Day 4

Manzoni is very elliptical when it comes to sexual matters. His reluctance to describe Don Rodrigo’s harassment of Lucia corresponds to her own decision not to tell anyone, except for her confessor. We learn about her through her thoughts, her inner life, rather than anything she says aloud. Padre Cristoforo’s advice to her? “He told me to get married as quickly as we could, and in the meantime to stay home and pray to God.” You could say it was another era, but it still sounds kind of… cringe.

Professor Argle-Bargle. In Italian, Azzecca-Garbugli, an oxymoron meaning to get something right (azzeccare) and to muddle something (ingarbugliare). Translating nicknames is tricky but sometimes, as in this case, unavoidable. I found a solution entirely by accident, and from an unlikely source. In the late Justice Scalia’s dissent from the Supreme Court majority’s ruling outlawing the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and thus paving the way for same-sex marriage, he dismissed his colleague’s arguments as “legalistic argle-bargle.” There I had it: a compound word beginning with an “A” sounding vaguely foreign and meaning nonsense. Turns out that Scalia’s father was a professor and translator of Italian, although I do wish the son had used his considerable linguistic acumen for less hateful ends.

We see the justice system turned upside down in the figure of these “poor animals.” This image has entered into Italian speech as “non fare come icapponi di Renzo,” don’t act like Renzo’s capons. In other words, don’t go getting mixed up in a desperate situation. It’s useless.

I’ll leave it to the reader to imagine what the journey must have been like for those poor animals, tied together and carried upside down by their claws, by a man who, in the grips of so many passions, had a gesture to accompany each thought agitating his mind… Through it all, they kept pecking at one another, as is too often the case with fellows in misfortune.

This comic episode, pivoting on the assumption that Renzo needs protection from the law rather than through it, is followed by another one, when Fra Galdino stops by the cottage of Agnese and Lucia to beg for chestnuts. In my mind he’s an Irish character, a born story-teller, who can’t bring himself to simply ask for chestnuts without offering a little entertainment as payment. And then we find out that Lucia has come up with her own plan to escape the predations of Don Rodrigo.