“Superior Stabat Lupus”

Translated by Miranda MacPhail

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “Superior Stabat Lupus”, tr. Miranda MacPhail. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2026.

“Superior Stabat Lupus,” whose Latin title translates roughly to “The Wolf Stood Higher Up” or, more simply, “The Wolf Stood Above,” was first published in the literary journal La Lettura in May of 1912. It was then included in the miscellany collections The Two Masks (Le due maschere, Florence: Quattrini, 1914) and You Laugh (Tu ridi, Milan: Treves, 1920). Finally, Pirandello added it to the eighth Collection of his Stories for a Year, From Nose to Sky (Dal naso al cielo), which was published by Bemporad in Florence in 1925.

The Latin title is a quotation taken from the fable of “The Wolf and the Lamb” as conveyed by the classical Roman author Gaius Julius Phaedrus (~15 BCE to 50 CE). The fable itself harkens back to Aesop. In Phaedrus’ version, it tells the tale of a wolf who invents false accusations against a lamb drinking downstream and, despite the lamb’s innocence, ultimately uses brute force to kill and eat it.

In Pirandello’s “Superior Stabat Lupus,” the story traces out a similar trajectory of self-interested betrayal, though in a much more complicated and multilayered way. The tale exhibits a dark irony, as Pirandello traces the catastrophic chain of substitutions and confusions resulting from a single cause. Corrado Tranzi’s sudden, impetuous love for Ebe, a young woman he meets while attending her dying aunt, is the source of the dominoing series of consequences. After marrying her in a rush of passion, she dies in childbirth; Tranzi irrationally associates their daughter with her death, and so he abandons the girl, who is also named Ebe after her mother, though she is called Bebè as well. She grows up in her grandparents’ house, where her cousin Marco Perla gradually transfers onto her the frustrated love he once felt for her mother, Ebe, blurring memory and desire in a morbid repetition of the past. Pressured into marrying Marco despite her own youthful passion for someone else, Bebè finds herself trapped in a marriage founded on relations of debt and sacrifice. When her father, Tranzi, reappears years later, he recognizes in his daughter the resurrected image of his lost wife and, in a perverse attempt to reclaim his paternal role and “free” her from the life of sacrifice to which she has been abandoned (by himself), he resolves upon a fatal act. The story thus unfolds as a tragic reflection on the ways in which the sins of the father are visited on his child, a Biblical theme, that here also bears resemblance to the Greek fable from which the story takes its name. However, in this version there are multiple characters who can be read as both wolf and sheep. At the same time, in typical Pirandellian fashion, the dark irony of the plot is not simply a condemnation: the reader is left with reason to feel compassion for the suffering of the whole host of characters, each of whom is moved to act in ways that are destructive to others while being rooted in their own deeply-felt needs, sometimes even desire to help precisely those whom they injure.

The Editors

Corrado Tranzi, who until the age of 24 was implacably contemptuous of all women and implacably scornful of all men who fell in love with them, as soon as he received his degree as a doctor of medicine and was summoned to a medical emergency while in the early morning he was arranging a hunting party in the pharmacy of a friend of his—(Was it the fair sky? The mild air of coming spring? A few dreams from the night before?)—he, too, fell in love all of a sudden, precisely during that first visit he performed as a doctor of medicine.[1]

What extraordinarily fine qualities and gifts he discovered in that young woman—who came to open the door with her unbrushed hair, only half-dressed, all gasping between her tears— only he, who had first discerned them, would know/would come to know. Certainly, since the first moment he saw her, he was amazed as he looked at her mouth, while she frantically spoke to him about finding her aunt in bed, fifteen minutes earlier, wheezing for air and unconscious.

Taken into the stricken patient's room, he saw next to her a young man who was perhaps, or rather surely, her son, as well as a man and a woman who were perhaps the mother and father of the young woman in tears. Tranzi noticed right away how, while he was stating the illness (an irrefutable and  irreversible case of a brain embolism),[2] she had begun caressing the hair of the young man, that young cousin who was crying with his face buried in the pillow right next to the head of his mother in the throes of death; indeed he became so vexed he cut off to order that the lad, for the love of God, might go cry farther off. Air! Air! Stand back and let some air circulate around the bed!

The sick woman died three days later. In those three days Corrado Tranzi succeeded in finding out a great many things: that the young woman's name was Ebe;[3] that she was the daughter of a certain De Vitti, professor of physics at the Collegio Nautico;[4] that the deceased was the professor's sister-in-law, many years a widow but taken into his home along with her son whose name was Marco Perla; that the latter, who had been for some time a humble clerk at the Customs House had, with the pleased approval of his relatives, asked for his cousin's hand in marriage; she, however, in great distress, had refused him, openly confessing that it was impossible for her to marry him, she loved him like a brother, and only like that and in no other way would she be able to love him.

Once these things were known, Corrado Tranzi lost no time in stepping forward. In a few months' time the outcome would be decided of a competition, in which he had taken part, to fill three vacancies for assistants at the city's largest hospital. He was sure to win one of them. He felt absolutely sure of it. He had some of his own funds as well as his profession as a doctor. He was able to marry.

Professor De Vitti was initially dismayed by the blusters and strange manners of the young doctor, curly haired and bearded, all jumps and outbursts during his off-the-cuff bouts of contemptuousness; De Vitti hesitated; he tried to take time with the excuse of this recent loss; but Corrado Tranzi stayed strong, as precisely on account of this recent loss he feared that the young woman's fraternal love for her cousin might, from one moment to another, change its nature via the emergence of sympathy, charity, pity, mercy, now that she knew he was completely orphaned and required comforting. Either yes or no, immediately! Ebe accepted him and in a very short time the wedding was held.

It was a rampage, a mad rush of love, that barely lasted one year. Ebe died in childbirth. On the very evening of the tragedy, Corrado Tranzi, without even wanting to see the baby girl who, through her being born, had killed her mother, ran away from home like a madman. He disappeared.

Later it became known that, having by chance met a young colleague who, that very evening, had to set sail as the ship doctor aboard an ocean-liner, he had agreed with pleasure to take the other's place; and he had stayed in America, leaving no trace of his whereabouts.

The little girl, orphaned of her mother and thus abandoned by her father, grew up in her grandparents' house, and they called her Ebe just like their own daughter. And to them it truly seemed that their Ebe had begun to live again in that little girl, first when held in their arms and cared for with their full hearts and baited breath, and then through their care made of shudders and fear.

Bit by bit, growing up, Bebè[5] continued to look more and more like her mother. She had all the same childlike grace, the movements, the smiles, the early games, all observed with wonder by the two old people who believed they were witnessing a prodigious resurrection.

Seeing her grow up so like his cousin whom he had once hoped to make his own, the nephew Marco Perla[6] began to feel every now and then, either on account of a quickly exchanged glance or the sound of laughter or a word or a whim or a tantrum from the little girl, the strange impression of almost an arrest within himself, of a mysterious return to so many things, not being re-lived again, but still alive inside himself; not so much the memories of his childhood spent with another little girl, of whom this one was the precise likeness, but rather the same sentiments which animated those memories that were now once again reviving through the very life of the little girl.

Who, that is to say, like that other one, wanted to play with him. She wanted—without knowing it—to have him repeat those same games he had once played with that other self of hers, who had been her mother as a small child.

And he repeated those games.

Returning home from the office, he used to hide behind the door of the dark room, where there were two old wardrobes. The smell of that stuffy place, with no air, with no light, was like the very breath of remote childhood. With the voice of that former time he called out, peekaboo,[7] then waited to see if that one, that other one, who was alive, alive in this little one, would come to seek him out, to discover him, to flush out his also little self just behind that door. And as soon as he saw her through the crack in the door, all eager and excited and perplexed, here then, just like back then, he held his breath and trembled and, if he could manage it, fled that hiding place and set off at a full run, dodging so as not to let himself be tagged, around the table with its dinner settings and diving among the chairs under the table to come up on the other side, until, fallen and sitting on the floor, he allowed himself to be captured by the little girl with her face lit up by fun and wild spirits.

But where did she grab onto him? Oh! Onto his mustache which back then he didn't have; or else she seized his eyeglasses which back then he didn't wear. And at this sudden sinking back inside himself he was first struck with amazement, slicking back his ruffled mustache, rubbing his bewildered, near-sighted eyes. Sometimes his aunt came across him still sitting on the ground and asked him what he was doing.

"Nothing," he replied with a wan smile, "I'm playing with Bebè."

Among all his memories, the clearest and most precise one he had was of the day and the hour when he, for the first time, he alone, suddenly felt in his little cousin's kiss the taste and warmth of a new love, different from the usual, whereby he was all tormented and excited, almost as if from those unknowing lips, pink and cool, came a delicious fire that suffused his veins.  Ebe had been twelve years old; he fifteen; and it had been an April day, in the early hours of the morning. She had immediately been aware, then, that for the first time he had caught a new taste in their kiss, and she had been offended and no longer wanted him to kiss her that way.

But she wasn't aware, she couldn't be aware of any of this, now, this little Bebè who, having already arrived at her mother's age, every day, seeing him come home from the office, threw her arms around his neck and kissed him with ardent childish exaggeration.

He withdrew into himself and shut his eyes tight and gritted his teeth under that excess to prevent with all his might that also from these pink and cool, unknowing lips, which for him even more than for the old grandparents were just the same as the first Ebe's, the same fire suffused through his every vein.

"You're not kissing me? Oh, you are funny! What's wrong?" Bebè asked him once, after kissing him, looking into his face and bursting out laughing. "Why do you put on that grim face? Why don't you kiss me?"

He ran away and, in front of the mirror, started to cry.

The almost sudden death of Professor De Vitti violently tore Marco Perla away from that mixed up and overwhelmed state of mind.

The professor, having entered the profession late, hadn't completed the number of years of teaching required for a pension, so the widow was left with a few thousand lire: about eight, which were set aside for the little granddaughter.

Now he, Marco Perla, remained the only bread winner for the little family.

He was happy about it, on the one hand; but on the other, the idea that Bebè would begin to see in him someone else, the head of the household, almost a father, and to consider him as such, was deeply disconcerting to him.

For some time, the aunt had noticed in him some odd losses of memory, strange agitations, sudden bouts of sadness; and she saw him getting thinner and more frequently arraying himself in a shaggy and shabby ugliness. She suspected he might be in love; that the death of his uncle might have cut off his hope of making a home for himself; that he was burdened by the debt of gratitude for all the care he had received as a child.

Marco Perla, however, seeing Bebè bloom more like a flower day by day, was overcome with fear that another man, all of a sudden, would come to tear her away from him, just as her mother had been torn from him, without him being able to oppose it in any way, even though he did feel loved by the little girl. Well, yes! Once loved as a brother; now perhaps as a father.

And soon the day came when the aunt, all joyful, believing she was giving him great news, confided to him that that very morning she had received a letter from a young man, who was often seen passing by in the street, beautiful as an angel, she said, blond, with long hair; a painter who would soon be leaving to stay in Rome, and who... The aunt couldn't continue, seeing such a change come over her nephew's face.

"Ah, this one goes to Rome? The way the other one went to America?" he grimaced in a frightful way. "Isn't one enough for you both? Two, eh? You both want to throw away two, to the first man who chances to come along?"

He said, you both, as if the uncle were still alive and wanting to inflict the same torture as before on his nephew.  Unhinged, confusing the first tragedy with this current one, and his first love for his cousin with this one for her child, which for him was the same ongoing love, the same love twice as alive, he shouted all his agony at his aunt.

His aunt, at first astounded, then almost terrified, tried to calm him. She told him that never ever could she have suspected that he had allowed himself to be overcome by such love for that little one. Yes, there was a reason; but it was difficult to make it clear to Bebè, who knew nothing. As if to say, "You, dearest, all these years you believed that you were living for yourself, but no: instead you've been living to renew within me, in my heart, the passion I felt for your mother!"

Oh, she, the aunt, would have been happy to entrust him with that little girl of hers; really happy. But Bebè? The aunt promised to help but there mustn't be any hurry. First they had to remove from Bebè's heart the childish pseudo-love for the young painter, showing her that, because of the youth's age, of his profession, of so many other things, he wasn't to be relied upon; then, bit by bit... who knows?

For Marco Perla these were months of anxiety and desperation.

Perhaps his aunt hadn't known how to speak of it. He felt this must be the case from his observation of Bebè's behavior towards him. But his aunt assured him she had not yet spoken to her about him, not even a mention, and that Bebè was behaving this way because, induced by her, she had broken off all correspondence with the young man who had left for Rome. Marco must wait some more, to let her calm down.

Wait? How long? The more time passed, the more deeply he saw rooted in her heart the memory and the regret for that young man who had left for Rome. Or maybe it was that his aunt couldn't summon the courage to speak to her. She was getting weaker day by day, poor old woman, almost worn away by that secret he had confided to her.

Just before she died, the poor aunt found the courage to speak to Bebè. She called her to her bedside and began by asking the girl if she realized the condition in which she would soon find herself: alone in the house, a youngster, with a man who was neither her father nor brother, and he, too, almost young still, with no true obligation towards her. What was he to her? The son of a sister of her grandmother. And she to him? The daughter of a man who had one day burst into the house like a storm and smashed it. A lithe plant almost without roots she was: her mother, dead; her father, disappeared. She had no other support left but him, Marco, who had sacrificed himself for them. She had to repay him, give recompense for so many sacrifices. He was good and he loved her: he would be both a father and a husband to her. If Bebè wanted her to die easy, she had to say yes.

Amazement, pain, horror, shame assaulted and overwhelmed Bebè, upon this unexpected revelation. She clasped her grandmother's neck and, bursting into sobs, begged her not to die, to have pity on her. No, no, here: she would hold onto her always and wouldn't allow her to die, that's it, she wouldn't allow her! Now that she knew this horrible thing, she didn't want to, nay, couldn't possibly stay with Uncle Marco. For pity’s sake! For pity’s sake! She would rather die.

Bebè had never thought about her father who had disappeared. She had never felt anything for him, neither rancor nor curiosity: for her he didn't exist, he had never existed. He began to exist only on the day her grandmother died, as soon as, returning home from the cemetery, she saw herself with Marco Perla: together yet apart, side by side in enmity, recognizing in him a sentiment to which she knew not how, nor did she want to, respond.

A dark and fierce hate possessed her, turned against the unknown father who had brought her into this world and abandoned her without even seeing her; who, after having given her life, had denied her any right to exist for him, only because she, with no fault of hers, by being born, had killed her mother; as if this hadn't been a tragedy for her as well, and as if instead of   hate and horror, the sight of her, the sight of his orphaned newborn daughter should have inspired in him greater pity, the sentiment of a double duty! He had fled, disappeared, in his horror of her, withdrawing from any responsibility for the life he had given her and turning this responsibility over first to the two poor old people, from whom he had taken their daughter, and over now to one person who had no duty at all to assume it.

Bebè overlooked the fact that this man also had been stripped of something by her father. She overlooked that he had left to him the weighty responsibility of his daughter after depriving him of the mother's love.

Where was the father now? Was he still alive? And how could he not think that, after so many years, the two old people into whose hands he had abandoned his little daughter might not be dead as well, as indeed they were? How could he not think of everything that might have happened and was indeed already happening to her, so alone and unaided? Perhaps, out there with him, he had another family, other children and, thinking of them who were close to him expecting love and care, he managed to shed any remorse for never having thought of her so far away.

And so here it happened someone was taking her in, someone who, in exchange for everything he had done for her, wanted to be paid and as payment exacted her entire self, all her life which belonged to him, since he, that other one, had shouldered him with the burden.

On account of the intensity of these thoughts and these feelings, Bebè, drowning in grief, her spirit overwhelmed by the unfairness of her fate, immediately fell ill, and so seriously that for many days her life was in danger.

For a long time, and without pause, her will to die fought Marco Perla's love, which spread around her, alert, ardent in hanging on to her, sustaining her with insistent and uninterrupted attentiveness, ready to give his own breath for every breath she no longer wished to take and his own life to nourish her against her terrible will to die.[8]

And in the end, his love won and she, in the limp tenderness and abandon of her convalescence, out of gratitude and compassion, finally gave in and convinced herself to marry him.

Once healed, now a woman, as she admired her flowering body, with its flesh still almost girlish yet already insulted by being condemned to never know any joy of love, she could not help thinking that the wretched, scrawny ugliness of him, already almost old, conferred an inestimable value to this body of hers. So it followed that his claim of the payment of it amounted to almost a contract of usury, only partially mitigated by the adoration in which he enclosed her.[9]

This adoration of his would have been just like the one felt by a miser for his treasure, if only he had not shown himself to be so greedy to own her; oh, yes, as if, through her, he wanted to satiate an interminable hunger, which horrified her when she thought back to the kisses she had given him as a child. And reflecting on that greed he continued to get even uglier, with yellowing skin and becoming, day by day, more disheveled and thinner. And he even threw himself into work in order to better their financial condition, which was hardly lavish.

A few months after the wedding he wanted to take part in an internal hiring competition open to Customs officials, and he succeeded in becoming one of the winners.[10] Now he had to go to Rome to take a two-year specialization course at the Higher Institute of Commodity Studies. He hoped, after two years, to be able to stay in Rome, to work at the Ministry of Finance.

However, it happened that, during the emptying of the house for their departure, Bebè discovered in an old cabinet of her grandmother's, banished to the attic, a packet of letters written by that young painter who had gone to Rome about two years previously for his artistic sojourn, letters that the grandmother had intercepted and hidden untouched, maybe because she either hadn't dared destroy them or had, until the end, promised herself to give them to her granddaughter should Marco become convinced that his attempt to get her to give in to him was in vain.

At this discovery, Bebè felt her innards and her heart tear asunder. First shocked, then irate, then disgusted, it all gave her such a sudden wave of feeling that, with her fingers in her hair and her eyes wide open in a fierce glare, she looked to herself almost out of her mind reflected in the mirror of that cabinet.

Having hidden those letters, how could her grandmother, tell her the young man had forgotten all about her, upon his arrival in Rome? Those letters overflowed with passion, they shouted and cried and begged. And she had believed her grandmother! And that young fellow could/might have thought all the bad things about her that she had thought about him! But yes, here it is, in the last desperate letter, he declared her unworthy of his love, and infantile, lying, flirtatious and heartless.

Ah, what infamy! What infamy! So it was that her grandmother and Marco had come to an agreement; and in agreement had they committed such base treachery against her?  But yes, of course! Wasn't she the one who had to pay? The sacrifice of her person wasn't enough; even through the sacrifice of that love she had to pay the care and keep that he had given her. Oh God, God what on earth... Oh God, what on earth...

But in Rome, ah! in Rome, now would she take her revenge. She would find that other man at all costs. Even if it meant losing herself, she would be avenged.

In Rome, three months later, one winter evening a knock came at the door of the few rooms Marco Perla rented in a lugubrious old barn of a place along the lonely avenue of Castro Pretorio al Macao.[11] It was a steely old man with a bristly beard, already very grayed, that blended into the gray collar of his fur coat. Corrado Tranzi.

Waiting for whoever would come to let him in, with his head bowed, his eyebrows knitted above grim eyes that clearly showed throes of anxiety, he dug his nails into the palms of his hands and convulsively wiped his thumbs across the backs of his other clenched fingers.

When at last the housemaid came to open the door, upon seeing the home into which he was about to enter, he felt his breath leave him.

"Mr. Perla?"

The housemaid gave him a look of consternation and said, hesitantly:

"Well, I don't know if the master can receive anyone. He's unwell, and..."

"And his wife?"

"She, too."

"Ill?"

"She's had... I don't know... wait here: I'll go ask the master."

And the housemaid fled, leaving him there before the entrance without even inviting him across the threshold. She came back soon thereafter to answer that Mr. Perla was sorry but there was really no way he could receive him because he was ill and the mistress, too, was indisposed.

"I'm a doctor," the visitor said at this. "For both of them."

And inside he went.

"But, Sir..."

"Tell Mr. Perla that doctor Corrado Tranzi is here. Go on."

During the previous evening, Marco Perla had flung himself on an armchair in a side room that was meant to be both a sitting room and a study. He had spent the night on it; he hadn't risen from it, not even to get any food at noontime. Only from the housemaid had he accepted, later, a cup of coffee with a lemon peel in it. Upon hearing the name of Tranzi he was transfixed as if astounded. And twice he tried to leap to his feet, each time falling back upon the armchair. Helped up by the housemaid, he succeeded at last in getting to his feet and rushing to the narrow entrance hall.

"Corrado?"

They both stood for a moment facing each other, as if they had thrown themselves together to observe one another from that far-off time of their last meeting. In an instant, with all the flashing recollections of everything that had happened to them, they had to fill the void of all that time in order to recognize their greatly changed selves.

Overwhelmed by astonishment and breathless, Marco Perla thought he read in Tranzi's eyes the impetus behind the father’s turning up to confront him. Wasn't it natural for Tranzi to expect, since he had stolen the mother away from Marco Perla, the younger man wanted to take revenge by marrying Tranzi’s daughter? And wouldn’t such a thought fill the older man with hate and reprobation?

Marco Perla felt faint, almost blacking out.

But then he found himself in the other's arms, held up attentively; instead he heard the other's voice saying, "You... in this way... So you really are ill! Here... what's wrong?... But you're very hot! You can't stand up! You've got a fever..."

And he felt relief, coolness, comfort, as natural and sweet as it was unexpected and unhoped for. He started to sob, to moan between sobs while Tranzi, together with the housemaid, took him back to the armchair in the side room:

"God above has sent you! God above has sent you!"

"Here... here..." Tranzi rejoined as he settled him into the armchair. "What is it? Look at me... Look me full in the face... I've come from Palermo... I disembarked in Genoa. I raced to Palermo, I asked around, they informed me of everything... You... You have married my daughter? Where is she? Where is she?"

Perla, swooned, leaning, with his hands over his face cried out in anger:

"Would I had never done it!"

"You shouldn’t have done it, Marco!" answered Tranzi readily, with a strange voice that seemed to only want to express reproach and regret but in which there was a vibration of rage that was hardly held in check. "How? How could you do such a thing?"

"You can take her back now. You can have her back..." replied Perla in a hurry, without taking his hands from his face. "You can take her away... away... away..."

"Why? Where is she, then?" asked Tranzi looking around.

"In there. She's locked herself in her room..." answered Perla. "Wait... wait..."

He turned to the housemaid. "You! Go tell the mistress..."

Then, groping, he put a hand into the inside pocket of his coat; he pulled out a beaten-up wallet from which he extracted a letter and handed it to Tranzi. "Read this first... read it..."

"What is it?"

"Read it... it's from her lover."

Corrado Tranzi clenched his fists holding the letter, and like a wounded wild animal, he charged the armchair, rising over Perla and growling, "But you..."

"I?" cried the other, then, recoiling and in a furious outburst of defiance, he threw in his rival's face all the evil things he had suffered on the other's account and, for his part, all the good he had done, only to be rewarded with this betrayal.

At the cries, the housemaid, bewildered, appeared at the door to the side room. As soon as Tranzi caught sight of her, he called out: "My daughter?"

And at a nod he ran.

Ebe standing on the threshold of the room where she had locked herself in, met him with unkempt hair, half dressed, all gasping between her tears, just the way her mother had greeted him the first time in that far-off spring morning when he, a young doctor, had been summoned by chance in a pharmacy.

It was her! It was her! His Ebe who greeted him thus anew, as one greets a stranger in an unexpected moment of sudden, sublime need! And very clearly he read in her hostile gaze that if she hadn't found herself in that dreadful state, she wouldn't have received him, she wouldn't even have wanted to see him.

"My Ebe! My Ebe!"

Recognizing her as her mother, he couldn't understand that she, with those same eyes of her mother, couldn't recognize him. He felt a hand pushing back on his chest away from his embrace.

"You don't hug me?... Oh my daughter! Let me at least kiss your hair... You are right. But all the harm, all the harm was your mother's doing, with her death!"

"And who paid for it?" said Ebe, looking at him with a cold severity in her eyes.

"Not you alone! Not you alone!" he immediately rejoined. "What do you know about any of it? Yes, I've been guilty in my behavior towards you... But I didn't think... I didn't think... Now that I see you, I understand everything!"

Ebe saw her father's face, as he got out these last words, suddenly contort in an expression that was between amazement and horror. She heard him add, under his breath, "I understand... I understand why he married you... You don't know, you cannot know..."

She trembled; she understood; she, too, asked under her breath: "My mother... him?"

"Yes, yes..."

And in this recognition they were overcome by emotion. He was overtaken by a furious rage, as if for a low betrayal that the other one, exploiting his absence in a cowardly way, had carried out with the mother; she was prey to revulsion, a sense of abomination as if for an act of incest that the other one had committed against her.

They both withdrew into her room. They locked the door and spoke at length among themselves. He also told her all the trials, all the struggles he had had to cope with over there, no matter how desperate, how eaten up by grief he was. Indeed, the thought of her was at first hateful to him, because he couldn't separate it from the thought of the death of her mother; it soured his wound and made him savage. Then, when he was able to start feeling pity for her, abandoned (never truly remorse, because he never imagined that care and affection could be denied her by the grandparents who, he believed, were still alive), he thought that, having abandoned her that way and never having been in touch with her since, he should at least make her rich, to recompense her long state of abandonment. And indeed he returned a rich man.

"Too late?"

Too late, yes. The betrayal, Ebe explained to him, hadn't been committed by her but by the grandmother and Marco, well before.

He still held in his hand, crumpled into a ball, the letter Perla had given him to read.

"Have you read it?" Ebe asked him.

"No, not yet..."

"Neither have I; but it must certainly contain the proof that he has nothing yet of which to reproach me! I've neither tricked nor betrayed. I did nothing more than justify myself with this... this young man, who wrote me the letter... Read it... Go ahead and read it..."

And she began to speak to him of this naive love of hers, when she believed herself free to make decisions for herself, for her heart: of the letters taken away by the grandmother and discovered by chance on the night before her departure for Rome.

But in the middle of her story the housemaid came to knock at the door to alert them that the master was really very ill in there; he seemed to be choking.

Corrado Tranzi rushed over. For some reason it came to mind to ask, first off, if a doctor had already been called?

"No, no doctor yet," the housemaid replied.

With her help, he carried Marco Perla over to the bed where, between flushes of fever, the sick man fell into delirium. Tranzi undressed him to start his examination, first listening at length to his heart then his lungs before tapping his chest and back. On the bed Marco Perla, held by the housemaid in a sitting position with his head dangling low, moaned, growled, and muttered rambling words. Once his examination was over, Tranzi nodded to the housemaid to lay the sick man back on the bed, under the covers, and then he began to pace the room, absorbed in his thoughts.

Wasn't it providential that he, that very evening, as soon as he'd arrived, had been able to count on his condition as a doctor? 

A shiver traveled up his spine. He straightened his upper body, painfully, passing his trembling hands across his hair; then he placed one finger between his teeth and stayed for quite a while gazing fixedly in front of him. Moving only his eyes, he caught sight of the housemaid. He turned to look at the sick man. He went to sit down at a little table upon which he placed his elbows, holding his head in his hands.

"Is it serious?" asked the housemaid.

He started and gazed at her, as if he hadn't understood.

"Serious, yes," he said, "but for now there's no remedy to be given to him. You may go; if I require help, I'll call for you."

Once left alone, he rose from his chair and began again to pace the bedroom, avoiding any glances towards the sick man.

For years and years he had become used to certain dreadful conversations with himself, which couldn't have any other conclusion than an extreme action. He knew his revulsion for this act, the tumult of all the vital energies rising to prevent him from it, the willpower that forced them back, the release that was then given to them, in imagining the life that would be left to the others after his death. But here the violent act he had to carry out was no longer against himself; and the life left behind for the others no longer presented itself as a sad, useless succession of virtually unvaried episodes. Here the others were no longer strangers, indifferent. He saw his daughter; and the life that presented itself, after the violent act to carry out, was hers. He wouldn't have hesitated a moment if he had to act against himself. But to act against another, and in treachery, made his disgust insurmountable.

All night long, struggling with himself in that appalling vigil in the sick man's bedroom, he tried to root himself to the terrible decision, which seemed to him to become, point by point, ever more necessary and almost fated.

Others had raised his daughter for him; others had until now kept her; on account of those others she was still alive. He had never done anything for her.

He had to do this, now. He no longer had anything else to do.

He had brought her wealth, but of what value could it be for her now that she was already tied to that old man, after the sacrifice of her love? In order for that wealth to be of value for her, in order for her to be able to say she truly owed her life to her father, he had to sever, annihilate what she owed to others, as well as the debt she had paid with her own person. Yes, with no hesitation, since chance had so providentially favored him, he would have to cancel the one who had done for his daughter everything that he should have done; kill the one who had wanted to supplant him in everything, even going so far as to recover for himself the mother through the daughter. Through this pact alone could he call himself a father. Only freeing her from all the bonds contracted during the time when, for her, he didn't even exist/she didn’t know he even existed, would restore her, with this freedom and wealth, to life.

Did any suspicion flicker in Ebe of her father's dreadful decision when, the next morning, she saw him focused and attentive to curing the sick man? After everything that had been said by them the evening before? Perhaps yes, but she forbade herself to become aware of it.

His gaze, however, spoke all too clearly when, exhausted, bent over the bed to catch the last breath of the dying man, he straightened up and turned to her, as she stood next to him trembling and terrified.

He told her with that gaze not to be afraid because he had had to do it this way.

He hugged her to his chest; he murmured into her hair, "you're free. Now you can live."

But she felt that she couldn't anymore, now, knowing. And she leaned against that chest so as not to catch any sight of the victim on the bed.