Francis shouldn't be sane for her, or I would now...

But of course, I convince myself that the sane have to be logical only up to a certain point.

Let's go back to when I was crazy.

At nightfall, in the villa, when my ears picked up the sound of distant bagpipes which led the march of the reapers returning in throngs to the village with their carts loaded with the harvest, I felt that the air between me and the things around me became gradually more intimate, and that I could see beyond the limits of natural vision. My spirit, attentive to and fascinated by that sacred communion with nature, descended to the threshold of the senses and perceived the slightest of motions, the faintest of sounds.. And a great, bewildering silence was within me, so that a whirr of wings nearby made me start, and a trill in the distance gave me almost a spasm of joy, because I felt happy for the little birds that in that season did not have to suffer the cold and found enough food in the countryside to feed themselves abundantly. I felt happy, because it seemed my breath gave them warmth and my body nourishment.

I also penetrated into the life of the plants, and little by little, from a pebble, from a blade of grass, I arose, absorbing and feeling within me the life of all things, until it seemed that I was almost becoming the world, that the trees were my limbs, the earth my body, the rivers my veins, and the air my soul. And for a while I went on like that, ecstatic and pervaded by this divine vision.

When it vanished, I would be left panting, as if I had actually harbored the life of the world in my frail breast.

I would sit down at the foot of a tree, and then the spirit of my folly would begin to suggest the strangest ideas to me: that humanity needed me, needed my encouraging word, an exemplary, practical word. At a certain point, I myself would notice that I was becoming delirious, and so I would say to myself: "Let's reenter, let's reenter our conscious mind..." But I would reenter it, not to see myself, but to see others in me as they saw themselves, to feel them within me as they themselves felt, and to want them to be as they wanted themselves to be.

Now then, employing the internal mirror of my mind to conceive and reflect upon those other beings as having a reality equal to mine, and in this way, too, considering Being in its unity as a selfish action, an action, that is, in which the part rises up to take the place of the whole and subordinates it, was it not natural that this would appear irrational to me?

Alas, it did. But while I walked through my lands, tiptoed and stooped in order to avoid trampling some little flower or insect whose ephemeral life I lived within myself, those others were stripping my fields, stripping my houses, and going so far as to strip me.

And now, here I am: ecce homo

3. Mirina

The blessed candle, the candle "of the good death" that that holy woman had brought along from the main church of her native village, was now serving its purpose.

She had kept it for herself at the bottom of her closet for so many years. It now burned on a tall leaden candlestick as if to keep vigil over the humble and dear memories of her distant town, dissolving into tears that dripped down the stem, behind the head of the dead woman already laid out in the coffin, still open on the floor, where her bed had formerly been.

Whenever I happen to think of my first wife, this funereal vision appears to me with extraordinary lucidity. The holy woman laid out in that coffin is Amalia Sanni, Mirina's older sister and, practically speaking, her mother. I again see the very modest bedroom, and, in addition to the blessed candle, two other somewhat smaller candles at the foot of the coffin, which are burning down a little faster and crackle from time to time.

I remain sitting by the window and, as if that unexpected misfortune had stunned more than saddened me, I gaze at the relatives and friends who have come together because of that death. They are sane and proper people, I surely wouldn't deny that, but they are guilty of excessive zeal in making me aware of the dislike they felt for me. Certainly they had every reason to act that way, but in so doing they were not helping me regain my sanity, because in their glances, I found reason to sincerely pity them.

I loved Amalia Sanni as I would a sister. I now recognize in her only one fault: her soul, in its conception of life, coincided in all respects with mine. I wouldn't say, however, that she was crazy. At worst, I would say that Amalia Sanni wasn't sane, like St. Francis. Because there is no middle course, either you're a saint or you're crazy.

Both of us made a solicitous effort to reawaken Mirina's soul without, however, spoiling the freshness of her disjointed and almost violent vitality, without at all mortifying that miniature doll-like body of hers, full of the most vivacious charms. We wanted to teach a butterfly, not to fold its wings and fly no longer, but rather to avoid settling on certain poisonous flowers. However, we failed to realize that what seemed like poison to us, was the butterfly's food.

Enough said. I don't want to dwell on my unhappy married life with Mirina. I'll only say that she detested in me what she admired in her sister. And this seems quite natural to me now.

All of a sudden, one of my wife's cousins, whose name I can no longer remember, entered the dead woman's room, panting. She was plump and dwarfish and wore a large pair of round glasses that magnified her eyes monstrously, poor thing. She had gone outside to pick as many flowers here and there as she could find growing in the vicinity of the little villa, and now she was coming to scatter them over the dead woman's body. Her disheveled hair still carried the wind that howled outside.

That gesture of hers was kind and compassionate, something I now recognize. But at that time... I remembered that, a few days before, when Amalia saw Mirina returning to the little villa with a large bouquet of flowers, she had exclaimed, quite distressed:

"What a shame! Why?"

In her sanctity, in fact, she maintained that those wildflowers do not grow for human beings, but are like the smile of the earth, which expresses gratitude to the sun for the heat it gives. For her, pulling up those flowers was a profanation. I confess that, being crazy, I couldn't stand looking at that dead woman covered with flowers.