‘Hu, Barbarà!’
The camel heard and began again its onward movement.
When the company of travellers reached the grove of willows on the left bank of the mouth of the Pescara – and the cock windvanes on the spars of the fishing smacks anchored by the Flagstaff landing had grown visible – Turlendana halted to drink.
The mother-river of the land was sending its perennial wave like a calming gesture to the sea. Both banks enclosed in many kinds of fluvial plants were silent, as if grown languid after the region’s recent effort of seasonal fecundity. Silence lay heavy on all things. Shallow inlets, like triangular sea-anchors laid across the course of tidal retreats, shone tranquilly in the sun, their luminosity enclosed in crystal cornices of salt; willow leaves flickered by turns from green to white, responding to the vagaries of the mistral.
‘So then – the Pescara!’ said Turlendana, and his words were spoken aloud with an accent of curiosity and surprised recognition; and he stood there above the river for some moments, looking at it. Then he descended to its edge where the shingle was clean, knelt and gathered water in his palms. The camel followed and curved its neck to drink in slow, long draughts, the she-ass drank too, and the monkey imitated the motions of the man, making a hollow with its slender hands, violet like tart cactus-fruit.
‘Hu, Barbarà!’
The camel heard and stopped drinking and drew back its head. From its soft lips drops cascaded over its calloused breast and it displayed its pallid gums and large yellow teeth.
They resumed their progress, now on a path that had been made by the coastal residents through the willow wood. The sun was beginning to sink when the group arrived at the Arsenal of Rampigna.
A fisherman was walking along the brick parapet, and Turlendana asked him, pointing across the river:
‘Be that Pescara?’
The man, astonished at the sight of the animals, replied:
‘Pescara.’
And he left what he was doing to follow the stranger.
Other sailors joined the first. In a short time, a tail of curious people gathered behind Turlendana, who went on tranquilly, not paying attention to their comments. When they arrived at the bridge of boats, the camel refused to pass over.
‘Hu! Barbarà! Hu! Hu!’
Turlendana encouraged the animal patiently with those sounds, agitating the halter he had fitted to it to conduct it through the town. But it squatted obstinately on the ground and dropped its head in the dust, showing clearly that it would remain like that a long time.
The city commoners, having overcome their first astonishment, now joined with their own tumult of shouts:
‘Barbarà! Barbarà!’
And since they were rather more familiar with monkeys – because occasionally mariners returning from long voyages carried such creatures home, as well as parrots and cockatoos – they poked at and provoked Zavalì in a thousand ways and extended to the macaque certain large green almonds. Those it opened, to eat with great relish the undeveloped kernel inside.
After persistent shaking and shouting, Turlendana at last succeeded in overcoming the camel’s stubbornness, and that monstrous architecture of bones and skin rose staggering to its feet in the midst of the crowd that pressed around it.
From all sides soldiers and citizens arrived running, to see the spectacle on the bridge. The sun falling behind Gran Sasso was illuminating the whole of the spring sky with a living roseate glow; vapours rising from the intervening humid fields and from the river, from the sea and from deltaic pools that had been warmed by the day’s sun, made all things, the houses, sails, spars, the vegetation, seem rosy too; and the forms of those objects was acquiring a kind of transparency, losing to the eye the precision of their contours and almost appearing to float part-submerged in that light.
The bridge, the whole low structure of it supported on tar-tamped boats and looking like a vast floating raft, creaked noisily under the weight of the augmenting caravan. The population made a festive tumult. At one point, and half-way across, Turlendana and his animals, surrounded for some moments, were immobilised, the camel, enormous and overtopping all heads, snuffing into the wind, slowly curving and almost coiling its neck like some fabulous furred snake.
From the novelty of the event the animal’s name had been quickly spread about and appropriated by everyone; and now all, out of a native love of noise and from a delight whose source was that sweet dusking of the springtime day, were shouting gleefully:
‘Barbarà! Barbarà!’
And Turlendana, leaning against the breast of the camel and hearing that applauding cry, felt himself filling with an almost paternal satisfaction.
But then suddenly the she-ass began to bray, and with such high-pitched, graceless variations and such sigh-filled, melancholy passion, that a gust of unanimous laughter swept the crowd, the clamour of it in its plebeian innocence jetting from one end of the bridge to the other, like gravel pouring down a mountain slope.
Then Turlendana on Pescara’s soil began again to make his passage through the throng; and no one knew him there.
When he came to the gate of the city, where the women sat behind their large rush baskets selling freshly-caught fish, Binchi-Banche, the little man with a yellow, lined visage like a desiccated lemon, appeared before him; and, as he habitually did when he met strangers, he offered his services in finding lodgings.
But first he asked, nodding towards Barbarà:
‘Is it fierce?’
Turlendana replied that it was not, smiling.
‘Well then,’ Binchi-Banche went on, reassured, ‘there is the house of Rosa Schiavona.’
The two turned towards the fish market and thence, followed by an undiminishing crowd, continued in the direction of Sant’Agostino. Women and children appeared at windows and balconies to look in wonder upon the passing of Barbarà, to admire the graceful points of the white she-ass, to laugh delightedly at the comical affectations of Zavalì.
Along the way, detecting a half-dry festoon of vegetation hanging from a low loggia, the camel extended its neck and lips to it and tore the titbit down. There was an instant outcry of terror from the women who had been leaning from the loggia, and other women in neighbouring loggias became infected by the panic and took up the screeching in turn, while the crowd in the street raised a roar of delighted laughter. The convoy had the spirit of a procession when throngs march behind the masks during a carnival, everyone applauding ‘Viva! Viva!’ with good will, intoxicated by the novelty of the spectacle and the spring air.
Arriving at the house of Rosa Schiavona, near the Portasale, Binchi-Banche made a sign to stop.
‘Behold,’ he said.
The house was a lowly structure with a single row of windows, the lower half of its walls was covered in obscene inscriptions and figures, a line of crucified bats ornamented the architrave of the entry, and a lantern bound with red paper hung at a central window.
Here were lodgings in which every kind of casual boarder and itinerant might find a billet. Sleeping disordered together could be discovered the carters of Letto Manopello, great-bellied oafs; the gypsies of Sulmona; traders in draught animals; repairers of cauldrons; spindle turners from Bucchianico; women from Città Sant’Angelo, come down to Pescara to practice unrestrained their lewd techniques among the soldiery; the bagpipe players of Atina; mountaineer bear-tamers; charlatans; pretending beggars; thieves; and fortune-tellers.
The proud procurer of this human stew was Binchi-Banche; its impartial hostess: Rosa Schiavona.
Hearing the tumult, the woman came out to her doorway; and in truth she herself looked like some wide and low creature generated by the union of a male midget and a sow.
She spoke first, with an air of unexpected diffidence, considering that the voice came from such a barrel body:
‘Heavens! What be this?’
‘Here be a Christian seeking lodgings, together with his beasts, Donna Rosa.’
‘Beasts? How many?�
��
‘Three, as you see, Donna Rosa: a monkey, an ass, and a camel.’
The crowd paid no attention to this dialogue. Some had again begun provoking Zavalì, others were feeling the legs of Barbarà, making observations on the animal’s hard disks of calloused skin encrusting its knees and chest. Two government guards who had once convoyed salt to Asia Minor talked loudly about the various virtues of camels, recounting with a wealth of confused detail having seen one performing dance steps while carrying musicians and half-naked damsels sitting along the length of its extended neck.
Their audience, greedy for such marvels, pleaded:
‘What else, what else? Do tell us more!’
And they all stood around the guards in expectant silence, with longing attention, eyes a little widened and eager.
Then, one of the guards, an old man with eyelids whose rims had been turned back permanently by the winds of the sea, began telling remarkable tales of the Asian lands; and little by little as he spoke he was captured by and grew intoxicated with the spell of his own words.
A kind of mysterious gentleness seemed to extend throughout the twilight. Fabulous seaboards, strangely illuminated, rose up in the imagination of the listening crowd. Through the arch of the old Portal, itself already occupied inside by shadows, barges could be seen passing on the river, loaded with salt, dipping their bows a little with the slight swell; and since the mineral absorbed so much of the last daylight, the vessels seemed made altogether of precious crystals. In the sky, now tinged with green, a moon in its first quarter was rising.
‘Tell us, tell us more!’ the younger voices still insisted.
Turlendana had collected his animals and provided them with their fodder, then gone out with Binchi-Banche. Many of the curious still remained gathered at the entry to the stall where the head of the camel appeared and disappeared behind a hanging screen of woven cords.
Along the way, Turlendana asked:
‘Are there taverns?’
Binchi-Banche replied:
‘Yes sir, there are.’
And lifting his large, unwashed hands he enumerated the establishments by pinching in turn with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand the fingers of the left:
‘The cantina of Speranza, the cantina of Buono, the cantina of Assaù, the cantina of Zarricante, the cantina of the blind woman of Turlendana…’
‘Ah,’ the man remarked calmly.
Binchi-Banche lifted his greenish little eyes up to measure the other.
‘Have you been here before, sir?’
And then, not waiting for an answer, he continued with the native loquacity of the Pescarans:
‘The cantina of the blind one is big and sells the best wine. The blind one is the female of the four husbands…’
Turlendana laughed with an explosive effect that wrinkled the whole of his jaundiced face into folds like the tripe of an ox.
‘Her husband number one was Turlendana, who was a sailor and went on the barks of the King of Naples to the lower Indies and to France and to Spain and even to America. That one was lost at sea, who knows where, together with the whole ship, for none ever heard of it again. ‘Tis now thirty years. Strong as Samson, he was, could pull up the anchor with a finger… poor lad! Those that follow the sea finish like that.
Turlendana listened without any expression of interest.
‘The number two married her after she had been a widow five years; an Ortonese, son of Ferrante, a damned soul who was in cahoots with smugglers in the days when Napoleon was at war with the English. They smuggled sugar and coffee brought by English boats, landing the goods along the coast from Francavilla up as far as Silvi and Montesilvano. Near Silvi there was a lookout tower, built in the time of the Saracen raids, standing below the woods: they signalled from there. When the patrol passed, tramp-tramp-tramp, we would come sliding down from the trees…’ Here the speaker’s face lit up at the recollection, and he quite forgot himself and began a prolix description of the whole clandestine operation, adding passion to the story by the aid of gestures and lively vocal effects. His small, leathery figure now shrank now enlarged itself throughout the performance. ‘At last, the son of Ferrante died of a gunshot to the kidneys, in a clash with the soldiers of Joachim Murat, at night, on the coast.
‘The third was Titino Passacantando, who died in his bed of a malignant illness. The fourth lives, and he is Verdura, a good man, does not mix his wine. You will see, sir.’
When they arrived at the acclaimed cantina, the pair separated.
‘The best of the night to you, sir.’
‘And to yourself.’
Turlendana entered. Drinkers were sitting about long tables, and he passed calmly through the air of curiosity that his arrival among them stirred.
Having asked for something to eat, he was invited by Verdura to an upper room where there were tables prepared for dinner.
No other clients were up there at that moment. Turlendana sat down and began eating with great mouthfuls, his face barely above the plate, not pausing, like one famished. He was almost totally bald; the furrow of a deep, red scar ran down from his forehead to mid-cheek, lost in thick grey whiskers that grew up to his prominent cheekbones; the skin of his face, dark brown, dry, coarse, worn by weather and torrid suns, full of the hollows of suffering, appeared to retain no human vitality; the eyes, and all those lineaments that could have conveyed to a viewer the living character of a person, had been as it were petrified into impassivity.
Verdura, curious, sat down across the table from the stranger and looked on. The innkeeper verged on the rotund, with a pink face faintly threaded with vermillion veins evocative of the spleen of an ox hanging in a butcher’s shop.
After a time he asked:
‘From what country come ye?’
Turlendana without lifting his face replied calmly:
‘I come from far.’
‘And where go ye?’ Verduna asked again.
‘I stop here.’
Verdura was speechless. Turlendana was lifting each fish by its head and tail and eating it that way, grinding the bones down with his teeth; after every two or three fish he took a mouthful of wine.
‘Ye know someone here, perhaps?’ Verdura resumed, delving now with some impatience.
‘Perhaps,’ the other answered simply.
Discomfited by the brevity of the other, the innkeeper fell silent a second time. He could hear Turlendana’s slow and careful chewing through the noise of the drinkers in the lower room.
After a while Verdura ventured again:
‘The camel, from what region comes it? Those two humps, are they real? How can such a great, strong beast be ever tamed?’
Turlendana remained still and let the other talk on.
‘Your name, stranger; your name, sir?’
The one so questioned raised his head from the plate and answered simply:
‘I am called Turlendana.’
‘What!’
‘Turlendana.’
‘Ah!’
The stupefaction of the host was infinite. And with that also a vague bewilderment began to flutter in the portal of his mind.
‘Tur-len-da-na!... From here?’
‘From here.’
Verdura’s blue eyes grew larger as he stared at the other man.
‘So then you are not dead?’
‘Not dead.’
‘And you are the husband of Rosalba Catena?’
‘I am the husband of Rosalba Catena.’
‘And now…what? Verdura exclaimed with a gesture of perplexity. ‘There be two of us.’
‘There be two of us.’
They both were silent for a moment. Turlendana was chewing a last crust of bread, still tranquilly, and the faint crunching was quite audible in the silence. Out of inborn kindness and a careless attitude toward his own interests, as well as from glorious imbecility, Verdura was moved by nothing more than the singularity of the affair. He was suddenly overtaken by an exuberant c
heerfulness bubbling out spontaneously from his breast.
‘Let us both go to Rosalba! Let us! Let us! Let us!’
He was now pulling the returned sailor by the arm, down through the arena of drinkers, agitated, shouting:
‘Here be Turlendana, Turlendana the sailor, the husband of my wife: Turlendana who died! Here be Turlendana! Here be Turlendana!’
TURLENDANA IN HIS CUPS
As he was drinking his last glass, the clock at the Commune was about to strike the second hour after midnight. The strokes when they came sounded distinctly in the silence of the moonlit night, and Biagio Quaglia, his voice thick with wine, said:
‘A curse on’t; what’re we doin’ here?’
Ciávola, resting on the lower extremity of his backbone, almost sliding off his seat, twitched his long sprinter’s legs and muttered something about illicit hunts in the preserves of the Marquis of Pescara. The night breeze had brought to his nostrils the resinous odour of pines from nearby seaside copses, and with that the remembered savour of wild hare had risen to his throat.
Biagio Quaglia said to the blond hunter, getting his attention with a kick and then himself rising:
‘Let us be goin’, matey’
And Ciávola rose with an effort, swaying his body, lean and long like a greyhound.
‘Let us; an’ we will take a li’ll walk,’ he replied, lifting his hand high in the air, as in a heavenward benediction, imagining up there migrating ducks, perhaps.
Turlendana moved too, and glimpsing behind him the tapstress Zarricante, who had fresh cheeks and whose breasts curved provocatively, he made a clumsy attempt to embrace her. But Zarricante detached herself and hurried away, flinging back a word of abuse at him.
At the door Turlendana asked to join the company of the two friends, just for their support over part of the way; but those two had been created an exclusive pair: they rejected him with disdain and soon disappeared into the night.
Pescara Tales Page 28
