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- Herausgeber: Dedalus
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Serie: Dedalus European Classics
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Brought up as a servant in the austere household of an uncle, Marianna is now a woman of property. But at thirty, she knows little of life. For others in the town of Nuoro and its surrounding hill farms, Sardinia is a harsh and unforgiving place. When she meets a former companion in service, now forced into banditry to support his family, her calm existence is turned upside down. The defining moment of her life has come. Does Marianna love for Simone Sole triumph over her common sense, social convention and what is expected of her by her family? Grazia Deledda explores the layers of temptation and doubt in a novel of Sardinian life coloured with her own intimate knowledge of its beauties and dangers.
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Dedalus European Classics
General Editor: Timothy Lane
MARIANNA SIRCA
Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited
24–26, St Judith’s Lane, Sawtry, Cambs, PE28 5XE
www.dedalusbooks.com
ISBN printed book 978 1 915568 34 2
ISBN ebook 978 1 915568 40 3
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First published by Dedalus in 2023
Marianna Sirca translation copyright © Graham Anderson 2023
The right of Graham Anderson to be identified as the editor & translator of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Elcograf S.p.A.
Typeset by Marie Lane
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A C.I.P. listing for this book is available on request.
THE AUTHOR
GRAZIA DELEDDA
Grazia Deledda was born in 1871 in Nuoro, Sardinia. The street where she was born has been renamed after her, via Grazia Deledda. She finished her formal education at age eleven. She published her first short story when she was sixteen and her first novel, Stella D’Oriente in 1890 in a Sardinian newspaper when she was nineteen. She left Nuoro for the first time in 1899 and settled in Cagliari, the principal city of Sardinia where she met the civil servant Palmiro Madesani whom she married in 1900. They then moved to Rome.
Grazia Deledda wrote her best work between 1903–1920 and established an international reputation as a novelist. Nearly all of her work in this period was set in Sardinia. She published Elias Portolu in 1903, La Madre in 1920 and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926. She died in 1936 and was buried in the church of Madonna della Solitudine in Nuoro, near to where she was born.
THE TRANSLATOR
GRAHAM ANDERSON
Graham Anderson was born in London. After reading French and Italian at Cambridge, he worked on the book pages of City Limits and reviewed fiction for The Independent and The Sunday Telegraph. As a translator, he has developed versions of French plays, both classic and contemporary, for the NT and the Gate Theatre, with performances both here and in the USA. Publications include The Figaro Plays by Beaumarchais and A Flea in her Ear by Feydeau.
His translations for Dedalus include Sappho by Alphonse Daudet, Chasing the Dream and A Woman’s Affair by Liane de Pougy, This was the Man (Lui) by Louise Colet and This Woman, This Man (Elle et Lui) by George Sand. He has also translated Grazia Deledda’s short story collections The Queen of Darkness and The Christmas Present.
His own short fiction has won or been shortlisted for three literary prizes. He is married and lives in Oxfordshire.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
INTRODUCTION
D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda are on a bus, exploring the hinterland of Sardinia. It is a February afternoon in 1921.
‘Turning sharp to the right we ran in silence over the moorland-seeming slopes, and saw the town beyond, a little below, at the end of a long declivity, with sudden mountains rising around it. There it lay, as if at the end of the world, mountains rising sombre behind… we slip into the cold high street of Nuoro. I am thinking that this is the home of Grazia Deledda, the novelist, and I see a barber’s shop. Deledda. And thank heaven we are at the end of the journey. It is past four o’clock.’
They check in at an inn, then set off on foot to see the town.
‘We came to the end of the street, where there is a wide, desolate sort of gap… there was a café in this sort of piazza — not a piazza at all, a formless gap… but I knew it would be hopeless to ask for anything but cold drinks or black coffee: which we did not want. So we continued forward, up the slope of the village street. These towns soon come to an end. Already we were wandering into the open… we came to the end of the houses and looked over the road-wall at the hollow, deep, interesting valley below. Away on the other side rose a blue mountain, a steep but stumpy cone. High land reared up, dusky and dark-blue, all around. Somewhere far off the sun was setting with a bit of crimson. It was a wild, unusual landscape, of unusual shape. The hills seemed so untouched, dark-blue, virgin-wild, the hollow cradle of the valley was cultivated like a tapestry away below. And there seemed so little outlying life: nothing. No castles even. In Italy and Sicily castles perching everywhere. In Sardinia none — the remote, ungrappled hills rising darkly, standing outside of life.’
At the time of the Lawrences’ visit, Grazia Deledda, the novelist, was living in Rome. She had married and left her native island in 1900. But she had taken with her nearly thirty years of life among the remote, ungrappled hills, and the evocation of this lonely place, its inhabitants’ way of life, their ancient customs and close-knit families, had become the subject of her prolific output. In all, she wrote over thirty novels, two hundred and fifty short stories and two plays. It was an astonishing transformation for a young woman no one had heard of, from a small town that very few had heard of.
She was born in Nuoro in September 1871, the fifth of seven children, to a fairly prosperous family, although her mother spoke no Italian, only the island language, Sard. Deledda herself had a brief elementary schooling lasting just five years, before receiving lessons at home from an Italian tutor. But she had immediately been seized with a passion for reading, and the tutor’s books, along with those from the library of her uncle, a priest, formed the basis of her ongoing education and the inspiration behind her desire to emulate the authors she admired. A story published soon after her move to Rome, The Queen of Darkness (1902), tells the tale of a young woman’s mysterious spiritual sickness, a gradual dissolution of the soul which is only remedied when the young woman, in a flash of understanding, realises that her real purpose in life, her calling, is to become a writer and to describe through her art the people and surroundings which have shaped her identity.
Already, as a teenage girl, Deledda had begun to write poems and short stories of her own. She found outlets for their publication in a number of Sardinian magazines and periodicals, for she was a bold and persistent pursuer of local and regional editors. She even wrote to the Rome-based fashion magazine L’ultima moda, who published some of her early works in the late 1880s. Her first novel, Stella d’Oriente, a romance, appeared in 1890; her second, Fior di Sardegna, the following year. Racconti sardi and Tradizioni popolari di Nuoro in Sardegna, both in 1894, were early examples of her life-long interest in collecting and preserving the folk tales and customs of her island. It was in 1896 that the distinguished writer and critic Luigi Campuana wrote a long and detailed appreciation of her novel La via del male (The Way of Evil) and enabled Deledda to consider herself ready for a wider stage. Nuorese life may have been the subject of her fictions, but the constraints of its reality were becoming burdensome. It was not thought fitting that a young woman, at that period and in that society, should wish to take up a literary career at all, still less use her fellow citizens and the poor and struggling rural peasants as her material.
Needing to find a way out, she was introduced, on a visit to Cagliari in 1899, to a handsome and kindly member of the island’s civil service, Palmiro Madesani, and in a matter of months they were married. Madesani’s transfer to the Finance Ministry in Rome, arranged in part through Deledda’s powers of persuasion, enabled the couple to make the move in March 1900. In December of that year, their first son, Sardus, was born; and in 1904 their second, Francesco. The new environment swiftly brought Deledda wider recognition. Her 1900 novel, Elias Portolu — and particularly its French translation in the prestigious Paris journal La revue des deux mondes in 1903 — became her first true success. Its subject, the inappropriate relationship that forms between Elias, an ex-convict, and his brother’s fiancée, the muddled and indecisive debate in Elias’ mind, his eventual retreat into the priesthood, his mixed feeling after the deaths of the other two, the awareness of rules observed but lives left unfulfilled — all these were to become significant themes in Deledda’s later works.
She published a new book almost every year. Notable novels included Cenere (Ashes, 1904), L’ombra del passato (The Shadow of the Past, 1907), L’edera (The Ivy, 1908) and Canne al vento (Reeds in the Wind, 1913). Marianna Sirca came out in 1915, at what might be considered the mid-point of her mature career. La madre (The Mother, 1920) has come to be regarded as one of her most intense and representative pieces, the story of a young priest, his poor but ambitious mother, and the young woman with whom he falls in love.
Grazia Deledda was now 49, and although she could not have known it, the 35-year-old DH Lawrence was well aware of her presence on the literary scene, as witnessed in the excerpt above from his travel book Sea and Sardinia (US, 1921; UK, 1923). Further works continued to pour from her pen: three in 1921 alone, one in 1922, two more in 1923, notably Silvio Pellico. La fuga in Egitto (The Flight Into Egypt, 1925) was the most recent novel she had published when the news came that the committee in Stockholm had awarded her the 1926 Nobel Prize in Literature. She collected it at a ceremony in Sweden the following year, managing only the briefest of speeches. Although a warm and relaxed woman in familiar company, her basically reserved nature made public appearances a trial. Her ambition was certainly fierce, but she was wary of the unknown and preferred to live quietly, away from the spotlight.
Episodes of ill health had begun to occur at about this time. Breast cancer was eventually diagnosed and a successful operation performed. She continued to write, industrious and disciplined. Many of her later books were lighter and more optimistic in tone: the collection of stories, fables and girlhood reminiscences of Il dono di natale (The Christmas Present, 1930), the novels Il paese del vento (The Land of the Wind, 1931) and Sole d’estate (Summer Sun, 1933) being examples. Her health, however deteriorated in the following years, and she died, in Rome, in August 1936, a few weeks short of her 65th birthday.
Marianna Sirca, her novel of 1915, is both typical and unusual. Its setting, once again, is Nuoro and the surrounding sheep pastures and cork-oak forests. Poverty and relative affluence live side by side. Born in a humble situation, Marianna is placed when still a child in the household of her uncle, a priest and owner of a comfortable house in the town. Her father, Berte Sirca, an efficient farmer but in other respects a weak man, hopes his only daughter will enjoy a better life than he can provide for her on their tanca up in the hills. And indeed, on the priestly uncle’s death, Marianna inherits everything, the farm holdings as well as the house. But she has become la padrona at a cost. Her youth has been lost, spent effectively in service to the uncle. The elderly servant Fidela is her only companion in the Nuoro house. Her older cousin Sebastiano, a sometimes mocking, sometimes wistful admirer, makes her uncomfortable. She is already thirty, yet feels she has never truly lived.
The unexpected reappearance of a young man who was once a servant alongside her in the priest’s house completely upsets her uneventful life of obedience to the wishes of others. This man, after many failed attempts to get on in life, has run away to become a bandit. It may be hard to imagine that outlaws still existed at the turn of the twentieth century, but the remoteness of Sardinia from the mainland and its modern ways, the long tradition of rugged self-survival, of family feuds settled by violence, of lives — criminal or merely escapist — being lived outside the community, still persisted. Simone Solo, as it turns out, is a sadly ineffectual bandit. He commits small robberies but is insufficiently ruthless to spill Christian blood. Inside him though, is a burning rage at the injustices of life. He despises the poverty into which his family, a sick father, a careworn mother and five sisters, has fallen. The disparity between his lot and Marianna’s is simultaneously a source of attraction and resentment.
When Marianna and Simone meet again after many years, a spark is ignited. Marianna has never loved, never been courted, never been allowed to make her own choices. Simone is driven by a dangerous mixture of emotional neediness and powerful self-regard. In bringing such opposite characters together, Deledda is not simply writing a romance between the repressed spinster and the dashing young outlaw. She is examining the clash between two ways of life — both of them unsatisfactory — and the constraints forced on all levels of Nuorese society by the haphazard distribution of wealth and the strict social conventions of the time. The damaged individuals who emerge from this society have little but pride and a sense of their personal dignity to keep them in balance. It is this pride, which both parties have in their different ways, which turns their brave hopes into disaster.
The idea for this novel allows Deledda to explore her native district in its three distinctive topographical settings: the rugged hills where the bandits live; the forests and farmsteads where the great majority earn their living; and the brooding and enclosed life of the town itself. It is all just as Lawrence sensed it to be in 1921, half a dozen years after Marianna Sirca was published. Motor buses and metalled roads may have come to inland Sardinia, as they had not yet done in Deledda’s early years; but old costumes were still seen on the streets, old customs still observed in the houses of the wealthy and the hovels of the poor. And in the hills, before the modern age of kidnap and ransom, bandits still lived, singly or in gangs, with a price on their heads.
Martha King’s biography Grazia Deledda, A Legendary Life, and her English translations of Elias Portolu and an autobiographical novel, Cosima, published the year after Deledda’s death, are highly recommended to interested readers. D. H. Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia can be found with a little internet research.
Meanwhile the unique voice of the Nobel Prize winning Grazia Deledda can be sampled in Dedalus Books’ 2021 reissue of La madre, translated by M. G. Steegman. And along with the present novel, Dedalus also publishes Deledda’s early and later short story collections The Queen of Darkness (La regina delle tenebre, 1902) and The Christmas Present (Il dono di natale, 1930).
I
After the death of her uncle, Marianna Sirca had gone to spend a few days in a little farmhouse she owned in the Sierra above Nuoro, in the midst of the cork oak forest. The uncle, a priest and a wealthy man, had died recently, leaving his estate to her.
It was June. Her uncle had lain paralysed for two long years. Worn out by nursing him at his bedside all that time, Marianna was so pale, so weak, so dazed, it seemed she had just emerged from prison. And she would not have moved on her own account, nor taken any notice of the doctor’s advice to get away and breathe some purer air, if her father, who was a sheep farmer and had always been a sort of servant to his priestly brother, had not expressly come down from the mountains to collect her, respectfully imploring her: ‘Marianna, listen to the people who love you. Do as they say.’
The housekeeper at Nuoro, a coarse, energetic woman from the wilds of Barbagia who had been with the priest for years and had seen Marianna grow up, assembled her belongings, cramming them roughly into the knapsack as if they belonged to a humble shepherd, and she too repeated: ‘Marianna, listen to the people who love you: do as they say.’
And Marianna had obeyed. She had always obeyed, ever since she had been placed in her uncle’s house to spread around the melancholy priest the light and joy of her young girlhood. She was to be his little caged bird, in exchange for a possible inheritance.
So she climbed up silently behind her father on his horse and gripped his belt, only nodding her head in reply to the zealous servant who was arranging her skirts around her legs and advising her not to catch cold in the night air.
‘And don’t tire her out, Berte Sirca!’
The latter put a finger to his lips and dug his heels into the horse’s flanks. He too was a man of few words, and in any case, with Marianna, they had little to say to each other.
As they travelled, he merely pointed out a field here and there, naming its owner. She knew these places anyway, because every year in spring, except for the last few when the priest had been ill, she used to go with him and various other relations to spend whole days on the tanca, the enclosed pastures where he kept his flocks of sheep and herds of cattle; and where a little farmhouse had replaced the usual primitive cabin of the Sardinian shepherds.
From the first day up there in the hills she felt better. The tanca occupied a high position on the border of the Nuoro and Orune districts. The forest trees were in blossom and an infinite serenity seemed to stretch across the whole land.
By the third day Marianna already seemed a different person. The thin and slightly stooping figure had straightened. The alabaster-pale face beneath the sweeping tresses of glossy black hair had taken on a dull amber colouring and her large and placid brown eyes reflected like a fawn’s the greenish light of the woods.
As evening fell on the third day, she was sitting outside the farmhouse. A small building of undressed stone, it had a shelter for the animals, a kitchen and a bedroom. Before her she could see a broad grassy clearing with an ancient cork oak in the middle, the dogs tethered to its trunk. And beyond it the green of the meadows which stretched as far as the forest and lost themselves in the already darkening shadows of the thickets of scrub and outcrops of rock. Meanwhile, to her right, through a line of trees, the ridge of mountains stood out, still blue, against the reddening sky of dusk.
She was alone except for the dogs, who rose every now and then to stare out across the landscape and soon came back to crouch in the dust. But she was expecting her father and the shepherd to return soon, and also awaiting the arrival of a relation who had promised her a visit.
She was alone and at peace. She wanted for nothing. Around her she had her extensive inheritance, looked after by the reliable hand of the simple soul, her father. And down in Nuoro her house too was looked after, by the faithful servant who did not sleep at night, for ever on watch against thieves.
She wanted for nothing. And yet, a private and introspective woman, what she saw when she looked inward, with full self-knowledge, was a kind of twilight. It may have been serene, yes, but with a quality of dusk nevertheless: red and grey, grey and red, and as solitary as the dusk filling the sheep pen.
It seemed to her that she was old. She could see herself as a child in this very same place, the first time they had brought her up here and someone had whispered in her ear: if you’re a good girl, all this will be yours. And she had gazed all around, with neither wonder nor desire in her placid eyes, just saying yes. And exploring in this direction and that, never wandering too far in case she got lost, she had found a den, a rock scooped out like a cradle, and squeezed herself into it, very pleased to be alone, mistress of all but hidden from everything. And she felt like the stone inside the fruit, the little bird inside the egg. In such a fashion, nestled away, pleased that the shepherds did not catch at her petticoat as she passed, saying, with a wink, ‘why not share your little den with me, Marianna?’ she had even fallen asleep there.
And now she was waking up, after so many years. Thirty of them already, and still she scarcely knew anything of love. They had brought her up seemingly as a girl from a noble family, destined for a rich marriage. In reality, her life had been that of a serving girl, subservient not only to her masters but to the servants of higher rank than herself.
But here was her father coming back. And her thoughts retreated into their most secret hiding place. No one in the world must know them, not so much out of pride as because in her mind, as in her house, she liked everything to be in order, cleaned, tidied away, belonging to herself alone.
In any event her father, even if he felt for her an unspoken admiration and a faithful servant’s attachment, was not a man capable of understanding her. Here he was, coming nearer, short, stooping, hands clasped together, his large bald head seemingly weighed down over his chest by the long grey curling beard. He resembled a holy brother in shepherd’s clothes, a gentle hermit with his great, still innocent, chestnut brown eyes.
‘What’s this, are you praying?’ he said, walking past her. ‘Come on, cheer up, we’re celebrating tonight. They’re coming up.’
‘Who, who?’ she said, looking round.
‘Sebastiano and another man. I’m lighting the fire now. If Sebastiano asks you how much they’ve offered you for the cork,’ he added, turning back, ‘tell him a thousand scudi. Hush! Listen to the people who love you.’
Marianna was ready to obey even this innocent vanity of his, which doubled the value of her harvest. All the more so since her relative, Sebastiano, was coming on behalf of certain dealers from Ozieri who wanted to acquire the cork from her oak woods. And without getting up, she narrowed her eyes, thinking of her second cousin, a man neither young nor old, neither rich nor poor, a widower and alone; and the only one, amongst so many needy relations bearing her a grudge over her uncle’s inheritance, to show her a little disinterested affection.
At times, she had suspected that Sebastiano loved her more deeply, but she rejected with distaste the idea of ending up the wife of a relative, a widower who was no longer young. And now here he came as well: he was on horseback; he was wearing the short cape of widowed men, and the black velvet of his coat caused the yellowish pallor of his face to stand out even from a distance, a narrow face ringed by a sparse little beard, dark and pointed. The large and gleaming dark eyes which illuminated his whole sad face immediately sought out Marianna; and almost before he had dismounted in front of her she had risen silently to her feet. He put an arm round her shoulders, looking her up and down, a little smaller than she was, familiar but somehow sly as well. She pushed him away, however, intent only on a tall and handsome young man advancing towards her with a smile. She thought she didn’t know him, yet also felt that she did. She seemed to have seen that mouth before, the teeth gleaming between fresh lips shaded by a downy moustache, and in that tanned face the long narrow eyes which appeared dark blue against the pale azure of the whites.
Coming up to her, he stopped, stood stiff, a soldier at attention. She blushed, but suddenly smiled and stretched out her hand.
‘Simone Sole!’
He nodded, taking her hand without squeezing it. Yes, it was him, Simone Sole, the bandit.
Some years before, as a boy, Simone had been a servant in her house. She knew the family too: poor but distinguished, of good stock, the father and mother both delicate, the sisters beautiful, proud young women who left their house only to go to church and who knelt in the shadows, where she too would usually be, beneath the altar of the sacrament. For the rest of the time they lived withdrawn in their little house under the hill of Santu Nofre, silent and grieving as if their brother were dead.
‘Simone,’ she repeated in a calm voice, having lowered her eyes then raised them placidly again to face him. ‘Well then?’
‘Well then, we’re here!’
And he continued to smile at her, his handsome teeth pressed together like a child trying to hold back a burst of laughter. He seemed pleased to have given her a surprise, but more than anything he was pleased at her welcome.
‘So, Marianna, have you come to roam the hills like a bandit as well?’
They both laughed, a little, as if sharing the joke. Quickly, however, Marianna saw the other’s eyes seek hers in a glance that disturbed her. And as he drew close enough to brush against her knees, she took a step back, aloof.
Meanwhile the father had appeared in the kitchen doorway, wiping his blood-stained hand on his trousers, and gesturing with a jerk of the head for the guests to step forward, to enter the house. They went in, and despite the heat, sat down round the hearth.
Simone looked about him, greeting the things he recognised so well: the smoke-blackened walls, the low bed, the mats on which he had slept his long adolescent slumbers, the simple benches, the cork-wood vessels, the skins and the stones and all the other household objects which smelled of cheese and hide and gave the rough room the feeling of the kind of tent inhabited by shepherds in the bible. Through the open doorway, opposite the small window with its background view of the green forest, could be glimpsed the little adjoining room, which also had a door opening on to the clearing. The impression of cleanliness, with Marianna’s little white bed, the table, a picture and a little mirror on the wall, made a marked contrast with the kitchen.
She closed the communicating door and sat at Sebastiano’s shoulder, because she became aware that he was following her with a roguish eye, not at all disconcerted, as she went about her business. But he swivelled sideways and continued to watch her.
‘Marianna!’ said Simone. ‘I feel I’m dreaming, seeing you again.’
‘It feels the same to me, Simone!’
‘I’d wanted to visit you for such a long time! But I didn’t know if you’d welcome it…’
Marianna waved a hand to signal he should stop, that remarks along such lines were needless. And he blushed, out of pride at her faith in him.
‘How is it you’re in these parts? It’s a good while since anyone’s seen you,’ the father said; while Sebastiano, taking the edge of Marianna’s apron, pulled it a little towards him, making gestures with his head for her to lean over, that he had something to tell her in secret. She remained bolt upright. It seemed to her that Simone was in his turn observing her and she wished to appear to him in full possession of her new status as a serious woman, a rich property owner. Simone was indeed looking at her, even while answering the questions of the man who had once been his companion in service more than his master.
‘Yes, it was nearly a year ago I last came this way, zio Berte. It’s already been five years since I last saw your Marianna. So the Canon is dead? What a strange man he was! Marianna, do you remember how he used to add years to his real age? Ten, he added. Maybe he thought life sounded too short otherwise, for a man in good health as he was. And he once got furious because his servant, Fidela (is she still alive, Lord help us?) went to church and had someone look up his real age in the records.’
‘That’s right, yes, and maybe it was so he could believe he was living longer,’ added Sebastiano. ‘And then in his case, those years were spent well, and he was right to add a few on.’
‘And those who take years off, isn’t that worse. Women? And certain men as well? Look at our Cristoru over there: he’s always twenty-two!’
Everyone laughed, looking outside towards the vast and swarthy figure of the servant who was approaching, his body moving stiffly, all of a piece, as if he was made of wood. Coming up to the doorway he stopped, without showing any surprise at the presence of Simone, who had been his companion in service. And for all that the two guests called to him, asking after his health, the animals, the shepherds on the neighbouring tanca, he made no move to step over the threshold.
He wanted Marianna, and Marianna had to go outside into the clearing to discuss dinner arrangements with him.
‘Your father sent me to slaughter a sheep. Tell me what I’m to cook, and if I’m to prepare a blood pudding as well. I warn you though, I haven’t any mint; I’ve only got two bay leaves, here they are.’
He held them up for her to see between his blood-stained fingers, and she went off to fetch salt as well, cheese and a small piece of the ground-barley bread. These things were all mixed together and stuffed inside the sheep’s heart, washed and cleaned like a velvety pouch; and the heart was then sewn up with a bamboo needle and put to cook under a heap of hot ashes.
Meanwhile the men were discussing the price of cork, and the father was saying, looking at the ground because he didn’t know how to lie, that the merchants from Ozieri had offered a thousand scudi. But Sebastiano laughed, his dark eyes gleaming in his sallow face, and looked at Marianna with a wink.
‘Zio Berte, you know how to talk up your wares all right!’
‘They’re not mine because they’re my daughter’s!’
‘They’re yours because they’re mine,’ Marianna retorted, and the father was very happy because he felt Sebastiano was making fun of him.
Marianna, during all this, was bent over the hearth, helping the servant prepare the dinner. She had pushed back the folds of her black scarf, so that they lay on the top of her head, leaving her white neck and rosy throat exposed. In the reflections from the fire, the gold buttons of her blouse, drawn together by a green ribbon, gleamed pinkly like two half-ripe strawberries, and every now and then she glanced at them as if afraid they might come loose, but in reality because she was aware of Simone’s gaze fixed on her. She felt obscurely troubled. She almost felt timid about turning to face him, yet he had been her inferior in service. He seemed to her like a man returned from foreign lands, where he had grown up, where he had become a man and had learnt all the bad things and also the good things in life, like the emigrants who returned from the Americas. Precisely because of this, however, she also felt pleasure in being watched by him: in the end, it was the look of a man who saw in her only the woman, without thinking about her money.
When the dinner was ready, she sat among the men round the well-furnished table set on the ground before the open door. The table was a slab of cork-wood, a whole slice cut from a tree, split and planed smooth; and the trays and bowls were of cork-wood too and the cups were of horn, fashioned by the shepherds. The impassive giant of a servant acted as carver, breaking the bones away from the roast with his powerful fingers. When he had finished dividing the meat into portions, he pushed the trencher in front of Marianna, saying in his heavy voice: ‘Put the salt on.’
And she took salt between her fingers with the same delicacy with which she had mixed the bay leaves with the blood, sprinkled it gravely, head bowed, over the fragrant roast.
They ate in silence. The red moon rose like a peaceful fire between the oaks at the bottom of the clearing, lighting the meadows with a blood-coloured glow. The woman, with her scarlet bodice rendered more vivid by the light of the flames from the hearth, shone amidst the black figures of the men like the moon between the tree trunks.
After the roast, the servant pulled the blood pudding from the ashes, cleaned it a little, split it in pieces and again placed the dish before Marianna.
‘Put the salt on.’
It seemed as if they were accomplishing a rite, the servant standing stiffly with his square black beard like an Egyptian priest’s, she pale and slender in her bodice, like a pomegranate flower.
Simone was the first to be served.
‘It’s not every evening you share your bread with a woman,’ said zio Berte, pouring him a drink in his horn cup.
‘And what a woman!’ Simone promptly replied, drinking and looking at her. And it seemed to her that the wine gleamed through the translucent vessel.
‘All the same, Simone ate last night with some women, and pretty ones too, besides Marianna!’ Sebastiano said, jealous.
Marianna looked up.
‘That was my sisters, yes. I was at home because my mother is ill.’
A moment of silence, solemn and sad; then Marianna asked, quietly: ‘How is your mother now?’
‘Ah, her usual trouble, the heart. My sisters are brave on their own account, but they easily take fright on someone else’s. So they sent for me, to go and see my mother. The trouble is that if I go to see her, there’s a danger of something worse happening: and she knows that very well! Last night I didn’t dare enter her room; but she said: “My Simone must be near, I can sense it. Bring him in.” So I went in; and she put her hand on my head and begged me to get away at once. Well, that’s the way of the world!’ he concluded, twitching his head aside in a childish gesture Marianna had seen him make from boyhood.
‘Ah!’ Berte Sirca sighed as well; and Sebastiano did not persist in his jokes.
Only the servant remained stern, impassive, as if nothing concerned him except his duties. And yet it was he who dispersed the shadow that had fallen on those around, asking Simone: ‘You had a partner: what happened to him? Is he inside?’
‘Inside?’ Simone protested, almost offended. ‘As long as he’s with me he’ll never be taken.’
All the same he began to laugh to himself, remembering his partner.
‘A little Brother, God help me! And how the fellow believes in God! He prays all the time and keeps a collection of relics hanging on a string round his neck. He only has to spot a church in the distance and he’s on his knees, and the best thing, dear brethren, is that he’s praying for me, not himself! And what’s more, he’s rich, an only son: his mother is the most well-to-do woman in Ottana, and gives him everything he wants. But he lives like a pauper, and fasts until he nearly brings on a fever.’
‘God preserve me, from what you say the man’s a sexton, not a bandit,’ said Sebastiano, who kept looking at Marianna, sending her signs inviting her to join him in his mockery. ‘And what has he done, if you please, to make him take to the forest? Did he kill a cat?’
