Her Husband

Translated and with an Afterword

by Martha King and Mary Ann Frese Witt

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

DURHAM AND LONDON

2000

© 2000 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
All dramatic, motion picture, radio, television, and other rights to this work are fully protected by all signatories to the Universal Copyright Convention as well as the Berne Convention, and no public or private performances—professional or amateur—may be given without the written permission of the copyright owners, Duke University Press and the Pirandello Estate.
Published by authorization of the Estate of Luigi Pirandello.
Agent: Ms. Toby Cole, 2915 Derby St., Berkeley,
CA
94705.
This work is a translation of
Suo marito
© the Pirandello Estate, copyright renewed.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

We are indebted to several people who have generously offered us their time, suggestions, and encouragement in the fascinating but sometimes frustrating endeavor to translate Pirandello. After we had started on the project, we learned from Daniela Bini that Eric Bentley was interested in finding a translator for
Suo marito
. He was more than generous to us with his time, encouragement, enthusiasm, and help. He read the entire manuscript carefully, raising important questions, pointing out stylistic problems, and offering suggestions. Indeed, without Eric Bentley’s work, the present translation would be a very different product.

Others have left their mark on this translation by helping us to understand a sometimes obscure Italian term and thus to find its English equivalent. We are grateful to Alberto Malfitano, Domenico Frezza, Donatella Spinelli, and Ronald Witt for their help in this area. In Florence, Gloria Anzilotti was always willing to help work out puzzling passages. We also thank Alexander DeGrand, who suggested important changes in the Afterword. Our editor, J. Reynolds Smith, made incisive and useful remarks on both the translation and the Afterword. Our copyeditor, Estelle Silbermann, read the manuscript with great care and precision, making several suggestions and changes.

Martha Witt Santalucia not only read the entire translation, improving it with several acute observations: she brought us together in the first place. We would like to dedicate our translation to her.

1
THE BANQUET

Attilio Raceni, publisher for four years of the women’s (not feminist) magazine
The Muses
, woke up late that morning in a bad mood.

Under the eyes of innumerable young Italian women writers–poets, novelists, and short-story writers (even some playwrights)–watching him from photographs arranged in various groupings on the walls, all with faces composed in a particular attitude of vivacious or sentimental charm, he got out of bed–oh, dear, in his night shirt, naturally, but a long one, long enough to reach his ankles, fortunately. Slipping into house shoes, he went to open the window.

Attilio Raceni was little aware of what he did in the privacy of his home, so if someone had said to him: “You just did this and this,” he would have objected, red as a beet.

“Me? Not true! Impossible.”

And yet, there he is: sitting in his night shirt at the foot of his bed, with two fingers tenaciously tugging at a hair deeply embedded in his right nostril. And he rolls his eyes and wrinkles his nose and purses his lips in the sharp pain of that obstinate pinching until all at once he opens his mouth and his nostrils dilate for the sudden explosion of a couple of sneezes.

“Two hundred and forty!” he then says. “Thirty times eight, two hundred and forty.”

Because while Attilio Raceni was tugging at that nose hair, he was absorbed in reckoning that if thirty guests paid eight lire each they
might expect champagne, or at least some modest (that is, local) sparkling wine for the toasts.

In attending to his routine personal care, even if he had looked up he wouldn’t have noticed the images of those writers, for the most part spinsters, although most of them tried to demonstrate in their writing that they were experienced in the ways of the world. Therefore, he wouldn’t have noticed that those sentimental ladies seemed distressed at the sight of their nice director doing certain unpleasant things (however natural), out of unconscious habit, and that they were smiling about it rather superciliously.

Having recently turned thirty, Attilio Raceni had not yet lost his youthful appearance. The pale languor of his face, his curly mustache, his velvety almond-shaped eyes, his raven forelock, gave him the air of a troubadour.

He was basically satisfied with the regard he enjoyed as director of that women’s (not feminist) magazine,
The Muses
, although it cost him considerable financial sacrifice. But from childhood he had been devoted to women’s literature, because his “mamma,” Teresa Raceni Villardi, had been a noted poetess, and in “Mamma’s” house many women writers had gathered, some now dead, others now very old, upon whose knees he could almost say he had been raised. And their endless fondling and caresses had almost left an indelible patina on him. It seemed as if those light, delicate, experienced female hands, stroking and smoothing, had shaped him into that ambiguous, artificial beauty forever. He often moistened his lips, bent over smiling to listen, held his chest high, turned his head, patted his hair like a woman. Once a friend had jokingly touched his chest: “Do you have them?”

Breasts! The schmuck! He had turned bright red.

Left an orphan with a small income, the first thing he did was quit the university, and in order to give himself a profession, he founded
The Muses
. It ate into his inheritance, but gave him enough to live modestly and devote all his time to the magazine. With the subscriptions he had diligently garnered, he had assured its continuation, which, aside
from the worries, no longer cost him anything: just as the numerous women collaborators cost him nothing, since they were never paid for their writing.

This morning he did not even have the time to regret the hairs his raven forelock left in the comb after a hasty styling. He had so much to do!

At ten he had to be at Via Sistina, at the home of Dora Barmis, the
prima musa
of
The Muses
, the very knowledgeable adviser on the beauty, natural charm, and morals of Italian signore and signorine. He had to get together with her to plan the banquet, the fraternal literary
agape
, that he wanted to give for the young and already very celebrated writer Silvia Roncella. Only recently she had come from Taranto with her husband to settle in Rome, “responding to Glory’s first call, after the triumphant reception unanimously given by critics and public for her latest novel,
House of Dwarves,
” as he had written in the last issue of
The Muses
.

From his desk he took a bunch of papers dealing with the banquet, gave a final glance in the mirror almost as if to say good-bye to himself, and left.