The Experience of Pain

by Carlo Emilio Gadda

  Colonel Di Pascuale, in turn, was perfectly moved. His harsh, square chin, his lower lip, which jutted half a centimetre beyond the upper lip, seemed almost to tremble with restrained emotion, in a resurgence of male compassion, inherited, for certain, from the rugged mountains of Samnium. He even managed to produce, from the two relevant pouches, two half-portions of truly paternal tears: which dried, slowly, down the ancient parchment of his cheeks, in the same way that the trickle of water from the wadi becomes lost in the brightness of Sirte; and after several chaste attempts to withdraw his hand, he managed to withdraw it only after it had been tested, inside and out, with the plebeian gratitude of much kissing and saliva.

  Then on the second sheet of the pad, after ripping off the first, he wrote again: ‘Come tomorrow to pick/up leave permit and/travel pass: departure/12 noon.’ And this time in red, since he had taken the pencil by the wrong end.

  And he gave him another brief, paternal smile.

  The deaf man lavished more blessings, incorporating this time various saints, including St Roch, St Basil of Caesarea, and St John Nepomucene, and his dead relations, chief among them his late Uncle Mahagones, as well as the Virgin Mary, in particular Our Lady of Pompeii, much venerated in Maradagàl for lack of any local Virgin Marys of any efficacy: since not one of them, inside those tin-roofed, barnlike churches, seems to radiate any light of miraculous comfort whatsoever.

  Palumbo continued his endless invocation for prosperity and good fortune, and grandchildren of both sexes, to be visited upon the bent shoulders of the old doctor: and a colonel malgré lui: a dear and kindly figure among the clutter of paperwork, dusty enough to make anyone sneeze, or among the stink of clothes and stale sweat of the examination rooms. The colonel gently pushed him towards the door and nodded yes, yes, yes –, without however proffering any words, since it is pointless talking to a deaf man; he did indeed, at that time, have two pregnant daughters-in-law, Blessed Holy Mother!, one more swollen than the other: and his third daughter, the youngest, had given birth the previous month, which had been a celebration as never before.

  Dawn broke the following day, and all the hospital bugles sounded all that there was to be sounded. Reveille, guard assembly, change of nursing staff, inspection sergeant, duty corporals, coffee, medical rounds, convalescents before the Commission, those under review to the quartermaster, arrivals at the reception hall, suspects under observation; and then fatigue duty, registration, X-rays, electrothermics, heliotherapeutics, kinesitherapeutics, bathing; and then urine, blood, sputum, faeces for analysis. Then washroom, cloakroom, pharmacy, Holy Mass for Catholic patients, those of course fit to attend; at eleven o’clock, double fanfare for General Ramírez, etc. etc.

  Every celebration or operation, or action or event, entrance or exit, rise or descent, ingestion or emission, liquid or solid, or so forth, everything had its own particular burble in the pipe of a bugle, at the top or bottom of a scale.

  The orderlies had already been touring the offices for two hours, their trousers slack, scratching the tiles with the nails of their boots, in their tired missions to deliver an envelope, or a sheet of paper: the benches were all already occupied by those who normally occupied them: and, at certain times, when the chatter and the doors and footsteps fell silent, together with the fits of coughing, catarrh and nose-blowing, then, those youngsters could hear the shy tips of their own junior-school pens scratching away, scritch-scritch, over the hardness of the paper, filling their noses with a smell of glue, and of nostalgic old ink, lawyer’s ink, from the inkwell, in celebration of the various syndromes and clinical developments in the dysentery of Freguglia and the other countless dysenteries of the countless Lépez and Gémez and Gutiérrez, each distinguishable from the other only by their registry number, by three digits, since their baptismal name alone was not enough. Clinical records, observation notes and commission reports, regimental passes and detachment orders, constantly filled those ‘clerk’s rooms’ with new documents, with orthographics and orthopaedics ever-more active; inside the registration offices ‘which were the ganglion of the whole shebang’, according to the description (yelled out) by warrant officer Pastorino.

  At ten o’clock Colonel Di Pascuale heard a knock, shouted, ‘Come in!’ in a tone of irritation. But no one entered. So a clerk got up: and let Palumbo in.

  The colonel was at the centre of the office, standing, with collar undone, as usual; he was talking, almost arguing, with another, fairly young, colonel who began to raise his voice, and contradict him, increasingly harshly. From time to time, he drew his head between his shoulders, as a tortoise does, and raising the wrinkles in the middle of his brow, said: ‘a’ now, wat ’m I s’ppos’ t’ do?’, and other more or less Maradagalese phrases, that there was nothing to be done, and he wanted to wash his hands of it, or rather, ’ands ’f ’t.

  There was also the registration quartermaster, erect, his face pocked by acne, awaiting orders: a bundle of papers under his arm, and a sheet of paper in his hand, duplicated with a second sheet. Colonel Di Pascuale, after a while, once he had spotted Palumbo, said to his colleague: ‘please, please one moment’: and he turned: ‘wat d’ya waant?’, he asked the deaf man roughly, as though it were the first time he’d seen him.

  Palumbo didn’t answer, as he hadn’t heard, being deaf. And he looked at his superior questioningly, surprised, saddened, with those poor eyes of a disabled serviceman, disabled in both ears!, now abstracted from the hubbub of acoustical meanings, of an infant world. ‘Uhh! U want ya pass?’ the colonel then said, all of a sudden, when he remembered the application. ‘Ri’ ’cha, cuarta masta’, dis boy’s pass, w’ere d’ya put it?’

  ‘Here it is, Colonel!’ said the lanky quartermaster, with his springtime of pockmarks; and he handed him the sheets that he was already holding: ‘Orh! okkay! …’ The colonel took them, moved to the desk, dipped his pen in the ink, bent down, and signed distractedly: his mind, it was clear, still on the argument with his colleague: who was still talking behind him, pestering him with continual objections (to what Di Pascuale had already stated): a dog that doesn’t give up. ‘So what are you trying to tell me? … that they haven’t blocked the promotion of Fagioletti Onofrio? …’ etc. etc. A torrent of ‘promotion plan’ and ‘promotion on merit’ (meaning ‘special’), with constant references to Fagioletti Onofrio.

  That argument had really upset him, poor Di Pascuale. He returned the sheet of paper to the sergeant, ignoring the soldier, and turned once more to his colleague.

  The quartermaster handed Palumbo the two documents, leave permit and travel pass, saying: (though quietly, out of deference to the argument going on between his superiors): ‘Here’s the leave permit: fifteen plus two days’ travel.’

  ‘But you’d promised me a month!’ Palumbo blurted out, distraught.

  Colonel Di Pascuale turned around as though he had been bitten by an asp: he looked at him: approached.

  ‘Orh! A munth?’, and he took a long pause, staring at him: ‘… A munth … I promis’ ’u.’ The face of Palumbo Manganones was scarlet. The other colonel, he too, was now smiling at him, diabolically. The quartermaster’s face, rather less yellow beneath the ruddy skim of pocks, looked at him from the second line, almost apologetically: ‘… The devil, yes, indeed, he’ll find you out … but … the fault’s not mine …’ He wasn’t the one, for sure, who had invented 051 Military Headquarters.

  ‘… Okkay, boy, stop’t ’ere once and for ’ll! … and dis madness ’bout you bin deaf! … Tall sturies git longr ’n longr … den turn bad … Now ’ere’s de evidence … Two gud witnissis … jus’ as law ricuires …’ (the clerks fell silent) ‘… One Colonel Zèppola’, and he went as if to introduce him to Gaetano, as might be done in civilian life: ‘… an’ dis my littl’ cuarta masta … gud lad … gud lad … now cuarta masta, you bin takin’ yoggurt? like I said … with this springtime all over ya’ face?’; then once again to Gaetano: ‘’ees witnisses, yur all pritty good, eh … For du Mado
nna ’v Pompeii yuv dun a pritty miracol … All ’v yu’ faces down to grownd!! … She’s seen you’ve bin prayn wid all of yur heart … prop’ly wid all yur heart! … ’l right, ’l right … I’m very glad; … so yu’ go on leave … unlimited … and yur pension stays ’ere, stays ’ere wi’ der guvenment’: he turned to Zèppola, nodding his head, up and down: ‘… wid our poor littl’ guvenment … wich ’lready pais tu much pinsion …’, and he waved his hand in the air, as if to say, ‘too much pension indeed!’

  All of this, of course, took place in the Maradagalese language, except perhaps for the odd extemporary comment, made there and then. But Dr HiguerÓa still had the conversation with the colonel fresh in his ear, in a lively torrent of dialect.

  There again, it seems that Palumbo, the quartermaster, and Zèppola himself perfectly understood Di Pascuale’s way of speaking, due to their long official acquaintanceship, and also, and more probably, because they themselves were of Italian origin, as would indeed appear from their names.

  The son had in mind, however, his own vivid picture of the old military doctor, whom he himself had had occasion to know, though not at the Central Military Hospital in Pastrufazio. The old doctor, and colonel nonetheless, with his square chin, collar insufficient for its girth, with its small stud every so often undone, at the neck: which appeared almost bandaged by the white military bandage. Bandages that he had seen, he Gonzalo, on those figures laid out: never white, in the mountain.

  Poorly dressed (one might say), after children and grandchildren. Staunch in his resistance behind mountains of paperwork, after those others, those other mountains: faithful to duty: which is everything, everything.

  Of whom it was said, according to various rumours, each of them reliable, that he had managed to retrieve several millions of pesos for the Maradagàl tax authorities, having patiently, laboriously, extracted them, like the marrow extracted from ossobuco, with that special harpoon-teaspoon that looks like a dentist’s tool, though in his case it was from the succession of ossicles, or other bones or biceps or kidneys or bladders of various sturdy young men, who, however, were overeager (according to him) to gain an early fourth-grade pension. Or sixth, as the case might be. At their age!

  It should be noted, moreover, that the fair stricture of the law, by denying benefit to those not qualifying, and the firmness with which the board applies its most salutary provisions to the case in point, had, and continues to have, a moral significance, and has produced a social consequence that goes far beyond the value of the argument in hand. Indeed, those thirty or forty young men, instead of receiving an early subsidy from the Maradagalese state for sloth and idleness, on the false grounds of having suffered the war in their own bodies – which, on the contrary, are as fragrant and healthy as fresh-faced Lazarus, or, if injured, had nevertheless been harmed and ring-wormed by quite another war than that in hated Parapagàl – those young men, I say, were encouraged by their non-pension to reflect seriously on their own situations and to find, I say, a different and more dignified means of support. The position of night patrolman is already, in itself, an honourable and socially meaningful occupation. So some of those lusty would-be pensioners, though in fact pension-rejects, and Manganones in particular, strove even harder: cooperating most eagerly for the success, indeed the continuing development, of the business organization of those fortunate businesses which had the ready instinct to make use of their cooperation. Becoming – and here I’m referring to Manganones – not only patrolman, but also scout, instant contractual agent, and instant collector, or one might say money grabber, à la fourchette, of the company itself. And learning, apart from everything else, in case of emergency, even to write his own signature. Cooperating in the best way towards the success of a whole range of initiatives: whether it be pushing slips of pink paper, each night, into Augustonian, Giuseppinian or Teresottian keyholes: or issuing the more substantial and detailed sheets, whether violet, blue or pink, from a block of forms: or issuing them identically from month to month, while tending to show, from month to month, an increasing modulation in value, namely a positive differential, as the mathematicians would put it, namely affected (the value) by a propitious (hence modulated) increment and favourable wind.

  Such increment and modulation of increment, unheeded by the pockets of subscribers, being a ‘very small differential quantity’, leads the company towards one of the surest advances that can be expected in human affairs. Melchiorre Gioia couldn’t have devised anything better.

  And finally, signing these forms himself, with a stub of a pencil chewed away at the end, is evidence that where there’s a will there’s a way. Will, will! Making money from the walls of the villas. From every villa! From salve hospes: from the lizard’s tail.

  Part Two

  * * *

  V

  She wandered about, alone, in the house. And those walls, that copper: were they all she had left? of a life. They had told her the exact name, cruel and black, of the mountain: where he had fallen: and the other name, desolately serene, of the ground where they had taken and left him, with face restored to peace and oblivion, devoid of any response, for ever. The son who had smiled at her, brief springtimes!, who had so sweetly, passionately, hugged, kissed her. A year later, at Pastrufazio, a military non-commissioned officerfn1 had presented her with a diploma, had handed her some kind of book, asking her to sign her name in another register: and on saying this he handed her a copying pencil. First he had asked her: ‘are you Señora Elisabetta François?’ Turning pale on hearing mention of her name, the name that tormented her, she had replied: ‘yes, I am she.’ Trembling, like a condemned woman at the cruel aggravation. To which, after the first atrocious cry, that dark voice of eternity continued calling her.

  Before he left, when with a clink of the chain he picked up the register and then the gleaming sword, she had asked him by way of invitation: ‘may I offer you a glass of Nevado?’: clasping her bony hands together. But he didn’t want to accept. It seemed to her that he strangely resembled the person who had occupied the brief splendour of time: of time consumed. The beating of her heart told her so: and with a tremble of the lips she felt the need to love the re-emergent presence again: but she knew well that no one, no one ever returns.

  She drifted about the house: and sometimes opened the shutters of a window; to let the sun in, into the main room. The light then met her modest, almost poor clothing: the small expedients she had managed to repair them with, holding back the tears, the shabby dress of her old age. But what was the sun? What day did it bring, over the baying of the darkness? She knew its sizes and its essence, its distance from the earth, from all the other planets: and their movement and orbit; she had learned and had taught many things: and Kepler’s formulations and squarings that pursue the ellipse of our desperate pain into the vacuity of senseless space.fn2

  She drifted about, in the house, as though searching for the mysterious path that would have taken her to meet someone: or perhaps just to solitude, devoid of any pity and of any image. From the kitchen, now with no fire, to the rooms, now voiceless: occupied by just a few flies. And surrounding the house she still saw the countryside, the sunshine.

  Sometimes the sky, so vast over vanished time, was overshadowed with its ominous clouds; which flowed plump and white from the mountains and gathered and then blackened, and suddenly seemed to threaten the person alone in the house, her sons far, terribly far, away. This occurred once again as that summer was ending, one afternoon in early September, after the long heat that everyone said would never end: ten days after she had called the keeper, with the keys: and had wanted to go down, with her, to the Cemetery. That threat hurt her deeply. It was the clash, it was the scorn of powers or of beings unknown, and yet bent on persecution: the evil that rises again, again and for ever, after the clear mornings of hope. What always upset her most of all was the unexpected malevolence of those who had no reason to hate her, or to insult her: of those to whom her trust, so pure, was s
o unreservedly given, as to equals and to brothers in a superior society of souls. Then each consoling experience and memory, value and labour, and support from the city and the people, was suddenly wiped out by the devastation of mortified instinct, the inner strength of awareness was lost: like a child run over by the crowd, knocked down. The barbarized crowd of lost ages, the darkness of things and souls, were a grim enigma, before which she wondered anxiously – (ignorant like a lost child) – why, why!

  The storm, that very day itself, would drive with long howls through the dreadful mountain gorges, and then out into the open against people’s houses and factories. After each sombre build-up of its bitter spite, it unleashed its thunderbolts throughout the sky, like the havoc and pillage of a marauding corsair among sinister flashes and gunshots. The wind, which had carried her son away towards forgetting cypresses, seemed to be searching for her as well, for her as well, inside the house. From the small window over the staircase, a blast of wind, breaking in, had snatched her by the hair: the creaking floors and their wooden beams seemed about to collapse: like planking, like a ship in a tempest: and its hatches closed, battened down, swollen by that fury outside. And she, like an animal already wounded, if it hears the brutal hunting horns above it again and again, it does what it can in its exhausted state to find a refuge, below, beneath the staircase: going down, step by step: into a corner. Timidly overcoming that emptiness of each step, trying them one after the other with her foot, clinging to the banister with her hands that could hardly grip, step by step, down, down, towards the darkness and the dampness below. There, a small ledge.