accompanied by a little old man, whom Mastro Rocco called his assistant.
But they always brought figures exactly like the first ones, all soiled
with the earth they had been dug from; and at last, one day, the baron
said—
“Mastro Rocco, if you do not find something different, you might as well
save yourself the trouble of coming. Look here, I have a whole cupboard
full of these.”
He pointed to a number of statuettes of Ceres, seated with her hands on
her knees, arranged in rows behind the glass doors, along with Greek
vases, lamps, bronzes of every sort, and antique coins of every size....
It was a long time before Mastro Rocco was seen again at the baron’s.
When he next presented himself, along with the little old man, he
carefully set down a basket full of hay which he had carried up under
his arm, and began to gesticulate vehemently as he pointed out the
precious objects reposing in the basket and covered with the hay.
“Ah! _signor barone!_ what a novelty! what a novelty! Your worship will
be enchanted, upon my word of honour!”
The baron had put on his spectacles in order the better to admire; and
when he saw some half-dozen figures of Ceres, exactly like the others,
but with unmistakable pipes in their mouths, instead of being enchanted,
he roared aloud—
“Ah! Mastro Rocco, you thief! Ah! you scoundrel!”
And he would have put a pistol-bullet through the head of each if they
had not jumped from the window regardless of possible broken necks;
though, after all, it was not very high. Mastro Rocco only broke his
arm, and had a mass said to his patron saint for assistance rendered in
this extremity. With his arm in a sling he imprecated curses on his
rascally partner, who had suggested the charming novelty of the pipes!
[Illustration]
“Was it not enough to have imitated the form of the little idols well
enough to take in even Baron Padullo?”
_Luigi Capuana._
_THE WAR OF THE SAINTS._
[Illustration]
All of a sudden, while San Rocco was quietly proceeding on his way,
under his baldachin, with a number of wax candles lit all round him, and
the band, and the procession, and the crowd of devout people—there came
to pass a general helter-skelter, tumult, and confusion worse
confounded. There were priests running away, with the skirts of their
cassocks flying wildly, drummers and fifers upset on their faces, women
screaming, blood flowing in streams, and cudgels playing even under the
very nose of the blessed San Rocco. The Prætor, the Syndic, the
Carbineers all hastened to the spot;—the broken bones were carried off
to the hospital,—a few of the more riotous members of the community were
marched off to pass the night in prison,—the saint returned to his
church at a run rather than a processional step,—and the festival ended
like the comedies of Pulcinella.
And all this through the spite of the people in the parish of San
Pasquale. That year the pious souls of San Rocco had been spending the
very eyes out of their heads in order to do things in grand style;—they
had sent for the band from town,—they had let off more than two thousand
squibs,—and they had now got a new banner, all embroidered with gold,
which, it was said, weighed over a quintal, and tossed up and down in
the midst of the crowd, like a wave crested with golden foam. Which
thing, by sheer contrivance of the Evil One, was a thorn in the sides of
the followers of S. Pasquale,—so that one of the latter at last lost
patience, and began, pale as death, to yell at the top of his voice,
“_Viva San Pasquale!_” Then it was that the cudgels began to fly.
Because, after all, to go and cry “_Viva San Pasquale_” in the very face
of San Rocco, is really a good, sound, indisputable provocation;—it is
just like going and spitting in a man’s house, or amusing yourself by
pinching the girl who is walking arm in arm with him. In such a case
there is no longer any sense of right and wrong,—and that slight amount
of respect which people still have for the other saints—who, after all,
are all related to each other—is trampled under foot. If it happens in
church, seats are flung into the air,—if during a procession, there are
showers of torch stumps like swarms of bats, and at table the dishes
fly.
“_Santo diavolone!_” cried Compare Nino, panting, heated, and
dishevelled. “I’d like to know who has the face to cry _Viva San
Pasquale_ again!”
“I!” yelled Turi the tanner, who looked forward to being his
brother-in-law, quite beside himself with rage, and nearly blinded by a
chance blow received in the _mêlée_. “_Viva San Pasquale_ till death!”
“For the love of Heaven! for the love of Heaven!” shrieked his sister
Saridda, throwing herself between her brother and her betrothed. All
three had been going for a walk in all love and good fellowship up to
that moment.
Compare Nino, the expectant bridegroom, kept crying in derision, “Long
live my boots—_viva San Stivale!_”
“Take that!” howled Turi, foaming at the mouth, his eyes swollen and his
face like a tomato. “Take that for San Rocco, you and your boots!
There!”
In this way they exchanged blows which would have felled an ox, till
their friends succeeded in separating them by dint of cuffs and kicks.
Saridda, who by this time had grown excited on her own account, now
cried _Viva San Pasquale_, and was very nearly coming to blows with her
lover, as if they had already been husband and wife.
At such times parents quarrel most desperately with their sons and
daughters, and wives separate from their husbands, if by misfortune a
woman of the parish of San Pasquale has married a man from San Rocco.
“I won’t hear another word about that man!” cried Saridda, standing with
her hands on her hips, to the neighbours, when they asked her how it
happened that the marriage had not come off. “I won’t have him, if they
give him to me dressed in gold and silver from head to foot! Do you
hear?”
“Saridda may stay where she is till she turns mouldy, for all I care!”
said Compare Nino, in his turn, as he was getting the blood washed from
his face at the public-house. “A parcel of beggars and cowards, over in
the tanner’s quarter! I must have been drunk when it came into my head
to look for a sweetheart over there!”
“Since it is this way,” had been the Syndic’s conclusion, “and they
can’t carry a saint out into the square without sticks and fighting, so
that it’s perfectly beastly,—I will have no more festivals, nor
processions, nor services; and if they bring out so much as one single
candle—what you may call a candle—I’ll have them every one in gaol.”
In time, the matter became important; for the bishop of the diocese had
granted to the priests of San Pasquale the privilege of wearing copes.
The parishioners of San Rocco, whose priests had no copes, had even gone
to Rome to raise an outcry at the foot of the Holy Father, carrying with
them documents on stamped paper, and everything else; but all had been
in vain, for their adversaries of the lower town—who, as every one
remembered, had once been without shoes to their feet—had now grown as
rich as Jews, through this new industry of tanning. And, in this world,
one knows that justice is bought and sold like the soul of Judas.
At San Pasquale they were awaiting Monsignor’s delegate, who was a
person of importance, and had silver buckles on his shoes weighing half
a pound apiece—and a fine sight they were to see—and he was coming to
bring the copes to the canons. And for this reason, they, in their turn,
had now sent for the band, and they were going to meet Monsignor’s
delegate three miles outside the town; and it was said that in the
evening there were to be fireworks in the square, with _Viva San
Pasquale_ over and over again, in letters as big as those on a
shop-front.
The inhabitants of the upper town were therefore in a great ferment; and
some, more excited than others, were trimming certain staves of pear and
cherry wood, as big as clothes-props, and muttering—
“If there is to be music, we shall want to beat time!”
The Bishop’s delegate ran a great risk of coming out of his triumphal
entry with broken bones. But the reverend gentleman was cunning enough
to leave the band waiting for him outside the town, while he, taking a
short cut, quietly walked to the parish priest’s house, whither he
summoned the principal men of the two parties.
When these gentlemen found themselves face to face—after all this time
that the feud had lasted—each man began to look into the whites of his
neighbour’s eyes, as if he could scarcely keep his nails out of them;
and it required all the authority of his Reverence—who had put on his
new cloth soutane for the occasion—to get the ices and the other
refreshments served without accidents.
“That’s right!” said the Syndic approvingly, with his nose in his glass.
“When you want me for the cause of peace, you’ll always find me on the
spot.”
The delegate, in fact, said that he had come for the sake of
conciliation, with the olive-branch in his mouth, like Noah’s dove, and
made his exhortation, distributing smiles and hand-clasps all round, and
saying, “Gentlemen, will you do me the favour of coming into the
sacristy to take a cup of chocolate on the day of the festival?”
“Do leave the festival alone!” said the Vice-Prætor; “if not, more
mischief will come of it.”
“Mischief will come of it if this tyranny is to be allowed—if a man is
not to be free to amuse himself as he likes, and pay for it with his own
money!” exclaimed Bruno, the carter.
“I wash my hands of the matter. The orders of the Government are
explicit. If you celebrate the festival I shall send for the Carbineers.
I am for order.”
“I will answer for order!” said the Syndic, tapping the ground for
emphasis with his umbrella, and looking slowly around.
“Bravo! as if we did not know that it is your brother-in-law Bruno who
blows the bellows for you in the Town Council!” retorted the
Vice-Prætor.
“And you have joined the opposition party only on account of that
bye-law about the washing, which you can’t get over!”
“Gentlemen! gentlemen!” entreated the delegate. “We shall do nothing if
we go on in this way.”
“We’ll have a revolution, that we will!” shouted Bruno, gesticulating
with his hands in the air.
Fortunately the parish priest had quietly put away the cups and glasses,
and the sacristan had rushed off at the top of his speed to dismiss the
band, who, having heard of the delegate’s arrival, were already
hastening up to welcome him, blowing their cornets and clarionets.
“In this way we shall do nothing at all!” muttered the delegate, worried
to death by the thought that the harvest was already ripe for cutting in
his own village, while he was wasting his time here talking to Compare
Bruno and the Vice-Prætor, who were ready to tear one another’s souls
out. “What is this story about the prohibition of the washing?”
“The usual interference. Nowadays one can’t hang a handkerchief out of
the window to dry without getting fined for it. The Vice-Prætor’s
wife—feeling safe because her husband was in a position of trust, for
till now people always had some little regard for the authorities—used
to hang out the whole week’s washing—it was not much to boast of—on the
terrace.... But now, under the new law, that’s a mortal sin; and now
even the dogs and fowls are prohibited, and the other animals[12]—saving
your presence—that used to do the scavenging in the streets; and now the
first rain that comes it will be Heaven’s mercy if we don’t all get
smothered in the filth. The real truth is that Bruno, the assessor, has
a grudge against the Vice-Prætor, on account of a certain decision he
has given against him.”
The delegate, in order to conciliate the local mind, used to sit boxed
up in his confessional, like an owl in its nest, from morning till
evening, and all the women were eager to be shriven by the Bishop’s
representative, who had powers of plenary absolution for all sorts of
sins, just as though he had been Monsignor in person.
“Your Reverence,” said Saridda, with her nose at the grating, “Compare
Nino makes me commit sin every Sunday in church.”
“In what way, my daughter?”
“He was to have married me, before there was all this talk in the place;
but now that the marriage is broken off, he goes and stands near the
high altar, and stares at me, and laughs with his friends, all the time
holy mass is going on.”
And when his Reverence tried to touch Nino’s heart the countryman
replied—
“No, it is she who turns her back on me whenever she sees me—just as if
I were a beggar!”
He, on the other hand, if Gnà Saridda passed across the square on
Sundays, gave himself airs as if he had been the brigadier, or some
other great personage, and did not even seem to see her. Saridda was
exceedingly busy preparing little coloured paper-lanterns, and put them
out in a row on the window-sill, in his very face, under the pretext of
hanging them out to dry. Once they found themselves together in church,
at a christening, and took no notice of each other, just as though they
had never met before; nay, Saridda even Went so far as to flirt with the
godfather.
“A poor sort of a godfather!” sneered Nino. “Why the child’s a girl! And
when a girl is born, even the beams of the roof break down!”
Saridda turned away, and pretended to be talking to the baby’s mother.
“What’s bad does not always come to do harm. Sometimes, when you think
you’ve lost a treasure, you ought to thank God and St. Pasquale; for you
can never say you know a person till you have eaten seven measures of
salt.”
“After all, one must take troubles as they come, and the worst possible
way is to worry one’s self about things which are not worth the trouble.
When one Pope’s dead they make another.”
“It’s fore-ordained what sort of natures children are to be born with,
and it’s just like that with marriages. It’s far better to marry a man
who really cares for you and has no other ends to serve, even though he
has no money or fields, or mules or anything.”...
On the square the drum was beating to give notice of the festival.
“The Syndic says we shall have the festival,” was the murmur that went
through the crowd.
“I’ll go to law till doomsday, if it should leave me as poor as holy
Job, with nothing left but my shirt; but that five francs’ fine I will
not pay! not if I had to leave directions about it in my will!”
“Confound it all!” exclaimed Nino. “What sort of a festival are they
going to have, if we are all to die of hunger this year?”
Since March not a drop of rain had fallen, and the yellow corn, which
crackled like tinder, was “dying of thirst.” Bruno, the carter, however,
said that when San Pasquale was carried out in procession it would rain
for certain. But what did he care about rain? or all the tanners of his
neighbourhood either? In fact they carried San Pasquale in procession to
east and to west, and set him upon a hill to bless the country on a
stifling May day, when the sky was covered with clouds,—one of those
days when the farmers are ready to tear their hair before the burnt-up
fields, and the ears of corn droop as if they were dying.
“A curse on San Pasquale!” cried Nino, spitting in the air, and rushing
about among his crops like a madman. “You have ruined me, San Pasquale;
you’ve left me nothing but the reaping-hook to cut my throat with!”
The upper town was a desolate place enough. It was one of those long
years when the hunger begins in June, and the women stand at their doors
with their hair hanging about their shoulders—doing nothing—staring with
fixed eyes. Gnà Saridda, hearing that Compare Nino’s mule was to be sold
in the public square, to pay the rent of his farm, felt her anger melt
away in an instant, and sent her brother Turi in hot haste, with the few
_soldi_ they had put aside, to help him.
Nino was in one corner of the square, with his eyes averted and his
hands in his pockets, while they were selling his mule, with all its
ornaments and the new headstall.
“I don’t want anything,” he replied sullenly. “My arms are still left
me, please God. A fine saint that San Pasquale of yours, eh?”
Turi turned his back on him, to avoid unpleasantness, and went on his
way. But the truth is that people’s minds were thoroughly exasperated,
now that they had carried San Pasquale in procession to east and west,
with no more result than that. The worst of it was that many from the
parish of San Rocco had been induced to walk with the procession too,
thrashing themselves like asses, and with crowns of thorns on their
heads, for the sake of their crops. Now they relieved their feelings in
exceedingly bad language; and the Bishop’s delegate was obliged to leave
the town, as he entered it, on foot, and without the band.
The vice-prætor, by way of retaliation on his opponent, telegraphed that
people’s minds were excited, and the public peace compromised; so that
one fine day a report went through the town, that the soldiers had
arrived, and every one could go and see them.
“They have come on account of the cholera,” others; said, however. “Down
in the city, they say, the people are dying like flies.”
The chemist put up the chain of his shop door, and the doctor left the
place as speedily as possible, to escape being knocked on the head.[13]
“It will not come to anything,” said the few who had remained in the
place, having been unable to fly into the country like the rest. “The
blessed San Rocco will watch over his own town.”
Even the lower town folks had begun to go barefoot to San Rocco’s
church. But not long after that, deaths began to come thick and fast.
They said of one man that he was a glutton, and died of eating too many
prickly pears, and of another, that he had come in from the country
after nightfall.[14] But, in short, there was the cholera, there was no
disguising it,—in spite of the soldiers, and in the very teeth of San
Rocco,—notwithstanding the fact that an old woman in the odour of
sanctity had dreamed that the saint himself had said to her—
“Have no fear of the cholera, for I am looking after that. I am not like
that useless old ass of a San Pasquale.”
Nino and Turi had not met since the mule was sold; but scarcely had the
former heard that the brother and sister were both ill, than he hastened
to their house, and found Saridda, black in the face, and her features
all distorted, in a corner of the room. Her brother, who was with her,
was recovering, but could not tell what to do for her, and was nearly
beside himself with despair.
“Ah! thief of a San Rocco,” groaned Nino. “I never expected this. Gnà
Saridda, don’t you know me any more? Nino, your old friend Nino.”
Saridda looked at him with eyes so sunken that one had to hold a lantern
to her face before one could see them, and Nino felt his own running
over.
“Ah! San Rocco,” said he, “this is a worse trick than the one San
Pasquale played me!”
However, Saridda in time got better, and as she was standing at the
door, with her head tied up in a handkerchief, and her face yellow as
new wax, she said to Nino—
“San Rocco has worked a miracle for me, and you ought to come too, and
carry a candle at his festival.”
Nino’s heart was too full to speak, and he nodded assent. But before the
festival came round, he too was taken with the pestilence, and lay at
the point of death. Saridda tore her face with her nails, and said that
she wanted to die with him, and she would cut off her hair and have it
buried with him, and no one should ever look her in the face again as
long as she lived.
[Illustration]
“No, no,” replied Nino, his face all drawn with agony. “Your hair will
grow again, but it will be I that will never see you again, for I shall
be dead.”
“A fine miracle that San Rocco has worked for you!” said Turi, by way of
comforting him.
Both of them slowly recovered; and when they sat sunning themselves,
with their backs to the wall and very long faces, kept throwing San
Rocco and San Pasquale in each other’s teeth.
One day Bruno, the carter, coming back from the country after the
cholera was over, passed by them, and said—
“We’re going to have a grand festival to thank San Pasquale for having
saved us from the cholera. We shall have no more demagogues and no more
opposition, now, that the vice-prætor is dead. He has left the quarrel
behind him in his will.”
“All very well; a festival for the dead!” sneered Nino.
“Perhaps it was San Rocco that kept you alive?”
“There!—do have done with it!” cried Saridda. “If you don’t, we shall
need another cholera to make peace between you!”
_Giovanni Verga._
_HIS REVERENCE._
He no longer went about now with the long beard and scapulary of the
begging friar. He got shaved every Sunday, and went for a walk in his
best soutane of fine cloth, with his silk-lined cloak over his arm. When
he looked at his fields, his vineyards, his cattle, and his ploughmen,
with his hands in his pockets and his pipe in his mouth, if he had
remembered the time when he washed up the dishes for the Capuchin
fathers, and they put him into the frock out of charity, he would have
crossed himself with his left hand.
But if they had not taught him, for charity’s sake, to read and write
and say mass, he would never have succeeded in fixing himself in the
best property in the village, nor in getting into his books the names of
all those tenants who worked away and prayed for a good harvest for him,
and then blasphemed like Turks when settling-day came round. “Look at
what I am, and don’t ask who my parents were,” says the proverb. As for
his parents, every one knew about them; his mother swept out the house
for him. His Reverence was not ashamed of his family—not he; and when he
went to play at cards with the Baroness, he made his brother wait for
him in the anteroom, with the big lantern to light him home with.... He
was popular as a confessor, and always ready for a little paternal
gossip with his female penitents, after they had relieved their
consciences and emptied their pockets, of their own and other people’s
sins. You could always pick up some useful information, especially if
you were given to speculating in agricultural matters, in return for
your blessing!
Good gracious! He did not pretend to be a saint—not he! Holy men usually
died of hunger—like the vicar, who celebrated, even when his masses were
not paid for, and went about poor people’s houses in a ragged soutane
which was a perfect scandal to religion. His Reverence wanted to get on,
and get on he did, with the wind right aft, though a little hampered at
first by that unlucky monk’s frock, which would get in his way, till he
escaped from it by means of a suit before the Royal Courts. The rest of
the brethren backed him up in his application, only for the sake of
getting rid of him; for, as long as he was in the monastery, there was a
free fight in the refectory every time a new Provincial had to be
elected, and the forms and dishes flew about with such goodwill that
Father Battistino, who was sturdy as a muleteer, had been half-killed,
and Father Giammaria, the guardian, had had his teeth knocked down his
throat. His Reverence, after having stirred up the fire all he could,
always retired to his cell on those occasions, and remained quiet there;
and it was in this way that he had succeeded in becoming “His Reverence”
with a complete set of teeth, which served him exceedingly well; while
of Father Giammaria, who had been the man to get that scorpion up his
sleeve, every one said: “Serves him right!”
And Father Giammaria was still only guardian of the Capuchins, without a
shirt to his back or a sou in his pocket,—hearing confessions for the
love of God, and making soup for the poor.