Pescara Tales Read online

  PESCARA TALES (1902)

  SPIRIT AND FLESH:

  IMAGES OF ABRUZZO

  PESCARA TALES (1902)

  SPIRIT AND FLESH:

  IMAGES OF ABRUZZO

  BY

  GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO

  Translated with an Afterword by

  Vladislav Zhukov

  Published by the translator

  at Mount Wilson, NSW

  2017

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Author:

  Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938)

  Title:

  Pescara Tales (1902)

  Original title: Le Novelle della Pescara (1902)

  ISBN:

  978-0-9874637-8-4

  Subject:

  Short stories and novellas translated from Italian into English

  Translator:

  Vladislav V. Zhukov © 2017

  Dewey Number:

  853.912

  Other translations into English by Vladislav Zhukov:

  From Vietnamese: The Kim Vân Kieu of Nguyen Du (1765-1820), published in 2004 by Pandanus Books, the Australian National University. Second edition published in 2013 by Cornell University Southeast Asia Program Publications.

  From Russian: Old Hunting Grounds and Other Stories: 38 short stories and novellas by Yuri Kazakov, published in 2013 in two volumes by the translator at Mount Wilson, NSW.

  From Indonesian: Javanese Gentry (original title: Para Priyayi, by Umar Kayam), published in 2013 by The Lontar Foundation, Jakarta. Revised edition published in 2014 by the translator at Mount Wilson, NSW as Gentry, Social Change in Java: The Tale of a Family.

  Printed by CreateSpace, an Amazon.com company

  CONTENTS

  THE VIRGIN ORSOLA

  THE VIRGIN ANNA

  THE IDOLATERS

  THE HERO

  THE FUNERAL VIGIL

  THE COUNTESS OF AMALFI

  THE DEATH OF THE DUKE OF OFENA

  THE FERRYMAN

  THE AGONY

  THE DEMISE OF CANDIA

  A CASE OF SORCERY

  THE PIECES OF GOLD

  THE BREAD CROCK

  MUNGIÀ THE MINSTREL

  THE WAR OF THE BRIDGE

  THE RETURN OF TURLENDANA

  TURLENDANA IN HIS CUPS

  SEA SURGERY

  TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD

  THE VIRGIN ORSOLA

  I.

  The viaticum was carried through the church door at midday. The first snow lay lightly on the streets, investing buildings, seeming to veil everything; but high up between the snow-clouds great islands of blue were appearing, were slowly expanding above the mansion of the Brina family and growing illuminated in the direction of the Bandiera quarter. Then, in the midst of the white air and over a white countryside, suddenly and miraculously the sun appeared.

  The viaticum was being taken to the house of Orsola dell’Arca. Passers-by stopped to watch the solemn progress of the group surrounding the priest, his head bare, a violet stole proclaiming his melancholy purpose, his person shielded by the large scarlet umbrella borne over him, on each side of him a burning lamp suspended from the hand of an attendant. The clean chime of a tiny bell punctuated his whispered recitation of the psalms. Stray dogs retreated into alleyways at the approach of the small procession, Mazzanti in a corner of the piazza stopped shovelling snow to uncover his egg-bald dome and bow, and at that moment from Flaiano’s bakery a warm and wholesome odour of new bread expanded and lingered in the air.

  In the house of the ailing woman those about her heard the bell and then the sound of the priest and his escort coming up the stairs. The virgin Orsola lay supine and unmoving on her bed, held in a stupor of fever, inertly somnolent, from time to time her breathing interrupted by an incipient death rattle. Her head resting on a pillow had lost nearly all its hair, her face had darkened to an almost cerulean tint out of which the whites of viscous eyeballs were part-revealed, below them the nostrils seemed smoke-blackened. At certain moments, she roused herself sufficiently to make a feeble, ambiguous motion with her fleshless hands, a vague attempt, it seemed, to clasp something in the emptiness in front of her, an unexpected cabalistic gestures that transmitted to the surrounding watchers a sensation very nearly of horror, and then over the pale arms shot ripples that were muscular contractions and the spasms of tendons. An unintelligible soft babble passed between those lips, as if the words in their attempt to emerge became mired in the scum coating the tongue, the mucus adhering to the gums.

  In the room prevailed the kind of tragic silence which precedes events of that supreme order to which death belongs, a silence in which the wretched woman’s breathing and inexplicable gestures and eruptions of hoarse coughing harrowed the watchers, painfully anticipating the end. Through the windows pure air flowed into the sickroom and fetid exhalations drifted out. A vivid brightness entered too, refracted from snow resting on the cornices and Corinthian capitals of the Portanova; rainbow glints radiated from the crystalline flowers of ice encrusting the old stone of the arch. On the walls of the room hung great brass medallions bearing the visages of saints; beneath a glass bell a Madonna of Loreto, her face, bosom and arms dark as the integuments of a barbaric idol, glinted at points where tiny crescent moons of gold adorned the figure’s vestments; in a corner, a small white altar bore an old mother-of-pearl crucifix standing between two blue Castelli beakers filled with aromatic herbs.

  Camilla, Orsola’ sister and last relative, sat pale at the bedside, wiping with a vinegar-dampened cloth the dying woman’s ashy lips and mucus-coated teeth. Don Vincenzo Bucci, the doctor, sat looking at the silver knob on his fine cane and at the incised carnelian settings of the good rings on his fingers, waiting. Teodora La Jece, a neighbour who worked as a weaver, stood upright in silence, intent on conveying an expression of pain on her pale, freckled face, and of sorrow in her cold eyes and cruel mouth.

  ‘Pax huic domui,’ the priest’s benediction came from the doorway, and he entered. Don Gennaro Tierno followed next, a very tall, reedy man with the feet of a giant and disconnected body-movements that brought to mind a caterpillar; behind him came Rosa Catena, a woman with a discreditable past unashamedly pursued in her salad days, and now succouring her soul by assisting the dying, washing the corpse, dressing it and arranging it in the coffin, done without pay.

  With the arrival of the priest all in the room knelt and bent their heads. The sick woman heard nothing, her senses entombed in her profound stupefaction. The aspergillum was lifted shining above her and drops of consecrated water came sprinkling down over the bed.

  ‘Asperges me, Domine, hyssopo, et mundabor…’

  But Orsola could not feel the purifying tide that in the presence of her Lord cleansed her whiter than snow. With frail fingers, she stroked the counterpane covering her, her lips trembling, a gargling sound in her throat the only issue from an effort to pronounce some word.

  ‘Exaudi nos, Domine sancte…”

  Through the Latin plea for divine heed sounded suddenly an explosion of weeping, and Camilla buried her tear-streaked face into the bedcovers near her. The doctor had approached and was holding Orsola’s pulse in his beringed fingers. He endeavoured to stir her, to prepare her for receiving the sacrament from the hand of Christ’s priest, to make her extend her tongue for the Host.

  Orsola babbled something, gestured vaguely again into the empty air, while an attempt was made to raise her with her back against the pillows. She heard nothing, unless it was the tinnitus of afflicted nerves in her ears, sometimes manifested as long screams, sometimes as music. The moment she was raised, her face turned livid red and then changed to a cadaverous pallor, the bladder of ice which had covered her head slipping
down on the sheet beside her.

  ‘Misereatur…’

  Finally, she put out her tongue, trembling and coated in a mucus mingled with dark blood, upon which the pristine white Host was laid, while the priest announced the presence of the Lamb of God, the Shriver of the world’s sins:

  ‘Ecce agnus Dei, ecce qui tollit peccata mundi…’

  But she did not retract her tongue at that contact, because she had no awareness of what was done to her, her stupor was not penetrated by the radiance of the Eucharist. Camilla fixed her eyes, bloodshot and full of dread and pain, upon that ashen face on which signs of life kept continually diminishing, upon the mouth which gaped like that of someone strangled. The priest went on with his solemn ministry, reciting the Latin supplications slowly. All the others there remained kneeling, and around them and outside, the diffused whiteness that had come earlier with the dawn now animated the middle portion of the day. The momentarily disconcerting odour of warm bread rose on a breath of wind to the nostrils of the ministering clerics; then came the invitation to prayer:

  ‘Oremus!...’

  At the urging of the doctor Orsola closed her lips again; she was helped back to a horizontal position, and the priest began the sacrament of Extreme Unction, his assistants, still kneeling, solemnly repeating in soft antiphon the seven penitential psalms:

  ‘Ne reminiscaris…’

  Teodora La Jece at the foot of the bed supressed an occasional hiccough by covering her face in her hands; Rosa Catena knelt upright beside her, whispering through her rosary and from time to time wiping pale-yellow effluvia from one partly-closed eye, the other being blind and walleyed with leucoma; and while the psalms rose softly up to the standing priest he crossed with oil the eyes, the ears, the nostrils, the mouth and the hands of the moribund body, and his sacred formula dominated all other sounds:

  ‘…indulgeat tibi Dominus quidquid per gressum deliquisti. Amen.’

  It was Camilla who uncovered her sister’s feet. They appeared from the blankets, yellow, scaly, inflamed at the nails, loathsomely dead to the touch. And on that desiccated skin her tears fell and mingled with the holy oil.

  ‘Kyrie eleison. Christe eleison. Kyrie eleison. Pater noster…’

  The Lord’s anointed lay immobile, breathing, with her eyes shut to the light, with her knees raised and arms held straight between her thighs in the attitude typical of typhoid victims. And the priest, having pressed for the last time a crucifix to her lips, having made from the room’s centre and high above everyone there a sweeping sign of the cross, departed with his entourage, leaving behind the drifting odour of incense and wax candles that is ever inseparable from sacerdotal vestments.

  Outside, beneath the windows, Matteo Puriello was hammering tacks into the sole of a shoe and singing.

  II.

  The indicators of illness began slowly to give way to more favourable signs. It was now the fourth week and stupefied drowsiness was being superseded by the natural quietude of sleep, by a lasting calm in which little by little all the perturbations that had deranged consciousness were being sedated, the senses grew less turbid, the rapid inhalations slower. But rasping fits of coughing occasionally exploded out of the depths of the sick woman’s chest, convulsing her ribcage; a painful disintegration of the skin and soft tissues went on day by day at the elbows, at the knees, at the extremity of the spine. When Camilla bent over the bed to utter ‘Orsola!’ the sister attempted to open her eyes, to turn towards the voice. But her weakness immobilized her, her awareness was yet sunk in stupor and lethargy.

  She was hungry, she was consumed by hunger; an animal longing for food tortured her empty stomach, gave to her mouth that eager uncertain opening of the jaws demanding something to chew on, gave occasionally to the poor bones of her fingers those prehensile contractions that monkeys greedy to grasp an apple will manifest. It was the canine hunger that afflicts one convalescing from typhoid, a terrible need in every cell of a body impoverished by long illness, a craving for vital nutrients. A meagre movement of blood still circulated with great difficulty throughout her tissues; in her weakly irrigated brain all mental activity stagnated, it was a machine whose liquid motive force had almost lapsed. Except that in all that disordered matter certain determining vibrations, certain movements which in life past had been habitual were still occurring; not that those mechanical acts existed in the perception of the convalescing woman. Mostly, she recited aloud the Litanies, or divided words senselessly by syllables, or reprimanded invisible pupils, or hymned some quinary verse to Jesus. Her index finger by a habitual movement coursed about the limit of the counterpane as if guiding the eye of some child along the printed lines of a book. Then again, at moments her voice filled out suddenly, robustly once more and took on an almost menacing gravity, pronouncing the admonitions of the Seven Trumps, recalling confusedly the words of Fra Bartolomeo da Saluzzo to sinners, having perhaps before her stupefied eyes the vision of those old woodcuts full of deformed angels trumpeting and demons being annihilated. But her eyes saw nothing, the heavy lids half-covering the irises, circles without colour, lost in the whiteness of the sclerotic balls and veiled-over with what looked like yellow phlegm. She lay extended on her bed with her head on two pillows, almost all of her hair had been shed during her illness, an earthy pallor of a kind beneath which it cannot be thought life might still exist lying over her face and occupying its cavities; and the skull was discernible through that surface tableau, as was the skeleton through the surviving arid and transparent skin; and all about that frame of bones, wherever it made contact with the bed and created a pressure point, there the adherent tissue mortified. Only an immense brute hunger animated that ruin, tortured its intestines ulcerated by the typhoid, their lesions slowly fusing into scars.

  Outside, it was the novena of Christmas, the gay festival of the old and of small children. There were certain early evenings, luminous and chilly, when Pescara seemed populated with sailors and the air was filled with the sound of bagpipes. The spiced odours of fish-soup floated everywhere from the open doors of taverns. One by one, lights appeared at windows, at doors, in the lanes; the sun lingered roseate on the stone terraces of the Farina building, on the chimneys of the Memmas, on the San Giacomo bell tower, those illustrious heights dominating like many lighthouses the town beneath occupied by shadows. Then, all at once, night began to constellate the firmament; over the houses of Sant’Agostino a half-moon revealed its cloven visage from behind a bastion, rose and swelled between the red glow of the watch light and the telegraph mast.

  In Orsola’s room all that vibrant animation ascended in a confused buzz like an awakening beehive at dawn.

  The rustic melodies of the bagpipes grew louder, approaching from house to house and door to door. There was a certain hallowed and familiar gladness in those sounds which the Ciociaria shepherds of Atina drew forth from a sheepskin bag and some perforated reeds. The woman heard, she lifted her body to support herself on an elbow, for that perception had reawakened the phantoms of other sensations past, and her eyes were filled again with a radiant vision of cribs and of convoys of white angels flying on a background of immaculate blue. She began to sing the Lauds, extending both her arms before her, stopping open-mouthed when the weak organs of her throat failed her; intensely, with the ardour of love, she began reciting the praises of Jesus, transported by the shepherds’ carolling now audible below, the holy images above her on the walls growing into hallucinating visions. She was ascending to the heavens, surrounded by the music of cherubim, by the vapours of myrrh and incense.

  ‘Hosanna!’

  Her voice trailed off and she remained half-raised, her arms stretched out before her. Beside her by the bed Camilla tried to quieten her and to recline her on the pillows again; she too felt on the point of falling subject to the spell of that blind vehemence of faith; her own hands and her lips trembled. Orsola fell back supine, head fallen to one side, throat and breast uncovered, the whites of her eyes alone showing in that d
read pallor of her face, a smile directed at something invisible. At that moment, she represented all of the imagery of some virgin martyr. The bagpipes were passing; later passed the songs of wine, bellowed into the night by mariners returning to their vessels on the river.

  III.

  The instinct of hunger was now awakening ever more acutely, as Orsola’s awareness of things grew clearer. When from Flaiano’s oven the warm odour of bread rose into the air, she begged, begged in the accents of a famished mendicant, extending a hand in supplication to her sister. And she devoured food quickly, with brutal enjoyment throughout all her being, peering about herself with mistrust as if someone might snatch the morsels from her hands.

  Her recovery was long and slow, but already in the early stages a gentle feeling of relief began to spread through all her limbs, to set free her brain. A healthy diet of lean meat and the whites of eggs impelled a new current of blood through her body; her lungs, dilating more capaciously with pure air, vivified that blood charged with nutrients, and tissues irrigated by the tepid wave gained colour as they recovered their natural ingredients, were renewed where there had been bedsores, were restored slowly with new skin; and, with that flux, now cerebral activities operated with certainty, and the enervated sensory organs, no longer distressed, rendered again clear sensations; and on the cranial shell hair follicles germinated densely anew. And from that reordering of life’s mechanical laws, from that redirecting to activity energies which illness had caused to fall into latency, from that intense eagerness with which the convalescing woman had for life and for feeling herself alive, from every new perception about her, slowly, almost as if in a second birth, a more developed person was emerging.