Another woman came with her daughter whose leg was broken and they were both naked. The doctor said to the mother:
“And what do you want?”
“Help for my daughter.”
To another destitute woman: “And you?”
Michele, a young man, was known to be in Reggio where he was employed in the Municipio. His father went from Caltanissetta to look for him and returned after four days, during which he had searched for his son and suffered mental anguish and physical discomfort. His friends went to the station to meet him. He talked politics to them and asked their opinion about the rotation of crops.
“And Michele?” they inquired.
“Oh! Michele,” here he began to laugh: “Michele; yes, he is buried under the ruins of a house three storeys high.”
They could get nothing more out of him except laughter and that Michele was lying under a house three storeys high. A few months later, Michele’s body was found, with no traces of decay, brought to Caltanissetta and buried. Then his friends wrote elegies in verse about him and handed them round for approval.
Plenty of people went mad besides Michele’s father. The streets of Messina were full of mad people. They told me of one who lost his wife. Within a fortnight he married a widow whose husband had been destroyed. This happy couple spent their honeymoon in digging out the bodies of their previous spouses and having them suitably buried.