Pescara Tales Page 19

  Donna Laura felt herself oppressed by all that happy vitality springing from objects and people around her. She hurried her steps, fled, virtually. The various allures in the windows of shops, within their open doors, in cafés, pained her acutely, were a distress to her eyes. Little by little a sort of daze occupied her mind, dismayed her spirits. What was she doing? Where was she going?... In that disordered consciousness it seemed to her almost as if she was bent on committing some sin or crime, it seemed that everybody was looking at her, judging her, guessing what she thought.

  Now the city was vermilioned by the last red blushes of the sunset. Here and there, wine-animated singing lifted from cantinas.

  When Donna Laura arrived at the door, she had no strength to enter. She went past, twenty paces; then she turned and went past in the opposite direction; then she turned again. Finally, she crossed over the threshold and ascended the stairs, halting exhausted in the antechamber.

  In the house there was that silent industry by which the family surrounds a sickbed. The domestic staff walked on tiptoe, carrying objects in their hands and holding dialogues at low voice in the corridors. A bald gentleman all in black, passing through the hall, bowed to Donna Laura and left.

  Donna Laura, her voice rendered firm by an effort, asked of a servant:

  ‘The Marquise?’

  The man respectfully indicated a room to Donna Laura and went to announce her visit.

  The Marquise appeared. She was a somewhat stout grey-haired lady and her eyes were tearful. She opened her arms to her friend without speaking, choking back a sob.

  After a moment Donna Laura asked, not lifting her eyes:

  ‘Can he be seen?’ And having uttered those words she braced her jaws tightly to control a violent tremor.

  ‘Come,’ the Marquise said.

  The two women went into the sickroom. The light there was low, the odour of pharmaceutics filled the room, objects cast long and strange shadows. The Marquis of Fontanella, his pale face covered in wrinkles, smiled at Donna Laura from his bed. His voice was slow when he said:

  ‘Thank you, Baroness,’ and he extended her a hand that was moist and tepid. Then he appeared suddenly by an effort of will to gather his spirits. He spoke about various things, choosing his words carefully, as he did in his days of good health.

  But Donna Laura, sitting in shadows, fixed on him such an ardent look of supplication that he, understanding, turned his head and said to his wife:

  ‘Giovanna, please make that mixture for me, as you did this morning.’

  The Marquise asked to be excused and left, unsuspecting. In the quiet of the house the muted sound of her steps on the carpet could be heard diminishing.

  Then Donna Laura with an unaccountable movement bent over the old man, took both his hands in hers, and by the fixity of her gaze into his eyes tore the words out of him:

  ‘At Penti… Luca Marino… He has a wife, children… a house… Don’t go! Don’t go!’ The words were uttered quickly in a slurred and broken voice by the old man. ‘At Penti… Luca Marino… Don’t reveal yourself!’

  The Marquise could be heard coming back with the requested medicine.

  Donna Laura sat down again and contained herself. The sick man drank, and each draught gurgled down his throat: once, and again; distinct, regular.

  Then there was silence. He seemed to grow drowsy, his face to acquire hollows, to gather deeper shadows, almost black in the cavities of his eyes, about his cheeks, his nostrils, his neck.

  Donna Laura took leave of her friend and left slowly, holding her breath.

  II.

  All those incidents passed through the mind of the old Baroness while she sat under the pergola in the tranquil garden. What therefore held her back now from seeing her son again? She would control herself, she would not betray anything. No. It would be sufficient to see him again, her son, whom she had held in her arms one day only, so many years ago, so many, many years. Had he really grown, then? Was he big? Was he handsome? How was he?

  And while she asked herself these things she was unable to envisage the figure of the man. The image of the infant kept supplanting any other, the distinct clarity of its details triumphed over those of any further conceivable form which sought to rise in her mind. She made no effort to control, to prepare herself, weakly giving way to an indeterminate sentiment. At that moment her sense of what was real had abandoned her.

  ‘I shall see him! I shall see him!’ she repeated to herself intoxicatingly.

  Things around her were silent, except when a breath of wind curved the massed roses slowly, to recover each time with a heavy movement. The water jets sparkled and darted like daggers out of the greenery.

  Donna Laura sat half-listening. Out of the silent Pan’s hour and the atmosphere of suspense that accompanies a Mediterranean summer midday, something was rising, great and inexorable, inciting a mysterious disturbance in her soul. She hesitated; then she got up and set off on a path through the garden, at first with rapid steps. Arriving at the gate she stopped inside its arching bower of foliage and flowers and looked back for a moment before passing through. In front of her the countryside extended deserted under a sun risen to its full zenith. In the distance Penti’s houses stood white against the blue rim of the sky, with a bell tower, a cupola, and two or three pine trees distributed among them. The river unrolled sinuously and blindingly on the plain, touching the houses.

  Donna Laura thought: He is there! and every maternal fibre in her vibrated. With a stir of energy, she resumed her pace, looking ahead with her old eyes narrowed in the light, unaware of the heat settling on her. At a point on the road she came to a coppice of trees, emaciated short poplars and all of them chancel-choirs of cicadas. Two barefoot women were coming towards her, each one bearing a basket on her head.

  ‘Do you know the house of Luca Marino?’ she asked, seized by an irresistible need to say that name aloud, freely.

  The two women halted and looked at her dumbly.

  One of them said without expression:

  ‘We are not from Penti.’

  Donna Laura, not pleased, continued to follow the lane, feeling already the beginning of tiredness, condemning to herself the wretchedness of her poor old limbs. Her eyes, irritated by the intense light, now saw red motes moving in the air. A slight vertigo had started to trouble her brain.

  Penti came nearer. The first hovels appeared out of an expanse of sunflowers. A woman, monstrously fat, was sitting in a doorway. She had what seemed by comparison with that great body the head of a child, her eyes had a tender look, and a placid smile revealed white teeth.

  ‘O madam, where are you going?’ she asked with innocent curiosity.

  Donna Laura came nearer. Her face was flushed and she breathed in gasps. She was rapidly losing her strength.

  ‘Oh my God, my God!’ she whimpered, clasping her palms to her temples. ‘Oh my God!’

  ‘Come inside, madam,’ the woman said kindly, inviting her in with a hospitable gesture.

  The house was low and dark and had that particular odour which such dwellings of crowded living have. Three, four naked children, all also with the swollen stomachs of those with a dropsical condition, dragged themselves around the floor, muttering among themselves and feeling about with their hands, and one knew that they would by instinct bring whatever they found to their mouths.

  While Donna Laura recovered, the countrywoman talked to her in an unconcerned and unceremonious manner, holding in her arms a fifth child, covered all over its body and face with a swathe of dark scabs, out of which two great blue and perfect eyes opened like miraculous flowers.

  Donna Laura asked her:

  ‘Which is the house of Luca Marino?’

  Her hostess pointed to a reddish house at the end of the village, near the river and almost surrounded by poplars.

  ‘It is the one over there, why?’

  The old lady moved to where she could see better. Her eyes smarted from the intense sunlight and
she blinked rapidly, but she stood there for some moments squinting, breathing with difficulty, not replying, almost choked by the maternal emotion that was rising within her. So, then, that was her son’s house? Instantly, the interior of that distant room in Provence, the country, the people, all sorts of objects, appeared to her as in the single flash of a lamp but with each revelation clearly distinguishable. She let herself fall back in a chair and remained speechless, disordered, in a physical stupor probably initiated earlier by the sun’s force. There was a continuous ringing in her ears.

  The woman asked her:

  ‘Do you want to cross the river, madam?’

  Donna Laura nodded weakly, mesmerised now by the unstable play of red circles on her retinas.

  ‘Luca Marino takes people and animals from one side to the other. He has a boat and a barge,’ continued the woman. ‘Otherwise you would need to go as far as Prezzi to look for a ford. He has done that work for thirty years. You can be sure of him, madam.’

  Donna Laura was listening, having made an effort to gather her spirits which she had felt dispersing; yet, confronted by that information about her little son she remained uncertain how to understand it.

  ‘Luca is not from the country here,’ the fat woman continued with the native loquacity of such types. ‘The Marinos brought him up because they did not have children. And a gentleman, not from here, after that gave Luca’s wife her dowry. He lives well now; works; but drink is his vice.’

  The woman went on talking and said other things, with great simplicity and without malice for the unknown origins of Luca.

  ‘Good-bye, good-bye,’ said Donna Laura, standing up and moved by a false vigour. ‘Thank you, good woman.’

  She thrust a coin into a child’s hand and went out into the light.

  ‘That path there!’ the woman shouted after her, pointing.

  Donna Laura followed the path, and a great silence reigned all around in which the cicadas sang with an impossible shrillness. Some clumps of contorted and knotted olives rose from the desiccated soil to her right. The river was brilliant on the left.

  ‘O-oh, La Martina-a-a!’ a voice called in the distance from the direction of the river.

  That human sound made the old woman’s being tremble. She peered towards its source. A boat was moving on the water, its shape just visible through the luminous vapour; and another, but with sails, whitened somewhat further away. In the first could be detected the forms of animals, she thought they might perhaps be horses.

  ‘O-oh, La Martina-a-a!’ the voice called again.

  The two vessels were approaching each other. That was the place of the shallows, where the ferryman and the man on the auxiliary boat needed to take precautions when loads were heavy.

  Donna Laura halted under an olive tree and leant against its trunk, following the activity with her eyes. Her heart pulsated with such violence that it seemed to her the noise filled the surrounding country. The rustle of the leaves beside her ear, the song of the cicadas, the water’s flashes, everything that her senses touched perturbed her, gathered within her awareness in an irrational disorder. The slow accumulation of blood drawn to her brain by the sun, now gave the objects of her vision a light-red tinge and unbalanced her movements.

  The two boats had arrived at a bend in the river and could no longer be seen. Then Donna Laura began walking again, swaying a little like a drunk woman. A group of houses around some sort of courtyard appeared before her. Six or seven beggars lay in a heap, sleeping their post-noon sleep in a corner of the yard, their tanned flesh, mottled with a variety of skin conditions, visible through the rags they wore, on their deformed faces sleep’s weight warping their features further towards a state approaching the bestial. One lay prostrate, his face hidden in a curved arm, another was on his back, with his arms thrown wide in the attitude of the crucified Christ. A cloud of flies swirled and buzzed industriously over those wretched human carcases, as if above a heap of dung. Through the closed doors beside them came the sound of looms still at work.

  Donna Laura passed across the little square. The sound of her steps on the paving stones woke one of the beggars, who lifted himself on his elbows and with eyes still closed stammered mechanically:

  ‘Alms, for the love of God!’

  At that, all the beggars woke and all lifted up the same cry:

  ‘Alms, for the love of God! Alms for the love of God!’

  The ragged group rose and began to follow her as she passed, a pleading chorus, hands extended. One was crippled and moved with little leaps like a wounded monkey; another heaved himself about on his bottom, punting his body forward on his two arms like a locust, the lower parts being effectively dead; another had a great furrowed goitre flushed with peacock colours, a mass which swung like a bovine dewlap as he walked; another’s arm was twisted into the shape of a monstrous root.

  ‘Alms, for the love of God!’

  Their voices varied, some cavernous and husky, others acute and effeminate like those of castrati, and they reiterated the same few words, in the same tone of supplication that wrung the heart:

  ‘Alms, for the love of God!’

  Trailed by that atrocious band, Donna Laura felt an instinctive need to flee, to save herself, but a blind dismay retained her. She might have cried out, if the voice in her throat had not died. The beggars were close about her, were touching her arms with their extended hands. The wanted alms, all of them did.

  The old lady felt in her clothes, took out some small coins, and let them fall behind her. The famished pursuers stopped, fell upon the money, fought, knocked each other to the ground, kicked and trampled and execrated one another.

  Three remained empty-handed, and they resumed following her, their calls now embittered:

  ‘We did not get any! We did not get any!’

  Donna Laura, in despair at that persecution, without turning dropped two more coins. The battle now was between the paraplegic and the goitre case. Both won something. But one poor epileptic idiot, bullied and disdained by everyone, still had nothing; and he commenced to whine and sob incomprehensible words of dolour, while tears and nasal mucus seeped down his face to his lips.

  III.

  Donna Laura had finally arrived at the house of the poplars.

  She felt herself to be at the limits of her strength: her vision was blurred, her temples throbbed, her tongue was dry and her legs trembled beneath her. In front of her she saw an open gate and she entered.

  A circular threshing-floor was bordered by tall poplars. Two of the trunks sustained between them a pile of flailed wheaten hay through which the lower leafy branches of the trees thrust out. On a perimeter of grass surrounding the floor two ochre-coloured cows grazed peacefully, beating their well-fed sides with their tails, their udders, the colour of succulent fruit, hanging heavy with milk between their legs. Numerous farming implements lay about the area. The cicadas sang in the poplars. Three of four pups cavorted and barked at the cows or pursued fowls.

  ‘O, madam, who are you seeking?’ an old man asked her, emerging from the house. ‘Do you want to pass over?’

  The man, bald and close-shaven, walked towards her with his torso held leaning forward on arched legs. His limbs were deformed from a lifetime of manual work, by all those slow and patient activities of an agricultural life: guiding the plow, which lifts up the left shoulder and twists the upper body; mowing, which flexes the legs apart at the knees; cropping and pruning vines, which curves the body double. Having uttered that last question, he pointed to the river.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Donna Laura replied, beyond knowing what she should say or do now, lost.

  ‘Then come this way. Here is Luca returning.’

  The old man turned towards the river, where one of the craft she had seen, a flat-bottomed boat loaded with sheep, was being poled towards the bank below. He conducted his passenger across an irrigated kitchen-garden to a pergola where others were waiting. As he walked preceding her he remarked approvingly on the v
egetables, making predictions to her on their abundance later, in the way of one grown unconscious over long years of any matter other than the things of the soil.

  Turning to her, because she had been silent as if she had not heard, he saw that her eyes were full of tears.

  ‘Why do you cry, madam?’ he asked in the same tranquil tone he had used in talking about the vegetables. ‘Do you not feel well?’

  ‘No, no… nothing…’ Donna Laura murmured, feeling that she was dying.

  The old man inquired no further. Life had hardened him, and the pains of others left him unmoved. He saw each day so many people ‘pass over’.

  ‘Sit there,’ he said when they came to the pergola.

  Three peasants were waiting, young men surrounded by bundles. All three smoked pipes with extraordinarily large bowls, and, in the manner of the peasantry in their rare moments of ease, concentrating their attention on that activity as if intending to extract the furthest extremity of voluptuous pleasure from it. They exchanged at moments one or another of those unvarying trifles which to the grave, slow and narrow agricultural soul seem to repay the uttering.

  They took note of Donna Laura with momentary puzzlement and then their faces returned to their impassible expressions.

  One of them said calmly:

  ‘The barge comes.’

  The second added:

  ‘It carries the sheep from Bidena.’

  The third:

  ‘They will be fifteen.’

  And they all rose, pocketing their pipes.

  Donna Laura had fallen into an inert stupor. The tears flooded her eyes but did not fall. She had lost all sense of reality. Where was she? What was she doing here?