Free The Oil Jar and Other Stories by Luigi Pirandello Page B

he seized one of them by the throat and pinned him to the wall, shouting:
    â€œBlood of the Madonna, you’ll pay for this!”
    Seized in his turn by the other two, their earth-colored, parched, brutish faces distorted by excitement, he turned his violent rage against himself, flung his ugly hat to the ground, and beat his head and cheeks for a long time, stamping his feet and bawling in the fashion of people mourning a dead relative:
    â€œThe new jar! Four onze ’ s worth of jar! Not even used once!”
    He wanted to know who had broken it! Did it break by itself? Someone must have broken it, out of meanness or out of envy! But when? How? There were no visible signs of violence! Could it have arrived broken from the potter’s shop? No! It rang like a bell!
    As soon as the farmhands saw that his first fury had abated, they started urging him to calm down. The jar could be repaired. You see, it wasn’t damaged badly. Just a single piece was broken. A competent tinker could fix it, make it as good as new. And Uncle Dima Licasi was the very man; he had discovered a miraculous resin cement, the secret formula for which he guarded jealously: a cement that couldn’t even be broken by a hammer, once it had taken hold. There. If Don Lollò was willing, tomorrow, at the crack of dawn, Uncle Dima Licasi would come and, before you knew it, the jar would be better than before.
    Don Lollò said no to those exhortations: it was all useless; there was no longer any way to put things right; but finally he allowed himself to be persuaded, and the next day, at dawn, punctually, Uncle Dima Licasi showed up at Primosole with his tool chest on his back.
    He was a crooked old man, with knotty arthritic joints, like an old stump of Saracen 5 olive tree. To wrench a word out of his mouth you needed a hook. It was haughtiness, that taciturnity, it was sadness rooted in that misshapen body of his; it was also a lack of belief that others could understand and rightly appreciate his deserts as an inventor who had not yet received any patent. He wanted the facts to speak for themselves, did Uncle Dima Licasi. And thus he had to be constantly on his guard so that his secret formula for making that miraculous cement wasn’t stolen.
    â€œShow it to me,” Don Lollò said to him, first off, after looking him up and down for some time in distrust.
    Uncle Dima shook his head in refusal, full of dignity.
    â€œYou’ll see when it’s done.”
    â€œBut will it work?”
    Uncle Dima put his tool chest on the ground and took out of it a tattered and faded cotton handkerchief, all rolled up; he unfolded it; he religiously drew out of it a pair of eyeglasses with the bridge and side pieces broken and tied with string; he put them on and began to examine attentively the jar, which had been brought out into the open air, on the threshing floor. He said:
    â€œIt will work.”
    â€œBut with the cement alone,” Zirafa laid down as a condition, “I wouldn’t feel safe. I want rivets as well.”
    â€œIn that case I’m leaving,” Uncle Dima replied tersely, putting his tool chest behind his back again.
    Don Lollò caught him by one arm.
    â€œWhere are you off to? Sir Pig, is that how you deal with people? Look, he puts on airs as if he were Charlemagne! A down-and-out, miserable, ugly tinker, that’s what you are, you donkey, and you ought to follow orders! I’ve got to put oil in there, and oil oozes out, you dumb animal! A crack a mile long, with nothing but cement? I want rivets. Cement and rivets. I’m the one giving the orders.”
    Uncle Dima shut his eyes, pressed his lips together and shook his head. They were all the same! He was denied the pleasure of doing a clean job, in a conscientious, artisanlike manner, and thus furnishing a proof of the powers of his cement.
    â€œIf the jar,” he said, “doesn’t ring again like a bell ...