Short Sicilian Novels

by Giovanni Verga

  After that, every time the baron’s man-servant emptied his dust-pan into the street, on the heads of the neighbours, not a woman murmured. Only they lamented that the hens, shut up in the house to escape the fine, didn’t rear good chicks any more; and the pigs, tied by the leg to the bedpost, were like souls tortured in purgatory. Anyhow they used to sweep their streets themselves, before.

  “All that muck would be so much gold for the grasshopper closes,” sighed Farmer Vito. “If I’d got my bay mule yet, I’d wipe up the street with my own hands.”

  And this also was a bit of Don Licciu Papa’s work. He had come with the bailiff to seize the mule for debt since Farmer Vito would never have let the bailiff by himself take the mule from the stable, no not if they’d killed him for it, he wouldn’t, he’d rather have bitten off the fellow’s nose and eaten it like bread. Then before the judge, who sat at the table like Pontius Pilate, when Farmer Venerando prosecuted him to recover the loan advanced on the half-profits, he couldn’t find a word to say. The grasshopper closes were fit for nothing but grasshoppers; the fool was himself, and had himself to blame if he’d come home from harvest empty-handed, and Farmer Venerando was quite right to want to be paid back, without all that talking and spinning things out, though that was what he’d paid a lawyer to talk for him for. But when it was over, and Farmer Venerando was going off gleefully, rocking inside his great boots like a fattened duck, he couldn’t help asking the clerk if it was true that they were going to sell his mule.

  “Silence!” interrupted the judge, who was blowing his nose before passing on to another case.

  Don Licciu Papa woke up with a start on his bench, and cried, “Silence!”

  “If you’d brought a lawyer, they’d have let you say something more,” Neighbour Orazio told him for his comfort.

  In the Piazza, in front of the Town Hall steps, the crier sold his mule for him.

  “Forty dollars for Neighbour Vito Gnirri’s mule! Forty dollars for a fine bay mule! Forty dollars!”

  Neighbour Vito, sitting on the steps with his chin between his hands, wasn’t going to let out a word about the mule’s being old, and it’s being over sixteen years that he’d worked her. And she stood there as happy as a bride, in her new halter. But the moment they’d really led her away, he went off his head, thinking of that usurer of a Farmer Venerando who was getting forty dollars out of him just for one year’s half-profits on the grasshopper closes, and the land wasn’t worth as much to buy it outright, and without his mule he’d never be able to work it, and next year he’d be in debt again. And he began to shout like a maniac into Farmer Venerando’s face:

  “What shall you want of me when I’ve got nothing left? – Antichrist that you are!”

  And he’d have liked to knock the baptism off his brow, if it hadn’t been for Don Licciu Papa who was there with his sword and his braided hat, and who began to shout as he drew back:

  “Halt in the Law’s name! Halt in the Law’s name!”

  “What Law!” squealed Neighbour Vito going home with the halter in his hand. “Law is made for them who’ve got money to spend.”

  Which was what the herdsman Arcangelo knew, who, when he’d gone to Law with his Reverence because of his bit of a house which his Reverence wanted to force him to sell to him, had everybody saying to him:

  “Are you out of your mind going to Law with his Reverence? It’s the tale of the pitcher fighting with the stones. His Reverence with all his money will hire the best lawyer’s tongue among them, and will bring you to poverty and craziness.”

  His Reverence, since he’d got rich, had enlarged the paternal house, this way and that, like the hedgehog does when he swells himself out to drive his neighbours away from his hole. Now he’d widened the windows looking on to Shepherd Arcangelo’s roof, and he said he needed the other man’s house so as to build a kitchen above it and turn the window into a doorway.

  “You see, my dear Neighbour Arcangelo, I can’t manage without a kitchen! You must be reasonable!”

  Neighbour Arcangelo didn’t see it, and kept on saying he wanted to die in the house where he was born. As a matter of fact, he only came there of a Saturday; but the stones knew him, and if he thought of the village, when he was away on the wild pastures of Carramone, he never saw it as anything except that patched-up little doorway and that window without any glass.

  “All right, all right,” said his Reverence to himself. “Pig-headed peasants! We’ve got to knock the sense in.”

  And from his Reverence’s window rained down broken pots, stones and dirty water on Shepherd Arcangelo’s roof, till the corner where the little bed stood was worse than a pigsty. If Shepherd Arcangelo shouted, his Reverence began to shout louder than he, from the roof above: Couldn’t one keep a pot of basil on his window-sill nowadays? Wasn’t a man free to water his own flowers?

  Shepherd Arcangelo had a head stubborner than his own wethers, and he went to Law. There came the judge, the clerk, and Don Licciu Papa, to see whether a man was free to water his own flowers or not, so of course on that day the flowers weren’t there on the window-sill, and his Reverence had only to take the trouble to remove them every time the Law was coming, and put them out again as soon as they’d turned their backs. As for the judge he couldn’t spend his days playing watchman on Shepherd Arcangelo’s roof, or patrolling up and down the narrow street; every visit he made was expensive.

  Remained only to decide whether his Reverence’s window should or should not have an iron grating, and the judge, the clerk and all the lot looked up with their spectacles on their noses, and took measurements so that you’d have thought it was a baron’s roof, that bit of a flat mouldy housetop. And his Reverence brought forth certain ancient rights for a window without a grating, and for a few tiles which projected out over the roof, till you could make nothing of it any more, and poor Shepherd Arcangelo himself stared up in the air as if to find out whatever his roof could be guilty of. He lost his sleep at nights and the smile from his mouth; he bled himself in expenses, and had to leave his flock in charge of the boy while he ran round after the judge and the bailiff. So of course the sheep began to die like flies, with the first cold of winter, which showed that the Lord was punishing him for falling out with the Church, so they said.

  “Then you take the house,” he said at last to his Reverence, when after so much law-suits and expenses they wouldn’t even advance him the money to buy a rope to hang himself from one of the beams. He wanted to sling his saddlebag over his neck and go off with his daughter to live with the sheep, for he didn’t want to see that accursed house again, while the world stood.

  But then his other neighbour the baron came forward, saying that he too had windows and lean-to tiles above the roof of Shepherd Arcangelo, and seeing that his Reverence wanted to build a kitchen, he himself had to enlarge his store-pantry, that the poor goat-herd no longer knew whom his house did belong to. But his Reverence found the means to settle the quarrel with the baron, dividing the house of Shepherd Arcangelo between them like good friends, and seeing that the latter had this other obligation as well, the price of the house was reduced by a good quarter.

  Nina, the daughter of Shepherd Arcangelo, when they had to leave the house and depart from the Village, simply never stopped crying, as if her heart was fastened to those four walls and to the nails of the partitions. Her father, poor fellow, tried to console her as best he could, telling her that away up there, in the Caves of Carramone, you lived like a prince, without neighbours and pig-snatchers. But the good-wives who knew the story winked among themselves, murmuring:

  “Up at Carramone the young Master won’t be able to come to her, at evening, when Neighbour Arcangelo is with his sheep. That’s why Nina is weeping like a fountain.”

  When Neighbour Arcangelo got to know this he began to swear and shout:

  “Hussy! Now who’ll you get to marry you?”

  But Nina wasn’t thinking of getting anybody to marry her. She only wanted to stop
where the young Master was, so that she could see him every day at the window, as soon as he got up, and make him a sign to ask him if he was coming to see her that evening. And in this way Nina had fallen, with seeing the young Master at the window every day, who had begun by laughing to her, and sending her kisses and the smoke from his pipe, and the neighbour women were bursting with jealousy. Then bit by bit love had come, so that now the girl had quite lost her senses, and she said straight and flat to her father:

  “You go where you like. I shall stop where I am.”

  And the young Master had promised her he would look after her.

  Shepherd Arcangelo wasn’t swallowing that, and he wanted to fetch Don Licciu Papa to take away his daughter by force.

  “Anyhow when we’ve gone from here nobody will know our shames,” he said. But the judge told him that Nina had already reached years of discretion, and she was her own mistress to do as she pleased and chose.

  “Ah! her own mistress?” stammered Shepherd Arcangelo. “And I’m master!” And the first time he met the young Master, who blew smoke into his nose, he cracked his head like a nut with a wooden cudgel.

  After they had tied him up fast, Don Licciu Papa came running up shouting: “Make way! Make way for the Law!”

  They even gave him a lawyer to defend him before the judge.

  “At least the Law will cost me nothing this time,” said Neighbour Arcangelo. The lawyer succeeded in proving that four and four make eight, that Shepherd Arcangelo hadn’t done it on purpose, wilfully seeking to murder theyoung Master with a cudgel of wild pear-wood, but that the cudgel belonged to his profession, and was used by him to knock the rams on the head when they wouldn’t hear reason.

  So he was only condemned to five years, Nina remained with the young Master, the baron enlarged his store-pantry, and his Reverence built a fine new house above that old place of Shepherd Arcangelo’s, with a balcony and two green windows.

  THE MYSTERY PLAY

  EVERY time he told this tale again, big tears came to Uncle Giovanni’s eyes, which seemed quite incredible in his policeman’s face.

  They had set up the theatre in the little square in front of the church: myrtle, oak, and entire branches of olive with all the foliage, showing that nobody had refused to let them take what they wanted for the Mystery Play.

  Uncle Memmu, seeing the sexton in his orchard hacking and breaking off whole branches, fairly felt the blows of the hatchet in his stomach and called to him from the distance:

  “Nay, aren’t you a Christian, Neighbour Calogero, or has the priest never marked you with the holy oil, seeing that you lash at that olive tree without mercy?”

  But his wife, really with tears in her eyes, kept trying to calm him down: “It’s for the Mystery Play; leave him alone. The Lord will send you a good year for it. Don’t you see the young corn dying of thirst?”

  Quite yellow, green-yellow like children when they’re sick, poor corn! and the earth as white and hard as a crust, eating it away, so that it made your throat burn to look at it.

  “This is all Don Angelino’s doing,” grumbled her husband, “to get his supply of kindling, and lay hands on the offerings money.”

  Don Angelino the curate had worked like a navvy for a week, with the sexton to help, digging holes, erecting posts, hanging up redpaper lanterns, spreading for a background the new curtains belonging to Farmer Nunzio, who had just got married, which made a fine show among the foliage, with the red lanterns in front.

  The play was the Flight into Egypt, and the part of Holy Mary was to be played by Neighbour Nanni, who was a small-made man and had had himself clean shaved for the occasion. The moment he appeared, carrying the Infant Jesus at his breast, the latter being Goodwife Menica’s little lad, and said to the robbers: “Behold my blood!” the people in the audience began to beat their breasts with stones, and started crying all in one voice, “Have mercy on us, Holy Virgin!”

  But Janu and Master Cola, the robbers, in false beards made of lamb’s skin, took no heed, and insisted on seizing the Sacred Child, to carry him off to Herod. The curate had chosen those two well, for robbers. Real stony-hearted villains they were! – so that Pinto, when he had a lawsuit with Neighbour Janu about the fig-trees in the vegetable garden, threw it up at him all that while after, saying: “You are the robber in the Flight into Egypt, you are.”

  Don Angelino, with the paper in his hand, kept repeating behind Farmer Nunzio’s curtain: “In vain, oh woman, is your prayer; pity does not move me! Pity does not move me! – It’s your turn Neighbour Janu.” For those two scoundrels had clean forgotten their part, good-for-nothing lot that they were! The Virgin Mary had to go on begging and beseeching them, while folks were muttering in the crowd: “Neighbour Nanni only plays the softy because he’s dressed-up as Holy Mary. But for that he’d stick the pair of them with that sheath-knife he’s got in his pocket.”

  But as Saint Joseph came on to the scene, with his white cotton beard, going round seeking for his wife in the forest that came up to his breast, the crowd couldn’t keep quiet, because the robbers and the Madonna and Saint Joseph could all have touched one another with their hands, if it hadn’t been that the Mystery Play said they’d got to go circling round after one another without meeting. And this was the miracle. If the malefactors managed to lay hold of the Madonna and Saint Joseph, both together they’d made mincemeat of them, and of the Infant Jesus as well, God preserve us!

  Goodwife Filippa, whose husband was in the galleys for having slaughtered his neighbour in the vineyard with his hoe, because the fellow was stealing his prickly pears, wept like a fountain seeing Saint Joseph chased by robbers worse than a rabbit, and thought of her husband, when he had come to the little hut in the vineyard absolutely spent, with the police at his heels, and had said to her:

  “Give me a drop of water. I’m done for!”

  Then they had handcuffed him like Jesus in the garden, and shut him up in the iron cage, to try him, with his bonnet between his hands and his hair absolutely gone like a grey old wig with so many months of prison – you could see it in his eyes as well – as he listened to the judges and witnesses with his yellow prison-face. And when they had taken him away by sea, on which he had never been before, with his basket over his shoulder, linked up to his galley-companions like a string of onions, he had turned round to look at her for the last time, ah with such a face, for he would never see her again, for from the sea nobody ever comes back, and she had never heard any more of him.

  “Ah Mother of Sorrows, you know where he is now!” mumbled the live man’s widow as she knelt sitting back on her heels, praying for the poor wretch till she fancied she could see him, there, far off, in the dark. She alone could know what anguish there must be in the heart of the Madonna, at that moment when the robbers were just on the point of seizing Saint Joseph by his cloak.

  “Now you see the meeting of the Patriarch Saint Joseph with the malefactors!” said Don Angelino wiping the sweat from his face with his pocket-handkerchief. And Trippa the butcher beat on the big drum – Zum! zum! zum! – to make them understand that the robbers were struggling with Saint Joseph. The goodwives began to scream, and the men picked up stones to flatten the snouts of those two rascals of Janu and Neighbour Cola, shouting, “Leave the patriarch Saint Joseph alone! you pair of villains!” And Farmer Nunzio, for love of his curtains, also started yelling that they were not to burst it. Don Angelino then poked his head but of his den, with his chin unshaved for a week, and worked himself to death trying with hands and voice to calm them:

  “Let them be! Let them be! That’s how it’s written in their part.”

  A fine part he’d written for them, indeed! and he said moreover it was all his own invention. Really, he would have put Christ on the cross with his own hands, to get the quarter for the mass. Or Neighbour Rocco, a father of five children, hadn’t he had him buried without a scrap of a funeral, because he couldn’t fleece anything from him – there, under the stone floor o
f the church, at night, in the dark, so that you couldn’t even see to lower him into the vault, for eternity! And hadn’t he turned Uncle Menico out of his little house, and taken it from him, because it was built on the rock-slope belonging to the church, and had a tithe-rent of a quarter a year on it, which Uncle Menico had never managed to pay? When he had built the cabin for himself, pleased as could be, carrying the stones with his own hands, it never entered his head that one day the curate would have it sold becaue of those five nickels tithe-rent. The difficulty was to get them together all at once when the tithes were due, and Don Angelino answered him, shrugging his shoulders:

  “What am I to do? You see, brother, it’s not my property, it’s church property.” Just like Master Calogero the Sexton, who repeated: “Serve the altar, and the altar will give you bread.” Now he had hitched himself on to the rope in the belfry and was ringing for all he was worth, while Trippa was beating on the big drum, and the women were yelling, “Miracle! Miracle!”

  Here Uncle Giovanni felt the hair rise on his head, as he remembered.

  Just a year later, day for day, on the eve of Good Friday, Nanni and Master Cola met in the same place, at night, under the Easter moon, so that it was light as day in the small square. Nanni was squatting behind the church-tower, to catch anyone who was going to visit Gossip Venera, whom he had once or twice caught all in a fluster with her dress undone and had heard someone making off through the garden gate.

  “Who was here with you? You’d better tell me. If you like somebody else, I’ll leave you to it, and goodnight to the music. But you know, I don’t like to have such a thing on my mind.”

  She protested it wasn’t true, swore by the soul of her husband, and called the Lord and the Madonna hung at the bed-head to witness, and kissed with crossed hands that very same light blue cotton petticoat that she had lent to Neighbour Nanni to act the Virgin Mary.