Tales of Madness

by Luigi Pirandello

  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.

  When I Was Crazy

  1. The Small Coin

  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 newlyweds, 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 newlyweds 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.”

  And there she is again, with the same monotonous whimper, just as before. I can’t take it any longer. Exasperated, I shout to her: “No!”

  Worse than before. It was as if that “no” had uncorked a couple of other sentences that she had been bottling up and saving for just such an eventuality. I huff, I huff again, and then, finally, a uff! I raise my cane. Like this. She backs off to one side, instinctively raising her arm to protect her head, and from under her elbow groans: “Even two cents!”

  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.

  “Listen,” I said to the girl, “I won’t give you any money, but do you really want to work?”

  She stopped to look at me for a while with those peevish eyes of hers under hatefully knit brows. Then she nodded several times.

  “Okay? Good, then come with me. I’ll give you some work to do in my house.”

  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.

  Always: “And me?” on all occasions. For therein lies the basis of true wisdom.

  Instead when I was crazy…

  2. The Foundation of Morality

  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.

  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.

  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.

  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:

  “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.