‘So little?’ Odone exclaimed. The other man looked at him more offended than astonished, and more than ever convinced that he was being made fun of by a brat. Then, realizing that the latter was serious, he opened the cage, took out the bird and breathed into its feathers to show off how fat it was, how appetizing the colour of the meat.

‘Enough, enough!’ Odone exclaimed, pained by the shrill cries the victim was emitting and the efforts it was making to hold its head up and not die of suffocation. ‘I’ll buy her,’ he said, ‘if you can send her to my house right away.’

‘Right away,’ the awful man replied; he called the boy who worked for him and handed him the fowl, holding it by the legs. Odone paid, gave his address, plus twenty heller as a tip for the boy, and instructed the latter to give his name to whoever opened the door. Then he looked at his watch. It was almost a quarter past two, and he hurried back to the office, trying to persuade himself that he had spent his own money well. With that aim in mind, he exaggerated to himself the joy he would feel when he got home and found Cò-Cò reborn. But the more he tried to dismiss the thought, the more afflicted he was by the suspicion that he had done something pointless, if not actually ridiculous. Cò-Cò had died once and for all, he felt, and could not be replaced by all the hens in the world; his childhood had also died, and it was a foolish thing to want to bring its sweet aspects back to life other than in memory; his mother’s hair had already turned completely white, she grew tired ever more quickly, and she might die before she could enjoy the affluence that he, Odone, had promised her; he had done the wrong thing in leaving school for work; an error had been committed in his life, he could not say what or when, a mistake, a sin that distressed his heart more every day, one that he believed was his alone, not yet knowing (as he was to know only too well later) that such pain was the pain of man, of any creature living as an individual; it was the pain that religion calls original sin.

Outside the warehouse, Odone found the day labourers waiting for him with a consignment of oranges in crates, and he forgot himself easily in the task of labelling and supervision; then he wrote out some invoices; he transcribed into fine commercial handwriting a long letter of which the boss had given him a rough draft; he went to run an errand on the other side of the city; returned with the reply, and had to go out again to the Adria shipping company to pay a bill for shipment; he washed the canvas sheets and put the letters in the press; finally, he helped the caretaker to close up. He ought also to have hurried to the central post office to make sure the correspondence should leave within the day, but that evening, as soon as he was out of sight of the boss, he threw it into an ordinary letterbox (the first he found); and he arrived home almost at a run. His mother, who had been waiting for him at the window, opened the door without asking: ‘Who is it?’ She took his hat from his hand, handed him his spare jacket and then said with a smile: