The little acrobat: a story of Italy

by Janie Prichard Duggan

Natale gazed earnestly into the woman’s face.

“I am not at all good, signora,” he said unsteadily, and he could not help the stirring of hope in his heart, with this confession, but Sora Grazia only smiled again and tapped his cheek, and said that perhaps the good Luigi would teach him to be good.

And there was no more opportunity left Natale for running away, for he was presently led into the kitchen where he had to sit and watch Sora Grazia prepare the macaroni for supper. He was hungry enough to enjoy a plateful of this but the slip of boiled beef served him on a clean plate afterward could not be choked down. He had overheard some one in the tent—could it have been only that very day?—say that he was to have meat every day in his new home, and his sister, Arduina, had added that she wished she were sure of getting a morsel three times a week. Had not a doctor in Sicily said that she must have all delicate and nourishing food? And what were dry bread and sour wine as substitutes? No, Natale could not eat the meat that night. Happily the plate of macaroni had been generous, and what in all the land of sunny Italy is so filling as a plate of macaroni?

The valley looked dismally dark that night, as Natale crept from his little trestle bed and crouched on the brick floor at the window, after he was supposed to be asleep. He was to share the priest’s attic chamber, and a few moments before Sora Grazia had carried away the candle. He peered out between the flower pots on the window ledge and again wondered in his childish way why anybody in the big world outside should have troubled to make him miserable.

He was very sure that he had done nothing to harm the foreign lady with the spectacles. Once he had laughed when she had sneezed many times very loudly, in crossing the field near him, but he was sure no one had heard him, for he was lying on the ground and had buried his face in the grass. The pretty signorina with her had laughed too, and said something in their strange language which the lady had answered by another loud sneeze. Besides this, there was absolutely nothing he could have done to provoke any of the people in the garden. Yet, here he was being punished!

The thought of Sora Grazia oppressed him, her serious face and her high hopes of his goodness. The house, too, was quieter than any place he had ever known,—he who had been used to few roofs save those of the caravan and tent. There were no children about, and there was no sound inside of crying, or laughing, or singing, or whistling. It was almost as bad as having to live in a solemn church when the candles are all out and the crowds are gone, and one feels, in the dimness and silence, as if something were coming up stealthily behind one to scare one’s wits away. It is all very well to rest for a minute in a cool church, out of the glare of the sunlight, when one may run out again at will, free as a wild bird or butterfly. But to have to stay, night and day, for a whole year in such a place! Natale shuddered, for this was just the way in which the awful quiet of the little stone house of the priest affected him.

When Luigi came up to bed, hours later, he lifted the sleeping boy from the bricks at the window and covered him up snugly in bed.

“My mother thinks we can do it,” he muttered to himself, as he threw off his black gown. “I shall do my part, but I am not sure they have done a wise thing.” Then he sighed a little. Perhaps he was wishing that he could be a little boy again, with the wide, wide world before him, and no one to interfere with his choice of a career,—free to be acrobat or priest, but always to have his own choice.

With the passing of the first night all idea of running away seemed to have left Natale’s mind, and Sora Grazia was at first delighted to find her charge as submissive as a lamb to all her arrangements. After the first day or two, however, it became not quite so comfortable to see the little boy sit immovable for hours at a time, on the floor of the balcony, gazing down into the valley where the river ran merrily over the rocks. She would even have preferred to rebuke the child for something a little more outrageous than his listless torpor. She herself had to eat the meat prepared for Natale, if she would not see it wasted, for Natale could not touch it, nor would Luigi, her usually tractable son.

The young priest was no less puzzled over Natale’s conduct than his mother was. The schoolmaster reported to him that the boy held his little paper-covered spelling-book before his eyes with the utmost diligence, and really seemed to try to remember the letters as they were pointed out to him with patient repetition, but that he might as well have been gazing off into the valley instead, for all the good the pages did him, and Luigi believed it.