After the Divorce

I

Nineteen Hundred and Seven. In the “strangers’ room” of the Porru house a woman sat crying. Crouched on the floor near the bed, her knees drawn up, her arms resting on her knees, and her forehead on her arms, she wept and sobbed continuously, shaking her head from time to time as though to indicate that there was no more hope, absolutely none at all; while her plump shoulders and straight young back rose and fell in the tightly fitting yellow bodice, like a wave of the sea.

The room was nearly in darkness; there were no windows, but through the open door which gave upon a bricked gallery, a stretch of dull grey sky could be seen, growing momentarily darker; and far, far away, against this dusky background, gleamed the yellow ray of a little, solitary star. From the courtyard below came the shrill chirping of a cricket, and the occasional stamp of horses’ hoofs on the stone pavement.

A short, heavy woman, clad in the Nuorese dress, with a large, fat, old-woman face, appeared in the doorway; she carried a four-branched iron candlestick, in one socket of which burned a wick soaked in oil.

“Giovanna Era,” said she in a gruff voice, “what are you about all in the dark? Are you there? What are you doing? I believe you are crying! You must be crazy! Upon my word, that’s just what you are⁠—crazy!”

The young woman began to sob convulsively.

“Oh, oh, oh!” said the other, drawing near, and in the tone of one who is deeply shocked and amazed. “I said you were crying. What are you crying for? There’s your mother waiting for you downstairs, and you up here, crying like a crazy creature!”

The young woman wept more violently than ever, whereupon the other hung the candlestick on a large nail, gazed vaguely about her, and then began hovering over her disconsolate guest, searching for words wherewith to comfort her; she could only repeat, however: “But, Giovanna, you are crazy, just crazy!”

The “strangers’ room”⁠—the name given to that apartment which every Nuorese family, according to immemorial custom, reserves for the use of friends from the country⁠—was large, white, and bare; it had a great wooden bedstead, a table covered with a cotton cloth and adorned with little glass cups and saucers, and a quantity of small pictures hung close to the unpainted wooden ceiling. Bunches of dried grapes and yellow pears hung from the rafters, filling the room with a faint fragrance; and sacks of wool stood about on the floor.

The stout woman, who was the mistress of the house, laid hold of one of these sacks, dragged it to another part of the room, and then back again to where she had found it.

“Now then,” said she, panting from her exertion, “do stop. What good does it do? And why should you give up, anyhow? What the devil, my dearie! Suppose the public prosecutor has asked for the galleys, that doesn’t mean that the jury are all mad dogs like himself!”

But the other only kept on crying and shaking her head, moaning: “No, no, no!” between her sobs.

“Yes, yes, I tell you,” urged the woman. “Get up now, and come to your mother,” and, taking hold of her, she forced back her head.

The action revealed a charming countenance; rosy, framed in a thick mass of tumbled black hair; the big dark eyes swollen and glistening with tears, and surmounted by heavy black eyebrows that met in the middle.

“No, no,” wailed Giovanna, shaking herself free. “Let me cry over my fate, Aunt Porredda.”1

“Fate or no fate, you just get up!”

“No, I won’t get up! I won’t get up! They’ll sentence him to thirty years at the very least! Do you hear me? Thirty years! That’s what they’ll give him!”

“That remains to be seen. And after all, what is thirty years? Why, you carry on like a wildcat!”

The other gave a shrill cry, and tore her hair in an access of wild despair.

“Thirty years! What is thirty years!” she shrieked. “A man’s whole lifetime, Aunt Porredda! You don’t know what you are talking about, Aunt Porredda! Go away, go away and leave me alone! for the love of Christ, oh, leave me to myself!”

“I’m not going away,” said Aunt Porredda. “The idea! In my own house! Get up, you child of the devil! Stop this before you make yourself ill. Tomorrow will be time enough to pull your hair out by the roots; your husband isn’t in the galleys yet!”

Giovanna dropped her head, and began to cry again in a subdued, hopeless way, heartbreaking to listen to. “Costantino, Costantino,” she moaned in the tone of one bewailing the dead, “I shall never see you again, never again! Those mad dogs have seized you and bound you fast, and they will never let you go; and our house will be empty, and the bed cold, and the family scattered. Oh, my beloved! my lamb! you are dead for this world. May those who have done it die the same death!”

Aunt Porredda, distracted by Giovanna’s grief, and unable to think of anything more to say, went out on the gallery, and began calling: “Bachissia Era! come up here; your daughter is losing her mind!”

A step was heard on the outer stair. Aunt Porredda turned back into the room, and behind her appeared a tall, tragic-looking figure all in black. The gaunt, yellow face, shaped like that of some bird of prey, was framed in the folds of a black handkerchief; two brilliant green spots indicated the eyes, deep set, overhung by fierce, heavy brows, and surrounded by livid circles. Her mere presence seemed to exercise a subduing effect upon the daughter.

“Get up!” she said in a harsh voice.

Giovanna arose. She was tall and lithe, though cast in a heavy mould and having enormous hips. Beneath the short, circular petticoat, adorned below the waist with a band of purple, and with a broad, green hem, appeared two little feet shod in elastic gaiters, and the suggestion of a pair of shapely legs.

“What are you worrying these good people for?” demanded the mother. “Have done now; come down to supper, and don’t frighten the children, or throw a wet blanket over the happiness of these good people.”

The “happiness of these good people” was in allusion to the arrival of the son of the house, a law student, home for the holidays.

Giovanna, recognising that her mother meant to be obeyed, quieted down without more ado. Pulling the woollen kerchief from her head, and thereby disclosing a cap of antique brocade, from whence escaped waves of coal-black hair, she turned towards a basin of water standing on a chair, and began to bathe her face.

The two women looked at one another, and Aunt Porredda, taking her lips between her right thumb and forefinger in sign of silence, noiselessly left the room.

The other, accepting this hint, said nothing more, and when Giovanna had finished bathing, and had set her hair in order, silently led the way down the outer stair.

Night had fallen; warm, still, profound. The solitary yellow star had been followed by a multitude of glittering asterisks, and the Milky Way lay like a scarf of gauze embroidered with silver spangles. The air was heavy with the penetrating odour of new-mown hay.

In the courtyard, the crickets, hidden away in the trelliswork, kept up their shrill chirping; the ruminative horse still stamped with his iron-shod hoofs upon the stones, and from afar floated the melancholy note of a song.

The kitchen opened on the courtyard, as did a ground-floor bedroom sometimes used as a dining-room. Both doors were standing open.

In the kitchen, beside the lighted stove, stood Aunt Porredda engaged in preparing the macaroni for supper. A child, clad in a loose black frock, fair, untidy, and barefooted, was quarrelling with a stout little urchin, fat and florid like his grandmother.

The girl was swearing roundly, naming every devil in turn; while the boy tried to pinch her bare legs.

“Stop it,” said Aunt Porredda. “There now, will you leave off, you naughty children?”

“Mamma Porru, she’s cursing me; she said: ‘Go to the devil who gave you birth.’ ”

“Minnia! what a way to talk!”

“Well, he stole my purse, the one with the picture of the Pope, that Uncle Paolo brought me⁠—”

“It’s not so, I didn’t!” shouted the boy. “You’d better not be talking about stealing, Minnia,” he added with a meaning look.

The girl became suddenly quiet, as though a spell had been cast over her, but presently her tormentor, seizing a long stick, tried to hook the curved handle around her legs. Minnia began to cry, and the grandmother faced about, ladle in hand.

“I declare, I’ll beat you with this ladle, you wretched children! Just you wait a moment!” she cried, running at them. The children made a dash for the courtyard, and collided violently with Giovanna and her mother.

“What’s all this? What’s all this?”

“Oh, those children, they’ll drive me wild! I believe the devil is in them,” said Aunt Porredda from the doorway.

At this moment a slim little figure in black emerged from the main gateway leading into the street, calling excitedly: “They are coming, Grandmother; here they are now!”

“Well, let them come; you would do better, Grazia, to pay some attention to your brother and sister; they have been fighting like two cocks.”

Grazia made no reply, but taking the iron candlestick from Aunt Bachissia she blew out the light, and hid it behind a bench in the kitchen, saying in a low voice: “You ought to be ashamed, Grandmother, to have such a looking candlestick, now that Uncle Paolo is here.”

“Uncle Paolo! Well, I declare! Do you suppose he was brought up on gold?”

“He has been to Rome.”

“To Rome! The idea! They only don’t have lights like that there, because they have to buy their oil by the pennyworth. Here, we can use as much oil as we want.”

“You must be green if you believe that!” said the girl; then, suddenly catching the sound of her grandfather’s and uncle’s voices, she flew to meet them, trembling with excitement.

“Good evening, Giovanna; Aunt Bachissia, how goes it with you?” said the hearty voice of the student. “I? Very well, the Lord be praised! I was sorry to hear of your misfortune. Never mind, courage! Who knows? The sentence is tomorrow, is it not?”

He led the way into the room where the supper-table was laid, followed by the two women and the children, whom their uncle’s presence filled with mixed terror and delight.

He was short and limped slightly, one foot being smaller than the other, and the leg somewhat shorter; this circumstance had earned him the nickname of Dr. Pededdu,2 a jest which he took in very good part, declaring that it was far better to have one foot smaller than the other, rather than a head smaller than those of other people.

His fresh, round, smiling face, with its little blond moustache, was surmounted by a big, tattered black hat. He proclaimed himself a Socialist. Sitting down on the side of the bed, with both legs swinging, he threw an arm around each staring, open-mouthed child, and drew it to him, giving his attention meanwhile to Aunt Bachissia’s recital of their misfortunes. From time to time, however, his gaze wandered to Grazia, the angles of whose girlish, undeveloped figure were accentuated by an ill-fitting black frock much too small for her. Her own hard, light-coloured orbs never left her uncle’s face.

“Listen,” said Aunt Bachissia, in her harsh voice, “I will tell you the whole story. Costantino Ledda had an uncle by blood, his own father’s brother. His name was Basile Ledda, but they called him ‘the Vulture’⁠—may God preserve him in glory if he’s not fast in the devil’s clutches already⁠—because he was so grasping.

“He was a wretch, a regular yellow vulture. God may have forgiven him, but there, they say he starved his wife to death! He was Costantino’s guardian; the boy had some money of his own, his uncle spent it all, and then began to ill-use him. He beat him, and sometimes he would tie him down between two stones in the open field, so that the bees would come and sting him on the eyes. Well, one day Costantino ran away; he was sixteen years old. For three years nothing was heard of him; he says he was working in the mines; I don’t know, but anyhow, that’s what he says.”

“Yes, yes, he was working in the mines,” interrupted Giovanna.

“I don’t know,” said the mother, pursing up her lips with an air of doubt, “well, anyway, the fact remains that one day, during the time that he was off, someone fired at Basile the Vulture out in the field. It is true he did have enemies. When Costantino came back he admitted that he had run away for fear he might be tempted to kill his uncle, he hated him so.

“Afterwards, though, he tried to make his peace with him, and succeeded too. But now listen to this, Paolo Porru⁠—”

“Dr. Porru! Dr. Porreddu!” shouted the small nephew, correcting the guest. The latter, turning on the boy angrily, started to box his ears, whereupon Giovanna laughed. On beholding their heartbroken guest⁠—she who up to that moment had been surrounded by a halo of romance and tragedy⁠—actually laughing, the pale, lank Grazia broke into a nervous laugh as well, and then Minnia laughed, and then the boy, and then the student.

Aunt Bachissia glared about her, and, lifting one lean, yellow hand, was about to bring it down on some one⁠—she had not quite decided whether her daughter or the boy⁠—when Aunt Porredda appeared in the doorway, bearing a steaming dish of macaroni.

She was followed by Uncle Efes Maria Porru, a big, imposing-looking man, whose broad chest was uncomfortably contracted in a narrow blue velvet jacket. He was a peasant, but affected a literary turn; his large, colourless face resembled a mask of ancient marble; he wore a short, curling beard, and had thick lips always parted, and big, clear eyes.

“Come, sit down at once,” said Aunt Porredda, planting the dish in the centre of the table. “What! laughing, are you? The little doctor is making you all laugh?”

“I was just about to give your grandson a box on the ear,” said Aunt Bachissia.

“And why were you going to do that, my soul? Come now, sit down, all of you; Giovanna, here; Dr. Porreddu, over there.”

The student threw himself back full-length on the bed, stretched out his arms, lifted his legs high in air, dropped them again, sat up, and jumped to his feet with a yawn.

The children and Giovanna began to laugh again.

“A little gymnastic exercise does one good. Great Lord! how I shall sleep tonight! My bones feel as though they had lost all their joints. How tall you have grown, Grazia; you look like a bean-pole.”

The girl reddened and dropped her eyes; while Aunt Bachissia thrust out her lips, annoyed at the student’s lack of interest, as well as at the general indifference to Costantino’s fate. To be sure, Giovanna herself had apparently forgotten, and it was only when Aunt Porredda placed before her a bountiful helping of macaroni covered with fragrant red gravy, that she suddenly recollected herself; her face clouded over, and she refused to eat.

“There now! what did I tell you?” cried Aunt Porredda. “She is crazy, absolutely crazy! Why can’t you eat? What has eating your supper tonight to do with the sentence tomorrow?”

“Come, come,” said Aunt Bachissia crossly. “Don’t be foolish, don’t go to work and spoil these good people’s pleasure.”

“A brave heart,” said Uncle Efes Maria pompously⁠—fastening his napkin under his chin and seeing an opportunity for a learned observation⁠—“a brave heart defies fate, as Dante Alighieri says. Come now, Giovanna, prove yourself a true flower of the mountains; more enduring than the rocks themselves. Time softens all things.”

Giovanna began to eat, but with a lump in her throat that made swallowing a difficult matter.

Paolo, meanwhile, had not spoken a word, but sat bowed over his plate, which, by the time Giovanna had managed to get down her first mouthful, was entirely clean.

“Why, you are a perfect hurricane, my son!” said Aunt Porredda. “What a ravenous appetite you have, to be sure! Do you want some more⁠—yes?⁠—and more still⁠—yes⁠—?”

“Well done!” cried Uncle Efes Maria. “It looks as though you had found very little to eat in the Eternal City!”

“Eh, that is precisely what I was saying just now,” said Aunt Porredda. “Beautiful streets, if you will; but⁠—when it comes to buying anything⁠—the pennies have to be counted down! I’ve been told all about it! On my word, they say that there are no provisions stored in the houses as there are here, and you all know for yourselves that with no provisions in the house it is not easy to satisfy one’s appetite!”

Aunt Bachissia nodded affirmatively; she knew only too well what happens when there is nothing in a house to eat.

“Is that true or not, Dr. Porreddu?”

“True, perfectly true,” said he, laughing, and eating, and waving his large, white hands with their long nails, in the air.

“It is that that makes him such a leech, a regular vampire,” said Uncle Efes Maria, turning to his guests. “I’ll not have a drop of blood left in my veins. Body of the devil! how the money must go in Rome!”

“Ah, if you only knew!” sighed Paolo. “Everything, every single thing is so frightfully dear. Twenty centimes for a single peach! There, I feel better now.”

“Twenty centimes!” exclaimed all the company in chorus.

“Well, Aunt Bachissia, and then? After Costantino came back?” asked Paolo.

“Well, Paolo Porru⁠—you see I go on addressing you familiarly, even though you will be a doctor soon; when you were a little chap I used to go so far as to give you a cuff now and then⁠—”

“I have no recollection of it, but go on with your story,” said the young man, while Grazia’s nostrils fairly dilated with anger.

“Well, as I said, Costantino disappeared for three years, and⁠—”

“He was working in the mines, all right; then he came back and was reconciled to his uncle. What then?”

“He met my Giovanna here, and they fell in love with each other; but the uncle made objections because my girl was poor. Then they began to hate one another worse than ever. Costantino was working for the Vulture, and he would never let him have a centime. So, then, one day Costantino came to me and said: ‘I’m a poor man; I haven’t got any money to buy trinkets for the bride, or to provide a feast and all the rest for a Christian wedding; and you are poor, too. Now then, suppose we do this way: we will have the civil ceremony, and all live and work together; then, when we have saved enough, we will be married by God. A great many do it that way, why shouldn’t we?’ So we did; we had the civil ceremony very quietly, and afterwards we all lived together and were happy enough. But the Vulture was furious; he used to come and yell things at us even in our own street, and he tried to interfere with Costantino in every way he could. But we just kept on working. So at last, when the vintage was over last autumn, we began preparing the sweets and things for the wedding, and then Basile Ledda was found dead one day, murdered in his own house! The evening before, Costantino had been seen going in there; what he went for was to tell his uncle about the wedding, and to try to make his peace with him. Ah, poor boy! he would not run off and hide somewhere as I begged and implored him to do, so of course they arrested him.”

“He would not go because he was innocent, mamma, my⁠—”

“There you go, you simpleton, beginning to cry again! If you don’t stop, I’ll not say another word, so there! Well, then, Costantino was arrested, and now the trial is just over, and the public prosecutor has asked to have him sent to the galleys; but he’s a dog, that public prosecutor! They have evidence, to be sure; Costantino was seen on the night of the murder entering his uncle’s house, where he lived all by himself, like the wild beast that he was; and then their relations in the past⁠—all true enough, but there are no proofs. Costantino was very contradictory, and full of remorse about something; he kept repeating: ‘It is the mortal sin’; for you must know that he is a good Christian, and he thinks that this misfortune has been sent as a punishment because he and Giovanna lived together before they were married by religious ceremony.”

“But tell me one thing⁠—”

“Just wait a moment. I should add that now they have been married by religious ceremony⁠—in prison! Yes, my dear, in prison; fancy what a horrid thing that was! Now don’t begin crying again, Giovanna; if you do, I’ll throw this salt-cellar at your head. There she is, the goose! Everyone told her not to do it. ‘Don’t be married now,’ they said. ‘If he’s found guilty and sentenced, you can marry some one else!’ ”

“How contemptible!” began the young woman, with flashing eyes, but the mother merely turned a cold, penetrating look upon her, and she broke off at once.

“Did I say so?” demanded the other. “No, it was other people, and they said it for your own good.”

“For my good, for my good,” moaned Giovanna, burying her face in her hands; “there is no more good for me, ever again, ever again!”

“Have you children?” asked Paolo.

“Yes, one, a boy. If it were not for him⁠—alas, alas! if Costantino is sentenced, and there were no child⁠—then, oh, misery, misery⁠—!” And she seized her hair by the roots, and began to drag her head violently from side to side, like an insane person.

“You mean that you would kill yourself, my beloved?” asked Aunt Bachissia ironically.

To the student there was something artificial in the action; it reminded him of a famous actress whom he had once seen in a French comedy, and this open display of grief only aroused his cynicism.

“After all,” said he, “the new divorce law has been approved, and any woman whose husband is serving a sentence can regain her freedom.”

Giovanna did not appear so much as to take in what he said, and continued to rock her head from side to side. Aunt Porredda, however, spoke up in a decided tone: “What an idea! as though anyone but God could undo a marriage!”

“Yes, I read about that in the papers,” said Uncle Efes Maria jocularly. “Those are the divorces they get on the Continent, where men and women marry over and over again without troubling themselves about priests, or magistrates either, for that matter, but here!⁠—shame!”

“No, Daddy Porru, that’s not on the Continent, it’s in Turkey,” said Grazia.

“Here too, here too,” said Aunt Bachissia, who had eagerly followed every word.

As soon as supper was over the two Eras went off to see their lawyer.

“What room have you given them?” asked Paolo. “The ‘strangers’ room’?”

“Why, of course; why?”

“Because I really thought I should like to sleep there myself; it is suffocating down here. What better ‘stranger’ could there be than I?”

“Be patient just till tomorrow, my boy. Remember these are poor guests.”

“O Lord! what barbarous customs! Will there ever be an end to them?” he exclaimed impatiently.

“That’s just what I should like to know,” said Uncle Efes Maria. “These women are draining my pockets. Well, what do you think of the new Ministry?”

“I don’t think anything of it at all!” laughed the student, recalling a character in the Dame chez Maxim, a favourite play at the Manzoni Theatre, which he frequented. Then he sauntered off to look at some books he had left on a shelf at the other end of the room. Minnia and the boy had run out into the courtyard; Grazia, seated at the table, with both cheeks resting on her closed fists, was still gazing at her uncle. He turned towards her:

“You read novels, don’t you?”

“I? No,” she answered, turning red.

“Well, I only wanted to say that if I ever catch you reading certain books⁠—I’ll rap you over the head with them.”

Her under-lip began to tremble, and, not to let him see her cry, she jumped up and ran out. In the courtyard she found the two children still quarrelling over the purse with the picture of the Pope. “As for stealing,” the boy was saying, “you had better keep quiet about that; you, and she there⁠—the bean-pole⁠—you two sold some wine today, and kept the money!”

“Oh, what a lie!” cried Grazia, falling upon him and dealing him a blow, but crying herself bitterly all the while.

The courtyard was filled with the chirping of the crickets and the noise of the horses’ hoofs; and the warm, starlit air was heavy with the scent of the hay.

“You must not be hard on her, she is a poor orphan,” said Aunt Porredda, speaking in Grazia’s behalf (they were the three children of an older son of the Porrus’, a well-to-do shepherd whose wife had died the year before). “And why not let her read if she wants to?”

“Yes, yes, let her read by all means,” said Uncle Efes Maria pompously. “Ah! if they had only allowed me to read when I was young⁠—I would have been an astronomer, as learned as a priest!” To Uncle Efes Maria an astronomer represented the height of learning and cultivation⁠—a philosopher, as it were.

“Have you seen the Pope, my son?” asked Aunt Porredda, from an association of ideas.

“No.”

“What! You have never seen the Pope?”

“Oh! what do you expect? The Pope is kept shut up in a box; if you want to see him, you’ve got to pay well for it.”

“Oh, go along!” said she. “You are an infidel,” and, going out to where the children were still fighting, she made a rapid descent upon them, separated the belligerents, and sent each flying in a different direction. “On my word!” she cried, “you are just like so many cocks. The Lord have mercy on me! Here they are, the chicken-cocks! Bad children, every one of you, bad, bad children!”

And the lamentations of the youngsters arose and mingled with the noises of the summer evening.