A Very Italian Christmas. Джованни Боккаччо

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      “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 are we doing tonight?”

      “Christmas has come, Canitù. We’re going to kill and butcher Ciccotto.” Although feeling somewhat shaky on her feet, Canituccia then went to squat in a corner of the courtyard to watch Ciccotto be killed. In the flickering light she saw them drag him into the courtyard, with Nicola Passaretti and Crescenzo holding him. She heard the pig’s desperate squeals, because he didn’t want to die, and she saw Sabatino’s knife cut Ciccotto’s throat. She watched them cut the pig’s head off by slicing through the neck all the way around, before laying it on a platter on a bed of fresh laurel leaves. Then she saw his body cut in half before the halves were weighed with the scales; she heard their cries of joy when the weight was announced—over three hundred pounds. She didn’t move from that dark corner of the courtyard. Time passed: it was a freezing cold December night. They called her into the kitchen. Rosaria and Teresa were using small funnels to force sausage meat into the pig’s intestines. Sabatino and Crescenzo were dealing with the hams and the bigger hunks of lard, while Nicola was watching over the cauldron, in which little white bits of lard were melting down, to become cracklings and pork fat. In one corner of the hearth, Pasqualina was frying the pig’s blood in a pan over the fire. Everyone was chattering loudly and gaily, caught up in the joy of all that meat and all that fat and all that prosperity, and inflamed by the heat of the fire and the work. Canituccia held back at the threshold, watching, but without entering the kitchen.

      Pasqualina, thinking that the child hadn’t eaten all day and that it was a festive occasion, took a piece of black bread and put a little bit of fried blood on it, before saying to Canituccia:

      “Eat this.”

      But the little girl said no by simply shaking her head, even though she was dying of hunger.

       1902

      FAMILY INTERIOR

       Anna Maria Ortese

      Anastasia Finizio, the older daughter of Angelina Finizio and the late Ernesto, one of Chiaia’s leading hairdress ers, who only a few years earlier had retired to a sunny and tranquil enclosure in the cemetery of Poggioreale, had just returned from High Mass (it was Christmas Day) at Santa Maria degli Angeli, in Monte di Dio, and still hadn’t made up her mind to take off her hat. Tall and thin, like all the Finizios, with the same meticulous, glittering elegance, which contrasted sharply with the dullness and indefinable decrepitude of their horsey figures, Anastasia paced up and down the bedroom she shared with her sister, Anna, unable to contain a visible agitation. Only a few minutes earlier, everything had been indifference and peace, coldness and resignation in her heart of a woman on the verge of forty, who, almost without realizing it, had lost every hope of personal happiness and adapted fairly easily to a man’s life—all responsibility, accounts, work. In the same place where her father had styled the most demanding heads of Naples, she had a knitwear shop, and with that she supported the household: mother, aunt, sister, two brothers, one of whom was about to get married. Apart from the pleasure of dressing like a sophisticated woman of the big city, she didn’t know or wish for anything else. And now in an instant, she was no longer herself. Not that she was ill, not at all, but she felt a happiness that wasn’t really happiness so much as a revival of the imagination she had believed dead, a disorientation. The fact that she had reached an excellent position in life, that she СКАЧАТЬ