These papers were entrusted to me by Signor Giorgio three days after he arrived back in Turin. He had returned from Milan all but cured of his serious stomach ailment, and more active, more lively than before. I felt relieved. He wrote for a good part of the day, and when I asked him, “What is it that you’re writing so furiously, Signor Giorgio?” he replied, “I’m writing my ugly confessions and doing my penance.” Then he added in a most sad and resigned tone of voice, “My dear Maria, it’s a terrible penance!”
On the morning of the fourth day he was unable to get out of bed. He had a burning fever. After a long visit the doctor shook his head and as he left he said in my ear, “This is the end.”
Signor Giorgio could not swallow anything, not even diluted milk. And his fever continued more violently than ever. He was so weak, he could hardly lift his arm. He raved almost the whole time. He talked to himself under his breath. I often heard the names of Giorgetta and Signora Emilia, and at such moments his face would take on a blissful expression, bliss that reduced me to tears. Then his face would darken again, and he would close his eyes, as though some fearful image was tormenting him.
One evening, the seventh after Signor Giorgio’s return, a servant came to fetch me. My patient seemed to be asleep, and I dared to leave him alone just for a moment. There was a woman wanting to speak to him. She insisted, she shouted. What a woman! How vulgar she looked! How brazen in her speech and manners! Never had such a woman set foot in this house before. She claimed that Signor Giorgio owed her money, how much I don’t know, and that she had come from Milan specially to collect it. I tried to quiet her, and just so that she would go I promised to let her in the following morning. She seemed prepared to leave, but as I returned to the bedroom she quietly followed behind me, and Signor Giorgio, who had woken up, saw her. I put my hands together and begged her not to move and not to speak.
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
