Even the people’s talk, a sort of elusive suburban dialect, was soft and unctuous: the jests of the shopkeepers would often go to the borders of scatology—the favorite stamping ground of persons in ecclesiastical garb—but never reached open obscenity. As for so-called modern life, it appeared here in bland, extremely family-like, not to say, bigoted forms. The local movie house, one of those which are called, for good reason, neighborhood houses, almost never had to post the sign: “Minors not admitted.” During the intermissions the brats and a few older rowdies would, it’s true, amuse themselves by pestering some isolated spectator, shouting across the half-empty hall. He was, of course, a little old, bald man, with a red face and a stentorian voice. When, however, this party, turning around half astonished and offended, reproached them, indignantly addressing the folded seats: “All the scum of Via Calatafimi, look at them!”—the rowdies simply replied, in a conciliating tone: “These old guys are trying to pick a fight with us!”—and that’s where it ended.
The two old maids, whom we shall call Lilla and Nena (diminutives frequent among people of their class), lived in a small second-floor apartment formed of a certain number of cramped rooms, half of which looked on the street and half on a squalid courtyard, the kind where kitchen rags are hung out to dry, carpets are beaten, etc., and from which at all hours of the day rises the most dreary smell of dishwater. But this courtyard was open on one side, separated by a wire fence from one of the convent gardens we’ve mentioned above. In which garden was placed, one of its walls abutting on the main building, a small chapel that looked like a pavilion and was the convent’s church. Sure enough, it was shaded by two eucalyptus trees, whitish and shiny, and the garden, enclosed on its three remaining sides by high walls, could not boast of any other trees or vegetation. It was indeed a melancholy garden, which looked more, like a prison yard; at set times one could see the nuns walk through it in silent files to the chapel, or come out, or linger there dazedly for a while.
Such was the habitual view of the two old maids who, because of the kitchen’s location in the apartment and the obscurity of the rooms on the street, generally stayed in this part of the house. The apartment itself was furnished in a certain average and mouldily respectable style, like so many of its kind: in the parlor, wicker furniture and poker-work pillows; in the good living room (almost always closed), sofas and armchairs covered with green velvet and, from the same material, a table runner trimmed by a ribbon adorned with dainty pink flowers. For these women were almost rich, though quite stingy, coming from a small town at the farthest borders of the province, where they owned land.
Lilla and Nena were both close to sixty. Lilla, thin and lanky, had a sweeter, more naïve, not to say insipid, character, suffered from stomach trouble and her nerves, wore a gold pince-nez tied to one ear by a thin chain of the same metal and also used a lorgnette which she wore around her neck, a lorgnette one of whose lenses had been cracked many years before. Nena had heart trouble, but all in all was much better preserved than her sister, and this had its effect on her temperament. Both of them were always dressed in black or, at any rate, in dark clothes, wearing short dusters or straight, waistless tunics, their shoulders covered by short tippets of purple wool or gray woolen shawls; their hair, often disheveled and standing out spikily at the neck and temples, was also grayish and vaguely red, due to certain old-fashioned efforts to keep it black; and finally, on their faces, in the furrows between the nostrils and the cheeks, and in some of the deeper wrinkles, perennially stagnated a thick sweat, like tallow.
Their life had been and was now, except for what we are about to relate, pretty much what one might imagine, and there’s no need to waste too many words on it. The circle of their relatives included distant or very distant kin (since they no longer had any close ones) and suchlike, whose visits they received every so often, although rarely did they return them. Among these it may be in place to mention briefly at least the head clerk at the Ministry of Agriculture, a man with very bulging eyes and bad breath, who had, despite certain literary yearnings in his youth, yellowed at his desk. A man of great outward and verbal vehemence, who made a big point (as he often insisted) of calling a spade a spade, and did not hesitate to describe his office as “the most filthy glob of spit in the ministerial cuspidor,” with which dubious ambiguity he certainly intended to cast discredit on his entire ministry.
A Rear Admiral, yellow too, with half his head husked of its hair, a long nose but almost no chin; who, when he talked, dropped words from that very hairy nose, like bits of snot (a manner of talking which some boys call “snot-snuffling,” a hypotyposis which these little impudents also use in regard to another function somewhat less important than speech). Rear Admiral speaks to the heart of generous exploits, vast, free spaces and far-off lands. But, alas, this man had not sailed except in his distant youth, then only to become an ensign, and he too had spent the remainder of his career in the office of a ministry; and now he was a God-fearing officer, who only insisted that his sons, gangly adolescents, wear blue sailor sweaters, no matter what the season.
An old, bemustached spinster with an unexpected first name, who “knew German better than Italian,” nor was there any other way of identifying her. From her quacky voice the old maids had been forced to learn some brief phrases in that language, such as “Wie geht’s Ihnen?”; “Ja, und?; ach, wo!” and a few others less correct.
And other people of the same sort. To which one might add, beyond the immediate circle of relatives, a few particularly respectable fellow-tenants. For example, the Senator on the third floor, an old, senile man, once Undersecretary of Public Works, who, however, had never set foot in the old maids’ apartment, being content to receive their visits a few times a year; some occasional acquaintances; and then the seamstress, one or two shopkeepers and a rather large number of nuns, monks, priests, deacons and such folk, who came not only for contributions but also to pass the time. Certainly there’s no need to mention that the two old maids were extremely devout, though each according to her own bent.
Whenever one of these squalid personages appeared at the door of their apartment, the two sisters, having quickly come into the dark entrance hall, would welcome them with reiterated nods of the head and liftings of the arms, every time as though they hadn’t seen him or her for at least ten years, and then go on welcoming the visitor, each in her special fashion—Lilla, emitting certain self-confident grunts, the other sister quavery “ohs” and “ahs.” Afterwards, depending on the visitor, they would go into the parlor or the good living room (or even more often, as we shall see, into their old mother’s bedroom). Here they all sat down with their hands on their knees and here was served the coffee, duly blended with barley from their holdings in the country. And then the conversation began, with its inevitable accompaniment of “You don’t say!” “Oh, really?” and “Oh, God help us!” and, now and then, the sign of the cross executed by the ladies of the house. For the guests always had something scandalous to recount, something which pious, respectable people cannot hear without quaking indignantly and which demanded on the part of the narrator, especially if a woman, a final, emphatic “Did you ever hear such a thing!” which more or less meant: “So you see what a pass we’ve come to and in what calamitous times we live!” Or the conversation would deal with the affairs and doings of their fellow townsmen, whose slightest acts and aims, as with everything that happened in the town, the old maids always managed to hear about even before, and in greater detail, the very persons involved did. And then, if the visitor was one of their intimates and the time for the afternoon snack had come, there appeared the specialty called “dainty egg,” originating no doubt in some nun’s school—that is, an omelet with one or more large slices of bread folded into it, so that the egg was nothing more than a very thin layer over the bread, and perhaps one egg was enough to make two “dainty eggs.”
But certainly the reader has by now a pretty clear notion of the scene and gladly dispenses m
e from adding other touches to this faithful picture.
2
As we’ve said, the two old maids lived with their old mother; and, we might add, a rather elderly maid, who was wholly wedded to their cause and had, without realizing it, patterned herself after them. It goes without saying that this person, though without the least forwardness and never, or almost never, to her own advantage, lorded it in the house, and her opinion was highly prized in every emergency. As for the mother, the decrepit as well as aged Signora Marietta was a notable example of her species (although not so rare as it might seem), therefore we feel that we ought to devote a few words to her.
She was, of course, sick; but what her sickness was no bearded specialist had ever been able to determine. Nervous and authoritarian she had always been; however, around her seventieth or seventy-fifth year the expressions of this predisposition had grown more and more alarming, until they became real symptoms, varying only in magnitude. One fine day the old lady began to complain of vague pains at several, unspecifiable points in her body, and after a year she was replying to the visitors who inquired about her health: “How are you, Donna Marietta?”—with the laconic singsong which the old maids never stopped hearing for some ten years and more: “Terrible pains.” After another two or three years she had adopted the other, more constant singsong, which did not need to be elicited and would suddenly explode in the silence or right in the middle of a discourse of a much different tenor: “What pains! What pains! Oh, oh, I can’t stand it any more.”
This sentence was always pronounced in the same, strangely musical tone: the first four words were high-pitched, like an enraged, shrilling blast, and the remainder gradually petered out in a kind of triumphant despair. The old woman was most likely fond of her illness, since it permitted her to continue to exercise her power over her daughters and throughout the house; indeed, one might suspect that, feeling her strength ebbing away, she had purposely clutched the only weapon left to keep the people around her in subjection—she had purposely fallen ill. For no organic fault had ever been discovered, and her pains, which no sedative could relieve, continued to be unbeatable and elusive. But the illness, whether natural or willed, dragged her little by little to the grave, nor was her good appetite, which never failed her right down to the last day, of any avail. At first she had to spend the greater part of the day in an armchair; toward the end she could no longer leave her bed, where she was struck, during the last years, by a stiffening of her legs and almost her entire body, though she could still move her arms, or rather her forearms. At that point she stopped talking, though she still made herself very well understood.
The outward manifestations of the disease, whose true nature remained hidden from all, consisted predominantly in frenzies of various kinds and differing intensities; these rages, unfailingly increased beyond all bounds if the old maids so much as left the sick woman’s bedside, or even as soon as they showed the slightest intention of doing so. The old woman was endowed with more than animal sensitivity and could read the thoughts of her victims. If Lilla (who, being delicate, should have been out in the fresh air as much as possible) were preparing, even in a room far from her mother’s, to slip out secretly for a half hour, the old woman would start screaming as loud and long as she could. She would beat her sides or punch herself on the head—in short, raise the very devil. The most trivial things could bring on this intemperateness: for instance, if one of the old maids had to go “to Paris”—another expression from some nun’s school, as everyone can see. No matter what it was that didn’t suit her, the old woman would begin to maltreat herself, thereby giving further proof of her insight; and the old maids and the servant rushed to restrain her and to remove the cause of her agitation. Then, with the passing of the years, the prohibition against leaving the house or leaving her side in any fashion, at first limited to the two old maids, was extended to the servant and finally to the pets, about whom I shall speak further on.
We must not think that Donna Marietta always wanted people around her because she was truly in need of assistance; in fact, if someone left the room even when she was sleeping placidly, she woke up with a jerk and started the usual pantomime. Having gathered all the occupants of the house around her like a mangy hen her chicks, she did nothing but intone: “What pains! What pains! Oh, oh, I can’t stand it anymore!” or stare at them in silence, since she almost never had anything definite to ask of them. Poor old woman, that was the only order she could now impose: her own presence. And if you think of it, just those two chicks nearly added up to two centuries! But that’s how it goes: mothers never learn to regard their offspring as grown up.
It is easy to imagine the kind of life this determined old lady made for the three other women. Dominated as they had always been by her will, dismayed at seeing even their slightest schemes exposed, the old maids retreated, if not into themselves, at least into their holes, giving up all thought of moving about save in cases of extreme necessity and renouncing all their own personal impulses.
Despite her complaints, Donna Marietta’s illness worsened with exceptional slowness. During the years in the armchair she would still sometimes, though infrequently, talk about small matters and even laugh, silently shaking her belly. This was the only sign she gave of enjoying anything. But when she had become bedridden she gave her full attention only to her illness and her obsession. Yet another two or three years passed before she was overtaken by the stiffening of her body. But neither this nor the cessation of speech which accompanied it, overwhelmed her strong constitution before still another three years had gone by.
During the last period she had been reduced to a block of wood, having all the attributes of death save for color and loss of appetite. And yet, gnarled just like an old stump and equally as inert, her eyes half dead and staring, she nevertheless clung to her customary and most personal mode of expression: beating herself. Her forearms were untouched by the paralysis, and she could still beat her chest at the level of her shoulder blades; this beating produced a hollow, lugubrious sound—tock tock—more like that of an African kettledrum than the notorious, gay big bass drum. This tock tock (two raps were the general rule) eventually assumed the significance of a simple negation, immediately robbing the questioner of any foolish desire to go on asking. For instance: “Donna Marietta, or Mama, would you like some consommé?”—Answer: “Tock tock.”—“All right, then, I’ll bring you your milk.”—“Tock tock.”—“But you’ve got to eat something.” Here the raps became stronger and the interlocutrix, if we may call her that, grasped the old woman’s arms. Then: “But say I put some noodles in the consommé?” Absolute immobility, the sign of assent. In fact, right to the last, although her head was rigid, the old woman continued not only to eat but also to masticate.
Since they always fussed over her and she almost always answered “no,” this tock tock had become the house’s true voice. Nevertheless one day she faded out, for, in the end, even such a mother eventually manages to die. Lilla had gotten up to leave the room, but no tock tock resounded to detain her—it became quite clear that the old woman was dead. Her head by now was nothing but a skull. A skull—and here follows a detail which, though belated, I consider very apposite—bearded and mustachioed beyond all reasonable imagining and in a completely masculine fashion, as Donna Marietta’s head had always been.
Over this skull, crazed by the presence of the corpse and plummeting down from the top of the closet, there came for a moment to bend its deformed face with heart-rending whimpers—the monkey. This monkey, who only now enters on the scene for the first time, is actually the true protagonist, indeed the hero of this story. Donna Marietta has no real role in it, since she has, it seems, renounced that of a ghost, which such characters more often than not will play after death. I have dwelt on her simply out of a love of completeness; and the very same scruple now demands that, before going on and getting to the heart of my story, I briefly mention a small bird which was also a member of the househol
d.
It was, needless to say, a “cardinal bird,” so named because of its crest or little cap of a sodden and funereal red. It was about the size of a shrike, or a little bit larger, and had a calm and resigned character; usually it lived in a cage hanging on a balcony overlooking the courtyard, until the old woman insisted on having it in her room, where the unhappy bird languished miserably (the room was never aired). The old maids were very fond of it and fed it chiefly on moistened sponge cake. But the full tide of their affections was reserved for someone else; and so, at this point, we must leave this bird to its obscurity.
3
The monkey was a rather small, vivacious animal, probably a Cercopithecus; but it will be best to give up from the start any attempt to describe him in detail and as a distinct entity—which, I can wager, will be greeted with great relief by the reader. For, in truth, all the qualities that an alert storyteller of the human species, expert as he may be in probing character, can notice in, or attribute to, an animal, are after all but mere suppositions to which only our immoderate anthropomorphism lends verisimilitude. Just between ourselves: How can anyone penetrate the thoughts of a brute, the true meaning of his acts, even if we adopt the human conception of such terms? One man in relation to another possesses, if nothing else, at least a convention of language by which to measure his qualities; but to transfer this convention to animals would be, to say the least, arbitrary. By what standard, for example, may a monkey be judged good or bad? So we might as well confess agnostically and from the very start that we’re absolutely in the dark, and close this embarrassing parenthesis. Well then, this monkey was a monkey, with all the external attributes and apparent characteristics of his species; he was a mysterious creature. We should explain, however, so that his presence in the house of the two old maids does not seem extraordinary, that many years before they’d had a brother, who had left home at an early age and become a sea captain (perhaps with the assistance of the now Rear Admiral). This brother, returning from one of his voyages, had brought the monkey to their home town, a monkey which had just been torn from his mother’s breast. The brother died soon after on foreign soil and the sisters, who had gradually concentrated on him all the affection of which they were capable—not a little, certainly—and solely to him had dedicated the beats of their feminine hearts, now poured this affection onto the animal. By now he was doubly and trebly dear to them.
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