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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194 the miracles of antichrist
was not afraid of being hated. She was the greatest
marvel that had ever been seen.
Of course she was not a Sicilian. She was an
Englishwoman. And the first thing she did when
she came was to take the whole first floor of the
hotel for herself alone. What was that for her?
All Diamante would not have been enough for her.
No, all Diamante was not enough for her. But
as soon as she had come she began to govern the
town like a queen. The syndic had to obey her.
Was it not she who made him put stone benches in
the square? Was it not at her command that the
streets were swept every day?
When she woke in the morning all the young
men of Diamante stood waiting outside her door, to
be allowed to accompany her on some excursion.
They had left shoemaker’s awl and stone-cutter’s
chisel to act as guides to her. Each had sold his
mother’s silk dress to buy a side-saddle for his
donkey, so that she might ride on it to the castle or
to Tre Castagni. They had divested themselves of
house and home in order to buy a horse and carriage
to drive her to Randazzo and Nicolosi.
We were all her slaves. The children began to
beg in English, and the old blind women at the
hotel door, Donna Pepa and Donna Tura, draped
themselves in dazzlingly white veils to please her.
Everything moved round her; industries and
trades grew up about her. Those who could do
nothing else dug in the earth for coins and pottery
to offer her. Photographers moved to the town and
began to work for her. Coral merchants and hawkers
of tortoise-shell grew out of the earth about her.
The priests of Santa Agnese dug up the old Dionysius
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