After the Divorce, Grazia Deledda [the giving tree read aloud .txt] 📗

a pallid young man, miserably clad in soiled and ragged woman’s clothing, accompanied them on a primitive instrument called a serraia⁠—a sort of cithern, made out of a dried sow’s bladder.

There were only three other men in the party, and in one of these, with a flushed, feverish face, and one hand bound up, the fisherman recognised Giacobbe Dejas.

Isidoro advanced, and joining the party laid one finger on the bandaged hand, Giacobbe, meanwhile, gazing at him wildly, his eyes transfixed with terror.

“Are you afraid you are going to die from a tarantula bite? No, no,” said Isidoro, smiling.

The women continued their chant. There were seven widows, seven wives, and seven maids. One of the widows was Giacobbe’s sister. She walked at his side, fresh and pink as ever, notwithstanding her wild state of alarm and anxiety; and her shrill little voice, like the note of a lively cricket, trilled and trembled high above all the others.

“He is suffering,” said one of the men to Isidoro in a low tone.

“Ah?” said the fisherman gravely.

The words chanted by the women ran as follows:

“Saint Peter he walked down to the sea
And into the water his keys dropped he.
Then the Lord unto him did say:
‘My Peter, what is it ails thee today?’
‘Of deadly bites I bear the smart
In my two feet, and my back, and my heart.’
‘Peter, take of the sad thorn-tree11
Pounded as fine as fine may be;
Take it three days for thy wound.
So shall Peter be made sound.’
Tarantula, with the painted belly,
You have a daughter straitly born,
Straitly is your daughter born.
One for the mountain I leave forlorn;
One for the mountain, and one for the valley.
You have killed me, and I will kill you.”

Meanwhile the group had stopped in front of the mound. The two men, who were provided with spades, began to dig, and Isidoro stood waiting with Giacobbe, the chanting women, and the blind man still playing on his strange instrument. Giacobbe silently watched the operations of his two friends, and Isidoro watched him, puzzled by the transformation he had undergone; he seemed, indeed, like an altogether different person; his face was inflamed, and drawn with fright, and the little eyes, which usually twinkled so shrewdly from beneath their bald brows, were dim with a childish terror of death. When they had come to the end of the chant, the women began again at the first line, the instrument continuing the accompaniment on the same monotonous key as before. It sounded like the humming of a swarm of bees in flight. Puffs of icy wind blew from the west, cutting the faces of the group gathered about the mound, like knives. The purple-blue of the sky was fading into a greenish tint, like the face of a lake when the sun has left it; and over the entire scene there hung a pall of indescribable melancholy⁠—the dull, cold twilight, the darkening uplands, the black village, the shadowy group of people, performing a superstitious rite with all the faith of heathen idolaters.12 The two men dug with friendly zeal, throwing up spadefuls of black earth mixed with rags, egg-shells, and refuse of all kinds. As it covered their feet and legs, they would mount higher, bending to their task, panting and sweating, while the women continued their chant, and the blind man his monotonous accompaniment.

A hole of sufficient depth having at last been dug, Aunt Anna-Rosa, never ceasing for an instant to emit the same shrill, mournful sounds, helped Giacobbe to remove his coat, and then, taking him by the hand, they led him to the edge of the excavation. He jumped in at a bound, and the two men, pushing him down with their hands, hastily piled on the earth, until he was buried up to the neck.

The performance that then took place was even more extraordinary. The head, looking as though it had been severed from the body and stuck in the centre of this heap of refuse, was surrounded by sparse vegetation, which trembled in the breeze as though affrighted; while overhead hung the melancholy sky. Hardly had the two men completed their task, and stood⁠—the one wiping the perspiration from his forehead with his sleeve, and the other knocking off the dirt that was sticking to his hands⁠—when the women closed in a circle around the head, and began to dance to the sound of their own chanting voices and the instrument still played by the blind man, who stood with his sightless balls and pale, impassive face turned towards the distant horizon. This continued for some time; then the dancing ceased, the circle broke, but the chanting still went on. Isidoro and the other men threw themselves on the mound, and with spades and hands, had soon disinterred Giacobbe. He was perspiring profusely when he emerged, covered with dirt, and his face and neck were purple. He said he had felt as though he would suffocate; then he shook himself and thrust first one arm and then the other into the sleeves of the coat which his sister held ready.

“Well, so you are not going to die after all, little spring bird?” said Isidoro jokingly. The other, however, made no reply; the cold wind struck his perspiring body with an icy chill, his face grew pallid, and his teeth chattered.

They walked off in the direction of Aunt Anna-Rosa’s house, Isidoro, who by this time had lost all interest in his supper, accompanying them.

“Did you kill it?” he enquired of the sick man, remembering to have heard that if one kills a tarantula with his ring finger he acquires the power to cure the bite with a simple touch of the same finger.

“No,” said Giacobbe; and then, while the weird chanting still continued, he gave an account of his misfortune.

“I was asleep; suddenly I felt something like the sting of a wasp. I woke up all in a perspiration. Ah, it had stung me! It had stung me! The horrible