Oh, that is simple enough! She needs it. On
the platform of the Reggio station (long before the earthquake) I once
counted five station-masters and forty-eight other railway officials,
swaggering about with a magnificent air of incapacity. What were they
doing? Nothing whatever. They were like this woman: they needed a job.
We are in a patriarchal country; work is pooled; it is given not to
those who can do it best, but to those who need it most - given, too, on
pretexts which sometimes strike one as inadequate, not to say recondite.
So the street-scavengering in a certain village has been entrusted to a
one-armed cripple, utterly unfit for the business - why? Because his
maternal grand-uncle is serving a long sentence in gaol. The poor family
must be helped! A brawny young fellow will be removed from a
landing-stage boat, and his place taken by some tottering old peasant
who has never handled an oar - why? The old man's nephew has married
again; the family must be helped. A secretarial appointment was
specially created for an acquaintance of mine who could barely sign his
own name, for the obvious reason that his cousin's sister was rheumatic.
One must help that family.
A postman whom I knew delivered the letters only once every three days,
alleging, as unanswerable argument in his defence, that his brother's
wife had fifteen children.
One must help that family!
Somebody seems to have thought so, at all events.
XXIX
CHAOS
I have never beheld the enchantment of the Straits of Messina, that Fata
Morgana, when, under certain conditions of weather, phantasmagoric
palaces of wondrous shape are cast upon the waters - not mirrored, but
standing upright; tangible, as it were; yet diaphanous as a veil of gauze.
A Dominican monk and correspondent of the Naples Academy, Minasi by
name, friend of Sir W. Hamilton, wrote a dissertation upon this
atmospheric mockery. Many have seen and described it, among them Filati
de Tassulo; Nicola Leoni reproduces the narrative of an eye-witness
of 1643; another account appears in the book of A. Fortis
("Mineralogische Reisen, 1788"). The apparition is coy. Yet there are
pictures of it - in an article in "La Lettura" by Dr. Vittorio Boccara,
who therein refers to a scientific treatise by himself on the subject,
as well as in the little volume "Da Reggio a Metaponto" by Lupi-Crisafi,
which was printed at Gerace some years ago. I mention these writers for
the sake of any one who, luckier than myself, may be able to observe
this phenomenon and become interested in its history and origin. . . .
The chronicles of Messina record the scarcely human feats of the diver
Cola Pesce (Nicholas the Fish). The dim submarine landscapes of the
Straits with their caves and tangled forests held no secrets from him;
his eyes were as familiar with sea-mysteries as those of any fish.
