Moscardino Read Online Free PDF Page B

onto their shoulders, it looked like a burning bier on four pillars, black pillars, quenched with the rain and suffocated with a dark brown cloth with metal corn tassels at the four supports almost unraveled in yellow.
    The coffin moved thus down the steep lane, and behind it Don Lorenzo bareheaded, and the women with the brass lanthorns. The smoke of the torches hung in the air, tarnished the window panes, crept into the house, sticky, resinous, heavy.
    Don Lorenzo is now in front of the coffin and stares at his mother
in her silk dress, with her hands crossed on her breast, shackled by justice forever, her head bound, her mouth closed, one eye just a bit open.
    They lift her from the litter by cords.
    She is stiff.
    They box her up like a bit of merchandise, put a double turn of rope round the casket and lower her into the grave as into a ship’s hole.
    The ropes are pulled up. They must be used again. They scrape against the rim of the casket with a dull sound of fraying, like pulleys of a crane.
    Don Lorenzo’s shoes were laced crooked with twine with mud on the ends at the low knot, and caked round the edge of his soutane, black stockings and silver buckles. He felt the water dripping down his sides from his hair, his face wet with rain and tears.
    The hole swallowed back the loose earth. It looks as if yeast were swelling it up; puffing it over the edges of a garden flowered with paper, cotton and wire.
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    Don Pietro Galanti, family guardian, took possession of the estate. A vineyard on Ripa Hill, two bits of wood at Giustagnana, a spur of hill whose sub-soil contained a hidden vein of marble, graded “White P.” The hope of the family.
    The surface was rented to a charcoal burner for the time being.

    Four houses at Seravezza, an olive yard and a field at Bonazzera, three olive yards at Pozzi, four farms at Cugnìa di Querceta, two poplar plantations and seven meadows at Puntone, Stroscia, Ranocchiaio, and Cinquale.
    A life allowance of four hundred dollars (scudi) a year to a “legitimate son who takes holy orders.”
    Inventory of furniture, kitchen copper and household linen.
    All entrusted to Sabina, Don Pietro’s servant who is surety for her and keeps the keys of the house.
    Grumpy got better. Sleeps now and again with Sabina.
    Cleofe weaned the baby, anointing her teats with bitter aloe.
    Don Pietro was deaf, he was seventy-one with a few smooth grey hairs more or less oily hung over his ears and straggled over his low forehead with three serpentine wrinkles scarcely showing in the thin olive hide.
    Prolix by nature, knobby of nose he shaved his dry face daily. On Fridays he distributed alms to the poor of his parish lined up according to the sexes right and left before his front door on the side toward the mountain where the sun never comes in winter.
    Not far from the house the mountain sweats; smooth grottoes cut in under the cliff with fungus-covered crevices, the sweat freezes with incredible icicles at its edge, exuded tears formed into glass work, as if
the high altar were inverted by conjury candles without flamelets but lit from inside with prodigious transparency.
    If a few wooden goats had climbed onto those blackish cavities, a shepherd with a crook and a brigand’s hat, it would have made a grot-toed presepio to be boxed in behind glass.
    Not until April when the rain is tepid and the hollow under the cliff is warmed by the sprouting moss and by other delights of God invisible to us do the fantastic candles wholly drop off and the shadows cease to play in magic luminosity.
    In April after the brief rains, the sky clears, the incredible glass work melts from the hills, carrying rotten leaves with it, the grottoes are washed and retinted. The pebbles of the walks are yellowed with mud, the feet of the poor therewith splashed. The rope sandals have lost their heels and the soles worn to a frazzle from being used all the winter.
    Don Pietro Galanti considered his