‘The world is full of sorrows, and some have more than others, like everything else,’ and the people who were outside in the courtyard were looking at the sky, because another drop of rain wouldn’t have come amiss. Padron Cipolla personally knew why it never rained now as it used to do. ‘It never rains nowadays because they’ve put up that dratted telegraph wire, which attracts all the rain and draws it away.’ Then compare Mangiacarrubbe and Tino Piedipapera stood open-mouthed, because indeed there were telegraph posts right there on the Trezza road; but as don Silvestro began his farmyard cackling, padron Cipolla got up from the wall in a fury, and expressed irritation with those ignorant people whose ears were as long as a donkey’s. Didn’t they know that the telegraph carried news from one place to the next; it did this because there was a sort of juice inside the wire like the sap in a vine tendril, and in the same way it drew water from the clouds and carried it away, to where it was needed more; they could go and ask the chemist, he had said so; and this was why they had passed a law saying that anyone breaking a telegraph wire should go to prison. Then don Silvestro did not know what more to say, and he held his tongue.
‘Holy saints! We ought to cut down all those telegraph poles and throw them on the fire,’ began compare Zuppiddo, but no one paid him any attention, and they peered into the vegetable patch, to change the subject.
‘A fine bit of land,’ said compare Mangiacarrubbe; ‘when it’s properly tended, it provides vegetables for soup the whole year round.’
The Malavoglia’s house had always been one of the most important in Trezza; but now, after the death of Bastianazzo, and with ’Ntoni doing his soldiering, and Mena to be married off, it was letting in water from all sides.
Anyhow, what could the house be worth? Everyone craned their necks to look over the wall of the vegetable patch and gave an appraising look, to reckon it up at a glance. Don Silvestro knew better than anyone else how things stood, because he had the deeds, in the office in Aci Castello.
‘Do you want to bet twelve tari that all that glitters is not gold?’ he said; and he showed everyone a new five lire piece.
He knew that the house had a rateable value of five tari a year. Then they all began to tot up how much the house could be sold for, with the vegetable patch and everything.
‘Neither the house nor the boat can be sold, because they are part of Maruzza’s dowry,’ said somebody else, and everyone got so worked up that they could be heard in the room where they were mourning the dead man. ‘Quite so,’ said don Silvestro, delivering his bombshell. ‘It’s part of the dowry.’
Padron Cipolla, who had exchanged the odd word with padron ’Ntoni about marrying Mena to his son Brasi, shook his head and held his peace.
‘So,’ continued compare Turi, ‘the real victim is zio Crofifisso, who won’t get the credit on his lupins.’
They all turned towards Dumb bell, who had come along too, out of tact, and was sitting quietly in a corner, to hear what they were saying, with his mouth open and his nose in the air, so that he seemed to be counting how many tiles and rafters there were on the roof, as though wanting to assess the value of the house. The more curious craned their necks from the doorway, and winked at one another glancing in his direction. ‘He looks like the bailiff making a distraint,’ they sniggered.
The neighbours who knew about the discussions between padron ’Ntoni and compare Cipolla said that now comare Maruzza would have to be helped over her grief, and conclude that marriage of Mena’s. But at that moment Maruzza had quite other matters on her mind, poor creature.
Padron Cipolla turned his back on them coldly without a word; and after everyone had gone away, the Malavoglia were left alone in the courtyard. ‘Now,’ said padron ’Ntoni, ‘we are ruined, and it is as well for Bastianazzo that he knows nothing of it.’
At those words first Maruzza, and then all the others started crying again, and the children, seeing the grown ups cry, started to wail too, although their father had been dead for three days. The old man wandered hither and thither, not knowing what he was doing; but Maruzza did not stir from the foot of the bed, as though she had nothing more to do. When she did utter a word, she would repeat it, gazing fixedly, and it seemed as though she had nothing else in her mind at all. ‘Now there’s nothing more for me to do!’
‘No!’ replied padron ’Ntoni, ‘that’s not so, we must pay the debt to zio Crocifisso, so that there is no excuse for people to say that when a decent man becomes poor, he becomes a rogue.’
And the thought of the lupins thrust the thorn of Bastianazzo deeper into his heart. The medlar tree loosened its grip on its withered leaves, and the wind drove them around the courtyard.
‘He went because I sent him,’ padron ’Ntoni would say over and over, ‘like the wind sending those leaves blowing over the ground, and if I’d told him to throw himself off the rocks with a stone round his neck, he would have done so without a word. At least he died when the house and the medlar tree were still his, down to the last leaf; and I, an old man, am still here. ‘Long life knows long misery.’ ’
Maruzza said nothing, but she had a single thought fixed in her head, which kept hammering at her and gnawing at her heart, and that was to know what had happened on the fateful night, because if she closed her eyes she seemed still to see the Provvidenza down there towards the Capo dei Mulini, where the sea was glassy and dark blue and dotted with boats, which looked like so many gulls in the sun, and you could count them one by one, zio Crocifisso’s, compare Barabba’s, the Concetta belonging to zio Cola, and padron Fortunato’s fishing boat, a sight to make the heart ache. And you could hear mastro Turi singing like a mad thing with those ox’s lungs of his, while thumping away with his caulker’s mallet, and there was a smell of tar coming from the beach, and the linen that cousin Anna was beating on the stones of the wash place, and you could even hear Mena crying quietly away in the kitchen.
‘Poor thing,’ murmured her grandfather, ‘the house has fallen about your ears too, and compare Fortunato went off so coldly, without saying a word.’
And one by one he touched the implements which were lying in a heap in the corner, with shaking hands, as old people do; and seeing Luca dressed in his father’s jacket which they had put on him, and which came down to his ankles, he said to him: ‘That will keep you warm, when you go to work; because now we must all help each other to pay off the lupin debt.’
Maruzza stopped her ears with her hands so as not to hear la Locca who was perched on the balcony, outside the door, shrieking from dawn to dusk, with that cracked voice of hers, demanding that they give her son back, and she wouldn’t listen to reason.
‘She does that because she’s hungry,’ said cousin Anna at last; ‘now zio Crocifisso has it in for all of them because of the lupin deal, and he won’t give her anything. I’ll go and take her something now, and then she’ll go away.’
Cousin Anna, poor creature, had left her linen and the girls to come and give comare Maruzza a hand — because it was as though Maruzza were ill, and if they had left her to her own devices she wouldn’t even have remembered to light the fire, and put on the pot, and they would all have died of hunger. ‘Neighbours must be like the tiles on a roof, and send the water over one from the other.’ Meanwhile those children’s lips were pale with hunger. Nunziata helped too, and Alessi, his face grubby from all the crying that he had done, seeing his mother weep, kept an eye on the little ones, so that they shouldn’t always be under people’s feet, like a brood of chicks, because Nunziata wanted to have her hands free.
‘You know your business,’ cousin Anna said to her; ‘and you’ll have your dowry right there in your own hands, when you’re grown up.’
Mena had no idea that they wanted to marry her to padron Cipolla’s Brasi to help her mother get over her grief, and the first person to mention it to her, some time later, was compare Alfio Mosca, by the gate to the vegetable patch, when he was coming back from Aci Castello with his donkey cart. Mena said that it just wasn’t true; but she was embarrassed, and while he was explaining how and when he had heard this news from la Vespa, at zio Crocifisso’s house, she suddenly became quite red in the face.
Compare Mosca too looked distraught, and seeing the girl like that, with that black handkerchief round her neck, he started to fiddle with the buttons on his jerkin, and would have paid good money to be transported elsewhere. ‘Listen, it’s no fault of mine, I heard in in Dumb bell’s courtyard, while I was chopping up the carob tree that was brought down in the storm on St. Clare’s day, do you remember? Now zio Crocifisso gets me to do his odd jobs for him, because he doesn’t want any more to do with la Locca’s son, after the other brother got involved in the wretched lupin business.’ Mena had her hand on the gate latch but she couldn’t bring herself to open it. ‘And anyhow if it wasn’t true, why have you gone so red?’ She couldn’t say, in all conscience, and kept fiddling with the latch. She knew the fellow by sight only, that was all, Alfio reeled off a long list of Brasi Cipolla’s possessions; after compare Naso the butcher, he passed for the village’s biggest catch, and the girls feasted their eyes on him. Mena stood there listening wide-eyed, and then marched off abruptly with a firm goodbye, and went into the vegetable patch. Alfio, furious, ran off to complain to la Vespa who had fed him such lies, just to make him quarrel with people.
‘It was zio Crocifisso who told me,’ replied la Vespa.
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