The Experience of Pain

by Carlo Emilio Gadda

  On the tenth day, 28 August, around eleven in the morning, just after his return from his first round of visits by bicycle, having removed his trouser clips and shaken off some of the dust, the good doctor was about to find no reason to further delay a good lathering, developable into a triumphant crescendo between chin and ears, which would have been followed, on completion, by several blood-coloured streaks arranged more or less in all directions over the whole masculine region of his cheeks; and also under the chin: streaks such as to bring to mind the Battle of the Metaurus. He was on the very point of yielding to the evidence, in front of the washbasin mirror, when José (Giuseppe at Villa Pirobutirro) came to tell him that the Señora’s son wished him, at his convenience, to go and see him. ‘What’s the matter with him?’ he asked. The peon shrugged: ‘No me enteré,’ he replied.

  The doctor, happy to get out of the bother of shaving, set about cheerfully washing his hands.

  He was once again in good spirits. ‘Anda, anda,’ he answered, ‘pero ligero, otra vez acabo yo de llegar antes … And tell him I’m coming straight away …’. ‘Good, I say you good day …’ said the peasant: and left. He hadn’t even removed his hat, nor his hands from his pockets.

  ‘There we are!’ thought the good doctor: the call had put him into a slight fever of excitement.

  The Señora’s son was waiting for him! Probably for nothing important, for one of those usual fancy notions: like a fear of dying … But he’s living like a lord! … (he chuckled). He had thermometer and stethoscope in his pocket: took the trouser clips from the bicycle, but then changed his mind, and decided instead to go on foot: put the clips back on the frame, where they sit astride: he left, taking a walking cane instead.

  And he thought, as he walked, into what a poor mould that son had been shaped, so cloistered, so distant from everyone, at Lukones, where he is said to be a misanthrope or, worse, an enemy of the people; perhaps even under police surveillance.

  The good doctor, on the other hand, was married with children; children whom the Military Service Office at Prado had systematically neglected, being girls, five of them: each more girlish than the other. And the Señora’s son, though misanthropic, might perhaps not be misogynous. He was certainly a bachelor, like Beethoven, and even more so, if that were possible to imagine: but it seemed there might still be time for him to remedy that fear of marriage, if he had a little courage: and could get a grip on himself. ‘Obvious! A spoonful of courage, ¡por Dios!,’ thought the doctor as he walked along.

  A man … like him! eighty kilos at least! … A man …

  There were some most extraordinary rumours about him, in Pastrufazio as well. But they knew him better in Lukones, having seen him several times posting a letter, or buying stamps at the post-office counter, where he had aroused the curiosity of the señorita. An enemy of the people? … That he had no sympathy for ordinary folk could be gleaned from his manner, from his bearing … not that he was haughty, but his gaze, or perhaps his inner gaze, seemed to exclude the misery and sallowness of poverty.

  José, the peon, claimed he had all seven inside him, in his belly, the seven deadly sins, deep inside his belly, like seven serpents: that gnawed away and devoured him from inside, from morning to evening: and even at night, in his sleep. He slept, in the morning, until eight, perhaps eight-thirty: and had coffee brought to him in bed, by the Señora, who was forever going up and down the stairs for that son, poor old woman!, and newspapers as well; and then to read them and sip it, slowly, the coffee, and the newspapers, stretched out in bed like a cow: (that’s what the peon used to say): and he also kept books on the bedside table, so he could read those as well from time to time, as though the newspapers were not enough, in bed. While the farmers, by eight, have already been sweating away for three hours, and need to resharpen their scythes. That’s what the people used to say, and then repeat. The doctor, through his compassionate ministry, had an opportunity to hear more or less everyone: and even Battistina, Batta’s cousin, who worked at Villa Pirobutirro: on a daily and temporary basis for the summer season and for the earliest hours of the day, which are the most precious; and she suffering from a goitre.

  And then he had never wanted to take a wife, to be freer, this was positive, to do whatever went on in his head. Which unworthy behaviour, moreover, the good doctor and family man could not bring himself to scorn with the virulence that the case required. ‘The current situation offers potential for change’, he argued, ‘and power and action are mother and son, in our Aristotelian world.’ And such was his wish, not to take a wife, that he hastened to foist the black bridegroom’s outfit on Peppa, for Peppa’s brother, Peppino: the outfit that his uncles Giuseppe and Nepomuceno had left him, on their deaths, as a sacred memory of those distant times when they had been ambassadors to Portugal. Others, however, had mitigated the accusation: he hadn’t been hasty at all: and indeed he had kept it religiously in mothballs, for forty years: from the age of five to forty-five: even sending home postal orders, when he was worn out scrabbling over stone, and his accursed skin wasn’t worth a centavo: postal orders for them to get mothballs for the wedding outfit, and above all pepper, pepper!, so necessary for the conservation of any fabric. The good doctor, as he walked along, felt obliged to accept this second view.

  Recently, other rumours had spread, all very sad: or indeed nauseating. It had been known for some time that he was quick-tempered, as well as a wastrel. Now the word was going around that, quick-tempered, in brutish fits of anger, he used to ill-treat his aged mother: denied however by Peppa, the washerwoman, who was particularly close to the Señora, and received from her the most tender and human confidences … and therefore also that reiterated denial, moved by charity and maternal love. The poor Señora! … He came in unexpectedly. He went out when everyone thought he was reading. They said he was greedy, and a glutton for food and wine; and cruel: ever since he was a child: with lizards, which he rapped wickedly, with Giuseppe’s chickens (the first Giuseppe, the predecessor to this one), which he chased wildly with a mad whip of his, even going as far, at times, so frightened they were, as to make them take off and almost fly, just think! just think! fly!, as if they were falcons, the chickens!

  Once, when a Jewish doctor reading mathematics at Pastrufazio had shown him, and with the aid of calculus, how a cat (falling from the gutter of any roof) can reach the ground on four legs unharmed, which is a marvellous gymnastic application of the impulse theorem, he dropped a fine cat several times from the second floor of the villa, curious to try the theorem out. And the poor beast, on landing, did indeed give the desired confirmation, each time, each time!, like a thought which, over successive fortunes, does not cease to remain eternal; but, as for the cat, it died shortly after, with eyes veiled by an irrevocable sadness, made melancholy by that affront. Since every insult is death.

  Greedy, and a glutton for food and wine: cruel: and extremely mean: so that he would go to Prado station on foot; whereas all true gentlemen went there by carriage, such as Batta or Miguel Chico, or in their own motor car: or at least by bus. And out of meanness he tried to sack the women, washerwomen, maids and others, who helped the old lady to keep house, raking up a few centavos or a few crumbs of bread, namely from the leftovers of his crapulous feasts.

  José, the peon, at the Hostería del Alegre CorazÓn, specifically confirmed this vice of greed, one of the worst, and which the Church most severely condemns; and he lamented the small production of wine and how much he continually had to pour into his master’s two-litre bottle, drawing it from the barrel. On the other hand, Peppa, Battistina, the landlord Manoel Torre, and his helper and errand-boy Pepite, who delivered the flasks, were in agreement that the Pirobutirros, mother and son, drank only white whites from Résqueta or the Sierra Encantadora, which Torre himself promptly delivered, and of good quality, as he did to the friars at the hermitage for saying Mass: or at most those clear, light wines from Nevado or Zanamuño. The other landowners and charcuterers in the area
were laudably teetotal, the doctor thought, as he continued on, rapping his right calf (a solid and sturdy cyclist’s calf) with his cherrywood cane. All of this could explain the obvious indulgence, and indeed partiality, this rogue Manoel Torre felt towards Pirobutirro, the son: it is well known that innkeepers regard anyone who doesn’t drink wine as fit only for prison … Someone then went as far as observing, with much humanity and a certain pride, that the air in Lukones is particularly thin, hunger-inducing: or at least it stimulates a healthy appetite for anyone who arrives lifeless from Pastrufazio, poisoned by urbanity and urbanization, and by that rationalizing flatness that constitutes its climate.

  And the son, on his brief appearances, must have arrived hungry: and perhaps it was the air of serenity, uncommon in him but native to those hills, and so general and gentle in them, and in the quivering droplets of countryside, that invited him to a Dionysian celebration: and the drowsiness that in Elysian clemency would turn to mist, at the foot of the snowy heights. They crowned the peaks, an icy diadem of eternity. Perhaps he sought the passing oblivion of the cup and a gentle gastric stimulus … once again … to get him through the day, the Pastrufazian day!, and to arrive, as best he could, at the vesperal star of the ocean.

  But most people added that those were fanciful ideas, those about the good air: completely fanciful: that even poor people then, having toiled all day, would have to dine on stew, if good air is what determines everything. No, no. He was white and ruddy: and the melancholy of the sunset didn’t prevent him from polishing off certain tastier fat slices of beef, straight down into his stomach, if you please, go on! go on!, with sweet-sour onions.

  The doctor chuckled: it seemed to him, thinking about it, that the Pirobutirro son spent too much time pondering his ailments, closed up in himself: ailments now corroded in time: and his thoughts were poisoning his spirit, like rotten debris. Certainly around this patient of his, so far from any norm, the strangest ideas had been forming in Lukones, and rumours of every kind circulating, for quite some time. His lust for food, for example, had become legendary. Poor people, undernourished, beggars, unanimously condemned that vice of greed, which is so vile in a man; then, what is more, that barbarous practice, after having eaten, of drinking Nevado on top of it, or Cerro; almost as though he, the glutton, were banqueting with the ghosts of his Viking ancestors. None of the local landowners, most of them teetotal, and some also vegetarians, could think of such a thing without being gripped by disgust. ‘People eat too much!’ the doctor reasoned to himself. ‘Half an apple, a slice of wholemeal bread, which is so delicious on the tongue and contains all the vitamins, from A to H, bar none … that’s the perfect meal for the honest man! … what do I mean? … for the normal man … More than that is just a burden, for the stomach. And for the organism. An enemy introduced into the organism without authority, like the Danai into the fortress of Troy …’ (that’s what he thought) ‘… which the gastroenteric system is then condemned to churn, pulp, expel … The peptonization of albuminoids! … And the liver! … And the pancreas! … turning fats into starch! … turning starch and glucose into sugar! … No joke! … Easier said than done! … At most, at critical times, a few seasonal vegetables can be added … raw, or cooked … pulses … peas …’

  He walked on, absorbed by these thoughts … ‘And then he doesn’t want stories to get about! As in ’28! …’ He was referring to the Pirobutirro son.

  In 1928, people – and first of all the people of Pastrufazio – said he had come close to dying, in Babylon, after swallowing a sea urchin, others claimed it was a crab, a kind of sea scorpion but scarlet instead of black, and with four whiskers, scarlet also, and very long, like four women’s hatpins, two on either side, and lower jaws as well, shaped like clamps, and very dangerous too; someone even suggested it was a swordfish or broach-fish; that’s right!, small, newborn; which he had swallowed whole (lightly boiled just so, but others said raw), from the head or sword part: or broach part. That the tail then flapped around from his mouth for quite some time, like a second tongue which he could no longer pull back, which nearly suffocated him.

  Educated people refused to credit such baroque fairy tales: having excluded point-blank both the ichthyic and the echinoderm, they claimed that the fearful crustacean must have been a lobster from Fuerte del Rey, an Atlantic resort well known throughout the country for its lobster farms. Por suerte, some information about the Aristotelian system had reached their ears. The almost fatal lobster reached the size of a newborn human baby: and he, with nutcrackers, and pressing hard, harder!, both elbows on the table, had savagely crushed the claws, coral-coloured as they were, and pulled out the best meat, his eyes gleaming with concupiscence, then squinting more and more and further inside, eyeing his prey, towards which he approached, nostrils flaring with desire, the obscene sucker of that mouth!, foul entrails that he had turned out earlier in order to speed on towards the coveted pleasure. According to legend, such an animal, in Babylon, they had never before seen. And he even had the heart, the sin vergüenza, to dip them in tartar sauce, one by one: i.e. those tasty and wholly innocent filaments, or fragments (coloured white or pink mother-of-pearl like a sea dawn), that he had gradually laboriously been extracting, and with his nails, from the inner emptiness of the two shattered! … splintered! … claws. And using his hands, even his fingers, he held them to his greasy and guilty lips with an extraordinary lust.

  Then, sated, having put down the nutcracker, he knocked back a drink.

  His snout and naturally piggish appearance also led to the story, apart from the one above, that throughout the whole of an interminable summer he had dined on nothing but lobster in tartar sauce, whiting in white sauce with lashings of mayonnaise, or (two or three times) peje-rey; and pigeons roasted in a casserole with rosemary and potatoes which were new, sweet (though not too sweet), and small, slightly overcooked, left in the juices of the pigeons themselves, which, in turn, were stuffed according to an Andalusian recipe, with oregano, sage, basil, thyme, rosemary, wild mint, and pimiento, zibibbo, pork lard, chicken brains, ginger, red pepper, cloves, and still more potato, inside, almost as if those other potatoes around them, i.e. outside the rumps of the pigeon, were not enough: as if these potatoes had themselves almost become a second meat pulp, so much had they become incorporated into the pigeon’s rumps: as if the bird, once roasted, had acquired entrails more suited to its new situation as a roast chicken, though smaller and fatter, since it was still a pigeon.

  And these potatoes inside, like those outside, were extremely floury on first contact with his tongue, where, as soon as they were spooned, since he, the glutton, had to eat them with a spoon, they dissolved all at once into a single paste along with their meaty stuffing, in other words the evacuated and stuffed animal, with a general flavour of rosemary, or perhaps a hint of basil, which soon replaced, and was quite overwhelmed, by that hellfire of red pepper. Since he munched all of it in one go – pigeons and potatoes and brains and bacon fat and pepper and cloves – the hog then washed it all down, before they’d even reached the end, with fine wines from the pre-Andean region, and the fish on the other hand, and the lobster, gadzooks!, all that with white wines, crystal clear, costing twenty-two and up to twenty-eight centavos, from Nevado or Cerro Pequeño.

  And between his lips he wanted an ice-cold goblet, slim and sleek, vitreosity devoid of thickness, frigid and incorporeal purity, clear crystal. In those moments of disdain he heartily loathed those rough tumblers on green baize, stubby and misshapen, at Manoel Torre’s place, crudely faceted to halfway up and flawed with air bubbles and cracks. But in the absence of anything better he wouldn’t have said no … not even to those! Oh! he wasn’t the ‘transeat a me!’ type, so the story went.

  Suffice it to say that he used these auxiliaries of the nutcracker and African pepper, gorging himself to capacity, inside a pitch-black hole in the Riachuelo district, where gypsies gathered and other shady characters and guitar, and free-loving toms and she-cats bet
ween the shoes of the grazers, in continual contention over chicken and fish bones however meatless, thrown down on feline territory by those supernal beings, once their lofty bone-cleaning was complete. And after all this little little of lap-lapping he even had the nerve, the sin vergüenza, to pick an argument each time with the innkeeper, telling him he was charging far more for such portions than for an ordinary plate of puchero. One fine day the innkeeper, though he was holding his apron and not a knife – (generally he used that dishwater-coloured apron to wipe the sweat from his neck, the grease all the way around) – sent him to the devil, telling him to find somewhere else to eat, where he could stuff himself better, and for nothing; and then he, the hidalgo, instead of smashing a jug of sauce over the head of that filthy wretch, went pitter-patter from the vergüenza on seeing all those still at table who were pasturing and grazing with such mild decency, and someone glugging a few gulps; so that he scampered out as soon as he could through the door on to the street: for even he could see, hidalgo though he was, that no other pigsty in the whole land would have fed him chunks of lobster with dollops of mayonnaise in such a way, and so cheaply. Sometimes even a marquis of Néa Keltiké manages to learn a thing or two.

  The Avenging Powers of Heaven decreed that the rainy season of crustaceans and rosemary should be followed through their just intervention – (and also due to the scorching sun, which, after the unusually low levels of most rivers, had brought widespread drought to the land) – by a long and most costly disease. And it was this that prevented him, once and for all, from doubling his stomach with mushy potatoes washed down with Pequeño wines: which forced him into eternal fasting, and reduced him to dusting the gastric mucous membrane with kaolin powder, or magistery of bismuth (bismuth subnitrate), whichever he preferred. Which the more honest apothecaries in Pastrufazio sold him – the bismuth – at twenty times the cost, with the excuse that it came from Europe and, more precisely, from Darmstadt.