Pescara Tales Read online

  The first days of February had come.

  From her bed Orsola could see the curved top of the Arco di Portanova, where weeds grew in tufts among the rose-coloured bricks, could make out the crumbling ornaments of the capitals, where last season the swallows had mortared their nests. On Sant’Anna’s church the violets had yet to flower in the fissures of its roof; above it the sky extended beatifically. From the Arsenal, at intervals came drifting on the air the squeals of a brass band rehearsing a fanfare.

  It was at that time that she, almost with a sense of incredulity, traversed again the life she had lived up until then. It seemed to her that that past belonged to someone else, it was not hers; an immeasurable distance divided her now from what she recollected of it, a dreamlike distance. She could make no certain assessments of time now, she needed to look at surrounding objects for help, her mind to make an effort of concentration, to gather itself for a span in order to recover things. She touched with her fingers the temples where hair was tenuously regerminating, and a vague, absent-minded smile flowered on her pale lips, passed fleetingly across her eyes.

  ‘Ah!’ she whispered weakly; and that light gesture of her fingers to her temples returned.

  It had been a sad and featureless life, in those three rooms, among all those unnatural small statues of saints, those images of the Madonna, among the noise of those children repeating together for five hours each day the same lists of words chalked on a blackboard that stood before them. Like the glorious martyrs of legend, like Saint Thecla of Lycaonia and Saint Euphemia of Chalcedon, the two sisters had consecrated their virginity to the Heavenly Groom, their nuptials to Jesus. They had mortified their flesh by furious privations and prayers, had breathed the atmosphere of the church, its incense and the smell of lighted candles, they had lived on vegetables alone. They had stupefied the spirit by those arid and long exercises in syllable recognition and spelling, in that cold distilment of words; and equally in that mechanical labour with needle and thread upon endless lengths of linen odorous of lavender and sanctity. Their hands never sought the sweetness of youthful tresses, the warmth of an angelic shock of flaxen locks, their lips never sought in an effusion of sudden tenderness the face of some pupil. They taught the reduced doctrine of the Church as it suited the comprehension of minors, and the simple songs of their religion; they caused those heads filled with playful schemes to bend for forty days beneath the admonitions and counsels of Lent, preaching to those innocents about sin, the horrors of sin, about eternal punishments, preaching in grave tones, while those wide eyes filled with wonder and those rosy lips opened with amazement. Objects around the children grew quickly animated by immature fancies: the yellowed profiles of mysterious saints emerging from the depth of old paintings, the agonized eyes of the Nazarene, head fringed with thorns and bloody drops, those eyes that found one in every part of the room, and up above the great vault of the fireplace every smoke-stain taking on the living form of something atrocious. Thus did the sisters establish the fundamentals of faith in those unknowing souls.

  Now the memory of such sterility returned to trouble Orsola. She rose, rose back to her most distant years, by a natural tendency of the spirit sought refuge backwards in the sources of her being; and then sudden happiness washed over her and filled her as if in a moment her very first youth had returned to lodge in her heart.

  ‘Camilla! Camilla!’ she cried out. ‘Where are you?’

  Her sister did not respond, she was not in the other room, had perhaps gone to church, to vespers. So then she was taken by the thought of putting down her feet to the floor, to try a few steps, alone.

  She laughed the timid laughter of a child hesitating over a novel and difficult undertaking, squinting her eyes, stopping momentarily to savour the delight of this new thought, to pat with her fingers her knees, her meagre calves, gathering herself into some position from which she might measure her strength; and she was laughing, because laughter insinuated a sweet languor in her, a subtle vibrant deliciousness in all her being.

  An arrow of sunlight streaked over the window-sill and cut into the water in a basin on a stand in the corner of the room, the ray’s thrown reflection trembling lightly like a fine gold thread on one of the walls. A flight of pigeons flew across the space framed by the window and then returned to settle on the Arch, like an augury. She carefully lifted away the bedclothes covering her, still hesitated; sitting on the edge of the bed she felt forward with a fleshless yellow foot for a woollen slipper. She found it, then found its mate; but now she was suddenly afflicted with a tender reasonless emotion and her eyes filled with tears, and everything trembled before her in an indistinct dawn-like half-light, as if things around her were becoming aerial and evanescent. The tears made two lines down her cheeks, came to a stop at her mouth, tears tepid and salty, she tasted the salt. Outside on the Arch the pigeons were lifting up again in ones and twos with a loud clap of wings. With a movement of her jaws Orsola freed the knot at the back of her throat that had come with the tears, then, leaning on the side of the bed, she meditated a moment and finally stood upright on her feet, smiling, with her eyes wet looking about herself. She had never known herself so weak, to be so unable to stand erect; she had a strange sensation in her shins as of a nest of ants there, a tickling in her muscles, almost the feeling of one who had been wounded rising on a bone that had yet to fully heal. She tried to take a step, advanced one foot timidly, grew fearful, seated herself back on the edge of the bed and looked around as if to ascertain no one was watching. Then she chose a point to aim for, the window, and began again, slowly and with her eyes fixed downwards on the foot that advanced, steadying herself, pressing her green shawl to her breast, feeling a little cold. Half way across, sudden panic possessed her, she swayed and attempted to regain her balance by a desperate fluttering of her arms, turned, and with three or four hasty steps regained the edge of the bed and fell back; there she remained stretched across the bed for a moment, breathless. She returned under the covers where the bed was still warm and drew them around her shivering body.

  ‘O Lord, how weak I’ve become!’

  And she looked over the edge of the bed at the floor where she had taken those steps, almost as if to see whether her prints had been left there.

  IV.

  Orsola said nothing to her sister about that first attempt. When she heard Camilla returning, she closed her eyes and remained still as if sleeping, feeling a strange pleasure in that deceit, forcing back a smile that titillated at the summit of her breast and kept trying to rise to her lips. She joyed in that little secret. Each day now she waited impatiently for the hour when Camilla went down the steps, stayed listening a moment while sitting up in bed, until she heard the sound of the too slow footsteps descending; then she rose, suppressing the desire to burst into gales of laughter, and began the adventure, leaning on the walls, on furniture, uttering muffled squeals of alarm each time her knees threatened to give way or her poise to become unsteady.

  Almost always at that time the smell of bread rising from Flaiano’s oven exasperated her. She would approach the window to seek out the drifting air, and it was a mingled torment to breathe that healthy emanation, while her tongue almost floated in salivary juices and her eyes flashed with primordial greed. Then a fury to rifle and ransack everything around took hold of her, to put her hand on objects, dragging herself from one point to another with infant slowness, angrily expending strength to no purpose on the locks to which Camilla had taken away the keys. Once, in the secret drawer of a small table, she found an apple and she sank her teeth ravenously into it. For some time as a convalescent she had been subjected to a rigorous regime and had not tasted fruit. This one had the fresh perfume of roses, a perfume that is sometimes found in certain shrivelled and discoloured apples, and may for that fragrance have been left in a drawer. With hope, she looked again in that drawer, but found nothing else except for the dull-green pod of a mustard plant that had probably been kept for its seeds; this she t
ook in her hand to look at with curiosity and then to hide under a pillow.

  Thus passed that hour of her days, in secret, in that acute enjoyment given to recovering children who do prohibited things, by infractions of the doctor’s orders, by small larcenies. The only witness was a cat, mottled all over like a serpent, which sometimes made a circuit of Orsola with its known meow, or stopped and grew tense, clawed vainly at the passing pigeons landing on the Arch outside. In time, Orsola had grown fond of that discreet companion. She gathered it into the warmth of her bed, whispered to it unconnected words, observed closely how it washed its paw with a rosy tongue, the way it extended its lizard neck to a caress, its pale-yellow throat that throbbed with a husky gentle purring like the undulating murmur of turtle doves in the forest. She, perhaps in a natural return to her former mysticisms, loved those flashes seen in half-light from the animal’s translucent eyes, their phosphoric gleam emanating so mysteriously and silently out from that shape in the dimness.

  Camilla noted with reserve and silent disapproval the arrival of strange predilections in her sister; and slowly, almost insensibly, their two personalities began parting and distancing from each other by the repulsion of growing dissimilarity.

  They had lived in a communion of habits and unvarying sentiments, because any variance of temper and any thrusting-up of rebellion had always been levelled and calmed by their one faith, faith in the infrangible cult of Christ’s divinity, the contemplation of which had become the sole scope of their lives. But as the cult absorbed them wholly, so the ties of consanguinity had little by little loosened and been substituted by the allegiance of their common conviction; thus, never more after that did any rush of natural tenderness bring them together again, never more were repeated those moments when one of them could abandon herself totally to the sympathies of the other with confidences, memories and hopes as sisters might. They were coreligionists, members of the great family of Jesus, its numbers extending over the earth and desperate for heaven.

  So that when by the re-making of Orsola during her illness and curative process she began to show unexpected qualities and unusual attitudes, revulsion was inevitable and the tempering voice of common blood no longer spoke in mitigation.

  V.

  The schoolchildren had returned, the first morning was in early March. Orsola had risen from her bed and was sitting on its edge, with the warmth of the sun on the nape of her neck and on her shoulders. From the classroom came a pungent smell where Camilla had poured vinegar into the disused inkwells that had gone mouldy, and through the window an occasional breath of air brought the odour of pansies just come to flower on the ledges of the Arch.

  The wave of young children arrived in the bedroom like a gust of March wind. At first at the doorway there was a tumultuous press of small heads bobbing one above another in their owners’ efforts to see her, then came a hesitation, a timidity, a kind of ingenuous wonder at the sight of the teacher so utterly pale and become so thin in body that they could scarcely recognise her.

  But the virgin was smiling, and a sudden commotion in all her blood overwhelmed her; in a moment, she was calling to them, was confusing their names that came crowding to her lips, offering them her hands. By ones and twos and threes the children came to her to take her hands and touch them with their lips, repeating the forms of the good wishes learned at home, mislaying in their efforts whole syllables as if swallowed.

  ‘No, stop, that’s enough!’ she told them, overcome, yet still leaving her hands to those warm and humid mouths. She felt faint.

  ‘Camilla, take them, take them…’

  Each child had a gift: there were flowers, there was fruit; the violets had immediately released their odour on the air, and in that ambience of scent, in that light, all those infant faces flushed by good plebeian blood beamed.

  Then came the lesson in the adjoining room. The first class began intoning at high volume the vowels and the diphthongs, the second practiced the syllables; and over that clear choiring occasionally rose Camilla’s voice, admonishing.

  ‘La, le, li, lo, lu…’

  In the intervals of quiet Matteo Puriello could be heard hammering tacks into shoe soles, from Jece’s loom came the thud of frames.

  ‘Va, ve, vi, vo, vu…’

  Then Orsola became annoyed. The monotony of those sounds and voices intruded an unwelcome leadenness in her mind, made her drowsy, whereas she wanted to be awake and quick, while she still felt around her the breath of those children, the joyous, fresh vigour of those lives.

  ‘Bal, bel, bil, bol, bul…’

  She stood the flowers in a glass of water, then bent over them, inhaling; for long her nostrils were immersed in their freshness, her eyes closed, her whole being centred on that sin of one of the senses.

  ‘Gra, gre, gri, gro, gru…’

  A great snowy cloud veiled the sun. Orsola went to the window and leant on the sill to look down on the square. Across the way Donna Fermina Memma in a rosy dress stood on her balcony between pots of carnations; a group of officers passed beneath, laughing and their sabre scabbards tapping intermittently on the pavement. Further away in the public garden the lilacs were on the point of blooming and the tip of the giant pine there bent with the wind. From Lucitino’s tavern Verdura the eternal drunkard was swaying out of the door, shouting something.

  Orsola drew back. It was the first time in a long while since she had stood at the window to face the square; it seemed to her she stood on some great height now when she looked down on it, and she felt slightly vertiginous.

  ‘Nar, ner, nir, nor, nur…’

  The choir within went on and on.

  ‘Pla, ple, pli, plo, plu…’

  Orsola felt herself suffocating, felt faint as the torment continued, her poor weakened nerves giving in. The chanting went on to the rhythm of Camilla’s pointer beating on a desk, implacably.

  ‘Ram, rem, rim, rom, rum…’

  ‘Sat, set, sit, sot, sut…’

  Then a sudden fit of sobbing shook the convalescing woman, and she returned to fall back on the bed. She sobbed thus, face down and arms thrown out each side, pressing her face into the pillows, her body quaked by spasms she could not repress.

  ‘Tal, tel, til, tol, tul…’

  VI.

  All her hair had grown back, chestnut and with a good wave in it, as it had been before. She now had a frequent desire to look at herself in the mirror, ever since the time Rosa Catena had said, passing a hand over her own front with one of those suggestive gestures which revealed the sensual female of gone years:

  ‘Mmm, very nice!’

  Having waited until Camilla had gone out, she would leave the bed, detach from a wall one of those ancient rococo mirrors in its tarnished and spotted gilt frame, with a corner of a blanket would wipe away its dust and look into it, smiling at her bare neck, at the sight of certain blue veins standing out on it almost in relief, at her small, elongated face in which she thought she could detect something vaguely caprine, at the fine mouth and sharply-sculpted chin, the eyes nut-brown as the hair but with yellow pistachio lights. Her transparent pallor and her smile lent a new grace, a new youth to her twenty-seven years.

  She remained gazing thus for some time, and it was pleasant to move the mirror away slowly and see the image disappear and then re-emerge again in that grey-green light as if in a depth of seawater. She was being conquered by vanity, occupied by it. She was now aware of so many little things that she had never paid attention to before, for instance a mole that looked like a small, flat lentil seed which spotted her left temple, and a slight scar over the arc of one of her eyebrows. She remained entranced like that for long. Then, taken with a sudden vivacity, she searched about for something else that might divert her.

  That pod she had found at the back of the drawer had opened and now displayed in its two halves a dense collection of dusky seeds. Each seed appeared to be connected to its cup by a tiny, clearly discernible silver thread, by which the clustered seeds da
ngled together compactly. But when the virgin blew a speculative puff of air into that cluster a cloudlet of minute white feathers lifted into the air, broke and scattered glistening everywhere: spies, it would appear, sent out by the little community. The seeds seemed winged, seemed delicate and evanescent insects that might dissolve on encountering a sunbeam, or seemed barely visible swan-down, floating wavelike, rising to fall again. They invaded Orsola’s hair, they touched for a moment her face, they began settling all over her. She laughed as she defended herself from their invasion, attempted to drive away this lint which tickled her skin and attached to her hands, but her laughter impeded her attempts to blow it away.

  Finally, she lay on the bed and left the snowflake-drift of it descend on her in its own time. She kept her eyes half closed to prolong the sweet pleasure, and as drowsiness invaded her she felt herself as if settling into an elevated nest of feathers. The light that entered the room was of the pale clarity which fills afternoons in the month of March, when the sun seems to smile shyly while departing, and its setting is a foretaste of the coming dawn when that same great sky brightens again.

  Camilla found her sister still sleeping, beside her the mirror, and the spies were in her hair.

  ‘Oh Lord Jesus! Oh Lord Jesus!’ she murmured, lifting her hands to her mouth in an act of bitter sadness. The good Christian had come from the church where they had been singing the Litanies of the Annunciation, and she had listened to a sermon on the message of the Archangel to the maidservant of God: Ecce ancilla Domini. The sonorous eloquence of the friar-preacher had intoxicated her; certain warning words still resounded in her ears.

  Orsola stirred, then and woke, yawned long and voluptuously and stretched herself.

  ‘O it’s you, Camilla,’ she said, a little confused at the other’s presence.

  ‘It’s me, of course it’s me! You’ll be a lost woman, you wretch, you’ll be lost!’ erupted the sister, scandalized at this aftermath to her devotions and pointing a finger at the mirror, ‘You have in your hands an instrument of the devil…’