family. He made a papery rustle at every step; the saw peeped out now and then above his collar.
Looking for wood in the city: easier said than done! Marcovaldo headed at once towards a little patch of public park that stood between two streets. All was deserted. Marcovaldo studied the naked trees, one by one, thinking of his family, waiting for him with their teeth chattering.
Little Michelino, his teeth chattering, was reading a book of fairy-tales, borrowed from the small library at school. The book told of a child, son of a woodsman, who went out with a hatchet to chop wood in the forest. 'That's the place to go!' Michelino said. 'The forest! There's wood there, all right!' Born and raised in the city, he had never seen a forest, not even at a distance.
Then and there, he worked it out with his brothers: one took a hatchet, one a hook, one a rope; they said good-bye to their Mamma and went out in search of a forest.
They walked around the city, illuminated by street-lamps, and they saw only houses: not a sign of a forest. They encountered an occasional passer-by, but they didn't dare ask him where a forest was. And so they reached the area where the houses of the city ended and the street turned into a highway.
At the sides of the highway, the children saw the forest: a thick growth of strange trees blocked the view of the plain. Their trunks were very very slender, erect or slanting; and their crowns were flat and outspread, revealing the strangest shapes and the strangest colors when a passing car illuminated them with its headlights. Boughs in the form of a toothpaste tube, a face, cheese, hand, razor, bottle, cow, tire, all dotted with a foliage of letters of the alphabet.
'Hurrah!' Michelino said. 'This is the forest!'
And, spellbound, the brothers watched the moon rise among those strange shadows: 'How beautiful it is…'
Michelino immediately reminded them of their purpose in coming there: wood. So they chopped down a little tree in the form of a yellow primrose blossom, cut it into bits, and took it home.
Marcovaldo came home with his scant armful of damp branches, and found the stove burning.
'Where did you find it?' he cried, pointing to what remained of a billboard, which, being of plywood, had burned very quickly.
'In the forest!' the children said.
'What forest?'
'The one by the highway. It's full of wood!'
Since it was so simple, and there was need of more wood, he thought he might as well follow the children's example, and Marcovaldo again went out with his saw. He went to the highway.
Officer Astolfo, of the highway police, was a bit shortsighted, and on night duty, racing on his motorcycle, he should have worn eyeglasses; but he didn't say so, for fear it would block his advancement.
That evening, there was a report that on the superhighway a bunch of kids was knocking down billboards. Officer Astolfo set out to inspect.
On either side of the road, the forest of strange figures, admonishing and gesticulating, accompanied Astolfo, who peered at them one by one, widening his near-sighted eyes. There, in the beam of his motorcycle's headlight, he caught a little urchin who had climbed up on a billboard. Astolfo put on the brakes. 'Hey, what are you doing there? Jump down this minute!' The kid didn't move and stuck out its tongue. Astolfo approached and saw it was an ad for processed cheese, with a big child licking his lips. 'Yes, of course,' Astolfo said, and zoomed off.
A little later, in the shadow of a huge billboard, he illuminated a sad, frightened face. 'Don't make a move! Don't try running away!' But nobody ran away. It was a suffering human face painted in the midst of a foot covered with corns: an ad for a corn remover. 'Oh, sorry,' Astolfo said, and dashed away.
The billboard for a headache tablet was a gigantic head of a man, his hands over his eyes, in pain. Astolfo sped past, and the headlight illuminated Marcovaldo, who had scrambled to the top with his saw, trying to cut off a slice. Dazzled by the light, Marcovaldo huddled down and remained motionless, clinging to an ear of the big head, where the saw had already reached the middle of the brow.
Astolfo examined it carefully and said: 'Oh, yes. Stappa tablets! Very effective ad! Smart idea! That little man up there with the saw represents the migraine that is cutting the head in two. I got it right away!' And he went off, content.
All was silence and cold. Marcovaldo heaved a sigh of relief, settled on his uncomfortable perch, and resumed work. The muffled scrape of the saw against the wood spread through the moonlit sky.
SPRING
9. The good air
'These children,' the Public Health doctor said, 'need to breathe some good air, at a certain altitude; they should run through meadows…'
He was between the beds of the half-basement where the family lived, and was pressing his stethoscope against little Teresa's back, between her shoulder-blades, frail as the wings of a tiny featherless bird. The beds were two, and the four children, all ill, peeked out at the head and foot of each bed, with flushed cheeks and glistening eyes.
'On meadows like the flower-bed in the square?' Michelino asked.
'The altitude of a skyscraper?' asked Filippetto. 'Air that's good to eat?' asked Pietruccio.
Marcovaldo, tall and skinny, and his wife, Domitilla, short and squat, were leaning on one elbow on either side of a rickety chest of drawers. Without moving the elbow, each raised the other arm and then dropped it, grumbling together: 'Where are we supposed to find those things, six mouths to feed, loaded with debts? How are we supposed to manage?'
'The most beautiful place we can send them,' Marcovaldo declared, 'is into the streets.'
'We'll find good air,' Domitilla concluded, 'when we're evicted and have to sleep under the stars.'
One Saturday afternoon, as soon as they were well again, Marcovaldo took the children and led them off on a walk in the hills. The part of the city where they lived is the farthest from the hills. To reach the slopes they made a long journey on a crowded tram and the children saw only the legs of passengers around them. Little by little the tram emptied; at the windows, finally freed, an avenue appeared, climbing up. And so they reached the end of the line and set forth.
It was early spring; the trees were just budding in a tepid sun. The children looked around, slightly disoriented. Marcovaldo led them up a little path of steps, rising among the green.
'Why is there a stairway without a house over it?' Michelino asked.
'It's not a house stairway; it's like a street.'
'A street… And how can the cars manage the steps?' Around them there were garden walls, with trees inside.
'Walls without a roof… Did they bomb them?'
'They're gardens… like courtyards…' the father explained. 'The house is farther back, beyond those trees.'
Michelino shook his head, unconvinced. 'But courtyards are inside houses, not outside.'
Teresina asked: 'Do the trees live in these houses?'
As they climbed up, it seemed to Marcovaldo that he was gradually shedding the moldy smell of the warehouse in which he shifted packages for eight hours a day and the damp stains on the walls of his house and the dust that settled, gilded, in the cone of light from the little window, and the fits of coughing in the darkness. His children now seemed to him less sallow and frail, already somehow part of that light and that green.
'You like it here, don't you?'
'Yes.'
'Why?'
'There aren't any police. You can pull up the flowers, throw stones.'
'What about breathing? Are you breathing?'
'No.'
