The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away

“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away” is a religious expression that recurs at moments when Giuseppina and Paolo confront losses they cannot readily reconcile with faith. Its two uses connect private anguish over motherhood with Paolo’s reckoning with illness, making the same words a measure of both belief and distress.

Giuseppina’s Conflict

At Piano San Giacomo, Giuseppina is preparing a modest breakfast when a sharp pain makes her stop with a hand on her belly. She believes children are sent by God and that refusing them is a mortal sin; the expression names the religious conviction shaping her response to her pregnancy. Yet that conviction does not make the child feel like hers. Unlike Vincenzo, who had seemed close to her even before birth, this child feels alien to her.

Giuseppina tries to persuade herself that time will help: she must grow accustomed to the pregnancy and allow nature to teach her once more how to be a mother. But the religious belief that makes harming the child unthinkable also turns her wish not to be a mother again into a possible sin. Here the expression is not spoken aloud; it belongs to the inner language through which she struggles to understand a painful conflict between faith and feeling.

Paolo’s Use of the Expression

The expression becomes explicit during Paolo’s worsening illness. He takes Ignazio by the hand and tells him that, after sitting under a lemon tree at the maid’s suggestion, he began coughing and had to change his clothes. He then recalls the saying, attempting an embittered smile as he reflects that God seems to be taking everything away from him. The words carry a different weight here: Paolo is not weighing a feared moral transgression, but describing the losses accumulating as his strength fails.

His conversation quickly turns from the saying to practical matters. Paolo asks whether Leone, the notary, has told Ignazio that he has made his will. Ignazio confirms that he knows, then helps Paolo drink as he struggles for air. Paolo goes on to say that, while he lives, nobody will bother Vincenzo; he has also found a tutor to teach the boy Latin and other subjects in place of Antonino Gagliano, who is soon to be ordained. The exchange places the expression beside Paolo’s efforts to protect and provide for his son as his illness advances.

Recurrence and Meaning

Across the two scenes, the expression gathers contrasting kinds of distress. Giuseppina’s private thought reveals a gap between the religious duty she accepts and the maternal attachment she cannot summon; Paolo’s spoken use gives voice to his sense that illness is stripping away what matters to him. In neither case does faith erase the loss. The repeated words instead make belief the language through which each character faces a painful limit: Giuseppina’s uncertainty about motherhood, and Paolo’s awareness of illness and his concern for Vincenzo’s future.