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
from Falco, and she put pride into him. But who
else hoped anything of him ? Falco could not even
learn to read. His mother tried to take a book and
teach him the letters. She pointed to A, that is
the big hat; she pointed to B, that is the spectacles;
she pointed to C, that is the snake. That he could
learn. Then his mother said: “ If you put the
spectacles and the big hat together, it makes Ba.” That
he could not learn. He became angry and struck
her, and she let him alone. “You will be a great
man yet,” she said.
Falco was dull and bad-tempered in his
childhood and youth. As a child, he would not play;
as a youth, he would not dance. He had no
sweetheart, but he liked to go where fighting was to be
expected.
Falco had two brothers who were like other
people, and who were much more esteemed than he.
Falco was wounded to see himself eclipsed by his
brothers, but he was too proud to show it. His
mother was always on his side. After his father’s
death she had him sit at the head of the table, and
she never allowed any one to jest with him. “My
oldest son is the best of you all,” she said.
When the people remember it all they say:
“Falco is proud. He will make it a point of honor
to destroy the railway.”
And they have hardly terrified themselves with
one story before they remember another about him.
For thirty long years, people say, Falco lived like
any other poor person on Etna. On Monday he
went away to his work in the fields with his brothers.
He had bread in his sack for the whole week, and
he made soup of beans and rice like every one else.
19
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