The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni: Day 43
Chapter 33 (to end)
The return to Pescarenico.
Poor Tonio, “Sitting listlessly on the ground, leaning against a jasmine bush.”
And all he can say is,
“When your time is up, it’s up.” (A chi la tocca, la tocca).
And Don Abbondio? As disgruntled as ever, but after his initial scolding of Renzo (“What are you doing here? Go back!”), we can see that he is buried in grief:
“With his head lowered, he kept exclaiming, ‘Poor boy!’ ‘Poor girl!’ ‘Poor things!’”
Renzo’s garden, one of the great tableaus of the novel. In this garden, Renzo, and we the readers, feel the full brunt of the plague’s devastation. The exuberance of the vegetation—all of it described with its proper botanical denomination—“untended by human hands.”
“Here and there fresh twigs or shoots sprouted from mulberry, fig, peach, cherry, and plum trees. But even they were choked and crowded out by a dense variety of new growth that had germinated and flourished, untended by human hands. There was a riot of nettles, ferns, ryegrass, scutch, goosefoot, wild oat, green amaranth, chicory, sorrel, cockspur, and the like, otherwise known as weeds by farmers throughout the world. There was a tangle of stalks competing to climb higher or spread wider than each other, creeping along the ground in every direction, through a jumble of leaves, flowers, and fruits of a hundred different colors, shapes, and sizes. Ears of wheat and corn were topped by tufts and clusters of white, red, yellow, and blue flowers.”
Join us on April 10 for a virtual discussion of The Betrothed with Michael F. Moore.
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"He put a kettle of water on the fire and started to make polenta, handing the wooden spoon over to Renzo, so he could stir"
There's so much tenderness to this scene with the young men cooking together and the curtesy they show each other. Then there's the comment on what they'd both learned about kindness. It's a simple thought worthy of contemplation that could so easily have been prosaic. Manzoni deftly hands the baton to the author of the manuscript for this moment, as if holding it slightly further away from us, so we might see it more clearly: "Because both of them, according to the manuscript, had learned that kindness is a balm for the soul, both in the giving and the receiving".
Oh, Perpetua!
The lack of any preparation for her death, or any commentary about it, makes it hit very hard.