Moscardino (4 page)

In the tubs from Montelupo the small flowers were drowned, the water sloshing to the brim was tinted with the red cinnabar brick paint. My grandfather drew her from the balcony into his arms, put his palms against her shoulders, rubbed the backs of her hands, stroked down her arms, her flanks, her legs down to her feet, and lamented: Cleofe, you are too lovely, you are what is driving me mad, my despair, lifelong despair. Cleofe, I shall have no peace, I shall have no peace as long as you are alive . . . and I am alive. Cleofe, death is good. Death is good.

Cleofe repeated: death, and turned her eyes away, and toward the child in its cradle; which, awakened by the noise, kicked and screamed. To die. My grandfather had a knife in his hands. Cleofe, I can't kill you.

He fell on the knife, slitting his belly.

The first person to reach the door was “that woman,” who had kissed Grumpy by the well-curb.

Then the doctors who put my grandpa in a straight waistcoat and sewed up his stomach.

He was off his head and didn't notice he was being carried away.

When Sabina, the woman who had kissed Grumpy at the well-curb, came in and saw my grandfather with his stomach slit, twitching on the ground, she ran to call her padrone, Don Pietro, Pietro Galanti who lived next to us and whose house had two doors, one on the tiled street and the other giving onto the courtyard toward the well. The abbé Don Lorenzo walked behind Sabina bobbing along to catch up. He went up Don P.G.'s stairs while she was calling the priest, he fetched out the silver crucifix and the stole and the surplice and the box with the holy objects that was in the downstairs cupboard.

It was not the first time he had scurried to death beds with Don Pietro Galanti and these were the things necessary on such occasions.

Then he fixed Don Galanti's tunic from behind and helped him to get on with the job as if it were perfectly ordinary and in no way alarming even if the slit stomach belonged to his brother.

Don Lorenzo stood still before Cleofe, smiled, stared at her quite a while with his hands in the folds of his soutane, quite calmly. Now, at any rate the disemboweled was in the hands of all those doctors and
could no longer jump on him and tweak the hairs out of his tonsure as he had done in times past.

If you want to see your brother before they take him away . . . He may die . . . up on that mountain near Lucca . . . tied up the way they have got him . . . all that way on a stretcher . . . Signora Pellegrina, I wouldn't like my presentiment to come true . . . wouldn't it be better for him to die here at home . . . at least he would go to the cemetery where his father . . . and where we all, anyhow.

Signora Pellegrina, you might at least say something or other to keep 'em from taking him away . . . You are his mother, I have done every . . . I have told 'em to let him die in peace in his bed.

There was a pool of blood on the floor.

How can a man live without blood? It's true, it's all God's will, but God's will could cure him in his own bed.

To die in his own bed . . .

The mayor says it can't be done.

I haven't been able even to give him the sacraments.

The Misericordia will be here . . . anyhow it's your business . . . come see him before they take him away and give him your benediction before they get him out of the door.

 

Mrs. Pellegrina trembled and stared into nothingness, rolled her eyes from the depth of her arm-chair . . . and didn't answer.

Her teeth clicked from time to time, and the beads of the rosary tapped one against another. And a fug in that room that hadn't been opened for months, a smell of oil wick and of mold, a feeling of death. That skeleton hardly moved by its trembling . . . hunched into wide-sided arm-chair in the darkness of the room.

When the Misericordia did come with the coffin and the two horses the whole village was on the brick sidewalk.

Toward evening. Cloudlets reddish and dark, hurrying in escape, in herds, from sea to hills. Those far off seemed like one cloud thinned out on a turquoise sky, more blackish than reddish.

The cold breeze stung the women's faces and they stopped their mouths with their yarn tippets keeping their hands under their aprons so that their bellies seemed to bulge out. They stood stock still looking at our house, close to the opposite wall like a frightened flock of pregnant and widowed witches.

 

Those two horses with traces and harness ends of yellow leather, brass buckles, bridles with square blinkers that almost boxed in the horses' noses to keep them from shying, and with tinklers on their heads to keep them from going to sleep, bits with two small bars of iron sticking out on each side of their mouths, from which the rope reins passed over their rumps between two oval rings set in the tiny saddle atop the belly-band, rings oval shaped like old-fashioned key tops.

One sorrel and one chestnut with their knees bundled in cloth, their tails bundled up, with their ears twitching against the shiny blinkers, that man with the embroidered hat with the four reins between the fingers of his heavy hands, high up, above the horses, with his whip-end touching the ground and the covering of the catafalque trailing behind, covered with oilcloth like an uneven warming pan; a terrifying apparition never described in the book of fears.

Meanwhile it was getting dark and this mechanism started toward the Lucca asylum down the steep brick-paved lane, the creaking breaks slowed the wheels . . . chi-chi-chieee . . . wailing of wounded crows in the tragic evening.

A window was thrown open and a living skeleton appeared. A howl and thud. The pregnant witches took their hand out from under their aprons as if to deliver themselves from an evil.

Mrs. Pellegrina had fallen on her back. Broken her skull, could not be given the sacraments.

Everybody in this damned house dies without being given the sacraments.

 

I adore thee in every instant, O living bread of heaven, O sacrament of the most high.

Tomorrow thou shalt be with God.

Say: Jesus, Joseph, Mary.

But the eyes were set and glassy. Don Pietro had held a lighted candle to her lips and the flame does not waver.

Sabina, tie a handkerchief under her chin so her mouth won't flop open.

The rosary is in her hand.

She is dressed in black silk, all you need do is to light another lamp and keep watch.

 

Grumpy still had that pool of blood before his eyes, and his head now wrapped in a woolen shawl.

He looked in the mirror but did not recognize himself, he has seen the bare skull of death inside his face.

He has opened his mouth to count his teeth feeling they will drop out of his violet-coloured gums one by one before long.

He has wrapped his head in the shawl to keep out sound, to keep out visions. But the dancing lights suddenly swelled, exploded. Fire, fire, they were burning into his brain and he could not open his eyes.

He heard that woman's voice in his ears, a gust of warm breath on his neck, her mouth as that day at the well . . . and a going and coming through the house.

Tomorrow thou shalt be with God.

He no more knew which throbbed worse, skull, heart or head, it seemed as if a wind were tearing the shawl from his shoulders.

A gust of wind, like a gust of wind, he felt two hands clutching his wrists, violently holding . . .

and that woman's voice . . .

Perhaps it is a snare of the devil, and the wind is blowing . . .

Tomorrow thou shalt be with God. Jesus, Mary, Joseph another fire burst amid the bright dancing spots.

And the wind pulling his shawl. His head was stunned, it gurgled, flopped, thick and foamy as if the picked bones of his skull were full of red wine-must.

Death was helping the wind tear his clothes off, must he flee naked?

They would think he was mad, like his brother . . . They would take him to the Lucca asylum, like his brother . . .

And another blood-puddle.

Now they have put a cold shirt on him, they are laying him out in his coffin, they are covering him with a linen sheet, cold, rough, dampish, as when you get into bed in winter after long weeks of wind off the North Mountain, where the sun never comes for three months at a time, and the caves are full of icicles dripping.

His legs ache. He will never be warm again.

Jesus, Joseph, Mary, O living bread of Heaven.

The voice of that woman attacked him, a warm gust of wind on his neck. He seemed to feel her mouth now on one ear, now on the other. He no longer sees red.

That woman has squirted drops of ink into his eyes, she has sucked out the beast that was gurgling inside him, there in his head that is now black and empty.

It is night now, the baby stops whimpering, Cleofe is rocking it; rock, beat, double tap the legs of the straw woven chair on the tiled floor with a dull tap.

Cleofe looked like the Mater Dolorosa with the child Jesus. Resigned, pallid, unweeping. Unwrapped the child which stopped whimpering.

The night leaned its hairy stomach against the windows, the panes were warm and opaque, beaded with sweat. The window frames showed white, and the divisions between the glass squares. Outside all black, everything black in the room. A single candle is not much to light a whole room. The blackness hides behind pieces of furniture and bulges out round the sides. The bed has leant its shore on the floor tiling, a wedge-shaped shadow which shows exaggeratedly wide and odd.

It is mussed with the mattresses rolled to the top, the green and red stripes are like furrows at night in a mountain field.

Sugar is being burnt in a pan, the air feels viscous and sticky. The
smoke passes in front of the mirror of the wardrobe and seems as if it would go on a long way into the darkness. They have washed up the blood spots with salt and water. The candle ogles, flickers onto the damp still remaining there, there is a huge patch between the bed and the window as if someone had dropped a wine flask.

Cleofe's shadow appears and disappears on the wall with the child at breast. Were it still you would say it melted into the paleness of the wall so vague that it seems but to continue the things about it.

Greyness, rain without clatter.

The sky is hooded over as far as the sea, seemed held up like a canopy by the mountains that edge the horn of Seravezza.

The tapers of the Misericordia crowd in along the walk that is paved with thin bricks, a thick cloud of smoke a bit above hooded heads.

When they had got the coffin onto their shoulders, it looked like a burning bier on four pillars, black pillars, quenched with the rain and suffocated with a dark brown cloth with metal corn tassels at the four supports almost unraveled in yellow.

The coffin moved thus down the steep lane, and behind it Don Lorenzo bareheaded, and the women with the brass lanthorns. The smoke of the torches hung in the air, tarnished the window panes, crept into the house, sticky, resinous, heavy.

Don Lorenzo is now in front of the coffin and stares at his mother
in her silk dress, with her hands crossed on her breast, shackled by justice forever, her head bound, her mouth closed, one eye just a bit open.

They lift her from the litter by cords.

She is stiff.

They box her up like a bit of merchandise, put a double turn of rope round the casket and lower her into the grave as into a ship's hole.

The ropes are pulled up. They must be used again. They scrape against the rim of the casket with a dull sound of fraying, like pulleys of a crane.

Don Lorenzo's shoes were laced crooked with twine with mud on the ends at the low knot, and caked round the edge of his soutane, black stockings and silver buckles. He felt the water dripping down his sides from his hair, his face wet with rain and tears.

The hole swallowed back the loose earth. It looks as if yeast were swelling it up; puffing it over the edges of a garden flowered with paper, cotton and wire.

 

Don Pietro Galanti, family guardian, took possession of the estate. A vineyard on Ripa Hill, two bits of wood at Giustagnana, a spur of hill whose sub-soil contained a hidden vein of marble, graded “White P.” The hope of the family.

The surface was rented to a charcoal burner for the time being.

Four houses at Seravezza, an olive yard and a field at Bonazzera, three olive yards at Pozzi, four farms at Cugnìa di Querceta, two poplar plantations and seven meadows at Puntone, Stroscia, Ranocchiaio, and Cinquale.

A life allowance of four hundred dollars
(scudi)
a year to a “legitimate son who takes holy orders.”

Inventory of furniture, kitchen copper and household linen.

All entrusted to Sabina, Don Pietro's servant who is surety for her and keeps the keys of the house.