Pescara Tales Page 24

  ‘Ahoy, Mastro Pé, an’ now whatcha doin’?’ chortled the goatherd again, displaying through his mocking grin a set of sallow, toothless gums. ‘Ahoy, ahoy, an’ what’s the meanin’ o’ that now!’

  The villeins broke the order in which they had been standing and came to surround La Bravetta, some with hoots of laughter, but others talking angrily; and an instant and brutal uprising on behalf of imperilled honour – always a passion which lies deep in our half-civilised peasantry – and furthermore the implacable claims of superstition demanding a response, erupted around the landlord in a tempest of abuse:

  ‘What didst thou ask us to come here for? To throw the blame on one o’ us with some false witchcraft? Embroil us in some dirty trick, hey? Thou hast made a mistake in thy tally! Thief, liar, bugle-nose, son of a mongrel dog, issue of a whore! So, thou had thought to tangle us in some scheme? Piece o’ twat! Thief! Dog snout! We’d like to break all thy Castelli pots over thy head! Whoreson!...’ And further such imprecations followed, until someone flung the ultimate anathema – ‘Thou shedder of Christ’s blood – yea, thou!’ and someone’s earthy index finger was levelled at poor Peppe, the choking, gasping Judas of the imputation. And after breaking the flagon and the glasses, the assembly dispersed, shouting back final injuries through the poplars.

  Those who remained were Ciávola, il Ristabilito, the regrouped geese, and La Bravetta. He, the last – filled with shame, with rage, with confusion, and with his palate still racked by the perversity of the aloes – could not utter a word. Il Ristabilito considered him with a cruel look, rocking on his heels and shaking his head ironically. Ciávola’s mocking laugh issued as one of his indescribable squeals:

  ‘Hee, hee, hee! Bravo! Bravo La Bravetta! Here be a man that keeps his counsel. So how much did you make on that pork? Ten ducats?’

  THE PIECES OF GOLD

  Passacantando entered, slamming the door shut behind him and making the glass panes in it rattle. He shook the raindrops from his shoulders with an irritable shrug, then looked around, took the sodden pipe from his mouth and spat a long jet of saliva in the direction of the tavern-keeper’s counter, a gesture both of indifference and contempt.

  The taproom was filled with a blue-grey haze of tobacco smoke through which the faces of drinkers and of the women who are found in such places could only barely and intermittently be made out. Pachiò was there, an incapacitated seaman with a greasy green band over his right eye, lost to some repulsive disease. Binchi-Banche was there, menial and factotum to the customs officers, a little man with a yellow and furrowed face like a dry lemon, a curved back, and weak legs lost in a pair of knee-high jackboots. Magnasangue was there, who pimped for the soldiers, a friend to comic actors, jugglers and mountebanks, to fortune-tellers and bear-tamers, to all the hungry, ambulatory gentry that halts an instant in some town to relieve a few farthings from the pockets of the indolent. And there were Fiorentino’s belles: three or four females grown flaccid in vice, with cheeks tinted brick-red, bestial eyes, and lips swollen and soft and dark-violet like overripe figs.

  Passacantando walked through the length of the tavern and sat down on a bench between Pica and Peppuccia, resting his back against a wall scribbled over with crudities. His pretty congnomen, construed as “One who passes by, singing”, belied, in the way so many surnames and nicknames of that province wryly do, a very different nature. He was in fact a young ne’er-do-well, tall, slender and loose-limbed, with a bloodless face from which projected a large rapacious nose bent to one side a little; the shape of his sinuous ears made one think of those paper cornets in which nuts are sold; one ear was also larger than the other. His lips, protuberant, vermillion, and of a certain soft formlessness, seemed perennially to store at the corners a few off-white bubbles of spittle. A beret, whose ingrained grease made it as malleable as wax, covered what appeared to be attentively-tended hair, judging from the way a lock in the shape of a hook descended to the bridge of his nose, and another curled on his temple. A sort of natural lewdness emanated from his every posture, every gesture, every modulation of voice, every glance.

  ‘Hey, l’Africana!’ he shouted across the room. ‘A half-litre!’ And he struck the table with his clay pipe, by that blow snapping its stem and souring his humour further.

  L’Africana, the tavern keeper, left her counter, swayed her great body towards Passacantando, and put a glass jar of wine before him. She remained standing at the table, looking at the man, her eyes filled with longing.

  As she stood there, Passacantando suddenly curved his arm round the neck of Peppuccia, forcing the trollop to drink from his glass, and before she had time to swallow he put his lips on hers. Peppuccia, in warding off her assailant and laughing, sprayed the mouthful of wine into his face.

  L’Africana’s expression changed to an image of fury. She returned to her bench, and from there she heard through the dense smoke the shrieks and snatches of words in the midst of laughter that were Peppuccia and Pica jeering her.

  Then the glass door opened again and Fiorentino appeared on the threshold, muffled in a Spanish military cape that made him look like a policeman.

  ‘Ahoy there my beauties!’ he rasped into the interior, ‘move out, it’s time!’

  Peppuccia, Pica and other women rose from the men they had been sitting with and began leaving, pursued by the hands and mockery of the males, and following their master they passed out into the rain. For a moment through the open door the Bagno, the old Bourbon prison, could be glimpsed squatting damply like an island in a muddy lake. Pachiò, Magnasangue and other clients also soon left, one by one. Binchi-Banche alone remained lying on his back under a table, drunk. The smoke began slowly lifting in the tavern. A turtle dove with very few remnant feathers appeared from somewhere and commenced to limp about the floor, pecking breadcrumbs.

  When she saw Passacantando make a movement to rise, l’Africana left her bench to come towards him, swaying her body ponderously, yet despite its deformity still making an attempt to convey by her walk something of soft femininity. But it was a desperate effort and in vain: her great breasts travelled like a wave from one side of her dress to the other; a grimace, no less than grotesque, creased her full-moon face, whereon in two or three places small tufts of hair sprouted from moles; dense down tinged her upper lip and her cheeks; her short, thick and wirelike hair compacted on her head into a sort of helmet, under which the eyebrows met above a flat, Ethiopian nose. She had, all in all, the features of some kind of monstrous hermaphrodite affected by elephantiasis or dropsy.

  She clutched at his arm to restrain him.

  ‘Oh, Giuvà!’ she burst out.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘What have I done to you?’

  ‘You? Nothing.’

  ‘Then why do you hurt me and torment me?’

  ‘I? You amaze me… Good-night! I have no time to waste just now.’

  And the man turned abruptly towards the door. But l’Africana threw herself at him, clasping her arms around him, immobilising his own by his sides, holding him face to her face, overwhelming him with the mass of her soft flesh. It was an act of such intense and unbridled passion and jealousy as to dumbfound him for a moment; and she babbled:

  ‘What d’you want? What? Tell me! What? What d’you need? I’ll give you everythin’, but stay here, stay with me. Don’t make me die of longin’… don’t drive me mad… What do you need? Look, come here! Take all you find…’ and she pulled him towards the counter, opened the cash drawer and with a gesture offered what was in it.

  Inside its greasy interior were some copper coins and among them glittered three or four small silver ones. Their total value came to perhaps five lire.

  Passacantando without a word gathered up the money and began counting it slowly on the counter, his lips formed in a contemptuous scowl. L’Africana looked in turn anxiously at the money and at the man’s face, her breathing that of an exhausted beast. There was the sound of the copper coins, of Binchi-Banche’
s irregular snoring, of the dove’s patter on the floor, all those standing out from the continuous background rustle of the rain and the murmur of the river below the Bagno and the Flagstaff.

  ‘T’aint enough,’ Passacantando said finally. ‘I want more or I’ll be on my way.’

  He had pushed his beret back onto the nape of his neck, revealing further the curled lock descending on his forehead; beneath that lock his eyes – the whites unclear, his look impudent, full of avarice, intent on l’Africana’s next response – cast on her a spell of evil fascination.

  ‘I’ve got no more. You’ve cleaned me out. Take what you see…’ l’Africana stammered, her tone appealing and tender, while her lips and the folds of flesh under her chin trembled and the tears began to squeeze out of her little, porcine eyes.

  ‘Oh well…’ Passacantando said in a low voice while he bent a little lower towards her, ‘oh well, and you think I don’t know the old man your husband’s got them gold Marengos?’ referring to coins that had been stamped by Napoleon in memory of the battle.

  ‘Oh Giovanni, I couldn’t.’

  ‘You go now, right this moment, and get ’em. I’ll wait for you here. He’ll be asleep. Now’s the time. Go on, or you’ll see me no more. By Sant’Antonio, you’ll see me no more!’

  ‘Oh Giovanni… I’m afeard.’

  ‘Afeard, afeard… what’s to be afeard of?’ hissed Passacantando. ‘Well then, I’ll come too. Let’s go!’

  L’Africana began to tremble, and she pointed to Binchi-Banche, still stretched out in deep slumber under a table.

  ‘And we oughter close the door first, too,’ she warned, submitting.

  Passacantando roused Binchi-Banche with a kick. From the shock of his awakening the drunk let out a series of shrieks and rattled the heels of his huge boots on the floor. Assisted through the door by a hand on his collar, he was flung outside into the mire and potholes, and the door was barred behind him.

  A lantern hanging from a shutter cast a rosy light over the interior grime of the taproom; the massive arches supporting the ceiling stood out in dark relief from their even deeper shadows; the architecture of the place seemed to have been conceived as an enclosure for dismal gloom. In that half-light, a set of brick stairs rose in a corner, suggesting a passage to some mysterious plane.

  ‘Let’s go!’ Passacantando repeated to l’Africana, who still stood trembling.

  They ascended the stairs in the dark corner, the woman urged ahead, he behind her. At the top of the steps a low-ceilinged room opened up, framed by unsealed wooden studs and joists. On one wall was affixed like an incrustation a Madonna in pale blue majolica; before it hung a votive lamp, no more than a glass tumbler in which a wick burned weakly in oil floating on water. Various images on tattered paper mottled the other walls as if with the varicoloured stigmata of leprosy. The smell of misery and the warm fetor of unwashed humans filled the room.

  The two thieves advanced cautiously.

  The old man lay on the marital bed in deep sleep, breathing with hoarse whistles through a toothless open mouth and a pair of clammy nostrils much dilated by tobacco. His bald head lolled awry on a striped cotton pillow; above his mouth – a cavity like a hole cut into the rotten portion of a pumpkin – lifted two bristling, tobacco-stained moustaches; the one visible ear, teeming with hair, with blister-like folds and shining with wax, resembled the turned-out auricle of a dog. One bare, almost fleshless arm, veined by lines of varicose swellings, had emerged from the bedclothes, its claw-like hand gripping a corner of the sheet as if in some habitual act of grasping to its owner whatever in the world was nearest and available.

  Now it happened that this ancient and feebleminded man had for some considerable time possessed two gold coins valued at twenty francs each, left him by some imprecisely identified but apparently usurious parent; and he had conserved those coins with jealous care within a cow’s horn in which he kept his tobacco, in the same way that people store musk-emitting insects for the aroma they pass on to objects folded about them. These were the two Marengos, yellow and bright, that Passacantando had referred to; and the old man, at any moment seeing them and touching them and holding them between his index finger and thumb, felt the passion of avarice and the voluptuousness of possession glow in him.

  L’Africana stole quietly closer, holding her breath, while Passacantando incited her to the theft with gestures. Then they heard a tiny noise on the stairs. Both stopped. The turtle dove, its almost featherless wings assisting it in a rocking progress up the steps, came skipping into the room and found its nest in an old slipper at the foot of the bed; but as with its arrival and in settling into the slipper it made some small noise, the man snatched it up in his fist and crushed it.

  ‘Are they here?’ he asked l’Africana in a whisper.

  ‘They’re here, under the pillow…’ she replied, sliding her hand beneath it.

  The old man moved in his sleep, emitting an involuntary groan, and a sliver of white appeared for a moment between the eyelids; then he fell back into the dumb insensitivity of senile unconsciousness.

  Overwhelmed by fear and with sudden audacity, l’Africana thrust her hand the full distance to the tobacco container, grasped it, and turned with it in flight to the stairs. She descended them hurriedly, followed by Passacantando.

  ‘Oh God! Oh God! D’you see what I do for you!...’ she babbled, pressing herself against him.

  And then they both with unsteady, mutually hindering hands opened the horn, began to search among the dark-brown shreds of tobacco, seeking the gold coins. The aroma of strong tobacco rose to their nostrils; and, as they were invaded by a need to sneeze, a sudden mad hilarity overcame them. In suppressing their sneezing, they rocked and lurched against each other, and the hazardous game excited the libidinous energies stored in l’Africana’s massive body. She had learned to love the amorous bites and pecks, the rocking like a ball she endured under Passacantando’s rough lovemaking, the blows and slaps he rained upon her, and now she thrilled all over again, shuddered in every part of her horrid and bestial form.

  But an indistinct growling became audible to them, then a grating outcry erupted in the room above, and the old man appeared at the head of the stairs, livid in the rosy light of the lantern, emaciated, skeletal, his legs bare, wearing only a ragged shirt on his upper body. By the time the thieving pair had fully turned, he was looking down at them and had begun waving his arms, shouting over and over like a condemned soul:

  ‘The Marengos! The Marengos! The Marengos!...’

  THE BREAD CROCK

  The moment Luca heard the sound of the crutches on the floor outside, he opened his eyes wide and turned them burning and turbid towards the door, expecting his brother to appear at the sill. His whole face, attenuated by suffering, devoured by fever, spotted with roseate blisters, suddenly took on a hard and almost insanely furious aspect. He clutched convulsively at his mother’s hands and shouted in a raucous, broken voice:

  ‘Drive him away! Drive him away! I don’t want to see him, do you understand? I don’t want to see him, ever! Do you understand?’

  The words choked him. He clasped tightly his mother’s hands, coughing and short of breath, while his shirt palpitated and opened further on his breast with every exertion. His mouth was swollen and on his chin the dried foam of saliva formed a crust that cracked and seeped blood with every change of his expression.

  His mother tried to calm him.

  ‘Yes, yes, my son. You won’t see him again. I’ll do as you want. I’ll drive him away, I’ll drive him away. This is your house, all yours. Do you hear me?’

  Luca was coughing into her face.

  ‘Now! Now! Immediately!’ he was saying with a ferocious persistence, rising in his bed, forcing his mother towards the door.

  ‘Yes, my son. Now. Immediately.’

  Ciro appeared at the threshold, leaning on his crutches. He was frail and had a bulbously large, heavy head; his hair was of such a light blond colour that
it seemed almost white; his eyes were as mild and trusting as those of a lamb, blue and framed by long, pale eyelashes.

  Entering, he said nothing, because some paralysis had rendered him mute. But he saw the look that the sick man fixed on him, intent and cruel, and he halted in the middle of the room, leaning on his crutches, irresolute and not daring to go further. His right leg, twisted and shortened, made small but visible spasmodic movements.

  Luca said to his mother:

  ‘What’s he come here for, that wry-bones? Drive him away! I want you to drive him away! Do you understand? Do it now!’

  Ciro heard him and he looked across at his stepmother as she rose. His expression had such entreaty in it that she had not the heart to beat him away. Then his hand left one of the crutches propped under his armpit and with that hand he made a desperate gesture, throwing a famished look at the earthenware bread crock in a corner. He wanted to say:

  ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘No, no, don’t give him anything!’ Luca shouted, agitated in his bed, enforcing his ill humour on the woman. ‘Nothing! Drive him away!’

  Ciro had lowered his great head on his breast and was trembling, his eyes were on the point of overflowing with tears. When his stepmother put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him towards the doorway he broke out in sobs but allowed himself to be steered out. He heard the door closing behind him and he remained on the landing, sobbing loudly and without pause.

  Luca said to his mother, making an angry movement:

  ‘Do you hear that? He does that on purpose, to make me feel ill.’

  His brother’s sobbing went on, broken at times by a singular indrawn whine as heartrending as the death wheeze of a long-suffering beast of burden.

  ‘But can’t you hear him? Go! Throw him down the steps!’

  The woman sprang up, went quickly to the door and raised her hands over the mute. They were hard hands, long used to beatings and cruelties.