A Very Italian Christmas Read online

  In the pale glow of the night lamp, my poor sick Giorgio stared at that despicable woman. His face grew serene, and he beckoned her close with his hand. “Emilia!” he murmured. It was a sweet delirium, and certainly full of many fond images that could be seen on the dying man’s face. He wanted to say something, but he kept repeating certain words in such a faint voice that even I could not understand him. At last I managed to grasp that he was asking for the pearl necklace—a magnificent thing, his last present to Emilia, given to her a few days before she died. I took it from the cabinet and handed it to him.

  He accepted it with both hands. And making an effort I would not have thought him capable of, and indicating to that dreadful woman to bend down, he very slowly placed it around her neck. He smiled with sublime tranquility.

  Having avidly examined the precious necklace, the woman twisted her lips in a smile of such base joy that it was a horror to see. A black gap, right in the middle of those white teeth, made her look even more sinister. Signor Giorgio stared at her, screamed with fright, then turned away, burying his face in the bolster, and breathed his last.

  1873

  CANITUCCIA

  Matilde Serao

  Sitting on the wooden bench in the shadows beneath the hearth’s broad black hood, Pasqualina recited the rosary with her hands under her apron. Only the psss psss of her moving lips could be heard as she murmured her prayers. Night was falling and there was no light left in the smoke-blackened kitchen, with its great greenish-brown wooden table, dark cupboard, and chairs with painted backs. The hearth fire, half-extinguished, lay hidden beneath the cinders.

  A wooden clog banged against the closed door. Pasqualina got up and opened the door, and Teresa, also known as “Cloth-head” because she had worked as a maid for the nuns in a convent in Sessa, came in with the water bucket on her head, stooped over a bit because she was tall, thin, and bony. Pasqualina helped her to put the bucket down on the floor. Teresa stood motionless for a moment, without breathing hard in spite of the great weight she had borne. Then she unwound the rag she had used to support the bucket on her head and spread it over a chair because it was soaking wet, as were both the cotton handkerchief she wore knotted around her head and her tousled gray locks.

  In the meantime Pasqualina had lit one of those brass oil lamps with three beaks and a wick made of cotton wool that soaks in the oil, while holding up— hanging on thin brass chains—the snuffer, wick trimmer, and poker. Then she opened the wooden cupboard and cut a long, thick piece of stale brown bread, added to it a small piece of strong cacio cheese, and gave Teresa her supper.

  “And Canituccia?” Pasqualina asked.

  “I haven’t seen her.”

  “It’s late and that little smart-ass isn’t back yet.”

  “She’ll come.”

  “Tere’, remember that tomorrow afternoon at one o’clock you have to go to Carinola to carry that sack of corn.”

  “Yes’m.”

  Without eating, Teresa stuck the bread and cheese in the deep pocket of her apron. She stayed a little while longer, with her mouth half-open and her whole face dazed and devoid of expression, not displaying the least sign of weariness.

  “I’m going. Good night to you, ma’am.”

  “Good night.”

  And slowly Teresa went off toward Via della Croce, where four youngsters were waiting for her in a little room for their supper.

  Pasqualina stood on the threshold and called: “Canituccia!”

  No one answered. Evening had come on this February day. Pasqualina struggled to see in the darkness. She called out again loud and long:

  “Canituccia, Canituccia!”

  Mumbling curses, Pasqualina then went down the narrow walkway that, bisecting the vegetable garden, led from the door of the house to the front gate. From there she looked toward the Carinola road, toward the road leading from the crossroads to the church of the Blessed Virgin, and toward the single street cutting in two the little village of Ventaroli.

  “She must have dropped dead, that lousy girl,” Pasqualina muttered.

  In reply, she heard a low lament. Canituccia was sitting on the step to the front gate, hunched over, with her head almost between her knees, and her hands in her hair, moaning.

  “Ah, so you’re here, and you don’t answer me when I call? May you hang for that! What? Why are you crying? Did they give you a thrashing? And where is Ciccotto?”

  Canituccia, who was seven years old, didn’t answer, but moaned more loudly.

  “Why did you come back so late? And Ciccotto? Tell the truth: Did you lose Ciccotto?”

  The old peasant spinster’s angry voice grew frightening.

  Canituccia threw herself sobbing onto the ground face down, with her arms outspread.

  She had lost Ciccotto.

  “Ah, you scamp, you murderer of what’s mine, you’re nothing but the daughter of a whore! You lost Ciccotto? Take this. You lost Ciccotto? Take that. You lost Ciccotto? Here’s some more.”

  Pasqualina punched, kicked, and slapped the little girl. Canituccia struggled to try to shield herself from the blows, shrieking without crying. When Pasqualina grew tired, she gave the child a shove and said in a hoarse voice:

  “Listen, smart-ass, I only let you live with me out of charity. If you don’t leave now and go look for Ciccotto in the countryside, and if you don’t bring him back home, remember that I’ll make you die on the street like the daughter of a bitch that you are.”

  Canituccia, who was still shrieking from the beating she’d just been given, hoisted her ragged skirt—made out of red cloth—and set off barefoot toward the road for the church of the Blessed Virgin. As she walked, she looked to her left and right in the hedges and in the farmers’ fields, calling to Ciccotto in a low voice. She had lost him on the way home: she hadn’t realized that he wasn’t following her any longer. But in the dark of night she couldn’t see anything. Canituccia walked on mechanically, stopping every so often to look around without being able to see. Her bare feet, which had turned a deep burgundy red in color from a whole winter’s worth of cold, no longer felt either the ground beneath them, which was growing icy cold, or the stones over which she stumbled. She was not afraid of the night or the lonely countryside: she just wanted to get Ciccotto back. All she could hear were Pasqualina’s threats not to feed her if she didn’t bring him home. She felt a gnawing, intense hunger that was twisting her stomach into knots. If she brought Ciccotto back, she’d eat: this was her one and only thought. So she called and called to him, walking fast between the tall hedges, a tiny speck of motion in that nocturnal calm:

  “Here, Ciccotto! My darling Ciccotto, where are you? Come to your Canituccia! Ciccotto, Ciccotto, Ciccotto, come to Canituccia! If I don’t bring you home, Mama Pasqualina won’t give me anything to eat. O Ciccotto, o Ciccotto!”

  She came out onto the main road that leads to Cascano, to Serra, and to Sparanisi. In the gloom of night the road shone white, and the desolate child’s little shadow cast strange, distorted figures on the ground. Her voice grew weary. She began to run wildly now, calling to Ciccotto with all her might. Twice she sat down on the ground, defeated and in despair: and twice she got up and started to run again. Finally, in Antonio Jannotta’s field, she heard something like a small grunt, then something like a little gallop, and Ciccotto came to brush up against her feet with his snout.

  Ciccotto was a pinkish-white piglet, rather chubby and round, with a gray spot on his back. Canituccia shouted with joy, took Ciccotto in her arms, and started back with the last strength left in her young legs. Laughing and talking, she hugged Ciccotto to her chest to keep him from escaping, while the piglet, with his short legs dangling in the air, grunted contentedly. Canituccia started to run, thinking that she’d once again be able to eat. From afar she spotted Pasqualina’s figure at the gate, and when within earshot Canituccia shouted to her:

  “I found Ciccotto, I found my darling Ciccotto.”

  She soon reached Pasq
ualina and triumphantly handed the piglet over to her. In the darkness, Pasqualina grinned. They went back into the house and Ciccotto was put into his pen, where he ate and immediately fell asleep. Breathing heavily, Canituccia watched everything that Pasqualina did. The little girl too was hungry, like Ciccotto; she followed Pasqualina into the kitchen, looking at her with big wild eyes that were unable to ask. Then Canituccia sat down on the raised edge of the hearth, without saying a thing. The peasant woman had taken her place on the bench and returned to her rosary, praying in a passionless monotone. Canituccia, doubled over in order not to feel the spasms in her stomach, followed the prayer with her eyes. She was no longer able to think at all: she was just hungry. Only a half hour later, when she had finished reciting the Salve Regina, did Pasqualina get up, open the cupboard, cut a piece of bread, put a few cold leftover beans on a little plate, and give Canituccia her supper. Still seated on the raised edge of the hearth, the girl ate hungrily. She had a small head, with a tiny white face full of freckles and frizzy hair that was a little bit reddish and a little bit yellowish, with some dirty chestnut brown mixed in for good measure. Her head was in fact too small, and set atop a scrawny body. She wore a white cotton shirt that was all patches, a waistcoat made of brown lightweight canvas, and a piece of red cloth as her skirt, held up at the waist by a short strand of rope. Her skinny legs showed, as did her bare, thin neck whose tendons looked like taut cords. Canituccia ate with a spoon made of blackened wood, and afterward went to drink from the bucket.

  The peasant woman had taken up her distaff and was spinning.

  “Get to bed now,” Pasqualina said to the girl.

  Canituccia opened the door of the pantry, where the apples were kept. She threw off her red skirt, lay down on some wretched straw bedding, pulled a rag made from an old yellow bedcover over her feet, and fell asleep. As she sat there spinning, Pasqualina thought about Canituccia with a certain diffidence. Her little servant was the illegitimate offspring of Maria the Redhead, as she was known. With her flaming hair and carnation-red lips, Maria had first sinned with the cobbler Giambattista. But he had gone off to become a soldier, and Maria had become the lover of Gasparre Rossi, a local gentleman. Then he too deserted Maria, although it was said that Candida—nicknamed Canituccia— was his daughter. There was no doubt that Maria, after a month at Sessa, had left Canituccia and gone off, some said to Capua while others said to Naples, to work as a prostitute. Gasparre hadn’t wanted to take care of the abandoned child, so she grew up in the household of Pasqualina and Crescenzo Zampa, who were sister and brother. But the girl’s white face, all dotted with freckles, reminded Pasqualina of Maria the Redhead. Pasqualina—a thin and virginal spinster with bony red hands, yellow teeth, and coal-black eyes, who had never married because her brother had refused to give her a dowry—trembled with hysterical terror at the thought of Maria the Redhead’s amorous follies, and didn’t trust her little bastard child. So the next day, fearful that Canituccia would lose Ciccotto again, Pasqualina tied one end of a rope to the piglet’s foot, and the other end around the girl’s waist, in order to keep them together. Following Canituccia, Ciccotto leapt about in his haste to get to pasture. They spent the day together in the field, looking for the first spring grasses and weeds. Many times Canituccia coaxed Ciccotto to a spot where she’d seen grass growing that he might like; sometimes Ciccotto dragged Canituccia toward a green field. At noon the girl ate a piece of bread. They wandered together through the spring afternoon until dusk fell, and separated only when back at home, where Ciccotto went right to sleep and Canituccia, after having gulped down cold chicory soup, or a few chickpeas, or a bit of pork rind with bread, also retired for the night. Pasqualina was surely no greedier or fiercer than other peasant women, but she herself was not so well off and ate only a bit of meat on Sundays. Sometimes she beat Canituccia, but no more often than the other peasant women beat their own children.

  Later on, in summer, Canituccia and Ciccotto were together for longer stretches of time. They left at dawn to search for corncobs, figs, and the first windfall apples, and Ciccotto had grown big and strong, while Canituccia was still skinny and weak. Sometimes Ciccotto ran too fast for the girl, and she felt herself being dragged along behind him over the cracked dry ground, worn out beneath the burning summer sun.

  “Wait, Ciccotto, wait for me, my dearest!” she would say, exhausted.

  Then Ciccotto would go to sleep and the girl would lie, with her eyes closed, on the ground along the furrows where the wheat had been harvested, sensing the blazing sun beneath her eyelids. She would get back up on her feet again, dazed, her cheeks red and her tongue swollen. By now there was no longer any need for the rope, because Ciccotto had become obedient. Canituccia had gotten a long stick with which to herd the pig and keep him from ending up under the wheels of the carts going along the main road. They would head back home in the evening, with Ciccotto coming along slowly and Canituccia a little ahead of him, driven by the insatiable hunger gnawing at her stomach. Once they tried to steal some sorbs in Nicola Passaretti’s field, but the sorbs were terribly bitter and Nicola thrashed her like a little thief. Even worse, Nicola told Pasqualina Zampa about it, and she too beat Canituccia. The girl went off through the fields with Ciccotto, weeping and saying to him:

  “Pasqualina beat me because I’m a thief.”

  But Ciccotto shook his head and began to graze. Still, every so often, when an idea appeared in Canituccia’s closed-off mind, she spoke about it to Ciccotto. When they were heading home, she told him:

  “Let’s go home now, and Ciccotto will go to his pen and Mama Pasqualina will feed him dinner, and then she’ll give Canituccia some soup, and I’ll eat it all.”

  And in the morning:

  “If Ciccotto doesn’t run, and if he always stays near Canituccia, then Canituccia will take him up the mountainside to our parish priest Don Ottaviano’s little tree, where she will get him lots and lots of apples to eat, while Canituccia eats some bread.”

  When autumn came, Ciccotto had become quite fat and hefty. Once he knocked the girl down with a blow of his head, but she got up, moved away from him, and showered him with stones. But that was the only time they quarreled. Canituccia ate less and less, and Pasqualina was sharper and sharper with the daughter of Maria the Redhead, for the harvest had been poor and the chaste old maid had a terrible suspicion that her brother, Crescenzo, had begun an affair with Rosella from Nocelleto: two caciocavallo cheeses and a ham had vanished from the pantry, and then Crescenzo had bought a gold ring for three lire at the market in Sessa. At home, Pasqualina became increasingly angry and stingy. She was always yelling at her maid, Teresa, at the gardener, Giacomo, at Canituccia, and at everyone else. On the last Sunday of the month, Don Ottaviano didn’t want to give her communion because of the many sins she’d committed in her thoughts.

  Then it didn’t stop raining, and every day Ciccotto and Canituccia came home soaking wet. The girl put her bit of red cloth on her head, but then she had only her shirt around her legs, and as she walked through puddles of water and mud, lashed by rain, she would say to Ciccotto:

  “Let’s run, Ciccotto my darling, let’s run because it’s raining and I’m wet all over; let’s run because at home there’s a fire going and we can warm ourselves.”

  But often the fire was out, and Canituccia had to go off to sleep still soaking wet from the rain. That November, people in Ventaroli said that Maria the Redhead had died of typhoid fever in Capua and, after Mass, the parish priest used her fate as an example in his sermon, which made both Concetta, daughter of Raffaele Palmese, and Nicoletta, daughter of Peppino Morra, blush because they had some remorse on their conscience. Canituccia was told that her mother was dead, but the child didn’t seem to grasp what was being said, as if she were deaf and dumb.

  In that same month of November, Ciccotto had become so big and so fat that he could no longer be taken to graze far from home: he had to use sober, deliberate steps to walk now. Canituccia call
ed to him, but in vain: he no longer had enough strength to come. The first time that she left him at home to go for firewood in the mountains, she gathered a heap of acorns in the woods, tied them up in a rag, and brought them to him.

  She went to check on Ciccotto before going out to run to the water fountain, or out to the fields to bring food to Crescenzo, or to do other errands. Upon her return, before entering the kitchen she would go to greet him again. It scared the girl a little to see him so big—and so much bigger than she was, for she was as thin as a broomstick.

  One December evening, when Canituccia came back from the water fountain, she found the parish priest, Don Ottavio, engaged in a lively discussion with Nicola Passaretti and Crescenzo: the three of them then went to have a look at Ciccotto before returning to their conversation. Canituccia did not understand. The next evening, however, the butcher, Sabatino Carinola, came to the house, as did Gasparre Rossi’s servant Rosaria, to give Teresa a hand. There was great commotion in the courtyard and in the kitchen. A large cauldron had been placed over a roaring fire on the hearth. All the biggest platters, all the basins, and all the buckets were ready: the scales were set up in one corner: knives, cleavers, and funnels were laid out on the kitchen table. Pasqualina, Teresa, and Rosaria had put on shorter skirts and white aprons. Sabatino came and went with an air of self-importance. Canituccia saw everything but understood nothing.

  In a low voice she asked Teresa:

  “What are we doing tonight?”

  “Christmas has come, Canitù. We’re going to kill and butcher Ciccotto.” Although feeling somewhat shaky on her feet, Canituccia then went to squat in a corner of the courtyard to watch Ciccotto be killed. In the flickering light she saw them drag him into the courtyard, with Nicola Passaretti and Crescenzo holding him. She heard the pig’s desperate squeals, because he didn’t want to die, and she saw Sabatino’s knife cut Ciccotto’s throat. She watched them cut the pig’s head off by slicing through the neck all the way around, before laying it on a platter on a bed of fresh laurel leaves. Then she saw his body cut in half before the halves were weighed with the scales; she heard their cries of joy when the weight was announced—over three hundred pounds. She didn’t move from that dark corner of the courtyard. Time passed: it was a freezing cold December night. They called her into the kitchen. Rosaria and Teresa were using small funnels to force sausage meat into the pig’s intestines. Sabatino and Crescenzo were dealing with the hams and the bigger hunks of lard, while Nicola was watching over the cauldron, in which little white bits of lard were melting down, to become cracklings and pork fat. In one corner of the hearth, Pasqualina was frying the pig’s blood in a pan over the fire. Everyone was chattering loudly and gaily, caught up in the joy of all that meat and all that fat and all that prosperity, and inflamed by the heat of the fire and the work. Canituccia held back at the threshold, watching, but without entering the kitchen.