Page:The International - Volume 1.djvu/157

 

PHENICIA'S SIN.

 

FROM THE BOHEMIAN OF JULIUS ZEYER.^[1]

 

OT even the children laughed any longer at poor Carmenio on account of his hunch-back and thin, weak legs, that could scarcely support his heavy body. Every one had become accustomed to him as he stood in the dim court of the palace of Corvejo, under the high Gothic window, beating into the kettles upon which he worked from morning till night. In some way he had become a part of that ancient, dilapidated palace that stood there like a Norman story within the Greek, Roman, Carthaginian,—and heaven knows what other sort of town, of Taormin. He seemed to be the re-incarnation of the Gothic monsters that in olden times had adorned the portals, but now were crumbling into dust.

"The monster!" old Nunziata would sometimes call him, as she sat spinning all day long beneath the shadow of a fig tree in the neighboring garden, having wide open her door, the threshold of which—made of an old relief of Roman times, but now worn smooth—was the favorite resort of all the gossips of the town, who could not pass the house without stopping to have a chat with the almost century-old Nunziata.

"The monster!" she would say; not in scorn or evil intent, but rather in wonder and pity. "To think of Phenicia being his own sister! Phenicia, with eyes as bright as the gold in the robe of the Madonna, and as beautiful as one of the pearls in her diadem, and straight as the candles burning upon her altar! Whenever I think of her, I pity her as I do the souls in purgatory."

She pitied poor Carmenio too,—he seemed so forsaken and lonesome in the dark court of the palace of Corvejo. But Carmenio thought: "There is light enough here for me to see clearly to work on my anvil, and my blows ring out like a bell, and scare away the devil whenever he comes to whisper in my ear how we have been wronged. And when the worst comes, when I'm tired and hungry, overcome with the burning heat of the sun, or the bitter cold winds of the winter, I always find some comfort by raising my eyes and looking at the sculptures upon the stairs and balustrade."

The reliefs represented Eve in Paradise, her temptation and fall, and the subsequent punishment. "Sorrow and labor is our lot," he murmured, glancing at old Nunziata sitting beneath the fig tree spinning. Like him, she came from Mola, that white nest perched high above Taormin, on a rock near the clouds, and looking down on the town below, just as Taormin itself, from its airy height, overlooks Giardini, bathing itself white in the blue sea, and concealed among gardens, as if crouching there to hide from the Olympic majesty of towering Ætna.

Carmenio remembered the old days, when as a child he would stand on the crooked, stony road outside the gates of the town and gaze down on Taormin. He remembered the weird stories about the desolate castle beyond the gates, where the Saracens had once dwelt,—people that believed neither in Christ nor in the Madonna. He also had a dim recollection about some gods and goddesses in those places, but he had never been to Taormin until his sister Phenicia married and moved there.

 

1. Englished by Frances Gregor.Published in 1892 by Bursick & Kohout, Prague, in a collection of stories by the same author, entitled "Stratonika and other Tales."