‘Thank you for the nice gift you gave me. How much did it cost you?’

‘Three Kronen fifty,’ Odone replied cheerfully, ‘plus a twenty-heller tip. Not much, is it?’ He was happy and surprised that his mother had welcomed with pleasure, and as a gift for her, that forbidden animal, in truth more adapted to a farmyard than a dwelling, which soiled everything in its path.

‘Where is she?’ he said. ‘Let me see her.’

She opened a door. Behind it, the hen hung on a nail, already plucked, in the rigidity of death. The sight froze Odone’s heart.

‘I don’t know,’ his mother said, ‘how you managed to find such a nice fat one. It looks more like a capon than a hen. It really was a lucky find. Tomorrow, I’ll add a bit of beef and make you an excellent broth. For this evening, you’ll have to be content with an omelette. The poor beast was so full of eggs, it was almost a sin to kill it.’

Odone did not want to hear any more and ran to take shelter in his room. His heart was pounding and tears of grief stung his eyes, not only for the miserable end of the fowl – which had served a purpose so different from the one for which he had bought it – but at the thought that his mother – his own mother! – had not understood. Was it possible that a mother did not understand her son? That a son, to make himself understood by his mother, had to explain himself as if to a stranger? Was that how mothers (ten years later he would say ‘women’) were, or only his? He felt no great desire to talk; nevertheless, when the guilty party entered his room, with the oil lamp already lit in her hand, Odone tried to explain the misunderstanding: the immense pain she had caused him, however involuntarily.

Signora Rachele shrugged her shoulders, surprised and annoyed, and said that a boy who was going to be fifteen in two months’ time does not play with hens. Then she advised him to go out for a while, because dinner was not ready yet and a little walk would do him good.

‘Who killed her?’ Odone asked.

‘I did. Why do you ask me that?’

‘Because I didn’t think you had the courage to kill poultry.’

‘When I was a girl,’ Signora Rachele said, ‘I wouldn’t have killed a bird even for a hundred francs. But since I became a mother, it’s stopped having any effect on me. When you were recovering from typhoid, I really relished wringing a fowl’s neck, thinking of the fine nourishing broth it would make for my son.’

Odone fell silent, feeling that what he had to say on the matter was more for himself than for others. But from that evening on, he loved his mother less and less.

‘La gallina’

Written in 1912–13. First published in the journal La tribuna (15 November 1913), then included (with significant changes) in Ricordi-Racconti, the fifteenth volume of Saba’s complete works (Mondadori, 1956).