Beati Paoli

by Luigi Natoli

part two, chapter 4

Matteo Lo Vecchio returned on the same night to the Duke of Motta, who had ordered that, at any time, the birro be introduced. Those were times when the government had a lot to do because of the interdict. Vittorio Amedeo had appointed a junta of government that had put itself to work joyfully and violently, to prevent the clergy from obeying the pope rather than the king; and persecution had begun against priests and friars who refused to perform religious duties. It could not therefore seem strange that the Duke, the consultant of that junta, received a birro of the standing of Matteo Lo Vecchio, the most active, daring and violent of the birri of the capital.

Matteo Lo Vecchio came to tell the Duke of the arrests operated that evening by the squadrons of guards and birri sent by him: the sacristan was inside, Zi' Rosario was inside: only Don Girolamo Admirata had escaped; certainly someone had warned him.

The duke seemed displeased, but the birro, smiling finely, said to him:

"Your Excellency, let no thought be given to it; he will fall for it: I have my plan. In the meantime, we have better than him... A better fish, Your Excellency..."

"Andrea?"

"That one will be dead. It's not about him, it's about a woman."

"A woman?"

"What's his name... Peppa."

"Peppa la Sarda?" exclaimed Don Raimondo pale from the emotion and not knowing how to dominate.

"Surely..."

"Where is it?"

"Arrested, for bacco!..."

"Ah!... Where did you find her? How?"

"The rascal was hidden in a room behind Zi' Rosario's shop. After this gallows piece was stopped, I wanted to go rummaging through the shop, in doubt of finding anything there; and I found you more than I hoped. When I came, the witch tried to open the door to escape. Your Excellency can imagine the astonishment, indeed the fear, in seeing me open the door and enter. She tried to lock herself in the little room where she ran away, but I called her, "Peppa, it's useless for you to try to escape, I know you..." I said this to scare her: I really didn't know who she was: but it didn't matter. To hear her name, in that way, her knees bent, and she fell begging for mercy. I arrested her, laid down her mannequins and pulled her behind me. She shouted, groaned, recommended herself, and to avoid any trouble, I was forced to bring a carrier, to take her to Vicaria. I was sure this news would bring pleasure to your Excellency..."

"In fact, if that woman is truly Peppa the Sarda, you have rendered a great service to the kingdom. It is an unholy one, who has committed many horrible crimes, and who to this day has escaped the search for justice."

The birro smiled under the nose, showing to take in good league the words of Don Raimondo, who, after the first concussion, had resumed his impenetrable and cold mask.

"Now that we have caught it," said Matteo Lo Vecchio, "it will certainly not escape."

The duke dismissed Matteo Lo Vecchio; he needed to stay alone to coordinate all the events that had taken place in that short period of months, and of which he seemed to have broken ranks. Broken? Giuseppico was dead, and there was no doubt. Peppa la Sarda was in jail, and she wouldn't come out alive. Andrea was missing. Those three were, due to the effects of their testimonies, the most terrible characters, but not the most fearsome. Some others remained behind them: Don Girolamo Admired, perhaps; but what reason would the rational have for persecuting him? And for what occult design did he try to use those three witnesses? And did Don Girolamo act on his own initiative, or in turn was the instrument of that mysterious society, of which he finally had some followers in his hands?

He recognized that, even after getting rid of those very important witnesses, he still remained in the dark, rather it seemed to him that the darkness increased perhaps he could snatch from the two sectarians arrested a few words, perhaps through them he could trace back to the source of that deaf and relentless war. Peppa la Sarda had to know something too... But a new terror froze his blood.

What if the witch, in the throes of torture, had made revelations against him? Wasn't Peppa's imprisonment and trial a terrible threat suspended on her boss? And was it not necessary, indispensable, at least, to prevent the confessions of Peppa la Sarda from being collected by others?

Among these thoughts Don Raimondo spent the night, and the joy of knowing the death or capture of those dangerous people, was poisoned by fear. He didn't think it was time for daylight; as soon as the sun rose, he went to the studio to execute his plan: but in throwing his gaze on the table, he paled: he saw a letter, from the shape he recognized the origin.

He opened it with a feverish and convulsive hand, and read: "You have just pushed off a nail; but there are others left, and the heads are firm. Remember!"

How and from where did that letter enter her study? So his house was always open to snares, no matter how much he surrounded himself with precautions and renewed servitude as soon as he was suspicious? Now more than ever it was persuaded that the same Don Girolamo Ammirata, who seemed to be the organizer of that war, was but one armed arm, but that the mind directive was another. Who could be this occult enemy who had set the Beati Paoli against him?

With these gloomy thoughts he was led to prisons. At that time, as there were churches and convents, there were also prisons: there were those of the Senate, near Santa Caterina, commonly called "Carbonera"; there were those of the Sant'Offizio and those of the archbishopric; there were those of Castellamare for nobles and for civilians and finally those of the Vicaria, the largest and most populated. These della Vicaria were located in Cassaro, near Piazza Marina, in a building that the Vicerè Marcantonio Colonna had begun to build as a foundation for customs and its successors transformed it into a palace of justice, until the second Ferdinando of Bourbon, in 1840, destined it to welcome the tax offices and baptized it Palazzo delle Finanze. We entered there by a strong iron gate, flanked by two fountains singing at night the fresh poem of the water before that sad place that resonated with moaning, screaming and blasphemy; at one corner, outside, stood the sedan pole: inside, in the courtyard, stood the Greek fork, with the pulley and the string hanging from the horizontal beam, the stairs leaning on the two vertical arms. There lived the executioner; and the sight of the instruments of justice and of the executioner, he offered himself continually to the eyes of those who entered into the sad asylum, with the threat on the head to end up on those three infamous woods and at the hand of that man dressed in yellow and red.

Arrested for debts, they gathered in the same halls or caves with forgers, thieves, murderers; and all lived in the same filth, in the same filth; naked, hungry, idle. As soon as men were divided by women, not so that sometimes they did not cross their borders. The most serious offenders, or those on whom the guardian's vengeance was exercised, were segregated in fetish cells, grumpy, or in the horrible secrets; the most lived in common inventing games, to pass the time, often sneaking, often still fighting, and the weapons were not lacking, and someone did not wait for death at the hands of the executioner, because he found it in the knife of a companion of misfortune.

Peppa the Sarda had been transported in a segetta in the Vicaria and his shouts had made the prisoners rush to the windows and the inner gates, who finding funny the show of the wretch that wrinkled in the arms of the birri, not to enter, they abandoned themselves to the most frank joy, raining on the witch the major contumelies.

"In the dungeon... you have to lock it in the dungeon, this one!" said the algozino to the caretaker.

At a wooden gate Zi' Rosario and the sacristan had clinged to the entrance of the new tenant. Uncle Rosario recognized her and paled.

"She too?..." he exclaimed, "Is there a spy among us?"

Fearing that Peppa saw him, he pulled back, but overwhelmed: neither only for that suspicion of the spy, but more and more, because he feared that the woman, subjected to torture, would make some revelation. They had not yet undergone any questioning, and they did not really know what charge they were charged with; of course, they were led to suspect that someone had denounced them as Beati Paoli; but it was difficult to prove them, and they trusted in their strength, to defend themselves; but the sight of that woman dismayed them. It was necessary to be on guard, and above all to watch Peppa la Sarda: what would not have been difficult for the very conditions of the prison and the life that led the prisoners, to whom the custodians themselves provided news of what was happening in the courts and of the progress of the trials.

Although the visits of gentlemen were not uncommon - there was a purification that had, at least as a statute, the pious office to protect the prisoners - every time someone came it was a real event; for it offered a diversion to the monotonous and empty life of the inmates and made them comfortable to vent the discontent: the length of the processes, which often lay on a table for years, the lack of nourishment, the abandonment. Oh, there was no shortage of reasons to grieve and in more than lively ways!

The noise of the carriage that came loudly into the courtyard caused many prisoners to rush to the windows and gates, who saw Don Raimondo, a former magistrate and now a man of government coming down, crowded into the corridors where it was supposed that he would pass, but to everyone's disappointment, the duke headed for the women.

Uncle Rosario at that time was playing with some inmates, one of the many pastimes devised by the idle mind, that in the shortage of means most suitable for recreation and even gain, resorts to the unthinkable. The game of the prisoners, very popular at that time in the Vicaria, consisted in letting run a fly private of the wings, or some of the insects that dirt and the absolute lack of combs produced, over the post office: the ones on whose coin the fly had gone or the other disgusting insect had won. The game, entirely entrusted to the case, and therefore without deception, enticed also because it required no attention, no work of the intellect.

The news that the Duke of Motta had gone into the women's corridor, if for all he was the object of curiosity and chatter, for Zi' Rosario instead was cause of not slight apprehension. He saw on that visit a reason for which he had everything to fear.

What would Peppa the Sarda say, since there was no doubt that she was precisely the person sought by Don Raimondo?

He warned his companion of misfortune, the sacristan of St. Matthew, with one of those signs and conventional words, of which they knew the value, and left the strange play, to try to ascertain what was happening in the corridor of women.

Don Raimondo just entered, as a pious visitor, had seen himself assaulted by a crowd of evildoers, most women of evil, arrested or in violation of the viceroyal bans, or of night in the alleys and in the Cassaro himself, which they transformed into the theater of their obscene hunts, or for common crimes: there were young and perhaps even beautiful still, of that mountain beauty, so strong and healthy when it is not corrupted, but grazed, filthy, with the clothes torn, the hair ruffled, transfigured by fasting, by the idleness, by the fevers, by the furry anger within the soul; all begged with their hands joined shouting all together, pushing each other with elbow strokes, to pass before calling the duke with the sweetest names, some for dress or for an improbable confidence in their supposed vestiges, resorted to some artifice of luxurious civetry.

The duke pretended to gather those laments, trying to remove those hands from himself, to prevent the contact of those garments; his eyes sought among many a well-known face and saw it, or rather guessed it, under the mask of sufferings and years.

Peppa the Sarda had also recognized Don Raimondo, and pale and frantic did not dare to approach: perhaps he guessed that the duke came looking for her, after having had her arrested and stood between fearful and suspicious, without talking.

"Oh, you!" apostrophe the duke pretending not to know her, and how to ask her why she didn't fight like the others.

Peppa looked at him gloomily, and murmured: "I?... I have nothing: Your Excellency knows more than I do."

He announced the last words with intention that he had Fr. Raimondo cheated.

"Poveretta!" he hastened to answer; "You will tell me the case. Who knows maybe I could help you."

He emphasized this vague promise, so as to make Peppa the Sarda understand that she would help her if she had conformed to her wishes. The witch understood and thought in her turn that perhaps the noble gentleman was afraid, afraid of her, and flashed the idea of taking advantage of it. After all, she could have ruined it with her own denunciation: it was true that that denunciation would cost her life, but to the straits, let Samson die with all the Philistines!

Soon after, Don Raimondo called Peppa la Sarda in the room where the criminal audience used to interrogate the inmates.

They were alone: their conversation was not long; in the end the duke called the caretaker, gave him a sum and, pointing to the witch, said to him: "I am interested in that woman. Here's some money. Provide her with food and separate her from all those wretches. I want her to be treated well."

The caretaker bowed, answering: "Your Excellency do not doubt."

This, which in our day, is the basis of laws and regulations strictly observed, would seem impossible, was in those times an ordinary matter; the threshold of the prisons was forbidden only to prisoners and the poor, but the lords could enter under the pretext of works of mercy and the money made the life of the prison less rigorous, sad and miserable: sometimes - when it was a matter of lords, - it also made it a pleasant holiday.

At midday Peppa la Sarda stayed in a room less horrible than the others among the envy of the compañeras and desined "like a lady"; but in the night she was taken by a violent colic, and before dawn she died, without being able to utter a word. Don Raimondo, who went to prisons, received the news from the caretaker, who seemed very sorry about that fact: "He ate too much, Your Excellency, he ate too much!..."

He was very concerned to notice the smile of satisfaction that was wandering on the Duke of Motta's lips and when he, pretending to be grieved, came out of Vicaria, the keeper, with his cap in his hand, embarrassedly asked him:

"Do I owe your Excellency the sum given to me for that woman?"

"Keep it to yourself."

"Oh, thank you, and may God bless you for the good you do!... That poor La Sarda must have been a disgrace! When she had found a great and generous heart like that of your Excellency, she died!... But let the will of God be done!..."

In the afternoon the tax attorney subjected Zi' Rosario and the sacristan to interrogation: one of the papers that formed the file of the trial, had this title:

Deposed of the inmate Peppa la Sarda, collected by his Excellency the Duke of Motta.