After half an hour he reappeared on deck, deathly pale as if rising from a sepulchre. He preferred to be in the open, under threat of the waves, to see the other men, to breathe the wind.
Ferrante, shocked by that pallor, asked:
‘What’s got into yer now?’
The other mariners from their places began loudly, virtually shouting in order to be heard above the storm, to discuss remedies. They grew excited, each had his own method and each propounded it with the confidence of a medical specialist. They forgot their danger in the dispute. Massacese two years earlier had witnessed a real medic operating on the flank of Giovanni Margadonna in a similar case. The medic had made his excision, then had scoured the wound with pieces of wood dipped in a fuming liquid, thus burning the face of the laceration. He used a kind of spoon to scrape away the scorched flesh, which looked like coffee grounds, and Margadonna was saved.
Massacese kept repeating with exaltation, ruthlessly, like an adamant professional:
‘It’s got to go! It’s gotta be cut!’
And he made a slicing sign with his hand in the direction of the unfortunate.
Cirù was of the same opinion. The two Talamontes also agreed with Massacese. Ferrante La Selvi shook his head for a moment or two and abstained.
Then Cirù turned to Gialluca with their decision. Gialluca refused.
Cirù with a brutal tactlessness that he could not restrain shouted:
‘Die, then!’
Gialluca turned paler still and looked with eyes wide with terror at the others.
Night was falling. The sea in the twilight seemed to howl with an added hostility. Each wave glittered a moment, passing rearwards in the light of the lamp at the bow. The land was far away. The men clung to a lifeline to withstand the greater billows. Ferrante manned the tiller, shouting from time to time into the storm:
‘Git below, Giallù!’
Gialluca, with a strange repugnance towards being left alone, despite his pain kept refusing to go. When a wave came on deck the mariners ducked their heads and uttered a united shout like a choral accompaniment to some laborious common endeavour.
The moon appeared from behind a cloud, tempering the wretchedness on deck; but the great sea swell continued throughout the night.
In the morning Gialluca, feeling totally confounded, told his shipmates:
‘Cut it.’
They first went into a grave consultation to decide conclusively how to proceed; then they examined the abscess. It was now a tumour grown to the size of a man’s fist. All the openings that had lent it the appearance of a wasps’ nest or sieve had been replaced by a single crater.
Massacese said:
‘Be brave! Let’s go!’
He was to be the surgeon. He tested the edge of all their knives on his thumbnail and chose the one belonging to Talamonte senior, which had been recently whetted. He repeated:
‘Brave now! Let’s go!’
Something like a tremor of impatience animated him and the others.
The afflicted one now seemed seized by a dumb stupor. He kept his eyes fixed on the knife and said nothing, his mouth half-open and his arms hanging loose by his sides like an idiot.
Cirù made him sit down and took away the last dressing, making involuntary sounds of disgust with his lips. For a moment they all bent over the eruption, looking in silence. Massacese said:
‘This way an’ then that,’ indicating with the point of the knife the direction of the cuts.
At that, suddenly, Gialluca broke out in great sobs, all his body shaking with them.
‘Take courage! Be strong!’ the mariners around him repeated to him, holding his arms.
Massacese began the work. At the first contact of the blade, Gialluca let out a bellow; then, gritting his teeth, a long half-suffocated moan.
Massacese cut slowly and with deliberation, the tip of his tongue held out as was his habit when he concentrated on something. Because the trabaccolo dipped and rolled throughout the operation the cut was not uniform, the knife now penetrating more now less. A jolt from the sea sent the blade into the uninfected flesh. Gialluca howled again, struggled, all bloody like an animal being butchered. He had had enough and he tore himself away, screaming:
‘No! No! No!’
‘Come back! Come back!’ Massacese shouted, following him, wanting to finish his work and believing it more dangerous if left undone.
The sea, still high, roared around them and onwards to infinity. In a sky deserted by any kind of bird, clouds shaped like upturned trumpets rose in the furthest distance, their upper flairs curving towards each other like arms embracing. At that moment, in the midst of that tumult, under that light, a peculiar excitement gripped those men. Inadvertently, in struggling with the wounded one to keep him still, they felt themselves being provoked to anger.
‘Grab him! Get him!’
Massacese made another four or five incisions, rapidly, at random. Blood mingled with whitish matter oozed copiously from them. All there were stained by the gore, all except Nazareno, who stayed at the prow, trembling and overwhelmed by the atrocious event.
Suddenly the vessel tilted sideways at an extreme angle and Ferrante La Selvi shouted a command at the top of his voice:
‘Loosen the mainsheet!’
Then:
‘Head ’er for the Bear!’ – which was to say, north.
The two Talamontes, Massacese and Cirù reacted quickly, and soon the trabaccolo returned to running in trim, dipping into the waves and rising again. Lissa could be made out in the distance. Zones of sunlight struck the sea whenever the fleeing sun emerged from behind a bank of clouds, the light forming on the water long glittering patterns that appeared and faded according to the celestial movements of the instant.
Ferrante remained at the tiller. The other mariners returned to Gialluca. It was necessary to tidy up the cut area, somehow to singe it and then cover it with a hempen dressing.
The suffering man was now in deep prostration. He seemed unable to understand anything. He looked at his companions with two deadened eyes, already turbid like those of an expiring animal. He repeated at intervals, almost to himself:
‘I’m done fer… done fer…’
Cirù tried to cleanse the wound with some kind of coarse wad, but he had a rude hand and his ministrations aggravated things. Massacese meanwhile, keen to the last to follow the example of Margadonna’s doctor, was carefully whittling into points the ends of some short lengths of fir. The Talamonte brothers were dealing with the tar, because that had been chosen to cauterise the wound. But it was impossible to light a fire on a deck that from moment to moment kept being flooded, so the two sought cover below.
Massacese shouted to Cirù:
‘Wash it in seawater!’
Cirù followed the instruction. Gialluca submitted to everything, whimpering continually, his teeth chattering. His neck had now swollen enormously, gone red all over, in certain parts almost violet. Odd brownish stains were beginning to appear around the incisions. The afflicted man was finding it difficult to breath, to swallow, and he was tormented by thirst.
‘Commend yerself to Sante Rocche,’ Massacese told him. He had finished shaping the pieces of wood and was waiting for the tar.
Blown headlong by the wind, the trabaccolo was now deviating northwards towards Sebenico, with the island of Lissa dropping out of sight; but however high the waves, the storm had begun showing signs of abating; the sun stood in mid sky between rust-coloured clouds.
The two Talamontes arrived with an earthen pot full of steaming tar.
Gialluca knelt again to renew his offerings to the Saint. Everyone made the sign of the cross.
‘Oh, Sante Rocche save me! I promise ye a silver lamp an’ oil for a year an’ thirty pounds of wax. Oh, Sante Rocche save me! I’ve got a wife and young uns… Have pity on me! Have mercy on me, good Sante Rocche.’ Gialluca held his palms together beseechingly and spoke in a voice that no longer seemed his. Then he returne
d to his previous seat and said simply to Massacese:
‘Do it.’
Massacese wound some wadding around the ends of the pieces of wood and dipped one in the boiling tar, applying it in a rubbing motion to the wound. To ensure an efficacious and deeper burning he poured some of the liquid over the site. Gialluca made no complaint. The others, witnessing the torture, sucked their breath in through their teeth.
Said Ferrante La Selvi from his post at the tiller, shaking his head:
‘You have killed him.’
The others took Gialluca, more dead than alive, down below and laid him in a cot. Nazareno stayed with him. The sounds of Ferrante giving orders for tacking, and the quick steps of the seamen could be heard above. The Trinita turned sharply, its timbers protesting.
All at once Nazareno noticed water pouring in from a leak in the canted side and called out. The sailors rattled down again, all shouting, proceeding by various frantic applications to stop up the leak. It looked like the boat would go down.
Gialluca, though bereft of strength or spirit, lifted himself on the cot, believing they were sinking, and catching hold of one of the Talamontes begged him like a woman:
‘Don’ leave me! Don’ leave me!’
They calmed him sufficiently to lay him back down. But he was now gripped by returning panic, babbling incomprehensibly, crying. He did not want to die! Because the growing inflammation covered all of his neck and cervix and had begun moving to the trunk, and the swelling was becoming monstrous, he felt he was being choked. He continually opened his mouth wide to gulp down what air he could.
‘Carry me up! Ain’t no air here; I’ll die here…’
Ferrante called the men up again. The trabaccolo’s tacking was building up pace. The manoeuvres were complicated. Ferrante watched for the wind’s signs and gave the necessary orders from the helm. As vespers neared, the waves became quieter.
After some time, Nazareno came up in a distraught state, shouting:
‘Gialluca’s dyin’! Gialluca’s dyin’!’
The mariners ran down, and they found their companion already dead. His body was twisted on the cot, his eyes were open, and his face was swollen like that of someone who had been strangled.
Said the elder Talamonte:
‘And now… what?’
The others did not speak, a little taken aback in the presence of the corpse.
They went back up on deck in silence, where Talamonte repeated his question:
‘And now… what?’
The day was slowly departing from the sea, and in the air tranquillity was spreading. Once again the sails fell slack and the boat was becalmed. The island of Solta was visible.
The seamen gathered on the poop to discussed the situation. An anxious dismay filled them. Massacese in particular was pale and thoughtful. He observed:
‘What if they say we killed him, hey? What if we get into trouble?’
That fear had already begun to torment those superstitious and distrustful minds, as easy to believe as to suspect. There was a murmur of replies:
‘That could be.’
Massacese went on:
‘Well? What’s to do?’
Talamonte major said simply:
‘He is dead. Let us throw him overboard. We will say he was lost in the storm… That will pass for sure.’
The others agreed. They called Nazareno.
‘You, now… dumb as a fish! Hear?’
And they sealed the secret in his soul with a menacing sign.
Then they went below to get the body. Even so soon, the open flesh of the neck was giving off an unhealthy odour, the suppurating matter dripping with every jolt as they began the carry to the deck.
Massacese said:
‘We will put him in a sack.’
They got a sack; but it could only contain the torso, with the legs remaining outside, so they tied the sack at the knees. As they prepared the corpse, they looked instinctively across the sea around them. There were no sails in sight. After the storm, the water’s surface was an extent of slow, long waves; Solta appeared all in blue, but far in the distance.
Massacese said:
‘Let us put a stone in there too.’
They brought up a stone from the ballast and tied it to Gialluca’s feet.
Massacese said:
‘Now!’
They lifted the body, tilted it over the side and let it slide into the sea. The water closed over it with a gurgle; it sank slowly initially and with an oscillating motion, then it disappeared. They returned to the stern and waited for the wind, smoking without speaking. Massacese at times made an involuntary gesture with his hand, like men do when they are deep in thought.
The wind rose. There was an instant of flapping and then the sails swelled out. The Trinita made for Solta. After two hours of good sailing they passed through the straits
The moon lit up the shores. The sea had now acquired an almost lacustrine calm. Two craft were emerging from the port of Spálato, coming towards the Trinita. Their crews were singing.
On hearing the song, Cirù exclaimed:
‘Ha! Those be from Pescara!’
Spotting the emblems and numbers on the sails, Ferrante added further:
‘They would be the trabaccolos of Raimondo Callare.’
And he called to them.
Those heading for the home port responded with a medley of shouts. One of the vessels had a cargo of dried figs, the other of young asses.
As the second one passed the Trinita at a distance of ten metres, there was another exchange of salutations. A voice shouted:
‘Oh, Giallù? Where be Giallucca?’
Massacese replied:
‘We lost him in the sea, in the middle of that storm. Tell his mother.’
There came some exclamations from the boat carrying the asses, then fare-wells.’
‘Good-bye! Good-bye! We’ll see ye in Pescara!’
And as the vessels drew apart, the homebound crews recommenced their moonlit singing.
TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD
Gabrielle D’Annunzio (1863-1938) set these tales in the Abruzzo of his youth, a region of the Italian south that had at that time experienced little of the industrial revolution nor seemed after Italian unification in 1860 to have lost much of its native particularism. It was the kind of backwater – with its dialects barely comprehensible to outsiders – to which Massimo D'Azeglio’s affirmation: ‘Italy has been created; now remains the making of Italians,’ would be relevant for some time yet: a contained locale whose vague vision of the big world of pomp and power was still tramontane Naples on the Tyrrhenian sea, and with a sense of homeland and a self-consciousness which traced via myth and folklore through Spanish and seigniorial centuries to the Roman Ostia Aternum and further back to some prehistoric substratum redolent of primitive magico-religious beliefs. That latter in particular lay at the core of what was often with humour or irony referred to as la psicologia popolare abruzzese. Nevertheless, having said the above, the abruzzesi, and particularly those in their capital, lived inevitably on the cusp of great changes.
D’Annunzio looked back in this collection to a time when Pescara’s massive Bourbon walls and military installations still stood, at least in remnant form, or certainly persisted in the memory of the citizenry as points of reference, their demolition having only begun in the early 1870s during the mayoralty of the author’s father. That now-regretted destruction of the fortezza made way soon afterwards for the coastal railway and a great deal of architectural modernisation, a process that accelerated after the bombing and demolitions of World War Two had done away with more medieval vestiges; thus very little remains to us of D’Annunzio’s boyhood town, beyond the sense of it that lingers with one after reading his stories. The place during those years had been barely more than a middling provincial centre, with a population even in 1903, the year after the publication of these collected stories, amounting to precisely 8,923; and that figure included the community of C
astellammare Adriatico across the river, the totality of the present city being gathered under the name ‘Pescara’ only in 1927, when the two independent municipalities (whose rivalry in former times was a backdrop to some of D’Annunzio’s tales) were finally united. D’Annunzio himself, ultimately a backward-looking romantic, was, oddly enough, an enthusiastic sponsor of urban development, and those changes, surely unforeseen by him, have been such that his bucolic images of women washing laundry by the Pescara River will not find their model again on the banks of today’s semi-industrial port-canal; nor is it likely that the small-town social psychology of his tales, the daily life of its provincial lower and middle classes, and in particular the area’s incomparable religiosity will again revive precisely as it was. One might in those days have deemed Pescara and its hinterland changeless and tedious, were it not that life was periodically thrown into turmoil, sometimes of a chiliastic or otherwise obsessive character, by natural, social or personal upheavals, in the absence of which D’Annunzio’s chronicles would have hardly been worth the telling.
In 1881 D’Annunzio entered university in Rome, the recently established national capital, and from that distance began to take an almost anthropological interest in the land he had left, in Pescarans and the outlying peasantry and plebeian small-town dwellers of inland Abruzzo, articles he wrote during the next years for metropolitan newspapers growing in time to be the source of the present compilation. So while late-19th century Western curiosity towards the ‘primitive’ began to consolidate into a new social-scientific discipline investigating cultures in distant and formerly unknown lands beyond the seas, here was someone who detected in his own birthplace, in a corner of ancient and civilized Europe, the same meld of barbarism and innocence worthy of being explored and its peculiarities and wonders revealed in all their variety, religious importantly, and those depicting popular customs, rituals and modes of thought, but chronicled from a primarily literary point of view, whose naturalism and interest in the humbler orders was termed in Italian verismo. The degree of religious fanaticism he recorded, the amazing acts of desperate worship, witnessing to the heavy load of superstition carried then by many of the inhabitants of Abruzzo, were described in those articles with almost fulsome detail, providing a background of verisimilitude to the otherwise hardly credible events and themes in such stories as ‘The Idolaters’ and ‘The Hero’ in particular. The following is an example of his journalism taken from the weekly magazine Fanfulla della Domenica (13/1/1883) in which D’Annunzio describes an occurrence that had become the subject of a recent painting (Il Voto ‘The Offering’, now hanging in Rome’s National Gallery of Modern Art), for not a few artists and writers were being drawn to the region’s extraordinary religious pageants:
Pescara Tales Page 30
