Read more
Informationen zum Autor Giovanni Verga Klappentext The stories of Giovanni Verga (1840-1922) are wonderful evocations of ordinary Italian life, focusing in particular on his native Sicily. In an original and dynamic prose style, he portrays such eternal human themes as love, honour and adultery with rich and colourful language. The inspiration for Mascagni's opera, 'Cavalleria Rusticana' depicts a young man's triumphal return home from the army, spoilt when he learns that his beloved is engaged to another man. Verga's acute awareness of the hardships and aspirations of peasant life can be seen in stories such as 'Nedda', 'Picturesque Lives' and 'Black Bread', while others such as 'The Reverend' and 'Don Licciu Papa' show the dominance of the church and the law in the Sicilian communities he portrays so vividly. The She-Wolf She was dark-haired, tall and lean, with firm, well-rounded breasts, though she was no longer young, and she had a pale complexion, like someone forever in the grip of malaria. The pallor was relieved by a pair of huge eyes and fresh red lips that looked as though they would eat you. In the village they called her the She-Wolf because, no matter what she had, she was never satisfied. The woman crossed themselves whenever they saw her coming, lone as a stray bitch, with the restless and wary appearance of a starving wolf. She would gobble up their sons and their husbands in the twinkling of an eye with those red lips of hers, and draw them to the tail of her skirt and transfix them with those devilish eyes, as though they were standing before the altar at St Agrippina's. Luckily the She-Wolf herself never set foot inside the church, either at Easter or at Christmas or to hear Mass or to go to confession. Father Angiolino of St Mary of Jesus, a true servant of God, had lost his soul on her account.Maricchia, poor girl, a good and worthy soul, shed tears in secret because she was the She-Wolf's daughter and nobody would ever want to marry her, even though she too had a fine trousseau tucked away in a chest and a patch of decent land in the sun, like any other girl in the village. Then it happened that the She-Wolf fell in love with a handsome young fellow back from the army, when the two of them were hay-making on the notary's farm. She'd fallen for him lock, stock and barrel, her flesh burning beneath her thick cotton bodice, and, staring into his eyes, she was overcome with the kind of thirst you would experience down in the valley on a hot midsummer day. But he just kept scything calmly away, head down over the hay, saying "What's the matter, Pina?". In the vast expansive fields, where all you could hear was the chirping of the crickets as they leapt, with the sun beating straight down, the She-Wolf tied up sheaf after sheaf, bundle after bundle, showing no sign of fatigue, never looking up for an instant, never putting her lips to the flask, just so long as she could be there behind Nanni, while he scythed away, asking her every so often, "What is it you want, Pina?". One evening she told him, while the men, exhausted from their day's labours, were nodding off to sleep in the barn, and the dogs were filling the dark air of the countryside with their howling, "It's you I want! You that are beautiful as the sun, and sweet as the honey! I want you!". "It's the unmarried daughter of yours that I want," Nanni replied, laughing.The She-Wolf thrust her hands into her hair, tearing at the sides of her head without uttering a word, then strode off and stayed away from the barn. But then the olive-crushing season came round in October, she set her eyes on Nanni again because he was working next door to were she lived, and the creaking of the press kept her awake the whole night long. "Pick up that sack of olives," she said to her daughter, "and come with me."Nanni was pushing the olives under the mill wheel with his shovel, and shouting "Gee up there!" to the mule to...
