“Is that you I hear, Giovann’ Battista?”
“Si, viejo. Steady. Not so loud.”
After his release by Sotillo, Giorgio Viola, attended to the very door
by the good-natured engineer-in-chief, had reentered his house, which
he had been made to leave almost at the very moment of his wife’s death.
All was still. The lamp above was burning. He nearly called out to her
by name; and the thought that no call from him would ever again evoke
the answer of her voice, made him drop heavily into the chair with
a loud groan, wrung out by the pain as of a keen blade piercing his
breast.
The rest of the night he made no sound. The darkness turned to grey, and
on the colourless, clear, glassy dawn the jagged sierra stood out flat
and opaque, as if cut out of paper.
The enthusiastic and severe soul of Giorgio Viola, sailor, champion of
oppressed humanity, enemy of kings, and, by the grace of Mrs. Gould,
hotel-keeper of the Sulaco harbour, had descended into the open abyss of
desolation amongst the shattered vestiges of his past. He remembered
his wooing between two campaigns, a single short week in the season of
gathering olives. Nothing approached the grave passion of that time but
the deep, passionate sense of his bereavement. He discovered all the
extent of his dependence upon the silenced voice of that woman. It
was her voice that he missed. Abstracted, busy, lost in inward
contemplation, he seldom looked at his wife in those later years. The
thought of his girls was a matter of concern, not of consolation. It
was her voice that he would miss. And he remembered the other child--the
little boy who died at sea. Ah! a man would have been something to lean
upon. And, alas! even Gian’ Battista--he of whom, and of Linda, his
wife had spoken to him so anxiously before she dropped off into her last
sleep on earth, he on whom she had called aloud to save the children,
just before she died--even he was dead!
And the old man, bent forward, his head in his hand, sat through the day
in immobility and solitude. He never heard the brazen roar of the bells
in town. When it ceased the earthenware filter in the corner of the
kitchen kept on its swift musical drip, drip into the great porous jar
below.
Towards sunset he got up, and with slow movements disappeared up the
narrow staircase. His bulk filled it; and the rubbing of his shoulders
made a small noise as of a mouse running behind the plaster of a wall.
While he remained up there the house was as dumb as a grave. Then,
with the same faint rubbing noise, he descended. He had to catch at the
chairs and tables to regain his seat. He seized his pipe off the
high mantel of the fire-place--but made no attempt to reach the
tobacco--thrust it empty into the corner of his mouth, and sat down
again in the same staring pose. The sun of Pedrito’s entry into Sulaco,
the last sun of Senor Hirsch’s life, the first of Decoud’s solitude on
the Great Isabel, passed over the Albergo d’ltalia Una on its way to
the west. The tinkling drip, drip of the filter had ceased, the lamp
upstairs had burnt itself out, and the night beset Giorgio Viola and his
dead wife with its obscurity and silence that seemed invincible till the
Capataz de Cargadores, returning from the dead, put them to flight with
the splutter and flare of a match.
“Si, viejo. It is me. Wait.”
Nostromo, after barricading the door and closing the shutters carefully,
groped upon a shelf for a candle, and lit it.
Old Viola had risen. He followed with his eyes in the dark the sounds
made by Nostromo. The light disclosed him standing without support, as
if the mere presence of that man who was loyal, brave, incorruptible,
who was all his son would have been, were enough for the support of his
decaying strength.
He extended his hand grasping the briar-wood pipe, whose bowl was
charred on the edge, and knitted his bushy eyebrows heavily at the
light.
“You have returned,” he said, with shaky dignity. “Ah! Very well! I----”
He broke off. Nostromo, leaning back against the table, his arms folded
on his breast, nodded at him slightly.
“You thought I was drowned! No! The best dog of the rich, of the
aristocrats, of these fine men who can only talk and betray the people,
is not dead yet.”
The Garibaldino, motionless, seemed to drink in the sound of the
well-known voice. His head moved slightly once as if in sign of
approval; but Nostromo saw clearly that the old man understood nothing
of the words. There was no one to understand; no one he could take into
the confidence of Decoud’s fate, of his own, into the secret of the
silver. That doctor was an enemy of the people--a tempter. . . .
Old Giorgio’s heavy frame shook from head to foot with the effort
to overcome his emotion at the sight of that man, who had shared the
intimacies of his domestic life as though he had been a grown-up son.
“She believed you would return,” he said, solemnly.
Nostromo raised his head.
“She was a wise woman. How could I fail to come back----?”
He finished the thought mentally: “Since she has prophesied for me an
end of poverty, misery, and starvation.” These words of Teresa’s anger,
from the circumstances in which they had been uttered, like the cry of
a soul prevented from making its peace with God, stirred the obscure
superstition of personal fortune from which even the greatest genius
amongst men of adventure and action is seldom free. They reigned over
Nostromo’s mind with the force of a potent malediction. And what a curse
it was that which her words had laid upon him! He had been orphaned
so young that he could remember no other woman whom he called mother.
Henceforth there would be no enterprise in which he would not fail. The
spell was working already. Death itself would elude him now. . . . He
said violently--
“Come, viejo! Get me something to eat. I am hungry! Sangre de Dios! The
emptiness of my belly makes me lightheaded.”
With his chin dropped again upon his bare breast above his folded arms,
barefooted, watching from under a gloomy brow the movements of old Viola
foraging amongst the cupboards, he seemed as if indeed fallen under a
curse--a ruined and sinister Capataz.
Old Viola walked out of a dark corner, and, without a word, emptied upon
the table out of his hollowed palms a few dry crusts of bread and half a
raw onion.
While the Capataz began to devour this beggar’s fare, taking up with
stony-eyed voracity piece after piece lying by his side, the Garibaldino
went off, and squatting down in another corner filled an earthenware mug
with red wine out of a wicker-covered demijohn. With a familiar gesture,
as when serving customers in the cafe, he had thrust his pipe between
his teeth to have his hands free.
The Capataz drank greedily. A slight flush deepened the bronze of his
cheek. Before him, Viola, with a turn of his white and massive head
towards the staircase, took his empty pipe out of his mouth, and
pronounced slowly--
“After the shot was fired down here, which killed her as surely as if
the bullet had struck her oppressed heart, she called upon you to save
the children. Upon you, Gian’ Battista.”
The Capataz looked up.
“Did she do that, Padrone? To save the children! They are with the
English senora, their rich benefactress. Hey! old man of the people. Thy
benefactress. . . .”
“I am old,” muttered Giorgio Viola. “An Englishwoman was allowed to give
a bed to Garibaldi lying wounded in prison. The greatest man that ever
lived. A man of the people, too--a sailor. I may let another keep a
roof over my head. Si . . . I am old. I may let her. Life lasts too long
sometimes.”
“And she herself may not have a roof over her head before many days are
out, unless I . . . What do you say? Am I to keep a roof over her head?
Am I to try--and save all the Blancos together with her?”
“You shall do it,” said old Viola in a strong voice. “You shall do it as
my son would have. . . .”
“Thy son, viejo! .. .. There never has been a man like thy son. Ha, I
must try. . . . But what if it were only a part of the curse to lure me
on? . . . And so she called upon me to save--and then----?”
“She spoke no more.” The heroic follower of Garibaldi, at the thought
of the eternal stillness and silence fallen upon the shrouded form
stretched out on the bed upstairs, averted his face and raised his hand
to his furrowed brow. “She was dead before I could seize her hands,” he
stammered out, pitifully.
Before the wide eyes of the Capataz, staring at the doorway of the dark
staircase, floated the shape of the Great Isabel, like a strange ship in
distress, freighted with enormous wealth and the solitary life of a man.
It was impossible for him to do anything. He could only hold his
tongue, since there was no one to trust. The treasure would be lost,
probably--unless Decoud. . . . And his thought came abruptly to an end.
He perceived that he could not imagine in the least what Decoud was
likely to do.
Old Viola had not stirred. And the motionless Capataz dropped his
long, soft eyelashes, which gave to the upper part of his fierce,
black-whiskered face a touch of feminine ingenuousness. The silence had
lasted for a long time.
“God rest her soul!” he murmured, gloomily.