Tales of Madness (25 page)

With what eyes had his son looked at him once, after a slap! In the throes of remorse, and recalling the look on his son's face, he
now scratched his face with his fingernails and insulted himself: pig, pig, beast, taking it out like that on an innocent creature!

He would leave his straw mattress, give up the idea of sleeping, and return to sitting on the doorstep of his shack, where the self-forgetful silence of the countryside immersed in the night would gradually calm him. The silence, rather than being disturbed, seemed to deepen as the distant, rhythmic chirping of the crickets arose from the depths of the great valley. The melancholy of the declining season already permeated the countryside. And he loved those first foggy humid days when light drizzles begin to fall that gave him a vague inexplicable feeling of nostalgia for his long-gone childhood, those first sad, yet sweet, sensations that make one feel close to the earth, to its smell. The emotion he would feel made his breast swell. He would be choked up with anguish and start crying. It was his destiny to end up in the country, but he really didn't expect it to be like this.

The ants were very tiny and as thin as you could imagine. They were pink and so light that a puff of breath could wipe out more than a hundred of them. Yet a hundred others would immediately appear from every direction. And how busy they were! There was order in their haste: teams of them coming here, and teams of them going there. They came and went incessantly and would bump into one another, detour for a while, but again find their way. They certainly understood and consulted one another.

But, perhaps because of their thinness and smallness, it had not yet seemed to him that they could eventually be feared, that they actually wanted to take over his house and his body, and
deprive him of his life. Yet he had found them everywhere. They
were in all his drawers. He had seen them come out of the most unexpected places. Sometimes, while he was eating a piece of
bread left for a moment on the table or elsewhere, he even found
them in his mouth. The idea that he should seriously defend himself against them, that he should seriously fight them, had not yet occurred to him. It occurred to him suddenly one morning, due perhaps to the mood he was in after a horribly restless night, one that was worse than all the others.

With his head bowed and his elbows resting on his knees, he let his hands dangle between his open legs. At a certain moment he saw some ants come out of his shirtsleeves and proceed down along his dangling hands. Evidently those ants had taken shelter under his shirt and were strolling about his body as if it were their home. Oh, that was probably the reason why he had been unable to sleep at night, and why all those worries and feelings of remorse had again begun to bother him. He became angry and decided to exterminate them on the spot. The anthill was only a short distance from his door. He would set it on fire.

How is it he didn't think of the wind? That's easy. He didn't think of it because there was no wind, none at all. The air was still, in anticipation of the rain that hung over the countryside in that suspended silence that precedes the fall of the first large drops. Not a leaf quivered. The gust of wind arose unexpectedly and treacherously as soon as he lit the small bundle of straw that he had gathered up from the ground. He held it in his hand
like a torch. When he lowered it to set the anthill on fire, the gust
of wind, striking it, carried the sparks over to the sheaf that had been left in front of the door. The sheaf, bursting immediately into flames, spread the fire to the other sheaves sheltered in the house, and the fire suddenly flared up, crackled, and filled the whole place with smoke. Like a madman, shouting with his arms in the air, he flung himself into that furnace, hoping perhaps to extinguish the fire.

When the people who had run over to help him dragged him out, everyone was filled with fright since he appeared horribly burned and yet still alive. As a matter of fact, he was quite hysterical and his arms were groping wildly while the flames continued to burn his clothes and the tousled curls on his head. A few hours later he died in the hospital where he had been taken. In his delirium he spoke unintelligibly about the wind, the wind and the ants.

"Joined in... joined in..."

Upon his return to Italy in 1891, he settled in Rome. Since he received a generous allowance from his father, he was able to devote himself fully to his literary pursuits. He frequented a small group of writers with whom he exchanged ideas, and wrote poetry, plays, and especially short stories, which he contributed to various periodicals.

In 1894 he married the daughter of his father's business partner, and soon thereafter his wife bore him three children. In these years he taught stylistics at the Istituto Superiore di Magistero, a women's college in Rome. Later, in 1908, he obtained the chair of Italian language at this same institution, a position which he was to keep until the early postwar years.

In 1903 his father's mine was abruptly shut down because of flooding. This disaster, which entailed the loss both of Pirandello's patrimony and his wife's dowry, left the young author virtually penniless. Forced to come to grips with this serious financial crisis, Pirandello began for the first time to request payment for his writings, and he increased his literary output. As a further consequence of this calamity, his wife suffered a trauma which affected her physically and mentally, and which ultimately destroyed the couple's happy home life.

The works Pirandello published in the following few years include his famous novel
I1 fu Mattia Pascal
(The
Late Mattia Pascal,
1904), which exemplifies the contrast between reality and illusion, and his essay
L'umorismo (Humor
, 1908), which contains his original poetics. During this period he also produced many short stories, some of which served as a basis for his future plays and novels. Having decided to write a total of 365 stories, beginning with the year 1921 he began issuing a complete collection of his tales in a series of volumes entitled
Novelle per un anno
(
Short Stories for a Year
)

In 1925 Pirandello founded an Art Theater in Rome, which he personally directed. Together with his troupe he traveled throughout Europe, staging performances mainly of his own works. He also embarked on a tour of South America, bringing his plays to audiences in Argentina and Brazil. After disbanding his company in 1928, he left Italy to live for extended periods in Berlin and Paris, where he continued to write and publish.

During the last decade of his life, Pirandello became keenly interested in cinema. He published articles concerning the nature of the new art, wrote original film treatments, and met with producers and directors, many of whom expressed interest in his work. His novel
The Late
Mattia Pascal
as well as several of his plays and short stories were adapted for the screen; but only one of his treatments,
Gioca, Pietro! (Play, Peter!),
was made into a film:
Acciaio (Steel,
1933).