Читать книгу One, None and a Hundred-thousand - Luigi Pirandello - Страница 7

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I wanted to be alone in an altogether unusual way, a new way. Quite the contrary of what you think: that is to say, without myself and, to be precise, with a stranger at hand.

Does this impress you as being a first sign of madness?

May not this be due to a lack of reflection on your part?

It may be that madness was in me already, I am not saying that it was not; but I beg you to believe that the only way of being truly alone is the one of which I am telling you.

Solitude is never where you are; it is always where you are not, and is only possible with a stranger present; whatever the place or whoever the person, it must be one that is wholly ignorant concerning you, and concerning which or whom you are equally ignorant, so that will and sensation remain suspended and confused in an anxious uncertainty, while with the ceasing of all affirmation on your part, your own inner consciousness ceases at the same time. True solitude is to be found in a place that lives a life of its own, but which for you holds no familiar footprint, speaks in no known voice, and where accordingly the stranger is yourself.

This was the way in which I wanted to be alone. Without myself. I mean to say, without that self which I already knew, or which I thought I knew. Alone with a certain stranger, from whom I darkly felt that I should be able never more to part, and who was myself: the stranger inseparable from me. There was, then, one only that interested me! And already, this one, or the need I felt of being alone with him, of confronting him in order to know him better and hold a little converse with him, was working me up to a pitch of half-shivering alarm.

If I was not for others what up to then I had believed myself to be to myself, what was I?

In the course of living, I had never thought of my nose, of its size, whether big or small, of the color of my eyes, or the narrowness or breadth of my forehead, and so forth. This was my nose, those were my eyes, this was my forehead; things inseparable from me, of which, immersed in my own affairs, taken up with my own ideas, given over to my own feelings, I had had no time to think.

But I was thinking now:

"And others? Others are not in me at all. For others, who look from without, my ideas, my feelings have a nose. My nose. And they have a pair of eyes, my eyes, which I do not see but which they see. What relation is there between my ideas and my nose? For me, none whatever. I do not think with my nose, nor am I conscious of my nose when I think. But others? Others, who cannot see my ideas within me, but who see my nose without? For others, there is so intimate a relation between my ideas and my nose that if the former, let us say, were very serious while the latter was mirth-provoking by reason of its shape, they would burst out laughing."

As I ran on like this, a fresh anxiety laid hold of me: the realization that I should not be able, while living, to depict myself to myself in the actions of my life, to see myself as others saw me, to set my body off in front of me and see it living like the body of another. When I took up my position in front of a mirror, something like a lull occurred inside me; all spontaneity vanished; every gesture impressed me as being fictitious or a repetition.

I could not see myself live.

I was to have a proof of this in the impression with which I was, so to speak, assailed a few days afterward, when, walking and talking with my friend, Stefano Firbo, I happened to catch an unexpected glimpse of myself in a mirror along the street, one that I had not noticed at first. This impression had not lasted more than a second, when that lull promptly occurred, spontaneity disappeared, and self-consciousness set in. I did not recognize myself at first. The impression was that of a stranger going down the street and engaged in conversation. I came to a halt. I must have been very pale.

"What's the matter?" Firbo asked me.

"It's nothing," I said. And to myself, seized by a strange fear that was at the same time a chill, I thought:

"Was it really my own, that image glimpsed in a flash? Am I really like that, from the outside, when—all the while living—I do not think of myself? For others, then, I am that stranger whom I surprised in a mirror; I am he and not the I whom I know; I am that one there whom I myself at first, upon becoming aware of him, did not recognize. I am that stranger whom I am unable to see living except like that, in a thoughtless second. A stranger whom others alone can see and know, not I."

From that time on, I had one despairing obsession: to go in pursuit of that stranger who was in me and who kept fleeing me; whom I could not halt in front of a mirror, without his at once becoming the me that I knew; the one who lived for others and whom I could not know; whom others beheld living and not I. I wanted to see and know him, too, as others saw and knew him.

I still believed, I may repeat here, that the stranger in question was a single individual: one to all, even as I believed that I was a single individual to myself. But my atrocious drama speedily grew more complicated, with the discovery of the hundred-thousand Moscardas that I was, not only to others, but even to myself, all with the single name of Moscarda, a name that was ugly to the point of cruelty, all of them lodged within this poor body which was likewise one, one and none, alas, if I took up my position in front of a mirror and, standing motionless, looked it straight in the eyes, thereby abolishing in it all feeling and all will of its own.

It was as my drama grew thus more complicated that those fits of incredible madness came upon me.