Moscardino (6 page)

And as they went along and along the doctor's eyes (Jack of Clubs) knew more and more about Sabina's legs, now that her dress, losing its laundered stiffness, stuck to them, now that there was a hollow between leg and leg made by the weight of Sabina's hands resting there.

And how would Grumpy have the courage to say a word of reproof to the doctor who could give him a powder of something and kill him off like a dog if he needed the doc for a constipation?

He worried: That doctor will come every day as he has done for two years . . .

And is today the first time? . . . and he convinced himself that the doctor had come to an agreement with Sabina, they had cooked up this trip to the seaside between 'em.

Jack of Clubs had arranged with her that he would be waiting by the new bridge under the plane trees.

Why had she told the driver to go by the New Bridge and not by the Annunziata?

Was it Sabina who told him? Cleofe's need of sea air had been invented on purpose?

This had all happened because of Cleofe. He hoped she would die soon and end it. That confounded consumptive would hang on for a long time yet, he would have to stand it or die off himself.

He scratched his head, his hands, got up, hitched the shawl round his neck, looked at Don Pietro Galanti with begging eyes. Turned his eyes to the fields, there were the red poppies. He looked at Cleofe, there was that damn one-lunger, cause of it all; who might at least die off and end it, then the doctor wouldn't come to the house any more. He didn't know where to look, if he cast his gaze inward he was terrified. He remembered all his past life, the meeting at the well, the first fear of those mocking reflections down in the water beneath him, which took him by the hair and slapped him against Sabina's face; that was the first bewitchment, hoodoo. Then that woman kissed him. That brought the blood of his disemboweled brother back before his eyes.

He saw red for the rest of the drive.

 

Gulls at rest on the sea-water, in little groups, crowds of them further off, others scattered over a sea fanned by a cool northwest wind. Patternless as a field of daisies sprouting in an unbounded meadow.

A sea paler than spring grass feathered by so gentle a breeze, petals blown off, deflowered.

A sea streaked by little furrows, unpatterned as soon as formed, as if a golden comb passed invisible, lining the white and blue, a page of the book eternally fabulous upsetting all men's calculations.

On the hard beach inshore the water scarcely moved, without foam, as if the sea breathed in blessed rest. No shadow of effort in the sleeping giant.

Cleofe hunched up on the sand under a black umbrella, not much shade, but enough for her. She does not feel the sun's heat though the sun is already high.

With all the pale sea in her eyes, sinuosity of the gulls, small pigeons new hatched, black and white with their wings open on the live water. Great lake as a bed for water lilies, amazed at the soon come summer.

 

Tota pulchra es.
Wholly fair art thou, Mary full of Grace! The abbé Don Lorenzo was reading the book of Sunday prayers for the month of May the most amorous pages that the faithful can say to the Virgin when she stands in the silver niche unveiled for the evening novena, with the golden rosebuds and the celestial mantle and on her rosy forehead the crown of lilies which shines and shakes to the echo of children's voices.

Wholly fair art thou, Mary,
piena di grazia,
said the abbé in a tiny lowered voice in the shadow near Cleofe.

It was the first time he had been so near that Madonna, who seemed to breathe, absorbed, with all the gleaming sea reflected in her tobacco-coloured eyes.

That pale wax face, the head bent toward the left shoulder, protected from the sun rays by a black baldacchino, with the child at breast as Mary in the desert of Egypt, followed by Herod. Eyes the colour of Macaboy snuff.

Full of grace; wholly fair art thou, Mary; for the first time Don Lorenzo dared to speak so near to her, protected by the shadow of the little black rain umbrella.

Tota pulchra es,
Mary,
piena di grazia.
He spoke the words of the Christian poet, and though protected by the shadow he was not free, he felt his heart caught in his throat and coughed every now and again a dry nervous cough.

He laboured and mistook the words, and the accents of the prayers which he would have liked to sing out in a song for her, to her, who watched the sea and listened to the break of the wavelets like the rustling of starched petticoats.

Don Lorenzo's words were heard, perhaps, and carried away by the angels who form the crown of mortal praises about Maria Regina. They were absorbed in space as if they had not been uttered aloud.

And in all the circumambience there was a divine and placid agitation
of love, a submissive labour, a weeping without sobs, a smiling without disturbance of men, or of things, a calm striving.

The men scratching for mussels in shore with iron pincers stood like the gold hunters in dime novels silently prying off shellfish amid the sieve of sand that the water left alternately dry; sousing in it the motherly water, bitter, pungent with the salt rinsing, then popped it into the wallets slung over their shoulders. Washerwomen came only to the river because sea water doesn't wash clothes, baskets on head, full of the white week's washing, planting their poles in the sand, stretching their ropes with sure wrist, they fold the big double bed sheets and the spreads covered with white heavy hookstitch.

The swaddling bands turned three times round the wash lines are gayer than the brides' night gowns with crossed lace. These last if the wind bellied them out seemed stuffed full of decrepit flesh. More amorous the towels with fringes like corn-ears with red mottoes and names interlaced in the corners. The smaller bits are baby blue like the hills of Seravezza after sunset.

All this festooned wash moved a little, as the sea by the beach, as the wings of the gulls, as the mussel fishers, as Cleofe's bosom, as the voice of Don Lorenzo, as the passion of the red-faced doctor and Sabina's carnal response, as the suspicion of Don Pietro Galanti and the churning of curses held in by the cowardice of a taciturn husband.

You have sewed me up with black thread, Don Pietro. You have sewed me to your tunic, like a rag button. Black thread don't show on black cloth, no one will see the stitches. But it is fate that I am your servant, even now that I am married. Wait, wait, serve always. Nobody ever waits on me, ever has waited on me.

First I had a job with an old priest in a house with no light, a dark house, now I am servant to a priest who has grown old, even older, and a young priest, and instead of a husband who has the sense to agree with me, I have one who agrees with my boss, if you call it agreeing when he sulks, hides in a corner, lengthens his mug; rolls his eyes as he does when you tell him what you think, Don Pietro.

I was evidently meant to stay bundled up in black thread and mend long black socks worn out heel and toe by priests, sew on black rag buttons, patch soutanes, mend pockets, brush the nap of priest's hats, and their hat cords and bat-wings. And if I go out for a walk and to breathe a breath of clean air with healthy people, first you jump on me, then my husband, and finally Don Lorenzo as if I was married to all of you three.

Life is a black thread bobbin, we live by needlefuls. But God measures the measure. I am seventy-one, Sabina. I think my life is at its last loop.

You can already see the white on the top of my wooden poll.

Don't be in a hurry, don't curse your servitude. Bear with my old age as I bore with your infancy.

I wish you would think of me as your father, if priests could have children. I brought you up, you may say, with pap and pacifier, and when you were grown I gave you good housing. If you no longer like me, I have been deceived by your benevolence, have you lost the good Christian qualities that I taught you?

What do you mean by “your servant even now that I am married”? You got married, does that mean that you are to kick over the traces and run wild like a yearling in heat?

If you do, you aren't like your mother of blessed memory. And in saying this Don P.G. got excited. He lost that serenity so habitual to him even in difficult moments.

And Sabina listened to him with irritation as if champing on the bit of a discipline grown insupportable.

 

The wind turned icy and harsh, the sea roughened and cast off the gulls as if impatient at having tolerated their perching on its rump for so many hours.

The calkers prophesied rain from the heavy flag-like clouds that saddened the heaven. There will be a downpour of big drops before long, pocking the sand waste.

They stretch brown oilskins over the upturned boats, awning'd out a bit further so they can work under them as under a cabin roof. The men looked like journeymen sweeps and locksmiths in orgasm, who on arriving in a country square when it is about to rain find the peasants asking sweeps and tinkers, have they brought the rain and bad luck? Then they look cross and don't have their chimneys done or their kettles fixed, if it rains before the tinkers' tents are up and the forges and bellows got going.

The calkers push aside ropes and nets, get astride the boats on the part plugged already and calked, and start again tapping the chisels that enlarge the cracks to get out the old tow between plank and plank.

The pitch smoke from the boiling iron cauldrons spreads out low, hanging heavy in the clogging heavy air, hiding the little hunch-back half naked who tends the fire and blows.

 

I lived with my gran'dad on Monte di Ripa.

My mother worked in the city. My father was dead and I had a brother who had convulsions, who stayed with a woman who looked after him out of charity. That woman was the butcher's wife and helped in the butcher shop and to kill in the slaughterhouse.

On slaughter days she didn't come home and my brother was alone shut up in the house, and he had convulsions.

They sometimes found him on the floor, as if dead. Sometimes she got drunk and cursed, and beat him.

At Carnival he died, and that woman said: blessed paradise!

She had been to the Carnival dance, and came in and stepped on him, then she noticed him. Took the cold body and threw it onto the bed. She took off his checked suit and spread a sheet over my brother whose soul was now safe.

I didn't see him, but I know what he looked like. Once I had seen him twitching on the floor, the door was half open, and the woman who kept him out of charity was at the butcher shop, and I looked through the key-hole and called him.

Then I ran to call her, and when she came back he was stiff.

I didn't see him dead but I can always see him stiff, as he was that day.

My gran'pop, called back to his native earth, called by the house and the town, had come from his travels to stop on in peace.

All his life had been voyage from a dream to a dream, from township to township or to far country.

In his young days the war had taken him as volunteer into its toils. Later, love armed his hand again. But neither love nor war had absorbed him. Now he felt the blood less restive in his veins and less turbid in warming his heart.

Middle high, live glance, biblical beard like my own, thick hair shining like filed iron. Face bright and rosy, thick mulatto's lips like a sucking infant's, he talked of life and death; of Dante, love, early grain crops, manures; half shutting and wide opening his eyes as if fixing an image when he got het up over poetry and things of that sort.

If, on the other hand, he talked of his own past life, of Cleofe, of the mad house, of the way gooks carry on — and he had passed the best part of his life among 'em — his voice grew gentle, he explained things as if he were talking of someone else.

He had the same intonation when he talked of Aladdin lost in the magician's cave among the jewels.

Every now and again he would try to fix a lost detail.

He laughed over his wasted life. It seemed to me odd that he would get into a passion when he talked of the Emperor of Hell with three heads of hideous colour so big he could eat a sinner in each of his three mouths at once. What excited my terrified fancy were the six black wings on the shoulders of so huge an animal, stuck fast to his midriff in ice.

As I had heard that many people sell their souls to the devil to get money in this world, I shook with fear at night, when I thought that my grandpop in some need or other in those far countries might have sold his soul to the devil.

Once he told me that when he was a kid and on the point of drowning he had seen the Madonna.

That made me cry.

We were at the hearth and it was raining. My grandfather had put out the light for economy. The room was lit by the embers. I was on the hearth with the Pomeranian bitch. My grandfather on the straw-plaited stool. I hid my teary face in the bitch's yellow coat.