Her Husband

by Luigi Pirandello

  HER HUSBAND

  HER HUSBAND

  by Luigi Pirandello

  Translated and with an Afterword

  by Martha King and Mary Ann Frese Witt

  DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

  DURHAM AND LONDON

  2000

  © 2000 Duke University Press

  All rights reserved.

  All dramatic, motion picture, radio, television, and other rights to this work are fully protected by all signatories to the Universal Copyright Convention as well as the Berne Convention, and no public or private performances—professional or amateur—may be given without the written permission of the copyright owners, Duke University Press and the Pirandello Estate.

  Published by authorization of the Estate of Luigi Pirandello.

  Agent: Ms. Toby Cole, 2915 Derby St., Berkeley, CA 94705.

  This work is a translation of Suo marito

  © the Pirandello Estate, copyright renewed.

  Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  1 The Banquet

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  2 School for Greatness

  1

  2

  3

  4

  3 Mistress Roncella: Two Accouchements

  1

  2

  3

  4

  4 After the Triumph

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5 The Chrysalis and the Caterpillar

  1

  2

  3

  4

  6 The Flight

  1

  2

  3

  4

  7 A Light Gone Out

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Afterword

  Notes

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  We are indebted to several people who have generously offered us their time, suggestions, and encouragement in the fascinating but sometimes frustrating endeavor to translate Pirandello. After we had started on the project, we learned from Daniela Bini that Eric Bentley was interested in finding a translator for Suo marito. He was more than generous to us with his time, encouragement, enthusiasm, and help. He read the entire manuscript carefully, raising important questions, pointing out stylistic problems, and offering suggestions. Indeed, without Eric Bentley’s work, the present translation would be a very different product.

  Others have left their mark on this translation by helping us to understand a sometimes obscure Italian term and thus to find its English equivalent. We are grateful to Alberto Malfitano, Domenico Frezza, Donatella Spinelli, and Ronald Witt for their help in this area. In Florence, Gloria Anzilotti was always willing to help work out puzzling passages. We also thank Alexander DeGrand, who suggested important changes in the Afterword. Our editor, J. Reynolds Smith, made incisive and useful remarks on both the translation and the Afterword. Our copyeditor, Estelle Silbermann, read the manuscript with great care and precision, making several suggestions and changes.

  Martha Witt Santalucia not only read the entire translation, improving it with several acute observations: she brought us together in the first place. We would like to dedicate our translation to her.

  HER HUSBAND

  1 THE BANQUET

  1

  Attilio Raceni, publisher for four years of the women’s (not feminist) magazine The Muses, woke up late that morning in a bad mood.

  Under the eyes of innumerable young Italian women writers–poets, novelists, and short-story writers (even some playwrights)–watching him from photographs arranged in various groupings on the walls, all with faces composed in a particular attitude of vivacious or sentimental charm, he got out of bed–oh, dear, in his night shirt, naturally, but a long one, long enough to reach his ankles, fortunately. Slipping into house shoes, he went to open the window.

  Attilio Raceni was little aware of what he did in the privacy of his home, so if someone had said to him: “You just did this and this,” he would have objected, red as a beet.

  “Me? Not true! Impossible.”

  And yet, there he is: sitting in his night shirt at the foot of his bed, with two fingers tenaciously tugging at a hair deeply embedded in his right nostril. And he rolls his eyes and wrinkles his nose and purses his lips in the sharp pain of that obstinate pinching until all at once he opens his mouth and his nostrils dilate for the sudden explosion of a couple of sneezes.

  “Two hundred and forty!” he then says. “Thirty times eight, two hundred and forty.”

  Because while Attilio Raceni was tugging at that nose hair, he was absorbed in reckoning that if thirty guests paid eight lire each they might expect champagne, or at least some modest (that is, local) sparkling wine for the toasts.

  In attending to his routine personal care, even if he had looked up he wouldn’t have noticed the images of those writers, for the most part spinsters, although most of them tried to demonstrate in their writing that they were experienced in the ways of the world. Therefore, he wouldn’t have noticed that those sentimental ladies seemed distressed at the sight of their nice director doing certain unpleasant things (however natural), out of unconscious habit, and that they were smiling about it rather superciliously.

  Having recently turned thirty, Attilio Raceni had not yet lost his youthful appearance. The pale languor of his face, his curly mustache, his velvety almond-shaped eyes, his raven forelock, gave him the air of a troubadour.

  He was basically satisfied with the regard he enjoyed as director of that women’s (not feminist) magazine, The Muses, although it cost him considerable financial sacrifice. But from childhood he had been devoted to women’s literature, because his “mamma,” Teresa Raceni Villardi, had been a noted poetess, and in “Mamma’s” house many women writers had gathered, some now dead, others now very old, upon whose knees he could almost say he had been raised. And their endless fondling and caresses had almost left an indelible patina on him. It seemed as if those light, delicate, experienced female hands, stroking and smoothing, had shaped him into that ambiguous, artificial beauty forever. He often moistened his lips, bent over smiling to listen, held his chest high, turned his head, patted his hair like a woman. Once a friend had jokingly touched his chest: “Do you have them?”

  Breasts! The schmuck! He had turned bright red.

  Left an orphan with a small income, the first thing he did was quit the university, and in order to give himself a profession, he founded The Muses. It ate into his inheritance, but gave him enough to live modestly and devote all his time to the magazine. With the subscriptions he had diligently garnered, he had assured its continuation, which, aside from the worries, no longer cost him anything: just as the numerous women collaborators cost him nothing, since they were never paid for their writing.

  This morning he did not even have the time to regret the hairs his raven forelock left in the comb after a hasty styling. He had so much to do!

  At ten he had to be at Via Sistina, at the home of Dora Barmis, the prima musa of The Muses, the very knowledgeable adviser on the beauty, natural charm, and morals of Italian signore and signorine. He had to get together with her to plan the banquet, the fraternal literary agape, that he wanted to give for the young and already very celebrated writer Silvia Roncella. Only recently she had come from Taranto with her husband to settle in Rome, “responding to Glory’s first call, after the triumphant reception unanimously given by critics and public for her latest novel, House of Dwarves,” as he had written in the last issue of The
Muses.

  From his desk he took a bunch of papers dealing with the banquet, gave a final glance in the mirror almost as if to say good-bye to himself, and left.

  2

  A confused outcry in the distance, a flurry of people racing toward Piazza Venezia. On Via San Marco an alarmed Attilio Raceni approached an overweight merchant of aluminum kitchen ware who was huffing and puffing as he hurriedly pulled down the metal barrier over his shop windows and asked him politely: “Please, what is it?”

  “Uh … they say… I don’t know,” the man grunted in reply without turning.

  A street sweeper, sitting quietly on the shaft of his cart with a broom on his shoulder like a flag, one arm on its handle as counterbalance, took his pipe from his mouth, spat, and said in Roman dialect: “They’re trying it again.”

  Attilio Raceni turned and looked at him as though in pity. “A demonstration? Why?”

  “Uhm!”

  “Dogs!” shouted the potbellied merchant, purple-faced and panting as he straightened up.

  Under the cart a hairless old dog with half-closed, runny eyes was stretched out, more placid than the street sweeper. At the merchant’s “Dogs!” he barely raised his head off his paws without opening his eyes, only wiggling his ears a little sorrowfully. Were they talking to him? He waited for a kick. The kick didn’t come. Then they weren’t talking to him. He settled down to sleep again.

  The Roman street sweeper observed: “They’ve done with their meeting.”

  “And they want to kick in the windows,” the other one added. “You hear? You hear?”

  A cacophony of whistles rose from the next piazza and right after that a shout that reached the heavens.

  The chaos there must be awful.

  “There’s a police barricade, no one can get through.” Without moving from the shaft, the placid street sweeper sang out after the people who were rushing by, and he spat again.

  Attilio Raceni hurried off in a huff. Fine thing if he couldn’t get through! All these obstacles now, as if the worries, cares, and annoyances plaguing him since he got the idea of that banquet weren’t enough. Now all he needed was the rabble in the streets demanding some new right, and the tremendous April weather didn’t help things: the fiery warmth of the spring sun was inebriating!

  At Piazza Venezia Attilio Raceni’s face dropped as though an inner string had suddenly let go. Struck by the violent spectacle before him, he stood openmouthed.

  The piazza swarmed with people. The soldiers’ barrier was at the head of Via del Plebiscito and the Corso. Many demonstrators had climbed onto a waiting trolley and were yelling at the top of their lungs.

  “Death to the traitors.”

  “Death!”

  “Down with the minister.”

  “Down!”

  In a fit of spite toward these dregs of humanity, and not about to take it quietly, Attilio Raceni got the desperate idea of elbowing his way quickly right across the piazza. If he managed that, he would plead with the officer guarding the Corso to please let him pass. He wouldn’t refuse him. But suddenly from the middle of the piazza: “Beep, beep, beep.“

  The trumpet. The first blare. A crushing confusion: many, roughed up in the rioting, wanted to run away, but they were so crammed and squeezed together they could only struggle angrily, while the most overwrought ruffians tried to force their way through the crowd, or rather, push ahead of the others among the ever more tempestuous whistles and shouts.

  “To Palazzo Braschiiii!”

  “Go! Go ahead!”

  “Break through the barriers!”

  And again the trumpet blared.

  Suddenly, without knowing how it happened, Attilio Raceni, choking, crushed, gasping like a fish, found himself bounced back to Trajan’s Forum in the middle of the fleeing and delirious crowd. Trajan’s Column seemed to be teetering. Where was it safe? Which direction to take? It seemed to him that the greater part of the crowd was moving up a street northeast of the Forum, Magnanapoli, so he bolted like a deer up Via Tre Cannelle. But even there he stumbled onto soldiers blocking off Via Nazionale.

  “No passing here!”

  “Listen, please, I must… .”

  A furious push from behind broke off Attilio Raceni’s explanation, causing his nose to squirt on the face of the officer, who repulsed him fiercely with blows to his stomach. But another very violent shove hurled him against the soldiers who caved in at the onslaught. A tremendous discharge of rifles roared from the piazza. And Attilio Raceni, in the terror-crazed crowd, was lost in the middle of the cavalry that appeared suddenly from heaven knows where, perhaps from Piazza Pilota. Away, away with the others, away at full speed, he, Attilio Raceni, followed by the cavalry, Attilio Raceni, director of the women’s (not feminist) magazine The Muses.

  Out of breath, he stopped at the entrance to Via Quattro Fontane.

  “Cowards! Riffraff! Scoundrels!” he shouted through his teeth, turning into that street, almost crying with anger, pale, shaken, trembling all over. He touched his ribs, his hips, and tried to straighten his clothes, to remove every trace of the violence suffered in the humiliating rout.

  “Cowards! Scoundrels!” and he turned to look behind him, afraid someone might have seen him in that condition, and he rubbed his quivering neck with his fist. And there, to be sure, was a little old man standing at a window taking it all in with his mouth open, toothless, scratching his short yellowish beard with pleasure. Attilio Raceni wrinkled his nose and was just about to hurl some insults at that blockhead, but he looked down, snorted, and turned again to look toward Via Nazionale. To regain his lost sense of dignity, he would have liked to throw himself into the fray again, to grab those rascals one by one and grind them under his feet, to knock that crowd around that had unexpectedly assaulted him so savagely and had made him suffer the disgrace of turning tail, the shame of his fear and flight, the derision of that old imbecile. … Ah, beasts, beasts, beasts! How triumphantly they rose up on their hind legs, shouting and lurching, about to snatch up the sop of those charlatan organizers!

  This image pleased him, and comforted him somewhat. But, looking down at his hands … Oh, God, the papers, where were the papers he had taken with him when he left home? The guest list … the acceptances? They had been torn from his hands, or he had lost them in the crush. How could he remember everyone he had invited? Those who had accepted or excused themselves from participating in the banquet? And among the acceptances, one dear to him, really precious, one that he had wanted to show Signora Barmis and then get framed to hang in his room: the one from Maurizio Gueli, the Maestro, sent from Monteporzio, handwritten… . That one lost as well! Ah, Gueli’s autograph, there, trampled under the filthy feet of those brutes…. Attilio Raceni felt all worked up again. How disgusting to be living in times of such horrid barbarity masquerading as civility!

  With the proud bearing and mien of an indignant eagle, he was already on Via Sistina near the descent of Via Capo le Case. Dora Barmis lived there alone in four small, dark rooms with low ceilings.

  3

  Dora Barmis enjoyed letting everyone think she was extremely poor, however many her cosmetics, galas, and charmingly capricious gowns. The little sitting room that also served as a writing room, the alcove, the dining room, and entry hall were, like the owner, strangely but certainly not at all poorly outfitted.

  Separated for years from a husband no one had ever known, dark and agile, with eyes lightly touched up, her voice a little hoarse, she clearly declared her knowledge of life with her looks and smiles, with every movement of her body. She knew the throbs of heart and nerves, the art of pleasing, of awakening, of arousing the most refined and vehement male desires that made her laugh loudly when she saw them flame in the eyes of the man she was talking to. But she laughed even louder at seeing certain eyes grow dreamy as if from the promise of a lasting sentiment.

  Attilio Raceni found her in the little sitting room near a small nickel-plated iron desk decorated with arabesques.
She was engrossed in reading, wearing a low-necked Japanese gown.

  “Poor Attilio! Poor Attilio!” she said after roaring with laughter at his account of the disagreeable adventure. “Sit down. What can I give you to soothe your troubled spirit?”

  She looked at him with a kindly mocking air, winking an eye and cocking her head on her provocative bare neck.

  “Nothing? Nothing at all? Anyway, you know? You look nice this way … a bit untidy. I’ve always told you, darling: a nuance of brutality would do wonders! Too languid and … must I say it? Your elegance has been for some time a little … a little démodée. For example, I don’t like the gesture you made just now as you sat down.”

  “What gesture?” asked Raceni, who didn’t know he had made one.

  “Pulling your lapels this way and that … And put that hand down! Always in your hair. We know it’s beautiful!”

  “Please, Dora!” Raceni snorted. “I’m frazzled!”

  Dora Barmis broke into laughter again, placing her hands on the desk and leaning backward. “The banquet?” Then she said, “Are you serious? While my proletarian brothers are protesting …”

  “Don’t joke, please, or I’m leaving!” Raceni threatened.

  Dora Barmis got to her feet. “But I’m serious, darling! I wouldn’t worry myself so much if I were you. Silvia Roncella … but first of all tell me what she’s like! I’m dying of curiosity to meet her. She’s not receiving yet?”

  “Uh, no. Poor things just found a house a few days ago. You’ll see her at the banquet.”

  “Give me a light,” Dora said, “and then answer me frankly.”

  She lit her cigarette, bending over and leaning her face toward the match held by Raceni; then, in a cloud of smoke, she asked: “Are you in love with her?”

  “Are you crazy?” Raceni fired back. “Don’t make me angry.”

  “A little plain, then?” Signora Barmis observed.