Pescara Tales Read online

  Don Grisostomo Troilo came visiting, having heard the news. He was a man advanced in years, short in stature, with a round, bloated face from which protruded the two points of a thin and well-waxed moustache resembling two possibly venomous spines. He said:

  ‘Well, Giovà, what’s all this?’

  Don Giovanni did not reply, but he made a movement as if shrugging off a comforting hand. Then Don Grisostomo began to reprove him kindly, soothingly, without mentioning the name Violetta Kutufà.

  Don Cirillo D’Amelio and Don Nereo Pica arrived next, wearing an almost triumphal look.

  ‘So you see? You see? We told you, did we not?’

  They both spoke nasally and with a cadence acquired from habitual singing to the organ at church, being members of the Congregation of the Most Holy Sacrament. They began mercilessly attacking Violetta: She did this, that, and the other.

  Don Giovanni, distraught, tried from time to time by a gesture to interrupt them, to refuse to listen to that shameless tirade. But the two persisted. Then came Don Pasquale Virgilio, Don Pompeo Nervi, Don Federico Sicoli, Don Tito De Sieri, almost all the parasites in a group. Thus banded, they were becoming ferocious: Violetta Kutufà had given herself to Tom, Dick and Harry, the whole gamut, the facts were unquestionable; and they delivered precise particulars, the exact places.

  Now Don Giovanni listened with burning eyes, avid to know, overtaken by a terrible curiosity. Those revelations instead of disgusting him fuelled his passion. Violetta seemed more desirable, even more beautiful, and he felt gnawing inside him a jealous fury which soon became confounded with his pain. In a trice, the woman appeared in his memory artfully arranged in a languid and abandoned pose. Now he no longer saw her any other way, and that enduring image made him dizzy. Oh God! Oh God! And he began to weep again. Those present around him looked at each other’s faces and suppressed their laughter; and in all truth, the anguish of that portly, bald and misshapen little man was of such a ridiculous complexion as to appear barely believable.

  ‘Do go away now!’ he babbled through his tears.

  Don Grisostomo Troilo gave the example, the others followed him, and on the stairs they could give vent to their hilarity without further discretion.

  When evening fell, Don Giovanni, left alone, gradually gathered his spirits. A woman’s voice asked at the door:

  ‘Can I come in now, Don Giovanni?’

  He recognised Rosa Catana and felt a sudden, instinctive joy. He hurried to open the door, and Rosa Catana appeared in the dusk of the entry. He said:

  ‘Come in! Come in!’

  He made her sit near him, made her talk, questioned her in a thousand ways. He seemed to feel less pain listening to that familiar voice, in which in a deluded way he thought he found qualities of Violetta’s voice. He took her hands.

  ‘You combed her hair, did you not?

  He caressed her rough hands, closing his eyes, his mind wandering, remembering the copious, unbound locks that those hands must have so often tended. Rosa at first did not understand, suspecting some extraordinary passion discovered for herself in Don Giovanni, and she withdrew her hands undecidedly, making uncertain noises, laughing. But Don Giovanni murmured:

  ‘No, no!... Be quiet! You brushed her hair, did you not? You helped her into her bath, did you not?’

  He began kissing Rosa’s hands, those hands that had combed, that had bathed, that had dressed Violetta. Kissing them, he stammered strange things, be-rhymed his words, stuttered like an infant learning its first syllables, and all so bizarrely that Rosa could barely contain her mirth. But she finally understood, and as a perspicacious female she compelled herself to remain grave, to calculate the advantages that she might extract from this infantile comedy of Don Giovanni’s. And she became passive, allowed herself to be caressed, to be called ‘Violetta’; she employed all the accumulated knowledge gained by keyhole observations and eavesdropping at the door of her mistress. She even tried to make her voice sound sweeter.

  In the room the day had almost gone. A rosy twilight came diffusing through the open window, and the garden-trees, almost black, continued their quiet rustling. From the sloughs near the Arsenal rose and extended a croaking of frogs. The hum from the city’s streets was indistinct.

  Don Giovanni drew the woman onto his knees and, as deranged as if he had drunk of a prodigiously strong liquor, he babbled to her a thousand sugary puerilities, joining with them the endless pleas and demands of childhood, his face near hers:

  ‘Darling Violetta, little Violetta! My little Cocò! Don’t go, Cocò!... If you go, your Ninì will die. Poor Ninì!...’ And such litanies were followed by a long howl like that of a distressed dog.

  And he continued in that manner as he had done with the singer. And Rosa Catana gave him patient little caresses, such as one would bestow on a sickly, spoiled boy; she took his head and put it against her shoulder, kissed his swollen, weeping eyes, stroked his bald crown, ran her fingers through his oily remnant locks.

  VI.

  Thus did Rosa Catana earn her way into the inheritance of Don Giovanni Ussorio, who in March 1871 died of a paralytic stroke.

  THE DEATH OF THE DUKE OF OFENA

  I.

  When he heard the first distant and confused clamour of the rebellion, Don Filippo Cassàura instantly lifted his eyelids, heavy folds of skin inflamed and inverted at the rims like those of mariners who sail through blusterous seas.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ he asked Mazzagrogna, standing beside him, and the tremor in his voice betrayed his dismay.

  The major-domo answered, smiling:

  ‘Do not fear, Your Excellency. Today is the feast of Saint Peter, the grain reapers are singing.’

  The old man remained a little longer listening, leaning on one elbow and looking at the balconies in turn. Warm gusts from the south-westerly Libyan were stirring the curtains. Swallows, auguring a storm, passed and repassed outside, rapid as arrows through the brilliant air; the house roofs below flamed, some with a roseate quality, others with the grey of embers; beyond the roofs extended an immense and opulent countryside of fields, almost all of them golden and ready for harvesting.

  The old man asked again:

  ‘But Giovanni, didn’t you hear that?’

  Noises were rising that in fact had nothing jubilant in their nature. The wind reinforced them at times, at others, dispersing them or mingling them with its own whistles, it made them still more inexplicable.

  ‘There is nothing to worry about, Excellency,’ responded Mazzagrogna. ‘Your ears are deceiving you. Be tranquil.’

  And he took some paces towards one of the balconies.

  He was a thickset man with legs curved outwards at the knees, and enormous hands whose backs were thick with hair, bestial hands. His somewhat slanted eyes were faded albino-like, he had a freckled face with sparse red hair at the temples, and the back of his head was covered in hard, dark excrescences akin to chestnuts.

  He stood for some time between two curtains that swelled around him like sails, investigating the level below. Dust was rising on the Fara Road as from the passage of a large herd of sheep; gathering clouds, lifted by the wind, distended into shapes like cyclonic trumpets, occasionally emitting flashes as if they contained within them bodies of men in arms.

  ‘Well?’ asked Don Filippo uneasily.

  ‘Nothing,’ answered Mazzagrogna; but his forehead was deeply creased.

  Once again, a gust of wind brought a hubbub of distant voices. A curtain was forced out horizontally and flapped like an unfurled gonfalon, a door slammed shut violently, glass in windows rattled, some papers that had lain on a table were scattered over the room.

  ‘Close it! Close it!’ shouted the old man with a gesture of panic. ‘Where is my son?’

  He was lifting himself in his bed, suffocated by his obesity, unable to rise because all the lower, palsied part of his body impeded the attempt. A continuous paralytic tremor agitated the muscles of his neck, his elbows, his knees;
on the bedsheet his hands were contorted and knotted like the roots of old olives; copious sweat dripped from his forehead and bald cranium and coursed in channels down his wide face, a face with a denatured pinkish colour and thinly veined like the spleen of oxen.

  ‘The devil!’ Mazzagrogna muttered through his teeth as he went about banging the shutters closed. ‘Can they be in earnest?’

  Had he remained at the open balcony, he would have now detected near the first houses on the Fara Road an agitated multitude of men surging forward like a sequence of sea breakers, some gesturing to those behind them, signalling evidently to other and still-invisible companies hidden by the line of roofs and by the oaks of San Pio. An auxiliary legion was apparently coming from the countryside to fatten the rebellion. The great crowd appeared to attenuate as it entered the central streets of the town, dispersing among them like ants in the labyrinth of a nest. Their shouts, subdued or echoed back by walls, came to the ear now as a continuous and indistinct roar. At times, that sound faded completely, and in its absence could be heard only the drone of the holm oaks standing in front of the palace, that great pile then seeming, behind their shelter, even more remote from the town.

  ‘Where is my son?’ asked again the old man, in a voice increasingly strident as his anxiety grew. ‘Call him, I tell you! I want to see him!’

  He trembled visibly in his bed, not only as a symptom of his palsy but now with dread. At the first evidence of sedition the previous day, when a hundred of so young hooligans had come under the palace balconies to cry down the latest requisitions by the Duke of Ofena, the old man had already fallen into the grip of such wild terror that he had cried like a girl and then spent the night invoking every saint in paradise. The thought of dying and of danger engendered an ineffable horror in the ancient paralytic, already more than half-spent and encumbered with a body in which those last quivers of life were so painful. He did not want to die.

  ‘Luigi! Luigi!’ he began to shout, anguished and breathless, calling his son.

  The whole palace was full of the rattle of loose panes, and from time to time could be heard the crash of a windblown door, the sound of quick footsteps, exclamations.

  II.

  The Duke appeared. He was somewhat pale and tense but controlled. Tall and robust of body, he had a beard still black covering powerful jaws, and his lips were tumid and imperious in a mouth whose very breathing was a vehement expression; his eyes were turbid and voracious and his nose, large and quivering, was at present irregularly flushed.

  ‘Well?’ asked Don Filippo, panting and with a rattle in his throat that seemed about to choke him.

  ‘Now father, there is nothing at all to fear. I am here,’ replied the Duke, coming to the bed and trying to smile.

  Mazzagrogna had gone again to the shutters of one of the balconies and was looking through a gap in them intently. No cries could be heard now, no one was in sight. The sun was declining within a band of unclouded sky, looking like a rosy circle of flame that grew larger and burned brighter as it lowered itself on the summit of the western ranges. The whole country seemed to glow like cinders, and the Libyan wind to be the breath fomenting that fire. The first quarter of the moon was rising from the thickets and scrub forests of Lisci. Poggio Rivelli, Ricciano, Rocca di Forca in the distance sent lantern flashes of reflections from their windows and at times the sound of bells. Here and there a fire that had been invisible in the overwhelming daylight began to glow. The heat took away one’s breath.

  ‘This,’ said the Duke of Ofena in his hoarse, hard voice, ‘comes from those Scioli rabble. However…’ and his open hand made a menacing hacking gesture. Then he went to Mazzagrogna.

  He was troubled about Carletto Grua, who had still not been seen. He paced with heavy steps up and down the room, at some point detaching from a wall-array two long-barrelled horse pistols and examining them carefully. His father followed each movement with dilated eyes, panting like a mule in distress, every so often flapping the sheet with his deformed hands in an effort to cool himself. Two or three times he asked Mazzagrogna:

  ‘What’s happening out there? Can you see?’

  Mazzagrogna suddenly exclaimed:

  ‘Here comes Carletto running, with Gennaro.’

  And in fact a furious knocking on the great door was presently heard, soon followed by the arrival in the room of Carletto and his servant, both pale, agitated, stained with blood and covered in dust.

  The Duke on seeing the state of Carletto uttered a cry, took him in his arms, began feeling for the places where he might be wounded, asking him over and over:

  ‘What have they done to you? Tell me! What have they done?’

  The young man was crying like a child.

  ‘Here,’ he said, through sobs, and he lowered his head to show at the nape of his neck tufts of hair adhering together with congealed blood.

  The Duke ran his fingers delicately through Carletto’s hair to find the wound. He loved Carletto Grua with an unhappy love and had for him a lover’s solicitude.

  ‘Does it hurt?’ he asked.

  The young man sobbed more loudly still. He was as slender as a girl, had a feminine face that was just beginning to be shaded by blond down, his hair was overlong, his mouth beautiful, and his voice was pitched to the tenor of a castrated singer. He was an orphan, the son of a confectioner in Benevento. He acted as the Duke’s valet.

  ‘They are coming!’ he said with a tremor of his whole body, turning his eyes filled with tears towards the balcony, through whose shutters again rose a clamour, louder and more terrible.

  The servant, who had a deep gash across his right shoulder and whose arm on that side was soaked with blood down to the elbow, was giving a confused account of how the two of them had been pursued by the maddened mob, when Mazzagrogna, who had remained at the shutter, exclaimed:

  ‘There they are! They are coming to the palace. They are armed.’

  Don Luigi left Carletto and went quickly to see.

  III.

  The multitude in fact was already on the broad stairs, howling and waving weapons and the implements of their various occupations, flooding forward in a furious mass that resembled less an assembly of single individuals than some blind body of viscous matter directed by an irresistible force. In a few minutes it was under the wall of the palace and like a great serpent had coiled around it, enclosing in the gathering twilight the whole building in a dense confining ring. Some among the rebels carried high in the air lighted torches of long, bundled rushes that threw on the faces underneath them a wavering rosy light, scattering sparks and crackling as they burned. Others were in a compact group that held up a stout spar from the top of which hung the body of a man. Their gestures and voices menaced death. Throughout all their torrent of insults and imprecations one name was heard repeated, among their race and its fertile vales a name evocative of ancient privileges and potency:

  ‘Cassàura! Cassàura!’

  The Duke bit his fingers on recognising hanging from the spar the mutilated remains of Vincenzio Murro, the messenger he had sent for the soldiers the previous night. Opening the shutter he pointed to the hanging body, and Mazzagrogna saw and said almost in a whisper:

  ‘It is all over!’

  But Don Filippo heard him, and he launched forth such a pitiful wail that the others felt their hearts and spirits fail within them.

  The servants were crowding at the door, ashy-pale, in the grip of their cowardice. Some wept, others invoked saints, yet others considered treachery, how they might save themselves by delivering their master to the people. Five or six of the least pusillanimous were even now arguing among themselves and urging one another towards some deed.

  ‘To the balcony! To the balcony!’ the crowd below roared. ‘To the balcony!’

  The Duke had been talking in a subdued voice aside with Mazzagrongna. Turning to Don Filippo, he said:

  ‘Sit yourself in a chair, father. It will be better.’

  There was a l
ow murmur among the servants. Two of them came forward to help the paralytic down from the bed, another two rolled the chair on its small wheels nearer. It was painful work, the fat old man panted and complained loudly and continually, clinging to the necks of the servants who supported him. He was dripping, and the room with its many closed windows was now filled with a barely tolerable fetid odour. His body finally in the chair, his feet began a rhythmic drumming on the floor. His great stomach trembled flaccidly on his knees, like a half-empty wineskin.

  The Duke then said to Mazzagrogna:

  ‘Giovanni, now comes your turn.’

  And the major-domo with a resolute gesture opened wide the doors and went out alone on the palace balcony.

  IV.

  He was greeted by an immense howl. Five, ten, twenty rush torches gathered beneath, illuminating faces animated by an eagerness for massacre, their lights singling out the metal of guns, of axes. Those carrying the torches had covered their faces in flour as a protection from sparks, and out of that pallor their bloodshot eyes shone weirdly. Black smoke rose in the air and dispersed quickly, tongues of flame flickered high, hissing, borne up by the wind and comingling like infernally entwining tresses. The thinner and drier of the canes flared and quickly bent, glowed and disintegrated, exploding like fireworks. It was a gay sight.

  ‘Mazzagrogna! Mazzagrogna! Death to the brute! Death to the squint-eyed swine!’ they were shouting, crowding forward to better fling their insults.

  Mazzagrogna lifted a hand to calm the clamour, gathered all his vocal powers, and to subdue the people into reverence he began by uttering the name of the King, as if about to promulgate a law by that authority: