|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 a _De
profundis_ for 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 the _Provvidenza_, 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 the _Provvidenza_ was 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 the _Provvidenza_ out 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’s
_Concetta_, 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.”