The Family by Tonino Benacquista Emily Read

Author:Tonino Benacquista, Emily Read [Benacquista, Tonino]
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908524225
Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press

6

None of the four Blakes had ever tried to be loved – they had never sought any favours. And yet they had all in different ways found themselves becoming increasingly popular in larger and larger, sometimes overlapping, circles. If you crossed paths with one of them, you would soon hear about another, and then a third, through coincidental connections. They were talked about at school, in the market, so much so that the rumour had now spread throughout the town that this was a quite exceptional family.

Maggie’s voluntary work for various charitable organizations had become well known. People praised her courage as well as her discretion, and they admired her energy and commitment. She was active in the preparations for the town fair and the school concert; she helped with the information campaign about the sorting of domestic rubbish; she attended residents’ meetings; she spent two afternoons a week cataloguing at the local library; and when there was a one- or two-hour gap in her timetable, she laid the foundations for her own charitable enterprise, which she would soon be putting before the town council. The more demands that were made on her, the more she rose to the occasion, and if, from time to time, she weakened, and began to find that the whole idea of charity was losing its charm, she would be needled back into action by the cruel memory of the past; remorse would drive her on, like a sharp pike in the back of a condemned man. Anyway, what mattered was not the reasons for her altruistic behaviour, but its results – after all, she had no interest in what drove the other volunteers to help total strangers. At the very start of the exercise, she had been curious about their motives, and had identified several types. There were the sufferers, who devoted themselves to others in order to escape from themselves. Then there were the unhappy ones, who gave because they had never received, and the opposite – the privileged and the idle, who wanted to find a way to pass the time. There were believers, who, under a halo of self-sacrifice, worked for the poor with half an eye on their own holy reflection; these people had a special expression as they worked, a kind but controlled smile, arms wide open like vales of tears, eyes moistened by all the misery they had witnessed. You could also find the progressive thinker, looking to others to salve his conscience; the plain fact of helping the disinherited brought him an extraordinary sense of intellectual well-being. Others expected to expiate their sins by one single action. Still others went against their own natures and stopped justifying their cynicism about the decadence of the world. And there were also those who, without realizing it, were finally growing up.

Nowadays, Maggie no longer cared which of them had a real empathy for the unhappiness of others, and which felt true indignation at the sight of injustice, or whose heart beat with solidarity with his fellow man, or bled for the sins of the world.

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