Cuore (Heart) - Edmondo De Amicis (speed reading book txt) 📗

in a great misfortune. In the San Carlo Square, all decorated with red, white, and yellow festoons, a vast multitude had assembled; masks of every hue were flitting about; cars, gilded and adorned, in the shape of pavilions; little theatres, barks filled with harlequins and warriors, cooks, sailors, and shepherdesses; there was such a confusion that one knew not where to look; a tremendous clash of trumpets, horns, and cymbals lacerated the ears; and the masks on the chariots drank and sang, as they apostrophized the people in the streets and at the windows, who retorted at the top of their lungs, and hurled oranges and sugar-plums at each other vigorously; and above the chariots and the throng, as far as the eye could reach, one could see banners fluttering, helmets gleaming, plumes waving, gigantic pasteboard heads moving, huge head-dresses, enormous trumpets, fantastic arms, little drums, castanets, red caps, and bottles;—all the world seemed to have gone mad. When our carriage entered the square, a magnificent chariot was driving in front of us, drawn by four horses covered with trappings embroidered in gold, and all wreathed in artificial roses, upon which there were fourteen or fifteen gentlemen masquerading as gentlemen at the court of France, all glittering with silk, with huge white wigs, a plumed hat, under the arm a small-sword, and a tuft of ribbons and laces on the breast. They were very gorgeous. They were singing a French canzonette in concert and throwing sweetmeats to the people, and the people clapped their hands and shouted. Suddenly, on our left, we saw a man lift a child of five or six above the heads of the crowd,—a poor little creature, who wept piteously, and flung her arms about as though in a fit of convulsions. The man made his way to the gentlemen’s chariot; one of the latter bent down, and the other said aloud:—

“Take this child; she has lost her mother in the crowd; hold her in your arms; the mother may not be far off, and she will catch sight of her: there is no other way.”

The gentleman took the child in his arms: all the rest stopped singing; the child screamed and struggled; the gentleman removed his mask; the chariot continued to move slowly onwards. Meanwhile, as we were afterwards informed, at the opposite extremity of the square a poor woman, half crazed with despair, was forcing her way through the crowd, by dint of shoves and elbowing, and shrieking:—

“Maria! Maria! Maria! I have lost my little daughter! She has been stolen from me! They have suffocated my child!” And for a quarter of an hour she raved and expressed her despair in this manner, straying now a little way in this direction, and then a little way in that, crushed by the throng through which she strove to force her way.

The gentleman on the car was meanwhile holding the child pressed against the ribbons and laces on his breast, casting glances over the square, and trying to calm the poor creature, who covered her face with her hands, not knowing where she was, and sobbed as though she would break her heart. The gentleman was touched: it was evident that these screams went to his soul. All the others offered the child oranges and sugar-plums; but she repulsed them all, and grew constantly more convulsed and frightened.

“Find her mother!” shouted the gentleman to the crowd; “seek her mother!” And every one turned to the right and the left; but the mother was not to be found. Finally, a few paces from the place where the Via Roma enters the square, a woman was seen to rush towards the chariot. Ah, I shall never forget that! She no longer seemed a human creature: her hair was streaming, her face distorted, her garments torn; she hurled herself forward with a rattle in her throat,—one knew not whether to attribute it to either joy, anguish, or rage,—and darted out her hands like two claws to snatch her child. The chariot halted.

“Here she is,” said the gentleman, reaching out the child after kissing it; and he placed her in her mother’s arms, who pressed her to her breast like a fury. But one of the tiny hands rested a second longer in the hands of the gentleman; and the latter, pulling off of his right hand a gold ring set with a large diamond, and slipping it with a rapid movement upon the finger of the little girl, said:—

“Take this; it shall be your marriage dowry.”

The mother stood rooted to the spot, as though enchanted; the crowd broke into applause; the gentleman put on his mask again, his companions resumed their song, and the chariot started on again slowly, amid a tempest of hand-clapping and hurrahs.

THE BLIND BOYS.

Thursday, 24th.

The master is very ill, and they have sent in his stead the master of the fourth grade, who has been a teacher in the Institute for the Blind. He is the oldest of all the instructors, with hair so white that it looks like a wig made of cotton, and he speaks in a peculiar manner, as though he were chanting a melancholy song; but he does it well, and he knows a great deal. No sooner had he entered the schoolroom than, catching sight of a boy with a bandage on his eye, he approached the bench, and asked him what was the matter.

“Take care of your eyes, my boy,” he said to him. And then Derossi asked him:—

“Is it true, sir, that you have been a teacher of the blind?”

“Yes, for several years,” he replied. And Derossi said, in a low tone, “Tell us something about it.”

The master went and seated himself at his table.

Coretti said aloud, “The Institute for the Blind is in the Via Nizza.”

“You say blind—blind," said the master, “as you would say poor or ill, or I know not what. But do you thoroughly comprehend the significance of that word? Reflect a little. Blind! Never to see anything! Not to be able to distinguish the day from night; to see neither the sky, nor sun, nor your parents, nor anything of what is around you, and which you touch; to be immersed in a perpetual obscurity, and as though buried in the bowels of the earth! Make a little effort to close your eyes, and to think of being obliged to remain forever thus; you will suddenly be overwhelmed by a mental agony, by terror; it will seem to you impossible to resist, that you must burst into a scream, that you must go mad or die. But, poor boys! when you enter the Institute of the Blind for the first time, during their recreation hour, and hear them playing on violins and flutes in all directions, and talking loudly and laughing, ascending and descending the stairs at a rapid pace, and wandering freely through the corridors and dormitories, you would never pronounce these unfortunates to be the unfortunates that they are. It is necessary to observe them closely. There are lads of sixteen or eighteen, robust and cheerful, who bear their blindness with a certain ease, almost with hardihood; but you understand from a certain proud, resentful expression of countenance that they must have suffered tremendously before they became resigned to this misfortune.

“There are others, with sweet and pallid faces, on which a profound resignation is visible; but they are sad, and one understands that they must still weep at times in secret. Ah, my sons! reflect that some of them have lost their sight in a few days, some after years of martyrdom and many terrible chirurgical operations, and that many were born so,—born into a night that has no dawn for them, that they entered into the world as into an immense tomb, and that they do not know what the human countenance is like. Picture to yourself how they must have suffered, and how they must still suffer, when they think thus confusedly of the tremendous difference between themselves and those who see, and ask themselves, ‘Why this difference, if we are not to blame?’

“I who have spent many years among them, when I recall that class, all those eyes forever sealed, all those pupils without sight and without life, and then look at the rest of you, it seems impossible to me that you should not all be happy. Think of it! there are about twenty-six thousand blind persons in Italy! Twenty-six thousand persons who do not see the light—do you understand? An army which would employ four hours in marching past our windows.”

The master paused. Not a breath was audible in all the school. Derossi asked if it were true that the blind have a finer sense of feeling than the rest of us.

The master said: “It is true. All the other senses are finer in them, because, since they must replace, among them, that of sight, they are more and better exercised than they are in the case of those who see. In the morning, in the dormitory, one asks another, ‘Is the sun shining?’ and the one who is the most alert in dressing runs instantly into the yard, and flourishes his hands in the air, to find out whether there is any warmth of the sun perceptible, and then he runs to communicate the good news, ‘The sun is shining!’ From the voice of a person they obtain an idea of his height. We judge of a man’s soul by his eyes; they, by his voice. They remember intonations and accents for years. They perceive if there is more than one person in a room, even if only one speaks, and the rest remain motionless. They know by their touch whether a spoon is more or less polished. Little girls distinguish dyed wools from that which is of the natural color. As they walk two and two along the streets, they recognize nearly all the shops by their odors, even those in which we perceive no odor. They spin top, and by listening to its humming they go straight to it and pick it up without any mistake. They trundle hoop, play at ninepins, jump the rope, build little houses of stones, pick violets as though they saw them, make mats and baskets, weaving together straw of various colors rapidly and well—to such a degree is their sense of touch skilled. The sense of touch is their sight. One of their greatest pleasures is to handle, to grasp, to guess the forms of things by feeling them. It is affecting to see them when they are taken to the Industrial Museum, where they are allowed to handle whatever they please, and to observe with what eagerness they fling themselves on geometrical bodies, on little models of houses, on instruments; with what joy they feel over and rub and turn everything about in their hands, in order to see how it is made. They call this seeing!”

Garoffi interrupted the teacher to inquire if it was true that blind boys learn to reckon better than others.

The master replied: “It is true. They learn to reckon and to write. They have books made on purpose for them, with raised characters; they pass their fingers over these, recognize the letters and pronounce the words. They read rapidly; and you should see them blush, poor little things, when they make a mistake. And they write, too, without ink. They write on a thick and hard sort of paper with a metal bodkin, which makes a great many little hollows, grouped according to a special alphabet; these little punctures stand out in relief on the other side of the paper, so that by turning the paper over and drawing their fingers across these projections, they can read what they have written, and also the writing of others; and