One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand

by Luigi Pirandello

“You see, my dear? And you thought it was a joke.”

it’s because ours are the bank's normal transactions! Whereas, that act of yours, if you will pardon me—you force me to say it—was that of a madman! a madman!”

it was plain that she no longer knew what to think either of him or of me.

“Do you see? Do you see! How, then, can you be so sure, since the least impression, at any moment, is all that is needed to make you doubt both yourselves and others?”

I saw down at the bank some scales, large and small. You employ them, I believe, for weighing pledges? But tell me something—yes, you, upon your conscience—did you ever weigh, with the scales of others, those things which you term the bank’s normal transactions?”

I can see now that violent altercations such as these, with their thrusts and counter-thrusts, are really and truly boxing matches between two opposing wills, each of which in turn is seeking to deliver a knockout blow to the other, striking, parrying, striking back, each certain that a well-aimed punch should be able to floor the other; until each of them, from the sturdy resistance with which the other returns his pommelings, becomes more and more convinced of the futility of keeping the thing up, since his adversary will not yield.

while there was nothing but darkness for all the others, who went on living blindly and securely in the habitual plenitude of their emotions. At the same time, I realized that, by revealing so much as a single one of mine, I should appear hopelessly mad to each of this pair—for example, the fact that, up to a short while back, I never had seen myself as they had always seen me,

“That’s enough of your Gengè! He’s not I! He’s not I! He’s not I! Let's hear no more about that marionette! I want what I want; and what I want shall be done!” I spun around on Quantorzo: “Do you understand?” He stormed out of the room.

the blind upward surge within me of a feeling and a will which had ended by giving body to me: a bestial body, which had struck terror and endowed my hands with violence. I was becoming “one”— I. I who now willed myself thus. I who now felt myself thus.

no longer Gengè (have done with that marionette!).

This new will of mine, this new feeling might surge up blindly from that “quick” inside me which had been stabbed, and which I was unable to locate; but they at once came tumbling down under the terrible fixity of that dark-gleaming light which I had discovered.

that bit of lacerated, macerated feeling,

An order to be carried out was already something, even in this void, for others. And it was something for me, too, if it enabled me for the moment to rid myself of this pair.

if I said “I”—but to whom was I saying it? For whose benefit? I was alone. In all the world, I was alone. For myself, I was alone.

I should first tell you (but I shall not tell you)

I felt a sudden lightness come over me, as a result of an immediate re-awakening of that mood of mirthful madness which, by good fortune, still swept my spirit now and then like a beneficent breeze.

I even winked an eye by way of signifying to that Moscarda there that we two understood each other, all the while, marvelously well. And it is but the truth I am telling you, when I say that he winked back, by way of confirming that understanding.

a moment later, before going out of the room, I turned my head a trifle to have a look at him in the mirror, he was already another person, even to me, with a satanic smile in his keen and brightly gleaming eyes. You would have been terrified by it, but not I; for the reason that I knew him; and I gave him a wave of the hand. He waved back at me in turn.)

You shall see how many varied Moscardas, all differing from the self that I had been, I was to amuse myself by producing that morning.

owing to that possibly disrespectful (Heaven knows, it was) reality which I up to this time had attributed to him,

his impeccably cut clothes sat upon him, not as his own, but as his tailor’s.

to watch him bat his sky-blue enamel eyes, to the accompaniment of a perennially blissful smile for everything that issued from his own coraline lips, and then to see him open his eyes again, the right lid remaining a little drawn and gummed there, as if he could not quite succeed in tearing himself away so abruptly from the sumptuous relish of an inner satisfaction that none would have supposed was in him—all

He could not countenance my taking his son-in-law (that Gengè of heaven knows what sort that he saw in me) out of the conditions under which the latter had lived up to then, that is to say, my destroying that comfortable marionette—like consistency which he on the one hand and his daughter on the other, and all my associates of the bank for their part, had attributed to him.