Tales of My Native Town

by Gabriele D'Annunzio

The brother did not answer. Both remained perplexed. There descended from the bark of a pine a file of ants and they extended themselves across the ground, each ant dragged a fragment of food and the entire innumerable family fulfilled its work with diligent precision. Anna watched, and there awoke in her mind the ingenuous beliefs of her childhood. She spoke of wonderful dwellings that the ants excavated beneath the earth. The brother replied with an accent of intense faith, “God be praised!” And both remained pensive, beneath the greatness, while worshipping God in their hearts.

In the early hours of the evening they arrived in the country of Ortona. Anna knocked at the door of the monastery and asked to see the abbess. On entering they saw a little court paved with black and white stone with a cistern in the centre. The reception parlour was a low room, with a few chairs around it; two walls were occupied by a grating, the other two by a crucifix and images. Anna was immediately seized by a feeling of veneration for the solemn peace that reigned in this spot. When the Mother Veronica appeared unexpectedly behind the grating, tall and severe in her monastic habit, Anna experienced an unspeakable confusion as if in the presence of a supernatural apparition. Then, reassured by the kind smile of the abbess, she delivered her message briefly, placed her boxes in the cavity of the turnstile and waited. The Mother Veronica moved about her benignly, watching her with her beautiful lion-like eyes; she gave her an effigy of the Virgin, and in taking leave she extended her illustrious hand to be kissed through the grating, and disappeared.

Anna went out full of trepidation. As she passed the vestibule, there reached her ears a chorus of litanies, a song, very regular and sweet, which came perhaps from some subterranean chapel. When she passed through the court she saw on the left, at the top of the wall, a branch loaded with oranges. And, as she set foot again on the road, she seemed to have left behind her a garden of blessedness.

Then she turned toward the eastern road in order to search for her relations. At the door of the old house an unknown woman stood leaning against the door-post. Anna approached her timidly and asked news of the family of Francesca Nobile. The woman interrupted her: “Why? Why? What did she want?”—with a voice and an investigating expression. Then, when Anna recalled herself, she permitted her to enter.

The relations had almost all died or emigrated. There remained in the house an old, rich man, Uncle Mingo, who had taken for his second wife “the daughter of Sblendore” and lived with her almost in misery. The old man at first did not recognise Anna. He was seated upon an old ecclesiastical chair, whose red material hung in shreds; his hands rested on the arms, contorted and rendered enormous through the monstrosity of gout, his feet with rhythmic movements beat the earth, while a continuous paralytic trembling agitated the muscles of his neck, elbows and knees. As he gazed at Anna he held open with difficulty his inflamed eyelids. At length he remembered her.

As Anna proceeded to explain her own experiences, the daughter of Sblendore, sniffing money, began to conceive in her mind hopes of usurpation, and by virtue of these hopes became more benign in her expression. Anna’s tale was scarcely told when she offered her hospitality for the night, took her basket of clothes and laid it down, promised to take care of her turtle and then made several complaints, not without tears, about the infirmity of the old man and the misery of their house. Anna went out with her soul full of pity; she went up the coast toward the belfry of the church, feeling anxious on approaching it.

Around the Farnese palace the people surged like billows; and that great feudal relic ornamented with figures, magnificent in the sunlight, was most conspicuous. Anna passed through the crowd, alongside of the benches of the silversmiths who made sacred apparel and native objects. At all of that scintillating display of liturgical forms her heart dilated with joy and she made the sign of the cross before each bench as before an altar. When at night she reached the door of the church and heard the canticle of the ritual, she could no longer contain her joy as she advanced as far as the pulpit, with steps almost vacillating. Her knees bent beneath her and the tears welled up in her eyes. She remained there in contemplation of the candelabras, the ostensories, of all those objects on the altar, her mind dizzy from having eaten nothing since morning. An immense weakness seized her nerves and her soul shrank to the point of annihilation. Above her, along the central nave, the glass lamps formed a triple crown of fire. In the distance, four solid trunks of wax flamed at the sides of the tabernacle.

XIV

The five days of the festival Anna lived thus within the church from early morning until the hour at which the doors were closed—most faithfully she breathed in that warm air which implanted in her senses a blissful torpor, in her soul a joy, full of humility. The orations, the genuflections, the salutations, all of those formulas, all of those ritualistic gestures incessantly repeated, dulled her senses. The fumes of the incense hid the earth from her.

Rosaria, the daughter of Sblendore, meanwhile profited by moving her to pity with lying complaints and by the miserable spectacle of the paralytic old man. She was an unprincipled woman, expert in fraud and dedicated to debauchery; her entire face was covered with blisters, red and serpentine, her hair grey, her stomach obese. Bound to the paralytic by vices common to both and by marriage, she and he had squandered in a short time their substance in guzzling and merry-making. Both in their misery, venomous from privation, burning with thirst for wine and liquor, harassed by the infirmities of decrepitude, were now expiating their prolonged sinning.