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Authors: Giovanni Verga
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front door of the cottage behind her in the wake of the coffin, and realized she no longer had a mother. But she refused to let the baby go to the Sisters of Charity.
‘You poor little child,’ she said. ‘If you have to suffer, let’s at least delay it as long as possible!’ The neighbours called her a shameless hussy because she had not acted the hypocrite and abandoned her child. But the baby went short of milk because the mother couldn’t get enough to eat. It was wasting rapidly away, and in vain did Nedda try to squeeze into its hungry little lips the very blood from her breast. One winter’s evening, at sunset, while the snow fell thickly on the cottage roof and the ill-fitting door rattled in the wind, the poor infant, its whole bodypurple with the cold, its tiny fingers clenched tightly into the palms of its hands, fixed its lifeless eyes on the fervent eyes of its mother, let out a sob, and breathed its last.
Nedda shook it, hugged it madly and savagely to her breast, tried to give it warmth with her breath and her kisses, and when she realized it was really dead, she laid it on the bed where her mother had slept, and knelt beside it, her eyes quite dry and popping out from their sockets.
‘Ah! Blessed are you that are dead!’ she exclaimed. ‘Ah! Blessed Holy Virgin, who has taken away my child so as not to let it suffer as I have suffered!’
From
Vita dei campi
Cavalleria rusticana
When Turiddu Macca, the son of Gnà Nunzia, came back from the army, he strutted round the piazza every Sunday in his sharpshooter’s uniform and his red forage-cap, as though he were the fortune-teller setting up stall with his cage of canaries. The girls couldn’t take their eyes off him as they went along to Mass with their faces half hidden in their mantillas, and the little boys buzzed round him like flies. He had even brought back a pipe carved with a lifelike image of the king on horseback, and he would strike matches on the seat of his pants, raising his leg as if to take a kick at something. But all the same, Massaro Angelo’s daughter Lola failed to show up either at Mass or on her veranda, as she had got engaged to a fellow from Licodia, who was a cart-driver with four Sortino 1 mules in his stable. When Turiddu first got to know about it, Christ in Heaven! he wanted to tear the guts out of that chap from Licodia, he really did! But the only thing he did was to give vent to his feelings by going and singing all the abusive songs he could think of under the fair young woman’s window.
‘Doesn’t Gnà Nunzia’s Turiddu have anything better to do,’ the villagers were saying, ‘than to spend his nights singing away like a thrush without a mate?’
He eventually bumped into Lola on her way back from the shrine of Our Lady of Peril, and when she saw him she didn’t turn a hair, as though he was none of her business.
‘Nice to see you!’ he said.
‘Ah, Turiddu, I did hear you’d come back on the first of the month.’
‘I heard one or two other things as well!’ he replied. ‘Is it true you’re going to marry Alfio, the cart-driver?’
‘If that’s the will of God!’ Lola replied, drawing her neckerchief up over her chin by its two corners.
‘You play around with the will of God in whatever way it suits you! It was the will of God that made me come all that way back to be faced with a fine bit of news like this, Lola!’
The poor wretch tried again to put a brave face on it all, but his voice trailed off, and he doddered along behind her with the tassel of his cap swinging from side to side across his shoulders. To be honest, the girl was feeling sorry to see him pulling such a long face, but she had no wish to encourage him with a lot of fine words.
In the end she turned round and said, ‘Look here, Turiddu, leave me alone so I can go and catch up with the other girls. What would people say in the village if they were to see me with you?’
‘Fair enough,’ replied Turiddu, ‘now
‘You poor little child,’ she said. ‘If you have to suffer, let’s at least delay it as long as possible!’ The neighbours called her a shameless hussy because she had not acted the hypocrite and abandoned her child. But the baby went short of milk because the mother couldn’t get enough to eat. It was wasting rapidly away, and in vain did Nedda try to squeeze into its hungry little lips the very blood from her breast. One winter’s evening, at sunset, while the snow fell thickly on the cottage roof and the ill-fitting door rattled in the wind, the poor infant, its whole bodypurple with the cold, its tiny fingers clenched tightly into the palms of its hands, fixed its lifeless eyes on the fervent eyes of its mother, let out a sob, and breathed its last.
Nedda shook it, hugged it madly and savagely to her breast, tried to give it warmth with her breath and her kisses, and when she realized it was really dead, she laid it on the bed where her mother had slept, and knelt beside it, her eyes quite dry and popping out from their sockets.
‘Ah! Blessed are you that are dead!’ she exclaimed. ‘Ah! Blessed Holy Virgin, who has taken away my child so as not to let it suffer as I have suffered!’
From
Vita dei campi
Cavalleria rusticana
When Turiddu Macca, the son of Gnà Nunzia, came back from the army, he strutted round the piazza every Sunday in his sharpshooter’s uniform and his red forage-cap, as though he were the fortune-teller setting up stall with his cage of canaries. The girls couldn’t take their eyes off him as they went along to Mass with their faces half hidden in their mantillas, and the little boys buzzed round him like flies. He had even brought back a pipe carved with a lifelike image of the king on horseback, and he would strike matches on the seat of his pants, raising his leg as if to take a kick at something. But all the same, Massaro Angelo’s daughter Lola failed to show up either at Mass or on her veranda, as she had got engaged to a fellow from Licodia, who was a cart-driver with four Sortino 1 mules in his stable. When Turiddu first got to know about it, Christ in Heaven! he wanted to tear the guts out of that chap from Licodia, he really did! But the only thing he did was to give vent to his feelings by going and singing all the abusive songs he could think of under the fair young woman’s window.
‘Doesn’t Gnà Nunzia’s Turiddu have anything better to do,’ the villagers were saying, ‘than to spend his nights singing away like a thrush without a mate?’
He eventually bumped into Lola on her way back from the shrine of Our Lady of Peril, and when she saw him she didn’t turn a hair, as though he was none of her business.
‘Nice to see you!’ he said.
‘Ah, Turiddu, I did hear you’d come back on the first of the month.’
‘I heard one or two other things as well!’ he replied. ‘Is it true you’re going to marry Alfio, the cart-driver?’
‘If that’s the will of God!’ Lola replied, drawing her neckerchief up over her chin by its two corners.
‘You play around with the will of God in whatever way it suits you! It was the will of God that made me come all that way back to be faced with a fine bit of news like this, Lola!’
The poor wretch tried again to put a brave face on it all, but his voice trailed off, and he doddered along behind her with the tassel of his cap swinging from side to side across his shoulders. To be honest, the girl was feeling sorry to see him pulling such a long face, but she had no wish to encourage him with a lot of fine words.
In the end she turned round and said, ‘Look here, Turiddu, leave me alone so I can go and catch up with the other girls. What would people say in the village if they were to see me with you?’
‘Fair enough,’ replied Turiddu, ‘now
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