Read Online Moscardino by Enrico Pea - Free Book Online Page B

then he remembered his smallest sister.
    He learned to smile. When the doctor pricked him with a needle he felt it. And man is man on condition that he feels pain always in two ways; that he feels grief for a distant family, and pricks on live cured flesh.
    His cure was rapid. He got well before my granddad, so that he became his nurse and consoler.
    My grandfather despaired of getting well, getting over the flow of madness that every now and again centupled his strength and drove him to devastation.
    After the cure of the Luchese emigrant, he understood that he too would get well.
    You must want to get well, said the Luchese with kind words, when my grandfather lost hope.
    Unless they want to, nobody will ever get well.
    Thus he had to want to get well, use his will to get well. And my grandfather began to want nothing except to get well.
    Not that the Luchese emigrant was dirty, quite the contrary, but this was because it was more beautiful to be clean than dirty; not because
dirtiness makes men ill. On that point no one could shake him. He didn’t believe in contagion and laughed at the doctor’s meticulous hygiene.
    Eleven million microbes can get onto the sticky side of a postage stamp.
    Alive? interrupted the Luchese emigrant, looking clever.
    Alive enough to bump you off in a very few hours. But can eleven million living creatures that I can stick onto the end of my thumb be that powerful and invisible all at once?
    That was something the Luchese couldn’t understand. Sometimes he thought the medicoes had heard this hocus-pocus from the lunatics.
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    When peculiarities mentioned in the story were shared by one of our acquaintance, my grandfather would say: “A drop or two more or less will make the jug slop over; another drop and the jug will slop over.
    That chap would be a nuisance or dangerous. And his relatives or someone would put him on a closed wagon and cart him off to the gook house up there past Monte Quiesa, and down the Sercio valley and then up that little hill, and shut him there in the sanctuary, where he’d have a much better time.
    No one is totally sane.
    No one is totally crazy, it’s a matter of balance, measured in the
interests of the half crazy who decide about their half sane fellow men.
    How often have I heard: He’s a good chap, but just a bit enthusiastic.
    Or: he goes off at full moon.
    That’s his weak point, don’t try that on him.
    He’s got a bit of smoke in his top story, gets all het up over nothing.
    He lies like a trooper, always digging up something.”
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    â€œWatch ’em when they get drunk, give ’em an extra drop and they get so kindly, kindly, so kindly.
    Laugh like hell and roar like the devil.
    Can’t stand up, and blame it on the earth’s goin’ round. Another one will grab a knife and think everyone’s against him.
    Have you ever seen drunks start pissing and dumping like beasts in front of everyone else?”
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    â€œIt’s a matter of degree.
    The richer can go further than poor folks.
    In every rich family there are at least two, if there are four in the family, who would get shut up in the sanctuary of Frigonaria but their parents, mostly doctors with stinking sores, put up with ’em and excuse’em, and say: Little horsey will stop when he’s run himself tired.

    In the meantime rich folk’s crazy children go on squandering what their parents have welched out of poor lunatics.
    There is a law of compensation even in this:
    See my house.
    And he came back: Pleasant to sleep in April.
    April’s way comes down barrel a day.
    Grumpy, Don Lorenzo and Cleofe. The red-faced doctor, Sabina, Don Pietro Galanti in the wagon, in the spring, coming back to the village.”
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    Those are the names of the lunatics. Grumpy. And now Don Lorenzo. Cleofe’s fever came back, the pain, the sleeplessness, the enervating sweats. She went back to bed for a week, seriously ill.
    Then