Life in the Country by Giovanni Verga

Author:Giovanni Verga
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Alma Books
Published: 2018-11-14T10:27:45+00:00

Rustic Honour

When Turiddu Macca, old Nunzia’s son, came home from soldiering, he strutted about the village square every Sunday in his bersagliere uniform, with the red cap which looked like a fortune teller’s when she sets up her stall with her cage of canaries. The girls, going to Mass with their noses well hidden in their mantillas, could not take their eyes off him, and the lads buzzed round him like flies. And he had brought back with him a pipe with its bowl carved in a lifelike representation of the king on horseback, and he struck matches on the seat of his trousers, raising his leg as he did so, as though about to give someone a kick. But, despite all this, Lola, the daughter of Farmer Angelo, had not shown herself either at Mass or on her balcony, because she had got engaged to someone from Licodia, a carter who had four Sortino mules in his stable. As soon as Turiddu heard of it, good God, he’d have his guts out, he’d have the guts out of that fellow from Licodia! But he did not do anything, except let off steam by singing every angry song he knew under that beauty’s window.

“Hasn’t Nunzia’s Turiddu got anything better to do,” asked the neighbours, “than spend the night in song like a lonely thrush?”

At long last he did come across Lola as she was returning from a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Peril. But when she saw him she did not change colour. It was as though none of this was anything to do with her.

“It’s a lucky man who catches sight of you,” he said to her.

“Oh, Turiddu! They told me you’d come back on the first of the month.”

“I was told some other things too,” he replied. “Is it true that you’re marrying Alfio the carter?”

“I am, God willing,” Lola replied, pulling the two corners of her kerchief up to her chin.

“You’re doing God’s will by chopping and changing as it suits you! And was it the will of God that I should come back home from as far away as I did just to hear this pleasant news, Lola?”

The wretched man tried to put a brave face on it, but his voice had gone hoarse. And as he walked behind the girl he swayed about, with the tassel of his cap swinging here and there on his shoulders. To be honest, she was sorry to see him with such a long face, but she had not the heart to beguile him with pleasant words.

“Look, Turiddu,” she told him finally, “you must let me catch up with my friends. What would people say if they saw me with you?”

“You’re right,” Turiddu replied. “Now that you’re going to marry Alfio, who has four mules in his stable, we mustn’t make people talk. My poor mother, on the other hand, had to sell our bay mule and that bit of a vineyard by the main road when I was a soldier.

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