A short story (not mine)
Sep. 11th, 2004 07:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbThis is a translation of a short story by the great Italian writer Giovanni Guareschi, creator of Don Camillo. It is dedicated to Bruno on the occasion of her coming thirtieth birthday. It is rather an odd and unfashionable production, but it always makes me feel moved.
MEMORIES OF AN OLD COUNTRY SCHOOLTEACHER
By Giovanni Guareschi – translated by F.P.Barbieri
“It seems”, said Smilzo, “that the Director wants to do something spectacular this year on account of the plants.”
“What plants?” asked Peppone, who was sitting at the desk in his office, signing papers.
“The school plants”, muttered Smilzo. “The planting business, I mean.”
“Those are called trees, in case you didn’t know”, snapped back Peppone. “It’s called the School Tree-Planting Day.”
“Well, boss, whatever it’s called, the thing is that tomorrow morning there’ll be an invasion of out-of-village nuisances, District Education Director, Prefetto, and like that.”
Peppone stopped signing.
“If the Pope himself were to come down, I wouldn’t shift”, he said harshly. “I’ve no time to waste with this rubbish.”
Smilzo shrugged: “Boss, I don’t think trees are rubbish.”
“Trees aren’t, city bigwigs are!”, decreed Peppone. “We know how to plant a tree without a city idiot to teach us. These are people who only leave their armchairs when it’s a matter of listening to schoolchildren singing or cut some blankity-blank ribbon for something someone else set up. When there’s problems to be solved, you can whistle for them. They can go hang, every last one of them!”
Smilzo tried again to make Peppone see reason.
“Boss, of course you’re right: they’re bastards every last one of them, from the Prefetto to the ushers. But you, as mayor, have a duty…”
“As mayor I have a duty to deal with the real business!” shouted Peppone, smashing his fist on the table.
Smilzo left swiftly and took care not to raise the argument again; so Peppone went to bed that night having already forgotten everything about trees, school and authorities.
Next morning Bigio and Brusco came to remind him:
“The authorities are coming. There’s lots of excitement in the village, and the road to the school is chock-a-block with people. Hurry up: you’ll lose lots of Brownie points if you’re late.”
Peppone had to get out his good Mayor suit, shave, send for the new shoes from the cobbler, and lost his temper right off. There was quite a row, oaths against every Saint under the sun, shouts fit to raise the roof, and without Bigio and Brusco’s combined efforts he would have ended up looking a fright.
When it pleased God, Peppone was able to leave the house; but the authorities had come already, and the crowd was so thick in the school’s great yard, that, in order to get in, Peppone had to forget mayoral rank and do his panzer act. The authorities were standing on a high podium decorated with red, white and green, and Peppone saw that the District Education Director had got out a thick wad of papers and was getting ready to orate. He felt desperate: if he could not reach the podium before that so-and-so opened his excuse for a mouth, that was it.
He did not manage it. The Director opened the taps straightaway, and Peppone, after his pushing and shaking had drawn many angry hushes, stood still, full of anger.
The Director spoke beautifully. He was one of those tremendous speakers who can draw out half a million words without actually saying anything. Crowds love them: they listen to them as though they were singers, and hardly trouble to follow the sense of what they are saying.
Peppone was listening with a gaping mouth, when a voice behind him whispered:
“Terrific. So our First Citizen has come in last.”
Peppone did not bother to turn.
“Second to last, if anything”, he muttered softly. “Someone seems to have come in even later.”
“I was here before anyone else”, explained Don Camillo. “I stayed down here because I had no intention of being found by the authorities in the company of certain individuals. Anyway, remember that you have made the village look ridiculous. The highest district authorities honour our village with a visit, and no Mayor or vice-Mayor to receive them!”
Peppone took his hat off and dried his sweat.
“Mind your own business!” he said, “I can mind my own.”
“As a member of the village, it is my business”, answered Don Camillo.
“Priests have no country!” retorted Peppone.
Don Camillo was right behind Peppone, and his first instinct was to drive his boot into the mayor’s behind. But he gave up the idea, not only for obvious reasons, but also because of lack of space to swing. Pressed by the crowd on both sides, he had Peppone in front and the big iron school gate at his back.
Meanwhile, the Director was still speaking; but he had reached the home stretch, and when he got to the very last sheet, he turned his eyes in Don Camillo’s direction, and added a rider to his speech:
“And now I wish to thank the authorities in the name of the teaching body. The mayor will thank them, as he best knows how, for the citizen body.”
He pointed at Peppone with an amiable gesture, and Peppone immediately felt a billion eyes on him. Then he heard the Director’s final outburst, the applause that greeted it, and – silence.
Nobody was making a sound; everyone expected the mayor to speak.
Everybody was waiting; and, except for the members of his Party, everyone was hoping to hear Peppone start with his usual ungrammatical gabble, that would be good for two or three months’ laughs among friends or at the family table.
Peppone was sweating and desperately nervous, but he could not open his mouth. “Please”, said the Director from the podium with a smile, “do step up to the microphone, Mr.Mayor. Kindly make way, ladies and gentlemen.”
It could no longer be put off:
“Thank you”, replied Peppone, “we can speak more better from ‘ere.”
The reactionaries were bursting with joy: “more better”, “’ere”; it promised to become even better than they had expected.
It was a cold November morning with a thin mist, which however went right into your lungs like molten ice; Don Camillo pulled his cloak right up to his eyes, and sank down into its black folds.
“We can speak much better from here”, whispered Don Camillo’s cloak.
“We can speak much better from here”, repeated Peppone.
“For here is where we have chosen to stand”, suggested the cloak.
“For here is where we have chosen to stand”, repeated Peppone.
“To feel once more as we did then, when we were boys as these hundreds of boys around us”, suggested Don Camillo’s cloak.
“To feel once more as we did then, when we were boys as these hundreds of boys around us”, repeated Peppone punctually.
“In this very same courtyard, bearing witness to this gentle ritual of the tree-planting; and the sky and the land were as they are now, but there was an enchantment in the air.”
Peppone was remarkable: he managed the whole tirade word for word, and the cloak went on suggesting:
“And our old schoolmistress was with us…”
Peppone hesitated for a second, then took off his hat and said, with a different intonation:
“And our old schoolmistress was with us…”
“And today, so many years after”, suggested Don Camillo’s cloak, “that wonder and that enchantment are renewed.”
But this time Peppone did not follow the lead. Instead, he said:
“…Our old schoolmistress, that morning so long ago. Old Mrs.Giuseppina, whom none of us can remember being young, and maybe she never was. Old Mrs.Giuseppina, who is dead, but lives on because she could not die, and I can feel her presence, here and now, down there behind those schoolmistresses and their students, class after class.
“Mrs.Giuseppina is present, with her old black dress she never changed, with her old little hat on her white head. As tough as ever; every now and then, her hard old knuckles flash out to drum some sense into some close-shaven head.”
Nobody laughed. Peppone went on:
“Yes, she is here with us, and, like all schoolmistresses, she has her students with her. They are all there. Not one is absent: Diego Perini, crushed to death by a cart at age eight; Angiolino Tedai, dead of typhus at six, Tonino Delbosco, fallen at the front at twenty-two, Mario Clementi, Giorgino Scamocci, Dante Fretti, Girolamo Anselmi, Giuseppe Rolli, Alvaro Facini. They are all here, not one of them is absent, and they all stand around Mrs.Giuseppina, And even those who left us at forty-two or forty-five still wear their children’s faces. They are now as they were then; Mrs.Giuseppina has taken them back, and, after teaching them grammar and maths, she is now teaching them eternal life.
“To me, this is the meaning of this festival. And the little trees you children will be planting today into the earth are like the bonds between death and life; between life that stands above and death that lies beneath. The life and the future of the tree are above the earth; but its roots reach deep below. And what that means is that the future is fed by the past. Woe to those who do not preserve the memory of the past: they are people who sow their seeds, not in the fertile earth, but in concrete.”
Peppone dried some more sweat, and then went on in a quiet tone:
“Children, I am telling you, you young trees feeding with new green shoots the forest of life, I am telling you, not as the mayor I am now, but as the schoolboy I was then: I know that my old schoolmistress is here with all her students; I am as confident of her presence as of my own, and I can tell you that if I turned my head a certain way, I would catch her eye. But I don’t dare. I don’t dare to look at her in the eye, because I have been the worst student in the world. I don’t dare to look at my old teacher in the face. Do not, one bad day in the future, find yourselves feeling as I do now…”
“I will live as long as fate allows, and when I die, I too will present myself to my old schoolmistress for inspection, as my friends have. And I am afraid that she might not want me back. I am afraid that she might say, as she did once when I did something worse than usual: ‘Out of here, Barabbas!’.”
Peppone’s speech ended almost in a whisper, his head bowed down. He kept twisting and twisting his hat in his hands. For a few seconds the people kept a stunned silence; then a tremendous outburst of applause broke.
Peppone could not bear to stay. He slipped away between the crowd and the wall; out of the gate, the mist swallowed him.
As soon as he found a dirt path, he left the road, thinking nothing of his new shoes and good Mayor dress clothes.
He walked slowly, hanging his head, to reach the little towpath and reach his home by walking around the village.
He felt Don Camillo coming up behind him. He took his side, but kept silent.
Don Camillo said nothing either.
They reached the towpath, and they seemed to be even more lost, for the embankment was drowned in fog, and nothing could be seen except the grey ribbon of the road, as though it were floating in mid-air.
They walked slowly, with their heads down, in a great silence; then Don Camillo heard a soft voice behind him:
“Camillo, I must have told you a thousand times not to suggest answers. You’re a donkey. You’re a donkey, even if your fool of a father wants to train you for the priesthood. A priest, indeed! You’d be better as a day labourer.”
Don Camillo went on walking and did not answer, for, if he had turned to answer, Peppone would have thought he was crazy.
Then the voice turned to Peppone:
“Barabbas! Barabbas! See what’s come of you? Head of the village rabble. Head of the enemies of God, of the anarchists…”
“I, I-“ stuttered Peppone. But the voice went on relentlessly.
“Silence! And mind you behave, if you don’t want me to throw you out as I did that time, when you get back to my classroom. As for your lesson today… Well, I think I’ll give you a pass mark.”
“That’s not fair!” whispered Peppone.
“And a minus for that! One more protest, and I’ll fail you. As for that other donkey, who suggested, and suggested wrong, he’s failed good and hard.”
The voice fell silent, and the two men went on walking in the fog.
Then, suddenly, they stopped, looked at each other, and, as though agreed, they both turned to look.
How could it be otherwise? Mrs.Giuseppina was at the end of the towpath, standing still on the embankment; and around her stood in order all her dead boys.
She raised her arm, and waved a threatening index finger in the air.
Don Camillo and Peppone turned in a flash, and started walking almost at running pace. Don Camillo kept muttering prayers as he walked, and every now and then Peppone intercalated: “Amen!”
What a country of lunatics.
MEMORIES OF AN OLD COUNTRY SCHOOLTEACHER
By Giovanni Guareschi – translated by F.P.Barbieri
“It seems”, said Smilzo, “that the Director wants to do something spectacular this year on account of the plants.”
“What plants?” asked Peppone, who was sitting at the desk in his office, signing papers.
“The school plants”, muttered Smilzo. “The planting business, I mean.”
“Those are called trees, in case you didn’t know”, snapped back Peppone. “It’s called the School Tree-Planting Day.”
“Well, boss, whatever it’s called, the thing is that tomorrow morning there’ll be an invasion of out-of-village nuisances, District Education Director, Prefetto, and like that.”
Peppone stopped signing.
“If the Pope himself were to come down, I wouldn’t shift”, he said harshly. “I’ve no time to waste with this rubbish.”
Smilzo shrugged: “Boss, I don’t think trees are rubbish.”
“Trees aren’t, city bigwigs are!”, decreed Peppone. “We know how to plant a tree without a city idiot to teach us. These are people who only leave their armchairs when it’s a matter of listening to schoolchildren singing or cut some blankity-blank ribbon for something someone else set up. When there’s problems to be solved, you can whistle for them. They can go hang, every last one of them!”
Smilzo tried again to make Peppone see reason.
“Boss, of course you’re right: they’re bastards every last one of them, from the Prefetto to the ushers. But you, as mayor, have a duty…”
“As mayor I have a duty to deal with the real business!” shouted Peppone, smashing his fist on the table.
Smilzo left swiftly and took care not to raise the argument again; so Peppone went to bed that night having already forgotten everything about trees, school and authorities.
Next morning Bigio and Brusco came to remind him:
“The authorities are coming. There’s lots of excitement in the village, and the road to the school is chock-a-block with people. Hurry up: you’ll lose lots of Brownie points if you’re late.”
Peppone had to get out his good Mayor suit, shave, send for the new shoes from the cobbler, and lost his temper right off. There was quite a row, oaths against every Saint under the sun, shouts fit to raise the roof, and without Bigio and Brusco’s combined efforts he would have ended up looking a fright.
When it pleased God, Peppone was able to leave the house; but the authorities had come already, and the crowd was so thick in the school’s great yard, that, in order to get in, Peppone had to forget mayoral rank and do his panzer act. The authorities were standing on a high podium decorated with red, white and green, and Peppone saw that the District Education Director had got out a thick wad of papers and was getting ready to orate. He felt desperate: if he could not reach the podium before that so-and-so opened his excuse for a mouth, that was it.
He did not manage it. The Director opened the taps straightaway, and Peppone, after his pushing and shaking had drawn many angry hushes, stood still, full of anger.
The Director spoke beautifully. He was one of those tremendous speakers who can draw out half a million words without actually saying anything. Crowds love them: they listen to them as though they were singers, and hardly trouble to follow the sense of what they are saying.
Peppone was listening with a gaping mouth, when a voice behind him whispered:
“Terrific. So our First Citizen has come in last.”
Peppone did not bother to turn.
“Second to last, if anything”, he muttered softly. “Someone seems to have come in even later.”
“I was here before anyone else”, explained Don Camillo. “I stayed down here because I had no intention of being found by the authorities in the company of certain individuals. Anyway, remember that you have made the village look ridiculous. The highest district authorities honour our village with a visit, and no Mayor or vice-Mayor to receive them!”
Peppone took his hat off and dried his sweat.
“Mind your own business!” he said, “I can mind my own.”
“As a member of the village, it is my business”, answered Don Camillo.
“Priests have no country!” retorted Peppone.
Don Camillo was right behind Peppone, and his first instinct was to drive his boot into the mayor’s behind. But he gave up the idea, not only for obvious reasons, but also because of lack of space to swing. Pressed by the crowd on both sides, he had Peppone in front and the big iron school gate at his back.
Meanwhile, the Director was still speaking; but he had reached the home stretch, and when he got to the very last sheet, he turned his eyes in Don Camillo’s direction, and added a rider to his speech:
“And now I wish to thank the authorities in the name of the teaching body. The mayor will thank them, as he best knows how, for the citizen body.”
He pointed at Peppone with an amiable gesture, and Peppone immediately felt a billion eyes on him. Then he heard the Director’s final outburst, the applause that greeted it, and – silence.
Nobody was making a sound; everyone expected the mayor to speak.
Everybody was waiting; and, except for the members of his Party, everyone was hoping to hear Peppone start with his usual ungrammatical gabble, that would be good for two or three months’ laughs among friends or at the family table.
Peppone was sweating and desperately nervous, but he could not open his mouth. “Please”, said the Director from the podium with a smile, “do step up to the microphone, Mr.Mayor. Kindly make way, ladies and gentlemen.”
It could no longer be put off:
“Thank you”, replied Peppone, “we can speak more better from ‘ere.”
The reactionaries were bursting with joy: “more better”, “’ere”; it promised to become even better than they had expected.
It was a cold November morning with a thin mist, which however went right into your lungs like molten ice; Don Camillo pulled his cloak right up to his eyes, and sank down into its black folds.
“We can speak much better from here”, whispered Don Camillo’s cloak.
“We can speak much better from here”, repeated Peppone.
“For here is where we have chosen to stand”, suggested the cloak.
“For here is where we have chosen to stand”, repeated Peppone.
“To feel once more as we did then, when we were boys as these hundreds of boys around us”, suggested Don Camillo’s cloak.
“To feel once more as we did then, when we were boys as these hundreds of boys around us”, repeated Peppone punctually.
“In this very same courtyard, bearing witness to this gentle ritual of the tree-planting; and the sky and the land were as they are now, but there was an enchantment in the air.”
Peppone was remarkable: he managed the whole tirade word for word, and the cloak went on suggesting:
“And our old schoolmistress was with us…”
Peppone hesitated for a second, then took off his hat and said, with a different intonation:
“And our old schoolmistress was with us…”
“And today, so many years after”, suggested Don Camillo’s cloak, “that wonder and that enchantment are renewed.”
But this time Peppone did not follow the lead. Instead, he said:
“…Our old schoolmistress, that morning so long ago. Old Mrs.Giuseppina, whom none of us can remember being young, and maybe she never was. Old Mrs.Giuseppina, who is dead, but lives on because she could not die, and I can feel her presence, here and now, down there behind those schoolmistresses and their students, class after class.
“Mrs.Giuseppina is present, with her old black dress she never changed, with her old little hat on her white head. As tough as ever; every now and then, her hard old knuckles flash out to drum some sense into some close-shaven head.”
Nobody laughed. Peppone went on:
“Yes, she is here with us, and, like all schoolmistresses, she has her students with her. They are all there. Not one is absent: Diego Perini, crushed to death by a cart at age eight; Angiolino Tedai, dead of typhus at six, Tonino Delbosco, fallen at the front at twenty-two, Mario Clementi, Giorgino Scamocci, Dante Fretti, Girolamo Anselmi, Giuseppe Rolli, Alvaro Facini. They are all here, not one of them is absent, and they all stand around Mrs.Giuseppina, And even those who left us at forty-two or forty-five still wear their children’s faces. They are now as they were then; Mrs.Giuseppina has taken them back, and, after teaching them grammar and maths, she is now teaching them eternal life.
“To me, this is the meaning of this festival. And the little trees you children will be planting today into the earth are like the bonds between death and life; between life that stands above and death that lies beneath. The life and the future of the tree are above the earth; but its roots reach deep below. And what that means is that the future is fed by the past. Woe to those who do not preserve the memory of the past: they are people who sow their seeds, not in the fertile earth, but in concrete.”
Peppone dried some more sweat, and then went on in a quiet tone:
“Children, I am telling you, you young trees feeding with new green shoots the forest of life, I am telling you, not as the mayor I am now, but as the schoolboy I was then: I know that my old schoolmistress is here with all her students; I am as confident of her presence as of my own, and I can tell you that if I turned my head a certain way, I would catch her eye. But I don’t dare. I don’t dare to look at her in the eye, because I have been the worst student in the world. I don’t dare to look at my old teacher in the face. Do not, one bad day in the future, find yourselves feeling as I do now…”
“I will live as long as fate allows, and when I die, I too will present myself to my old schoolmistress for inspection, as my friends have. And I am afraid that she might not want me back. I am afraid that she might say, as she did once when I did something worse than usual: ‘Out of here, Barabbas!’.”
Peppone’s speech ended almost in a whisper, his head bowed down. He kept twisting and twisting his hat in his hands. For a few seconds the people kept a stunned silence; then a tremendous outburst of applause broke.
Peppone could not bear to stay. He slipped away between the crowd and the wall; out of the gate, the mist swallowed him.
As soon as he found a dirt path, he left the road, thinking nothing of his new shoes and good Mayor dress clothes.
He walked slowly, hanging his head, to reach the little towpath and reach his home by walking around the village.
He felt Don Camillo coming up behind him. He took his side, but kept silent.
Don Camillo said nothing either.
They reached the towpath, and they seemed to be even more lost, for the embankment was drowned in fog, and nothing could be seen except the grey ribbon of the road, as though it were floating in mid-air.
They walked slowly, with their heads down, in a great silence; then Don Camillo heard a soft voice behind him:
“Camillo, I must have told you a thousand times not to suggest answers. You’re a donkey. You’re a donkey, even if your fool of a father wants to train you for the priesthood. A priest, indeed! You’d be better as a day labourer.”
Don Camillo went on walking and did not answer, for, if he had turned to answer, Peppone would have thought he was crazy.
Then the voice turned to Peppone:
“Barabbas! Barabbas! See what’s come of you? Head of the village rabble. Head of the enemies of God, of the anarchists…”
“I, I-“ stuttered Peppone. But the voice went on relentlessly.
“Silence! And mind you behave, if you don’t want me to throw you out as I did that time, when you get back to my classroom. As for your lesson today… Well, I think I’ll give you a pass mark.”
“That’s not fair!” whispered Peppone.
“And a minus for that! One more protest, and I’ll fail you. As for that other donkey, who suggested, and suggested wrong, he’s failed good and hard.”
The voice fell silent, and the two men went on walking in the fog.
Then, suddenly, they stopped, looked at each other, and, as though agreed, they both turned to look.
How could it be otherwise? Mrs.Giuseppina was at the end of the towpath, standing still on the embankment; and around her stood in order all her dead boys.
She raised her arm, and waved a threatening index finger in the air.
Don Camillo and Peppone turned in a flash, and started walking almost at running pace. Don Camillo kept muttering prayers as he walked, and every now and then Peppone intercalated: “Amen!”
What a country of lunatics.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-09-11 04:00 am (UTC)We all have ghosts from the past, don't we...that was the part that moved me the most: Mrs. Guiseppina and her dead boys, standing in this unreal landscape of fog.
Thanks. :)
no subject
Date: 2004-09-11 11:40 am (UTC)Thank you for posting it. There’s something wonderful about the relationship between Don Camillo and Peppone, the way that - when it comes down to it - their shared experiences and allegiance to the village run deeper than their public roles and rivalry. It’s lovely to get a glimpse of their schooldays – how apt that Mrs. Giuseppina appears to have had a similar attitude toward them both.
Oh, and I’m sorry I didn’t reply to your e-mail, a few months back. I have a bad habit of wanting to take time to sit down and reply ‘properly’, which always gives RL an excuse to get in the way. :(
no subject
Date: 2004-09-11 12:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-09-15 01:16 pm (UTC)There were a few things that came through in your translation - like the significance of Peppone's speech patterns - that I hadn't picked up before. Though perhaps that was more to do with me than the translation I read before, as I read the DC stories at a time when I was completely incapable of understanding subtleties in text...
no subject
Date: 2004-09-15 01:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-29 07:09 am (UTC)ETA: what's interesting in reading your translation is that you translate Peppone's grammatical lapses (or their equivalents, perhaps); the English Peppone speaks in the translations I have feels fairly robust and working class, but is always correct - so that when other characters comment on his grammar and education, it seems a little strange. The only exception I can recall to this is his spelling, which is another matter. Or is it just that there are not many stories in which Peppone's grammar does lapse?
no subject
Date: 2009-11-29 07:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-30 12:30 am (UTC)It's odd, because the (English speaking) schools I went to never really taught us grammatical rules as such - and let's face it, we have more exceptions than rules anyway - you just ended up learning what 'sounds right'. Though this probably explains a lot about all those grocers' apostrophes and people using 'less' when they mean 'few'.
So do they have you chanting verb endings in primary school, or is that reserved for foreign language students?
no subject
Date: 2009-11-30 12:35 am (UTC)