A Very Italian Christmas. Джованни Боккаччо

fact too small, and set atop a scrawny body. She wore a white cotton shirt that was all patches, a waistcoat made of brown lightweight canvas, and a piece of red cloth as her skirt, held up at the waist by a short strand of rope. Her skinny legs showed, as did her bare, thin neck whose tendons looked like taut cords. Canituccia ate with a spoon made of blackened wood, and afterward went to drink from the bucket.

      The peasant woman had taken up her distaff and was spinning.

      “Get to bed now,” Pasqualina said to the girl.

      Canituccia opened the door of the pantry, where the apples were kept. She threw off her red skirt, lay down on some wretched straw bedding, pulled a rag made from an old yellow bedcover over her feet, and fell asleep. As she sat there spinning, Pasqualina thought about Canituccia with a certain diffidence. Her little servant was the illegitimate offspring of Maria the Redhead, as she was known. With her flaming hair and carnation-red lips, Maria had first sinned with the cobbler Giambattista. But he had gone off to become a soldier, and Maria had become the lover of Gasparre Rossi, a local gentleman. Then he too deserted Maria, although it was said that Candida—nicknamed Canituccia— was his daughter. There was no doubt that Maria, after a month at Sessa, had left Canituccia and gone off, some said to Capua while others said to Naples, to work as a prostitute. Gasparre hadn’t wanted to take care of the abandoned child, so she grew up in the household of Pasqualina and Crescenzo Zampa, who were sister and brother. But the girl’s white face, all dotted with freckles, reminded Pasqualina of Maria the Redhead. Pasqualina—a thin and virginal spinster with bony red hands, yellow teeth, and coal-black eyes, who had never married because her brother had refused to give her a dowry—trembled with hysterical terror at the thought of Maria the Redhead’s amorous follies, and didn’t trust her little bastard child. So the next day, fearful that Canituccia would lose Ciccotto again, Pasqualina tied one end of a rope to the piglet’s foot, and the other end around the girl’s waist, in order to keep them together. Following Canituccia, Ciccotto leapt about in his haste to get to pasture. They spent the day together in the field, looking for the first spring grasses and weeds. Many times Canituccia coaxed Ciccotto to a spot where she’d seen grass growing that he might like; sometimes Ciccotto dragged Canituccia toward a green field. At noon the girl ate a piece of bread. They wandered together through the spring afternoon until dusk fell, and separated only when back at home, where Ciccotto went right to sleep and Canituccia, after having gulped down cold chicory soup, or a few chickpeas, or a bit of pork rind with bread, also retired for the night. Pasqualina was surely no greedier or fiercer than other peasant women, but she herself was not so well off and ate only a bit of meat on Sundays. Sometimes she beat Canituccia, but no more often than the other peasant women beat their own children.

      Later on, in summer, Canituccia and Ciccotto were together for longer stretches of time. They left at dawn to search for corncobs, figs, and the first windfall apples, and Ciccotto had grown big and strong, while Canituccia was still skinny and weak. Sometimes Ciccotto ran too fast for the girl, and she felt herself being dragged along behind him over the cracked dry ground, worn out beneath the burning summer sun.

      “Wait, Ciccotto, wait for me, my dearest!” she would say, exhausted.

      Then Ciccotto would go to sleep and the girl would lie, with her eyes closed, on the ground along the furrows where the wheat had been harvested, sensing the blazing sun beneath her eyelids. She would get back up on her feet again, dazed, her cheeks red and her tongue swollen. By now there was no longer any need for the rope, because Ciccotto had become obedient. Canituccia had gotten a long stick with which to herd the pig and keep him from ending up under the wheels of the carts going along the main road. They would head back home in the evening, with Ciccotto coming along slowly and Canituccia a little ahead of him, driven by the insatiable hunger gnawing at her stomach. Once they tried to steal some sorbs in Nicola Passaretti’s field, but the sorbs were terribly bitter and Nicola thrashed her like a little thief. Even worse, Nicola told Pasqualina Zampa about it, and she too beat Canituccia. The girl went off through the fields with Ciccotto, weeping and saying to him:

      “Pasqualina beat me because I’m a thief.”

      But Ciccotto shook his head and began to graze. Still, every so often, when an idea appeared in Canituccia’s closed-off mind, she spoke about it to Ciccotto. When they were heading home, she told him:

      “Let’s go home now, and Ciccotto will go to his pen and Mama Pasqualina will feed him dinner, and then she’ll give Canituccia some soup, and I’ll eat it all.”

      And in the morning:

      “If Ciccotto doesn’t run, and if he always stays near Canituccia, then Canituccia will take him up the mountainside to our parish priest Don Ottaviano’s little tree, where she will get him lots and lots of apples to eat, while Canituccia eats some bread.”

      When autumn came, Ciccotto had become quite fat and hefty. Once he knocked the girl down with a blow of his head, but she got up, moved away from him, and showered him with stones. But that was the only time they quarreled. Canituccia ate less and less, and Pasqualina was sharper and sharper with the daughter of Maria the Redhead, for the harvest had been poor and the chaste old maid had a terrible suspicion that her brother, Crescenzo, had begun an affair with Rosella from Nocelleto: two caciocavallo cheeses and a ham had vanished from the pantry, and then Crescenzo had bought a gold ring for three lire at the market in Sessa. At home, Pasqualina became increasingly angry and stingy. She was always yelling at her maid, Teresa, at the gardener, Giacomo, at Canituccia, and at everyone else. On the last Sunday of the month, Don Ottaviano didn’t want to give her communion because of the many sins she’d committed in her thoughts.

      Then it didn’t stop raining, and every day Ciccotto and Canituccia came home soaking wet. The girl put her bit of red cloth on her head, but then she had only her shirt around her legs, and as she walked through puddles of water and mud, lashed by rain, she would say to Ciccotto:

      “Let’s run, Ciccotto my darling, let’s run because it’s raining and I’m wet all over; let’s run because at home there’s a fire going and we can warm ourselves.”

      But often the fire was out, and Canituccia had to go off to sleep still soaking wet from the rain. That November, people in Ventaroli said that Maria the Redhead had died of typhoid fever in Capua and, after Mass, the parish priest used her fate as an example in his sermon, which made both Concetta, daughter of Raffaele Palmese, and Nicoletta, daughter of Peppino Morra, blush because they had some remorse on their conscience. Canituccia was told that her mother was dead, but the child didn’t seem to grasp what was being said, as if she were deaf and dumb.

      In that same month of November, Ciccotto had become so big and so fat that he could no longer be taken to graze far from home: he had to use sober, deliberate steps to walk now. Canituccia called to him, but in vain: he no longer had enough strength to come. The first time that she left him at home to go for firewood in the mountains, she gathered a heap of acorns in the woods, tied them up in a rag, and brought them to him.

      She went to check on Ciccotto before going out to run to the water fountain, or out to the fields to bring food to Crescenzo, or to do other errands. Upon her return, before entering the kitchen she would go to greet him again. It scared the girl a little to see him so big—and so much bigger than she was, for she was as thin as a broomstick.

      One December evening, when Canituccia came back from the water fountain, she found the parish priest, Don Ottavio, engaged in a lively discussion with Nicola Passaretti and Crescenzo: the three of them then went to have a look at Ciccotto before returning to their conversation. Canituccia did not understand. The next evening, however, the butcher, Sabatino Carinola, came to the house, as did Gasparre Rossi’s servant Rosaria, to give Teresa a hand. There was great commotion in the courtyard and in the kitchen. A large cauldron had been placed over a roaring fire on the hearth. All the biggest platters, all the basins, and all the buckets were ready: the scales were set up in one corner: knives, cleavers, and funnels were laid out on the kitchen table. Pasqualina, Teresa, and Rosaria had put on shorter skirts and white aprons. Sabatino came and went with an air of self-importance. Canituccia saw everything but understood nothing.

      In a low voice she asked Teresa:

      “What