XV.
People said that Lia was gone to live with Don Michele; that the Malavoglia, after all, had nothing left to lose, and Don Michele would give her bread to eat. Padron ’Ntoni was of no use to anybody any more. He did nothing but wander about, bent almost double, and uttering at intervals proverbs without sense or meaning, like, “A hatchet for the fallen tree”; “Who falls in the water gets wet”; “The thinnest horse has the most flies”; and when they asked him why he was always wandering about, he said, “Hunger drives the wolf out of the wood,” or, “The hungry dog fears not the stick,” but no one asked how he was, or seemed to care about him, now he was reduced to such a condition. They teased him, and asked him why he stood waiting with his back against the church-tower, like Uncle Crucifix when he had money to lend; or sitting under the boats which were drawn up on the sand, as if he had Padron Fortunato’s bark out at sea. And Padron ’Ntoni replied that he was waiting for Death, who would not come to take him, for “Long are the days of the unhappy.” No one in the house ever spoke of Lia, not even Sant’Agata, who, if she wished to relieve her feelings, went and wept beside her mother’s bed when she was alone in the house. Now this house, too, had become as wide as the sea, and they were lost in it. The money was gone with ’Ntoni, Alessio was always away here or there at work, and Nunziata used to be charitable enough to come and kindle the fire when Mena used to have to go out towards evening and lead her grandfather home in the dusk, because he was half blind. Don Silvestro and others in the place said that Alessio would do better to send his grandfather to the poor-house, now that he was of no more use to anybody; but that was the only thing that frightened the poor old fellow. Every time that Mena led him out by the hand in the morning to take him where the sun shone, “to wait for Death,” he thought that they were leading him to the poor-house, so silly was he grown, and he went on stammering, “But will Death never come?” so that some people used to ask him, laughing, where he thought Death had gone.
Alessio came back every Saturday night and brought all his money and counted it out to his grandfather, as if he had still been reasonable. He always replied, “Yes, yes,” and nodded his head, and they always had to hide the little sum under the mattress, in the old place, and told him, to please him, that they were putting it away to buy back the house by the medlar-tree, and that in a year or two they should have enough. But then the old man shook his head obstinately, and replied that now they did not need the house, and that it would have been better if there had never been the house of the Malavoglia, now that the Malavoglia were all scattered here and there. Once he called Nunziata aside under the almond-tree, when no one was by, and seemed to be anxious to say something very important; but he moved his lips without speaking, and seemed to be seeking for words, looking from side to side. “Is it true what they say about Lia?” he said at last.
“No,” replied Nunziata, crossing her hands on her breast, “no; by the Madonna of Ognino, it is not true!”
He began to shake his head, with his chin sunk on his breast. “Then why has she run away, too? Why has she run away?”
And he went about the house looking for her, pretending to have lost his cap, touching the bed and the cupboard, and sitting down at the loom without speaking. “Do you know,” he asked after a while—“do you know where she is gone?” But to Mena he said nothing. Nunziata really did not know where she was, nor did any one else in the place.
One evening there came and stopped in the black street Alfio Mosca, with the cart, to which was now harnessed a mule; and he had had the fever at Bicocca and had nearly died, so that his face was yellow as saffron, and he had lost his fine, straight figure, but the mule was fat and shining.
“Do you remember when I went away to Bicocca?—when you were still in the house by the medlar?” he asked. “Now everything is changed, for ‘the world is round, some swim and some are drowned.’” This time they had not even a glass of wine to offer him in welcome.
Cousin Alfio knew where Lia was—he had seen her with his own eyes, looking just as Cousin Mena used to when she used to come to her window and he talked to her from his. For which reason he sat still, looking from one thing to another, looking at the furniture and at the walls, and feeling as if the loaded cart were lying on his breast, while he sat without speaking beside the empty table, to which they no longer sat down to eat the evening meal.
“Now I must go,” he repeated, finding that no one spoke to him. “When one has left one’s home it is better never to come back, for everything changes while one is away, and even the faces that meet one are changed, so that one feels like a stranger.”