sharp chin sinking in the shadow of her hollow neck, whilst he, bent over her, talked to her as if she was a child, smiling, but with his eyes swollen.
‘They want to set Lavinia in the house for you. – They can’t wait for me to close my eyes – ’
He protested that it wasn’t so, that Lavinia wasn’t of the least concern to him, that he would not marry again, that he had seen trouble enough. And the poor thing listened to him quite pleased, with her shining eyes that penetrated right into him, to see if he was speaking the truth.
‘Listen – again – something else – ’
She always motioned with her hand, because her voice failed her, her voice that seemed to come from afar off, her eyes that gradually were growing darker, becoming veiled. She had even made the effort to raise herself so as to clasp an arm round his neck, as if there was nothing left but him to cling to for life, to hold her to life, shaking her face, that had gone still sharper, as if she wanted to hide it in his breast, as if she wanted to confess herself to him. After a moment she relaxed her arms again, with her face rigid and closed, and her voice changed.
‘Later on – I will tell you – But I can’t now – ’
NOW everything was going to rack and ruin for Don Gesualdo; the house all in disorder; the country labourers, far from the master’s eyes, doing what they liked; the very servants left one by one, afraid of catching consumption; even Mena, the last one remaining for the absolute needs, when they spoke to her about washing the sick woman’s clothes, that the washerwoman refused to take to the river, for fear of losing her other custom, said straight out:
‘Don Gesualdo, you’ll excuse me, but my life’s worth as much as yours, though you’re rich. – Don’t you see how far gone your wife is? – It’s a wasting decline, God help us! I’m frightened of it, and so excuse me.’
And that after she had grown fat in his house! Now everybody abandoned him as if he was ruined, and there was nobody even to light the lamp. It was like that night at Salonia, when he had had to put his father in the coffin with his own hands. Neither money nor anything was any good any more. Then Don Gesualdo really lost heart. Not knowing what to do, he thought of his old friends, those whom one remembers in time of need, and he send to fetch Diodata to lend a hand. Instead of her appeared her husband, suspicious, looking around, careful where he put his feet, spitting right and left.
‘As for me – I’ll risk my skin for you, if you want it, Don Gesualdo! But Diodata is mother of a family, you know. – If anything was to happen to her, God preserve you and me. – If she caught your wife’s illness. – We are poor folks. – And you’re rich enough; but I shouldn’t even have the money to pay the doctor and the druggist – ’
In short the same old song, the same chanting to get more money out of him, to bleed him again. At last, after a bit of pulling and holding back, they agreed as to the recompense. He had to shut his eyes and bow his head. Nanni l’Orbo, quite content with the bargain he had made, wound up:
‘As for us, you’re the master even of our lives, Don Gesualdo. You’ve only to give your orders, night and day. I’m going to fetch my wife, and I’ll bring her along.’
But now Bianca had got another cause for suffering. She didn’t want to see Diodata about the house. She wouldn’t take anything from her hands.
‘No! – You, no! – Go away with you! – What have you come for, you? – ’
And she fretted against those greedy creatures who came to feed at her expense. How she clung to her possessions, now! – and how the old rancour awoke again in her now, a jealousy of her husband whom they wanted to rob away from her, those wicked people who had come on purpose to hurry her into her grave, to make themselves masters of everything that was hers. She had become absolutely like a child, suspicuous, irascible, capricious. She complained that they put something in her broth, and that they changed her medicines. Every time she heard the door-bell there was a scene. She said they sent people away because they didn’t want to let them see her.
‘I heard my brother Don Ferdinando’s voice! – There was a letter came from my daughter, and they wouldn’t give it me! – ’
The thought of her daughter was another torment. Isabella also was in poor health, so far away, that a journey would have prostrated her for ever, wrote the husband. For the rest they had known for some time how Bianca dragged herself from her bed to her lying-chair, and they would never have believed that the catastrophe was so near. But the poor mother would give herself no peace, she turned upon Don Gesualdo and everybody who was near her. It needed the patience of a saint. In vain her husband said to her:
‘Look now! – What the deuce are you getting into your mind now? – Even you take it into your head to be jealous!’
She looked at him with such black looks as he had never seen. And with a certain tone he had never heard before in her hoarse voice, she said to him:
‘You’ve taken my daughter away from me – even now when I’m in the state I am in! – I leave you to your own conscience! – ’
Or else she threw it in his face that he had brought these other people around her. Or else she wouldn’t answer at all, with her face turned to the wall, implacable.
Nanni l’Orbo had installed himself like a father in Don Gesualdo’s house. He ate and drank, he came every day to fill his belly. Diodanta looked after what there was to do, whist he ran round in the market-place amusing himself, confabulating with his friends, holding forth about what was needed and what must be done, upholding the cause of the poor people in the matter of dividing up the communal lands, every man his own bit, as God had intended it, and every gentleman to have as many portions as he had children to bring up. He also knew by thread and sign all the manoeuvres of the big-wigs who were trying to get the lands for themselves. On one occasion he started a grand discussion on this point with Canali, and they came to blows over it, now that the days of arrogance were over and every man might say his say.
The day after, Master Titta had gone to Canali’s to shave him, when the door-bell rang and Canali went to see who it was, with all the soap on his chin. While he was sharpening the razor, Master Titta stretched his neck from simple curiosity, and saw Canali talking in the anteroom with Gerbido, and the pair of them with faces to make anybody open his ears full width. Canali said to Gerbido:
‘So you rely on it, then?’
And Gerbido replied:
‘Oh! ! !’
Nothing else.
Canali came back to be shaved, as quiet as if it was all nothing, and Master Titta thought no more about it. Only that evening, he himself didn’t know why – but he had a presentiment, seeing Gerbido leaning against the corner of the Masera, with his gun behind him! – The words he had heard a while before came back to him.
‘Who knows whom that pill is destined for,’ he thought to himself.
Things were already looking doubtful, and people had hurried home before Ave Maria was rung. Further on, meeting Nanni l’Orbo hanging around down there, his heart told him that this was the very person for whom Gerbido was waiting.
‘What are you doing out at this hour, neighbour Nanni?’ said Master Titta to him. ‘Better come along home. We’ll be going the same way.’
‘No, Master Titta, I’ve got to go to the tobacconist’s here, and then I’m going for a moment to see Diodata who is waiting on Don Gesualdo’s wife – ’
‘Do me this favour, neighbour Nanni! Come along home now! I’ll give you tobacco, and you can go to see your wife tomorrow. These are no fit times for roving round the street at this hour! – You believe me! – ’
The other passed it off in joke; saying he wasn’t frightened of their robbing him of money he hadn’t got. – His wife was expecting him with a plate of macaroni – and plenty else. – For a plate of macaroni, God save us, you’d risk your skin! –
As soon as Master Titta heard the noise of the gun two minutes later, he said to himself:
‘There’s neighbour Nanni getting it.’
Don Gesualdo had had other trials that morning. Speranza sent the sergeant-bailiff just when she knew it would make him most mad. They gave him no peace from year’s end to year’s end, and they’d made his hair go grey with those law-suits. And Speranza herself was become like nothing but a witch; she had eaten up the fields and the vineyard, egged on by everybody who had a grudge against her brother. She went round everywhere vilifying him. She waited for him in the street in order to vomit insults upon him. She incited her children against him, since her husband didn’t want to inflame himself – he was good for nothing but for taking his belly for a walk round the village, he was; and Santo himself, now that he wanted money, turned his coat and went over to Don Gesualdo’s side, to spit back at his sister the same ugly things he had said before against his brother; a weathercock who spun round with the wind.
‘It’s a real villainy, that it is, Don Camillo! They come down on me with this, just when I’m up to my neck in trouble already. I’ve sown good and reaped evil from everybody, I have.’
Don Camillo shrugged his shoulders.
‘Excuse me, Don Gesualdo. I do my duty. Why did you fall out with the canon-priest Lupi? – About the contract for the high-road! – for a mere nothing. – You need to keep friends with that servant of God. Now he blows the fire up against you with your relations. I don’t want to speak ill of anybody; but he’ll make it hot for you, my dear Don Gesualdo.’
And Don Gesualdo was silent; he bent his back now that everybody could say his say against him, and anybody could throw stones at him.
As it was known that his wife was worse, Marchese Limòli came to visit his niece and had even brought Don Ferdinando as well, arm in arm the two of them, holding each other up. ‘Death and the dunce,’ said those who met them in the street at that hour, with the ferment there was in the village; and they crossed themselves, seeing Don Ferdinando still in the world of the living, with that old greatcoat which hardly hung together any more. The two old men had sat down by the bed, their chins on their sticks, while Don Gesualdo told the story of the illness, and his brother-in-law turned his back on him without saying anything, looking towards his sister, who looked back first at one, then at the other, poor thing, with those eyes of hers which seemed to want to make everybody happy, when suddenly they heard a shouting in the street below, people running, crying loudly, as if the expected revolution had really broken out. All at once, they heard a knocking at the street door, and a voice calling:
‘Neighbour Diodata, open! Come quick. Come and see your husband, he’s been shot – he’s there in the pharmacy – ’
Diodata ran just as she was, with her head uncovered, screaming down the streets. In a moment Don Gesualdo’s house was all upside-down. Baron Zacco also came, suspicious, anxious, mumbling his words, looking in front and behind him before he opened his mouth.
‘Did you see? They’ve done it! They’ve killed Diodata’s husband.’
Then Don Gesualdo lost patience.
‘Well, what’s it to do with me? I needed this, that I did! What the devil do you want with me?’
‘Ah – what’s it to do with you? – Excuse me! I thought you’d thank me – if I came at once to let you know – out of good feeling for you – as a friend – and as a relation – ’
Meanwhile other people arrived. Zacco went to see who it was, half closing the door of the anteroom. Every minute there was a banging at the street door, so many shocks for the poor sick woman. Then Zacco came to say, quite overwhelmed:
‘There’s been the devil of a row at Palermo. – The revolution. – They want to make it here as well. – That rascal of a Nanni l’Orbo did well to get himself killed just now! – ’
Don Gesualdo still only shrugged his shoulders, like one to whom nothing mattered now, nothing except the poor dying woman. After a while the wife and daughters of Baron Zacco also arrived, dressed in their house dresses, with their yellow shawls down their backs, and long faces, never saluting anybody. You could see that all was over. Every minute the baroness went over to speak to her husband, in a low voice. Donna Lavinia had appropriated the keys. Seeing this Don Gesualdo went white. He hadn’t even the courage to ask if the hour had come. Only his bright eyes interrogated first one and then the other.
But they answered him with half words. The baron pulled a long face, and his wife turned her eyes up to heaven and put her hands together. The girls, already sleepy, kept silent, sitting together in the next room. Towards midnight, as the sick woman had gradually become quieter, Don Gesualdo wanted to send them away to rest.
‘No,’ said the baron. ‘We shall not leave you alone tonight.’
Then Don Gesualdo breathed no more, since there was no more hope. He began to walk up and down, with bent head, and his hands behind his back. From time to time he leaned over his wife’s bed. Then he went to continue his walking in the next room, muttering to himself, shaking his head, shrugging his shoulders. At last he turned to Zacco, his voice full of tears:
‘I say we ought to send for her relations – eh? – Don Ferdinando – What do you think?’
Zacco made a grimace.
‘Her relations? – Ah, all right – as you will. – Tomorrow – as soon as it’s day – ’
But the poor man couldn’t contain himself, the words were burning inside him and on his lips.
‘Don’t you see? – Not even letting her see her daughter for the last time! – He’s a swine, that noble duke! For three months he’s been writing – we’ll come today and we’ll come tomorrow! As if the poor thing had got a hundred years to live! It’s a true proverb: Out of sight, out of mind. He’s stolen both child and dowry, that assassin!’
And he went on raving like this for some time with Zacco’s wife, for she was a mother herself, and she nodded yes! yes! forcing her eyes to keep open, while they shut by themselves. He felt neither sleepy nor anything, and began grumbling again:
‘What a night! What an endless night! How long this night lasts, Lord God!’
Day had hardly dawned when he opened the balcony doors to call Nardo the labourer, and sent him round to all the relations to say that Bianca was very bad, poor thing, and if they wanted to see her. Along the street there was an extra-ordinary come and go, and down in the square you could hear a great buzzing. On his return Master Nardo brought the news:
‘They have made the revolution. There’s the flag on the church-tower.’
Don Gesualdo sent him to the devil. Little he cared about the revolution now. He’d got revolution enough at home now! But Zacco tried to calm him down.
‘Careful! Careful! In these days we have to be careful, my dear friend.’
A short time after, they heard a knocking at the street door. Don Gesualdo ran to open it himself, thinking it was the doctor or one or other of all those whom he had sent for. Instead he found himself face to face with the canon-priest Lupi, who was dressed in short clothes and with a ragged hat on his head, and the young Baron Rubiera, who stood aside.
‘Excuse me, Don Gesualdo. We don’t want to bother you – But it’s a serious business. – Hark here – ’
He drew him aside into the stable to tell him in a low voice what he had come for. Don Ninì, in the distance, still scowling, nodded approbation.
‘We’ve got to make a demonstration, you understand? – Shout that we want Pio Nono and liberty as well. – If we don’t the peasants will turn on us. And you must join in. We mustn’t give a bad example, good God!’
‘Ah! The old song about the Carboneria?’ burst out Don Gesualdo, infuriated. ‘Many thanks to you, Canon! I’m not making any more revolutions! We made a fine show of it at the start! They’ve got to like it now, and every little while they’ll be making another, to get the money out of your pocket. I know what it all amounts to now: – You get out, and give me what you’ve got!’
‘You mean to say you stick up for the Bourbon? Speak out.’
‘I stick up for my own possessions, bless you! – I have worked hard – with my sweat. – And so – all right. – But now I’m not going any more to do just what suits those who don’t own anything or possess anything.’
‘Then they’ll do it to you, you understand! They’ll sack your house and everything!’
The canon-priest added that he came on behalf of those who had something to lose and who ought to unite together, in the present peril, for the common good. – Otherwise he wouldn’t have set foot in his house – after the trick he had played him about the contract for the high-road –
‘Excuse me. – Since you want to play at being deaf. – You know how many enemies you’ve got! Jealous persons – who would like to lay hold of. – They don’t look on you very kindly – They say you’re worse than the others, now you’ve got money. This is the time to spend your money, if you want to save your skin!’
At this point Don Ninì chimed in also:
‘You know they accuse us of having had Nanni l’Orbo killed – to stop his mouth – you for the first! – I’m sorry they saw me coming here the other evening with my wife.’
‘Ay,’ observed the canon-priest – ‘we are honest men. Whose concern could it be, after all, to stop neighbour Nanni from talking so much? – The devil’s own tongue he had, my sirs! The whole village knows the history of Diodata. Now they’re letting loose even the children against you. – You’ll see, Don Gesualdo!’
‘All right – ’ replied Don Gesualdo. ‘Good day. I can’t leave my wife in the state she’s in, to listen to your gossip.’ And he turned his back on them.
‘Ah – ’ returned the canon-priest, following him up the stairs. ‘Excuse me, I knew nothing about it. I didn’t think it had already got so far – ’
Since they were there they could do no less than go up and see Donna Bianca for a moment, he and the young baron. Don Ninì stopped in the doorway, hat in hand, without saying a word, and the canon-priest, who understood these things, after a while nodded his head to Don Gesualdo as if to say Yes, the hour had come.
‘I will go,’ said Don Ninì putting his hat on again. ‘Do excuse me, but I can’t bear it.’
Don Ferdinando Trao was already there at the bedhead, like a mummy, and Aunt Macrì, who was wiping her niece’s face with a handkerchief of fine linen. The Zaccos were pale with having lost a night’s sleep, and Donna Lavinia could hardly stand. The Marchese Limòli arrived with the confessor. Donna Agrippina then turned them all out, all the lot. Don Gesualdo, behind that closed door, felt a knot in his throat, as if they were taking his poor wife from him before her time.
‘Ah!’ muttered the marchese. ‘What a comedy, poor Bianca! We remain here to keep up the comedy every day, eh, Don Ferdinando! – Even death has forgotten that we’re in the world – ’
Don Ferdinando listened blankly. Now and again he looked timidly, furtively, at his brother-in-law, whose eyes were swollen, whose face was yellow and bristly, and he made as if to go away, frightened –
‘No,’ said the marchese. ‘You can’t leave your sister at this point. You are like a child, bless my life!’
At that moment Baron Mendola entered, out of breath, beginning at once to make excuses in a loud voice.
‘I’m sorry. – I knew nothing about it. – I didn’t think – ’
Then seeing around him such faces and such silence, he dropped his voice and went to finish his discourse in a corner, in the ear of Baron Zacco. The latter began to talk about the night’s sleep he had lost; his daughters who had never closed their eyes, Lavinia who could hardly stand. Don Gesualdo, it is true, stared blankly around, but it was obvious he didn’t take it in. Just then the priest came out again, dragging his feet, and so moved that his hanging lips were trembling, poor old man.
‘A saint!’ he said to the husband. ‘A real saint!’
Don Gesualdo nodded his head, his heart also swollen. Bianca now lay prostrate, her eyes unseeing, her face as if veiled by a shadow. Donna Agrippina was preparing the altar on the commode, with a damask tablecloth and silver candlesticks. What good would silver candlesticks do anybody now? Don Ferdinando went round touching everything, really like an inquisitive child. Then he stood right in front of the bed, watching his sister who was making her account with the Lord God at that moment, and he began to weep and sob. They were all crying. At that instant Donna Sarina Cirmena peeped in at the door, flustered, her mantle inside out, hesitating, looking round to see how she would be received, beginning already to rub her eyes with her embroidered handkerchief.
‘Excuse me! Pardon me! I haven’t got the heart of a stone. – I heard that my niece. – My heart is in the right place, and it’s tender! – I’ve loved her like a daughter! – Bianca! – Bianca! – ’
‘No, aunt! – She is waiting for the sacrament. Don’t disturb her now with worldly thoughts – ’ said Donna Agrippina.
‘You are right,’ said Donna Sarina. ‘Excuse me, Don Gesualdo.’
After she had taken the communion, Bianca seemed a little calmer. The choking passed off, and she managed to stammer a few words. But in a voice that was hardly audible.
‘You see?’ said Donna Agrippina. ‘You see, now she has made her peace with God! – Sometimes the Lord performs the miracle.’
They put on her breast the relic of the Madonna. Donna Agrippina got the girdle of the tunic to push it under her pillow. Aunt Cirmena gave examples of miraculous healings: everything depends on having faith in the saints and in the blessed relics: The Lord can do as much and more. Don Gesualdo himself began to cry like a baby.
‘Even he!’ murmured Donna Sarina, pretending to speak in Dame Macrì’s ear. ‘Even he hasn’t got a bad heart, at the bottom. But I can’t understand why Isabella hasn’t come – duchess or not! – We’ve only got one mother! – Was it necessary to tell so many stories just to get this fine result here – ’
‘He’s a swine! – a villain! – an assassin!’ Don Gesualdo kept growling, glaring round, his lips compressed and his eyes glowing like a madman’s.
‘Eh? What did you say? – ’ asked Dame Cirmena.
‘Ssh! Ssh!’ interrupted Donna Agrippina.
Baron Mendola leaned over to say something in Zacco’s ear. The other shook his dishevelled, swollen head once or twice. The baroness took advantage of this good opportunity to press Don Gesualdo to take a little refreshment from Lavinia’s own hands.
‘Yes, a drop of broth, for it’s two days since the poor man opened his mouth! – ’
As they went into the next room, which opened on to the street, they heard a noise like the sea in storm. Mendola then told what he had seen, coming along.
‘Yessir! They’ve put the flag on the church tower. They say it’s a sign that all food-taxes and land-taxes are abolished. So they’ll be making the demonstration just now. The letter-carrier has brought news that at Palermo they have already done it – and in all the villages along the road as well. So that it would be vile if they didn’t do the same here. However, what will it amount to? The band, four ells of muslin – Look! Look!
From the Rosary Street dawned a tricolour banner on a long cane, and behind it a flood of people shouting and waving arms and caps in the air. From time to time also there was a gun-shot. The marchese, who was deaf as a mole, asked:
‘Eh? What is it?’
The end of the world it was! Don Gesualdo stood arrested, basin in hand. A loud ringing was heard at the street door, and Zacco ran to see. After a moment he poked his head through the door of the anteroom, and called loudly:
‘Marchese! Marchese Limòli!’
They were discussing for some time, in low voices, in the other room. It sounded as if the baron were putting in a good word for a third party who had just arrived, and the marchese was getting fiery.
‘No! no! it’s a swinish trick! – ’
‘Listen, Don Gesualdo! – A moment – just a word – ’
The crowd had gathered right under the house; you could see the banner there at the balcony height, as if it wanted to come in. Shouts were heard: Hurrah for – Down with –!
‘One moment!’ exclaimed Zacco then putting every consideration aside. ‘Come out here a moment, Don Gesualdo. Show yourself to them, or else there’ll be I don’t know what devil to pay! – ’
There was the canon-priest Lupi carrying the portrait of Pope Pius IX, the young Baron Rubiera, yellow as a corpse, waving his handkerchief, and a lot more people all shouting:
‘Hurrah for –! – down with –! – death to –!’
Don Gesualdo, huddled in a chair with his basin in his hand, kept shaking his head and lifting his shoulders, white as his shirt, looking a perfect wreck. The marchese absolutely insisted on knowing what all those people wanted down there:
‘Eh: What is it?’
‘They want all you’ve got!’ burst out Baron Zacco at last, quite beside himself.
The marchese began to laugh, saying:
‘Welcome! Welcome every time!’
At that moment Donna Agrippina Macrì passed in a frenzy, her puce-coloured tunic flapping behind her, and in the dying woman’s room was heard a great commotion, chairs upset, women crying. Don Gesualdo jumped up, swaying, his hair on end; he put the basin on the little table, and began to walk up and down, beside himself, hitting his hands against one another and repeating:
‘The game’s up! – it’s over!’
A LETTER arrived from Isabella a little later; she knew nothing of the catastrophe as yet, and her letter would have made the stones weep. The duke also wrote – a small sheet of notepaper with a black border as thick as your finger, and the crested seal, that black as well, enough to break your heart – inconsolable for the loss of his mother-in-law. He said that the truth had to be hidden from the duchess, by the doctors’ advice, for it would have come like a thunderbolt to her, ailing as she was, and just on the eve of starting off to see her mother! – He wound up by asking for some memento of the dead woman, for his wife; some trifle, a lock of hair, her mass-book, the wedding-ring she wore on her finger –
He wrote also to the lawyer to inquire whether the defunct, rest her soul, had left any property outside her dowry – Then it came out through Don Emanuel Florio, the postmaster, who nosed out the business of everybody in the village, that the lawyer never even answered the letter, and that he only went round grumbling among his intimate friends, like the peevish old man he had become with age:
‘It strikes me that the noble duke is driven to fishing for the moon in a pond, that’s what it strikes me!’
The poor dead woman had gone to the grave in haste, between four candles, amid the hubbub of the mutinous populace who wanted this, that, and the other, stuck in the market-place from morning till night, bawling, with their hands in their pockets and their mouths open, waiting for the manna to fall down from the flag on the church-tower. Ciolla had become somebody at last, with a black feather in his cap and a velvet blouse, so that he looked a perfect child, at his age, and he walked up and down the square, looking here and there as if to say to folks: ‘Hey! You mind yourselves!’ – Don Luca, carrying the cross in front of the coffin, winked amicably, so that the people would make way for him through the crowd, and he smiled to his acquaintances as he heard all the chants of praise which they vented along the street after Mastro-don Gesualdo.
A thief! An assassin! A fellow who had got rich, while so many others were left poor and more needy than ever! A fellow who had his store-barns full of stuff, and sent round the sergeant-bailiff to collect the debts from other people.
Those who shouted loudest were such debtors as had eaten their corn in the blade, before it came to ear. They reproached him, moreover, with having been the most obstinate against letting them have the communal lands, each his own bit. They didn’t know whence the accusation had arisen, but it was a fact. Everybody said so: the canon-priest Lupi armed to the teeth. Baron Rubiera in his fustian hunting-jacket, like any poor devil. They were always in the midst of the land-labourers, handy and jolly, with their heart on their lips:
That Mastro-don Gesualdo was always alike! He had let his wife die without so much as sending to Palermo for a doctor! A Trao! One who had raised him up to honour in the world! What good had it done her, being so rich? –
The canon-priest let out more things against the other man, in confidence: – He had begrudged the very masses for the soul of the poor woman! – ‘I know it for certain. I was in the sacristy. If he has no feeling even for his own flesh and blood! – Don’t make me talk, I’ve got to say mass tomorrow morning! – ’
Gentry and plebeians, after the first shock, had become all one family. Now the gentry were fervent protectors of liberty: priests and friars with the crucifix on their breast, or the cockade of Pius IX, and with muskets on their shoulders. Don Nicolino Margarone was nominated captain, with spurs and a striped cap. The Captain’s lady went round collecting to buy firearms, dressed in the tricolour, a short red overdress, a white skirt, and a Calabrian hat with green feathers that was a perfect love. The other ladies carried stones every day to the barricades, outside the gates, with their little baskets ornamented with ribbons and the band playing in front. It was like a festival, morning and evening, with all those flags and that crowd down the street, the shouting of Hurrah for! and of Down with! every moment, the bells chiming and the band playing, and later on the illumination. The only windows that remained shut were those of Don Gesualdo Motta. He alone had retired into his lair like a wolf, the enemy of his village, now that he’d got rich, doing nothing but complain because they came to him every day to ask for something, the commission for the poor, the forced loan, the requisition of firearms! – They put him at the head of the list, and made him pay twice as much as anybody else. He had to defend himself and contend with them. The gentlemen of the Committee returned from his house worn out and telling fine tales. They said he didn’t understand anything any more, absolutely stupid, nothing but a shadow of Mastro-don Gesualdo, a real corpse, who kept on his feet still to defend his own property, but the hand of God would fall on him sooner or later.
Meanwhile the peasantry and the starving people who stood about the square from morn till night, open-mouthed, expecting the manna that never came, inflaming one another as fast as they could, talked of the fraudulent way they’d been treated, the hardships they suffered in winter, while there were folks who had store-barns full of stuff, and fields, and vineyards! – They could do with the real gentry, who were born to it. – But they couldn’t rest for thinking that Don Gesualdo Motta had been born poor and naked as themselves. – They all remembered him a poor navvy – Speranza, his own sister, preached there in front of the flag hoisted on the Town Hall, that now at last the moment had come to make restoration of ill-gotten gains, to take justice into one’s own hands. She incited her own children against their uncle, and now that her boys had grown big and strong they would have been able to make themselves felt, if they hadn’t been two ninnies, like their father, who had quieted down the moment his brother-in-law had sent a handful of money, when Bianca was so ill, saying he wanted to make peace with everybody, and he had only too many troubles already. Giacalone, whom Don Gesualdo had made to pawn his mule to pay for the harvest-debt; and Pirtuso’s heir who was still fighting him in a law-suit about certain moneys which the agent had carried with him into the other world; all those who were against him for one reason or another, now blew up the fire, saying he was a shady one, telling all the dirty tricks of Mastro-don Gesualdo, crying him down in every little drinking-tavern and in every club, even rousing up those who had nothing against him, with the story of the communal lands which were going to be divided amongst everybody, so that everybody was expecting his bit from day to day, and yet nothing was really decided about it, and anybody who talked about it they had him killed to stop his mouth. – They knew well enough where the shot had come from! Master Titta had recognized Gerbido, the former servant-boy of Don Gesualdo, as he ran away hiding his face in his handkerchief. And so came up again the story of Nanni l’Orbo who had taken on Don Gesualdo’s woman and the children she had had by him, poor foundlings who went hoeing in their father’s fields to earn their bread, and kissed his hands into the bargain, like that fool of a Diodata who if you gave her a kick said Thank you for it.
So on and so on, they managed to let loose even these two upon him, one evening when they had drawn them into the tavern with their talk, and the two lads hadn’t even the money to pay for a drink for their friends. Then, at that hour, Don Gesualdo saw appear before him Nunzio, the more fiery of the two. His grandfather’s name, yes, that he had given him; but the property, no! – As near as nothing they were to coming to blows, father and son. There was a great shouting, a row that lasted for half an hour. Nunzio, rolling drunk, stuck up for himself there to his father’s face, and told him everything he could lay his tongue to, him and her as well. Uncle Santo, who had made it up with his brother after the death of his sister-in-law, helping him to live through his grief, eating and drinking at his expense, seized the wooden bar to make peace between them. Poor Don Gesualdo went to lie down, more dead than alive.
In the midst of so many worries he had really got ill. It poisoned his blood to hear all the talk that went on. Don Luca the sexton, who had come and established himself in the house, as if it was already time to bring him the extreme unction, made out that Don Gesualdo ought to open his store-barns to the poor, if he wished to save body and soul. He himself had five children to keep, five mouths to fill, six with his wife. Master Titta, when he came to bleed him, sang the rest of the song, lancet in air:
‘You see! If they don’t use a bit more sense, some of them, it’ll come to a bad end this time! People can’t stand any more. I’ve been cutting hair and letting blood for forty years, and I’m not changed, I’m not!’
Don Gesualdo, ill, yellow, with his mouth always bitter, had lost appetite and sleep; he had cramps in his stomach like mad dogs inside him. Baron Zacco was the only friend he had left. And people said that even he had something to gain by being friends with him, some scheme up his sleeve. He came to see him morning and evening, and brought his wife and daughters, all dressed in black, so that they darkened the street. He left him his daughter to look after him.
‘Lavinia is a splendid hand at making decoctions – Lavinia is a demon for keeping her eye on things about the house. – Let Lavinia do it, she knows how to manage things – ’
On the other hand, the baron looked black if Diodata dared so much as to show her face there, at Don Gesualdo’s, with a black kerchief on her head, loaded with children, already grey and bent like an old woman.
‘No, no, good woman. We don’t want you! Better look after your own affairs, we don’t keep lavish open house here any more – ’
Afterwards he babbled his paternal advice to his friend.
‘What the devil do you want with that old woman? – You’ve no business to have her hanging round, now she’s a widow! – Especially seeing that you used to have her in the house when she was a lass. – You know what the world is, and how it talks! – Then that other business of her husband’s death – Though it’s true he deserved it! – Besides, you don’t need anybody, now we have my daughter here – ’
He himself took upon himself to order and dispose of everything in the house of his cousin Don Gesualdo, poking his nose into all his business, running up and down with the keys of the store-houses and the cellar. He advised him, moreover, to put out his ready money to interest, supposing he had any by him, for fear things should get worse.
‘Give it out on loan, with a good lawyer’s security – a bit for everybody, for those who shout loudest, because they’ve nothing to lose, and are threatening now to break in to your store-houses and burn your house. Then they’ll be quiet for the time being. Then, if they do manage to get hold of the communal lands, you can jump on them with a fine mortgage. Things can’t go on always like they are now. Things will change round again, and you’ll have got your claws in in time – ’
But he wouldn’t hear of money. He said he hadn’t any, that his son-in-law had ruined him, that he’d rather meet them with guns, the folks who came to burn his house or to break in to his store-barns. He had become like a wild beast, green with bile, the illness itself making him frantic. He shouted, threatening:
‘Ah! My own property! I’d like to see them! After I’ve been forty years getting it together – penny by penny! – Better cut out my liver and all the rest at once, for I’m rotten inside with miseries. – With guns, I say! I’d like to murder a dozen or so of them first! If a man wants to take from you what you’ve got, you take his life from him!’
So he had armed Santo and Master Nardo, the old labourer, with sabres and carbines. He kept the door barred, and two fierce mastiffs in the courtyard. People said that his house was like an arsenal; that at night he received Canali, Marchese Limòli and the others, to conspire with them, and that one fine morning you’d find the gallows set up in the market-place and all those who had made the revolution hanging on it. So his few friends had abandoned him so as not to be looked upon with dislike. And Zacco really ran an ugly risk by keeping on going to see him, with all his family.
‘Pity that soap and water don’t wash with you!’ the baron said to him more than once. The baroness at last, seeing that there was no coming to a conclusion with that man, decided to explode the bomb one day when Don Gesualdo was just nodding on the sofa, yellow as death, and her daughter was playing sick-nurse, sitting on guard by the window.
‘Excuse me, cousin! I’m a mother and I can’t keep quiet any longer, I can’t – you, Lavinia, go out a minute while I speak to Cousin Don Gesualdo. – Now that my daughter’s gone, tell me what’s in your heart, Cousin – tell me plainly what is your intention. – As for me, I shall be very pleased – so will the baron, my husband. – But we must speak out plainly – ’
The poor wretch opened his sleepy eyes wide, still a wreck after the colic –
‘Eh? What do you say? What do you mean? I don’t understand you.’
‘Oh! You don’t understand me? Not when my daughter Lavinia is here doing everything for you? An unmarried girl! And you’re a widower at last, and you ought to have reached years of discretion, so that you can make up your mind and know what you want to do.’
‘Nothing. I don’t want to do anything. I want to be left in peace, if you’ll leave me alone – ’
‘Ah? So that’s it? Then stay as it suits you. – But anyhow it’s not right – you know it! – I am a mother – ’
And now, resolute, she ordered her daughter to take her mantle and come away home. Lavinia obeyed, also in a fury. The two of them, as they left that house for the last time, drew a cross savagely on the threshold. –
A veritable galley, that hole! Poor Cousin Bianca had left her bones there with a slow decline! – Zacco went that very evening to visit Baron Rubiera, instead of boring himself to death with that farm-labourer of a Mastro-don Gesualdo who spent the whole time whining, holding his stomach, in the dark in order to save the light.
‘You don’t mind my coming, eh? Cousin Rubiera – Donna Giuseppina – ’
Don Ninì had gone out to some secret meeting or other, to decide some weighty matter. While waiting for him, Baron Zacco wanted to pay his respects to the dowager baroness, since he had not seen her for some time. He found her in her room, nailed in her chair facing the matrimonial bed, near which still hung her husband’s gun, rest his soul, and the crucifix which they had laid on his breast when he was dying. She was bunched up in an old shawl, her helpless hands in her lap. The moment she saw her cousin Zacco come in, she began to cry with emotion, childish: – big silent tears which welled little by little in her dull eyes, and fell slowly down her loose cheeks.
‘Good, good, that’s right, Cousin Rubiera! Your head is all right! You know people when you see them!’
She also wanted to tell him of her own troubles, mumbling, puffing, and confusing herself, with her thick tongue and her violent lips frothing with saliva. The baron bent over her, listening closely and affectionately.
‘Eh? What! Yes, yes, I understand! You are right, poor thing!’
Whereupon arrived the infuriated daughter-in-law.
‘She doesn’t understand a damn thing,’ said the baron. ‘It must be a purgatory for you who are closely related to her.’
The paralytic looked daggers at them, lifting more than she was really able, her head which was bent over her shoulder, while Donna Giuseppina scolded her like a child, wiping her chin with a dirty handkerchief.
‘What’s the matter? – What do you want? – Stupid! – You’ll ruin your health! – She’s a real infant, God bless us! You don’t have to believe what she says! It takes the patience of a saint to put up with her, it does.’
The mother-in-law now made big eyes, looking round in dismay, drawing her head in between her shoulders, as if she was afraid of being beaten.
‘You see! Blessed patience!’
‘As I told you,’ concluded the baron. ‘You’ve got your purgatory here on earth, you can go straight to heaven after this.’
Don Ninì came in to take the keys of the cellar. Finding his cousin there, he put on a silly sort of look.
‘Ah – Cousin! – What’s the latest? Is your wife well? – Here you can see what it is – trouble by the shovelful. What’s amiss, mamma? – the same old worries? Excuse me, cousin Zacco, I must go downstairs a moment – ’
The keys always hung there on the door-post. The paralysed woman followed them with her eyes, without being able to say a word, forcing herself to turn her head more than she could, following every stride her son took, while splotches of sick blood burnt again all at once in her cadaverous face. Then Zacco began to recite the rosary against Mastro-don Gesualdo.
‘Lord God, I blame myself, and I repent! I’ve kept on only too long with that fellow! It seemed to me a miserable thing to abandon him in his need – in the midst of all his enemies – if it was only out of Christian charity. – But no more! it’s too much. – Not even his own relations can put up with that man! Think of it! not even a simpleton like Don Ferdinando! He’d rather stop at home than be forced to put on the new suit his brother-in-law sent him. – As long as he lives, you understand? He’s a man of character! And really I am tired, you know. I don’t want to ruin myself for love of Mastro-don Gesualdo. I’ve got a wife and children. Must I carry him hung round my neck like a stone to drown myself with?’
‘Ah! – I told you so! Why look, in all conscience! What was Mastro-don Gesualdo twenty years ago? – And now he puts his foot on all our necks. Just look my sirs, a Baron Zacco blacking his boots and quarrelling with all his relations on account of him! – ’
The other bowed his head in contrition. He confessed that he’d been wrong, but in a good cause, to prevent the man from doing any more harm and to try and get out of him the little good that was in him. Once in a lifetime one may make a mistake.
‘But you know now? Now you know which of us two was right?’
His wife stopped the words in his mouth with a nudge of her elbow.
‘Let him speak. It’s his business now to tell us what he wants of us – what he’s come for – ’
‘All right,’ returned Zacco with a good-humoured smile. ‘I’ve come to play the Prodigal Son, my word! Does it please you?’
Donna Giuseppina was pleased with a sour mouth. Her husband looked first at her, then at his cousin Zacco, and didn’t know what to say.
‘All right,’ resumed Zacco once more. ‘I know that those lads want to make a bit of a row in the streets tonight. You’ve just got the keys of the cellar in your hand, to keep them good-tempered. And you remember that I’m not one of your mealy-mouthed sort, if some of them take it into their heads to come and annoy me under my windows. I’ve got my own stomach full of stuff, and I don’t want to have a lot of enemies to my credit, like Mastro-don Gesualdo – ’
Husband and wife looked at one another meaningly.
‘I’m father of a family!’ the baron went on. ‘I’ve got to defend my own interests. – Excuse me. – But if we play at kick who can amongst ourselves – !’
Donna Giuseppina took up the reply, scandalized.
‘Why whatever are you talking about? – Excuse me, really, if I speak about your business. But, after all, we’re relations.’
‘That’s what I say. We are relations! And it’s better to hang together, among ourselves – in these days! – ’
Don Ninì held out his hand.
‘What the devil! – what nonsense!’
Then he unbuttoned altogether, looking frequently at his wife.
‘Come to the theatre this evening, for the singing of the hymn. Show yourself along with us. The canon-priest will be there as well. He says it won’t be a sin, because it’s the Pope’s hymn. – We’ll talk about it. – But you’ll have to put your hand in your pocket, my friend. You’ve got to spend and treat. See me?’ And he shook the cellar keys before him. The old woman, who had not lost a word of this conversation, although nobody was paying any heed to her, began to growl in the obstinate anger of a child. on purpose making the veins of her neck swell till she was purple in the face. Then the racket began again: son and daughter-in-law scolded her together; and she tried to howl more loudly, shaking her head infuriated. Rosaria appeared, with a huge belly, and with her dirty hands in her greyish, towsled hair, and she too began threatening the paralytic:
‘Just you look! She’s become as wicked as a sandy-coloured ass! What does she want, eh? She eats like a wolf!’
Rosaria never knew when to finish this tune. Baron Zacco thought well to take his leave out of that upset.
‘Well, good evening till the cantata.’
THERE was a full theatre because entrance was free. Lights, singing, applause rising to the stars. Signora Aglae had come on purpose from Modica, at the village expense, to declaim the Hymn of Pius IX and other suitable poems. Seeing her dressed in Greek robes, with all that flesh on her, good luck to her, Don Ninì Rubiera amid the general emotion felt tears come to his eyes, and clapped louder than anybody, murmuring to himself:
‘Body of –! She is still a fine-looking woman! – Blessing my wife isn’t here!’
But those who were shut out, who pushed without being able to get in, went off at last to shout Death! and Hurrah! on their own account; and all those who were in the theatre, hearing the uproar, went out into the square, leaving the leading lady and Signor Pallante to embrace alone, with the flag in their hands. In a moment a great crowd gathered, and kept on increasing like a river. There was an immense shouting, yells which in the darkness and the confusion sounded threatening. Don Nicolino Margarone, Zacco, Mommino Neri, all the well-disposed, burst their throats shouting ‘Out with the lights!’ so that they could see better, so that trouble should not arise.
The crowd kept on shouting this way and that for a time. Then it burst in a torrent down the street of San Giovanni. In front of Pecu Pecu’s Tavern there was a bench with dishes of fried vegetables and things, and this went flying – pumpkin and tomato all underfoot. Santo Motta, who was as if shopkeeper and at home there, seeing all this stuff go to waste, screamed like one possessed:
‘Fools! animals! – Don’t you eat good food, don’t you?’
They were very near to pounding him too, in the fury. Giacalone and the most fervent proposed to bash in the church doors and carry round the saint in procession, to make more impression. – Yes and No. – Curses and knocks on the jaw, there in the dark, in the sacred place. Master Cosimo meanwhile climbed the belfry and rang unceasingly. The cries and the clash of bells were heard even at the Alia, even as far as Monte Lauro, like the ravings of a hurricane. Lights were seen running in the upper village – an end of the world. All at once, as if some word of order had been given, the crowd poured tumultuously towards the Fosso, apparently following some precious leaders.
Mendola, Don Nicolino, and canon-priest Lupi himself, who had buried himself in the thick of the tumult to do what good he could, in vain yelled:
‘Stop! Stop!’
Baron Zacco, not having young legs any more, landed out right and left with his stick, biff! bang! to make the bereft hear reason.
‘Hey? What are we up to? – Gently, gently, my masters! We’re not going to begin doing dirty fools’ tricks! In these things you know where you begin but you don’t know – ’
Just as many of them had lent their ears to the talk about smashing in doors and taking out all the saints for a dance, so now the mob thronged before the storehouses of Mastro-don Gesualdo. They said they were full to the roof. – A man who was born poor as Job, and now who had got stuck-up, and was sworn enemy of the poor and of the liberals – ! With stones, with cudgels! – Some of them had armed themselves with a big stone and were smiting the street-door with blows that sounded like canon-shot. The shrill voice of Brasi Camauro was heard whining:
‘My sirs! There’s no religion left! They won’t have any more to do with Christs and saints! They want to let us starve to death every one of us!’
All at once out of the commotion came yells to make your flesh creep. Santo Motta, torn and bleeding, by rolling himself on the floor succeeded in making a bit of space in front of the storehouse door. And then the gentry, also yelling, shoving, fighting, drove back the most riotous. The canon-priest Lupi, clinging on to the iron grating of the window, tried to make himself heard:
‘… like this? … religion! … other people’s possessions! – The Holy Father! … if we begin – ’
Other shouts responded from the multitude:
‘… equal … poor people … dragged by his feet! … fat ox! – ’
Giacalone, in order to excite the mob, pushed forward Diodata’s two bastards who were there in the crowd, yelling:
‘… Don Gesualdo! … if there is justice anywhere! … abandoned on the streets … the Lord God Himself weeps at such a sight! … go and reckon with him! …’
From the Square of Santa Maria di Jesu, from the first houses of San Sebastiano, the neighbours, terrified, saw a flood of people passing, a great commotion, weapons glinting, men’s arms waving in the air, flushed, fiery faces, showing convulsed in the light of the torches. Doors and windows slammed to. From the distance came screams and weeping of women, voices crying:
‘Holy Mother of God! Oh, holy Saints!’
Don Gesualdo was sick in bed, when he heard somebody knocking at the little side-door opening on to the alley, knocking as if they would break it down. Then the rumble of the tempest supervened. That very evening a kind soul had run to warn him:
‘Beware, Don Gesualdo! They’re threatening you because you are for the Bourbons. Lock yourself in the house!’
He, having got so much other trouble on him, shrugged his shoulders. But now, seeing it was really turning out seriously, he jumped out of bed just as he was, with handkerchief round his head and a cataplasm on his stomach, pulling on his trousers anyhow, putting his pains aside at the sound of that voice crying:
‘Don Gesualdo! – quick! – escape!’
A voice he’d not forget if he lived to be a thousand. Dishevelled, half-dressed, with his eyes glittering like a wildcat’s and his face green with bile, he went about the room looking for pistols and hunting-knives, resolved at least to sell his life dear. Master Nardo and those few house-servants who had remained faithful out of necessity, recommended their souls to God. At last Baron Mendola succeeded in making them open the little side-door to him, Don Gesualdo, posted at the window with a gun, nearly caused a disaster.
‘Eh?’ yelled Mendola, entering done-up. ‘You want to shoot me dead, if you please! This is my reward!’
The other wouldn’t hear reason. He was trembling from head to foot with rage.
‘Ah? so that’s it! That’s what we’ve come to, that a gentleman isn’t safe even in his own house? and his own things aren’t his own? Here I am! But Samson will fall along with the Philistines, mark you! Even the wolf, when you get him cornered – ’
Zacco and two or three others of the well-disposed, having arrived in the meantime, worked themselves into a sweat trying to persuade him, shouting all at once:
‘What do you think you can do? Against a whole village! You’re out of your mind. They’ll burn everything down! They’re starting their Massacre of the Innocents here! You’ll get yourself murdered and everybody else.’
He, infuriated, with his hair bristling:
‘So, if it’s like that! – If they reckon they’re going to put their hand in my pocket by force! – If this is how they’re going to repay me! I’ve been good to them – I’ve fed the whole village – Now they can eat powder, and I’ll start with the first that comes up – ’
Actually! He was determined to make a slaughter of it. Thank goodness, canon-priest Lupi burst into the room and flung himself upon him without minding risks, pushing him and wrestling with him round the room till he succeeded in wresting the gun from his hands.
‘What the devil! You don’t play with firearms!’
He was gasping for breath, his cranium was red and bald, smoking like when he was young, and he stammered in a broken voice:
‘Oh, holy devils! – Lord, forgive me! You make me sweat like a pig. Don Jackass! We’re here to save your life, though you’re not worth it! Do you want them to start sacking and burning the whole village? I don’t care about you, fool that you are! But there are some things that we mustn’t let start even in fun, you understand. Nay, not even against a mortal enemy! If that lot who have got no further than shouting, so far, if they once lay their hands on other people’s possessions, we’re done for!’
The canon-priest was properly beside himself. Then the others all started again on that pig-headed fool of a Mastro-don Gesualdo who was risking compromising them all; they abused him for ingratitude; they simply stunned him. Baron Zacco even went so far as to put his arm round his neck, in confidence, confessing in his ear that he was with him, on his side against all the rabble; but for the moment you had to be prudent, let things take their course, and give in.
‘Say yes – everything they want, now. – There’s no lawyer to put your promises on paper. – A bit of management, a bit of money. – Better your purse should suffer than your belly – ’
Don Gesualdo, seated on a chair wiping away his sweat with his shirt-sleeve, did not say a word, dazed. Down before the great door meanwhile Baron Rubiera, Don Nicolino, Neri’s son were all striving and struggling with all their might to calm the most riotous spirits.
‘Gentlemen – you are right – Everything you want shall be done. – We can swallow all the lot of them in one bite. – Hurray! Hurrah! – All brothers! – One hand washes the other. – Tomorrow – by daylight. Anybody who’s in want come here to us. – Now it’s late, and we’re all one colour, – rogues and gentlemen. – Hey! Hey! I say – !’
Don Nicolino had to catch by the collar a fellow who was slipping through the partly opened door, profiting by the confusion and press which had arisen around a woman who was screaming and pleading:
‘Nunzio! Gesualdo! My sons! – What are they making you do! – Nunzio – Ah, holy Madonna! – ’
It was Diodata, who had heard that her boys were among the mob, shouting for death and destruction against Don Gesualdo, along with the rest, and she had come running with her hands in here hair.
‘Holy Madonna! – What are they making you do!’
Meanwhile Zacco and Master Nardo brought down little barrels full of wine, and helped to make peace by pouring out drink for whoever wanted it, while the canon-priest preached from above:
‘Tomorrow! Come back tomorrow, whoever wants anything. – There’s nobody at home now. – Don Gesualdo is away in the country – but in his heart he also is here, along with us – helping us. – Every man is to have his own loaf of bread and his own piece of land. – We’ll make it right. – Come back tomorrow – ’
‘Tomorrow be damned!’ Don Gesualdo grumbled inside himself. ‘It looks to me as if your honour wanted to pay for everything out of my pocket, Canon!’
‘Will you keep quiet! Do you want to make me look a liar? – Haven’t I said you’re not here, to save your skin – ’
But Don Gesualdo still rebelled.
‘Why? What have I done? I’m in my own house! – ’
‘What you’ve done is that you’re as rich as a pig! – ’ the canon-priest bawled in his ear at last, losing patience. Then all the others attacked him at once, with fair words and foul, saying that if the revolutionaries only found him there, they wouldn’t leave one stone of the house upon another; they’d take everything; they wouldn’t even leave him his eyes to weep his losses. So at last they induced him to flee by the side door. Mendola ran to knock at Uncle Limòli’s.
Hearing the uproar in the village, the marchese by this time as deaf as a mole, had thrown a mantle over his shoulders and stood at his balcony window looking down; he was in his shirt, with his bare feet in heel-less slippers, and a little earthenware warming-pan in his hands, when this new shot took him in the wind. They had a rare job making him understand what they wanted with him at that hour, Mastro-don Gesualdo more dead than alive, the others shouting at the top of their voices in the old man’s ear:
‘They want to play the deuce with him – with your nephew Don Gesualdo. – You must hide him – ’
He winked with his flabby, dropping eyelids, nodding yes, and showing a malicious smile.
‘Ah? – play the deuce? – with Don Gesualdo? – Quite right! Your time has come, my dear man. – You are the sample of the goods – ’
But at last, when he realized that they actually did want to do for him, he changed his tone, pretending to be anxious, in his cracked voice:
‘What? – Him himself! But what do they want then? – What’s going to become of us, at this rate?’
Mendola explained to him that Don Gesualdo was just the pretext for falling upon the richest people in the village but there at the marchese’s they’d never come to look for riches. The old man shook his head, agreeing that they naturally wouldn’t, looking round his rooms with that sour little smile on his toothless mouth.
They were two little rooms that had grown old along with him, and on which his every habit had left its mark; the patch of grease behind the chair in which he nodded off after dinner; the floor-tiles worked loose in that short track between door and window, the plaster rubbed off the wall by the bed where he struck a light. And in that squalor the marchese lived like a prince, spitting his poverty in everybody’s face.
‘Excuse me, gentlemen, if I receive you in this rat-hole. – It isn’t good enough for you, Don Gesualdo. – The fine lot of relations you’ve got now, eh? – ’
On the old sofa with its back against the wall, after they had propped it steady with pieces of the above-mentioned broken tiles, they made up a bed for Don Gesualdo, who could not keep up any more, while the Marchese grumbled on:
‘Look you now what’s come to pass! – I’ve seen a good many things! But this I didn’t expect!’
However he offered to share with him the basin of milk in which he had put his crusts to soak.
‘I’ve come back to pap, you see. I’ve nothing else to offer you for supper. Meat won’t do for my teeth any more – neither for my purse. – You’re used to different fare, my friend. – Well, it can’t be helped! The world turns round for all of us, my dear Don Gesualdo!’
‘Ah!’ replied the latter. ‘It isn’t that, Marchese, sir. It’s that my stomach won’t let me. It’s full of poison. I’ve got a mad dog in my belly.’
‘All right,’ said the others. ‘You can thank God. Here nobody will touch you.’
It was a tremendous blow for Mastro-don Gesualdo. The agitation, the bile, the sickness he had upon him. – The night passed as best it might. But the day after, at Ave Maria, Mendola came again muffled up in his cloak, with his hat down on his eyes, looking carefully around before entering the door.
‘Now something else!’ he exclaimed, entering. ‘They’ve set spies on to you, Don Gesualdo! And they want to dog you out even from here, to make you keep all those promises which the canon-priest made. – Ciolla in person – I saw him just down there, standing sentinel – ’
The marchese, who had become lively again and gay amid all this upset, sharpening his ears and poking in between people to catch a word of what was said, now ran to the balcony.
‘That’s right! There he is in his blouse like a litle boy. – That’s a sign that everybody is growing backwards! – ’
Don Gesualdo had risen gasping, shouting that it was better to make an end of it, that he would run down and pay Ciolla, pay him all the promises, full on the spot! And that if they were looking for him, there he was, quite ready to receive them! –
‘Of course, of course,’ repeated the marchese. ‘If they’re looking for you it means they need you. They don’t come looking for me, you bet. They want to make you shout Death! and Hurrah! along with them. Well then go along! Hurrah for you if you’ve got something to make them shout with.’
‘No! I know what they want!’ returned Don Gesualdo, who was becoming stupefied.
‘Excuse me, but it’s not a question of you only,’ observed Mendola. ‘It’s that after you there’s the whole village, me and everybody!’
Arrived the canon-priest, scratching his head, perplexed by the turn things had taken. The spree was still going on. A fine look-out for some folks! Those rascals had fastened on to those words of peace which he had let fall, and now they were waiting in the market-place expecting the manna to drop from heaven: – ‘You’ve got me into a fine mess, you have, Don Gesualdo!’
At this new departure from the canon-priest arose a new squabbling between the two of them.
‘I, eh? – I? – It was I who promised them earth and air and sea?’
‘To keep them quiet, in God’s name! Words of the moment, of course. I’d have liked to see you stuck in front of all their infernal faces.’
The marchese was quite amused:
‘Just hark! hark now! Look! Look!’
‘Anyhow,’ concluded Mendola, ‘this sort of talk is no good, and we’ve got to gain time! So meanwhile you’ll take yourself off, causa causarum! At the bottom of a cistern, in a hole, where the devil you like, but you can’t go on putting so many fathers of families into danger, just for the sake!’
‘In the Trao house!’ suggested the canon-priest. ‘Your brother-in-law will receive you open-armed. Everybody’s forgotten that he’s still alive, and they won’t come looking for you there.’
The marchese also approved of this.
‘Splendid! It’s a splendid idea! Dog and cat shut up together! – ’
Don Gesualdo was obstinately against it.
‘Then,’ exclaimed the canon-priest, ‘I wash my hands of it, like Pilate. Then I’ll go and call Ciolla and all the lot of them, if that’s what you want.’
Don Gesualdo was reduced to such a state that they did as they liked with him. Two hours after dark, through certain back streets, they went to wake Grazia who had the keys of the street door, and then in the darkness, cautiously, they arrived at Don Ferdinando’s door.
‘Who is it?’ they heard an asthmatic voice bleating from within. ‘Grazia, who is it?’
‘It’s us, Don Gesualdo, your brother-in-law – ’
No answer. Then they heard a stir in the darkness. And all at once Don Ferdinando bolted himself in, and began to pile tables and chairs in front of the door, screaming continually:
‘Grazia! Grazia!’
‘Devil and all!’ exclaimed Mendola. ‘This is worse than ever! That fool will bring all the village.’ The canon-priest was smiling under his nose, shaking his head. Meanwhile Grazia had lighted a stump of candle, and was looking first one and then the other in the face, bewildered, blinking her eyes.
‘What do you want to do, gentlemen?’ she hazarded timidly. Don Gesualdo, who really could not stand, pale and broken, broke forth in a desperate tone:
‘I want to go back to my own house! – no matter what happens. – I’m determined on it! – ’
‘No sir!’ interrupted the canon-priest. ‘This is your own house as well. There’s your wife’s share in it. Why, good Lord! You’ve borne till now. – Now enough! – There, in Donna Bianca’s room. The bed is there same as ever.’
Mendola regained his good humour while they were making the bed. He rummaged round everywhere. He went to poke his nose into the dark passage behind the door. He made jokes, recalling old stories. – What changes! What things had happened! – Who could ever have told, eh, Don Gesualdo? –
Even the canon-priest himself let slip a little smile.
‘While you’re here you can meditate all you wish upon life and death, to pass the time away. What a comedy it is, this dirty world! Vanitas vanitatum!’
Don Gesualdo gave him a black look, but did not reply. He still had strength of stomach enough to shut his troubles and misfortunes inside himself, without amusing his friends by sharing with them. He threw himself down on the bed and was left alone with his pains, stifling his laments and swallowing down the bitterness that every memory brought up into his throat. Only one thing troubled him, that he might die there where he was, without his daughter ever knowing. And there in the fever there passed before his darkened eyes Bianca, Diodata, Master Nunzio, and others, and then his own second self that slaved and toiled in sun and wind, always with a sullen face, and which spat in his face with words like:
‘Fool! Fool! What have you done! You look well!’
With the day returned Grazia who came to help him a bit, spent as she was, panting if she moved a chair, stopping every moment full in front of him with her hands on her enormous stomach, to start again her complaints against Don Ferdinando’s relations, who left him there on her hands, poor thing, begrudging him even his bread and wine.
‘Yessir, they’ve every one forgotten him, there in his corner like a sick dog! – But my heart won’t let me! – We’ve always been neighbours – good servants of the family – a great family – My heart won’t let me, it won’t!’
In her wake came a swarm of children turning everything up-side-down. Then arrived Speranza screaming that she wanted to see her brother, as if he was on the point of death.
‘Let me come in! He’s my own flesh and blood, when all’s said and done. Now he is as he is I don’t think of anything but that I’m his sister.’
She, her husband and children. They set all the neighbourhood in an uproar. Don Gesualdo got up out of bed gasping. Chains wouldn’t have kept him in it.
‘I want to go to my own house! What am I doing here? Anyhow, everybody knows – ’
With great effort they persuaded him to wait till evening. And then after Ave Maria, quietly and secretly, Burgio and all his relations accompanied him home. Speranza wanted to stop and look after her brother, since he was so ill, and for a miracle they hadn’t put everything to sack and pillage that night.
‘It’s no good saying we’ve fallen out. In time of need folks show their heart. Money is one thing, love is another. We have quarrelled and we shall quarrel till the Judgement Day, but we are children of the same father, we are one blood!’
She protested that she’d cherish him like the apple of her eye, him and all that belonged to him. She arrayed in front of him her husband and her children, who kept looking around with greedy looks, and she repeated:
‘These are your own kith and kin! These won’t betray you!’
And he, beaten, weary, disheartened, hadn’t even the strength to rebel.
So, bit by bit, they all foisted themselves on him. His nephews roving round the house and gardens, playing the master, laying hands on everything. His sister, with the keys at her waist, rummaging, ransacking, sending her husband here and there, to fetch remedies, to look for healing herbs. As Farmer Fortunato grumbled that he hadn’t the legs of a man of twenty to run round in this fashion, she yelled at him:
‘What do you want? Don’t you do it for love of your brother-in-law? Prison, sickness and necessity call for an amnesty.’
She wasn’t frightened of Ciolla nor any of that tribe. Once when Vito Orlando thought he would come and do a bit of showing off, with his pistol in his pocket, to settle certain debts with Don Gesualdo, she followed him down the stairs throwing a pot of dirty water over him. Even canon-priest Lupi himself had had to put his tail between his legs, and couldn’t try being generous with other people’s things any more, now that Ciolla and the most scoundrelly members had gone off to seek fortune in the city, with banners and trumpets. The canon-priest, in order to quiet the rest, had had to resort to the expedient of going out in procession, with the scourge and the crown of thorns; and so the others let off their steam in festivals and holidays, while he went round preaching brotherhood and love of one’s neighbour.
‘He doesn’t fork out a farthing, for all that,’ bawled Gossip Speranza. – ‘And all right then. But if he comes trying it on again here at this house, playing the camorrista, I’ll receive him as he deserves – like Vito Orlando.’
In the meantime Don Gesualdo’s house was being sacked and pillaged all the same. Wine, oil, cheese, pieces of cloth also, disappeared in the twinkling of an eye. From the Canziria farm and from Mangalavite appeared farm-managers and peasants laying complaints against the sons of Farmer Fortunato Burgio who came ruling with a high hand, and sacked the fields and orchards of their uncle as if the place was already masterless. He, poor wretch, fast in bed, fretted in silence; he dared not rebel against his sister and her husband; he thought of his own troubles. He had a dog, there in his belly, which devoured his liver, the mad dog of Saint Vito the Martyr, which martyred him also. In vain did Speranza lovingly seek for herbs and medicines, and consult Zanni and others who had secrets for all ills. Each one brought a new remedy, decoction, ointments, even the relic and the image of the blessed saint, which Don Luca wanted to try with his own hands. It was all no good. The sick man insisted:
‘It’s nothing – a touch of colic. I’ve had so much to trouble me. Tomorrow I shall get up – ’
But even he didn’t believe it, and he never got up. He was reduced almost to a skeleton, skin and bone; only his belly swollen like a water-sack. In the village they began to say he was done for; the hand of God was upon him destroying him in the midst of his riches. His noble son-in-law wrote from Palermo for precise information. He also spoke of affairs which he had to regulate, and moneys which were falling due, and which he had to pay. In the postcript were two unhappy lines from Isabella, who had not recovered from the blow she had received a little while before. Speranza, who was present just when her brother was feeling touched by the letter, spat out her venom:
‘There you are! Now you’ll make yourself worse, and all! If you don’t look out you’ll be gone to the next world – alone and abandoned like one who doesn’t own a thing! – Who have you found ready at your side in time of need, tell me that! Your daughter may send you pretty words – But her husband knows what he’s after – ’
Don Gesualdo did not answer. But when he was alone he turned to the wall and lay and cried, softly, unseen. He seemed to have become a child again. You wouldn’t have recognized him. When Diodata heard that he was so ill, and wanted to go and ask his pardon for the breach of respect her boys had committed, on the night of the rising, she was petrified at seeing him such a wreck, smelling of the grave, with eyes that became so lustrous at every new face.
‘Don Gesualdo, sir – I came to see you because they told me you were so bad. – You must forgive them – those scamps who offended you like that. – Boys who didn’t understand. – They let themselves be led on, without knowing what they were doing. – You must forgive them for my sake, Don Gesualdo sir!’
Any one saw she spoke sincerely, poor thing, with her pitiful face, trying to swallow down and hide the tears that came to her eyes at every word, trying to take his hand to kiss it. He made a vague gesture, and shook his head, as if to say it didn’t matter, now. Whereupon arrived Speranza and took upon herself to abuse the brazen hussy who had come to tempt her brother on his death-bed, to get something out of him, to strip him to the last shred. A blood-sucker! She had fattened upon him already! Wasn’t it enough? The crows were flying, now they smelt carrion. The sick man closed his eyes to escape the torture, and writhed in his bed as if he had another attack of colic. So that Diodata left without being able to say good-bye to him, her head hanging, clutching herself together in her mantle. Speranza came back to her brother all loving and smiling.
‘You’ve got us here now to help you. – We won’t leave you by yourself, don’t you worry. – Everything you want. – You’ve only to speak. What do you want with that witch now? She’d eat you up body and soul. You couldn’t even take the viaticum with that scandal in the house!’
As for her, she attended to him better than a servant, looked after him with love, sparing neither trouble nor expense. But seeing that nothing did him any good, she went so far as to call in the son of Tavuso, who had just returned raw and fresh from Naples, with a doctor-of-medicine degree – a young fellow without a hair on his chin yet; who made you pay as if he was a prince. – However, Don Gesualdo spoke his mind when he saw him putting pen to paper to write the usual fraud.
‘Don Margheritino, I saw you born. Do you want to write me a prescription? What do you take me for, my dear chap?’
‘All right then!’ returned the little doctor, infuriated. ‘All right then, let the vet cure you. What did you send for me for?’ And he took his hat and marched off.
But since the sick man suffered all the tortures of the damned, in the hope that somebody might still find a cure for him, and to shut the mouths of the neighbours, who accused him of avarice, he had to bow his head once more, bow his head to doctors and medicaments. Tavuso’s son, and Bomma, and all the upstarts in the village, they all passed before Don Gesualdo’s bed. They came, they looked, they touched and poked, they bandied among themselves a lot of nasty outlandish words that made your flesh creep, and they all left their say each one on a bit of paper – bits of scribble like leeches. Don Gesualdo, terrified, didn’t say a word, but tried to catch whatever they meant; watching their hands suspiciously as they wrote. Only, so as not to throw his money away too freely, he took Don Margheritino aside and showed him that he’d got a cupboardful of little pots and bottles, bought for his wife, poor soul.
‘I spared no expense, Doctor. And I’ve got them all there, just as they are. If you think they might be any good now – ’
But they took no notice of him even when he kept stammering, frightened by those serious faces:
‘I feel better. Tomorrow I’m going to get up. Send me into the country and I shall be better in twenty-four hours.’
They said yes, to please him, like a child.
‘Tomorrow! The day after tomorrow – ’
But they kept him there, to milk him, doctors, relations, and druggists. They turned him over, and they turned him back again, they tapped him on the stomach with two fingers, they made him drink a thousand dirty mixtures, they smeared him with stuff that raised blisters on his abdomen. Once more there was an arsenal of medicines on the chest of drawers, just as in the last days of Bianca, rest her soul. He grumbled, wagging his head:
‘We’ve come to the medicines that cost a lot. That means there’s no more hope.’
Money in streams, a come and go, a turmoil throughout the house, the table spread the whole day long. Burgio, who wasn’t used to it, ran to show his tongue to the doctors, when they came to visit his brother-in-law; Santo never stirred out of the house any more, not even to go to the tavern; and the nephews, when they came in from the land, tore each other’s hair, quarrels and contentions amongst them as to who could lay hold of most, rows which even reached the sick man’s chamber, so that he listened for all he was worth, crazy to know what they were doing with his things, till he even began to shout from his bed:
‘Let me go to Mangalavite. All my things are going to rack and ruin. Here I eat my heart out. Let me go, else I shall die.’
He’d got a ball of lead in his stomach, which weighed on him, and wanted to come out, always hurting him; from time to time it contracted, it got red hot, it throbbed like a hammer, and danced in his throat till it made him scream like one in hell, and bite everything that was near him. Then he was left spent, panting, with the vague terror of another attack in his starting eyes. Everything that he made himself swallow, to keep him alive, the most delicate tit-bits, that he never asked what they cost, just turned to poison inside him; they came back again like hell-stuff, blacker than ink, bitter, God-cursed. And the pains and the swelling increased; a paunch that his legs couldn’t support any more. Bomma tapping on it one day, said:
‘There’s something here!’
‘What did you say, your honour?’ stammered Don Gesualdo, bouncing up into a sitting posture on the bed, in a cold sweat.
Bomma looked him full in the face, drew up his chair, turned this way and that to see if they were alone.
‘Don Gesualdo, you are a man – you’re not a child, are you? – ’
‘Yessir,’ he replied with a firm voice, all at once calm, showing the courage which he had always had upon necessity. ‘Yes-sir, speak out.’
‘Very well, you ought to have a consultation. You haven’t just got a prickly-pear thorn in your stomach! It’s something really serious, you know! It’s not a thing for the wise beard of Don Margheritino or one of that sort – let me say it without offence to them, here in confidence. Fetch the best doctors you can find, from a distance, Don Vincenzo Capra, Doctor Muscio from Caltagirone, whom you like. – You’re not short of money – ’
At these words Don Gesualdo went into a rage.
‘Money! – You can none of you take your eyes off the money I’ve earned! – What good is it to me – if I can’t buy even my health? – A lot of bitterness it’s brought me – always! – ’
But nevertheless he wanted to hear the rest of what Bomma had to say. You never can tell. – He let him finish, keeping still, holding his chin, thinking of his own case. At last he wanted to know:
‘A consultation? What will a consultation do for me?’ Bomma lost his stirrups.
‘What will it do for you? Be hanged! It’ll do what it can for you – at least folks won’t be able to say you died without proper attention. I speak for your own sake. It won’t put anything in my pocket – I’m just a druggist. – It’s not my affair – I don’t understand those things. I’ve attended you for friendship’s sake – ’
But as the other shook his head, diffident, a sly smile on his livid lips, the apothecary put aside every respect.
‘You’re a dead man, Don Sillyface! I tell you straight.’
Then Don Gesualdo looked around slowly and tenaciously, blew his nose. and sank down on to the bed. After a while, looking up at the ceiling, he added with a sigh:
‘All right. We’ll have the consultation.’
He didn’t sleep a wink at night. Tormented by a new anxiety, with shivers that seized him from time to time, and cold sweats, fears which made him suddenly sit up in bed with his hair on end, looking around in the shadows, always seeing the menacing face of Bomma, feeling himself, stifling his pain, trying to delude himself. He really did think he felt better. He wanted to take care of himself, since it was a serious matter. He wanted to get better. He repeated the very words of the apothecary: he wasn’t short of money; he had worn out his life for it; he hadn’t earned it all to please his noble son-in-law; why should ungrateful folks enjoy it, when they left him to die without coming near him; out of sight out of mind! That’s how the world is made, everybody turns the water to his own mill. And his own mill, for his part, was to get his health back again, with his own money. There were good doctors in the world who might cure him if he paid them. Then he wiped away his sweat of agony, and tried to sleep. He wanted the strange doctors who were coming the next day to find him in better form; he counted the hours: it seemed a thousand years to him, till he could see them there before his bed. The very light of dawn encouraged him. Then, when he heard the bells of the litter which carried Doctor Muscio and Don Vincenzo Capra, he felt his heart expand, I can’t say how much. He drew himsef lightly up to sit on the bed like one who really feels better. He greeted these good folk with a fine smile which would reassure even them, the moment he saw them enter.
But they hardly looked at him. They were all ears for Don Margheritino, who was telling the story of the illness with a great amount of personification of abstract things; and they nodded their heads from time to time; they only glanced now and then abstractedly at the sick man, whose face was becoming more and more perturbed, seeing those grave countenances, and those grimaces, and hearing the trilling of the bit of a doctor who seemed as if he was reciting the funeral oration. After this youngster had finished chattering, the other doctors rose one after the other, and began feeling and questioning the sick man, shaking their heads, with a certain sententious blinking, and certain glances from one to another that absolutely stopped his breathing. There was one of the strangers particularly who stood there frowning and pensive, going every moment ‘Uhm! Uhm!’ without opening his mouth. The relations, the servants, even some neighbours crowded round the doorway out of curiosity, waiting for the sentence, while the doctors confabulated together in low voices in a corner. At a sign from the apothecary, Burgio and his wife also went to hear, on tiptoe.
‘Speak out, gentlemen!’ then exclaimed the poor man, who was pale as death. ‘I’m the one who’s bad, I believe. I want to know where I stand.’
The Muscio fellow started a smile that made him look uglier than ever. And Don Vincenzo Capra, in proper style, began to expound the diagnosis of the illness: Pylori Cancer, the pyrosis of the Greeks. There were as yet no symptoms of ulceration; even the adhesion of the tumour to the vital organs was not certain; but the degeneration of the tissues was already shown by certain pathological symptoms. Don Gesualdo, after having listened attentively, replied:
‘That is all very fine. But tell me if you can cure me, your honour. Without thinking about money – paying you according to your merit – ’
At first Capra wouldn’t answer, and shrugged his shoulders.
‘Eh, eh – cure you – of course – that’s what we’re here for, to try and cure you.’
But the Muscio fellow who was more brutal blabbed straight out the only thing that there was left to try, the extirpation of the tumour, a rare job, a surgical operation that would do anybody credit. – He explained the way how it should be done, getting quite heated over the proposition, accompanying his words with gestures, already smelling blood, his eyes kindling in his fat face that went quite purple, as if he was just going to roll up his sleeves and set to work; so that the patient opened his eyes and mouth, and shrank instinctively away; and the women, overcome, broke out into moans and sobs.
‘Madonna of the Perils!’ Speranza began to scream. ‘They want to kill my brother for me – cut him up and quarter him alive like a pig!’
‘Be quiet,’ said he, passing the hem of the sheet over his face that was dripping drops of sweat. The other physicians were silent, and agreed more or less with Doctor Muscio, out of courtesy. Don Gesualdo, seeing that nobody uttered a sound, repeated again:
‘Be quiet! – It’s my skin that they’re talking about – so I can say what I think. – Gentlemen – I am a man – I am not a child. If you say it is necessary, this operation. – If you say it is necessary – yessir – we’ll have it done. – But let me say what I think – ’
‘That’s right, you say.’
‘Well then – one thing only. – I want to know first if you really guarantee to save my life. – We are gentlemen – and I trust you. – It’s not a bargain to be made with your eyes shut. I want to see my way clearly – ’
‘What are you talking about!’ interrupted the Muscio man, bouncing on his chair. ‘I am a surgeon, my friend. I practise my own profession, and don’t set out to make quack’s promises! Do you think you’re dealing with Zanni, at the fair?’
‘Then we’ll have nothing to do with it,’ replied Don Gesualdo. And he turned his back on them. ‘Look here, Bomma, you gave me a fine bit of advice!’
Speranza, most anxious, saw that the time had come to turn to the saints, and she rushed round trying to procure relics and blessed images. Neri thought that they ought to warn the daughter and son-in-law at once of the danger Don Gesualdo was in. But he wouldn’t hear anything. He said he’d got a heap of saints and relics already, there in Bianca’s cupboard, along with the other medicines. He didn’t want to see anybody. Since he was condemned, he wanted to die in peace, without any operations, away from all his worries, in his own country place. He clung to life with might and main, desperate. He had gone through other stress before this, and he had always helped himself, when he was in a tight fix. He’d got courage and a thick skin. He ate and drank; he persisted that he was better; he got up for two or three hours a day; he trailed himself through the rooms, from one piece of furniture to another. At last he had himself carried to Mangalavite, gasping for breath. Master Nardo on one side and Masi on the other, holding him up on the mule; – a journey that took three hours, and made him say a hundred times:
‘Throw me in the ditch, that’s the best.’
But once there, among his own possessions, he realized that it was actually all over, that every hope was lost, for nothing mattered to him any more. The vines were already coming into leaf; the young corn was high, the olives in flower, the sumachs green, and over everything a mist was spread, a gloom, a black veil. The house itself, with its windows shut, and the terrace where Bianca and his daughter used to sit and work, the deserted avenue, even his own country people who were afraid of bothering him and kept at a distance, there in the courtyard or under the shed, everything wrung his heart; everything said to him: ‘What are you doing? What do you want?’ – All the things that belonged to him, there, the pigeons that circled in flocks above his head, the geese and the turkeys that cackled in front of him. – You could hear the voices and singing of labourers working in the fields. Along the little road from Licodia, in the near distance, people passed on foot and on horseback. The world still went its way, while there was no more hope for him, gnawed by a worm like a rotten apple that must fall from the bough, not having strength to take a stride, nor even the will to swallow an egg. Then, in despair that he must die, he began to beat the ducks and turkeys, to break down the buds and the young plants. He would have liked to destroy with one blow all the wealth and substance he had got together bit by bit. He wanted his possessions to go along with him, desperate as he was. Master Nardo and the manservant had to carry him back to the village again more dead than alive.
A few days after arrived the Duca di Leyra, summoned by express courier, and he took possession of his father-in-law and of the house, saying that he wanted to take him to Palermo to have him attended to by the best doctors. The poor wretch, now only a shadow of himself, let them do as they liked; yet he opened his heart again to hope; he was softened by the anxiety of his son-in-law and of his daughter, who was awaiting him with open arms. He fancied his strength was already coming back. He couldn’t wait to be gone, as if he thought he would leave all his ills behind him, there in that house and in those fields that had cost him so much sweat, and which now weighed on him like a burden. His son-in-law busied himself with the procurator getting his affairs in order. As soon as Don Gesualdo was fit to travel, they put him in a litter and set off for the city. It was a rainy day. The houses of note, and the faces of acquaintances, which hardly turned to look at him, passed by the windows of the litter. Speranza and her lot, angry because the duke had come to turn them out, did not put in an appearance. Master Nardo had wanted to accompany his master as far as the last houses in the village. In the Street of the Masera they heard somebody shouting: ‘Stop! Stop!’ – And Diodata appeared, wanting to say good-bye to her master for the last time, there in front of her own door. And then, when she came near him she hadn’t a word to say, and she stood with her hands on the window-ledge nodding her head.
‘Ah Diodata – you’ve come to wish me a good journey? – ’ said he.
She nodded yes, yes, trying to smile, her eyes filling with tears.
‘Poor Diodata! You’re the only one that remembers your master – ’
He looked out of the window, perhaps expecting somebody else, but as it was raining he drew in quickly again.
‘Now you mind yourself – out in the rain – and nothing on your head! – It’s your old bad ways! – You remember, don’t you, you remember?’
‘Yessir,’ she replied simply, and she kept on nodding her head to her words. ‘Yessir, have a good journey, your honour!’
Then slowly, slowly she drew back from the litter, as if unwillingly, and she went back into her house, closing the door, humble and very sad. Then Don Gesualdo remembered Master Nardo who had come with him so far, and he put his hand in his pocket to give him a few pence.
‘ – I’m sorry, Master Nardo! – I haven’t got anything. – It’ll have to be another time, if we see one another again, eh? – if we see one another again – ’
And he threw himself back, with his heart swollen because of all the things he was leaving behind him, the muddy road he had traversed so often, the church-tower lost in the mist, the cactus plants striped with the rain which threaded down on either side of the litter.
IT seemed to Don Gesualdo as if he had come into another world, when he found himself in his daughter’s house. It was a great palace so vast that you lost yourself inside it. Everywhere curtains and carpets till you didn’t know where to put your foot; – even on the marble staircase; – and the door-keeper, a proper grand somebody, with such whiskers and such a tail-coat on him, stared you up and down, scowling, if by ill luck you had a face he didn’t take to, and he shouted at you out of his cage:
‘There’s a scraper to wipe your shoes on!’
An army of lazy rascals, lackeys and chambermen, yawning with their mouths shut, walking on tiptoe, and serving you without saying a word or taking one extra step, and so very condescending that they fairly made you feel you hadn’t a will of your own. Everything regulated by a bell ringing, with as much ceremony as high mass – to get a glass of water, or to go to your daughter’s room. And the duke dressing himself up at meal-times as if he was going to his wedding.
Poor Don Gesualdo kept his courage up for the first few days, to please his daughter, and dressed himself to come to table, trussed and shackled, with a roaring in his ears, his throat tight with all that paraphernalia, with the waiter who counted every mouthful he ate, behind his back, and whose cotton glove appeared every moment under his nose, reaching out treacherously to snatch away his food from in front of him. His son-in-law’s white cravat also intimidated him, as did the sideboards high and glittering like altars, and the exquisite tablelinen, so that he was always terrified of dropping something on it. And so he was scheming to get his daughter to himself for a while, so that he could say what he had on his mind. The duke, luckily, got him out of the difficulty by saying to Isabella, after coffee, with his cigar in his mouth and his head leaning on the back of his big arm-chair:
‘My dear, I think it would be better to have your father’s meals served in his own rooms, after today. He no doubt has his own hours and his own habits – I don’t want to put him out – And then with the special régime that his state of health demands – ’
‘Yes, yes,’ stammered Don Gesualdo. ‘I was just going to tell you – I should like it better myself – I don’t want to be in your way – ’
‘No. I don’t mean that. It is a pleasure to us to have you, always, my dear sir.’
He behaved like a real good son to his father-in-law; he encouraged him to smoke a cigar; he assured him that he found him looking better, since he had come to Palermo, and that the change of air and the careful attention would quite cure him in the end. And then he tried the business touch. He showed himself shrewd; he wished by every manner of means to secure himself the pleasure of his father-in-law’s company in his house, without having to fear that the latter’s affairs would go to rack and ruin; – a general power of attorney – a sort of alter ego. – Don Gesualdo felt his smile die on his lips. There was nothing to be done. This son-in-law, even when he wanted to be amiable and as nice as possible to you, had something in his face, in his words, even in the tone of his voice, which seemed to thrust you backwards, and made your arms fall to your side even when you were just wanting to fling them round his neck, like a real son, and say to him:
‘Eh bless you, that’s enough said! Never mind the rest! Do as you like – ’
So that Don Gesualdo didn’t often come down to see his daughter. He felt uneasy with his noble son-in-law; he was always afraid lest he might start on that tune of alter ego again. He felt he couldn’t breathe, there among so many idle-jacks. He had almost to ask leave of the servant who was posted in the antechamber if he so much as wanted to see his daughter, and he had to flee if a visitor arrived. They had put him in a wing on the upper floor, a few rooms that were called the guest apartment, where Isabella came to see him every morning, in her dressing-gown, often not even staying to sit down, loving and thoughtful for him, it’s true, but somehow she seemed to the poor man a real stranger. Sometimes she was so pale, she looked as if she too had not slept a wink. She had a fold between her brows, and something in her eyes which was to him, old and used to the world as he was, by no means pleasant to see. He would have liked to take her too between his arms, and hold her fast, fast, and ask her softly in her ear:
‘Why what’s amiss? – tell me then! – You can tell it to me, for I’ve had so many troubles myself, I shan’t betray you.’
But she drew in her horns like a snail. She kept herself close, spoke very rarely even of her mother, as if the nail was driven right in, fixed; – showing the proud stomach of the Traos, who closed their rancour and their diffidence against you, implacable.
And so he had to keep back his kind words, and even his tears, which swelled his heart big inside him, and he had to keep his own troubles to himself. He passed melancholy days at the window, watching the horses being groomed and the carriages being washed, in that courtyard as big as a market-place. Stablemen in their shirt-sleeves and with bare feet in their wooden pattens, sang, shouted, bandied jokes and chatted with the house-servants who were wasting their time at the windows, with their big aprons up to their necks, or in red waistcoats, carelessly trailing a duster in their rough hands, making coarse jokes, so that their quizzing rascally faces, so well-shaven and carefully combed, seemed now to turn into masks. Then the coachmen, other grand gentlemen, stood looking on with cigars in their mouths and their hands in the pockets of the smart coats, talking now and then with the concierge who came out of his little house for a smoke also, making signs and shouting snatches of vulgar song to the servant-maids whom they saw passing behind the windows of the balcony, maids who for their part peeped out provokingly to shout down ugly words and laughter of loose women, from their Madonna faces. Meanwhile Don Gesualdo was thinking how much good money must be slipping through these hands; all that host eating and drinking at his daughter’s expense, devouring the dowry he had given her, Alia and Donninga, the good land which he had brooded over with his eye for so long, night and day, and measured out with his desire, and dreamed of in his sleep, and won at last rood by rood, day by day, denying himself the very bread from his mouth; the poor bare earth that had need of ploughing and sowing; the mills, the houses, the store-barns he had built with so much effort, so much sacrifice, one stone upon another. Canziria, Mangalavite, the house, everything, everything would slip through those hands. Who would be there to defend his property after his death? – alas, poor property! Who knew what it had cost? The noble duke, he, when he went out of the house with his head high and a cigar in his mouth and the head of his little cane in the pocket of his greatcoat, the moment he stopped to glance at his horses, everything was obsequiousness like before the Holy Sacrament, the windows shut in a hurry, everybody ran to his post, all with their hats in their hands, the concierge holding low his gold-laced cap, erect in front of his window, the stablemen motionless by the cruppers of their horses, the curry-comb resting against their thighs, the first coachman, a grand gentleman, bending double while the review lasted, and while he received his orders: a comedy that lasted for five minutes. – Afterwards, hardly had he turned his back than the row and chatter started again, from the windows, from the arcade of the portico that led to the stables, from the kitchen which smoked and flamed under the roof, full of scullions dressed in white, as if the palace was abandoned to a starving horde, paid on purpose to squander everything until the sound of the bell announced some visitor – and then another solemnity. – On certain days the duchess prepared herself in greater state than ever to receive visits, like a soul in purgatory. From time to time arrived a flaming carriage; it passed like a flash of lightning before the concierge, who had hardly time to shove his pipe in his pocket and hang on to the bell; ladies and footmen in fine array exploded hastily out into the high vestibule, and ten minutes later back they came, to set off full speed for somewhere else; really like folks who had been hired by the day to do it. And he, alas, spent his time counting the tiles opposite, and calculating, with all the love and solicitude of his old trade, how much the carved windows had cost, and the massive pillars, the marble steps, the sumptuous furniture, all that stuff and velvet, those people, those horses which ate and swallowed money as the earth swallows seed, as it drinks up rain, but without giving anything back, without bringing forth fruit, always more hungry, more devouring, like the illness which devoured his own bowels. What couldn’t have been done with all that money! How many good strokes of the hoe, how much labourers’ sweat would it not have paid for! Farms, whole villages it might have built – land sown, as far as you could see – and an army of harvesters in June, mountains of corn to bring in, money in streams to put in your pocket! – And then his heart swelled to see the sparrows squabbling on the tiles, the sun dying on the cornice without ever coming as low as his windows. He thought of the dusty roads, the fine fields gold and green, the twittering along the hedges, the beautiful mornings when the furrows steamed! – And now! – And now! –
Now he was shut up between four walls, with the rumble of the city always in his ears, the clanging of so many churches beating on his head, as he was slowly consumed by the fever, gnawed by pains that made him bite his pillow, sometimes, so as not to disturb the servant who was yawning in the next room. During the first days, the change, the different air, perhaps also some medicine they had hit upon, by mistake, had performed the miracle and made him believe in the possibility of cure. Then he went back and was worse than before. Not even the best physicians had been able to find any help for that accursed disease! no better than the ignorant doctors of his own village, and they cost more, as goes without saying! They came one after the other, grand doctors who kept their carriage and made you pay even for the servant they left in the ante-chamber. They examined him, they felt him, as if they were handling a child or a peasant. They showed him to their apprentices as the quack at the fair shows the cock with horns, or the sheep with two tails, expounding the case in mysterious words. They hardly answered him, speaking from their lips, if the poor devil took the liberty of inquiring what disease it was he was nursing inside him, as if he had nothing to do with it, nothing to do with his own vitals! And this lot as well had made him buy a whole druggist’s shop; mixtures which you counted by the drop, like gold, ointments which you smeared on with a fine brush, and which opened raw places on you, poisons which gave you colic worse than ever, and left the taste of copper in your mouth, baths and sudorifics which left him exhausted without the strength even to move his head, seeing the shadow of death already spread over everywhere.
‘Gentlemen, what are we playing at?’ he wanted to say. ‘All right then, if it’s always the same old game, I’ll go back to my own village.’
At least they respected him for his money, down there in his own place, and they let him speak, if he wanted to know how much they were spending for the sake of his health. Whereas here he seemed to be at the hospital, cured out of charity. And he had to stand in awe even of his son-in-law, who came up to accompany the grand gentlemen who were called in to a consultation. They spoke in an undertone among themselves, turning their back on him, without caring in the least about him who was waiting open-mouthed for the word of life or death. Or else they charitably gave him an answer which meant nothing, or a little smile which very plainly meant: ‘Good-bye, my good man. See you again in Paradise.’ – And there were even some of them who turned their backs on him as if they considered themselves offended by him. He guessed that it must be something serious, by the faces which these doctors made, and their discouraging shrugs of the shoulders, at their long stay with his son-in-law, and by the long murmuring which they kept up among themselves in the antechamber. At last he could restrain himself no longer. One day when these gentry were playing the same pantomime over again, he seized one of them by the coat-tails before he could get away.
‘Doctor, sir, just let me know. It’s I who am ill, after all! I’m not a child. I want to know what it really is, since it’s my own life that’s in danger.’
But the doctor fellow began making a scene, almost as if he had received an insult in his house. And it took heaven knows what to calm him down, and prevent him from throwing over the patient and the disease, once and for all. Don Gesualdo heard them saying to him in an undertone:
‘Bear with him. – He doesn’t know how to behave. – He is a primitive man – in the state of nature – ’
So that the poor man had to put up with everything, and turn to his daughter to try and learn something from her.
‘What do the doctors say? – Tell me the truth! – It’s a serious disease, isn’t it?’
And when he saw her eyes fill with tears, in spite of her effort to keep them back, he became furious. He didn’t want to die. He felt a desperate energy come over him, to arise and depart from that accursed house.
‘I don’t mean you. – You’ve done all you could. – I don’t want for anything. – But I’m not used to it, you see. – I seem as if I’m stifling inside myself – ’
But neither was she happy in that house. The poor father knew it in his heart. They seemed to be in perfect accord, husband and wife; they talked courteously to one another, before the servants; the duke almost always passed half an hour in his wife’s little sitting-room after dinner; he went to bid her good morning every day before breakfast; and on All Souls’ Day, and at Christmas, for the feast of Saint Rosalia, and on the occasion of her name-day or of the anniversary of their wedding he gave her jewels which she showed to her father for him to admire, in proof of how fond her husband was of her.
‘Ah, ah – I know – they must have cost a rare lot! – But you’re not happy, for all that – one can see plain enough that you’re not happy – ’
He read in the depths of her eyes another secret, another mortal anxiety, which would not leave her even when she was with him, but which made her start if she heard an unexpected step, or if the bell that announced the duke rang at an unusual hour; and which gave her a deathly pallor, and certain rapid glances in which he seemed to read a reproof. Several times he had seen her arrive running, pale, trembling like a leaf, stammering excuses. One night late, when he was in bed with his sufferings, he heard an unusual disturbance downstairs, doors banging, the voice of the chambermaid screaming almost as if she was crying for help, a voice that made him sit up terrified in bed. But the next day his daughter wouldn’t tell him anything; it seemed, moreover, as if his questions annoyed her. They even counted their words and their sighs in that house, each one keeping his own troubles to himself, the duke with his cold smile, Isabella with the good grace they had taught her in college. The curtains and carpets suffocated everything. And yet, when you saw them together, husband and wife, so calm, so that no one would ever have suspected what was lurking underneath, it sent a shiver down your spine.
And then, what could he do, anyhow? He had enough of his own troubles. Worse off than anybody was he who had got death on his shoulders. When he was gone all the others would be at peace, just as he had found a certain peace after his father’s death, and his wife’s. Everybody leads the water to his own mill. He had given plenty of water to turn other people’s mills! Speranza, Diodata, all the rest – a real river. And there as well, in that lavish palace, everything was of his earning; and yet he found no rest between the fine linen sheets and on the down pillows; he was stifled by the curtains and the fine silk stuffs that shut out the sun. All the money he spent to keep the show going, the noises in the courtyard, the servant who watched over him behind the door and counted his sighs, even to the cook who prepared him his insipid broths which he couldn’t get down, everything was like poison to him; he didn’t even digest the choicest morsels, they were like so many nails in his flesh.
‘They’re starving me to death, they are,’ he complained to his daughter, occasionally, his eyes kindled with despair. ‘It’s not out of meanness – I believe it’s good stuff. – But my stomach isn’t used to it. Send me back home. I want to die there where I was born.’
The thought of death now never left him; it revealed itself in his insidious questions, in his looks full of suspicion, even in his anxious efforts to conceal it in various ways. He had no fear of anybody now, and he stopped anybody who came near him with the request:
‘I want to know the truth, dear sirs. – To put my affairs in order – my business affairs – ’
And if they tried to reassure him, telling him it was nothing urgent – nothing serious – for the moment, he kept on insisting, watching with a sharp eye, cunningly, to see through them.
‘You see I’ve got such a lot to do, down there in my own village, gentlemen! – I really can’t stop here wasting my time! – I must think of everything, if I don’t it spells ruin.’
Then he explained whence this disease had come upon him.
‘It’s all the troubles I’ve had! – all the bitter things! – and I’ve had a lot! – You see, it’s left the yeast here in my inside – !’
He had become cunning. He was afraid that they couldn’t wait to get rid of him, to save his expenses and lay hold of what he possessed. He tried to reassure them all, with an affable smile:
‘Never mind the expense – I can pay. – My son-in-law knows it. – Everything that’s needed – It won’t be money thrown away. – If I live I shall make more, plenty more money – ’
With shining eyes, he tried even to ingratiate his own daughter. He knew that money, alas, made hell between father and children. He talked to her. He stammered, caressing her just as when she was a child, watching her furtively all the time, with his heart in his throat:
‘What do I lack here? I’ve got everything I can have, to cure me. We’ll buy everything that’s needed, won’t we?’
But the disease conquered him and took away every illusion. And in those moments of discouragement the poor man thought aloud:
‘What use is it to me? – What good is it all? – It was never any use to your mother either!’
One day the duke’s manager came to see him, officious, and, like his master, all kindness when he was getting ready for an attack. He inquired about his health; he condoled with him about the illness which had lasted so long. He could well understand, being himself a business man like Don Gesualdo – how much disorder – how many losses – the consequences – such a vast property – without anybody really to look after it. – In the end he offered to take the responsibility of it upon himself – for the sake of the interests of the house, which he had at heart – and for Her Grace the Duchess’s sake. He had been a good servant of the noble duke for so many years. – So that he had Don Gesualdo’s welfare also at heart. He proposed to relieve him of every burden – until he was well again; – if he thought – by giving him a power of attorney –
And in proportion as he went on spitting out his poison, Don Gesualdo became more and more disconcerted. He hardly breathed, but listened with his eyes wide open, ruminating meanwhile how he should get out of the mess. All at once he began to cry and throw himself about as if he was seized once more by the colic, as if his last hour had arrived, and he could neither hear nor speak any more. He only stammered, raving:
‘Fetch my daughter! I want to see my daughter!’
But no sooner had she arrived, terrified, than he became silent. He closed up inside himself to think out how he should extricate himself from the evil situation, sullen, suspicious, turning his back so that he should not let escape any look which might betray him. Only he fixed a long look on that gentleman who went away rather smaller than he had come. Then, bit by bit, he pretended to grow calmer. He had to use all his cunning to get out of those clutches. He began to nod yes, yes, fixing his eyes lovingly on the dismayed face of his daughter, with a paternal smile and a kindly manner:
‘Yes – I want to put everything I’ve got into your hands – to relieve myself of the burden. – I shall be only too glad – seeing the state I’m in. – I want to give away everything – I haven’t long to live. – Send me back home to make the procuration – the deed of gift – everything you wish. – I know the lawyer there – I know where to put my hand on everything. – But first send me back home. – And then I’ll do everything you want!’
‘Oh, father, father!’ exclaimed Isabella, tears in her eyes.
But he felt he was dying from day to day. He couldn’t move any more. It seemed to him as if he hadn’t the strength to get up from the bed and go away, because they were taking from him his money, and the blood from his veins, to keep him a prisoner on the quiet. He bluffed, he raved, he howled with pain and rage. And then he fell back exhausted, threatening, foam at his mouth, suspicious of everything, keeping his eye on the hands of the servant if he drank a glass of water, looking everybody in the eyes to read the truth, to read his own sentence, forced to resort to artifice to find out something about the very things that concerned him most.
‘Fetch that man that came the other time. – Bring me the papers to sign. – It’s all right, I’ve thought about it. I’ve got to let somebody take the responsibility for my affairs, till I get better – ’
But now they were in no hurry; they kept on promising him, from day to day. The duke himself shrugged his shoulders, as if to say it was no good now. A greater, closer terror, the fear of death, took hold on him, seeing their indifference. He insisted, he wanted to dispose of his possessions, as if to hold on to life in that way, to perform an act of energy and will. He wanted to make his will, to show himself that he was still master. At last the duke, to quiet him, told him there was no need, since there were no other heirs – Isabella was the only child –
‘Ah?’ replied he. ‘There’s no need – she’s the only child?’
And he lay down again, lugubrious. He would have liked to answer him that there were heirs, born before her, blood of his blood. And with his bile remorse arose. He had bad dreams, ugly pale angry faces appeared to him in the night; voices, shocks which woke him up with a start, bathed in sweat, his heart hammering hard. So many thoughts came to him now, so many memories, so many people filed before him: Bianca, Diodata, and others still: they would never have left him to die helpless! He wanted another consultation, the best doctors. There must be special doctors for his disease, if you knew how to find them, and paid them well. That’s what he had earned his money for, in fact! In his own village they had given him to believe that if he would consent to have his inside opened. – All right, he would, he would!
He awaited the consultation on the appointed day, from the early morning, sitting up in bed, shaved and combed smooth, his face the colour of earth, but firm and resolved. Now he wanted to see clearly into this matter.
‘Speak freely, gentlemen. Everything that needs to be done shall be done!’
His heart beat rather fast. He felt a creeping sensation among the roots of his hair, in a spasm of anticipation. But he was ready for everything: he almost uncovered his abdomen to let them do as they liked with it. If a tree has canker on it, what does it amount to? You cut off the bough! But now the doctors wouldn’t even operate on him. They had scruples, buts and ifs. They looked at one another and mumbled half-words. One was afraid of the responsibility; another observed that it wasn’t necessary – now. – The oldest of them, with such an ill-omened face that it made you die before your time, as God’s above, had already started to comfort the family, telling them that it would never have been any good even earlier, with a disease of that sort –
‘Ah – ’ replied Don Gesualdo, become hoarse all at once. ‘Ah – I understand – ’
And he let himself slide very slowly down, stretched in the bed, overcome. And for the time being he said no more. He kept still and let them finish what they had to say. Only he wanted to know if the moment had come when he must think of settling his affairs. It was no use joking now! He had such a lot of serious business to get into order.
‘Be still! Be still!’ he muttered, turning to his daughter who was weeping at his side. With a cadaverous face, and eyes like two nails sunk in their livid sockets, he waited for the answer they would give him, at last.
‘ – No, no. – There is time. – Such illnesses last for years and years. – But yet – yes – to be ready – to get your affairs in order in good time – it wouldn’t be a bad idea – ’
‘I see what you mean,’ said Don Gesualdo, with his nose among the coverlets. ‘I thank you, gentlemen.’
A cloud descended on his face and stayed there. A sort of rancour, something which made his hands and his voice shake, and which leaked out through his half-shut eyes. He signed to his son-in-law to stay behind; he called him to his bed to speak to him quite alone.
‘Well, now, this lawyer – will he come, or won’t he? I must make my will – I’ve got some scruples of conscience. – Yessir! – Am I master or aren’t I? – Ah – ah – you’re there listening as well, are you?’
Isabella threw herself on her knees at the foot of the bed, her face buried in the mattresses, sobbing in despair. The son-in-law for his part did his best to calm him.
‘Why yes, why yes, whenever you wish, and just as you wish. There is no need to make scenes. – Look how you have upset your daughter – ’
‘All right,’ he kept muttering. ‘All right! I know!’
And he turned his back on them as his father had done, rest his soul. As soon as he was alone he began to moan like an ox, with his nose to the wall. But then if people came he kept quiet. He nursed his disease and his bitterness inside himself. He let the days go by. He thought to spin them out, maybe, to win at least those few, one after another, taking them as they came, and patience! While there’s breath there’s life. And in proportion as his breath failed him, little by little, he gave himself up to his sufferings; he even got used to them. He had a broad back, and would hold out for a long time, thanks to his tough constitution. Sometimes he felt a certain satisfaction inside himself, under the sheet, thinking at the face my lord the duke would make, and all the others, seeing what a tough constitution he had. He had even come to be fond of his pains, he listened to them, caressed them, wanted to feel them there with him, to go forward with them. And his relations had got used to it as well; they had learnt that that disease lasted years and years, and they took it calmly now. That is how the world is, alas; when the first excitement is over everybody goes his own way and minds his own business. He didn’t complain either; he said nothing, like the sly peasant he was, so as not to waste his breath, and not to let out what he didn’t want to say; only he let some very significant glances escape him from time to time, seeing his daughter come to him with that desolate face of hers, and afterwards he turned on the husband, who kept him prisoned there under his eyes, pretending to be fond of him, to cherish him, for fear he should play him some trick in the will. He divined that she had other hidden troubles, and that sometimes her mind was straying elsewhere, while her father was lying there with death upon him. He fretted himself away inside, as he grew physically worse; his blood had every bit turned to poison; he became more and more sullen, taciturn, implacable, with his face to the wall, replying only in grunts.
At last he made up his mind that his time had come, and he prepared himself to die like a good Christian. Isabella had come at once to be with him. He put all his strength into his elbows and raised himself to a sitting posture on the bed.
‘Listen,’ he said to her, ‘listen here – ’
His face was troubled, but he spoke calmly. He kept his eyes fixed on his daughter, and nodded his head. She took his hand and burst into sobs.
‘Be still,’ he resumed. ‘Leave off. If we start like that we shall get nowhere.’
He panted because he was short of breath, and also with emotion. He looked around suspiciously, and kept on nodding his head in silence, out of breath. And she turned her eyes full of tears towards the door. Don Gesualdo lifted his wasted hand and made the sign of the cross in the air, to signify that it was over, and that he forgave everything, before going.
‘Listen – I’ve something to say to you – while we’re alone – ’
She threw her arms round him, desperate, weeping, sobbing No, no, her hands wandering caressing him. And he slowly stroked her hair, slowly, without speaking. After a while he resumed:
‘Yes, I say. I’m not a child. – Don’t let us lose time uselessly – ’
And then he suddenly softened.
‘You’re sorry, eh? – You’re sorry, aren’t you!’
Her voice was also softened, her eyes, gloomy as they were, had become sweeter, and something trembled on her lips.
‘I’ve been fond of you – I have – as much as I could. – And when a man has done what he could – ’
Then he drew her slowly to him, almost hesitating, looking at her closely to see if she wanted it too, and he clasped her close, close, putting his rough cheek on her fine hair.
‘I don’t hurt you, do I? – like when you were a child!’
And then other things rose at the same time on to his lips, waves of bitterness and passion, those odious suspicions which scoundrels had tried to put in his mind, for his money’s sake. He passed his hand over his brow, to drive them back, and changed his manner.
‘Let us speak about our business. We won’t waste ourselves in useless talk, now – ’
She didn’t want to, she went raving round the room, she thrust her hands in her hair, she said he was breaking her heart, that it was like an ill-omen, as if her father was going to close his eyes for ever.
‘But no, let us talk!’ insisted he. ‘There are serious things to say. I’ve no time to lose now – ’ His face was going darker, the old rancour glittered in his eyes. ‘You mean then that you don’t care – that you’re like your husband – ’
Then seeing her resigning herself to listen, sitting with her head bent, beside the bed, he began to talk about all the heartaches she had given him, she and her husband, with all those debts. – He begged her to look after her property, to protect it and defend it – ‘Rather have your hand cut off, look you – when your husband starts asking you again to sign papers! – He doesn’t know what it means! – ’
He explained all that they had cost him, those fields and groves, the Alia, Canziria, he lingered over them with loving resignation; he recalled how they had come to him, one after the other, little by little, the arable lands, the pastures, the vineyards; he described them minutely, furrow by furrow, and their quality, good or bad. His voice trembled, his hands trembled, all his blood flamed in his face, tears came to his eyes.
‘Mangalavite, you know – you know it yourself – you were there with your mother. – Forty square furlongs of land all with trees! – you remember – the splendid oranges? – your mother, poor thing, used to refresh her mouth with them in her last days! – three hundred thousand a year, they gave! Nearly three hundred guineas! And Salonia – corn-land worth its weight in gold – miraculous crops – blessed by your grandfather, whose bones lie buried there! – ’
Till at last he began to cry like a child, with emotion.
‘Enough,’ he said then. ‘I’ve got something else to say to you. – Listen – ’
He looked fixedly into her eyes that were full of tears, to see what effect his will would have made on her. He made her a sign to come closer, to lean over him as he lay stretched out, hesitating, fumbling for his words.
‘Listen! – I’ve got scruples of conscience. – I would like to leave a legacy to some people towards whom I’ve got obligations – just a little. – It won’t be much for you who are so rich – you can think of it as a present which your father asks of you – on his deathbed – if I have done something for you – ’
‘Oh father, father! – What are you saying?’ sobbed Isabella.
‘You’ll do it, will you? You’ll do it? – even if your husband isn’t willing? – ’
He took her temples between his hands and lifted her face to read in her eyes whether she would obey him, to make her understand that it really was important to him, and that he had that secret on his mind. And as he looked at her like that, he seemed to read in her that other secret, that hidden pain there in the depths of his daughter’s eyes. And he wanted to say more to her, he wanted to ask her other questions, at that point, to open her heart as if to her confessor, and to read in his own. But she bent her head again as if she had guessed, with the obstinate frown of the Traos between her brows, drawing back, closing inside herself, haughty, with her sufferings and her secret. And he felt himself become a Motta again, as she was a Trao, suspicious, hostile, another flesh. He slackened his arms and said no more.
‘Now fetch me a priest,’ he said in a changed tone of voice. ‘I want to make my accounts with the Lord God.’
He lingered for a day or two still, alternating between better and worse. He even seemed to be reviving a little, when all at once, one night, he got rapidly worse. The servant whom they had ordered to sleep in the next room heard him restless and raving before dawn. But since he was used to these goings on, he turned over, pretending not to hear. Then, irritated by that song, which didn’t come to an end, he went sleepily to see what was amiss.
‘My daughter!’ muttered Don Gesualdo, in a voice not like his own. ‘Fetch my daughter!’
‘Ah, yessir! I’ll go and fetch her now,’ replied the man-servant, and he went to lie down again.
But that miserable creature didn’t let him sleep. Now he was high and shrill, now he was worse than a deep bass in his snoring. Hardly had the servant closed his eyes than he heard a strange sound that made him jump up in bed; raucous squeakings, like one who was puffing and panting, a sort of rattling that worried you and made your skin creep. So that at last he had really to get up again, furious, mumbling curses and abuse.
‘What’s up? Has he got a heat on him now? Is he up to some trick? What’s he after?’
Don Gesualdo did not reply; he continued to gasp as he lay supine. The servant took off the lampshade to look at his face. Then he started rubbing his eyes hard, and the desire to go back to sleep left him all at once.
‘Ohee! Ohee! What are we up to now?’ – he stammered, scratching his head.
He remained a moment watching, with the lamp in his hand, wondering whether it was better to wait a bit or to go down at once and wake the mistress and upset all the house. Don Gesualdo meanwhile grew calmer, breathing shorter, seized by a tremor, only making a grimace with his mouth from time to time, his eyes always fixed wide open. All at once he went stiff and was quite still. The windows began to whiten. The first bells were ringing. In the courtyard horses were heard stamping, and curry-combs rattling on the pavement. The servant went to get dressed, then came back to straighten the room. He drew the curtains of the bed, opened wide the windows, and stood to take a breath of air, smoking.
The stableman who was leading a sick horse up and down, lifted his head towards the window.
‘Morning, eh, Don Leopoldo?’
‘Night as well!’ replied the chamber-man yawning. – ‘This nice job has had to fall to me!’
The other shook his head as if to ask what had happened, and Don Leopoldo made a sign to say that the old man had gone, thank God.
‘Ah – so – slipped off quiet, like?’ observed the concierge who was dragging the broom and his slippers along the corridor.
Other servants had appeared meanwhile, and they wanted to go and look. So that in a few minutes the death-chamber was filled with people in shirt-sleeves and pipe in mouth. The maid who attended to the wardrobe, seeing all those men at the window opposite, came as well to peep from the next room.
‘What an honour, Donna Carmelina! Pray come in; we certainly shan’t eat you. Nor will he either – he will never lay hands on you again, that’s a fact – ’
‘Be quiet, irreligious creature! – No, I’m frightened of him, poor thing. He has ended his sufferings – ’
‘So have I,’ added Don Leopoldo.
And so, to the group of them, he told all the bother which that Christian there had been to him – a man who turned night into day, and you never knew how to take him, and he was never satisfied.
‘Bad enough to wait on those who were really born better than we. – But there, we won’t speak ill of the dead.’
‘You can see how he was born,’ observed the first coachman gravely. ‘Look what hands!’
‘Ay, they’re the hands that have made the pudding! – See what it is to be born lucky – You die in fine linen like a prince! –
‘Well then,’ said the concierge, ‘am I to go down and shut the great door?’
‘Why of course! He’s one of the family. Now we’ve got to warn the duchess’s maid.’