The poor old man did everything he could think of to touch his heart, and even went so far as to take a shirt of his to Don Giammaria to be exorcised, which cost him thirty centimes.
“See,” he said to ’Ntoni, “such things were never known among the Malavoglia! If you take the downward road, like Rocco Spatu, your brother and your sister will go after you. ‘One black sheep spoils the flock.’ And those few pence which we have put together with such pains will all go again—‘for one fisherman the boat was lost ‘—and what shall we do then?”
’Ntoni stood with his head down, or growled something between his teeth; but the next day it was the same thing over again; and once he said:
“At least if I lose my head, I forget my misery.”
“What do you mean by misery? You are young, you are healthy, you understand your business; what do you want more? I am old, your brother is but a boy, but we have pulled ourselves out of the ditch. Now, if you would help us we might become once more what we were in other days; not happy as we were then, for the dead cannot return to us, but without other troubles; and we should be together, ‘like the fingers of a hand,’ and should have bread to eat. If I close my eyes once for all, what is to become of you? See, now I tremble every time we put out to sea, lest I should never come back. And I am old!”
When his grandfather succeeded in touching his heart ’Ntoni would begin to cry. His brother and sisters, who knew all, would run away and shut themselves up, almost as if he were a stranger, or as if they were afraid of him; and his grandfather, with his rosary in his hand, muttered, “O blessed soul of Bastianazzo! O soul of my daughter-in-law Maruzza! pray that a miracle may be worked for us.” When Mena saw him coming, with pale face and shining eyes, she met him, saying, “Come this way; grandfather is in there!” and brought him in through the little door of the kitchen; then sat down and cried quietly by the hearth; so that at last one evening ’Ntoni said, “I won’t go to the tavern again, no, not if they kill me!” and went back to his work with all his former good-will; nay, he even got up earlier than the rest, and went down to the beach to wait for them while it wanted still two hours to day; the Three Kings were shining over the church-tower, and the crickets could be heard trilling in the vineyards as if they had been close by. The grandpapa could not contain himself for joy; he went on all the time talking to him, to show how pleased he was, and said to himself, “It is the blessed souls of his father and his mother that have worked this miracle.”
The miracle lasted all the week, and when Sunday came ’Ntoni wouldn’t even go into the piazza, lest he should see the tavern even from a distance, or meet his friends, who might call him. But he dislocated his jaws yawning all that long day, when there was nothing to be done. He wasn’t a child, to go about among the bushes on the down, singing, like Nunziata and his brother Alessio; or a girl, to sweep the house, like Mena; nor was he an old man, to spend the day mending broken barrels or baskets, like his grandfather. He sat by the door in the little street, where not even a hen passed by the door, and listened to the voices and the laughter at the tavern. He went to bed early to pass the time, and got up on Monday morning sulky as ever. His grandfather said to him, “It would be better for you if Sunday never came, for the day after you are just as if you were sick.” That was what would be best for him—that there should not even be Sunday to rest in; and his heart sank to think that every day should be like Monday. So that when he came back from the fishing in the evening, he would not even go to bed, but went about here and there bemoaning his hard fate, and ended by going back to the tavern. At first when he used to come home uncertain of his footing, he slipped in quietly, and stammered excuses, or went silently to bed; but now he was noisy, and disputed with his sister, who met him at the door with a pale face and red eyes, and told him to come in by the back way, for that grandfather was there.
“I don’t care,” he replied. The next day he got up looking wretchedly ill, and in a very bad humor, and took to scolding and swearing all day long.
Once there was a very sad scene. His grandfather, not knowing what to do to touch his heart, drew him into the corner of the little room, with the doors shut that the neighbors might not hear, and said to him, crying like a child, the poor old man! “Oh, ’Ntoni, don’t you remember that here your mother died? Why should you disgrace your mother, turning out as badly as Rocco Spatu? Don’t you see how poor Cousin Anna works all the time for that big drunkard of a son of hers, and how she weeps at times because she has not bread to give to her other children, and has no longer the heart to laugh? ‘Who goes with wolves turns wolf,’ and ‘who goes with cripples one year goes lame the next.’ Don’t you remember that night of the cholera that we were all gathered around that bed, and she confided the children to your care?”
’Ntoni cried like a weaned calf, and said he wished he could die, too; but afterwards he went back—slowly, indeed, and as if unwillingly, but still he did go back—to the tavern, and at night, instead of coming home, he wandered about the streets, and leaned against the walls, half dead with fatigue, with Rocco Spatu and Cinghialenta; or he sang and shouted with them, to drive away his melancholy.