Note: Translator Pauline Bancroft Flach died in 1966, less than 70 years ago. Therefore, this work is protected by copyright, restricting your legal rights to reproduce it. However, you are welcome to view it on screen, as you do now. Read more about copyright.
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FRA GAETANO
41
being blessed by the people. Gaetano could not
live if he could not sit by the fountain in the square
and tell legends.
But if Gaetano went on living in Donna Elisa’s
garden, and eating peaches and mandarins, he would
never hear the great human sea roar about him. He
must go out and be a hermit on Etna; he must
dwell in one of the big caves, and live on roots and
fruits. He would never see a human being; he
would never cut his hair; and he would wear nothing
but a few dirty rags. But in ten or twenty years he
would come back to the world. Then he would look
like a beast and speak like an angel.
That would be another matter than wearing velvet
clothes and a glazed hat, as he did now. That would
be different from sitting in the shop with Donna
Elisa and taking saint after saint down from the
shelf and hearing her tell about what they had done.
Several times he had taken a knife and a piece of
wood and had tried to carve images of the saints.
It was very hard, but it would be worse to make
himself into a saint; much worse. However, he was
not afraid of difficulties and privations.
He crept out of his room, across the attic and
down the stair. It only remained to go through the
shop out to the street, but on the last step he
stopped. A faint light filtered through a crack in
the door to the left of the stairs.
It was the door to Donna Elisa’s room, and Gaetano
did not dare to go any further, since his foster
mother had her candle lighted. If she was not
asleep she would hear him when he drew the heavy
bolts on the shop door. He sat softly down on the
stairs to wait.
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