Then her head, all covered in blood, was gently bathed, without disturbing it, without pulling a hair, using cotton wool soaked in alcohol and then, since that was not enough, using essence and eau de cologne, found in a phial on the table: and all this with extreme caution: the whole room immediately scented with alcohol, benzine, eau de cologne, which pervaded the mortal clothing of those around. But the bathing required the doctor’s patience and time, while those present stood in horror. Her head then revealed two injuries, seemingly not serious, to the right parietal lobe and to the right temple, and other lacerations and minor abrasions: and that hideous bruise to the right cheek, which was so terribly swollen, as far as the eye. The haemorrhage had smeared her head, face, lips, it had congealed and clotted in her hair, in her right ear, on her face, under her nose: much blood had also come from the nose: the edge of the sheet, the pillow, had been horribly reddened.
Everyone realized, seeing the traces of blood on the edge of the night table, towards the bed, that her head, to be injured in this way, must have been struck violently against it; perhaps someone had taken hold of her with two hands, by the neck, and beaten her head against the corner of the night table, to terrify her, or intending to kill her. For everyone, it was and remained terrible to see that injured face, which they knew to be so noble and good, even in the decay of old age.
Now swollen, injured. Vilified by some wicked purpose operating in the absurdity of the night; and abetted by that same trust or kindness of the Señora. This chain of causes traced the sweet and lofty system of life back to the horror of subordinate systems, nature, blood, matter: solitude of thoughtless flesh and faces. Abandonment.
‘Let us leave her in peace,’ said the doctor, ‘go, leave.’
In the unassisted weariness in which the poor face had to lay swollen, as in a final restoration of its dignity, everyone seemed to read the terrible word of death and the supreme awareness of the impossibility of saying: I.
The aid of medical skill, treatment and cloth pads partially disguised the horror. The last drops of water and alcohol could be heard dripping from the squeezed pads into a basin. And dawn already appeared between the slats of the shutters. The cockerel, peremptory and ignorant as always, summoned it, all of a sudden, from the distant mountains. Inviting it to approach and to count the mulberry trees, in the solitude of the risen countryside.
Appendix
The Publisher justifies his salvaging of the text requesting the intervention of the Author
P: The text of The Experience of Pain has to be regarded as what remains, ‘quod superest’, of a work that factual circumstances beyond the conscious will, the intended work plan, hence the moral responsibility of the author, have then prevented him not only from completing (perfecting) but even concluding. The very careful critical introduction by Gianfranco Contini,fn1reminds us that work on The Experience of Pain is ascribable to the years 1938‒41 (see issues 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14, 17 of Letteratura): this fact can already in itself explain the external history of the incomplete story and the reasons for its incompleteness, whether external or internal to the author’s mind. The catastrophic calamities that Europe experienced from 1939 to 1945, and which less unhealthy intellects must already have foreseen by 1934‒8, had perturbed the mind of the writer to such an extent as to impede him (up until 1940) and then to make it gradually impossible for him to produce any sort of prose. The story was published in the above-mentioned issues of Letteratura, in instalments, at intervals: (word accepted in this sense by the author himself). The text that appeared in print reflects, moreover, the tragic, leaden lights or the dark onset of earlier and distant years; of events, of changes, that are, and will perhaps always remain, internal and external to mortal hearts and minds.
Distinguishing events in the world and society as visions or spectacular symbols, blights of biological history and its relative aesthetic component, and as profound, truthful motives and sentiments of spiritual reality, this process is characteristic of the way the author likes to represent society: the spectacular symbols often hint at deliberate ridicule, which in certain passages reaches a frantic tone and deformed aspect: they stir it to polemic, to derision, to the grotesque, to the ‘baroque’: to intolerance, to apparent callousness, to a ‘misanthropic’ manner of thought. But the baroque and the grotesque already exist in all things, in the single discoveries of a phenomenology outside us; in our very customs, in the ‘common’ sense of the few or of the many: and in the arts, whether they be human or inhuman: grotesque and baroque not ascribable to the author’s premeditated will or expressive propensity, but linked to nature and to history:fn2 the scowl of the braggart, even though screwed, or the line ‘that most proud highness’ cannot be blamed upon the iniquitous and ‘baroque’ will of the author, but rather the real and historical childishness of others or third parties, of their demeanour, or of their septenaries: so much so that the rallying cry ‘Gadda is baroque!’ might be transformed into the more reasonable and more serene assertion ‘The world is baroque, and Gadda has perceived and portrayed its baroqueness.’ Related to that non-entity Napúleon [sic in the act of baptism] the great Manzoni’s septenary becomes grotesque, insofar as He was, i.e. the Most Proud Highness, was notoriously a superweenie pygmy: in physical size (physicality), someone barely fit, if not unfit, for military service. If he had been Italian and sharp-witted, that wouldn’t have been a good reason to call him a highness. The line, in reality grotesque, is not to be seen as the philo-baroque fixation or mania of anyone who quotes or writes it, in momentary wit, but rather as a baroque commodity and reality of the history of Italian nineteenth-century poetry.
And those, of a certain learning, who have felt able to interpret the baroque (sometimes no further defined) as an essential requirement of certain moments or trends or temptations or fashions or researches in art or human creation, a category of human thought, might or should perhaps recognize in the baroque, in other circumstances, one of those attempts at construction, at expression, which might better be attributed to nature and history, describing nature and history as all that is revealed outside us and outside our operative faculty, our mental and practical responsibility. Nature and history, perceived as a continual series of investigations, efforts, discoveries, of an Art or of a Mind that transcends our current operative or cognitive possibilities, sometimes make a false move, or false moves: that in their efforts, namely in the investigatory and heuristic process, make a ‘temporary’ pause or detour to encounter the baroque, and even the grotesque. The grotesque, in such a vast external instance, such grotesqueness does not lurk in the scheming perversity of the gall of the author of The Experience of Pain, but rather in the scheming gall of universal reality. This gall of the researcher, entangled in reiterated attempts, ensnared in reiterated impasses, and having extracted himself with great difficulty, withdraws more or less awkwardly, gets caught up again and strains once more to break free; strains towards the infinite, in time and number, subdivision-specialization-objectification of multiple realities.
A: So it is not a question of reading in the grotesque layers and substance of The Experience of Pain a deliberate glandular-temperamental choice by the writer (des Verfassers) but of reading there a conscious interpretation (by him) of the stupidity of the world or of the childish inanity of so-called history, which might more appropriately be called a farce by play-actors who are born cretins and professional jackasses. Historiography, then, would be the mirror, or the portrayal, or the mental reconstruction of this ‘history’, it brings into operation its two favourite instruments: the faltering language of reticence and the straightforward syntax of falsehood. What you prefer not to state, you omit or fail to mention … and what suits you even less … you write down and record and publish the opposite. The idolizing urge of many authors (in the widest sense and towards their few or many idols), the idolizing urge of various contexts of the world, of the various cultures, of the various groupings of people or nations, for the variou
s opinions or various conditions of life or fact that generally condition human judgements, confers an auxiliary overload on historiographical falsehood and reticence. It takes the same virtue, with its claws and its witch’s exorcisms. It is forbidden to say it! because it is forbidden to do it! because virtue gets mad! and she throttles you: the sacred and sadistic harridan that she is. Hence the worthy and never sufficiently commended category of ‘moralist’ historiographers who try to empty the sea with a bucket, who rewrite the events of the past (après coup) recounting precisely the opposite of what happened, since by describing what really happened he loses his place as a historiographer: or loses his head in the basket: dans le panier.
P: In The Experience of Pain the very gossip of the people, and conversation and behaviour of play-actors, shysters and crooks, of the deluded and demented, is coloured at times with the colours of grotesqueness; whereas the weakness of the sick, of the simple-minded or idiots, of poor, humble folk, does not give rise to the same treatment, except perhaps for a pale and almost pitiful grotesqueness of character for the most part idiomatic, and of an Italianized sub-Andean kind: in any event figurative and faintly onomatopoeic of the poverty of spirit, and in the respect that is due to them as beings of greater means. Elsewhere it becomes a psychopathological ‘grotesqueness’ …
A: … the very obsession of Gonzalo, who judges ‘others’, even the humble and the simple-minded, from his exasperated awareness of common brutishness. In this sort of outburst of hatred towards those who are deficient, half-witted, opining cretins, self-seekers pecking about in the straw for some paltry and already shrivelled advantage, all persons and corporate bodies with voting rights equal to his, one might discern, in addition to the certainty of mind of the reactionary and of the bona fide hijo-de-algo, an economic and sociological calculation not devoid of a certain lucidity-rationality, and a rage that had exploded and, so to speak, sprung forth from the same source of reasoning: in short, a judgement that might lead to a motivated and convincing succession of further economic and social judgements. Voilà: the deficient, or born delinquent, or the guest of certain wonderful charitable institutions (such as the Little House of Divine Providence founded by the sublime Cottolengo) and on the other hand the cretin, and devious cretin and professional perpetrator of every manner of fraud, obtain for themselves treatment and benefits in accommodation and care which the bright and normal child has not known, when he found himself deprived from the very silence of a miserly care and lack of proper nourishment, adequate clothing against the cold and the north wind, prompt surgical or medical assistance in a case of extremely serious trauma: or in another, of CO poisoning.
The CO seeped, seeped silently, along the cracks of the never adequately inspected ‘domestic walls’ from pre-Cavallottian chimney pots. The chimneys gave off sweet warmth to the carpets of the fellow residents: and to him, in his sleep, deadly CO.
Im leuchtenden Teppichgemache
Da ist es so duftig und warm!
And nor had he known a book or notebook offered affectionately as a viaticum or research prize from a horticultural association, for his fine diligence in covering the pear-tree roots with costly fomentation (horse straw), on the first frost of Capricorn.
In the madly bureaucratized and byzantine history of human society, one recognizes a paradox, or rather a recurrent ritual, that those who are good, and even the best, will never manage, not merely to succeed, but not even to sniff that paper-wrapped ripe pear, that subsidy, that scholarship, that advance on salary, that award of the Caja de Ahorros or backing from the Maradagàl Caja (healer and plugger of conspicuous embezzlements, of plenteous shortfalls, to its own Cajas) lavished on the most depraved delinquents in the form of munificent assistance in legal proceedings, applications and further applications on appeal and to the supreme court; in which procedural accuracy and extremely costly expert reports and counter-reports of psychiatrists and counter-psychiatrists, for each side, allow no expense to be spared in enabling Universal Humanity to reach the conclusion that this fellow has stabbed the young girl seventeen times in the lower groin through a complete infirmity of mind, at that moment, and is wholly unfit to plead or to understand anything whatsoever: save for the notion of groin, the notion of virgin, the number seventeen and the atrocious and for him satisfying and we might add tranquillizing mutilation of the thirteen-year-old. This is how the world works: the world of mutilations, of expert reports, of counter-reports, and of non-scholarships to the good and starving.
P: Gonzalo’s obsession doesn’t seem to be circumscribed, to be sparked off, by a ‘distorted interpretation of reality’ or by a gratuitous quixotic dream: it originates and proceeds ‘from others’, it follows on from other people’s errors of judgement and from other people’s shortcomings, individual or collective, in social behaviour. It has as its origin, and chooses as the target of its attack, the madness and stupidity ‘of others’. This doesn’t alter the fact that he himself may have erred: and for his own errors he makes no tearful plea for mercy.
A: In Gonzalo there is an active and continual criticism of the unsociability of others: conduct that reaches a far worse level than his own. His own unsociability is limited to seeking and prescribing for himself two medicines to restore his disconsolate will, his lack of desire to live: these medicines have a name in the pharmacology of reality, of truth: they are called silence and solitude. His illness requires a technical silence and a technical solitude: Gonzalo is intolerant of the general imbecility of the world, of the idiocy of bourgeois ritual; and abhors the crimes of the world. He could in no way be described by right-thinking, discerning and fair-minded judges as unsocial, as a misanthropist. He feels distressed by the common destiny, by common suffering. The idea of home territory is clear, well circumscribed, well fixed, in him: it answers to a fact: to a system of proven facts. The bells and their battling in storms increase the overload of nervous tension at a moment when he is trying to concentrate, since he wants, since he ‘technically’ must concentrate on his studies and on his philosophical or algebraic studies.fn3
Autumn
Silent images of sorrow
From plane-tree to pasture!
When mist dissolves in the mountain
And a thought caresses
And then leaves empty – the marble front;
When the tower, and the patched-up manor,
Ask no more, of the old Architect:
Then the whole estate – one plum ripens
Each leap year,
On the sweet and desolate hill.
The pasture falls silent, from the song.
The Marchesina’s pianoforte
Has fallen asleep
At the magic touch of her fingers:
And after her departure – autumn
Has chosen a new pupil:
The sparrow! gatekeeper’s tongue
From the jasmine to the yard.
And the bell-tower’s dirge
Surmounts gate and shield: recounts
Returns to the golden forest:
Garibaldian tune of joy
Over the gentile labour
For the girl – to admire her soldier on leave,
He who sings up there, he who tramps up there.
Grey mop of hair, the Marquis has staged a hunt
With fifteen hounds and gallops
Plenipotentiary in decline
On his rheumatic nine-year-old.
News not credited about the fox – the scent lost.
Venerated, Marquis! – the horse
English-style stumbles
Into butcher’s broom – and the horn with stertorous nose
Deafens the dormouse in its burrow
As it munches a hazelnut!
On the twelfth round
The pack has begun to loll and pant
And, surging thicket, circles around white
In the empty heath
There, towards the level crossing,
Where the steam engine
arrives,
Tired, gasping.
The passing goods train and the brakesman – handsome,
Long clamour! – vain flag!
Has charmed the signal woman.
Here the fast train leaves – towards far-off cities.
The horse limps – wanders
Into the cursed brambles; treads again
On the empty anthills and burrows.
But the bell tower – chimes the festive hour. Chimes
The vain returns to the Factory,
Vain sorrows!
Through the mists the hunt declaims
From heath to pasture:
It needed one who gave breath – to the horn
After fifty years, at least one day!
For each one had forgotten it.
It needed at least a scent of fox
Given the rendering – crumbling from the manor …
But the pack assembles, resigned peace,
Among the feet of the eighty-year-old steed …
Nor do they now terrorize the voracious sow
That snuffles and grubs – where it abounds with acorns
Beneath the oak behind the elm –
Most solitary track.
Cheered with poor
Joys and foods
The people’s Sunday outing
Egg shells, gorgonzoloid papers strewn,
Has well littered – the feudal land!
The pensive electrical engineer boldly
Attacks the pre-war tin of sardines,
Round, round the welded lid
The Experience of Pain Page 22
