Jeli, who had charge of the horses, was thirteen when he first became
acquainted with the young gentleman, Don Alfonso. But he was so small
that he did not come up to the belly of the old mare Bianca, who
carried the big bell for the drove. Wherever his animals wandered for
their pasturage, here and there, on the mountains and down in the
plain, he was always to be found erect and motionless on some eminence
or squatting on some big rock.
His friend, Don Alfonso, while he was at his country seat, went to
find him all the days that God sent to Tebidi, and shared with him his
piece of chocolate and shepherd's barley-bread and the fruit stolen in
the neighborhood.
At first Jeli called the young nobleman _eccellenza_--your
excellence--as is the custom in Sicily, but after they had had one
good quarrel their friendship was established on a solid basis. Jeli
taught his friend how to climb up to the magpies' nests on the tip-top
of the walnut-trees, higher than the campanile of Licodia, to knock
down a sparrow on the wing with a stone, and to mount with one spring
on the bare backs of his half-wild animals, seizing by the mane the
first that came within reach, without being frightened by the wrathful
whinnyings and the desperate leaps of the untrained colts.
Ah! the delightful gallops across the mown fields with their hair
flying in the wind; the lovely April days when the wind billowed the
green grass and the horses neighed in the pastures; the glorious
summer noons when the whitening fields lay silent under the cloudy
sky, and the crickets crackled among the clods as though the stubble
were on fire; the bright wintry sky seen through the naked branches
of the almond trees shivering under the north wind, and the narrow
path sounding frozen under the horses' hoofs, and the larks singing on
high in the warmth, in the azure; the delicious summer afternoons that
passed slowly, slowly, like the clouds; the sweet odor of the hay in
which they plunged their elbows, and the melancholy humming of the
evening insects, and those two notes of Jeli's zufolo or whistle,
always the same--iuh iuh!--making one think of distant things, of the
feast of Saint John, of Christmas eve, of the dawn of the
_scampagnata_,[4] of all those great events of the past which seemed
sad, so distant were they, and made you look up with moistened eyes as
if all the stars that were kindling in heaven poured showers into your
heart and made it overflow!
[4] Pic-nic day.
Jeli, himself, did not suffer from any such melancholy; he squatted on
the side of the hill with puffed-out cheeks, quite intent on sounding
his iuh! iuh! iuh! Then he would bring together his drove by dint of
shouts and stones, and drive them into the stable beyond the "poggio
alla Croce."[5]
[5] Hill with a cross on it.
Out of breath he would mount the hillside beyond the valley, and
sometimes shout to his friend Alfonso,--
"Call the dog! ohe! Call the dog!" or "Fling a good-sized stone at the
bay who's got the better of me and is slowly wandering away, dallying
among the bushes of the valley," or "To-morrow bring me a big
needle--one of _gna_ Lia's."
He could do all sorts of things with the needle, and he had a heap of
odds and ends in his canvas bag, in case of need, to mend his trousers
or the sleeves of his jacket; he also knew how to braid horsehairs,
and with the clay in the valley he used to wash out his own
handkerchief which he wore around his neck when it was cold. In fact,
provided he had his bag with him, he needed nothing in the world,
whether he were in the woods of Resecone, or lost in the depths of the
plain of Caltagirone. _Gna_ Lia used to say,--
"Do you see Jeli, the shepherd? He is always alone in the fields, as
if he himself had been born a colt, and that's why he knows how to
make the cross with his two hands!"[6]
[6] _I.e._, a _lusus naturae_, abnormal!
Indeed, it is true that Jeli needed nothing, but everybody connected
with the estate would have gladly helped him in any way because he was
a serviceable lad, and there was always a chance of getting something
from him. _Gna_ Lia baked bread for him out of neighborly love, and he
showed his gratitude by making her osier baskets for her eggs, reels
of reeds, and other little things.
"Let us do as his animals do," said _gna_ Lia, "they scratch each
other's backs."
At Tebidi every one had known him since he was a baby; there was no
time when he wasn't seen among the tails of the horses pasturing in
the "field of the _lettighiere_" and he had grown up, so to speak,
under their eyes, though really no one ever saw him very much, for he
was forever here and there, roaming about with his drove.
"He had rained down from heaven and the earth had taken him up," as
the proverb has it; he was just one of those who have neither home nor
relatives. His _mamma_ was out at service at Vizzini, and he never saw
her more than once a year when he went with his colts to the fair of
San Giovanni; and the day that she died they came to call him--it was
one Saturday evening--and on the following Monday Jeli was back with
his drove, so that the _contadino_ who had taken his place in looking
after the horses might not lose a day's work; but the poor lad came
back so upset that he kept letting the colts get into the ploughed
land.
"Ohe! Jeli!" cried _massaro_ Agrippino, from the threshing-floor.
"You want to have a taste of the rope's end, do you, you son of a
dog?"
Jeli started to run after his stray colts, and drove them mechanically
toward the hill; but always before his eyes he saw his mamma with her
head done up in the white handkerchief. She would never speak to him
more!
His father was a cow-herd at Ragoleti, beyond Licodia, "where the
malaria could be harvested," as the peasants of that region say,
meaning to signify its density; but in the malarious lands the
pasturage is fat and cows do not catch the fever. Jeli for that reason
stayed in the fields all the year long, either at Don Ferrante's, or
in the enclosure of la Commenda, or in the valley of il Jacitano, and
the hunters or travellers who took cross-cut over the country saw him
in this place or in that, like a dog without a master.
He did not suffer from this state of things because he was accustomed
to be with his horses, as they moved about leisurely nibbling the
clover, and with the birds who flew around him in bevies, while the
sun accomplished his daily journey, slowly, slowly, until the shadows
grew long and then vanished; he had time to watch the clouds pile up
on the horizon, one behind another, and imagine them mountains and
valleys; he knew how the wind blew when it brought thunder-showers,
and what color the clouds were when it was going to snow. Everything
had its aspect and significance, and his eyes and ears were kept on
the alert all day long. In the same way when toward sunset the young
herdsman began to play his alder-whistle, the brown mare would come
up, lazily cropping the clover, and also stand looking with great,
pensive eyes.
The only place where he suffered a little from melancholy was in the
desert lands of Passanitello, where not a grass-blade or a shrub is to
be seen, and during the hot months not a bird flies. The horses there
would cluster together with drooping heads to shade one another, and
during the long days of the threshing that mighty silent radiance
rained down without mitigation for sixteen hours. Wherever pasturage
was abundant and the horses liked to loiter, the lad busied himself
with something else--he would make reed-cages for the crickets, or
carved pipes and little baskets of bulrushes; with four branches he
could set up a shelter for himself when the North wind drove the long
lines of crows through the valley, or, when the cicadae fluttered their
wings in the broiling sun over the parched stubble; he would roast
acorns in the coals of his sumach fire and imagine they were
chestnuts, or toast his thick slice of bread when it began to grow
musty, because, when he was at Passanitello in winter, the roads were
so bad that sometimes a fortnight would elapse without a single soul
passing.
Don Alfonso, who had been kept in cotton by his parents, envied his
friend Jeli the canvas bag in which he stored his effects,--his
bread, his onions, his bottle of wine, his neckerchief for cold
weather, his little hoard of rags and thread and needles, his little
tin food-box and his flint; he envied him especially that superb
spotted mare, that animal with rough forelock and wicked eyes,
swelling her indignant nostrils like a fierce mastiff when anyone
tried to mount her. Sometimes she would allow Jeli to get on her back
and scratch her ears; she was jealous of him, and would come smelling
round to find out what he was saying.
"Let the _vajata_ be," Jeli would say, "She isn't ugly, but she
doesn't know you."
After Scordu from Bucchiere took away the Calabrian which he had
bought at San Giovanni's Fair, under agreement to keep her in the
drove until vintage time, _Zaino_, the bay colt, orphaned, refused to
be comforted and galloped over the mountain precipices with long,
lamenting neighings, and its nose in the wind. Jeli ran behind it,
calling to it with loud shouts, and the colt paused to listen with its
head in the air, and its ears pricking back and forth, and switching
its flanks with its tail.
"It's because they have carried off his mother, and he doesn't know
what to make of it," observed the herdsman. "Now we must keep him in
sight, for he would be capable of jumping over the precipice. That was
the way I felt when my mamma died; I couldn't see with my eyes."
Then, after the colt began to try the clover and to make believe
bite:--
"See! he is gradually beginning to forget.... But this one will be
sold, too. Horses are made to be sold, just as lambs are born to go to
the butcher, and the clouds to bring the rain. Only the birds have
nothing else to do but sing and fly all day."
These ideas did not come to him clear cut and in sequence one after
the other, for it was rarely that he had anyone to talk with, and,
therefore, he had no cause for haste in starting them up and
disentangling them in the depths of his brain, where he was accustomed
to let them sprout and grow gradually, as the twigs burgeon under the
sun.
"Even the birds," he added, "have to hunt for food, and when the snow
covers the ground they perish."
Then he pondered for a moment,--"You are like the birds; but when
winter comes you can sit by the fire and do nothing."
But Don Alfonso replied that he too went to school and had to study.
Jeli opened his eyes wide and was all ears, while the signorino began
to read, and he looked at the book and at the young master himself
with a suspicious air, listening with that slight winking of the
eyelids which indicates intensity of attention in beasts little
accustomed to mankind.
He was delighted with the poetry that caressed his ears with the
harmony of an incomprehensible song, and occasionally he frowned,
drew up his chin, and made it evident that a great mental operation
was taking place within him; then he nodded "yes, yes," with a crafty
smile, and scratched his head. Then when the signorino started to
write so as to show how many things he knew how to do, Jeli could have
staid whole days watching him; and suddenly he would look round
suspiciously. He could not be persuaded that the words that were said
either by him or by Don Alfonso could possibly be repeated on paper,
and still more--those things that had not proceeded from their mouths,
and he ended with that shrewd smile.
Every new idea which knocked for entrance at his head made him
suspicious; he seemed to try it with the wild diffidence of his
_vajata_. But he expressed no wonder at anything in the world; he
might have been told that in cities horses rode in carriages,--he
would have kept on that mask of oriental indifference which is the
dignity of a Sicilian peasant. It would seem as if he intrenched
himself instinctively in his ignorance, as if it were the force of
poverty. Every time that he remained short of arguments he would
repeat,--
"I do not know at all. I am poor," with that obstinate smile that was
intended to be shrewd.
He had asked his friend Alfonso to write for him the name of Mara on a
piece of paper that he had found somewhere, because it was his habit
to pick up whatever he saw lying about and put into his packet of odds
and ends. One day, after being rather quiet and looking round
anxiously, he said, very gravely,--
"I'm in love with some one."
Alfonso, though he knew how to read, opened his eyes in astonishment.
"Yes," continued Jeli, "_massaro_ Agrippino's daughter Mara, who used
to be here; but now they're at Marineo, in that great house in the
plain that you can see from the 'plain of the _lettighiere_' yonder."
"O you're going to get married, then?"
"Yes, when I'm grown up and have six _onze_ a year wages. Mara knows
nothing about it."
"Why, haven't you told her?"
Jeli shook his head and reflected. Then he opened his hoard and
unfolded the paper which bore the written name.
"It must be that it says 'Mara'; Don Gesualdo, the _campiere_,[7] has
read it; and _fra_ Cola, when he came down here begging for beans."
[7] Field guard.
"He who knows how to write," he went on saying, "is like one who
preserves words in his tinder-box and can carry them in his pocket,
and even send them this way and that."
"Now what are you going to do with that piece of paper that you can't
read?" asked Alfonso.
Jeli shrugged his shoulders, but kept on carefully folding his written
leaf to put away in his heap of odds and ends.
He had known la Mara ever since she was a little girl. Their
acquaintance had begun in a pitched battle once when they met down in
the valley, both of them after blackberries. The little girl, knowing
that she was "within her rights," had seized Jeli by the neck as if he
were a thief. For awhile they exchanged blows on the slope--"You one,
I one,"--as the cooper does on the hoops of his barrels; but when they
got tired of it they gradually calmed down, though they still had each
other by the hair.
"Who are you?" demanded Mara.