Last Tales (21 page)

“And where will you sleep yourself?” she asked him.

“I never sleep a whole night through,” he answered and sighed. “I wake up many times, go out and see whether it is south wind or north wind, east or west wind, and come back again. I shall look after the fire, so that the room shall not be cold when you wake up tomorrow.”

The touch of the goatskins on the hard floor was pleasing to her after her soft bed in Rome. But as again she looked at the old man, blowing on his fire, she called to mind the fools
who had shared that bed with her, and once more felt his loneliness akin to her own.

“Nay,” she said, “lie down with me here. You have told me that I need not fear you. The dip is burning down. Leave the fire, and lay you down to sleep as peacefully as, when you were a small child, you lay down by the side of your mother, who could sing to you.”

Laboriously the old man obeyed her order, first going down on his knees, then stretching himself out. Vaguely, for a short moment, the face of Lincoln, who had last lain close to her, ran through her mind. “Why must pity of human beings,” she asked herself, as again she chased away the picture, “forever suck the marrow from my bones?”

She said in the dark: “My small son Niccolo, I know that you have stolen apples, broken your little sister’s nose with a stone, and eaten human flesh. But all is still well between us, and our two heads can rest on the same pillow.”

A mighty, mute movement ran through the huge and coarse male body by her own; it was as if the bones in it were beginning to break. He raised one arm and dropped it heavily across her breast. His big head followed it; he bored it down into the freshness of her hair and the softness of her bosom beneath it—indeed, for a minute, like a babe seeking and pressing toward his mother’s nipple. At the moment when the spasm of his limbs dissolved, and he loosed himself from her, he was asleep. A short while after, she slept herself. Two or three times in the course of the night she woke up and heard him snoring lowly and deeply.

When she awoke it was light. She looked round to find out where she was. A basin of fresh water stood by the side of the couch, and she washed her face and combed her hair. At that the old man returned with a jug of hot goat’s milk and bade her good morning.

She looked up at him while she drank. “Now I am going away, Niccolo,” she said, “and I thank you for bread and onions, for wine and milk and shelter.”

“I would rather you stayed on,” he said.

“Speak not so,” said she. “Those are words that hurt my ears, and have hurt them too many times.”

“What words, then,” he asked, “should I speak to you that will not hurt your ears?”

“If you be my friend,” she said, “and if you wish to help me, you will answer the question which every day comes back and makes life burdensome to me.”

“If I can, I shall answer it,” he said.

“Tell me then,” said she, “whether to go to the right or to the left.”

He thought her question over. “And if I tell you, will you follow my advice?” he asked. “Will you care to know, as you are walking on and in the place you come to and where you sit down: Niccolo sent me here?”

“Yes,” she answered him. “Add now, Niccolo, you who are still allowed to remember, your weight to the weight of the forces which are sending me forth. It will do me good to think, wherever I go and in whatever places I sit down to rest: Niccolo sent me here.”

He again thought the matter over. “You are a lady,” he said, “unused to walking in the mountains. You will soon wish to sit down within a house. But in any house you walk into people will ask you who you are. And you will not tell who you are.”

“I cannot tell who I am,” she said.

“I know but of one house,” he said after a while, “into which people may go, and nobody will ask them who they are.”

“What house is that?” she asked.

“It is a church,” he said.

She laughed. “Are you a churchgoer, Niccolo?” she asked him.

“No,” he answered. “I have not been inside a church for sixty-five years. But when I was a child my mother took me
there, and sometimes in the ports the ship’s chaplain also took me to church with him.”

“And what kind of houses, then, are those churches?” she asked again.

“They are strange houses,” he said, “for they are called the houses of God, yet the doors are always open to people, and they have got seats for people in them. And in there someone is waiting for people to come. His name is Jesus and Christ, both names, and He is God and man, both.”

“Alas, the hard lot,” said she. “I, too, have heard of Him. He will have been pleasant to talk with, for He was highly urbane, and said things to people which they must have been happy to hear. He said: ‘Be ye therefore perfect!’ And I tell you, Niccolo, there is not a singer in the whole world who is not longing to hear those words spoken. Yet He went through much, even more than we. For He will, in His quality of God, have known man’s dreadful obstinacy, which may well be incomprehensible to a God. And He will also, in His quality of man, have known God’s terrifying fancifulness, incomprehensible to man.”

“Hush,” said the old man, obviously scared. “You must not speak like that. Such words as yours are called heresy, and if the people of the town heard them, they would throw stones at you too.”

“Nay, Niccolo,” said Pellegrina. “I have said these things to God. I may say them to men as well.”

“Think not so,” Niccolo said, more alarmed than before. “One may take many liberties with God which one cannot take with men. One may allow oneself many things, toward Him, which one cannot allow oneself toward man. And, because He is God, in doing so one will even be honoring Him.”

“We will not quarrel about theology, Niccolo,” said she. “Tell me, instead, whether the church of which you speak stands to the right or to the left.”

The old man took down the key from its nail, unlocked the door and walked outside the house with his guest of the night, to explain to her what way to take. There was a fine drizzling rain. Pellegrina, listening to him, with her left hand lifted up her skirt to start on her way down the muddy road.

When Niccolo had finished his directions, he stood silent. “You told me last night,” he said at last, “that the mouths of many fools had kissed your hand.”

“Yes,” said she, “many foolish mouths, filled with frivolity and flattery.”

The old man fumbled for her right hand and lifted it to his mouth. “And this mouth of mine, which you have made speak the truth to you,” he said, “has now kissed it.”

“Farewell,” she said.

“Farewell, Lady,” said he.

It was a Sunday morning and the Feast of the Rosary. Up in the rainy air the church bells were swinging and ringing, and people going to church carried umbrellas, and here and there in the narrow streets knocked against one another. Pellegrina walked along with them and came to the small square on which the church stood. In the porch to the church she stopped for a moment, the nave before her in spite of its candles looked a dark place to enter. But she bethought herself that she had for once been advised where to go, and that she ought to follow the advice.

The boys’ choir struck up the
Kyrie
, and on her chair she began to feel the cold of the room and the smells of damp clothes and of human bodies round her, and to wish that the service would come to an end.

But as, at the offertory, the shrill, innocent braying of many young singers ceased, one single clear boy’s voice took up the opening notes of the
Magnificat
. All alone, abandoned by the other voices and leaving them behind, it rose to the low ceiling of the church and reverberated from it.

A minute later a lady in the congregation fell forward on her knees, her head on the ledge of her prie-dieu. A couple of
women near her stirred on their chairs, believing her to be suddenly taken ill, then, looking at her silk gown, reflected: “A great
peccatrice
, of the great outside world, up here in our church has been struck down by the weight of her sins,” and sat on.

But Pellegrina was not struck down by any weight. Her body fell from her like a garment, because her soul went straight upwards with the tones. For the voice that gave them out was known to her. It was the voice of young Pellegrina Leoni.

At the sound of the first notes she did not believe her ears, but lifted her fingers to stop them. Then, as, in the “from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed,” she took in the ring and the timbre of the singing, she was filled with immense joy and was floating in light. After a long time she cried in her heart: “O Sweet. Sweetness of life! Welcome back.” And again after a very long time she laughed. Aware that it was unseemly to laugh in church she brought up her handkerchief to her face; when she took it back she found that it was drenched with tears.

Even when the young singer had long finished his solo, and her soul was slowly returning to her body, she remained on her knees. As in the end she looked up and gazed around her, the priest had read the last gospel, and the church was almost empty. But a little girl with two long black plaits, who had sat on a chair to her left, kept standing beside it, troubled by the idea that the fine, unknown lady might be dead. As slowly she got to her feet, her eyes met those of the child, and so radiant with happiness was the face of the woman that the little girl’s face, like a reflection in a mirror, broke into a smile.

“Who was it,” Pellegrina asked her, “that sang the
Magnificat?”

“It was Emanuele,” the child answered in a low, sweet voice.

“Who is Emanuele?” Pellegrina asked.

“Emanuele is my foster brother,” said the little girl.

Here the row of choir boys on their way out of the church passed the two. The girl indicated one of them. “That is Emanuele,” she whispered. Pellegrina tried to see the face pointed out to her, but things were swimming before her eyes; it passed by and was gone.

The little girl was still by her side. “What is your name?” Pellegrina asked her.

“Isabella,” the child answered.

“I shall be staying on here a little, Isabella,” said Pellegrina. “I became giddy a while ago, I know not why.”

In the afternoon of that same day Pellegrina took lodgings in the town with an old spinster by the name of Eudoxia, the very last of a family who had lived in their tall narrow house for two hundred years. Eudoxia sewed lace, and after she had come to be alone in the house and her old legs had grown too stiff to carry her up the stairs, she slept and cooked her meals on the ground floor, where she had her shop. The top flat of the house stood empty, furnished with worm-eaten and faded beds and chairs of ancient days. From its windows there was a wide view over the neighboring mountain slopes and the low land at their feet.

For a week Pellegrina sat by these windows and looked out. Many thoughts ran through her head. She reflected: “It is a strange thing that I should have known on my first arrival here that this town is the place in which one may stay on.” And on another day, recalling the row of village boys amongst whom Isabella had pointed out to her the singer of the
Magnificat:
“So you have, lost voice of mine, taken abode in a young breast, the breast of a peasant boy of the mountains whom, as he was herding his father’s goats on a slope, I might have passed in my carriage without noticing him. The gods disguise themselves cunningly, and will also, in their own time, don goatskins and sheepskins.”

Her landlady’s big gray cat took a fancy to Pellegrina and came up to lie on her window sill; he brought the old maid
herself up the stairs. To Eudoxia her lodger named herself Signora Oreste and explained that she was the widow of a world-famous singing master of Rome, who in his day had taught both great singers and princes and had traveled from court to court in Europe. Now, she said, she had been ill for a long time, and on the advice of the doctors had traveled up to the mountain town because of the excellency of its air and water, maybe she would some day make its name as famous as that of her husband.

After a while Pellegrina inquired about Emanuele. The old woman started upon the theme with unexpected solemnity. Emanuele, she said, was a brand plucked out of the fire. His father, who had been a distant cousin of Eudoxia’s, and his mother, who had come from Milan, once had owned a farmstead some way out of the town. Twelve years ago, when the boy was but a baby, a mountain slide had crushed the house with its stables and outbuildings. The husband and wife with their two little daughters, and their donkeys, cattle and goats had all perished, and the wife’s young brother, who was living with them, had had both legs smashed under the stones. But in the morning the child was found, unhurt and yelling for food, in the midst of the ruins. One might call it a miracle.

In very old days, Eudoxia explained, the town had possessed a priest who worked miracles, and whom the townspeople had wished to be made a saint. A deputation had traveled the long way to Rome to see the Pope on the matter, but nothing had come of it. From her account Pellegrina understood that since those days a bitterness had remained in the hearts of the town, together with a mystic hope of rehabilitation. Now many people felt that this child had been spared and chosen by Providence for great things in life, and that the village might still come to have a saint of its own. The pious Podesta, whose name was Pietro Rossati and who was a widower, had taken the small boy into his house and had him brought up with his own, only child. Emanuele,
Eudoxia thought, might become a priest. But he might also come to marry Pietro’s daughter—if so, he would make a greater match than he had been born for, but Pietro would not hold back the hand of his daughter from a husband picked out by the hand of the Lord. From the window Eudoxia pointed out the place where the lost farm had stood.

When she had gone, Pellegrina sat on, gazing toward the spot.

“I have heard,” she thought, “the story of the Phoenix which burns herself up in her nest and has her one egg hatched by the heat, because there must never be more than one Phoenix in the world. It is an old story. But God likes a
da capo
. Twelve years ago this boy was still a baby. He may well have been born at the hour of the Opera fire in Milan. Was, then, that fire in reality kindled by my own hand? And was the flaming death of the old Phoenix and the radiant birth of the young bird but one and the same thing?”