I looked at him.
"You sent him into the plains last summer?" I ventured.
"To Cisterna. One must make a little money, or starve."
"And you expect to keep your children alive if you send them to
Cisterna?"
I was astonished that the local medicine man had not diagnosed malaria.
I undertook that if she would put him into the train when next I went to
Rome, I would have him overhauled by a competent physician and packed
home again with written instructions. (I kept my word, and the good
doctor Salatino of the Via Torino - a Calabrian who knows something about
malaria - wrote out a treatment for this neglected case, no part of
which, I fear, has been observed. Such is the fatalism of the
country-folk that if drugs and injections do not work like magic they
are quietly discarded. This youth may well have gone the way of "those
other two" - who, by the by, were also sent into the Pontine
Marshes - since you cannot reject your food for ever, and grow more
anaemic every day, without producing some such result.)
Meanwhile my friendly offer caused so great a joy in the mother's heart
that I became quite embarrassed. She likened me, among other things, to
her favourite Saint.
All comparisons being odious, I turned the conversation by asking:
"And that last one?"
"Here," she said, pushing open the door of the inner room.
He lay on the couch fast asleep, in a glorious tangle of limbs, the
picture of radiant boyhood.
"This one, I think, has never been to Cisterna."
"No. He goes into the mountains with the woodcutters every morning an
hour before sunrise. It is up beyond Collepardo - seven hours' labour,
and seven hours' march there and back. The rest of the time he sleeps
like a log...."
Children from these hill-places often accompany their parents into the
plains to work; more commonly they go in droves of any number under the
charge of some local man. They are part of that immense army of
hirelings which descends annually, from the uplands of Tuscany to the
very toe of Italy, into these low-lying regions, hardly an inch of which
is fever-free. I do not know even approximately the numbers of these
migratory swarms of all ages and both sexes; let us say, to be on the
safe side, a quarter of a million. They herd down there, in the broiling
heat of summer and autumn, under conditions which are not all that could
be desired. [31] Were they housed in marble palaces and served on
platters of gold, the risk would not be diminished by a hair. How many
return infected? I have no idea. It cannot be less than sixty per cent.
How many of these perish? Perhaps five per cent. A few thousand annual
deaths are not worth talking about. What concerns the country - and what
the country, indeed, has taken seriously in hand - is this impoverishment
of its best blood; this devitalising action of malaria upon unnumbered
multitudes of healthy men, women, and children who do not altogether
succumb to its attacks.
