Sicilian Stories by Giovanni Verga

Author:Giovanni Verga
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dover Publications

desolate. “For us who are born to live below ground,” Nasty Redhead would reflect, “there ought to be darkness always and everywhere.” The little-owl hooted on the lava, roaming here and there, and he reflected: “Even the owl senses the dead men who are below ground here, and it’s in despair because it can’t go and find them.”

Frog was afraid of owls and bats, but Red used to bawl him out, because people who are compelled to be alone shouldn’t be afraid of anything; not even the gray donkey was afraid of the dogs that were eating it up, now that its flesh no longer felt the pain of being devoured.

“You were accustomed to working on roofs like a cat,” he’d say to him, “and then it was a completely different matter. But now that it’s your fate to live underground like a rat, you no longer need to be afraid of rats, or of bats, which are just old rats with wings, and rats like to keep company with the dead.”

For his part, Frog derived great pleasure from explaining to him what the stars were doing up in the sky; he’d tell him that Heaven was up there, where dead people went who were good and never grieved their parents. “Who told you so?” Nasty Redhead would ask, and Frog would reply that his mother had told him that.

Then Nasty Redhead would scratch his head and, with a smile, would repeat a saying typical of a spiteful, know-it-all brat: “Your mother tells you that because, instead of pants, you should be wearing skirts.”

And, after thinking it over a little:

“My father was good and never did harm to anyone, so much so that they called him Dumb Animal. But he’s down there, and they even found his tools and shoes, and these trousers that I’m wearing right now.”

Not long afterward, Frog, who had been in a decline for some time, became so ill that every evening he had to be carried out of the pit on the donkey’s back, sprawling among the big baskets of sand and shaking with fever like a wet chick. One workman said that that boy “would never stick it out” at that job; to work in a mine and not lose your life there, you’ve got to be born to it. At such times Nasty Redhead felt proud of being born to it and of remaining so healthy and vigorous in that bad air and with all those privations. He’d carry Frog on his back, encouraging him in his own way, by yelling at him and hitting him. But one time, when he hit him on the back, Frog spat blood; Nasty Redhead was frightened and desperately examined his nose and mouth to see what he had done to him; he swore that he couldn’t have caused such a serious injury, the way he had struck him; to prove it to him, he gave himself heavy blows on the chest and the back with a stone.

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