The Toad

Silvio Capuana could never forget the poverty of his youth, or the pain and contempt it had brought him in the Apennine village of Contrada, where he was born 60 years ago. Reared in a two-room hovel swarming with flies, brothers and sisters, all as dirty and hungry as himself, he had spent his childhood working long hours in the local wheatfields for a few pennies a day, resenting the shouts of harsh masters and dreaming of a better life. As soon as he was old enough, he fled to seek his fortune in Canada.

When Silvio came back to Contrada in 1933, he was 40 years old, a man of substance, with a real pearl stickpin in his cravat. He built a luxurious villa outside the village, and proceeded to show his contempt for the Contradese in a perverse display of ostentation and charity. He refused to enter the village but gave generously to the local church, and twice each year he would drive his blooded Arab horse around the outskirts to the back door of a house in which some Contradese girl cried her heart out because her family lacked money for a dowry. Contradese parents soon learned to come running when they heard the crack of Silvio's whip, for it meant that he had come with a dowry fit for a patrician. "I know the bitter humility impoverished youth is made to feel in Contrada," he would say.

Wealth v. Brains. At home, Silvio amused himself by decorating the gardens of his villa with a weird menagerie of statuary whose faces bore a startling resemblance to the stuffier citizens of Contrada. Nevertheless, most of the villagers were content to accept Don Silvio as a wealthy, if eccentric, benefactor.

The one exception was Carmine Guarino, nicknamed "the Toad." Like Silvio, Carmine had been born to poverty, but he had found escape along another road, by burying his nose in books until his eyes dimmed and his skin grew waxen with the pallor of lamplight. Carmine's studies brought him no money, but they helped make him a schoolmaster and a politician, full of respect for the ordered and privileged past and contempt for illiterate successes such as that of Silvio.

As president of Contrada's town council, Carmine, a dedicated Monarchist, set himself to bait the sulky showoff, Silvio, an ardent Demo-Christian, at every turn. When Silvio planted cherry trees on the borders of his property, Carmine made him cut them down because they overhung the village highway. When Silvio built himself a tomb in the local churchyard, Carmine complained that its steps were on public property. "Material wealth can never replace brains," he gloated when the steps were ordered removed.

Faction v. Faction. Soon afterward, a new statue appeared on Don Silvio's lawn --a large toad with a human head. Carmine Guarino saw it and made the mistake of complaining in public. Soon all of Contrada was flocking to the Capuana estate to look at the new portrait and laugh at its subject. Professor Guarino writhed in an agony of shame. Silvio broke precedent by driving into the village to write, "Life can be beautiful," in bold, black letters on the side of his desecrated tomb. Carmine promptly brought suit for defamation of character.

For months afterward the Contradese argued the merits of the impending case. By last week it had split the village in two. On each side of the road, a long line of villagers marched to the provincial court in Avellinp. Neither file deigned to speak or even look at the other. As the trial progressed, open warfare between the factions was averted only by the judge's threat to clear the court--nobody could bear the thought of being shut out. But when the verdict came, nobody could say who was the victor. The offending statue was ordered put out of sight, and Silvio got a six-month suspended jail sentence. But Carmine was distressed nonetheless. "The constituted order confirms it," he moaned. "I do have that toad's face."

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