“I too, I too,” answered Simone Pau, slightly irritated by the question. “And you too, Serafino. Take it, I tell you! Don’t you see that it is a rite?”
The little old man, with the pinch between his fingers, shut one eye wickedly:
“Contraband tobacco,” he said softly. “It comes from over there….”
And with the thumb of his other hand he made a furtive sign, as though to say: “Saint Peter’s, Vatican.”
“You understand?” Simone Pau turned to me, thrusting his pinch out before my eyes. “It sets you free from Italy! Does that seem to you nothing? You snuff it, and you no longer smell the stench of the Kingdom!”
“Come, come, do not say that…” the little old man pleaded in distress, for he wished to enjoy in peace the benefits of toleration, by tolerating others.
“It is I who say it, not you,” replied Simone Pau. “I say it, who have a right to say it. If you said it, I should ask you not to say it in my presence, is that all right? But you are a wise man, Signor Cesarino! Go on, go on, please, describing to us, with your courtly, old-fashioned grace, the good old oil-lamps, with three wicks, of days gone by… I saw one, do you know, in Beethoven’s house, at Bonn on the Rhine, when I was travelling in Germany. There, this evening we must recall the memory of all the good old things, round this poor violin, shattered by an automatic piano. I confess that I am not over pleased to see my friend in the room here, at such a moment. Yes, you, Serafino. My friend, ladies and gentlemen—let me introduce him to you: Serafino Gubbio—is an operator: poor fellow, he turns the handle of a cinematograph machine.”
“Ah,” said the little old man, with a note of pleasure.
And the three old maids gazed at me in admiration.
“You see?” Simone Pau said to me. “You spoil everything with your presence here. I wager that you now, Signor Cesarino, and you too, ladies, have a burning desire to learn from my friend how the machine works, and how a film is made. But for pity’s sake!”
And he pointed to the dying man, who was breathing heavily in a profound coma under the ice-pack.
“You know that I…” I attempted to put in, quietly.
“I know!” he interrupted me. “You do not enter into your profession, but that does not mean, my dear fellow, that your profession does not enter into you! Try to disabuse these colleagues of mine of the idea that I am a professor. I am the Professor, for them: a trifle eccentric, but still a professor! We may easily fail to recognise ourselves in what we do, but what we do, my dear fellow, remains done: an action which circumscribes you, my dear fellow, gives you a form of sorts, and imprisons you in it. Do you seek to rebel? You cannot. In the first place, we are not free to do as we wish: the age we live in, the habits of other people, our means, the conditions of our existence, ever so many other reasons, outside and inside us, compel us often to do what we do not wish; and then, the spirit is not detached from the flesh; and the flesh, however closely you guard it, has a will of its own. And what is our intelligence worth, if it does not feel compassion for the beast that is within us? I do not say excuse it. The intelligence that excuses the beast, bestialises itself as well. But to feel pity for it is another matter! Christ preached it; am I not right, Signor Cesarino? So you are the prisoner of what you have done, of the form that your actions have given you. Duties, responsibilities, a chain of consequences, coils, tentacles which are wound about you, and do not leave you room to breathe. You must do nothing more, or as little as possible, like me, so as to remain as free as possible? Ah, yes! Life itself is an action! When your father brought you into the world, my dear fellow, the deed was done. You can never free yourself again until you end by dying. And not even after your death, Signor Cesarino here will tell you, eh? He never frees himself again, eh? Not even after death. Keep calm, my dear fellow. You will go on turning the handle of your machine even beyond the grave! But yes, yes, because it is not for your being, for which you are not to blame, but for your actions and the consequences of your actions that you have to answer, am I not right, Signor Cesarino?”
“Quite right, yes; but it is not a sin, Professor, to turn the handle of a cinematograph machine,” Signor Cesarino observed.
“Not a sin? You ask him!” said Pau.
The little old man and the three old maids gazed at me stupefied and dismayed to see me assent with a nod of my head, smiling, to Simone Pau’s verdict.
I smiled because I was picturing myself in the presence of the Creator, in the presence of the Angels and of the blessed souls in Paradise standing behind my great black spider on its knock-kneed tripod, condemned to turn the handle, in the next world also, after my death.
“Why, of course,” sighed the little old man, “when the cinematograph represents certain indecencies, certain stupid scenes….”
The three old maids, with lowered eyes, made a sign of outraged modesty with their hands.
“But this gentleman would not be responsible for it,” Signor Cesarino hastened to add, courteous and still friendly.
There came from the staircase a sound of sweeping garments and of the heavy beads of a rosary with a dangling crucifix. There appeared, under the broad white wings of her coif, a Sister of Charity. Who had sent for her? The fact remains that, as soon as she appeared on the threshold, the dying man ceased to breathe. And she was quite ready to perform the last duties. She lifted the ice-pack from his head; turned to look at us, in silence, with a simple, rapid movement of her eyes towards the ceiling; then stooped to arrange the deathbed and fell on her knees. The three old maids and Signor Cesarino followed her example. Simone Pau summoned me from the room.
“Count,” he bade me, as we began to go downstairs, pointing to the steps. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. The steps of a stair; of this stair, which ends in this dark passage…. The hands that hewed them, and placed them here, one upon another…. Dead. The hands that erected this building…. Dead. Like other hands, which erected all the other houses in this quarter…. Rome; what do you think of it? A great city…. Think of this little earth in the firmament…. Do you see? What is it?… A man has died…. Myself, yourself … no matter: a man…. And five people, in there, have gone on their knees round him to pray to some one, to something, which they believe to be outside and over everything and everyone, and not in themselves, a sentiment of theirs which rises independent of their judgment and invokes that same pity which they hope to receive themselves, and it brings them comfort and peace. Well, people must act like that. You and I, who cannot act thus, are a pair of fools. Because, in saying these stupid things that I am now saying, we are doing the same thing, on our feet, uncomfortably, with only this result for our trouble, that we derive from it neither comfort nor peace. And fools like us are all those who seek God within themselves and despise Him without, who fail, that is to say, to see the value of the actions, of all the actions, even the most worthless, which man has performed since the world began, always the same, however different they may appear. Different, forsooth? Different because we credit them with another value, which, in any event, is arbitrary. We know nothing for certain. And there is nothing to be known beyond that which, in one way or another, is represented outwardly, in actions. Within is torment and weariness. Go, go and turn your handle, Serafino! Be assured that yours is a profession to be envied! And do not regard as more stupid than any others the actions that are arranged before your eyes, to be taken by your machine. They are all stupid in the same way, always: life is all a mass of stupidity, always, because it never comes to an end and can never come to an end. Go, my dear fellow, go and turn your handle, and leave me to go and sleep with the wisdom which, by always sleeping, dogs shew us. Good night.”
I came away from the Shelter, comforted. Philosophy is like religion: it is always comforting, even when it is a philosophy of despair, because it is born of the need to overcome a torment, and even when it does not overcome it, the action of setting that torment before our eyes is already a relief, i
nasmuch as, for a while at least, we no longer feel it within us. The comfort I derived from Simone Pau’s words had come to me, however, principally from what he had said with regard to my profession.
Enviable, yes, perhaps; but if it were applied to the recording, without any stupid invention or imaginary construction of scenes and actions, of life, life as it comes, without selection and without any plan; the actions of life as they are performed without a thought, when people are alive and do not know that a machine is lurking in concealment to surprise them. Who knows how ridiculous they would appear to us! Most of all, ourselves. We should not recognise ourselves, at first; we should exclaim, shocked, mortified, indignant: “What? I, like that? I, that person? Do I walk like that? Do I laugh like that? Is that my action? My face?” Ah, no, my friend, not you: your haste, your wish to do this or that, your impatience, your frenzy, your anger, your joy, your grief…. How can you know, you who have them within you, in what manner all these things are represented outwardly? A man who is alive, when he is alive, does not see himself: he lives…. To see how one lived would indeed be a ridiculous spectacle!
Ah, if my profession were destined to this end only! If it had the sole object of presenting to men the ridiculous spectacle of their heedless actions, an immediate view of their passions, of their life as it is. Of this life without rest, which never comes to an end.
4
“Signor Gubbio, please: I have something to say to you.”
Night had fallen: I was hurrying along beneath the big planes of the avenue. I knew that he—Carlo Ferro—was following me, in breathless haste, so as to pass me and then perhaps to turn round, pretending to have remembered all of a sudden that he had something to say to me. I wished to deprive him of this pleasure, and kept increasing my pace, expecting at every moment that he—growing tired at length—would admit himself beaten and call out to me. As indeed he did…. I turned, as though in surprise. He overtook me and with ill-concealed annoyance asked:
“Do you mind!”
“Go on.”
“Are you going home?”
“Yes.”
“Do you live far off?”
“Some way.”
“I have something to say to you,” he repeated, and stood still, looking at me with an evil glint in his eye. “You probably know that, thank God, I can spit on the contract I have with the Kosmograph. I can secure another, just as good and better, at any moment, whenever I choose, anywhere, for myself and my lady friend. Do you know that or don’t you?”
I smiled, shrugging my shoulders:
“I can believe it, if it gives you any pleasure.”
“You can believe it, because it is the truth!” he shouted back at me, in a provocative, challenging tone.
I continued to smile; and said:
“It may be; but I do not see why you come and tell me about it, and in that tone.”
“This is why,” he went on. “I intend to remain, my dear Sir, with the Kosmograph.”
“Remain? Why; I never even knew that you had any idea of leaving.”
“Some one else had the idea,” Carlo Ferro retorted, laying stress on the words some one else. “But I tell you that I intend to remain: do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“And I remain, not because I care about the contract, which doesn’t matter a damn to me; but because I have never yet run away from anyone!”
So saying, he took the lapel of my coat between his fingers, and gave it a tug.
“Do you mind?” it was now my turn to ask, calmly, as I removed his hand; and I felt in my pocket for a box of matches; I struck one of them to light the cigarette which I had already taken from my case and held between my lips; I drew in a mouthful or two of smoke; stood for a while with the burning match in my fingers to let him see that his words, his threatening tone, his aggressive manner, were not causing me the slightest uneasiness; then I went on, quietly: “I may possibly understand to what you wish to allude; but, I repeat, I do not understand why you come and say these things to me,”
“It is not true,” Carlo Ferro shouted. “You are pretending not to understand.”
Placidly, but in a firm voice, I replied:
“I do not see why. If you, my dear Sir, wish to provoke me, you are making a mistake; not only because you have no reason, but also because, precisely like yourself, I am not in the habit of running away from anyone.”
Whereupon, “What do you mean?” he sneered. “I have had to run pretty fast to catch you!”
I gave a hearty laugh:
“Oh, so that’s it! You really thought that I was running away from you? You are mistaken, my dear Sir, and I can prove it to you straight away. You suspect, perhaps, that I have something to do with the arrival here, shortly, of a certain person who annoys you?”
“He doesn’t annoy me in the least!”
“All the better. On the strength of this suspicion, you were capable of believing that I was running away from you?”
“I know that you were a friend of a certain painter, who committed suicide at Naples.”
“Yes. Well?”
“Well, you who have mixed yourself up in this business….”
“I? Nothing of the sort! Who told you so? I know as much about it as you; perhaps not so much as you.”
“But you must know this Signor Nuti!”
“Nothing of the sort! I saw him, some years ago, as a young man on one or two occasions, not more. I have never spoken to him.”
“Which means…”
“Which means, my dear Sir, that not knowing this Signor Nuti, and feeling annoyed at seeing myself looked at askance for the last few days by you, from the suspicion that I had mixed myself up, or wished to mix myself up in this business, I did not wish you, just now, to overtake me, and so increased my pace. That is the explanation of my running away. Are you satisfied?”
With a sudden change of expression Carlo Ferro held out his hand, saying with emotion:
“May I have the honour and pleasure of becoming your friend?”
I took his hand and answered:
“You know very well that I am so unimportant a person compared with yourself, that the honour will be mine.”
Carlo Ferro shook himself like a bear.
“Don’t say that! You are a man who knows his own business, more than any of the others; you know, you see, and you don’t speak…. What a world, Signor Grubbio, what a wicked world we live in! How revolting! Everyone seems… what shall I say? But why must it be like this? Disguised, disguised, always disguised! Can you tell me? Why, as soon as we come together, face to face, do we become like a lot of puppets? Yes, I too; I include myself; all of us! Disguised! One putting on this air, another that…. And inside we are different! We have a heart, inside us, like… like a child hiding in a corner, whose feelings are hurt, crying and ashamed! Yes, I assure you: the heart is ashamed! I am longing, Signor Gubbio, I am longing for a little sincerity… to be with other people as I so often am with myself, inside myself; a child, I swear to you, a new-born infant that whimpers because its precious mother, scolding it, has told it that she does not love it any more! I myself, always, when I feel the blood rush to my eyes, think of that old mother of mine, away in Sicily, don’t you know? But look out for trouble if I begin to cry! The tears in my eyes, if anyone doesn’t understand me and thinks that I am crying from fear, may at any moment turn to blood on my hands; I know it, and that is why I am always afraid when I feel the tears start to my eyes! My fingers, look, become like this!”
In the darkness of the wide, empty avenue, I saw him thrust out beneath my eyes a pair of muscular fists, savagely clenched and clawed.
Concealing with a great effort the disturbance which this unexpected outburst of sincerity aroused in me, so as not to exacerbate the secret grief that was doubtless preying upon him and had found in this outburst, unintentionally I was certain on his part, a relief which he already regretted; I modulated my voice until I felt that I could
speak in such a way that he, while appreciating my sympathy for his sincerity, might be led to think rather than to feel; and said:
“You are right; that is just how it is, Signor Ferro! But inevitably, don’t you see, we put constructions upon ourselves, living as we do in a social environment…. Why, society by its very nature is no longer the natural world. It is a constructed world, even in the material sense! Nature knows no home but the den or the cave.”
“Are you alluding to me?”
“To you? No.”
“Am I of the den or of the cave?”
“Why, of course not! I was trying to explain to you why, as I look at it, people invariably lie. And I say that while nature knows no other house than the den or cave, society constructs houses; and man, when he comes from a constructed house, where as it is he no longer leads a natural life, entering into relations with his fellows, constructs himself also, that is all; presents himself, not as he is, but as he thinks he ought to be or is capable of being, that is to say in a construction adapted to the relations which each of us thinks that he can form with his neighbour. And so in the heart of things, that is to say inside these constructions of ours set face to face in this way, there remain carefully hidden, behind the blinds and shutters, our most intimate thoughts, our most secret feelings. But every now and then we feel that we are stifling; we are overcome by an irresistible need to tear down blinds and shutters, and shout out into the street, in everyone’s face, our thoughts, our feelings that we have so long kept hidden and secret.”
“Quite so… quite so…” Carlo Ferro repeated his endorsement several times, his face again darkening. “But there is a person who takes up his post behind those constructions of which you speak, like a dirty cutthroat at a street corner, to spring on you behind your back, in a treacherous assault! I know such a man, here with the Kosmograph, and you know him too.”
He was alluding of course to Polacco. I at once realised that he at that moment could not be made to think. He was feeling too keenly.
“Signor Gubbio,” he went on resolutely, “I see that you are a man, and I feel that to you I can speak openly. You might give this constructed gentleman, whom we both know, a hint of what we have been saying. I cannot talk to him; I know my own violent nature; if I once start talking to him, I may know how I shall begin, I cannot tell where I may end. Because covert thoughts, and people who act covertly, who construct themselves, to use your expression, I simply cannot stand. To me they are like serpents, and I want to crush their heads, like that … look, like that….”
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