"You sent him into the plains last summer?" I ventured.
"To Cisterna. One must make a little money, or starve."
"And you expect to keep your children alive if you send them to Cisterna?"
I was astonished that the local medicine man had not diagnosed malaria. I undertook that if she would put him into the train when next I went to Rome, I would have him overhauled by a competent physician and packed home again with written instructions. (I kept my word, and the good doctor Salatino of the Via Torino--a Calabrian who knows something about malaria--wrote out a treatment for this neglected case, no part of which, I fear, has been observed. Such is the fatalism of the country-folk that if drugs and injections do not work like magic they are quietly discarded. This youth may well have gone the way of "those other two"--who, by the by, were also sent into the Pontine Marshes--since you cannot reject your food for ever, and grow more anaemic every day, without producing some such result.)
Meanwhile my friendly offer caused so great a joy in the mother's heart that I became quite embarrassed. She likened me, among other things, to her favourite Saint.
All comparisons being odious, I turned the conversation by asking:
"And that last one?"
"Here," she said, pushing open the door of the inner room.
He lay on the couch fast asleep, in a glorious tangle of limbs, the picture of radiant boyhood.
"This one, I think, has never been to Cisterna."