They replied:
"There is misfortune everywhere, and they all know it."
Disparagingly she shook her head.
But foreigners, driven by the desire for change, wander everywhere, and naturally enough as they passed her house looked in. She was at home, she saw the ugly looks, expressing aversion and loathing, on the repleted faces of these idle people, heard how they spoke about her son, making wry mouths and screwing up their eyes. Her heart was especially wounded by a few words uttered contemptuously, with animosity, and obvious triumph.
Many times she repeated to herself the stranger's words, committing them to memory; her heart, the heart of an Italian woman and a mother, divined their insulting meaning.
That same day she went to an interpreter whom she knew and asked what the words meant.
"It depends upon who uttered them!" he replied, knitting his brows. "They mean: 'Italy is the first of the Latin races to degenerate.' ... Where did you hear this lie?"
She went away without answering.
The next day her son died in convulsions from over-eating.
She sat in the yard near the box, her hand on the head of her dead son; still seeming to be calmly waiting, waiting. She looked questioningly into the eyes of everybody who came to the house to look upon the deceased.