“What on earth are you going to do with it, Buffo?”
“Why, everyone who goes to Catania brings home a piece of lava.”
“Yes, but what do they want it for? It might be a neat chimney ornament, but you have no fireplace in your house. Or you might use it as a paper-weight, but in your family you scarcely ever write a letter.”
He looked at me sadly for a moment and then said:
“I thought you were an artist and now you are being practical. Usefulness is not everything. This piece of lava will be for me an object of eternal beauty, and when I contemplate it I shall think of the happy time we have spent here together.”
I said: “O Buffo! don’t go on like that or you will make me cry.”
In the evening we went to the Teatro Machiavelli and saw a performance by living players. In the first act a good young man introduced Rosina to the cavaliere, who congratulated him on having won the affections of so virtuous and lovely a girl. The cavaliere gave a bad old woman one hundred francs, and in return she promised to procure him an interview with Rosina. The bad old woman persuaded Rosina to enter a house in which we knew the cavaliere was. The good young man asked the bad old woman what she had done with his girl; of course she had done nothing with her, but we heard shrieks. The good young man became suspicious, broke open the door of the house and, on learning the worst, shot the bad old woman dead and was taken by the police.
“This seems as though it were going to be a very interesting play,” said the buffo when the curtain had fallen.
“Yes,” said I, “what do you think will happen next?”
“You ought to know that,” he replied; “it’s no use asking me. I never saw a Sicilian play in Rio.”