Free Moscardino by Enrico Pea

she got better.
    And thus it went on till October, when the streets of Seravezza rustle with leaves and thistles, blown down from the mountain with the first frisky wind.
    Again appears Grumpy with his head bundled up, with his ear glued to key-holes, listening for the doctor’s voice and Sabina’s, who no longer slept in his bed:
    She had had a girl child that looked like the red-faced doctor, with red hair and a freckly face.

    If he got ill there was that doc, Jack of Clubs at the door: won’t die of that, takes more than that to kill ’em.
    Or he ordered a medicine which Grumpy didn’t take because it might have poison in it.
    The veins swelled on his neck, he got red as a peperone.
    There was no doubt of it, the red head persecuted him. Jack of Clubs came and said they should bleed him.
    Grumpy was scared and objected. He knew that his time had come. Jack of Clubs wanted to kill him and get Sabina, who was now his whore and had had a child by him, which Grumpy couldn’t bear to touch.
    He felt aversion for blood not his own. He couldn’t stand that reddish fuzz and the scabs on the top of its head.
    Even Don Pietro Galanti couldn’t get a word out of him.
    Nothing for it but to recommend him to God.
    Jack of Clubs said he ought to go amuse himself for a month in a city to get rid of his hypochondria, and Grumpy knew it was just to get him out of the house.
    The Doc said: Even Lucca. And Grumpy knew the gook house was in Lucca, where his poor brother was.
    But you got to get over this mania, said the Doc. And Grumpy cowered down under the bedclothes, waiting to be copped.

    He heard ’em saying the one lunger was no worse and that she was getting better, and Grumpy knew that he was the one who was going to die, that Jack of Clubs needed to keep Cleofe alive in order to be able to drop in at any time.
    With Cleofe as an excuse he could come in and enjoy Sabina and see his maggoty brat.
    And he, Grumpy, couldn’t say anything, for fear of those shiny scalpels that the doc had in his leather case.
    One of those little knives could make a little hole in his skull and the blood would come out a drop at a time, and even those few drops were a sea without port or harbour.
    He thought he might kill Cleofe.
    She was so full of t.b. she would die sometime sooner or later. But he wouldn’t have had the courage to die.
    He thought of arguing it out with the abbé, might find some complicated way to convince him; the abbé could do it, always in Cleofe’s bedroom.
    But when he opened his mouth to start explaining to the abbé, with the long argument that he had been chewing over for days, and masticating inside his groggy head-piece, Don Pietro Galanti appeared at the door.
    Grumpy felt his tongue swell up between his teeth, and he couldn’t get his mouth shut again.

    He locked himself in his room.
    He remembered his mother, dead without the sacraments and with one eye open.
    Believe in God’s punishment!
    He hung himself with the cord they used to hang out the maggoty brat’s dirty diapers.
    Â 
    â€œI never wanted to ask how Cleofe died.
    She must have faded out bit by bit with solemn humility:
    Without useless sighs.
    Without wasting a breath, must have closed her snuff-coloured eyes.
    Don Pietro Galanti probably said to the red-faced doctor: It’s a pleasure when they die that way, just little by little.
    At least there is time for the sacraments; neither too soon nor too late. And get to heaven before other sins can get onto their soul . . .”
    Â 
    â€œI heard she was dead, years later, when they thought I was cured.”
    Â 
    â€œThe nuns brought me your mother in the Campana Institute uniform. I knew like a shot, and made a sign that they shouldn’t say anything; for the pity I felt seeing the child in those ridiculous clothes.”

Printed by The Stinehour Press
in Lunenburg, Vermont on 60 lb Mohawk Vellum paper.
Designed by David