Tales of My Native Town

by Gabriele D'Annunzio

XII

Thus to the daughter of Luca was opened the true road to Paradise. The passing of time was not marked by her except in ecclesiastical occurrences. When the river re-entered its channel, there issued in consecutive order for many days processions throughout the cities and country. She followed all of them, together with the people, singing the Te Deum. The vineyards everywhere had been devastated; the earth was soft and the air pregnant with white vapours, singularly luminous, like those rising from the swamps in spring.

Then came the feast of All Saints; then the solemnity for the dead. A great number of masses were celebrated for the assistance of the victims of the flood. At Christmas Anna wished to make a manger; she bought a Christ-child, Mary, Saint Joseph, an ox and an ass, wise men, and shepherds, all made of wax. Accompanied by the daughter of the sacristan she went to the ditches of the Salaria road to search for moss. Under the glassy serenity of the fields, the lands were covered with lime, the factory of Albarosa appeared on the hill among the olives, and no voice disturbed the silence. Anna, as she discovered the moss, bent and with a knife cut the clod. On contact with the cold verdure her hands became violet coloured. From time to time, at the sight of a clod greener than the others, there escaped from her an exclamation of contentment. When her basket was full, she sat down upon the edge of the ditch with the girl. She raised her eyes thoughtfully and slowly to the olive-orchard, and they rested upon the white wall of the factory that resembled a cloisteral edifice. Then she bowed her head, tormented by her thoughts. Later she turned suddenly to her companion—”Had she never seen the olives crushed!” She began to picture the work of the crushing with voluble speech; and, as she spoke, little by little arose in her mind other recollections than those she was describing, and they showed themselves in her voice by a slight trembling.

That was the last weakness. In April of 1858, shortly after Ascension Day, she fell sick. She remained in bed almost a month, tormented by a pulmonary inflammation. Donna Cristina came morning and evening to her room to visit her. An aged maid servant who made public profession of assisting the sick gave her medicines to her. Then the turtle cheered the days of her convalescence. And as the animal was emaciated from fasting, and was nothing but skin, Anna, seeing him so lean, and perceiving herself so debilitated, felt that secret satisfaction that we experience when we suffer the same pain as a beloved one. A mild tepidity arose from the tiles covered with lichens, in the court the cocks crew, and one morning two swallows entered suddenly, flapped their wings about the room, and fled away again.

When Anna returned for the first time to the church, after her recovery, it was the festival of roses. On entering she breathed in greedily the perfume of incense. She walked softly along the nave, in order to find the spot where she had been accustomed to kneel, and she felt herself seized with a sudden joy when finally she discovered between the mortuary stories that one which bore in its centre an almost effaced bas-relief. She knelt upon it, and fell to praying. The people multiplied. At a certain point in the ceremony two acolytes descended from the choir with two silver basins full of roses, and commenced to scatter the flowers upon the heads of the prostrate ones, while the organ played a joyful hymn. Anna remained bent in a kind of ecstasy that gave her the blessedness of the mystic celebration and a vaguely voluptuous feeling of recovery. When several roses happened to fall upon her, she gave a long sigh. The poor woman had never before in her life experienced anything more sweet than that sigh of mystic delight and its subsequent languor.

The Rose Easter remained therefore Anna’s favourite festival and it returned periodically without any noteworthy episode. In 1860 the city was disturbed with serious agitations. One heard often in the night the roll of drums, the alarms of sentinels, the reports of muskets. In the house of Donna Cristina a more lively fervour for action manifested itself among the five suitors. Anna was not frightened, but lived in profound meditation, having neither a realisation of public events nor of domestic wants, fulfilling her duties with machine-like exactness.

In the month of September the fortress of Pescara was evacuated, the Bourbon militia dispersed, their arms and baggage thrown into the water of the river, while bands of citizens flocked through the streets with liberal acclamations of joy. Anna, when she heard that the Abbot Cennamele had fled precipitately, thought that the enemies of the Church of God had triumphed, and was greatly grieved at this.

After this her life unfolded in peace for a long time. The shell of the turtle increased in breadth and became more opaque; the tobacco plant sprang up annually, blossomed and fell; the wise swallows every autumn departed for the land of the Pharaohs. In 1865 the great contest of the suitors at length culminated in the victory of Don Fileno D’Amelio. The nuptials were celebrated in the month of March with banquets of solemn gaiety. There came to prepare the valuable dishes two Capuchin fathers, Fra Vittorio and Fra Mansueto.

They were the two who after the suppression of the order remained to guard the convent. Fra Vittorio was a sexagenary, reddened, strengthened and made happy by the juice of the grape. A little green band covered an infirmity of his right eye, while the left scintillated, full of a penetrating liveliness. He had exercised from his youth the art of drugs, and, as he had much skill in the kitchen, gentlemen were accustomed to summon him on occasions of festivity. At work he used rough gestures that revealed in the ample sleeves his hairy arms, his whole beard moved with every motion of his mouth and his voice broke into shrill cries. Fra Mansueto, on the contrary, was a lean old man with a great head and on his chin a goatee. He had two yellowish eyes full of submission. He cultivated the soil and going from door to door carried eatable herbs to the houses. In serving a company he took a modest position, limped on one foot, spoke in the soft idiomatic patois of Ortona, and, perhaps in memory of the legend of Saint Thomas, exclaimed, “For the Turks!” every little while stroking his polished head with his hand.

Anna attended to the placing of the plates, the kitchen ware and the coppers. It seemed to her now that the kitchen had assumed a kind of secret solemnity through the presence of the brothers. She remained to watch attentively all of the acts of Fra Vittorio, seized with that trepidation that all simple people feel in the presence of men gifted with some superior virtue. She admired especially the infallible gesture with which the great Capuchin scattered upon the dishes certain secret drugs of his, certain particular aromas known only to him. But the humility, the mildness, the modest jokes of Fra Mansueto little by little made a conquest of her. And the bonds of a common country and the still stronger ones of a common dialect cemented their friendship.

As they conversed, recollections of the past germinated in their speech. Fra Mansueto had known Luca Minella and he was in the basilica when the death of Francesca Nobile had happened among the pilgrims. “For the Turks!” He had even helped to carry the corpse up to the house at the Porta-Caldara, and he remembered that the dead woman wore a waist of yellow silk and many chains of gold....

Anna grew sad. In her memory this matter up to that moment had remained confused, vague, almost uncertain, dimmed by the very long inert stupor that had followed her first paroxysms of epilepsy. But when Fra Mansueto said that her mother was in Paradise because those who die in the cause of religion dwell among the saints, Anna experienced an unspeakable sweetness and felt suddenly surge up in her soul an immense adoration for the sanctity of her mother.

Then, remembering the places of her native country, she began to discourse minutely on the Church of the Apostle, mentioning the shapes of the altars, the position of the Chapels, the number of the ornaments, the shape of the cupola, the positions of the images, the divisions of the pavement and the colours of the windows. Fra Mansueto followed her with benignity; and, since he had been in Ortona several months before, recounted the new things seen there. The Archbishop of Orsogna had given the Church a precious vase of gold with settings of precious stones. The Confraternity of the Holy Sacrament had renovated all the wood and leather of the stoles. Donna Blandina Onofrii had furnished an entire change of apparel, consisting in Dalmatian chasubles, stoles, sacerdotal cloaks and surplices.

Anna listened greedily, and the desire to see these new things and to see again the old ones began to torment her. When the Capuchin was silent she turned to him with an air half of pleasure, half of timidity. The May feast was drawing near. Should they go?