Moscardino (8 page)

We passed the rest of that winter alone, granddad and I in the evenings with the light out.

I on the hearth stone, and grandpop on the straw stool, by the fire, the brand was of luminous olive wood and gave a lot of cinders and very little flame.

Long boring evenings ending with yawns so steady as to make young Buck weep, despite his being all ears and alert to hear the true fairy tales of his grandpop, illustrated by examples, coloured with pictures of clear poetry and somber drama; telling how the lunatics with whom he had lived twenty-four years fell in love with the new moon. They prepared curious wreaths of flowers for her, without leaves, five or seven kinds with the same number of unspotted petals, a real certo-sian and geometric field, studied and worked out lovingly with a smile on their lips, their eyes bright and absorbed.

And there are other nice lunatics so gentle they can call the birds with names you have never heard. Until they see birds in the sky, fabulous, all made of air, invisible and transparent. Others talked with the wind and with field flowers. Or they praised God from year's end to year's end, standing still in a corner with their eyes turned up to heaven and their arms folded.

Others have no use for talk, tongue doesn't work, they would stand mute for ages, guarding what secrets?

But if the lunatics had cut open their bellies for love . . . Or others, in sleep, stabbed with crazy jealousy had strangled those whom they ought to have loved all their lives, and now wept because they were dead, reappeared to them in sleep . . . They saw them upright, steady, still in the garden cross-walk, waiting till they could get out of that prison to be reunited and go on to heaven knows where . . .

 

Generous, impatient outbursts of that blond young fellow, all eyes and sinews of steel, jammed into a straitjacket near my grandfather's bed in the first days: Near the big window . . .

He SAW her, he leapt up to go to her, and she always turned off toward the shrubbery and didn't see him. And didn't see his chained love, and he was tied up by his rival who wanted to steal her from him . . .

But who couldn't because now he had written to the queen, and she will come with coach and footmen and maid servants to free him.

But in the meanwhile
she
has turned off by the myrtles and don't know this. Let the queen come and she will fix it O.K.

It grows dark and
she
is still there by the standing still.

Perhaps she is chained and don't hear, and don't see her lover behind the barred window, in pain, crying out, and making signs. But he can't call her by name because her name is made up of letters that aren't in the alphabet any longer.

And the women that so terrified me in my grandfather's stories,
women turned into mooing buffaloes in bestial conjunctions in the marshes of the maremma. I can still see them going on all fours prodded on by pock-marked guardians in white overalls.

And the others that tear off their clothes without knowing why, and have lost all shame and talk excitedly with the men without suspicion of sex, and at night roll up in the moonlight like hedgehogs in underbrush.

Violent men that had killed many kings of the earth so that mankind might be sated with goods, who support your chains with pride, and shake every now and again and tug at the straps that bind you. To run again to your place of combat in the world, shoving it along with mighty heaves so that it will revolve more quickly. Beautiful and terrible your bloody fury! How many times have you slept with me on my cot, with the few coverlets in those long winter nights.

Don't kill me. I am not a king's son.

And I would wake up and think of the sons of kings born with such cruel destinies. One does not know why God puts so heavy a burden on their shoulders.

And those women huddled weeping on the ground from morning till evening.

Undone, because they have forgotten, lost something they can not find again.

And they bend over, opening their eyes wide and full of tears. These
lanterns lit on a rainy night, to hunt in the corners, in the cracks of the pavement, in the chinks of the wall.

They have lost something. What have they lost? They wander about sobbing like marmosets, souls in purgatory paying their sins, seventy years for each lie.

And look at the doctors with eyes half shut, leering at the other women of whom they are jealous. They walk along scraping the walls, with little short steps so as not to be seen and recognized; and all day and every day with their hands tied, because if the doctor unties them, they will begin to scratch their mons veneris till the blood comes, as if they had a herd of lice there at pasture.

 

This was the son of a Luchese emigrant.

He had lost his reason in an American forest, and lost his way home. He made friends with the apes in the forest, eating nuts and wild fruit. He slept in the trees for fear of snakes, he became a thin ape with long nails and a hairy face. But carnivorous teeth wanted meat. Therefore in bad weather he ate the carcasses killed and left by the other wild animals.

He was found by relatives, peasants near the forest. Recognized, captured, like a wild animal he tried to bite them, refused food, let out guttural howls like a lion.

Thus he was brought back to his native country, and my grandfather knew him in the days of his adventure.

I followed him step by step on his return voyage. He followed, he began to call his father, then he remembered his smallest sister.

He learned to smile. When the doctor pricked him with a needle he felt it. And man is man on condition that he feels pain always in two ways; that he feels grief for a distant family, and pricks on live cured flesh.

His cure was rapid. He got well before my granddad, so that he became his nurse and consoler.

My grandfather despaired of getting well, getting over the flow of madness that every now and again centupled his strength and drove him to devastation.

After the cure of the Luchese emigrant, he understood that he too would get well.

You must want to get well, said the Luchese with kind words, when my grandfather lost hope.

Unless they want to, nobody will ever get well.

Thus he had to want to get well, use his will to get well. And my grandfather began to want nothing except to get well.

Not that the Luchese emigrant was dirty, quite the contrary, but this was because it was more beautiful to be clean than dirty; not because
dirtiness makes men ill. On that point no one could shake him. He didn't believe in contagion and laughed at the doctor's meticulous hygiene.

Eleven million microbes can get onto the sticky side of a postage stamp.

Alive? interrupted the Luchese emigrant, looking clever.

Alive enough to bump you off in a very few hours. But can eleven million living creatures that I can stick onto the end of my thumb be that powerful and invisible all at once?

That was something the Luchese couldn't understand. Sometimes he thought the medicoes had heard this hocus-pocus from the lunatics.

 

When peculiarities mentioned in the story were shared by one of our acquaintance, my grandfather would say: “A drop or two more or less will make the jug slop over; another drop and the jug will slop over.

That chap would be a nuisance or dangerous. And his relatives or someone would put him on a closed wagon and cart him off to the gook house up there past Monte Quiesa, and down the Sercio valley and then up that little hill, and shut him there in the sanctuary, where he'd have a much better time.

No one is totally sane.

No one is totally crazy, it's a matter of balance, measured in the
interests of the half crazy who decide about their half sane fellow men.

How often have I heard: He's a good chap, but just a bit enthusiastic.

Or: he goes off at full moon.

That's his weak point, don't try that on him.

He's got a bit of smoke in his top story, gets all het up over nothing.

He lies like a trooper, always digging up something.”

 

“Watch 'em when they get drunk, give 'em an extra drop and they get so kindly, kindly, so kindly.

Laugh like hell and roar like the devil.

Can't stand up, and blame it on the earth's goin' round. Another one will grab a knife and think everyone's against him.

Have you ever seen drunks start pissing and dumping like beasts in front of everyone else?”

 

“It's a matter of degree.

The richer can go further than poor folks.

In every rich family there are at least two, if there are four in the family, who would get shut up in the sanctuary of Frigonaria but their parents, mostly doctors with stinking sores, put up with 'em and excuse'em, and say: Little horsey will stop when he's run himself tired.

In the meantime rich folk's crazy children go on squandering what their parents have welched out of poor lunatics.

There is a law of compensation even in this:

See my house.

And he came back: Pleasant to sleep in April.

April's way comes down barrel a day.

Grumpy, Don Lorenzo and Cleofe. The red-faced doctor, Sabina, Don Pietro Galanti in the wagon, in the spring, coming back to the village.”

 

Those are the names of the lunatics. Grumpy. And now Don Lorenzo. Cleofe's fever came back, the pain, the sleeplessness, the enervating sweats. She went back to bed for a week, seriously ill.

Then she got better.

And thus it went on till October, when the streets of Seravezza rustle with leaves and thistles, blown down from the mountain with the first frisky wind.

Again appears Grumpy with his head bundled up, with his ear glued to key-holes, listening for the doctor's voice and Sabina's, who no longer slept in his bed:

She had had a girl child that looked like the red-faced doctor, with red hair and a freckly face.

If he got ill there was that doc, Jack of Clubs at the door: won't die of that, takes more than that to kill 'em.

Or he ordered a medicine which Grumpy didn't take because it might have poison in it.

The veins swelled on his neck, he got red as a peperone.

There was no doubt of it, the red head persecuted him. Jack of Clubs came and said they should bleed him.

Grumpy was scared and objected. He knew that his time had come. Jack of Clubs wanted to kill him and get Sabina, who was now his whore and had had a child by him, which Grumpy couldn't bear to touch.

He felt aversion for blood not his own. He couldn't stand that reddish fuzz and the scabs on the top of its head.

Even Don Pietro Galanti couldn't get a word out of him.

Nothing for it but to recommend him to God.

Jack of Clubs said he ought to go amuse himself for a month in a city to get rid of his hypochondria, and Grumpy knew it was just to get him out of the house.

The Doc said: Even Lucca. And Grumpy knew the gook house was in Lucca, where his poor brother was.

But you got to get over this mania, said the Doc. And Grumpy cowered down under the bedclothes, waiting to be copped.

He heard 'em saying the one lunger was no worse and that she was getting better, and Grumpy knew that he was the one who was going to die, that Jack of Clubs needed to keep Cleofe alive in order to be able to drop in at any time.

With Cleofe as an excuse he could come in and enjoy Sabina and see his maggoty brat.

And he, Grumpy, couldn't say anything, for fear of those shiny scalpels that the doc had in his leather case.

One of those little knives could make a little hole in his skull and the blood would come out a drop at a time, and even those few drops were a sea without port or harbour.

He thought he might kill Cleofe.

She was so full of t.b. she would die sometime sooner or later. But he wouldn't have had the courage to die.

He thought of arguing it out with the abbé, might find some complicated way to convince him; the abbé could do it, always in Cleofe's bedroom.

But when he opened his mouth to start explaining to the abbé, with the long argument that he had been chewing over for days, and masticating inside his groggy head-piece, Don Pietro Galanti appeared at the door.

Grumpy felt his tongue swell up between his teeth, and he couldn't get his mouth shut again.

He locked himself in his room.

He remembered his mother, dead without the sacraments and with one eye open.

Believe in God's punishment!

He hung himself with the cord they used to hang out the maggoty brat's dirty diapers.

 

“I never wanted to ask how Cleofe died.

She must have faded out bit by bit with solemn humility:

Without useless sighs.

Without wasting a breath, must have closed her snuff-coloured eyes.

Don Pietro Galanti probably said to the red-faced doctor: It's a pleasure when they die that way, just little by little.

At least there is time for the sacraments; neither too soon nor too late. And get to heaven before other sins can get onto their soul . . .”

 

“I heard she was dead, years later, when they thought I was cured.”

 

“The nuns brought me your mother in the Campana Institute uniform. I knew like a shot, and made a sign that they shouldn't say anything; for the pity I felt seeing the child in those ridiculous clothes.”

Printed by The Stinehour Press
in Lunenburg, Vermont on 60 lb Mohawk Vellum paper.
Designed by David Bullen Design.

Copyright © 2004 Archipelago Books