Pellegrina answered: “It is like this: joy is my element. Therefore do I also wish that tonight I might give you joy.”
“In what way would you give me joy?” he asked, surprised and as if angered.
“It is like this,” she said again, “that just as it is forbidden me to remain long in the same place, remembrance is forbidden me. But you, my friend, who are free to remember things, look you back sixty-five years, or ten or fifteen years more, and tell me whether there you will find an hour in which you were happy.”
“It is not good to remember things,” said he.
“I have forgotten,” she said, “what it is like to remember things.”
“And it is not such hours as you speak of that I remember,” said he.
He sat on for a long time. In the end—as from the bottom of a deep draw-well and by the aid of a heavy and rusty chain—he heaved up a recollection. When he had been a very small child among his brothers and sisters, it seemed that in the evening, and as she had got all her children put to bed, his mother had sung to them.
“I do not much like,” he said, and looked in front of him into space, “to listen to people talking. Maybe it is better to hear them sing. Maybe you would give me joy, as you say, if you would sing to me.”
“I would fain do so, dear Niccolo,” she said, “but unfortunately I cannot sing.”
Now Niccolo could think of no more things which would give him joy. But he called to mind that besides the bread he had onions, cheese and wine in his house, and brought forth these.
“I have not,” he said, “during those years of which I have spoken, had anybody come into my house. I have not shared a meal with anybody. I have forgotten how, in sharing it with other people, one breaks bread. Do you this for me.”
She did as he required and handed him half of the loaf. “Is not this a fair hand?” she said as he took the bread from her. “The mouths of many fools have kissed it.”
“I do not like to touch people,” he said. “I do not like hands.”
“But if I am to break the bread with you,” she said, “I ought, I think, to say grace as I have heard it said. ‘Dear Lord,’ I should say, ‘help us that we may with happy hearts administer to the wants of this our flesh, which you have destined for the glory of the resurrection.’ ”
“But that is a lie,” said the old man. “There is no resurrection of the flesh. Or tell me, Lady, how that flesh would ever rise again which the fish have eaten?”
Pellegrina smiled at him. “I am no priest, Niccolo,” she said, “but we will pretend that I be one. I shall answer you, then, that the dumb fishes, too, are pious creatures of God, and that our flesh, if it be eaten by them and be committed to their keeping until the Lord decides otherwise, the while is safe and well with them.”
The old man sat on in silence, munching his onions.
“And if,” he asked suddenly, “one man has eaten of another man’s flesh? If an evil man, a boy with no good in him, has eaten of the flesh of a good and holy man? And many years have passed, so that it has become one with his own? How would it come to happen that this flesh should rise?”
“Alas, Niccolo,” she said. “Life is hard, and sad things happen round us in the world. Yet I can tell you that the Lord likes a jest, and that a da capo—which means: taking the same thing over again—is a favorite jest of his. He may have wanted, now, a sailor stuck on the top of a mountain, such as was Noah, whose name begins with the same letter as yours. It is a very sad thing that for the olive leaf I can only bring you a twig of laurel, all dry. But I shall tell you, to make up for it, that the Ark upon its rock may well have been laughing at the weightless flotsam from the deluge, running about from one place to another.”
“You have not answered me,” he said and stared at her.
“In my heart I have answered you,” said she. “But I shall answer you over again:
“Alas, Niccolo, I guessed it when in the street you raised your hand against me—to strike or to hide your face—as I spoke to you the word of meat. Sad things happen in the world round us. I have heard of people shipwrecked in a boat, and the one of them might well be a good and holy man, and the other of them might well be a boy with no good in him, who saw no other way of saving his life than eating of the flesh of his dead companion.”
“Yes, it was like that,” Niccolo said after a pause. “We had got away from the ship in a boat, the two of us, I myself and the old chaplain of the ship, the Durkheim, all alone for a long row of days, on a long row of gray waves. And when he had died, I saw no other way of living on than by eating of him. I would not touch his face, and I would not undo his clothes. His left hand lay beneath his body; I ate the flesh of his right hand. On the evening of that same day I was picked up by a Spanish ship.
“I have told nobody,” he said after another silence, “what I have now told you. If, when you go away, you tell it to the people of the town, they will chase me out of my house and away from the mountain by throwing stones at me.”
“And then,” she said, “I shall have no house to offer you instead, as you have offered me yours.”
“Are you going to tell them, then?” the old man asked, his pale eyes on her face.
At that she became so sad that she dropped her head and her long hair fell forward.
“I told you that I was your friend,” she said. “Should I then, always, be betraying my friends?”
“I have got no friends,” said Niccolo. “I know nothing of the ways of friends. Are you going to tell your friends what I have now told you?”
“No,” she said, “it is to you that I shall tell something. The right hand of that good man, the ship’s chaplain, when the hour of resurrection comes, will grip you by the hair—and that, Niccolo, is why you have still got such long, thick hair—or will hold on to the very entrails and bowels of you, to lift you up with him. And you shall see before you the flesh, the thought of which has followed you in the dark, radiant like the sun.”
“From where do you know this?” he asked.
“I have come from far away,” she answered, “and I have got far to go. I am nothing but a messenger sent out on a long journey, to tell people that there is hope in the world.”
“Are you an angel then?” he asked.
“I was an angel once,” she answered, “but I let my flight feathers wither and fall off, and as you see I can no longer get up from the ground. Yet, as you will also see, I can still flutter a little, from one place to another. But we will not speak any more of me. Tell me instead of the shipwreck. And the more things you can tell me about it, Niccolo, the more joy you will give me.”
The old man after a while set to telling his long tale, with the breaks and searchings for words of a man who has lost the habit of speaking, and with the keen recollection of details of a man whose thoughts have time after time gone over his theme. The Durkheim had caught fire and had gone down, in open sea, south of the Cape. The crew had taken to the boats; at the last moment the ship’s boy had dragged the old ship’s chaplain through the fire and the smoke, and had tumbled with him into a last boat that had been overlooked. In this boat the two had suffered great distress, until one morning the chaplain died.
During this account Pellegrina, who had come in from the cold, on her stool close to the fire grew sleepy. Yet when it was finished, and the narrator had sunk back into silence, she asked him to tell her more about his life. Niccolo told her slowly and unevenly as before that he had been a wild boy and that, while quite a small child, he had broken his little sister’s nose with a stone. As he related his life on board the ships and in port, she asked him if he had ever had a sweetheart. “No,” he said, “when the Durkheim went down I was but fifteen, I had never kissed a girl. And afterwards I thought my mouth too rare a thing to give to kissing women.”
In the end her eyes twice fell to. “Niccolo, my friend,” she said, “I could spend the whole night sitting up here and listening to you. But I am tired after a long journey, a
nd I must needs sleep. Show me a place where I can lie down for a couple of hours.”
Niccolo looked at her, looked round the room, and got up from his chair. There was no bed in the room, but only on the floor a couch made up of goatskins, “I have got but this bed to give you,” he said, “and you will be used to a silken bed. But lie down there and fear not me. I shall do you no harm.”
“And where will you sleep yourself?” she asked him.
“I never sleep a whole night through,” he answered and sighed. “I wake up many times, go out and see whether it is south wind or north wind, east or west wind, and come back again. I shall look after the fire, so that the room shall not be cold when you wake up tomorrow.”
The touch of the goatskins on the hard floor was pleasing to her after her soft bed in Rome. But as again she looked at the old man, blowing on his fire, she called to mind the fools who had shared that bed with her, and once more felt his loneliness akin to her own.
“Nay,” she said, “lie down with me here. You have told me that I need not fear you. The dip is burning down. Leave the fire, and lay you down to sleep as peacefully as, when you were a small child, you lay down by the side of your mother, who could sing to you.”
Laboriously the old man obeyed her order, first going down on his knees, then stretching himself out. Vaguely, for a short moment, the face of Lincoln, who had last lain close to her, ran through her mind. “Why must pity of human beings,” she asked herself, as again she chased away the picture, “forever suck the marrow from my bones?”
She said in the dark: “My small son Niccolo, I know that you have stolen apples, broken your little sister’s nose with a stone, and eaten human flesh. But all is still well between us, and our two heads can rest on the same pillow.”
A mighty, mute movement ran through the huge and coarse male body by her own; it was as if the bones in it were beginning to break. He raised one arm and dropped it heavily across her breast. His big head followed it; he bored it down into the freshness of her hair and the softness of her bosom beneath it—indeed, for a minute, like a babe seeking and pressing toward his mother’s nipple. At the moment when the spasm of his limbs dissolved, and he loosed himself from her, he was asleep. A short while after, she slept herself. Two or three times in the course of the night she woke up and heard him snoring lowly and deeply.
When she awoke it was light. She looked round to find out where she was. A basin of fresh water stood by the side of the couch, and she washed her face and combed her hair. At that the old man returned with a jug of hot goat’s milk and bade her good morning.
She looked up at him while she drank. “Now I am going away, Niccolo,” she said, “and I thank you for bread and onions, for wine and milk and shelter.”
“I would rather you stayed on,” he said.
“Speak not so,” said she. “Those are words that hurt my ears, and have hurt them too many times.”
“What words, then,” he asked, “should I speak to you that will not hurt your ears?”
“If you be my friend,” she said, “and if you wish to help me, you will answer the question which every day comes back and makes life burdensome to me.”
“If I can, I shall answer it,” he said.
“Tell me then,” said she, “whether to go to the right or to the left.”
He thought her question over. “And if I tell you, will you follow my advice?” he asked. “Will you care to know, as you are walking on and in the place you come to and where you sit down: Niccolo sent me here?”
“Yes,” she answered him. “Add now, Niccolo, you who are still allowed to remember, your weight to the weight of the forces which are sending me forth. It will do me good to think, wherever I go and in whatever places I sit down to rest: Niccolo sent me here.”
He again thought the matter over. “You are a lady,” he said, “unused to walking in the mountains. You will soon wish to sit down within a house. But in any house you walk into people will ask you who you are. And you will not tell who you are.”
“I cannot tell who I am,” she said.
“I know but of one house,” he said after a while, “into which people may go, and nobody will ask them who they are.”
“What house is that?” she asked.
“It is a church,” he said.
She laughed. “Are you a churchgoer, Niccolo?” she asked him.
“No,” he answered. “I have not been inside a church for sixty-five years. But when I was a child my mother took me there, and sometimes in the ports the ship’s chaplain also took me to church with him.”
“And what kind of houses, then, are those churches?” she asked again.
“They are strange houses,” he said, “for they are called the houses of God, yet the doors are always open to people, and they have got seats for people in them. And in there someone is waiting for people to come. His name is Jesus and Christ, both names, and He is God and man, both.”
“Alas, the hard lot,” said she. “I, too, have heard of Him. He will have been pleasant to talk with, for He was highly urbane, and said things to people which they must have been happy to hear. He said: ‘Be ye therefore perfect!’ And I tell you, Niccolo, there is not a singer in the whole world who is not longing to hear those words spoken. Yet He went through much, even more than we. For He will, in His quality of God, have known man’s dreadful obstinacy, which may well be incomprehensible to a God. And He will also, in His quality of man, have known God’s terrifying fancifulness, incomprehensible to man.”
“Hush,” said the old man, obviously scared. “You must not speak like that. Such words as yours are called heresy, and if the people of the town heard them, they would throw stones at you too.”
“Nay, Niccolo,” said Pellegrina. “I have said these things to God. I may say them to men as well.”
“Think not so,” Niccolo said, more alarmed than before. “One may take many liberties with God which one cannot take with men. One may allow oneself many things, toward Him, which one cannot allow oneself toward man. And, because He is God, in doing so one will even be honoring Him.”
“We will not quarrel about theology, Niccolo,” said she. “Tell me, instead, whether the church of which you speak stands to the right or to the left.”
The old man took down the key from its nail, unlocked the door and walked outside the house with his guest of the night, to explain to her what way to take. There was a fine drizzling rain. Pellegrina, listening to him, with her left hand lifted up her skirt to start on her way down the muddy road.
When Niccolo had finished his directions, he stood silent. “You told me last night,” he said at last, “that the mouths of many fools had kissed your hand.”
“Yes,” said she, “many foolish mouths, filled with frivolity and flattery.”
The old man fumbled for her right hand and lifted it to his mouth. “And this mouth of mine, which you have made speak the truth to you,” he said, “has now kissed it.”
“Farewell,” she said.
“Farewell, Lady,” said he.
It was a Sunday morning and the Feast of the Rosary. Up in the rainy air the church bells were swinging and ringing, and people going to church carried umbrellas, and here and there in the narrow streets knocked against one another. Pellegrina walked along with them and came to the small square on which the church stood. In the porch to the church she stopped for a moment, the nave before her in spite of its candles looked a dark place to enter. But she bethought herself that she had for once been advised where to go, and that she ought to follow the advice.
The boys’ choir struck up the Kyrie, and on her chair she began to feel the cold of the room and the smells of damp clothes and of human bodies round her, and to wish that the service would come to an end.
But as, at the offertory, the shrill, innocent braying of many young singers ceased, one single clear boy’s voice took up the opening notes of the Magnificat. All alone, abandoned by the other voices and leaving them behind,
it rose to the low ceiling of the church and reverberated from it.
A minute later a lady in the congregation fell forward on her knees, her head on the ledge of her prie-dieu. A couple of women near her stirred on their chairs, believing her to be suddenly taken ill, then, looking at her silk gown, reflected: “A great peccatrice, of the great outside world, up here in our church has been struck down by the weight of her sins,” and sat on.
But Pellegrina was not struck down by any weight. Her body fell from her like a garment, because her soul went straight upwards with the tones. For the voice that gave them out was known to her. It was the voice of young Pellegrina Leoni.
At the sound of the first notes she did not believe her ears, but lifted her fingers to stop them. Then, as, in the “from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed,” she took in the ring and the timbre of the singing, she was filled with immense joy and was floating in light. After a long time she cried in her heart: “O Sweet. Sweetness of life! Welcome back.” And again after a very long time she laughed. Aware that it was unseemly to laugh in church she brought up her handkerchief to her face; when she took it back she found that it was drenched with tears.
Even when the young singer had long finished his solo, and her soul was slowly returning to her body, she remained on her knees. As in the end she looked up and gazed around her, the priest had read the last gospel, and the church was almost empty. But a little girl with two long black plaits, who had sat on a chair to her left, kept standing beside it, troubled by the idea that the fine, unknown lady might be dead. As slowly she got to her feet, her eyes met those of the child, and so radiant with happiness was the face of the woman that the little girl’s face, like a reflection in a mirror, broke into a smile.
“Who was it,” Pellegrina asked her, “that sang the Magnificat?”
“It was Emanuele,” the child answered in a low, sweet voice.
“Who is Emanuele?” Pellegrina asked.
“Emanuele is my foster brother,” said the little girl.
Here the row of choir boys on their way out of the church passed the two. The girl indicated one of them. “That is Emanuele,” she whispered. Pellegrina tried to see the face pointed out to her, but things were swimming before her eyes; it passed by and was gone.