APS TOGETHER
Day 44
The Betrothed by Alessandro ManzoniChapter 34 (through p.574: “the living were left.”)
April 5, 2023 by Michael F. Moore
“But what city was this?”
“As for how to enter the city, Renzo had heard something about strict orders not to let anyone enter its gates without a health certificate. But he’d also heard that a resourceful man who seized the moment could easily evade this decree. And he was right.”
The first sentence of this chapter reads as if it were completing the last paragraph of the previous chapter. Renzo is going to need all the resourcefulness in his arsenal to make it through Milan and find Lucia.
This was written long before we first heard the term “social distancing”:
“Renzo, always the respectful country lad, removed his hat as he approached the man. With his left hand holding the hat, and his right inside the crown, he went up to the man. But the man took a step back, his eyes popping out, raised his knotty walking stick, and pointed its steel tip at Renzo’s waist, shouting, ‘Keep your distance!’”
After donating his bread to the woman locked up in the house with her children, Renzo remarks,
“Ah: So this is reparations. I’m glad I did not give the bread back to the bakery that day, for this is truly an act of mercy.”
