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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FALCO FALCONE
30 7
tied a nosegay for a girl, or plucked a rose for his
button-hole. He has never even laid a wreath on
his mother’s grave.
Therefore the delicate flowers rebel against him.
The flower sprays are entangled in his hair and in
his hat, and the petals have caught in his bushy
beard. He shakes his head violently, and the scar
in his cheek glows red as fire as it used to do in the
old days, when he fought with the carabinieri.
Still the wreath grows, and thick as a tree-trunk
it winds round Falco’s feet and legs. Falco swears
at it as if it were the steel fetters that once dragged
between his ankles. He complains more, when he
tears himself on a thorn or burns himself on a
nettle, than he did when the whip of the galley
guard lashed his back.
Biagio and Passafiore, his nephew, do not dare to
show themselves; they lie concealed in a cave till
everything is ready. They laugh at Falco with all
their might, for such wailings as Falco’s have not
sounded in the quarry since unhappy prisoners of
war were kept at work there.
Biagio looks up to great Etna, which is blushing
in the light of the setting sun. “ Look at
Mon-gibello,” he says to Passafiore; “see how it blushes.
It must guess what Falco is busy with down in the
quarry.” And Passafiore answers: “ Mongibello has
probably never thought that it would ever have
anything on its head but ashes and snow.”
But suddenly Biagio stopped laughing. “It is
not well, Passafiore,” he said. “Falco has become
too proud. I am afraid that the great Mongibello
is going to make a fool of him.”
The two bandits look one another in the eyes
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