All Our Yesterdays Page 18

  And Anna told him one evening that she put on her insect face not because she did not like the contadini, but because she did not like him, Cenzo, when he was with the contadini, the way he slapped them on the back and talked dialect with them, as though he enjoyed pretending to be the con-tadini’s protector. Cenzo Rena remained silent a moment, and then all of a sudden he went very red and the veins in his neck swelled, he did not pretend to be the contadin’s protector, he was the contadini’s protector, he was the friend and spokesman of the contadini, the only thing the contadini had in that dismal country, where everything was gradually rotting to pieces. The contadini went to the municipal office and waited for hours and hours sitting on the floor in the entrance-hall and on the staircase, until they were called into the room where the local secretary and the mayor were sitting at a table, and the secretary sat listening to them cutting his nails with a pair of curved scissors, then he would write something in the register and nod to them to leave the room. And they would shrug their shoulders and sigh and go out, and they knew that nothing more would happen, everything they asked for at the municipal office dropped into the register like a stone into a well. And even the mayor who seemed to be one of themselves when they saw him milking his cows in his stable and selling the milk, even the mayor, behind that table, was transformed into the municipal office, into a well that swallowed up the poor little stories of the contadini, swallowed them up and made them disappear for ever as though they had never existed. But when he arrived at the municipal office the mayor took fright and became a little contadino again, he apologized for his shaky handwriting, he had spent his whole life digging the ground. And the secretary took fright as well and put down his scissors and started fumbling amongst archives and registers. In this way he, Cenzo Rena, had obtained relief for poor people, by digging out old crumbling records from the bottoms of drawers, and each month he went to the municipal office to see whether they had distributed the relief, and he went to the chemist’s shop too to see if they had any serum against snake-bites, he went round all the time making himself a nuisance to everybody, to the doctor and the vet and the schoolmistress, yes, he even went to the schoolmistress to see what she was teaching the children, and in fact he had had the annoyance of a schoolmistress who had once fallen in love with him and had hoped to get him to marry her. And he had a great many plans for after the war, if Fascism collapsed and if there was an after, if there was an after he had a whole heap of charming little plans that would be a nuisance to everybody. He walked up and down the room and talked as though to himself. But all of a sudden he remembered her and told her to go to bed, the fire had gone out and she might catch cold. He was still, perhaps, rather angry, and he merely waved his hand as she went out.

  3

  There came a letter from Signora Maria saying that she and Giustino were coming to San Costanzo about Christmastime. Anna was very pleased, never had she thought she could be so pleased at the idea of seeing Signora Maria. Together with La Maschiona she started cleaning the rooms, and in the meantime she told her about Signora Maria who always wore little shoes with bows on them, goodness knows how she would ever manage to climb up those rocks with shoes like that, and goodness knows whether she would ever eat that tough old mutton, she was always so tiresome about meat and about the smell that it had. La Maschiona told her not to think about the mutton, at Christmas-time there would be some veal. The whole village knew at once when the butcher was going to kill some veal, and some people ran off secretly to the butcher, even the day before, to take him presents so that he should put aside a piece of meat for them, and at night, at the door of the butcher’s shop, there were two policemen and a queue of women, who waited for hours and hours and grew gradually fiercer and fiercer and began to throw insults at each other, and La Maschiona, planted in front of the door to protect her place, was the fiercest of all. On veal nights there was a great clamour of voices to be heard in the square in front of the butcher’s shop, and then suddenly the door would be heard opening and there would be loud shouts and a rush into the shop and the policemen would be stormed and thrust aside. Cenzo Rena looked out of the window and called Anna to come and see and said that that was the South, poor people ready to get themselves trampled upon for a little piece of meat, and very often, after all those hours of standing and after this great battle, all they took away was a piece of lung, because the money they had was not enough to buy anything else. But they even enjoyed the battle, and La Maschiona, when she heard about the veal, became cheerful and fierce, at the thought of how she would wait and shout at the door of the butcher’s shop at night.

  It was a veal night and Anna could not sleep, partly because of the noise in the square and partly because Giustino and Signora Maria were to arrive in the morning. She turned over and over in bed with her heart beating very fast, and then at last it was morning and La Maschiona came in to display the big piece of veal she had captured, and the bruises on her arms from the pinching and punching. Anna and Cenzo Rena waited in the village square, they waited for a long time and then at last they saw the bus a long way off, swaying from side to side and heavily laden, and then Signora Maria slipped out from inside the bus with a heap of bundles and boxes and a wine-flask of coffee and milk, and Giustino came down, from the roof and a little later Emanuele also, he had been in Rome on some kind of soap-factory business and he too had wanted to have a look at San Costanzo. Emanuele and Cenzo Rena greeted each other very warmly, it looked as if they had forgotten that time at Le Visciole when they had not been such great friends, now they clapped each other on the shoulders and shook each other violently, and resounding peals of laughter, as usual like the cooing of a pigeon, came from Emanuele. Anna, hearing these peals of laughter, gradually recalled everything, the garden and the ivy-covered walls of the house opposite, and Ippolito and the radio and France and at the same time Giuma and the bushes on the river bank, it all came back to her heart in a strong, deep rush. The dog had dashed forward and was barking round Giustino and Giustino bent down to pat it and speak into its ear, Signora Maria told him he took more notice of the dog than of his sister. Signora Maria was dressed as for the North Pole, in a big, hairy grey cloak that she had had made when she went to St. Moritz with Anna’s grandmother, and she was not wearing her shoes with bows on them but high, laced-up boots. She had her hands full of bags and boxes, La Maschiona wanted to take them from her but she would not hand them over.

  Emanuele was very pleased because the war was going really badly, the Italians were getting into trouble all over the place and in the meantime the Germans had not succeeded in landing in England, England was still there in the middle of its own sea and no one talked now about zero hour. It was not like the time of the fall of France, he said, when he used to spend his days sleeping so as not to hear any more about it, and tears came into his eyes when he remembered Ippolito, he could not forgive him for having wanted to die, he might have been with them now to see the fine new things that were happening every day. The story of France now seemed only a small episode, at the time it had looked as though it was all over and yet fine things could still be seen happening. He had begun to feel himself reviving when he had heard that the English had retaken Sidi-el-Barrani, he had lain awake all night and had kept on repeating; “They’ve retaken Sidi-el-Barrani”, and now the name of Sidi-el-Barrani still made his heart beat, he wanted to go and see Sidi-el-Barrani as soon as the war was over. But now Cenzo Rena began to get angry, what were all these fine things that were happening every day, poor innocent people dying in Africa and in Greece, so many poor young fellows. They were passing through the narrow lanes of the village and Cenzo Rena pointed out the houses where there was someone away at the war, and already news of dead and missing had arrived, faces he still seemed to see about in those lanes; they had taken sausages by night to the police-sergeant so as to stay at home, but they were small black sausages and the police-sergeant had not been willing to take any trouble. Emanuele immediately w
ent red and apologized for saying the wrong thing, he himself also suffered at the thought of the people away at the war, if he had not had that lame leg he would be away at the war too. But it was not his fault that he had a lame leg. Limping and panting he climbed up through the snow and the rocks, and he wiped the sweat from his brow and looked at the houses and the hills, and he said to Cenzo Rena that San Costanzo was just as he had imagined it to be from what he had heard about it. He told Anna that she had not changed much during those months, she had not taken to looking very much like a married woman, apart from her big belly she had remained the same. He said it made a great impression on him to see her with that big belly, he still remembered her when she went to school with her satchel and when she went out for walks with Giuma and Giuma recited Montale to her, of course she had forgotten Giuma by now, Giuma who had once upon a time been her admirer. Even infants now thought about getting married, even Giuma had suddenly declared that he wanted to get married to a girl called Fiammetta, he kept a photograph of the girl Fiammetta on his desk and acted as if he was engaged to her. But he had failed in his exams, failed with unheard-of ignominy, and now he had started going to school again and was silent and gloomy, and had more or less given up reading Montale and instead had all the books of Kierkegaard on his desk. They had given up the villa above Stresa, Mammina had wanted to come back to the town in the autumn and she was not giving much thought to the war, she said it was a small war that was not causing much trouble. And poor Franz had been sent away by the police to a village rather like San Costanzo but even further south, together with other foreign and Italian Jews, and Amalia had gone there too and they had rented a kind of ducal palace in which they were quite comfortable but Franz was dying with fright all the time and drew breath again only when the English seized a piece of Africa, all day he sat with his atlas and his radio, but at night the amount that the English had seized seemed to him very small, he would waken Amalia to tell her how small it was and then she would give him a camphor injection. In their own little town everything was as usual, but he, Emanuele, was all alone, and when he went through the public gardens and saw Ippolito’s seat he could not bear the thought that he had wanted to die, he could not forgive him for that, he turned away his eyes so as not to look at that seat on which people came and sat, it seemed to him cruel that people should sit there. And Danilo too was far away and so he had no friends left, he shut himself up and worked in his office at the factory, but even there he was in a state of despair because of the disgusting soap that was now produced. He saw Danilo’s wife sometimes, he went and fetched her at the foundry with Giustino and they spent the evening with her, to keep her company and to comfort her for the rude behaviour of her sisters-in-law and her mother-in-law, since Danilo had gone away they treated her very badly.

  At table they were all astonished at the veal and the white bread, in the town meat was rationed and they gave you two or three little slices once a week, of course anyone who could bought in the black market but prices were always going up. And the bread in town was rationed and was a kind of soft, grey dough that you couldn’t ever digest, the bread was like the soap and the soap was like the bread, both washing and eating had become very difficult. And Mammina was getting meaner and meaner about her supplies in the cellar, previously Emanuele had managed to steal a few little pieces of soap or a little sugar for Danilo’s wife or for Signora Maria, but now there was no longer any possibility of Mammina parting with the cellar keys for one minute, and she was constantly in the cellar walking up and down with her eyeglasses amongst the sacks and the boxes and the demijohns. La Maschiona brought a piece of soap to show them the kind that she made in the house with fat that was left over, Emanuele took it and started sniffing at it to make it clear that he understood such things and cried that it was marvellous, and they all passed round from hand to hand the big piece of soap which still had incrusted in it clots of fried bacon and hunks of rind. Cenzo Rena said that La Maschiona also made the bread at home, she used to make it even before the war and La Maschiona’s bread was famous at Borgo San Costanzo. Then Signora Maria said that she too had started to make the bread at home with the flour they brought her from Le Visciole, but there was not much of this flour and the contadino talked about the bad harvest and about the number of hundredweight that had to be given to the Government pool, there was this Government pool now to upset things still further. But Giustino said he still preferred the soft, grey rationed bread to the white bread, as hard as marble, that Signora Maria made at home. Signora Maria said that of course her bread was hard because it was unleavened bread, in any case she did not make it for Giustino but for Concettina who had to suckle her baby, and Concettina soaked it in her broth and found it very wholesome and light. Concettina’s baby was becoming more and more beautiful, said Signora Maria, and at once she started to tell them about Concettina’s baby’s nose and mouth and eyes, and she started whispering to the baby just as if she had had it there beside her. Giustino gave a heavy sigh, both at lunch and at supper Signora Maria never failed to entertain him with this subject of Concettina’s baby’s nose and mouth and eyes. When Signora Maria had gone off to rest on her bed, Giustino said he was sick and tired of living alone with Signora Maria, she had become terribly tiresome and would give him no peace, she came running after him in the street with an umbrella and a scarf and treated him like a small child, and then every evening she asked that nephew of here to come in and was deeply offended if he did not stay in the sitting-room and make conversation. He said he was really sick and tired of it and wanted to get a divorce from Signora Maria. He said that as soon as he had passed his final exams he would go to the war as a volunteer. Emanuele told him that by the time he passed his final exams the war would be finished three times over. Cenzo Rena said no, he would be wanted before the war was over. And he said it was a fine reason for going to the war as a volunteer, that Signora Maria was so tiresome and asked her nephew to come in in the evenings; in any case it would not be long before the nephew was called up, gradually they would be calling up everyone, perhaps even himself, Cenzo Rena, though he was old, and Emanuele, though he had a leg like that. Giustino said that at any rate he was sick and tired of it and he was going. He was fed up, and he wanted to see what war was like, but above all he was fed up. Emanuele put his arm round his neck but Giustino threw off his arm and retired into a corner. Then Cenzo Rena asked Giustino whether he would not like to go out for a little in the pine wood so that they could have a talk by themselves.