When I’ve put aside a bit of money I’ll buy a mule and be able to be a real carter, like compare Cinghialenta.’
The girl was all ears for what compare Alfio was saying, and meanwhile the grey olive tree was rustling as if it were raining and scattering the road with little dry crumpled leaves. ‘Now winter is coming, and I shan’t be able to do that again before the summer,’ observed compare Alfio. Mena kept her eyes on the shadows of the clouds which were running over the fields and scattering like the leaves of the grey olive tree; that was how the thoughts ran in her head, and she said to him: ‘compare Alfio, did you know, that story about padron Fortunato Cipolla’s son is quite untrue, because first we have to pay off the debt for the lupins?’
‘I’m pleased about that,’ replied Mosca, ‘because that way you won’t be leaving the neighbourhood.’
‘Soon ’Ntoni will be back from military service, and we’ll all work to pay off the debt, with grandfather and all the others. Mother has taken in cloth to weave for the Signora.’
‘Being a chemist is no bad thing either,’ observed Mosca.
At that point comare Venera Zuppidda appeared in the lane, spindle in hand. ‘Oh goodness,’ exclaimed Mena, ‘people are coming,’ and she rushed inside.
Alfio whipped the donkey, and wanted to be off too. ‘Oh compare Alfio, what’s the hurry?’ asked la Zuppidda; ‘I wanted to ask you whether the wine you’re delivering to Santuzza is from the same cask as last week’s.’
‘I don’t know; they give me the wine in barrels.’
‘Hers was fit for making salads,’ replied Zuppidda, ‘real poison; that’s how Santuzza got rich, and to cheat the world at large she’s hung the scapular of the Daughter of Mary from her chest! That scapular covers a multitude of sins. In this day and age, that’s the way you have to behave. If you don’t, you just move crabwise, like the Malavoglia. They’ve pulled up the Provvidenza, have you heard?’
‘No, I haven’t been around, but comare Mena didn’t know anything about it.’
‘They brought the news just now, and padron ’Ntoni ran straight to the Rotolo, to see her being towed towards the village, and it was as though the old man had new legs. Now they’ve got the Provvidenza, the Malavoglia will get their feet again, and Mena will be marriageable once more.’
Alfio said nothing, because Zuppidda was staring at him with her little yellow eyes, and he said that he was in a hurry to go and deliver the wine to Santuzza. ‘He won’t say anything to me,’ grumbled Zuppidda. ‘As if I hadn’t seen them with my own eyes. They’re trying to hide the sun with a net.’
They had towed the Provvidenza to shore all shattered, just as they had found her beyond the Capo dei Mulini, with her nose amid the rocks, and her back in the air. The whole village, men and women, had immediately run to the shore, and padron ’Ntoni, mingling with the crowd, was there as well, just like the other lookers-on. Some even gave a kick at the Provvidenza’s belly, and the poor old man felt that kick as though it were to his own stomach. ‘Providential for you, what?’ don Franco said to him, having come down in shirt sleeves, with his awful old hat on his head and pipe in his mouth, to have a look along with the rest.
‘Now all she’s good for is burning,’ concluded padron Fortunato Cipolla; and compare Mangiacarrubbe, who was in the trade, volunteered the information that the boat had sunk all at once, and without those in her having been able to say so much as ‘Christ, help me!’ because the sea had swept away sans, yards, oars and everything; and it had not left a single wooden peg holding firm.
‘This was where father sat, where there’s the new rowlock,’ said Luca, who had climbed on to the edge, ‘and the lupins were under there.’
But there was not a single lupin left, for the sea had washed everything out, swept everything clean. That was why Maruzza had not even left the house, and she never wanted to see the Provvidenza again as long as she lived.
‘Her belly is sound, and something can still be done with her,’ mastro Zuppiddo the caulker pronounced finally, and he too gave her a few kicks with his great feet. ‘A few planks, and I could have her back at sea for you. She’ll never be a boat for strong tides, a sideways wave would knock the bottom out of her like a rotten barrel. But she could still serve for longshore fishing, in good weather.’ Padron Cipolla, compare Mangiacarrubbe and compare Cola stood listening without saying a word.
‘Yes,’ said padron Fortunato gravely at last.
‘Rather than throw her on the fire…’
‘I’m delighted,’ said zio Crocifisso who was there taking a look too, with his hands behind his back. ‘We’re good Christians, and must rejoice in our neighbours’ good fortune; the proverb says ‘it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good,’.
The Malavoglia children had settled in the Provvidenza, along with the other village children who wanted to climb in too.
‘When we’ve patched up the Provvidenza good and proper,’ said Alessi,’she’ll be just like zio Cola’s Concetta;’ and they too puffed and panted, pushing and pulling the boat to mastro Zuppiddo’s door, where there were big stones to hold the boats, and the tub for the tar, and a pile of ribs and planking leaning against the door.
Alessi was for ever scuffling with the boys who wanted to climb on to the boat and help to blow into the fire under the tar cauldron, and when they gave him a good thrashing he would threaten, snivelling the while:
‘Soon my brother ’Ntoni will be back from military service.’
And indeed ’Ntoni had managed to obtain his discharge, although don Silvestro the town clerk had assured them all that if he stayed on for another six months, his brother Luca would be exempted from conscription. But ’Ntoni didn’t want to stay on even another week now that his father was dead; Luca would have done the same, and he had had to weep over his misfortune alone, when they brought him the news about his father, and he would have liked to drop everything then and there, if it hadn’t been for those brutes of superiors.
‘Myself,’ said Luca, ‘I’ll gladly go for a soldier instead of ’Ntoni. That way, when he comes back, you’ll be able to put the Provvidenza to sea again, and we won’t need to take on anyone extra.’
‘He’s a Malavoglia through and through,’ commented padron ’Ntoni exultantly. ‘Just like his father Bastianazzo, whose heart was as big as the sea, and as good as God’s mercy.’
One evening, after the boats had returned, padron ’Ntoni arrived at the house all breathless, and said: ‘The letter’s here; compare Cirino gave it to me just now, while I was taking the fish traps to the Pappafave.’ La Longa went white as a sheet, and they all rushed into the kitchen to see the letter.
’Ntoni arrived with his beret at a rakish angle and a shirt with the five pointed military star, and his mother couldn’t get enough of touching it, and trailed after him amidst all the friends and relatives while they were coming back from the station; and then the house and the courtyard were suddenly filled with people, just like when Bastianazzo had died, all that time back, and now no one thought about that any more. There are some things that only old people think about, as though it were yesterday — and indeed la Locca still hung around outside the Malavoglia’s house, leaning up against the wall, waiting for Menico, and she turned her head this way and that down the little road, at every step she heard.
’Ntoni had arrived on a holiday, and he went from door to door greeting friends and neighbours, so that everyone stood looking at him as he passed; his friends followed after him, and the girls came to stand at the window; but the only one not in evidence was comare Tudda’s Sara.
‘She’s gone to Ognina with her husand,’ Santuzza told him. ‘She married Menico Trinca, who was a widower with six children, but stinking rich. She married him within a month of his wife’s death, and the bed was still warm, God forgive them!’
‘A widower is like a person who goes off soldiering,’ added Santuzza. ‘A soldier’s love it does not last, at the beat of a drum his love is past.’ ’ And then, the Provvidenza had been lost.
Comare Venera, who had been at the station when padron ’Ntoni’s ’Ntoni had left, to see whether comare Tudda’s Sara had gone to say goodbye to him, because she had seen them talking over the vineyard wall, wanted to get a good look at ’Ntoni’s face when he received this news. But time had gone by for ’Ntoni too and, as they say, ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ And now ’Ntoni wore his beret at a rakish angle, like a real man of the world. ‘Compare Menico is aiming to die a cuckold,’ he said to comfort himself, and she liked that, the Mangiacarrubbe girl, who had called him ‘booby’, and now that she saw what kind of a booby he was, she would willingly have exchanged him for that good-for-nothing Rocco Spatu, whom she’d taken up with because there was no one else.
‘I don’t like those flippertigibbets who carry on with two or three boys at a time,’ said the Mangiacarrubbe girl, pulling the corners of her scarf over her chin and looking all demure.
‘If I loved someone, I wouldn’t exchange them for Victor Emanuel, or Garibaldi, you wait and see!’
‘I know who you’re interested in,’ said ’Ntoni with his hand on his hip.
‘Of no you don’t, compare ’Ntoni, and what you’ve heard is gossip.
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