Moscardino by Enrico Pea Read Free Book Online Page B

wild like a yearling in heat?
    If you do, you aren’t like your mother of blessed memory. And in saying this Don P.G. got excited. He lost that serenity so habitual to him even in difficult moments.
    And Sabina listened to him with irritation as if champing on the bit of a discipline grown insupportable.
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    The wind turned icy and harsh, the sea roughened and cast off the gulls as if impatient at having tolerated their perching on its rump for so many hours.
    The calkers prophesied rain from the heavy flag-like clouds that saddened the heaven. There will be a downpour of big drops before long, pocking the sand waste.

    They stretch brown oilskins over the upturned boats, awning’d out a bit further so they can work under them as under a cabin roof. The men looked like journeymen sweeps and locksmiths in orgasm, who on arriving in a country square when it is about to rain find the peasants asking sweeps and tinkers, have they brought the rain and bad luck? Then they look cross and don’t have their chimneys done or their kettles fixed, if it rains before the tinkers’ tents are up and the forges and bellows got going.
    The calkers push aside ropes and nets, get astride the boats on the part plugged already and calked, and start again tapping the chisels that enlarge the cracks to get out the old tow between plank and plank.
    The pitch smoke from the boiling iron cauldrons spreads out low, hanging heavy in the clogging heavy air, hiding the little hunch-back half naked who tends the fire and blows.
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    I lived with my gran’dad on Monte di Ripa.
    My mother worked in the city. My father was dead and I had a brother who had convulsions, who stayed with a woman who looked after him out of charity. That woman was the butcher’s wife and helped in the butcher shop and to kill in the slaughterhouse.
    On slaughter days she didn’t come home and my brother was alone shut up in the house, and he had convulsions.

    They sometimes found him on the floor, as if dead. Sometimes she got drunk and cursed, and beat him.
    At Carnival he died, and that woman said: blessed paradise!
    She had been to the Carnival dance, and came in and stepped on him, then she noticed him. Took the cold body and threw it onto the bed. She took off his checked suit and spread a sheet over my brother whose soul was now safe.
    I didn’t see him, but I know what he looked like. Once I had seen him twitching on the floor, the door was half open, and the woman who kept him out of charity was at the butcher shop, and I looked through the key-hole and called him.
    Then I ran to call her, and when she came back he was stiff.
    I didn’t see him dead but I can always see him stiff, as he was that day.
    My gran’pop, called back to his native earth, called by the house and the town, had come from his travels to stop on in peace.
    All his life had been voyage from a dream to a dream, from township to township or to far country.
    In his young days the war had taken him as volunteer into its toils. Later, love armed his hand again. But neither love nor war had absorbed him. Now he felt the blood less restive in his veins and less turbid in warming his heart.

    Middle high, live glance, biblical beard like my own, thick hair shining like filed iron. Face bright and rosy, thick mulatto’s lips like a sucking infant’s, he talked of life and death; of Dante, love, early grain crops, manures; half shutting and wide opening his eyes as if fixing an image when he got het up over poetry and things of that sort.
    If, on the other hand, he talked of his own past life, of Cleofe, of the mad house, of the way gooks carry on — and he had passed the best part of his life among ’em — his voice grew gentle, he explained things as if he were talking of someone else.
    He had the same intonation when he talked of Aladdin lost in the magician’s cave among the jewels.
    Every now and again he would try to fix a lost