Читать книгу One, None and a Hundred-thousand - Luigi Pirandello - Страница 15

Table of Contents

There is a knock at the door of your room.

And yet, you remain where you are, remained stretched out comfortably in your easy chair. I will sit here. You say no?

"Why?"

Ah, that is the chair in which, all these many years ago, your poor mother died. If you don't mind my saying so, you would not have given a penny for it, but now you would not sell it for all the money in the world; I can well believe that. Any one, meanwhile, who saw it in your well-furnished room would certainly, if he did not know the facts in the case, wonder how you could go on keeping it here, old, faded and torn as it is.

These are your chairs. And this is a tiny table, as tiny as could be. That is a window, looking out over the garden. And out there are the pines, the cypresses.

I know. Delightful hours spent in this room, which to you is so beautiful, with a glimpse of those cypresses yonder. Yet on account of this room, you have broken off with the friend who used to come to see you almost every day, and who now not only does not come any more, but who goes about telling everybody that you are mad, quite mad, to go on living in a house like this.

"With all those cypresses in a row out in front," he goes about saying. "Why, my good people, there are more than a score of cypresses; it's like a cemetery."

He cannot get over it.

You blink your eyes and shrug your shoulders. "A matter of taste," you sigh.

For it does seem to you that it is, properly speaking, a question of taste, of opinion or of habit; and you do not for a moment doubt the reality of these beloved objects, a reality which it gives you pleasure to see and to touch. But go away from this house, come back in three or four years to view it again, in another frame of mind than the one you are in today, and you will find that there is nothing left of that reality which you so cherish.

"Oh, look, so this is the room? And this the garden?"

And let us hope in the name of heaven that some other one near of kin to you has not died, so that to you now all those cypresses there take on the appearance of a cemetery. You tell me that this is something everybody knows, that the mind changes and anyone may be mistaken. It is, in fact, an old story. I, however, do not pretend to be telling you anything new. I merely have a question to put to you:

"Good Lord, why is it, then, that you act as if you did not know it? Why is it that you insist upon believing that the only reality is your own, the reality of today, and why do you cry out in angry astonishment that your friend is wrong, although he, poor chap, whatever he might do, could never have within himself the mind that is your own?"