Pescara Tales Read online

  XV.

  Anna at last in irrepressible distress took the turtle and went to ask succour from Donna Veronica Monteferrante. As the poor woman had lately been of service to the monastery, the Abbess in her kindness took her on as a lay-sister.

  Although not in orders, Anna wore the monastic habit: a long black tunic, a wimple, and a white coif with amply extended brims. She felt in that dress as one who had become sanctified, and from the first, when a breeze bent those brims about her head with a flutter like bird wings, she would start with a shock that brought a flush to all her body; and at moments when the sun reflected into her face the living glare of snow from the starched whiteness of the coif, she believed herself illuminated by some mystic fulgor.

  With the passing of time, such ecstasies came more frequently; the white-haired virgin now might hear angelic sounds, echoes of distant organs, noises and voices insensible to other ears; luminous figures rose before her in the dark, heavenly odours transported her. Thus, a kind of sacred horror began to course throughout the monastery, as in the presence of some occult sway, a sense that wonders of some sort were imminent. As a precaution, the new lay-nun was freed from all domestic obligations; her expression and bearing, her speech, how she gazed at things were all observed, commented on with superstitious awe; and a legend of sanctity began to flower.

  In the year of our Lord 1873, on the first day of February by the Roman calendar, the voice of the virgin Anna became singularly husky and deep; then her faculty of speech disappeared. The startling event disordered the minds of the religious women around her, and all stood considering with mystic dread the ecstatic poses and expressions of her body, the vague movements of her speechless lips, the immobility of her eyes, from which at moments poured streams of tears. The features of the ill woman, much extenuated by long fasting, had by now assumed an almost ivory purity, and the weave of her veins and arteries had become so transparently visible, stood forth in such relief while incessantly throbbing, that in the presence of that unmistakable pulsing blood a species of trembling dread seized the nuns, as if they stood around some corpse despoiled of its Christian skin.

  When May the month of Mary approached, a loving diligence towards the Virgin Mother solicited the Benedictines to rise and decorate their oratory. They spread themselves across the cloister’s orchard-garden, all flowering with roses and opulent with ripe oranges, to gather May’s new bounty for an offering at the foot of the altar. Anna, who had returned to composure, went down too to assist in the pious work, from time to time, given that her loss of speech continued, indicating by gestures what she intended. They were indulging themselves in the sun, those brides of the Lord, wandering among the gladdening sources of all that perfume. A portico projected half-hidden from a wall of the garden, and just as in the depths of the virgins the fragrances reawakened long enervated imaginings, so did the sun penetrating beneath those low arches revive in the once frescoed plaster some remnants of Byzantine gold.

  The oratory was ready for the day of the first office. The ceremony began after vespers. One of the sisters went up the steps to the organ loft. As soon as it sounded, the instrument’s harmonics seemed to transmute into an all-pervading spiritual vibration; all faces bent downwards; the censers broadcast their benzoin fumes; the little flames atop of tapers flickered each one its palpitations above the crown of flowers surrounding it. Then lifted the hymns and the chant of the litanies, filled with their old prescribed appeals, with supplicating tenderness. As the voices soared with mounting fervour, Anna, her impediment unstopped by the vast swell of her emotion, cried out. Overcome by the prodigy, she fell supine, moved her arms vaguely, tried to rise. The litanies were interrupted. Among the sisters, awe approaching terror made some of them incapable of movement, others hurried to help the afflicted woman. The miracle was unexpected, brilliant, absolute.

  And then, soon, gradually, throughout the chapel the common stupor, the uncertain murmuring, the hesitations, were superseded by limitless jubilation, by a choir of clamorous praise; intoxication spread across a concord of exulting voices. Anna, kneeling, herself still mastered by the marvel’s sway, had no awareness of what was happening around her. But when the hymns were with an even greater vehemence resumed, she also sang. Her notes emerged at intervals to rise from the descending waves about her, since at such moments the others tempered the jubilation in their voices to listen to that singular one which had by the grace of heaven been revived. And the virgin in that fervent hymning became by turns the golden censer whence exhaled the sweetest fragrances, the lamp that by day and by night illumed the sanctuary, the urn containing heaven’s manna, the bush that burned e’er unconsumed, the stem of Jesse that bore the comeliest of flowers.

  Afterwards, the fame of the event spread from the monastery to all the district of Ortona and from that to the adjoining districts, augmenting matter in its travels. And the monastery grew in honour. Donna Blandina Onofrii, a patrician titled la Magnifica, offered to the Madonna of the oratory a robe of silver brocade and a rare turquoise necklace from the island of Smyrna. Other gentlewomen of Ortona brought further, lesser gifts. The Archbishop of Ortona came in pomp on a congratulatory visit, during which he addressed Anna with edifying eloquence as one ‘whose purity of life had rendered her worthy of celestial gifts.’

  In August 1876, new prodigies were witnessed. The infirm woman arriving to vespers would fall into an ecstatic and cataleptic state, out of which she recovered almost as if propelled by some invisible influence; and then, standing upright and retaining all the while an unchanging manner and pose, she would begin to speak, at first slowly, then gradually accelerating as if under the urging of some mystical inspiration. Her speech was no more than a tumultuous mixture of words, phrases, entire verses that she had once learned and now in her state of unawareness were being reproduced, fragmenting and falling into combinations that followed no law. Native forms of dialect were grafted to those of the classroom, were insinuated among the hyperboles of biblical language; and in that disorder monstrous conjunctions of syllables were produced, unheard-of concords of sounds. But the deep tremor of the voice, yes, and the sudden changes of inflection, the alternate ascents and descents of tone, the spirituality of her figure in its trance, the mysterious and incalculable effect of aura, all those particulars combined in sum to overpower the minds of her onlookers.

  The spectacle was repeated daily, with regularity. At vespers, the lamps in the oratory were lighted, the nuns knelt in a circle and the sacred enactment began. As the frail woman entered into her cataleptic ecstasy, dulcet preludes on the organ were already lifting the souls of the surrounding worshippers into a receptive higher sphere. The lamplight diffused from above was soft and lent uncertainty to the air and almost a fading sweetness to the appearance of things. At some point the organ ceased. The woman’s breathing was now growing deeper; her fleshless arms, outstretched, displayed the tendons vibrating like the strings of an instrument. Then, suddenly, she bounded to her feet, crossed her arms over her breast and remained still in the mystic attitude of caryatids on a baptistery; and her voice resounded in the silence, now sweet now mournful now almost melodious, nearly always incomprehensible.

  At the beginning of 1877 these paroxysms diminished in frequency, appearing two or three times a week; then they disappeared completely, leaving the woman’s body in a miserable state of feebleness. And then some years passed during which the poor idiot lived through atrocious suffering, her limbs rendered inert after bouts of articulatory spasms. She had no more interest in cleanliness, ate nothing save soft bread and a few herbs, kept about her neck and on her breast, a great quantity of little crosses, relics, images and rosaries; she spoke in an infantile babble for the lack of any teeth, her hair fell and her eyes were now as turbid as those of an old cart-horse nearing death.

  Once, in May, while she lay and suffered where she had been placed beneath the portico, and the sisters were again gathering roses for Mary, the tortoise passed slowly by
her. It had been carrying on its peaceful and innocent life in the cloistral garden. The old woman saw its form moving and then progressing away from her. No memory woke in her mind. The tortoise disappeared into some bushes of thyme.

  But the nuns considered her imbecility and infirmity to comprise one of those supreme tests of martyrdom by which the Lord calls his select to final sanctity and glory in paradise, and they surrounded her in her idiocy with all their veneration and attention.

  In the summer of 1881 the signs of imminent death appeared. Consumed and ruined, her miserable body no longer resembled that of a human being. Slow deformations had left her over time with cruelly twisted joints, tumours as large as apples bulged from her side, from a shoulder, from the nape of her neck.

  On the morning of 10 September, towards the eighth hour, an earthquake shook Ortona to its foundations. Many buildings collapsed, others were damaged in roof and walls or were left leaning and on the point of toppling; and all the good folk of Ortona, with weeping, with shouting, with supplications, with a great calling upon saints and Marys, poured out of their doorways to gather in the plain of Saint Rocco, fearful of an imminent final cataclysm. The nuns in panic broke out of their cloister, irrupting onto the road, dishevelled, seeking safety. Four of them carried Anna out on a table, and they all began walking too to the plain, towards the surviving populace.

  As they came into sight, the people raised a unanimous clamour, encouraged to hope by the arrival of these representatives of religion. On all sides and around lay the injured, the infirm aged, children in swaddling clothes, women stupid with terror. A beautiful morning sun illuminated the shifting, never-still heads, the sea, the vineyards; from the beaches below, the seamen were running up to look for their wives, calling the names of children, panting, out of breath and hoarse; and from Caldara began to arrive herds of sheep and oxen with their shepherds and herdsmen, flocks of turkeys with their female keepers, beasts loaded with a variety of burdens: for everyone feared to be alone, and all in that dissolution, men and beasts, wanted to be with company.

  Anna was put down under an olive tree, and feeling her death approaching she grieved in a feeble babble, for she did not want to die without the sacraments; and the nuns around her were trying to comfort her, and people standing near looked on her with pity. Now, awesomely, a report spread through the crowds that the bust of the Apostle had independently issued from the Caldara Gate. Hope surged; chants of supplication rose fervidly. As an indeterminate glitter was discerned vibrating in the distance far away, women fell to their knees and with unkempt hair and tearstained faces began to stagger thus towards that light, singing psalms.

  Anna was in agony. Propped up by two sisters, she heard the prayers, heard the announcement, and perhaps, too, balmed by a last illusion imagined she saw the Apostle approaching, because on her wasted face passed a smile of almost beatific happiness. Some bubbles of saliva appeared on her lips; the extremities of her body made a visible rapid flutter; her eyelids, ruddy as wounds, dropped; her head sank into her shoulders; and the virgin Anna in that manner at last expired.

  When the glitter came closer to the adoring women, the shape of a lone donkey was revealed in the light of the sun, the beast balancing on its rump among its dishevelled harness a typical little metal ornament in the form of a weathervane.

  THE IDOLATERS

  I.

  The great sandy square glinted as if powdered with pumice, its surrounding whitewashed houses looked as hot as the walls of some immense furnace whose fire was at last extinguishing. At one end of the square the pilasters of the church reflected the clouds’ dazzle and in that strange light had turned to galleries of pink granite; the stained-glass windows above them flared as if confining a fiery explosion within, their sacred imagery taking on a living movement of colours and attitudes; and the mass of the building now, invested by the splendour of the darkening meteor above, was assuming more loftily than usual its power of dominion over the homes of Radusa’s population.

  Groups of men and women were converging on the square from the streets that fed into it, talking loudly and gesticulating. Within the mass of that humanity a superstitious terror was quickly assuming gargantuan proportions, a thousand terrible images were emerging from those uncultivated imaginations; opinions, fiery disagreements, pleading supplications in the name of sacred entities, disconnected rumours, prayers, shouts, were all clashing and combining into one bass intonation like the noise of an approaching hurricane. Already for some days that bloodlike redness had loitered in the sky after dawn, had invaded at the end of day the tranquillity of night, covered with tragic tints the sleeping countryside, wrung long howls from dogs.

  ‘Giacobbe! Giacobbe!’

  Those shouts, accompanied by gesturing arms, came from the front of the church, where some who had until then been holding a discussion in low voices stood crowded around a pilaster of the vestibule.

  ‘Giacobbe!’

  A man was coming out of the mother-door of the church, and he approached those who were calling him. He was lanky and somewhat bent, appeared consumptive, was bald except for a part-crown of remnant long hair with a gingerish tinge growing at the temples and the nape of his neck. His small, deep-set eyes seemed animated by the ardour of some hidden passion, were of an uncertain colour and converged somewhat towards the bridge of his nose. When he spoke, the absence of two upper front teeth gave to the movement of his mouth and his pointed, badly barbered chin the singular appearance of a decrepit old faun. The rest of his body presented a miserable architecture of bones ill-contained by the unkempt clothing that hung from it. The skin on his hands, his wrists and where his arms and chest were visible was stippled with dark-blue symbols: incisions made with the point of a pin and ingrained with indigo powder: done in memory of visited sanctuaries, of graces obtained and vows fulfilled.

  As this zealot drew near the anxious group standing by the pilaster, a confusion of questions rose from them to meet him. Well then? What had Don Consolo said? Was the silver arm alone to be brought out? And wouldn’t the whole bust be better? When would Pallura arrive with the candles? Was it to be a hundred pounds of wax? Only a hundred? And when would the bells be rung? Well then? Well then?

  The clamour augmented around this Giacobbe; people who had been some distance from the church crowded towards the voices, while from the surrounding roads others flowed into the square and filled the vacated spaces. And Giacobbe replied to the questioners in a sombre low voice, as if revealing terrible secrets, as if bringing prophecies from afar. He had seen in the heavens, in the midst of the blood, a menacing arm, and then a black veil, and then a sword and a trumpet…

  ‘Yes, yes, tell us all! Tell us more!’ the audience pressed him, looking intently into his face, gripped by a strange need to hear miraculous things; and as each wonder was divulged it sped quickly from mouth to mouth through to the multitude behind.

  II.

  The great zone of vermilion lifted slowly from the horizon and flowed towards the zenith, growing broader in its progress as if intending to invest the whole cupola of the heavens. A vapour like that given off by smelting metals seemed to undulate in waves over the roofs of houses, and in the descending lucent twilight beams, sulphur-coloured and violet, crossed each other, mingled and trembled iridescently. One ray, a long ribbon and brighter than the rest, jetted to a road that gave onto the river, and there the flaming water shone between the lean tall stems of the embankment’s poplars. Beyond them, beyond the limits of the town and through the glittering haze, spread an expanse of the bare countryside where old Saracen towers rose haphazardly like islets of rock. Overpowering emanations from new-mown hay hung in the air, recalling at times the smell of dead caterpillars rotting in autumn foliage. Nearer, flights of swallows crossed each other, trafficking shrilly between the riverbanks and the roof-gutters of houses.

  The hubbub of the multitude had been suspended more than once by pauses of expectant silence; now the name Pallura flew around
the square, and impatient and irritated shouts exploded in different corners: the cart had yet to appear on the road by the river and there were no candles; thus, Don Consolo was being delayed in exposing the relics and beginning the exorcisms; and, meanwhile, the peril hung over everything. Panic was spreading through the human mass gathered like a great herd, no one among it daring any longer to lift his eyes to the sky; now sobs were escaping from the breasts of women, a wail of anguish, and with that sound a supreme consternation oppressed and stupefied the souls of all those who heard it.

  At that moment, the bells were tolled at last. As their great bulk of bronze hung at but a low height, the melancholy booming made an instantly tangible impact, blanching every face with awe; and soon was heard between the beats a kind of long-drawn ululation:

  ‘San Pantaleone! San Pantaleone!’

  It was an immense and unanimous shout of despair, uttered by a people frantic for succour, all kneeling now with hands outstretched, white-faced, imploring:

  ‘San Pantaleone!’

  At the portal of the church Don Consolo appeared between the rising smoke of two censers, glittering in a violet chasuble embroidered with gold. He held up high the sacred silver arm, while exorcising the mid-air in Latin:

  ‘Ut fidelibus tuis aeris serenitatem concedere digneris, Te rogamus, audi nos’.

  The sight of the reliquary limb excited a sigh of affection, a delirium of tenderness in the multitude; the balsam of the censers darted to the nostrils of the heartened devotees, every eye brimmed, and through that lucid veil of imminently welling tears, within the kindled atmosphere, each person was convinced he saw the marvel of a sacred fulgour emanate from those three silver fingers raised in benediction, the contours of the arm become enlarged, dim glimmers from the heavens incite a dazzling variation of colour in the precious stones.