Comparative Psychology
By Marchesa Colombi

The poulterer let the cook from Trestelle House in through the back of the shop, to see his new appliance used for the mechanical fattening of fowl. He’d had it sent from Paris; an adaption of the one invented by Odile Martin; it cost five hundred lira. It was a big chicken coop, or rather a small cylindrically shaped prison. The chickens had a cell each; at the bottom they were chained up by the feet; they couldn’t move, they couldn’t see anything to the right nor to the left. They listened to the other prisoners gurgle the odd coo-coo, or send forth a kind of rasping breath; and they curiously stuck their heads out from the opening at the front of the coop. However they saw nothing but the empty dim light of the little room, which was almost a cellar, having had to descend several small steps to arrive there, and being faintly illuminated by two open holes at the top of the wall. 

From the eyes of those chickens you could see that all of them were worried. They responded coo-coo in the same subdued tone, then they returned to sticking out their heads with shining pupils like little flames; their gaze and the restless moving of the neck appeared to say:

—“Where are the others?”

This new type of coop had neither feeder nor bottle.

—“And the chicken feed?” Asked the cook from Trestelle House. 

—“The chicken feed doesn’t fatten,” pontificated the poulterer with the air of he who knows a thing or two. “Stay and see the feed that makes both ours and the chicken’s luck.”
With his right hand he took a rubber tube fixed to a vat where there was a mixture of milk and barley; with his left he grabbed the hen’s beak and inserted the mouthpiece of the tube; then pressing a pedal with his foot, he set a pump in motion, which sent the desired ration from the vat into the animal’s stomach. 

“There,” he said removing the tube and moving on to operate on the chicken in the following cell. “For eight hours this hen is catered for.” 

—“It won’t eat anything else?” asked the bewildered cook.

—“It’s had its portion,” responded the poulterer. “Look; twenty-five centilitres,” and he indicated the metal sheet with the engraved figure, fixed on the external wall of the cell. Every chicken had its ration indicated in that way, like the diet of the sick lying in hospital beds. 

Some of them were huge, immersed in a kind of moronic drowsiness, like gluttons engrossed in the bliss of heaviness. Only when the machine turned on the pivot, did they sway stupidly on their legs, disproportionate to the weight of their bodies, squint for a moment, then relapse into their slumber.

There were capons with eyes burning like embers, who all shook in a supreme effort to pull a leg up underneath a wing. But the chain was well-soldered, and the two feet had to remain immobile at the bottom of the prison; and the capons gurgled a kind of imprecation and their phosphorescent eyes emitted lightening. 

Instead the hen, the spring chicken that was fed first, had a fine little head, the movements of the undulating neck, the glossy feathers, and her body, flourishingly rounded from the unlimited rest and convenient nutrition, was still not deformed by the pinguidity. 

As soon as the poulterer had finished feeding her, she gave a little jolt of the head, extended her neck to swallow all of the milk and barley that he had put in her body, then she looked down avidly as if she were searching for something to peck.

But she was on a higher level; there were many cells below hers from which the floor remained far away, and in that semi-darkness she wasn’t able to see them. Doubting her eyes maybe, hoping in the dark, she pushed her beak down two or three times, down further, as much as the binding on her feet permitted; but touching nothing, she drew back. 

The cook came closer and looked into the cell. The hen was squatting, and remained immobile with eyes closed as if she were sleeping. But, behind the slender eyelids, the eyes were moving and a meek and cheerful chirp accompanied her breathing. 

Suddenly she opened her eyes, then she closed them quickly, as if taking care to recover the thread of a dear dream. Maybe, in the heat of juvenile desire, she was imagining herself scratch around the boundless space of a farmyard; she was dreaming, in that blessed half-sleep, the noisy life of a rustic courtyard; a crowd of turkeys, of ducks, of geese, of chickens who intersected and bumped into each other, clamouring loudly, and the cockerel’s fights, that hastened the throng of poultry. and silenced them into shock.

Two or three times an ecstatic voice escaped her, a guttural and prolonged oooo! And she showed for a moment her eyes shining with joy. Who knows, with a hen's imagination, what she saw again; the mass of pigeons, white, turquoise and violet, the beautiful chickens flying in the air, then landing in the courtyards to recount the blue vastness of the horizon, before precipitously ravaging the feed and flying away again. And the green flowerbed, and the delight of opening up a crossing in the coolness of the still-white salad leaves, of tender parsley, of strawberries bathed in dew, like in the labyrinths of a forest, and the raw emotion of taking on the gardener’s broom or of ducking behind the large cabbages!… Only those who are born to live in the open, in the infinite liberty of fields, can imagine such visions of green, of blue, of sunlight, that could flash before those closed eyes! And the enamoured young cockerel that follows the hen with its head held high, and the reddening crest, that he plants in front of her with his little raised leg, absorbed in admiration staring at her with hot-blooded eyes…

Suddenly you could hear rise from a nearby poulterer’s courtyard the merry voice of a young free cockerel:

—Cock-a-doodle-doo!!!

The hen stood up in shock; the feathers swelled around her, her crest turned scarlet, and trembling all in joy, she stuck her little head out of the cell, and jerking her head this way and that, she looked into the empty space with eyes dilated, as if she saw the vegetable gardens, the farmyard, the cockerel; and, from the bottom of her heart, she too let out a high-pitched voice, jubilant like laughter:

—Cock-a-doodle-doo0000!!!

—“Hen that like a cockerel sings, thunderstorm or misfortune brings,” said the cook, who, despite his twenty years of city life, had not forgotten the proverbs of his native Lower Novarese; and he left singing an old burlesque song softly through his teeth:

“Without the young cockerel, my little hen
Oh poor thing—what will she do…”

But he gave it a melancholic tone, slackening the cadences, it seemed like he was singing the Miserere; and he finished the little verse with a sigh, then walked at length in silence, only mumbling now and again: “Poor thing!”

Back home, he set down the supplies in the kitchen, then he went up to the top of the stairs, to the attic where the owners had allocated him a room. There were several doors on the landing, and one was left ajar. Before opening his, the cook pushed open the door, and entered. The room was long and narrow, with the entrance on one side and a small window on the other. It seemed like an omnibus. Against the right wall, next to the door, there was a small bed, indeed not much bigger than the seat of an omnibus; in the wall opposite was the hearth; and on the two sides of the hearth, a chest of drawers and a built-in cupboard for the dishes, the saucepan, the bucket, the ladle and all of the kitchen utsensils. At the foot of the bed stood the pole of a coatrack, of which the hangers disappeared beneath a load of clothes, all covered by an old discoloured skirt, tightened at the top by a cord passed through the waistband, falling back down softly as an umbrella without ribs, which gave a mysterious appearance to that cheap piece of furniture. It seemed like a trabiccolo, or like a silkworm incubator, and, for the moment, its rotundness reminded the cook of the machine for fattening the chickens, and forced another sigh out of him. 

—“Always so gloomy, Signor Battista?”—his attic neighbour said to him with a friendly smile, raising her eyes from the lace pillow on which she was mending a Honiton lace. 

She was a young lady, twenty years of age, but so skinny, pallid and small in stature, that she looked sixteen, at most. She had no other relatives apart from her mother; and even they didn’t live together, though they lived in the same housing block.

The mother served an old spinster, sick and alone, down on the mezzanine floor; a heavy service, because she had to be the cook, the maid, and also the nurse, by day and by night, sleeping next to the mistress, and often waking her. This Signora paid her little, and maintained her on a diet of sickness-food leftovers, and in exchange she demanded a lot, and God help her if the maid abandoned her for ten minutes to go up and see her daughter. But she had the shrewdness to give her the hope of a good allowance, and the poor woman sacrificed herself and endured it all, thinking of the two nice little rooms that they would have furnished with that money, her and her Teresa, and what tranquil life they would pass together, working without killing themselves. 

This is why Teresa remained alone in the attic, but her mother kept her eye on her, and paid attention to who went up and down. As for the rest, they were superfluous precautions; Teresa was a good daughter, calm, and her day was so busy that she didn’t have time to take an interest in anything but her work. From sunrise to sunset she was always there beneath the tall window, with the lace pillow in her lap, piericng and repiercing holes with her armies of pins, with the prowess of a general directing a manoeuvre. 

She was a good worker. The women had recommended her to each other and they entrusted her with very expensive lace. That work yielded enough for her modest needs; but it was laborious, difficult; and she had to execute it rapidly in order to not hold onto those valuable objects for too long a time. To satisfy all of her practices, she had to work day and night, assiduously, even during festivals, always with that lace pillow on her knee, always beneath that little window, to gather as much light as she could on the lace in restoration. In the winter there was little light inside; but when April came, a clear strip fell down from the window, reddening in the midday hours, and this was a delight. Often Teresa lifted her head from the lace pillow and remained with her eyes fixed on that deep blue square of sky that she saw from across the window, and she thought about the vastness, and the infinite land that it covered. It was like a landscape that Michetti had painted for her, and she saw there the whole world, like a sick person who admires the beauties of nature in a marina hanging on the wall opposite her bed, and she boards those tiny ships, and crosses the oceans, and defying imaginary dangers. 

—“Always so gloomy, signor Battista?”—said the young girl who, in the confident serenity of her twenty years, often smiled at the incomprehensible sadness of the old man. And then Battista told her about the machine used for mechanically fattening the fowl. 

—“Such barbarity! To keep those animals in the dark with nothing to eat or drink; because receiving nutriments in the stomach three times a day without having tasted the flavour, you can’t call that eating.”

Teresa listened dumbfounded. “Yes, that is cruel. Poor animals! To make them ‘live’ like that, devoid of air, to take away their freedom to flap around, and to roost, to condemn them to never enjoy the delights of the raised bank of a country road, to contradict all their natural instincts! And why? For the benefit of a few gentlemen who at their own raised bank will find a more flavoursome morsel… Poor animals! Poor animals!”

And the young girl, who passed her life shut in that little room, with her hands and eyes forcefully intent on the lace pillow, was moved by the cruelty to the poultry prisoners. 

—“How beautiful freedom is!” she said. “And to run around the green countryside…”

—“How does Signorina know of the countryside, she who never leaves this room?” asked the cook.

—“I was there once, when I used to go to the school to learn my vocation. The teacher, for her name-day, brought us all to lunch in Sesto. I saw some happy chickens then. There was a clutch of chirping chicks who pecked blissfully above the pigsty; and they had the satisfied air and hunger of many little children around a sweet-shop window.”

She continued to work in silence, smiling at her memories, then she resumed:

—“It’s all so wonderful for them when they find themselves in their natural surroundings. There was an enormous sow, exhausted from her excessive pinguidity, who dozed grunting at the foot of the pigsty against which she was leaned, with her stomach hanging and trembling like a bladder full of water or a hide of oil. And the chicks, pecking and chirping, went down one after the other onto that vast dark surface; and they strolled as if they were on a piazza, chasing their beaks through the hairs, and communicating to each other their impressions with a pi pi pi full of wonder. There was one who undertook a journey of exploration in the labyrinths of an ear; but the sow, feeling tickled, gave a shake that made it fall with the rest of its companions. And what chirping then, what squawking from the scared mother, who beat her wings, what a clamour all over the courtyard!…”

She turned over several pins, weaved together the ends of thread making the numerous spindles ring that clashed into each other, then, still smiling at her serene images, she came back to say:

—“How beautiful the countryside is!”

—“And you won’t go out even today?” asked the cook. “If you’d seen what a day it is — and the sun!”

—“What! I don’t have time to even make myself some soup. I don’t know when I’ll be able to move; I have an extraordinary job. The ladies need lace for their bathing; if I go for a walk, who will prepare it? I have to stay here all day and all night until who knows when; and Mamma too needs me to work to give her a bit of money…”

The cook went back down to the kitchen more gloomy than before, mumbling even more slowly the cadences of his song:

“Without the young cockerel, my little hen
Oh poor thing—what will she do…”

Teresa continued to fumble about with the pins and spindles. Every and now then she lifted her head and pushed it back, turning it from right to left to stretch her neck, painful from staying bent over for too long. Many times she covered her eyes with a hand, and held it there to give them rest. Then she went back to work with greater vigour; and meanwhile she thought again about the misery of those chickens: “How unhappy they must be! Certainly they don’t sing inside there anymore; they must die from melancholy.”

At nightfall, while Teresa bent down with her eyes on the lace pillow to make the most of the final glimmer of daylight, she heard a man’s voice, young and tall, singing:

“Dark-haired girl, to where do you go?
Down to Monza, on the tram I go.”

Teresa stayed a moment to listen, then she put down the lace pillow, stood on the chair, and looked out the window that was set in the roof. She looked at that endless stretch of roofs and chimneys and eaves and drainpipes and church domes and bell towers, and further away, like a green strip, the peaks of the chestnuts above the ramparts; then blue, clear blue, infinite, as if after the ramparts was the sea. And she seemed to see the countryside of her memories; a tavern in Sesto, a young girl in love with freedom, with the pure air, with natural beauty, and walking, walking under the tree-lined avenues, on the fresh wet grass. 

“Dark-haired girl, to where do you go?
Down to Monza, on the tram I go…”

That tenor voice repeated in a little falsetto.

And Teresa was thinking about going to Monza on the tram, in her Sunday best; and that young man that was singing, that one or another one, was there on the tram’s bench awaiting her. They went together; him looking into her eyes and her feeling herself blush. They didn’t speak, but they were happy, happy in silence, until they alighted at the station, took each other by the arm, and away to the avenue, down to the park, where they sat next to each other, on the green grass, underneath the deep-blue sky…

Her heart leaped from the commotion, her eyes shined, watching the shadow that had descended across all of the city, and she also began to sing with a trembling voice:

“Dark-haired girl, to where do you go?
Down to Monza, on the tram I go…
Down to Monza, on the tram I go…”

The cook, who was doing the dishes down in the bottom of the courtyard near the kitchen window, lifted his head towards the roof that he couldn’t see, and exclaimed gloomily:

—“So nice to be young!”