One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand

by Luigi Pirandello

the unforeseen, unexpected discovery of this particular defect angered me like an undeserved punishment.

I let out a most venomous “thanks,”

but I did confer a very great and extraordinary importance upon the fact that I had gone on living all these years without ever once having changed noses, keeping the same one all the time, and with the same eyebrows and the same ears, the same hands and the same legs—and to think that I had had to take a wife, to realize that they were not all that they should be.

—I could swear that, for days in a row, in the worthy city of Richieri, I saw (unless it was nothing more than my own imagination) a very considerable number of my fellow-citizens going from one shop window to another and coming to a stop before each to observe their own reflections, one to study a zygoma, another the corner of his eye, a third to examine the lobe of an ear, and a fourth to investigate his nostril.

the day it rained and the public square looked like a lake with all the raindrops glistening in a merry sprinkling of sunlight,

but I beg you to believe that the only way of being truly alone is the one of which I am telling you.

This was the way in which I wanted to be alone. Without myself. I mean to say, without that self which I already knew, or which I thought I knew.

I do not think with my nose, nor am I conscious of my nose when I think.

I could not see myself live.

the stranger in question was a single individual: one to all, even as I believed that I was a single individual to myself. But my atrocious drama speedily grew more complicated, with the discovery of the hundred-thousand Moscardas that I was, not only to others, but even to myself, all with the single name of Moscarda, a name that was ugly to the point of cruelty, all of them lodged within this poor body which was likewise one, one and none,

what I wanted to do was to take myself by surprise, in my own natural actions, in those sudden alterations of countenance which accompany the mind’s every movement; by way of capturing, for example, an expression of unforeseen astonishment

they could not have been real, for the reason that had they been so, I should not have been able to view them; they would at once have ceased, owing to the very fact that I was viewing them.

My expression of rage, for instance, would not have been the same to one who feared it, to another disposed to excuse it, to a third inclined to smile at it, and so on. Ah! what good sense I still had, to be able to grasp all this; and yet, I was unable to make use of it,

The idea that others saw in me one that was not the I whom I knew, one whom they alone could know, as they looked at me from without, with eyes that were not my own,

How could I endure this stranger within me? This stranger who was I myself to me?

“A quarter of an hour, no more. Please.” In this manner, I made sure that she would not be home until nightfall.

He was to me what I was to others; I could be seen but could not see myself.

even as I smothered it, my image grew pale and seemingly withdrew from me; and I in turn paled and all but fell, and I felt that, had I gone on, I should have been lulled into a doze.

Ah, at last! There it is! Who was I? I was

There it was, like a lost dog, without a master and without a name, a dog that one person might call Flik and another Flok, at his own good pleasure. It did not know anything, not even itself; it lived to live, and did not know how to live; its heart beat, and it did not know it; it breathed, and it did not know it; it moved its eyelids, and was unaware of the fact.

Who was I? Was I, I?

Each one might take it, that body there, to make of it the Moscarda that he deemed most fitting and that pleased him best, shaping it today in one manner, tomorrow in another, depending upon circumstances and the mood of the moment.

Who was that one? No one. A poor body, without a name, waiting for someone to take it.

then without warning came crumbling down, to the explosive accompaniment of a couple of sneezes.

I made up my mind to find out who I was, at least to those closest to me, acquaintances so-called, and to amuse myself by maliciously decomposing the I that I was to them.

it is rather because you are under the blissful illusion that others, from without, must picture you to themselves as you picture yourselves.

You have just had a big word in your mouths; permit me now to insert a tiny, tiny thought in your minds.

You see it, you touch it; and within it, you even smoke a cigar, if you like (a pipe? very well, a pipe), and blissfully stay there watching the smoke-spirals vanishing, one by one, in the air.

they came to furnish seats for the gossips of the neighborhood, who, hesitatingly at first, one after the other, at last got up their courage to cross the threshold, in search it seemed of a place where they might repair to find a seat, silence, and a bit of grateful shade;

they would let down their hair, glossy with oil, over their shoulders, to “have a hunt” in their heads as the monkeys do.

Sick, too, perhaps, from the melancholy squeaking of the pulley, when the wind of a night stirred the rope; while over the deserted courtyard was the white splendor of the starry sky, starry but veiled, a sky which in that vain, white, dusty splendor seemed fixed up there forever.

On either side of his face, like samples of calligraphy, he had a perfect fishlike eye, while his cheeks were a dense network of violet-colored veins.

those clean airy warehouses which, as a boy, I had seen being built, and where I used to run about, finding a strange exaltation in the dazzling whiteness of the plaster and something like a drunkenness in the cool humidity of the factory, over the resounding brick pavement, still all sprinkled over with chalk.

into the open country, which impressed me as having been made to receive and diffuse the music of horses’ bells.

should have gone on using it, even if all the gnats in Richieri had disappeared, owing to the delight it gave me, stretched as I stretched it, skyhigh, and draped all about the bed without a fold. The room that one sees and does not see, through that myriad of little holes in the light tulle; the isolated bed; the impression of being wrapped in a white cloud.

he was making me live inside himself as a perfect imbecile,

saw me as I should never have been able to see myself,

on account of this room, you have broken off with the friend who used to come to see you almost every day, and who now not only does not come any more, but who goes about telling everybody that you are mad, quite mad, to go on living in a house like this.

Why is it that you insist upon believing that the only reality is your own, the reality of today, and why do you cry out in angry astonishment that your friend is wrong, although he, poor chap, whatever he might do, could never have within himself the mind that is your own?”

you, my dear friend, will never know, and I shall never be able to tell you, how what you say to me is translated inside me.

You fill them with your meaning, as you speak them to me; while I, in taking them in, inevitably fill them with my own. We thought we understood each other; we did not understand each other at all.

“Is your head swimming a little? Then, then—let’s leave off.”

So even you are now beginning to realize that, a minute ago, you were a different person?

“Just look for a moment at man, what he is capable of doing! He mutilates the mountain, hews rocks out of it, squares them, lays them one upon another, and, what is and is not, that which was a bit of the mountain has become a house.” “‘I,’ says the mountain, ‘am a mountain and do not move.’

your beeches, your walnuts, your firs—there they are, in my house. Do you see how well we have worked them over? Who would recognize them now in those chairs, in those clothespresses, in those cupboards?”

man is a very small animal, and yet, he has in himself something that you have not.

by means of the song and the creaking, the imprisoned goldfinch and the walnut made into a chair understand each other.”

It is as if you already were becoming a trifle infected with my madness, since at everything I tell you, your face at once clouds as you inquire, “Why? What does that have to do with it?”

Yes, this is a street. Are you really afraid that I may tell you it is not?

look, what a blaze of red poppies in the sun!—How is that? Red babies’ hoods?—Well, well, I must be blind! Right you are, red woolen hoods. They looked like poppies to me.