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  THE DAY OF JUDGMENT

  Salvatore Satta

  Translated from the Italian by Patrick Creagh

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  About the Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

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  About The Day of Judgment

  Around the turn of the twentieth century, in the isolated Sardinian town of Nuoro, the aristocratic notary Don Sebastiano Sanna reflects on his life, his family’s history and the fortunes of this provincial backwater where he has lived out his days.

  Written over the course of a lifetime and published posthumously, The Day of Judgment is a classic of Italian, and world, literature.

  Contents

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  About The Day of Judgment

  The Marvellous Word: An Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Translator’s Note

  Historical Note

  About Salvatore Satta

  About the Translator

  Endpapers

  About the cover and endpapers

  More from Apollo

  About Apollo

  Copyright

  The Marvellous Word: An Introduction

  Visitors to Nuoro can follow a Salvatore Satta Itinerary, linking locations in this book. The Caffè Tettamanzi on Corso Garibaldi is still open. Beneath its painted ceiling and mottled mirrors, old men pore over newspapers; a television screen mutters on the wall; backpackers gurn for selfies. Communing with the writer and his phantoms is not easy. Better to take a minor road away from the town and halt in the open, during ‘the season when the sun brings nothing but fire and death’. The burnt ochre landscape of Sardinia’s interior begins to whisper in dolorous voices – the voices of Satta’s unique novel.

  When The Day of Judgment was published in 1979, four years after its author’s death, it was acclaimed as a masterpiece. Some 60,000 copies were sold within a few months. Vying in their praise, some critics likened the book to The Leopard, another unexpected novel from Italy’s periphery. Translations quickly multiplied (there were nineteen at last count); conferences were held; Susan Sontag – vigilant for excellence – saluted this ‘improbable gift, for which one cannot be too thankful: a great European novel.’

  Salvatore Satta (b. 1902) might have reacted to the applause with a mordant smile and then made his excuses. As a young man, he yearned for literary success. He wrote a novel about his spell in a sanatorium, being treated for tuberculosis, and entered the manuscript for a prestigious prize in 1928. When he failed to win, Satta renounced fiction and dedicated himself to the legal studies which he had started when he left his native Sardinia for mainland Italy in 1920. He became an extremely distinguished jurist, one of Italy’s foremost experts on procedural law, a prolific author of standard works on civil procedure and bankruptcy and an esteemed teacher at several universities.

  By the end of the nineteen-sixties, Satta was approaching retirement, living quietly on the outskirts of Rome with his wife, who had her own career as a scholar; their children were grown; his brothers (he was the youngest of seven) were all dead. Amid the isolation of old age and the strong premonition of mortality, Satta was swept back to the lost world of his childhood. In the summer of 1970, he began to write a novel about his family and his birthplace in Sardinia. He told a friend that it was ‘a crazy endeavour’, a ‘book of memories’, a ‘secret book’. The upwelling of ‘infinite’ material seemed to ‘submerge’ him.

  As the months passed, he found that the ‘terrible shades’ in his novel had become ‘necessary to my existence’, more real than the living people around him. And he knew the worth of what he was writing. ‘Everything I’ve been trying to describe was a living world. If I succeed in recapturing that life, as itself, simply as what it was when it was alive, I’ll make a masterpiece; but I lack the strength in every sense.’ That last clause was characteristic. Despite his achievements and domestic fulfilment, Satta was convinced beyond reason that aspiration was inscribed with defeat. Conservative in outlook, he possessed – or was possessed by – a reactionary imagination, grounded in a Catholic faith which was never secure against despair. Humankind was sinful; people continually, compulsively violate the (Christian) values which should be sacrosanct; change meant decay; failure was the norm. Satta’s widow Laura said that he had seemed to bear the griefs of the world on his back.

  Many sensitive people wear some such armour. Satta’s excitement while he wrote The Day of Judgment, conveyed in his letters, surely reflected the pleasure of finding that his lyrical voice had not been suffocated. The taproot to childhood was still alive. The sentiments in the book may often be gloomy, but the zest of the telling – the sense of imaginative recovery – counters the darkness of the tale, to haunt us ever after (in my case, at least) with its warmth, evocative power, and the fascination of its style: one that has been steeped in legal texts and is now serving a radically different purpose.

  Before his death in April 1975, Satta had revised his manuscript but not completed it. The last sentence breaks off: ‘In tutta questa confusione era tornato in campo Mussolini,’ (Amid all this confusion, Mussolini came back on the scene). Satta’s family decided that the book as published should conclude instead with a page of reflections compiled from the last portion of the manuscript. ‘To know ourselves we must live our lives to the very end’, Satta enjoins. ‘And even then we need someone to gather us up, to revive us, to speak about us both to ourselves and to others, as in a last judgment.’

  *

  What sort of novel, then, is The Day of Judgment? Of no sort at all; it is sui generis. Much is provided to the reader: a fresco of a particular place and time, with summaries of rituals and customs, almost ethnographic in their detail; a vision of a remote fastness on the edge of Europe as modernity approaches and changes it forever; a family chronicle across two or three generations; vivid portraits of townsfolk. This is all supplied with poetic concision by a narrator who, far from pronouncing in the manner of a judge, interrupts his story with anxious asides. ‘My problem,’ he remarks in Chapter Twelve, ‘is whether there is any sort of connection between these women and the drinkers in the Caffè Tettamanzi.’ He could make one up, of course, but that would violate a principle. (‘In what I have written there is not an untrue word, and it has been really painful to reread it.’) Satta allows himself the freedom to remember, not the liberty to invent. Even this might not have overcome his innate reticence, had he not also released his pen from fealty to anything juridical in nature. He trusted his memory to lead him, and trusted himself to receive its dictation.

  The family portrayed is Satta’s own, with altered names. Don Sebastiano is a notary, masterful with his clients, cold with his wife and seven sons. His life is governed by iron routine; tenderness is confined to the plants in his cherished garden. Neglected as a spouse, abandoned over time by children who leave home, Donna Vincenza is a study in unhappiness; her inarticulate suffering permeates the book. Satta relates her story with profound sympathy, sharpened by filial guilt. She becomes a tragic emblem of Sardinian womanhood in its several phases, as in this remark about her maidenhood: ‘young girls in t
hose days were made for the future, and therefore not only did they have no “past”, which is only too obvious, but no present either.’

  Modernity demands the articulation of what had never needed putting into words. Satta communicates the muteness of tradition and implication; he interprets the manifold silences of Nuoro and makes them expressive. If he gives voice to the voiceless, it is not done with the political aim of empowering the disempowered, but in a religious spirit of ultimate commemoration and an artistic spirit of passionate inquiry. His parents’ generation was the last for which ‘the simple, humble certainties of life’ were a given, the last that was bound together in a ‘mysterious communion’. Satta evokes the harshness and ‘wondrous abundance’ of life in a small society governed by immemorial custom.

  We each discover that we were raised in prehistory; as childhood recedes, it becomes our painted cave, accessible to nobody else, lit by flares of adult memory which intensify over time. The advance of modernity (which Satta regarded with implacable distrust) differed in its contours from place to place. And Nuoro was small and separate enough to be a laboratory.

  A word about Nuoro. Spreading over a rumpled granite plateau called the Barbagia, this ancient town reaches down toward the brown plains and up to the flanks of Mount Ortobene, matt green with holm oak and juniper. After the unification of Italy all Sardinians felt neglected, but none more so than the landlocked Nuorese. The abolition of communal grazing rights by the new authorities provoked an uprising in 1868 that brought members of parliament across the sea to investigate social and economic conditions. The ferment encouraged cultural creativity. By the end of the nineteenth century, young intellectuals were calling their town ‘the Athens of Sardinia’, with pride as well as irony. For it produced writers and artists of real distinction. The Nobel laureate for literature in 1926, Grazia Deledda, was born here and did not leave until her thirtieth year, when she travelled to Cagliari – now only two hours’ drive away. Among her early books was a series of essays about the ethos and customs of her birthplace. ‘The character of the Nuorese is spirited and grave,’ she wrote. ‘Their concept of life is said to be severe and melancholy.’ Nuoro was the ‘most characteristic of all Sardinian towns’, it was ‘the heart of Sardinia’, and ‘the open field where emergent civilisation wages a silent struggle with outlandish Sardinian barbarity.’

  Then there was Salvatore Satta’s uncle Sebastiano, a poet, and no less heartfelt a conservative than his nephew, according to whom ‘Sebastiano Satta saw the first car in Sardinia drive past and he immediately foresaw the death of his homeland.’ The encounter is enshrined in plangent verses: ‘…an alien rumble and alien beasts / Pass by. O nightingales ’fore dawn, O flowers, O flocks, O sylvan scenes, / No more are we alone’, and so forth. By this time, Nuoro had some 7,000 inhabitants; the total now approaches 40,000. Half a century ago, Alan Ross reported that the hills around Nuoro were ‘tourist country that has not received its tourists’. Traditional costume was worn here after it had disappeared from other Sardinian towns. Alan Ross again: ‘The black stocking-caps, smocks, waistcoats and gaiters of the men are shiny with use, the velvet rubbed away. And the women, too, in brocade jackets over white blouses, in embroidered skirts made out of two solid-coloured materials, the front and the back different, dress to their surroundings.’ While these visible differences have passed, a faintly archaic atmosphere still lingers.

  In The Day of Judgment, Satta depicts the town’s modernisation as coinciding with his own childhood, in the first decades of the last century. The author’s prehistory coincided with his community’s entrance into history. The electrification of the streets, the irruption of the First World War, the arrival of democratic politics: these seismic events in Nuoro are matched by the growth and disappearance of Don Sebastiano’s sons.

  Although the book’s tones are sombre, not everything is gloomy. The gorgeous descriptions in Chapter Five read almost like a Mediterranean Cider with Rosie. Such rapt evocation is a pure form of love. Besides, the note of threnody in the book never turns into lamentation; Satta shows how terrible the past was. And there are several grim jokes, perhaps Irish in flavour. ‘An enormous silence filled the dingy room, and the dead man was not the most silent among them.’

  *

  Judgment was a concept that Satta had pondered for half a century. As a jurist, he once wrote that the essence of judgment, its constitutive element, is this: it must be rendered by a third party. ‘No one can be a judge in his own cause, which is to say that whoever judges in his own cause does not deliver a judgment.’ As the servant of a truth which stands outside and above him, the judge must participate [partecipare] in the trial without becoming partial [essere parte]. In this role lies ‘the mystery of the trial’. For a man of his religious and moral temperament, every day is the day of judgment, when all our acts may be weighed in the scales of eternal justice and found wanting. In this novel, Satta the narrator is that third party who alone can render judgment, the one who gathers up his family and neighbours and speaks about them. It is not comfortable to play the part of a recording angel; as he wrote elsewhere, ‘Whoever judges another knows that he judges himself first of all’. If he shies away from doing this, however, something real will be lost forever.

  In an essay from the nineteen-fifties, Satta had written that Sardinians were possessed by ‘the idea of immanent sin’, and even more by ‘the imperious sense of judgment, conceiving of life itself as a judgment, with no margin for liberty and the heedlessness of action’. This burden could crush the islanders’ initiative, thickening the torpor that blanketed and blighted their lives. On the other hand, ‘whoever has such a lively and troubling sense of the law and of sin (the sense of death, to put it more briefly, for nobody knows that he must die as the Sardinian knows it) has something more than faith. He has a vocation of sanctity: an absurd and anachronistic vocation, which stops us from entering the process of history and leads us, fatally, to dissolve history in utopia’. The Italian word for process, processo, also means trial. History is a trial; its sentence cannot be appealed. Yet there was more to judgment, in Satta’s understanding, than punitive severity. He once praised it as a ‘marvellous word’ that expressed the unity of knowing and creating, ‘knowledge as a truly creative act’.

  Mark Thompson, 2016

  1

  At precisely nine o’clock, as he did every evening, Don Sebastiano Sanna Carboni pushed back his armchair, carefully folded the newspaper which he had read through to the very last line, tidied up the little things on his desk, and prepared to go down to the ground floor, to the modest room which served as dining room, sitting room, and study for his brood of sons, and was the only lively room in the large house, partly because it was the only one to be heated, by an old fireplace.

  Don Sebastiano was a nobleman, if it is true that Charles V distributed minor titles of nobility to the Sardinian natives who had grafted the wild olive trees throughout their countryside (the higher nobility with real pretensions was almost entirely confined to Cagliari, and practically foreign to the island). But the double-barreled surname was only an outward show, the “Carboni” being nothing more than his mother’s name tacked on to Sanna, which was the only real family name. This was due partly to the Spanish custom, and partly to the need to distinguish between one person and another, given the small variety of names caused by the sparsity of population. Every yokel in Sardinia has two surnames, even if in the course of time both are usually triumphed over by a nickname which with luck becomes the much-feared distinguishing mark of a dynasty of shepherds. A typical example is that of the Corrales clan. Time and necessity have eventually given some measure of legitimacy to these double-barreled names, and in fact “Sebastiano Sanna Carboni” in roman letters surrounded the coat of arms of the House of Savoy on the official brass stamp which Don Sebastiano scrupulously locked away every evening in a drawer of his desk. For Don Sebastiano was a notary, a notary in the provincial capital of Nuoro.

&n
bsp; Who this Carboni woman was, who had left her name on a stamp, no one could have said. Don Sebastiano’s mother must have died young, and nothing is more eternal in Nuoro, nothing more ephemeral, than death. When someone dies it is as if the whole town had died. From the cathedral—the Church of Santa Maria high on the hill—there falls upon the 7,051 inhabitants registered at the last census the tolling of the bell that announces that one of their number has passed away: nine strokes for men, seven for women, tolled more slowly for prominent people. No one knows whether this last is at the discretion of the bell ringer or according to the clergy’s scale of charges, but a poor man who gets himself su toccu pasau, the slow tolling, is little less than a scandal. The next day the whole town winds along behind the coffin, with one priest in front, then three priests, then the entire chapter (for Nuoro is the see of a bishop), the first one unpaid and in a hurry, the others making two, three, four stops on the way to the graveyard—however many are asked for—and truly the wing of death descends on the little low houses and on the occasional more recent mansions. Then, when the last shovelful has brought the scene to an end, the dead man is dead with a vengeance, and even his memory vanishes. The cross remains on the grave, but that’s up to it. And in fact in the graveyard, or rather, in the cemetery, dominated by a crag that looks like one of the Fates, there is neither chapel nor monument. (This is not the case today: ever since death ceased to exist, the place has been crammed with family tombs. Sa ’e Manca, Manca’s plot, as it used to be called, I imagine after the name of the long-expropriated owner, over and beyond its costly walls and absurd colonnades, has become a continuation of the now middle-class city.) And in this way the Carboni woman dissolved into nothingness, in spite of the five sons she had brought into the world, who didn’t even remember her Christian name, launched as they were into the adventure of their own lives. After all, apart from this fatiguing adventure, were they alive themselves? And the people whom destiny had hitched to their wagons—wives, children, servants, relatives—did they feel them to be living?