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February 19, 2020 - November 30, 2025
(you will have to excuse all these winks on my part, but I have need of winking, to wink like this, since, not being aware just what impression I am making upon you at this moment, I may be able thus to obtain a hint),
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we had to risk our lives as well, in order that I in the end (one, none and a hundred-thousand) might find and resume the path of well-being.
Erwin Maack liked this
24. For the reason that (and these are most assuredly factual data), on the—day of the year—, in the reign of Victor Emmanuel III, by the grace of God and the will of the people King of Italy, in the worthy city of Richieri, in the Via del Crocefisso, at the official number 24, there was one Signor Cav. Elpidio Stampa who kept a notary’s office. “It is still there? At No. 24? So, you all know Notary Stampa?” Ah, then, we can be quite sure that we are not mistaken. That Notary Stampa, then, whom you all know. Right? But you cannot imagine what a state of mind I was in as I entered his office.
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is the same jest that works you up into a fury every five minutes or so, and which causes you to exclaim to the friend at your side, “I beg your pardon! But how does it come that you don’t see this? Are you blind?”
catching sight of that poor little notary, Signor Stampa, with a face that was all gravity and without the faintest suspicion that I could be to myself any other being than the one he saw before him, so sure was he that, to me, he was the same individual who every day beheld himself in the mirror, knotting his little black cravat, with familiar objects all around him. Do you get it, now? I simply had to wink at him, too, by way of signifying roguishly, “Look underneath! Look underneath!”
who could say what sort of office it was or where it was for the Signor Notary himself. What odor did he scent that was different from the one that met my nostrils? Or who could say what was the location and manner of being in the Signor Notary’s world of that particular house, of which I had been speaking to him in a far-away voice;
“Excuse me, but how do I walk? You might at least tell me how it looks to you!” I was holding myself in with difficulty; but I could not resist turning, as I opened the glass-paned door, to remark to him with a pitying smile: “Why, with my own stride, thanks!”
Horses don’t laugh with their mouths, not by any means! Do you know what it is horses laugh with, Signor Notary? With their behinds. I assure you that a horse, when he is walking, laughs with his behind, from time to time—he surely does—either at certain things which he sees, or at things that run through his head.
I kept on walking, you will note, with perfect consciousness down the main street of madness, which was none other than Reality Street to me, and which had now opened up most dazzlingly before me, with all the likenesses of myself, validly mirrored and alive, stalking along beside me.
The lowest of Quantorzo’s or of Firbo’s subordinates had more to say in that bank than I did.
there they all were, working away so zealously for me, in order to clench more and more, with their assiduous toil, the unfortunate conception of myself that was prevalent about the countryside, to the effect that I was a usurer.
upon which no one sat, over by the little tables; they had shoved them to one side and left them there where they did not belong, and for those poor useless chairs, it must have been an insult and an affliction to be left like that.
I could hear squirts of laughter from them now and then,
I thought these things, I may tell you once again, as if another had been thinking in me, one who, all unforeseen by me, had become so strangely cold and distracted.
What sort of reality can that be which the majority of mankind succeed in setting up inside themselves? Wretched, slippery, uncertain. And the domineering ones, mark you, profit by it! Or better, they are under the illusion of being in a position to profit by it, by causing to be submissively accepted that meaning and that value which they attribute to themselves, to others, and to things, in order that all may see and hear, think and speak after their manner.”
“Who’s deluding himself?” “Those that try to domineer! Signor Firbo, for example! They are deluding themselves, since the truth is, my dear fellow, all they succeed in imposing on another is words. Words, understand? Words that each one hears and repeats to suit himself. But, we must not forget, they go to make up what is commonly known as public opinion! And woe to him who one fine day finds himself branded with one of those words that everybody goes about repeating.
“I want you to give an accounting,” he said, “for that remark you just made about my wife.” I dropped to my knees. “Why, certainly!” I cried. “Look! Like this!” And I touched the stones of the floor with my forehead.
“New words!” I shouted. “Do you want to hear them? Then go——go there where you keep those people locked up; go, go and listen to them talk! You keep them locked up because it's more convenient for you!”
No one could believe it. But before you shut her up, eh? we all stood about listening to her, and we were thoroughly scared. What I want to know is, why!” Firbo barely gave me a glance, but turned to Quantorzo as if to seek the latter’s advice. When he spoke, it was with a foolish dismay: “Oh, well, if you want to know! It was simply because nobody could believe it!”
A depressing light filtered in through the windows, which were literally plastered with dust and mildew, the bars of the iron grating outside being barely visible, along with a glimpse of the blood-colored tiles of a roof over which the window looked. The tiles of that roof, the varnished wood of those window-jambs, those panes, filthy as they were, all represented the immobile calm of inanimate objects.
I could hear the quickened breathing of that body, which had come there to rob; and the sight of those hands, opening the doors of that cabinet, sent a shudder down my spine. I gritted my teeth and shrugged my shoulders.
I was about to go through with an act. But was I—I? The idea assailed me that all those strangers who were inseparable from myself had entered with me, and that they were about to commit this theft with my hands.
I heard as from an infinite distance, borne by the wind which must have come up outside, the cackling of a hen that had laid an egg.
All this was accompanied by Signora Diamante’s screams, as she, all disheveled, came to the window to hurl forth certain weird imprecations of her own; and these were received with catcalls and other stupid noises by the overgrown barefoot ragamuffins who, paying no heed to the rain, were engaged in dancing about that wretched heap and splashing water from the puddles upon the curious ones, as the latter cursed them out for it roundly.
that peeling gray plaster affair, with perforations here and there, did not, like me, feel the need of blushing, as if for an offense against modesty, at sight of an old chamber-pot which had been set out with other objects from the hovel and exposed to the gaze of all, upon a chest of drawers, in the middle of the street.
I cannot explain it, but I was trembling all over, as if in expectation of a miracle, the miracle of my own transfiguration, from one moment to another, in the sight of all. And then, without warning, my mood was hacked to a thousand bits, and my whole being was hurled violently and dispersed here and there by an explosion of ear-splitting catcalls, mingled with nameless cries and insults on the part of the whole crowd, at the mention of my name;
caught sight of me there, leaning against the wall like a ghost, he fell back at first in utter disconcertion; then he shot me, from his cruel eyes, a look which I shall never forget, and with the snarl of a wild beast, a sound compounded at once of sobs and laughter, he leaped upon me frantically and began screaming at me; I could not tell whether he meant to exalt or slay me, as he hurled me up against the wall.
an argument of Quantorzo’s, to the effect that my father in his day had been given to “freakish indulgences” or fits of generosity like this, accompanied by a certain good—natured cruelty,
the only thing I was good for being to tear down scandalously what my father with so much hidden sagacity had built up.
was so horror-struck by her eyes, by her assured and smiling gaze upon me—a horror of those cool hands that stroked me, in the certainty that I was as those eyes beheld me;
and this mouth which I kissed with love’s own fire, while she kissed mine with a fire so different from my own,
You, I know, have never experienced this horror; for the reason that all you have done, ever, has been to clasp in your arms the whole of your world, in the person of the woman who is yours, without the faintest suspicion that she all the while has been embracing her world in you, which is another one, one where you may not enter.
Dida, at bottom, however she might force herself to put a stern face on the matter, was laughing over the brutal pastime in which her Gengè had been indulging; she obviously did not pause to reflect that everyone might not understand that all he had wanted to do was to play a practical joke, no more.
The dog appears to be doing its best to give me to understand that, if I do not wish to go, neither does she care to come with me; she puts down her little paws and has to be dragged, until I become angry and give her a fierce tug, at the risk of breaking that red leash of hers.
a big house and no telling how ugly, to judge from its neighbors.
I drop my eyes to the patch of shade here on the vagrant grass, which sends up a rich, warm odor into the pregnant silence, broken only by the hum of minute insects; a big black fly, irritated by my presence, settles buzzingly on me;
“That stench—I smell it, too. But to me, you know, it is the least offensive one that can come to me henceforth from men. It is of the body. The one that exhales from the soul and its needs is worse, Bibi. And you are really to be envied, since you can have no intimation of it.”
That is a vice that people have, and you cannot cure them of it. The only thing to do is for all of us to cure ourselves of the vice of taking down the street, for a walk, a body that is subject to being stared at.
do you imagine for a minute there is any one who stops to think of you animals, as you gaze at men and things with those silent eyes of yours? Who knows in what manner you see them, or how they look to you?
the very words that I am saying to you—I do not know, Bibi, I really do not know, who it is that is uttering them.”
I leaped to my feet, terrified. I had known, I had known the solitude that was mine; but only now did I feel and touch the horror that confronted me in every object that I saw—my
The little creature sneezed, as if to say: “I refuse! I refuse!”
a fear of everything and nothing, a nothing that might in an unlooked-for manner become something which he then would be the only one to behold.
the one a dark, heavy figure, wallowing in the depths of the green divan, the other slender and white, in a gown that was all frills and furbelows and which spread out for three-quarters of its bulk over a neighboring easy chair, and with a glint of sunlight on her throat.
the temptation came to me to tum and look for the other one who had entered with me, knowing very well, as I did, that my paternal friend Quantorzo’s “dear Vitangelo” was also in me, as was my wife Dida’s “Gengè,” and that the whole of me together for Quantorzo was none other than that same “dear Vitangelo,” and for Dida, none other than her “Gengè”.
I came to know the horror of seeing my own body as being in itself that of a nobody, in the differing and incoercible reality which those two all the while were bestowing upon me. “Whom are you looking for?” my wife asked me, upon seeing me turn. I hastened to reply, with a smile, “Ah, no one, my dear, no one. We are all here, aren’t we?”
What a charming conversation there was going to be, here in this drawing-room, among these eight who believed themselves three!
“Why do you stare like that?” And no one stops to think that this is the way in which we all ought always to stare, each with eyes horror-filled at his own inescapable solitude.)
he thought he had made out from my eyes that I already grasped the real object of this call of his,
