A Vendetta
Guy de Maupassant
The widow of Paolo Saverini lived alone with her son in a poor little house on the outskirts
of Bonifacio. The town, built on an outjutting part of the mountain, in places even
overhanging the sea, looks across the straits, full of sandbanks, towards the southernmost
coast of Sardinia. Beneath it, on the other side and almost surrounding it, is a cleft in the
cliff like an immense corridor which serves as a harbor, and along it the little Italian and
Sardinian fishing boats come by a circuitous route between precipitous cliffs as far as the
first houses, and every two weeks the old, wheezy steamer which makes the trip to Ajaccio.
On the white mountain the houses, massed together, makes an even whiter spot. They look
like the nests of wild birds, clinging to this peak, overlooking this terrible passage, where
vessels rarely venture. The wind, which blows uninterruptedly, has swept bare the
forbidding coast; it drives through the narrow straits and lays waste both sides. The pale
streaks of foam, clinging to the black rocks, whose countless peaks rise up out of the water,
look like bits of rag floating and drifting on the surface of the sea.
The house of widow Saverini, clinging to the very edge of the precipice, looks out, through
its three windows, over this wild and desolate picture.
She lived there alone, with her son Antonia and their dog "Semillante," a big, thin beast,
with a long rough coat, of the sheep-dog breed. The young man took her with him when out
hunting.
One night, after some kind of a quarrel, Antoine Saverini was treacherously stabbed by
Nicolas Ravolati, who escaped the same evening to Sardinia.
When the old mother received the body of her child, which the neighbors had brought back
to her, she did not cry, but she stayed there for a long time motionless, watching him. Then,
stretching her wrinkled hand over the body, she promised him a vendetta. She did not wish
anybody near her, and she shut herself up beside the body with the dog, which howled
continuously, standing at the foot of the bed, her head stretched towards her master and her
tail between her legs. She did not move any more than did the mother, who, now leaning
over the body with a blank stare, was weeping silently and watching it.
The young man, lying on his back, dressed in his jacket of coarse cloth, torn at the chest,
seemed to be asleep. But he had blood all over him; on his shirt, which had been torn off in
order to administer the first aid; on his vest, on his trousers, on his face, on his hands. Clots
of blood had hardened in his beard and in his hair.
His old mother began to talk to him. At the sound of this voice the dog quieted down.
"Never fear, my boy, my little baby, you shall be avenged. Sleep, sleep; you shall be
avenged. Do you hear? It's your mother's promise! And she always keeps her word, your
mother does, you know she does."