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
wrote to Don Ferrante’s widow that she would not
be allowed to construct the railway. What did he
mean by his threat? Why does he sit still when
people are braving his interdiction? Why does he
not shoot down the people of Corvaja when they
come creeping through the night with wheelbarrows
and pickaxes? Why does he not drag the blind
singers down into the quarry and whip them? Why
does he not have Donna Micaela carried off from
the summer-palace, in order to be able to demand a
cessation in the building of the railway as a ransom
for her life?”
Donna Micaela says to herself: “Has Falco
Falcone forgotten his promise, or is he waiting to
strike till he can strike harder?”
Everybody asks in the same way: “ When is Etna’s
cloud of ashes to fall on the railway? When will
Mongibello cataracts tear it away? When will the
mighty Falco Falcone be ready to destroy it?”
While every one is waiting for Falco to destroy
the railway, they talk a great deal about him,
especially the workmen under Signor Alfredo.
Opposite the entrance to the church of San
Pasquale, people say, stands a little house on a bare
crag. The house is narrow, and so high that it
looks like a chimney left standing on a burnt
building site. It is so small that there is no room for
the stairs inside the house; they wind up outside
the walls. Here and there hang balconies and other
projections that are arranged with no more
symmetry than a bird’s nest on a tree-trunk.
In that house Falco Falcone was born, and his
parents were only poor working-people. In that
miserable hut Falco learned arrogance.
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