Tales of My Native Town. Gabriele D'Annunzio

L’Ummalido, in a spasm of pain, twisted his mouth. The women spectators shuddered.

      At length the statue was lifted and L’Ummalido withdrew his hand, crushed and bleeding and formless. “Go home, now! Go home!” the people cried, while pushing him toward the door of the church.

      A woman removed her apron and offered it to him for a bandage. L’Ummalido refused it. He did not speak, but watched a group of men who were gesticulating and disputing around the statue.

      “It is my turn!”

      “No!—no! It’s my turn!”

      “No! let me!”

      Cicco Ponno, Mattia Seafarolo and Tommaso di Clisci were contending for the place left vacant by L’Ummalido.

      He approached the disputants. Holding his bruised hand at his side, and with the other opening a path, he said simply:

      “The position is mine.”

      And he placed his left shoulder as a prop for the Patron Saint. He stifled down his pain, gritting his teeth, with fierce will-power.

      Mattala asked him:

      “What are you trying to do?”

      He answered:

      “What Saint Gonselvo wishes me to do.”

      And he began to walk with the others. Dumbfounded the people watched him pass. From time to time, someone, on seeing the wound which was bleeding and growing black, asked him:

      “L’Umma’, what is the matter?”

      He did not answer. He moved forward gravely, measuring his steps by the rhythm of the music, with his mind a little hazy, beneath the vast coverlets that flapped in the wind and amongst the swelling crowd.

      At a street corner he suddenly fell. The Saint stopped an instant and swayed, in the centre of a momentary confusion, then continued its progress. Mattia Scafarola supplied the vacant place. Two relations gathered up the swooning man and carried him to a nearby house.

      Anna di Cenzo, who was an old woman, expert at healing wounds, looked at the formless and bloody member, and then shaking her head, said:

      “What can I do with it?”

      Her little skill was able to do nothing. L’Ummalido controlled his feelings and said nothing. He sat down and tranquilly contemplated his wound. The hand hung limp, forever useless, with the bones ground to powder.

      Two or three aged farmers came to look at it. Each, with a gesture or a word, expressed the same thought.

      L’Ummalido asked:

      “Who carried the Saint in my place?”

      They answered:

      “Mattia Scafarola.”

      Again he asked:

      “What are they doing now?”

      They answered:

      “They are singing the vespers.”

      The farmers bid him good-bye and left for vespers. A great chiming came from the mother church.

      One of the relations placed near the wound a bucket of cold water, saying:

      “Every little while put your hand in it. We must go. Let us go and listen to the vespers.”

      L’Ummalido remained alone. The chiming increased, while changing its metre. The light of day began to wane. An olive tree, blown by the wind, beat its branches against the low window.

      L’Ummalido began to bathe his hand little by little. As the blood and concretions fell away, the injury appeared even greater. L’Ummalido mused:

      “It is entirely useless! It is lost. Saint Gonselvo, I offer it up to you.”

      He took a knife and went out. The streets were deserted. All of the devotees were in the church. Above the houses sped, like fugitive herds of cattle, the violet clouds of a September sunset.

      In the church the united multitude sang in measured intervals as if in chorus to the music of the instruments. An intense heat emanated from the human bodies and the burning tapers. The silver head of Saint Gonselvo scintillated from on high like a light house. L’Ummalido entered. To the stupefaction of all, he walked up to the altar and said, in a clear voice, while holding the knife in his left hand:

      “Saint Gonselvo, I offer it up to you.”

      And he began to cut around the right wrist, gently, in full sight of the horrified people. The shapeless hand became detached little by little amidst the blood. It swung an instant suspended by the last filaments. Then it fell into a basin of copper which held the money offerings at the feet of the Patron Saint.

      L’Ummalido then raised the bloody stump and repeated in a clear voice:

      “Saint Gonselvo, I offer it up to you.”

II THE COUNTESS OF AMALFI

       Table of Contents

I

       Table of Contents

      When, one day, toward two o’clock in the afternoon, Don Giovanni Ussorio was about to set his foot on the threshold of Violetta Kutufas’ house, Rosa Catana appeared at the head of the stairs and announced in a lowered voice, while she bent her head:

      “Don Giovà, the Signora has gone.”

      Don Giovanni, at this unexpected news, stood dumbfounded, and remained thus for a moment with his eyes bulging and his mouth wide open While gazing upward as if awaiting further explanations. Since Rosa stood silently at the top of the stairs, twisting an edge of her apron with her hands and dilly-dallying somewhat, he asked at length:

      “But tell me why? But tell me why?” And he mounted several steps while he kept repeating with a slight stutter:

      “But why? But why?”

      “Don Giovà, what have I to tell you? Only that she has gone.”

      “But why?”

      “Don Giovà, I do not know, so there!”

      And Rosa took several steps on the landing-place toward the door of the empty apartment. She was rather a thin woman, with reddish hair, and face liberally scattered with freckles. Her large, ash-coloured eyes had nevertheless a singular vitality. The excessive distance between her nose and mouth gave to the lower part of her face the appearance of a monkey.

      Don Giovanni pushed open the partly closed door and passed through the first room, and then the third; he walked around the entire apartment with excited steps; he stopped at the little room, set aside for the bath. The silence almost terrified him; a heavy anxiety weighted down his heart.

      “It can’t be true! It can’t be true!” he murmured, staring around confusedly.

      The furniture of the room was in its accustomed place, but there was missing from the table under the round mirror, the crystal phials, the tortoise-shell combs, the boxes, the brushes, all of those small objects that assist at the preparation of feminine beauty. In a corner stood a species of large, zinc kettle shaped like a guitar; and within it sparkled water tinted a delicate pink from some essence. The water exhaled subtle perfume that blended in the air with the perfume of cyprus-powder. The exhalation held in it some inherent quality of sensuousness.

      “Rosa! Rosa!” Don Giovanni cried, in a voice almost extinguished by the insurmountable anxiety that he felt surging through him.

      The