Don Crescenzio, the lottery banker, a handsome man, with a red beard, worked there with his two lads, who were anything but lads: one, an old man of seventy, bent, half-blind, his nose always on the gambling register, made people say their lottery numbers three times, to make no mistakes, and wrote them very, very slowly. The other was a colourless type of no particular age; his face had undecided lines, his beard was an indefinite colour, one of those queer beings that are employed as witnesses by ushers, as middlemen at the pawn-shop, as distributors of handbills, and agents for furnished rooms. Don Crescenzio lorded it over his two young men. That Thursday he had quite changed his shop, putting up a gallery in it draped in white and crimson, to which he invited his best customers. Yes, they were all there, those that came every week to put down the best of their income—money hardly earned, either snatched from domestic economies, or got by cunning expedient, bold at first, and then shameful.
All were there at the lottery shop, turned into a stand. The Marquis di Formosa, Don Carlo Cavalcanti, with his lordly air; Dr. Trifari, red of face, hair, and beard, bloated as if he were going to burst, a suspicious look in his false blue eyes; Professor Colaneri, more than ever that day, clearly showed the indelible marks of a priest who has given up the Church; then Ninetto Costa, come from his club in Don Gennaro Parascandolo's company, felt drawn by a powerful, irresistible desire to his haunt; and other eight or ten—a court judge, a steward of a princely house, a sickly painter of saints, and Cozzolino the barber, who was a great Cabalist, down to the shoeblack Michele, in a corner on the ground, a hunchback and lame, his wrinkled old face full of irrestrained passion; beside him was Gaetano, the glove-cutter, more worn and pale than before, his eyes burning with discontent, uneasiness in every line of his face. Don Crescenzio's clients held their carnival in the shop dear to their ruling passion, and as they were tormented to buy caraways, they, too, threw them at the carriages, but mostly at the passers-by, among whom they found acquaintances sometimes. No one was surprised to see such different sorts of people together—a Marquis, a stock-broker, a court judge, a doctor, a professor, down to a workman. Carnival, carnival! The gentle popular madness had seized all brains; the warmish day, the bright colours, the whims in the thousands of vehicles passing, the clamour of a hundred thousand people overpowered even those suffering from another fever, which was pushed back for a time into a corner of the mind.
When Cesare Fragalà passed on foot, laughing and shouting, in a Russia-linen dust-cloak and travelling-cap, two long bags of caraways at his sides, which he emptied against balconies of his acquaintance and went filling again at every corner of the street from wandering salesmen, joking with everyone, fat, strong, and jovial, needing an outlet to his spirits—when he passed before Don Crescenzio's shop there was a chorus of greetings. Under the Rossi Palace, before his own balconies, he had already had half an hour's fight from below with his wife and her friends. Luisella, Carmela Naddeo, the Durantes, and the Antonaccis had thought Cesare's idea so original and he so charming that they had knocked him down by dint of caraway showers; he had been obliged to run away, laughing, keeping down his head, pulling his cap over his ears. There were noisy greetings, therefore, from Don Crescenzio's shop, and calls for him to come in. Was he not a customer, too, always hopeful of getting eighty thousand francs hard cash to open a shop in San Ferdinando? But Cesare was too satisfied wandering about alone, laughing and shrieking with everyone, buffeted by the caraways, red, panting with health and fun.
He went among the carts and carriages, borne by the crowd, through a burst of excitement, which the time of day made keener. The quietest did silly things now. Those standing on the cars, at first only merry, looked like so many demons. Raffaele, nicknamed Farfariello, loving Carmela's betrothed, passed in a carriage; to be seen better, he and his friends had made up their minds to sit on the roof. From there they waved white silk handkerchiefs, tied to sticks like flags, at the crowd. Alas! he did not see her, the girl who waited so many hours for him at the corner of D'Affitto Lane. She, having cried out, waved her arms and a bit of white stuff, felt stunned at the neglect, but whispered to herself as a consolation, 'It does not matter.'
But she still stayed there, hemmed in by that growing carnival frenzy. A thicker crowd closed in under the balcony where the lovely lady dressed as a Japanese was. She, getting excited, began to send down a shower of confetti by handfuls and boxfuls, as if she had a store in the house, a servant handing them to her. A shout of rogues and enthusiastic common folk rose to the skies, whilst she from above, quite serious, but a pink flame in her cheeks, recklessly flung down confetti, sweets, and chocolate-boxes. On the balcony draped with blue and silver net, the exalted personage's son had thought of the joke of tying a bottle of champagne, a game pie or a big chocolate-box, to a long rod, and letting it down to the level of the crowd's outstretched hands, pulling it up, dancing it about, amidst the longing cries, uplifted hands, and open mouths of the people below, until a shout of triumph announced some lucky one had carried off the prize of the new Cockayne. The rod was pulled up, and the young fellows, who had taken a mad fancy to the game, tied on some other eatable or drinkable—a bottle of bourdeaux, a cheese wrapped in silver paper, or a bag of confetti, and the game started again, with an unutterable row and obstruction to traffic. The men in the cars now, having taken in new stores as the evening went on, danced, sang, and threw things, behaving like demons.
It was at this most exciting time of the day that a new cart came out from a side-street of Toledo, arriving late, the horses drawing it at a foot-pace. It was queer and fantastic, being a philosopher's chemical laboratory, where a wretched old Faust sat cursing all human things in a frozen, melancholy way. It formed a dark room, with two shelves of books, a furnace, and an alchemist's retort, and there was an open Koran on a carved wooden desk. A bent old man in a black velvet skull-cap, with a long yellowy-white beard, tottered about the car, throwing boxes of sweets shaped like books, retorts, alembics, furnaces, to the crowd in the streets and balconies, each having a figure of Mephistopheles. But they were good sweets. Then a chimerical touch got into the carnival fury. The sorcerer's car seemed quite supernatural. The old man, whom the laughing women in the balconies called the Devil, his bald head in the skull-cap quivering, threw out things, magically producing them from beneath the car. Now and then amid the clamour of the populace a shrill voice called out to the decrepit sorcerer, 'Give us lottery numbers! give us tips!'
Having got to San Ferdinando, Faust's car turned to go back the same way up Toledo, when a most curious, indescribable thing happened. The old man took out of a copper alembic, beside the boxes of sweets, long, narrow strips of yellow paper and threw them to the crowd, who rushed furiously on them. A shout went before, and followed Faust's car, 'These are storni, storni!'
To carry out a new, splendid, eccentric generosity pleasing to the people, the old man threw lottery-tickets of two or three numbers, ready paid for next Saturday, at two sous each. They are called storni. He nobly threw handfuls of them to the people, laughing in his thick, white beard, forgetting he was old, holding his head back with ferocious gaiety.
What a shout everywhere, from the streets and windows up to the sky paling at sunset! What a lengthened shout of desire and enthusiasm! The whole population raised their hands and arms as if to seize the promised land. They cast themselves on the ground and kicked each other, so as to snatch a lottery-ticket, with its conditional promise of ten or two hundred francs gain. What joyous excitement among men, women, boys, rich and poor, needy and comfortably off! What an irresistible rush, that from holy fear respected the sorcerer's car; they made a triumph for him of glorious shouts from one end of Toledo to the other! But when he had thrown ten thousand tickets to the crowd he disappeared, no one knew where or how.