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Cottolengo? The sound was not repeated. Through the door of a chapel a chorus of women was heard. All around there was a bustle among the various polls set up in almost all the pavilions, in ground-floor or second-floor rooms. White signs with black numbers and arrows stood out against the columns, under the old blackened plaques with the names of the saints. Municipal guards went by, carrying briefcases filled with papers. The regular policemen dawdled, their eyes dull, seeing nothing. Watchers from other polls had come out, like Amerigo, to smoke a cigarette and stare up at the sky.
    â€œGratitude to God.” Gratitude for their misfortunes? Amerigo tried to calm his nerves by reflecting (theology was not his forte) on Voltaire, Leopardi (his arguments against the goodness of nature and of providence), and then—naturally—on Kierkegaard, Kafka (the acknowledgment of a god beyond man’s ken, a terrible god). The election, here, if you paid it some attention, became a kind of religious rite. For the mass of voters, but also for him: the supervisor’s concern with possible frauds was finally trapped in a metaphysical fraud. Seen from here, from the depth of this condition, politics, progress, history were perhaps not even conceivable (we are in India), any human effort to modify what is given, any attempt to elude the fate that falls to a man at birth, was absurd. (This is India, it’s India, Amerigo thought, satisfied at having found the key, but also suspecting that he was brooding over banalities.)
    This assemblage of afflicted people could only be summoned, in politics, to testify against the ambition of human forces. This is what the priest meant: here any form of action (including voting in the election) was modeled on prayer, every task carried out here (the work of that little shop, the teaching in that classroom, the treatment in that hospital) had only one meaning, a variation on the one possible attitude: prayer, that is, becoming part of God, or (Amerigo was venturing definitions) the acceptance of human smallness, adding one’s own nothingness to the sum in which all losses are canceled out, assenting to a final, unknown end which alone could justify these misfortunes.
    To be sure, once you admit that when you say “man” you mean a Cottolengo man and not man endowed with all his faculties (to Amerigo now, despite himself, came mental images of those statuary, forceful, Prometheus-like figures from certain old party cards), the most practical attitude became the religious attitude, establishing a relation between one’s own affliction and a universal harmony and completeness (did this mean recognizing God in a man nailed to a cross?). So were progress, liberty, justice then only ideas of the healthy (or of those who could, in other circumstances, be healthy), ideas of a privileged class, not universal ideas?
    Already the boundary line between the Cottolengo men and the healthy was vague: what do we have beyond what they have? Limbs a bit better turned, a somewhat better proportion in our appearance, a somewhat greater capacity for co-ordinating sensations and thoughts... not much, compared to the many things that neither we nor they manage to do or know... not much, compared to our presumption that we can construct our history....
    In the Cottolengo world (in our world which could become, or already be, Cottolengo), Amerigo could no longer trace the line of his moral choices (morality impels one to act; but what if the action is futile?) or his aesthetic choices (all images of man are antiquated, he thought, walking among those little plaster Madonnas, those saints; it was no accident that the painters of Amerigo’s age had all turned to abstraction by now). Forced for one day in his life to consider the extent of what is called natural misfortune (“And I should be grateful that they’ve only allowed me to see the brighter ones...”), he felt the vanity of