That day I was armed with greater courage. I pushed further ahead in my exploration of the rooms. I came in sight of a little crowd. People dressed in black shirts. Bent over little anvils. Lit from above by lamps hooded by conical shades. And beating on the anvils with fine and perfectly silent little hammers.
I took a few more steps, so as to find out what this minute and precious work might be. But I bumped my nose against an invisible obstruction. A sheet of glass closed off the space between me and the little crowd of minute workers. One of them raised his eyes. They were dark, deep, inky. He looked at me but did not see me. The glass obliterated me.
If someone from the obscure world outside the white and luminous house still wrote to me, a chill creature would emerge from the depths of the shining corridors, would come to meet me silently and, by virtue of the spell alone, would stop three steps away from me, fixing on me two dark and deep beacons, which gave out not a gaze but a sort of cosmic ray, and, with the voice of a ventriloquist, would say: “A letter, Your Excellency.”
“Excellency? . . .” The language of fairy tales.
We left. We left the white and luminous house. So Adam and Eve, too, must have felt on abandoning the earthly paradise. In us, moreover, there was no consciousness of sin.
The white and luminous house will go on. It will go on in my mind. Whole. In all its whiteness. In all its brightness. And I thought, I knew, that one day, amidst the silent blaring of trumpets, we would come back . . .
Months went by. We went to other cities, and from the sea to the mountains.
The day before yesterday, at last, we returned to that same city. The taxi took us as far as the intersection of two roads. And stopped there. Why? Why didn’t he turn? Two stonecutters, their heads covered with newspaper caps, their flanks protected by upright matting, were chiseling away at some stone slabs by the entrance to the smaller street. Caesar’s death was also preceded by signs, and Caesar ignored them. The taxi driver tried to enter the street from the other end. But it was one-way. He came back to the previous point. He stopped twenty meters from the main gateway. We had to drag the suitcase behind us. An enormous suitcase. Extremely heavy.
My wife has a suitcase complex. A suitcase is nothing but a minor form, a reduced form, of a trunk. My wife has a trunk complex. For many years I didn’t understand. One day I understood.
My wife has a domestic soul. Domestic and familial. In her house, near her children, she is happy. With that superior happiness which is the repose of the soul in the midst of an assurance of affection. She had also been happy, and in the same way, in her paternal home. Then she became an actress. Traveled. Went as far as California. Her mother followed her journey in an encyclopedia printed in the middle of the last century, in which California was described as a land of outlaws and redskins who scalped the heads of travelers, and she sent letters to the Italian consular authorities appealing for protection. My wife, unable to bring the house with her in those travels, brought a trunk with her. A trunk with three partitions, three floors. A trunk that represented the house. Substituted for the house.
Today, in our travels, the simulacrum of the house accompanies her still. No longer a trunk, but a suitcase. Small for a trunk, but enormous for a suitcase. And extremely heavy. My obsession.
In the cold, in the inhospitality of hotel rooms, my wife opens the suitcase every now and then and looks into the house. It comforts her.
We went up three floors, dragging the suitcase behind us. What matter? We were about to reenter paradise.
It was extinguished. It was the skeleton of paradise. There had been a fire, a flood. Or some other disaster. I don’t know. No more light, no more white, no more docile lion, no more chill creature with spellbinding beacons for eyes, no more child, no more windows raining down in pieces and reconstituting themselves on their own.
Silence and desolation. I was afraid to look. I also saw that old lady in mid-flight through rooms no longer white but black.
What to do? Call out to her?
No. She was shaken by choreic movements.
We went back down the stairs, dragging the simulacrum of a house behind us.
And that which remains inscribed in our minds—where is it now? What labors must be performed, what initiations gone through, to what humiliations must we be subjected, in order to find it again?
A Head Goes Flying
ARE THEY STICKING A PIG? . . . No: it’s a woman’s screams. I go running across the corridor, throw open the front door.
I live on the ground floor. My door opens on the landing, to the left, at the head of twelve marble steps that go down to the front gate. A nineteenth-century house. A gate made of metal bars. Fourteen centimeters between the bars. An elephant cage. My son Ruggero, when he was smaller and we came home after ten, did not wait for me to open the gate with the key: he slipped between the bars, leaped up seven steps of the marble stairway in a single bound, and pushed the button on the wall that released the lock of the gate, and the Savinio family, through the merit of its youngest member, entered the house without any trouble. This Alcinean entry did not take place on days when there was no electricity.1
On the same landing, opposite, live the Scachi. One morning one of the Scachi, the grandmother, burst in on us, stammered: “My daughter is dying,” and collapsed on the sofa, as if she, too, were dead. My wife snatched a bottle of smelling salts and went running over there. The next day, Annibale, the doorkeeper, tied a white ribbon to the elephant cage. The eloquence of gates has only two notes. The other is the gate half closed: a sign that there has been a death in the house.
Beyond my landing, a door with windows, fan-shaped. Farther beyond, the doorkeeper’s lodge with Annibale in it: a fat bird that has lost its song.
My doorkeeper is pious and has tender feet.
For several years we lived on the third floor of the same house. Going out of the house or coming back in, one had to pass by the doorkeeper. Since our descent to the ground floor, there is no longer this obligation. A profound change. I understood the effects on us of a despot’s eye. When I was a child, my parents admonished me that hiding was no use: even in the most secret places, the Eye finds you. Under fascism, I again felt the Eye. Despotism infantilizes the most adult peoples.
Going out to the landing, I got into a little assembly. Two women were leaving through the gate. In a hurry. I saw them from behind. I was struck by their size—their shape. They were wearing gray tailleurs.2 Identical. More than tailleurs, uniforms. They were carrying something between them: a woman. Very different from them. Old. Tiny. Bent. Boneless inside a white nightshirt. For a moment I saw the flash of a shiny, pink little cranium. One of the female soldiers bent down, picked up the wig, replaced it awkwardly on the old woman’s head. She went on screaming like a stuck pig. All three got into an automobile parked at the curb. Or, better, the two female soldiers threw their white and quivering bundle into the automobile and climbed in after it. The automobile raced off.
In the little assembly were the Scachi in full; there was Annibale the doorkeeper, with his wife Adalgisa and his daughters Giorgina and Tomasina; Signora Miriffo and the lawyer Pirco, who also lived on the ground floor, but on the other side of the glass door; there were the tenants of the second floor, the third, the fourth. The ground floor has this additional advantage, that you have a “summary” of the whole house. The tenants of the fifth floor were missing—pour cause.
I asked the doorkeeper, “What’s happened?”
“Portano via la testa.” That is, “They’re taking the head away.”
I pictured a head flying off, madness sweeping over the world.
My impression would have been different if Annibale had formulated his phrase differently.
Once Annibale the doorkeeper wore a brown uniform, the chest barred with metal buttons, and a visored cap. Back then, Annibale spoke of the tenants with deference. He said “Signor Commendatore Pirco.” He said “Her Excellency the generaless Puti di Valme
scia” (the tenant of the third floor). He said “Signora the baroness Testa di Cuvolo” (the tenant of the fifth floor). Me he called “Signor Professore.” But in my house the rents are blocked. For several years no one has seen any longer to replacing the doorkeeper’s uniform. The latter, in winter, still wears the overcoat with metal buttons, though it’s on its last legs. But the cap has had to be replaced by a homburg.
Since Annibale replaced the cap with a homburg, an egalitarian complex has formed in him. Authoritarian rulers are well acquainted with the effects of uniforms. Annibale now no longer says “Her Excellency the generaless Puti di Valmescia”; he says “Puti” tout court. Me he no longer calls “Signor Professore.”
The phrase “Portano via la testa” should therefore be interpreted thus: “They’re taking away the baroness Testa di Cuvolo.” But why were they? And who were those two broad-shouldered and militaryish women?
“Two nurses from the asylum for the criminally insane. They’ve taken the baroness away because she’s a murderer.”
So said Adalgisa, wife of Annibale the doorkeeper. Adalgisa usually spoke in a clipped and rudimentary fashion. But in telling me the dreadful story of the baroness Testa di Cuvolo, Adalgisa used the most exact words, the most well-formed periods. A clear confirmation that one speaks well (and writes well) when one has something to say. And the story of the baroness Testa di Cuvolo gives one much to say.
The baroness Emma Testa di Cuvolo was a widow. She had a son, Riccardo, now going on thirty-six. She had also had a daughter, Linda, who had died of typhus at the age of seven, while the baroness was pregnant with Riccardo. When Riccardo came into the world, Emma united in her son her love for her dead daughter as well. Riccardo became a double creature: man and woman, a complete creature. Being a widow, Emma brought up her son by herself. Absolutely and extremely jealous. She began to tour Europe, bringing with her, like an appendix, this melancholy, obedient boy.
Riccardo turned thirty. Wrote a little. Painted a little. With poetic fantasy, singular, profound. Riccardo’s works never crossed the threshold of the house. The mother alone read, saw, appreciated, understood. E basta. Riccardo himself was content, desired nothing else. Riccardo was the greatest writer in the world, the greatest painter in the world. Both were convinced, deeply. Riccardo’s artistic independence was assured by a solid capital left by Riccardo’s father, of which mother and son regularly consumed the fruits.
Riccardo rarely went out alone. But once was enough. He met a girl, he fell in love with her, and since Riccardo did everything seriously, he married the girl, married her in secret from his mother. When the baroness learned (indirectly) that “her” Riccardo had taken a wife, it was the end of the world. Did that simpleton have any need of a wife? Wasn’t his mother enough for him? Riccardo was chased out of the house.
For three months, Riccardo and his wife lived as vagrants. But those were three months of torture for the baroness Emma. Only so as to have her Riccardo back, she took in the intruder as well. It was life in hell: a frozen hell. The baroness ignored the son’s wife. She looked right through her. As if her daughter-in-law were transparent. As if she weren’t there. At moments, walking, she would bump into her.
Then, all at once, the situation changed. The baroness “discovered” Anna. Became fond of her. Loved her. More and more. Made her presents of her jewelry. All of it. Put it on her. Herself. Covered her with necklaces, earrings, bracelets. Took her to the dressmakers. Ordered clothes for her by her own fantasy, gaudy and old-fashioned. Took her to plays, receptions, balls, while Riccardo, alone in the house, went on writing, painting. She was glad when men paid suit to Anna. She encouraged the suitors. She was seeking a husband for her daughter-in-law. In Anna she had recovered Linda, her little girl who had died of typhus at the age of seven.
Riccardo, in his silence, was aware of it all. In spirit he was inclined to happy solutions. His mother was seeking a husband for Anna? One day she would become aware that there was a husband—himself—and the “problem” would be solved in the simulacrum of a new marriage, different from the first, tragic one: reconciled, happy.
Riccardo, in his silence, awaited the solution. And perhaps the solution would have come. But one night, in the dark, Anna, by half hints, made Riccardo to understand that in her there was something changed—something certain.
When the baroness Emma, much later, also came to know Anna’s changed condition, horror fell upon the house of Testa. Riccardo was her son, Anna her daughter. Riccardo and Anna were brother and sister. And now . . .
One morning, Annibale the doorkeeper once again tied a white ribbon to the bars of the elephant cage.
At night the baroness Emma went into her son’s studio. Riccardo was sleeping on the sofa bed. He woke up with a start before this aged specter. The aged specter said: “I haven’t forgotten that you’re my son. Despite all the harm you’ve done me. No matter. You needn’t worry about it any more. I’ve put things in order.”
Adalgisa, in the end, made this comment, revealing a profound logic. She said: “If a grandmother is a mother twice over, a grandmother who strangles her little grandchild in the cradle is an infanticide twice over.”
The assembly of tenants broke up. The elevator was closed for servicing. We climbed on foot to the fifth floor. We stopped outside the baroness’ door. There was nothing to be heard.
We went down again. A head went flying before me.
Orpheus the Dentist
I HAD DECIDED TO LEAVE ON TUESDAY. But starting Saturday, when, in the evening, I had the supreme joy of hearing a broadcast of my radio opera Agenzia Fix on the radio,1 a dull pain began to occupy, at ever more frequent intervals, the upper right side of my jaw, and to spread itself through my head, like a spider its legs.
I thought: “It’s him.” He was one of my last premolars. He had already made himself felt at other times. The pain would wake up, torment me for several days, doze off again; sometimes for whole seasons, like snakes.
Teeth are cunning. His predecessors had done the same. Until, one by one, they left. Without remorse. Yet teeth are part of us. And, in some men, a very important, very “functional” part. In Woodrow Wilson, for example; in Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Yet, despite the extremely important function that teeth have had in the mouths of these two presidents of the United States, many citizens of those States have their teeth pulled, in full youth and perfect conditions of dental health, and replace them with false teeth.
“Why say false? Better to say painless. At the end of this May, the Piccolo Teatro di Milano will produce a work of mine, The Alcestis of Samuel. The one who will bring Alcestis back from Hades this time is not Hercules but Franklin Delano Roosevelt. By no means an arbitrary substitution. Perfectly justified. As I myself explain in the context, and as the audience will certainly understand, Hercules is not a singular figure, confined to the son of Alcmene. Hercules, that “purgator,” is a figure who periodically renews himself. The penultimate Hercules, in order of time, was Giuseppe Garibaldi; the latest was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. In my version of Alcestis, the part of Hercules, that is, of Roosevelt, will be played by Camillo Piloto. Piloto, at the present time, is studying the physiognomy of the President in minute particulars on photographic documents in the American Library of Rome: the form of the eyeglasses, which did not hook over the ears like mine or yours, but were pinched to the nose; and meanwhile a brave dental technician is fabricating a row of enormous teeth which, in the actor’s mouth, will imitate the famous laugh.
In 1914, in Paris, I got to know a citizen of the United States, of Mexican origin: Marius de Zayas. He had a pair of Nietzschean mustaches which, starting from under his nostrils, fell in a hairy cascade over his sharp and obstinate chin. Marius de Zayas was a theater impresario. In July 1914, he made an agreement with Apollinaire and me for a tour of lectures and concerts the following autumn to several cities of the United States, during which Apollinaire’s Breasts of Tiresias would be staged, accompanied by music wr
itten for the occasion by me.2 A month later the First World War broke out.
The mustaches of Marius de Zayas had not only an ornamental function but also hid his mouth, empty and black as a cave. Zayas, though he was going on thirty then and was immune to cavities, had spent some time in a clinic in New York, and had all thirty-two of his teeth removed one after the other; but, unable to bear dentures, which he abandoned in the water glasses of hotel rooms during his frequent travels, he chewed every sort of food, down to the toughest steak, with his bare gums.
In contrast to Marius de Zayas, toothless and a most robust chewer, we may cite the god Pushan, an Indian colleague of the Greek Hermes and the Latin Mercury, because Pushan, like the son of Zeus and Maia, was also a god of the roads, and not only guided men on their earthly roads, but continued to guide them on the roads of the beyond. Pushan performed his functions as a guide seated on a little cart drawn by goats, and although, unlike Zayas, his gums were armed with leonine teeth, he ate only foods soaked in water.
Two years ago I visited the convent of Saint Francis in Paola. The saint’s relics are kept in a glass case in the church. While Francis was living and working as a saint in Calabria, Louis XI, in France, was casually killing off, by means of other hands, all those who somehow got in his way, and killed so many that in the end, despite a very tough conscience, he began to feel the sting of remorse. How to heal it? The king was told that an Italian monk by the name of Francis, who lived in far-off Calabria, was a good healer of consciences, and Louis ordered that the healer come to France without delay, as today, for the same reason, they call in some famous psychoanalyst: for example, the father of that young American student who, not long ago, married the sister of the Shah of Persia, in a civil ceremony in Civitavecchia, and is now studying the Koran so as to be able to marry her religiously as well. Francis had a sister. Seeing him on the point of departure, she said to him: “You’re going so far, and you’re not leaving me anything to remember you by?” “Yes, I’m leaving you something,” replied Francis, and, so saying, he pulled out a canine tooth with two fingers and left it to his sister to remember him by. Extremely white, this canine tooth now gleams in the glass case of relics, in the church of Saint Francis in Paola. On the relations between Louis XI and Saint Francis of Paola, Casimir Delavigne wrote, as is known, a ridiculous play.3
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