to come out. The rabbit followed him, cautiously bit the carrot and began gnawing it diligently, in Marcovaldo's hand. The man stroked it on the back and, meanwhile, squeezed it, to see if it was fat. He felt it was somewhat bony, under its coat. From this fact, and from the way it pulled on the carrot, it was obvious that they kept it on short rations. If it belonged to me, Marcovaldo thought, I would stuff it until it became a ball. And he looked at it with the loving eye of the breeder who manages to allow kindness towards the animal to coexist with anticipation of the roast, all in one emotion. There, after days and days of sordid stay in the hospital, at the moment of leaving, he discovered a friendly presence, which would have sufficed to fill his hours and his thoughts. And he had to leave it, go back into the foggy city, where you don't encounter rabbits.
The carrot was almost finished. Marcovaldo took the animal into his arms while he looked around for something else to feed him. He held its nose to a potted geranium on the doctor's desk, but the animal indicated it didn't like the plant. At that same moment Marcovaldo heard the doctor's step, coming back: how could he explain why he was holding the rabbit in his arms? He was wearing his heavy work coat, tight at the waist. In a hurry, he stuck the rabbit inside, buttoned his coat all the way up, and to keep the doctor from seeing that wriggling bulge at his stomach, he shifted it around to his back. The rabbit, frightened, behaved itself. Marcovaldo collected his papers and moved the rabbit to his chest, because he had to turn and leave. And so, with the rabbit hidden under his coat, he left the hospital and went to work.
'Ah, you're cured at last?' the foreman, Signor Viligelmo, said, seeing him arrive. 'And what's that growth there?' and he pointed to the bulging chest.
'I'm wearing a hot poultice to prevent cramps,' Marcovaldo said.
At that, the rabbit twitched, and Marcovaldo jumped up like an epileptic.
'Now what's come over you?' Viligelmo said.
'Nothing. Hiccups,' he answered, and with one hand he shoved the rabbit behind his back.
'You're still a bit seedy, I notice,' the boss said.
The rabbit was trying to crawl up his back, and Marcovaldo shrugged hard to send it down again.
'You're shivering. Go home for another day. And make sure you're well tomorrow.'
Marcovaldo came home, carrying the rabbit by its ears, like a lucky hunter.
'Papa! Papa!' the children hailed him, running to meet him. 'Where did you catch it? Can we have it? Is it a present for us?' And they tried to grab it at once.
'You're back?' his wife said, and from the look she gave him, Marcovaldo realized that his period of hospitalization had served only to enable her to accumulate new grievances against him. 'A live animal? What are you going to do with it? It'll make messes all over the place.'
Marcovaldo cleared the table and set the rabbit down in the middle, where it huddled flat, as if trying to vanish. 'Don't anybody dare touch it!' he said. 'This is our rabbit, and it's going to fatten up peacefully till Christmas.'
'Is it a male or a female?' Michelino asked.
Marcovaldo had given no thought to the possibility of its being a female. A new plan immediately occurred to him: if it was a female, he could mate her and start raising rabbits. And already in his imagination the damp walls disappeared and the room was a green farm among the fields.
But it was a male, all right. Still Marcovaldo had now got this idea of raising rabbits into his head. It was a male, but a very handsome male, for whom a bride should be found and the means to raise a family.
'What are we going to feed it, when we don't have enough for ourselves?' his wife asked, sharply.
'Let me give it some thought,' Marcovaldo said.
The next day, at work, from some green potted plants in the Management Office, which he was supposed to take out every morning, water, then put back, he removed one leaf each-broad leaves, shiny on one side and opaque on the other-and stuck them into his overalls. Then, when one of the girls came in with a bunch of flowers, he asked her, 'Did your boy-friend give them to you? Aren't you going to give me one?' and he pocketed that, too. To a boy peeling a pear, he said, 'Leave me the peel.' And so, a leaf here, a peeling there, a petal somewhere else, he hoped to feed the animal.
At a certain point, Signor Viligelmo sent for him. Can they have noticed the plants are missing leaves? Marcovaldo wondered, accustomed always to feeling guilty.
In the foreman's office there was the doctor from the hospital, two Red Cross men, and a city policeman. 'Listen,' the doctor said, 'a rabbit has disappeared from my laboratory. If you know anything about it, you'd better not try to act smart. Because we've injected it with the germs of a terrible disease and it can spread it through the whole city. I needn't ask if you've eaten it; if you had, you'd be dead and gone by now.'
An ambulance was waiting outside; they rushed and got in it, and with the siren screaming constantly, they went through streets and avenues to Marcovaldo's house, and along the way there remained a wake of leaves and peelings and flowers that Marcovaldo sadly threw out of the window.
Marcovaldo's wife that morning simply didn't know what to put in the pot. She looked at the rabbit her husband had brought home the day before, now in a makeshift cage, filled with shavings. 'It arrived just at the right moment,' she said to herself. 'There's no money; his wages have already gone for the extra medicines the Public Health doesn't cover; the shops won't give us anymore credit. Raise rabbits, indeed! Or wait till Christmas to roast it! We're skipping meals, and we're supposed to fatten a rabbit!'
'Isolina,' she said to her daughter, 'you're a big girl now, you have to learn how to cook a rabbit. You begin by killing it and skinning it, and then I'll tell you what to do next.'
Isolina was reading a magazine of sentimental romances. 'No,' she whined, '
'What a help!' her mother said. 'I don't have the heart to kill it. But I know it's a very easy matter; you just have to hold it by the ears and hit it hard on the back of the head. As for skinning, we'll see.'
'We won't see anything,' the daughter said, without raising her nose from the magazine. 'I'm not hitting a live rabbit on the head. And I haven't the slightest notion of skinning it, either.'
The three little ones had listened to this dialog with wide eyes.
Their mother pondered for a moment, looked at them, then said, 'Children…'
The children, as if by agreement, turned their backs on their mother and left the room.
'Wait, children!' their mother said. 'I wanted to ask you if you'd like to take the rabbit outside. We'll tie a pretty ribbon around his neck and you can go for a walk with him.'
The children stopped and exchanged looks. 'A walk where?' Michelino asked.
'Oh, a little stroll. Then go call on Signora Diomira, show her the rabbit, and ask her if she'll please kill it and skin it for us. She's so good at that.'
The mother had found the right method: children, as everyone knows, are caught up by the thing they like most, and they prefer not to think of the rest. And so they found a long, lilac-colored ribbon, tied it around the animal's neck, and used it as a leash, fighting over it, and pulling after them the reluctant, half-strangled rabbit.
'Tell Signora Diomira,' the mother insisted, 'that she can keep a leg for herself! No, better the head. Oh, she can take her pick.'
The children had barely gone out when Marcovaldo's room was surrounded and invaded by orderlies, doctors, guards, and policemen. Marcovaldo was in their midst, more dead than alive. 'Where is the rabbit that was taken from the hospital? Hurry: show us where it is, but don't touch it; it's infected with the germs of a terrible disease!' Marcovaldo led them to the cage, but it was empty. 'Already eaten?'
'No, no!'
'Where is it then?'
'At Signora Diomira's!' And the pursuers resumed their hunt.
They knocked at Signora Diomira's door. 'Rabbit? What rabbit? Are you crazy?' Seeing her house invaded by strangers, in white jackets or uniforms, looking for a rabbit, the old woman nearly had a stroke. She knew nothing about Marcovaldo's rabbit.
In fact, the three children, trying to save the rabbit from death, had decided to take it to a safe place, play with it for a while, and then let it go; and instead of stopping at Signora Diomira's landing, they decided to climb up to a terrace over the rooftops. They would tell their mother it had broken the leash and had run off. But no animal seemed so ill-suited to an escape as that rabbit. Making it climb all those steps was a problem: it huddled, frightened, on each step. In the end they picked it up and carried it.
On the terrace they wanted to make it run: it wouldn't run. They tried setting it on the edge of the roof, to see
