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

and sisters” of this particular small community, shook his head.

“Yes,” he said; “my brothers have treated me as Cain treated Abel; it would take a good deal more than sheep and cows to make it up to me.”

“Oh, well! that has nothing to do with it,” replied the syndic, absorbed in his idea. “You have travelled; tell me now, have you never stood on the top of some high mountain, and looked down on the villages scattered about in the plain below? Well, didn’t they seem to you like so many houses, each with its little family living inside?” Costantino, who was tired of the conversation, merely replied that all he wanted was to leave this village and never come back to it again.

“Oh, no! You mustn’t do that!” urged the other. “Where would you go? No, no; you must stay here, where we are all brothers.”

The next to arrive was Doctor Puddu, carrying a large, dirty, grey umbrella. He at once peered into the earthenware saucepan to see what was cooking.

“You are all degenerates, every one of you,” he announced in his harsh voice, rapping the saucepan with his umbrella. “And I’ll tell you the reason: it’s because you will eat pork.”

“Don’t break the saucepan, please,” said Uncle Isidoro. “And I beg your pardon, but that is not pork; it’s beans, and bacon, and sausage.”

“Well, isn’t bacon pork? You’re all pigs. Well⁠—” turning to Costantino. “And so, good sheep, you’ve come back? I saw him die⁠—what’s his name?⁠—Giacobbe Dejas. He died a miserable death, as he deserved to. You had better take a purgative tomorrow; it’s absolutely necessary after a sea voyage.”

Costantino looked at him without speaking.

“You think I’m crazy?” shouted the doctor, going close to him, and shaking his umbrella. “A purgative! do you understand? A purgative!”

“I heard you,” said Costantino.

“Oh, so much the better! Well, I’ve heard that you say you want to go away. Go-o-o⁠—! Go, by all means. Go to the devil. But first of all, go to the cemetery, go to that dunghill you call a cem-e-te-ry; and dig and scratch like a dog, and tear up Giacobbe Dejas’s bones, and gnaw them.”

He ground his teeth as though he were crunching bones; it was both grotesque and horrible, and Costantino could do nothing but stare at him in utter amazement.

“What are you looking at me like that for? You’ve always been a fool, my dear fellow⁠—my dear donkey! Just look at you now! calm and amiable as a pope! They’ve robbed you of everything you possessed, betrayed you, murdered you, knocked you about among them as though you had been a dried skeleton, and there you sit, bland and stupid as ever! Why don’t you do something? Why don’t you go to that vile woman, and take her, and her mother, and her mother-in-law by the hair of their heads, and tie them to the tails of the cows they offer to give you as a charity, and set fire to their petticoats, and turn them loose in the fields so that they may spread destruction in every direction? Do you understand? I say, do you understand, idiot?”

He flung the words in the other’s face, his breath heavy with absinthe, his eyes bloodshot.

Costantino recoiled, trembling, but the doctor turned to go. On the threshold he paused again and shook his umbrella.

“You make me long to break your neck!” he cried. “Men such as you deserve precisely the treatment they get! Well, take a purgative, anyhow, stupid.”

“Yes, I’ll do that,” said Costantino, with a laugh, but at the same time the doctor’s words made a deep impression on him. There were times, indeed, when he felt utterly desperate. He said over and over again that he meant to go away, but, as a fact, he did not know where to go. Nor, on the other hand, could he see what was to become of him should he decide to remain on in the village. He said to himself: “I have no home, and there is no one belonging to me; for this one day everyone rushes to see me out of curiosity, but by tomorrow they will all have forgotten my very existence. I am like a bird that has lost its nest. What is there for me to do?”

All the time, though, those words of the doctor’s kept ringing in his head. Yes, truly, that would be something for him to do. Go there, fall suddenly upon them like a bolt out of heaven, and utterly destroy all those people who had destroyed his life!

“No, Costantino,” resumed Uncle Isidoro, as they sat at table, eating the neighbour’s white bread and sausage. “No; she is not happy. I have never looked her full in the face since, and it gives me a queer feeling to meet her, as though I were meeting the devil! And yet, do you know, I can’t help feeling sorry for her. She has a little girl that they tell me is like a young bean, it is so thin and puny. How could a child born in mortal sin be pretty? It was baptised just like a bastard, the priest wouldn’t go back to the house, and the people were sneering all along the street.”

“Ah, do you remember my child?” asked Costantino, cutting off a slice of fat, yellow bacon. “He was not like a bean, not he! Ah, if he had only lived!”

“It may be better so,” said the fisherman, beginning to moralise. “Life is full of suffering; better to die innocent, to go⁠—to fly⁠—up there, above the blue sky, to the paradise that lies beyond the clouds, beyond the storms, beyond all the miseries of human life. Drink something, Costantino; this wine is not very good, but there is still some left.⁠—Well, I remember last year on Assumption Day, Giacobbe Dejas asked me to take dinner with him. He was afraid of me; he thought I knew, and he wanted his sister and me to get married. Oh!