Translation:The girl with a turned up nose/Chapter 2

by Monteiro Lobato

THE INFIRMARY

AS the carriage sped along the bottom of the stream, Narizinho admired the beautiful panoramas through the windows, the avenues of white sand, the round stones and the fish that stopped respectfully to watch them pass. At a certain point, the carriage changed direction, took a turn and stopped at the hospital gates. It was a large room, full of beds and tables with medicine bottles. Doctor Snail, the kingdom's famous expert, was there, along with some cockroaches nurses dressed as sisters of charity. The prince called the doctor and asked for news on the patients. The two yellow-bellied catfish were in one of the beds, wrapped in three blankets, very pale and sweating profusely. Scaly took their pulse and saw that they had a high fever.

— God forbid they should die!" he said to Narizinho. "Doctor Snail is a great doctor, but all his patients die... He has no luck at all...

Further on, in another bed, the cockroach father moaned, mortally wounded by the green frog.

— How is this patient?" asked the prince.

— Very badly, replied Snail. He's broken five legs, torn a wing and is all broken up inside. I gave him Master Scarab's pills, but I have no hope of saving him.

— Has he been to the confessional yet, the prince asked?

— He went to confession just now and is going to take communion right now. Here comes Friar Mantis with the sacraments.

No sooner had the doctor said these words than Friar Mantis entered, accompanied by a little choir mosquito. The scene was so sad that Narizinho felt like crying. The friar cheered the patient up, spoke of the beauty of heaven and offered him the sacred host: a small fish scale. The poor man couldn't even sit up in bed. The nursing sisters had to lift him up by the shoulders and stay there to support him. The dying cockroach swallowed the host, grimaced, choked, coughed and died.

— Better that way, said the doctor. If he healed, what a sad life he would have, alone in the world, without his wife or his children...

Everyone agreed, wiping away their tears. The prince, after ordering the burial, asked Master Snail:

— What about the other patients, Doctor?

— The others... the others are dead," he replied a little sheepishly.

Scaly winked at the girl as if to say: "See? No one escapes his hands..." and invited her to leave. Before leaving, however, Narizinho peeked out of the window and saw the killer frog hanging by its neck from a hawthorn branch. She felt pity, but remembering the dying cockroach father, she said to herself: — Well deserved!