You’ll see, when the olive harvest comes they’ll tell you to wait till Christmas, and then till Easter. This is how families meet their downfall. But I’ve earned my property with the sweat of my brow. Now one of the family is in heaven, the other wants to get his hands on la Zuppidda; they can’t keep that shattered boat afloat, yet they’re trying to marry off the girl. All they think about is marriage; it’s an obsession, like with my niece la Vespa. Now that Mena is getting married, you’ll see how comare Mosca will come back, to grab la Vespa’s smallholding.’

Finally they blamed the lawyer, who persisted in writing endless letters before sending in the bailiff.

‘It must have been padron ’Ntoni who told him to go slow,’ added Piedipapera; ‘you can buy ten rotoli of lawyers with one rotolo of fish.’

This time he had broken in earnest with the Malavoglia, because la Zuppidda had gone to remove comare Grazia’s washing from the side of the wash place and had put her own there; the sort of offensive behaviour which makes your blood boil; la Zuppidda dared to do this because she was backed up by that goon ’Ntoni Malavoglia, who was a noted bully. A pack of swine, those Malavoglia, and she didn’t want even a distant glimpse of those mugs of theirs that that other mug don Giammaria had christened with his damned holy water.

Then the red tape began to fly, and Piedipapera said that the lawyer couldn’t have been sufficiently satisfied with padron ’Ntoni’s present to allow himself to be bought, and that proved what a stingy band they were, and whether you could believe them when they promised to pay. Padron ’Ntoni started rushing to the town clerk again and to Scipioni the lawyer; but the lawyer just laughed in his face, and told him that ‘fools should stay at home,’ that he shouldn’t allow his daughter-in-law to ‘set her mind to it’ and that he had made his bed and now he would have to lie on it. ‘The stumbler may not call for help.’

‘Now you listen to me,’ don Silvestro put it to him. ‘You’re better off giving him the house, otherwise you’ll lose the Provvidenza too in expenses, let alone your peace of mind; and you’ll waste your earning time too, coming and going to that lawyer.’

‘If you hand over the house without a fuss,’ Piedipapera said to him, ‘we’d leave you the Provvidenza, so you’ll always be able to earn your bread, and you’ll be self-employed still, and there won’t be any bailiffs with documents.’

Compare Tino hadn’t an ounce of gall in him, and he spoke to padron ’Ntoni as if it were nothing to do with him, putting his arm around his neck, and saying: ‘Look, my friend, I feel worse about this than you do, throwing you out of your own house, but what can I do? I’m just a poor devil; I took those five hundred lire from my own mouth, and charity begins at home. In all conscience, if I were rich like zio Crocifisso I wouldn’t so much as mention it.’

The poor man didn’t have the courage to tell his daughter-in-law that they should go without a struggle, after they had been there so long, and it was almost as if they were having to leave the village, and go into exile, or were like those who had left and had been supposed to come back, but then hadn’t, and Luca’s bed was still there, and the nail where Bastianazzo used to hang up his jacket. But in the end they had to take all those poor household belongings down from their places and go off with them, and each one left a mark where it had been, and the house seemed a different place, without them. They took their things away at night, to the little house which they had rented from the butcher, as though the whole village didn’t know that the house by the medlar tree belonged to Piedipapera now, and that they had had to leave it; but at least no one saw them with their belongings in their arms.

When the old man pulled out a nail, or took a small table from its usual position in the corner, he gave a little shake of the head. Then they all sat down on the mattresses which were piled up in the middle of the room, to rest a little and they looked around to see if they had forgotten anything; but padron ’Ntoni soon got up and went into the courtyard, into the open air.

But there was straw scattered everywhere there too, and broken pieces of pot, shattered lobster pots and, in one corner, the medlar tree, and the vine over the door, all tendrils. ‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘Let’s go, children. What difference does it make whether it’s to-day or tomorrow! …’ and still he didn’t move.

Maruzza was looking at the courtyard door through which Luca and Bastianazzo had gone, and the little street down which her son had walked with his trousers tucked in, while it was raining, and then vanished from sight under his oilskin. And Alfio Mosca’s window was closed too, and the vine was hanging from the courtyard wall, tugged at by every idle passer-by. Everyone had something to look at in that house, and as he was leaving the old man put a surreptitious hand on the battered door which, as zio Crocifisso had said, needed a couple of nails and a solid bit of wood.

Zio Crocifisso too had gone to have a look, along with Piedipapera, and they were talking out loud in the empty rooms, so that the words could be heard as though they were in church. Compare Tino had been unable to survive by living on thin air until that day, and had had to sell everything back to zio Crocifisso, to get his money back.

‘What can I do, compare Malavoglia?’ he said to him, putting his arms round his neck. ‘You know I’m a poor devil, and five hundred lire means something to me. If you’d been rich I would have sold it to you.’ But padron ’Ntoni couldn’t bear going round the house like that, with Piedipapera’s arm around his neck. Now zio Crocifisso had come with the carpenter and builder, and all kinds of people who were sauntering hither and thither through the rooms as though they were in the square, and saying: ‘You could do with some tiles here, a new beam here, the shutter needs mending here,’ as though they owned the place; and they also said that the house should be whitewashed, and then it would look like another house altogether.

Zio Crocifisso was scuffling through the straw and broken shards, and even picked up a piece of what had been Bastianazzo’s hat, and threw it into the vegetable patch, where it might serve as manure. Meanwhile the medlar tree still rustled gently, and the garlands of daisies, shrivelled by now, were still hanging at the door and windows, as they had been hung on Ascension Day.

La Vespa had come to see too, with her knitting at the neck of her dress, and was poking through everything, now that it all belonged to her uncle. ‘Blood is thicker than water,’ she said loudly, so that even the deaf man might hear. ‘I care about my smallholding.’ Zio Crocifisso let her speak on and didn’t seem to hear, now that compare Alfio’s door was there for all to see, with its great bolt. ‘Now that compare Alfio’s door is bolted, you can set your heart at rest, and I’m not thinking of him, as you can imagine,’ said la Vespa into zio Crocifisso’s ear.

‘My heart is at rest,’ he answered. ‘Don’t you worry.’

From then onwards the Malavoglia didn’t dare show themselves in the streets or in church on Sundays, and they went all the way to Aci Castello for mass, and no one greeted them any more, not even padron Cipolla who went round saying: ‘Padron ’Ntoni shouldn’t have played that trick on me. It’s tantamount to deceiving your neighbour, if they involved his daughter-in-law’s affairs in the lupin debt.’

‘Just what my wife says,’ added mastro Zuppiddo. ‘She says that now even dogs avoid the Malavoglia.’

But that bird brain Brasi stamped his feet and wanted Mena, whom he had been promised, like a child at the toy stand in a fair.

‘Do you think I stole your property, you blockhead’, his father said to him, ‘to be willing to throw in your lot with someone who has nothing?’

They had even taken away Brasi’s new suit, and he gave vent to his feelings by going and digging out lizards on the sciara, or sitting astride the wall at the wash place, and swore not to lift a finger again, not even if they killed him, now that they wouldn’t give him his wife, and they had even taken away his wedding suit; luckily Mena couldn’t see him dressed as he was, because the Malavoglia too were always behind closed doors, poor things, in the little house belonging to the butcher which they had rented, in the strada del Nero, near the Zuppiddos, and if he chanced to see them in the distance, Brasi ran to hide behind the wall, or among the prickly pears.

Cousin Anna, who saw everything from the beach where she would lay out cloth, said to comare Grazia: ‘Now that poor St Agatha will stay at home, like a pot hanging on the wall, exactly like my daughters who have no dowry.’

‘Poor thing,’ replied comare Grazia, ‘and they had even parted her hair.’

But Mena was quite happy, and she had put the little silver sword back into her hair of her own accord, without saying anything.