Lucky’s Reviews > The Late Mattia Pascal > Status Update

There was little or nothing to boast of in that miserable life they had insisted on ending there in the millrace. After all the mistakes he had made, Mattia Pascal perhaps deserved no better fate.
Now I wanted to remove every trace of him, not only externally, but also within myself.

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.

In order to carry early fruit to the market and sell it at high prices, they gather apples or peaches or pears before they have reached the stage which makes them sound and flavorsome, and the vendors ripen them by the simple expedient of bruising them.

And this was how my spirit, still green, ripened to its maturity.

From time to time, a book or two would crash from the shelves, followed by rats as fat as rabbits.
To me they wére like Newton's apple.
"Eureka!" I shouted happily. "There's something for me to do while Romitelli is reading his Birnbaum."

I may say that, from that day on, I have made a habit of laughing at all my misfortunes and torments. At that moment I saw myself as an actor in a tragedy that could hardly have looked more comical: my mother had run out with that mad-woman; my wife was in the other room busy... we'll skip that! Marianna Pescatore there on the ground; and I myself... not knowing where to turn for my daily bread.

Beyond his respectable appear-ance, his fine manners, his elegant-gentleman façade, Berto had nothing to give his wife, not even a crumb of affection, which would probably have compensated her for any trouble that my poor mother's presence would have caused. Well, that's how God made him; God gave him only a tiny scrap of a heart. What could poor Berto do about it?

I was truly horrified at the sight of my mother in contact with the widow Pescatore. The sainted old lady was no longer unaware of her wrongs, but in my eyes she was in no way responsible for them. She just couldn't grasp the full extent of human wickedness.

(Madonna complex?)

Now what was to be done? Almost without hope, I began looking for some kind of occupation, to provide for the family's most pressing needs. I was no good at anything, and the reputation I had won by my youthful exploits and my idleness certainly didn't inspire anyone to give me a job.