Pescara Tales Page 3

  And, excited by her own opening invective, she continued in a raised voice to hurl burning phrases which she had heard during the sermon, gesticulating, expanding on the dangers of eternal damnation, soon not only with reference to the threatened sinner before her, but escalating to admonish and remind the delinquents of the universe.

  ‘Memento! Memento!’

  Orsola had stopped listening, had lost the thread of all that vociferation, her senses stunned.

  In a corner of the square a military band gave vent to a fanfare with a flourish of twenty trumpets.

  VII.

  At the rear of the house was their third room, small and low-ceilinged with beams blackened by smoke, a room full of the smell of onions, dishwater and soot. Copper pans hung unburnished in a row on a wall; plates of Castelli ware were arranged on a console table, displaying their merry decorations of flowers, birds and laughing faces; scattered on various surfaces were an ancient brass lamp, empty bottles, scraps of wilting vegetables; and over all this dominated protectively the image of Saint Vincent Ferrer, depicted with his great book in one hand and the Holy Spirit’s red flame bursting from his forehead.

  There in past times Orsola, surrounded by vapours of boiling water and the exhalations of vegetables on which the two women lived, had often heard coming from the little window over her head the musical accompaniment to some bawdy song, and then the loud guffawing that typically followed its verses. The singing and the laughter grew louder during summer nights, amid the noise of passacaglias, of guitars and the rhythmic thudding of boots. All the sounds of animation in that lowlife quarter of the town rose during certain hours to the elevation of those poor brides of Jesus and caused them to tremble with horror, bent in humility over earthen pots filled with the eremitic innocence of legumes and leafy greens. But now, in her new era of higher spirits, on hearing one day those voices, a desire coursed through Orsola to look out upon their source.

  Camilla was away; it was the fifth Sunday of Lent and the Raising of Lazarus. There was a ferment in the air betokening the arrival of April, a feeling of its imminence aroused by brief rains and then a gratifying drift of warm air; and in that atmosphere the maid felt even more fully and certainly a sense of her rebirth. And so, being idle and moving about in the rooms at a loss, her native curiosity goaded her to look; and she was suddenly captivated by that morbid fascination which the sight of an obscene spectacle will exert on even the most chaste and subdued of humans.

  She stood on a stool, and that brought her head to the level of the window; but then before she could look out she was assaulted by a spasm of trembling and she turned about in panic that someone might surprise her in the act.

  All around her was quiet; a drop of water made a sound falling into a basin. Outside, voices rose to her and drew her attention back again.

  The virgin, grown calmer, looked out. In the alley below, the roadway after the rain was covered with a deposit of fermenting slime; the flagstones had darkened under a film of black mud on which lay mixed together rotten fruit, tufts of grass, rags, worn-out slippers, hat brims, and all the other refuse that is finally flung out after having lost its value to even the meanest orders of society. A row of dwarfish houses, leaning on the old Bourbon barracks for support, seemed to pant upon that cloacal extent out of which the sun propagated insects and miasmic smells. Yet, from all the windows of those houses and from every opening that allowed the passage of air carnations poured forth in freedom from pots, their healthy blossoms open, rosy and red, dangling magnificently in the sunlight. And among those blossoms passed like apparitions the flaccid painted faces of the area’s whores, resounded verses of obscene ditties, the barks of guttural laughter; and out on the adjoining pavement, under the iron gratings of the barracks, other such females moved about in the vicinity of outward-leaning soldiers, talking up to them in raucous voices, provocatively. And the soldiers, inflamed by the springtime fervours of blood, the sensual flowering of all the distempers of Aphrodite, stretched their hands through the grills to get… whatever they could get, devouring with ardent eyes those women long undone by years of tending to the lechery of numberless ships’ crews, to gangs of drunken dockworkers.

  Orsola stood stunned, dazed by the spectacle of all that corruption seething under the goodly Lent sun and rising to her window. She remained there unmoving; but on lifting her eyes she suddenly saw a blond man standing at a dormer window of the barracks, looking directly at her and smiling. She came down precipitately from the stool, even paler than before, imagining too that she had heard Camilla’s voice. She ran into her room and threw herself on the bed, dismayed by what she had seen and breathless as if someone had been pursuing her, menacing her.

  VIII.

  From that day on, every hour, every moment that Camilla was away from home, the diabolical temptation drew her back to that spectacle. She resisted at first, but in vain, without strength, allowing herself to be defeated. She went to it with the anxious suspicion of someone going to a lovers’ tryst; she remained long behind a barely-open decrepit shutter, while the miasmas of the carnal hell below agitated and corrupted her.

  She spied on all of it, narrowing her eyes she sought to penetrate the carnations that obstructed the windows, to see inside, to discover there… she knew not what. The sun now was growing hot, with a heat that seemed weighty, multitudes of insects eddied in it. At intervals, when a man entered the alley, out of the windows came the calls of anticipating women; in disordered dress, breasts uncovered, they came out to offer themselves. The man would disappear into one of the dark entries with his chosen, while the disappointed others flung jeers and laughter at the back of the pair and returned to their ambushes behind the carnations.

  Thus did desire ignite in the virgin. The need of love, once latent, emanated now from all her being, had become torture, an incessant and ferocious begging from which she knew not how to defend herself.

  A surge of salubrious warmth filled her; certain sudden fits of joyous vivacity stirred her blood, made themselves felt in her breast almost as a beat of wings, inspiring songs in her mouth. At times a breath of wind, one of those brief quivers as the air dilates under the sun, or a beggar’s distant singing, or an odour, or something else totally undefined, was enough to cause her to lose herself in vagueness, an abandonment in which she seemed to feel across all her limbs the caressing velvet touch of some ripe fruit. She was so free and so lost in unknown sweet abysses! The irritation of continence, the unnatural superabundance of lymphatic secretions, that constant distention of overstimulated nerves, kept her in a kind of daze similar to the first stage of drunkenness. The past was dissolving, was falling into slumber somewhere at the bottom of her memory and there was no reawakening for it. And hourly and everywhere desire insidiously attended and directed her: the saints on the walls, the Madonnas, the naked crucified Christs, the small misshapen statuettes in wax, all things around now adopted an impure character and that impurity sprang out from them and alighted on her and suffocated her.

  ‘There, I’ll go down to the street right now,’ she would decide, no longer in control of herself.

  Then in the act of opening the door her hands trembled; the squeal of the bolt sliding through its rings was intimidating. She turned back and returned to the bedroom, throwing herself on the bed, almost fainting, ashen-faced, disconcerted by the shadow of a once-glimpsed man.

  IX.

  On Palm Sunday, she went out for the first time after many months, Camilla wanted to take her to render thanks at church for her recovery. When the bells began ringing Orsola appeared at her bedroom window. The whole town was in a gay fervour, involved in the greater gaiety of a sunlit Easter-day in April. All the countryside had invaded the streets, olive branches in hand, the sign of peace.

  Now she had to dress quickly in her holiday best, people would see her passing in the streets. She was suddenly overcome by a manic vanity; she closed the door and began searching in the bottom of the clothes-chest for someth
ing light-coloured, attractive. A strong odour of camphor rose from the old dresses kept there for years. There were ample gowns patterned with flowers, in green and violet and iridescent silk, that perhaps had once been swelled around the hips of a new bride by a crinoline petticoat, things with low busts and wide sleeves; there were short mantles, turtle-pied, hemmed with white lace; veils woven through with silver thread; collars of fine linen embroidered with drawn thread-work: all dead things of no use, gauche things stained with mould.

  Orsola rummaged through the clothing, guided as if by a new instinct for the apt and pleasing, her hands absorbing the odour of camphor. All that useless silk and those veils irritated her; she could find nothing that might suit her. Angrily, she shut the chest and pushed it under her bed with a violent movement of her foot. The bells rang for a third time. In a feverish state, she donned her usual sad grey dress, and biting her lips to keep from crying joined Camilla.

  The bells called the town. In the streets palm fronds emitted a mobile silver glitter, above every gathering of country people a small forest of sprays rose and disseminated through the air the candid goodwill of the Christian benediction, diffusing from those fronds as if their waving hailed indeed the Galilean’s approach, the humble mild King coming seated on a she-ass, surrounded by the tumult of his followers, the rapt hosannas of a folk redeemed. Benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini. Hosanna in excelsis!

  In the church the crowd was immense under that canopy of fronds. By one of those currents that occur unavoidably in masses of people, Orsola was separated from Camilla, left lone in that tide, encircled by its contacts, its jostling, its breathing. She tried to open a passage for herself, her hands touched the spine of some man, then touched other warm hands, whose meeting disconcerted her. She felt her face brushed by olive leaves, her pace forward blocked by a knee, her side elbowed, unidentified pressures were an affront to her breast, her shoulders. Beneath the veil of odorous incense, under the consecrated fronds, in that mystical penumbra, in all that amassed Christianity of both sexes, small sparks of erotic energy flashed here and flashed there, encountering their counterparts and generating responses; secret loves met again and joined. Daughters of the countryside with fronds over their bosoms passed in front of Orsola, a fleeting smile in the corner of an eye angling back in the direction of trailing admirers; and she in turn felt the near passing of that ardour, felt her body put between those bodies seeking one another, herself an obstacle to those gestures that sought to make contact, to the clasp of those hands, the linking of those arms. And something of such interrupted caresses entered into her own blood. At one point she came face to face with the blond soldier; the movement of a column of worshippers almost pushed her face into his tunic. She raised her eyes, and the young man smiled broadly as he had done that day at that window of the barracks. Behind her the pressure continued, the vapour of incense spread overhead more densely, and the deacon from the depths of the nave intoned:

  ‘Procedamus in pace.’

  And the choir responded:

  ‘In nomine Christi. Amen.’

  That interchange announced the start of the procession, beginning a collective movement by the crowd. Instinctively, without thinking, Orsola attached herself to the man as if she belonged to him already; she let herself be almost lifted by those hands clasping her sides, in her hair feeling that virile breath that smelled lightly of tobacco. She went so, weak, helpless, overcome by the sensual pleasure that had gathered her up so suddenly, seeing nothing before her, dazed.

  Then from the major altar the thurifer swung his censer forward, puffing clouds of blue sweet smoke over the moving congregation, that now commenced uncoiling from the centre of the church in a procession of white vestments followed then by the lay celebrants, still bearing olive branches in their hands and singing.

  X.

  All the Holy Week protected in its complicit shadows the love of virgin Orsola. Throughout Pescara each church was immersed in a crepuscular dimness invoking the night of Christ’s passion; the crucifix on every altar was covered with a violet drape; the recessed sepulchres of the Nazarene were surrounded by plants that had been grown in nurseries underground and become long-stemmed and blanched; the perfume of flowers and benzoin hung heavy in the air.

  On her knees near the altar, Orsola waited until a light step behind her made her start. She must not stir to look back, because Camilla watched her now, but she felt herself embraced by the observation of the man, seared by a subtle fire, and a vague tenderness spread through all her flesh. She fixed her eyes on the remnants of candles burning on a triangular frame beside the altar. The priests sang with a great book in front of them, and one by one the candles were extinguished. Now there were only five left, now two; darkness advanced from the depths of the side chapels, approaching the scattered worshipers at their prayers. The last flicker of light finally died; the benches resounded under the blows of rods: the scourging of Jesus. Orsola in that darkness felt herself touched by a pair of exploring hands and she leapt up from the pavement, startled and bewildered. Then, hurriedly leaving the church, the thought of having violated a sacred place filled her to her depth with guilt and instantly the dread of everlasting punishment returned to her. She fell into a dreamlike void in which the figure of Christ, livid and dead, and the rattle of the rods, and the tremors of her incited flesh, and the intense odour of the flowers, and the breath of that blond man all mingled in an inexpressible sensation of grief and rapture.

  XI.

  But with Jesus ascended in triumph to the glory of heaven, the remnant aromas of Easter now no longer solaced the need for love in the virgin Orsola. Now love’s setting was the dominion of stray cats and roof-infesting pigeons, its tender signals passing from the dormer window to her own, between and below which the brothel zone lay like a putrid drain, adjacent to which flowers fertilized by the mire blossomed. The pigeons circled above, flashing green and grey reflections from their feathers.

  Her innamorato had a fine and ancient name, he was called Marcello, and the sleeves of his tunic were attractively trimmed in red and silver. He wrote epistles replete with eternal fire and other reckless expressions that brought the beloved to the edge of swooning with tenderness and barely-contained passion. She read those pages in secret, kept them night and day in her bosom. Because of the warmth, the violet ink printed itself on her skin like a gentle love-tattoo, and in that she gloried. Her answers were interminable: all the textbook knowledge of a schoolmistress, all the treasury of psalmodic apostrophizing known to a devout believer, all the fluent sentimentality of a late-blooming maid was poured on the pages of exercise books ruled with dark blue lines. As she wrote, she lost herself, felt herself drawn upwards and carried by a wave of sonorous verbosity. It almost seemed as if a new faculty had developed in her and had suddenly taken a manic form. That great sedimentation of mystic lyricism accumulated during long years of reading the books of psalms and prayers in all faithfulness to the celestial Spouse, now, unsettled by the tumult of earthly love, re-emerged confusedly in the aspects of unprecedented profanity. The tearful entreaties to Jesus were now converting to hopeful sighs directed towards far less ethereal embraces; the offering of her soul’s flower to the Summit of all Goodness had become transmuted into tender dedications of her body to the desires of the blond lover; the aphrodisiac light of the moon took to itself the crown of epithets by which the radiance of the Holy Ghost is solemnly quantified; nor did spring’s zephyrs lack power to waft into oblivion the aromas of the wedding banquet in paradise.

  XII.

  Their messenger was one of those men who seem to sprout like mushrooms from the dampness of a muddy road and have in all their figure a sort of native tint of mire, one of those grey individuals who seem able to insinuate themselves everywhere, are found wherever a cent is to be gained, where a bit of fat can be lapped up or a rag stolen; such a one may today be a junk dealer and tomorrow a pimp procuring housemaids and loose women; today he brokers wares of dub
ious origin and tomorrow catches stray dogs.

  This prodigy bore the melodramatic name Lindoro, and from the hospital quarter to the Sant’Agostino bastion that name had become leagued with infamies. Born from the coupling of a wandering clarinet-player with a street-peddler of fruit, he had inherited the nomadic instinct of his father and the inborn covetousness of his mother. He had first dragged himself with a trowel and pail over the garbage heaps behind the town’s houses; he had then worked as a scullion in a tavern, where soldiers and sailors threw the dregs of their glasses and the bones of ill-cooked fish into his face. From there he had landed in a bakery, where all night long, sweating and near-blinded, he shifted loaves with a long paddle nearer to or further from the flames. From those ovens he passed to the office of a public lamplighter, wearing down one shoulder under the weight of a portable ladder. Sacked for syphoning-off paraffin oil from the great white-zinc containers, he responded to the call of the road, buying and reselling old clothes, offering himself to the hovels of the riffraff for the rudest employment, ministering by all kinds of odious services to soldiers and out-of-towners, ever struggling thus for his mouthful of bread.

  Both in his soul and on his body each employment had left its mark, made habitual some gesture, developed certain individual muscles, corroded an organ, created callouses and insensitivity, tuned the tone of his voice, donated a new phrase from its jargon’s vocabulary. He was short in stature, wiry, with a huge near-bald head displaying sparse clusters of bristles on his cheeks, and pustules among those clusters. His clothing was hybrid and changed constantly, all the fashions passing over his body and overtaking each other in contrasting orders: a noble short capote in green, perhaps, and below that a pair of trousers all in patches; a red felt hat and some servant’s house slippers; shining metal buttons, decorations in white bone, military braid, lengths of lace, in short, a mixture of superannuated wealth and base misery, the stock of a Jew’s second-hand stall.