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natural resentment against the facility with which a man does and undoes; but she redoubled Amerigo’s alarm, and he protested: “No, no, you can’t... it isn’t right to have children like that, it’s not being responsible...” until she hung up as he was in mid-sentence.
    â€œI’ve finished, you can wash up,” he said to the maid. He went back and sat down by the bookcase and thought of when he had been seated there earlier, as if it were a remote time, serene, carefree. Most of all, he felt humiliated. For him, procreation represented, first of all, a defeat of his ideas. Amerigo was an ardent supporter of birth control, even though his party’s attitude on the subject was either agnostic or hostile. Nothing shocked him so much as the ease with which people multiply, and the more hungry and backward, the more they keep having children, not so much because they want them as because they are accustomed to letting nature take its course, accustomed to carelessness and neglect. But to maintain this show of detached bitterness and amazement, like some Scandinavian Social Democrat, toward the underdeveloped world, he had to keep himself blameless of that sin....
    Now, too, the hours spent at Cottolengo began to weigh on him, all that India of people born to unhappiness, that silent question, an accusation of all those who procreate. This sight, this awareness, he thought, would not be without consequences as if he were the pregnant mother, sensitive as a photographic plate, or as if atomic disintegration were already at work inside him and he could produce only disastrous progeny.
    How could he return to reading now, to universal reflections? Even the books open before him were his enemies: the Bible with that eternal problem of continuing, amid famines and deserts, the generations of a human race that wishes to save every drop of its seed, still unsure of its survival; and Marx, who also wanted no limitation of human semination, convinced of the earth’s infinite richness: forward, all was flowing fecundity, go on, hurrah! Both books were great counselors! How could anyone not understand that the danger to the human race now was quite the opposite?
    It was late; they would be waiting for him at the polls; the others had to take their turn; he should hurry. But first he called Lia once more, though he still didn’t know what to say to her: “Lia, listen, I have to go out now, but look here, I...”
    â€œSssh...” she said: the record was playing again as if that middle telephone call hadn’t existed, and Amerigo felt a spurt of annoyance (“There, for her it’s nothing, for her it’s nature, for her the logic of the mind doesn’t count, only the logic of physiology!”) and also a kind of reassurance, because Lia was really the same Lia as always: “Hush... you must listen to it to the end... And, after all, what could have changed in her? Not much: something still nonexistent, which could therefore be thrust back into nothingness (at what point does a being become a being?), a mere biological potentiality, blind (at what point does a human become human?), a something that only a deliberate desire to make human could add to the ranks of human presences.
XII
    A CERTAIN number of the voters registered at Cottolengo were patients who couldn’t leave their beds or their wards. For such cases the law provides that some of the election watchers be chosen to set up a “detachment” of the polls which can go and collect the votes of the sick in their “place of treatment,” in other words, on the spot. They agreed to form this “detachment” with the chairman, the clerk, the woman in white, and Amerigo. They were issued two boxes, one with the blank ballots and the other to contain the ballots after they had been marked. They were also given a special folder, the register, and a list of the “voters in place of