“Not I,” Peppone interrupted. “I have children, but if their lives depended on medicine flown in by the United States ambassadress, I’d let them die!”
Don Camillo only opened his eyes wide in horror.
At three o’clock in the morning Peppone was still unable to sleep. He got up and dressed, then with his shoes in his hand went to peer into his young son’s room. He switched on the light and scrutinized the child’s face. After some time he put out the light and tiptoed away. A few minutes later, with his coat collar raised all the way to his eyes, he walked through the icy streets to the church square. Under the rectory windows he stooped to look for a stone, but the hardened snow had stuck them all to the ground. He scratched at the frozen ground and with every passing minute his anxiety grew. Finally he loosened a stone and threw it at the shutters of the second window from the left of the second floor. The sound that it made when it struck the shutters was somehow reassuring. The shutters were thrown open and a rough voice called down:
“What do you want?”
“Come downstairs.”
Don Camillo draped the bedspread over his shoulders and came to open the door.
“What can you want at this hour? What’s the matter?”
“Nothing’s the matter,” said Peppone glumly.
“Good. When I first saw you I was afraid.”
“Afraid of what? I’m not a burglar.”
“I’m always afraid when someone rouses me at night. People don’t come to see a priest at an hour like this in order to tell him a funny story.”
Peppone stood with lowered head for a minute and then mumbled:
“When a fellow holds a public discussion, he often says more than he means.”
“I know,” said Don Camillo. “There’s no use taking such things too seriously.”
“But other people take them seriously.”
“Nonsense! They know what kind of reasoning to expect from a carburettor.”
Peppone clenched his fists.
“Father, you’re the one that’s talking stupidly.”
“You may be right. But then a carburettor has no right to wake up a priest at three o’clock in the morning.”
Peppone stood his ground until the priest asked him:
“Is there something you want, Comrade Peppone? Do you need a tin-opener?”
“I have a tin-opener,” said Peppone gloomily.
“Good! See that you don’t lose it. And may God shed a little more light upon you next time you talk in public!”
Peppone went away, and before Don Camillo got back into bed he knelt down before the crucifix in his room.
“Lord,” he said, “he hasn’t become a carburettor, or anything else soulless and purely mechanical. He’s just the same poor fellow that he was before. May Divine Providence be praised!”
And then he, too, was at last able to go to sleep.
The Closed Gate
THE highway unrolls its asphalt ribbon along the bank, matching the peaceful flow of the river. But the tributary roads which run into it, although they come from an area as flat as a billiard-table, are tortuous and winding. A city driver, bitten by the mania for speed, would find them unutterably irritating, but they exactly suit a man who works his own land and is jealous of its boundaries.
The Quarta road, doubtless a former cow-path, is such a one. Just a few hundred yards beyond the village it leaves the northbound highway and winds its way for five miles or so before rejoining it, only one mile farther on. The last section of it runs parallel to both highway and river, then, just half a mile away from the junction, it makes a right-angle turn and climbs straight up the bank. The farm known as the Cantone is there at the turn, with the road bounding it on two sides and the farm buildings right at the corner.
The curve is a dangerously blind one, and because the Quarta road runs by a number of properties and is the only line of communication between the village and the outlying community of Torricella, it is heavily travelled. The farmhouse is at the side of the road just before the right-angle turn to the east, and the barns, which are joined to it, just after. Between them lies the bare, rectangular barnyard, open towards the south and towards the river. The main entrance to the farm was originally at the south-east corner of the house.
All these topographical details serve only to explain something very simple: if some luckless fellow were to come carelessly out of the barnyard and another, equally luckless, were to drive at top speed towards the curve, it was obvious that they might run straight into each other. Something of the sort did happen, and as a result the gate was closed and creeper allowed to grow over it.
Marco Stocci had inherited the farm from his father, after many years of working at his side. Now he continued to work, with his wife and one hired man to help him. He was forty years old, but he had married late and Gisa, the eldest of his three children, was only just over twelve years old. With this family to bring up and a large amount of land to till, it is not surprising that Marco was a difficult and sometimes intractable man. He had an exceedingly quick temper and if his children annoyed him, he struck out at them with a violence which might have caused pain even to a grown person. The two little boys, eight and ten years old, took all this in a sporting spirit and were careful only to stay out of his reach. But twelve-year-old Gisa had a more sentimental nature and was mortally afraid of her father. Being a delicate and sensitive child she suffered most when he struck her in the presence of strangers, and in this he seemed to take particular joy. The last time that Marco mistreated his daughter was when the barnyard was full of men who had come for the threshing.
The threshing was a meagre affair that year; after an unusually severe winter, the wheat yielded very little grain. Marco Stocci was boiling over with resentment. Every now and then he plunged his hand into the sack hanging under the threshing-machine, pulled out a fistful of grain and then put it back, cursing. There was another major worry on his mind: his best cow was mortally ill and the vet showed no signs of coming. His two sons, aware of the oppressive atmosphere, had taken to the bush, but Gisa had been given the job of carrying water to the men on the machine and could not get away. The vet arrived around noon when the men had just come in from the fields and were sitting down to lunch, amid considerable confusion. He went to look at the ailing cow, wrote out a prescription, and said to Stocci:
“The pharmacy’s closed at this hour. At three o’clock, when it reopens, send someone there to pick up this medicine. I’ll be back at four to give the injection.”
While the men lingered over their lunch in the cool hall, Stocci went into the parlour. He remembered that the pharmacist had sent him a bill the month before and it seemed like a good time to pay it. The bill was in a yellow envelope; it came to 4,500 liras, which meant that 10,000 liras would easily cover the present prescription as well as those that had gone before. He put the prescription into a pink envelope, lying on his desk, together with a 10,000-lira note. Then he thought it would be simpler to have everything together, and put it all in the pharmacist’s yellow envelope.
It was a hot day, and the men were anxious to finish the threshing early and go on to another job. Stocci had barely enough time to eat a few mouthfuls of lunch and gulp down half a bottle of wine before they were ready to return to work. At half past two, when the machine was just about to swallow up the last bale of wheat, Stocci remembered the vet and the sick cow and called to his daughter:
“Take the yellow envelope from the parlour table and run to the pharmacy. Hand him the envelope and then wait for what he gives you. Hurry!”
Gisa look the envelope and started off, walking alongside her bicycle, as her parents had always told her she should do until she was on the open road. She went through the gate and continued to walk until she was round the dangerous curve. Then she mounted the bicycle and rode to the village by the shortest road, which was that along the bank of the river. When she came back the threshing was over, and while some of the men were mak
ing the machine ready to go, the others were cooling off with glasses of wine. Stocci was in the loft, over the sealed door between the house and the barn, and when he saw Gisa arrive with a small parcel attached to the handlebars of her bicycle, he called down from the window:
“Have you got everything?”
“Yes, father.”
“How much change did he give you?”
“What change?” she stammered.
“Change from the 10,000 liras that were in the envelope!”
“There were two sheets of paper in the envelope, and nothing more,” she said, shaking her head.
Money is a sore subject where a peasant is concerned, because it is so very hard for him to come by. It’s safer to cut off his ear than to touch his money. And so Stocci let out a loud cry.
“Nothing more! I put the money in with my own hand! And now you’ve gone and lost it, you little good-for-nothing! If you don’t find it, I’ll kill you!”
Blind anger made the veins stand out on his forehead and muddled his brain. Not content with shouting, he started to climb down the wooden ladder up which he was later to carry sacks of wheat. And Gisa, instead of waiting for him, fled in terror. She jumped on to the bicycle and pedalled furiously in the direction of the gate. Her father ran after her, but she had a head start, and had already reached the road. The road was covered with gravel, and as she turned to the right, she lost control and went off to the extreme left, at the edge of the ditch. Just then a truck roared down the road at full speed, and as it cleared the curve Gisa was directly in its way. She was killed on the spot, in plain sight of her father.
This was why Stocci closed the gate to his farm. He fastened it with a heavy chain and lock, and put the key in his pocket so that no one could ever go through the gate again. The portion of the highway which ran parallel to the country road, some hundred and fifty feet away, was connected with it at another place, where there was no blind corner. The creeper, which formerly had covered only the gate-posts, now ran over all the iron grating. After a month had gone by, Stocci recovered a measure of calm. He was not very different from what he had been before, but he no longer shouted, and he let his wife look after the little boys.
One of the gate-posts was up against the corner of the house, while the other marked the beginning of the hedge which separated the barnyard from the road. Beside the latter post grew a tall poplar tree, and in the summer Stocci sat in its shade looking out through the over-grown bars of the closed gate at the dusty, white road, with the sun beating upon it.
It was an August afternoon, and the air was particularly heavy. Almost everyone was asleep in the river valley, and silence and solitude reigned. Stocci sat under the tree, staring at the gate. Suddenly someone rode up the road on a bicycle and stopped directly in front of it. The leaves had grown so thick that Stocci could not make out who it was. He got up and went nearer. It was Gisa, staring at him out of her deep blue eyes. Stocci searched his vest pocket for the key. The lock was so rusty that the key was hard to turn, and it was no easy job to tear away the vine, but there was a feverish strength in Stocci’s hands and soon he had the gate open.
“Come in,” he said to his daughter, but she only shook her head, remounted the bicycle, and rode off towards the fatal curve.
For a minute Stocci could not move. But when she was out of sight he ran back to his own bicycle, which was leaning against the wall of the house. He leaped on to the saddle and pedalled out through the open gate, just as fast as Gisa had pedalled to her death before him. He skidded on the gravel and veered to the left just in time for the luckless driver coming round the curve to find him in his way and run him down.
It was two o’clock in the afternoon, and old Antonietta, whose insomnia made her the only person left awake in the heat, swore that she saw Stocci and Gisa riding their bicycles along the road in front of her house. They rode side by side, in true cyclists’ fashion, and every now and then they looked at each other and smiled.
Sheer imagination, of course. But in the secret compartment of Stocci’s wallet they found a pink envelope containing the 10,000-lira note which Gisa had never lost because her father, in the confusion, had never put it in with the bill and the prescription. This part of the story is absolutely true, and Stocci’s widow gave the 10,000-lira note to Don Camillo.
“Say some masses,” she told him.
“For whose soul?” he asked her.
“For both of them, Father.”
So spake Stocci’s widow, and she closed the gate again, this time with the aid of a blow-lamp. After which the creeper resumed its temporarily interrupted process of growing.
Lullaby
PEPPONE sat in front of the fireplace, while his wife and children set the supper-table, at the same time watching the pot and frying-pan on the stove. Just then Smilzo burst into the house with a large rolled-up paper in one hand.
“Here’s the corrected proof, Chief,” he said. “If it’s O.K., we’re ready to print it.”
“Stand away,” ordered Peppone. “I want to get the general effect.”
Smilzo stepped several steps back, unrolling the paper. At this distance the poster was most effective. It stated very clearly that a Very Important Party Person would come to the village at three o’clock Saturday afternoon and explain to the citizenry “the true story of the Hungarian counter-revolution”.
“All right,” said Peppone. “The posters have got to be up by tomorrow morning.”
After Smilzo had gone away, Peppone’s wife said:
“Haven’t you killed those poor devils enough by now?”
“What nonsense are you saying?” asked Peppone, wheeling brusquely around.
“It’s no nonsense. If you were an honest man, you’d get out in a hurry.”
Peppone was in no mood for an argument and so he turned back to the fire, with one parting shot over his shoulder.
“I’m an honest man. But a soldier can’t abandon his post just because the general has changed his tactics. Ours is a just struggle, because we’re fighting for the good of the working-class.”
“You don’t do much good to the working-class by killing it off,” said his wife severely. “They weren’t capitalists, they were peasants and workers, and students, peasants’ and workers’ sons.”
“That’s all propaganda,” jeered Peppone; “just the usual line.”
“Propaganda isn’t what goes over with me,” said his wife. “I listen to my conscience, and I’m getting out of the Women’s League, I can tell you.”
Peppone wasn’t prepared for such a drastic decision, and for a few minutes he was left speechless.
“Keep your mind on the supper,” he said in a surly voice. “I don’t feel like joking.”
“It’s no joke,” she retorted, and taking a card out of the top bureau drawer she tore it into tiny pieces and threw them on the table. “There is my membership,” she said, “and tomorrow morning I’ll go and tell Gisella to take my name off the list.”
Peppone jumped to his feet in a towering rage and shook a fist in his wife’s face.
“You’ll do no such thing,” he shouted. “You’ll stay right here. I wear the trousers in this house.”
Peppone’s wife wasn’t a woman to be easily buffaloed. Taking advantage of the fact that she was on the other side of the table from Peppone, she seized the pot and frying-pan off the stove and threw their contents down the sink.
“If you wear the trousers, then eat the supper.”
Such a bit of rebellion would have indisposed the most peaceful of men, and Peppone was anything but peaceful. Because of his build and masculine dignity he couldn’t very well jump over the table, but he did move with astonishing swiftness to lay hands on his wife. He had counted without her bodyguards, however, and his impetus was checked by four little children crawling around his legs and shattering his eardrums with their cries. A second later his wife had disappeared up the stairs and his pursuit was blocked by the attic door.
&
nbsp; “Open up, or I’ll break through!” he roared, hammering at it with his fists.
When he received no answer, he threw the full weight of his shoulder against the door and erupted into the attic, which, to his discomfiture, was empty. His wife had climbed through the skylight on to the roof, and there, in spite of the darkness, Peppone finally detected her, hanging on to a chimney. His rage was transformed into worry and he drew back, with cold sweat breaking out on his forehead. Meanwhile the children too had reached the attic, weeping and calling for their mother.
“Shut up and get out of here!” said Peppone irritatedly. Fearfully they retreated towards the door, until the oldest suddenly broke away from the rest, scuttled up the ladder standing under the skylight, and joined his mother on the roof. With this Peppone turned tail and fled.
When Peppone came home, after midnight, he found things just as he had left them: the table still set and the scraps of the membership card scattered all over it. The big double bed in the bedroom was empty and so were the beds of the children. The rebels, all five of them, had taken refuge in the room which had formerly belonged to his wife’s parents. Peppone made a feeble attempt to force the door but soon realized that it was barricaded. Back in the empty, disorderly kitchen, where the fire in the stove was dead and cold, he attempted to stay his appetite with bread and cheese, but they only made his stomach turn over. Before going out again he knocked once more at the rebels’ door.
“Tomorrow noon, if I don’t find lunch, I’ll smash everything in sight.”
“Smash what you please,” his wife answered calmly. “Either you let me go and see Gisella, or else tomorrow you’ll find the house empty.”
Peppone started to kick at the door, but the children’s weeping and wailing caused him to desist.
Don Camillo and the Devil Page 11
