The story of the good old man and the beautiful girl

Here he is! Look at him, walking down the street, about to get on the tram in his city of Trieste. Well dressed, his eyes tell of inner doubts. Who is it about? "The good old man", an elderly and respectable man, with means, who will automatically meet the object of his desire. His train is galloped forward by a beautiful and vivacious girl. He falls in love with her, and will even try to seduce her. There will be meetings, meals, and contact - if we want, this is a rare meeting between old age and youth. Before us is also a meeting between the existential fatigue of the European-bourgeois culture and its complete opposite. The old man became obsessed. His behavior is whimsical. He is in an inner turmoil, and his moral position is determined by the fluctuation of his impulses: love, jealousy, regrets, tension and instability. The old man investigates his mental state, gets lost in a maze of oppressive assumptions. And so, in order to communicate with his inner self, the old man grasped the idea: to leave an intellectual legacy in the form of an essay, the purpose of which would be to prove "how essential the health of the old is for the benefit of humanity." "The good old man and the beautiful girl" is an ironic, wonderful and refined parable, which is slowly worked out and reaches perfection. This is Italo Sabbo's most central short work. It was written in 1930 after a creative break of twenty-five years, and this is its first translation into Hebrew.