Elio Vittorini
AN EPISODE FROM "IN SICILY" *
Some time before this I had been very
ill
for months.
I had a profound knowledge of what it meant, that profound misery
among the miseries of the working class: particularly when one has
already been confined to bed for twenty or thirty days, and has
to stay within the four walls of his room, he and the bed linen, the
metal of the kitchen utensils, and the wood of the chairs, table,
and cupboard.
At such times there is nothing but these things in the world.
You look at them, these pieces of furniture, but you cannot do any–
thing with them, you cannot make soup of a chair or a cupboard.
Yet the cupboard is so large that it would provide enough to chew
for a month. You look at these things as
if
they were edible: and
perhaps that is why children become dangerous and set about smash-
ing things. . . .
·
The baby has the rung of the high chair in
his
mouth
all
day
and shrieks if his mother tries to take it away. Mother, wife, or per–
haps a daughter, she scans the bookshelf and picks out a volume
occasionally and proceeds to read it. She spends hours reading or
glancing through its pages.
"What are you reading?" asks the sick man.
The woman does not know what she is reading: yet a book
can be anything, a dictionary or an old grammar.
Then the sick man says: "Must you choose this moment to
acquire your culture?"
The woman replaces the book, but later returns to scan the
shelf of books, not of eatables- and again chooses one, and perhaps
*
This episode is taken from Vittorini's novel
Conversll(.ione in Sicilia,
which
will be published in this country under the title of "In Sicily." The translation
is by Wilfred David.
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