IV + 

The season dragged on, and whenever he could Gian-Luca went home to Maddalena. He clung to her now like a frightened child, eating without complaint the food that she prepared, in order to keep up his strength. Sometimes he would try to express his great sadness but his words would be inadequate and vague. + 

“I saw something horrible today,” he might begin, “a poor wretch in khaki grinding an organ⁠—” + 

“They are often frauds,” Maddalena would tell him. + 

Then he would stammer and would want to explain that this in itself was a reason for pity, only the words would fail him. He wanted to tell her about Jane Coram and the thing that cowered behind her eyes. + 

“Maddalena, it is lonely because of the crowds⁠—” + 

“But why must she drink as she does?” she would ask him. + 

Why indeed? He would stare at his wife, bewildered; somewhere deep down, he thought he knew the answer, but it always seemed to evade him. + 

There were days when his sadness infected Maddalena, descending upon her like a cloud, when all that she did seemed futile and useless; her very prayers lacked conviction at such times, as though there was no one to hear her. Then it was that in a kind of self-preservation she would speak to Gian-Luca of her Church. + 

“If only you belonged to the Church,” she would tell him, “you would know peace, amore, you would come to know God.” And the sound of her own words would comfort a little. “You would surely come to know God!” + 

He always listened patiently to her while she praised and glorified her faith, listened because of the burden he inflicted in making her share his sadness. But when she had finished he would shake his head: + 

“I cannot find God, Maddalena.” + 

“You have never looked for Him,” she would say reproachfully. + 

“Ma si,” he would tell her. “I have looked for Him lately, only I cannot find Him, and if I should find Him, Maddalena, I should have many questions to ask.” + 

“The Church would answer your questions, Gian-Luca, is it not God’s own mouthpiece?” + 

Then Gian-Luca would smile: “I do not feel God as needing a mouthpiece in that sense, piccina⁠—I feel Him as being too vast and aloof⁠—perhaps that is the trouble; your God is too aloof to notice poor, everyday things.” + 

But Gian-Luca was beginning to notice more and more those pitiful everyday things, so that now he could not pass one of the afflicted without a strong thought of pity. Sometimes it would be a long-suffering beggar who must earn a living by displaying the shame of a wretched, misshapen body; sometimes one of those dwarfed, consequential creatures who elbowed their way through the crowded streets with a kind of pathetic and impudent defiance, born of a conscious grotesqueness; sometimes it would be a man out of work, bearing military ribbons on his coat, or another performing some mean, dreary labor in the remnants of glorious khaki. And Gian-Luca would want to comfort such people, not weakly, but with the whole strength of his being, only he did not know how to set about it; he would feel inadequate, self-conscious and shy, and when he stopped to give money to a beggar he would flush with a curious feeling of shame, and as like as not would speak brusquely: “Be quiet, do not thank me!”⁠—for the thanks of the poor filled him with a sense of outrage. He had not yet learnt that Compassion, the divine, has a sister whose name is Gratitude, and that each must form part of the perfect whole that alone is capable of healing. + 