I Malavoglia Page 2
Milan, 19 January 1881
CHAPTER I
At one time the Malavoglia had been as numerous as the stones on the old Trezza road; there had been Malavoglia at Ognina too, and at Aci Castello, all good honest sea-faring folk and, as is often the case, quite the opposite of their nick-name, which means ‘men of ill-will’. Actually, in the parish records they were called Toscano, but that didn’t mean anything because they had always been known as the Malavoglia from generation to generation, ever since the world began, in Ognina, in Trezza and in Aci Castello, and they had always had sea-going boats and a roof over their heads. But now the only ones left in Trezza were padron ’Ntoni and his family from the house by the medlar-tree, who owned the Provvidenza which was moored on the shingle below the public wash-place, next to zio Cola’s boat Concetta and padron Fortunato Cipolla’s fishing-boat.
The squalls which had scattered the other Malavoglia had passed without doing much harm to the house by the medlar-tree and the boat moored below the wash-place; this miracle was explained by padron ’Ntoni who would show his clenched fist, which looked as if it were carved out of walnut wood, and would say that the five fingers of a hand had to pull together to row a good oar, and also that ‘little boats must keep the shore, larger ships may venture more.’
And padron ’Ntoni’s little family was indeed like the fingers of a hand. First there was padron ’Ntoni himself, the thumb, the master of the feast, as the Bible has it; then his son Bastiano, called Bastianazzo or big Bastiano because he was as large and solid as the Saint Christopher painted under the arch of the town fishmarket; but large and solid as he was, he did his father’s bidding like a lamb, and wouldn’t have blown his own nose unless his father said to him ‘blow your nose’, and indeed he took La Longa as his wife when they said to him ‘Take her’. Then came La Longa, a short person who busied herself weaving, salting anchovies and producing children, as a good housewife should; then came the grandchildren in order of age: ’Ntoni, the eldest, a great layabout of twenty or so, who still got the odd slap from his grandfather, and the odd kick lower down to redress the balance if the slap had been too hard; Luca, ‘who had more sense than his elder brother,’ as his grandfather used to say; Mena (short for Filomena) nicknamed Saint Agatha because she was always at her loom and, the saying goes, ‘a woman at her loom, a chicken in the hen-run and mullet in January are the best of their kind;’ Alessi (short for Alessio), a snotty-nosed brat who was the image of his grandfather; and Lia (Rosalia) who was too young to be fish, flesh or good red herring. On Sundays, when they went to church one behind the other, they were quite a troupe.
Padron ’Ntoni also knew certain sayings and proverbs which he had heard the old folks use, and he felt the old folks’ sayings were tried and true: a boat couldn’t go without a helmsman, for instance; if you wanted to be Pope, first you had to be sexton; a cobbler should stick to his last, a beggar could never be bankrupt and a good name was better than riches, he said. He had quite a stock of such prudent sayings.
This was why the house by the medlar-tree flourished, and padron ’Ntoni passed for a sensible fellow, to the point where they would have made him a town councillor if don Silvestro, the town clerk, had not put it about that he was a rotten die-hard, a reactionary who approved of the Bourbons and was plotting for the return of King Francis II, so that he could lord it over the village as he lorded it in his own home.
But padron ’Ntoni didn’t know the first thing about Francis II, and simply minded his own business, and used to say that some must watch while some must sleep, because Old Care has a mortgage on every Estate.
In December 1863 ’Ntoni, the eldest grandchild, was called up for naval service. So padron ’Ntoni rushed to the village bigwigs, who are the people who can help in such cases. But don Giammaria, the parish priest, told him he’d got his just deserts, and that this was the result of that fiendish revolution they had brought about by hanging that tri-coloured bit of flag from the belltower. While don Franco the chemist began to snicker, and promised him gleefully that if they ever managed to get anything like a republic under way, everyone connected with conscription and taxes would be given short shrift, because there wouldn’t be any more soldiers, but everyone would go to war, if need be. Then padron ’Ntoni beseeched him for the love of God to have the republic come quickly, before his grandson ’Ntoni went for a soldier, as though don Franco had it all buttoned up; and indeed the chemist finally ended up by losing his temper. While don Silvestro the town clerk split his sides laughing at these discussions, and finally told padron ’Ntoni that a certain sum slipped into a certain pocket, on his advice, could produce a defect in his grandson that would get him exempted from military service. Unfortunately the boy was conscientiously built, as they still make them at Aci Trezza, and when the army doctor looked at the strapping lad before him, he told him that his defect was to be set like a column on great feet that resembled the shovel-like leaves of a prickly pear; but such shovel-feet are better than neat-fitting boots on the deck of a battleship on a rough day; and so they took ’Ntoni without so much as a ‘by your leave’. When the conscripts were taken to their barracks at Catania, La Longa trotted breathlessly alongside her son’s loping stride, busily urging him to keep his scapular of the Virgin Mary always on his chest, and to send news every time anyone he knew came home from the city, and he needn’t worry, she would send him the money for the writing paper.
His grandfather, man that he was, said nothing; but he too felt a lump in his throat, and he avoided his daughter-in-law’s gaze, as if he were annoyed with her. So they went back to Aci Trezza in silence, with their heads down. Bastianazzo had hastily tidied up the Provvidenza so as to go and wait for them at the top of the street, but when he saw them coming along like that, all crestfallen and with their boots in their hands, he didn’t have the heart to open his mouth, and went home with them in silence. La Longa immediately rushed to shut herself straight in the kitchen, as though she couldn’t wait to be alone with her pots and pans, and padron ’Ntoni said to his son: ‘Go and have a word with the poor creature, she can’t take any more.’
The next day they all went back to the station at Aci Castello to see the convoy of conscripts on their way to Messina, and they waited over an hour behind the railings being jostled by the crowd. At last the train came, and they saw all those boys flapping their arms about, with their heads sticking out of the train windows, like cattle on their way to market. There was so much singing, laughing and general din that it was almost like the feast day at Trecastagni, and amid the hubbub and racket the earlier sense of pain was almost forgotten.
‘Goodbye, ’Ntoni!’ ‘Goodbye, mother!’ ‘Goodbye, and remember what I told you.’ And there at the roadside was Sara, comare Tudda’s girl, apparently cutting grass for their calf; but comare Venera, known as ‘la Zuppidda’, the lame, was spreading the rumour that in fact she had come to say goodbye to padron ’Ntoni’s ’Ntoni, who she used to talk to over the garden wall, she herself had seen them as sure as she would wind up before God her maker. Certain it is that ’Ntoni waved goodbye to Sara, and she stood there with her sickle in her hand staring at the train until it moved off. La Longa felt she personally had been cheated of her own goodbye; and for a long time afterwards, every time she met Sara in the square or at the wash-place, she turned her back on her.
Then the train had left, whistling and roaring in such a way as to drown everyone’s songs and goodbyes. And when the onlookers had gone their own ways, there was just a group of women left, and the odd poor soul who carried on standing up against the railings without quite knowing why. Then gradually even they ambled off, and padron ’Ntoni, guessing that his daughter-in-law must have a bitter taste in her mouth, treated her to two centesimos worth of lemon water.
To comfort La Longa, comar Venera la Zuppidda came out with: ‘Now you may as well resign yourself — for five years you’ll just have to act as though your son were dead, and shut him out of your mind.’
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But they continued to think about him, in the house by the medlar-tree, sometimes because of an extra bowl that La Longa kept coming across when she set the table, sometimes because of a running bowline for securing the rigging which ’Ntoni could do better than anyone else, or when a rope had to be pulled as taut as a violin string, or a hawser hauled up by hand when you really needed a winch. Between his puffings and pantings, his grandfather would interpolate remarks like ‘Here’s where we could do with ’Ntoni,’ or ‘I haven’t got that boy’s wrist, you know.’ And as his mother plied her comb rhythmically across her loom she would remember the pounding of the engine which had taken her son away, a pounding which had stayed with her, amid all that bewilderment, and whose insistent beat seemed to be with her still.
His grandfather had some odd ways of comforting himself, and others: ‘After all, let’s be honest: a bit of soldiering will do that boy good. He always did prefer loafing about of a Sunday to using that good pair of arms of his to earn an honest crust.’
Or: ‘When he’s tasted the salt bread you eat elsewhere, he’ll stop complaining about the soups he gets at home.’
At last ’Ntoni’s first letter arrived from Naples, and it set the whole neighbourhood buzzing. He said that the women in those parts wore silken skirts which swept the ground, and that on the quay you could watch Pulcinella, and they sold pizza at two centesimos, the sort rich people ate, and that you couldn’t exist without money, it wasn’t like being at Aci Trezza, where you couldn’t spend a brass farthing unless you went to Santuzza’s wine shop. ‘We’d better send that greedy boy some money to buy himself some pizza,’ said padron ’Ntoni grudgingly; ‘It’s not his fault, that’s just how he is; he’s like a codfish, which would swallow a rusty nail given a chance. If I hadn’t held him at the font with my own arms, I’d swear don Giammaria had put sugar in his mouth instead of salt.’
When comare Tudda’s Sara was at the wash-place, the Mangiacarrubbe girl kept saying:
‘I can just imagine it! Women dressed in silks simply waiting to get their hands on padron ’Ntoni’s ’Ntoni. They don’t have that kind of booby there.’
The others guffawed, and from then on the more disgruntled girls called him the booby.
’Ntoni also sent a photograph of himself, all the girls at the wash-place had seen it, because comare Tudda’s Sara let them pass it round from hand to hand, under their aprons, and the Mangiacarrubbe girl was sick with jealousy. He looked like the archangel Michael in flesh and blood, with those feet of his resting on the carpet, and that curtain at his head, like the one behind the Madonna at Ognina, and so handsome, sleek and clean that his own mother wouldn’t have recognised him; and poor La Longa couldn’t see enough of the carpet and the curtain and that column against which her son was standing so stiffly, with his hand scratching the back of a fat armchair; and she thanked God and his saints that they had placed her son in the midst of all that finery. She kept the portrait on the chest-of-drawers, under the glass dome with the statue of the Good Shepherd — to whom she told her beads — said la Zuppidda, and she thought she’d got a real treasure there on that chest-of-drawers, while in fact sister Mariangela la Santuzza had another one just like it, for anyone who cared to look, given her by compare Mariano Cinghialenta, and she kept it nailed on the counter in the wine-shop, behind the glasses.
But after a bit ’Ntoni got hold of a lettered comrade, and then he let fly with complaints about the wretched life he led on board ship, his superiors, the discipline, the thin soup and tight shoes. ‘That letter isn’t worth the twenty centesimos it cost to send,’ grumbled padron ’Ntoni. La Longa lost patience with all those scrawls, which looked like fish-hooks and couldn’t possibly say anything good. Bastianazzo shook his head as if to say no, it wasn’t right, if it had been him he would have covered that paper with cheerful things only, to make people feel better — and he thrust out a finger as thick as a rowlock pin — if only out of consideration for La Longa, who couldn’t seem to resign herself, and was like a mother cat that has lost her kittens. Padron ’Ntoni went in secret to have the letter read out to him by the chemist, and then by don Giammaria, who was a man of the opposite persuasion, so as to hear both sides, and when he was convinced that the letter was indeed as it had first seemed, he repeated to Bastianazzo and his wife:
‘Didn’t I say that that boy ought to have been born rich, like padron Cipolla’s son, so he could scratch his stomach all day long without doing a hand’s turn?’
Meanwhile it had been a bad year and fish had virtually to be given away like alms, now that Christians had learned to eat meat on Fridays like so many Turks. Furthermore there weren’t enough hands left at home to manage the boat, and at times they had to take on Menico della Locca, or someone else. Because the king’s trick was to take boys away for conscription when they were ready to earn their own bread; but as long as they were a drain on family resources, you had to bring them up yourself, so they could be soldiers later; and in addition to all this Mena was nearly seventeen and was beginning to turn young men’s heads when she went to mass. ‘Man is fire, and woman the straw; the devil comes, and blows.’ That was why the family from the house by the medlar-tree had to sweat blood to keep the boat seaworthy.
So, to keep things going, padron ’Ntoni had arranged a deal with zio Crocifisso Dumb-bell, a deal in connection with some lupins which were to be bought on credit and resold at Riposto, where compare Cinghialenta had said there was a boat loading up for Trieste. Actually the lupins were not in the peak of condition; but they were the only ones in Trezza, and the artful Dumb-bell also knew that the Provvidenza was wasting good sun and water moored up there by the wash-place, not doing anything; that was why he persisted in acting dumb. ‘Eh? Not a good deal? Leave it then! But I can’t make it one centesimo less, so help me God!’ and he shook his head in such a way that it did indeed resemble a bell without a clapper. This conversation took place at the door of Ognina church, on the first Sunday in September, the feast of the Virgin Mary, and all the people from the nearby villages were there, including compare Agostino Piedipapera, or Duckfoot, who was so bluff and blithe that he managed to bring about an agreement on the price of two onze and ten per salma, to be paid on the never at so much a month. Things always turned out like that for zio Crocifisso, he could always be wheedled into agreeing because, like some girls, he couldn’t say no. ‘That’s it. You simply can’t say no when you should,’ sniggered Piedipapera, ‘You’re like those…’ and he said what he was like.
When La Longa heard about the deal with the lupins, after supper, when they were sitting chatting with their elbows on the tablecloth, her mouth fell open; it was if she could feel that huge sum of forty onze weighing physically on her stomach. But women have no business sense, and padron ’Ntoni had to explain to her that if the deal went well they would have bread for the winter, and ear-rings for Mena, and Bastiano would be able to go to Riposto and back in a week, with Menico della Locca. Meanwhile Bastiano was snuffing out the candle without saying a word. That was how the lupin deal came about, and with it the voyage of the Provvidenza, which was the oldest of the village boats but which had a lucky name anyhow. Maruzza still felt black at heart, but she kept quiet, because it wasn’t her business, and she quietly went about organizing the boat and everything for the trip, the fresh bread, the pitcher with the oil, the onions and the fur-lined coats stowed under the footrest and in the locker.
The men had been up against it all day, what with that shark zio Crocifisso, who had sold them a pig in a poke, and the lupins, which were past their prime. Dumb bell said he knew nothing about it, honest to God. ‘What’s been agreed is fair indeed,’ was his contribution. And Piedipapera fussed and swore like a maniac to get them to agree, insisting heatedly that he had never come upon such a deal in his whole life; and he thrust his hands into the pile of lupins and showed them up to God and the Virgin, calling upon them as witnesses. Finally, red, flustered and beside himself, he made a last des
perate offer, and put it to zio Crocifisso who was still acting dumb and to the Malavoglia who had the sacks in their hands: ‘Look. Pay for them at Christmas, instead of paying so much a month, and you’ll save a tari per salma. Now can we call an end to it?’ And he began to put the lupins into the sacks: ‘In God’s name, let’s call it a day!’
The Provvidenza set sail on Saturday towards evening, and the evening bell should already have rung, though it hadn’t, because mastro Cirino the sexton had gone to take a pair of new boots to don Silvestro the town clerk; that was the time of evening when the girls clustered like a flock of sparrows around the fountain, and the evening star was already shining brightly, so that it looked like a lantern hanging from the Provvidenza’s yard. Maruzza stood on the seashore with her youngest child in her arms, not saying a word, while her husband unfurled the sail, and the Provvidenza bobbed like a young duckling on the waves which broke around the fangs of rock offshore.
‘When the north is dark and the south is clear, you may set to sea without any fear,’ padron ’Ntoni was saying from the shore, looking towards Etna which was all black with clouds. Menico della Locca, who was in the Provvidenza, shouted something, but the sea swallowed it. ‘He said you can give the money to his mother, la Locca, because his brother is out of work,’ added Bastianazzo, and this was the last word they heard him speak.