Free The Watcher and Other Stories by Italo Calvino Page B

numbers on the beds. At a certain moment the chairman stopped at the motionless giant with the huge head, and consulted the list as if to verify that it was the fourth voter’s number, but the priest pushed him away. “Come, let’s go out. I can see that they’ve all got worse in here...”
    â€œThe other years they had them do it,” the nun said, as if she were talking of injections.
    â€œWell, now they’re worse,” the priest concluded. “Obviously, a sick person either gets well or he gets worse.”
    â€œNot all of them are capable of voting, of course, poor things,” the woman in white said, as if apologizing.
    â€œOh, my goodness!” the nun laughed, “There are some that can’t vote, all right. You should see over there, on the veranda...”
    â€œCan we see?” the woman in white asked.
    â€œWhy, of course, come this way.” The nun opened the glass door.
    â€œIf they’re the kind that frighten people, I’m afraid,” the clerk said. Amerigo, too, had drawn back.
    The Reverend Mother was still smiling: “No, no, why be afraid? They’re good creatures....”
    The door opened on a terrace, a kind of veranda; and there was a semicircle of huge high chairs, with a number of young men seated in them, their heads shaved, but not their faces, their hands resting on the chair arms. They wore blue-striped robes which fell to the ground, hiding the pot beneath each chair, but the stink and the trickles of the overflow were visible on the floor, between their bare legs, their feet in clogs. They too had the same fraternal resemblance that reigned at Cottolengo and their expressions were the same, with their shapeless, snaggle-toothed mouths open in a snigger that could also be a kind of weeping; and the racket they made was a single, lifeless bleat of laughter and tears. Standing in front of them, an assistant-one of those ugly but brighter boys—kept order, with a switch in his hand, and he intervened when one of the boys wanted to touch himself, or get up, or when he disturbed the others or made too much noise. A bit of sun shone against the glass panes of the veranda, and the young men laughed at the reflections, then passed abruptly to wrath, shouting at one another, then they immediately forgot.
    The election watchers looked in for a moment, from the door, then drew back, and went along the ward. The Reverend Mother preceded them. “You’re a saint,” the woman in white said. “If there weren’t souls like you, these poor unhappy things...”
    The old nun looked around, with her limpid, happy eyes, as if she were in a garden filled with health, and she answered the other’s praise with those ready-made remarks that express modesty and love of one’s neighbor, but her words were natural, because everything must have been very natural for her, there must have been no doubts, since she had chosen definitively to live for these inmates.
    Amerigo, too, would have liked to express his admiration and fondness to her, but what occurred to him was a speech on how society should be, according to him, a society where a woman like her would no longer be considered a saint, because persons like her would be countless, instead of being relegated to the margin of society, shut off in their halo of sanctity; and living, as she did, for a universal goal would be more natural than living for any special goal, and it would be possible for each to express himself, his own, buried, secret, individual energy, in his social functions, in his personal relationship with the common good....
    But the more he stubbornly thought these things, the more he realized that this, too, wasn’t what mattered to him at that moment: it was something else, for which he couldn’t find words. In short, facing the old nun, he still felt himself in his own world, confirmed in the moral feelings he had always (though inaccurately