One, No One & 100,000

by Luigi Pirandello

  5 ~ Euphemistic Job Titles

  Up to that point, I’d never detached myself from my father like this. I’d always thought of him, remembered him as the father he was to me, which was actually not much of one. Since my mother had died very young, I was sent off to a boarding school far from Richieri, then to another, then to a third, where I stayed until I was 18 and went to university where I spent six years majoring in one subject after another without getting any practical benefit out of any of them. That was why I was finally summoned back to Richieri and immediately married off. Whether it was a reward or a punishment, I have no idea. Two years later, my father died, leaving me nothing of himself. The most vivid memory of his affection was that tender smile which revealed—like I said—a hint of compassion, a bit of derision.

  But what he been to himself? He was dying now, my father, completely. What he’d been to others—and how little to me! And that smile he had for me surely came from others as well, from the reality that they’d ascribed to him, and the one he’d suspected…

  Now I understood it all, and I understood the horrible reason behind it.

  “What does your father do?” my boarding school classmates would often ask.

  I’d say: “He’s a banker.” Because to me, my father was a banker.

  If your father were an executioner, how would that job title be euphemistically described in your family to reconcile it with the love you have for him and he has for you? Oh, he’s really, really nice to you, oh, I know. You don’t need to tell me. I can perfectly imagine the love of such a father for his young son, the tremulous gentleness of those big hands buttoning up his young son’s little white pajamas. Then how savage those same hands would be tomorrow at dawn, at the gallows. I can also perfectly imagine a banker going from charging ten to twenty percent, then from twenty to forty percent, gradually raising his interest rate to match his growing bad reputation all over town as a usurious loan shark, a reputation that tomorrow will weigh like a burden of shame on his young son who currently knows nothing about it, amusing himself with bizarre thoughts, that poor little excessive indulgence who really deserved—I’m telling you—that tender smile, half compassion, half derision.

  6 ~ The Good but Wild Son

  My eyes were brimming with horror from this discovery, a horror clouded by a sad dejection that still managed to pull my lips into a hollow smile. I suspected no one could possibly believe or accept that those thoughts were mine. That’s the state I was in when I went to face my wife Dida.

  She was standing—as I recall—in a bright, well-lit room, dressed all in white and completely enveloped in sunlit splendor, arranging her new spring clothes in the large, white- and gold-lacquered three-door wardrobe. Struggling against a bitter, secret shame to summon a voice that wouldn’t sound too strange, I asked her: “Uhm, Dida, you know what I do for a living, right?”

  Holding a hangar with a gauzy dress the color of parchment, Dida turned to look at me as if I were a stranger. Bewildered, she repeated: “What you do for a living?”

  I had to taste the bitterness of my shame all over again as I repeated the question that was practically ripping through my soul. But this time the words crumbled in my mouth. “Yeah,” I said. “What do I do?”

  Then Dida stood a moment gaping at me before bursting into a fit of laughter. “What are you talking about, Gengè?”

  The sound of her laughter instantly shattered my horror, dissolving the nightmare of the blind destiny my spirit had crashed into with a shudder in the depths of my soul-searching a moment earlier.

  Oh, there we have it—a usurer, a loan shark out there to others, an idiot here for my wife Dida. I was Gengè, one individual here in my wife’s mind and eyes, and who knows how many other Gengès I was out there, in the minds or merely the eyes of the people of Richieri. It had nothing to do with my soul, which in its pristine privacy, felt free and clear of any considerations of what had come to me, what had been done to me, or what had been given to me by others—first and foremost my father’s money and profession.

  No? So what was it really all about, then? I could refuse to accept as my own the contemptible reality others had assigned me, but unfortunately I still had no choice but to admit that even if I’d constructed a reality for myself, it would’ve been no more real a reality than the one they’d given me—the one others had assigned to this body that now, in front of my wife, couldn’t even feel like mine, especially since her Gengè had appropriated it, and had just now uttered another stupid remark that made her laugh out loud. Asking his line of work! As if there was anyone who didn’t know!

  “Excessive indulgence,” I said, almost to myself, pulling my voice from a silence that seemed removed from life, because, as a shadow in front of my wife, I no longer knew where I—the real me—was speaking to her from.

  “What are you talking about?” she repeated, from the assured solidity of her life, with that creamy-yellowish dress on her arm.

  Since I didn’t respond, she approached me, took me by the arms and blew on my eyes, as though erasing an expression that no longer belonged to Gengè—to her Gengè—because she knew he had to pretend, just as she did, not to know how they referred to my father’s profession in town.

  But wasn’t I even worse than my father? Oh! At least my father worked—but me, what did I do? The good but wild son. The good son who talked about foreign (and weird) things ranging from the discovery that my nose is bent to the right, to the far side of the moon. All the while my father’s so-called bank continued to work, to prosper, thanks to the efforts of two trusted friends, Firbo and Quantorzo. They were—what’s it called—partners, and the bank also had junior partners, and everything was going full steam ahead without even the slightest meddling from my part. All the partners loved me—Quantorzo like a son and Firbo like a brother. They all knew it was a waste of time talking business with me, and all they really needed was to have me come in once in a while to sign something. I signed things and that was it. Not really, because sometimes somebody would also come by to request that I accompany him to see Firbo or Quantorzo with a short letter of recommendation. Sure! And then I’d discover a slightly off-center dimple that divided his chin into two parts that weren’t perfectly equal, one side standing out a little more than the other.

  How come they hadn’t already done me in? Oh, they didn’t bump me off, my friends, because I’d hadn’t yet detached from myself to really see myself. I was living like a blind man in the condition I’d been placed, without considering what it really was, because I’d been born and raised in it, so it was natural for me. Likewise, others thought that it was my natural state as well. That’s how they’d come to know me and couldn’t picture me any other way. And by now they could all look at me almost without hatred, and even smile at this good but wild son.

  Everyone?

  I suddenly felt two pairs of eyes piercing into my soul like four poisoned daggers—the eyes of Marco di Dio and his wife Diamante, who I ran into every day on my way home.

  7 ~ Necessary Digression, Once and For All

  As luck would have it, Marco di Dio and his wife Diamante were my first victims (if I recall correctly). I mean, the first to participate in the experiment to destroy a Moscarda.

  But what gives me the right to talk about them? What right do I have here to attribute a point of view and words to others outside myself? What do I know about them? How can I talk about them? I see them from the outside, and as they appear to me, obviously. In other words, I see them in a way that they certainly wouldn’t recognize themselves. So then, aren’t I guilty of the same injustice that I’m always complaining about myself?

  Yeah, sure. But with the slight difference of the obsessions I’d spoken about at the outset—how everyone wants to build himself up, in this way or that, according to how he sees himself and sincerely believes he is, not just to himself, but to others as well. At any rate, it’s a presumption you have to pay the price for.

  I know, you guy
s don’t want to give up yet. “What about facts?” you exclaim. “For the love of God, aren’t there any actual facts, any hard data?”

  Yes, of course there are. Being born is a fact. Being born in a given time instead of another, as I’ve already mentioned, having this father or that one, these life circumstances or those, being born in Lapland or Central Africa, male or female, attractive or ugly, with a hunchback or without: all facts. And even if you lose an eye, that’s a fact. You might even lose both eyes, and if you’re a painter, that’s the worst fact that could happen to you.

  Time and space are unavoidable necessities. Fate and luck are products of chance. But they’re all life’s traps. Do you want to exist? Here’s the catch: nothing exists in the abstract. To exist, something must be captured in a form, a shape, and remain for a period of time, here or there, this way or that. And for as long as it lasts, everything bears the penalty of its form along with it—the penalty of being one way without the possibility of being any other way. That man crippled with rickets there, it seems like a prank, a joke you could more or less tolerate for about a minute, no more. Now stand up straight, nimble, agile, tall! Say what? It’s going to be like that forever, your entire one and only life? And you’ve got to accept it and live that way forever and ever.

  And actions are just like forms.

  When an action is done, it’s done—there’s no changing it. When someone, anyone, does something, even without later accepting it and recognizing it as something he’s done, it remains something he’s done, like a personal prison. If you’ve gotten married, or more tangibly, let’s say you’ve stolen something and been caught, or you’ve killed someone—the consequences of your actions wrap around you like coils or tentacles, and the responsibility for those actions and their consequences, undesired or unforeseen as they may be, looms over and around you like air so thick you can’t even breath it. And how can you ever free yourself?

  Alright, but what does it all mean? That actions, just like forms, determine reality for you and me? How? Why? They’re a prison, no one can deny that. But if that’s all you want to assert, be careful not to contradict me, because what I’m saying and truly believe is that not only are they a prison, but they’re the most unfair prison you could possibly imagine.

  Good God, I thought I’d proven it! I know John Doe. Based on what I know about him, I assign him a reality—my version of reality. But you know John Doe too, and the man you know is certainly not the same as the one I know, because we all know him in our own way, and we all give him our own individual version of reality. Now, even as far as John Doe is concerned, he has as many realities as there are people who know him. He knows himself one way with me, another way with you, another with a third person, a fourth, and so on. This means that John Doe is really one person with me, another with you, another with a third person, yet another with a fourth, and so on, despite he himself—especially him—being under the mistaken illusion that he’s the same person with everyone.

  Here’s the predicament, or the cruel joke, if you prefer: We carry out an action. We believe in good faith that we’re fully involved in that action. Unfortunately, that’s not how it is. The action is always carried out by only one of the many individuals that we are or that we can be, and we realize that when a very reckless circumstance suddenly leaves us high and dry. In other words, we realize we weren’t entirely involved in that action, so it would be an atrocious injustice to judge us by that sole action, keeping us bound to it like a pillory for our entire existence, as though our life was completely summed up by that one action.

  “But I’m this one, too, and that one, and this other one as well!” we begin shouting.

  Yeah, there’s plenty of us. Plenty who weren’t included in the action of that one, and who had nothing, or practically nothing, to do with it. Not only that, but the one in question, that is, that version of reality that we gave ourselves in that particular moment, the one who carried out the action, often vanishes completely shortly afterwards. In fact, the memory of the action lingers in us—if it remains at all—like an inexplicable, agonizing dream. Another, ten others, all the others that we are or that we could be, rise up one by one in us to ask how we could’ve done this, and we’re at a loss for an explanation.

  Bygone realities.

  If the facts aren’t too serious, we call these bygone realities disappointments. Yes, alright, because every reality really is a fraud. That’s why I need to tell you now that you’ve got another fraud in store for you.

  “You’re wrong!”

  We’re very superficial, you and I. We don’t really delve into the joke. It’s too deep and too deeply rooted, my dear friends. And here’s the joke: a person has to behave according to forms, which are the appearances that people create for themselves and the ones we arbitrarily call reality. Naturally this reality changes depending on what form and action we observe that person in.

  No wonder it seems to us that everyone else is wrong, thinking that a given form, a given action isn’t this and isn’t like that. But inevitably, a little later, if we shift our perspective a bit, we realize we’ve been mistaken as well, and it really isn’t this and isn’t like that. We’re finally forced to recognize that it’ll never be this or like that in any secure, stable way. Instead, it’s one way now and a different way later, until a certain point comes when everything will seem totally wrong or totally right to us—but it doesn’t matter either way, because a reality wasn’t given to us and one doesn’t even exist. We have to create it ourselves if we want to exist. And it’ll never be the same for everyone, forever, but instead will be subject to continuous and endless change. Our ability to delude ourselves into thinking today’s reality is the only real one, on the one hand, sustains us. But on the other hand, it sends us tumbling into an infinite void, because today’s reality is destined to reveal itself as tomorrow’s illusion. And life doesn’t conclude. It can’t conclude. Tomorrow if it concludes, it’s finished.

  8 ~ Let’s Bring it Down a Notch

  Do you feel like I’ve gone over your heads? Let’s bring it down a notch. A rubber ball needs to hit the ground before it can bounce up again. Why don’t we get our feet planted firmly on the ground and catch the ball in our hands?

  Which facts would you like to talk about? The fact that I was born in such-and-such year, on such-and-such day, in the fine city of Richieri, in the house at such-and-such address on such-and-such street, to Mr. and Mrs. So-and-So, was baptized in the city’s main church when I was six days old, sent to school when I was six years old, married when I was twenty-three, that I’m five feet eight and a half inches in height with reddish hair, etc.?

  Those are my vital statistics. Factual data, you might say. Would you like to draw my reality out of these facts? Do you think these facts that mean nothing by themselves would lead everyone to the same conclusion? And even if they presented a complete and accurate picture of me, where would that picture be? In which reality?

  In yours, which isn’t the same as that person’s over there, or that person’s, or that one’s either. Couldn’t there possibly be just one reality, for everyone? But we’ve already seen that there’s not even one single reality for each one of us, since our own inner reality is constantly changing! So where does that leave us?

  Here we are, with our feet firmly planted on the ground. Are there five of you there? Come with me.

  This is the house where I was born, in such-and-such year, month, day. Well then, based on its topographic details, its height, length, and number of window situated on its façade, this house is the same for everyone. Given the fact that all five of you agree I was born there, in such-and-such year, month, day, with red hair and a height of five feet eight and a half inches, doesn’t it then follow that all five of you assign the same reality to this house and to me? To you who lives in a hovel, this house seems like a fine palace. To you, with a certain artistic flair, the house must seem the height of vulgarity. You, who only grudgingly walks down
the street where it stands because it reminds you of a sad episode of your life, glower at it. You, on the other hand, look at it with affection because—as I’m well aware—your poor dear mother used to live right across the street and was a good friend of my own mother.