Moscardino (5 page)

Grumpy got better. Sleeps now and again with Sabina.

Cleofe weaned the baby, anointing her teats with bitter aloe.

Don Pietro was deaf, he was seventy-one with a few smooth grey hairs more or less oily hung over his ears and straggled over his low forehead with three serpentine wrinkles scarcely showing in the thin olive hide.

Prolix by nature, knobby of nose he shaved his dry face daily. On Fridays he distributed alms to the poor of his parish lined up according to the sexes right and left before his front door on the side toward the mountain where the sun never comes in winter.

Not far from the house the mountain sweats; smooth grottoes cut in under the cliff with fungus-covered crevices, the sweat freezes with incredible icicles at its edge, exuded tears formed into glass work, as if
the high altar were inverted by conjury candles without flamelets but lit from inside with prodigious transparency.

If a few wooden goats had climbed onto those blackish cavities, a shepherd with a crook and a brigand's hat, it would have made a grot-toed presepio to be boxed in behind glass.

Not until April when the rain is tepid and the hollow under the cliff is warmed by the sprouting moss and by other delights of God invisible to us do the fantastic candles wholly drop off and the shadows cease to play in magic luminosity.

In April after the brief rains, the sky clears, the incredible glass work melts from the hills, carrying rotten leaves with it, the grottoes are washed and retinted. The pebbles of the walks are yellowed with mud, the feet of the poor therewith splashed. The rope sandals have lost their heels and the soles worn to a frazzle from being used all the winter.

Don Pietro Galanti considered his poor, saw them as souls in purgatory that see God and remain in torment, half in joy half in sorrow.

Don Pietro's poor have their feet in the mud and wait to be un-famished by providence, the sky is clear and nightingales are making new nests, the peach trees reflower and the orange trees in the gardens of the rich are pearled with new white blossoms.

Don P.G. opened his door at ten A.M. every Friday. He pauses a moment on the threshold to make quite sure there are no infiltrations of poor from outside his parish limits.

Then he emerges with his cloth purse containing the chicken feed.

The men lift their hats, the women stretch out their hands, “God reward you in paradise” was the usual verbal manifestation of gratitude, when not augmented by other explanations, excuses, after the admonitions inseparable from the eleemosynary act.

Don P.G.'s gabble annoyed the women particularly and he was specially and nauseously longwinded with widows. He required peculiar religious observance and exemplary conduct from widows.

On Sunday Don Pietro said the ten o'clock mass and his poor flocked to the balustrade, otherwise no hand-out the following Friday.

He came slowly out of the sacristy so as to have time to count his poor. The altar boy meanwhile put the missal on the reading stand, set out the cruets of water and wine, and stood patiently at the foot of the altar steps chewing over joyously the next week's freedom consoling himself with the idea that the next week's longwindedness would fall on the junior clerk his companion.

Ten o'clock mass in San Lorenzo at the altar of the warrior saint Discoglio lasted an hour, invariably. That is until the start of the other
mass said by Don Caesar, the other thin priest. Don Pietro's opposite in temperament and in habits.

Don Caesar sang out of tune, had no manners, loose-jointed as the sandy cat from the nun's pharmacy, he loped up the altar steps, his head moving on springs, his hooded eyes blinking against the candle light trying to find the rubrics in the missal, in fact rather like the royal blackbird in the Piazza butcher shop, pecking at the raw tripe which its owner stuffed through the wire bars of its cage.

Don Caesar thin, tobacco stained, choleric, bungling, liberal, untidy, boozy, impatient at the door of the sacristy, his legs nervous, and tapping his heels on the stone step near the bell tower, with his eye glued on the altar of the warrior saint Discoglio, awaited for Don P.C. to get to the Salveregina and leave room at the altar.

The little bell for Don Caesar's mass broke in without manners on the opening words of Don P.G.'s Salveregina, and shocked the sensibilities of Don Pietro who despite his deafness always heard the bell and felt as if it were a set of rude words addressed to him personally, and thought within himself of blasphemy and the sin of him who approacheth the altar fasting but with his heart full of wrath and presumption.

They passed midway before the High Altar, one with his eyes sparkling with hurry, the other lowering his so as not to look at him, and
seeming to nod to each other as they both bent head and knee before the sacrament of the Most High.

Don Lorenzo, the abbé, was not an ordained priest and did not come in for the annuity.

He had been to the seminary before his father's death but had forgotten whatever scraps of Latin had been poked into his block. He had even forgotten the Paternoster and the Salveregina and when he served at mass he mumbled at random clucking in his throat like the women of the people when they try to join in the Latin litany.

He had been thrown out of the seminary for keeping his hands in the slits of his soutane. Up till then his father had been supplicant, had begged the Archbishop time and again to find some way to consecrate him so that he could get the annuity, after which he promised to shut him up in a monastery so that with patience and God's will he might then get a little sense and education.

If his father had lived he would have fixed it one way or another; he would have taught him to read the missal by ear and from memory; he would have had him anointed priest so that he could get the annuity.

Instead of which, he had been left to himself in the courtyard, under the orange trees, to count the buckets of water which Don P.G.'s servant pulled up to water the tubs from Montelupo, and finally forgot the inscriptions on them and the conception of the bottoms of his pockets; forgot that pockets have bottoms.

Don Pietro Galanti had to restart with the first exercises. He kept the house key and watched him by night. Lorenzo was put on rigid abbé's regime “rules for ecclesiastics” as Don Pietro called it, and had so impressed the abbé with this set of rules for ecclesiastics that he now kept his eyes on the clock for lessons and meals.

The house, watched by Don Pietro, took on new aspect. The abbé occasionally went to Cleofe's room, she was half the time in bed, half in the arm-chair. But he no longer smiled at her or kept his hands in his pockets; he stood mute and looked at her in terror as if my grandfather's shadow might at any instant appear.

Sometimes when Cleofe slept he was moved to tears, thinking of his mother nailed inside that box under the ground.

He felt Cleofe's death coming, because her breath came so gently, her eyes were sunk, her pallor.

Cleofe seeing him at her bedside so often and so changed, showed a maternal tenderness for him.

He blushed, began to shake again, and looked toward the door.

He felt a new attraction toward Cleofe, and thanks to this feeling he tried to look different. He had a sense of well-being, of self-respect, a sense of being alive, a sense of life, now, a bit late, just as he had learned to walk late.

He now seemed to see clear inside himself, he had new feelings never known before now. Setting his eyes forward toward death he
seemed to see the limits of life, . . . opening an unknown world, a hidden treasure.

Now he could even shed tears, not for his bodily aches and pains but for his soul in torment. So that, still seeing his mother's coffin being lowered into the grave, he was moved by Cleofe's lips sketching a smile for him.

What is life anyway if it be not softened by such tenderness for one another?

To feel that someone cares, as your own mother had, after your mother has gone under the earth.

To feel the desire to clasp the person loved, until she can no longer breathe, to be wholly united with her body. To take something eternal from her lips which can not be said with words. There it is. One could be happy in this world if the devil didn't take up arms against you.

He crossed himself, so that the devil shouldn't appear and blot out his reason.

Before summer came, the doctor ordered sea air for Cleofe during the spring and part of July . . . because she had suffered so much, passed a horrible winter always shut in her bedroom.

The days began to lengthen and Cleofe had been getting up for several weeks. She coughed less; but if she went down into the garden and walked up the stairs afterward she was weighed down with
enervating weakness as if she had climbed a mountain. She broke into light sweat toward nightfall, her cheeks got red and at once a light sleep like a slight torpor obliged her to close her eyes and she would stay in a doze for hours.

It had been a stiff winter, the grottoes, the river's high banks, the ravines had been constantly frozen. The water in the ravines and rivers could be seen working along with difficulty under a thick plate of ice, seeming to suffer from want of air.

It must have been gurgling loudly, whirling strongly, because it shot up at the edge of the ice all foamy. The branches, thistles, dry leaves borne along in the torrents had been caught fast in the freeze, imprisoned as if asleep, like birds in a cage of water.

The wheels of the sawmills were ringed with short thick candles of ice, with filaments and drops like pin-wheels for the Madonna del Carmine, curious boughs and branchings were formed in the riverbeds as if half sculptor's fine marble, half mottle in the rough stone ways gouging the bottom. Even the horse turds and cow droppings were made fantastic and precious between the icy mud of the cart tracks.

So after the feast of St. Discoglio, new varnished by old Ciampino who was also church upholsterer and decorator, there reappeared after many years the fine old
giardiniera
wagon, six-seater all new black and yellow with the curtains of heavy linen fringed with blue.

Grumpy was bundled up, cocoon'd with a grey shawl round his neck, such as his father had used, more grouchy he had aged so much in so short a time that many people seeing him staggering into the wagon thought of his dad, not merely because of the shawl but from facial resemblance.

He stood beside Sabina who was in her new clothes with circular earrings and with a pink handkerchief over her head stuck on with a gold pin that looked like a nail rammed through the nape of her neck. Her face blazing, gesticulating and rolling her eyes and her hips shaking with the wobbling of the wagon. Vibrating with full contentment she alone in that vehicle felt, and was, boss, brazen, proud of feeling that she was the real boss of a six-seater with sky blue cushions covered with ticking that could carry so many people.

In town clothes the family doctor, bachelor, red-skinned, sat opposite Don Pietro Galanti who shot knifed glances stealthily at him when turning a leaf of his breviary.

Cleofe had the lowered curtain behind her serving as support and cushion to what was left of her saddened body.

And the abbé Don Lorenzo next to her with his little shiny eyes, tickled the baby's neck as it sat in Cleofe's lap.

Sabina and the red doctor were the live animals in that funeral coach. Their thought was clear, concealed by nothing save the conventions of the moment. She burning with the exuberance of healthy vitality, he a man of scant learning and no scruples whatever.

Their carnal eagerness was of a certainty visible to everyone. The others moused round the same question, of flesh in heat, with tortuous imagination, and turned in on themselves in their uneasiness.

Cleofe had her eyes on the frosted hills, on the olives shot with sunlight, which fled under her gaze as she was carried from them. She let herself be borne along as in a dream without thinking, as a soul in transmigration, as if her life were ending, gently, in beatitude, and the child which as yet had neither reason nor soul, slept cradled.

The red poppies amid the grain flashed into Grumpy's eyes. The red head of the medico jutted out like a flashing ball of copper, speckled now and again by rays of sun at play in the branches. Dizziness, dazzle, those splotches of sun leapt from the doctor's red poll onto Grumpy's hands and played over them, and onto his grey shawl, his face, and bit into him with a voluptuous malignity.

Grumpy felt the pain almost on the surface of his skin. He had been feeling pain ever since the doctor had asked to go with them and use the sixth free seat in the carry-all.

But as they went along this painful sensation grew more and more
unbearable till he had to scratch his hands now and again as if stung by an insect, and tap his face now and again. He had to keep from looking at the doctor's head because he always met the watchful eyes so near him . . . as if they were right to strip Sabina stark naked.