Her Husband (26 page)

Rirì had left them there to do something very important, something that seemed unusual for a little boy: to die! The little horse, although lame and threadbare, as is the destiny of all toys, seemed to bob its head, almost as if it couldn’t understand. If only the horn could call him back from that sleep amid all those flowers there! But the horn was broken, too–it didn’t play anymore. Rirì’s mouth spoke no more . . . his little hands moved no more … his eyes opened no more … himself a broken toy, Rirì!

What had those little two-year-old eyes seen, open to the spectacle of a world so big? Who keeps memories of things seen with two-year-old eyes? And now those little eyes that looked without keeping memories of the things seen were closed forever. Outside there were so many things to see: the meadows, the mountains, the sky, the church. Rirì had left that big world that had never been his, except in that little papier-mâché horse that smelled of glue, in that little boat with its sails spread, in that tin horn, in that little clown that laughed and beat his tambourine. And he hadn’t known his mother’s heart. Rirì . . .

Evening came. The doctor’s wife went away; Silvia remained alone, in the enormous, total silence.

She looked into the little mortuary room. There was Graziella saying her rosary and the nurse napping in a chair. Silvia was suddenly tempted to send them both to bed and stay alone with her little boy, to bar the window and door and lie down next to her little one, to let herself be absorbed by his cold death, killed by all those flowers. Dazed by their perfume that had made her head leaden, she felt suddenly overcome by a desperate weariness of everything in life, in the gloomy silence of that house crushed by death’s nightmare. However, looking out the window, she had the strange feeling that her soul had remained
outside there all this time, and that she had just found it now with an infinite wonder and relief. It was that same soul that had looked up at the sight of another moonlit night like this one. But in the sweetness of the relief there was now a more intense heartache, a more urgent need to be free of everything. And with the wonder, a more eager awakening to new revelations, vaster revelations of eternal dreams. She looked at the moon hanging over one of the big mountains, and in the placid pure light that spread over the sky, she gazed at, drank in, the few stars that were appearing like pools of more vivid light. She lowered her eyes to the earth and saw again the mountains in the distance with their blue brows lifted to breathe in the light. She saw again the amazed trees, the meadows resounding with water under the limpid silence of the moon. Everything seemed so unreal that her soul, suffused in that unreality, became tree and silence and dew.

From the depths of her spirit an immense darkness rose to join that limpid, dreamlike unreality: a vague, deep feeling for life, made up of so many inexpressible, whirling, gusting, overlapping impressions from the deepest darkness. Outside of all the things that gave meaning to our lives there was another meaning in the life of things that we couldn’t understand: those stars said it with their light, those grasses with their odors, that water with its murmur. A mysterious meaning that was bewildering. We had to go beyond the things that give meaning to our lives, to penetrate this mysterious meaning of the life of things. Beyond the petty necessities that we create for ourselves, there were other obscure, gigantic necessities taking shape in the fascinating flow of time, like those great mountains there, in the enchantment of the very silent lunar dawn. From now on she had to keep her mind fixed on them, to face them with the mind’s rigorous eyes, to give voice to all the unexpressed things of her spirit, to those things that until now had caused distress, and leave the miserable absurdities of daily existence, the absurdities of humans, who, without realizing it, stumble around immersed in the immense vortex of life.

She stood at the window all night long until the cold dawn slowly came to change and solidify the appearances of her earlier vaporous
dream. In this cold solidity of things touched by the light of day she also felt the divine fluidity of her own being almost congeal, and come up against the cruel reality, the brutal, hard dreadfulness of matter, that powerful, greedy, ferocious destroyer, nature, under the implacable eye of the rising sun. That dreadfulness and ferocity would now put her poor little boy underground and make him earth again.

There, they were bringing the casket. The church bell rang gloriously in the light of the new day.

How long is a day for a little dead body lying on his bed waiting to be buried? How long is the return of light not seen since the previous day? The light already finds him further away in the shadows of death, already further away in the survivors’ grief. Soon now grief will draw closer and howl at the horrible spectacle of enclosing the little body in the waiting casket. Then, immediately after the burial, this grief will go away again, to remake itself hurriedly in that brief, cruel return, until it slowly disappears in time where only occasionally will memory struggle to rejoin it, to recognize it, and then, oppressed and tired, it will retreat, called back by a sigh of resignation.

What did Giustino, who had slept heavily, read in Silvias face, which seemed to have absorbed the pallor of the moon she had watched from the window all night long? He looked dazed as he stood before her. He was again racked by tears, but no longer dared embrace her as before. Instead, he dropped down next to the little body already lying in the flower-covered casket. Prever dragged him away. Graziella and the nurse dragged the grandmother away. No one troubled with Silvia, who hoped to have the strength to stay there until the end, after having kissed death on the little boy’s small, hard, cold brow. After the cover of the casket had been soldered, the young journalist came, and though his concern touched her, she didn’t want to leave.

“Now . . . now it’s done,” she said to him. “Thank you. Leave me alone! Now I’ve seen everything. . . . There is nothing more to see. A casket and my love as a mother, there . . .”

A flood of tears leapt to her throat, gushed from her eyes. She restrained them almost angrily with her handkerchief.

As soon as Giustino, supported by Prever, in the middle of those come to the funeral procession, saw the young journalist walking behind the casket next to Silvia, he realized that after the burial she would never come home again. Then he said to Prever and to the people standing around him: “Wait, wait. . .”

He ran upstairs. For him death was not in that little casket as much as it was in Silvia’s appearance, in her definite departure. His child’s death was nothing compared to what was dying with his wife’s desertion. The two sorrows for him were one and inseparable. In putting the boy in the tomb, he was putting something else in her hands: nothing less than the rest of his life.

A short time later he was seen coming down with a sheaf of papers under his arm. Leaning on Prever, he followed the funeral procession to the church graveyard while holding on to these papers. When the service was over, he let go of Prever’s arm and went unsteadily to Silvia, who was ready to leave in the journalist’s car.

“Here,” he said, handing her the papers. “Take them. . . . Now I. . . what . . . what can I do with them? They might be useful to you. . . . They are … they are from translators … my notes … calculations … contracts . . . letters. . . . They might be useful to … to keep you from getting cheated…. Who knows … who knows how badly they’ll cheat you. .. . Take them . . . and . . . good-bye! Good-bye! Good-bye! . . .”

Sobbing, he threw himself into the arms of Prever, who had come to his side.

Known almost exclusively in the United States for his great contributions to modern European theater, especially
Six Characters in Search of an Author
and
Henry IV
, Luigi Pirandello began his literary career as a novelist and writer of short stories. While these works are still widely read and studied in Italy, they have received little attention abroad. Although it is true that his innovations in fiction never made the startling impact of those in
Six Characters
when that play first appeared on the stage, they nonetheless deserve a place in the canon of early twentieth-century European fiction evolving from naturalism to modernism.

A Sicilian by birth and by formation, Pirandello began to write under the influence of two prominent fellow countrymen, Luigi Capuana and Giovanni Verga, leaders of the Italian school of naturalism known as
verismo
. His first novel,
L’Esclusa (The Outcast)
, written in 1893 and published in 1901, realistically portrays aspects of contemporary Sicilian life and mores while recounting the story of a woman banished from her home because of unfounded rumors of her adultery, which threatened her husband’s honor. With the ironic conclusion, however, when the protagonist, Marta, is deemed innocent and allowed to return home (although she has in fact by then committed adultery), Pirandello begins to find new artistic means for depicting the relation between being and seeming, and between illusion and reality, for which
he will become famous. This theme, and the fictional innovations it requires, will be more fully developed in his best-known novel,
Il fu Mattia Pascal
(
The Late Mattia Pascal
), published in 1904. In this novel, Pirandello experiments with free indirect discourse, restricted points of view, and interior monologues in telling the story of a man who, finding that he has been reported to be dead in his native town, creates for himself a new personage under a new name in Rome, only to discover the impossibility of living out the fiction. Pirandello here reveals the fictional or “constructed” basis of all social existence, a theme he will develop more fully in his theater.

Her Husband
(
Suo marito
), Pirandello’s fifth novel, has its roots in the “veristic” observation of society, appearances, mores, and character, but betrays a peculiarly Pirandellian modernism in the dialectic between subjectivity and objectivity, the metafictional reflections on language and literature, the use of cinematic close-ups, and especially the portrayal of the evanescent and illusory nature of the self. In 1908, three years before the publication of
Suo marito
, Pirandello published his most famous treatise on poetics,
Umorismo
(
On Humor
), where he studies the process of “decomposition” that certain authors exert on conventional literary forms and expectations. The greatest novelists, in his view, combine comic distance and tragic pathos—thereby revealing the contradictions of existence—by creating characters at whom we laugh and with whom we sympathize at the same time. Pirandello clearly applies his “humoristic” theories to the creation of the character Ely Faciolli in
Her Husband
, and even to some extent to the title character, Giustino Boggiolo. But the author’s voice becomes heavily satirical, even sarcastic rather than humoristic, in its portrayal of certain elements of contemporary society in what was then known as “the third Rome.”

The first and the second Rome refer to the hegemonies of the ancient Roman empire and of the papacy. Although Italy was unified in 1861, with its capital first in Turin and then in Florence, the nation only wrested Rome from papal control in 1870. The next year, in an attempt to revive the nation’s past glory and grandeur, as well as to found a
new society based on the ideals of Italy’s national movement, the risorgimento, the capital was moved to Rome. Given these expectations, it is hardly surprising that disillusionment would set in. The difficulties of governing a country with regional traditions ranging from the Sicilian to the Milanese and political allegiances from socialist/anarchist to Catholic/royalist did not coincide with romantic aspirations to unity.

The early twentieth-century Rome in which Pirandello lived was the seat of the government of Giovanni Giolitti, the prime minister who did his best to bring together the divergent economic and political interests of the new nation. Intellectuals, however, considered Giolitti the embodiment of bureaucratic mediocrity, and his efforts at democratization and liberalization evidence of the flaws inherent in parliamentary democracy itself. They accused the liberal state of betraying the glorious ideals of the risorgimento. Pirandello, who subscribed to these criticisms of Giolitti, never wavered in his conviction that democracy, “the tyranny of the crowd,” was not a viable form of government for Italy. Along with mediocrity in government, democracy–and
fin de siècle
decadence–bred mediocrity in society, individuals, and art. The aristocracy, who no longer exercised any real function in the society of the “third Rome,” took refuge in a kind of sterile aestheticism and preservation of forms without substance, while the bourgeoisie, who did hold power, pretentiously mimicked aristocratic taste.

One of the major accomplishments of the Giolitti government was a significant rise of literacy in Italy. With this came a surge in publications, primarily journals and magazines, but also popular novels. Thus writers of popular literature, literary bohemians with avant-garde pretensions, would-be aristocratic aesthetes, and serious writers mingled in the society of the new Rome, aware of the newly acquired power of journalists and the publishing establishment to make or break their careers. It is this literary scene that Pirandello satirizes mercilessly in the first part of his novel. At the beginning, where he depicts the encounter of a literary-magazine publisher with a riotous proletarian crowd, he also evokes the reality of the often violent strikes, which were organized frequently by socialist labor unions at the time. Attilo
Raceni, however, representative of the new bourgeoisie, understands even less of the significance of the demonstration he witnesses than Stendhal’s Fabrizio del Dongo understood the battle of Waterloo.

Raceni is not just a literary publisher, but a specialist. Pirandello describes his publication as “la rassegna femminile (non femminista)
Le Muse,”
which we translated as “the women’s (not the feminist) magazine
The Muses.”
The brief sentence reflects the facts that early twentieth-century Italy, with a surge in the number of literate women, witnessed not only a proliferation of women’s magazines and fiction, poetry, and drama written by and for women, but also the rise of a small but vocal and influential feminist movement. The distinction between “feminine” and “feminist,” which is still being made today, was even then probably not as clear as it seems to have been in Attilo Raceni’s mind. Pirandello, if we can judge from his satirical attitude toward Raceni’s journal and his remarks elsewhere on feminism, had no particular respect either for the new social movement or for the “feminine” literature then being produced for women readers. Why then did he choose to write a novel centered on a sympathetic and penetrating portrayal of a woman writer of great talent?

While it is by no means primarily a roman à clef,
Her Husband
was clearly based on Pirandello’s acquaintance with the Sardinian writer Grazia Deledda (winner of the Nobel Prize in 1926) and her husband Palmiro Madesani. Analogies between Deledda and Pirandello’s fictional woman writer Silvia Roncella and between Mandesani and her husband Giustino Boggiolo are evident throughout the novel. Although Silvia is from Taranto, in Apulia, rather than from Sardinia, she, like Deledda, left her provincial southern hometown to come to Rome with her husband to continue the writing she began almost as a child. Grazia Deledda’s lifelong dream had been to live in Rome, a place where she imagined her writing, also begun at an early age, would be better appreciated than in Sardinia. Like Silvia, she published her first stories in a women’s magazine. However, one difference between the real writer and the fictional one becomes immediately apparent. Deledda had the nineteenth-century woman’s determination
to achieve what she set out to do through her heavily disguised manipulative skills, and even before Deledda and Palmiro Madesani were married in Sardinia in 1900, she importuned important friends to find her husband work in Rome. Silvia, on the other hand, is brought to Rome rather reluctantly by her husband’s job and wants no part in the marketing of her work. Both the fictional and the real husband hail from northern Italy, and they take upon themselves the business affairs and social contacts necessary for promoting their wives’ work; both women are unusually shy, sometimes morose or sullen, in social gatherings.

One evening shortly after their arrival in Rome Deledda and her husband, just like the fictional Silvia and her husband, were honored at a dinner hosted by Giovanni Cena, editor of the prestigious
Nuova Antologia
. One of the guests there was Senator Ruggero Bonghi, another literary editor, who helped to launch Deledda’s career by writing a preface to her novel
Anime oneste
(
Honest Souls
) in 1895. He is represented, not particularly kindly, by the character Romualdo Borghi. Another guest at the event was Luigi Pirandello, at that time a comparatively lesser known writer of poetry, short stories, plays, and novels than she, but important enough for Deledda to have included him in her list of those to receive a copy of her novel
Nostalgie
when it first came out in 1905.
¹
In 1906 Deledda’s husband referred to Pirandello as a “friend” in a letter to her French translator.
²
But at this particular gathering of writers and editors, Pirandello’s disparaging attitude toward the celebrity’s husband had been embarrassingly apparent. All evening Pirandello referred to Palmiro Madesani as “Grazio Deleddo.” By making the final vowels of her names masculine, apparently to show his low regard for Madesani’s supporting role, he succeeded in discomforting everyone present.
³

Used as a vehicle to satirize what he felt was the insensitivity, pretentiousness, and materialism of Roman literati, as well as to express his own particular concerns, Pirandello’s portrayal of the Deledda-Madesani couple is not entirely accurate. He does reflect the fact that “her husband” helped Deledda with the business end of her work.
Deledda wrote to an old friend: “I have had many requests for translations, and Madesani is studying English and German and Spanish to keep up with the correspondence.”
⁴
However, a truer picture of Palmiro Madesani would show him as someone who supported her efforts, and who was in no way jealous of or threatened by the public acclaim she attracted. Perhaps it would be fair to say that Madesani, too, like Silvia’s husband, saw there was gold to be mined from his wife’s output, but this did not seem to bother Deledda. She was happy to give him credit for his work on her/their behalf. On one occasion she jokingly referred to their mutual enterprise as the Madesani-Deledda Company.
⁵

Pirandello had expected that the distinguished Florentine publisher Treves would publish
Suo marito
, not taking into account the embarrassment it would cause an important author on the publisher’s list–Deledda herself. In a letter to his editor friend Ugo Ojetti, Pirandello wrote: “I will send my novel,
Suo marito
, to Treves, I hope in April. It’s a takeoff on the husband of Grazia Deledda. Do you know him? What a masterpiece, Ugo—Grazia Deledda’s husband, I mean. . . .”
⁶
After Treves rejected it out of “delicacy,”
⁷
and probably because of Deledda’s objections, Pirandello blamed the writer. In another letter to Ugo Ojetti (to whom the novel is dedicated), he explains the situation, claiming that he was being persecuted unjustly. Far from writing a novel about the couple, he claimed, he had taken from their reality only a cue (
spunto
), working freely with his imagination to create a work of art. Deledda’s actions had only made the situation worse. “What spiritual poverty, what narrow-mindedness in that Deledda! Not to understand that acting in this way, she only incites the morbid curiosity of that filthy, petty barnyard of gossips that is our modern literary world!”
⁸
Here Pirandello seems to imply that as an artist, Deledda should be on
his
side. Perhaps she has been corrupted by her husband? In any case, he delineates in no uncertain terms his opinion of the milieu that is the object of his satire in the novel.

Suo marito
was finally published in 1911 by Quattrini of Florence, a much smaller, less prestigious publishing house. Pirandello would
not allow the novel to be reprinted after the first printing sold out. He seems to have eventually regretted his quarrel with Deledda. In his later years, he expressed on numerous occasions his admiration for her work. Yet his views on the business of literature did not change. In 1934, after Deledda’s death and two years before his own, he began to work on a revision of the novel, of which he completed four chapters. In 1941, his son Stefano published the four revised chapters, along with the three unrevised ones, under the new title chosen by his father,
Giustino Roncella nato Boggiòlo
, thus continuing the name play he started when he called Deledda’s husband Grazio Deleddo. Although the satire seems somewhat attenuated in this new version, the differences are not on the whole significant. Italian publishers have in recent years preferred to reprint Pirandello’s original novel,
Suo marito
, the text we have translated here.

It could be argued that one of the sources of Pirandello’s portrayal of Silvia Roncella was his sense of a “feminine” side of his own creativity, or perhaps of all literary creation. Certainly, he put into Silvia’s character important aspects of his own biography and writing. Just a year before the publication of the novel, Pirandello’s first works for the stage,
The Vise
and
Sicilian Limes
, based, like many of his one-act plays, on two of his short stories, were performed in Rome. Silvia’s perceptions of the contemporary theater and the effect of writing for the stage are his own; Deledda was not a playwright. Furthermore, the plots of Silvia’s plays,
The New Colony
and
If Not This Way
. . ., recounted in some detail in the novel, are those of Pirandello. Although he did not write
The New Colony
until 1928, the story line, except for a significant change in the ending, is almost the same. Pirandello published
Se non così
(If Not This Way) in 1915, rewriting it later as
La Ragione degli altri
(The Reason of Others). Other Pirandellian texts attributed to Silvia include a page of his treatise on poetics, Oh
Humor
, published in 1908, in an interior monologue in which Silvia “sees herself living,” and one of Pirandello’s poems, written by Silvia during her sojourn in Piedmont.