Pescara Tales

by Gabriele D'Annunzio

  IX.

  Out of habitual irresolution, Anna kept putting the wedding off; religious doubts tormented her. She had heard that in paradise only virgins would be admitted to encircle the mother of God. Well? Should she renounce that celestial sweetness for an earthly good? In seeking for an answer, an ardour more compelling than before invaded her devotions, and she spent all her free hours at the Church of the Rosary, kneeling in front of the great oaken confessional and remaining immobile in an attitude of prayer. The church was a simple and poor one, the pavement tiled with old tombstones, a sole, tarnished metal lamp burned before the altar. The woman sighed inwardly for the pomp of her home-basilica, the solemnity of its ceremonies, the eleven silver lamps and three altars of precious marble.

  But in the Holy Week of 1857 there was a great occurrence: war broke out between on one side the Confraternity of the lay faithful, captained by Don Fileno d’Amelio, and on the other Abbot Cennamele, aided by diocesan satellites, and its cause was a dispute over the procession of Jesus Dead. Don Fileno expected that the spectacle, which had been equipped by the secular congregation, should start from the church to which the Confraternity was attached, while the abbot thought that it should issue from the diocesan church. The war attracted and enveloped all the citizens, involving the militia of the King of Naples, stationed in the fort. Popular disorders broke out; the roads were occupied by assemblies of fanatics; armed patrols went around periodically to suppress the riots; the Count Archbishop of Chieti was besieged by innumerable messengers from both parties; much money was spent on bribes; rumours of mysterious conspiracies circulated throughout Pescara. The source of all these firebrands of odium was none other than the house and hearth of Donna Cristina Basile. Don Fiore Ussorio shone in those days for his admirable stratagems and unprecedented audacity. Don Paolo Nervegna had a dangerous effusion of bile. Don Ignazio Cespa employed in vain all his bland conciliatory arts and mellifluous smiles. Victory was fought for with doglike implacability up to the ritual start of the funerary pageant. The population trembled in expectation; the commander of the militia, a partisan of the abbey, threatened chastisements at the mutineers of the Confraternity. Rebellion was on the point of erupting, when lo, a mounted soldier arrived in the square bearing an episcopal message that gave the victory to the lay congregation.

  The pageant passed with rare magnificence through thoroughfares scattered with flowers. A choir of fifty children sang the hymns of the Passion, and ten censer-bearers filled the city with the odour of incense. The baldachins, the standards, the tapers, the new ornate tackle, all resplendent in its detail, filled those present with astonishment. The defeated abbot stayed away, and in his place Don Pasquale Carabba, the abbey’s Great Coadjutor came, clothed in its vestments, following with majestic and solemn pace the bier of Jesus.

  During the gravest moment of the contest Anna had made votive offerings for the victory of the abbot; but, in the event, the sumptuousness of the ceremony appeased her and quite dazzled her, and as she watched the spectacle she warmed to it with increasing rapture, to the extent that she even felt a surge of gratitude to Don Fiore Ussorio when he went by in the procession, holding in his fist an enormous taper. Then, as the last ranks of the active celebrants passed, she too joined in with the following men, women and children and partook in their fervour; and so she went, her feet hardly feeling the ground, holding her eyes fixed on the garland ahead in the distance crowning the Mater Dolorosa. Above, a succession of seigniorial drapes hung displayed from the balconies; from bakers’ shops dangled rustic figurines of lambs made of wheaten flour; at intervals, where there was the junction of three or four streets, a smouldering brazier diffused aromatic smoke.

  The procession did not pass beneath the abbey’s windows. From time to time a kind of irregularity afflicted the progress of its files, as if the standard bearers had met an obstacle. And the cause was a dispute between the bearer of the crucifix of the Confraternity and the commander of the militia, two parties that had received conflicting itineraries. Since the officer could scarcely call on sacrilegious force, the crucifix won each time. The congregation exulted, the officer boiled with ire, and the population were filled with wonder.

  When the great pageant turned in the vicinity of the Arsenal, preparing to enter again the church of San Giacomo, Anna took a short cut by way of an oblique alley and in a few steps was at the main portal. She knelt inside. The man holding up the gigantic crucifix arrived first; next came the standard-bearers, each by a practiced play of muscles balancing a tall pole on his forehead or chin; then came the divisions, all almost shrouded in a cloud of incense: the angel-choirs, the dignitaries of the Confraternity in capes, the virgins, the gentlemen, the clergy, the militia. The spectacle was breathtaking. A kind of mystic terror gripped the soul of the beholding woman.

  As customary, an acolyte in the vestibule advanced with a large silver platter to collect the unconsumed tapers. Anna watched from her position. Then it was that the commander, hissing through his teeth bitter words against the Confraternity, threw down his taper viciously on the plate and turned his back on the filling church, a threatening expression on his face. All were stunned, and there was a moment of silence in which only the rattle of the officer’s scabbard could be heard as he departed. Don Fiore Ussorio alone had the temerity to smile.

  X.

  Those events continued for some time to excite the vocal activity of the citizenry and were a cause of unrest. As Anna had witnessed the ultimate scene, some came to her to obtain the details. She patiently repeated to them the same words. Her whole life from then on was expended between religious practices, her domestic duties, and her loving care of the tortoise. In the first warmth of April the tortoise awoke from a long period of lethargy: one day, suddenly, its head emerged from beneath the shield of its carapace and swayed about weakly, while its legs below were yet under the spell of its winter torpor and the little eyes remained half-covered by their lids; and the animal, perhaps unaware of its captivity, began moving with an uncertain and sluggish progress, tapping the floor with experimental paces, driven by the need to find food for itself as it would have done in the sands of its native forest.

  Anna at the sight of this reawakening was filled with an ineffable tenderness and stood watching with eyes damp with tears. Then she picked up the tortoise, put it on her bed and offered it some green leaves. It hesitated to touch the leaves, and in tentatively opening its jaws towards them showed a tongue as fleshy as that of a parrot. The folds of skin covering its neck and its feet looked like the yellowish, flaccid membranes of some extinct organism. At that sight, the woman felt herself seized by a great pity; she urged this little object of her love to eat, encouraged it with the blandishments of a mother appealing to a convalescing child. She wiped the bony shell over with fragrant oil, and where the sun struck the polished planes they shone admirably.

  In such attentions passed the months of spring; but Zacchiele, stimulated by the new season to expend greater efforts in paying court, pressed the woman with such tender supplications as finally extracted a solemn promise from her. The nuptials would be celebrated on the day preceding the nativity of Jesus Christ.

  Then the idyll bloomed once more. While Anna plied her needle in preparing her trousseau, Zacchiele read aloud the narrations of the New Testament. The marriage at Cana, the miracles performed by the Redeemer in Capernaum, the dead man in Nain, the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, the liberation of the daughter of the Canaanite woman from a spirit, the ten lepers, the man born blind, the resurrection of Lazarus: all those wondrous accounts beguiled the woman. And she thought long of Jesus entering Jerusalem borne on a she-ass, while the population spread their cloaks and scattered palm fronds on the road before him.

  Sprigs of thyme in an earthenware vase scented the room. The tortoise from time to time drew near the woman sewing and made attempts upon the borders of the linen with its beak, or nibbled at the edges of her shoes. One day Zacchiele while reading
the parable of the Prodigal Son felt an unexpected movement between his feet and by an unthinking act of revulsion kicked the tortoise, flinging it against a wall. It landed on its back, its dorsal shell separating slightly where there were natural divisions, a little blood appeared on one leg that the animal waved about in a futile attempt to return to its normal state.

  If the unfortunate lover was demonstrably and inconsolably struck down by the event, Anna after that day shut herself into a kind of diffident severity, stopped all conversations, and would not listen further to the readings. And thus the Prodigal Son remained for ever beneath the trees, standing among the acorns, tending to his master’s pigs.

  XI.

  Zacchiele died in the great flood of October 1857. The dairy farm where he lived, in the area of the Capuchin monastery, outside the Porta Giulia, was inundated, the waters covering all the countryside from the heights of Orlando to those of Castellammare, and because they swirled over vast sediments of clay they looked as gory as those of the ancient tale. The crowns of trees jutted out here and there above that blood-like and boiling mire. Beneath the walls of the fort passed at intervals with the rush of a waterfall enormous trunks complete with their roots, household effects, objects of unrecognisable form, groups of animals not yet dead that bawled and disappeared and reappeared and were then lost in the distance. Oxen coming down in clusters presented an especial sight of wonder, their great pale bodies pursuing and passing one another, heads desperately stretched out of the water, furious entanglements of horns occurring under the impetus of terror. The sea to the east accepted and then regurgitated all that volume of water coming to it. The salt lake at Palata and the coastal estuaries united with the river. The fort became a lost island.

  Inland, the roads went under; in the house of Donna Cristina the water level rose to half way up the staircase; the noise of ruin kept growing; church bells sounded continually; prisoners in jails howled.

  Anna, believing in a supreme punishment visited down from the Most High, had recourse to the succour of prayer. On the second day, having climbed to the pigeon-house, she could see water everywhere, water in all directions beneath the clouds, and then she saw maddened horses galloping furiously around the gun terrace of the San Vitale bastion. She came down in a state of stupefaction, her mind in turmoil, the persisting clamour and the atmospheric darkness combining to deprive her of any notion of place or time.

  When the flood began to recede, the country people made their entry into the city by means of ships’ longboats. Men, women and children expressed on their faces and in their eyes an anguished stupefaction, all told of sad events. Then a cowhand of the Capuchins arrived at the Basile house to announce that Don Zacchiele had gone to the sea. The rustic spoke simply, describing how the death had occurred. He said that near the Capuchins certain women had tied their infants, whom they had until then been nursing, to the top of a great tree to save them from the water, and the whirlpool had freed the roots, the falling tree then dragging down the five creatures. Don Zacchiele was on a roof, one of a group of Christians huddling tightly together and all calling for succour, and the roof was on the point of going under, and the bodies of animals and broken branches were already careering into those desperate people, and when the tree with the infants finally passed over them the violence was so terrible that after its passing there was no trace left of roof or Christians.

  Anna listened dry-eyed, and in her battered mind the account of that death, with that tree of the five infants, and those people crowded together on a roof, and the corpses of animals thrusting into them, excited a species of superstitious awe similar to that which had been aroused by certain stories from the Old Testament. She rose with slow steps to her room, trying to gather herself. A modest sun shone on the windowsill; the tortoise slept in a corner, tucked inside its shell; a chirping of sparrows came from the tiles. All these natural things, this habitual surrounding tranquil existence gradually soothed her. From the depths of that moment of calm at last lifted up a clear and unambiguous sorrow, and she dropped her head on her breast in a great surge of mourning.

  Then remorse stabbed at her that she had maintained against Zacchiele that unspoken rancour for so long, and recollections one by one came to assail her, and the virtues of the departed returned more clearly apparent and shone now in their religious character in her memory. As the wave of her grief grew, she got up and went to her bed and lay prone. And her sobbing mingled with the chirping of the birds.

  Later, when the tears had stopped, the quietude of resignation began descending on her, and she reasoned that all earthly things are frail and that we must conform to the will of Providence. The balm of that simple act of abandonment laved her heart with a sweet completeness. She felt herself liberated from any uneasiness and found repose in that humble and secure confidence. From then on in her rule of life there existed only this invocation: The sovereign will of God, always just, always to be adored – be it present in all things, be it lauded and exalted for ever!

  XII.

  Thus was the true road to paradise opened to the daughter of Luca. And the course of time itself was in no wise determined for her other than by the ecclesiastical cycles. When the river re-entered its channel, orders were issued that over a number of consecutive days processions should go forth through the city and the countryside. She took part in all of them, together with the populace singing the Te Deum. The vineyards all around were devastated, the ground was waterlogged and soft, and the air was saturated with unclean vapours that were singularly luminous as during the thaw in spring.

  Then came the feast of All Saints; then the solemnities for the dead. Exceptional grand masses were celebrated for the repose of the souls of the victims of the flood. At Christmas, Anna wanted to make a manger, and she bought an infant Jesus made of wax, and also Mary, Saint Joseph, the ox, an ass, the magi and shepherds, all made of wax. To decorate the manger, she went accompanied by the daughter of the sacristan to look for moss in the ditches by the Salaria road. Beneath the glassy serenity of a winter sky the fields of the great estates rested fat with the new layer of deposited mud; the Albarosa mill could be espied through olive trees, couched in its hills; no voices disturbed the silence. As Anna found each piece of moss, she bent and with a knife cut it clear together with its clod of earth. From frequent contact with the cold grass, her hands had turned a violet colour. From time to time at the sight of moss that was particularly green a murmur of satisfaction escaped her. When her pail was full she sat down with the girl on the edge of the ditch. Her eyes lifted slowly up the path beside the olive grove and halted at the white walls of the mill, whose bulk from there had a monastic look. At that moment, a thought passed through her mind and she dropped her head. Then she suddenly turned to her companion and asked her: had she ever seen olives being crushed? And she began at great lengths to describe the operation of the millstones; and, as she continued talking, little by little new memories rose before her, one by one turned spontaneously into words and were voiced with a slight tremor.

  That was her last moment of weakness. In April 1858, a little after Easter Sunday, she fell ill. She remained bedridden for almost a month, afflicted by an inflammation of the lungs. Donna Cristina came morning and evening into her room to visit her. An old menial who made public profession of assisting the sick administered medicines. Then the tortoise cheered her days of convalescence, and since the animal had grown meagre from fasting and its shell become dry and rough, Anna, who saw her own emaciation and knew herself to be frail, felt that kind of hidden satisfaction which we have when our suffering joins us to another sufferer. A moist warmth rose to the two convalescents from the lichen-covered tiles; out in the yard the roosters called; and one morning two swallows entered suddenly, fluttered their wings against the walls of the room and fled again.

  When Anna went back to her old church for the first time after she was well, it was Easter of the Roses, Pentecost. On entering, she breathed in the perfume of the incens
e with hungry pleasure. She walked slowly along the nave to find the place again where she used to kneel, and felt moved by sudden joy when she detected at last among the mortuary tablets one with a worn-down bas-relief in the middle. She bent her knees on it and began praying. People entered in increasing numbers. At a certain point in the rite two acolytes came down from the choir with silver basins filled with roses, and while the organ played a cheerful hymn they began scattering petals about the bowed heads of the worshipers. Anna had been humbly bent, possessed by a kind of ecstasy that was a blissful consequence of the just celebrated mystery and was partly enhanced by a vague voluptuousness originating in her state of recovered health. When some of the petals fell on her too, she trembled for a long moment. The poor woman had never felt in her life a sensation as sweet as that tremor of mystic joy or its following languor.

  Easter of the Roses, therefore, became Anna’s favourite festival, although it returned many times subsequently without any notable episode. In 1860 the city was riven by grave disturbances. The nights were frequently unsettled by drum rolls, alarums of sentries and musket shots. In Donna Cristina’s house was manifested a livelier fervour of activity among the five pretenders to her hand. Anna did not allow herself to be troubled, living totally collected, for the greater part wilfully unaware of and unmarked by either public or domestic events, fulfilling her duties with mechanical exactness.