In Maremma/Volume 1/Chapter 13

by Marie Louise de la Ramée

 

CHAPTER XIII.

 

HE removal of Joconda's body from its grave was never noticed by the sacristan of Santa Tarsilla, or by any one of her neighbours.

No one ever went nigh that rough space of ground under the sea wall. They had done with her when they had buried her. When the torch of Andreino had flared itself out, the last rite of remembrance had been finished for ever.

Santa Tarsilla was like the greater world that lay around outside its desolate plains and swamps.

'That girl is a base one,' said the neighbours; 'never so much as a wooden cross has she set above the grave, or a two-soldo print of a saint has she hung above it!'

They knew she had gone to live away on the moors; where, they were not sure; it was a matter of indifference. They had got the money, and had torn each other well-nigh to pieces over it; they were readier to forget her than to recall her. If she had come back she might have demanded some clear account of their alleged claims, and to satisfy her would have been awkward. The landlord, or rather his steward, for the landlord was a gay noble, far away, came and looked about the house, and affirmed that he had a title to a year's rental, and sold the sticks of furniture, and the pots and pans, the mattress on which Joconda had lain every night till she had slept on it her last sleep, and the porridge-pot from which she had given the child of Saturnino her first bit and sup.

The landlord was far away; the steward pocketed the proceeds of the sale, though Joconda had paid her rent beforehand, as every tenant does in Italy; and he took credit to himself, as he conversed with the people, that he did not find the girl out, and make her render him up the mule. So an honest life went out under the smirch of calumny, as a sweet-smelling pine-cone goes out in smoke when it is thrown on a coke fire.

In Santa Tarsilla the August weather was hot with the cruel, unchanging, misty heat that breeds all manner of disease from the waters and the earth, and which is only good for the lecherous vine that strangles the maples it clings to, and lives on to steal the soul out of man by and by, and vines are there none in Maremma.

After the momentary excitation following on Joconda's death and legacy, the few inhabitants returned to the dull, dropsical apathy in which they were wont to pass their lives. The girl was somewhere on the moors, and Andreino's boat was missing one night from its mooring by the mole, though replaced the next; but it was no concern of theirs. Curiosity consents to close its unwinking eyes when interest sings its lullaby.

Old Andreino had, indeed, spasms of the pain of conscience, for in his way he had been fond of Musa, and had a regard for the woman of Savoy. But he never sought for her. Nay, if he had not been ashamed to put up such a prayer to his saint, he would have entreated S. Andrea to grant him never to see her face again, since he felt that the rebuke and the reproach of those magnificent jewel-like eyes would be very hard to bear, and he remembered how strong her wrist was, and if it should please her to belabour him with one of his own oars he would be as a rush in the grasp of the reed-cutter. And when his conscience pricked him, he felt that he had behaved not nobly; and he was sorry for his conduct; for, after all, the women had hustled him so that he had not been able to get one single coin that had rolled out of the pitcher.

'I might just as well have stood up for her, he thought woefully; 'and after all she might in time have come to think of our little Nandino. I was too quick with her, that is the truth; and then those hags came in between us with their screeching—well, the Saints grant me not to see her face!'

He was terribly afraid lest he should see her. When he sat on the mole smoking his pipe as the shadows lengthened, he scanned anxiously the open sea and the low shore in fear lest he should behold the figure of Musa coming between him and the evening sky.

But the days and the weeks and the months went by, and she never came back to Santa Tarsilla.

One night Santa Tarsilla, which never hardly heard any news at all (the only news-sheet in the place being the priest's copy of the Voce della Verità), was a little stirred out of its feeble, feverish drowsiness by hearing that the escaped galley-slave Saturnino Mastarna had been captured afresh: taken by the carabineers after a fierce fight, having been discovered as he was hiding in a wine-shop in the hamlet of Saturnia, whose owner, a widow woman, had gone into Orbetello to sell some Etruscan ornaments and an Etruscan crown of oak leaves to a goldsmith.

The woman's poverty, and her halting story to the goldsmith, had roused the suspicions of the police, and the carabineers, entering her house by force, had shot down Saturnino through the keyhole of a door, and had seized him, after being crushed by his arms and rent with his teeth where he lay shot on the ground, as though he were a beast of prey they were driving out of its lair.

Wounded and disabled, but not so greatly as to be thought in peril of his life, the once famous brigand had been borne to the casemates of Orbetello, thence to go back to his doom on Gorgona. So the pale, emaciated, fever-shaken coastguards said one night, standing about on the mole, and smoking their rank tobacco.

More than fourteen years had gone since the name of Saturnino had been at once the pride and the terror of Maremma, and the legends of him had faded off the minds of the people, as the frescoes of their churches faded in the damp of ages. Yet when they heard his name again—that name which had been as a trumpet-call, as an incantation, as the belling of the king-stag in the forest to his herd—even the sickly women lifted their heads, even the palsied men took their pipes from their mouths: 'he was a man!' they said softly, under their breath.

The mountain robber always bewitches the fancy of the multitude, and the robbery which only strikes at the rich always seems a sort of rough justice to the poor: the argument of the bandit is the argument of the socialist couched in simpler language.

Beneath their subjugation by that witchery of adventure and of defiance, which allure the imagination of the populace, there is always, also, this resentful thought—he is condemned, this bold marauder who carries his life in hand, whilst the sleek poltroons, the thieves in broadcloth and fine linen, the Barabbi of commerce, stalk abroad through the tens of thousands they have duped or ruined, untouched by law, undenounced by any wrath of earth or wrath of heaven. The preference of the multitude may be unsound morality, but it has a wild justice and a rude logic at its base.

Santa Tarsilla once more lamented for Saturnino. It was of the same mind with the mob of Orbetello, which, could it have got at the woman whose stupidity had cost him his liberty, would have made her rue that ever she had been born.

In like manner all the villages and the towns in Maremma mourned for him; feeling pity and pain for the old eagle of their rocks who had broken loose from his cage only to be trapped afresh. He had once been the glory of Maremma; the country was hurt in its own pride to think that their hero was dealt with like any mean cut-purse of the cities.

Even to little San Lionardo the tidings of his sad fate travelled; travelled by the mouth of a sensale; that is, a go-between, who negotiates with the farmers or shepherds who sell cattle, and the butchers or breeders who buy them.

Owners and buyers would be much better served if they did their own negotiations without the middleman; but Italy is the land of go-betweens, in commerce as in love, and these men swarm over the land and fill their money-bags not ill nor slowly.

This one, riding about the moors in the evening time, viewing herds and flocks, had business which took him to San Lionardo; a little white-washed place lying on the amethyst and pearl-grey of the hills like a humble sea-shell on a grand table of pietra dura and mosaic.

San Lionardo never knew anything unless by some rare stray visit of a pedlar or of a dealer; it had very few dwellers in it, and had not even a church or a priest. When any were wedded or buried in the hamlet they had to go up miles above, along the road that wound over the bare face of the stone mountain, where every tree and shrub had been felled, and the sun scorched the rock, that had not the shade of even a leaf or a blade of grass.

These little white hamlets and towns of Italy glisten all over her long, low, mountain sides, their church towers red-roofed with tiles, or brown with wooden belfry, or pointed with the air-perched statue of a saint in their midst, and not seldom around them the circle of broken walls which tells the tale of their ancientness and of their bygone wars. Oftentimes they are old as Rome itself; classic as Tusculum; full of memories as the foundations of Troy; but ho one comes to them. They are little, lonely, humble places now, far out of the highways of men; and, save their spinning-women, and their hinds and herdsmen, and their priest, they shelter no living thing. When winter comes, they are severed by unbridged torrents even from other villages that lie along the same line of hills; and up to their heights in the snow, or in the heat, no traveller ever wanders.

There is something quaint, pathetic, touching, in the lives that begin and end in these solitary places; the hamlet is the nation of its people, and the church tower to them is the centre of the world. The great plains lie beneath them, and often from their walls the sea is visible, but the cities and the seas of the world are nought to them; their history lies in Pippa's plaiting, in Sandro's bridal, in the birth of children, in the huckster's price for wool and linen. They are peaceful lives; simple, archaic, close-clinging about tradition, more innocent than most lives are; when they are no more on the face of the mountains men will be sadder, and earth will be the poorer.

Into San Lionardo the sensale came this day, and, drinking his thin red wine at the tavern door, told the few people of the hamlet how the brigand had been captured, away there in Orbetello. There was a little fellow there who heard, while his goats and he were lying in the shade of the house wall.

The little fellow was Zefferino, whom his village called Zirlo, who had taken his goats up to the hills out of the heat, and who listened as he lay in the shade on the stones.

When he could take his flock again on to the lower lands, in the greyness of dawn, which is the freshest hour at this season, he lost no time in descending the mountain side and making for the moor, until he came to broad pools, laden with golden and white water-lilies, and cliffs of sandstone broken by strata of palombino, of macigno, and of travertine.

There he whistled like the thrush.

'Via!' cried the voice of a girl from beneath his feet, and presently the face and throat of Musa raised themselves from out of the acanthus and alaternus and enchanter's nightshade that grew about the entrance of the tomb. She lifted him up a little brown earthenware can; he took it and milked one of his ewes, and handed the can back to her full of milk. She had been up an hour; her brilliant face was like a flower in its freshness, for she bathed herself in the sea every daybreak; her hair was brushed back in its massive undulations and just touched her throat, as Joconda had always kept it; her clothes were still of the linen-cloth Joconda had spun.

She took the milk and gave him a little copper coin, and came up with a piece of black bread in her hand, and ate the bread and drank the milk, sitting on a stone amongst the wild clematis, and sharing her meal with Leone.

She had made friends with Zefferino; there was a certain distance between them always because he was a little afraid of her, and she was a little suspicious of him. He had been forced to swear to her that he would tell no one how or where she dwelt, and having sworn this, he shared her confidence. One thing alone she never told him, that she had brought the coffin of Joconda there, and had laid it in an inner chamber of the painted tombs.

He was of use to her.

She cut the lake-rush and the chairmaker's-rush and wove them into rude matting and into frail baskets, and he sold these to San Lionardo folk for a few centimes. She had learned many uses of edible roots and cryptogams from Joconda, and gathered those, and he sold them also; he brought her flax and she spun it; he brought her straw and she plaited it; when his goats were on the hills and his smaller brother minded them, he had run to and fro on her errands. Busy and fond of money, which his father never let him handle, he was glad to go between moorland and mountain on these missions, and could cheat her comfortably with a childish glee that was united with a shrewd self-interest.

He was only a little fellow, living, with his goats and his reed-pipe and his naked feet, the most sylvan and pastoral life in the world; but he knew the worth of money as well as the bailiff adding up figures in his fat note-book, or the innkeeper selling watered draughts to thirsty wayfarers.

Zefferino was a pretty little curly-headed boy, with a sweet voice, a sunny smile, and limbs like a child-Bacchus; he was affectionate and he was very innocent, but all the same he knew how to lie and he knew how to cheat, his round laughing eyes open and candid all the while, and his mouth smiling.

Why not? Had he not seen the wine-carriers bore the hole in the cask and suck the wine out with a straw, and sell such a drink to anybody on the road? Had he not always heard his father, bartering with the cattle-dealer, say, 'And what will there be as mancia for me?' which meant, 'How much will you let me rob my friend if I induce him to sell you this beast?'

So he himself robbed this strange maiden, of whom he was half frightened always; yet he loved her and admired her in his half-hearted way, and kept her secret for her, because he thought if others knew that she lived here down in the ground they might do what she wanted, and so he would lose the taste of her pratajoli buoni^[1] and blackberries and broth, and all those centimes that got him bread and polenta and salt fish and rude sweetmeats, such as old Deaneira sold in San Lionardo, sitting at the stall under the battered Madonna in her iron cage, against the old watch-tower wall, that looked down from the hills on moor and sea.

'Are you happy here?' he asked her now, sitting with his legs drawn up amongst the purple loosestrife, all dry with the past summer heat; watching her as she ate, while his goats strayed about, cropping what they would, the fourfooted Huns that ravage the mountains and the forests and lay them bare as with fire, so that nothing will ever spring again where their little hoofs have trodden and their little teeth have browsed.

'Happy!' echoed Musa; the word sounded strangely. 'I do not know. I am alone; that is always good.'

She had never heard of Chateaubriand, who wrote above his house in the depth of the Bréton solitudes, à l'abri des hommes. But the spirit that moved him to write it was in her. Zirlo tilted himself over on his back.

He was a child, so he let the reply he had had go by without compliment. He said instead:

'I forgot to tell you, Saturnino is taken.'

'Taken!'

She left off eating and stared at him, with a light in her gaze and a flush on her cheek.

'Yes. On the coast. A woman was selling his gold things for him, and they shot him down in the Orbetellano.'

She leapt to her feet, her eyes flashed, her whole face lit up with exultation.

'Selling my gold—their gold! They took him so? I am glad! I am glad!'

'It was not yours,' said Zefferino, who knew from her what the galley-slave had done.

'No. It was theirs. It was sacred. He stole it; he is well served. If it had been my own I would not have minded; but a thing that belonged to the dead! oh, it was vile, vile! And I wronged Joconda that I might feed him; I left her alone to return to him, and she died; I am glad indeed that they have got him. Are you certain it is true?'

'Oh, yes,' said the little lad; 'they shot him down as they shoot the roebucks here, and took him; he was alive, though badly hurt. He fought like a devil, but there was the whole troop of the carabineers all there. They do say that another one, who got away from Gorgona with hin, is loose still, hiding somewhere in the hills, but about that I do not know much. But there is a reward for anyone who sees him, and I mean to look about; I might get the money as well as another.'

'I am glad he is taken,' said Musa, unheeding; 'I am glad. He robbed them and he was false to me.'

Zirlo shuddered. Had he not himself cheated her to go and nibble at mother Deaneira's stall?

'You are savage,' he said with a little whimper and tremor. 'That poor soul was a brave man they say, and never did any sin except lightening rich men's purses; he used to live upon the mountains, right away there as high as the stars are, and never touched a poor man; they all say so,—only the rich———'

'And is not the gold of the rich their own as well as the crust of the poor?' said Musa with scorn in her low tones. 'He was a thief; a thief; and a traitor. I sheltered him, and he robbed the dead. He was a thief and a traitor.'

Zirlo rolled over and hid his face in the green bichierini,^[2]. pretending to catch a lizard. He had gone back into the tombs the very day after the galley-slave had robbed them, conquering his abject fear of the place for sake of the gold toys and the gold lamps that he too would have taken if he could only have found them.

'And I should not have been a thief,' thought Zirlo, with national sophistry instinctive in him. 'I should not have been a thief; they belonged to nobody; they were as much mine as hers.'

Yet not for worlds would he have had her know that he had ever crept into the graves on any such errand.

'He was a thief and a traitor. And he was taken as he sold the gold? I am glad,' she said once more, and her face was exultant, sombre, almost cruel.

The fate of the robber of the tombs seemed to her so just; it was almost beautiful in its inexorable and instant justice.

'You are savage,' said Zirlo.

'Why not?' she answered; to be savage was right enough; it was what they called the boar, when he fought for his own poor life, and his own lair in the thickets.

The boy said nothing. He was frightened. If ever she knew, he thought, of those centimes?

Musa rose, leaving the rest of her bread uneaten, and dropping it between the paws of the dog.

'He wronged my shelter and betrayed me,' she said once more. 'He has met a right fate. Zirlo, drive your goats farther on; my mule needs this forage.'

Zirlo rose and mutely obeyed.

His heart was beating. He wished that the polenta and baccala that had tempted him, and that old Deaneira's luscious muscat wine that was like the honey of thyme-fed bees, had all been down the throats of the people of San Lionardo instead of down his own.

'If ever she know, she will beat me black and blue, or throw me with one hand into the sea,' thought the little sinner miserably.

She went down into the tomb, and brought the mule up to pasture while there was still some coolness and shade; then she again descended, lit her little fire and put on her pot with fish and herbs to stew by noontide, and took up her distaff and went and sat in the open air once more.

She was oppressed and absorbed by the tidings of the galley-slave's capture. She was glad; yes, she was glad; but the gladness began to glow less hotly in her: she thought of the wretched homeless fugitive as he had sat on the sands after her rescue of him: for what had she rescued him?—only for fresh torture.

All was still around her in the hush of early day: the only sound was the insect life that is never still on those moors and marshes night and day. The first heavy rains of September had fallen and the refreshed earth was growing once more green, and the fainted leaves arose and stood out in the clear air. The snakes were sorry the drought was gone, but all other living things were glad.

Zirlo, who had sent his goats farther away, strayed back and stood looking at old Cecco, the mule.

'He is of no use to you?' he said timidly.

'No use; no.'

'Would you not sell him?' he said more timidly too, thinking of the sensale.

'T would not sell him.'

'You would get money for him—much money———'

'I do not want money.'

'But you want to eat.'

'I get enough to do that.'

' He is old———'

'The more reason to keep him by me; old things fare ill with strangers.'

Zirlo eyed the mule wistfully, and went away a little sulky and a good deal afraid.

'What will you do in the winter?' he said fretfully. 'I cannot leave the goats to run your errands in the winter. Sometimes it snows, too, and I am always very busy. You must go up and live in San Lionardo; that is what you must do.'

'I shall not do that,' said Musa; 'I shall live where I am. You will do my errands in winter and in summer both when you want a bowl full of soup or a handful of mushrooms.'

Then Zefferino cried.

He did not like her to fancy him selfish.

'For if she once think me so,' he thought, 'she will begin to doubt, and to count the centimes.'

But Musa did not count the centimes.

When the heat of noon came, she took the mule down into the painted chambers of the dead, and sat there herself. Zirlo came too;—a pretty little quaint figure, a childish Faunus;—and asked her for a bowl of soup. Then together they ate, using the black earthenware cups and platters that had been strewn on the floor of the tombs: cups and platters made two thousand years before, made for the banquets of the dead, and perhaps profaned by their young lips, yet innocently so.

 

1. Agaricus campestris.
2. Lichen pyxidatus

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