“Cousin Mena is not seen but heard, and she stays at the loom day and night, like Sant’Agata,” said the neighbors.
“That’s the way to bring up girls,” replied Maruzza, “instead of letting them stay gaping out the window. ‘Don’t go after the girl at the window,’ says the proverb.”
“Some of them, though, staring out of window, manage to catch the foolish fish that pass,” said her cousin Anna from the opposite door.
Cousin Anna (really her cousin this time, not only called so by way of good-fellowship) had reason and to spare for this speech; for that great hulking fellow, her son Rocco, had tacked himself on to the Mangiacarubbe’s petticoat-tail, and she was always leaning out of the window, toasting her face in the sun.
Gossip Grazia Goosefoot, hearing that there was a conversation going on, came to her door with her apron full of the beans she was shelling, and railed about the mice, who had made her “sack like a sieve,” eating holes all over it, as if they had had wits like Christians so the talk became general because those accursed little brutes had done Maruzza all sorts of harm, too. Cousin Anna had her house full of them, too, since she had lost her cat, a beast worth its weight in gold, who had died of a kick from Uncle Tino.
“The gray cats are the best to catch mice; they’d go after them into a needle’s eye.” “One shouldn’t open the door to the cat by night, for an old woman at Aci Sant’Antonio got killed that way by thieves who stole her cat three days before, and then brought her back half starved to mew at the door, and the poor woman couldn’t bear to hear the creature out in the street at that hour, and opened the door, and so the wretches got in. Nowadays the rascals invent all sorts of tricks to gain their ends; and at Trezza one saw faces now that nobody had ever seen on the coast; coming, pretending to be fishing, and catching up the clothes that were out to dry if they could manage it. They had stolen a new sheet from poor Nunziata that way. Poor girl! robbing her, who worked so hard to feed those little brothers that her father left on her hands when he went off seeking his fortune in Alexandria, in Egypt. Nunziata was like what Cousin Anna herself had been when her husband died and left her with that houseful of little children, and Rocco, the biggest of them, no higher than her knee. Then, after all the trouble of rearing him, great lazy fellow, she must stand by and see the Mangiacarubbe carry him off.”
Into the midst of this gossiping came Venera la Zuppidda, wife to Bastiano, the calker; she lived at the foot of the lane, and always appeared unexpectedly, like the devil at the litany, who came from nobody knew where, to say his say like the rest.
“For that matter,” she muttered, “your son Rocco never helped you a bit; if he got hold of a soldo he spent it at the tavern.”
La Zuppidda knew everything that went on in the place, and for this reason they said she went about all day barefoot, with that distaff that she was always holding over her head to keep the thread off the gravel. Playing the spy, she was; the spinning was only a pretext. “She always told gospel truth—that was a habit of hers—and people who didn’t like to have the truth told about them accused her of being a wicked slanderer—one of those whose tongues dropped gall. ‘Bitter mouth spits gall,’ says the proverb, and a bitter mouth she had for that Barbara of hers, that she had never been able to marry, so naughty and rude she was, and with all that, she would like to give her Victor Emmanuel’s son for a husband.
“A nice one she is, the Mangiacarubbe,” she went on; “a brazen-faced hussy, that has called the whole village, one after another, under her window (‘Choose no woman at the window,’ says the proverb); and Vanni Pizzuti gave her the figs he stole from Mastro Philip, the ortolano, and they ate them together in the vineyard under the almond-tree. I saw them myself. And Peppi (Joe) Naso, the butcher, after he began to be jealous of Mariano Cinghialenta, the carter, used to throw all the horns of the beasts he killed behind her door, so that they said he combed his head under the Mangiacarubbe’s window.”