Читать книгу One, None and a Hundred-thousand - Luigi Pirandello - Страница 10

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I wanted first to compose myself, to wait until every trace of anxiety or of joy had disappeared from my countenance, until every impulse to thought or feeling had come to a halt inside me, in order that I might be able to take in front of the mirror a body that was, so to speak, strange to me, and as such, stand it up in front of me.

"Come," I said, "let's be on our way!"

I went with eyes shut and with my hands groping before me. When I had touched the side of the clothes press, I paused again to await, with eyes shut still, an inner calm and an indifference that should be as absolute as possible. But a cursed voice from within kept telling me that he was there, too, the stranger, there in front of me, in the mirror. Waiting like me, with eyes shut. He was there, and I did not see him. Nor did he see me, since, like me, he had his eyes closed. But what was he waiting for? To see me? No. He could be seen, but could not see. He was to me what I was to others; I could be seen but could not see myself. Yet if I opened my eyes, would I see him like another?

This was the point. How many times, by chance, had I confronted my eyes in a mirror, with someone who stood looking at me in the same mirror. I in the mirror did not see myself, but was seen; and the other person, similarly, did not see himself, but saw my face and saw himself being looked at by me. Had I been able to project myself in such a manner as to be able, the I in the mirror, to see myself, I should perhaps have been visible still to the other person, but I—no—I should no longer be able to see him. One could not, at one and the same time, see one's self and see another who stood looking at one in the same mirror.

As I stood thinking these things, with my eyes all the while shut, I put to myself certain questions:

"Is my case any different now, or is it the same? So long as I keep my eyes closed, we are two; I here and he in the mirror. But when I open my eyes, he will turn into me and I into him, and that is the thing I must prevent. I must see him without being seen. Is it possible? As soon as I see him, he will see me, and we will recognize ourselves. No, thanks! I don't want to recognize myself; I want to know him, outside of me. Is it possible? My one supreme effort must be this: not to see myself in me, but to be seen by me, with my very own eyes, but as if I were another, that other whom all see and I do not. Come, then, be calm, stop every sign of life, and look sharp!"

I opened my eyes. What did I see?

Nothing. I saw me. There I was, whipped, burdened with my own thoughts, with a very disgusted countenance. A fierce anger assailed me, and I was tempted to spit in my own face. I held myself in. I smoothed out my wrinkles, did what I could to smother the sharpness of my glance; and lo, even as I smothered it, my image grew pale and seemingly withdrew from me; and I in turn paled and all but fell, and I felt that, had I gone on, I should have been lulled into a doze. I held myself with my eyes. I strove to forestall the feeling that I, likewise, was held by those eyes in front of me—that those eyes, that is to say, were making their way into my own. I did not succeed. I could feel them—those eyes. I could see them there, confronting me, but I also could feel them here, in me; I felt them mine, not fixed upon me now but as existing in themselves. And if, for a little, I succeeded in not being thus intimately conscious of them, I did not see them any more. Alas, that was precisely the way it was: I could see them as a part of me, I no longer could see them.

And now, look what happened. As if constrained by this verity which tended to reduce my experiment to a game, my visage suddenly essayed in the mirror an unprepossessing smile.

"Be serious, you imbecile!" I shouted at it then. "There's nothing to laugh about!"

The change of expression in my image was instantaneous, by reason of the spontaneity of my wrath; and this change was followed, with equal suddenness, by a bewildered apathy; as a result of all of which, I succeeded in beholding, there before me in the mirror, my body detached from my imperious soul.

Ah, at last! There it is!

Who was I?

I was nothing. No one. A poor, mortified body, waiting for someone to take it.

"Moscarda," I murmured, after a long silence.

It did not move, but stood gazing at me in astonishment.

It might be that it had another name.

There it was, like a lost dog, without a master and without a name, a dog that one person might call Flik and another Flok, at his own good pleasure. It did not know anything, not even itself; it lived to live, and did not know how to live; its heart beat, and it did not know it; it breathed, and it did not know it; it moved its eyelids, and was unaware of the fact. I looked at the reddish hair; at the forehead, firm, pale, immobile; at those eyebrows with the circumflex accent; at the greenish eyes, the cornea of which appeared to be perforated here and there with little yellowish spots; astonished, unseeing eyes; that nose which sagged to the right, but handsomely aquiline in contour; the "sandy" mustache hiding the mouth; the firm chin, a trifle prominent.

This is the way it was, you see; they had made it like that, a chip off the old block; it was not for it to be other than what it was, to assume another stature; it might alter in part its aspect, might shave off that mustache, for example; but for the moment it was like this; in time, it would be bald or gray, wrinkled and flabby, toothless; it might incur, too, some disfigurement or other, acquire a glass eye, a wooden leg; but for the moment this was the way it was.

Who was I? Was I, I? But I might also be another! Anyone might be that one there. Might have that reddish hair, those eyebrows with the circumflex accent, and that nose which sagged to the right, not only for me, but likewise for another, who was not I. Why must I, this being, be like this? In life, I had formed for myself no image of myself. Why, then, must I see myself in that body there, why must I see in it an inevitable image of myself?

It stood there before me, as if non-existent, like an apparition out of a dream, that image. And I very readily might fail to recognize myself thus. Supposing, for instance, that I had never seen myself in a mirror? Should I not all the same have had my own thoughts lodged within that stranger's head there? Ah, yes, and how many others? What had my thoughts to do with that hair, hair of that shade, which might not have been there at all any more, or which might have been white or black or blond; or with those greenish eyes, which might equally well have been black or blue, or with that nose, which might have been either straight or pug? I could even very easily feel a profound antipathy for that body, there; and I did feel it.

And yet, all men in summary fashion knew me as that reddish hair, those greenish eyes, and that nose: the whole of that body, which for me was as nothing, mind you, nothing! Each one might take it, that body there, to make of it the Moscarda that he deemed most fitting and that pleased him best, shaping it today in one manner, tomorrow in another, depending upon circumstances and the mood of the moment. And I, myself—Was I by any chance acquainted with it? What acquaintance could I have with it? The moment in which I fixed it with my gaze, that was all. If I did not wish myself or feel myself to be as I saw myself, then it was a stranger to me as well, since in addition to those features which it had, it might have had yet others. By the time the moment in which I fixed it with my gaze was past, it was already another; as witness the fact that it was no longer what I had been as a boy, and was not yet what I should be as an old man; and here I was today endeavoring to recognize it in the one of yesterday, and so on. And in that head there, motionless and firm, I might put all the thoughts I wished, might kindle the most varied visions, visions such as these: a wood that lies, calm and mysterious, darkening beneath the light of stars; a lonely roadstead, wrapped in sickly clouds, from which a spectral ship slowly weighs anchor at dawn; a city street swarming with life beneath a sparkling shower of sun that kindles faces with purpling gleams and windowpanes, mirrors and the glass fronts of shops with darting, many-colored rays of light. I extinguished the vision, and the head remained there as before, firm and motionless, in an apathetic astonishment.

Who was that one? No one. A poor body, without a name, waiting for someone to take it.

But all of a sudden, as my thoughts ran like this, something happened to change my stupor to a looming terror. I beheld in front of my eyes, through no will of my own, the apathetically astonished face of that poor mortified body piteously decomposing, the nose curling up, the eyes turning over inward, the lips contracting upward, and the brows drawing together as if for weeping—they remained like that, in suspense for an instant, and then without warning came crumbling down, to the explosive accompaniment of a couple of sneezes. The thing had happened of itself, at a draught of air from some place or other, without that poor mortified body's having said a word to me, and quite beyond any will of my own.

"To your health!" I cried.

And I beheld in the mirror my first madman's smile.