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There is no cheese like ours.

You are not Sicilian, are you?

Why not?

A Sicilian

never eats in the morning. You are American,

aren't you?

Yes. I am American.

For fifteen years.

I have cousins in America.

An uncle and cousins.

And in what place? In New York or in Argentina?

I don't know. In America.

From what place are you?

I? I was born in Syracuse.

No. From what place are you in America?

From... from New York.

How goes it in New York? Is it going well?

One doesn't get rich there.

What does that matter? It can go well without getting rich.

Better, in fact.

Who knows! There's also

unemployment there.

And what does unemployment matter?

It is not always the unemployment

that does the damage.

That's not it. I am not unemployed. None of us is.

We work. In the gardens.

Did you return for unemployment?

No. I returned for a few days.

Right. And you eat in the morning.

Does everyone

in America

eat in the morning?

I think so.

And at midday does everyone eat?

In one way or another...

And in the evening?

Well or badly.

Bread? Bread and cheese? Bread and vegetables? Bread and meat?

Yes, bread and other things.

They are eaten in salad.

In America?

No, here by us.

Here by us? In salad with oil?

Yes, with oil. And a little garlic, and salt.

And with bread?

Surely, with bread.

I always ate that as a boy.

Ah, you ate that?

It went well for you then, too?

So-so.

You never ate oranges in salad, did you?

Yes, sometimes. But there is not always oil.

It is not always a good year.

The oil can cost a lot.

And there is not always bread.

If one doesn't sell the oranges there is no bread.

But why?

Is it so difficult to sell the oranges?

They won't sell. No one wants them.

Abroad they don't want them.

And the boss pays us this way, he gives us the oranges.

And we don't know what to do. No one wants them.

We come to Messina on foot and no one wants them.

We go to see if they want them in Reggio, in Villa San Giovanni,

and they don't want them. No one wants them.

We go back and forth, we pay the way,

we don't eat bread,

no one wants them.

As if they were poison. Accursed oranges.

But what did this fellow want?

He seemed to protest.

He had it with someone.

I would say he had it with everyone.

I would say so, too. He was a starveling.

If I had been down there I would have arrested him.

You would only have done your duty.

Naturally.

Such fellows are always to be arrested.

Definitely. You never know.

Every starveling is a dangerous man.

Capable of anything.

Of robbery.

That goes without saying.

Of stabbing.

No doubt.

And also of political crimes.

Whatever class... Whatever status...

Be they ignorant... Be they educated...

No difference.

Shopkeepers...

Lawyers...

My grocer in Lodi...

And in Bologna, a lawyer...

You see, they have no respect.

They have no consideration.

But it is because we are Sicilians.

That's it, because we are Sicilians.

But in this country, in Sicily, it's even worse.

In Mussumeli, I...

In Sciacca, my mother

does not say what I am, she is ashamed to say it,

and she says I am an employee at the Land Registry.

An employee at the Land Registry!

It is a question of preconceptions.

I know. Old prejudices.

I don't know why I return there.

And do I know, perhaps?

What do we get out of it?

Rotted bowels.

Poisoned blood.

You didn't smell the stink?

The stink? What stink?

What? You didn't smell it?

I don't know.

I don't understand what stink you are talking about.

Unbelievable! He doesn't know what stink I am talking about.

I really don't understand. I don't smell any stink.

The gentleman is talking about the stink that came from the corridor.

Stink was coming from the corridor?

That's unbelievable! He didn't smell it!

The gentleman is talking about the stink of those two.

Those two?

Those two at the window? They stank?

Ah, the stink, the stink!

It's strange. There's no place in the world

where they are in worse regard

than in Sicily.

And yet they are almost all Sicilians, in Italy,

who have this trade.

All Sicilians?

Really!

For fifteen years I've toured through Italy. I have lived

in Florence, I have lived in Bologna, in Turin,

and I live in Milan,

and wherever I have found a Sicilian,

he had this trade.

That's what my cousin says, too,

who travels.

Bah, besides, it's understandable.

We are a sad people.

Very sad. Gloomy even.

Always ready,

all of us, to see things darkly, always hoping for something else, better,

and always despairing of having it. Always discouraged.

Always beaten down. And always

with the temptation in us of taking one's life.

It could be that it is true.

But how does that enter into taking up such a trade?

I don't know how to explain it, but I believe it enters into it.

What does one do when he abandons himself?

When he throws himself away as lost?

He does what he hates doing most.

I am from Leonforte,

up in the Val Demone between Enna and Nicosia,

I am a landowner with three beautiful daughters,

one more beautiful than the other,

and I have a horse

on which I ride across my lands and then I believe I am a king.

But it doesn't seem to me to be everything,

believing I am a king when I mount my horse,

and I would like to acquire some other knowledge

and feel myself to be different with something new in my soul,

I would give all that I possess

and the horse, too, the lands,

to feel myself to be more at peace with men,

as one who has nothing to cause self-reproach.

Not that I had any particular cause for self-reproach.

Not at all. And I'm also not talking in the sense of the sacristy.

But it seems to me that I am not at peace with men.

I would like to have a fresh conscience

and that would require me to fulfill other duties,

not the usual, other, new duties and higher,

regarding other men, because in fulfilling the usual duties

there is no satisfaction and one remains, as if one had done nothing,

discontented with oneself, disappointed.

I believe man is ripe for other things. Not only

not to steal, not to kill, etc. and to be a good citizen.

I believe he is ripe

for other things, for other duties, new ones.

That is what one feels, I believe,

the lack of other duties, other things to fulfill. Things to do

for our conscience in a new sense.

I believe you are right. Are you a professor?

Nothing to laugh at, little Grandpa. Nothing to laugh at.

Ah I believe that is just it. We feel no satisfaction any more

in the fulfillment of our duty, of our duties. To us the fulfillment is

indifferent.

We feel bad all the same.

And I believe, it is just because of this,

because these are duties that are too old,

too old and become too easy,

without significance any more for the conscience.

But really you are not a professor?

Have I the air of a professor?

I am not ignorant,

I can read a book, if I want to,

but I am not a professor. I was with the Salesians as a child,

but I am not a professor.

You will permit me, won't you?

By God, why not?

It seemed to me I had seen you get off in Catania.

Ah, you saw me? But

I accompanied a friend to the train for Caltanissetta.

I got back on at the last minute. In the last car.

I hardly had time.

I was preoccupied for my valises!

Yes, you never know.

True,

eh? You never know. With these nasty fellows going around.

I am an employee at the Land Registry.

Oh, really?

And what are you doing? Are you going home on holiday?

Yes, I am going on leave. I am going to Sciacca, to my village.

To Sciacca. And you are coming from far away?

From Bologna. There I am

an employee. And my wife is from Bologna. My children also.

And you are going to Sciacca this way?

Yes, this way.

Syracuse, Spaccaforno, Modica, Genisi, Donnafugata...

Vittoria, Falconara, Licata.

Girgenti...

Agrigento, please.

But wouldn't it be more convenient to proceed via Caltanissetta?

Yes, it would be more convenient and would have saved me eight lire.

But here you always go along the sea.

You like the sea?

I don't know.

I believe I like it. In any case it's this line

I like.

You are stopping in Syracuse?

I am stopping there.

You live there?

No, I don't live there.

But have you no one in Syracuse?

You are going there for business then.

No, no.

You have a beautiful baritone voice.

Didn't you know that?

Oh, as for knowing, I know it.

Naturally.

You could not have lived till today

without knowing.

Too bad that you are an employee at the Land Registry

instead of singing.

Yes. I would have liked that.

In Falstaff, in Rigoletto, on all the stages of Europe...

Or even on the street, what does it matter?

Always better than being an employee.

Oh, yes, perhaps...

We are in Syracuse.

I believe I will get a connection right away.

But what will you do in Syracuse?

How did you recognize me?

I ask myself that, too.

Come, I have a herring on the fire.

You will see how good it is.

Did we eat that when I was a child?

And how!

Herrings in winter and pepperoni in summer.

That was always our way of eating. Don't you remember?

And beans with cardoons.

Yes, beans with cardoons,

you always would have wanted a second plate. And lentils also,

cooked with onions, dried tomatoes, and bacon...

And a twig of rosemary, no?

Yes. And a twig of rosemary.

And of that, too, would I always have wanted a second plate?

And how! You were like Esau...

You would have given your primogeniture

for a second plate of lentils.

It seems to me I see you returning from school

at two, at three in the afternoon, on the train.

Yes, on the freight train, in the baggage car.

At first I alone,

then I and Felix, then I, Felix and Liborio...

All of you sparrows, with your heads full of hair,

with muzzles black, hands always black.

And right away you would ask: Are there lentils today, Mama?

In these line-keepers' houses

where we lived. One got off the train at the station,

San Cataldo, Serradifalco, Acquaviva, all the places we have been,

and one had to go 1 or 2 kilometers on foot to arrive at home...

Yes, sometimes even three kilometers.

The train went past and I knew you were underway along the line,

and I put the lentils on to warm,

the herring to roast and then I would hear you call: "Land, land!"

Land? Why land?

Surely, land! Some kind of game of yours.

And then once in Racalmuto,

the line-keepers' house was on an incline

and the train had to go slower,

and you learned to jump from the moving train,

and you jumped off in front of the house,

and I was terribly afraid you would fall under

and I waited

outside with the stick.

And you beat us?

And how!

I broke your legs with that stick.

And I even left you

without food in some cases.

Don't you make soup for yourself?

Do you speak for me? I've almost never eaten soup

in my life. I cooked for you and your father

but for me that was my food:

herrings in winter, roast pepperoni in summer,

much oil, much bread.

Always that?

With olives, too, naturally,

and sometimes pork, sausages,

when we had a pig.

Some years we had a pig in these line-keepers' houses.

We raised it on prickly pear and then slaughtered it...

We had chickens, too, no?

Yes, we had some, naturally.

We made "mostarda"...

We made all sorts of things...

Sun dried tomatoes, pastry from prickly pear...

It went well for us. We had

wire netting!

They were places with malaria for the most part.

With the cicadas!

I believed the cicadas were the malaria!

Perhaps that is why you caught so many?

But I believed their song was the malaria,

not them... Did I catch them?

And how!

Twenty, thirty every time.

I imagine I caught them as crickets.

What did I do with them?

I have an idea you ate them.

Yes. You and your brothers.

How is that possible?

Perhaps you were hungry.

We were hungry?

Perhaps yes.

But if it went well for us at home?

Yes. Your father received money

at every month's end and then it went well for us for ten days,

we were the envy of all the peasants and the people of the sulphur mines.

But after the first ten days

we became like them. We ate snails.

Yes, and wild chicory.

They only ate snails?

Yes, all the poor

eat only snails, usually.

And we were poor

the last twenty days of each month.

And we ate snails for twenty days!

Snails and wild chicory.

I imagine they were good, after all.

Very good.

You can prepare them in so many ways.

Simply boiled, for example. Or with garlic and tomatoes.

Or floured and fried.

What an idea! With the shell?

But of course!

You eat them by sucking them out of the shell.

Don't you remember?

I remember, I remember.

All the taste is in sucking the shell, it seems to me.

You pass hours with sucking...

He was a great man, Grandfather?

And how! Didn't you know that?

He was a great man. He could work eighteen hours a day,

and he was a great socialist,

a great hunter,

and great on a horse in the procession of St. Joseph.

He rode in the procession of St. Joseph?

And how! He was a great rider,

better than all here in the village, and also in Piazza Armerina.

How do you think they could have had the cavalcade without him?

But he was a socialist...

He was a socialist.

He could neither read nor write but he understood politics

and he was a socialist.

How could he ride behind St. Joseph if he was a socialist?

The socialists don't believe in St. Joseph.

What a beast you are! Your grandfather

was not a socialist like all the others. He was a great man.

He could believe in St. Joseph and be a socialist.

He had a mind for a thousand things together. And he was a socialist

because he understood politics. But he could

believe in St. Joseph. He said nothing against St. Joseph.

But the priests,

I imagine that they found him contrary.

But of what import was that to him, the priests?

But the procession

was a matter of the priests!

How ignorant you are!

The procession was horses and men on horses.

It was a cavalcade.

The cavalcade

departed from over there. There is a small church

that you don't see on the mountain but they lit it up inside and out

and it became a star.

And the cavalcade departed from the church with lanterns and bells

and descended the mountain.

It was always by night, naturally. One saw the lanterns

and I knew that my father was at the head,

a great rider,

and all waited on the piazza below,

and on the bridge.

And the cavalcade entered the woods,

one saw the lanterns no more, one only heard the bells.

It took a long time and then the cavalcade appeared on the bridge,

with all the noise of the bells

and with lanterns and with him at the head

as if he felt like a king...

It seems to me I remember.

Nonsense!

You were three years old the only time you saw it.

But why do you look at me?

May I not look at you?

Bah, if you want to look at me, look at me...

But what idea came to Papa that he went away

with another woman

in old age?

What do you know of that?

He wrote it to me.

The coward! He wrote to you

that he saw another woman and left me

and went away with her! What a coward!

Why? Isn't it true?

How can it be true?

Don't you remember any more what a coward he was?

Coward?

But yes. When he beat me and then began to weep

and asked me for pardon...

One sees it displeased him.

It displeased him!

As if I didn't know how to defend myself,

and didn't give it to him, too. Perhaps that displeased him.

And also when I gave birth, he wept.

I had labor pains and I didn't weep,

and he wept. Do you understand what a coward he was?

I imagine it displeased him to see you suffer.

It displeased him! Why should it displease him? I was not dying.

Better he had given a hand and helped,

instead of weeping.

What could he do?

What could he do?

Don't you do anything when your wife gives birth?

Well, I hold her...

You see that you do something.

But he didn't even hold me.

One was alone in these solitudes,

and there was so much to do,

warm water to prepare,

but he could only weep. Or he ran

to the next line-keepers' house to call the women from there...

That pleased him, to have other women in the house,

but they didn't come right away,

and I needed help,

I cried to him to help me, to hold me, to make me walk,

and he wept. He didn't want to see.

No, he didn't want to see.

You boys wanted to see. You came out to the landing of your room

and stood where he was,

but he would not lift his eyes and you had yours wide open.

You looked at him weeping,

me trying to walk holding onto the furniture,

and then I cried to him to send you away,

but he, nothing, he didn't understand,

didn't lift his eyes, was afraid to look.

And one time I felt the head of the baby outside,

it was the third one of you,

and I threw myself on the bed and said to him: Run, it's here!

And do you know what he did?

He raised his arms to the heavens

and began to invoke God as if he were reciting his tragedies.

Yes, he did that...

And the baby looked at me, became violet in the face,

it was a beautiful baby, I didn't want it to suffocate!

I suppose someone came then.

It was two o'clock at night and no one came...

But I took up the bottle of water that was on the night table,

a great rage had seized me, and threw it at your father's head.

Did you hit him?

By God!

I have a good aim: I hit him,

and then he persuaded himself, to help me and he helped me,

pulled the baby out safe and sound

as if it were another man and not him,

but naturally I pushed more than he pulled,

he had a face all blood and sweat.

You see that he was not a coward? He did not lack courage.

Rather he had something more,

that left him when the blood flowed.

Something more?

What more do you want him to have? He was not a man like my father!

He was a peasant

who could hoe the earth eighteen hours a day and had courage,

and he did everything when my mother gave birth.

Where are you going?

We also had winter melons.

I kept them under the straw in the chicken roost.

Now I keep them there in the attic.

I have about ten.

That's it.

Is none of our furniture here?

No furniture.

There are dishes and the kitchen things

of ours.

And the blankets, the linens.

The furniture we sold when we came here.

But how did you decide to come here?

I decided.

That is the house of my father and there is no rent to pay.

He built it himself, a bit every Sunday.

Where would you have had us go?

I don't know.

But it's very far from the railway here.

How can you live without at least seeing the line?

What does it matter to see the line?

I meant...

without ever hearing a train pass?

What does it matter, to hear a train pass?

I believed it would matter to you.

You went out

and stood with the flag at the barrier when it passed.

Yes, if I didn't send one of you.

There was a place,

where we lived near the station.

Serradifalco, I believe.

We didn't see it, but we could hear the freight cars

bumping one against the other during the shuntings...

Cut the melon!

Yes, then. What happened about Papa then?

Why talk about it? For me

it's all the same with him or without him.

And if for him it is the same without me,

it doesn't matter to me.

It is true, then, that he went with another?

Went? Nonsense, went.

I sent him away.

It was my house here.

Oh madame! He had become boring

and you sent him away?

Well, I endured him for many years,

and now it was too much,

I couldn't endure it, to see him enamored at his age.

But he was always like that with women.

He always needed other women in the house

and to play the cockerel among the women.

You know that he wrote poetry.

He wrote it for them.

That was nothing bad.

And that they looked down on me

because they were called queens in this poetry,

that was not bad?

But yes. And even

queen bees! Dirty wives of line-keepers

and teachers and stationmasters' wives...

Queen bees!

But how could they know that it was about them?

When one saw that he was nice to her

and at the fêtes drank to the most beautiful

looking at her, and then read this poetry,

his arms extended toward her,

what more was needed to know it?

He was a great fool. He could not be without an uproar.

Every six, seven days he had to be up to something:

call together the railwaymen of all the line

with their wives and daughters

and play the cockerel among them.

There were periods when there were meetings every evening,

at our house or another, dances or card games or recitations.

And him at the center of the fête with shining eyes...

In that he was great. He never tired of dancing

and he never missed a round.

If the record was finished he ran over and changed it,

and he came back, grabbed a lady and danced.

And he knew how to direct the quadrille

with a witty remark at every phrase...

And he could play the accordion and bagpipes, too.

Doesn't it matter to you to be alone?

If you think I must miss the company of your father,

you are deceiving yourself.

Why? Didn't he give you good company?

I imagine that he helped you

with washing up, too.

That does not mean that I must feel alone

without him.

But he was a nice man!

One must not have him in the house, a nice man!

It was my misfortune that he was a nice man...

You see, your Grandfather

was not a nice man, he did not call women queen bees,

he did not write poetry

for them...

I suppose he did not like them.

He liked them ten times more than your father did.

But he didn't need to call them queens. When he liked one,

he took her into the vale.

There are many

here in the village who still remember him, and many in Piazza, too.

And you complain about Papa?

I have the idea it would have been worse for you

with your character, to have been the wife of Grandfather, for example.

Worse? Why worse?

Well, Grandfather took them into the vale,

and Papa wrote them poetry.

I have the idea

these escapades into the vale would have been

a harder outcome for you than the poetry.

Not in the least!

All that was bad was the poetry, with your father.

I would have been glad

if he had only taken them into the vale.

He took them into the vale and then he wrote them poetry?

Naturally, and called them queens, treated them like queens.

He was a nice man.

And if one had a nice name, such as Manon for example,

he appeared to go mad, a ridiculous thing at his age!

Who had the name Manon?

The rider from the circus.

Because of her I sent him away. Because she had the name Manon.

But he always treated them like queens, which was bad,

that he treated them like queens, not like dirty cows.

They came into my house

wives of railwaymen, wives of peasants,

and they were impudent, tranquil,

they didn't lower their eyes,

they looked at me

as if they were who knows what.

And I could not look down on them. That was bad.

He

gave them to understand that they were much more than I.

And they looked at me as if they were

much more than I.

You are a funny woman!

You would have wanted them to feel like cows?

That I would have wanted. I would have

laughed about the whole thing.

Naturally.

It would not have mattered to me. I would have laughed about it!

But he didn't treat them like cows...

Why should he have done that?

They had a husband, like you, and children, too, like you...

Well, no one forced them to play the cow.

Was it so dirty, what they did?

Didn't they do the same as you did

with him? Or did they do some other thing?

What other thing?

They did the same, naturally.

What else could they do?

And then? They didn't do anything dirtier

than what you did with him, too...

Why

should he have treated them like dirty cows?

But he was not their husband,

he was my husband.

And there is the difference?

I don't understand how you reason.

You were a dirty cow

when you did the thing with other men?

Because I suppose you, too, will

have been into the vale?

You won't always have been in the kitchen.

You also will have been into the vale with someone?

Oh! With one!

With one! Because another time it was a mistake

and that doesn't count.

A mistake? How, a mistake?

It was a thing with a relative

while we were in Messina. After the earthquake.

It was a matter of confusion in sum,

I was very young and it was never talked about again.

And with this other one?

Oh! With this other one it was by accident!

Was he a relative of ours, too?

No. He was one I didn't know.

What do you find so astonishing? You don't know how things went.

But where was that?

Were we already at the line-keepers' houses?

We were in Acquaviva.

But we were all big in Acquaviva.

It was after the war.

And then what?

Should I have asked your permission

if you were big?

You were eleven. You went to school and you went to play.

It was a terrible summer. There was no wasps,

there were no flies, there was nothing.

It must have been afternoon. I had baked bread.

I was washing: we had a basin outside by the well,

and it must have been afternoon because the shadow

was just on the side of the basin.

He was a wayfarer.

With a little knapsack for clothes to change,

and dressed as a soldier without any stars,

an old reaper's hat on his head.

And he had taken off his shoes,

he carried them tied together over his shoulder...

Did he come from far?

He told me

that he had come through Pietraperzia, Mazzarino, Butera,

Terranova and a hundred other places.

But it seemed

that he had come directly from where the war had just ended.

All on foot?

On foot.

On that day it had been forty eight hours that he

had not encountered a village or a living soul.

The last place he had passed through was a farm

and the dogs would not let wayfarers approach the farm.

So he told me

and meanwhile he had drunk a pail of water.

Did he want nothing but water?

He demanded nothing, in truth.

But I gave him a loaf of bread

that I had baked not more than an hour before,

and I seasoned it with oil, salt and oregano,

and he smelled the air, the odor of the bread,

and said blessed God!

But in sum this, too, was a passing thing.

No.

Then he was from these parts? He was not a wayfarer?

He was a wayfarer.

He was going to Palermo and had wandered through all of Sicily.

He was going to Palermo?

He was going

but he did not go. He went as far as Bivona

and there he found work in a sulphur mine;

he stayed there.

In Bivona? But Bivona is far from Acquaviva.

About fifty kilometers. All the villages

are about fifty kilometers away

from Acquaviva.

Casteltermini is nearer than fifty kilometers.

Why didn't he stay in Casteltermini?

Perhaps there was no work in Casteltermini.

Or perhaps he wanted to continue toward Palermo and arrived at Bivona,

and there decided otherwise.

And he did fifty kilometers on foot to come to find you?

Fifty to come and fifty to go back.

Did he reappear many times?

Various times.

He brought me small gifts.

Once he brought me a fresh honeycomb

that perfumed the whole house.

How is it he did not reappear?

Towards winter there was

a strike in the sulphur mines and the peasants rebelled, too.

The railwaymen didn't strike. Trains passed, loaded with gendarmes.

And there died

more than a hundred

in Bivona;

not of the gendarmes,

of them.

And you believe he was among the dead?

I believe so.

Why else

wouldn't he have

reappeared?

I'm talking to you, stranger.

Have you brought nothing to sharpen

in this village?

Have you no sword to sharpen? Have you no cannon to sharpen?

You don't have much to sharpen

in this village?

Not much that is deserving of it. Not much that is worth the trouble.

Not much that gives pleasure.

You would well sharpen knives. You would well sharpen scissors.

Knives? Scissors?

Do you believe there still exist

knives and scissors in this world?

I had the idea, yes.

Do neither knives nor scissors exist in this village?

Neither in this village nor in others.

I go through many villages

and there are fifteen or twenty thousand souls I sharpen for;

but I never see either knives or scissors.

But what do they give you to sharpen

if you never see knives or scissors?

That is what I always ask them.

What will you give me to sharpen?

Will you give me no sword? Will you give me no cannon?

And I look into their faces, into their eyes,

I see that what they give me one cannot even call a nail.

It gives pleasure to sharpen a true blade. You can throw it

and it is an arrow.

You can take it in your hand

and it is a dagger.

Ah! If only everyone always had a true blade.

Why?

Do you think something would happen?

I would have pleasure to always sharpen a true blade.

Sometimes it seems to me it would be enough

if everyone had teeth and nails to sharpen.

I would sharpen them like vipers' teeth, like leopards' claws.

Forty centesimi.

Four for bread. Four for wine. And the taxes?

Four for taxes. Four for bread. And the wine?

Four for wine. Four for taxes. And the bread?

But why

don't you put it all together

and then divide?

Too risky.

Sometimes I would eat it all, sometimes drink it all.

Keep it. I wanted to take from you two more soldi

but God does not will it. It was the two soldi that made the confusion.

Two for bread,

two for wine,

two for taxes.

You must excuse me.

I believed I could do it because you are a stranger.

Oh, that is nothing. Two soldi more or two soldi less...

The question is

one does not know how to comport oneself

with strangers.

There are perhaps scissors sharpeners

who charge eight soldi in other villages,

and one risks damaging them

in charging six.

It is beautiful, the world.

Light, shadow, cold, heat, joy, non-joy...

Hope,

charity...

Infancy, youth, age...

Men, children, women...

Beautiful women, ugly women, the grace of God, roguery

and honesty...

Memory,

fantasy.

What should that mean?

Oh, nothing.

Bread

and wine.

Sausages, milk, goats,

pigs and cows.

Rats.

Bears.

Wolves.

Birds.

Trees and smoke,

snow.

Sickness, recovery. I know, I know.

Death,

immortality and resurrection.

It is extraordinary.

I suppose.

Too bad

to offend the world.

Excuse me, if someone knows another

whose acquaintance he has made with great pleasure,

and then takes from him two soldi or two lire more

for a service he should have rendered gratis

due to the great pleasure it gives him to know him,

what kind of thing is that one,

isn't that a man who offends the world?

Thank you, friend.

Sometimes

one confuses the pettinesses of the world

with the offenses to the world.

Ah! If there were

knives and scissors, awls, picks and harquebuses,

mortars, sickles and hammers, cannons, cannons, dynamite.

Translation: Danièle Huillet Barton Byg