Free History by Elsa Morante, Lily Tuck, William Weaver

Giuseppe, but was too long for her, falling to her feet. A local man seeing her go by in the distance, cloaked in that way, could have taken her for the monacheddu, the little domestic bri disguised as a monk, who roams

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    about at night, they say, entering houses by dropping down the chimney. Apparently, however, nobody encountered her, naturally enough, on that isolated shore, seldom visited, especially at night.
    The fi to fi her were some boatmen coming in at dawn from their fi and immediately they thought she was a suicide, brought ashore by the sea's currents. But the position of the drowned woman and the condi tion of her body did not agree with that hasty conclusion.
    She was lying below the waterline, on sand still wet from the recent tide, in a relaxed and natural attitude, like someone surprised by death in a state of unconsciousness or in sleep. Her head was on the sand, which the light fl had made even and clean, without seaweed or fl and the rest of her body was on the great man's cloak, held at the collar by the buckle and spread out at her sides, open, all soaked with water. The little artifi silk dress, damp and smoothed by the water, clung decorously to her thin body, which seemed unharmed, not swollen or abused as bodies washed in by the tide usually look. And the tiny blue carnations printed on the silk appeared new, brightened by the water, against the dark back ground of the cloak.
    The sea's only violence had been to tear off her little shoes and undo her hair which, despite her age, had remained long and abundant, and only partly graying, so that now, wet, it seemed black again, and had fallen all down one side, almost gracefully. The curren t had not even slipped from her emaciated hand the little gold wedding ring, whose slight, precious gleam was distinct in the day's advancing light.
    This was all the gold she possessed. In spite of her patriotic comform ity (unlike her timid daughter Ida), she had not wanted to part with it even when the government had invited the people to "give gold to the Fatherl to aid the Abyssinian conquest.
    On her wrist, not yet spotted with rust, there remained her cheap little metal watch, stopped at four o'clock.
    The examination of the body confi beyond a doubt her death by drown but she had left no sign or farewell message that indicated any suicidal intention. They found on her, hidden in the usual place beneath her stocking, her secret treasure in banknotes, still recogniza though reduced by the water to a valueless pulp. Knowing Nora's character, we can be sure that if she had meant to do away with herself, she would fi have taken care, wherever she was, to save from destruction that capital, so huge for her, accumulated with such perseverance.
    Moreover, if she had really abandoned herself to the great mass of the sea, deliberately seeking death, we can suppose that the cloak's weight, increased by the water, would have dragged her to the bottom.
    The case was closed, with the verdict: accidental death by drowning.
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    And this, in my opinion, is the most logica explanation. I believe that death caught her unawares, perhaps when she had fallen into one of those spells she had been prone to for some time.
    At that part of the coast, and in that season, the tides are light, especially at the new moon. In her futile, haunted, and almost blind journey in the darkness of the night, she must have lost all sense of direc tion and even all sensory signals. And inadvertently she must have ad vanced too far on the strip washed by the tide, perhaps confused between the ocean of com and the windless sea, or perhaps in some deranged move towards the ghost outline of a ship. There she fell, and the tide, already turning, covered her, just enough to drown her, but without assaulting her or stri her, and with no other sound save its own sucking imperceptible in the calm air. Meanwhile, the water-logged mantle, its edges buried under layers of sand, held