Pescara Tales Page 7
Anna retained from that voyage a memory like a dream, and because she was of a taciturn nature she said little in response to her girlfriends’ questions.
II.
The following May the archbishop of Orsogna came to officiate at the feast of the Apostle. The cathedral was hung all over with red drapery and golden foliage, before the bronze gates burned eleven lamps that had been fashioned by professional silversmiths, and every evening an orchestra played a solemn oratorio, accompanying a fine choir of sopranos. On Saturday, the bust of the Saint was to be displayed, and his devotees came from all the maritime and inland towns, carrying votive offerings in their hands and flocking to the high points above the sea to sing hymns in his presence.
On that Friday Anna celebrated her first communion. The archbishop was a venerable and mild old man, and when he raised his hand to give the blessing, the gem in his ring shone like some godly eye. As soon as Anna felt on her tongue the Eucharistic wafer, her eyes were at once deprived of sight by such joy as seemed to flood all over her to the roots of her hair, like the sensual bliss of a warm and odorous bath. Behind her, whispers ran through the multitude. Having risen, other little virgins took the sacrament in their turn, bending their faces to the steps with a stern expression of penitence for their committed sins.
That night Francesca wanted to sleep on the floor of the basilica, as was the custom of the faithful, to await the exhibiting of the Saint in the morning. She was seven months pregnant and very fatigued by the weight in her belly. The pilgrims lay packed together, their bodies exhaling warmth into the air. Sometimes an indistinct word or two left the mouth of an unconscious sleeper. Little flames trembled and were reflected in the oil of lamps suspended between arches, and through the void of the great open doors the stars of a spring night glittered.
Francesca was awake for two hours, in great difficulty because the smells of the sleepers nauseated her, but determined to resist and suffer for the good of her soul she bore on, until overcome by weariness she finally dropped off. At dawn, she sprang wide-awake again. An increasingly restless expectation became visible in those present and in the many additional folk who had arrived; in each burned the ambition to be the first to see the Apostle. The external entrance to the chapel of the Saint was opened, and the squeal of the hinges resounded distinctly in the expectant silence and echoed in all hearts. The second entrance was opened, then the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and the last, the seventh. It seemed then that the pressing forward of the multitude grew in a few moments to resemble the vortex of a hurricane. A mass, primarily of men, poured towards the tabernacle, uttering high-pitched cries into the swirl of air churned by that impetus; ten, fifteen persons were crushed and suffocated, while a tumultuous, confused noise of praying rose above the chaos.
Those killed were pulled outside in the open. Francesca’s body, all bruised and livid, was carried to her family. A crowd of questioning neighbours congregated outside, while in the house her parents moaned pitifully.
When Anna saw that corpse laid on her mother’s bed, its face a violet tinge and spotted with dry blood, she fell insensible to the floor. Then for many months she was tormented by epileptic fits.
III.
In the summer of 1835 Luca was departing for a port in Greece aboard the trabaccolo Trinita owned by Don Giovanni Camaccione. Since he had an undisclosed intention in his mind, before setting off he sold his household effects and asked his parents to keep Anna with them until he returned. After touching land at the beach of Roto the vessel continued on its journey and came back loaded with dry figs and Corinthian grapes. Luca was not among the crew and it was voiced about that he had remained in the country of the Portuguese, as the strand where the oranges grew was conceived to be in the geographic vision of those living on the upper coasts of the Adriatic. He had remained there with an amorous female. Anna was then reminded of the stammering hostess of a time gone by. A great sorrow descended on her life.
Her grandparent’s house was located below the eastern walkway, not far from Ortona’s mole. The seamen came to drink wine in a ground-floor room from which almost all day singing went on amid the smoke of pipes. Anna passed among the drinkers, carrying full beakers, and the first consciousness of her chaste condition awoke during those unceasing contacts and her daily association with that crude masculinity. At any moment of the day she had to suffer listening to shameless expressions, coarse laughter, to be herself the object of ambiguous gestures and the rogueries of ships’ crews who had been made even more uncouth by the fatigues of a voyage. She dared not complain, eating as she did the bread of others, living in their house, but that constant distress rendered her dull. Little by little a kind of dismal imbecility weighed down her already deprived intelligence.
By natural inclination she had a touching love of animals. An ancient donkey was stalled behind the house in a lean-to made of straw-reinforced clay. The meek beast carried daily burdens of wine down from Sant’Apollinare to the small tavern, and although its teeth had begun to yellow and its hooves to flake, although its hide was already desiccated and almost hairless, nevertheless at the sight of a flowering thistle it would raise its ears and bray vivaciously like a juvenile.
Anna’s duty was to fill its manger with oats and its drinking tub with water, and when at midday the heat was great she would come into the stall to cool off. The donkey would be attempting to pick out a strand or two of straw from the walls, and she with a leafy twig would carry out a deed of pity by liberating its back from the molestations of insects. From time to time the donkey turned its head, distinguished by those two ridiculous ears, to curl its flaccid lips in a way that displayed the gums, almost, it seemed, in a flesh-red animal grin of apologetic gratitude, and by that oblique movement of the head over its shoulder show a yellowish, blue-veined globe of an eye like a gall blister. Flies circled with a heavy buzz over the dung-littered floor, but, apart from those, neither from the land nor the sea came any sounds from nature or any human voice, and a sense of infinite peace filled then the young woman’s soul.
In April 1842 Pantaleo, who had been charged with taking the donkey on its quotidian journey, was killed in a knife fight. From that day Anna was employed in his stead, and she departed at dawn and returned at midday, or departed at midday and returned in the evening. The road curved over a sunny hill planted with olive trees, descended to pass through irrigated fields that had been left to pasture, and, again rising, now through vineyards, arrived at the wineries of Sant’Apollinare. The donkey walked ahead, its ears drooping from tiredness, a worn and faded green fringe of harness slapping the beast’s ribs and back, remnants of copper foil shining from the old pack-saddle.
Whenever the donkey stopped to regain its breath Anna would give its neck a caressing nudge and speak encouragingly to it, for she was sorry for its wretched decrepitude. Every now and again pulling a handful of leaves from a hedge she extended them to fortify the animal, and she was moved to tender pity when feeling on her palm the gentle movement of its lips accepting her offering. The hedges were in flower and the blooming hawthorn sent forth an odour of bitter almonds.
At the edge of the olive grove there was a large cistern, and by that cistern stretched a long channel lined with stones where cows came to drink. Every day Anna halted at that place, where she and the donkey quenched their thirst before continuing on their way. On one occasion, she met the man who tended the cattle, a native of Tollo, who had something of a squint and also showed a hare lip. He greeted her and they began to talk about pastures and water, and then about holy sanctuaries and miracles. Anna listened to him good-naturedly and with frequent smiles. She had a lean figure and was very fair, her eyes were of exceptional clarity, mouth large, and her chestnut hair was plaited back without a division. About her neck could be seen the reddish scars of old burns, and the arteries there visibly and unceasingly pulsed.
From then on, the conversations were repeated. The cows dispersed nearby and rested on the ground ruminatin
g or grazed standing. Those peacefully-moving forms augmented the tranquillity of the solitary fields. Anna, sitting on the rim of the cistern, spoke simply, and the man with the cloven lip gazed on at her as if love-stricken. One day, by a sudden unexpected revival of memory, she told of her journey to the hills of Roto; and, because the long passage of time deceived her, she spoke in tones of utter credibility about all kinds of marvellous things. The man listened with dumb attention and without blinking an eye. When Anna fell silent the stillness and solitude surrounding them seemed to have grown more solemn, and both remained thoughtful. The cows came by habit to drink together, between the hind legs of each a hanging udder that the beast’s browsing had replenished. As they lowered their noses into the channel and with each slow and regular draught the level of water subsided.
IV.
Towards the end of June, the donkey fell ill. It had taken no food or water for almost a week. The journeys were interrupted. One morning when Anna came down to the lean-to she saw the beast all twisted in a miserable state on the dung-scattered floor. A hoarse and tenacious kind of coughing periodically jerked the great carcass so poorly enclosed in its own skin. Above each eye a cavity like a vacuous orbit had appeared, the eyes themselves now looking like two swollen balls the colour of whey. When the donkey heard Anna’s expressions of concern it managed to lift itself onto its feet, its upright body then swaying, the neck drooping at an acute angle below the shoulders, the pendent ears swinging with each involuntary and uncoordinated movement. It was like a huge toy whose directing centre had lost control over its parts. A mucous liquid dripped from its nostrils, at times extending in filaments that hung down to its knees; the hairless patches in its coat had gone a tint that was bluish ranging almost to slate. Some of its old pack-sores bled.
At the sight, Anna felt herself squeezed by an anguish of pity, and because by nature and habit she felt no marked repugnance towards touching unclean matter, she approached the animal. With one hand she supported its lower jaw, with the other a shoulder, and so tried to help it move some steps, in the hope that exercise might ease it. At first the donkey hesitated, quaked by new fits of coughing, then finally it began descending the gently sloping lane towards the beach. The water in front of them paled almost to whiteness in the newborn morning, and in the direction of Penna some men were busy caulking a hull. As Anna removed the support of her hands to take up the halter, the donkey stumbled with its front legs and unexpectedly crashed to the ground. From inside its great frame of bones came the sickening sound of breakage, and the drum of hide enclosing its belly and flanks resounded dully and pulsed. With the donkey now on its side, its legs made a feeble motion of running, a little blood seeped from the gums and diffused between the teeth where its head had struck the ground.
The woman gave a shout and hurried back up towards the house; but while she was gone the caulkers came to laugh and caper over the prostrate, dying animal. One of them kicked it in the belly, another seized the head by the ears and lifted it, then let it drop heavily to the ground again. The eyelids closed, tremors passed across the belly, lightly distending as if by a breath of wind the remnant white fur growing there; one of the rear legs thrust out at the air two or three times, then everything went still; unless on the surface of one shoulder where there was an ulcer a light tremor yet passed, as if the dying flesh had independently commanded the hide to make a last response to the molestation of an insect. When Anna returned she found the caulkers dragging the carcass about by the tail and singing a Requiem over it, and that in the braying tones of a donkey.
Thus, Anna was left alone, and while her youth faded she continued living in the house of her relatives, fulfilling humiliating offices and enduring vexations with Christian patience. In 1845 her epilepsy returned with violence, but then it disappeared after some months. Her religious faith in that period deepened and grew ardent. She went up to the cathedral every morning and every night, knelt there in a dark corner, protected by a great marble holy-water stoup on which was carved in crude bas-relief the flight of the sacred family from Egypt. Was the docile little donkey transporting the infant Jesus and his mother from the land of the idolaters an unrecognised association that had initially inclined her to select that spot? A great quietude of love descended on her spirit when she bent her knees in those shadows, and her prayer flowed purely out of her breast as from a natural fountain, because she prayed only with a blind desire to adore and not from hope of obtaining some good in this earthly life. She prayed with her head lowered on the pew, and when worshipers in entering and leaving dipped their fingers in the stoup and made the sign of the cross over themselves, she was startled sometimes to feel a drop of the blessed water falling on her hair.
V.
When in 1851 Anna came to the town of Pescara for the first time, the Feast of the Rosary, in the first Sunday of October, was about to be celebrated. She came on foot to fulfil a vow, carrying a little silver heart wrapped in a silk handkerchief. She walked scrupulously along the coast, since the provincial road at that time had still to be made passable and a pine forest stretched over a large tract of the undeveloped inland. The day seemed mild, except that the waves were rising and at the extreme limits of sight misty vapours soared in increasing trumpet-like swirls. Anna went on, all absorbed in thoughts of sanctity. At the arrival of evening, as she came to the salt flats, it suddenly began to rain, at first lightly and then in great abundance, so that in the absence of any shelter she soon found her clothes were soaked. Not far onward the mouth of the Alento delivered a goodly flow of water and she had to take off her shoes to wade across. Near Vallelonga the rain stopped and the forest of pines re-emerged into sight in the washed air, diffusing an odour almost of incense. Anna, in her mind giving thanks to the Lord, followed the coastal track, but at a quicker pace because she felt an unwholesome humidity penetrating her to the bone, and her teeth had begun to chatter.
At Pescara, she had an attack of malaria and was charitably nursed in the house of Donna Cristina Basile. From her bed, hearing the canticles of the sacred pageantry and seeing the tops of the standards swaying past at the height of her window, she prayed invoking God’s help in her recovery. When the Virgin passed, she could only see the bejewelled crown, and in adoration she assumed as best she could a kneeling posture on the pillows.
After three weeks she was well again, and as Donna Cristina offered her a place she remained in the house with the functions of a domestic. Now she had a small room that looked out on a courtyard. The walls of the room were whitened with lime, an old screen covered in profane figures stood before a corner, and numerous spiders had peacefully stretched out their webs between the ceiling joists. Beneath the window a short roof inclined, and a courtyard, usually alive with domestic fowls, opened out below. On the roof grew a tobacco plant where some sediment had been banked up by five loose tiles. The sun dallied on that side of the building from before midday to mid-afternoon. Every summer the plant flowered.
Anna in her new life and in a new house felt herself little by little becoming more elevated in spirit and revived. Her natural inclination to orderliness unfolded, and she attended to all her duties calmly and without argument. And her belief in matters supernatural grew exceedingly. Within the Basile house certain legends had in past times evolved in connection with two or three locations and had been passed on between the generations. In the never used yellow room on the second floor lived the soul of Donna Isabella. Within an urn, located somewhat obstructively at an angle in a flight of stairs which descended to a door not opened for eons, lived the soul of Don Samuele. Those two names exercised a singular influence on each new resident and spread over the old building a kind of monastic gravity. As an additional atmospheric, since the courtyard was encircled by a number of other roofs, cats would slink over them from every direction to a terrace, where they assembled to meow mysterious, sweet incantations when seeking from Anna an advance on their customary rations.
In March 1853, the husband
of Donna Cristina died of a urinary illness after long weeks of seizures. He had been a man who feared God, home-loving and charitable, had led a congregation of religious landowners, read the works of theologians, and could play on the harpsichord some simple airs of the old Neapolitan masters. When the viaticum arrived, magnificent in the number of the ministers conveying it and the richness of their trappings, Anna fell to her knees at the door and began praying in a loud voice. The room filled with a haze of incense through which the ciborium glinted and the censers swinging back and forth glowed like lamps; sobs were heard, then the lifted voices of the ministering priests commending the soul to the Highest. Anna, transported by the solemnity of the event, lost any horror of death, and from that moment was convinced that the death of Christians was a sweet and even a jubilant interlude.
Donna Cristina kept all the windows of the house closed for an entire month. She continued to beweep her husband at dinner and supper, gave alms to beggars in his name, and she returned more than once a day, voicing sighs, to dust with the brush of a fox his harpsichord as if it was a holy relic. She was a woman of forty, tending towards corpulence, still fresh in her appearance, for that had been conserved by her childlessness. And because she had inherited considerable wealth from the deceased, the five more mature bachelors in the neighbourhood began to lay snares and entice her with flattering arts towards a new matrimonial union.
Those champions were as follows: Don Ignazio Cespa, whose honeyed ways approached that extremity which disgusts, a person of ambiguous sexuality with the countenance of an old gossiping female, pockmarked by small-pox and topped with hair drenched in cosmetic oils, whose fingers were loaded with rings, and ears pierced to hang from each lobe a tiny gold circle; Don Paolo Nervegna, LL.D., an orator and wary, with his lips kept in a sardonic wrinkle as if he were perpetually chewing on some bitter herb, his forehead domed by some kind of reddish tumour impossible to conceal by any coiffure; Don Fileno D’Amelio, the new leader of the congregation, an unctuous and ostentatiously religious man, going bald and showing a receding forehead above a pair of eyes sheeplike-opaque in expression; Don Pompeo Pepe, a gay blade, lover of wine, of women and ease, abundant in bodily flesh and especially so about the face, loud in laughter and conversation; Don Fiore Ussorio, a man of pugnacious spirit, a great reader of political tracts and in every dispute an exultant citer of historical examples, pale of an ashen pallor, with a thin corona of whiskers curving above his cheeks and around a mouth set singularly in an oblique line. To those needed to be added, as an auxiliary to Donna Cristina’s resistance, Abbot Egidio Cennamele, who, wishing to incline the inheritor instead towards laying a generous benefaction on the Church, marshalled by well-concealed subterfuges all kinds of impediments to the lurers.