The Land of Cockayne: A Novel

by Matilde Serao

'What a punishment—what a punishment!' the apostate said, hiding his face in his hands.

'I am going away,' Don Crescenzio said, prostrate now, in a state of utter depression.

'Be patient.'

'What is the use of patience? it is a punishment! You spoke the truth just now: it is a chastisement! I am going away; good-bye.'

They did not look at each other nor say another word; both of them felt seized and cowed by the frightfulness of the punishment, not feeling any more rage or rancour in that breaking-down of all pride and vanity that the Divine chastisement brings. When he was on the stairs, Don Crescenzio was seized with such faintness that he had to sit down on a step, and stay there confused, neither seeing nor hearing in that moral numbness that comes on after great excitement. How long did he stay there? In the end, it was the step of someone going up and brushing past him that roused him, and with that start all his frightful pain came back unbearably. He rushed downstairs helter-skelter, and ran through the streets like one in a dream, urged on as if someone with a straight, unbending weapon were pushing him with the point. He got to Guantai Street, to the little inn, Villa Borghese, a resort of country people, where for four months past Trifari had lived with his father and mother, who had left their village at his bidding. The two humble peasants had managed, from youth to old age, to put some pence together and buy some bits of land by working eighteen hours a day and eating stale black bread, being content with beet soup cooked in water, with no salt, and sleeping all in one large room, with only a bed and a chest in it, upon a straw pallet; and this they bore for the sake of making their son a doctor, handing on to him all their peasant's vanity, making him have an unbounded longing to be a gentleman, a great man, superior to everyone in the country-side, so giving him, unknowingly, that rage for gambling that, according to him, was to make him grow rich suddenly, very rich, so as to crush everyone with his power and luxury.

But in a few years his whole professional career was ended, for he scorned it and gave it up; he had begun to lead a life of shameless indebtedness, expedients, and dodges. He had begun by deceiving his parents, and had ended by weaving for himself nets of intrigues and embarrassments. His father and mother gloomily, in the silence of their peasant souls that know of no outlet, had sold off everything gradually, going on sacrificing themselves for this son that was their idol, whom they adored because he was made of better clay than themselves. They were at last so reduced, so chastened in their pride, they waited in their old house for their son to send them ten of twenty francs now and then for food. And he did it; bound to his old folk by a fierce love made up of filial instinct and gratitude, he shivered with shame and grief every time they told him, resignedly, that in spite of being well on in years they would have to go back to work in the fields to earn their daily bread, so as not to be a burden upon him. But these helps had got to be less frequent; the rage for gambling blinded him so he could not even take ten francs off his stakes to send to the unlucky peasants. The finishing stroke was when he wrote imperiously, ordering them to sell the last house they had left, the old home with its sparse furniture and kitchen utensils, to bring the money and come and live in Naples with him; they would spend less there, and be more comfortable.

It was a dreadful blow, for these unhappy folk held so to the habit, now become a passion, of living in their own house and village, and the very word Naples frightened them. Still, saying not a word of their sufferings, they kept up their pride, told the villagers they were going to live as gentlefolk with their gentleman son at Naples, and had obeyed. They had haggled for a long time over the price of the old house and those few bits of old furniture they got at the time of their marriage; but at last, hoarding up the few hundred francs they had got for them carefully in a linen bag, and travelling third class, they got to Naples, frightened, not sad, but buried in that dumbness that is the only sign of a peasant's ill-humour.

They had lived four months at that inn, in two dark rooms; for they were on the first-floor with their son, who always came in at a very late hour, sometimes when they were getting up. They had no occupation, and never spoke to each other; staying up in their own room, they looked with melancholy, surprised eyes on all the extraordinary Naples people that moved about in that narrow, populous road, Guantai Nuova. They stayed hours and hours, wrapt up in gazing on a sight that stupefied them; but they were incapable, however, of making any complaint, though they were suspicious of everything, of the spring bed, of the bad, greenish glass of the mirror, of the miserable dinners served in their own rooms. As it was a thing they were not accustomed to, they thought they were living in unheard-of luxury. They disliked the servants, who scoffed at the two peasants, and the washerwoman, who brought back their coarse shifts all in holes, and loaded them with abuse in the true Naples style if they made any remarks.

Sometimes, getting over their instinctive shyness about speaking, they told their son to take them away from the inn and hire a small house, where his mother would cook and do the house-work; but he pointed out to them that would require too much money, and they would do it later, when he had got the fine fortune he was expecting from day to day.