Her Husband

by Luigi Pirandello

  Giustino noticed it, and he felt his head growing hot from that chill, making him perspire and wriggle restlessly. For Gods sake! To expose oneself like this to the terrible trial of a new play, after the clamorous success of the first one, without adequately preparing the press, without informing the public that this new play would be totally different from the first one, revealing a new aspect of Silvia Roncella’s talent. This was the result: the audience expected the savage poetry of The New Colony and expected to see strange costumes and unusual characters; instead it found itself facing ordinary, prosaic, everyday life and remained cold, disenchanted, unhappy.

  He should be enjoying it, but he couldn’t! Because what was still alive in him was all involved in that work failing before his very eyes, and he felt it a shame he couldn’t get his hands on it, to prop it up, lift it up to make it into another triumph. A shame for the work and a ferocious cruelty to himself!

  He jumped to his feet at a prolonged hissing that suddenly rose out of the orchestra like a wind to shake the whole theater, and he shrank to the back of the box with his hands on his flaming face, almost as if he had been whipped.

  Leonardo Arciani’s stubborn refusal to reason with his father-in-law had offended the spectators. But perhaps in the end Ersilia’s cry that explained that stubbornness–“Papa, he has a daughter, a daughter: he can’t reason anymore! ”–would save the act. Signora Fresi entered. Everyone grew silent. Guglielmo Groa and his son-in-law almost came to blows. The audience didn’t understand yet and became even more restless. Giustino wanted to shout from his box in the last row: “Idiots, he can’t reason! He has a daughter!”

  But there, there, Signora Fresi shouted it. Brava! Loudly, with her whole soul, like a whip. The audience broke into a lengthy aaahhh. Why?… Didn’t they like it?.. . Wait… . Many were applauding… . There, the curtain fell during the applause, but it was scattered applause, many were hissing also…. Oh, God, a sharp, lacerating whistle from the gallery… damned, damned whistle! In reaction, the applause picked up in the boxes and orchestra seats. With his face bathed in tears, Giustino convulsively twisted his hands trying to applaud furiously, impeded by his anxious concentration on the stage. The actors came out…. No, she wasn’t there…. Silvia wasn’t there…. Another curtain call! Oh, God .. . Was she there?.. . The applause tapered off, and with the applause Giustino also fell on a chair in the box, worn out, gasping for breath as though he had been running for an hour. Large, tearlike drops of perspiration appeared on his burning forehead. He tried to relax his contracted muscles, his pounding heart, and a moan came out of his labored breathing as from intolerable suffering. But he couldn’t remain still an instant. He stood up, leaned on the box railing with his arms limp, handkerchief in hand, head dangling … he looked at the exit… brought the handkerchief to his mouth and tore it…. He was a prisoner there…. He couldn’t let himself be seen…. He would at least have liked to hear the comments about the first act, to go near the stage, to see those who were going there to comfort the writer. .. . Ah, at that moment she certainly was not thinking of him. He didn’t exist for her: he was one of the crowd, mixed in with everyone else. No, no, no, not even that–he couldn’t even be part of the crowd. He couldn’t be and in fact he wasn’t: closed up, hidden there in a box that everyone had to think was empty, the only empty one, because someone wasn’t able to come.. .. What a temptation, now, to run to the stage, to push through the crowd as if he owned the place, to take his rightful position again, as the one who gave the orders! A heroic furor stirred him to do things unheard of and never before seen, to change the destiny of that evening point-blank, before the amazed eyes of the entire audience, to show that he was there, he who had staged the triumph of The New Colony… .

  Now the bells rang for the second act. The battle began again. Oh, God, how could he watch, exhausted as he was?

  The restless audience entered the theater noisily. If they didn’t like the first scene of the second act, between the father and daughter, the play would have failed completely.

  The curtain rose.

  This scene represented Leonardo Arciani’s study. It was daylight and the lamp still burned on the desk. Guglielmo Groa was sleeping in an armchair with a newspaper over his face. Ersilia entered, put out the lamp, woke her father, and told him her husband had not yet come home. At his stern, blunt questions, like a hammer pounding rocks, Ersilia’s hardness broke, and her repressed emotions began to flow. With a languid, sorrowful calmness she spoke in defense of her husband, who, having to choose between her and his daughter, had chosen his daughter: “Home is where the children are!”

  Giustino, enthralled, fascinated by the profound beauty of that scene played admirably by Signora Fresi, didn’t notice that the audience had now become very attentive. At the end, when a warm, long, unanimous applause broke out, he felt his blood rush to his heart and then suddenly rise to his head. The battle was won, but he was lost. If Silvia had appeared with that applause to thank the audience, he wouldn’t have seen her: a veil had fallen over his eyes. No, no, thank goodness! The play went on. He, however, could no longer pay attention. The anxiety, the heartache, the excitement grew as the act progressed, approaching the end, the marvelous scene between the husband and wife when Ersilia, pardoning Leonardo, sends him away: “You can no longer stay here now. Two houses, no; I here and your daughter there, no. It’s not possible, go away! I know what you want!” Oh, how Signora Fresi told him! Now Leonardo was going away. She breaks into tears of joy, and the curtain fell amid loud applause.

  “Author! Author!”

  With arms tightly crossed over his chest and his hands gripping his shoulders, almost as if to stop his heart from leaping out, Giustino groaned and waited for Silvia to appear at the footlights. The torture of waiting made his face look almost ferocious.

  There she was! No. Those were actors. The applause continued to thunder.

  “Author! We want the author!”

  There she was! There she was! That one? Yes, there she was between two actors. But she was barely discernible from such a height: the distance was too great and too great the commotion clouding his vision! Now they were calling her out again. There she was, there she was again. The two actors stepped back and let her go to the footlights alone, exposed for such a long time to the powerful response of the audience, on its feet clapping. This time Giustino could see her better: standing straight, pale, and unsmiling. She barely bowed her head, with a dignity not cold but full of unconquerable sadness.

  Giustino thought no more about hiding. As soon as she left the footlights he dashed out of the box like a madman, threw himself down the stairs along with the crowd leaving the theater and filling the hallways, pushed his way through with furious gestures, to the surprise of those he knocked out of the way. He heard shouts and laughter behind his back as he found the theater exit. In the murky dizziness filling his head, pierced by flashes of light, he felt nothing but the fire that devoured him and made his throat burn atrociously.

  Like a beaten dog he took off down the first long, straight, deserted street that opened off the piazza. He kept going without knowing where, eyes closed, scratching his head at both temples and repeating voicelessly, his mouth dry as cork:

  “It’s over .. . it’s over … it’s over… .”

  This certainty had penetrated his being at the sight of her and was fixed like an absolute conviction: everything was finished, because that was no longer Silvia. No, no, that was no longer Silvia. It was someone else he could never approach. Someone distant, unreachably distant, above him, above everyone because of that sadness enveloping her: isolated, elevated, so stiff and severe, as if she had survived a calamity. She was another person for whom he no longer existed.

  Where was he going? Where had he gone? Lost, he looked around at the quiet, dark houses. He looked at the street lamps, watchful in the sad silence. He stopped, about to fall, and leaned against a wall with his eyes on a lamp, staring at the motionless light li
ke an idiot, then down at the circle of light on the sidewalk. He looked farther down the street. But why try to sort it out if everything was finished? Where should he go? Home? Why? He had to go on living, didn’t he? Why? There in Cargiore, in a vacuum, in idleness, for years and years and years … What was left for him, what could give some sense, some value to his life? No affection that didn’t represent an intolerable duty: for his son, for his mother. He no longer felt the need for those affections. They, his son and his mother, needed him, but what could he do for them? Live, right? Live to keep his old mother from dying of sorrow … After he and his grandmother died, his son would have his mother and they would both be better off. With the boy she would have to think about him, the boy’s father, the man who had been her husband, and so he would go on existing for her, with her son, in her son.

  How could he get back to Cargiore from Giaveno on foot, so exhausted? His mother was certainly waiting up for him, sad about his leaving… . For days he had behaved like a lunatic after learning that Silvia would be coming to Turin. His mother had found out through Prever, who had probably heard it in town. Perhaps Dr. Lais had read it in the newspaper. His mother had come to his room to beg him not to go to town at this time. Poor woman! Poor woman! What a spectacle he had made of himself! He had begun to shout like a madman that he wanted to be left alone, that he didn’t need anyone’s protection, that he didn’t want to be smothered by all those concerns and fears, or done in by all that advice. For three days he didn’t even go down at mealtimes, staying in his room, not wanting to see anyone or to hear anything.

  Now he was through. He had seen her and lost all hope. What was left for him to do? Return to his son and his mother, that was it… that was it forever!

  He took off for the station to get a tram to Giaveno and arrived just in time for the last one.

  After reaching Giaveno around midnight, he started off for Cargiore. All was silent under the moon on the sweet cool May night. More than surprise at the amazing and nearly stunning solitude in the soft moonlight, he felt almost brokenhearted over the mysterious, fascinating beauty of the night, all dappled with shadows from the moon and resonant with silvery trills. At intervals murmurs of unseen water and leafy branches made the heartache more intense. It seemed like that murmuring didn’t want to be heard, nor did it want to hear his footsteps, and so he walked more softly. Suddenly from behind a gate a ferociously barking dog made him jump and tremble and grow cold with fright. Other dogs began to bark from near and far, protesting his passing at that hour. When he stopped trembling, he noticed how extremely tired his legs felt. He thought about how he came to be so tired. He thought about the interminable road he had ahead of him, and suddenly the beauty of the night dimmed for him, its fascination vanished, and he sank into the somber darkness of his pain. He walked on for more than an hour without wanting to stop a moment to catch his breath. Finally, he couldn’t take anymore and sat on the edge of the road: he just collapsed, without the strength to hold up his head. Gradually the deep roar of the Sangone down in the valley became more distinct, then the rustle of the new chestnut leaves and the thick coolness of the wooded valley, and finally the laugh of a little brook down there. And he felt the burning in his mouth again. He moaned in pity for himself, for his grim and harshly treated soul, and tired and desperate, he felt a scorching need for comfort. He stood up again to go quickly to the only one who could give it to him. But he had to walk another half hour before seeing the octagonal cusp of the church, pointing like a threatening finger toward the sky. When he got there and looked in the direction of his house, he was surprised to see lights in three windows. He had expected one, but why so many?

  In the dark, sitting on the steps in front of the door, he found Prever weeping.

  “Mamma?” Giustino shouted.

  Prever stood up, and with head down he held out his arms:

  “Rino … Rino …” he groaned between sobs in his long beard.

  “Rino? But how? What’s wrong?” Shaking himself angrily from the old man’s arms, Giustino ran to his son’s room, still shouting, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”

  The little boy was being bathed in cold water, and his grandmother held him on her knees, wrapped in a sheet. Dr. Lais was there. Graziella and the nurse were crying. The little boy wasn’t crying; he was shaking all over, with his curly little head soaked with water, his eyes closed, his little face red, almost purple, swollen.

  His mother barely looked up, and Giustino felt pierced by her glance.

  “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” he asked the doctor in a trembling voice. “What happened? So … suddenly.”

  “Well, for two days,” the doctor said.

  “Two days?”

  His mother turned to stare at him.

  “I didn’t know … I didn’t know anything,” Giustino stammered to the doctor, as if to excuse himself. “But how? What’s wrong, Doctor? Tell me! What happened? What happened?”

  Doctor Lais took him by an arm and motioned with his head, taking him into the next room.

  “You came from Turin, didn’t you? You were at the theater?”

  “Yes,” whispered Giustino, looking at him, dazed.

  “Well, then,” Dr. Lais continued hesitantly. “If his mother could come …”

  “What?”

  “I think that … it would be a good thing, perhaps, to advise her to …”

  “Then,” shouted Giustino, “then Rino … my little boy …”

  Three sobs answered him from the next room, and a fourth behind him from Prever, who had come back up. Giustino turned, threw himself into the old man’s arms, and broke into tears himself.

  Dr. Lais returned to the room of the boy, who had been put back into bed. Although sunk into lethargy, he jerked convulsively. He was burning again. Breaking free from Prever, Giustino went back into the room.

  “I want to know what’s wrong with him! I want to know what’s wrong with him!” he shouted at the doctor, seized by uncontrollable anger.

  Dr. Lais was irritated with him and shouted back: “What’s wrong with him? He has tertian fever!”

  His tone and scowl said: “You go to the theater and have the gall to ask me in this way what’s wrong with your son!”

  “But how? In three days!”

  “Certainly in three days! Why the surprise? That’s what tertian fever means! Everything has been done… . I’ve tried …”

  “My Rino … My Rino … Oh, God, Doctor .. . My little Rirì!”

  Giustino threw himself down on his knees next to the bed to touch the boy’s burning hand with his forehead, and sobbing, he thought he had never given all his heart to that little being who was going away, who had lived for nearly two years away from his love, away from his mother’s, poor boy, and who had found refuge only in his grandmother’s love…. And only that evening he had thought of giving him to his mother! But she didn’t deserve him, either, just as he didn’t! And so the little boy was going away… . Neither of them deserved him.

  Dr. Lais had him get up and with gentle insistence took him into the next room again.

  “I’ll be back as soon as it’s daylight,” he told him. “If you want to send a telegram to his mother … It seems the right thing to do. … I can, if you wish, take care of it before coming back. Here, write on this.”

  He took a piece of paper from his notebook, and a pen. He wrote: “Come at once. Your son is dying. Giustino.”

  4

  The little room was full of flowers; the bed on which the little corpse lay under a blue veil was full of flowers. Four candles sputtered at each corner, as if the flames were laboring to breathe in that air too heavily laden with sweet perfumes. Even the little dead child seemed oppressed by them: ashen, eyes hardened under livid eyelids.

  All those collective flowers no longer gave off a single odor: they polluted the closed air of that little room; they dazed and nauseated. And the child under the blue veil, abandoned to that nauseating smell, sunk i
nto it, prisoner of it, could be looked at only from a distance, in the light of those four candles whose yellow heat made the stagnating stench of all those odors almost visible and impenetrable.

  Only Graziella, her eyes red with weeping, was staying by the door to watch the little body when, toward eleven, like a sudden wind on the stairs, among moans, the rustling of clothes, and renewed sobbing down on the ground floor, Silvia, supported by Dr. Lais, started to rush into the little room. Suddenly she stopped just outside the door, lifting her hands as if to protect herself from the sight, and opening her mouth for one cry after another that would not erupt from her throat. Dr. Lais felt her faint in his arms; he shouted: “Get a chair!”

  Graziella pulled one over, and they both helped her sit down, and suddenly Dr. Lais ran to the window, exclaiming: “But how can you stand this? You can’t breathe in here! Air! Air!”

  And he quickly returned to Silvia, who now sat with her hands over her face, her head bowed as though under a sentence. Besides the weight of sorrow, she carried the weight of remorse and shame, and was weeping, shaken with violent sobs. She wept like this for a while. Then she raised her head, propping it with her fingers splayed over her eyes, and looked at the little bed. She got up and went to it, saying to the doctor who wanted to stop her: “No … no … let me … let me see him.”

  First she looked at him through the veil, then without the veil, stifling her sobs, holding her breath to feel deeply within herself the death of her son, whom she no longer recognized. As though unable to bear the lifelessness she had taken into herself, she bent to kiss the forehead of the poor little body and moaned: “Oh, how cold you are … how cold you are.”

  And she wept inwardly: “Because my love couldn’t keep you warm… .”

  “Cold … cold…” And she lightly caressed his head, his blond curls.