Pescara Tales Page 20

  The craft nudged its square front lightly against the bank. The sheep were bleating, crammed tightly against each other and frightened of the water. Their shepherd with the ferryman and the latter’s son began driving them ashore. As soon as each animal felt the ground, it made a little run and then stopped to return as quickly among its mates, all bleating. Two or three lambs frisked and leapt about for some moments on disproportionally long, crooked legs and then sought their mother’s udder.

  Having completed the disembarkation, Luca Marino re-moored the lightened ferry and then with great, slow strides ascended the bank towards the garden plot. He was a man who showed his forty-odd years, was tall and grown wiry, with a flushed face and a receding hairline. He had a moustache of indeterminate colour, sparse bristles grew unevenly on his chin and cheeks, and his eyes were unclear, without vivacity or intelligence, their whites veined with blood in the manner of heavy drinkers. His open shirt showed a thick mat of chest-hair, and on his head lay a greasy beret.

  ‘Whew!’ he gasped, blowing that sound of relief at the pergola. He halted with legs spread wide and wiped his forehead, beaded with sweat, then walked on, passing across the front of the passengers without giving them a glance. Here was someone who offered nothing of grace or politeness in any of his gestures or his attitude towards others. In his appearance he was indeed almost brutal. His hands were enormous, the veins on their backs swollen, hands accustomed to row and to pole and that now seemed a burden to him, held dangling by his sides as he tramped up towards the house.

  ‘God, but I’m dry!...’

  Donna Laura stood as if turned to stone, without words, without will or awareness beyond one thought.

  That was her boy! That was her boy!

  A pregnant woman, her figure already aged and degraded by work and her own fecundity, came down bringing a mug of wine to her parched husband. The man drank it at one draught, then he wiped his lips with the back of his hand and clicked his tongue in satisfaction. He returned to the landing.

  ‘Ready,’ he said brusquely and without enthusiasm.

  With his eldest boy to help him, a large young oaf of fifteen, two planks were thrown down between the ferry and the bank as a gangway for the passengers.

  ‘Why do you not board, madam?’ asked the same old man, when he saw Donna Laura sitting unmoving and silent.

  She stood up mechanically and followed him, and he helped her onto the boat. Why was she boarding? Why cross the river? She was neither aware of what she was doing nor able to examine the act. Her power of sentience, so impacted by what she had seen, was now inert, almost immobilised at one point only: that was her son! And then, moment by moment, something began to extinguish inside her, a great vacuity to darken her mind. She comprehended nothing now. She saw and heard involuntarily, as in a dream.

  When Luca’s son came to her for the fare, before the boat had left the bank, she did not understand him. The boy jingled in his cupped hand coins that he had received from one of the young men, repeating his demand more loudly in the belief that the old lady was hard of hearing.

  Imitating dumbly the motions of the other two men when they paid next, she produced money, but it was above what was necessary. The boy tried to explain that he had no change for that amount. She could not comprehend. He finally pocketed the money and turned away with a malicious twist to his mouth; and the other passengers grinned at each other with that expression which crosses the faces of peasants when an outsider is seen to be swindled. One of them said:

  ‘Are we to go at last?’

  Luca had been pulling in the anchor; he now pushed the ferry off and it drifted quietly on the gurgling water, the bank with its rushes and poppies soon appearing to move quickly past them and to curve away like a sickle retracting. The sun was setting fire to all the river; it had just begun its descent into the western half of the sky where violet vapours were rising. A group of gesticulating people milled on the bank they had left, and it was the beggars, wrestling the idiot down. At times, with a momentary draught of wind, a word or two or a faint gust of laughter like the sound of distant breaking waves reached the ferry.

  Those on the oars, the ferryman and boy, shirtless now, rowed with all their might to defeat the force of the current. Donna Laura could see Luca’s spine, burned almost black, where the design of the ribs stood out and the sweat trickled in streams. Her eyes, a little dilated, dull, were fixed upon that sight.

  One of the passengers stood up to collect his things from under a thwart and said:

  ‘We’re there.’

  Luca picked up the anchor and threw it on the bank. The boat floated down with the current for the length of the rope and stopped abruptly with its side against the bank. The men were on the ground in one leap, and with disinterested civility they helped the old woman off, then they went on their way. The ferry commenced its return.

  The country on that side was planted with vines, short and meagre, extending away in green rows. Here and there the domed shapes of trees interrupted the regularity of the plain.

  Donna Laura found herself alone, lost on that shore with little shade, unconscious of anything save the continuous beat of her arteries, save a hollow, deafening clamour in her ears. She was losing the sensation of firm ground under her feet, feeling with each step as if she were sinking in mud or soft sand. Everything about her turned and dissolved; everything, and even her own existence, appeared vague to her, distant, forgotten, finished with forever. Dementia and delusions afflicted her mind: she suddenly saw people, houses, another country, another sky. She collided with a tree, tripped over a stone and fell, rose again, and her poor exhausted body stood oscillating in ways that were both terrible and laughable. Yet nothing around her could equal the resplendent glory of her white hair under that ferocious sun.

  Now the beggars on the other bank had by their mockery driven the idiot to swim across the river to obtain there his share of alms from the woman. They had stripped him of his rags and thrust him into the water; and the idiot was swimming like a dog, encouraged to cross by volleys of stones; the others, themselves a collection of deformities, whistling and howling at him, alive with the joy of their cruelty to a fellow:

  ‘Look, look, he’s drowning! He’s drowning!’

  But with desperate strength the idiot made it to the other bank; and thus naked, and without intelligence, dead to the sentiment of modesty, he walked towards the woman, with each step holding his hand out and bent in the typical posture of a supplicating mendicant.

  The demented woman saw him, and with a movement expressing horror she gave a shrill cry and took hurried steps towards the river. Did she know what she was doing? Did she seek death? What did she think in that instant?

  At the limit of the bank she stepped into the river. The water gurgled and closed over her, and from that point for some seconds a number of small whirlpools passed downstream, spread into lucid and smooth undulations and dispersed.

  The beggars on the other bank were shouting to the ferry that was now distant from them in mid-stream:

  ‘O-oh, Luca-a-a! O-oh, Luca Marino-o-o!’

  And they ran to the house of the poplars to raise the alarm.

  And in due course Luca pushed his barge back in the direction pointed out, calling on the way to the other boatman, La Martina, who was at that time placidly making way against the current in his vessel.

  Luca shouted:

  ‘There is one who has drowned over there.’

  He said nothing more, neither about what had happened nor the person. He did not like talking.

  The two river-men coupled their vessels board-to-board and rowed calmly.

  La Martina said:

  ‘Have you tried that new wine of Chiachiù? Believe me…’ and he circled his thumb and index finger, a gesture that described the excellence of the vintage.

  Luca replied:

  ‘No, not yet.’

  La Martina said:

  ‘Will you take a drop later?’


  Luca replied:

  ‘I? Yes.’

  La Martina:

  ‘After. Iannangelo will be there waiting for us.’

  Luca said:

  ‘Good.’

  They arrived at the place. The idiot, who might have better shown the place, had fled and been taken by a fit of epilepsy among the vines. On the other bank the curious were beginning to gather.

  Luca said to his companion:

  ‘You stop rowing your boat and come into mine. One can row and the other one looks.’

  La Martina did so. He rowed them up and down for some twenty metres and Luca poked at the bottom with the barge pole. Every now and again feeling some resistance he muttered:

  ‘It is here.’

  But he was mistaken; until finally after many tries, he said:

  ‘This time we have it.’

  And bending his body and almost squatting on his hams, he very slowly lifted the weight on the end of the pole, his biceps quivering.

  La Martina asked, leaving the oars:

  ‘Do you need me to help?’

  Luca replied:

  ‘No. ‘Tis nothing.’

  THE AGONY

  I.

  When Donna Letizia came in, with an expression of tearful misery on her face and carrying the patient in her well-fleshed fine arms, her daughters surrounded her, all of them affected by pity and conveying that genteel sentiment by wails of sorrow. Their female voices mingling in the room had an accompaniment of noise rising through the open windows from the street traffic, interpolated in which were the calls of a wandering seller of cures extolling the powers of certain angelic waters and infallible powders.

  The dog that was being borne in by the lady responded to that concern for it with a faint tremor that visibly travelled down its spine to the very tip of its tail. With an effort, it lifted its lids to turn on those who were caressing it two enormous eyes overflowing with gratitude, moving its head side to side with difficulty, as if the cords of the neck had grown rigid, its partly-open mouth displaying between the lower canines a tongue that looked like a vermillion leaf lined with violet veins. A little foam dampened its lower jaw where the absence of hair revealed the rosy skin. The difficulty it had in breathing was conveyed at times by a sort of hoarse sibilation, while its nostrils had been progressively drying and were close to acquiring the hard and scabrous aspect of a truffle.

  ‘Oh Sancho, poor Sancho, what have they done to you? Poor Bibby, hey? Poor old thing!...’

  The girls’ sensitive commiserations were becoming yet more tender, culminating in an infantile babble without significance beyond the lamenting and caressing sounds themselves. They all wanted to pass a hand over the animal’s head, to pick up a paw, to touch its nose. Donna Letizia supported the dear weight maternally, and her fat white fingers, swollen almost to morbidity, stroked Sancho’s neck slowly, insinuating themselves through the dog’s fur.

  The afternoon light and fresh airs from the seashore were entering the room through curtains of a smoky green tinge. Eight coloured prints in black frames adorned walls covered in a paper patterned with yellow flowers. On an old chest of drawers from the eighteenth century, topped by a slab of rosy marble and studded with brass rivets, a triumph of wax flowers posed under a bell-shaped crystal cover flanked by mirrors mounted on silver legs. On the mantelpiece above the diffident fireplace glinted a pair of gilt candelabras holding pristine candles. A clockwork figure made of papier-mâché and representing a macaque in Moorish dress stood meditating on top of one of those inlaid little tables that one brings back from Sorrento. A number of chairs, showing episodes from pastoral fables on their tapestried backs, a sofa fashionable in the time of the Empire, and two modern armchairs competed in the general discord of forms and colours.

  II.

  After the ailing creature was deposited in the curve of an armchair an interval of silence reigned in the room. Sancho lifted himself on four trembling legs, turned several times in search of a position which might be less painful than another, in the restlessness of suffering decided to squat on his hind legs and placed his head on an arm rest, remaining like that for some moments, breathing with difficulty and his eyelids closed as if overtaken by sudden drowsiness. On his broad chest three or four light ridges of fur curved together in a kind of hoop that looked like the bow of a yoke, while over the back of his neck those ridges were denser and more pronounced. Around the edge of his mouth what could be called lips hung flaccidly from his upper jaw. Altogether, in its disorder the poor animal had that something of both the ridiculous and miserable that dwarves have who are oppressed by corpulence and asthma.

  Confronted by that prostration the girls were rendered mute, overcome by immense grief and an acute sense of coming tragedy; for Sancho had over many years been in their beloved care, the object of their blandishments and caresses, the unknowing outlet for those eruptions of gentleness and tenderness that female pubescence will often exhibit between its intervals of anaemic chlorosis. Sancho had been born and had grown up in the house, attaining the thickset and heavy body bestowed on him by his bastard pedigrees and the further roundness of a eunuched beast of leisure and often-appeased gluttony. And so, little by little, in his dumb, clear eyes there appeared a look replete with humanity and devotion. In those hours of joy, he would raise his stump of a tail and wag it animatedly, would lift one paw, and, his body totally involved and a singular tremor agitating all his hide, he would trot around with the grace of a guinea pig among spring grass.

  Those blessed memories now tormented the undeveloped souls and emotions of the girls.

  ‘And what about the doctor, when is he coming?’ Teodolinda the youngest asked impatiently, she who had the face of a little monkey and at that moment presented it all whitened with cosmetic talc. Her brows were fringed by red locks.

  The sick animal uttered an occasional weak lament, opening its eyes and casting around a pleading look, a look slow and gentle, made affectingly more human by a nervous squint and a brown line of dried tears beneath each eye. As Donna Letizia tried to make it accept a spoonful of nourishing soup, it darted its tongue in all directions with the effort of swallowing, unable to close its grown-rigid jaws.

  Now the voice of Doctor Zenzuino could be heard in the foyer, he had finally arrived; and there entered into the room a gentleman with a handsome, clear-eyed face that exuded high spirits and total health in his own case.

  ‘Oh Don Giovanni, cure Sancho, do! He’s dying…’ exclaimed a pathetic voice.

  The medic looked over all that grieving family, for whom he had for many years and needlessly prescribed arsenic, iron, ferruginous oil, and Levico water, and there was a faint glow of humour behind his gold-framed glasses; then, considering the patient with the interest of a scientist, he said slowly and carefully:

  ‘I believe we have here a case of paralysis of the mandible and the sub-maxillary salivary glands. A condition that has its source in an alteration of the central nervous system, probably of the meninges, its aetiology deriving from a hereditary or parasitic origin, and by disposition progressive. The process will tend to diffuse, will by stages advance, organ by organ, to deprive the body of its functions, until arriving for a short time at the seat of one or another vital operation, whether circulatory or respiratory, will result in death…’

  The terrible barbarous words stabbed with supreme pain the tender and yet-unformed consciousness of the adolescents, while the florid cheeks of Donna Letizia grew in an instant pale.

  ‘I believe a factor influencing the development of the condition was alimentative, mm?’ added Don Giovanni pitilessly.

  At that accusation remorse began to torment the girls, who had sinfully always indulged Sancho’s greed. And Teodolinda with an ineffable movement of discomfort asked:

  ‘Is there no remedy, then?’

  ‘We could try. I recommend applying a mustard plaster at the nape of the neck,’ the Doctor replied, excusing himself amiably and departing.

&nbs
p; Sancho wanted to descend from the chair, hesitated at the edge without strength to leave it, implored help with feeble glances from eyes that were already becoming veiled like two black grapes overspread by the silvery rime of autumn’s decline. In his fat features pain was progressively carving out shadows of senility: the rosy tint of the muzzle where the whiskers were long and sparse seemed now to have degraded to something nearer yellow, his docked ears trembled lightly at times, and with that same tremulous quivering a corresponding shudder passed over the full extent of his white hide. Isabella, the most ethereal of the five daughters, who by the cruelty of fate had inherited from her father his pious Bourbon nose and harelike forehead, went distressed to the animal, took it in her arms and gently deposited it on the floor.

  Sancho remained still for a moment, unable to move his legs, holding his head up and his back arched, oppressed by his difficulty in breathing; then he began to move forward on dragging feet, staggering painfully like a hunted animal that had been struck by a bullet through the haunches. Perhaps he was thirsty, because when his bowl was offered he attempted to lap the water; but because the growing paralysis already impeded even that act, after some fruitless angry attempts he turned, squatted on his back legs and with a front paw began vigorously stroking his muzzle, as if to rub off from it that obstacle which was causing him so much pain.

  And the dog’s attitude was so vividly soulful, and its pupils were so full of human supplication and desperation, that all at once Donna Letizia burst into tears:

  ‘Oh, poor Bibby… who would have thought… my poor Bibby…’

  The girls joined in, and the commotion of woe reached an extreme pitch. Teodolinda gathered the dying beast and carried it to the sofa. Heroic measures were necessary, the time had come to grasp at any remedy, at any cost, and she turned to her sisters with determination:

  ‘Isabella, Maria, the scissors! Come now, quickly!’

  Suppressing their anxiety and pallid, they all bent around Sancho, who had closed his eyes again and was blowing warm breath into the hands of his deliverer. And she, overcoming her first repugnance, began cutting away the fur on the back of his neck, carefully, stopping at times to blow on the shorn part; and soon an approximately round bare patch widened on Sancho’s fat nape, and the tonsured animal once again assumed a miserable clownish appearance.