The Experience of Pain

by Carlo Emilio Gadda

  And the drawer … Adieu! And the eleven thousand lire! Just at the very moment that he had to pay the last tax instalments. And his late, dear Teresa’s diamonds … His eyes welled with tears. Then, saying, ‘Poor Teresa, my poor Teresa!’, he had telephoned the sheriff, but it was dawn before he had him at the other end of the line, and the police were on the road towards nine, on foot … can you believe it?

  ‘It’ll take more than that,’ said Giuseppe, ‘by this time they’ll be safe and sound in Parapagàl …’ And he pointed to the mountains, crossed by busloads of the tourist-fraternity.

  God is great! and the Nistitúo de Vigilancia seems to worship the nemesis of history, just like Giosuè Carducci. In spite of this, Caballero Trabatta, down in the village that morning, around eleven, had announced to the pharmacist, the tobacco seller, the butcher, the baker and the town clerk that he would not submit to any demand, to any blackmail (he didn’t use this word, but he implied it), never. He didn’t want to explain any further, since he was one who knew his way around in the world. And nor could he say, ‘But what’s this damned fool Manganones doing?’, since Manganones could quite properly have replied: ‘you’re not signed up, you can’t expect a thing.’

  Manganones, indeed, as soon as he had taken on the surveillance of the area, and therefore of those villas adjoining Trabatta, which had paid up, had likewise adopted a particular practice of excluding from his surveillance the villas that had not signed up: these were quite rightly abandoned to their fate. What he did to exclude them is not entirely clear: perhaps, when going past, he closed his eyes and looked the other way. It is certain, however, that he carried out his duties so scrupulously and so effectively that there was never an instance of any of those villas that had paid up ever suffering the slightest harm. Those villas that had signed up were then so pitifully lacking in crockery and bedding that the thieves could sense the wasted energy from a distance and left them to enjoy their subscription in peace, beneath the starry basin of the night.

  By a quarter to twelve Caballero Trabatta had already recruited two young lads in the town, two cousins – and Peppa named and described them: trousers, height, appearance, resources, coat, family, residence, occupation, which at that moment was none – who were not war veterans, given their young and lusty age, nor former war-deaf miraculously healed by the Madonna of Pompeii, but looked the kind who could stare the devil in the face, even if he was coming down the road from the church. Caballero Trabatta was certainly not going to pick fault with the mattresses, or the sheets, or the chamber pots, or the double gun licence. And indeed many years would pass before the Nistitúo de Vigilancia was able to slap its special terms and conditions on the new subscriber with lightning conductor, to slip the reassuring scrap of paper into one of the many spokes of the gate at dawn:

  Nistitúo de Vigilancia para la Noche

  de la Provincia del Serruchón

  Autorizado por decreto del Gobernador General

  N° 224488 – 14-5-1933

  The ‘saw-toothed’ (sic) peaks of the Serruchón rose high against the fire and the security of the Dawn, shadows billowed down into the crags on this side, towards the small hermitage of King Agilulfo that appeared grey as the rock and the cliffs of the mountain, in the somewhat blurred field of the old binoculars … They brought to mind edelweiss, picked out by the pallor of the dawn, small Carmelite flowers, and morning lichens on the damp faces and clefts in the rock, that would have stirred the thoughts of Camillo Sbarbaro …

  From the terrace of the villa, everything seemed to flee to its fate like the rolling trains that already with the first steps of day were lost whistling into the healthland – and from the gently saddened heart those words might have come to the lips from the immortal prelude of The Betrothed: ‘So that there is no one, on first seeing it (the Serruchón), provided he is viewing from the front, for example from the walls of Pastrufazio that face north, who would not immediately distinguish it by its name (namely its saw-toothed outline) from those other Sierras with a more mysterious name and more ordinary shape …’, which, being in South America, can expect a sunset from one moment to the next, a fine sunset, according to Carducci.fn1

  A few days later the mother had occasion to receive another visit from Peppa. The good lady, as Giulio Carcano would have said, was brought in by the peon, who was acting as psychogogue in clogs and ceremonial marshal; even though the way, through the small gate and through the avenue of plums, along the wall that ran behind the house, and then on to the level terrace, was perfectly easy for every more plain and simple soul, as, moreover, for every more tenebrous soul who had the fine idea of paying a visit to the few members of the family when they were in their night dress, or busy clipping the nails of their lower extremities.

  Any person, any outsider, could have appeared, dark and unexpected, in the frame of the dining-room window, without asking anyone’s permission and without meeting any obstacle along the line of familiarity and of ‘we have nothing to hide’. The Marquis, his father, builder of the villa and of the level terrace, was and felt so pure, and, beneath the shield of pure feeling, so loved the people and placed such faith in the people of the Serruchón that he had never wanted to know about bolts or bars or locks and shards of bottle-glass in the walls, with which certain wealthy old men protect themselves against the temptations of others. On the other hand, he was never in fact a wealthy old man, since, once the villa was built, he never had two coins to rub together.

  The peon therefore came in with Peppa, as he did with everyone, having once studied them with suspicion and, where necessary, having roughly questioned them. But it is well known that a certain protection is universally exercised over elderly ladies in villas, by old and loyal servants. Immediately after, the mother also received Poronga the carpenter, who wanted to make her a rustic gift of a basket of mushrooms (very musky, in September, in the Cordillera Maradagalese): he knew how to gather the non-poisonous ones under chestnut trees, after each rainfall, and guarding himself with a figwood stick,fn2 as a precaution against the coffee-brown tenderness of the asp; which, coiled upon itself, might seem like a simple and innocuous turd to the inexperienced: but Heaven help anyone who steps on it. Excluded inevitably from the crop, the Boletus Atrox Linnaei, which resembles the Boletus Edulis like a shyster resembles his identity card. Poronga, then, in his working hours, used to build stools and tripods for the señoras in their villas: who, having filled their lungs with the country aromas, rendered more piquant by the activity of Poronga’s more lively sebaceous glands, and after an exchange of proper and well-chosen words of loyalty to the villas and the lands of the Serruchón, gladly paid him twenty or thirty lire a pair for them. Entering the dining room with Poronga, in addition to his trousers and his feet, were a drenched mushroomer’s shirt, as well as the patches that covered the seat of those perilous trousers, which, it might be said, were there, there, to capitulate at every word, but instead managed, who knows how, to serve their purpose for a few more minutes, for a few minutes more, yes, yes, and so on, minute by minute.

  Kilometres of walking and other evidence exuded into the room. Then Beppina the fishwife turned up: Beppina with a B instead of a P,fn3 known in the whole district for her practice of pissing standing up, in the fields, in the most populous and proliferant crowds, since the item of lingerie that would have prevented such an operation, or at least impeded it, was never among those that graced her person. She came into the room barefoot, simpering with devotion and rustic spontaneity, offering an enormous, yellow tench from the Seegrün, which she held dangling from a metal hook. The other end of the hook had been fashioned into a ring, through which the woman had thrust her middle finger. In glory, and to the wonder of those present, she held up the dead animal, whose eyes were veiled by an Acherontic languor, and the mouth open and round, as if it had been prepared for the insertion of a cannula: and instead had been hung through the palate with that hook.

  ‘Oh! just fifteen pesos …’ whine
d Beppina, ‘what are fifteen pesos, these days, Señora mia, after the war … after the victory against those curs of Parapagàl? …’ ‘Oh! If he were here, my poor Angelino, to see it, a fish like that … my grandson, you know … the son of my poor Gina … he so loved fishing for tench in the lake …’ ‘Angelino … yes … yes, him, that’s right, ooh … yes, that’s the one, sure! … ooh, that one who used to play with your poor boy, ooh, when they were children, like that, ooh, just like that … Yes … no … I mean yes … died of typhoid while on leave … but after all the strains of the war … bad food … Oh, that war! …’

  The mother wanted to say yes: her desperate impulses automatically brought tears to her old eyes: which cherished only a few yellow photographs, beyond the comings and goings of the flies. Soon, perhaps, who knows!, the vain tumult of time would have made her eyes similar to those … were it not for the dignity of the eyelids, which fall, fall, like Caesar’s toga, when surprised by death … The mushrooms, the tench … Yes … poor creatures … it seemed to her, when the years were over, that victory … that charity … yes, memory demanded this too … this too was only right … In her quiver of tears she began to feel a tender admiration for the yellow belly of that foul and slimy fish. (She wanted to blow her nose but searched in vain for a handkerchief.) With compassionate sweetness, she blotted out the turpitude of the images. In memoriam.

  Some of the peon’s hens, then, or perhaps chickens, highly sensitive to the notion of Friday, which for them is what we would regard as a kind of festive interlude between a sermon and a lecture on morals, had made their way, scratching among the plum trees and pecking who knows what, and having wandered behind the house to the terrace as though they too were part of the beloved crowd, one even seemed to be contemplating passing through the Pillars of Hercules and thus reaching, as though by right, the dining room … But, in front of the chickens that scattered in great terror, suddenly in the frame of the glass door there appeared the little woman from the cemetery: and she was, or seemed, a black cockroach on the scorching cement of the terrace: wife of the dwarf sacristan of Santa Maria (the parish church), a man born two months premature, whom the municipal authority, a jealous guardian of public resources, to save money, had entrusted to manage the cemetery and oversee the dead at half price, and had indeed appointed him as chief municipal gravedigger on half-time … and half-salary, after his church duties of course, and with the assignment of a fixed emolument of around eight lire a month, in Maradagalese currency. But then, when it came to the actual job, he couldn’t manage it, small as he was;fn4 and by the time he’d dug half the grave, exhausted, he gave the pick and shovel, each time, to the pubescent youth of the village, who, for half a flask of wine, would finish it off for him; he being as eternally hairless as a prepubescent boy. The grave certainly had to be dug deep somehow or other, for there’s no playing with the dead, and they want their final resting place ready, when the time comes.

  The little woman, whom everyone called Pina del Goeupp but was, in fact, Giuseppina or rather Giuseppa, regularly managed to get along the narrow path by the plum trees and the terrace, after a slight crunch of gravel, into the house, kitchen or main room, avoiding any formalities of etiquette, such as ringing the bell (though there wasn’t one) or calling out, ‘Anyone at home?’ or ‘Excuse me’: all trivialities, these, of a bygone time and custom.

  She even succeeded in avoiding the suspicious peon, so well had she mastered the technique of the cockroach. Moreover, since it was Friday, the peon’s eighty-three-year-old mother, paralysed down the left side, came to observe the day of abstinence at the Señora’s house, and was surrounded by the most cordial and revitalizing care, with the richest croconsuelo that had ever stunk on Mother Earth. Toothless, she was able to slurp it most efficiently, treating it with saliva and wine on her lisping tongue.

  The peon had not been involved in the war, except in spirit, having been exempted by reason of his ‘farming’ activity from the duty incumbent on the Maradagalese soldier to receive rounds of Parapagalese machine-gun fire in his stomach. Many other farmers like him had had to go there and even remain there, in the war, but he, fortunately, not. Nevertheless, in the mother’s mind and I would say deep within her, the mother‒son relationship was so closely identified with the war‒death relationship of the son, that she could no longer think of a mother except as a knot of inhuman pain that outlived those sacrificed. And besides, the peon’s half-paralysed mother had herself grieved for a son, who was not the peon, but another son. Indeed, he was listed first among the war dead, on the Cemetery plaque, since the surname of the dead man began with an ‘a’.

  The French windows on the terrace were wide open and fixed back to the walls with brass chains. The congregation of fleas and the conspiracy of more volatile valerates, in the dining room, had animated the soft, equinoctial calm: April was entering the room, like our September, from the windows, and various flies, gnats and crepuscular horseflies, these latter rather decadent in tone and, quite frankly, somewhat suspect, buzzed and circled high up, in a tired and distant manner, over the odorous basket of those young mushrooms: to whose lively freshness they also attributed (in their imaginative ignorance) the odour of Poronga’s feet and perhaps other areas of skin, which were, by gad!, agreeably damp and sweaty.

  The hens, the chickens, strutting about, pecking, at goodness knows what, given the bareness of the terrace, looked in at the doorway. The sun was coddling their brains. Perhaps, however hopelessly, they were searching for someone to drive them suddenly away, like the wrath of God, ready to scatter in a whirl of mad cock-a-doodle-dos, a few feathers lost, the brains that control them displaced in the schizophrenic syndrome of terror; which is at the same time torment and intoxication for their privileged natures. They blinked at two-hundredths of a second, with short, rapid, horizontal shifts of the head, inside which their brain was supposed to nestle. The osmanthus fragrans had shiny, short leaves beneath the September sun; the sky beyond the fields filled by a distant bell; the enamel-green leaves of the osmanthus; curved, and a delight for art classes: from its pure, white succulent flower-clusters, it gave off a heady, yet unique, allure of aristocratic climes.

  The sun and the lights were setting towards their sweetness, when the son came down from the Symposium, or perhaps from the Laws, and, with no warning, opened the door of the room. He saw his mother, her eyes red with tears, holding an assembly, standing: and around her, like a band of cohorts that has finally caught its victim, Peppa, Beppina, Poronga, chickens, peon, the old, half-paralysed woman who comes on Fridays, the dwarf hunchback wife of the gravedigger, black as a cockroach, the tomcat, and the female cat drawn by the smell of the fish: but they were staring at Poronga’s filthy young dog, which was now trembling and showing signs, the coward, of being afraid of the two cats, after having sniffed everyone’s shoes long and lecherously, and even pissed under the table. But the trickle of piss had then advanced of its own accord towards the fireplace. And on the plate, the dead fish, stinking. It was enormous, yellow, its eyes soft and cyanotic after the shamelessness and the nudity; with its round-open mouth, it seemed they had given it the tube of gas to suck, to finish it. In the basket the mushrooms smelling of feet; in the air the flies, or rather, several horseflies, two hornets, one or maybe two wasps, a moth flapping madly against the mirror: and, he calculated immediately, clenching his teeth, a proportionate contingent of fleas. His rage, an infernal rage, did not however alter his expression. He had a special capacity for hatred without any alteration to his physical features. He was, perhaps, a timid soul. But more often he was thought of as an idiot. He felt humiliated, tired. The old obsession about the crowd: his dread of his schoolfriends, their feet, their lunch of croconsuelo; the stink of ‘playtime’, the stupid horseplay; the long processions towards the blocked urinals, in line, two by two; the high-handed schoolmistress who said stop to anyone who took too long over it: some then delayed the rest until a better moment. The disgust he had harboure
d as a boy, for all those school years, the contempt he had felt in the post-war months for the voices of so-called men: through the streets of Pastrufazio he’d found himself hunted out, as though he were a beast, by their infuriated charity, of men: of association, of a thousand. He was one.

  The years! and the estate was still there on the hill; and the Serruchón was still there in the eastern sky, an orographic totem for its people, radiance, red dolomite, waiting for the Copernicus of Pian Castagnaio to lend it a sun that sets in the opposite direction, a Phoebus’s chariot backfiring. The butirro pears grew heavy in the golden somnolence of the autumn, hard as stones: until, suddenly, St Carlo, making good use of his large nose, seizes them for the drool of Donna Paola Travasa. One night, all of a sudden. What couldn’t St Carlo do! Besides, teeth aren’t needed ‒ or two or three at most ‒ for butirro pears after the feast of St Carlo.

  The whole goblet, come on, bottom up! He wasn’t the type for ‘transeat a me’. The whole goblet of triviality: down it all, bottom up!, right to the dregs. Not even burbling back, argh argh, pinching his nose with his fingers, like when you force down a purgative, castor oil. The whole stupidity, the whole clomping residue of the years had to be the only thing, to count, to have any value, in the world. And now it was in his house, this company, as though he, the Marquis, had dreamt, predicted it: ‘For my sons, the villa, the pears, for my sons.’ What a shame that one of them had vanished into air … good air … in that way: but the gravitation had worked, 9.81 m/s²: with two red lines over the lips from the nostrils, and eyes open, open, inside which the sunset was fading … With his lips he seemed to want to drink his own blood again … for it’s no good … from the mouth … Blood … two red lines … from the nose. This company: as their father and mother used to like it, in the house, with clomping peons and peonesses; they used to gutturate their variations, hundred-per-cent Indo-European belches after a riot of mad, tolling, faith-propagating bells: from the tower. Five hundred, five hundred, pre-war currency. The clitoral clapper was the great glory of the jubilant village. Five hundred pesos; five hundred. Just five hundred. In his jersey, the son’s, when he was fourteen, against the blast of the north wind, which at school they called the Borea, he had four gaping windows; as big as that. And they had to eat little, in order to grow healthy, slim. But for the future, the villa, the villa.