Status Updates From El difunto Matías Pascal

My leap from the train saved me, as if it had shaken that stupid idea from my head. In a flash I glimpsed... of course! my liberation, the freedom of a new life! I had eighty-two thousand lire with me, and now I wouldn't have to give the money to anyone! I was dead, dead! I had no debts now, no wife, no mother-in-law. Nobody! Free! Free! Free! What more could I ask for?

But even if it weren't true for me, it was still true for the others, and the certainty of my death, which those others had felt since yesterday, was like a per-manent, crushing, unbearable tyranny…

All the disgust and frictions that come when Need, like a scrawny black cat, nests in the ashes of a spent hearth, had made living together odious to us both. Could I, with eleven thousand lire, restore peace in our home and resuscitate that love wickedly killed at birth by the widow Pescatore? What folly!

From Marseilles I would embark at random, with a third-class ticket, perhaps for America. After all, could anything worse befall me than what I had suffered and was still suffering at home? No doubt, I was only heading for new chains, but they surely wouldn't seem heavier than the ones I had just ripped from my ankles.