Giovanni Verga
Mastro-don Gesualdo

”In small towns, there are people who would travel miles to bring you bad news.”

Although everything that needed to be said has already been said.

While I was distractedly listening to SuperQuark, I heard Piero Angela assert that the percentage of children with a father different from their registered father was around ten percent (then reading here and there, since there are, of course, no precise statistics, I saw that the figure varied widely on either side of this number). Anyway, after thinking about my youthful naivety, for which I need the patience of Saint Thomas to retract a certainty of mine, and then after reviewing all the faces of fathers who are different from their presumed children I know, I came to startling discoveries, but above all, I picked up a book that everyone knows and many have read: The Master Don Gesualdo by Giovanni Verga.

The story begins with Isabella Trao in dramatic anticipation. Consequently, Master Don Gesualdo, a newly rich man, makes his entrance into the high society of the town. Indeed, the canonical and other greedy characters see the marriage between him and Bianca Trao (from the noble and very poor Trao family) as the solution to overcome Bianca's tragic pregnancy, a consequence of the relationship with her cousin and Baron Ninì Rubiera. The marriage between the two is indeed inconceivable (Ninì could never marry his cousin without a dowry). Setting aside torments and sufferings, the marriage between the parvenu and the noblewoman in decline will take place in the almost total absence of the town's nobility. Meanwhile, Don Gesualdo arranges for his servant with whom he had a relationship, Diodata, to marry his worker, Nanni the one-eyed.

After the marriage, Don Gesualdo continues to get richer by making good investments and covers the investments and waste of family members (father, brother, sister, son-in-law, legitimate and illegitimate children) until...

In short, summarizing, throughout we will witness and hear about these four births:

• Isabella Trao Motta, who is not the daughter of Master Don Gesualdo, but of Ninì Rubiera.

• Gesualdo and Nunzio, who are not the sons of Nanni the one-eyed, but are the sons of Master Don Gesualdo.

• Isabella's daughter, also the granddaughter of Master Don Gesualdo, is not the daughter of the Duke of Leyra, but of cousin Corrado La Gurna.

“...the door suddenly opened, and woman Bianca appeared, disheveled, pale as a corpse, clutching convulsively with her hands, without uttering a word, fixing her insane eyes of terror and anguish on her brother. Suddenly she collapsed to her knees, clutching the door post, stammering: ― Kill me, don Diego!... Kill me if you must!... but don't let anyone enter here!...”

The images of the book are eloquent. The way the world works, even the myth of sweet anticipation remains what it is, a myth. In this story, in this town, in this family, life, from conception to death, is a sea of dangers, an ocean of pain, to which one clings, despite everything, because in any case, one must go on.

From birth, as above, to death.

Again. Bianca Trao, brought to the brink of death by consumption, finds herself jealous of her husband, whom she had not loved, and clings to life as soon as she perceives that cousin Zacco, cared for the house with his daughters, intending to replace one of them with her as soon as she was dead.

All of this takes place in the historical context of Sicily in the first half of the nineteenth century, amidst epidemics of cholera and consumption (for which numerous articles of acute relevance could be written), revolutions that turned into carnivals, secret societies, and egalitarian movements.

However, the story also has a timeless dimension, as it mostly shows straightforwardly the dynamics of social relations. The struggle for survival lies behind the obsession for Gesualdo's stuff, behind ostentatious family obligations, behind social contracts, behind youthful amorous whims, behind urban snobbery. In this universe, it becomes particularly ruthless, driving everything except thoughts, shaping a varied, cynical humanity, in which everyone tries to grab the biggest share of Stuff.

Though Verga's pen gives way to some light sentimentalism, parodic (the dreamt dreams of little Isabella) and not (in the face of Bianca and Gesualdo's deaths), Verga predominantly uses a skilled polyphony to lay bare human nature in society. You become immersed in a whirlwind where, within a few phrases, you can hear every character weaving their web, using words to convey a dual message: the literal one and the subliminal one; even those who, like the Traos, operate according to a dignity of caste, or those like Isabella and Corrado, live according to idealisms then in vogue, do not do so out of a sincere feeling of the soul, but because that is the only way they have been taught to survive.