It might have been said that there he was only protecting his own. From
the first he had been admitted to live in the intimacy of the family
of the hotel-keeper who was a countryman of his. Old Giorgio Viola,
a Genoese with a shaggy white leonine head--often called simply “the
Garibaldino” (as Mohammedans are called after their prophet)--was, to
use Captain Mitchell’s own words, the “respectable married friend” by
whose advice Nostromo had left his ship to try for a run of shore luck
in Costaguana.
The old man, full of scorn for the populace, as your austere republican
so often is, had disregarded the preliminary sounds of trouble. He
went on that day as usual pottering about the “casa” in his slippers,
muttering angrily to himself his contempt of the non-political nature of
the riot, and shrugging his shoulders. In the end he was taken unawares
by the out-rush of the rabble. It was too late then to remove his
family, and, indeed, where could he have run to with the portly Signora
Teresa and two little girls on that great plain? So, barricading every
opening, the old man sat down sternly in the middle of the darkened cafe
with an old shot-gun on his knees. His wife sat on another chair by his
side, muttering pious invocations to all the saints of the calendar.
The old republican did not believe in saints, or in prayers, or in
what he called “priest’s religion.” Liberty and Garibaldi were his
divinities; but he tolerated “superstition” in women, preserving in
these matters a lofty and silent attitude.
His two girls, the eldest fourteen, and the other two years younger,
crouched on the sanded floor, on each side of the Signora Teresa, with
their heads on their mother’s lap, both scared, but each in her own
way, the dark-haired Linda indignant and angry, the fair Giselle, the
younger, bewildered and resigned. The Patrona removed her arms, which
embraced her daughters, for a moment to cross herself and wring her
hands hurriedly. She moaned a little louder.
“Oh! Gian’ Battista, why art thou not here? Oh! why art thou not here?”
She was not then invoking the saint himself, but calling upon Nostromo,
whose patron he was. And Giorgio, motionless on the chair by her side,
would be provoked by these reproachful and distracted appeals.
“Peace, woman! Where’s the sense of it? There’s his duty,” he murmured
in the dark; and she would retort, panting--
“Eh! I have no patience. Duty! What of the woman who has been like a
mother to him? I bent my knee to him this morning; don’t you go out,
Gian’ Battista--stop in the house, Battistino--look at those two little
innocent children!”
Mrs. Viola was an Italian, too, a native of Spezzia, and though
considerably younger than her husband, already middle-aged. She had a
handsome face, whose complexion had turned yellow because the climate
of Sulaco did not suit her at all. Her voice was a rich contralto. When,
with her arms folded tight under her ample bosom, she scolded the squat,
thick-legged China girls handling linen, plucking fowls, pounding corn
in wooden mortars amongst the mud outbuildings at the back of the house,
she could bring out such an impassioned, vibrating, sepulchral note that
the chained watch-dog bolted into his kennel with a great rattle. Luis,
a cinnamon-coloured mulatto with a sprouting moustache and thick, dark
lips, would stop sweeping the cafe with a broom of palm-leaves to let
a gentle shudder run down his spine. His languishing almond eyes would
remain closed for a long time.
This was the staff of the Casa Viola, but all these people had fled
early that morning at the first sounds of the riot, preferring to hide
on the plain rather than trust themselves in the house; a preference for
which they were in no way to blame, since, whether true or not, it
was generally believed in the town that the Garibaldino had some money
buried under the clay floor of the kitchen. The dog, an irritable,
shaggy brute, barked violently and whined plaintively in turns at the
back, running in and out of his kennel as rage or fear prompted him.
Bursts of great shouting rose and died away, like wild gusts of wind on
the plain round the barricaded house; the fitful popping of shots
grew louder above the yelling. Sometimes there were intervals of
unaccountable stillness outside, and nothing could have been more gaily
peaceful than the narrow bright lines of sunlight from the cracks in the
shutters, ruled straight across the cafe over the disarranged chairs
and tables to the wall opposite. Old Giorgio had chosen that bare,
whitewashed room for a retreat. It had only one window, and its only
door swung out upon the track of thick dust fenced by aloe hedges
between the harbour and the town, where clumsy carts used to creak along
behind slow yokes of oxen guided by boys on horseback.
In a pause of stillness Giorgio cocked his gun. The ominous sound wrung
a low moan from the rigid figure of the woman sitting by his side. A
sudden outbreak of defiant yelling quite near the house sank all at once
to a confused murmur of growls. Somebody ran along; the loud catching of
his breath was heard for an instant passing the door; there were hoarse
mutters and footsteps near the wall; a shoulder rubbed against the
shutter, effacing the bright lines of sunshine pencilled across the
whole breadth of the room. Signora Teresa’s arms thrown about the
kneeling forms of her daughters embraced them closer with a convulsive
pressure.
The mob, driven away from the Custom House, had broken up into several
bands, retreating across the plain in the direction of the town. The
subdued crash of irregular volleys fired in the distance was answered by
faint yells far away. In the intervals the single shots rang feebly, and
the low, long, white building blinded in every window seemed to be
the centre of a turmoil widening in a great circle about its closed-up
silence. But the cautious movements and whispers of a routed party
seeking a momentary shelter behind the wall made the darkness of the
room, striped by threads of quiet sunlight, alight with evil, stealthy
sounds. The Violas had them in their ears as though invisible ghosts
hovering about their chairs had consulted in mutters as to the
advisability of setting fire to this foreigner’s casa.
It was trying to the nerves. Old Viola had risen slowly, gun in hand,
irresolute, for he did not see how he could prevent them. Already voices
could be heard talking at the back. Signora Teresa was beside herself
with terror.
“Ah! the traitor! the traitor!” she mumbled, almost inaudibly. “Now we
are going to be burnt; and I bent my knee to him. No! he must run at the
heels of his English.”
She seemed to think that Nostromo’s mere presence in the house would
have made it perfectly safe. So far, she, too, was under the spell of
that reputation the Capataz de Cargadores had made for himself by
the waterside, along the railway line, with the English and with the
populace of Sulaco. To his face, and even against her husband, she
invariably affected to laugh it to scorn, sometimes good-naturedly,
more often with a curious bitterness. But then women are unreasonable in
their opinions, as Giorgio used to remark calmly on fitting occasions.
On this occasion, with his gun held at ready before him, he stooped down
to his wife’s head, and, keeping his eyes steadfastly on the barricaded
door, he breathed out into her ear that Nostromo would have been
powerless to help. What could two men shut up in a house do against
twenty or more bent upon setting fire to the roof? Gian’ Battista was
thinking of the casa all the time, he was sure.
“He think of the casa! He!” gasped Signora Viola, crazily. She struck
her breast with her open hands. “I know him. He thinks of nobody but
himself.”
A discharge of firearms near by made her throw her head back and close
her eyes. Old Giorgio set his teeth hard under his white moustache, and
his eyes began to roll fiercely. Several bullets struck the end of the
wall together; pieces of plaster could be heard falling outside; a voice
screamed “Here they come!” and after a moment of uneasy silence there
was a rush of running feet along the front.
Then the tension of old Giorgio’s attitude relaxed, and a smile of
contemptuous relief came upon his lips of an old fighter with a leonine
face. These were not a people striving for justice, but thieves. Even to
defend his life against them was a sort of degradation for a man who had
been one of Garibaldi’s immortal thousand in the conquest of Sicily. He
had an immense scorn for this outbreak of scoundrels and leperos, who
did not know the meaning of the word “liberty.”
He grounded his old gun, and, turning his head, glanced at the coloured
lithograph of Garibaldi in a black frame on the white wall; a thread
of strong sunshine cut it perpendicularly. His eyes, accustomed to the
luminous twilight, made out the high colouring of the face, the red of
the shirt, the outlines of the square shoulders, the black patch of the
Bersagliere hat with cock’s feathers curling over the crown. An immortal
hero! This was your liberty; it gave you not only life, but immortality
as well!
For that one man his fanaticism had suffered no diminution. In the
moment of relief from the apprehension of the greatest danger, perhaps,
his family had been exposed to in all their wanderings, he had turned to
the picture of his old chief, first and only, then laid his hand on his
wife’s shoulder.
The children kneeling on the floor had not moved. Signora Teresa opened
her eyes a little, as though he had awakened her from a very deep and
dreamless slumber. Before he had time in his deliberate way to say a
reassuring word she jumped up, with the children clinging to her, one on
each side, gasped for breath, and let out a hoarse shriek.
It was simultaneous with the bang of a violent blow struck on the
outside of the shutter. They could hear suddenly the snorting of a
horse, the restive tramping of hoofs on the narrow, hard path in front
of the house; the toe of a boot struck at the shutter again; a spur
jingled at every blow, and an excited voice shouted, “Hola! hola, in
there!”