Today is our last day at Monte Ilice. Tomorrow morning we leave for Catania. If we pass through Mascalucia, I shall see you.
If you could only see how miserable everything is here! The cloudy sky, the chilly atmosphere, the valleys shrouded in mist and the mountains covered with snow, the trees that have lost their leaves and the birds that have lost their cheerfulness, the pallid sun, the long black lines of crows wheeling through the air, cawing, and the country folk huddled round their fires.
My family can’t stay on here any longer, by themselves, in the cold weather, and now that the fear of cholera’s past, papa can’t wait to leave. I spend hours thinking, of heaven knows what, leaning on my sill when it’s sunny, or gazing sorrowfully at the sky through the window-panes.
My God! This is death … the death of nature, and of the heart … and of that poor rose …
And to think how beautiful this place was! And how happy I was here!
I’m reconciled with God and with my vocation. I’ve realized that peace, calm and tranquillity are only to be found there, in that cell, at the foot of that Cross. And that all worldly pleasures – every single one of them! – leave you with a sense of bitterness in the end.
Yet I feel that I’m leaving a bit of my heart in this place where I’ve spent so many hours of sadness and so many days of joy. At the sight of every object, I thought, ‘After tomorrow, I shan’t ever see that again!’ This evening I went for a last walk in the woods. I sat for the last time on the wall. I gazed at the little cottage opposite our front door, and standing at the window I contemplated with an inexplicable sense of sorrow the trees, the mountains with their ravines, and the sky from which daylight was fading … and I took final leave of them, and even of the moss-covered stone and of the eaves over my head. All these things have a special look, the melancholy look of things that seem to say farewell … And mine is an eternal farewell. In the coming year, when these mountains that now stand silent and dreary are alive with sounds and smells and brightness, when the village girls sing in the vineyards and the lark up in the skies, my family will return … They’ll see these lovely places again … but not I! I’ll be far away, enclosed in the convent … for ever.
I gazed at his house again … it looks sad and frightened, alone, cold and silent, lost at the bottom of the valley. I closed my window for the last time. I watched as the twilight faded from these window-panes and the stars came out in the firmament, one by one. By the light of the last evening’s candle the walls have a special look: this trestle-bed, this crucifix, these pieces of furniture, all these little things have become animate, they’re sad, and they’ve wished me goodbye … And I am sad … I cried, and my heart felt lighter.