The House of Scorta (20 page)

T
he humidity made one’s skin sticky. There wasn’t a breath of wind to dry the body’s sweat. Elia walked slowly, so as not to soak his shirt, taking care to hug the walls in shade. He arrived before the great white gate of the cemetery and went inside.

At that hour, on the patron saint’s feast day, there was nobody around. The old women had got up early to put flowers on their late lamented husbands’ graves. It was all empty and silent.

He went down the lanes, surrounded by sunstruck white marble. He walked slowly, squinting to read the names of the dead etched in stone. All the families of Montepuccio were there. The Tavagliones, the Biscottis, the Espositos, the De Nittis. Fathers and sons, cousins and aunts. Everyone. Whole generations, co-existing in a garden of marble.

“I know more people here than in town,” Elia said to himself. “Those kids this morning were right. I’m a little old man. My loved ones are almost all here. I guess that’s how you can tell that the years have caught up with you.”

He found an odd sort of comfort in this idea. He was less afraid of dying when he thought of all those who had made the transition before him. Like a child who trembles in front of a ditch he must cross, but who, when he sees his friends jump and cross over to the other side, grows bold and thinks to himself: “If they can do it, so can I.” That’s exactly what he told himself. If all those others had died—and they were no braver or tougher than he—then he himself could die in turn.

He now approached the area where his family lay buried. Every one of his uncles had been interred with his wife. There wasn’t a vault big enough to hold all the Scortas. But they’d specifically requested not to be put too far away from one another. Elia took a few steps back and sat down on a bench. From where he was sitting, he could see them all. Uncle Mimì
vaffanculo
. Uncle Peppe
pancia piena
. Uncle Faelucc’. He sat there a long time, under the sun, forgetting the heat, paying no attention to the sweat running down his back. He thought of his uncles, and what they had meant to him. He thought of the stories they had told him. He had loved those three men with all his childish heart. More than his own father, who had often seemed like a stranger to him, uneasy at family reunions, unable to pass on a bit of himself to his sons. Whereas the three uncles, for their part, were forever looking after him and Donato, with the generosity of mature, somewhat world-weary men towards new and innocent children. He couldn’t begin to compile an exhaustive list of everything he’d gotten from them. Words. Gestures. Values, too. He realized this now that he was a father and his grown-up daughter sometimes chided him for his ways of thinking, which she said were outdated. Such as never talking about money. Giving one’s word of honor.

Being hospitable. Bearing grudges. He got all this from his uncles, and he knew it.

Elia sat there on his bench, letting thoughts merge with memories, a smile on his lips, surrounded by cats that seemed to have come up out of the earth. Was the heat of the sun, beating straight down on him, making him hallucinate? Or were the vaults really letting some of their tenants out for a brief moment? His vision seemed to blur, and then he saw his uncles right there, barely two hundred yards away. He saw Domenico, Giuseppe, and Raffaele, all sitting around a wooden table, playing cards, as they loved to do, on the Corso in the late afternoon. He was dumbfounded and didn’t move. He could see them so clearly. They’d aged a little, perhaps, but barely. Each still had the same tics, the same gestures, the same profile. They were laughing. The cemetery belonged to them. And the empty lanes echoed with the sweet sound of cards being slapped down on the table.

Sitting slightly apart from the table was Carmela. She was watching the card game, berating one of her brothers when he made a bad move, or defending the one that the others ganged up on.

A drop of sweat ran down from Elia’s eyebrows and made him close his eyes. He became aware that the sun was beating down hard. He stood up and, without taking his eyes off his loved ones, he withdrew, walking backwards. Soon he could no longer hear their conversation. He crossed himself and commended their souls to God, humbly begging Him to let them play cards until the end of time.

Then he turned around and left.

H
e felt an overwhelming desire to talk to don Salvatore. Not as parishioner to village priest— Elia seldom went to church—but man to man.

The old Calabrian was still alive, keeping the slow rhythms of old age. A new priest had arrived in Montepuccio, a young man from Bari named don Lino, whom the women liked. They adored him, in fact, and were forever saying that it was time Montepuccio had a modern priest who understood the problems of the day and knew how to speak to the young. And don Lino did know how to touch young people’s hearts. He became their confidant. He played guitar late into the night at parties on the beach in summer. He reassured the town’s mothers, savored their pies, and listened to their marital problems with a smile full of restraint and concentration. Montepuccio was very proud of its new priest. All of Montepuccio, in fact, except for the old folks, who saw him only as a flirt. What they’d liked most about don Salvatore was his frankness and peasantlike roughness; to them, the
Barese
²³
was not of the same mettle as his predecessor.

Don Salvatore had refused to leave Montepuccio. He wanted to live out his last days there, among his flock, in his church. It was impossible to tell how old the Calabrian priest was. He was an old man with wiry muscles and a harrier’s gaze. He was getting on towards eighty, and time seemed to have forgotten him. Death would not come.

Elia found him in his little garden, feet in the grass and a cup of coffee in hand. Don Salvatore invited him to sit down beside him. The two men loved each other deeply. They chatted a bit, then Elia opened up to his friend and told him what was tormenting him.

“The generations follow one after the other, don Salvatore. But what does it mean, when all is said and done? Do we get anywhere in the end? Look at my family, the Scortas. Each one fought hard, in his way, and each, in his way, managed to outdo himself. To get where? To me? Am I really any better than my uncles were? No. So what was the purpose of all their effort? There wasn’t any, don Salvatore. There wasn’t any. It’s enough to make you cry.”

“Yes,” replied don Salvatore, “the generations follow one after the other. One simply has to do one’s best, pass things on, and make way for the others.”

Elia remained silent a moment. He liked the priest’s way of not trying to simplify problems or give them a positive turn. Many churchmen have that flaw. They sell heaven to their flocks, which leads them to make silly speeches about cheap consolation. Not don Salvatore. It was enough to make you think his faith was no consolation whatsoever to him.

“I was just asking myself,” the priest continued, “before you arrived, what the town had become. It’s the same problem, on a different scale. You tell me, Elia: what has Montepuccio become?”

“A bag of money on a pile of stones,” Elia said bitterly. “Right. Money has driven them mad. With the desire to have it, and the fear of not having any. Money is their sole obsession.”

“Maybe so,” Elia replied, “but you have to admit that the Montepuccians aren’t starving to death anymore. Children no longer get malaria, and all the houses have running water.”

“Yes,” said don Salvatore, “we’ve grown rich, but who will ever measure the impoverishment that has gone hand-in-hand with this evolution? The town’s life is poor. These fools haven’t even realized it.”

Elia thought don Salvatore was exaggerating, but then he thought of how his uncles had lived, and what his uncles had done for one another. Had Elia done the same for his brother Donato?

“Now it’s our turn to die, Elia,” the priest said gently. “Yes,” said Elia, “my life is behind me. A life of cigarettes. All those cigarettes sold, adding up to nothing. Just hot air and smoke. My mother sweated, my wife and I sweated over those packs of dried leaves that vanished between our customers’ lips. Tobacco gone up in smoke, that’s what my life has been. Clouds of smoke disappearing in the wind. It all adds up to nothing. Just a strange life that people puffed on nervously or inhaled in long, calm drags on summer nights.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll go before you do. You still have a little time left.”

“Yeah.”

“What a shame,” the priest added. “I loved them so much, these bumpkins of mine. I can’t bring myself to leave them.”

Elia smiled. He found this remark very odd on the lips of a churchman. What about eternal rest and the joy of being called to sit at God’s right hand? He wanted to point out this contradiction to his friend, but he didn’t dare.

“Sometimes I think you’re not really a priest,” he merely said, smiling.

“I haven’t always been one.”

“What about now?”

“Right now, I’m thinking about life, and I feel furious that I have to leave it behind. I’m thinking about the Lord, and the thought of His goodness isn’t enough to ease my pain. I think I’ve loved people too much to resign myself to abandoning them. If I could just know for certain that, from time to time, I would receive news of Montepuccio.”

“It’s time to pass things on,” said Elia, repeating the priest’s words.

“Yes.” Silence fell over the two men. Then don Salvatore’s face lit up and he added: “Olives are eternal. One olive doesn’t last. It ripens and then it spoils. But the olives keep growing, over and over, forever. They are all different, but their long chain of succession never ends. They all have the same shape, the same color; they ripen under the same sun and have the same taste. So, yes, olives are eternal. Like people. It’s the same unending succession of life and death. The long chain of mankind will not break. Soon it will be my turn to pass away. Life is drawing to a close. But it will continue for everyone else.”

The two men remained silent. Then Elia realized he was going to be late to the tobacco shop, and took leave of his old friend. As he warmly shook his hand, it seemed to him that don Salvatore was about to add something. But he didn’t, and the two men parted.

“W
hat on earth is she doing?” Elia was now standing in the doorway of the tobacco shop. The evening sun caressed the facades along the street. It was eight o’clock, and for Elia, it was a sacred moment. The lights of the town were on. A dark crowd crammed the sidewalks of the Corso. A motionless, noisy crowd. The procession was about to pass, and Elia wanted to be there, in front of his shop, to see it. As he had always done. And as his mother, before him, had done. He waited. The throng began to crowd around him.

“What on earth is she doing?”

He was waiting for his daughter. He had told her that morning, “Come to the shop for the procession.” And as she had said yes without seeming really to have heard him, he’d repeated twice: “Eight o’clock in front of the shop. Don’t forget.” She had laughed, stroked his cheek, and chided him, saying, “Yes, papa, just like every year. I won’t forget.”

The procession was about to pass and she wasn’t there. Elia started fretting. It wasn’t such a complicated matter, after all. The town wasn’t so big that you could get lost in it. Too bad. If she wasn’t there, it was because she hadn’t understood a thing. He would watch the procession all by himself. Anna was a beautiful girl. She’d left Montepuccio at the age of eighteen to study medicine in Bologna, a long course of study that she’d begun with enthusiasm. It was Elia who’d pressed her to choose Bologna. The girl could have easily imagined herself in Naples, but Elia wanted the best for his daughter and had misgivings about life in Naples. She was the first of the Scortas to leave the village and try her luck up North. There was never any question of her taking over the tobacco shop. Elia and Maria were dead set against it, and in any case, their daughter had no desire to do so. For the moment, she was utterly thrilled to be a student in a beautiful university city full of boys with sparkling eyes. She was discovering the world, and Elia was proud of this. His daughter was doing what he himself hadn’t done when
zio
Domenico had suggested it to him. She was the first to extricate herself from this dry land that had nothing to offer. She was probably leaving forever. Elia and Maria had often talked about this. It was quite possible she would meet a boy, decide to settle there, perhaps get married. She would soon become one of those beautiful, elegant women covered with jewelry who come to spend one month a year, in summer, on the beaches of the Gargano.

He was thinking of all this, standing motionless on the sidewalk, when, at the corner of the street, he saw the great banner of Sant’Elia appear, swaying slowly, hypnotically, over the passersby. The procession was arriving. At its head, a lone man, strong and sturdy, was carrying a wooden pole from which hung a long banner with the town’s colors. He proceeded slowly, weighed down by the heavy velvet fabric and taking care not to let the pole get caught among the electric lights hanging from the lampposts. Behind him the procession came into view. Elia stiffened, straightened the collar of his shirt, put his hands behind his back, and waited. He was about to grumble about his daughter already being a perfect Milanese, when he felt a young, nervous hand slip into his own. He turned around. There was Anna. Smiling. He looked at her. She was a beautiful woman, with all the carefree joy of her years. Elia kissed her and made room for her beside him, keeping her hand in his.

Anna was late because don Salvatore had taken her to the old confessional. He’d talked to her for several hours and told her everything, and it was as though Carmela’s old, cracking voice were caressing the grass on the hillsides. The image that Anna had retained of her grandmother—a senile old woman with a weary, ugly body—had been swept away as Carmela spoke through the priest’s mouth. Henceforth, Anna would carry the secrets of New York and Raffaele inside her. She was determined to say nothing to her father. She didn’t want New York to be taken away from the Scortas. Without her really knowing why, these secrets made her feel strong, infinitely strong.