Читать книгу One, None and a Hundred-thousand - Luigi Pirandello - Страница 14

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Do You know, on the contrary, the basis upon which the whole thing rests? I will tell you. Upon a presumption that God keeps you ever. The presumption that reality, as it is for you, ought to be and is the same for all others. You go on living inside it; you walk out of it in security. You see it, you touch it; and within it, you even smoke a cigar, if you like (a pipe? very well, a pipe), and blissfully stay there watching the smoke-spirals vanishing, one by one, in the air. Without the faintest suspicion that all the reality about you has for others no more consistency than has that smoke.

You say no? Look. I was living with my wife in the house that my father had had built after my mother's premature death, because he wished to move out of the one in which he had lived with her, which was full of harrowing memories. I was a lad at the time, and it was not until later that I became fully aware that this house, down to the last, had been left unfinished by my father and practically open to anyone who chose to enter. That archway for a door, without a door, which rose, on one side and the other, by the whole of its central span, above the unfinished walls of the huge front courtyard, with the sill beneath destroyed and the pilasters peeling off at the corners—all this makes me think now that my father possibly left it so, empty and up in the air, one might say, for the reason that he believed the house after his death would necessarily remain my property, which is equivalent to saying, the property of all and of none, and that it would, accordingly, have been useless to repair a door.

So long as my father lived, no one attempted to set foot in that courtyard. Ever so many hewed stones had been left lying about; and the first thought of any passer-by might well have been that work had been stopped for a while but would shortly be resumed. But no sooner had the grass begun shooting up between the pebbles and along the walls than those useless stones seemed, of a sudden, old and crumbling. In the course of time, my father having died, they came to furnish seats for the gossips of the neighborhood, who, hesitatingly at first, one after the other, at last got up their courage to cross the threshold, in search it seemed of a place where they might repair to find a seat, silence, and a bit of grateful shade; after which, seeing that no one said anything, they left it to their hens to hesitate for a little while longer, and forthwith proceeded to look upon as their own that courtyard and the water that sprang up from the basin in the center; they would do their washing there and hang out their clothes to dry; and with the merry, dazzling sun over all that white expanse of sheets and shirts that fluttered from the lines, they would let down their hair, glossy with oil, over their shoulders, to "have a hunt" in their heads as the monkeys do.

I never manifested either annoyance or pleasure at this invasion of theirs, although I was especially irritated by the sight of one continually prying old hag with dried-up eyes and with the hump on her back plainly outlined under her faded green doublet, and my stomach was turned by a fat, filthy and tattered wretch with a horrifying pap always sticking out from her bosom, while on her knees she held a grimy brat with an overgrown, disgustingly scurvy head, the scabs of which were visible among the reddish mop. My wife, I fancy, profited somewhat from leaving them there, since she made use of them at need, giving them by way of compensation either the left-overs from the kitchen or a few cast-off garments.

Pebble-paved like the street, the courtyard was wholly sloping. I can see myself as a lad, on vacation from boarding school, standing late of an evening on one of the balconies of the house, which was then new. What a boundless pain I felt at sight of the great livid whiteness of all those pebbles on the side of the slope, with that big basin in the middle, mysteriously sonorous! Rust by that time had almost eaten away the red-tinted varnish of the iron haft which at the top regulates the pulley over which the well-rope runs; how sad it seemed to me, that faded hue of varnish on that sickly looking iron haft! Sick, too, perhaps, from the melancholy squeaking of the pulley, when the wind of a night stirred the rope; while over the deserted courtyard was the white splendor of the starry sky, starry but veiled, a sky which in that vain, white, dusty splendor seemed fixed up there forever.

Upon my father's death, Quantorzo, charged with looking after my affairs, thought of closing off with a partition the rooms which my father had reserved for his own dwelling, and of making out of them a small apartment to let. My wife was not opposed to this. And into that apartment there came to live, shortly afterward, a very silent and thoughtful old man, always very well dressed, cleanly and simply, a little old man but with something of the soldier in his slender well-set-up figure, as well as in his energetic face, somewhat scarred by time, which was that of a retired colonel. On either side of his face, like samples of calligraphy, he had a perfect fishlike eye, while his cheeks were a dense network of violet-colored veins. I had never paid any attention to him, nor cared to know who he was or how he lived. I had met him several times on the stair, and hearing him say, very courteously, "Good morning," or "Good evening," I had jumped to the conclusion that this housemate of mine was a very courteous individual.

No suspicion was awakened in me by a complaint of his concerning the gnats that molested him at night, and which, in his opinion, came from the big warehouses, to the right of the dwelling, that had been converted by Quantorzo (all this after my father's death) into filthy coachhouses which were rented out.

"Ah, really!" I had exclaimed upon that occasion, in response to his complaint.

But I remember perfectly that in this exclamation of mine there was a note of displeasure, not assuredly over the gnats which were molesting my tenant, but over those clean airy warehouses which, as a boy, I had seen being built, and where I used to run about, finding a strange exaltation in the dazzling whiteness of the plaster and something like a drunkenness in the cool humidity of the factory, over the resounding brick pavement, still all sprinkled over with chalk. In the light of the sun which came in through the big iron-grated windows, one had to shut one's eyes, as if the very walls were on fire.

Nevertheless, those coach-houses with their old landaus for hire and their three-horse turnouts, though they might be wholly saturated with the foul odor of rotting litters and with the grime from repeated rinsings that lay stagnating out in front, also made me think of the gladness I had known upon carriage excursions as a boy, when we would go for an outing, down the high street and out into the open country, which impressed me as having been made to receive and diffuse the music of horses' bells. And in gratitude for this memory, it seemed to me that the proximity of the coach-houses might be tolerated, all the more so by reason of the fact that, quite apart from the coach-houses, it was known that gnats caused much annoyance at Richieri, and every household commonly employed mosquito-netting.

What impression must have been made upon my neighbor and tenant by the sight of a smile upon my lips, as he with his ferocious little face shouted at me that he never could endure netting, because it made him feel as if he were smothering? That smile of mine assuredly was expressive of astonishment and compassion. Not to be able to endure netting, when I should have gone on using it, even if all the gnats in Richieri had disappeared, owing to the delight it gave me, stretched as I stretched it, sky-high, and draped all about the bed without a fold. The room that one sees and does not see, through that myriad of little holes in the light tulle; the isolated bed; the impression of being wrapped in a white cloud.

I did not take any account of what he might think of me after this meeting. I continued seeing him on the stairs and hearing him say, "Good morning" or "Good evening"—and was left with the idea that he was an exceedingly courteous fellow indeed. I assure you, on the contrary, that at the very moment when he, with outward courtesy, was saying to me on the stair, "Good morning" or "Good evening," he was making me live inside himself as a perfect imbecile, for the reason that I tolerated the invasion of the old women out there in the court, and because of the impinging wash-house stench and the gnats.

Obviously, I should not have gone on thinking, "Dear me, what a courteous chap my housemate is," had I been able to see myself inside him, while he, on the other hand, saw me as I should never have been able to see myself, by which I mean from without, in my stead, but still within that vision of his own which he at that time had of men and things, and in which he made me live after his own fashion: as a perfect imbecile. I did not know it, but kept on thinking, "Dear me, what a courteous chap my housemate is—"