Tales of Madness (5 page)
Authors: Luigi Pirandello
The strangest part, however, was that I thought I could justify my madness; actually, to tell the whole truth without shame, I had gone so far as to make an outline of a unique treatise that I intended to write and that was to be entitled The Foundation
of Morality.
Here in my drawer I have my notes for this treatise, and once in a while in the evening (while Marta is taking her usual after-dinner nap in the adjoining room), I take them out and reread them very, very slowly to myself. I do this secretly and, admittedly, with some pleasure and bewilderment, because it's undeniable that I reasoned quite well, when I was crazy.
I should really laugh about this, but I can't, perhaps for the rather particular reason that the majority of my arguments were aimed at converting that unfortunate woman who was my first wife and of whom I will speak later in order to furnish the most incontestable proof of the blatantly mad acts of those times.
From these notes I surmise that the treatise The Foundation
of Morality
no doubt was to consist of dialogs between that first wife of mine and myself, or perhaps of apologs. One small notebook, for example, is entitled The Timid Young Man, and certainly in it I was referring to that fine boy, son of a country merchant who was a business associate of mine. This boy would come to the city, sent by his father to visit me, and that wretched woman would invite him to have dinner with us in order to have some fun at his expense.
of Morality
no doubt was to consist of dialogs between that first wife of mine and myself, or perhaps of apologs. One small notebook, for example, is entitled The Timid Young Man, and certainly in it I was referring to that fine boy, son of a country merchant who was a business associate of mine. This boy would come to the city, sent by his father to visit me, and that wretched woman would invite him to have dinner with us in order to have some fun at his expense.
I'm transcribing from that small notebook:
Oh, Mirina, tell
me. What sort
of eyes do you have? Can't you see that the poor boy has caught on that you intend to make fun of him? You consider him
stupid, but
actually he's only timid —
so
timid that he
doesn't know
how to avoid the
ridicule you expose him
to,
however much
it
makes him
suffer internally. Oh
Mirina,
if the boy's suffering were no
longer just something
that made you laugh, if you
weren't only aware
of your wicked
pleasure, but also
at the
same time,
of his pain, don't you think you'd stop
making him
suffer, because your
pleasure would
be disturbed
and destroyed
by your
awareness
of
someone else's pain? Obviously, Mirina, you're acting
without being fully aware of your action, and you feel its effect only in yourself.
me. What sort
of eyes do you have? Can't you see that the poor boy has caught on that you intend to make fun of him? You consider him
stupid, but
actually he's only timid —
so
timid that he
doesn't know
how to avoid the
ridicule you expose him
to,
however much
it
makes him
suffer internally. Oh
Mirina,
if the boy's suffering were no
longer just something
that made you laugh, if you
weren't only aware
of your wicked
pleasure, but also
at the
same time,
of his pain, don't you think you'd stop
making him
suffer, because your
pleasure would
be disturbed
and destroyed
by your
awareness
of
someone else's pain? Obviously, Mirina, you're acting
without being fully aware of your action, and you feel its effect only in yourself.
That's it exactly. You must admit, for a madman, it's not bad. The trouble was that I didn't realize that it's one thing to reason, and quite another to live. A half, or about a half, of all those wretches who are kept locked up in asylums — aren't they perhaps people who wanted to live in accordance with common abstract reasoning? How much proof, how many examples I could cite here, if every sane individual today didn't recognize the fact that so many things one does or says in life, as well as certain customs and traditions, are really irrational, so that whoever justifies them is crazy.
Such was I, after all, and such did I appear in my treatise. I would not have become aware of it, had Marta not lent me her eyeglasses.
Meanwhile, those who do not wish to content themselves with a belief in God, because they say that that belief is founded on a sentiment that does not acknowledge reason, might be curious to see how I justified His existence in this treatise of mine. The trouble is, I now admit that this would be a difficult God for sane people. Indeed, it would also be quite an impractical one, because whoever would accept Him, would have to act towards others as I once did, that is, like a madman, treating others as one does himself, since those others are conscious beings just as we are. Whoever would truly do that, and would attribute to others a reality identical to his own, would of necessity possess the idea of a reality common to everyone, of a truth and even of an existence that transcends us — namely, God.
But, I repeat, not for sane people.
Meanwhile, it's curious to note that when I read
The Little
Flowers of St. Francis,
for example (following our old custom of
reading some good book before going to bed), Marta interrupts me from time to time to exclaim with reverence and great admiration:
The Little
Flowers of St. Francis,
for example (following our old custom of
reading some good book before going to bed), Marta interrupts me from time to time to exclaim with reverence and great admiration:
"What a saint! What a saint!"
Like that.
It's probably a temptation from the devil, but I put the book down on my lap and look at her for a while to find out whether she's really speaking earnestly in my presence. Now really, if one follows logic, St. Francis shouldn't be sane for her, or I would now...
But of course, I convince myself that the sane have to be logical only up to a certain point.
Let's go back to when I was crazy.
At nightfall, in the villa, when my ears picked up the sound of distant bagpipes which led the march of the reapers returning in throngs to the village with their carts loaded with the harvest, I felt that the air between me and the things around me became gradually more intimate, and that I could see beyond the limits of natural vision. My spirit, attentive to and fascinated by that sacred communion with nature, descended to the threshold of the senses and perceived the slightest of motions, the faintest of sounds.. And a great, bewildering silence was within me, so that a whirr of wings nearby made me start, and a
trill in the distance gave me almost a spasm of joy, because I felt
happy for the little birds that in that season did not have to suffer the cold and found enough food in the countryside to feed themselves abundantly. I felt happy, because it seemed my breath gave them warmth and my body nourishment.
I also penetrated into the life of the plants, and little by little, from a pebble, from a blade of grass, I arose, absorbing and feeling within me the life of all things, until it seemed that I was almost becoming the world, that the trees were my limbs, the earth my body, the rivers my veins, and the air my soul. And for a while I went on like that, ecstatic and pervaded by this divine vision.
When it vanished, I would be left panting, as if I had actually harbored the life of the world in my frail breast.
I would sit down at the foot of a tree, and then the spirit of my folly would begin to suggest the strangest ideas to me: that humanity needed me, needed my encouraging word, an exemplary, practical word. At a certain point, I myself would notice that I was becoming delirious, and so I would say to myself: "Let's reenter, let's reenter our conscious mind..." But I would reenter it, not to see myself, but to see others in me as they saw themselves, to feel them within me as they themselves felt, and to want them to be as they wanted themselves to be.
Now then, employing the internal mirror of my mind to conceive and reflect upon those other beings as having a reality equal to mine, and in this way, too, considering Being in its unity as a selfish action, an action, that is, in which the part rises up to take the place of the whole and subordinates it, was it not natural that this would appear irrational to me?
Alas, it did. But while I walked through my lands, tiptoed and stooped in order to avoid trampling some little flower or insect whose ephemeral life I lived within myself, those others were stripping my fields, stripping my houses, and going so far as to strip me.
And now, here I am: ecce homo
3. Mirina
The blessed candle, the candle "of the good death" that that holy woman had brought along from the main church of her native village, was now serving its purpose.
She had kept it for herself at the bottom of her closet for so many years. It now burned on a tall leaden candlestick as if to keep vigil over the humble and dear memories of her distant town, dissolving into tears that dripped down the stem, behind the head of the dead woman already laid out in the coffin, still open on the floor, where her bed had formerly been.
Whenever I happen to think of my first wife, this funereal vision appears to me with extraordinary lucidity. The holy woman laid out in that coffin is Amalia Sanni, Mirina's older sister and, practically speaking, her mother. I again see the very modest bedroom, and, in addition to the blessed candle, two other somewhat smaller candles at the foot of the coffin, which are burning down a little faster and crackle from time to time.
I remain sitting by the window and, as if that unexpected misfortune had stunned more than saddened me, I gaze at the relatives and friends who have come together because of that death. They are sane and proper people, I surely wouldn't deny that, but they are guilty of excessive zeal in making me aware of the dislike they felt for me. Certainly they had every reason to act that way, but in so doing they were not helping me regain my sanity, because in their glances, I found reason to sincerely pity them.
I loved Amalia Sanni as I would a sister. I now recognize in
her only one fault: her soul, in its conception of life, coincided in
all respects with mine. I wouldn't say, however, that she was crazy. At worst, I would say that Amalia Sanni wasn't sane, like St. Francis. Because there is no middle course, either you're a saint or you're crazy.
her only one fault: her soul, in its conception of life, coincided in
all respects with mine. I wouldn't say, however, that she was crazy. At worst, I would say that Amalia Sanni wasn't sane, like St. Francis. Because there is no middle course, either you're a saint or you're crazy.
Both of us made a solicitous effort to reawaken Mirina's soul without, however, spoiling the freshness of her disjointed and almost violent vitality, without at all mortifying that miniature doll-like body of hers, full of the most vivacious charms. We wanted to teach a butterfly, not to fold its wings and fly no longer, but rather to avoid settling on certain poisonous flowers. However, we failed to realize that what seemed like poison to us, was the butterfly's food.
Enough said. I don't want to dwell on my unhappy married life with Mirina. I'll only say that she detested in me what she admired in her sister. And this seems quite natural to me now.
All of a sudden, one of my wife's cousins, whose name I can no longer remember, entered the dead woman's room, panting. She was plump and dwarfish and wore a large pair of round glasses that magnified her eyes monstrously, poor thing. She had gone outside to pick as many flowers here and there as she could find growing in the vicinity of the little villa, and now she was coming to scatter them over the dead woman's body. Her disheveled hair still carried the wind that howled outside.
That gesture of hers was kind and compassionate, something I now recognize. But at that time... I remembered that, a few days before, when Amalia saw Mirina returning to the little villa with a large bouquet of flowers, she had exclaimed, quite distressed:
"What a shame! Why?"
In her sanctity, in fact, she maintained that those wildflowers
do not grow for human beings, but are like the smile of the earth,
which expresses gratitude to the sun for the heat it gives. For her, pulling up those flowers was a profanation. I confess that, being crazy, I couldn't stand looking at that dead woman covered with flowers. I said nothing. I went away.
I still remember the impression that nature's sudden spectacle made on me that night. Nature seemed to be almost completely in flight with the howling vehemence of the wind. Infinite formations of rifted clouds fled with desperate fury through the sky and seemed to drag along the moon, pale from consternation. The trees twisted and turned, rustling, creaking, and trembling ceaselessly, as if they were about to uproot themselves and flee, way, way over there, where the wind was bringing the clouds to a stormy encounter.
As I left the villa, my spirit, completely locked in the grief of death, suddenly opened up, as if the grief itself had opened up in the presence of that night. I felt that there was another immense sorrow in that mysterious sky, in those rifted, scrambling clouds; another arcane sorrow in the air, furious and howling in that flight. And, since the mute trees shook in that manner, an unknown spasm certainly must have been present within them. All of sudden, I heard a sob, almost a bubble of frightening light in that sea of darkness: a screech of a scops owl down in the valley; and in the distance, cries of terror: crickets chirping long and loudly over there, towards the hill.
Assailed by the wind, I sought refuge among the trees. At a certain point, I don't know why, I turned to look towards the little villa, whose other side was now in view. After looking for quite a while, I suddenly leaned forward to ascertain in the darkness whether what I thought I saw was real. Near the low window of the room where Mirina had retreated to cry over her sister's death, what seemed like a shadow was moving. Could that shadow have been just an optical illusion? I rubbed my eyes so hard that for an instant, I could no longer make anything out, as if an even greater darkness had descended around me to prevent me not from seeing, but from believing what I thought I had seen. A shadow gesticulating? The shadow of a tree shaken by the wind?
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