“Far Away” (“Lontano”)

Translated by Marella Feltrin-Morris

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “Far Away” (“Lontano”), tr. Marella Feltrin-Morris. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2021.

Originally published in the literary and cultural journal Nuova Antologia (January 1 and 16, 1902), this long short story was then republished in the 1915 edition of Pirandello’s novel The Turn (Il turno, also originally published in 1902). Grouping this long short story with his short novel, the volume labelled both as ‘novelle’, drawing together their genres: Il turno. Lontano. Novelle (Milan: Treves, 1915). “Far Away” was later made a part of the Collection The Fly (La Mosca), published in 1923 as a part of Stories for a Year (Novelle per un anno).

This story deals with a typical set of Pirandellian themes, focusing on the experience of alienation and displacement in its depiction of a Norwegian sailor who finds himself in Sicily after falling ill. While he marries a local Sicilian girl, the marriage does not prevent him from feeling lonely in a foreign land. The existential reflections occasioned by his feeling of difference resonate with a set of concerns that recur across Pirandello’s corpus. ”Far Away” also has a political sub-theme, highlighting a sense of disillusionment that was typical of the post-Garibaldian era. This theme can likewise be traced in other works by Pirandello, including his autobiographical short story “Interviews with Characters” (“Colloquii coi personaggi”) written some years later, in 1915. In “Far Away,” this element emerges in the contrast of two main characters, one who risked his life for his country as part of the effort to cast off the Bourbon tyranny, and another who is instead getting rich off of sulfur mining. The story thus highlights a contrast between commitment to the common good versus materialism and selfishness. Similar themes are depicted in other stories, for example in “The Medals” (“Le medaglie”) and “The Dressing Room of Eloquence” (“Il guardaroba dell’eloquenza”). Likewise, there are strong biographical ties in this plot, resonating both with the history of Pirandello’s family, who were involved in the anti-Bourbon movements in Sicily, as well as the way in which the young Pirandello’s family made its fortune investing in sulfur mines. Other short stories also focus on the Sicilian sulfur mines, for example “The Fumes” (“Il fumo”), which was first published in 1904 and so dates to around the same period as “Far Away.”

In addition to being reprinted in 1915, “Far Away” was also part of a project Pirandello was attempting to pitch for a film adaptation in 1914. In a letter to the writer and theater director Nino Martoglio, Pirandello offered both “On Target” (“Nel segno”) and “Far Away” as possible stories to be turned into movies, going so far as to request an advance payment of 500 liras for the project. While that project did not progress any further, Pirandello pursued other avenues later on: in 1932, he proposed a film adaptation of “Far Away” to Emilio Cecchi, head of production at Cines. The producer was not convinced, however, and remained skeptical of how Pirandello represented Sicily in the story as patriarchal and behind the times. Pirandello’s response was that the story focused on representing the drama of what it means to feel distant, far away even from those to whom one ought to feel close. While none of these adaptation projects came to fruition, it is interesting to note that the director Roberto Rossellini took up a similar theme in his film Stromboli (1950); however, in this film the protagonist is a woman, Karin, played by Ingrid Bergman, who is displaced onto the small Sicilian island and confronts an existential crisis. Rossellini’s film thus repeats the essential structure of the story but reverses its gender dynamics. More recently, this story was adapted into a libretto by Walter Zidaric, to music by Paolo Rosato, in Lars Cleen (Lo straniero) (2015), the text to which was published in Pirandello oggi: Intertestualità, riscrittura, ricezione, ed. Anna Frabetti and Stefania Cubeddu-Proux (Metauro, 2017).

The Editors

After searching everywhere in vain for this and that piece of his outfit, and grumbling porco diavolo! a hundred times as he huffed and puffed and made all kinds of angry gestures, [1] eventually Pietro Milio (or Uncle Trawler, as they called him in town) felt the need to let off steam. [2] He walked over to the wall that divided his room from that of his niece Venerina and yelled out:

“Sure, go on sleeping, dearie! Till noon, if you want! I’m warning you, though: no fool is going to go fishing for you today!”

It was actually true: that morning Uncle Trawler couldn’t go fishing as he had been doing for many years. Instead —porco diavolo!—he had to put on his formal wear, or, in his words, doll himself up. And all of it because he was, yessir, the deputy consul of Sweden and Norway. And Venerina, who had known since the previous night of the imminent arrival of the new Norwegian steamship, hadn’t starched his shirt, or laid out his tie, or his cufflinks, or his topcoat—nothing.

Instead of his shirts, inside the top drawers of his dresser he discovered a few terrified cockroaches, which immediately started crawling away.

“Don’t bother! Don’t bother! Sorry I disturbed you!” he said to them.

In the third drawer he found a single shirt, which had been starched who knows when, and was now yellowed. Uncle Trawler pulled it out holding it with two fingers, cautiously, as if he feared that it, too, might be inhabited by the prolific little creatures from the drawers above. Then, noticing that the collar, the front, and the cuffs were frayed, he commented, addressing them:

“Good job, fellows! Did you all grow a beard?”

And he started rubbing the stump of a stearic candle on the frayed edges.

Clearly, all the other shirts—there must not have been that many—were in the dirty laundry basket, where they had been waiting for months for the steamboats from Sweden and Norway.

As deputy consul of Scandinavia at Porto Empedocle,[3] Uncle Trawler also served as interpreter on the sporadic steamships that stopped there to load sulfur. Each steamship, a starched shirt. No more than two or three a year—not expensive, in terms of starch.

He certainly couldn’t have lived off the scanty earnings of this occasional job if it hadn’t been for his daily catch of fish and his meager pension as a wounded veteran. That’s right: he hadn’t just recently turned into a jackass; as he himself declared, he had always been a big jackass: he had fought for this dear homeland, and ruined himself.

“Dear-Homeland,” therefore, was also his nickname for his miserable frock coat.

He had moved from Girgenti to the Marina,[4] which is what the cluster of modest houses on the beach of Porto Empedocle was called back then. When the sirocco was howling, the walls of those houses were lashed by furious waves. He still remembered back when Porto Empedocle consisted of just a pier, now called the Old Pier, and a tall, grim, square tower, built a long time back, perhaps as a garrison by the Aragonese,[5] who used it for convicts condemned to forced labor. Those poor convicts were the only honest men in the whole town!

Back then, Pietro Milio was indeed making a mint! There were no other interpreters to serve all the merchant steamships that arrived at the port, none except for him and that tilted beanpole, Agostino Di Nica, who at the time followed him like a famished puppy to pick up the crumbs that Milio dropped. The captains, no matter what their nationality, had to content themselves with the few French words that Milio knew and that he would fling at them, unperturbed, with an authentic Sicilian accent: bonjourre, monsieurre, etc.

“Ah, but our dear country! Our dear country!”

In truth, Uncle Trawler had only been guilty of a single crime: being twenty years old in 1848. [6] Had he been ten or fifty, he wouldn’t have ruined himself. An involuntary crime, then. Right when his business was at its highest, he had become involved in the political struggle and forced into exile in Malta. [7] His other crime, that of being thirty-two in 1860, had clearly been a natural consequence of the first one. During his twelve years in Valletta he had actually managed to get by with the help of other deportees. And then the year 1860 came along. Just the thought of it still made him quiver with anger. In Milazzo he was shot in the chest by a Bourbon soldier,[8] but he wasn’t able to take advantage even of that merciful gift—he survived!

Once he returned to Porto Empedocle, he found the town had swelled almost miraculously at the expense of old Girgenti, which, lying on a tall hill about four miles away from the sea, was resigned to die a slow death for the fourth or fifth time in its history as it gazed over the ruins of the ancient city of Akragas on one side and the port of the rising new city on the other.[9] And in his place, Milio found many new interpreters, one cleverer than the other, and all competing against each other.

While Milio was in exile, Agostino Di Nica had struck it rich. He had quit his job as interpreter and started his own business. With a little steamer he owned he began ferrying passengers back and forth between Porto Empedocle and the two nearby isles of Lampedusa and Pantelleria.[10]

“But, Agostino, what about our country?”

Di Nica would frown and, jingling the gold coins in his vest pocket, he would say:

“Our country? I’ve got it right here!”

Yet, in all fairness, Di Nica hadn’t changed: he was still his unassuming self. In making him, mother nature had certainly not overlooked his nose. What a nose he had! It looked like a ship’s sail! On his head he still wore the same canvas cap with a leather visor. And to all those who asked him why, now that he had so much money, he wouldn’t allow himself the luxury of a real hat, he would invariably respond:

“It’s not because of the hat, gentlemen; it’s because of the consequence of wearing a hat.”

Lucky him!, thought Uncle Trawler. And instead I, though I’m dirt poor, have to wear a frock coat and strangle myself with a starched collar. All because I’m deputy consul!

Right, and if that meant that now he had to skip fishing for a few days, he might have to go to bed without dinner—not just him, but his niece, too, that poor orphan left in his care by his brother, who in turn had been so lucky that as soon as he set foot in America he had died of yellow fever. At least Uncle Trawler had earned a couple of medals for the battles of 1848 and 1860!

As he held the fishing rod and stared at the floating cork, he would reminisce about his long life, and often shake his head with bitterness. He would gaze at the two cliffs of the new port, now reaching out towards the sea like two long arms enfolding the little Old Pier which, thanks to its dock, had maintained the honor of housing the harbor master’s office and the white tower of the main lighthouse.[11] He would gaze at the town stretched out before his eyes, from the tower called Rastiglio at the foot of the pier all the way down to the train station.[12] He felt as though all the years and misfortunes had crept up on him just like all those houses had cropped up over there. Now they rose almost on top of each other and climbed up the ridge of the marly plateau that loomed over the beach with its tiny white cemetery,[13] the sea in front of it and the countryside behind it. Scorched by the setting sun, the marl blazed in its whiteness, while the glasslike, dark green sea washed over the shore and turned gold as the vast horizon quivered, framed to the east by Punta Bianca and to the west by Capo Rossello.[14]

Some mornings, as he headed to his fishing spot, the smell of the sea among the cliffs, that smell of salty wind made his coat and trousers flap against his body and overwhelmed him to the point that he could barely breathe or walk. It was the peculiar smell of ubiquitous sulfur dust in the sweat of toiling men, the smell of tar, of pickled fish, the pungent odor exuded by the fermentation of dry seaweed in the wet sand—all the smells of that village that had almost grown up with him were soaked with memories. And so, in spite of his meager existence, he felt a pang of sorrow at the thought that the same years that made him old were instead the years of the village’s infancy; and while, day after day, the village became more alive and bustling with young people, he got older and older, shunned and forgotten.

Every morning at dawn, from the staircase of the Montoro family house there came three loud calls as a messenger with a formidable voice summoned everyone to the beach for a new day’s work: “Stevedores, get moving!” Uncle Trawler heard those three calls every morning from his bed and got up, too, but only to go fishing, grumbling under his breath. As he got dressed, he could hear the carts screech by, laden with sulfur. Springless carts with iron hinges, jerking on the drenched gravel of the dusty road crowded with gaunt harnessed donkeys that balanced two blocks of sulfur on their backs. Descending to the beach he saw the spigonare with their triangular sails at half mast waiting for their cargo, beyond the eastern side, where most of the sulfur deposits were lined up.[15] The lever scales were positioned under the heaps, and on them the sulfur was weighed and then loaded on the stevedores’ shoulders, which were protected by a sack secured to their foreheads. Barefoot, wearing canvas trousers, the stevedores carried the loads to the spigonare, wading into the water up to their hips. As soon as the boats were loaded, they set sail and delivered the sulfur to the merchant steamships anchored at port or beyond it. And so it went all day until sunset, unless the sirocco prevented them from sailing out.

But what about Uncle Trawler? Uncle Trawler just sat there, with the fishing rod in his hands. And not infrequently he would shake it with anger, his mouth hidden by a wooly beard that contrasted with his tawny skin made leathery by the sun and with his greenish, watery eyes.

“Porco diavolo! They didn’t even leave me any fish in the sea!”

II

Sitting up in bed, her black hair disheveled and her eyes puffy with sleepiness, Venerina was still putting off the decision to leave her room when she heard, on the steps, the muddled sounds of shuffling feet, gasping breath, and her uncle’s voice shouting:

“Easy, easy! Here we are.”

Venerina rushed to open the door. She stopped in her tracks, astonished and confused:

“Oh, my God! What’s this?”

Just outside her door, up the narrow staircase, a makeshift stretcher was being carried with great difficulty by a group of panting, dispirited sailors. On the stretcher, under a large coarse woolen blanket, a body was lying.

“Uncle! Uncle!” screamed Venerina.

Her uncle’s voice reached her from behind the group of men who were struggling to climb the last few steps.

“It’s nothing, it’s nothing, don’t be scared! I caught a fish—even today! God’s grace never abandons us. Easy, easy, fellows. We’re here. Here, come in. We’ll lay him down on my bed.”

Venerina saw, next to her uncle, a young man of extraordinary height. He looked foreign, blond, his face a bit smokey, and he carried a box under his arm. Venerina glanced down at the stretcher, which the sailors had deposited by the doorstep to catch their breath, and asked:

“What’s this? What happened?”

“A new kind of fish, mind you!” answered Don Pietro, causing the seamen to smile as they mopped the sweat from their foreheads. “A real bounty! Come on, fellows, let’s hurry up. Come this way, put him on my bed.”

He led the sailors with their sorry load into his room, which was still in disarray.

The foreigner moved everyone out of the way and bent down over the stretcher. He carefully pulled down the blanket and under Venerina’s horrified stare uncovered a poor invalid, almost a skeleton. His enormous eyes were open wide with terror, their color such a pure blue they almost looked glass-like in the dismal gauntness of his unshaven face. Then, with the carefulness of a mother, the foreigner picked him up like a child and lay him on the bed.

“Now, everybody leave!” ordered Don Pietro. “Let’s leave them alone. Fellows, the captain of the Hammerfest will give you what you’re owed.” Once he had shut the door of the room, he added, turning to his niece: “See? And you say we’re not lucky! We get a steamship once in a blue moon, but when we do get one, it’s a godsend. Let’s thank the Lord!”

“But who is he? Will you tell me what happened?” insisted Venerina.

“Nothing. A sailor sick with typhoid fever, more dead than alive. The captain saw the sign ‘idiot’ on my face and said: ‘Here, good man, I want to give you a little present.’ If that poor guy had died en route, he would have ended up a meal for a shark or a lion-fish. Instead, he insisted on getting all the way to Porto Empedocle because he knew that here he would find Pietro Milio, a dumbass-fish. Well, that’s all. I’ll go to Girgenti today to find him a bed at the hospital. First, I’ll stop by your aunt, Donna Rosolina. [16] I hope she’ll do me the favor of keeping you company until I return from Girgenti. Hopefully it’ll all be over by tonight. Oh, wait… I need to tell…”

He opened the door of the room again and said a few things in French to the young foreigner, who nodded several times in reply. Then, as he left the house, he said to his niece:

“Make sure you stay in your room. I’ll be right back with your aunt.”

On the street, to the people who asked him what had happened, he responded without even turning:

“A big catch, a big catch: a walrus!”

Ignoring the maid’s orders, he forced his way into Donna Rosolina’s house. He found her in her underskirt and bodice, her skinny arms bare and a towel over her bony little shoulders, getting the oat milk ready to wash her face.

“Damn it!” shrieked the fifty-four-year-old spinster, dashing to hide behind a curtain. “Who dares barge in like that? What kind of manners—.”

“My eyes are closed! My eyes are closed!” exclaimed Don Pietro to defend himself. “I’m not staring at your lovelies!”

“Turn the other way—right now!” ordered Donna Rosolina.

Don Pietro complied and, soon after that, he heard her bedroom door being slammed angrily. And so, from outside the door he had to explain what had happened and ask her to please hurry and come over to his house.

Impossible! She, Donna Rosolina, leave her house at that time of day? Impossible! Under exceptional circumstances, yes. But that invalid—was he young or old?

“For the love of God!” moaned Don Pietro. “At your age? Are you being serious? He’s neither young nor old. He’s just dying. Hurry up, quick!”

Oh, quick, sure! It took over an hour for Donna Rosolina to finally say goodbye to the mirror. At last she appeared, primped up like a monkey in a costume: a wide Indian shawl with fringes that brushed against the floor, fastened over her bosom with a massive enameled gold brooch adorned with drop-like pendants, chunky earrings, rouge on her cheeks and lips, and on her forehead little curls shaped with who knows what sticky concoction to form symmetrical commas.

“I’m ready, I’m ready…”

Batting the long, long lashes of her beady, voluptuous eyes, she pleaded for Don Pietro’s admiration and gratitude for getting all decked out so promptly. (Years earlier, those same eyes had pleaded with him for quite a different reason, but it was not by chance that his name resembled pietra, rock.)

They found Venerina furious. The young foreigner had dared knock at the door of her room, where she had barricaded herself, and blabbered God knows what in his language. Then he had left.

“Just be patient, put up with this until tonight,” snorted Uncle Trawler. “I’m off to Girgenti now. Say, did you hear any sound from the invalid?”

The three of them peeked quietly into the room, holding their breath. He looked dead.

“Oh, God!” moaned Donna Rosolina. “I’m scared! I can’t handle it!”

“Just stay in the other room, the two of you,” said Don Pietro. “You only need to pop your head in the door every now and then to see how he is. I wish he would hold on for at least a couple more days, but he really seems to be on his way out, and that’s the last thing I need! Ah, some great service Norway has dealt me! Well, enough of that. Let me go.”

Donna Rosolina grabbed him by the arm:

“Say—is he a Christian or an infidel?”[17]

“An infidel, an infidel, he doesn’t go to confession,” replied Don Pietro hastily.

“Mamma mia! A heathen!”[18] exclaimed the spinster, crossing herself with one hand and holding out the other to lead Venerina out of the room. “Always the same story!” she sighed later, in her niece’s room, referring to Don Pietro who had already left. “Always with his head in the clouds! Ah, if he had been more sensible…”

And here Donna Rosolina, who invariably managed to use Uncle Trawler’s endless misfortunes as a springboard to bring up, with abundant sighs and false restraint, her missed opportunity to get married, once again chose to interpret this latest calamity as a sign from God, as a punishment for an ancient crime he had committed: that of not taking her as his wife.

Venerina seemed to be paying close attention to her aunt’s words; in reality, she was wrapped up in thought, dismayed and frightened at the idea of that poor wretch in the other room who was dying alone, forsaken, far away from his country where perhaps he had a wife and children waiting for him. At a certain point she suggested to her aunt that they should go and see how he was.

They tiptoed over, holding on to each other for support. They stopped just a few steps inside the room and stretched their necks to peer at the bed.

The invalid’s eyes were closed. He looked like a wax Christ figure deposed from the cross. Was he sleeping or dead?

They ventured a bit closer; but hearing their soft steps, the invalid opened his eyes, those big, dazed blue eyes. The two women held on to each other even more tightly, but when they saw him raise a hand and make as if to speak, they screamed with fear and ran off to lock themselves in the kitchen.

When it was already late, they heard the doorbell and rushed over to the entrance, but instead of Don Pietro they found themselves face to face with the young foreigner they had seen in the morning. The spinster hobbled away in haste and went into hiding again. Venerina, instead, took heart and accompanied him into the invalid’s room, which at that point was almost completely dark. She lit a candle and handed it to the foreigner, who thanked her by bowing his head and smiling with sadness. Then she stood there and looked on woefully as he bent over the bed and brushed his hand on the invalid’s forehead. She heard him call tenderly:

“Cleen… Cleen…”

Was that his name, or a term of endearment?

The invalid stared at his friend as if he didn’t recognize him. And then she saw the colossal body of that young sailor shudder and heard him cry, hunched over the bed. Through the tears he spoke words full of distress in a language she didn’t know. She felt her own eyes well up with tears. Then the foreigner turned towards her and motioned to her that he wanted to write something. She nodded and hastened to provide him with what he needed. When he was done writing, he gave her a letter and a little satchel.

Venerina didn’t understand the words he said, but from his gestures and the expression on his face she inferred that he was entrusting her with his poor friend. She saw him bend again over the bed and kiss the invalid’s forehead several times. He left hurriedly, pressing a handkerchief against his mouth to stifle the sobbing.

A short while later, Donna Rosolina, trembling with fear, peeked into the room and saw Venerina sitting there. She looked unfazed but deep in thought, and her eyes were teary.

“Psst! Psst!” Donna Rosolina called her, and motioned to her as if to say, What are you doing? Are you out of your mind?

Venerina showed her the letter and the satchel, which she still held in her hand, and beckoned her to come in. There was nothing to fear anymore. In a whisper, she told her about the heartbreaking scene between the two friends and asked her to sit with her and keep wake over that poor man who was dying all alone.

Meanwhile, night had fallen when, all of a sudden, the silence was broken by the long, sharp, harrowing whistle of a siren, like a human scream.

Venerina looked at her aunt, then at the invalid in the bed, shrouded in darkness, and said softly:

“They’re leaving. They’re bidding him farewell.”

III

“Uncle, what’s ‘jackass’ in French?”

Pietro Milio, who was washing up in the kitchen, turned around, his face dripping, and stared at his niece:

“Why? Do you want to call me that in French? It’s bête, child, bête, bête! Make sure you say it out loud!”

He deserved to be called that and worse. About two months had gone by, and he was still hosting and feeding that sailor who had fallen down on them from the sky. Needless to say, he hadn’t been able to find him a bed at the hospital in Girgenti. What was he supposed to do—throw him out on the street? He had written to the Consul of Palermo. Fat chance! The Consul responded telling him to give lodging and assistance to the sailor from the Hammerfest until he recovered—or, if he ended up dying, to give him proper burial, and that Milio would be reimbursed for any expenses incurred.

What a genius, the Consul! As if he, Pietro Milio, could afford to put his own money up front and give lodging to the sick. How? Where? Lodging, yes: he had given up his bed to the invalid, and now he was breaking his bones sleeping on that rickety old sofa that stuck its tangled springs between his ribs, with the result that every night he dreamt of lying on the peaks of a mountain range. But as far as the assistance—was he supposed to go to the pharmacist, the grocer, the butcher, and buy things on credit, telling them that Norway would pay up later? The reality was, bogues and mullets for lunch and congers for dinner—if he caught any.[19] And if he didn’t, nothing at all!

And still, that poor wretch had managed to stay alive! He must really have been bulletproof if he had survived even the village doctor, who, in his kindness and generosity, managed to put down at least one fellow citizen a day. Don Pietro didn’t speak that way because he had anything against that poor foreigner—he didn’t. “But, porco diavolo,” he would exclaim, “who has worse luck than me?”

Well, at least in a few days he would get rid of him. The Norwegian, whose name was Bernt, Bernt Cleen (but Don Pietro called him Burnt),[20] was already recovering, and within a week, two at the most, he would be in good enough shape to head out again.

And it was high time, because Donna Rosolina was fed up with watching over her niece. She argued that she, too, was unmarried, and that it seemed improper for two women to keep company to that man, who she truly believed was an infidel and therefore beyond the grace of God. He had already started getting up from bed, he could move, and... who knows what he might do!

In her complaints to Don Pietro, Donna Rosolina didn’t add that, for a while now, Venerina’s attitude towards the recovering invalid was making her uncomfortable.

The patient looked almost as if he had re-emerged from that deadly illness as a newborn child. His smile, the expression in his clear blue eyes were indeed childlike. He was still very thin, but his face had become more serene, his skin had acquired a slightly rosy color. And his hair, which had fallen out during his illness, was growing back—blonder, lighter, finer.

Seeing him so timid, so lost in the blissfulness of being reborn in that unknown town, among strangers, Venerina felt towards him almost a motherly tenderness. But since she didn’t know any French, let alone Norwegian, all of their exchanges were limited to variations in the tone of her voice every time she pronounced his last name, Cleen. Thus, if he refused to take some medicine or food, by scrunching up his nose or shaking his head No, she would pronounce that Cleen with a deep, imperious voice, and with a stern frown that meant: “Do as you’re told. No whining.” And if he, in an outburst of joyous affection, playfully tugged at her skirt as she walked by, his face lighting up with a smile of gratitude and amity, Venerina would draw out that Cleen into a shocked and reproachful exclamation, as if to say: “Are you crazy?”

But her shock was simulated, her reproach sweet; both were just meant to assuage the concerns of Donna Rosolina, who, witnessing those scenes, would have turned a hundred different colors, were her shriveled cheeks not already coated with rouge.

Even Venerina felt as if she had been reborn. Accustomed to always being alone in that meager, empty house, with no doting care, no authentic affection, for a while she had let herself sink into an insurmountable lethargy, a restless boredom. Her heart had somehow grown sterile, and such sterility of feeling had unraveled within her, turning into the most slothful apathy. On the other hand, she wouldn’t have been able to explain why now she felt so eager to do chores around the house, cheerfully even, or to get up early and spruce herself up.

“A miracle!” Uncle Trawler would exclaim, returning home in the evening with his fishing gear, all redolent of sea breeze, and finding that everything had been taken care of: the table set, dinner ready. “A miracle!”

He would walk into the invalid’s room, rubbing his hands together with satisfaction:

“Bonsoirre, monsieurre Cleen, bonsoirre!”

“Buo-na se-ra,” the recovering patient would respond in Italian, smiling, articulating the two words and almost enunciating them with his pronunciation.

“What’s that? What am I hearing?” Don Pietro would ask, astonished, looking at Venerina who had started laughing, and then at Donna Rosolina, who was sitting up very rigidly, sulking, her lips tight and her scowling, heavy eyelids half closed.

Little by little, Venerina had managed to teach the foreigner a few phrases and some basic vocabulary using a very simple method. She would point to an object in the room and force him to repeat its name several times, until he pronounced it correctly: bicchiere, glass; letto, bed; seggiola, chair; finestra, window.... And how she would giggle when he got it wrong, and actually laugh out loud if she noticed that her maiden aunt, stiff in her prudish sternness, was twisting her lips to resist the urge to laugh, too. Most hilarious of all was when the patient would accompany those carefully-enunciated words with some comic gestures in order to convey the salient parts of his message that he didn’t know how to express verbally. Soon, however, he also learned how to say aprire finestra, open window; chiudere finestra, close window; prendere bicchiere, take glass; and also voglio andare letto, I want to go bed. Except that, once he learned that word, voglio, I want, he started using it all the time, and the effort he made to overcome his difficulty in pronunciation gave an even sharper tone of command to it. Venerina laughed about it, but she took care to soften that tone by teaching the patient to first say prego, please, before that voglio. But because, no matter how he tried, he couldn’t pronounce that new word, prego, correctly, when he wanted something he would wait until Venerina turned towards him, and then he would put his hands together as if in prayer and enunciate, more imperiously than ever, that voglio.

Prefacing his request with that sign of prayer was absolutely necessary every time he wanted the little box that his friend had brought for him from the steamship the day he had been carried ashore half dead. Each time, Venerina would hand it to him reluctantly, without her usual solicitude. That box represented to him his homeland far away: in it were all his mementos, many letters and a few portraits. Watching him from the corner of her eye while he re-read some of those letters or sat there lost in thought, his eyes glazed over, Venerina saw him almost as another person. It was as if he were wrapped in an atmosphere that suddenly distanced him from her, and in those moments she noticed many peculiarities of his foreign nature that she had never noticed before. That box, in which he rummaged around so obsessively, brought back to her mind the image of that other sailor, the one who had picked him up from the stretcher like a child, had laid him there on that bed, and had left crying. She had taken such good care of him, alone and forsaken as he was! Who was he? Where did he come from? What memories did he treasure so lovingly in that box? Eventually, Venerina would shrug her shoulders with annoyance, saying to herself: “What do I care?” and would leave him alone in the room to wallow in his secret memories. She would drag along her aunt, who stumbled after her, confused by the abrupt decision.

“What are we doing?”

“Nothing. We’re leaving!”

In those moments, Venerina would instantly sink back into her apathetic boredom, embittered by a dull irritation and afflicted by the pangs of a vague longing. The house seemed empty again, her life empty, too, and she would whine with exasperation: she didn’t want to do anything—anything, anymore!

IV

As soon as he was alone, Bernt Cleen felt as if he had fallen into another world, a brighter world, in which he knew but three people and one house—or rather, one room. He couldn’t make sense of Venerina’s tantrums. He couldn’t make sense of anything. He would pay attention to the noises on the street and make an effort to understand what was going on, but no perception of life outside of that house would evoke a realistic picture in his mind. The church bell—yes, but in his imagination, he would see a church from his distant hometown! The whistle of a siren would conjure up for him the Hammerfest, lost in faraway seas. And how astonished he had been one night, when, surrounded by silence, he had seen the moon framed against the window! It was, sure it was, the same moon he had seen many times back home and at sea. But he had felt that there, in that unknown country, the moon spoke to the roofs of those houses, to the steeple of that church, almost in another language of light. He had watched it for a long time with a sense of anguished dismay, feeling the pain of abandonment and isolation more deeply than ever.

He lived in a vague, indefinite dimension, as if in a wispy bubble of dreams. One day he finally noticed that on the lid of his wooden box someone had written three words with chalk: Beet, beet, beet!—just like that. He motioned to Venerina, asking them what they meant. Venerina responded promptly:

“You, beet!”

Bernt Cleen just sat there staring at her with his clear eyes, smiling and lost. He didn’t understand, or rather... he couldn’t believe that—no, no, he protested, shaking his head and putting his hands together to ask her not to be mad at him; soon he would have to leave anyway. Venerina shrugged her shoulders and waved her hand at him.

“Safe travels!”

No, no, Cleen shook his head again and signaled for her to come closer. He opened the box and took out a photograph of Trondheim. Through the trees, one could glimpse the majestic marble cathedral towering over all the other buildings, with its adjacent graveyard where devout folks go every Saturday to adorn the tombs of their loved ones with flowers.

She could not understand why he was showing her that image.

“Ma mère, ici,” Cleen struggled to tell her, pointing his finger at the graveyard, there, in the shade of that magnificent church. Like Don Pietro, Cleen was not very fluent in French, and even if he had been, it would not have helped with Venerina. Then he took another picture out of the box: the portrait of a young woman. Venerina stared at it, and instantly grew pale. But Cleen held the portrait next to his face, to show her the resemblance.

“Ma soeur,” he said.

This time Venerina understood, and her face lit up. Whether that sister was the fiancée or already the wife of the young sailor who had brought over the box, Venerina didn’t bother to speculate. It sufficed for her to know that Burnt was unmarried. Right; but wasn’t he supposed to leave again in a few days? He was already well enough to get out of the house at sunset and walk all the way down to the Old Pier.

Every time he did, a throng of rascals, all of them barefoot and in rags if not completely naked and baked by the sun, would follow him in his walks. They would watch him, exchanging loud comments that soon turned into mockery. Confused, blinded by the dazzling light, he would turn alternately to one and the other, smiling. Occasionally he was forced to threaten the more brazen ones with a stick, but otherwise he would just sit on the low wall of the pier gazing at the docked freighters and at the sea aflame with the reflection of the evening clouds. People would stop and stare at him while he sat there with that expression on his face somewhere between bewildered and ecstatic. They would stare at him as if he were a tired, lost crane or stork that had come all the way down from the sky. Most of all, it was his fur cap, the paleness of his face, and the impossible blondness of his beard and hair that attracted their attention. Eventually he got tired of it and slowly, slowly walked back, enveloped in sadness.

From the letter that his friend had left him along with some money, he knew that the Hammerfest, after sailing to America, would return to Porto Empedocle in six months. Three had already gone by. He would gladly get back on board his steamship and join his shipmates again. But how could he possibly spend three more months in the house that had been hosting him, now that there was no more reason for it? Milio had already written to the Consul of Palermo to help Cleen obtain a free repatriation. What to do, then? Wait or leave? He resolved to ask Milio himself for advice, one night after the latter had returned from his conger fishing expedition.

Venerina witnessed, after dinner, a conversation carried out in pseudo-French between her uncle and the foreigner. A conversation? One would rather have called it a squabble, judging from the vehemence of the gestures that each of them made in exasperation. At a certain point, Venerina, agitated and mortified seeing that her uncle was pointing furiously at her, became all flushed in the face. Was that right? Were they talking about her, then? In that way? Shame, anxiety, and annoyance caused such a turbulence of emotions inside of her that, as soon as Cleen retired to his room, she confronted her uncle.

“What do I have to do with it? What did the two of you say about me?”

“About you? Nothing,” replied Don Pietro, still burning up and out of breath from that exhausting effort.

“That’s not true! You were talking about me. I could tell perfectly well. And you got all upset!”

Don Pietro couldn’t make heads or tails of what she was saying.

“What did he tell you? What story did he make up?” insisted Venerina, feverishly. “Does he want to leave? Let him leave, then! I don’t care at all, you know, not one bit!”

Uncle Trawler stared at his niece for a while, his mouth open in bewilderment.

“Are you crazy? Or am I—”

Suddenly he started walking frantically around the room as if he were seeking a way out, and waving his paddle-like hands in the air.

“What a dummy I am!” he shouted. “What an idiot! Oh, what a fool! At seventy-eight years of age! Mamma mia! Mamma mia!”

He turned around with a jerk to face Venerina and threw his hands up in the air.

“Tell me something: was that why you asked me—to tell him that I’m a jackass?”

“No, not you... What did you understand?”

Again Don Pietro, holding his head between his hands, started pacing around the room.

“What a jackass I am, what a jackass—and that’s to put it mildly! But what was that monkey-like aunt of yours doing here the whole time? Sleeping? Porco diavolo! And what about you? And what about that damn... Wait, wait, let me take care of him—right now!”

And with those words he darted towards the door of the room where Cleen had retreated. Venerina quickly blocked his way.

“No! What are you doing, uncle? I swear to you he doesn’t know anything. I swear to you, there has never been anything between us! Didn’t you hear that he wants to leave?”

Don Pietro reeled. He couldn’t understand anything anymore.

“Who? He? He wants to leave? Who told you that? Quite the opposite! He doesn’t want to leave. Do you really think I’m a jackass, a complete imbecile? But I’ll kick him out myself, yes I will—right now!”

Venerina stopped him again, but this time she burst into tears and hid her face against his chest. Uncle Trawler felt his knees buckle. With his free hand he started making the sign of the cross.

“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” he sighed. “Come here, come here, child! Let’s go to your room and make some sense of all this. I feel like I’m losing my mind!”

He took her into the other room, made her sit down, handed her a handkerchief so she could wipe away her tears, and started asking her questions, patiently, like a father.

Meanwhile, Bernt Cleen, who had heard the argument between uncle and niece without understanding a word of it, quietly opened the door of his room and peeked, with his lantern in his hand, into the darkness. What had happened? He could only make out Venerina’s sobbing across the hall, and was deeply upset by it. Why that argument? And why was she crying like that? Milio had told him he couldn’t possibly stay in his house any longer: there wasn’t enough room for him, and also, the old bat, Donna Rosolina, was tired of watching over his niece. On the other hand, his niece couldn’t be left home alone with a stranger. All of these complications, Bernt Cleen couldn’t quite fathom. Who knows! So many other things, now that he had started going outside, seemed strange to him about this country. Regardless, he had to leave, that was for sure; he couldn’t wait for the steamship. And he would lose his position as boatswain. Leave! Was that why his young friend, who had nursed him back to health, was crying?

Bernt Cleen sat there, on his bed, until late that night, thinking, daydreaming. He felt as if he could see his sister far away; yes, he could see her. Ah, she was the only one now left in the world who still cared for him. But what about this other girl, here—could it be that she, too...?

“This one? And you, would you like that?”

Who knows! Every time he went back to his country, his sister told him that she would gladly give up seeing him again in this lifetime if, on one of his distant journeys, he fell in love with a nice girl and married her. It tore her apart to see him like that, sick of life and willing to resign—or rather, abandon—himself to the whim of destiny. He had given up everything to chance, taken on even the riskiest tasks with no concern for his own safety, like that time when, while they were crossing the ocean in the middle of a storm, he had jumped into the waves from the Hammerfest to save one of his shipmates! Yes, he had done that, and not in view of gaining any praise—because life, to him, was no longer worth anything.

But here? Now? Was it possible? Was this faraway seaside town in Sicily the place where he was fated to end up? Had he reached his destiny without even realizing it? Was that why he had fallen so sick he had almost died? Just so he would start a new life here? Who knows!

“And do you love him?” Don Pietro was asking in the meantime, after gleaning from Venerina, who still hadn’t calmed down, the scarce, vague information she had about the foreigner and her confession of their innocent pastimes. Pastimes which had brought about that love, a love that, up until that point, had just been floating in the air, like a bird fluttering on its wings.

Venerina had buried her face in her hands.

“Do you love him?” repeated Don Pietro. “Is it so hard to say yes?”

“I don’t know,” answered Venerina, sobbing.

“Well, I do!” grumbled Uncle Trawler, getting up. “Go, go to bed now, and try to sleep. Tomorrow, maybe... I can’t believe it! Now I have to act as a...”

And, shaking his wooly head, he went to bunk on the rickety old sofa.

Once alone, Venerina, still flushed and with her eyes sparkling, broke into a smile. Then she covered her face with her hands again, and held it tight, tight, just like that. Finally, she threw herself into bed, with her clothes still on.

She really didn’t know if she loved him. But in the meantime, she kissed and squeezed the pillow of her little bed. Still dazed by the unexpected exchange into which she had been dragged by her wounded pride as a result of a misunderstanding, she couldn’t yet come to terms with her own feelings and with what had happened. A burning sense of shame prevented her from being truly happy about that clarification with her uncle. And yet, perhaps she had unconsciously been wanting that clarification, after so many months spent carrying a thought, a feeling, as if suspended, incapable of grabbing onto something real and somehow expressing itself. Now she had said yes to her uncle, and certainly she would feel a great pain if Cleen were to leave. She was terrified of the insufferable boredom into which she would fall again, all alone in that silent, empty house. And she was glad that her uncle was now with her, in the other room, devising a way to overcome, if possible, the difficulties that up to that point had kept her feelings in suspense.

But could those difficulties truly be overcome? Though Cleen was right there, to her he seemed so, so far away. He spoke a language that she didn’t understand. In his heart, in his eyes was a distant world that she couldn’t even imagine. How to make him stay? Was it possible? And could he truly intend to spend, for her sake, his whole life away from his own world? He did want to stay, yes. But only until his steamship returned from America. In the meantime, he certainly didn’t have any love interest drawing him back to his country, because if he did, once he had miraculously cheated death he would immediately have made plans to return. If he wanted to wait, it meant that he, too, must feel—who knows! Maybe he did feel, towards her, that same affection, suspended and somehow lost in an uncertain destiny.

Lying on the rickety sofa with tangled springs, Don Pietro was tormented by different thoughts. The springs squeaked, and Uncle Trawler snorted:

“Mad, mad, that’s what they are! How on earth could they understand each other, if one doesn’t know a single word of the other’s language? And still, they understood each other, yes they did! The wonders of madness! They love each other, oh yes, and they haven’t even given a thought to the fact that the mullets, bogues, and congers of ‘Uncle Beet’ can’t magically crawl up from the sea and take care of paying for the wedding and supporting a new family. Fortunately, I... well, assuming master Di Nica agrees. Tomorrow, tomorrow we’ll see. Now, let’s sleep!”

Agostino Di Nica had been making a bundle with his steamer. So much so that he had thought of expanding his business all the way to Tunis and Malta and, to that end, he had ordered at the Arsenal of Palermo the construction of another steamer, slightly bigger, that could also be used to transport passengers.

“Maybe,” Don Pietro kept thinking, “he could use a man like Burnt. He knows French better than me, and he’s fluent in English. Also, he’s a sea dog. He could work as an interpreter or as a sailor, just as long as Di Nica hires him and gives him enough to live on and support his family doing an honest job... Meanwhile Venerina can teach him to speak properly. It sounds like she’s making miracles, with her method. But I can’t leave them alone anymore. Tomorrow I’ll take him to master Di Nica with me and, if my proposal is accepted, Cleen can wait, if he wants, but he’ll have to come fishing with me every day. And if it’s not accepted, he’ll need to leave right away, no ifs, ands, or buts. But let’s sleep for now.”

Sleep—one could only wish! It felt as if the tips of those tangled springs had become even sharper that night, sensing the predicaments in which Uncle Trawler was floundering.

V

Two weeks passed, during which Bernt Cleen regularly went fishing with Milio. He would leave with him, and with him he would return.

Master Di Nica, though with much hesitation, had accepted the proposal that Milio had presented to him like a real blessing (right—but what about the consequences?). The new steamer would be ready within a month at the most, and Cleen would start working on it as an interpreter—the first month a probationary period.

Venerina had made it very clear to her uncle that Cleen hadn’t yet opened himself up to her, and therefore she pleaded with him to act very tactfully, first by encouraging Cleen to talk and express his intentions. Poor Uncle Trawler, grumbling more than ever because of this growing quagmire, first went alone to Di Nica and, once he had obtained the position for Cleen, he returned home to offer it to him. In his rudimentary French, he added that, if Cleen wanted to stay as he had indicated he wished to do, it had to be on one condition: that he would work. Well, Uncle Trawler had found him a job. When the steamship came back from America, he would have two jobs, and at that point he could choose: one or the other, whichever was most convenient to him. In the meantime, while he waited, he would have to go fishing with him every day.

At his proposal, Cleen had been perplexed. It became clear to him that the scene between uncle and niece, that night, had been caused by his imminent departure, and that he had been the reason why his dear little nurse had burst out crying. So, accepting the proposal would be equal to making a commitment. But how could he turn down that offer, after all her doting care and solicitude? That offer, which didn’t bind him in the least, and which instead left him free to choose whether or not he wanted to show gratitude for everything that had been done for him?

Now, every morning, getting up from the rickety old sofa with his bones all sore, Don Pietro would cheer himself on:

“Come on, Uncle Trawler! Onward, to the double fishing expedition!”

And he would set out to prepare the gear: two fishing rods with lines, one for him and one for Burnt, the cans of bait, and the extra hooks. Sure, he was well equipped for that kind of fishing; but what about that other kind—fishing for a husband for his niece—who would give him the hook to make Cleen speak his mind?

Don Pietro would stand in the middle of the room, tightening his lips, his eyes wide open. Then he would wave his hands in the air and exclaim:

“And a French hook, no less!”

That’s right, because if that weren’t enough, he even had to approach the subject in French, when he already didn’t know how to do it in Sicilian.

“Monsieurre, ma nièsse...”

And then? Could he just come out and say, flat out, that his silly niece was in love with—or at least had a crush on—him?

Either Norway or the Consul of Palermo would probably reimburse him for his expenses—but who would reimburse him for this other trouble?

“He should, yes, him, porco diavolo! Didn’t he start a fire in my house? Then let him get burnt!”

That dumb expression on Cleen’s face, like that of a simpleton fallen from the sky—Uncle Trawler would take care of putting an end to it. And there, on the cliff by the port, while he put new bait on the hooks, he kept turning to look at Burnt, who was sitting on a nearby rock, his back straight, his clear blue eyes fixed on the cork hanging from the line and floating on the sharp blue water that glimmered with needlelike quivers.

“Hey, Monsieurre Cleen, hey!”

Sure, Cleen was staring at the cork, no doubt about that. But was he really seeing it? He looked as if he were in a trance.

Hearing that call, Cleen would rouse as if from a dream, and smile at Milio. Then he would slowly pull up the fishing rod from the water, thinking that was what Milio meant, and would put new bait on the hooks, which must have been hanging empty for who knows how long.

Ah, that sure made for some really good fishing! Uncle Trawler, too, as he was busy thinking, working out a way to bring up that complex and delicate issue, would accidentally let the fish eat away the bait. He would get distracted, no longer see the cork or the sea, and only snap out of it when the water, splashing through the nearby cliffs, would retreat with a heavier undercurrent. Then, irritated, he would tug at the fishing rod with the impulse to smack it across the face of that ungrateful one. But what made him even angrier was the exclamation that Cleen had learned from him and that he now repeated often, smiling, as he pulled up his own fishing rod.

“Porco diavolo!”

In those moments, Uncle Trawler would forget to speak to him in French and blurt out:

“No, I’m saying porco diavolo for real! You’re laughing, you idiot! What do you care?”

No, no, it couldn’t go on like that. He wasn’t making any progress, he was just making his own liver sour.

“Let them sort it out, if they want to!”

He said as much to his niece one night, coming home from fishing.

He was completely taken aback when Venerina reacted to his frustrated announcement by bursting out laughing, her face all flushed and beaming.

“Poor uncle!”

“Are you laughing?”

“Of course!”

“Is it done?”

Venerina covered her face with her hands, nodding several times, gleefully. Uncle Trawler, though secretly happy to have been relieved of that burden when he least expected it, became furious.

“What? You didn’t tell me anything? You kept me hanging like that for days! And, he, too, not a word, quiet like a fish!”

Venerina looked up:

“He didn’t get around to saying anything to you, even today?”

“Like a fish, I’m telling you! A dumb fish!” shouted Uncle Trawler, more furious than ever. “My liver is this big from all the bile I’ve racked up all these days!”

“Maybe he felt embarrassed,” said Venerina, trying to excuse him.

“Embarrassed! He’s a man!” exclaimed Don Pietro. “He’s made all the fish in the sea laugh behind my back! Where is he? Call him! Have him say it to my face tonight, right now! It’s not enough that he told you!”

“But don’t frown like that,” pleaded Venerina, smiling.

Uncle Trawler calmed down, shook his wooly head, and grumbled under his beard:

“I’m really... well, you know it already, better than me. But tell me, how did you do it, with no French?”

Venerina blushed, shrugged her shoulders lightly, and her big dark eyes sparkled.

“Just like that,” she said, with innocent coquetry.

“And when?”

“Today, when the two of you came home at noon. After lunch he took my hand... and I...”

“Enough! That’s enough!” mumbled Uncle Trawler, who had never flirted in his whole life. “Is dinner ready? Now I’ll talk to him.”

Venerina looked at him pleadingly again and ran off. Don Pietro entered Cleen’s room.

Cleen was standing with his forehead pressed against the balcony window, looking out, but he wasn’t seeing anything. The little piazza right in front of the house was dark and empty at that time. The oil lamps were taking a break, because the moon was in charge of lighting the village that night. Hearing the door open, Cleen turned around with a start. Who knows what he had been thinking.

Uncle Trawler stood right there in the middle of the room, his legs apart, shaking his head. He wanted to give Cleen a talking-to as the old curmudgeon uncle. But he immediately sensed the difficulty that he would encounter if he were to formulate a speech in French to match the stern expression that his face and demeanor had already assumed. He barely kept in check a most solemn snort of impatience and began:

“Monsieurre Cleen, ma nièsse m’a dit…”

Cleen smiled sheepishly, feeling confused, and gave a few slight nods of his head.

“Oui,” continued Uncle Trawler. “Fine, then!”

He drew his index fingers together several times to mean: “Husband and wife, united...”

“Vous et ma nièsse... arriage... oui?”

“Si vous voulez...” answered Cleen, turning his palms upward as if he weren’t completely certain that he was being given consent.

“Oh, sure, as far as I’m concerned...” blurted out Don Pietro, inadvertently, but he immediately regained his composure. “Très heureux, monsieurre Cleen, très hereux. C’est fait! Donnez-moi la main...”

They shook hands, and so the marriage was settled. But Cleen remained astonished. He kept smiling, but timidly, feeling awkward about the strange situation into which he had stumbled without any clear intentions. Sure, he liked that Sicilian brunette, so lively, her eyes full of sun, and he was very grateful for her devoted care. He owed her his life, he did, but—his wife, really? Was it settled already?

“Maintenant,” resumed Uncle Trawler, in his rudimentary French, “je vous prie, monsieurre Cleen: cherchez, cherchez d’apprendre notre langue… je vous prie…”[21]

Venerina rapped her knuckles gently against the door.

“Dinner’s ready!”

That first night, sitting down at the table, all three of them felt greatly embarrassed. Cleen looked as if he had just fallen off the face of the earth. Venerina, her face burning up, felt dazed and couldn’t look at either her uncle or her fiancé. Her eyes would get all cloudy as soon as they met Cleen’s, and she would lower them immediately. She would smile in response to his equally awkward smile, but she would gladly have run off and locked herself in her room, all alone, thrown herself on her bed and cried… That’s right, without knowing why.

If that’s not madness, there are no mad people left in the whole world, thought Uncle Trawler in the meantime, frowning, feeling edgy himself as he made an effort to swallow his meager dinner.

But then, though with some hesitation, Cleen asked him to kindly translate for Venerina a sweet thought that he didn’t know how to express to her on his own; and in turn, Venerina, blushing timidly, asked her uncle to thank Cleen and to tell him…

“What?” asked Uncle Trawler, opening his eyes incredulously.

And since, after that first exchange of messages, the conversation between the two would need to continue through him, he banged his fists on the table:

“Enough of that!” he exclaimed. “What kind of fool do you think I am? You two sort it out by yourselves!”

And as the young couple burst out laughing, he got up and went to smoke his pipe on the old sofa, grumbling porco diavolo into his wooly beard.

VI

On the last night of May, Di Nica’s steamer was on its third voyage back from Tunis. In an hour, towards daybreak, it would dock at the Old Pier. Everybody on board was sleeping except for the helmsman at the stern and the second mate on guard on the main deck.

Cleen had left his berth, and for a while, sitting on the quarterdeck, he had been gazing at the waning moon through the ratlines of the rigging, which was quivering at the ship’s monotonous vibrations. He felt an oppressive sense of anguish, there on that nutshell, in that confining sea, and the moon... yes, even the moon seemed smaller, as if he were looking at it from the distance of his exile, while from the ocean it seemed so much bigger, when he saw it through the rigging of the Hammerfest, where some of his shipmates, perhaps, were looking at it at that same moment. His whole heart felt close to that ship. Who was standing guard on the Hammerfest right then? He closed his eyes and saw his shipmates, one by one, climb through the hatches onto the deck, as if he were right there on board; in his mind he saw his steamship, white with salt, majestic and alive with sound. He heard the ship’s bell strike, breathed in the peculiar smell of his old berth, locked himself in it to think and daydream. Then he opened his eyes again, and everything seemed to him like a dream—not only what he had seen while reminiscing and fantasizing, but the sea, too, the sky, the steamer, and his present life. He was overwhelmed by a profound sadness, a restless sense of dejection. His new shipmates didn’t care about him, they didn’t understand him, nor did they want to. They mocked the way he pronounced the few Italian words he had managed to learn. And so, in order not to make matters worse, he had to hide his irritation and smile at their boorish, stupid ridicule. Well, so be it. In time, they would stop. And little by little, with constant practice and Venerina’s help, he would learn how to speak correctly. In any case, things were already set for him: there, in that town, in that nutshell and on that sea—his whole life.

Uncertain about his new existence, he could not imagine anything definite about the future. Can a tree grow in the air, if its roots are still sparse and not firmly planted in the ground? But one thing was for sure: destiny had transplanted him here, and for good.

The Hammerfest, which was supposed to return from America within six months, had never returned. His sister, to whom he had written to let her know of his deadly illness and to announce his betrothal, had responded from Trondheim with a long letter full of anxious solicitude and joyous surprise. She had informed him that, according to the communication she had received from her husband, in New York the Hammerfest had received a countermand and had been assigned to sail to India. Who knows, then, if Cleen would ever see it again. And what about his sister?

He stood up to shake off the misery of those thoughts. It was close to daybreak. The stars had died in the dim sky; the moon was slowly dying, too. Over there, still lit, was the green lantern of the Pier.

Uncle Trawler and Venerina were on the dock, waiting for the steamer’s arrival. During the two days in which Cleen stayed in Porto Empedocle, Don Pietro didn’t go fishing; he was forced to keep guard over the betrothed. Donna Rosolina, that blockhead, had refused to help even with that: first because she was unmarried, and her decency would go up in flames next to the fire of love shared by those two; and second, because that foreigner intimidated her.

“Are you afraid he’ll eat you alive?” Uncle Trawler would yell at her. “You’re a bag of bones, will you get that into your head?”

Donna Rosolina wouldn’t. And even on the occasion of the betrothal, she had refused to give away any of her belongings, not even a tiny ring among the many she had, to show her niece that she was happy for her.

“Later, later,” she would say.

It was actually true. Someday Venerina would necessarily inherit everything she owned: her house, her small farm up on the hills towered over by Mount Cioccafa,[22] her jewelry, her furniture, and even those eight woolen blankets she had knitted with her own hands, in her not-yet-extinguished hopes of smothering a poor husband under them.

Uncle Trawler was incensed by such stinginess, but he didn’t want Venerina to show disrespect towards her aunt.

“She’s your mother’s sister! Besides, I’m bound to go before her, it’s the law of nature, and I have nothing for you to inherit. She’ll be the only one left, so you need to keep on her good side. Have your husband flatter her a little, and you’ll see it’ll help. After all, as much as the Lord may care about a fool like me, rest assured that He’ll watch over us.”

Indeed, the Norwegian consulate had finally sent him a modest reimbursement for the assistance he had given to Cleen. With it, he had been able to buy some simple furniture, the most indispensable items to set up the betrothed couple’s house as best as he could. Cleen’s papers had also arrived from Trondheim.

That morning, Venerina was so happy and impatient to show her fiancé how their new little nest was already fixed up! But very soon, when the steamer finally docked at the pier and Cleen was able to get off, her joy suddenly turned into irritation when she heard the greeting that the other sailors, almost meowing, addressed to her fiancé:

“Gut morning, gut morning!”

“Nasty idiots,” she hissed, turning and darting angry glances at them.

Cleen was smiling, and Venerina grew even more indignant.

“Say, can’t you just sock one of them? You let those thugs make fun of you like that, and you smile?”

“Oh, come on,” said Uncle Trawler. “Don’t you see they’re only kidding? It’s just shipmates’ banter.”

“I don’t want them to!” retorted Venerina, her face flushed with resentment. “Let them joke amongst themselves, not in that stupid way, with a foreigner who cannot even talk back!”

She almost felt like she, too, was being ridiculed. Cleen was staring at her and saw those fiery glances like flames of passion directed at him. He liked that indignation, but every time he had the urge to express how he felt, or to share a secret with her, it seemed to him as if he were banging his head against a wall, and so he kept quiet and smiled, failing to understand that, at times, Venerina didn’t appreciate his smiling kindness.

But after all, was it his fault if other people were rude? If he still couldn’t step out into the street without being surrounded, right away, by a throng of rascals? Threatening them made it even worse: they would scatter with screams, guffaws, and jeers.

It made Venerina furious.

“Why don’t you beat one of them to a pulp? Teach them a lesson! Why do you have to become the village laughingstock?”

“Good advice!” grumbled Don Pietro. “Instead of teaching him to be cautious!”

“With those mongrels? A stick is what he needs with them, a stick!”

“They’ll stop, don’t worry, as soon as Burnt has learned our language.”

“Bernt!” screamed Venerina, now mad even at her own uncle, who called her fiancé that name just like the rest of the town.

“But it’s the same thing!” sighed Don Pietro, irked, shrugging his shoulders.

“Change that name of yours!” insisted Venerina, now turning in exasperation to Cleen. “It’s not funny to be called Burnt’s wife!”

“Don’t they already call you Uncle Trawler’s niece? What’s wrong with that? He’s Burnt and I’m Trawler. Cheers!”

Now Venerina no longer laughed when she taught her fiancé her language. On the contrary, she got riled up.

“See?” she would say to him. “Of course they make fun of you, if you speak like that! The word is chiaro, chia-ro, clear! Jesus, is it that hard?”

Poor Cleen smiled docilely—what else could he do?—and tried to improve his pronunciation. But then, two days later, he had to leave again. And so the lessons were often interrupted, and he couldn’t make as much of them as Venerina would have liked.

“You’re like a box of rocks, my dear!”

To Don Pietro, who was forced to keep guard over them, this bickering seemed petty, and it irritated him. At the same time, his presence made Cleen feel even more awkward, since he couldn’t understand why it was needed at all. Wasn’t he Venerina’s fiancé? Couldn’t they go for a walk up there on the plateau in the countryside, just the two of them? He had suggested it one day, but Venerina herself had asked, bewildered:

“Are you crazy?”

“Why?”

“Here a betrothed couple is never left alone, not even for a single moment.”

“They need a chaperone!” grumbled Don Pietro.

Cleen was demoralized by all of the limitations. They made him confused and depressed. Being treated like an idiot by the whole town was causing to him suffer from a dull exasperation, a secret gnawing feeling. He feared he might become an idiot for real.

VII

But master Di Nica was well aware that Cleen wasn’t an idiot, from the way he carried out his duties and handled those crooked agents in Tunis and Malta. As usual, Di Nica wouldn’t say it out loud, not because he wanted to deny him his merit and praise, but to avoid the... well, the consequences of that praise.

However, he thought he gave him a very generous proof of how pleased he was with his work when he granted him a ten-day marriage leave.

“Are you saying ten days are not much? They’re quite enough, pal!” he said to Don Pietro, when the latter expressed his dissatisfaction. “You’ll see how, in ten days, they’ll manage to cook up a nice, big baby boy! At the most, when Burnt gets on board again after his leave, I can allow him to take his bride with him to Tunis and Malta, for a little honeymoon. He’s a responsible fellow; I trust him. But I can’t do more than that.”

And when Don Pietro asked him to be best man at the wedding, he got all flustered.

“I have nothing against that nice young man, of course. But if, God forbid, I did it once, I would end up having to do it for the rest of my life. No chance, dear Pietro, no chance! I’ll send the bride a little present, in consideration of our old friendship—but make sure you don’t tell anybody!”

For her own part, Donna Rosolina squeezed, squeezed that kind heart that God had given her, and came up with another little present for Venerina: a pair of dangling earrings from the sixteenth century. But she also prided herself on offering the couple, for their ten-day honeymoon, her country estate by Mount Cioccafa.

“But make sure you watch the furniture!”

Those four rickety chairs would move on their own if you snapped your fingers, so ravaged were they with woodworms! And the musty smell of that decrepit shack buried up there among the trees was unbearable.

After the wedding, as soon as Venerina arrived in the carriage along with the groom, her uncle, and aunt, she hurried to open up all the shutters and windows.

“Watch the curtains! The draperies!” shrieked Donna Rosolina, trying to chase after her impetuous niece.

“Let them get some air! Look, look how they’re breathing! Ahh, so nice!”

“Yes, but the light will fade them.”

“It’s not like they’re made of brocade, aunt!”

That hour spent up there with the couple was pure torture for Donna Rosolina. She suffered as much in seeing them paw this or that object as if they had been ripping out those sticky little comma-like curls from her forehead. She suffered seeing the stableman’s family stomp into the house with their heavy hobnailed boots to congratulate the newlyweds.

The stableman was in charge of the small farm and lived with his family in the cobblestone courtyard of the farmhouse, in a dark one-room building that served as both house and barn. Unsure of whether or not he had done well, he brought a basket of fresh fruit as a present.

Bernt Cleen stared with disbelief at those creatures who looked as if they were from another world, dressed in that odd way, scorched by the sun. They seemed so strange and different from him that he was amazed at seeing them blink just like he blinked, and move their lips like he did. What were they saying?

Smiling, the stableman’s wife was announcing that one of her five children, the second one, had been suffering from malaria for two months and was lying on the straw like a little corpse.

“Poor child, he’s unrecognizable!”

She was smiling, not because she didn’t feel pain, but so as not to show her affliction while they were celebrating.

“I’ll come and visit him,” promised Venerina.

“Oh, no, Miss, what are you saying?” exclaimed the peasant woman. “Don’t bother with us poor people, Miss. Enjoy yourself! What a handsome groom! Would you believe me if I told you I don’t even dare look at him?”

“What about me?” asked Uncle Trawler. “Am I not handsome? And, hey, I’m a groom, too! Donna Rosolina is my bride! Two couples!”

“Quiet!” yelled the aunt, suddenly stirred up with emotion. “I don’t want certain things to be said, not even as a joke!”

Venerina was laughing hysterically.

“No, I’m serious, I’m serious!” protested Don Pietro.

He was trying so hard to make the celebration lively for his niece that he insisted with that bad joke until the spinster ended up refusing to ride back to town alone with him, and ordered the stableman to climb up on the driver’s seat next to the coachman.

“The gossip... you never know! With a prankster like you!”

“Ah, dear Donna Rosolina! What do you expect I might do at this point? I can’t do anything to you anymore!” said Don Pietro during the carriage ride back, shaking his head and letting out a heavy sigh through his nose, as if he were deflating at last after all the cheer he had put on for his niece. “I just hope I made that poor girl happy!”

He felt he had finally reached the goal of his long, troubled, messy existence. What else was left for him to do? Just make himself available for death, with his conscience clear—yes, clear, but anguished. Just a few more boring days, and then... there, the carriage was riding by the graveyard, suspended on the fiery red plateau beneath the setting sun.

“There, and what have I achieved?”

Donna Rosolina was sitting next to him, her lips pursed and her eyes fixed intently ahead. She was trying to imagine what the newlyweds, now alone, might be doing at that moment. She struggled to keep in check the yearning that was coming over her, which manifested itself as bitter aggravation against the old grouch—too old, by then—sitting beside her. She turned to look at him, saw him with his eyes closed, and thought he was sleeping.

“Come on, come on, we’re almost there.”

Don Pietro opened his eyes, red with the tears he had been holding back, and grumbled:

“I know, wifey. I’m thinking of the congers for tonight’s dinner. Who’s going to cook them for me?”

VIII

Once she had overcome the initial, intense uneasiness of the sudden intimacy with a man who still looked to her as if he had fallen down from the sky, Venerina started protecting him and leading him by the hand, like a child. That man, her new husband, was spellbound by the sights of the countryside, whose nature struck him as strange and almost violent.

He would stop and stare endlessly at some colossal olive tree trunks, all twisted and covered with lumps, knobs and mangled joints, and would keep exclaiming:

“The sun! The sun!” As if, etched in those trunks, he saw the live image of the sun’s burning rage, a rage that stunned him and almost intoxicated him.

He saw that sun everywhere, and especially in the eyes and in the eager, juicy lips of Venerina, who laughed at his astonishment and pulled him away to show him other things that she considered worthier of awe: the Cioccafa cave, for example. But instead he would stop whenever she least expected it, in front of things that she regarded as ordinary.

“Yes, they’re prickly pears.[23] So? What are you staring at?”

He really looked like a child to her, and after looking at him for a while, she would burst out laughing in his face—why was he always gawking like that about nothing? She would shake him and blow over his eyes to snap him out of that stupor that sometimes made him speechless.

“Wake up! Wake up!”

In those moments he would smile at her, hug her, and let her lead him, following her helplessly like a blind man.

He would always end up talking to her, with the same horrified expressions, about the stableman’s family. Ever since they had paid them the visit they had promised, he could not wrap his mind around the fact that those people lived there, in that cramped, miserable room which had become almost a smoke-filled, malodorous cave. In vain did Venerina insist:

“But if you take the donkey, the pig, and the chickens out of the room, they can’t sleep there in peace anymore. They all have to stay together in there: they’re one family.”

“Horrible! Horrible!” he exclaimed, waving his hands in the air.

And what about that poor boy lying there on the straw, his face yellow from continuous bouts of malaria, his body almost a skeleton? They were treating him with some foolproof concoction of theirs. He would get better, just like the others. But in the meantime, the sight of that poor lad was heartbreaking! He just lay there, nibbling weakly on a piece of coarse bread.

“Don’t think about it!” said Venerina, who did feel sorry for the boy, but not so much, because she knew that’s how poor people live. She thought her husband must surely know it, too, and therefore, seeing him so upset, she became increasingly convinced that his good nature was uncommon, almost unhealthy, and was disturbed by it.

Those ten days in the countryside went by very quickly. Once they returned to the village, Venerina accompanied her husband to the steamer, but she refused to get on board with him for the honeymoon granted by Di Nica.

Don Pietro tried to convince her:

“You’ll see Tunis, which our dear French brothers, always so thoughtful, snatched away from us. And you’ll see Malta, where your uncle the jackass ended up ruining his life. How I wish I could go, too! You’d see how gladly I would slap myself if, through the streets of Valletta, I met my younger self the way I was back then, an idiotic patriot.”

No, no, Venerina would hear none of it. The sea scared her, and besides, she would feel uncomfortable among all those men.

“But wouldn’t you be with your husband?” insisted Don Pietro. “That’s what all our women are like! They just won’t make their men happy. And what do you say?” he asked Cleen.

Cleen didn’t say anything. He looked at Venerina hoping she would go along with him, but he didn’t want her to make a sacrifice or to actually feel sick during the journey.

“I take it,” concluded Uncle Trawler. “You’re a big babbalacchio!”[24]

Bernt didn’t understand the Sicilian word used by Don Pietro, but he smiled, seeing Venerina laugh about it so heartily. And a little later, he left—alone.

He waved his handkerchief at his bride, who waved hers from the dock of the Pier. But as soon as the steamer sailed away from the port, as she became smaller and smaller and could hardly be made out in the distance anymore, he instinctively felt a big relief, which, as he thought about it, made him even sadder. He realized then and there, alone before the expanse of the sea, that although he had welcomed the intimacy with his young wife during those ten days, he had suffered from an intense sense of oppression. Now he could think more freely, let his soul unfold, without having to struggle anymore to guess the thoughts and feelings of that creature who was so different from him but who had now become such an intimate part of him.

He consoled himself in the hope that, with time, he would adjust to this new existence, that he would start thinking and feeling like Venerina, or that she herself, through her affection and intimacy, would find her way to him, and then he would no longer feel so alone, in that dreadful exile of the mind and of the heart.

Meanwhile, Venerina and her uncle were talking about him in the new little house, where Don Pietro, too, had moved.

“Yes,” she was saying with a smile. “He’s exactly as you said!”

“A babbalacchio? A dope?” asked Uncle Trawler. “Come on, he’s good, he’s a good man...”

“And what does ‘good’ mean, uncle?” Venerina pointed out with a sigh.

“That’s true!” acknowledged Uncle Trawler. “Indeed, nowadays, scoundrels are called wise men, and your uncle is the first to tip his hat to them. Let’s hope that the air of our sea, which must be, you know, saltier than the sea by his own country, will do him some good. But I too am afraid that, in terms of wisdom, he’s a lot like me.”

Don Pietro had actually grown fond of Cleen, but he had no plans, not even out of curiosity, to try and guess what was going on in his mind, nor did it occur to him to suggest that Venerina do it, either.

“You’ll see,” he said to her instead. “You’ll see that, little by little, he’ll adopt our customs. Common sense he does have.”

Before leaving, Cleen had advised Venerina to discourage the old man from going fishing anymore. But not only had Uncle Trawler ignored the advice—he had become positively upset:

“You two no longer have any use for my congers, do you? Well, well, that means I’ll eat them by myself.”

“That’s not the point, uncle!” protested Venerina.

“So are you two trying to kill me, then?” insisted Uncle Trawler. “Back in my day there was a poor farmer who was ninety-five years old, and every blessed morning he would come up from the countryside to Girgenti with a large basket of vegetables on his shoulders and spend the whole day going around selling them. People saw how old he was, they felt sorry for him, and they decided to have him admitted into the hospital. That did it— within three days he was dead. Balance, my dear! Once they took the basket from his shoulders, that poor man lost his balance and died. It would be the same for me, if you took away my fishing rod. Congers, it has to be congers: tonight, and tomorrow night, and for as long as I live.”

And he kept going with his fishing gear and his small lantern to the cliffs by the port.

Alone, Venerina did her best to think about her husband far away. She waited for him anxiously, she did, the first few days. But she couldn’t even bring herself to want him any other way: two days at home, and the rest of the week at sea. Two days with him, and the rest alone, waiting every night for her uncle to come home from fishing; then dinner, then to bed—alone, yes. Was that enough for her? No. Not for her, either. Too little... And so she spent a long time wrapped up in secret anticipation, though that anticipation also filled her with a certain dismayed anxiety.

“When?”

IX

“Whoa, what a rush!” exclaimed Uncle Trawler as soon as he noticed the first signs of nausea and dizziness. “That doggone Agostino had predicted it! Tell the truth, were you afraid that your uncle wouldn’t last long enough to hear the sweet mewling of the kitten?”

“Uncle!” hollered Venerina, outraged but smiling all the while.

She was happy. She suddenly felt an urge, in those long nights spent alone in the house, to start making baby caps, bibs, swaddling bands, shirts... and not just at night. She no longer had either the time or the inclination to take care of her appearance, so engrossed was she in planning for the little angel who would come—“from heaven, Aunt Rosolina! From heaven!” she would reassure the prudish spinster, hugging her impulsively and ruffling her up.

“And you’ll be godmother, and Uncle Pietro godfather!”

Donna Rosolina blinked and swallowed, anxiety prickling her nose. That blessed girl must have gone crazy, squeezing her like that and showing no consideration for all her poultices.

“Easy, easy! Yes, gladly, as long as you give him a Christian name. I still don’t know what to call your husband.”

“Call him Burnt, like everybody else!” answered Venerina, laughing. “I don’t care about it anymore now!”

She didn’t care about anything anymore. She wouldn’t even tidy herself up a bit when he was due to return.

“Fix up your hair, at least!” advised Donna Rosolina. “You don’t look pretty like that.”

Venerina would shrug:

“By now, what’s done is done. This is what I look like, if he wants me. And if he doesn’t, he can leave me alone. So much the better!”

Her joy about expecting that new life was so exclusive that Cleen didn’t feel part of it. He felt left out, and was only happy for her, as if the coming child would not belong to him too, since he would be born there, in that country not his own, from that mother who didn’t even bother to find out how he felt about it or what he thought.

She had already found her place in life. She had her little house, her husband. Soon she would also have the child she longed for. And she wasn’t thinking that he, a foreigner, was just at the beginning of his new existence, and was waiting for her to hold out her hand to guide him. Unconcerned, or oblivious, she was leaving him at the door, cast out, lost.

So he would leave again, and while he was far away, sailing across that sea on that nutshell, he felt more and more alone and anguished. His shipmates, seeing him so sad, no longer mocked him the way they used to, that’s true, but they didn’t pay any attention to him, either. It was exactly as if he weren’t there. No one would ask him: “What’s the matter?” He was the foreigner. Who knew what he was like and why!

He wouldn’t have minded so much if it weren’t for the fact that he also felt like a stranger in his own home. His home? That one, in that Sicilian town? No, no! His heart still flew far away, up to his native country, to his old home, where his mother had died, where his sister now lived, his sister who maybe right at that moment was thinking about him and pictured him happy.

X

He still held on to one hope, one last defense, one last shelter against the melancholy that overwhelmed and suffocated him: that he would get to see himself, recognize himself in his newborn son. With him, there in that land of exile, he would be less alone, no longer alone.

But even that hope immediately failed him, as soon as he beheld his little boy, born two days earlier while he was away. He looked exactly like his mother.

“Dark-skinned, so dark, my poor little baby! A true Sicilian rascal,” said Venerina from the bed, while Cleen gazed with disappointment into the crib. “Close the curtain. You’ll wake him up. He kept me up all night, poor thing. He has colic. Now he’s finally calmed down, and I’d like to take advantage of it.”

Choked up with emotion, Cleen kissed his wife’s forehead, pulled the shutters closed again, and quietly left the room. Once alone, he covered his face with his hands to stifle his uncontainable sobs.

What had he hoped for? A sign, at least a sign, in that tiny little creature, in the color of his eyes, in the fuzz on his head, that would reveal him as his, a foreigner like himself, who would remind him of his country far away. What had he hoped for? Even if that had been the case, wouldn’t the boy grow up there, just like all the other boys from town, under that blistering sun, with those customs which were alien to him, raised almost exclusively by his mother and therefore with her same thoughts and feelings? What had he hoped for? Ever the foreigner, he would be a foreigner even to his own son.

Now, during the two days he spent at home, he tried to hide how he felt, which was not difficult since no one paid any attention to him. Don Pietro went fishing as usual, and Venerina was busy with the baby, and wouldn’t even let Cleen touch him.

“You’ll make him cry... You don’t know how to hold him! Shoo, shoo, get out of the house for a bit. What are you staring at me for? You can see very well the shape I’m in. Go, go visit Aunt Rosolina. She hasn’t been here for three days. Maybe Uncle Pietro is right—she really could use some flattery.”

Cleen did go once just to please his wife, but the old spinster gave him such a welcome that he vowed never to return, either alone or with company.

“Alone, nossir,” Donna Rosolina had said, embarrassed and annoyed, keeping her eyes fixed on the ground. “I’m sorry, but I have to tell you. I understand you are my nephew now, but people know you as a foreigner, with odd customs, and who knows what they might think. Alone, nossir. I’ll go to your house later, if you don’t want to come here with Venerina.”

And so, he found himself turned away, and couldn’t, wouldn’t laugh about it like Venerina did when he told her what had happened. But if she knew that the old lady was so unbearably crazy, why did she cajole him into making himself ridiculous? Did she want to laugh behind his back, too?

“Haven’t you made a friend yet?” Venerina would ask.

“No.”

“It’s difficult, I know. We’re curmudgeons, my dear! And it doesn’t help that you’re still out of joint like a headless fly. Won’t you wake up? Go and see uncle, at least. He’s at the port. You’re both men, you’ll understand each other. I’m a woman, I can’t entertain you. I’m so busy!”

He would stare at her, and fight the urge to ask her: “Don’t you love me anymore?” Venerina, realizing he hadn’t moved, would look up from her sewing, catch him with that lost expression on his face, and burst out laughing:

“What do you want from me? My God, you’re a grown man and you spend your time at home like a little boy! Just learn to live like our men—more outside than inside. I can’t stand to see you like that. You frustrate me and make me feel sorry for you at the same time.”

She didn’t see him outside. But from the moping look on his face as he prepared to go out, chased from his own house like a deserted dog, she could have guessed how reluctantly he dragged himself around the streets of that town where destiny had cast him, a town he had already come to hate.

Not knowing where to go, he would head to Di Nica’s office. He would always find the old man standing over his clerks, stretching his neck with his glasses perched on the tip of his nose to see what they wrote in the ledgers. Not because he didn’t trust them, of course, but one never knows, it takes just a moment’s distraction to write one number instead of another, to get one addition wrong. Also, he did it to keep an eye on their handwriting. Handwriting was his pet peeve: he wanted the ledgers to look neat. Meanwhile, some days that dank little first-floor room was already dark at four in the afternoon. It was hard to see without lighting the lanterns.

“Master Di Nica, it’s outrageous!” his clerks would say. “With all that money...”

“What money?” asked Di Nica. “Unless you give me some! And besides, I won’t hear of it! Here’s where I started, and here’s where I want to stay till the end.”

Seeing Cleen come in, he would get agitated.

“What now? What now? What now?”

He would approach him, holding his head back so he could see through his glasses still perched on the tip of his nose.

“What do you want, my son? Nothing? Then get a chair and sit over there, outside the door.”

He was afraid that the clerks would really get distracted, and also he didn’t want Cleen to know the company’s business before he set out on trips.

Cleen would sit for a while, there by the door. Did no one want anything to do with him, then? He no longer wore his fur cap; he was dressed like everybody else, and yet, people still turned around to look at him, as if he had put himself on display right there outside the agency. All of a sudden a little rascal would start doing cartwheels in front of him, and then, as a reward for his clownish feat, would hold out his hand for Cleen to put a coin in it. Everybody would laugh.

“What’s going on? What’s going on?” shouted master Di Nica, appearing at the door. “Is the puppet theater in town?”

The rascals would scatter, screaming and blowing raspberries.

“Dear son,” Di Nica would say to Cleen. “As you can see, they’re savages. Do me a favor, go somewhere else.”

And so Cleen would leave. Even that old man, so miserly and suspicious, had started to get on his nerves. He would head to the beach, which was cluttered with blocks of sulfur, and he would witness, with a mixture of bitterness and disgust, all those people toiling like animals under the scorching sun. Why, with all the wealth piled up thanks to that trade, didn’t anyone make the job of those poor creatures more humane, instead of having them work as if they were beasts of burden? Why didn’t anyone think to build docks on the cliffs of the new port, where the merchant steamers dropped anchor? Wouldn’t it be quicker, from those docks, to load the sulfur with carts or wagons?

“Don’t ever let a word about this slip out of your mouth!” Uncle Trawler urged him one night, after dinner. “Do you want to end up like Jesus Christ? All the rich men in town have an interest in the docks not being built because they own the boats that carry the sulfur from the beach onto the steamships. Watch out! They’ll hang you on the cross!”

Right, and in the meantime the sewers lay open out there on the beach among the sulfur deposits, fouling the air of the whole town. And everybody complained, but no one bothered to provide enough water for the parched population. What was all that hard-earned money for? Who was benefiting from it? So much money, and so much poverty! Not a single theater or a place that would offer some harmless entertainment, after all that hard work. As soon as the sun set, the whole town looked dead, with just those four oil lamps keeping vigil over it. And it looked as if the men, always caught up in the disputes and suspicions caused by the war for profit, didn’t even have time to bother with love, judging by how listless and unenthusiastic their women appeared. The husband was made to work; the wife to take care of the house and bear children.

“Is this it?” thought Cleen. “Is that what life is all about?”

And he felt more and more choked up.

XI

“The Hammerfest! The Hammerfest is coming!” announced Uncle Trawler, out of breath, to Venerina, whom he had rushed to with the news. “I have the notice—look: it’s arriving today. And Burnt just left! Porco diavolo! Who knows if he’ll make it back in time to see his brother-in-law and his friends!”

He ran over to Di Nica, with the notice in hand:

“Agostino—the Hammerfest!”

Di Nica looked at him as if he had gone mad.

“Who’s that? I don’t know him.”

“My nephew’s steamship.”

“Well, what do you want from me? Tell it I said Godspeed.”

And he started laughing, with his eyes closed and a peculiar nasal giggle, hearing the nonsense that came out of Don Pietro’s mouth as a result of his deep disappointment.

“If you could...”

“Oh, sure!” answered Di Nica. “Say no more. I’ll send a telegraph to Tunis right now and order it to return straight away. Trust me!”

“You’re so funny!” yelled Uncle Trawler, turning his back on him. “Thanks for nothing!”

Don Pietro went home and got dressed up for the official visit to the ship. As soon as the Hammerfest entered the port, he was welcomed warmly on board by all of Cleen’s shipmates. If in his role as deputy consul he normally managed with just a handful of phrases, that time he had to do unspeakable violence to his imaginary knowledge of the French language in order to answer all the questions they peppered him with about Cleen. He reduced his poor starched shirt to a sorry state, so much did he sweat from the effort of trying to convey to those devils that he wasn’t exactly his father-in-law, since Burnt’s wife wasn’t exactly his daughter, even though he had raised her as a daughter since she was a little girl.

Either they didn’t understand, or they chose not to. “Beau-père! Beau-père!”

“Fine!” exclaimed Uncle Trawler. “I’ve become a beau-père!”

It wouldn’t have been an issue if, to celebrate him as beau-père, they hadn’t insisted on getting him drunk, despite his valiant attempts to refuse.

“Je ne bois pas de vin!”

It wasn’t wine. Who knows what on earth they poured into his body. He felt like he was on fire. He had to struggle exhaustingly to get it into the minds of the crew, who wanted at all costs to meet the bride, that it was simply not possible—not all of them together!

“Only the beau-frère! Only the beau-frère! Where is he? Vous seulement! Venez! Venez!”

He led him home. Cleen’s brother-in-law didn’t know about the baby yet. He had only brought the bride some gifts on behalf of his own wife far away. He was truly sorry he wouldn’t have the joy of seeing Bernt again. The Hammerfest was bound for Marseille three days later.

Venerina could not exchange a word with that gigantic young man, who brought back to her the vivid memory of the day when Bernt had been carried into her uncle’s house on a stretcher, half dead. Yes, it was him that she had provided with a pen and paper so he could write that letter to the poor wretch. It was he who had given her the satchel, and it was after seeing him cry inconsolably that she had taken such good care of the invalid. And now, now Bernt was her husband, and that blond, smiling giant leaning over the crib was now related to her—he was her brother-in-law. She insisted that her uncle tell her in Sicilian what the man was saying about the baby.

“He says he looks like you,” answered Uncle Trawler. “But don’t believe him: he actually looks like me.”

It was the nasty stuff they had poured into his stomach while he was on board—Uncle Trawler didn’t mean to say those words out loud. He didn’t want to show the tender affection he had started to feel for that baby, whom he called kitten. Venerina started laughing.

“Uncle, what is he saying now?” she asked him a little later, hearing that the foreigner, her brother-in-law, was speaking again.

“Be patient, child!” grumbled Uncle Trawler. “I can’t handle both of you at the same time... Ah, oui... Burnt, yes. Dommage! What a disappointment, he says... Yes, unfortunately he won’t be able to see him... if the captain—you understand? Right! Exactly. Oui... business affaires, you understand? The steamship can’t wait.”

But Cleen wasn’t spared even that final heartbreak. Because of a delay in the arrival of the bills of lading, the Hammerfest had to postpone its departure by a day. It was getting ready to set sail from Porto Empedocle when Di Nica’s steamer entered the Pier.

Bernt Cleen jumped on a rowboat and made a mad dash for his steamship, his heart pounding in his chest. He was beside himself with frenzy! Ah, to leave, to escape with his companions, to speak his language again, to feel at home, there, on his steamship—there it was! So big! So beautiful!—to escape from that exile, from that death! He threw himself in his brother-in-law’s arms, clutching him so tightly he almost suffocated him, as he burst out crying uncontrollably.

When his shipmates, gathering all around him, asked him with great concern why he was weeping like that, he regained his composure, lied, and told them he was just crying out of joy over seeing them again.

Only his brother-in-law didn’t ask him anything. He read in his eyes the desperation, the irrational intention with which he had rushed on board, and looked at him to let him know he understood. There was no time to waste: the ship’s bell was already striking to announce the departure.

A short while later, from the rowboat, Bernt Cleen watched as the Hammerfest left the port. He waved farewell to it with his handkerchief wet with tears, while more tears streamed down his face, incessantly. He ordered the boatman to row all the way to the edge of the port, so he could watch the steamship sail further and further away on the endless sea, carrying with it his country, his soul, his life. There it was, moving further... further still... disappearing...

“Shall we head back?” asked the boatman, yawning.

He simply nodded.