Tales of Madness (4 page)

"It seems to me that you reason too much..." asserted Valdoggi, already half dazed.

"Yes! And that's my problem!" Lao Griffi exclaimed with deep sincerity, as he opened his light eyes wide. "But I'd like to say to my mother: 'Listen, I've been improvident. Yes! as much as you care to believe... I was even predestined, quite predestined to get married — that I'll grant! But is it necessarily the case that in Udine or in Bologna I would have found another Margherita?' Margherita, you understand, was my wife's name."

"Oh," said Valdoggi. "Did she die?"

The old woman lowered her head and coughed slightly.

"No... I don't know anything about it," answered Valdoggi, surprised, embarrassed, and distressed for having hit on a delicate matter, but nevertheless curious to know all about it.

"I'll tell you," continued Griffi. "I've just come out of jail. I spent five months there. But it was only preventive detention, mind you! They acquitted me. Naturally! But if they had left me in, don't think that I would have minded! Inside or out, at this point it's jail in either case. So I told the jurors: 'Do with me what you will: sentence me, acquit me, anyhow for me it's all the same. I'm sorry for what I've done, but in that terrible instant I didn't know how, nor was I able to do otherwise. Whoever is not guilty, whoever has no reason to be sorry, is always a free man. Even if you chain me, I'll always be free internally. At this point, I don't care what happens to me externally.' I didn't want to say anything more, and I didn't want a lawyer to defend me. But everyone in town knew quite well that I, temperance and moderation personified, had incur
red a mountain of debts for her, that I had been forced to quit my
job... And then... ah, yes, and then... Can you tell me how a
woman, after having cost a man so much, can do what she did to
me? That wicked woman! But you know? With these hands... I swear to you that I didn't want to kill her. I wanted to know how she could do it, and I asked her, shaking her after having seized her by the throat... like this... I squeezed too hard. He had jumped out the window into the garden... Her former sweetheart... Yes, previously she had dropped him, as one says, for
me; for the nice young officer... And look, Valdoggi! If that fool
had not gone away for a year, thereby giving me the opportunity to fall in love with Margherita (unfortunately for me), by now those two no doubt would be man and wife, and probably happy. Yes, I knew them both well. They were made to get along marvelously. Look, I can picture quite well the life they would have lived together. Actually, I do picture it. Whenever I want, I can picture them both alive down in Potenza in their house. I even know the house where they would have gone to live, as soon as they were married. All I have to do is place Margherita, alive, in the various events of life as I have
seen her so often. I shut my eyes and see her in those rooms with
windows open to the sun. She's in there singing with her pretty voice, all trills and modulation. How she sang! She held her little hands interlocked on top of her blond hair, like this. 'Good morning, happy bride!' They would not have had children, you know? Margherita couldn't have any. See? If there is madness in all of this, this is my madness... I can see everything that would have been, if what had happened had not happened. I see it, I live in it; actually, I live only in it... The
if,
in a word, the
if,
understand?"

He became silent for quite a spell. Then he exclaimed with such exasperation that Valdoggi turned around to look at him, believing that he was crying:

"And what if they had sent me to Udine?"

This time the old woman did not repeat 'Destiny!' but she certainly uttered it in her heart. And so much so, that she shook her head sadly and sighed softly, keeping her eyes continuously lowered and moving under her chin all the silver tassels of those two ribbons that looked like they were taken from a funeral wreath.

First of all, let me preface my story by stating that I am now
sane. Oh, as far as that goes, poor too. And bald. But when I was
still myself, I mean, when I was the respected and wealthy Mr. Fausto Bandini, and had a head full of magnificent hair, I was crazy, crazy beyond the shadow of a doubt. And of course, a little leaner. And yet I still have these same eyes that have remained since then, frightened eyes set in a face completely marked with lines which reflect the chronic feelings of compassion that afflicted me.

Once in a while, in moments of distraction, I have relapses. But they are only flashes that Marta, my sensible wife, quickly puts an end to, with certain terrible little words of hers.

The other night, for example.

Things of small consequence, mind you. What can ever happen to a sane poor man (or to a poor sane man) reduced to living in a more orderly fashion than does an ant?

The finer the cloth, the more delicate the embroidery, I once read, I don't know where. But, first of all, one has to know how to embroider.

I was returning home. I believe no one can bother you more than an insistent beggar, when you don't have a single coin in your pocket, and yet he can tell by the expression on your face that you're quite willing to give him one. In my case the beggar was a girl. For a quarter of an hour non-stop, in a whimpering voice at my back, she went on repeating the same sentences, two or three of them. But I turned a deaf ear without looking at her. At a certain point she leaves me, accosts a pair of newly-weds, and hangs onto them like a gadfly.

Will they give her a small coin? I ask myself.

Oh, you don't know, young lady! The first time newly-weds go
walking arm in arm along the street, they think everybody in the whole world is staring at them. They experience the embarrassment of their new situation, which all those eyes perceive and imagine they feel, and they have neither the knowledge nor the ability to stop and give alms to a poor soul.

A little later, in fact, I hear someone running after me and shouting: "Sir, sir."

My God, what strange eyes lit up in that emaciated, yellowish face topped with reddish, matted hair. All the vices
of the street squirmed in those eyes — appalling eyes in a girl so
young. (I'm not adding an exclamation point to that sentence, because, now that I'm sane, nothing should astonish me anymore.)

Even before seeing those eyes of hers, I regretted my threatening gesture.

"How old are you?"

The girl looks at me askance, without lowering her arm, and does not reply.

"Why don't you work?"

"I wish I could! I can't find a job."

"You're not looking for one," I tell her, setting out again, "because you've taken a liking to this fine sort of occupation."

It goes without saying, the girl followed me again with her painful chant: that she was hungry, that I should give her something for the love of God.

Could I have taken off my jacket and said to her: "Take this"?
I wonder. In former times I would have. But, of course, in former
times I would have had a small coin in my pocket.

Suddenly an idea came to me, for which I feel I must excuse myself in the presence of sane people. To go out and work is no doubt good advice, but advice that is all too easily given. It occurred to me that Marta was looking for a servant girl.

Mind you, I consider this sudden idea a stroke of madness, not so much for the anxious joy it aroused in me, and which I immediately recognized quite well, since on other occasions, when I was crazy, I had experienced exactly the same feeling: a sort of dazzling elation that lasts a second, a flash, in which the world seems to throb and tremble entirely within us, but for the reflections — those of a poor sane man — with which I immediately tried to sustain the elation. I thought: As long as we give this girl something to eat, a place to sleep and some hand-me-down clothes, she'll serve us without expecting anything else. It will also be a saving for Marta. That's exactly how I reasoned.

The girl stopped again, perplexed.

"And what about Mama?"

"You'll go tell her about it later. Come along now."

It seemed to me that I was walking down another avenue and... I'm ashamed to say, that the houses and trees were charged with the same excitement that I felt. And the excitement grew; it grew by degrees as I approached my house.

What would my wife say?

I couldn't have presented the proposition to her more awkwardly (I was stuttering). And certainly, most certainly, my clumsy manner must have not only contributed to making her reject the idea, as was only right, but also to angering her, poor Marta. Yet, now that I've become sane, how much better
would I do, if I'm unable to utter a couple of words, one after the
other, because I'm continually afraid that some absurdity will slip out of my mouth? Enough said; my wife didn't forego the opportunity to repeat her terrible "Again? Again?" which for me is worse that an unexpected cold shower. Then she sent the girl away without even giving her a pittance because, as she said, she had already made her contribution for the day. (And actually, Marta does make some charitable contribution every day. Mind you, she gives a small coin to the first poor soul whom she happens to meet, and once she has given it and has said: "Remember me to the holy souls in purgatory," she has eased her conscience and doesn't want to hear anything else.)

In the meantime I express the thought: If that girl isn't already a lost soul, she certainly will be one before too long. Yes, but what should it matter to me? Now that I've become sane, I shouldn't be thinking about such things at all. "Think about myself!" — this is my new motto. It took some effort to persuade myself to use that as a guide for every act of this new "life" of mine, let's call it that. But somehow, by not doing anything... Enough said. If, for instance, I now stop under the
window of a house where I know there are people crying, I must
immediately look for my own bewildered and haggard image in the pane of that window. When it appears, it has the express obligation to shout down to me from up there, as it lowers its head slightly and points a finger at its breast: "And me?"

Just like that.

Instead when I was crazy...

When I was crazy, I didn't feel I was inside myself, which is like saying, I wasn't at home within myself. I had, in fact, become a hotel, open to everyone. And if I would but tap my forehead a bit, I would feel that there were always people who had taken up lodgings there: poor souls who needed my help. I had, likewise, many, many other tenants in my heart. Nor can anyone say that my hands and legs were for my own personal use, but rather for the use of the unhappy people within me who sent me here and there to continuously tend to their affairs.

I could no sooner say "I" to myself than an echo would
immediately repeat "I, I, I" for so many others, as if I had a flock
of sparrows within me. And this meant that if, let us say, I was hungry and would tell myself that, so, so, many others within me would repeat on their own behalf: "I'm hungry, I'm hungry, I'm hungry." Naturally I felt I had to provide for them and always regretted not being able to do so for everyone. I viewed myself, in brief, as being part of a mutual aid society with the universe. But since at that time I needed no one, that "mutual" had meaning only for the others.