Pescara Tales Read online

  But in September the great Pescara fortezza was evacuated, the Bourbon militia disbanding and heaving their weapons and baggage into the river. The citizens ran about the roads in throngs, shouting joyfully liberal and reformist acclamations. Anna, who had heard that Abbot Cennamele had fled with all haste, thought that the enemies of God must have triumphed and she was deeply saddened.

  After that, her life went on peaceably for a long time. The shell of the tortoise grew in breadth and became opaquer; the tobacco plant came up annually, flowered and then dropped; the wise swallows departed each autumn for the land of the pharaohs. At the end of 1865 the great contest of the pretenders ended with the victory of Don Fileno d’Amelio. The wedding was celebrated in March with all propriety and merriment by the attendant guests. And to prepare the exquisite viands came two Capuchin friars: Fra Vittorio and Fra Mansueto.

  Those two were the last remaining after the suppression of their monastery, being left as guardians to watch over it. Fra Vittorio was a sexagenarian whose love for the grape gladdened and fortified him and tinted his face vermillion. A narrow green ribbon covered some infirmity of his right eye, while the left one glistened with a curious penetrating sparkle. He had practiced from youth the pharmaceutical art, and, as he spent much time in kitchens, the gentry were wont to call him over on the occasions of their festivities. While at his work, he tended to make violent gestures which uncovered from his ample cassock-sleeves exceptionally hairy arms. His whole beard stirred with every movement of his mouth, his voice often broke into stridency. Fra Mansueto, instead, was very old and wizened, with two yellow eyes full of submission and a head made goat-like by a pendent little beard of white. He tended the abbey garden and on his rambles seeking alms he carried edible herbs to houses. In helping his companion, he always adopted a deferential attitude, one leg limping as he followed him about. He spoke in the quiet idiom of his native Ortona and, perhaps in memory of that town’s legend of Saint Thomas regarding the miraculous translation of the Apostle’s bones from the control of the Turks, he often exclaimed, while wiping one hand across his bald pate: Pe’ li Turchi!... as one annoyed or frustrated in some innocuous enterprise or in a moment of excitement might appeal to the devil.

  Anna assisted by bringing them plates, galley utensils, copper pots, and, by the presence of the friars, kitchen activities now seemed to her to have assumed a devout earnestness. She watched intently every act of Fra Vittorio, gripped by that trepidation which simple people have in the presence of men deemed to be endowed with some superior knowledge, admiring especially the dependable wide gesture of his arm with which the senior Capuchin scattered certain particularly aromatic secret spices over the sauces. However, the humility, meekness and modesty with which Fra Mansueto revealed his own subtle but polite humour won her preference to him after a time, and the ties of a common city, and those more evident of common speech, brought them close together in friendship.

  When those two talked, memories of the past teemed. Fra Mansueto had known Luca Minella, and he had been in the basilica when Francesca Nobile died among the pilgrims. Why – Pe’ li Turchi! – he had even assisted in carrying the body up to the houses at Porta Caldera, and seemed to recall that the dead woman wore a dress of yellow silk and many gold necklaces…

  Anna grew sad. For her the event up to that point was confused, vague and almost unreal, her memory of it attenuated by the long still stupor that had followed her bout of epilepsy. But when Fra Mansueto said that the dead woman was in paradise, since those who die because of religion ascend among the saints, Anna was touched by an unutterable sweetness and suddenly felt surge up in her an immense exaltation for the sanctity of her mother.

  Then to uncover more memories of places in their native Ortona she began to talk in exhaustive detail about the Cathedral of the Apostle Thomas, describing the shape of the altars, the location of the chapels in relation to each other, the number of sacred utensils, the configuration of the cupola, the attitudes of the images, the way the pavement was set out in divisions, the colours in the windows. Fra Mansueto benignly acknowledged each detail, and, because he had been in Ortona some months previously, he recounted to her some new features: the Archbishop of Orsogna had made the Cathedral a gift of a golden ciborium encrusted with precious stones; the Confraternity of the Most Holy Sacrament had renewed the woodwork and leather of the stalls; Donna Blandina Onofrii had furnished a complete suite of vestments, including Dalmatian chasubles, stoles, copes and tunics.

  Anna listened avidly, and the desire to see the new things and to see again the old ones began to torment her. When the Capuchin fell silent she turned to him with an expression divided between jubilance and timidity. The feast of May was approaching: should they go?

  XIII.

  On the first day of May by the old Roman calendar, the woman having obtained the permission of Donna Cristina made her preparations. She became anxious for the tortoise: should it be left or taken with her? She remained long in indecision, and finally made up her mind to take it to be free of worry. It was put into a basket between her clothes and the boxes of sweets which Donna Cristina was sending to Donna Veronica Monteferrante, the abbes at the monastery of Santa Caterina.

  At dawn Anna and Fra Mansueto set out on the road. At the beginning, Anna set a rapid pace with a gay air, her hair, almost all white now and glossy, tucked under a kerchief. The friar limped along behind her, supporting himself on a stick, the pockets of his begging poke hanging empty on each side of a shoulder. On reaching the pines they made their first stop. The pinewood at that early hour of a May morning stretched out in wavelike undulations, immersed voluptuously in its own new tang, between the serenities of the sky and the sea. The tree-trunks distilled drops of resin; blackbirds whistled; all the fountains of life seemed to have opened and were flowing, intent on transfiguring the earth.

  Anna sat down on the grass and offered bread and fruit to the Capuchin and began talking about the coming festival, eating during pauses; the tortoise made attempts with its front legs on the rim of the canister, its timid reptilian head emerging and withdrawing during its efforts. Anna helped it descend, and the creature started to move over the moss towards a stand of myrtle, at a rate rather less slow than normal, perhaps feeling some confused joy in primitive freedom, and its shell, visible through the grass, was a delight.

  At that sight, Fra Mansueto made some moral observations and lauded a Providence that gives a house to tortoises and sleep to them in the season of winter. Anne said a few things that demonstrated in the tortoise great candour and rectitude, then added the question: ‘What would it think about?’ And again, after a moment: ‘All animals, now, what do they think?’

  The friar did not reply. Both of them remained perplexed. A column of ants followed a root down to the ground and thence extended into a long line, each ant dragging a fragment of food and all the members of that innumerable family performing their work with diligence and order. Anna looked on, and in her mind awoke the simple credences of childhood. She talked of marvellous habitations that ants dig for themselves underground, and the friar responded in an accent of intense faith: ‘And God be praised!’ And the two remained there pensive under the green trees, adoring God in silence.

  In the first hour after noon they arrived at the confines of Ortona and separated. Anna knocked on the door of the monastery and asked if she could speak to the abbes. On entering, she saw before her a small courtyard in the middle of which rose a cistern made of black and white stonework. The parlour was a low room with some few chairs; two of the walls were in large part gratings, the other two displayed a crucifix and various images. Anna was immediately overcome by a sense of veneration for the solemn peace reigning in the place. When Mother Veronica, a tall and severe figure in her monastic habit, materialised suddenly behind a grating, her visitor had a moment of speechless bewilderment, as if she found herself standing before some ghostly apparition. Then, encourage by the kind smile that broke out on the face of
the abbes, she conveyed her message in a few words, deposited the boxes in a niche within a turnstile and waited. Mother Veronica turned from the gifts to Anna with a kindly look, fixing for a moment her beautiful tawny eyes on her; she presented Anna with an effigy of the Virgin, and in dismissing her extended through the grate an aristocratic hand to be kissed. Then in withdrawing again she seemed to disappear.

  Anna left in a state of wonderment. While she was passing out of the building’s vestibule, she heard a choir chanting litanies, the voices sweet and even seeming to come from a subterranean chapel. While she walked across the courtyard she saw to one side, stretching out over the top of a wall, a branch heavy with oranges, and when she stepped again onto the road she had the sense of having left behind her a garden of beatitude.

  She then took a direction towards the eastern road to seek out her relations. Coming to the old house she saw a strange woman leaning against the door-post. Anna approached her and asked her timidly for news about the family of Francesca Nobile. The woman’s response was terse: Why? What did she want? Her voice was hard and she scrutinized Anna in an unfriendly way; then when Anna had explained who she was, she was grudgingly invited to enter.

  It turned out that almost all her relatives were either dead or had emigrated. There remained in the house only an old and ill uncle, Zi’ Mingo, who had married this woman, Sblendore’s daughter, in a second marriage. The pair, it appeared, lived in a state approaching abject misery. The old man at first did not recognise Anna. He was sitting on a tall chair from which red fabric hung in tatters and seemed to be a discard of some church. His hands resting on the arms of the chair were contorted and enormous, afflicted by a monstrous gout; his feet drummed the floor with rhythmic constancy; a paralytic tremor agitated the muscles of his neck, his elbows and knees. Peering myopically at Anna, and with difficulty keeping his inflamed eyelids open, he finally remembered her.

  While Anna was explaining her situation to the daughter of Sblendore, that woman, who it soon became evident dearly loved money, began to conceive in her mind hopes of a usurpation, and by virtue of those hopes now assumed more gentleness. When Anna fell silent, the woman offered her the hospitality of the house; she took the basket of clothes and promised to look after the tortoise; then she launched into a pitiful complaint on the infirmity of the old man and the wretched state of the house, a performance that even drew tears from her own eyes. Anna went out, affected by gratitude and deep sympathy. She left the coast behind her and walked up towards the sound of the basilica’s bells, feeling a sense of growing uncertainty now that she was near her goal.

  People milled around the Parnese Palace, and that great feudal relic with its ornaments and statuary, splendid in the sunlight, dominated everything below it. Anna passed through the crowd and along the stalls of silversmiths selling utensils for the mass and articles for votive offerings. She felt herself dilating once again with light-hearted happiness at the sight of all that white glitter of liturgical equipment, and she made the sign of the cross before each stall as if it were an altar. When she arrived at the cathedral and glimpsed the lights inside and heard the singing of the mass, she could no longer contain the vehemence of her joy and she advanced with unsteady steps as far as the pulpit. Her knees felt weak and tears flowed from her hallucinating eyes. She remained standing in contemplation of the candelabras, the monstrance, the individual objects on the altar, her mind empty. She had not eaten any-thing since that morning in the forest and an immense weakness seemed to possess her, seeping through all her veins, and she felt her soul diminishing to total nothingness within her. Above her in the central nave glass lamps in three-tiered circles shaped a triple crown of fire. At the cross of the transepts a great trunk of wax flickered at each corner of the tabernacle.

  XIV.

  Anna passed the five days of the festival in that manner, faithfully attending the church from morning until the hour when the doors were closed; during her time within, inhaling the warm air transmitted to her senses a beatific lassitude, to her soul a joy filled with grateful humility. The mass, the orisons, the genuflections, salutations, all those formulas, those ritual gestures incessantly repeated, blissfully stupefied her. The incense smoke hid the ground beneath her.

  Rosaria, the daughter of Sblendore, extracted profit meanwhile by moving Anna to pity with deceitful laments and by exploiting the miserable spectacle of the old paralytic. She was an ill-natured woman, expert in frauds, dedicated to debauchery; her face was a tableau of all her humours, flushed and crossed in various places by serpentine capillaries; her hair was grey and her belly large. Tied to the sick old man by shared vices and their marriage, she and he had quickly dispersed their never-large substance through drink and gluttony. In their misery, envenomed by privation, craving wine and strong liquor, harried by the infirmities of age, they both were expiating now their long-corrupted life.

  Anna, immediately compassionate, gave Rosaria all the money intended for the poor, all her superfluous clothes; she detached her ear-rings and two gold rings from her fingers, a necklace of coral and promised additional help. She then returned on the road to Pescara, in company with Fra Mansueto, carrying as before in the same basket the tortoise.

  On the way, as the houses of Ortona diminished in the distance, a great sadness fell on the woman. Groups of pilgrims crossed their path, going in other directions, singing, and their slow and monotonous chants remained long in the air. Anna listened to them and an overwhelming desire pulled at her to join those bands, to live like that, to be a pilgrim trekking from sanctuary to sanctuary, from one country district to another, to exalt the miracles of saints, the virtues of reliquaries, the bounty of all those disparate Marys.

  ‘They are going to Cucullo,’ Fra Mansueto told her, gesturing in the direction of an invisible town; and they began talking about Saint Dominic, who protects men from the bite of serpents and guards seedling-beds from caterpillars. That conversation continued with an enumeration of other such patrons and their cults: how at Bugnara, above the Ponte del Rivo, over a hundred pack-beasts, comprising horses, asses and mules loaded with wheat, go in procession to the Madonna of the Snows. The devotees ride sitting on the burdens, an ear of corn in each hat, a huge bread doughnut hung crosswise over one shoulder. They go to place their harvest-gifts at the foot of the image. The offering at Bisenti is made by girls, each bearing on her head a basket of grain and singing while they lead along the streets and into the Church of the Madonna of the Angels an ass with a large full basket on its crupper. At Torricella Peligna, adults and children wearing crowns of roses and red berries make a pilgrimage up to the Madonna delle Rose, her shrine set on a crag bearing the footprint of Samson. At Loreto Aprutino a white ox, fattened by a year of abundant pasturing, follows with great pomp behind the borne statue of Saint Zopito. The beast is draped with a vermillion caparison and is ridden by a child. As the Saint enters the church, the ox is made to kneel at the threshold, then to slowly rise and follow the statue amid the applause of the people. Having arrived mid-church, it excretes, and from that smoking issue the devotees draw out auspices pertaining to the local agronomy.

  While Anna and Fra Mansueto were talking of such devout usages, they arrived at the mouth of the Alento. In its bed flowed the new waters of spring, coursing among bryony plants that had yet to flower; and the Capuchin spoke of the Crowned Virgin, where on her behalf during the feast of Saint John her devotees tie bryony about their heads and during the night go to the river Gizio to pass the water, as they say there with great merriment.

  Anne removed her shoes to wade across. She now felt in her spirit an immense and loving adoration for all things, for the trees, the grass, the animals, all the things that those Catholic practices had sanctified. And at that moment from the depths of her ignorance and simplicity came surging the human instinct for idolatry.

  Some months after her return, an epidemic of cholera broke out in the region and the mortality was severe. Anna gave freely of her minist
rations to the stricken poor. Fra Mansueto died. Anna grieved deeply, and in 1866, when the time of the festival in Ortona recurred, she wanted to be discharged and to return home permanently, because she saw nightly in a dream Saint Thomas commanding her to depart. She took the tortoise, her belongings and savings, tearfully kissed the hands of Donna Cristina, and left, this time in a cart shared with two mendicant nuns.

  In Ortona she lived in the house of her paralytic uncle, sleeping on a straw pallet, eating nothing but bread and pulses. With marvellous fervour, she dedicated every hour of the day to the practices of the Church, and her mind lost more and more any faculty other than that of contemplating the Christian mysteries, adoring symbols and imagining paradise. She was completely engrossed in the enigma of God’s charity, was totally penetrated by that divine passion that priests declare continually with those ever-repeated signs and words, she understood only that language, had that refuge alone, warm and solemn, wherein all her heart dilated in a pious security of peace and her eyes grew wet in an ineffable sweetness of tears.

  For the love of Jesus, she suffered domestic miseries, was gentle and submissive, never offered a complaint or reproach or threat. Rosaria over time obtained from her all her savings, and then began to make her suffer hunger, to torment her, to call her brutal names, to persecute the tortoise with constant malice. The old cripple was for ever uttering a kind of indistinct howl, opening wide his mouth wherein the tongue trembled; he dribbled saliva continually. One day when he saw his wife enjoying her liquor and she denied him the glass, moving away from him, with sudden energy he lifted himself from his chair and began to stagger towards her. His legs quavered, his feet met the ground with involuntary rhythmic thuds; then, all at once, with his upper body bent forward and taking short, quickly-succeeding paces, he accelerated like one propelled from behind by some irresistible hand, until he fell as if shot, face-down on the edge of the doorsteps.