Translated automatically by AI from the Italian original.
Well, I don’t know, blah blah blah… and how lovely the weather is. This typical Sicilian exchange sums up a whole feeling, dozens of thoughts and deep distrust when you want to say nothing or everything. The Sicily of 1860, Pirandello’s *The Pension*, a short story that seems written today for the eternal anguish of the land, the struggle to cultivate it to stop it going to ruin and the visceral desire to grab it for yourself. And so first one peasant, then another, come across a Maltese man greedy to amass land out of vanity, a bailiff Caloriu, a Sedara from *The Leopard*, who skims off the top of everything, yet always remains the expert on land and such matters. And the pension—worth one lira for the first peasant—after his death is passed to the second with another pension, this time of two lire, with the same Maltese man, the same notary and the same doctor. The master remains the trickster, the bailiff who plays with money, seed and imperial sulphur. “Ten black wafers and ten hosts, remember to give them to Zzu Marà.” And how’s it going? And how do you want it to go? The little balloon that wants to become the moon and bursts: so the Maltese man schemed, always hoping for Zzu Marà’s death… but he does not die. In fact, sorcery, the evil eye mixed with women’s prayers drive death away and reverse the Maltese man’s fortunes compared to his expectations—he falls ill and dies. Everyone who hopes to live far longer than the pension’s recipient dies, because they do not love the evening crickets or the olives that know how to fall, do not love life but only the income that can come from the land or from others’ sacrifice. They envisage a life built on the blood of generations who have sown, built and risked. They die of illness, of cirrhosis, of terrible diseases, as Pirandello reminds us… and then there is him, the one always ready to go if He decides, yet who instead stays on his land, waiting… “But I’m 100 years old and I’m sitting in this chair, death has passed by but does not see me or does not want me. Life goes on and on, it never stops… on and on.”
