Tales of My Native Town

by Gabriele D'Annunzio

I

When the first confused clamour of the rebellion reached Don Filippo Cassaura, he suddenly opened his eyelids, that weighed heavily upon his eyes, inflamed around the upturned lids, like those of pirates who sail through stormy seas.

“Did you hear?” he asked of Mazzagrogna, who was standing nearby, while the trembling of his voice betrayed his inward fear.

The majordomo answered, smiling, “Do not be afraid, Your Excellency. Today is St. Peter’s day. The mowers are singing.”

The old man remained listening, leaning on his elbow and looking over the balcony. The hot south wind was fluttering the curtains. The swallows, in flocks, were darting back and forth as rapidly as arrows through the burning air. All the roofs of the houses below glared with reddish and greyish tints. Beyond the roofs was extended the vast, rich country, gold in colour, like ripened wheat.

Again the old man asked, “But Giovanni, have you heard?”

And indeed, clamours, which did not seem to indicate joy, reached their ears. The wind, rendering them louder at intervals, pushing them and intermingling with its whistling noise, made them appear still more strange.

“Do not mind that, Your Excellency,” answered Mazzagrogna. “Your ears deceive you.”

“Keep quiet.” And he arose to go towards one of the balconies.

He was a thick-set man, bow-legged, with enormous hands, covered with hair on the backs like a beast. His eyes were oblique and white, like those of the Albinos. His face was covered with freckles. A few red hairs straggled upon his temples and the bald top of his head was flecked with dark projections in the shape of chestnuts.

He remained standing for a while, between the two curtains, inflated like sails, in order to watch the plain beneath. Thick clouds of dust, rising from the road of the Fara, as after the passing of immense flocks of sheep, were swept by the wind and grew into shapes of cyclones. From time to time these whirling clouds caused whistling sounds, as if they encompassed armed people.

“Well?” asked Don Filippo, uneasily.

“Nothing,” repeated Mazzagrogna, but his brows were contracted.

Again the impetuous rush of wind brought a tumult of distant cries.

One of the curtains, blown by the wind, began to flutter and wave in the air like an inflated flag. A door was suddenly shut with violence and noise, the glass panel trembled from the shock. The papers, accumulated upon the table, were scattered around the room.

“Do close it! Do close it!” cried the old man, with emotional terror.

“Where is my son?”

He was lying upon the bed, suffocated by his fleshiness, and unable to rise, as all the lower part of his body was deadened by paralysis. A continuous paralytic tremor agitated his muscles. His hands, lying on the bed sheets, were contorted, like the roots of old olive trees. A copious perspiration dripped from his forehead and from his bald head, and dropped from his large face, which had a pinkish, faded colour, like the gall of oxen.

“Heavens!” murmured Mazzagrogna, between his teeth, as he closed the shutters vehemently. “They are in earnest!”

One could now perceive upon this road of Fara, near the first house, a multitude of men, excited and wavering, like the overflow of rivulets, which indicated a still greater multitude of people, invisible, hidden by the rows of roofs and by the oak trees of San Pio. The auxiliary legion of the country had met the one of the rebellion. Little by little the crowd would diminish, entering the roads of the country and disappearing like an army of ants through the labyrinth of the ant hill.

The suffocated cries, echoing from house to house, reached them now, like a continuous but indistinct rumbling. At moments there was silence and then you could hear the great fluttering of the ash trees in front of the palace, which seemed as if already abandoned.

“My son! Where is he?” again asked the old man, in a quivering, squeaking voice. “Call him! I wish to see him.”

He trembled upon his bed, not only because he was a paralytic, but also because of fear.

At the time of the first seditious movement of the day before, at the cries of about a hundred youths, who had come under the balcony to shout against the latest extortions of the Duke of Ofena, he had been overcome by such a foolish fright, that he had wept like a little girl, and had spent the night invoking the Saints of Paradise. The thought of death and of his danger gave rise to an indescribable terror in that paralytic old man, already half dead, in whom the last breaths of life were so painful. He did not wish to die.

“Luigi! Luigi!” he began to cry in his anguish.

All the place was filled with the sharp rattling of the window glasses, caused by the rush of the wind. From time to time one could hear the banging of a door, and the sound of precipitate steps and sharp cries.

“Luigi!”