He remembers, in a room on the second floor, at the end of the corridor . . .
Sick? Malingering?
He was in bed for ten months. He wore a miller’s cap on his head. Around the bed, on bedside tables of white enameled iron, he had collected a polyglot’s library. He was learning languages on his own. He mouthed the syllables with silent lips, now looking in the dictionary, now repeating from memory, gazing into space.
Night fell. The light fell in the rooms and corridors. The moon fell through the hemp smoke beyond the window.
The Seminary slept. Outside, in the fields, the orderlies made love to the girls from the neighboring farms. In the bluish corridor, the clinical polyglot, a skeleton in ghostly pajamas, paced rapidly up and down with inaudible steps. Now and then the turkey’s gobbling came from the basement.
“And you, Signor Dido, what do you think of abstract painting?”
Past? Present? . . . A man turned into a turkey? A woman with slanting eyes? . . . Creatures of flesh and blood? Shades? . . .
The Kiss
LIKE SO MANY OTHERS, SIGNOR DIDO went to see the Caravaggio exhibition in Milan this past summer. Paintings of Caravaggio that Signor Dido had never seen in museums or churches. Gathered together, the work made a profound impression on him. Before this representation of things “as they are,” dark and at the same time flashing like a thunderstorm, the Renaissance representation of things “as they ought to be” seemed all the more false to him. He marveled above all that things “as they are” could rise to such power, to such poetry. Is poetry, then, not beyond things “as they are,” superior to things “as they are”? No one manages to escape this “theological” opinion of poetry, starting with those who negate it. Realism? Yes, but carried to its extreme. A mother’s lament for the death of her children, for the destruction of her house under the blows of Roberto Bracco,1 rivals the howling of Hecuba.
The rage to get to the roots of reality now devours Signor Dido.
Hidden were the sources of the Nile; hidden was the human soul. More hidden than the sources of the Nile and the human soul is the reality of things; and all the more hidden in that everyone thinks it is self-evident, obvious, easily within reach.
Signor Dido has mobilized his friends. He draws them, models them, paints them. And in each of them he seeks the root of their own reality. So that the insides of reality should appear on the canvas, that reality which not only the veiled eye of euphemism, but nature herself conceals; all the more so from a man veiled in euphemism.
Three days ago Signor Dido began the portrait of Professore Elvio.
Can it be called a portrait?
“Began” also won’t do. The dash with which he sets out to pierce the appearance of reality and get to its roots makes the word “attack” more suitable.
Signor Dido felt the absence in this “portrait” of a very important element in the metaphysical reality of Professore Elvio: death.
A skull was needed. A real skull, perfectly round. Signor Dido now found it repugnant to work in a Mannerist way.
Professore Elvio said: “I have an idea,” and went to make a telephone call.
Doctor Cerimele arrived in a taxi, a young physician, recently graduated. He was carrying a leather briefcase. Flat.
“What’s in the briefcase? He must not have understood.” So thought Signor Dido, and he became angry. Signor Dido is more and more intolerant of the small or large obstacles that block his way; and his way is becoming more and more a sort of personal film, an unbroken ribbon of his own desires, thoughts, and dreams, and of the realization of his own desires, thoughts, and dreams.
The young physician opened the briefcase and took out a skull. He held it up in his hand, showed it around, and placed it on the desk.
A little volley of jokes burst out. The two physicians and Signor Dido himself barely refrained from playing Hamlet.
The skull was small and in excellent condition. The teeth were perfect.
“No trace of cavities,” noted Professore Elvio.
“What age was it?” asked Signor Dido.
“Twenty, twenty-five at the most. Look at the clarity of the sagittal. In old people the parietals fuse and the sagittal disappears.”
“How long has it been dead?”
“Some twenty years. Perfect preservation, smooth bone.”
Signor Dido went back to painting. He felt the orbital cavities fixed on the back of his neck from the desktop.
A man’s look or a woman’s?
This doubt gradually penetrated his mind like a soft nail.
He decided to ask Professore Elvio.
“No way to know. There are no sexual differences between a man’s skull and a woman’s.”
Cerimele had left. Professore Elvio also left. Alone with himself, Signor Dido thought of putting the image of Death beside Professore Elvio’s head. He placed the skull on the tip of a portable easel. He stuck the pointed tip of the easel into the large occipital foramen. He tipped the skull to one side, as if in confidential colloquy. Under the skull he draped a pink drapery.
Man or woman?
The sky darkened. It began to rain. One could no longer see to paint. Signor Dido drew the curtain over the window of the studio.
He went to have supper. Then withdrew to the studio again.
A progressive lack of stimuli for our soul; our soul so in need of stimuli, of replies to its continuous, insistent, “silent” questions; so in need of happiness.
What comes to us from the world? The resumption or nonresumption of negotiations in Korea; Persian oil; revisions of the Diktat; Trieste and Zone B; the English on the Suez Canal . . .
And our mind goes on waiting.
Signor Dido tries to make up for this marasmus with poetry and philosophy. Poetry and philosophy have so far yielded good results. Even as arid a philosophy as the Nicomachean Ethics.
“This evening,” thinks Signor Dido, “the Divine Comedy may yield me some beneficial effects.” He takes the Divine Comedy from the bookshelf, like taking a bottle of vitamins from the medicine chest.
He gets into bed. He opens to the first cantos of the Paradiso.
What verses he comes upon!
These organs of the universe, then, go
From grade to grade, as now thou see’st is done,
For from above they take, but work below.2
He searches further ahead:
So would a hound stand still between two does.3
Signor Dido knows that dame means damme, female deer: however, the image of a chien dans un jeu de quilles stays with him.4
Signor Dido raises his arm and flips the light switch.
Usually, when the switch is flipped, the light goes out. This time it shines more brightly.
From the back of the studio, the draped figure comes forward. It stops at Signor Dido’s bedside.
“So you had doubts? Look at me. I’m a woman.”
Her hair hangs free. Her body quivers under the drapery freed of ties and buttons.
The timidity which since adolescence has worked on Signor Dido’s mind like Westinghouse brakes on the wheels of railway cars, works all the more strongly now insofar as he is in bed and this magnificent girl is standing before him. What’s more, his pajamas are not very fresh. And to shield his hairless scalp from the chill of night, Signor Dido has pulled a woolen cap down to his ears.
“Who are you? How did you manage to get in? I bolted the door myself.”
“Clown!” the girl shoots back. “Who am I? How did I manage to get in? . . . But your friend, that Professore Elvio, was wrong. I was thirty. And for thirty years I haven’t grown any older. So we’re the same age, you and I, though we look so different.”
The girl bends down to Signor Dido, as if to talk with him in secret.
Signor Dido shrinks back against the wall.
“Softly, for goodness sake! My wife is asleep in there.”
The girl bursts into laughter, which bares her teeth. Extremely w
hite, even; too white, in fact, and too even; the teeth of a horse, the teeth of a . . .
“And you even pretend you don’t recognize me! Don’t you remember the magnificent words you said to me, the magnificent phrases you wrote to me? I’ve kept all your letters here, under this sort of pink peplum you yourself put on me . . . See if you recognize me now!”
The girl throws herself full length on Signor Dido and presses her mouth to his mouth.
So sweet—so unbearable: the kiss you’re not prepared for.
Either from this unprepared-for kiss, or from fear that the door would open and Signora Dido would appear in her nightgown, Signor Dido takes hold of the girl’s head, tears it from him, pushes it away.
And the head falls.
It is still rolling about in two pieces when Signor Dido turns on the light.
Signor Dido picks up one piece and sets it on the desk. The other had ended up who knows where.
In the morning Vittoria came into the studio. Signor Dido asked her to sweep under the bookcase.
Vittoria drew the other half of the skull from under the bookcase. Along with it came the corpse of a cockroach and three olive pits.
Signor Dido is a glutton for olives.
From time to time Signora Dido buys him some olives, but, in order to dole them out to him herself, she hides them in a place known only to her.
Signor Dido has discovered the hiding place. At night he goes and steals olives. To remove the traces of his guilt, he throws the pits under the bookcase.
The Pizza
IT IS CHRISTMAS DAY.
Signor Dido is on the train that leaves Syracuse at 7 AM and arrives in Rome at 9:30 PM.
The train bears the title of an express.
This is the first time that Signor Dido has found himself on a train on Christmas day.
Signor Dido is savoring the advantages of this singular journey.
It is in the literal meaning of “singular” that the felicitous character of this journey lies.
The Syracuse–Rome express carries only one first-class car, and this car carries only one traveler: Signor Dido himself.
To enjoy the advantages of his solitary journey even more, Signor Dido thinks of life as it unfolds for people on this same day at home in the bosom of their families. He thinks of the full family, enriched by “added” relations. He thinks of festive clothes. He thinks of the tip for the doorman and the exchange of good wishes. He thinks of the longer than usual meal, the laborious digestion, the empty afternoon.
Whereas on the train . . .
A conductor had appeared in the compartment, had taken the ticket from Signor Dido’s hand, had examined it, punched it, and handed it back without offering a word. The functionary’s footsteps had gone down the corridor, had reentered the roar of the train. And Signor Dido thought: “A wave forms on the surface of the sea, runs on solitarily, reenters the sea.”
To the right the mountains of Calabria unroll one after another and roll back up again; the sea to the left extends motionlessly under the sun.
Christmas.
Signor Dido again picks up the newspaper bought in Sicily, rereads for the fourth time some news items totally lacking in interest, turns to put it down on the empty seat.
Boredom here, too, but without constraints. Boredom free in itself. And nature all around—sky, earth, sea—nature transformed entirely into an immense divan, in the middle of which he, Signor Dido, jounces solitarily to the jouncing of the wheels.
The family dinner, the voices, the laughter, the confusion: like finding yourself in the rain without an umbrella. Yes. But when your stomach begins to growl in the silence under your cardigan . . .
Having crossed the Strait, the train had maneuvered onto the tracks of Villa San Giovanni, and Signor Dido, leaning out the window, had watched with childish avidity the coupling of the dining car to his own car.
“The dining car!”
“How many sittings?” Signor Dido asked in return.
The employee in the brown uniform did not answer aloud: he spread his arms in a gesture of submission. And Signor Dido, the enemy of ready-made phrases, recognized that even he was sometimes the victim of ready-made phrases.
Signor Dido went lurching down the corridor and through the accordion passage between the cars.
Only three tables were set. At one an elderly and thin married couple, at the other a middle-aged woman.
Signor Dido goes to sit at the third table. He turns the glass mouth-up, pinches the bread roll, looks circumspectly at the middle-aged woman.
“How come alone on Christmas day?”
He looks closer.
“This woman is rich in appetites but lacking in sentiments.”
He adds:
“Of this type of woman, the French say: Elle a les foies blancs.”1
The waiter, with the gestures of a tightrope walker, takes away the plate on which Signor Dido has finished eating rice and peas.
From the door opposite the one through which Signor Dido entered, a man comes into the dining car.
A man of about thirty. Olive-skinned. Thick of hair and pelt. Blue-jowled. Big almond eyes. The placid gaze of a ruminant. Clothes stretched over bundles of muscles.
He sits at a table across the aisle, level with Signor Dido. He indicates the bare table with his hand.
The waiter spreads a tablecloth, sets down before the latecomer two superimposed plates, silverware, glasses.
“Wine!” orders the traveler.
The waiter comes back with a small bottle of wine, uncorks it, places it on the table.
The traveler grasps a package that he has placed under his seat, unwraps it, pulls out a pizza folded like a wallet, and spreads it on the plate.
An enormous pizza. It completely covers the plate, its edges touch the tablecloth. Its top is red with tomatoes, silvery with anchovies.
The traveler nails the pizza down with a perpendicular fork and begins cutting around it; he studies each slice with his placid eye, stuffs it into his mouth, swelling out his cheeks, and chews with a methodical rotation of the jaw.
The waiter, who comes from the far end of the car holding a plate of rice and peas, stops in perplexity.
Observed from behind by the waiter, the traveler with the pizza goes on chewing methodically.
The waiter, overcoming his perplexity, resumes his advance with a hunter’s tread.
In Signor Dido’s mind a story by Dostoevsky entitled The Double replays itself.
The waiter continues to advance.
Signor Dido read that story many years ago, but, like all things by Dostoevsky, it was stamped in his memory with an indelible imprint.
The waiter advances.
It is about a certain man who sees himself—the Double—in the most shameful situations: naked in the midst of a room full of people in evening dress, spat upon in the presence of the woman he loves . . .
The waiter is in front of the man with the pizza.
“Having lunch, eh?”
The traveler raises his serene gaze.
“That I am.”
He gestures with his abundantly hairy hand.
Anguish gathers in Signor Dido’s heart.
“You can’t do that here!”
“Why not? It’s very good. I had it made specially.”
He points to the pizza, three fingers thick and already a good half eaten.
“Want to join me?”
“This is the dining car! It’s forbidden!”
“Pizza’s forbidden? Nobody told me.”
He casts an innocent glance around.
“It should be written there.” He points to the glass of the window.
“Enough chatter! Pizzas are not eaten here!”
“But they’re really good. In the best restaurants . . .”
“Even in the king’s palace, but here—no! This is the dining car!”
The second waiter is approaching.
Anguish clutches at Signor Dido’s throa
t.
“No? . . . Who says so?”
The second waiter has joined the first waiter.
“Get up!”
A conflict is about to break out between the two waiters who are defending the privileges of the dining car and the man with the pizza.
What is going on in the latter’s mind?
Signor Dido can bear it no longer. He gets up in a cloud of mist. Flees unsteadily. Finds himself back in the solitary compartment.
To the right, the mountains of Calabria unroll one after another and roll back up again; the sea to the left extends motionlessly under the sun. But Signor Dido now sees both the mountains and the sea in an eclipsed light.
Minutes pass.
Among his Dostoevskian memories, the memory of a character who is gnawed by anguish because he has fled the dining car without paying his bill is lacking. And yet . . .
Signor Dido makes up his mind.
He goes lurching down the corridor and through the accordion passage between the cars.
The dining car is empty. Gone is the elderly and thin married couple. Gone is the woman aux foies blancs. Gone is the man with the pizza.
No trace of a fight.
Signor Dido advances down the aisle.
At the far end of the car, behind a partition, the personnel of the dining car are eating.
“I left because I wasn’t feeling very well . . . I’d like to pay . . .”
Sitting at the table are the two waiters, the cook with a white chef’s hat on his head, and a fourth companion: the traveler with the pizza.
In the middle of the table, an enormous pizza. Its top red with tomatoes, silvery with anchovies.
Christmas.
Charon’s Train
THE TRAIN BEGINS TO MOVE.
A solution.
To this accustomed solution we give no weight, and yet the solution of the train leaving is the model for far more serious solutions.
While the train stands in the station, both those who are about to leave and those who will remain have a “problem” to resolve.
Great uneasiness for the ones and for the others.
Death is likewise a solution, also preceded by a “problem.” A greater solution than a train leaving, but of the same sort. Mourir c’est partir beaucoup.1
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