Pescara Tales Read online

  The great contest, which the present chronicler will narrate one day more fully for wider acquaintance, lasted long and with a variety of outcomes, but its principal arena was the lady’s supper-room, a rectangular hall around which by chance the French wallpaper represented in that country’s style the trials of Ulysses, shipwrecked on the island of Calypso. Almost nightly the champions gathered around the illustrious widow-Penelope, playing games of cards and of love alternately.

  Anna was an impartial witness. She announced the visitors, laid the cloth on the table, and in the middle of the evening-party served glasses of fruit syrup of a greenish composition concocted from uncommon herbs by nuns. On one occasion, she heard above her on the stairs Don Fiore Ussorio in the heat of some dispute shouting an injury at Abbot Cennamele, who on his part was speaking in a restrained way; and because the irreverence seemed to her monstrous she from then on held Don Fiore to be a diabolical man and at his appearance always made a stealthy sign of the cross and muttered a Pater.

  VI.

  In the spring of 1856, one day when she was beating the laundry on the pebbly bank of the Pescara, she saw at the mouth of the river a convoy of craft enter and come sailing slowly up against the current. The sun shone serenely, the two banks were reflected in the water as if rising from the depths to embrace each other across the river, and in the middle some sprays of green leaves and the remnants of a reed basket floated past on the flow like symbolic offerings of peace to the sea. The craft, almost all of them with the mitre of Saint Thomas painted in an angle of the mainsail as their port’s insignia, advanced up the fair river sanctified by the legend of Saint Cetteus the Liberator. At the sight of that spectacle the memory of her native town awoke in the woman an unexpected agitation, and she, thinking suddenly of her father, felt herself overflowing with an immense sense of tenderness.

  The vessels were caiques from Ortona and had come from the promontory of Roto with cargoes of citrus fruit. After they had anchored, Anna approached the sailors, eyeing them silently with a timid and half-expectant curiosity. One of them, noticing her persistent attention, recognised her and questioned her familiarly: Was she looking for someone? What did she want? Then, drawing him aside a little, she asked the man if he had not by chance seen in the land of the Portuguese her father, Luca Minella. Was he still with that woman? The man replied that Luca had died quite some time back. ‘Well,’ he added cheerily with the simple philosophy of his kind, ‘he was old; you can’t expect to live forever, can you?’

  Anna contained her tears, for she wanted to ask many things; and the man told her many things: Luca had married that woman, had fathered two sons. The elder sailed on a caique and came to Pescara from time to time for his market needs. Anna was perplexed, her mind was in an indefinite agitation, what occurred in it was a kind of confused straying in and out of disparate thoughts, for she could not arrive at a new balance or clarity of judgement before those too-complex facts. She had two brothers? Did she have to love them, then? Should she try to meet them? So, what might be the right thing for her to do now?

  And in that vacillating mood, her thinking unsettled, Anna returned with her laundry. And then on many an evening when the boats entered the river she walked along the landing to look at the sailors. There were times when a caique brought from Dalmatia a cargo of young asses and dwarf horses. The animals on feeling the ground under them stamped their hooves, and the air resounded with neighing and braying. Anna in passing would stroke with her hand the oversized heads of the little asses.

  VII.

  At about that time the steward of the property gave her a tortoise. The new, slow and taciturn guest became the delight and concern of the woman during her free hours. It walked from one point in her room to another, hauling with difficulty the heavy weight of its body on olive-coloured legs like stumps of limbs privy of hand or foot; and since it was still young its carapace, made up of overlays of yellow tiles spotted with black, at certain times glowed translucently in the sun with a glorious amber tint. The yellowish head, covered in scales and compressed into an acute angle at the front, jutted up hesitatingly and timorously, giving the impression of a tired old serpent poking out of the discarded shell of some crustacean. Anna liked most of all the animal’s habits and nature: its silence, frugality, modesty, its love for its own home. For food, she gave it vegetable leaves, roots and worms, watching with ecstatic observation the movement of the horny little jaws, the bone of both the upper and lower mandible furnished not with teeth but indented around the edges, she, feeling at those times an almost maternal sentiment, encouraging it with low murmurs and selecting for it the most tender and the sweetest leaves.

  The tortoise became in time the initiator of an idyll. The steward, coming to the house a number of times each day, stopped at the terrace to talk up to Anna, and being a humble-natured person, devout, prudent and honest, he was pleased to see those pious virtues reflected in the woman. Out of habitual friendship there grew over time a warm familiarity. She already had the odd white hair at the temples, and her face expressed a calm openness of character. He, Zacchiele, was older by a few years. He had a large head with a jutting brow and the two gentle and rotund eyes of a rabbit. They usually sat now outside in the terrace for their talking, above them between the roofs the sky looking like a luminous cupola, and at intervals a flight of domestic pigeons, each bird as white as the depicted Paraclete, traversing the celestial calm. The conversations turned on the harvests, the fruitfulness of the earth, on the simple norms of farming, and were replete with the pair’s own peasant experiences and rectitude.

  Because from innocent natural vanity Zacchiele liked at times to display his knowledge, the uninformed and credulous woman conceived a high estimation of him, a virtually limitless admiration. She learned that the world was divided into five parts, and five were the races of men: the white, the yellow, the red, the black, and the brown. She learned that the earth was a globe, that Romulus and Remus had been suckled by a she-wolf, and that the swallows in autumn fly over the sea to Egypt, there where the pharaohs ruled in ancient times. But weren’t all men of one colour, in the image and semblance of God? Could people walk on the surface of a ball? Who were those king-pharaohs? She could make nothing of his information and so remained bewildered. However, from that time she looked on the swallows with reverence and took them to be birds endowed with human wisdom.

  One day Zacchiele showed her a book of sacred history from the Old Testament, illustrated with figures. Anna dwelled long on them as she listened with awe to their elucidation. And she saw Adam and Eve among the hares and stags, Noah half-naked kneeling before an altar, the three angels of Abraham, and Moses saved by the waters; she saw finally a pharaoh standing in the presence of Moses, who held his rod changed to a serpent, and the queen of Sheba, the feast of the Tabernacles, the martyrdom of the Maccabees. The story of the ass of Balaam filled her with wonder and tenderness, that of the discovery of Joseph’s cup in the sack of Benjamin caused her to break out in tears. And she imagined the Israelites trekking through a desert landscape filled with quails, under dew that was called manna and was as white as snow and sweeter than bread.

  After the sacred history, and taken by a singular ambition, Zacchiele began a series of readings about the deeds of the royals of France, from the emperor Constantine to Orlando, Count of Anglante. A great tumult then convulsed the woman’s mind: the battles of the Philistines and the Assyrians became confused with those against the Saracens; Holofernes with Rizieri; King Saul with the Moorish King Mambrino; Eleazar with Balante; Naomi with Galeana, the beloved of Charlemagne. And she, worn out, ceased following the thread of those narrations, only collecting herself again at moments when she heard sounding in Zacchiele’s voice the echo of some favoured name: and such might be that of Dusolina, and of Duke Bovetto, who fell in love with the daughter of the Frisian king and possessed himself of all England.

  The calends of September had arrived. In the air tempered by recent rain t
here diffused a placid autumnal clarity. Anna’s room had now turned into the location for the readings. One day Zacchiele sat narrating from the pages how Galeana, the daughter of Galafro, fell in love with Mainetto and desired from him the garland of grass. Because to Anna the fable appeared uncomplicated and rustic, and because the voice of the reader seemed to have grown more engaging with new inflections, she listened with visible attention. The tortoise was creeping over some lettuce leaves, the sun pouring its light through the window illuminated a large web that had been spun across it, and the last rosy flowers of the tobacco plant were visible through the fine golden work of the web.

  When the chapter ended, Zacchiele put down the book, and looking at the woman he smiled with one of those complacent smiles that creased his brow and the corners of his mouth. Then he began talking vaguely and with the hesitations of someone who is having difficulty getting to a desired point. Finally, he asked boldly if she had ever thought about marrying. Anna did not reply to the question. They sat in silence, both of them filled with a confused sensation, sweet and agreeable in the breast, almost an astonished reawakening of interred youth and a human call once more to love. And they were disconcerted, as if the fumes of a surprisingly invigorating wine had mounted to their brains, perturbing their minds that had grown listless.

  VIII.

  But a tacit agreement to marry came a considerable time later, in October, during the first crushing of olives and the last emigration of the swallows. By Donna Cristina’s leave, one Monday Zacchiele conducted Anna to the mill out on the hills where the olive press was located. They left the town on foot through the Portasale and took the Salaria road, leaving the river behind them. From the day of the story of Galeana and Mainetto, they had begun to feel towards each other a sense of trepidation, a mixture of embarrassment and excessive consideration that created a distance between them. They lost their previous easy familiarity, now talking little together and always with a hesitant reserve, lingering in a state of juvenile timidity and awkwardness, without quite looking at each other and with uncertain smiles that lost themselves immediately in blushes.

  From the beginning they walked in silence, following separately on each side of the road a dry and narrow path beaten by the feet of many travellers, divided from each other by the road’s mud and deep wheel-ruts. The vintage was being gathered and the limitless joy of that season filled the countryside, the songs of the trodden must sounding in alternate measures over the plain. Zacchiele kept back a little, from time to time breaking their silence by some words across the road on the weather, the vines, or the gathering of the olives. Anna looked with interest at the thickets, reddening with berries, the tended fields, the water in the ditches; and little by little a vague happiness awoke in her, such as enters one with the return of pleasant sensations known long ago. As the road began ascending the declivity that divided in two the productive olive groves of Cardirusso, a lucid recollection of Sant’Apollinare suffused her, and then of the donkey and the herder of cattle, and she suddenly felt as if her heart was being washed through by a surge of fresh blood. The elements of that forgotten episode in her youth came together in her memory with marvellous clarity, the images of places returned before her, and in that apparition she saw once more the man with the hare-lip, she heard again his voice, feeling now a new and disturbing sensation without knowing why.

  The mill was nearer, through the trees a light wind blew that brought down the riper olives; an expanse of calm sea was visible from that height. Zacchiele had come to walk beside the woman and from time to time he looked at her silently with a kindly, tender questioning. So, he asked her once, what had she been thinking about? And she, turning to him in some confusion as if caught in an error, shook her head, replied that she had not been thinking of anything.

  They arrived at the oil-press, where peasants were crushing the first collection of olives that had fallen early from the trees. The chamber where the mill-stones were working was low and dark; from the vault, glittering with saltpetre, hung smoky brass lamps; a blindfolded horse turned with a regular pace a gigantic wheel of stone. The peasants, dressed in long tunics like sacks, their legs and arms bare, muscular and greasy, were pouring the gathered liquid into jars and basins and terracotta vases.

  Anna stood looking at the work with great interest, and as Zacchiele gave orders to the mill workers and moved around the stones, noting the quality of the olives with total confidence in his judgement, she felt her admiration for him growing. Then when he took up a large full beaker and decanted its luminous oil into a vase, calling as he did so on the grace of God, she made the sign of the cross, feeling herself filled with veneration for the opulence of the earth.

  Two women of the mill came to the door, each one holding to her breast an infant and behind them padded a goodly tribe of children clutching at the women’s skirts. The two began to talk in placid tones, and when Anna attempted to caress the children the women showed pride in their fecundity and with laughing honesty of language described their deliveries. The first had seven children, the second eleven. It was the will of Jesus Christ; and then here in the country there was always the need of hands.

  The conversation continued about families. Albarosa, one of the mothers, asked many things of Anna: had she never had children? In answering that she was not married, Anna felt a certain embarrassment and a touch of bitterness, confronted by the power of all that chaste maternity. Then to change the subject she again extended her hand to one of the children. Its companions looked on with huge eyes that seemed to have acquired a limpid vegetable-tint from the constant spectacle of green matter. The smell of crushed olives diffused through the air and penetrated to the throat, exciting the palate. Groups of workers appeared and disappeared under the rosy light of the lamps.

  Zacchiele, who until that moment had been concerning himself with measuring oil, now turned to the women. Albarosa looked at him with a merry expression and asked how long would Don Zacchiele wait to take a wife. He smiled awkwardly at that question and gave a quick look towards Anna, who was still stroking the semi-wild child and feigned that she had not heard. Albarosa, with kind-natured peasant quickness, united Zacchiele and Anna by an exaggerated wink of her bovine eyes in their direction and continued with further provocations. They were a couple blessed by God: what were they waiting for? The other peasants, suspending their work to have something to eat, joined in the play and made a circle around the couple. Confused by the chorus of testimonials for the wedded state, the pair remained dumb, uncertain how much pleasure, sufferance or chaste modesty to express. Don Zacchiele made at last an effort to convey on his face a comic lover’s pain, and one among the younger champions of matrimony grinned delightedly and elbowed his companions. The horse neighed for its hay.

  The food was prepared quickly. A focused bustle occupied the great rustic family. In the open space outside, among the tranquil groves of olives and in the presence of the sea below, the men sat at their meal. Plates of legumes steamed, seasoned with new oil, wine glistened in simple, liturgically-shaped beakers and vases, and the frugal fare disappeared quickly into the stomachs of the toilers.

  Anna in a sudden moment felt herself as if assaulted by a tumult of joyous sensations, felt as if bonded in a kind of intimacy with the two women. They took her into the house, where the rooms were large and airy if very old. On their walls sacred images alternated with Easter palm fronds; hams and other joints of pork hung from the ceiling; the nuptial couches rose wide and high-curtained from the floor, with next to them the cribs; everything emanated the serenity of family concord. Anna, considering that order, smiled timidly to feel a mood of tenderness warming within her, and at a certain moment she was swayed by a strange commotion, almost as though all her latent virtues as a mother-domestic and her instincts as a nurturer had suddenly quickened into life and overflowed.

  When the women returned outside, the men were still around the table, Zacchiele in conversation with them. Albarosa took a sma
ll roll of wheaten bread, broke it in half and sprinkled it with oil and salt. She offered the half to Anna. The taste of the new oil that had just then been pressed from the fruit diffused a savoury bitter aroma in her mouth, and Anna, delighted, ate the rest of the bread as well. She drank their wine, too. Then, because the time of vespers was nearing, she and Zacchiele returned to the road to begin their descent.

  Behind them the peasants they had left were singing, and many other songs rose from the countryside around, melding and expanding in the dusk into something like the great level harmony of a Gregorian psalm. The wind that breathed through the olive groves was now more humid; a dying light suffused the sky with tints that washed from rose to violet.

  Anna walked ahead with a rapid pace, close to the tree trunks. Zacchiele followed her this time, thinking about things that he wanted to say. Both, now that they were alone again, felt once more that adolescent unease. Once, Zacchiele called out to the woman by her name, and she turned to him, humble and apprehensive. She asked him what he wanted, but he said nothing more and joined her, in two steps came beside her. And so they continued walking, in silence, until the Salaria road divided them again. As with the journey out, each chose a footpath, one to the left and the other to the right of the road and walked thus until they re-entered Portasale.