It’s my misfortune that no one ever takes, or wants to take into account, anything that I feel. Renzi, as I said, was laughing and a little later, in order to amuse the sick man, decided to tell him this fine story. Now listen to what ensued.
At first the poor fellow was strangely astonished at my blunder. For quite a while during the trip from the station to the hotel he mulled over the idea, and finally, taking me by the arm, his greatly dilated eyes staring into mine, he shouted at me:
“Pitagora, you’re right!”
“What do you mean, dear Tito?”
“I mean you’re right!” he repeated, without letting go of me, and with a glimmer of terrifying light in his eyes, which became increasingly more dilated. “You weren’t mistaken! The person you have been greeting is me. Really me, Pitagora! I’ve never left Rome! Never! Never! Whoever says the opposite is my enemy! Here, here. You’re right, I’ve always been here in Rome, young, free, happy, as you’ve been seeing and greeting me every day. My dear Pitagora, ah, now I can breathe! I can breathe! What a burden you’ve taken off my mind! Thanks, dear friend, thanks, thanks… I’m happy! Happy!”
And turning to his brother-in-law:
“We’ve had a terrible dream, my dear Quirino! Give me, give me a kiss! I hear the cock crowing again in my old studio in Rome! Pitagora here can tell you. Right, Pitagora? Right? Every day you meet me here in Rome… And what do I do in Rome? Tell Quirino. I’m a painter! A painter! And I sell, right? If you spot me laughing, it means I’m selling. Ah, it’s going quite well… Hurrah for youth! A bachelor, free, happy…”
“And your bride-to-be?” I unfortunately let slip from my tongue, not noticing that Renzi, in telling about my blunder a little while back, had prudently left out this dangerous detail.
Tito’s face suddenly darkened. This time he took hold of both my arms.
“What did you say? How’s that? I’m getting married?”
And he looked at his brother-in-law, dumbfounded.
“Of course not!” I immediately say to remedy the situation, at a signal from Renzi. “Of course not, dear Tito! I know well that you’re just playing around with that little goose!”
“I’m playing around? Ah, I’m playing around, you say?” Tito retorted, becoming furious, orbiting his eyes, shaking his fists. “Where am I? Where do I live? Where do you see me? Beat me like you would a dog if you see me playing around with a woman! One doesn’t play around with women. One always begins like that, my dear Pitagora! And then … and then …
He again burst out crying, covering his face with his hands. Renzi and I tried unsuccessfully to quiet him, to console him.
“No, no!” he continued, shouting in reply. “If I get married even here in Rome, I’m ruined! Ruined! Do you see what state I’ve been reduced to in Forli, my dear Pitagora? Save me, save me, for heaven’s sake! You have to prevent me from it at all costs, immediately! Even there I began by playing around.”
And he trembled all over, as if shivering with fever.
“But we’re just going to be here for a few days,” Renzi said to him. “Only enough time to negotiate the sale of your paintings with two or three gentlemen, as we had agreed. We’ll be returning to Forli right away.”
“It won’t do any good!” replied Tito, with a desperate gesture of his arms.
“We’ll be returning to Forli, and Pitagora will still continue to see me here in Rome! How can it be otherwise? I’ve always been living here in Rome, my dear Quirino, even though I live up there. Always in Rome, always in Rome, in the flower of my youth, unmarried, free, happy. Exactly as Pitagora saw me just yesterday, right? Yet we were in Forli yesterday. Can’t you see I’m not telling lies?”
Moved, exasperated, Quirino Renzi relentlessly shook his head and squinted to stop the tears. Until then, his brother-in-law’s madness had not appeared so terribly serious to him.
“Come on, come on,” continued Tito, turning towards me. “Let’s go. Bring me immediately to the place where you usually see me. Let’s go to my studio in Via Sardegna! At this time of day I should be there. I just hope I won’t be at my girlfriend’s place!”
“How’s that? You’re here with us, my dear Tito!” I exclaimed with a smile, hoping to bring him back to his senses. “Are you speaking in earnest? Don’t you know that I’m famous for making blunders? I’ve mistaken a gentleman who resembles you for you.”
“He is me! Scoundrel! Traitor!” the poor madman then shouted at me, his eyes flashing as he made a menacing gesture. “Do you see this poor man? I’ve fooled him. I got married without telling him anything about it. Now are you perhaps trying to fool me, too? Tell the truth, are you in cahoots with him? Are you aiding and abetting him? Are you secretly trying to make me get married? Accompany me to Via Sardegna… No, wait, I know the way, I’ll go on my own!”
To prevent him from going alone, we were forced to accompany him. As we walked, I said to him:
“Pardon me, but don’t you remember that you no longer live on Via Sardegna?”
He stopped, perplexed at this remark of mine. He looked at me angrily for a while, then said:
“And where do I live? You should know better than I.”
“Me? Oh, that’s a good one! How do you expect me to know that, if not even you know it?”
My answer seemed quite convincing to me, and such as to keep him motionless and nailed to the spot. I didn’t know that even the so-called mad possess that most complicated little thought-producing machine known as logic, which is in perfect running order, perhaps even more so than ours, in that, like ours, it never stops, not even in face of the most inadmissible deductions.
“Me? I don’t even know that I’m about to get married! Since I live in Forli, how do you expect me to know what I’m doing here, alone in Rome, free as I once was? You probably know, since you see me every day! Let’s go, let’s go. Accompany me. I’m putting myself into your hands.”
And, as we walked, he would turn towards me from time to time with silent, imploring, inquisitive eyes that pierced my heart, because with those eyes he was telling me that he was going along the streets of Rome in search of himself — in search of that other self, free and happy, of the good old days. And he would ask me if I could see him around anywhere, since he was looking for him with my eyes, eyes that until yesterday had seen him.
An agonizing worry took hold of me. What if by some misfortune, I thought, we should happen to run into that other one! He would no doubt recognize him, since the similarity is so obvious and perfect! And then, with those shoes that squeak at every step, that beast makes everybody turn around! And it seemed to me that from one moment to the next I could hear the dree, dree, dree of those blasted shoes behind me.
Could it perhaps not have happened? Not a chance!
Renzi had entered a shop to buy something or other, while Tito and I waited for him outside. It was almost evening. I impatiently watched the shop that Renzi was to come out of, and every minute we stood there waiting, seemed an hour to me. All of a sudden, I feel someone pulling me by the jacket and see Tito with his mouth open in a silent, blissful smile, poor thing! Two large tears were dripping down his clear, cheerful, expressive eyes. He had spotted him. He was pointing to him there, a couple of feet away from us, standing alone on the same sidewalk.
At least this once: try to put yourself in my shoes without laughing! That gentleman, seeing himself looked at and pointed out in that way, became uneasy; but then, noticing me, he greeted me as usual, so polite was the poor man. With one hand I secretly tried to signal him, while with the other I attempted to drag Tito away. Not a chance!
Fortunately, the man had understood my signal and was smiling. But he had only understood that my companion was mad. He had not recognized himself in Tito’s features, while the latter certainly did in his, and he did so immediately. Of course! They were the same ones he had had three years before… It was himself whom he finally met, as he had been not more than three years before. And he drew ne
ar to him and ecstatically contemplated him and caressed his arms and chest, slowly, slowly, as he whispered to him:
“How handsome you are… how handsome you are… This is our dear Pitagora, see?”
That gentleman, embarrassed and fearful, looked at me and smiled. To calm him, I smiled at him sadly. I wish I had not done that! Tito noticed that smile of ours and, immediately suspecting some complicity between the two of us, turned menacingly to the man and said:
“Don’t get married, imbecile, you’ll ruin me! Do you want to end up like me, penniless and desperate? Leave that girl! Don’t fool around with her, you stupid scoundrel! Without experience…”
“What gall!” shouted that poor man, turning to me as he saw people running up curious and astonished, and gathering all around us.
I had barely enough time to say: “Have pity on him…” when Tito broke in: “Quiet, traitor.”
And he gave me a hard push. Then, turning again to the gentleman, he said in a subdued, persuasive tone of voice:
“No, calm down, for heaven’s sake! Listen to me… You’re impetuous, I know… But I have to stop you from bringing me to ruin a second time…”
At this point Renzi rushed up, thrusting himself into the crowd and calling out loudly:
“Tito! Tito! What happened?”
“What?” answered poor Bindi. “Look at him, there he is! He wants to get married again! You tell him that a blind baby will be born to him… Tell him that…”
Renzi led him away forcibly. A little later I had to explain the whole thing to the gentleman. I expected him to smile over it, but that didn’t happen. He asked me, worried:
“But does he really look a lot like me?”
“Oh, not now!” I replied. “But if you had seen him before, three years ago, a bachelor, here in Rome… You in person!”
“Let’s hope then that in three years,” he said, “I won’t have to end up like him…”
Now tell me, after all this, didn’t I have the right to believe that it was all over?
Well, no such luck.
The day before yesterday, about two months after the encounter I described, I received a postcard signed “Ermanno Levera.”
It reads as follows:
Dear Sir:
Inform that fellow Bindi that he has been obeyed. I couldn’t forget him any more. He has remained before me like a specter of my imminent destiny. I’ve called off the wedding and tomorrow I’m leaving for America.
Yours truly, Ermanno Levera
See? If I had not greeted him, poor young man, having taken him for that other fellow, at this moment, who knows? He would probably be a happy husband… Who knows? Everything is possible in this world, even miracles such as that.
But I believe that if the encounter with that other fellow was so startling to him as to produce such an effect, he, too, must have believed that he had found himself in Bindi as he would have been three years later. And until I have proof to the contrary, I cannot assert in all conscience that this Mr. Levera, too, is mad.
In the meantime I expect that one of these days I will receive a visit from the abandoned bride-to-be and from the no longer future mother-in-law. I will send them both off to Forli, word of honor. Who knows whether they might not recognize themselves in poor Bindi’s wife and mother-in-law. It now seems to me, too, that they are all really a single thing, with in addition only that blind child who, God willing, won’t be born, if it is true that this Mr. Levera did leave for America yesterday.
Set Fire to the Straw
Since he no longer had anyone to order about, Simone Lampo had acquired the habit-, quite some time ago, of ordering himself around. And he did so with a stick.
“Here, Simone! There, Simone!”
Out of spite for his condition, he purposely assigned himself the most thankless chores. He sometimes pretended to rebel in order to force himself to obey, acting out both roles of the farce at the same time. He would angrily say, for example:
“I don’t want to do it!”
“Simone, I’ll beat you. I told you to collect the manure! No?”
Whack!… He would inflict on himself a walloping slap, and then collect the manure.
That day, after visiting his small field, the only parcel remaining of the numerous lands he once owned (barely an acre, left abandoned up there without the supervision of a single farmhand), he ordered himself to saddle the old she-donkey with which he was accustomed to carrying on the most specious conversations on his trip back to town.
The donkey, now pricking up this, now that bald ear, seemed to listen to him patiently, though she was bothered by a certain inconvenience that for some time now her master had been inflicting on her, but which she was at a loss to identify. It was something that, as she moved along, bumped against her hind legs, back there under her tail.
It was a small wicker basket without a handle, tied with two straps to the crupper of the saddle and suspended under the poor animal’s tail. Its function was to collect and retain the fuming hot pellets of manure that she would otherwise have planted along the road.
Everyone laughed when they saw the old donkey with that basket behind her, ready for use, and Simone Lampo had the time of his life.
The townsfolk knew quite well how openhandedly he had once lived and what little regard he had had for money. But now, he had had to learn his lesson from the provident ants who, b-a-ba, b-a-ba, had taught him this expedient for not losing even a bit of those droppings, good for enriching the soil! Yes, indeed!
“Come on, Nina, come on; let me put this pretty frill on you! What are we anymore, Nina? You’re nothing and I’m no one. All we’re good for is making the town laugh. But don’t worry about it. We still have several hundred little birds at home. Cheep-cheep-cheep-cheep… They don’t want to be eaten! But I do eat them, and the whole town laughs. Let’s be merry!”
He was referring to another brainstorm of his that could have been a perfect match for the basket hanging under the donkey’s tail.
Several months before, he had pretended to believe that he could again become rich by raising birds. He had converted five rooms of his house in town into one large coop (hence it was called “the madman’s coop”). He had confined himself to living in two small rooms on the upper floor, with the few kitchen utensils he had saved from his bankruptcy, and with the doors, blinds, and panes of the small and large windows that he had covered with screens in order to provide ventilation for his birds.
From morning to night, to the great delight of the neighborhood, there arose from the five rooms below, snarls and squeals and screeches and cheeps, the warbling of blackbirds, the chirping of finches - a twittering, a dense, continuous, deafening chatter of birds.
But for quite a number of days now, fearing that that venture would be unsuccessful, Simone Lampo had been eating small birds at every meal, and there in his small field, had destroyed the apparatus of nets and rods that he had used to catch hundreds and hundreds of those little birds.
Having saddled the donkey, he rode towards town.
Nina would not have hastened her pace, not even if her master had rained lashes down upon her. It seemed she purposely went slowly in order to make him better savor, with the slowness of her pace, the sad thoughts that, according to him, came to his mind also because of her. They came to him because her slow pace forced him to continually nod his head. Yes sir! Since his head went up and down as he sat atop the animal, looked about, and saw the desolation of the fields that darkened by degrees with the last glimmers of twilight, he couldn’t help lament his ruin.
It was the sulphur mines that had ruined him.
How many mountains he had disemboweled, all for the mirage of hidden treasure! He had believed he would find another California in every mountain. Californias everywhere! Pits as deep as 600 or even 900 feet, ventilation shafts, steam-engine systems, aqueducts for drainage, and so, so many other expenses for a small vein of sulphur that ultimately was not really worth mining. The
sad experience he had had on several occasions, and his vow never again to attempt other enterprises, had been of no use in discouraging him from new ventures, until he ended up as he was now, practically on the street. What is more, his wife had left him to move in with a wealthy brother of hers, because their only daughter had become a nun out of desperation.
Now he was alone, without even an old servant around the house. He was alone, and consumed by a constant feeling of anxiety that made him commit all those crazy acts.
Yes, he knew it; he was aware of his crazy acts; he committed them purposely to spite the people who, when he was rich, had so greatly respected him and who now turned their backs and laughed at him. Everybody, everybody laughed at him and avoided him. There was no one who wanted to help him. No one said: “Old friend, what are you doing? Come here. You know how to work. You’ve always worked and done your work honestly. Quit doing those crazy things. Join me in a good enterprise!” No one.
The restless torment he experienced in having been aban— doned by everyone, in having been left in that stark and bitter solitude, continued to grow, exasperating him more and more.
The uncertainty of his condition was his greatest torture. Yes, because he was no longer either rich or poor. He could no longer mingle with the rich, and the poor refused to recognize him as one of their own because he had a house in town and that small field up there. But what did the house yield him? Nothing. Taxes, that’s all it yielded. And as for the small field, the fact is that it only produced a small amount of grain which, if harvested within a few days, would perhaps allow him to pay the bishop’s land tax What then would be left for him to eat? Those poor little birds there… And even this was dreadful! As long as it was just a question of trapping them in order to attempt a business venture that would make people laugh, so be it; but now, to have to go down into the enormous coop and catch, kill, and eat them…
“Come on, Nina, come on! Are you sleeping this evening? Let’s go!”
That damned house and that damned field! These possessions kept him even from being a decent pauper, that is, one who’s poor and mad, there in the middle of the road, poor and carefree, like so many he knew and of whom he felt painfully envious, given the state of exasperation in which he found himself.
Tales of Madness Page 7
