He leaned out of the window. The town, with its white houses in a big semi-circle on the shore, was hugging the sea; its shape might have been given it by a huge wave that had pushed it back in the middle. It looked grey and sad, and a haze overhead seemed to come from a blending of mists, the only trace of its vitality. Inside, in that beehive, people were running about after money; and Alfonso, who had known life there and thought life was like that nowhere else, breathed freely as he fled that cowl of cloud.
XVI
IN THE LAST DAYS’ agitation he had quite forgotten that his journey would bring not only the pleasure of escaping from places he hated, but the joy of revisiting his home village.
On remembering this, all his bitterness vanished at once. It was purest delight to think of the unexpected pleasure he would bring his mother.
This village of his was a group of houses scattered in a fold of a vast green valley crossed diagonally by the railway. The station lay a stone’s throw from the village. It was a road-mender’s hut, raised to the dignity of a station as a result of pressure by the local parliamentary deputy. Before that one had to leave the train at the previous station and reach the village by cart. “Poor but happy!” thought Alfonso, remembering the villagers’ joy when they got their station. And what a fine road they had made to join the new station to the village! Straight as on a map and wide enough for three carts at the same time.
The Nittis’ house was as far from the station as it was from the village. Alfonso’s father, wanting a shorter route to it, had improved an existing lane which had passed his land and rejoined the main road halfway along. Alfonso remembered his father as the sort of man who must have lived in cities at one time; and yet he had been simple enough to be pleased when the locals called this lane of his Via Nitti.
Alfonso remembered the existence of this lane, which would take him faster now to his mother’s arms.
In front of the station hut, leaning on a thick stick, watching the train pass, stood Mascotti the notary. He was dressed in a black velvet jacket, light-coloured trousers and very high boots. Thickset and fat but rather bent by age, with a sunburnt face fringed by a short grey beard, he looked like a retired soldier.
“Here already?” he asked Alfonso in surprise.
Just as surprised, Alfonso asked in return: “Is she expecting me?”
“No, no!” exclaimed the notary, slowly putting his forefinger to his nostrils and rubbing it up to an eye. The gesture, which Alfonso remembered, made him realize that the notary was thinking hard. With a naturalness which deceived Alfonso he then added, “I’m surprised to see you, that’s all. I wasn’t expecting you.”
They came down from the embankment and passed by a road-mender’s shack, his wife and two half-naked children staring wide-eyed at Alfonso as if he had dropped from the sky. Of the two children, one, aged about six, in a shirt and trousers reaching his knees, was holding the other, who could not have been more than two, dressed only in a shirt fastened round the middle by a band from which hung more shirt. They made up a tangle of thin dark limbs; even the one who could not yet walk by himself burnt black by the sun.
Alfonso did not realize at once how odd Mascotti’s bearing was; absorbed in the first sensations at seeing his village again, he had no time to observe him.
Autumn had already stripped the valley, which in its bareness looked very close to the stony region nearby. The countryside had not the brownness of damp fertile earth and was scattered with white stones which proliferated a few miles further on. Nearby fields were also scattered with pebbles left mingling with the soil, so that the bora wind which raged there would not sweep off the loose earth; a few rocks broke the regularity of furrows or stunted the growth of scraggy trees.
The houses of the village were scarcely visible in the slight mist covering the valley; but the wide road off which lay the Nittis’ house, and which went straight on to become the main street of the village, was visible as a gleaming streak. The landscape held no surprises for him; he remembered its smallest details. From beyond the village he could see the white tip of a hillock of stones, a regular shaped dome without houses or vegetation, and on its right a small copse of young pine trees planted against the encroaching stones. But since he had left the copse had made little progress.
There was one surprise. He had expected his home to be nearer the village; wanting his mother to be less isolated in his imagination he had moved their home and now looked for it where it was not. In fact it lay quite a distance off, all on its own in the midst of fields, although old Nitti had hoped that the area, being in the most fertile part of the valley, would soon be built over.
Alfonso hastened his step impatiently. Now he saw one side of the house, the colour of terracotta. The front faced the village and was the only side with windows worthy of the name; the other side had only a couple of holes bored by the old doctor himself to help the air circulate. He came to the alley leading up to the house. It must be little used because it merged for stretches into a field from which it never really detached itself.
Mascotti had been silent for a long time and, after waiting in vain to be questioned, spoke first.
“Please, I’m sixty-five, and if you hurry so I won’t reach your home at the same time as you!” He leaned against a tree to rest. Then with an air of indifference, and staring at the white felt cap he had taken from his head, he said: “Your mother is not very well.”
Alfonso glanced at him closely, hesitating. Was Mascotti’s air of indifference sincere? Moved, he asked: “What’s wrong with her?”
“Some little thing to do with her heart, it hasn’t a regular beat, so the doctor says,” replied Mascotti, thinking he had found the simplest way of defining the illness.
“You were waiting at the station; was I sent a telegram?” asked Alfonso, who remembered Mascotti’s first surprise at seeing him.
“Yes, but thank heaven …”
Alfonso heard no more than the “yes”.
“See you at home,” he said, and bag in one hand and stick in the other he began to run, taking no more notice of Mascotti, who followed him for a time shouting some word which he did not understand.
The unexpected news had made his heart beat faster. Things must be very serious if they’d had to call him back so urgently. Though soon tired from running and emotion he raced on, as it seemed that his mother’s life partly depended on the result of his efforts.
As he ran he suddenly thought with horror that he might be running to embrace a corpse; could that be the announcement Mascotti had tried to shout after him?
Oh, it was so long since he had thought of this woman who was dying! She had not written for three weeks, and, all intent on hanging about Annetta, he had not even noticed. He should have understood, should he not, that only something really serious could have made her interrupt her usual regular flow of letters?
Finally he reached the kitchen garden in front of the house. A tall strong old woman was gathering vegetables.
“What d’you want?” she asked him, straightening up in all her length.
Her face was quite new to him. The skin on it, only recognizable as a woman’s by its hairlessness, was shrivelled by the sun, and its whole expression was concentrated in a pair of lively eyes.
“How’s my mother?” asked Alfonso impatiently.
“Oh! Signor Alfonso! You were right to come,” said the old woman slowly, coming towards him. “The Signora’s better, so the doctor says.”
She was better, and he had thought her dead! Anyway he was being granted time to kiss her and show the immense affection welling in his heart. Fate was treating him better than he deserved.
“Go on in! Go on in!” said the old woman to him, looking longingly at her vegetables.
He did not want to and asked her to go in first to prepare the sick woman. Then seeing her hesitate, he explained that she was first to warn his mother that there was someone there, then say it was someone she would be surprised to see again
, finally someone she would love to see again, her own son.
He entered the house with her. The only two rooms that the Nittis had used in the relatively large building were on the ground floor. They were the only two with sufficient light, and in vain had the defunct doctor attempted to accustom himself to a third as a study. It lacked light and had been too big for the old doctor with his few pieces of furniture and books, and he had felt lonely in it; the room remained as a library in intention, but the doctor had never studied there again.
The entrance room was empty with only a truckle-bed in a corner; when Alfonso lived in it, everything good the Nittis possessed had been put there. The walls had been hung with the few pictures which the little family owned and with many reproductions of famous pictures, some by Horace Vemet of camels with huge bodies and calm patient faces, beasts more attractive than the men leading them.
In the other room had lived Doctor Nitti and his wife. It was full of big old pieces of simple wooden furniture which looked well in that big room and enhanced it. Between the two windows was a modem pendulum clock, the last object brought home by old Nitti. During the month of the old doctor’s last illness his family had dined in that room to keep him company, and the table was set in the middle; it should be there from what Signora Carolina had written to Alfonso.
The sadness which assailed him in that first room, where he waited to be called and which he recognized in spite of there being no object in it to help his memories, was not entirely due to finding his mother ill. He felt he was about to face one of the major disasters of his life. The death of his father had been a big enough blow. Everywhere since leaving the train, in the village and the house and that first room, he had felt accompanied by memory. What a lovely childhood he had spent there! How calm and protected! The family must certainly have been through some bad patches of which he had known nothing, either during his early youth in the village or later in town where for some time old Nitti had tried in vain to form a practice. What goodness, what resignation! Never once had the old man complained; the father’s experiences had not stolen the son’s illusions. “It’s only right!” he had said one day when Alfonso brought a good school report home with him on holiday. “The luck I’ve had will come to you.” And Alfonso had believed him because he saw that his parents, who were old and experienced, believed it themselves.
Now his mother called him with a cry in which he recognized both joy and weakness.
He wanted to fling himself in her arms, but on taking a step into the room found himself in complete darkness and did not dare move forward.
He felt himself taken roughly by an arm and pulled to the right. His mother was in that bed, he realized. From there she was asking with a stutter: “Is that you, Alfonso?”
“Are you better, mother?”
“Yes yes, much. Open the window, Giuseppina, so that I can see him.”
The old woman threw open first the window furthest from the bed, and in the half-darkness he recognized his mother’s face, which seemed little changed. She was lying supine, looking at him and murmuring words in a low voice. Thinking her to be delirious he was alarmed and called her.
“I’m a believer,” she said with a start. “I’d lost hope of seeing you again, and I thank God, who made you get here so soon.” And she drew him to her with a smile.
He recognized that voice and manner, the gravity so ready to merge into sweetness and joking. He saw once more the physiognomy of his father, who had thought and spoken in just that way, never so near to smiling as when his face looked very serious and his words sounded deeply moved. During the long years she had lived with him, she had assimilated his mannerisms.
Giuseppina opened the other window too, flinging it wide with one blow, noisily.
Not even then did Alfonso realize how much his mother’s face had changed. He kissed her on the forehead, almost calmed.
“You’re looking fine.”
“I’m quite plump, eh?”
Roughly, Giuseppina’s grating low voice intervened.
“Yes indeed! I always say she looks fine and that the doctor who makes her stay in bed is an idiot.”
Signora Carolina had drawn Alfonso to her again and was passing her hand over his brown hair. “You’re better looking too, Rosina would never have thought it possible,” she said looking at him closely. “We were wrong to part. I’d surely be in the same state but would have been happier till now!”
At that distance Alfonso now realized what made his mother look so fat. She was swollen, one cheek much more than the other, and on the swelling was reproduced the pattern of rough material and of irregular marks of sewing on the pillowcase. Her face which had been oval now looked round. Such white hair as she still had made a crown around her face like a baby’s.
She realized what a painful impression the swelling must make on him and tried to attenuate it.
“Oh it doesn’t hurt me here!” and she touched her cheek with a contemptuous finger.
This produced a livid cavity which remained even when she took her finger away. That was nothing, she explained, it did not hurt her. Where she was suffering was in her lungs, and she had not enough air. Probably it was from that she would die. Finding herself so close to death, she was beginning to study its mystery.
He tried to prove she was wrong, which should have been easy with her vague notions about her own illness, but could not concentrate on deceiving her. She was dying, that was the painful thing, not her knowing it. He had realized there was no longer any remedy. He asked about other symptoms, always hoping to find indications of health. In vain; her whole organism was in decay. For years she had suffered from disturbances in which an expert eye could have recognized the organic disease which was their cause. Even when she noticed that her feet were slightly swollen, she had not called in a doctor, partly from ignorance and mainly from economy. When she finally did consult one, he made her stay in bed; she never got up again, saying she felt better than when up, and that she hated dressing and seeing her body disfigured like that. Now she could no longer move. What had not been done by illness had been completed by inertia and lack of fresh air. The room was suffocating. When for an instant the windows had been opened, the breath of outside air reaching Alfonso was balsam compared to the air in the room.
“As you’re here I’ll get back to the garden. If you need me just knock on the window,” said Giuseppina and went out.
“What about this nurse?” asked Alfonso. “Does she usually leave you as much alone as I found you a short time ago?”
His mother explained that she only had her in the house for a month, partly to take over the little jobs that needed seeing to.
“I found her living in such squalor. She seemed so good and attentive.”
He noticed the past tense which suggested a present one in which her opinion about Giuseppina must have changed; and it was so obvious that his mother was surrounded by carelessness and utter indifference out of all proportion to the gravity of the illness from which she was dying that he could not restrain himself and burst into tears.
She understood why he was crying and, with tears in her own eyes, at once hugged him in thanks for this sign of affection to which he must have been little used.
“Now you’re here, and I need nothing else.”
To soothe her he produced another reason for his outburst of grief, and lamented his not having been told before or he would have brought with him some competent doctor from town who would have cured her quicker and saved her a great deal of suffering. But these words only touched her the more. She wept and her poor half-lifeless body lay motionless as if nailed there; only her head drooped over the sheets to be nearer him.
Alarmed by the state he had thrown her into, he assured her that very soon, with the help of the doctor he intended calling that very day, she would be cured. For, unable to resign himself to the gravity of the situation, however little hope there was, he wanted to ask Prarchi to come and tend to her.
But she had a stronger mind than her son. She forbade him to call in other doctors because she had had enough of the one who came already. She wanted to die in peace and, taking one of Alfonso’s hands between hers, brought it to her cheek so as to lean her head against it, jerking herself on to one side with an immense effort in doing so. Then she wept silently without a sob, hiding her eyes with her hand.
She was utterly finished. What miracle could ever again set to rights that body which that movement had shown to be so misshapen?
As it was no longer a question of saving her, he made an effort to distract her. He asked her what medicines she had been given as if he thought it important.
“I’m supposed to take that one,” she replied, “but I don’t want to because it harms me. After taking it I not only have difficulty in breathing but feel my head going round … even convulsions sometimes.”
Her eyes were not yet free of tears before she raised her head and asked in a lively voice with an arch smile:
“Will you soon be boss? How are things at the bank?”
At that moment the notary came in, saying he was exhausted by the race Alfonso had made him run. The good man was actually breathing quite calmly, and there was no trace of sweat on his low, wrinkled forehead.