THE SOUL OF A CITY
He hated Marco first of all because one day he undersold him in the Campo, put him to shame in open market. Figs were going cheap that October in spite of the waning year; but there was no earthly reason why he should give the English ladies more than four for two soldi. What were soldi to English people? The scratch of a flea! He would have given them a handful, taken as they came, for their piece of cinquanta, and reaped a tidy little profit for himself. Who would have been the worse? God knew he needed it. Mariola crumpled with the ague like a dried leaf, and that long girl of his growing up so fast, and still running wild with goat-herds and marble quarrymen. How could he send her to the nuns for a place unless he bought her some shoes and a rosary? And then that pig Marco—thieving old miser—peered forward with his mock candour and silver-rimmed goggles and offered ten for two soldi—ten! with the market price, Dio mio, at twelve! And fichi totati too! Do you wonder that the ladies in striped blankets gave the cheek to Maso Cecci and turned to Marco Zoppa?
That wasn't all, but it was an accentuation of a long series of spiteful injuries wrought him by the wrinkled old villain. Maso endured, hating the old man daily more and more; tried little tricks, little revenges, upon him, upset his baskets, hid his pipe; but they generally failed or recoiled with a nasty swiftness upon himself. He only got deeper and deeper into the bad odour of the neighbours who traded in the Piazza with fruit and indifferent photographs. Nothing went very well—thanks to that unspeakable old Marco! His girl grew longer and lazier and handsomer, with a shapelier bust and a pair of arms like that snaky Bacchante in the Opera. Maso had to quail more than he liked to admit before the proud stare of her eyes; and when she dropped the heavy lids upon them and sauntered away, arms akimbo under her shawl, he could only swear. And he always cursed Marco Zoppa who gave her chestnuts and sage counsel for nothing. God only knew what devilry he might be whispering to her in the shady corner where the sun never came and the grass sprouted between the flags—she leaning against the wall, looking down at her toes, and he peering keen-eyed into her face and muttering in his beard, sometimes laying an old brown hand on her shoulder—Lord! he did hate the man.
Then came the August races.
Maso had brought his Isotta into the city to see the fun and she had disappeared in the press just before the procession stayed by the Palazzo and the trumpets sounded for the first race. Maso shrugged his shoulders and cursed his luck, but didn't budge. The girl must look after herself. He was on the upper rim of the great fountain craning his neck over the pack of people: then he got a dig under the ribs enough to take the breath of an ox. It was the spout of old Marco's green umbrella. "Hey! silly fool," spluttered the old liar, "dost want that loose-legged slut of thine in trouble? I tell thee she's playing in a corner with Carlo Formaggia. Already he's pinched her cheek twice, and who knows what the end may be? Mud-coloured ass, wilt thou let thy child slip to the devil while thou standest gaping at a horse-race?" And this before all the neighbours! What to say to such a man? Maso babbled with rage; but he had to go, for Carlo Formaggia was well known. He had ruined more girls than enough; he was in league with vile houses, gambling dens, thieves' hells; Captain of an infamous secret society; the police were only waiting for a pretext to get him shipped off to the hulks. He must go of course. No thanks to Marco though: in fact he hated him worse than ever, partly because he had drawn all eyes and a fair share of sniggering and tongues thrust in the cheek upon his account; but most because he knew he had been trapped into losing a good place. For, as he mounted the narrow stair cut between old houses steep as rocks, he turned and saw Zoppa placidly smoking his pipe in the very spot he had held, squatted on the fountain-rim with his green umbrella between his knees. He was beaming through his spectacles, in a fatherly, indulgent sort of way, upon the shouting people; following the race too, like one who had paid for his box. Maso, when he heard the shatter of hoofs and the wild roar from thousands of throats down below him in the Campo, cursed old Zoppa with a grey face, and went muttering round the blinding sides of the Duomo to find his daughter. And when he did find her she was eating chestnuts at the open door of her aunt's shop in the Via Ghibellina! Bacchus! she was sick of all those folk in their festa clothes, was all the explanation she would give him from between fine white teeth all clogged with chestnut-meal. If he chose to dress his daughter like a beggar's brat he had better not take her to the races. Maso's feeling of relief at finding her alone and looking her usual sulky impassive self, gave way very rapidly to a sort of righteous wrath against his triumphant enemy. So, by foul slanders of honest God-fearing people that old Jew had not scrupled to rob him of his place! His place and his day's fun. By Heaven, he was tricked, duped by a scaly-eyed Jew pedlar, a vile old dog tottering down to Hell with lies in his beard. Well! he would put this morning's work down to his score; some day there would be a choice little reckoning for Ser Marco.
Maso, green with impotent fury, poured out his flood of gutturals upon his insouciante child. General reproaches were always a failure in cases of this sort. Some were sure to be wild guess-work and to drown the real ones: you could never tell when you had hit the mark. Had she not— she fourteen, too!—slid astride down the railing into the Campo and been caught up in the arms of Carlo Formaggia waiting and laughing at the bottom? Had she not lain a whole minute in his arms, panting? And then, Dio mio, with the sweat still on her forehead, she had slipped off to San Domenico and confessed to coughing at mass the Sunday before! Pest! he would give her the strap over her shoulders when he got her home. The long, brown girl leaned against the lintel kicking one heel idly against the other. She was smiling at him, smiling with her lazy, languid eyes and with her glistening teeth. Every now and then she inspected a chestnut critically—like an amateur!—and slipped it between her jaws. They split it like a banana. And then she squeezed the half skins and dropped the flour down her throat. She had a long sinewy throat, glossy as velvet, with its silvery lights and dusky brown shadows. Maso stood helpless before her as she drank down her flour; he chattered like a little passionate ape. At last he lifted up both hands in a sudden frenzy of despair and went away.
Of course the races were over. The sober streets swarmed with people in their holiday clothes. They all seemed laughing and smoking, and talking fluently of something ridiculous. Maso, egoist, knew it must be about him— or his daughter. Arms and heads went like mill-sails or tall trees in a gale of wind. Then, with a rattle and the sudden sliding of four hoofs on the flags, a cart would be in the thick of them, and the people scoured to the curb, still laughing, or spitting between the spasms of the interrupted jest. The boys tried to peep under the sagging hats of the girls, and the girls turned pettish shoulders to them and, as they turned, you caught the glint of fun in their great roes' eyes and saw the lips part before the quick breath. The streets were mere gullies, clefts hewn in zig-zag between grey houses that tottered up and up, and lay over them like cliffs. An ancient church with bleached stone saints under flowery canopies, a guttering candle before a tinsel shrine, and the hoarse babel of the streets—whips that cracked and spluttered like squibs, a swarming coloured stream of men and maids, once the twang of a chance mandoline. Siena was feasting, and the waiters furtively swept their foreheads with their coat-sleeves as they ran in and out of the trattorie.
In the trattoria of the Aquila Rossa old Marco Zoppa smoked his pipe and talked, between the spurts of smoke, to his neighbours. Fate brought him face to face with two enemies at once. Maso was battling his way up the street, white and strained as a grave-cloth; and Carlo Formaggia, the approved bravo—oiled and jaunty, with his brown felt fantastically rolled and stuck over one ear, with a long cigar which he alternately gnawed and sucked, Carlo the broad-chested, of the seared, evil face, came down with the stream on the arms of two other gilded youths. They met before the cafe, the man of intolerable wrongs and the Pilia-Borsa of Siena. Maso scowled till his thick eyebrows cut his face horizontally in two. He stood ostentatiously still, muttering with his lips as the trio went lightly by. Then he made to go on. But old Marco Zoppa stood up and made a speech. He had the wooden stem of his pipe 'twixt finger and thumb, and used it like a conductor's bâton to emphasise his points. As his voice shrilled and quavered, Carlo Formaggia caught his own name and turned back to listen, prick-eared. He stood out of sight resting one foot on a doorstep, and leaned forward on to his leg. He might have been dreaming of some night of love, but he held every word as it dropped.
"Maso," Marco went on, "thou art but a thin fool. I know what I know; but thou must needs stick dirt in thine ears and pass me by. Well, let be, let be; the end will come soon enough—this night even. And I have warned thee."
"Spawn of a pig, wilt never have done irking me? See, I scratch thee off me!" Maso drove home his gibe with a dramatic performance. The trattoria was agape. Every table held its three craning necks and six piercing, twinkling eyes atop.
"I grow old, my Maso, I grow very old, and thy monkey's tricks are nought. 'Tis thy slip of a girl and thy poor twisted Mariola I would save in spite of thee. Listen then once more, and for the last time. Ser Carlo intends to snare thy pigeon. He has limed his twigs; the bird flutters free for this noon, but by to-night she will be caged. For me, I have done my possible—but I am old. Life tingles fiercer in the blood of a young man. Therefore beware. Wilt thou see that brawny assassin toying with thy girl; leaning over her where she crouches, poisoning her with fat words? That's how the snake licks the turtle before he gulps her—'tis to make her sleek, look you! Well, go thy way, dolt and blunderhead. For me—old as I am—I will shoot a last bolt for Mariola. This very night after supper I go to the Sbirro: and thy thanks will be a rounder oath and some more knave's tricks with my baskets."
"No thanks are owing, Marco Zoppa"; Maso was ashy with shame and rage at the old man's placid benevolence. "Marco Zoppa, thou hast been my enemy ever, and I have borne it"—the Café roared with laughter; a fat old Capuchin nearly had a fit. Maso looked round with fright in his eyes. He went on, "Now thou hast gone too far—insulting me grossly before these citizens. Thou hast brought thine end upon thyself." He ran away fighting through the delighted crowd. Everybody who could get at him slapped him on the back. A big carter stove his hat in.
Old Marco shrugged his patient shoulders and sat down to read the Secolo. He balanced his silver-rimmed spectacles on his nose and held the journal at arm's length with hand a thought more shaky, perhaps, than usual. Presently he looked up: "Mother of God! what a white-faced rogue it is! Eh, Giuseppe?" "By Mars, if looks could stab, thou hadst been riddled by the knife before this," said his friend. Marco shrugged and went on reading—he was an old man.
But when Carlo Formaggia had heard the debate, he turned a shade shinier, and his eyes harder and brighter. As he motioned his friends off with a look, he swallowed something hard in his throat. Then he turned down the first side street, doubled round to the right, turned to the left down a kind of black sewer-trap and let himself into a wine-shop, where he sat down, breathing short. He drank brandy—but he drank like a machine. The muscles of his jaw were working spasmodically as he sat rigid on a tub, leaning against the counter. And he fingered something at his belt. His eyes were in a cold stare: he saw nothing and didn't move. But he went on drinking brandy till late in the afternoon, till the Hail Mary bells began to sound a tinkling chorus through the still air.
And Maso Cecci, he too, rushed away white and chattering. Rage had past definition with him, he saw things red, and they choked him. The air felt thick to him, full of flies. He brushed his hands before his face, struck out vaguely, and swore as the dazzling black things settled round him again in a swarm. Irritated, maddened as he was, he still heard the derisive yells of the crowd at the birreria and saw Marco's calm wise old face smiling urbanely behind silver spectacles. Cristo amore! how he loathed that old man. Siena could never hold the pair of them: there must be an end—there should be an end. His heart gave a jerk under his vest as he thought of it. An end!—an end of his eternal fretting jealousy in the Campo, his continued sense of being worsted, of galling inferiority to that methodical old villain. An end of his worries about Isotta; an end—ah! but there would be something rarer than that? To a man like Maso, a small man, of immoderate self-esteem, and that self- esteem always on the smart, there is another satisfaction—that of seeing the better man totter and slip forward to his knees. This insufferable old Marco who was always so right, with his slow methods and accursed accuracy—to see him stumble and drop! That was what made Maso's heart flutter and thud against his skin. And then, as he thought of it, it seemed inevitable. It could be done in a minute, via! The old man was alone—it would be dusk—he would peer forward through the gloom to open the door and—Madre di Dio!—and then! Maso was sweating; the back of his palate itched intolerably; something hot and sticky clogged his mouth and glued his tongue against the roof of it. His knees shook so that he could scarcely walk. Some little boys stood to stare at him as he lurched by, and laughed stealthily to see the hated Maso tipsy. But Maso was unconscious of all this: he staggered on homewards with scorching eyes….
Old Marco lived down beyond the Railway Station—a room in a crazy block of buildings that had been run up for the needs of the factory hands. It was like a great smooth cliff, this block, and was washed over a raw pink, but it glowed in the setting sun that evening, like the city herself and all the hills, the colour of bright blood. As Maso neared its blind face, stepping warily with outstretched neck like some obscene bird, and with one hand under his coat—the sun was going down into a purple bank of cloud. He gilded the edges as he sank and shot broad rays of crimson light up into the green sky. Here and there a star twinkled faint; the city lay over him like a cloudy, silent company of rocks; the tower of the Palazzo ran up into the pallor of the sky, a shaking spear.
There was but one glimmer of light in the whole ghostly wall of tenements and that, Maso knew, was Marco Zoppa's. Every soul else was crowded in the Campo waiting for the fireworks. And, as he thought, he heard a dull thud behind him, and turned; and there, far up, a single shaft of flame shot aloft, and stayed, and burst into a fan of lights; and a puff told him it was the first rocket. "Ecco! Madre di Dio, a sign! a sign! So will I go up; and so shall my enemy come down." And Maso crept up the stairway breathing thick and short….
With a hand still under his cloak he rapped his knuckles on the door. No answer. An echo, only, fluttered and grew faint down the stone steps. He hoisted his cloak from the shoulder and swung his right arm free. Then he knocked again. Nothing. No sign. Heavy silence; only a distant murmur of voices, muffled and infinitely far, from the Campo on the hill.
"The game has flown! Or the old dog sleeps." Maso sighed, for he wanted to see him drop gurgling to his knees. Still, it made his affair easier. He gave one fierce hoist to his cloak, twitched his right arm once or twice, and gently turned the handle. Then he stepped lightly and daintily into the room.
A candle guttered on a little table in the corner, and the Crucified showed white upon the black cross above. Marco Zoppa lay on his bed with his throat cut from ear to ear. The cut was so resolute that his head stuck out at an angle from his body—almost a right angle; and in some struggle he had got his nostril sliced. That gave him an odd, mesquin expression, lying there with his mouth open and his yawning nostril, as if he wanted to sneeze. The room smelt stale and sour; the thick air gathered in a misty halo round the candle, and a fat shroud of tallow drooped over the edges of the candlestick.
Maso dropped his long, clean knife; dropped on to his knees and wailed like a chained dog. He could not take his eyes from the horrible black pit between the dead man's chin and trunk. Out of that pit a thin scarlet stream was still slipping lazily, and crawling down the white coverlet to the floor. Maso's wailing attracted a dog near by. He too set off howling from behind his door: and then another, and another. There was a chorus of howls, long-drawn, pitiful, desolate; and Maso, the only man in that woeful company, howled like any dog of the pack.
Gradually his moaning sank and then stopped with a dry sob. He crawled on his knees a little nearer to the bed and eyed fearfully a patch of blood on the counterpane. Just God! what was that patch? A faint circle smeared with the finger, and through the midst of it a ragged dart. Carlo Formaggia had been there! He knew that mark! And then the whole truth blazed before him like a sheet of fire. He fell forward on his face. The thin thread of scarlet from Marco Zoppa's gaping throat crawled drop by drop on to his shoulder.
Carlo Formaggia had limed his bird.