The Watcher and Other Stories Read Free Page B

reassuring aspect (reassuring for the others, who expected the election to confirm the old positions; depressingly normal, for Amerigo), but no one felt reassured by it (not even the others), and all sat there instead waiting for some presence to make itself known from those invisible recesses, perhaps a challenge.
    There was a lull in the flow of voters, and a footstep was heard, a kind of hobbling, or rather a banging of planks, and all the election officials looked toward the door. In the doorway a little woman appeared, very tiny, seated on a stool; or rather, not exactly seated, because she didn’t touch the floor with her feet, nor did her legs sway, nor were they folded under her. They weren’t there, her legs. This stool, low, square, a footstool, was covered by her skirt, and below—below her waist, and also below the woman—it seemed there was nothing: only the legs of the stool could be seen, two vertical sticks, like the legs of a bird. “Come in!” the chairman said, and the little woman began to advance, that is she thrust forward one shoulder and a hip, and the stool shifted obliquely on that side, and then she thrust out the other shoulder and the other hip, and the stool made another quarter-turn to catch up; and fixed to her stool in this way, she dragged herself across the long room to the table, holding out her voter’s certificate.
IV
    YOU BECOME accustomed to anything, and more quickly than you think. Even to watching the inmates of Cottolengo vote. After a while, it seemed the most usual, monotonous sight to those on this side of the table; but on the other side, among the voters, the emotion of the exceptional event, the breaking of the norm, continued to spread. The election itself had nothing to do with it: who understood that? The thought that filled them was apparently the unusual public appearance required of them, inhabitants of a hidden world, unrehearsed to play the protagonist’s part before the inflexible gaze of outsiders, representatives of an unknown order. Some of the voters suffered, morally and bodily (stretchers carried in some patients, while others, lame or paralyzed, hobbled forward on crutches), some displayed a kind of pride, as if their existence had finally been recognized. In this pretense of freedom that had been imposed on them, was there also, Amerigo wondered, a glimmer, a presage of real freedom? Or was it only the illusion, for just a moment and no more, of being there, of displaying oneself, of having a name?
    It was a hidden Italy that filed through that room, the reverse of the Italy that flaunts itself in the sun, that walks the streets, that demands, produces, consumes; this was the secret of families and of villages, it was also (but not only) rural poverty with its debased blood, its incestuous couplings in the darkness of the stables, the desperate Piedmont which always clings to the efficient, severe Piedmont, it was also (but not only) the end of all races when their plasm sums up all the forgotten evils of unknown predecessors, the pox concealed like a guilty thing, drunkenness the only paradise (but not only that, not that alone), it was the mistake risked by the material of human race each time it reproduces itself, the risk (predictable, for that matter, on a calculable basis, like the outcome of games of chance) which is multiplied by the number of the new snares: the viruses, poisons, uranium radiation... the random element that governs human generation which is called human precisely because it occurs at random....
    And what, if not random action, had placed him, Amerigo Ormea, a responsible citizen, an aware voter, a participant in democratic power, on this side of the table, and not on the other side, like that idiot, for example, who came forward laughing, as if it were all a game?
    When he was opposite the chairman, the idiot snapped to attention, made a soldierly salute, and held out his documents: identity card,