Читать книгу One, None and a Hundred-thousand - Luigi Pirandello - Страница 4

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"What are you doing?" my wife asked me, as she saw me lingering, contrary to my wont, in front of the mirror.

"Nothing," I told her. "I am just having a look here, in my nose, in this nostril. It hurts me a little, when I take hold of it."

My wife smiled.

"I thought," she said, "that you were looking to see which side it is hangs down the lower."

I whirled like a dog whose tail has been stepped on:

"Which side hangs down the lower? My nose? Mine?"

"Why, yes, dear," and my wife was serene, "take a good look; the right side is a little lower than the other."

I was twenty-eight years old; and up to now, I had always looked upon my nose as being, if not altogether handsome, at least a very respectable sort of nose, as might have been said of all the other parts of my person. So far as that was concerned, I had been ready to admit and maintain a point that is customarily admitted and maintained by all those who have not had the misfortune to bring a deformed body into the world, namely, that it is silly to indulge in any vanity over one's personal lineaments. And yet, the unforeseen, unexpected discovery of this particular defect angered me like an undeserved punishment. It may be that my wife saw through this anger of mine; for she quickly added that, if I was under the firm and comforting impression of being wholly without blemishes, it was one of which I might rid myself; since, just as my nose sagged to the right—

"Something else?"

Yes, there was something else! Something else! My eyebrows were like a pair of circumflex accents, ^ ^; my ears were badly put on, one of them standing out more than the other; and there were further shortcomings—

"What, more?"

Ah, yes, more: my hands, the little finger; and my legs (no! surely they were not crooked!)—the right one was bowed slightly more than the other, toward the knee—ever so slightly.

Following an attentive examination, I had to admit that all these defects existed. It was only then, when the feeling of astonishment that succeeded my anger had definitely changed to one of grief and humiliation—it was only then that my wife strove to console me, urging me not to take it so to heart, since with all my faults, when all was said, I was still a handsome fellow. I made the best of it, accepting as a generous concession what had been denied me as a right. I let out a most venomous "thanks," and, safe in the assurance that I had no cause for either grief or humiliation, proceeded to attribute not the slightest importance to these trifling defects; but I did confer a very great and extraordinary importance upon the fact that I had gone on living all these years without ever once having changed noses, keeping the same one all the time, and with the same eyebrows and the same ears, the same hands and the same legs—and to think that I had had to take a wife, to realize that they were not all that they should be.

"Huh! small wonder in that! Doesn't everybody know what wives are for? Made, precisely, for discovering a husband's faults."

True enough, mind you—I don't deny this about wives. But I may tell you that, in those days, I was prone to fall, at any word said to me, at the sight of a housefly* buzzing about, into deeps of reflection and pondering that left me with a hollow feeling inside, and which rent my soul from top to bottom and tore it inside out like a molehill, without any of all this being visible on the outside.

[* In Italian, mosca; cf. the protagonist's name, Moscarda. (Translator.)]

"It is plain to be seen," you will tell me, "that you had plenty of time to squander."

Not exactly that, I would have you know. Some allowance is to be made for the state of mind I was in. But beyond that, I don't deny that my life was leisurely to the point of idleness. I was well-to-do, and a pair of faithful friends, Sebastiano Quantorzo and Stefano Firbo, had looked after my interests since my father's death. My father, by fair means or other, had not succeeded in doing anything with me, beyond seeing that I married at a very early age, possibly with the hope that I would at least provide a son who would be not at all like me; but the poor man had not been able to get even this out of me. It was not, understand, that I opposed any will of my own to taking the path upon which my father wished to embark me. I took them all. But taking them was all I did; I did not do any walking to speak of, but would come to a halt at every step, at every smallest stone I encountered, to hover about it, first at a distance and then closer up; and I wondered no little how others could go on past me, without taking any account whatever of that stone, which for me meanwhile had come to assume the proportions of an insurmountable mountain, as well as those of a world in which, without any further ado, I might have made myself at home.

I had remained halting like this at the first steps I had taken along so many paths, my mind full of worlds, or of little rocks, which amounts to the same thing. As a matter of fact, it did not seem to me that those who had passed me, and who had gone all the way, were substantially any the wiser than I. They had passed me, there was no doubt about that, prancing like colts; but at the end of the road, what they had found was a cart, their own cart; they had harnessed themselves to it with a vast deal of patience, and were now engaged in drawing it after them. But I drew no cart, and bore, accordingly, neither bridle nor blinders; I could certainly see farther than they; but go—where was there to go?

Coming back now to the discovery of those slight defects, I was immersed all of a sudden in the reflection that it meant—could it be possible?—that I did not so much as know my own body, the things which were most intimately a part of me: nose, ears, hands, legs. And turning to look at myself once more, I examined them again. It was from there that my sickness started, that sickness which would speedily have rendered me so wretched and despairing of body and of mind that I should certainly have died of it or gone mad, had I not found in my malady itself the remedy (I may say) which was to cure me of it.