The Day of Judgment Read online

  Don Sebastiano picked up the oil lamp, a great white globe on an iridescent stem, and started into the stairwell. The darkness was vast, and his hesitant steps caused a round eye of light to flicker swiftly here and there on the ceiling. Twenty years earlier he had built this house, on a piece of land bought from some impoverished Neapolitans whom the winds had blown as far as Nuoro, and the winds had then carried off God knows where. This undertaking had not been easy, with seven sons to launch into the future, and—it may be added—starting from scratch in a world that rejected the least mention of hope. But being a notary in a small town is an incalculable privilege, for (as they used to say) a power of attorney keeps the pot boiling. And apart from the lunatic document that is a power of attorney (three lire charge plus fifty lire fees) there were wills, there were sales of property which—since word of honor was losing its value—were beginning to be made in writing; there were the contracts which gentlemen from the Continent came to draw up, for the cutting down of the woods and the devastation of the island. Those were fabulous people, who turned all they touched into gold (though some of them ended by remaining on the island, bewitched by its demoniacal sadness). Accustomed to the profiteering notaries of the mainland, they could scarcely believe that they had found a notary who romantically described himself as the depository of the public’s trust, who procured business for them and bargained over prices with the owners, and all this without demanding a penny (and indeed refusing all offers) above the fee laid down for the deed in question. No matter: what counts is not earning much, but spending little, and in fact not spending at all, if possible. And possible it was, on account of the lambs and kids which honest folk sent as gifts. On one occasion, and it was the first and last, he had allowed himself to be inveigled to the Officers’ Club (for Nuoro was also the headquarters of a garrison) and had sat down at a gaming table. After half an hour, inexpert as he was, he had lost thirty lire. He waited until the hand came round to him (dignity above everything) and then he stood up, holding firm against all blandishments. Back at home, for three nights in a row, with his own hand he wrote the copies meant for the clerk, until he had made up for the thirty lire. Therefore, said malicious tongues, it was the clerk who paid. But what matter? Someone always has to pay.

  If you can buy a brick for a penny, the house will build itself. Ah yes, that would be fine. But the fact is that a notary’s house simply can’t be like the house of a peasant in Sèuna, with its yard, its rustic patio, its log pile, its lòriche*1 for the oxen, and the kitchen at the end, with the fireplace in the middle of the room. Such houses had grown by themselves over the centuries, like bird’s nests. But Don Sebastiano needs an architectural engineer, and the engineer is right there in the house across the road, perhaps the oldest middle-class dwelling in all Nuoro, clapped tight like a fortress, full of women and maniacs, with its windows constantly shuttered and doors that open only at prearranged signals. Don Gabriele Mannu, like all the Mannu clan, was a rich man living in penury. But he had been to Rome, he had studied, and he had come back as an architectural engineer to a town where no one had built a house for a century. That land of the impoverished Neapolitans, and that enterprising notary, offered his ancestral idleness—based on distrust of himself even more than of others, for he invariably answered no before finding out what someone wanted of him—both a test-bench and a challenge. So he made design after design, calculation after calculation. All very well, but he had in mind the palaces of Rome and the staircases which (he had read) men of old climbed up on horseback. And thus, instead of a house he made a staircase, an enormous space from which at every landing little holes opened off (which were the rooms, one leading into the other); and he thereby committed the growing family to hardship and irritability. It is true that people peering in across the threshold were astounded at that immense, useless atrium, and began to imagine who knows what untold riches—even if the master builder did go around saying that without his providential intervention Don Sebastiano would have had to crawl into his palace on all fours, so low had the designer planned the architrave of the front door.

  For this reason the evening descent from the study to the ground floor was something of a voyage, and for this reason the round eye of light from the oil lamp flitted here and there over the vaults with the faltering of his footsteps. But at last he heard laughter and shouting and quarreling, and Don Sebastiano was able to put out the lamp, blowing across the top of the long glass chimney with the flame burning at the bottom.

  Another, larger lamp was alight in the dining room, this one consisting of a bronze base sustaining a vessel very like an urn, decorated with transparent hunting scenes on a pale-blue background. Goodness knows how much a lamp like that would be worth today, but the Sannas, with their accursed instinct for dissolution, have not left even the most meager trace of their past. In Sardinia death is eternal and ephemeral not only for men, but for objects as well. This lamp was burning on a massive oval table that filled almost the entire room. The mahogany sideboard with the good china on show (at one end the bowl containing copper soldi and silver lire for housekeeping money; below, the huge rounds of bread in tall stacks replenished every fortnight) was inserted into the wall shared by the neighboring kitchen. But the light that played on the faces of the seven boys, the youngest scarcely more than ten years old, did not come from the lamp, but from the oak logs burning in the fireplace, the only source of warmth in the whole house. Donna Vincenza, wife and mother, sat apart in a corner, wrapped in black garments such as befitted her fifty years, exhausted, swollen from childbearing, her head perpetually bent upon her breast. For her it was as if each of those sons were still in her womb, and in the depths of her silence she listened to their voices as if feeling their hidden, mysterious movements within her. They were her life, not her hope. For Donna Vincenza was a woman without hope.

  The entry of a father into his children’s room damps their shouts and laughter down to a murmur, especially when the children are many and the father has to maintain and raise them by his own labors, rendering them present to him but unfamiliar. The evening meal had been over for some time, if indeed it had ever begun, because everyone ate what they wanted or what they could find, and whenever they saw fit; or else they formed into intimate little cliques within the family, each going its own way. At five o’clock, when there was still no one around, Donna Vincenza would heat herself a cup of milk and soak half a round of bread in it. For five years Don Sebastiano had not dined at all, and in fact it was this decision that had started the break-up of the evening meal. For some time before that he had been having dizzy spells when work was particularly fierce, and the treatment provided by Dr. Manca, the family physician, who (though intelligent) was an alcoholic like half the male population of Nuoro, had been of no avail. So one fine day, without breathing a word to anyone, he set off (believe it or not) for Sassari, 120 kilometers away. He was gone for two days, throwing everybody into despair. At last he returned, and by way of greeting announced that he was never again going to eat in the evening. Doctor’s orders. Donna Vincenza’s cries rose up to the heavens, but they did not remotely touch Don Sebastiano’s heart. The dinners ceased and the dizzy spells ceased, and it was then that he took to spending the hour of the evening meal in the study where we found him. The void surrounding Donna Vincenza increased. So that evening, as usual, he moved toward the fireplace, and in passing stuck two icy fingers down the neck of one of his sons.

  It was a familiar gesture, which made his younger boys jump, and by this time maddened the older ones. Certainly, it was meant as a joke, but deep inside he took pleasure in displaying his self-sacrifice, or at least his virtue, by reminding them of the cold he suffered while the rest were in the warm (and all thanks to him). “All you have to do is have a brazier brought up,” said Donna Vincenza from her silence; and this was obvious, but for precisely that reason it should not have been said. Then Don Sebastiano joined them at the table, with his back to the fire, which gilded his
bald head; and he began to talk.

  He usually talked about things he had read in the paper. Not about political matters, of course. Politics in those days, for people of his station, born to work and to reap the precious and costly fruits of middle-class toil, literally did not exist. Politics was the government in office, those far-off, fabulous people called ministers, who due simply to the fact that they were ministers possessed merits such as put them above criticism. Anyway, who went in for politics in Nuoro? Those four or five lawyers who perpetually presented themselves as candidates (each with his own personal ballot paper, bearing his first and last names surmounted by a symbol for the benefit of the illiterate—Avvocato Manca had a plow, while Avvocato Corda had a four-leaf clover, which never managed to bring him luck) did not really practice politics as such. They aspired to speak in a chamber larger than the courtroom and (some hope!) to become one of those ministers. Only the priests—one perceived this vaguely, like the glitter of a distant wave—ever put forward anyone who was not a lawyer, nor among lawyers could they have found a candidate. But they never managed to get their man elected. Men such as Don Sebastiano not only did not meddle with politics, but did not even vote, because men of his class had a duty not to vote. As a notary Don Sebastiano collected the four or five hundred names of the voters, and during those days the staircase to the study was a constant procession. He himself stood the expense of the stamped paper, since for the sake of impartiality he made no one pay. Donna Vincenza pointed out that it would have been equally impartial if everyone had paid, and this also was obvious, and because it was obvious it should not have been said.

  But in this abstention from politics there was something more profound, more freighted with inevitability. Don Sebastiano was Nuorese, and he would have had a family tree consisting entirely of Nuorese, had he been able to conceive of the past at all. The people who went in for politics, the candidates, were all from the villages: from Orune, from Gavoi, from Olzai, from Orotelli, and even from Ovodda—those minuscule settlements as remote from one another as are the stars, which look upon Nuoro as their local capital. They were villages of shepherds, of peasants, of people toiling away to get nowhere, but whose children had discovered the alphabet, that prodigious weapon of conquest; or at least of redemption from the arid, grudging soil. The zii, or uncles, as these elderly rustics were called, came to Nuoro with their massive beards, clad in their brand-new costumes as if entering a drawing room, and went to testify, or talk to a lawyer or a notary (when they were not brought to town in handcuffs) once or twice a year, dragging their children behind them. These children, got up in modern dress, feeling stupid even in their own eyes and growing more and more ashamed of their fathers (in comparison with those gentlemen who were no less at a loose end but who sat at the caffè tables as if exercising a class prerogative), saw the huge shop windows spread with sweetmeats or toys or books, or with headless dummies dressed in ready-made clothes, very likely all moth-eaten and moldy, but nonetheless symbols of something never seen or even imagined: wealth in hard cash, so different from being rich in sheep or goats. The Nuorese lawyer and the Nuorese notary, who spoke to their fathers in a Sardinian dialect more refined than their own Olzaese or Orunese or Gavoino, were men who “knew,” even if the lads could not understand what they were saying; and they “knew” because they were Nuorese. They began to feel that if they wished to be someone they had to become Nuorese, and this notion encouraged them to study, to go to secondary school, and even to undertake the great adventure of the university, if possible with a scholarship to the Collegio delle Province—all that was left of the old Kingdom of Sardinia—or else by bartering away their father’s plot of land. But even in Turin, or Sassari, or Rome, the goal was always Nuoro: the goal or the battlefield, no matter which. Finally they burst into the fortress like plebeian blood into the veins of a decaying nobleman. Intelligent, astute, despised but not despising others, they had only one advantage over the Nuorese, but this was a great one: they knew what they wanted. They could not, of course, become Nuorese, if only on account of their speech, which even after twenty or thirty years still retained traces of their native village; but the jobs swung more and more toward these newcomers. Among other things, they brought with them the quarrelsome clientele of their native villages; and then, someone who works will always get the better of someone who just dreams his daydreams and doesn’t do a stroke. Francesco Cossu Boi, known as Armchair Cossu, a penniless would-be painter whose means of livelihood was a mystery to everyone, saw fit to reply to those who offered him jobs: “We Boi have never worked.” But these other smart fellows, so modest in their dealings with the Nuorese, even the poorest of them, knew the way to become Nuorese in the end. In the smooth walls of those decaying old town houses there was a breach, invisible but unfailing; and this was the women. All such houses were full of them, because it appeared that the Nuorese—the “suitable” ones—had a vocation for celibacy; and in truth, marriage becomes impossible for those who do not acknowledge the simplicity of life. So they spurned those rich, pale women who dreamed and pined in their cloistered life, and occasionally appeared like ghosts behind the windowpanes, or left the house to go to Mass. The newcomers knew the value of these women, quite apart from their fortunes. They did not come forward merely as dowry-hunters, but tipped the scales with their Sword of Brennus, which was their industriousness. The spinsters were only too glad to leave the title of “Donna” behind in their gloomy mansions and to live in the spruce, tasteless houses of the newcomers, which were already springing up on the outskirts of town. What could Don Serafino, Don Gabriele, or Don Pasqualino do except open the door to the applicants, if only to shut it again at once? Life was in their hands. None of them, of course, would have been able to handle a case like a Nuorese lawyer; but thank you very much, the latter took twenty years about it (one had to take twenty years because lawsuits are serious matters), whereas the newcomers made three or four quick thrusts and everything was settled.

  For the Nuorese, Nuoro itself was one of those grand, sad ladies, and it took an outsider to appreciate the amount of hidden power that lay there; that is, what it meant to have the administration in one’s hands. Basically Don Sebastiano, and those who like him worked to build a house and a family, were unable to understand the public domain, for the simple reason that they identified it with themselves. Even the poor, and even the great mass of those who had chosen idleness as their occupation, could not feel otherwise. Of course, 7,051 persons did have common needs that someone had to provide for. But when it came down to it, what was at stake? Of the water system, with the not inconsiderable expense that it entailed (not to mention water purloined from the surrounding countryside), there was no need to speak. Could they not make do with those meager springs on the outskirts of town—Obisti, Istiritta—with their cool waters, which at twilight the serving-maids brought home in amphoras set lightly upon heads barely protected by a little pad? Even today, when there are so many aqueducts, the true Nuorese spurns the water that passes through pipes, and sends out for the time-honored water from the hillside.

  And what about street lighting? Certainly, with life changing as it does, they could not go on making their way down the street with flaming firebrands whenever they went out at night (and they went out only when necessary). In fact Don Priamo, Don Sebastiano’s brother, had concerned himself with this when he was mayor. That meeting remained memorable because the council wanted to limit oil lighting to moonless nights. But Don Priamo had shut everyone up by observing, “And how can we tell if the moonlit nights aren’t going to be cloudy?” He still boasted about it. The drinking troughs at the three entrances to the town had always been there, and the peasants themselves, arriving with their oxen thirsty from the long climb, saw to keeping them clean and scraping off the moss and lichen. In short, all was in place, and everyone was in his place, for the common good. But the outsiders had understood, precisely because they were outsiders and had rescued the women from their
sepulchers, that the administration of Nuoro did not lie in these trivialities, but in something quite different—the power one could lay one’s hands on. Being mayor meant seeing the Nuorese, including Don Sebastiano, Don Gabriele, and Don Pasqualino, come forward hat in hand to ask for something. And, foreseeing the future, the outsiders knew that such people would have increasing need for that something from the administration. Power meant conceding this certain something; and this was all the more important because, in spite of appearances, power is shown more by giving than by taking away.

  Then there was another thing the Nuorese had not realized: that the city or town, as the case might be, did not consist solely of themselves, but also of people who had come from the outside world, from the far-distant Continent: the subprefect, the garrison commander, the captain of the carabinieri, the president of the tribunal. These were employees, agreed, but because of them Nuoro was no longer or not only Sardinian; it was a fragment of Italy, in communication with Italy. And so the horizons widened. The conquest of the administration was also the road to politics—to Rome, to Rome! In short, the Nuorese found themselves administered and represented by outsiders, and all things considered, they were not sorry. It was one thing less to bother with.

  Don Sebastiano did not mention politics, but he spoke about the King, who on the occasion of his birthday had entertained a hundred poor children at the Quirinal Palace, and luncheon had been served by the Queen and the princesses. Don Sebastiano was not a monarchist except insofar as there was a king, and it did not occur to him that it might be otherwise. But that the King, in whose name he drew up deeds on stamped paper (and it did not cross his mind that the stamp was a tax or a levy: it was what lent prestige to his profession), that the King should humble himself to the poor in this way profoundly moved him; as he had been moved by the story of the minister who had gone to visit his constituency, where they had prepared a huge luncheon; and when he found that they had laid a separate table for him and his entourage he would not sit down until all the tables had been put back together again. His voice would catch a little in his throat, but not from sentimentality. It was one of those things that lent value to life, which he believed in because he was alive. The same applied to the news that a doctor in Milan had injected his son with a serum against some disease or other, or that a member of the Chamber of Deputies in Turin had forced a policeman to fine him for an offense he had committed; or that by crossbreeding they had obtained a new strain of sheep that gave a hundred liters of milk per head, whereas Sardinian sheep achieved twenty liters in a good year; or again, that a ship had sunk in the Atlantic and the captain had refused to enter the lifeboat, even as the last man. Not everyone listened to these accounts, but Don Sebastiano really spoke only for his own benefit. He repeated what he had read without suspecting for a moment that it might be nonsense. Newspapers were not what they are today, commercial enterprises. They were something of an encyclopedia, a source of knowledge, the only source of knowledge in a small town, and it was impossible not to believe what they said. Otherwise, why would they have said it? (This was the case even with the Giornale d’Italia, let alone the Corriere della Sera, which never published a single photograph, but did not reach Sardinia.) In Don Sebastiano and men of his class it was as if the Age of Enlightenment had been prolonged into the late nineteenth century, manifesting itself in a serene and entirely unconscious atheism, without aversion for religion or even for the priests, though Nuoro had a swarm of them; and this attitude was nourished by a sure faith in the power of man over the forces of nature. Atheism is a static moment in life, and life then was static, like a chessboard on which one can play thousands of games, though the combinations are not infinite. The infinite was there (who knows?) in some of those youngsters, if while growing up they had ever felt it impossible to be reduced to pawns, or jacks, or even to kings. Or maybe it was there in that poor woman shorn of hope, who from out of her silence listened to Don Sebastiano’s chatter with a few muttered, unheard comments.