Don Chichi, having “demysticised” the church in its externals, was carrying his offensive to the core now, having launched a series of sermons that was a continuous ardent denunciation of the malevolence and guilt of the rich.
A lot of people had stopped coming to Mass and Don Camillo, coming across Pinetti in the street, asked him why he never saw him in church any more.
“I worked honestly all my life for what I have now,” Pinetti answered, “and it grates to come to church just to be insulted by that Don Chichi.”
“One goes to church out of respect to God, not for the priest. And by staying away from church you show disrespect for God—not for the priest.”
“I know, Father; my brain knows it but my liver doesn’t.”
Not a profound pronouncement, but it had a certain logic, and since defections were increasing, Don Camillo decided the time had come to have a little talk with Don Chichi.
“It is written that ‘A camel will pass through the eye of a needle more easily than a rich man will pass through the Gates of Heaven,’” Don Chichi answered shortly. “The doors of the Church should be no wider than the Gates of Heaven. God created the earth for all mankind, and a rich man is rich simply because he has taken the share of other men. Were it not for the rich, the poor would not exist, just as the robbed would not exist were there no thieves. The rich man is a thief and property can most accurately be called stolen goods. The Church of Christ is a church for poor folk because the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to the poor alone.”
“Poverty is a disgrace, not a virtue,” Don Camillo answered. “It’s not enough to be poor, to be a just man. And it is not true that only the poor have rights and only the rich have duties. Before God, all men have just one thing, their duty to him. But leaving that aside, you are alienating not just rich people from the Church. Your campaign against war, for example: You’re quite right to condemn war but you can’t treat people like criminals just because they’ve fought in a war and perhaps given their health or even their life to it.”
“A man who kills is a murderer!” Don Chichi shouted. “Just wars and holy wars simply don’t exist: all wars are unjust and diabolical! God’s judgement is, ‘Thou shalt not kill’. He also says, ‘Love thine enemy.’ Can’t you see, Father, this is the hour of truth and the time has come to call bread bread and wine wine!”
“That’s a precarious position to put yourself in, here where bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ!” Don Camillo roared pigheadedly.
Don Chichi gave him a pitying look. “Don Camillo, the church is a great ship which for many centuries had been tied to the dock. The time has come to weigh anchor and set sail for the high seas! And the time has come to renovate the ships trimmings too. The time has come for dialogue, Father!”
Don Camillo shrugged his shoulders. “Twenty years ago, when you were babbling your first word, I was already having it out with the Communists.”
“I am not being facetious, I’m not talking about intransigence and violence!” Don Chichi shouted. “I mean dialogue, true coexistence.”
“Argument is the only possible sort of dialogue with Communists,” Don Camillo answered. “After twenty years of quarrels, here we are, still alive: I cannot picture any better way of coexisting than this. The Communists bring me their children to be baptized and they get married before the altar, while I, for my part, bestow on them as I do to non-Communists only the right to obey God’s laws. My church is not the great vessel you are talking about but only a poor little boat: but it has always been able to go from one shore to another. Now you are at the helm and I let you take it where you want because I have been ordered to do so: however, I do advise you not to capsize my boat. You alienate many men from the old trimmings so as to take on newcomers from the other shore: watch out that you don’t lose the old without finding the new to replace them. Remember the story of the two friars who threw the tiny shriveled peaches they had into the dirt, assuming they would find beautiful ripe ones on the trees beyond—those trees had no peaches at all and the two friars had to return to their old peaches, only to find them eaten by worms.”
“How your stories of the two friars do come in handy!” said Don Chichi, laughing. “The good sower does not throw his seed onto the field until he has cleared it of weeds.”
Don Camillo was a poor country priest and, unlike Don Chichi, had read few books and did not even read many newspapers. So, apart from the changes in liturgy, he had no idea what this new direction the church was supposed to be going in was all about. Nor could he understand it, because before everybody else, in fact twenty years before them, Don Camillo had already been going in the same new direction and doing just that had got him into some fearsome fixes. It stood to reason, then, that he wasn’t going to sympathize with the cub priest who, having arrived to teach Don Camillo how to be a priest, had in fact done nothing but empty out his church.
Sic stantibus rebus (that is, at this juncture) Pinetti came into the rectory.
“My daughter is getting married,” Pinetti said. “But I want her to get married in the same way me and my wife were and my father and mother before us; in front of the same altar with the same Mass said.”
“Your daughter will be married as the Church has decreed!” Don Chichi countered aggressively. “Keep in mind, Mister Pinetti, that this is not a shop where one can choose the merchandise one prefers. And, particularly, remember that before God, your money isn’t worth dirt!”
“It’s worth considerably more than that to my daughter and her fiancé,” Pinetti snapped. “So if those two want me to shell out her dowry, they’d better get the Mayor to marry them!”
Don Chichi jumped to his feet. “If this is your kind of Christianity,” he shouted, “it’s no great tragedy for the Church to lose a Christian like you!”
“Just as it’s no great blessing to the Church to have priests like you!” Pinetti shouted as he stalked out of the door.
Don Camillo hadn’t said a word, but after Pinetti had gone, he sighed. “That will be the first civil ceremony ever performed in my parish.”
“Is that any reason to give in to that rascal’s blackmail?”
“He’s not a rascal and he wasn’t asking for anything contrary to the laws of God.”
“The church must renew itself!” the little priest shouted. “Do you mean to tell me you know absolutely nothing about what went on at the Ecumenical Council?”
“Yes, I’ve read about it,” Don Camillo answered. “But it’s too difficult for me. I cannot go much beyond the word of Christ. Christ spoke in a simple, clear way. Christ was not an intellectual, he used no complicated phrases, only the humble, easy words that everybody knows. If Christ had been present at the council, His talks would have sent the erudite conciliar delegates into gales of laughter.”
“You never stop joking,” the little priest answered. “But you know that if Christ returned to earth today, he would not speak the way people do now.”
“No,” Don Camillo agreed. “Otherwise the poor ignorant folk like me would not understand him.”
“Don Camillo, the truth is, you don’t want to understand!”
“I only know the facts. And to me, the fact of Pinetti’s daughter’s civil ceremony is much more important than all the erudite conciliar delegates’ erudite conciliar dialogues put together. A civil ceremony is an embarrassment to the Church and an insult to God. Precisely that, particularly when the real problem is that the Church, in suddenly opening its doors, suddenly discovers a world where the majority of people don’t believe in God. Millions of people no longer have any religious faith at all. This is the only thing I understood out of what was said at the council. And it is the most important thing of all.”
Don Chichi spread his arms in despair. “Without blowing the incident out of proportion,” he said, “I agree that it would be better if that civil ceremony were not performed. Why don’t you marry them in your little chapel? It’s a private chapel and the old ceremon
y would be allowable there.”
“I will give it the most serious thought,” Don Camillo answered.
Actually he didn’t give it a second thought because it was precisely what he had dreamed of all along. Pinetti’s daughter was indeed married in Don Camillo’s chapel, and there were so many people present that they filled not only the chapel but the garden outside too. And among the guests were all those people that Don Chichi had alienated from the church and this was a great consolation to Don Camillo, a consolation that he had deep need of, because every day his horrendous niece made his life more bitter.
* * *
Flora was his niece’s nickname, and if there was ever on this earth a young girl less like a flower, Don Camillo could not imagine such a creature. It seemed as if there could be no one on the face of the earth capable of causing one half of the trouble that Don Camillo’s niece could produce.
Although Anselma had clear ideas and heavy hands, and didn’t bat an eyelid about spanking Flora whenever the occasion to do so arose, this didn’t change things in the slightest.
“I’ll get my own back, with interest,” Flora said each time.
Anselma cackled with glee: this she would not have done had she known what the girl was plotting. Venom was not mistaken, and the onslaught began on a boring, sunny, sleepy holiday afternoon.
The town was quiet; in the square, empty chairs and tables at the café were becoming red hot under the sun. Shopkeepers propped up against their doorsteps snoozed on their teetering wicker stools. In the bars and lobbies, the usual old men clutched their glasses of ruby wine.
It was like the great tempest of ’68. In a moment the town was turned into an inferno. Thirty Scorpions in black leather jackets rounded the curve into the square, atop thirty thundering motorcycles.
The gang that left the city had numbered fifty but at a certain point along the way, twenty of them had veered off towards Castelletto, while the rest had taken up a position behind a hedge. When they reached Castelletto, the twenty had set about smashing everything they could lay their hands on. The chief of police, warned by telephone, took four of the six policemen entrusted to him to guard the entire territory, and scampered over to Castelletto, leaving behind only the deputy and the turnkey. Then the group of thirty Scorpions attacked the defenceless town.
Having dismembered all the tables and chairs in the square riding round on their mechanical carousel, the thirty wild hoodlums jumped off their machines and began to devastate the shops, beating up any poor soul who stood in their way.
At the same time, a select band was closing in on the church via the side streets. Flora, who had organized the entire coup by telephone, ran to the window of the bell-ringers house as soon as she heard the motors.
“Come inside,” she ordered the toughs. “Before you get me out of here, you have to help me take care of something.”
Anselma slept on the first floor and, luckily, had locked her door with a chain. There were four Scorpions, though, and the chain could hardly withstand their rabid charge. Flora was the first one in: she picked up the dough paddle and, pointing at Anselma who was trying to pull something over her shoulders, ordered: “Hold her tight while I settle our account.”
Anselma fought like a lioness but the four boys were soon able to hold her still, face down on the bed. Flora raised the dough paddle. “When I get through with you, you won’t be able to sit down for three years,” she howled. “And not even that fat priest of yours will be able to fix it up for you.”
Then, everything happened in a second. A hand as big as a spade latched on to her hair while at the same time another took the dough paddle out of her grasp. Venom and eight of his country toughs had come to the rescue. The four Scorpions attacking Anselma were quickly rendered helpless.
It was quite a struggle to stuff the first of the four through the window, but after he had dropped to the pavement below with a thud, the others were a cinch. Old houses in the Valley are small and a flight from the first floor is no traumatic affair. In any case, the four hooligans were hard as rocks and, bouncing on the ground, they broke only a few minor bones.
“Anselma,” Venom said, “we’ve got to get moving; do you think you can take care of this snotnose by yourself?”
“Don’t worry,” Anselma reassured him. “I’ll roast her for dinner.”
In the square, the Scorpions were resisting the country gang quite efficiently, but the arrival of Venom and the eight additional thugs marked the turning point of the battle. Venom was a practical young man and when it was clear the Scorpions were near the end, he said to his men: “If we keep it up, we’re going to have to carry them home ourselves. I think it’s better if they go home alone. Let’s let them go.”
The Scorpions dragged themselves onto their motorcycles and lit out like jets.
The whirlwind intervention of Venom and his gang of country toughs was enough to convince the men of the town, who had improvised an army to repulse the invader, not to get involved in the battle. But they didn’t want the Scorpions to leave without some souvenir. The Scorpions rode their motorcycles affecting a rather unusual pose: stomachs flat against their petrol tanks, rears in the air, they looked like jockeys; and, as an afterthought, the townspeople decided to let them have a little taste of buckshot. But the leader of the group of men had a smattering of Latin and said: “No, friends, no lead. One must act cum grano salis.”
And so they loaded their cartridges with grains of salt.
Anybody who has felt the pangs of bits of salt in his seat will tell you that he would not rush back to the town that distributed souvenirs of that sort.
The twenty-six city-bred seats, once out of the town, entered the ambush area and were roundly salted up. Only twenty-six because the four Venom and his friends had defenestrated remained, stunned and dazed, in the bell-ringers vegetable garden. Peppone himself came to arrest them, Smilzo, Brusco and Bigio tagging along to lend a hand; just as they were about to load the four tearaways and their motorcycles on to the back of a lorry for the police to deal with, Don Camillo arrived, having spent the afternoon blissfully puttering around his house hidden in the green. He had no idea what had been going on.
“Who are these four goons?” asked Don Camillo.
“Visitors from out of town, Father,” Peppone explained. “Thanks to your dear little niece, we are enjoying a great influx of tourists. She’s quite a girl, your niece. You must introduce us one day.”
“She already knows enough troublemaking lunatics,” Don Camillo muttered to himself.
Revenge
The little priest’s aggressiveness continued to depopulate the church, and, just as Don Camillo had foreseen, recruits from the other shore, deaf to all blandishments and solicitations, did not arrive to fill the empty pews.
Nonetheless, in answer to Don Camillo’s recriminations, the little priest did nothing but repeat, “The good sower clears his fields of rank weeds before sowing his seed.”
“The good sower,” Don Camillo amended, “checks to see if the soil is arable before he sows his seed.”
“All soil is arable!” the little priest squeaked. “A thread of water suffices to make the driest desert sand sprout luxuriant vegetation! This was the mistake of the old church: it divided the world into good and bad. It is precisely in this arid land that the new church will sow good seed after fertilizing it with its sweat and tears, and even its blood, if necessary! I will bring Christ to the margins of society, to its outcasts, to those forced to beg for a living, to the sinners forced to sell themselves for a living, to the disgraced girls seduced and abandoned by a society who then turns away from them, erecting a wall of contempt around them!”
“Oh I see,” Don Camillo said. “You’ve decided to move to another parish.”
“What’s that you say?”
“I mean, you’re not likely to find people like that around these parts,” Don Camillo explained. “If you spot any beggars, they’re professionals who come from far
away or tramps who come by train for market day. As for lost girls, there are those, just as there are every other place in the world, but they don’t do it for a living.”
“You mean to say you don’t have any unwed mothers?” Don Chichi asked sarcastically.
“Oh yes, a few.”
“I will bring Christ to those poor outcasts!”
Desolina came in with the post.
“Then you can start right away,” Don Camillo informed the little priest. “Desolina here is one of those poor outcasts you should be bringing Christ to.”
“Maybe he’s an outcast, but I wouldn’t know anything about it,” Desolina said, pointing to Don Chichi. “As for Christ, I know where to find him without being led around by this shepherd.”
Don Chichi took offence. “Is this the way a sinning woman rejected by society speaks to a minister of God? Where is your humility!”
“Maybe your sister’s a sinning woman rejected by society,” the lady defended herself sharply. “When I was sixteen I had a child and I brought him up working honest and hard; then, when he went to start his own family, I helped out with his young ones. Now that the oldest of these has a baby eight months old, I’m raising him too but in spite of that I find some time to help out here at the rectory. The way I see it, I have been quite humble enough throughout my seventy-two years on this earth!”
Desolina stalked out, her head held high in fierce pride, and Don Camillo explained to the priest: “This is an unusual case of an unwed mother who is also an unwed grandmother and an unwed great-grandmother. However, there are more ordinary cases around. Unfortunately they are all girls who live with their parents and I wouldn’t go around stirring up any dust if I were you, because they’ve all got fathers and brothers who are pretty brutal when it comes to people messing about with their family problems.”
Don Camillo meets Hell’s Angels Page 5
