After midnight the wind began to howl as if all the cats in the place had been on the roof, and to shake the shutters. The sea roared round the Fariglione as if all the bulls of the Fair of Saint Alfio had been there, and the day opened as black as the soul of Judas. In short, an ugly September Sunday dawned—a Sunday in false September which lets loose a tempest on one between the cup and the lip, like a shot from behind a prickly-pear. The village boats were all drawn up on the beach, and well fastened to the great stones under the washing-tank; so the boys amused themselves by hissing and howling whenever there passed by some lonely sail far out at sea, tossed amid mist and foam, dancing up and down as if chased by the devil; the women, instead, made the sign of the cross, as if they could see with their eyes the poor fellows who were on board.
Maruzza la Longa was silent, as behooved her; but she could not stand still a minute, and went up and down and in and out without stopping, like a hen that is going to lay an egg. The men were at the tavern, or in Pizzuti’s shop, or under the butcher’s shed, watching the rain, sniffing the air with their heads up. On the shore there was only Padron ’Ntoni, looking out for that load of lupins and his son Bastianazzo and theProvvidenza, all out at sea there; and there was La Locca’s son too, who had nothing to lose, only his brother Menico was out at sea with Bastianazzo in theProvvidenza, with the lupins. Padron Fortunato Cipolla, getting shaved in Pizzuti’s shop, said that he wouldn’t give two baiocchi for Bastianazzo and La Locca’s Menico with the Provvidenza and the load of lupins.
“Now everybody wants to be a merchant and to get rich,” said he, shrugging his shoulders; “and then when the steed is stolen they shut the stable door.”
In Santuzza’s bar-room there was a crowd—that big drunken Rocco Spatu shouting and spitting enough for a dozen; Daddy Tino Goosefoot, Mastro Cola Zuppiddu, Uncle Mangiacarubbe; Don Michele, the brigadier of the coast-guard, with his big boots and his pistols, as if he were going to look for smugglers in this sort of weather; and Mastro Mariano Cinghialenta. That great big elephant of a man, Mastro Cola Zuppiddu, went about giving people thumps in fun, heavy enough to knock down an ox, as if he had his calker’s mallet in his hand all the time, and then Uncle Cinghialenta, to show that he was a carrier, and a courageous man who knew the world, turned round upon him, swearing and blaspheming.
Uncle Santoro, curled all up in the corner of the little porch, waited with out-stretched hand until some one should pass that he might ask for alms.
“Between the two, father and daughter, they must make a good sum on such a day as this,” said Zuppiddu, “when everybody comes to the tavern.”
“Bastianazzo Malavoglia is worse off than he is at this moment,” said Goosefoot. “Mastro Cirino may ring the bell as much as he likes, to-day the Malavoglia won’t go to church—they are angry with our Lord—because of that load of lupins they’ve got out at sea.”
The wind swept about the petticoats and the dry leaves, so that Vanni Pizzuti, with the razor in his hand, held on to the nose of the man he was shaving, and looked out over his shoulder to see what was going on; and when he had finished, stood with hand on hip in the door-way, with his curly hair shining like silk; and the druggist stood at his shop door, under that big ugly hat of his that looked as if he had an umbrella on his head, pretending to have high words with Don Silvestro, the town-clerk, because his wife didn’t force him to go to church in spite of himself, and laughed under his beard at the joke, winking at the boys who were tumbling in the gutters.
“To-day” Daddy Goosefoot went about saying, “Padroni ’Ntoni is a Protestant, like Don Franco the apothecary.”
“If I see you looking after that old wretch Don Silvestro, I’ll box your ears right here where we are,” shouted La Zuppidda, crossing the piazza, to her girl. “That one I don’t like.”
La Santuzza, at the last stroke of the bell, left her father to take care of the tavern, and went into church, with her customers behind her. Uncle Santoro, poor old fellow, was blind, and didn’t go to the mass, but he didn’t lose his time at the tavern, for though he couldn’t see who went to the bar, he knew them all by the step as one or another went to take a drink.
“The devils are out on the air,” said Santuzza, as she crossed herself with the holy water. “A day to commit a mortal sin!”
Close by, La Zuppidda muttered Ave Marias mechanically, sitting on her heels, shooting sharp glances hither and thither, as if she were on evil terms with the whole village, whispering to whoever would listen to her: “There’s Maruzza la Longa doesn’t come to church, and yet her husband is out at sea in this horrid weather! There’s no need to wonder why the Lord sends judgments on us. There’s even Menico’s mother comes to church, though she doesn’t do anything there but watch the flies.”
“One must pray also for sinners,” said Santuzza; “that is what good people are for.”
Uncle Crucifix was kneeling at the foot of the altar of the Sorrowing Mother of God, with a very big rosary in his hand, and intoned his prayers with a nasal twang which would have touched the heart of Satan himself. Between one Ave Maria and another he talked of the affair of the lupins, and of theProvvidenza, which was out at sea, and of La Longa, who would be left with five children.
“In these days,” said Padron Cipolla, shrugging his shoulders, “no one is content with his own estate; everybody wants the moon and stars for himself.”
“The fact is,” concluded Daddy Zuppiddu, “that this will be a black day for the Malavoglia.”
“For my part,” added Goosefoot, “I shouldn’t care to be in Cousin Bastianazzo’s shirt.”
The evening came on chill and sad; now and then there came a blast of north wind, bringing a shower of fine cold rain; it was one of those evenings when, if the bark lies high and safe, with her belly in the sand, one enjoys watching the simmering pot, with the baby between one’s knees, and listening to the housewife trotting to and fro behind one’s back. The lazy ones preferred going to the tavern to enjoy the Sunday, which seemed likely to last over Monday as well; and the cupboards shone in the firelight until even Uncle Santoro, sitting out there with his extended hand, moved his chair to warm his back a little.
“He’s better off than poor old Bastianazzo just now,” said Rocco Spatu, lighting his pipe at the door.
And without further reflection he put his hand in his pocket, and permitted himself to give two centimes in alms.
“You are throwing your alms away, thanking God for being in safety from the storm; there’s no danger of your dying like Bastianazzo.”
Everybody laughed at the joke, and then they all stood looking out at the sea, that was as black as the wet rocks.
Padron ’Ntoni had been going about all day, as if he had been bitten by the tarantula, and the apothecary asked him if he wanted a tonic, and then he said:
“Fine providence this, eh, Padron ’Ntoni?” But he was a Protestant and a Jew; all the world knew that.
La Locca’s son, who was out there with his hands in his empty pockets, began:
“Uncle Crucifix is gone with old Goosefoot to get Padron ’Ntoni to swear before witnesses that he took the cargo of lupins on credit.”
At dusk Maruzza, with her little ones, went out on the cliffs to watch the sea, which from that point could be seen quite well, and hearing the moaning waves, she felt faint and sick, but said nothing. The little girl cried, and these poor things, forgotten up there on the rocks, seemed like souls in Purgatory. The little one’s cries made the mother quite sick—it seemed like an evil omen; she couldn’t think what to do to keep the child quiet, and she sang to her song after song, with a trembling voice loaded with tears..
The men, on their way back from the tavern, with pot of oil or flask of wine, stopped to exchange a few words with La Longa, as if nothing had happened; and some of Bastianazzo’s special friends—Cipolla, for example, or Mangiacarubbe—walking out to the edge of the cliff, and giving a look out to see in what sort of a temper the old growler was going to sleep in, went up to Cousin Maruzza, asking about her husband, and staying a few minutes to keep her company, pipe in mouth, or talking softly among themselves. The poor little woman, frightened by these unusual attentions, looked at them with sad, scared eyes, and held her baby tight in her arms, as if they had tried to steal it from her. At last the hardest, or the most compassionate of them, took her by the arm and led her home. She let herself be led, only saying over and over again: “O Blessed Virgin! O Blessed Virgin Mary!” The children clung to her skirts, as if they had been afraid somebody was going to steal something from them too. When they passed before the tavern all the customers stopped talking, and came to the door in a cloud of smoke, gazing at her as if she were already a curiosity.
“Requiem aeternam,” mumbled old Santoro, under his breath: “that poor Bastianazzo always gave me something when his father let him have a soldo to spend for himself.”
The poor little thing, who did not even know she was a widow, went on crying: “O Blessed Virgin! O Blessed Virgin! O Virgin Mary!”
Before the steps of her house the neighbors were waiting for her, talking among themselves in a low voice. When they saw her coming, Mammy Goose-foot and her cousin Anna came towards her silently, with folded hands. Then she wound her hands wildly in her hair, and with a distracted screech rushed to hide herself in the house.
“What a misfortune!” they said among themselves in the street. “And the boat was loaded—forty scudi worth of lupins!”
The worst part of it was that the lupins had been bought on credit, and Uncle Crucifix was not content with “fair words and rotten apples.” He was called Dumb-bell because he was deaf on one side, and turned that side when people wanted to pay him with talk, saying, “the payment can be arranged.” He lived by lending to his friends, having no other trade, and for this reason he stood about all day in the piazza, or with his back to the wall of the church, with his hands in the pockets of that ragged old jacket that nobody would have given him a soldo for; but he had as much money as you wanted, and if any one wanted ten francs he was ready to lend them right off, on pledge, of course—“He who lends money without security loses his friends, his goods, and his wits”—with the bargain that they should be paid back on Sunday, in silver, with the account signed, and a carlino more for interest, as was but right, for, in affairs, there’s no friendship that counts. He also bought a whole cargo of fish in the lump, with discount, if the poor fellow who had taken the fish wanted his money down, but they must be weighed with his scales, that were as false as Judas’s, so they said. To be sure, such fellows were never contented, and had one arm long and the other short, like Saint Francesco: and he would advance the money for the port taxes if they wanted it, and only took the money beforehand, and half a pound of bread per head and a little quarter flask of wine, and wanted no more, for he was a Christian, and one of those who knew that for what one does in this world one must answer to God. In short, he was a real Providence for all who were in tight places, and had invented a hundred ways of being useful to his neighbors; and without being a seaman, he had boats and tackle and everything for such as hadn’t them, and lent them, contenting himself with a third of the fish, and something for the boat—that counted as much as the wages of a man—and something more for the tackle, for he lent the tackle too; and the end was that the boat ate up all the profits, so that they called it the devil’s boat. And when they asked him why he didn’t go to sea, too, and risk his own skin instead of swallowing everything at other people’s expense, he would say, “Bravo! and if an accident happened, Lord avert it! and if I lost my life who would attend to my business?” He did attend to his business, and would have hired out his very shirt; but he wanted to be paid without so much talk, and there was no use arguing with him because he was deaf, and, more than that, wasn’t quite right in his head, and couldn’t say anything but “Bargaining’s no cheating;” or, “The honest man is known when pay-day comes.”
Now his enemies were laughing in their sleeves at him, on account of those blessed lupins that the devil had swallowed; and he must say aDe profundisfor Bastianazzo too, when the funeral ceremony took place, along with the other Brothers of the Happy Death, with the bag over his head.
The windows of the little church flashed in the sunshine, and the sea was smooth and still, so that it no longer seemed the same that had robbed La Longa of her husband; wherefore the brothers were rather in a hurry, wanting to get away each to his own work, now that the weather had cleared up. This time the Malavoglia were all there on their knees before the bier, washing the pavement with their tears, as if the dead man had been really there, inside those four boards, with the lupins round his neck, that Uncle Crucifix had given him on credit, because he had always known Padron ’Ntoni for an honest man; but if they meant to cheat him out of his goods on the pretext that Bastianazzo was drowned, they might as well cheat our Lord Christ. By the holy devil himself, he would put Padron ’Ntoni in the hulks for it!—there was law, even at Trezza.
Meanwhile Don Giammaria flung two or three asperges of holy-water on the bier, and Mastro Cirino went round with an extinguisher putting out the candles. The brothers strode over the benches with arms over their heads, pulling off their habits; and Uncle Crucifix went and gave a pinch of snuff to Padron ’Ntoni by the way of consolation; for, after all, when one is an honest man one leaves a good name behind one and wins Paradise, and this is what he had said to those who asked him about his lupins:
“With the Malavoglia I’m safe, for they are honest people, and don’t mean to leave poor Bastianazzo in the claws of the devil.”
Padron ’Ntoni might see for himself that everything had been done without skimping in honor of the dead—so much for the mass, so much for the tapers, so much for the requiem—he counted it all off on his big fingers in their white cotton gloves; and the children looked with open mouths at all these things which cost so much and were for papa—the catafalque, the tapers, the paper-flowers; and the baby, seeing the lights, and hearing the organ, began to laugh and to dance.
The house by the medlar was full of people. “Sad is the house where there is the ‘visit’ for the husband.” Everybody passing and seeing the poor little orphaned Malavoglia at the door, with dirty faces, and hands in their pockets, shook their heads, saying:
“Poor Cousin Maruzza, now her hard times are beginning.”
The neighbors brought things, as the custom is—macaroni, eggs, wine, all the gifts of God that one could only finish if one was really happy—and Cousin Alfio Mosca came with a chicken in his hands, “Take this, Cousin Mena,” he said, “I only wish I’d been in your father’s place—I swear it—at least I should not have been missed, and there would have been none to mourn for me.”
Mena, leaning against the kitchen door, with her apron over her face, felt her heart beat as if it would fly out of her breast, like that of the poor frightened bird she held in her hand. The dowry of Sant’Agata had gone down, down in theProvvidenza, and the people who came to make the visit of condolence in the house by the medlar looked round at the things, as if they saw Uncle Crucifix’s claws already grasping at them; some sat perched on chairs, and went off, without having spoken a word, like regular stockfish as they were; but whoever had a tongue in their heads tried to keep up some sort of conversation to drive away melancholy, and to rouse those poor Malavoglia, who went on crying all day long, like four fountains. Uncle Cipolla related how there was a rise of a franc to a barrel in the price of anchovies, which might interest Padron ’Ntoni if he still had any anchovies on hand; he himself had reserved a hundred barrels, which now came in very well; and he talked of poor Cousin Bastianazzo, too, rest his soul; how no one could have expected it—a man like that, in the prime of life, and positively bursting with health and strength, poor fellow!
There was the sindaco, too, Master Croce Calta “Silk-worm”—called also Giufà—with Don Silvestro, the town-clerk, and he stood sniffing with nose in the air, so that people said he was waiting for the wind to see what way to turn—looking now at one who was speaking, now at another, as if he were watching the leaves in the wind, in real earnest, and if he spoke he mumbled so no one could hear him, and if Don Silvestro laughed he laughed too.
“No funeral without laughter, no marriage without tears.” The druggist’s wife twisted about on her chair with disgust at the trifling conversation, sitting with her hands in her lap and a long face, as is the custom in town under such circumstances, so that people became dumb at the sight of her, as if the corpse itself had been sitting there, and for this reason she was called the Lady. Don Silvestro strutted about among the women, and started forward every minute to offer a chair to some new-comer, that he might hear his new boots creak. “They ought to be burned alive, those tax-gatherers!” muttered La Zuppidda, yellow as a lemon; and she said it aloud, too, right in the face of Don Silvestro, just as if he had been one of the tax-gatherers. She knew very well what they were after, these bookworms, with their shiny boots without stockings; they were always trying to slip into people’s houses, to carry off the dowry and the daughters. ’Tis not you I want, my dear, ’tis your money. For that she had left her daughter Barbara at home. “Those faces I don’t like.”
“It’s a beastly shame!” cried Donna Rosolina, the priest’s sister, red as a turke, fanning herself with her handkerchief; and she railed at Garibaldi, who had brought in the taxes; and nowadays nobody could live and nobody got married any more.
“As if that mattered to Donna Rosolina now,” murmured Goosefoot.
Donna Rosolina meanwhile went on talking to Don Silvestro of the lot of work she had on her hands: thirty yards of warp on the loom, the beans to dry for winter, all the tomato-preserve to be made. She had a secret for making it, so that it kept fresh all winter; she always got the spices from town on purpose, and used the best quality of salt. A house without a woman never goes on well, but the woman must have brains, and know how to use her hands as she did, not one of those little geese that think of nothing but brushing their hair before the glass. “Long hair little wit,” says the proverb, specially when the husband goes under the water like poor Bastianazzo, rest his soul!
“Blessed that he is!” sighed Santuzza, “he died on a fortunate day, a day blessed by the Church—the eve of Our Lady of Sorrows—and now he’s praying for us sinners, like the angels and the saints. Whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth.’ He was a good man, one of those who mind their own business, and don’t go about speaking ill of their neighbors, as so many do, falling into mortal sin.”
Maruzza, sitting at the foot of the bed, pale and limp as a wet rag, looking like Our Lady of Sorrows herself, began to cry louder than ever at this; and Padron ’Ntoni, bowed and stooping, looking a hundred years older than he did three days before, went on looking and looking at her, shaking his head, not knowing what to say, with that big thorn Bastianazzo sticking in his breast as if a shark had been gnawing at him.
“Santuzza’s lips drop nothing but honey,” observed Cousin Grace Goosefoot.
“To be a good tavern-keeper,” said La Zuppidda, “one must be like that; who doesn’t know his trade must shut his shop, and who can’t swim must be drowned.”
“They’re going to put a tax on salt,” said Uncle Mangiacarubbe. “Don Franco saw it in the paper in print. Then they can’t salt the anchovies any more, and we may just use our boats for firewood.”
Master Turi, the calker, was lifting up his fist and his voice, “Blessed Lord—” he began, but caught sight of his wife and stopped short.
“With the dear times that are coming,” added Padron Cipolla, “this year, when it hasn’t rained since Saint Clare, and if it wasn’t for this last storm when theProvvidenzawas lost, that was a real blessing, the famine this year would be solid enough to cut with a knife.”
Each one talked of his own trouble to comfort the Malavoglia and show them that they were not the only ones that had trouble. “Troubles old and new, some have many and some have few,” and such as stood outside in the garden looked up at the sky to see if there was any chance of more rain—that was needed more than bread was. Padron Cipolla knew why it didn’t rain any longer as it used to do, “It rained no longer on account of that cursed telegraph-wire that drew all the rain to itself and carried it off.” Daddy Tino and Uncle Mangiacarubbe at this stood staring with open mouths, for there was precisely on the road to Trezza one of those very telegraph-wires; but Don Silvestro began to laugh with his hen’s cackle, ah! ah! ah! and Padron Cipolla jumped up from the wall in a fury, and railed at “ill-mannered brutes with ears as long as an ass’s.” Didn’t everybody know that the telegraph carried the news from one place to another; this was because inside the wires there was a certain fluid like the sap in the vines, and in the same way it sucked the rain out of the sky and carried it off where there was more need of it; they might go and ask the apothecary, who said it himself; and it was for this reason that they had made a law that whoever broke the telegraph-wire should go to prison. Then Don Silvestro had no more to say, and put his tongue between his teeth.
“Saints of Paradise! some one ought to cut down those telegraph-posts and burn them!” began Uncle Zuppiddu, but no one listened to him, and to change the subject looked round the garden.
“A nice piece of ground,” said Uncle Mangia-carubbe; “when it is well worked it gives food enough for a whole year.”
The house of the Malavoglia had always been one of the first in Trezza, but now—with Bastianazzo drowned, and ’Ntoni gone for a soldier, and Mena to be married, and all those hungry little ones—it was a house that leaked at every seam.
“In fact what could it be worth, the house?” Every one stretched out his neck from the garden, measuring the house with his eye, to guess at the value of it, cursorily as it were. Don Silvestro knew more about it than any one, for he had the papers safe in the clerk’s room at Aci Castello.
“Will you bet five francs that all is not gold that glitters,” he said, showing the shining new silver piece of money. He knew that there was a mortgage of two francs the year, so he began to count on his fingers what would be the worth of the house with the well and the garden and all.
“Neither the house nor the boat can be sold, for they are security for Maruzza’s dowry,” said some one else; and they began to wrangle about it until their voices might have been heard even inside, where the family were mourning for the dead. “Of course,” cried Don Silvestro, like a pistol-shot, “there’s the dowry mortgage.”
Padron Cipolla, who had spoken with Padron ’Ntoni about the marriage of his son Brasi and Mena, shook his head and said nothing.
“Then,” said Uncle Cola, “nobody’ll suffer but Uncle Crucifix, who loses his lupins that he sold on credit.”
They all turned to look at old Crucifix, who had come, too, for appearance’ sake, and stood straight up in a corner, listening to all that was said, with his mouth open and his nose up in the air, as if he was counting the beams and the tiles of the roof to make a valuation of the house. The most curious stretched their necks to look at him from the door, and winked at each other, as if to point him out.
“He looks like a bailiff making an inventory,” they sneered.
The gossips, who had got wind of the talk between Cipolla and Padron ’Ntoni about the marriage, said to each other that Maruzza must get through her mourning, and then she could settle about that marriage of Mena’s. But now La Longa had other things to think of, poor dear!
Padron Cipolla turned coolly away without a word; and, when everybody was gone, the Malavoglia were left alone in the court.
“Now,” said Padron ’Ntoni, “we are ruined, and the best off of us all is Bastianazzo, who doesn’t know it.”
At these words Maruzza began to cry afresh, and the boys seeing the grown-up people cry began to roar again, too, though it was three days now since papa was dead. The old man wandered about from place to place, without knowing what he was going to do. But Maruzza never moved from the foot of the bed, as if she had nothing left that she could do. When she spoke she only repeated, with fixed eyes, as if she had no other idea in her head, “Now I’ve nothing more to do.”
“No!” replied Padron ’Ntoni. “No! we must pay the debt to old Dumb-bell; it won’t do to have people saying: Honest men when they grow poor become knaves.” And the thought of the lupins drove the thorn of Bastianazzo deeper into his heart.
The medlar-tree let fall dry leaves, and the wind blew them here and there about the court.
“He went because I sent him,” repeated Padron ’Ntoni, as the wind bears the leaves here and there, “and if I had told him to fling himself head foremost from the Fariglione, he would have done it without a word. At least he died while the house and the medlar-tree, even to the last leaf, were his own; and I, who am old, am still here. ‘Long are the days of the poor man.’”
Maruzza said nothing, but in her head there was one fixed idea that beat upon her brains, and gnawed at her heart—to know, if she might, what had happened on that night; that was always before her eyes, and if she shut them she seemed to see theProvvidenzaout by the Cape of the Mills, where the sea was blue and smooth and sprinkled with boats, which looked like gulls in the sunshine, and could be counted one by one—that of Uncle Crucifix, the other of Cousin Barrabbas, Uncle Cola’sConcetta, Padron Fortunato’s bark—that it swung her head to see; and she heard Cola Zup-piddu singing fit to split his throat out of his great bull’s lungs, while he hammered away with his mallet, and the scent of the tar came on the air; and Cousin Anna thumped her linen on the stone at the washing-tank, and she heard Mena, too, crying quietly in the kitchen.
“Poor little thing!” said the grandfather to himself, “the house has come down about your cars too.” And he went about touching one by one all the things that were heaped up in the corner, with trembling hands, as old men do, and seeing Luca at the door, on whom they had put his father’s big jacket, that reached to his heels, he said to him, “That’ll keep you warm at your work—we must all work now—and you must help, for we have to pay the debt for the lupins.”
Maruzza put her hands to her ears that she might not hear La Locca, who, perched on the landing behind the door, screamed all day long with her cracked maniac’s voice, saying that they must give her back her son, and wouldn’t listen to reason from anybody.
“She goes on like that because she’s hungry,” said Cousin Anna, at last. “Now old Crucifix is furious at them all about the lupins, and won’t do anything for them. I’ll go and give her something to eat, and then she’ll go away.”
Cousin Anna, poor dear, had left her linen and her girls to go and help Cousin Maruzza, who acted as if she were sick, and if they had left her alone she wouldn’t have, lighted the fire or anything, but would have left them all to starve. “Neighbors should be like the tiles on the roof that carry water for each other.” Meanwhile the poor children’s lips were pale for hunger. Nunziata came to help too, and Alessio—with his face black from crying at seeing his mother cry—looked after the little boys, crowding round him like a brood of chickens, that Nunziata might have her hands free.
“You know how to manage,” said Cousin Anna to her, “and you’ll have your dowry ready in your two hands when you grow up.”
Mena did not know that there was an idea of marrying her to Padron Cipolla’s Brasi “to make the mother forget her grief,” and the first person to tell it her was Alfio Mosca, who, a few days later, came to the garden gate, on his way back from Aci Castello, with his donkey-cart. Mena replied, “It isn’t true, it isn’t true!” but she was confused, and as he went on telling her all about how he had heard it from La Vespa in the house of Uncle Crucifix, all of a sudden she turned red all over. Cousin Alfio, too, lost countenance seeing the girl like that, with her black kerchief over her head. He began to play with the buttons of his coat, stood first on one leg, then on the other, and would have given anything to get away. “Listen; it isn’t my fault; I heard it in old Dumb-bell’s court while I was chopping up the locust-tree that was blown down in the storm at the Santa Clara, you remember. Now, Uncle Crucifix gets me to do chores for him, because he won’t hear of La Locca’s son ever since his brother played him that trick with the cargo of lupins.” Mena had the string of the gate in her hand, but couldn’t make up her mind to open it. “And then if it isn’t true, why do you blush?” She didn’t know, that was the truth, and she turned the latch-string round and round. That person she knew only by sight, and hardly that. Alfio went on telling her the whole litany of Brasi Cipolla’s riches; after Uncle Naso, the butcher, he was the best match in the place, and all the girls were ready to eat him up with their eyes. Mena listened with all hers, and all of a sudden she made him a low courtesy, and went off up the garden path to the house.
Alfio, in a fury, went off and scolded La Vespa for telling him such a lot of stupid lies, getting him into hot water with everybody.
“Uncle Crucifix told me,” replied La Vespa; “I don’t tell lies!”
“Lies! lies!” growled old Crucifix. “I ain’t going to damn my soul for that lot! I heard it with these ears. I heard also that theProvvidenzais in Maruzza’s dowry, and that there’s a mortgage of two francs a year on the house.”
“You wait and you’ll see if I tell lies or not,” continued La Vespa, leaning back against the bureau, with her hands on her hips, and looking at him all the time with the wickedest eyes. “You men are all alike; one can’t trust any of you.” Meanwhile Uncle Crucifix didn’t hear, and instead of eating, went on talking about the Malavoglia, who were talking of marriages in the family; but of the two hundred francs for the lupins nobody heard a word.
“Eh!” cried La Vespa, losing patience, “if one listened to you nobody would get married at all.”
“I don’t care who gets married or who doesn’t, I want my own; I don’t care for anything else.”
“If you don’t care about it, who should? I say—everybody isn’t like you, always putting things off.”
“And are you in a hurry, pray?”
“Of course I am. You have plenty of time to wait, you’re so young; but everybody can’t wait till the cows come home, to get married.”
“It’s a bad year,” said Uncle Dumb-bell. “No one has time to think of such things as those.”
La Vespa at this planted her hands on her hips, and went off like a railway-whistle, as if her own wasp’s sting had been on her tongue.
“Now, listen to what I’m going to say. After all, my living is mine, and I don’t need to go about begging for a husband. What do you mean by it? If you hadn’t come filling my head with your flattery and nonsense, I might have had half a thousand husbands—Vanni Pizzuti, and Alfio Mos-ca, and my Cousin Cola, that was always hanging on to my skirts before he went for a soldier, and wouldn’t even let me tie up my stockings—all of them burning with impatience, too. They wouldn’t have gone on leading me by the nose this way, and keeping me slinging round from Easter until Christmas, as you’ve done.”
This time Uncle Crucifix put his hand behind his ear to hear the better, and began to smooth her down with good words: “Yes, I know you are a sensible girl; for that I am fond of you, and am not like those fellows that were after you to nobble your land, and then to eat it up at Santuzza’s tavern.”
“It isn’t true! you don’t love me. If you did you wouldn’t act this way; you would see what I am really thinking of all the time—yes, you would.”
She turned her back on him, and still went on poking at him, as if unconsciously, with her elbow. “I know you don’t care for me,” she said. The uncle was offended by this unkind suspicion. “You say these things to draw me into sin.” He began to complain. He not care for his own flesh and blood!—for she was his own flesh and blood after all, as the vineyard was, and it would have been his if his brother hadn’t taken it into his head to marry, and bring the Wasp into the world; and for that he had always kept her as the apple of his eye, and thought only of her good. “Listen!” he said. “I thought of making over to you the debt of the Malavoglia, in exchange for the vineyard, which is worth forty scudi, and with the expenses and the interest may even reach fifty scudi, and you may get hold even of the house by the medlar, which is worth more than the vineyard.”
“Keep the house by the medlar for yourself,” said she. “I’ll keep my vineyard. I know very well what to do with it.” Then Uncle Crucifix also flew into a rage, and said that she meant to let it be gobbled up by that beggar Alfio Mosca, who made fish’s-eyes at her for love of the vineyard, and that he wouldn’t have him about the house any more, and would have her to know that he had blood in his veins, too. “I declare if he isn’t jealous!” cried the Wasp.
“Of course I’m jealous,” said the old man, “jealous as a wild beast;” and he swore he’d pay five francs to whoever would break Alfio Mosca’s head for him, but would not do it himself, for he was a God-fearing Christian; and in these days honest men were cheated, for good faith dwells in the house of the fool, where one may buy a rope to hang one’s self; the proof of it was that one might pass and repass the house of the Malavoglia till all was blue, until people had begun to make fun of him, and to say that he made pilgrimages to the house by the medlar, as they did who made vows to the Madonna at Ognino. The Malavoglia paid him with bows, and nothing else; and the boys, if they saw him enter the street, ran off as if they had seen a bugbear; but until now he hadn’t heard a word of that money for the lupins—and All Souls was hard at hand—and here was Padron ’Ntoni talking of his granddaughter’s marriage!
He went off and growled at Goosefoot, who had got him into this scrape, he said to others; but the others said he went to cast sheep’s-eyes at the house by the medlar-tree; and La Locca—who was always wandering about there, because she had been told that her son had gone away in the Malavoglia’s boat, and she thought he would come back that way, and she should find him there—never saw her brother Crucifix without beginning to screech like a bird of ill omen, making him more furious than ever. “This one will drive me into a mortal sin,” cried Dumb-bell.
“All Souls is not yet come,” answered Goosefoot, gesticulating, as usual; “have a little patience! Do you want to suck Padron ’Ntoni’s blood? You know very well that you’ve really lost nothing, for the lupins were good for nothing—you know that.”
He knew nothing; he only knew that his blood was in God’s hands, and that the Malavoglia boys dared not play on the landing when he passed before Goosefoot’s door. And if he met Alfio Mosca, with his donkey-cart, who took off his cap, with his sunburnt face, he felt his blood boiling with jealousy about the vineyard. “He wants to entrap my niece for the sake of the vineyard,” he grumbled to Goosefoot. “A lazy hound, who does nothing but strut round with that donkey-cart, and has nothing else in the world. A starving beggar! A rascal who makes that ugly witch of a niece of mine believe that he’s in love with her pig’s face, for love of her property.”
Meantime Alfio Mosca was not thinking of Vespa at all, and if he had any one in his eye it was rather Padron ’Ntoni’s Mena, whom he saw every day in the garden or on the landing, or when she went to look after the hens in the chicken-coop; and if he heard the pair of fowls he had given her cackling in the court-yard, he felt something stir inside of him, and felt as if he himself were there in the court of the house by the medlar; and if he had been something better than a poor carter he would have asked for Sant’Agata’s hand in marriage, and carried her off in the donkey-cart. When he thought of all these things he felt as if he had a thousand things to say to her; and yet when she was by his tongue was tied, and he could only talk of the weather, or the last load of wine he had carried for the Santuzza, and of the donkey, who could draw four quintals’ weight better than a mule, poor beast!
Mena stroked the poor beast with her hand, and Alfio smiled as if it had been himself whom she had caressed. “Ah, if my donkey were yours, Cousin Mena!” And Mena shook her head sadly, and wished that the Malavoglia had been carriers, for then her poor father would not have died.
“The sea is salt,” she said, “and the sailor dies in the sea.”
Alfio, who was in a hurry to carry the wine to Santuzza, couldn’t make up his mind to go, but stayed, chatting about the fine thing it was to keep tavern, and how that trade never fell off, and if the wine was dear one had only to pour more water into the barrels. Uncle Santoro had grown rich in that way, and now he only begged for amusement.
“And you do very well carrying the wine, do you not?” asked Mena.
“Yes, in summer, when I can travel by night and by day both; that way I manage pretty well. This poor beast earns his living. When I shall have saved a little money I’ll buy a mule, and then I can become a real carrier like Master Mariano Cinghialenta.”
The girl was listening intently to all that Alfio was saying, and meanwhile the gray olive shook, with a sound like rain, and strewed the path with little dry curly leaves.
“Here is the winter coming, and all this we talk of is for the summer,” said Goodman Alfio. Mena followed with her eyes the shadows of the clouds that floated over the fields, as if the gray olive had melted and blown away; so the thoughts flew through her head, and she said:
“Do you know, Cousin Alfio, there is nothing in that story about Padron Fortunato Cipolla, because first we must pay the debt for the lupins.”
“I’m glad of it,” said Mosca; “so you won’t go away from the neighborhood.”
“When ’Ntoni comes back from being a soldier, grandfather and all of us will help each other to pay the debt. Mamma has taken some linen to weave for her ladyship.”
“The druggist’s is a good trade, too!” said Alfio Mosca.
At this moment appeared Cousin Venera Zup-pidda, with her distaff in her hand. “O Heaven! somebody’s coming,” cried Mena, and ran off into the house.
Alfio whipped the donkey, and wanted to get away as well, but—
“Oh, Goodman Alfio, what a hurry you’re in!” cried La Zuppidda, “I wanted to ask you if the wine you’re taking to Santuzza is the same she had last time.”
“I don’t know; they give me the wine in barrel.”
“That last was vinegar—only fit for salad—regular poison it was; that’s the way Santuzza gets rich; and to cheat the better, she wears the big medal of the Daughters of Mary on the front of her dress. Nowadays whoever wants to get on must take to that trade; else they go backward, like crabs, as the Malavoglia have. Now they have fished up theProvvidenza, you know?”
“No; I was away, but Cousin Mena knew nothing of it.”
“They have just brought the news, and Padron ’Ntoni has gone off to the Rotolo to see her towed in; he went as if he had got a new pair of legs, the old fellow. Now, with theProvvidenza, the Malayoglia can get back where they were before, and Mena will again be a good match.”
Alfio did not answer, for the Zuppidda was looking at him fixedly, with her little yellow eyes, and he said he was in a hurry to take the wine to Santuzza.
“He won’t tell me anything,” muttered the Zuppidda, “as if I hadn’t seen them with my eyes. They want to hide the sun with a net.”
TheProvvidenzahad been towed to shore, all smashed, just as she had been found beyond the Cape of the Mills, with her nose among the rocks and her keel in the air. In one moment the whole village was at the shore, men and women together, and Padron ’Ntoni, mixed up with the crowd, looked on like the rest. Some gave kicks to the poorProvvidenzato hear how she was cracked, as if she no longer belonged to anybody, and the poor old man felt those kicks in his own stomach. “A fine Providence you have!” said Don Franco to him, for he, too, had come—in his shirt-sleeves and his great ugly hat, with his pipe in his mouth—to look on.
“She’s only fit to burn,” concluded Padron For-tunato Cipolla; and Goodman Mangiacarubbe, who understood those matters, said that the boat must have gone down all of a sudden, without leaving time for those on board to cry “Lord Jesus, help us!” for the sea had swept away sails, masts, oars, everything, and hadn’t left a single bolt in its place.
“This was papa’s place, where there’s the new rowlock,” said Luca, who had climbed over the side, “and here were the lupins, underneath.”
But of the lupins there was not one left; the sea had swept everything clean away. For this reason Maruzza would not leave the house, and never wanted to see theProvvidenzaagain in her life.
“The hull will hold; something can be made of it yet,” pronounced Master Zuppiddu, the calker, kicking theProvvidenzatoo, with his great ugly feet; “with three or four patches she can go to sea again; never be fit for bad weather—a big wave would send her all to pieces—but for ‘long-shore fishing, and for fine weather, she’ll do very well.” Padron Cipolla, Goodman Marigiacarubbe, and Cousin Cola stood by, listening in silence.
“Yes,” said Padron Fortunato, at last. “It’s better than setting fire to her.”
“I’m glad of it,” said Uncle Crucifix, who also stood looking on, with his hands behind his back. “We are Christians, and should rejoice in each other’s good-fortune. What says the proverb? ‘Wish well to thy neighbor and thou wilt gain something for thyself.’”
The boys had installed themselves inside theProvvidenza, as well as the other lads who insisted on climbing up into her, too. “When we have mended theProvvidenzaproperly,” said Alessio, “she will be like Uncle Cola’sConcetta;” and they gave themselves no end of trouble pushing and hauling at her, to get her down to the beach, before the door of Master Zuppiddu, the calker, where there were the big stones to keep the boats in place, and the great kettles for the tar, and heaps of beams, and ribs and knees leaning against the wall. Alessio was always at loggerheads with the other boys, who wanted to climb up into the boat, and to help to fan the fire under the kettle of pitch, and when they pushed him he would say, in a threatening whine:
“Wait till my brother ’Ntoni comes back!”
In fact ’Ntoni had sent in his papers and obtained his leave—although Don Silvestro, the town-clerk, had assured him that if he would stay on six months longer as a soldier he would liberate his brother Luca from the conscription. But ’Ntoni wouldn’t stay even six days longer, now that his father was dead; Luca would have done just as he did if that misfortune had come upon him while he was away from home, and wouldn’t have done another stroke of work if it hadn’t been for those dogs of superiors.
“For my part,” said Luca, “I am quite willing to go for a soldier, instead of ’Ntoni. Now, when he comes back, theProvvidenzacan put to sea again, and there’ll be no need of anybody.”
“That fellow,” cried Padron ’Ntoni, with great pride, “is just like his father Bastianazzo, who had a heart as big as the sea, and as kind as the mercy of God.”
One evening Padron ’Ntoni came home panting with excitement, exclaiming, “Here’s the letter; Goodman Cirino, the sacristan, gave it to me as I came from taking the nets to Pappafave.”
La Longa turned quite pale for joy; and they all ran into the kitchen to see the letter.
’Ntoni arrived, with his cap over one ear, and a shirt covered with stars; and his mother couldn’t get enough of him, as the whole family and all his friends followed him home from the station; in a moment the house was full of people, just as it had been at the funeral of poor Bastianazzo, whom nobody thought of now.
Some things nobody remembers but old people, so much so that La Locca was always sitting before the Malavoglia house, against the wall, waiting for her Menico, and turning her head this way and that at every step that she heard passing up or down the alley.