Read Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories Online
Authors: GIOVANNI VERGA
Cavalleria rusticana and Other Stories (30 page)
The orphan of the chemist stole Neli Pirru’s wife from him, and thought it a good way of avenging himself against the man who had killed his father.
Now and again, when the woman had qualms because she feared her husband would slash her face when he came out of prison, he would say, ‘Don’t worry, he’ll never come out.’ Nobody gave them a second thought any more, except for a few mothers and a few older men whenever they cast their eyes towards the plain, where the city lay, or else on Sundays, when they saw the others calmly
discussing their affairs with the bigwigs in front of the club, cap in hand, which only went to show that the poor always came off worse in the end.
The trial lasted three years!
Imagine!
Three whole years locked up without a glimpse of the sun.
The accused looked like so many corpses dug up from the graveyard, every time they were led handcuffed into the courtroom.
Everyone who could manage it dashed in from the village as though to a festival: witnesses, relatives, rubbernecks, so as to take a look at their fellow-villagers cooped up in the dock like so many fattening fowl, which was all they became after such a long time in jail.
And there was Neli Pirru, standing face to face with the chemist’s son, who had played him such a trick to become his in-law!
They were made to stand up one after the other.
‘What is your name?’ And each of them heard himself spouting it out, name, surname and what he had done.
The lawyers fought it out in their broad-sleeved gowns amid the hubbub, getting over-excited and foaming at the mouth, then drying themselves off with their white handkerchiefs and taking a pinch of snuff.
The judges were dropping off to sleep so often behind their spectacle lenses that your heart absolutely froze.
In the jury-box opposite sat twelve good men and true, so tired and bored by the proceedings that they were yawning, scratching their beards, or twittering among themselves.
Of course people said it was lucky for them that the good men and true were not from that village up in the hills, when they had struck a blow for freedom.
The poor devils in the dock tried to read their faces.
Then they went away to have a chat among themselves, and the prisoners waited, pale in the face, their eyes fixed on that closed door.
When they came back, the foreman, looking almost as white-faced as the accused, speaking with his hand on his belly, said, ‘On my honour and on my conscience…!’
As they were putting on his handcuffs again, the charcoal-burner muttered, ‘Where are you taking me?
To prison?
What for?
I never even got a square metre of land out of it!
They told me it was all in the cause of freedom…!’
Springtime
When Paolo had arrived in Milan with his music under his arm – at that time of life when the sun shines every day, and all the women you meet are beautiful – he had met the Princess.
The girls in the workshop called her that because she had an aristocratic little face and delicate hands, but above all because she was rather proud, and in the evenings, when her companions burst into the Galleria
1
like a flock of sparrows, she preferred to stride majestically through Milan to the Porta Garibaldi
2
alone, with her white scarf wrapped neatly round her head.
That was how she met Paolo, as he wandered about engrossed in his musical thoughts, and his dreams of youth and fame.
It was one of those wonderful evenings when he was feeling light as air, the better able to ascend to the clouds and the stars without being dragged to earth by the demands of his stomach and the emptiness of his purse.
He took pleasure in linking his pleasant daydreams to the pretty little woman who was hurrying on ahead of him, raising her neat grey skirt whenever she was forced to descend from the pavements on the tips of her elegant, mud-flecked boots.
He watched two or three times as she did this, and in the end he was at her side.
When he first spoke to her she burst out laughing; in fact, she laughed every time he caught her up, then walked straight on.
If she had taken notice of him the first time, he would no longer have bothered to pursue her.
Then finally, one evening when it was raining and Paolo still possessed an umbrella, they found themselves walking arm in arm along the road, which by that time was almost deserted.
She told him she was called the Princess, because, as often happens, she was still too shy to reveal her real name, and he walked her back to her house, a stone’s throw from the Porta Garibaldi.
She
wanted no one, least of all Paolo, to see inside the sort of palace at thirty
lire
a month where the Princess’s parents were living.
They carried on in this way for two or three weeks.
Paolo would wait for her in the Galleria, near the Via Silvio Pellico end, shivering in his summer coat that stuck to his legs in the January wind.
She would come quickly up to meet him, holding her muff to her face, red with the cold, and link her arm under his.
Then they would amuse themselves counting the paving-stones as they sauntered along in two or three degrees of frost.
Paolo would often chatter away about fugues and canons, and the girl would ask him in Milanese dialect to spell it out to her more clearly.
The first time she went up to his tiny room on the fifth floor, and heard him play one of his romances on the piano, she began to understand all the things he had been telling her about.
At once curious and bewildered, she gazed around the room in a sort of daze, felt the tears welling up in her eyes, and gave him a passionate kiss.
But that happened some time later.
At the dressmaker’s, behind the cardboard boxes and the heaps of flowers and the ribbons scattered across the big worktable, they whispered about the Princess’s new ‘sweetheart’, and had a good laugh over ‘this new fellow’, who went about in an overcoat that looked as if it had come from the rag-and-bone merchant, and who never bought his girl-friend a shred of clothing.
The Princess pretended to hear nothing, shrugged her shoulders, and got on with her sewing, quiet as a mouse and proud as a peacock.
The penniless budding genius had plied her with so much talk of future fame, and all the other splendid things that followed in its wake, that at least she couldn’t accuse him of trying to pass himself off as a Russian prince or a Sicilian baron.
On one occasion, just after the end of the month, he tried to present her with a slender gold ring with a chip of synthetic pearl mounted on it.
She blushed and thanked him, overcome for the first time with emotion, and pressed his hands tightly into her own, but refused to accept it.
Perhaps she had some inkling of the privations that the trivial bauble would cause her Verdi of the future to suffer.
True, she had accepted a great deal more from the Other One without displaying so many scruples, or so much gratitude either.
But anyway, to do her lover proud, she went on a spending
spree, picked up a pretty little dress on credit in the Largo Cordusio,
3
and bought a shawl for 20
lire
on the Corso di Porta Ticinese, along with some costume jewellery that was on offer in the Galleria Vecchia.
The Other One had whetted her appetite for stylish things, and encouraged her to consider them a necessity.
She enjoyed hearing Paolo telling her how beautiful she looked, as it pleased her to think that for the first time none of her attractive appearance was owed to her lover.
On Sundays, if the weather was fine, they would go for a stroll in the country, or along the city walls, to Isola Bella, or Isola Botta,
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or one of those other dusty, so-called islands on terra firma.
They spent freely on those days, so much so that when the time came to reckon it all up, the Princess worried about all the mad things they had got up to during the day.
Feeling sorry for herself, she would go and rest her elbows on the ledge of the window looking out on the garden.
He would come over and join her, and as they stood there, side by side and shoulder to shoulder, with their eyes fixed on the patch of green below them, while the sun slowly disappeared behind the Arco del Sempione,
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they were overwhelmed with a sweet sensation of melancholy.
When it was raining they had other diversions: they would take the bus from Porta Nuova to Porta Ticinese, and from Porta Ticinese to Porta Victoria,
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and for thirty
soldi
they would ride around like a pair of aristocrats.
The Princess would spend six whole days with her brass needles, making lace and embroidering it with voile flowers, and thinking only of the delights in store on Sunday.
On the day before and the day after, the young man would often go without a decent meal.
In this way they spent the whole of the winter and the following summer, playing at being in love as children play at being soldiers or at staging processions.
She would not allow their relationship to go any further, and the enamoured youth felt himself too poor to ask any more of her.
She was truly in love with him, but the Other One had been the cause of a great many tears, and she was now convinced she knew better.
The poor girl never even suspected that by not throwing herself into his arms after what she had been through with the Other One, her delicate instincts were suggesting a way of proving she really loved him.
When October came along, he was seized with a bout of autumn
melancholy, and proposed they should spend the day together in the country, at Lake Como.
They took advantage of a day when her father was away to make good their escape, a costly escape that would leave them fifty
lire
the poorer, and spent the whole day in Como.
On the way there, Paolo had asked the Princess what she would do if she were forced to stay away from home for the night, and she had laughed and said, ‘I’d say I spent the night at the workshop to finish off some urgent work.’ So when the hotel manager asked them if they would be going back by the evening train, she lowered her head and told him they would be leaving next morning.
As soon as they were alone she was aflame with desire, and let herself go completely.
How different it now became from the carefree days when they wandered openly arm in arm beneath the blossoming horse-chestnuts, when she paid no heed to the fine silk dresses that passed her by in four-horse carriages, or to the splendid headgear of the young men who rode around puffing their cigars!
How different from those Sundays they had spent together, painting the town red with five
lire,
or from those wonderful evenings when they would hold each other’s hands as they stood for an hour on the doorstep before parting, exchanging a score of words at most, while people passed hurriedly on about their business!
When they began they had no thought of one day becoming lovers in earnest, and now that they had the proof they were filled with new anxieties.
Paolo had never said a word to her about the Other One, whose existence he had assumed from the moment the Princess had first taken shelter beneath his umbrella.
He had assumed it from a hundred trifling and insignificant details, from certain ways she reacted, from the way certain words were spoken.
But now he was gripped by an insane curiosity to know more.
She was fundamentally honest, and told him everything.
Paolo said nothing, and gazed at the curtains surrounding that huge hotel bed on which unknown hands had left their indelible mark.
They knew that some day their happiness would come to an end.
Both of them knew it, but they dismissed the thought from their minds, perhaps because the joys of youth still lay ahead of them.
Paolo, in fact, experienced a kind of relief after hearing the girl confess to him, as
though all at once her confession freed him from all scruples, and made the moment to bid her farewell less painful.
At that stage in their relationship, they both kept thinking about it, but calmly, like something inevitable, a bad omen to which they resigned themselves in advance.
But for the moment they were still in love, and held each other tightly in their arms.
When the day came, it was another matter entirely.
The poor devil was badly in need of shoes and money.
His shoes had got worn out in the pursuit of his youthful ambitions and his daydreams of artistic fame – those ill-fated daydreams that pour into Milan from every corner of Italy to turn pale and fade away beneath the shining glass canopy of the Galleria, in the cold hours of night or the rueful hours of the afternoon.
The heedless follies of his love were costing him dear!
When you are twenty-five years old, rich only in your mind and your feelings, you have no right to love any woman, even a princess; you have no right to avert your gaze for a single moment, under the penalty of plunging into the abyss, from the splendid illusion that has kept you under its spell and may turn into the glittering star of your future; you must constantly move forward, ever forward, your eyes fixed eager and intent on that distant beacon, with a heart that is sealed, ears that are deaf, and a step that is steadfast and relentless, even if it should trample upon your own better feelings.
Paolo fell ill, and no one heard anything of him for three whole days, not even the Princess.
Then along came those days that seem dismal and unending, the days when people go for a stroll along the dusty roads beyond the city gates, or peer into the jewellers’ shop windows, or read the newspapers pinned up on the doors of the kiosks, the days when the water flowing beneath the bridges of the Naviglio
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makes you feel dizzy as you look up in fascination at the spires of the cathedral that are still reflected there.
As he waited for her in the Via Pellico, he noticed the cold more than before, the time seemed to drag, and the Princess no longer had the same carefree spring in her step.
Around that time he came into an enormous fortune, something like 4,000
lire
a year, to go pounding away at the piano in cafés and night clubs in America.
He took the job on as happily as if he’d had any choice in the matter, and turned his thoughts to the Princess.
That evening, like some dissolute man of means, he reserved a private alcove
at the Biffi
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and invited her to supper there.
He had received an advance of 100
lire
and spent a large portion of it.
The poor girl was wide-eyed with amazement at seeing such a feast laid out before her, and after coffee, feeling rather weak at the knees, she leaned back against the wall behind the divan where she was sitting.
She looked a little pale and a little sad, but more beautiful than ever.
Paolo kept pressing his lips against the nape of her neck.
She did not resist, but fixed her eyes on him in bewilderment, as though sensing that something unpleasant was going to happen.
He felt his heart turn to stone, told her how much he loved her, and asked her what she would do when they no longer saw one another.
The Princess said nothing, turned her head into the shadow, her eyes closed, and remained motionless in an effort to conceal the huge, glistening tears that rolled down her cheeks one after another.
When he saw her in tears he was taken by surprise: it was the first time he had known her to cry.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.
‘It’s nothing,’ she kept repeating, choking back her tears.
She was never very talkative, and was too proud to tell him what was upsetting her, like a small child.
‘Are you thinking about the Other One?’ It was the first time he had asked her such a question.
‘Yes!’ she said, nodding her head.
‘Yes!’ And it was true.
Whereupon she began to sob.
The Other One!
The very phrase signified the past; it signified days full of wonder and happiness, the springtime of her youth, her shallow affections destined to drag her in similar fashion from one Paolo to another, trying not to weep too much when she was sad, or rejoice too much when she was happy.
It signified the present as it moved into the past, and this young man, bound to her body and soul, who like the Other would become a stranger to her within another month, within another one or two years.
Paolo perhaps at that moment was vaguely turning over similar thoughts in his mind, but was not bold enough to tell her what he was thinking.
He simply held her tightly in his arms and began to cry himself.
How different from the laughter of their first meeting!
‘Are you leaving me?’ the Princess murmured.
‘Who told you that?’
‘No one, I just know, I can guess.
Are you leaving me?’
He nodded.
She stared at him for a moment with her eyes full of tears, then turned away, and wept quietly to herself.
After a while, perhaps because her mind was wandering or her feelings had got the better of her, she began to ramble on again, and told him what she had always concealed from him out of timidity or self-respect; she told him how the Other One had come into her life.
Her family was not very well off, in fact; her father had an ill-paid job in railway management, and her mother took in embroidery, but her eyesight was getting weaker all the time, which was why the Princess had taken a job in the fashion shop to eke out the family’s income.
Once she had started work, the rest: inevitably followed, in part because of the fine dresses she saw there, in part through the compliments they showered on her, in part through the example of others, in part through her own vanity, in part because it all seemed so natural, in part because her workmates encouraged her, and in part because that young man followed her wherever she went.
She had never thought it was wrong, except when she felt the need to keep it a secret from her parents.
Her father was a gentleman, her mother a saint; they would have died of grief if they had suspected she was having an affair, and would never have thought it possible that they had exposed their daughter to such a temptation.
She alone was to blame, but not really, so whose fault was it, then?
Certainly she would never have taken up with the Other One now that she had met her Paolo, and if Paolo left her she would never take up with anyone else.
