Lo studente e lo scoparo

It was October.

The ashy-blue sky seemed even paler above the dark line of the broom-thickets, which spread out all the way to the horizon.

Only a lark broke, with its faint cry, the silence of the landscape, and only a small cloud, white and faint as a feather, broke the solitude of the horizon; and it seemed that the lark, a little bored and sad, directed its cry at the cloud; and that the cloud had halted its solitary, tedious course to listen to the lark.

He felt a treacherous drowsiness veiling his mind: it seemed to him that the shadow of the motionless fig tree on the reddish wall — a heavy, deadly shadow — was settling over his thoughts.

"Even the clouds and the birds grow bored here.

While the whole world stirs and moves forward, it alone, the dead island, is silent.

And what is not yet dead is dying, just as my father's vineyard — this vineyard, which alone lived on in the wild moorland — is dying of phylloxera.

Next year there will be nothing left but the walls and this fig tree, if even those remain.

And I won't be able to replant it, our vineyard!

How could I?

Do I know anything about vineyards?

But who is that man?

Ah, uncle Pascale — now the landscape is completed by his sad, hard figure.

That old man looks like a man made of rusted iron.

If I were a symbolist painter I would draw that old man, just like this, between two broom-bushes, beside a blood-red rock, against the pale sky, and I would title it: Sardinia.

Didn't you know he was a rich man?

There, now — stand still.

Where is the saddlebag?

Ah, what shall I do, my silver Saint Francis?

Pascaleddu, golden lamb, don't torment me so....

No, I'm a soul from hell.

God bless you, my soul; I can't see anymore, you know — see, to me you look like a cloud.

You're a doctor, aren't you?" asked the old man, growing ever more deferential.

What do you do with this broom you're gathering?

When I was strong, yes, when I was twenty years old, thirty years old.

But now!...

Have you always worked as a broom-gatherer?

But tell me, is it true that you're employed at the King's Court?

Maybe in time.

Who do you live with?

But it seems to me you're ill.

Ill!

Very ill, son of my heart!

Ah, this cough!

It seems to me that here, inside my chest and throat, there's a saw working continuously.

I knew your father, you know.

He was a benefactor…. oh…. this cough….

I've tried the medal of Santu Pascale, I've tried boiled mullein, flaxseed poultices…. I've tried everything…. but do you want to hear what it is?

It's death, coming for me....

And yet how many times, before leaving for his studies, and during vacations, had he not seen the old broom-gatherer and a hundred and a thousand other specimens of that same race to which he himself belonged?

I was ten years old the first time I went to Nuoro to sell broom: my father too was a broom-gatherer; my son a broom-gatherer too.

He once, tired of walking and always walking on foot, threw a rope around a horse grazing in an enclosed pasture, and mounted it.

Well, two carabinieri who were out searching for a bandit came upon him.

"Did you steal this horse?" they said to him.

He protested.

But the two carabinieri, who were perhaps afraid of running into the bandit, seized my son, tied him up, and carried him off to prison.

When the coughing passed, he took up speaking again, still standing beneath the wall, upright, sickle in hand, like the image of Death.

Yes, my son died in prison, just as he was about to finish his sentence.

Well; he left me two children.

Well then, two children; a boy and a girl.

The boy went off with a traveling tinker and I never saw him again.

The girl, Maria Annicca, went into service in the mayor's household.

You know him, Marcu Virdis…. eh, you know him?

That rich man.

Well?"

The girl was a silver palm-tree; she was the light of my eyes.

But she was very careless.

She had a child by her master.

But didn't she know that Marcu Virdis was a rich man?

That he couldn't marry her?

My silver Saint Francis, patience!

The Lord will have forgiven her, as I forgave her.

Ah, it seems to me I've already heard this story!

She's dead, isn't she?

A little devil!

He won't work, he doesn't help me, nothing!

Well, patience.

My greatest torment is thinking about what will become of this creature.

What will become of him, without relatives, poor and alone?

The world is moving forward.

Across the sea, on the mainland, men want to become all equal; in twenty or thirty years, maybe sooner, there will no longer be rich or poor; that is, all men will work and all will have enough to live comfortably.