Calm Sea, by Grazia Deledda

Celebrating the 154th birth anniversary of Grazia Deledda, 1926 Nobel Prize for Literature

Calm Sea

Bonaccia – from the short story collection “Summer Sun”, by Grazia Deledda, 1933

Translated into English by Enzo Martinelli

©️ 2025 – Enzo Martinelli

Even gales are good for the poor. The sea, like a rabid master who forces his servant to make a good house-cleaning, throws ashore all the debris that does not please him: and this rubbish forms the wealth of the poor people on the beach. Here, for example, is Mr Milio, Mr Milio himself, the former owner of a small shipyard, walking the length of the shore, from the mouth of the river to the wharf, with a mysterious bag of his own, white as the lining of a pillow: and like a pillow, the lining swells, but with hard lumps that really look like flattened woolen balls. Each one of these black bumps has cost Mr Milio, who by now is accustomed to folds of all sorts, a back bend: indeed, the cool air of the sea, now good again, is good for the old ship-owner: his congested red face fades a little, his legs, which at first were as uncertain as those of a child beginning to feel the effects of the sun, of a child beginning to walk, grow stronger and stronger: the eyes, oh, the eyes, in the shadow of the old panama that seems to have been cut out of the rough rind of a salted codfish, rival the colour of the sea in their blue and golden sparkle.

They are friends again, the sea and Mr Milio; and he feels happy: the hangover of the night before is completely sobered up, and the man firmly promises himself not to drink any more, to return to work in earnest, and little by little to rebuild his former fortune. For now he continues to collect, among the seaweed, among the dead crabs, among the cuttlefish bones and rusty cans, only his little pieces of black wood, which are splinters of wrecked ships and boats, fossilised by salt, good for stoking the fire in the white, frozen days that inexorably advance.

Waiting for these days, even the old woman with the nose gnawed off by an ailment whose name one dare not even pronounce, yet they say she is almost a hundred years old and does not want to enter the hospice. However, they say she is almost a hundred years old and does not want to enter the old people’s home. She makes provisions for the fire, collecting brushwood from the sandy shore, but keeping a respectful distance from the handsome Luigino, formerly a decorative waiter in summer hotels, who now enjoys, he says, uprooting the wild thistles, silvery and hard as ore, from whose roots an exquisite liqueur for jams is extracted.

But the real riches, the living gifts of the sea, are taken by the sail and seine fishermen: the latter have also come from afar, with their biblical boat, red, black and blue, watched over by the Holy Virgin: and there are twelve of them, like the Apostles, all reddish, some bald, some curly, with clear, glaucous eyes, which in the long run have taken on the liquid transparency of those of certain fish. Even their skin, sour with saltiness, has the colour of mullets: and everything around them smells of fruit and sea herbs.

Or it was the scent of the rushes and seagrasses that resumed an almost spring-like possession to the very edge of the land. The dunes were already all covered with them, and certain small sandbars, covered with their carpet, looked like lounge seats. An infinity of shoots of watermelons and melons, a reminder of fresh summer gluttony, also flourished beneath the tender foam of the waves: and a radicchio bush bloomed in the middle of them, as quietly as in a meadow, its little flowers giving the illusion of violets. And how many wasps, golden and nasty like betrayed women! They stalked, and this is natural, the handsome Luigino, trying to suck at least his hoe; but what they wanted from the old woman’s earthworks, and above all from Mr Milio’s sack, was not known.

He let them be, for it is worse to drive them away; indeed he was also pleased with their buzzing, which heralded the duration of fine weather. And as long as there is sunshine on the horizon, it is as if there still exists on earth a person whose affection warms our hearts. Instead, he was alone, on earth, in an ibex, barely saved from the shipwreck of the construction site like those splinters he religiously collected. The ibex, a mat, a blanket, a stone cooker, a small bottle of oil and another always full and always empty of wine rather than water: and he thought of this home of his as a palace.

Yes, the tender autumn sun is good for the heart. And the fishermen too, in pulling the ropes of the long net that seemed to come from the other side of the sea, felt all warm with goodness, cheerfulness and appetite. It is true that in the morning they had caught and immediately sent to the market a good quintal of fish, almost all of it coarse and fine: now it was their turn, and each of them was already counting on sucking down a mackerel and a slice of skate, as well as bread dipped in brodetto. One of the eldest, the one with the silver-red curls around the nape of his neck and the trousers with a hundred and one patches of different hues, had already competed with the old woman with the gnawed nose, gathering a pile of brushwood in a hole in the sand; and on two stones he placed a vessel that could have been a frying pan or a basin, at will: he poured oil into it and set fire to it. And the great tulip of flame enveloped the receptacle, and seemed to look into it as if eager to overwhelm in its joy of life the oil that responded by frying: but the handfuls of chopped onion and then the thick blood-red preserves, which the cook poured unsparingly into the frying pan, calmed the fire’s invitation. On bended knees he supervised his work, and in the meantime sliced a large square loaf, which looked like pumice stone and instead opened softly and flaked like a book. The jack-knife, aided by a stick, was used to stir the sauce, the scent of which attracted the wasps, but they were immediately repelled by the steaming breath of the fire. Then they tried to attack a disc of cold polenta, laid like a cake on a clean paper; but the man pulled it close to the fire, and with a thread sharper than a knife began to slice it.

He noticed, however, that his companions, who had already pulled the net, as they shook it and tightened it by the flaps, forming a kind of sack at the bottom of which the fish piled up, were unusually silent and worried. They seemed to have caught something sad, even funereal: almost a drowned man. And in reality they had caught nothing: nothing in proportion to the vastness of their empty stomachs. For, dashed upon the sand, darted many crabs and a few small fishes, which had indeed the living silver on them; and, as the head of the meagre family, only two greenish platinum mackerels, which the oldest fisherman, the half-naked one, wrapped in leather like a barbarian warrior, immediately cut out with the nail of his thumb, as if in revenge for the miserable catch; while the crabs scampered about like little grey toads.

Mr. Milio, the handsome Luigi with his hair shining like a leftover of Brylcreem, and further on the old woman of the dunghill, had stopped to look at the derisory catch; and the two first ones allowed themselves to joke.

– A little fish for one does nobody any harm.

But the fisherman who had slaughtered the mackerel raised his bloody finger and said:

– If you want, there is also some for you.

The former waiter, accustomed to gentlemen’s lunches, grimaced: the old woman flinched even more, for she knew she should not accept: Mr Milio, on the other hand, accepted the invitation evangelically; for all that God sends is good. To make himself useful, he offered to fetch water from the fountain, but one of the fishermen replied:

– We like red water.

And this was enough for the cheerfulness to return to everyone, while the old man lifted, pretending to make a great effort, the light basket of fish, and another pulled up from the boat three flasks of the red water that they liked and that Mr Milio also liked.

The bread, the polenta, and the sauce were plentiful: even the wasps were tossed morsels, which lingered until sunset in the place where the fishermen’s footsteps and the scent of their brodetto and goodness remained.