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

Meanwhile I had realized that, in buying that dog, I would be acquiring a friend; but I would also have to pay a dog tax...I who no longer paid any taxes! This struck me as a first step towards compromising my freedom. I walked away, thinking for the first time that this boundless freedom of mine was no doubt beautiful but that it was also something of a tyrant, since it wouldn't permit me even to buy a little puppy

At heart I was already a little tired of that around, always silent and alone. I was instinctively to feel the need of company.

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.

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.

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.