Ismaele Carnesecca

Ismaele Carnesecca is a wandering Bible seller whose open Christian witness has made him a target of mockery and physical danger. He appears briefly but decisively in the story: after thanking Donna Fedele for shelter, he spends a wet night on her terrace and interrupts Lelia’s attempt to throw herself from a bridge. The episode turns a vulnerable itinerant, accustomed to being cast as a victim, into the person whose presence preserves another life.

Identity and religious conviction

Donna Fedele first calls him Carnesecca, then quickly corrects herself to Ismaele. The correction matters to him less than her concern suggests. He explains that people gave him a name of mockery because he preaches Jesus and Jesus’ best servants, and that he takes pride in the insult as a small place among the blessed. He invokes the biblical words “Beati estis cum dixerint omne malum.” His response makes endurance, rather than retaliation, the mark of his public religious identity.

His manner is physically worn: he is described as thinner and yellower than before, approaches slowly with his hat in his hand, and, when he raises his arms, the worn seams of his gray shirt show. Yet his speech is assured. He tells Donna Fedele that he neither offers her a Bible, since he is certain she already has one, nor seeks to convert her: he recognizes her as a genuinely Christian Catholic. His appeal to Christian kinship crosses confessional difference without pretending that the difference is absent. He sees no need to make her Protestant in order to acknowledge her faith.

Return to danger and Donna Fedele’s hospitality

Ismaele has come from Vicenza on foot after a seven-hour walk. He is on his way to Laghi, prepared, as he puts it, to suffer martyrdom again at Posina. Donna Fedele answers his expectation of renewed violence with a dry seasonal joke: at that time of year, the likely ordeal would be potatoes. Her humor briefly punctures his solemn language, but it does not erase the danger he anticipates.

He has returned that evening principally to thank her for previously taking him in when he was injured. The gratitude recalls an earlier act of hospitality without specifying more than the evidence supplies about how he was hurt. Donna Fedele sympathizes with his exhaustion but draws a boundary: she had sheltered him with broken bones, she says, but will not shelter him when he is setting out to have them broken again. Ismaele accepts her refusal without argument and mentions only a vague hope of spending the coming night in a hayloft at the Montanina. He does not know that Marcello has died, or who Lelia is; after hearing the news, he leaves without saying whether he has changed his plan.

The night on the terrace

The next night, Ismaele has found no place to shelter and has taken the liberty of sleeping on Donna Fedele’s terrace. That unplanned return places him near the house just as Lelia, intent on suicide, slips out into the rainy darkness. She has prepared herself to descend quietly and jump from the bridge, even considering how far she must leap to avoid striking posts in the deep drainage channel below. On reaching the veranda, she finds Ismaele’s human shape in her path, overturns chairs as she bolts past, and disappears down the garden steps.

Donna Fedele calls from her open window. Ismaele answers that a woman has run out and vanished; when she tells him to pursue the supposed sleepwalker, he runs toward the small gate. He catches Lelia on the grassy slope above it. She cries out when he seizes her and collapses as if dead. Ismaele then carries her back into the house with the help of the maid and cook. His own explanation is practical and grateful: it was fortunate that, having found nowhere to shelter, he had come to spend the night on the terrace. Without that circumstance, he says, Lelia might have been lost.

Narrative role

Ismaele’s significance rests on a sharp reversal of the danger surrounding him. At his first appearance, he speaks as someone returning to a place where he expects suffering, and Donna Fedele tries to prevent him from exposing himself to another beating. At the moment of Lelia’s crisis, however, he is not the endangered person but the alert presence between her and a lethal fall. The rescue does not arise from a planned mission: it is made possible by his exhaustion, the failure to find shelter elsewhere, and his choice to seek refuge on the terrace.

His relation with Donna Fedele is framed by reciprocal acts of care. She once gave shelter to the injured Bible seller; later, her home again becomes his refuge, and his presence protects Lelia, whom Donna Fedele loves. The novel leaves Ismaele’s wider history and subsequent fate unstated in these scenes. What it does establish is the force of an apparently incidental encounter: a man marked by religious mockery and anticipated violence becomes, through ordinary dependence on another person’s hospitality, the means by which a desperate act is interrupted.