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had mopped it. Maria Toscana, 345 Walnut Street, Rocklin, Colorado, for Donna refused to use the married name of her daughter. The heavy, savage writing might have been streaks from a hawk’s bleeding beak, the script of a peasant woman who had just slit a goat’s throat. Maria did not open the letter; she knew its substance.
    Bandini entered from the back yard. In his hands he carried a heavy lump of bright coal. He dropped it into the coal bucket behind the stove. His hands were smeared with black dust. He frowned; to carry coal disgusted him; it was a woman’s work. He looked irritably at Maria. She nodded to the letter propped against a battered salt cellar on the yellow oilcloth. The heavy writing of his mother-in-law writhed like tiny serpents before his eyes. He hated Donna Toscana with a fury that amounted to fear. They clashed like male and female animals whenever they met. It gave him pleasure to seize that letter in his blackened, grimy hands. It delighted him to tear it open raggedly, with no care for the message inside. Before he read the script he lifted piercing eyes to his wife, to let her know once more how deeply he hated the woman who had given her life. Maria was helpless; this was not her quarrel, all of her married life she had ignored it, and she would havedestroyed the letter had not Bandini forbidden her even to open messages from her mother. He got a vicious pleasure out of her mother’s letters that was quite horrifying to Maria; there was something black and terrible about it, like peering under a damp stone. It was the diseased pleasure of a martyr, of a man who got an almost exotic joy out of the castigation of a mother-in-law who enjoyed his misery now that he had come upon hard times. Bandini loved it, that persecution, for it gave him a wild impetus to drunkenness. He rarely drank to excess because it sickened him, but a letter from Donna Toscana had a blinding effect upon him. It served him with a pretext that prescribed oblivion, for when he was drunk he could hate his mother-in-law to the point of hysteria, and he could forget, he could forget his house that remained unpaid, his bills, the pressing monotony of marriage. It meant escape: a day, two days, a week of hypnosis – and Maria could remember periods when he was drunk for two weeks. There was no concealing of Donna’s letters from him. They came rarely, but they meant only one thing; that Donna would spend an afternoon with them. If she came without his seeing a letter, Bandini knew his wife had hidden the letter. The last time she did that, Svevo lost his temper and gave Arturo a terrible beating for putting too much salt on his macaroni, a meaningless offense, and, of course, one he would not have noticed under ordinary circumstances. But the letter had been concealed, and someone had to suffer for it.
    This latest letter was dated the day before, December eighth, the feast of the Immaculate Conception. As Bandini read the lines, the flesh upon his face whitened and his blood disappeared like sand swallowing the ebb tide. The letter read:

    My Dear Maria :
    Today is the glorious feast day of our Blessed Mother, and I go to Church to pray for you in your misery. My heart goes out to you and the poor children, cursed as they are by the tragic condition in which you live. I have asked the Blessed Mother to have mercy on you, and to bring happiness to those little ones who do not deserve their fate. I will be in Rocklin Sunday afternoon, and will leave by the eight o’clock bus. All love and sympathy to you and the children .
    Donna Toscana .
    Without looking at his wife, Bandini put the letter down and began gnawing at an already ravaged thumb nail. His fingers plucked his lower lip. His fury began somewhere outside of him. She could feel it rising from the corners of the room, from the walls and the floor, an odor moving in a whirlpool completely outside of herself. Simply to distract herself, she straightened her