“Yes,” I agreed, “of course she is. But are not you both making too much of this? You could not have known there would be an earthquake in Messina. If there was to
be one it might have been in some other city, and they would not have been destroyed.”
“Look here; perhaps she was not a so bad woman; perhaps some day she would be making a little Ricuzzu and would be learning to be a good woman.”
“She might learn very slowly or not at all; and think of her poor husband all the time!”
“Let us talk of something other. Do you remember Alfio Mascalucía?”
“Perhaps; what did he do?”
“You were always calling him Bellini.”
“In the barber’s shop opposite? Of course, I remember him, but I had no idea he had such a magnificent name or I never should have dared to take liberties with it.”
I remembered him very well. I remembered going into the shop one day and he was alone, busy writing at a table in the corner. He said he was composing a polka. He had ruled his own staves because, like Schubert, he could not afford to buy music paper; he wanted all the money he could save to pay a publisher to publish his polka—just as we do in England—and if it succeeded his fortune would be made. I felt a sinking at the heart, as though he was telling me he had been gazing on the mirage of the lottery until he had dreamt a number. He had filled about two pages and a half with polka stuff, but had not yet composed the conclusion.
“You see, what I must do is to make it arrive there where the bars end” (he had drawn his bar lines by anticipation); “that will not be difficult; it is the beginning that is difficult—the tema. It does not much matter now what I write for the coda in those empty bars, but I must fill them all with something.”