Pescara Tales Page 6

  That sign was now being fulfilled on the holy day of Corpus Domini. And so Orsola, all heated with expectation and pious joy, went onwards in the dust of the new road, indifferent to the effort expended with her every step. On both sides, hedges glinted here and there as if peppered with the white droppings of birds; groups of sonorous poplars stood by the edges of fields, and their silvery trunks reflected the variations of the light. Peasant women from Villa del Fuoco, short folk with flat noses and broad lips, Afroid but with pale skins, passed her in twos and threes coming from the opposite direction. The life of the clouds engaged the countryside like an elemental drama played out in an immense theatre.

  Orsola passed the Mill, then passed the Villa. Nervous energy animated her steps. She felt gusts of wind at the nape of her neck, and over her head heard the poplars singing; but a veil of dust and the frequent alternation of shadows were beginning to affect her vision, the warmth of her toil to sway her thoughts. Her will was now only concerned with the unusual physical effort of this momentous walk, and she went forward in a kind of growing daze that was turning to indisposition. Then, all at once, overcome by tiredness and the heat, she let herself be drawn to a stand of olives on a slope to her left.

  Four or five gypsies astride red donkeys went past, bare-chested, bronzed, with amulets glistening on their breasts. One of them was whistling as he pounded the sides of his beast with his heels. All had switches in their hands, and at their thighs hung leather saddlebags. They looked at the woman sheltering in the trees and talked together in low voices and laughed.

  Orsola was frightened by those eyes that displayed so much white in the attention they directed towards her, and she remained tense until the group passed. Now discouragement began creeping over her, and her solitude grew frightening, as over the land long gusts of wind announced the approach of rain and an almost doleful silence descended in the air from the gathering clouds. She was leaning on a trunk when cool gusts began intermittently to envelop her body, to chill the perspiration in her pores, gusts that approached her with rustles like stealthy animals in the grass, while about her the sun’s shimmer was like distant water glinting. Pale flowers of a sulphurous yellow colour made waves at the foot of the olives.

  A memory then passed down from the goodly trees to the soul of the woman, of that day the church had been full of consecrated twigs of olives and of aromas, and she had gone through the crowd trembling and upheld by Marcello’s arms… But as she paused in that thought she lost it as her mind wandered, everything fading to the uncertainty of a dream, except that her heart was being assaulted by dumb blows, and anguished starts obstructed her breathing. A dull sensation of drowsiness seemed to fall upon her brain with the weight of a hammer-blow; but then a remnant of vigilant will succeeded in stirring her weakly, and she returned to the road.

  Clouds that had marshalled in the direction of Maiella were taking on the diaphanous grey colour of hanging waves of water about to break, tall waterspouts like inverted trumpets approached from the sea, bearing their own liquid loads, and still some blue fields dilated high up in the sky. A humid odour was already rising with the blown dust of the road and from fields panting in expectation. Unmoving trees seemed to absorb the light, stood black in the hazy air, populating with uncertain shapes the distance.

  Orsola walked on, immensely weary, feeling that her strength was leaving her. There! she thought, I’ll get to that tree and fall! But she did not fall. The houses of San Rocco could be made out on the right. In front, a peasant was approaching her at a run.

  ‘Good man, is that San Rocco?’

  ‘Yes, yes, take the first lane, it’s faster.’

  Big noisy drops began to fall; then all at once the rain increased and was tracing long white arrows through the air, extended rods that struck the ground like whips cracking. A monstrous stir of clouds ensued now, rays of sunlight flashed through it here and there, the hills in the distance were lit up for a moment behind the curtain of rain and went dark again. A fragile silvery calm rose above the Maiella and seemed to grow keener and durable, putting in mind a fine sword unsheathed and levelled over the massive.

  Orsola tried to jog to an oak a hundred strides away. Raindrops striking the nape of her neck trickled down her spine, others assaulted her face, and already her dress was soaked and she was wet to the skin. Her pace slowed on the slippery ground and she fell and rose twice. Almost out of her mind, she began to shout towards a house:

  ‘Help me! Help me!’

  An old woman came out of the door, followed by two barking dogs, and hurried over to help her to the house.

  Orsola let herself be led, without the strength to utter a word through her locked teeth, pale and with an expression distorted by anxiety. It was only after some moments that she recovered and responded to the concern of her hostess; when suddenly among the woman’s questions she heard the name Spacone uttered and she remembered everything.

  ‘Oh, but where is Spacone? she asked.

  ‘He’s at Popoli, good woman; they called him there.’

  Orsola could bear it no longer: she began sobbing and clutching at her hair.

  ‘What is it, good woman? What do you need? I am his wife, I can do something…’ the hag soothed Orsola in a mewing tone, holding her wrists, encouraging her to talk.

  Orsola hesitated a moment; then she told everything, in a torrent of words, between sobs, covering her face with her hands.

  ‘Wait. Something can be done. But it will cost fifty soldi, good woman,’ said the sorceress in a peculiar idiom of soft vowels, voicing her ‘good woman’ in a singsong tone.

  Orsola untied a knot in her handkerchief and offered five small silver coins. Then she waited, become calmer.

  The room was large but low-ceilinged. On the scabrous stone walls, discoloured by verdigris, flowered encrustations of nitre. Badly-made majolica images representing figures from Christian idolatry populated the back of the cavernous space; strangely-shaped utensils and instruments encumbered tables. The place was like a herbalist monk’s medieval laboratory.

  Standing before her fireplace Spacone’s wife proceeded to mix in silence the components of a philtre. She was a tall, bony woman, deathly white of face, with a broken nose as violet as a fig, her red hair was smooth at the temples and she had albino eyes. There were tattoos on her chin, her forehead and on the back of her hands.

  ‘There, good woman! Take it, be brave.’

  Orsola swallowed the liquid in one draught. Straightaway she felt an atrocious bitterness harrowing her palate and then her entrails. She fell to the floor with her mouth open, her hands over her stomach, one foot drumming in time with the first spasms of her contracting uterus.

  ‘Be brave, saintly woman, be brave!’ repeated the witch, fixing her washed-out eyes on the prostrated Orsola, bending down to stroke the area over Orsola’s kidneys. ‘You have time to get to Pescara… Go! Go!’

  Orsola could say nothing, only moans rose to her mouth. Cramps were locking her stomach, her respiratory muscles were turning rigid, she wanted to vomit. Her eyeballs had turned up as if with the first symptoms of an epileptic convulsion. Through her weak constitution the excessive power of the beverage was now producing unexpected effects.

  The unnatural parturition occurred almost at once, with one of those terrible expulsions of fluids on which the forces of life can float, decline insensibly and drain away.

  ‘Jesus!’ murmured the hag apprehensively, overtaken by sudden fear in the presence of such misery in that crumpled frame, ‘Jesus help me…’

  She rocked Orsola, who came to her senses after some moments and, as gradually the flow appeared to stop, the poor sufferer was able to regain her feet. The woman supported her to the door and Orsola reached the new road, swaying and pale as if not a drop of blood remained beneath her skin, but sustained by the hope that the worst danger had passed.

  Now all the country about was freshly bright after the rain. A line of carts loaded with gypsum was passing, an
d the fat carters of Letto Manoppello, full of wine, were stretched out smoking on the sacks. As Orsola joined the end of the convoy the carter there shouted:

  ‘Hey, pretty girl, do you want a lift?’

  Hardly conscious, Orsola let herself be pulled up by the strong arms of the man, and in that state found a place on the sacks. She paid no attention to the laughter and vulgarities that passed from cart to cart.

  She had enough instinctive energy to keep her knees together to block the flow. Soon she felt a numbness in her senses, so that the frequent jars along the gravelled way inflicted only a dull pain, and her nostrils suffered most from the stink of the carters’ pipes. Then her ears became aware of a hum in the distance, her eyes of a shimmer. A number of times she would have toppled from the cart if the driver had not held her; and he, encouraged by her docility attempted some coarse fondling.

  At the summit of the road the town of Pescara appeared, sunlit and sending its sounds abroad on the wind.

  ‘They have started the procession,’ said one of the men. The others lashed their beasts, and the road resounded to the burdened trot of hooves, the chiming of the little bells and the crack of whips.

  The vehemence and noise of that forward jolt took Orsola back to immediate reality, the man had an arm around her hips and wheezed wine-laden breath at her cheek. With a blind impulse she fell to shouting and writhing almost as if delirious, the phantom of Lindoro suddenly rising before her dulled sight to prompt more shudders of horror from what was left of her nervous sensibility. The cart stopped, and in that moment she slid down from the sacks to the ground, willing her legs to move, driven by the breathless anxiety of one desperate to reach a safe place to collapse in.

  Young maidens veiled in white were coming to meet her along the road, holding in their hands coloured tapers and singing. Behind that angelic company a great flutter of drapes and baldachins filled the air that had recently been hallowed by the rain, and from there too came the hymn:

  Tantum ergo sacramentum

  Veneremur cernui…

  Orsola only glimpsed all that indistinctly as she turned into an alleyway leading to the home of Rosa Catena. Entering, she was brought short by a bout of vertigo and collapsed in the middle of the floor. And there, with the flow of blood recommencing, paralysis crept over the lower half of her body, and every manner of voluntary movement died in her.

  Rosa was not at home, the procession that day had attracted to it all the town. In a corner of the room Muà, Rosa’s father, a monster of human senility, blind and nailed for years to a wooden chair by deforming arthritis, tried randomly, while a slavering mutter came from his toothless mouth, to discover by probing the brick floor with his cane the cause of this sudden noise.

  At the feet of the horrible brute, surrounded by sinful blood, with her thumbs bent tightly in the clutch of each fist, without an outcry, the violated bride of the Lord convulsed for some moments in her final throes.

  ‘Git out! Git out! Git out o’ there!’

  In the belief that the butcher’s mastiff had come inside, the old man had stretched forward to drive the beast away, and was stabbing with his levelled cane at the body of the dying woman.

  THE VIRGIN ANNA

  I.

  Luca Minella was born in 1789 at Ortona, in one of the houses at Porta Caldara. He was a seaman and for some time during his early youth he sailed on a two-masted trabaccolo called Santa Liberata, plying from the Ortona roadstead to various Dalmatian ports, carrying timber and wheat and dried fruit; then, just for the sake of changing his employer, he took service with Don Rocco Panzavacante and made many journeys on a new cargo caique carrying citrus fruit from Roto, one of the large and delightful promontories of ancient Italy, extensively covered in a forest of oranges and lemons.

  At twenty-seven he grew enamoured of Francesca Nobile and after some months they were married.

  Luca was a short man and exceptionally strong, had an attractive blond beard around the periphery of his rosy face and he wore round gold earrings like a woman. He was fond of wine and tobacco, professed a fervent devotion to the apostle Saint Thomas, and, being innately superstitious and inclined to be easily awed by novelty, he had a fund of singular tales about his adventures and the marvels of countries across the water, portraying the people of Dalmatia and the Adriatic islands in terms that made them sound like tribes inhabiting lands at the furthest pole of the planet.

  Francesca, a woman just past the first bloom of youth, had the typical features of an Ortonese in her ruddy face and soft lines. She was a great churchgoer and made much of religious functions, sacred pageants and the music of the triduum that preceded feasts. Her habits were simple, and because her intelligence was not particularly deep she could believe the most incredible things that were told her and at their hearing would laud the Lord in all his acts and manifestations.

  From their union was born Anna in the month of June 1817. Because the birth was a difficult one, and there was concern it might end in misfortune, the sacrament of baptism was administered on the mother’s belly while the infant had yet to come forth into the light of day. But after much travail the birth was completed successfully; the little creature suckled from the maternal breasts and grew healthy and content. At evening, whenever the boat was due to return from Roto, Francesca would come down to the harbour carrying the babe in her arms. Luca on disembarking would have about him and venting from his shirt into the air the smell of meridional fruit. On returning together towards the houses in the upper part of the town, they would stop a moment to kneel in the church. In its side chapels, votive lamps would already be burning, and at the end, visible through seven bronze gates, the richly adorned bust of the Apostle glittered like an unearthed hoard of treasure. Their prayers invoked a heavenly blessing on the head of the daughter. On the way out, when the mother wet Anna’s forehead from the holy-water stoup, the infant’s bellows echoed long among the naves, great resonators that they were, like lofty shells of refined metal.

  Anna’s infant years passed evenly, without any event of note. In May 1823 dressed as a cherub, wearing a crown of roses and a white veil and bewildered among the angelic press, she took part in a procession, holding in her hand a thin taper. In the church, her mother lifted her up to kiss the Saint-protector; but as other mothers holding up other cherubim were thrusting forward in a crowd, one of the tapers accosted Anna’s veil, which caught fire, and suddenly the whole figure of the tender child was wrapped in flames. A reflex of horror propagated through the mass of people there, as each tried to be the first to scramble out of the church. Francesca, despite being rendered almost impotent by horror, managed to tear away the burning clothes, press to herself her stunned and almost senseless naked daughter, and thus grappled together throw them both in pursuit of the fleeing crowd, calling with great cries on Jesus as she went.

  Because of her burns Anna was gravely ill and bedridden for a long time and speechless as if rendered dumb, her pinched pale face retaining in her eyes an unblinking look of puzzled stupor rather than pain. In autumn, she got well again and was taken to hang up a votive offering.

  In times when the weather was good the family came down to the boat for their dinner. Under an awning Francesca would light the fire and cook fish, the genial odour of the food floating along the quay and blending with perfumes drifting down from the kitchen-gardens of the Villa Onofria. The sea in front then was often calm enough to allow the ripple of the eddies on the reef to be heard, and the air was so clear that the point at San Vito crowned by its cupola of houses would rise plainly in the distance. Luca joined the other men in singing, while Anna helped her mother as best she could at her age. After the meal, and as the moon rose in the sky, the sailors got the vessel ready for departure. Luca, meanwhile, warmed with wine and food and avid at such times to tell astonishing stories, would turn to describing distant littorals. Yonder, somewhere past Roto, there was a mountain inhabited by monkeys and men of India, there was a mountain there of great
height on which grew plants all hung with precious stones… His wife and daughter listened in silence, awed. Then the sails would loosen from the mast and sprit and slowly belly out with air, their canvas all marked with black figures and Catholic symbols, like the old galleons of state. And so Luca would depart.

  In February 1826 Francesca was delivered of a dead boy. In the spring of 1830 Luca wanted to take Anna to the promontory. Anna was then in her adolescence and the trip was a happy one. Out at sea they met a merchant ship, a great vessel that made head by the use of immense white sails. Dolphins swam in its wake and the sea moved gently around its hull, sparkling in many colours as if a carpet of brilliant peacock feathers floated on the water. Anna followed with intense interest the progress of the ship as it diminished in the distance. Then later a kind of blue cloud seemed to rise and widen on the line of the horizon, and it was the fructiferous mountain of Luca’s tales. Coastal Puglia grew gradually defined and the perfume of citrus trees spread into the sunny and serene air. When Anna landed on the shore she was taken by a sense of joyous lightness and a great curiosity to see the plantations and the men who were native to this place. Her father took her to the house of a woman who was not young and spoke with a slight stammer. They remained with her for two days. Anna saw her father kiss their hostess on the mouth but did not understand. When they returned to the boat it was loaded with oranges and the sea was still gentle.