The Hen

Translated by Howard Curtis

Odone Guasti, who was later, under another name, to acquire a degree of fame in the republic of letters, was, at the age of not yet fifteen, an office and warehouse apprentice in a small firm in Trieste dealing in citrus fruits. Thinking himself perhaps a born merchant, he had been overjoyed to abandon his classical studies, to which he believed himself unsuited, in favour of a commercial career. But he had not spent even a month in his new life when, faced with crates of oranges to be marked and letters to be copied into the book, the restlessness fundamental to his nature had caught up with him just as it had over the Ministry-approved Greek and Latin texts which he had defaced with caricatures in the margins. He hated his boss, the ‘exploiter’ of his clear handwriting and his long adolescent legs, with a hatred very similar to that which he had borne the class monitor; and he felt as much contempt for his only workmate, an elderly clerk, as he had felt at school for his classmates, who always got good marks at the end of the year and were always well treated by the masters. This hatred was, of course, unjust, but many years were to pass, and many sorrows overcome, before Odone, thinking over the past and comparing it with the present, realized that the blame was entirely his, that he had done too much and too little to succeed either as a good pupil or, later, as a good employee. It is an inestimable privilege of maturity to find the roots of our ills only in ourselves, whereas the young man cannot help but blame the outside world, and with all the more ferocity the greater his own defects. And besides, who was there to explain Odone to himself and provide him with constructive criticism when his own father had gone, God alone knew where, even before he was born and had never returned, and he lived alone with his mother, a poor, deeply unhappy woman who understood little of life beyond the need for her only son to be physically well and to soon earn enough to relieve the two of them of a humiliating dependence on their relatives? Signora Rachele (that was Odone’s mother’s name) loved the boy with an almost sinful intensity, with that exaggerated maternal love peculiar to women who have married in vain; and the loved one had until then returned a similar affection, although tinged with selfishness; because parents love for what they give, and children for what they receive. There comes a moment in the life of a young man when filial love, before burning itself out in reaction to the family, to be replaced by love in the strictest sense of the word, flares up one last time in the most resplendent fashion: so it was that, on the afternoons of feast days, the few loving couples in the half-deserted Passeggio Sant’Andrea would see Odone, already in long trousers and with the beginnings of a moustache on his lips, walking arm in arm with his mother, who was much shorter than he and wore a black veil and such a strange, tiny hat as to make the observer feel sorry for her. In the same way, after dinner, mother and son would indulge in the tenderest of conversations, in which their differences of opinion, already beginning to become marked in the young man, were not yet such, compared with the certainty of a common future, as to cause his filial submission to degenerate into open revolt, and their romance into quarrels. As far as his mother was concerned, Odone was still a child who every evening, before going to bed, never forgot to thank God in his prayers for having granted him the most beautiful, the best, the wisest of all the many mothers who have inhabited, for the happiness of their sons, the splendid and never sufficiently praised work of creation.