After supper there came a large moth which fluttered about the lamp; one of the guards called it a “farfalla notturna,” a nocturnal butterfly, and said it had come to bring us good fortune. Another of the men, who was of a sceptical temperament, said it might be so, but that in matters of this kind one never can be sure what one’s fortune would have been if the moth had not come. I said that if there was to be any good fortune for me I should like it to take the form of curing the cold which, for my sins, I had caught that morning as I came out of the sanctuary. The guard who believed in the moth—after returning my compliment about the cooking by saying I must be wrong to talk about my sins, for he was sure I had never committed any—said that as to the kind of luck the moth would bring, Fortune would not submit to dictation, the most I could do to control her would be to look out farfalla notturna in the book and put a few soldi on the number in the next lottery. I told him I had had enough of the lottery at Castelvetrano. The brigadier was interested, so I told him about it and said I was afraid the reason I had lost was that my numbers had nothing to do with anything that had happened to me during
the week. He confirmed what Peppino had said and added that he was always very careful about the choosing of his numbers.
“But surely,” I said, “you do not always win when you follow that rule?”
“I have played every week for twenty years,” said the brigadier, “and have only won four times; but I always hope.”
“One can hope,” I said, “without spending any soldi.”
Here the guard who believed in the moth interposed, seeing that I did not know much about it—
“It is no use hoping unless you do something. It would be absurd to hope for two hundred and fifty francs next week unless you encouraged Fortune to send you the money. Buy a ticket with a likely number and you will have the right to hope.”
“It is like praying for rain,” added the brigadier; “the Madonna may not answer the prayer, but those who pray have done their best and are entitled to hope that rain will follow.”
“This,” I said, “reminds me of an old lady who always insisted on her daughter taking a dose of the medicine her doctor prescribed for her own imaginary complaints.
’How can you hope to be well,’ she used to say, ‘if you never take any medicine?’“