The Wedding Journey: A Story
by CORRADO ALVARO
★
I WAS going home for the first time in many years, and as I drew nearer and nearer, childhood memories crowded upon me. I remembered even the holes in the walls, those holes where the stone is eaten away by the wind and the southern sun, where women hide combings of their hair and their children’s first teeth, safe from bad luck, holes that were my storehouse for buttons and nails which I had picked up off the rain-washed road, or my garden, where I watched a pale sheaf of wheat grow from a seed that had fallen upon a wind-swept pile of dirt. But the most vivid memory awaited me just inside the house, when I saw the high chest in one corner of my father’s room, whose top drawer used to hang like a canopy over my little head and where my father kept such very mysterious possessions. There it was, just as I used to see it, with the slender black columns at either side that made it the temple of my dreams. I waited, now that I was taller, for my father to pull open some of the drawers and let me look in. A familiar odor spun about my head, and i was intoxicated by the smell that still came out of a drop of resin, distilled from the wood one summer long ago.
“This is your mother’s dress, the one she wore on her wedding journey. And here are her shoes.”
I felt the silk of the dress in my fingers. Faille, I remembered hearing my mother call it, a lightbrown silk with an odor of faded flowers. A high collar, puffed sleeves, and a ladder of lace running up the front. And the yellow shoes, which had barely been scratched by their too-short walk on the Neapolitan pavements.
For it was to Naples that my mother and father went on their wedding journey. No sooner had my grandfather given his daughter to this thirty-yearold man than he was sorry. He shut himself up in his room and refused even to say good-by. “The bandit!” he muttered over and over. Meanwhile, the bride, in her rustling silk dress, with a tiny straw hat perched on her knot of hair, rode away on horseback down the road leading to the sea. And my father’s shadow rode beside her, along the stream beds, where occasional pools of water, not yet dried up by the summer heat, gleamed stilly in the sun.
The bridegroom had the same big wallet that I remembered seeing him carry. He kept it in an inside pocket which he had fastened with a pin. Aboard the train he did not relax his vigilance for a moment. Every now and then he laid his hand on the suitcase to make sure it was still there. The bride was happy to be with a man so reliable, in this world where the Lord had made no two faces alike. The great world, filled with all the voices to be heard on the train, seemed to knit the two of them closer together. They searched for the humblest figure in the compartment and their eyes fastened upon a woman dressed in black with a baby, who seemed like an answer to their prayer.
“Is his father dead?” asked the bride, looking at the baby, and this was the beginning of their conversation. Her guess was correct, and she proceeded to ask about the dead man, speaking with all the reverent timidity to which he was entitled. Then they fell silent, because they had nothing more to say, except when they pointed out the growing things in the fields on either side of the track. But they looked at one another in friendly fashion, because simplehearted people are naturally drawn together by sorrow.
They arrived in Naples toward evening. The wide streets were frightening, and everyone seemed to have something to tell them: cabbies, small boys and men who stepped virtually out of the walls in order to recommend a certain furnished room in the house of respectable people. The bridegroom had buttoned up his jacket and he carried the heavy suitcase in both hands, dangling in front of him, so that he could feel the stiff corner of the wallet in his pocket with one thumb. The bride was tempted to answer a polite “no" to all the solicitations shot at them by perfect strangers, but he warned her with his eyes and walked straight ahead as if they were not talking to him at all. She was afraid and held onto his arm. The houses seemed to lean over her on either side, with their dizzily high balconies and out-of-sight, secret windows, which gave her a hitherto inexperienced feeling of panic. She admired her man, who knew what it was all about and walked proudly ahead, and she resolved to be worthy of him.
“We shan’t go to a hotel,” he was saying. “Those schemers aren’t going to take our money! ” He pronounced himself as if he were baring a plan to defraud a whole city, which lay in wait for him at its peril. Now they took heart again whenever they crossed people in dark suits, old men and women, or couples with their children around them. What mystified them was the number of isolated individuals who poured out onto the street, pacing up and down the sidewalks and pausing at a corner as if in expectation. Were they waiting for them?
The bridegroom meant to take her to a safe place, to the house of some friends he had made ten years before when he was doing his military service. These friends would provide a room for a few days, and one where he could feel at ease. But now the city seemed new and strange and he didn’t know where he was. They came to a halt in an enormous square, with their eyes on a luminous clock that suddenly flashed on, in spite of the fact that there was still sun in the sky. The shops were lit up like churches, and in front of the smaller ones the owners sat taking the air. The bride and groom searched the passing crowd for someone of whom to inquire about the street for which they were looking. They were unwilling to confide their predicament to just anyone, for the human race, as they saw it around them, had faces such as they had never seen before; all these people were involved in trades and passions that were unknown and hence vaguely terrifying. Finally they spotted a man who looked as if he might have come from their part of the world. They asked their question in a low voice and followed with their eyes the motions of the man’s hand. But afterward they hesitated before starting out and watched their informant walk away.
The house was in a poor street, teeming with loaded pushcarts and loud voices, except where silent lines stood in front of the pawnshops. Here they look courage and felt at home. The little women straggling across the street, the cripples sticking out here and there like evidences of fate, the fat, bejeweled shopkeepers, the children crawling over the sidewalks, and the merchants who opened their mouths shamelessly wide in strident praise of the wares they were selling, all these seemed familiar and put them in a good humor. The bridegroom pointed out the wealth of fruit and vegetables, set out on the street. “Just think, you can get grapes here the year around, and other fruits, too, even out of season!” he said to startle her.
They came to the house, and he rushed in with the impetuousness of ten years before. But the old landlady hardly remembered him. She thought and thought, and finally muttered: “Yes, yes,” staring at him all the while. Her husband was dead and her sons were all married. Her daughter was married too, and when she said this she raised her eyes to look at him. The bride bent her head and blushed. But the bridegroom broke the silence with his loudest and gayest voice, the voice in which he had spoken in days gone by. “Here we are in Naples,” he said, “and of course we wanted to come to you. You’re as beautiful as ever!” She opened up her big bedroom with the faded red, gold-flowered paper on the wall and the photographs draped in black for mourning and also for protection from the flies. Then she brought a kerosene lamp and accepted two lire for the night.
The clamor of the city outside made the windowpanes rattle. The bridegroom locked the door and leaned a chair against it, while the bride sat down on a chair beside the chest of drawers, where a statuette of the Madonna under a glass bell was clothed in a torn blue dress and a crown that was all askew. When the bridegroom sat down at the table, solitude fell upon them. “Now we must have something to eat,” he said in a low voice. “I’ve taken care of that, you’ll see.” He opened the suitcase and took out two parcels, one of which he set aside, saying: “That’s for tomorrow.”
They didn’t say it, but the same thought was in both their minds, a thought of those that were to come, the children that would one day be theirs. The bride’s hands, so accustomed to work and so ill at ease being idle, lay folded in her lap, while the bridegroom cut a piece of the chicken he had set out on a newspaper. Then he poured the wine and held the glass up to the light. He made an effort to laugh and said in a low voice: “Draw up your chair, and let’s eat some of the good things from our own village. They don’t have anything like this here. If the old lady could see this, she’d want some. We’re not wasting our money in the hotels! What do you say if tomorrow we buy a cradle, with a pink embroidered lining? Pink or blue?”
My mother had put her arm on the table and was silently weeping.
Translated by Frances Frenaye