Part 5

Turlendana was stupefied, while a sort of vague uneasiness awoke in his soul and he went on his way a little more quickly, stumbling over the rough places in the ground. When he reached the corner of the coopers, where the large barrels of Zazetta were piled in whitish heaps like monuments, he heard the heavy, regular breathing of a beast. As the impression of the hostility of all beasts had taken a hold on him, with the obstinacy of a drunken man, he moved in the direction of the sound, that he might make another experiment.

Within a low barn the three old horses of Michelangelo were breathing with difficulty above their manger. They were decrepit beasts who had worn out their lives dragging through the road of Chieti, twice every day, a huge stage-coach filled with merchants and merchandise. Under their brown hair, worn off in places by the rubbing of the harness, their ribs protruded like so many dried shingles through a ruined roof. Their front legs were so bent that their knees were scarcely perceptible, their backs were ragged like the teeth of a saw, and their skinny necks, upon which scarcely a vestige of mane was left, drooped towards the ground.

A wooden railing inside barred the door.

Turlendana began encouragingly:

“Ush, ush, ush! Ush, ush, ush!”

The horses did not move, but breathed together in a human way. The outlines of their bodies appeared dim and confused through the bluish shadow within the barn, and the exhalations of their breath blent with that of the manure.

“Ush, ush, ush!” pursued Turlendana in a lamenting tone, as when he used to urge Barbara to drink. Again the horses did not stir, and again:

“Ush, ush, ush! Ush, ush, ush!” One of the horses turned and placed his big deformed head upon the railing, looking with eyes which seemed in the moonlight as though filled with troubled water. The lower skin of the jaw hung flaccid, disclosing the gums. At every breath the nostrils palpitated, emitting moist breath, the nostrils closing at times, and opening again to give forth a little cloud of air bubbles like yeast in a state of fermentation.

At the sight of that senile head, the drunken man came to his senses. Why had he filled himself with wine, he, usually so sober? For a moment, in the midst of his forgetful drowsiness, the shape of his dying camel reappeared before his eyes, lying on the ground with his long inert neck stretched out on the straw, his whole body shaken from time to time by coughing, while with every moan the bloated stomach produced a sound such as issues from a barrel half filled with water.

A wave of pity and compassion swept over the man, as before him rose this vision of the agony of the camel, shaken by strange, hoarse sobs which brought forth a moan from the enormous dying carcass, the painful movements of the neck, rising for an instant to fall back again heavily upon the straw with a deep, indistinct sound, the legs moving as if trying to run, the tense tremor of the ears, and the fixity of the eyeballs, from which the sight seemed to have departed before the rest of the faculties. All this suffering came back clearly to his memory, vivid in its almost human misery.

He leaned against the railing and opened his mouth mechanically to again speak to Michelangelo’s horse:

“Ush, ush, ush! Ush, ush, ush!” Then Michelangelo, who from his bed had heard the disturbance, jumped to the window above and began to swear violently at the troublesome disturber of his night’s rest.

“You damned rascal! Go and drown yourself in the Pescara River! Go away from here. Go, or I will get a gun! You rascal, to come and wake up sleeping people! You drunkard, go on; go away!”

Turlendana, staggering, started again towards the river. When at the cross-roads by the fruit market, he saw a group of dogs in a loving assembly. As the man approached, the group of canines dispersed, running towards Bagno. From the alley of Gesidio came out another horde of dogs, who set off in the direction of Bastioni.

All of the country of Pescara, bathed in the sweet light of the full moon of the springtime, was the scene of the fights of amorous canines. The mastiff of Madrigale, chained to watch over a slaughtered ox, occasionally made his deep voice heard, and was answered by a chorus of other voices. Occasionally a solitary dog would pass on the run to the scene of a fight. From within the houses, the howls of the imprisoned dogs could be heard.

Now a still stranger trouble took hold upon the brain of the drunken man. In front of him, behind him, around him, the imaginary flight of things began to take place again more rapidly than before. He moved forward, and everything moved away from him, the clouds, the trees, the stones, the river banks, the poles of the boats, the very houses,—all retreated at his approach. This evident repulsion and universal reprobation filled him with terror. He halted. His spirit grew depressed. Through his disordered brain a sudden thought ran. “The fox!” Even that fox of a Ciavola did not wish to remain with him longer! His terror increased. His limbs trembled violently. However, impelled by this thought, he descended among the tender willow trees and the high grass of the shore.

The bright moon scattered over all things a snowy serenity. The trees bent peacefully over the bank, as though contemplating the running water. Almost it seemed as though a soft, melancholy breath emanated from the somnolence of the river beneath the moon. The croaking of frogs sounded clearly. Turlendana crouched among the plants, almost hidden. His hands trembled on his knees. Suddenly he felt something alive and moving under him; a frog! He uttered a cry. He rose and began to run, staggering, amongst the willow trees impeding his way. In his uneasiness of spirit, he felt terrified as though by some supernatural occurrence.

Stumbling over a rough place in the ground, he fell on his stomach, his face pressed into the grass. He got up with much difficulty, and stood looking around him at the trees. The silvery silhouette of the poplars rose motionless through the silent air, making their tops seem unusually tall. The shores of the river would vanish endlessly, as if they were something unreal, like shadows of things seen in dreams. Upon the right side, the rocks shone resplendently, like crystals of salt, shadowed at times by the moving clouds passing softly overhead like azure veils. Further on the wood broke the horizon line. The scent of the wood and the soft breath of the sea were blended.

“Oh, Turlendana! Ooooh!” a clear voice cried out.

Turlendana turned in amazement.

“Oh, Turlendana, Turlendanaaaaa!”

It was Binchi-Banche, who came up, accompanied by a customs officer, through the path used by the sailors through the willow-tree thicket.

“Where are you going at this time of night? To weep over your camel?” asked Binchi-Banche as he approached.

Turlendana did not answer at once. He was grasping his trousers with one hand; his knees were bent forward and his face wore a strange expression of stupidity, while he stammered so pitifully that Binchi-Banche and the customs officer broke out into boisterous laughter.

“Go on! Go on!” exclaimed the wrinkled little man, grasping the drunken man by the shoulders and pushing him towards the seashore. Turlendana moved forward. Binchi-Banche and the customs officer followed him at a little distance, laughing and speaking in low voices.

He reached the place where the verdure terminated and the sand began. The grumbling of the sea at the mouth of the Pescara could be heard. On a level stretch of sand, stretched out between the dunes, Turlendana ran against the corpse of Barbara, which had not yet been buried. The large body was skinned and bleeding, the plump parts of the back, which were uncovered, appeared of a yellowish colour; upon his legs the skin was still hanging with all the hair; there were two enormous callous spots; within his mouth his angular teeth were visible, curving over the upper jaw and the white tongue; for some unknown reason the under lip was cut, while the neck resembled the body of a serpent.

At the appearance of this ghastly sight, Turlendana burst into tears, shaking his head, and moaning in a strange unhuman way:

“Oho! Oho! Oho!”

In the act of lying down upon the camel, he fell. He attempted to rise, but the stupor caused by the wine overcame him, and he lost consciousness.

Seeing Turlendana fall, Binchi-Banche and the customs officer came over to him. Taking him, one by the head and the other by the feet, they lifted him up and laid him full length upon the body of Barbara, in the position of a loving embrace. Laughing at their deed, they departed.

And thus Turlendana lay upon the camel until the sun rose.

V

_THE GOLD PIECES_

Passacantando entered, rattling the hanging glass doors violently, roughly shook the rain-drops from his shoulders, took his pipe from his mouth, and with disdainful unconcern looked around the room.

In the tavern the smoke of the tobacco was like a bluish cloud, through which one could discern the faces of those who were drinking: women of bad repute; Pachio, the invalided soldier, whose right eye, affected with some repulsive disease, was covered by a greasy greenish band; Binchi-Banche, the domestic of the customs officers, a small, sturdy man with a surly, yellow-hued face like a lemon without juice, with a bent back and his thin legs thrust into boots which reached to his knees; Magnasangue, the go-between of the soldiers, the friend of comedians, of jugglers, of mountebanks, of fortune-tellers, of tamers of bears,—of all that ravenous and rapacious rabble which passes through the towns to snatch from the idle and curious people a few pennies.

Then, too, there were the belles of the Fiorentino Hall, three or four women faded from dissipation, their cheeks painted brick colour, their eyes voluptuous, their mouths flaccid and almost bluish in colour like over-ripe figs.

Passacantando crossed the room, and seated himself between the women Pica and Peppuccia on a bench against the wall, which was covered with indecent figures and writing. He was a slender young fellow, rather effeminate, with a very pale face from which protruded a nose thick, rapacious, bent greatly to one side; his ears sprang from his head like two inflated paper bags, one larger than the other; his curved, protruding lips were very red, and always had a small ball of whitish saliva at the corners. Over his carefully combed hair he wore a soft cap, flattened through long use. A tuft of his hair, turned up like a hook, curled down over his forehead to the roots of his nose, while another curled over his temple. A certain licentiousness was expressed in every gesture, every move, and in the tones of his voice and his glances.

“Ohe,” he cried, “Woman Africana, a goblet of wine!” beating the table with his clay pipe, which broke from the force of the blow.

The woman Africana, the mistress of the inn, left the bar and came forward towards the table, waddling because of her extreme corpulence, and placed in front of Passacantando a glass filled to the brim with wine. She looked at him as she did so with eyes full of loving entreaty.

Passacantando suddenly flung his arm around the neck of Peppuccia, forced her to drink from the goblet, and then thrust his lips against hers. Peppuccia laughed, disentangling herself from the arms of Passacantando, her laughter causing the unswallowed wine to spurt from her mouth into his face.

The woman Africana grew livid. She withdrew behind the bar, where the sharp words of Peppuccia and Pica reached her ears. The glass door opened, and Fiorentino appeared on the threshold, all bundled up in a cloak, like the villain of a cheap novel.

“Well, girls,” he cried out in a hoarse voice, “it is time for you to go.” Peppuccia, Pica, and the others rose from their seats beside the men and followed their master.

It was raining hard, and the Square of Bagno was transformed into a muddy lake. Pachio, Magnasangue, and the others left one after another until only Binche-Banche, stretched under the table in the stupor of intoxication, remained. The smoke in the room gradually grew less, while a half-plucked dove pecked from the floor the scattered crumbs.

As Passacantando was about to rise, Africana moved slowly towards him, her unshapely figure undulating as she walked, her full-moon face wrinkled into a grotesque and affectionate grimace. Upon her face were several moles with small bunches of hair growing out from them, a thick shadow covered her upper lip and her cheeks. Her short, coarse, and curling hair formed a sort of helmet on her head; her thick eyebrows met at the top of her flat nose, so that she looked like a creature affected with dropsy and elephantiasis.

When she reached Passacantando, she grasped his hands in order to detain him.

“Oh, Giuva! What do you want? What have I done to you?”

“You? Nothing.”

“Why then do you cause me such suffering and torment?”

“I? I am surprised!... Good night! I have no time to lose just now,” and with a brutal gesture, he started to go. But Africana threw herself upon him, pressing his arms, and putting her face against his, leaning upon him with her full weight, with a passion so uncontrolled and terrible that Passacantando was frightened.

“What do you want? What do you want? Tell me! What do you want? Why do I do this? I hold you! Stay here! Stay with me! Don’t make me die of longing; don’t drive me mad! What for? Come,—take everything you find ...”

She drew him towards the bar, opened the drawer, and with one gesture offered him everything it contained. In the greasy till were scattered some copper coins, and a few shining silver ones, the whole amounting to perhaps five lire.

Passacantando, without saying a word, picked up the coins and began to count them slowly upon the bar, his mouth showing an expression of disgust. Africana looked at the coins and then at the face of the man, breathing hard, like a tired beast. One heard the tinkling of the coins as they fell upon the bar, the rough snoring of Binchi-Banche, the soft pattering of the dove in the midst of the continuous sound of the rain and the river down below the Bagno and through the Bandiera.

“Those are not enough,” Passacantando said at last. “I must have more than those; bring out some more, or I will go.”

He had crushed his cap down over his head, and from beneath his forehead with its curling tuft of hair, his whitish eyes, greedy and impudent, looked at Africana attentively, fascinating her.

“I have no more; you have seen all there is. Take all that you find ...” stammered Africana in a caressing and supplicating voice, her double chin quivering and her lips trembling, while the tears poured from her piggish eyes.

“Well,” said Passacantando softly, bending over her, “well, do you think I don’t know that your husband has some gold pieces?”

“Oh, Giovanni! ... how can I get them?”

“Go and take them, at once. I will wait for you here. Your husband is asleep, now is the time. Go, or you’ll not see me any more, in the name of Saint Antony!”

“Oh, Giovanni!... I am afraid!”

“What? Fear or no fear, I am going; let us go.”

Africana trembled; she pointed to Binchi-Banche still stretched under the table in a heavy sleep.

“Close the door first,” she said submissively.

Passacantando roused Binchi-Banche with a kick, and dragged him, howling and shaking with terror, out into the mud and slush. He came back and closed the door. The red lantern that hung on one of the shutters threw a rosy light into the tavern, leaving the heavy arches in deep shadow, and giving the stairway in the angle a mysterious look.

“Come! Let us go!” said Passacantando again to the still trembling Africana.

They slowly ascended the dark stairway in the corner of the room, the woman going first, the man following close behind. At the top of the stairway they emerged into a low room, planked with beams. In a small niche in the wall was a blue Majolica Madonna, in front of which burned, for a vow, a light in a glass filled with water and oil. The other walls were covered with a number of torn paper pictures, of as many colours as leprosy. A distressing odour filled the room.

The two thieves advanced cautiously towards the marital bed, upon which lay the old man, buried in slumber, breathing with a sort of hoarse hiss through his toothless gums and his dilated nose, damp from the use of tobacco, his head turned upon one cheek, resting on a striped cotton pillow. Above his open mouth, which looked like a cut made in a rotten pumpkin, rose his stiff moustache; one of his eyes, half opened, resembled the turned over ear of a dog, filled with hair, covered with blisters; the veins stood out boldly upon his bare emaciated arm which lay outside the coverlet; his crooked fingers, habitually grasping, clutched the counterpane.

Now, this old fellow had for a long time possessed two twenty-franc pieces, which had been left him by some miserly relative; these he guarded jealously, keeping them in the tobacco in his horn snuff-box, as some people do musk incense. There lay the shining pieces of gold, and the old man would take them out, look at them fondly, feel of them lovingly between his fingers, as the passion of avarice and the lust of possession grew within him.

Africana approached slowly, with bated breath, while Passacantando, with commanding gestures, urged her to the theft. There was a noise below; both stopped. The half-plucked dove, limping, fluttered to its nest in an old slipper at the foot of the bed, but in settling itself, it made some noise. The man, with a quick, brutal motion, snatched up the bird and choked it in his fist.

“Is it there?” he asked of Africana.

“Yes, it is there, under the pillow,” she answered, sliding her hand carefully under the pillow as she spoke. The old man moved in his sleep, sighing involuntarily, while between his eyelids appeared a little rim of the whites of his eyes. Then he fell back in the heavy stupor of senile drowsiness.

Africana, in this crisis, suddenly became audacious, pushed her hand quickly forward, grasped the tobacco box and rushed towards the stairs, descending with Passacantando just behind her.

“Lord! Lord! See what I have done for you!” she exclaimed, throwing herself upon him. With shaking hands, they started together to open the snuff-box and look among the tobacco for the gold pieces. The pungent odour of the tobacco arose to their nostrils, and both, as they felt the desire to sneeze, were seized with a strong impulse to laugh. In endeavouring to repress their sneezes, they staggered against one another, pushing and wavering. But suddenly an indistinct growling was heard, then hoarse shouts broke forth from the room above, and the old man appeared at the top of the stairs. His face was livid in the red light of the lantern, his form thin and emaciated, his legs bare, his shirt in rags. He looked down at the thieving couple, and, waving his arms like a damned soul, cried:

“The gold pieces! The gold pieces! The gold pieces!”

VI

_SORCERY_

When seven consecutive sneezes of Mastro Peppe De Sieri, called La Brevetta, resounded loudly in the square of the City Hall, all the inhabitants of Pescara would seat themselves around their tables and begin their meal. Soon after the bell would strike twelve, and simultaneously, the people would become very hilarious.

For many years La Brevetta had given this joyful signal to the people daily, and the fame of his marvellous sneezing spread through all the country around, and also through the adjoining countries. His memory still lives in the minds of the people, for he originated a proverb which will endure for many years to come.

I

Mastro Peppe La Brevetta was a plebeian, somewhat corpulent, thick-set, and clumsy; his face shining with a prosperous stupidity, his eyes reminded one of the eyes of a sucking calf, while his hands and feet were of extraordinary dimensions. His nose was long and fleshy, his jaw-bones very strong and mobile, and when undergoing a fit of sneezing, he looked like one of those sea-lions whose fat bodies, as sailors relate, tremble all over like a jelly-pudding.

Like the sea-lions, too, he was possessed of a slow and lazy motion, their ridiculously awkward attitudes, and their exceeding fondness for sleep. He could not pass from the shade to the sun, nor from the sun to the shade without an irrepressible impulse of air rushing through his mouth and nostrils. The noise produced, especially in quiet spots, could be heard at a great distance, and as it occurred at regular intervals, it came to be a sort of time-piece for the citizens of the town.

In his youth Mastro Peppe had kept a macaroni shop, and among the strings of dough, the monotonous noise of the mills and wheels, in the mildness of the flour-dusty air, he had grown to a placid stupidity. Having reached maturity, he had married a certain Donna Pelagia of the Commune of Castelli, and abandoning his early trade, he had since that time dealt in terra cotta and Majolica ware,—vases, plates, pitchers, and all the poor earthenware which the craftsmen of Castelli manufactured for adorning the tables of the land of Abruzzi. Among the simplicity and religiousness of those shapes, unchanged for centuries, he lived in a very simple way, sneezing all the time, and as his wife was a miserly creature, little by little her avaricious spirit had communicated itself to him, until he had grown into her penurious and miserly ways.

Now Mastro Peppe was the owner of a piece of land and a small farm house, situated upon the right bank of the river, just at the spot where the current of the river, turning, forms a sort of greenish amphitheatre. The soil being well irrigated, produced very abundantly, not only grapes and cereals, but especially large quantities of vegetables. The harvests increased, and each year Mastro Peppe’s pig grew fat, feasting under an oak tree which dropped its wealth of acorns for his delectation. Each year, in the month of January, La Brevetta, with his wife, would go over to his farm, and invoke the favour of San Antonio to assist in the killing and salting of the pig.

One year it happened that his wife was somewhat ill, and La Brevetta went alone to the slaughtering of the beast. The pig was placed upon a large board and held there by three sturdy farm-hands, while his throat was cut with a sharp knife. The grunting and squealing of the hog resounded through the solitude, usually broken only by the murmuring of the stream, then suddenly the sounds grew less, and were lost in the gurgling of warm vermilion blood which was disgorged from the gaping wound, and while the body was giving its last convulsive jerks, the new sun was absorbing from the river the moisture in the form of a silvery mist. With a sort of joyous ferocity La Brevetta watched Lepruccio burn with a hot iron the deep eyes of the pig, and rejoiced to hear the boards creak under the weight of the animal, thinking of the plentiful supply of lard and the prospective hams.