Pescara Tales Read online

  A band of loafers happened to be gathered in front of the café, disposed by their expressions to welcome some buffoonery.

  While the woman drank, Filippo La Selvi turned to this audience and said:

  ‘She knows all the tricks, eh? This old vixen…’ And he clapped the bony shoulder of the laundress.

  Everyone laughed.

  Magnafave, a small hunchback, simple-minded and a stutterer, joined his left and right index fingers at their tips and said, stumbling on the syllables:

  ‘Ca…ca…ca… Candia… la… la… la… Cinigia…’

  And he proceeded by further gestures and babbling and with a foolish air of cunning to imply that Candia and la Cinigia were in league. All the male audience there were contorted with laughter, watching that performance.

  Candia, glass in hand, stood confounded for a moment; then she understood: they did not believe in her blamelessness; they accused her of having returned the silver spoon secretly, as instructed by the witch, to avoid further trouble!

  At that a surge of blind fury invaded her. She could find no words. She fell upon the weakest there, on the little hunchback, and rained upon him a veritable storm of punches and scratches. Those there, taking cruel pleasure in the battle, made a clamorous circle around the two, as if they were a pair of fighting animals, encouraging them with shouts and gesticulations.

  Magnafave, bewildered by such unexpected rage, sought to flee, and he stumbled about with the gracelessness of an ape, until finally gripped in the terrible hands of the laundress he was carried around and around with an increasing momentum like a stone in a sling, at last on being released flying through the air and coming down mightily on his face.

  Some there ran to help him up; Candia amidst the sound of hisses departed to enclose herself in her house and collapse on her bed, where in a great agony of heartache she lay sobbing and biting her fingers. The new accusation burned her more painfully than the first, especially since, once again, she felt herself capable of the subterfuge. How to exculpate herself this time? How to establish the truth of the matter? She despaired, thinking she would never now be able to bring up in her defence any material obstacles to the execution of such a trick. Access to the courtyard was easy: a door, never locked, opened onto the first landing of the great stairs, free access being needed there for various people to take out rubbish and for other reasons; so she could not silence her accusers by saying: How could I have got in? No, the means of doing the thing were many and at hand, and on that no doubt was founded the conviction of the populace.

  Candia then looked for other persuasive arguments, whetted her faculties, imagined three, four, five states and conditions that could explain how the spoon had been found to have lodged in a hole in the courtyard; she had recourse to ingenious artifices and cavils of all kinds, to subtleties of singular ingenuity. She set out to do the round of the shops, the houses, attempting in all manner of ways to conquer people’s disbelief. The people listened to those entangled arguments, listened amused, and on every occasion they cut them short with:

  ‘Yes, yes, quite so… but enough now!’

  And the tone of their response annihilated Candia. All her efforts had been useless! No one believed her! No one believed! With admirable pertinacity she returned to the assault, passed whole nights in imagining new arguments, in constructing new edifices, overcoming new obstacles. And little by little her mind was becoming exhausted with this continuous effort, could sustain no other thought than that of the spoon, had lost almost all awareness of social reality. Later, as the cruelty of her fellow citizens never diminished, a mania captured the poor woman.

  Neglecting her work, she was reduced to poverty; she washed clothes badly, lost things, tore things; when she went down to the riverbank under the steel bridge where the other washerwomen were gathered, she would let a piece of linen slip into the current and be lost. She talked constantly and tirelessly about the same thing, shouted and gesticulated like a deranged woman. To drown out the sound of her voice the young laundresses would start singing, and they mocked her in those songs, contriving heartless rhymes.

  No one gave her work anymore. Sometimes some old client sent her food out of pity. And so, little by little she grew used to begging, she went about the streets all ragged, bent, her hair dishevelled. Urchins shouted at her back:

  ‘Tell us the tale of the spoon, Aunty Ca’! We have not heard it before!’

  She would at times stop unknown passers-by to recount the story, wandering and losing herself in the mazes of her defence. Young men-about-town would for a coin have her go over her arguments three or four times, in order to raise difficulties against them, to listen until the end and then wound her with one demolishing word. She would shake her head and pass on. She joined other mendicant women and made her case with them, constantly, constantly, indefatigably, invincibly. She was attached to a deaf woman who limped and was afflicted with a sort of rose-coloured leprosy.

  In the winter of 1874 she was struck down with a malignant fever. The leper was at her side. Donna Cristina Lamonica sent her a cordial and a box of charcoal.

  The sick woman, lying on her deathbed, gibbered about the spoon, lifting herself on her elbows, attempted to gesture in ways that would accentuate her peroration. The leper kept taking her hands into her own in kindly attempts to sooth her.

  In her last agony, when her grown-great eyes were becoming veiled-over as if a level of turbid water was rising internally, Candia still babbled:

  ‘It was not I, signó… you see… because… the spoon…’

  A CASE OF SORCERY

  When the town square heard the seven consecutive detonations that were the sneezes of Mastro Peppe De Sieri, known as La Bravetta to the inhabitants of Pescara, they were sitting down to begin their midday meal. Immediately following the last of the seven, the church bell rang to confirm their occurrence on the hour. A general mood of merriment circulated among the city’s diners.

  For many years La Bravetta provided the Pescarans their daily chronometry and indulgent amusement, the latter we detect in the cognomen – typically given to some noisy, pugnacious little girl – by which they embellished and diminished him. The fame of his marvellous sneezing spreading over the surrounding farms and far into the regions beyond them; and still among the goodly vulgar its memory lives on preserved in proverb, and will long endure.

  I.

  Mastro Peppe La Bravetta was a man of the commonalty, with a short, round body, a face that reflected prosperous empty-headedness, eyes like those of an unweaned calf, and hands and feet of an extraordinary amplitude; and since he had a very long and fleshy and singularly mobile nose and his jaws were powerful, he in laughing and sneezing must have resembled one of those elephant seals whose fat snouts, so tell us sailors, tremble like gelatine. Furthermore, in common with those creatures, he was in fact lazy, lethargic in his movements, ridiculous in his postures when at rest, and he loved his sleep. He could not pass from sun to shade or shade to sun without an irresistible burst of air exploding from his mouth and nostrils: its thunder, especially during the quiet hours, being audible at a great distance, and, as said, because there was a certain regularity inhering in it, serving as a clock for much of the countryside.

  In his younger years Mastro Peppe had kept a macaroni shop and grown up in an ambience of harmless inanity and delight watching pasta become variously elaborated, surrounded by the constant noise of shaking sifters and turning wheels, and breathing warm air invaded by a dust of flour. In maturity, he had tied the matrimonial knot with a certain Donna Pelagia from the Castelli commune, and from that point had abandoned the alimentary trade and become a middle-man in majolica and terracotta crockery: retailing oil-jars, plates, mugs and in short, all the honest earthenware by which Castelli potters have long gladdened the mensal tables of the land of Abruzzo. By the trade in those homely – and one might almost say religiously-informed articles, unchanging as they have been for centuries, and indeed unchangeable �
� he lived a simple, easy life, sneezing as the need came upon him. And, it needs to be said for its relevance to this chronicle, as his wife was avaricious, so his soul too in time was conquered by a corresponding miserliness.

  By the time of the events which follow here, he had acquired on the right bank of the Pescara a piece of land with a rustic farmhouse-manor on it, just on the point where the river took a new direction and left behind it an amphitheatre level as a lake, where the irrigated soil rendered besides grapes and cereals a great quantity of comestible greens, where the trees of an orchard multiplied and a pig fattened each year under an oak heavy with acorns. Every January, La Bravetta left town and went with his wife to this property, having first stopped to seek the blessing of Saint Anthony upon the slaying and salting of that year’s porker.

  On this occasion his wife was indisposed and La Bravetta went alone to pray for the favour.

  The pig was caught and lifted onto a wide table in the open air, there it was held down by two or three of La Bravetta’s peasant sharecroppers and its throat was slit with a razor-edged knife. The animal’s high-pitched grunts and shrieks resonated for some little while through the fluvial stillness, became suddenly feeble and hoarse, and then while the great body jerked in its final throes were lost in the gargle of warm and vermilion blood pouring from the gaping wound; all this while the morning sun of the new year was drinking mist from the river and the humid earth. La Bravetta watched with a kind of ferocious glee the killer, Lepruccio, burning with a red-hot iron the pig’s eyes set deep in their surrounding fat, and while listening to the bulbs sizzle he joyed in the thought of how much lard and ham was promised here.

  The corpse was lifted by strong arms to a hook on a rude forked frame and there it hung head down while the peasants singed away all its hair and bristles with sheafs of lighted cane. The torches sparked and crackled as they burned, and the flames were barely visible in the strengthening light of the midmorning sun. Armed with his shining blade, Lepruccio proceeded as a final act to scrape the blackened body, while another man sluiced it over with boiling water, the hide gradually becoming clean, taking on a dubiously rosy pallor and smoking in the sunlight. Lepruccio – who had the wrinkled and unctuous face of an old female and wore a gold bell hanging from each earlobe – pressed his lips tightly as he worked, by turns stretching forward and compressing his frame, manoeuvring on his knees.

  When everything had been done, Mastro Peppe told the workers to carry the pig into a storeroom, where it would lie under cover. Never in all his years had he seen such a stupendous mass of meat, and he only regretted that his wife was not there to joy in the sight.

  Just then, and by now it was early afternoon, the two friends Matteo Puriello and Biagio Quaglia came by from the nearby house of Don Bergamino Camplone, a priest given to trade. They were a pair addicted to the gay life, always ready for something new, dedicated to wickedness, eager for any amusement; and since they had heard the outcry made by the porker, and were aware that Donna Pelagia was away, they now arrived in anticipation of some new adventure and to see what attempt might be made on La Bravetta.

  Matteo Puriello, called Ciávola the Raven, was a man above forty, a poacher, tall and thin, with indefinitely-blond hair and a moustache of thick bristles cut short like a brush. Due to a faded-yellow complexion, his whole head had the aspect of a wooden effigy on which a faint trace of the original gilding remains. His round and active eyes, as restless and mobile as those of a pursued animal, glinted like two new coins. In all his person, dressed almost always in some kind of subdued, earth-coloured cloth, he had the attitudes, movements and the swinging stride of those long-bodied dogs bred in the commune of Barbaresco to run down hares on the Piedmont plains.

  Biagio Quaglia, known as il Ristabilito after his supposed conversion to virtue during some crisis in an ill-spent youth, was, in contrast, of a medium height and a few years younger. Facially rubicund, he was by nature a creature that radiated a happy expansiveness, like a springtime almond tree in bud. He had the singular talent of moving independently and by some mysterious muscular faculty his ears and the skin on his forehead and cranium, and he had such a versatile range of facial contortions and an amusing power of mimicry, of plucking forth the ridiculous in people and occasions and of representing those in one sole gesture or curt witticism, that all the fisher guilds called him to enliven their revelries and to partake in them. He did well in that pleasant parasitical life, and also by playing the guitar at weddings and baptismal pomps. His eyes glistened like those of a ferret and his head was covered in a sort of soft down such as is left on a fat plucked goose ready for the grill.

  La Bravetta, in the best of humour, greeted the pair of friends:

  ‘What good wind brings ye, lads?’

  And when the honest and light-hearted welcomes and responses had been exhausted, he took them to the storeroom where the splendid porker lay on a table and there invited them to admire:

  ‘What d’ye say to this beauty, eh? Well, what d’ye say?’

  The two friends contemplated the pig in silent awe. Il Ristabilito clicked his tongue against his palate. Then Ciávola asked:

  ‘And what will you do with it?’

  ‘I’m going to salt it, that’s what,’ La Bravetta replied, and in his utterance could be heard a thrill of glutinous joy for the delectation that would soon come to his gullet.

  ‘You’re going to salt it?’ repeated with a shout il Ristabilito. ‘You’re going to salt it? Well now, Cià, have you seen a more silly man than this? For lettin’ slip a chance?’

  La Bravetta, stunned, cast his calf’s eyes first at one and then the other of his visitors.

  ‘Donna Pelagia keeps you on a short string,’ continued il Ristabilito. ‘But she’s not here, is she now? Hawk the pork and pocket the coin.’

  ‘But Pelagia? But Pelagia?’ La Bravetta babbled, in whose mind the phantom of a violent wife had the power to create an immense commotion.

  ‘And you tell her t’was stolen,’ the blond Ciávola offered the lie with a brusque gesture of impatience.

  La Bravetta was horrified.

  ‘And how would I go to her with such a tale? Pelagia would ne’er believe me, would throw me out, would beat me… Ye don’t know Pelagia?’

  ‘Oh Pelagia! Oh now, Donna Pelagia!’ and the two tempters squealed together in a mocking duet; and il Ristabilito instantly adopted the whining voice of Peppe and the high-pitched, strident one of the woman: representing a scene of low comedy in which Peppe was henpecked and spanked like a marionette.

  Ciávola was laughing and leaping uncontrollably around the pig, while he who was being lampooned – now overtaken by a violent fit of sneezing – waved his hands at the prancer in an attempt to interrupt him, and with each sneeze the windows rattled. Upon this scene and on the faces of those three so disparate humans the pale fires of the westering sun began to fall now, and with il Ristabilito and the room calm again, Ciávola said:

  ‘Ah well, the day’s getting on, time we went.’

  ‘If ye would like to stay for supper…’ Mastro Peppe began his invitation without enthusiasm.

  ‘Ah no, old mate,’ Ciávola interrupted him, turning towards the door. ‘You go butter thy Pelagia and salt yon pig.’

  II.

  The two friends were walking along the riverbank. In the distance the boats of Barletta, loaded with salt, shone like low edifices made of precious stones; in the direction of Montecorno a magnificent tree stretched high its branches through the immobile evening air, its reflection flawless in the limpid river.

  Il Ristabilito stopped and turned to Ciávola.

  ‘Mate, do we want to steal that pig tonight?’

  Ciávola said:

  ‘How?’

  Il Ristabilito said:

  ‘I know how, if the pig stays where we saw it.’

  Ciávola said:

  ‘Well, let’s. But then what?’

  Il Ristabilito stopped again, his little eyes glo
wing like two carbuncles, his whole exuberant, rosy face, flanked by faun-like ears, moving in a grimace of joy. But he spoke laconically:

  ‘Leave it to me.’

  From some distance, Don Bergamino Camplone came walking towards the two, a black figure through naked and silvery poplars. When they saw him, they recommenced their walking to meet him, and the priest on detecting their cheery expression asked, smiling:

  ‘What news, my beauties?’

  In a few words the two communicated their intention to Don Bergamino, who listened to them with great good humour; and then il Ristabilito lowered his voice and added:

  ‘Tis a matter to do cunningly. You know that since Peppe tied up with that old witch Donna Pelagia he’s turned skinflint, but he likes a sup o’ wine? Well, we will take him to Assau’s tavern. You, Don Bergamino, will press us all to drink and pay the count. Peppe will swallow a vat when his money’s not buyin’. That will grease our business later.’

  Ciávola lauded il Ristabilito’s plan, and the priest readily contracted to do his part. They turned together towards La Bravetta’s house, which then was about two musket shots away, and when they were near it, Ciávola hailed:

  ‘Ahoy, La Bravetta-a-a! D’you want to come to Assau? The priest here will pay for a carafe. Ahoy-y-y!’

  La Bravetta made no delay in coming down his path and through the farmyard’s portal, and all four walked off in a file, laughing and joking under the light of a new moon. In the quiet the meowing of amorous cats rose at intervals, and il Ristabilito said:

  ‘O Peppe, sure now, that’s not Pelagia callin’ thee?’

  From the left bank, the tavern lights shimmered towards the four, their reflection bright on the water. Now because the stream was usually calm along that stretch, Assau kept a boat for ferrying customers to his side, and when he heard their voices he rowed over to them. With much sociable noise the four boarded; then long-legged Ciávola set the boat to rock and squeak, terrifying La Bravetta, who in the humid atmosphere of the river had broken out again in sneezing.