One, No One & 100,000

by Luigi Pirandello

  And if you give this little game some careful reflection, it’s clear it was bound to drive me crazy. Or, perhaps more accurately, it was bound to lead me to the horrible awareness of madness—crisp and clear like an April morning, shiny and accurate as a mirror.

  Because, embarking on that first experiment, I was about to gracefully whip out my inner desire like I was pulling a handkerchief out of my pocket. I wanted to commit an act that I shouldn’t, an act that instead should’ve been committed by that shadow inside me who lived his own reality in someone else—a reality so solid and real that I could’ve tipped my hat to greet it, if damned necessity hadn’t forced me to meet and greet it in the flesh, not exactly in me, but in my own body, which, being no one unto itself, could have been mine and was mine in so far as it represented me to myself, but which also could’ve belonged to and did belong to that shadow, to those hundred thousand shadows that represented me in a hundred thousand different living, breathing ways to a hundred thousand different people.

  Wasn’t I in fact on my way to play a dirty trick on Mr. Vitangelo Moscarda? Oh, yes, my friends, a dirty trick (please excuse all my winking, but I need to wink, wink like this because I can’t know how I look to you, so I’m using all this winking to try to guess). In other words, I’m going to make him carry out an action completely alien and out of character for him, an act that would, in one fell swoop, shatter the logic of his reality, completely erasing him in the eyes of Marco di Dio as well as countless others.

  What an idiot I was! I had no idea that such an action couldn’t possibly play out the way I’d intended. I’d imagined I could show up afterwards and go around asking everyone:

  “Now do you see, my friends, that it’s simply untrue that I’m this usurious loan shark you want to picture me as?”

  But instead, the reaction would be shock and amazement, with everyone exclaiming: “Oh my God, have you heard? Moscarda the loan shark has lost his mind!”

  Because Moscarda the loan shark could definitely go crazy, but he couldn’t suddenly self-destruct, not with one single out-of-character action. Moscarda the loan shark wasn’t a shadow you could mess around with or underestimate—he was a gentleman to be treated with all due respect, five feet eight and a half inches tall with reddish hair like his father, the bank’s founder, and eyebrows that looked like those funny French circumflex accents, and that nose that bent to the right, like the one that my wife’s stupid Gengè had—in short, a gentleman who, God forbid, if he were to go insane, would risk dragging all the other Moscardas with him to the insane asylum. All the other Moscardas that I was to everyone else, including, oh God, my wife Dida’s poor, harmless Gengè. And, might I add, myself as well, who’d flippantly taken the gamble with a smile on my face.

  I was in danger—that is, we were all in danger as you’ll see—of ending up in the insane asylum that first time, and that still wasn’t enough. We also had to risk our lives in order for me to recover and end up finding my path to well-being (all one, no one, and a hundred thousand of me).

  But let’s not get ahead of the story.

  3 ~ At the Notary Public

  My first stop was Mr. Stampa’s notary public office, located at 24 Via del Crocefisso, because (oh, these are one hundred percent factual details) on date X in the year 19xx, during the reign of Vittorio Emanuele III, King of Italy by the grace of God and the will of the people. This Mr. Elpidio Stampa, Esq., 52 or 53 years of age, maintained a notary public office there in the noble city of Richieri, at that exact address, number 24, on Via del Crocefisso.

  Is it still there? At number 24? Do you all know Mr. Stampa the notary?

  Oh, well then, we can rest assured we’re not mistaken. Everybody knows that particular notary, Mr. Stampa. So far so good? But as I stepped into his office, I was in such a state of mind, you couldn’t possibly imagine. Excuse me, how could you imagine, when you still think that walking into a notary’s office to have some random document notarized is the most normal thing in the world, especially when you claim to know this particular notary, Mr. Stampa?

  I’m telling you I went there, that day, for my first experiment. So would you like to join me in this experiment, once and for all, or not? An attempt to penetrate that terror-inducing hoax that lies beneath the placid normality of daily relations, the ones that seem the most ordinary and normal to you, the hoax beneath the calm surface of so-called physical reality?

  For the love of God, this is the very hoax that makes you so furious that you turn to your friend every five minutes or so and scream: “Come on! How are you not seeing this? Are you blind?”

  And no, your friend doesn’t see it because he’s seeing something else while you think he should be seeing what you see, the way you see it. No, instead he sees it the way it looks to him. So as far as he’s concerned, you’re the one who’s blind.

  I call it a hoax because I’ve already figured it out.

  Now I was stepping into that office, burdened by all the reflections and considerations I’d been brooding over for so long. I felt them seething inside me, in great turmoil, and all the while I wanted to maintain a clear steadiness in a practically immobile frigidity. Well, you can imagine the kind of uproarious laughter that burst out of me when I saw that poor little notary, Mr. Stampa, standing there looking all serious, without the slightest suspicion that I might not see myself as the same man he was looking at, and absolutely certain he was to me the exact same man he saw knotting his little black tie in front of the mirror every day, surrounded by all his things.

  Do you get it now? I felt like winking. Winking at him as well, as if to slyly signal to him: “Look below the surface! Look below the surface!” And my God, I had the urge to suddenly stick my tongue out and wiggle my nose with an abrupt little grimace, all in good fun, just to change his impression of me in one fell swoop, to alter what he believed was the real me. But I had to be serious, right? Hard-core serious. I had to do the experiment.

  “Well then, Mr. Stampa, here I am. Sorry, but is it always so deadly quiet in here?”

  He abruptly turned to me, looking me up and down. “Quiet? Here?”

  At that moment, in fact, there was a steady stream of pedestrian and vehicular traffic up and down Via del Crocefisso.

  “Of course, not in the street, obviously. But there’re all these papers here, Mr. Stampa, behind the dusty glass of those shelves. Don’t you hear it?”

  Half worried and half bewildered, he turned his gaze back to me, then pricked up his ears. “What should I be hearing?”

  “That scratching! Oh, it’s the claws. Sorry, your canary there, his claws, sorry, sorry. They’re rather sharp, those claws, scratching the zinc of the cage—”

  “Right. Yes. What’s your point?”

  “Oh, nothing. Doesn’t it get on your nerves, sir—the zinc, Mr. Stampa?”

  “The zinc? Why, who notices that? I don’t—”

  “Still, the zinc, think about it! In a cage, under the delicate claws of a canary, in a notary’s office… I bet he doesn’t sing, this canary.”

  “No, sir, he certainly doesn’t.”

  The way the notary had begun looking at me, I figured it would be wise to drop the canary thing right there to avoid compromising the experiment, which, at least to start with, and especially there with the notary, required that there be no doubt about my mental faculties. So I asked the good notary if he was familiar with a certain house, located at such-and-such address on such-and-such street and belonging to a certain Mr. Vitangelo Moscarda, son of the late Francesco Antonio Moscarda…

  “Isn’t that you?”

  “Yes, exactly. It would be me—”

  What a shame! It was so nice in that notary’s office, among all those yellowed files on those dusty old shelves, talking like that, as though it were centuries removed, about a certain house belonging to a certain Vitangelo Moscarda… Even nicer because, yes, it was me there, present with my name on the contract, in that notary’s office. But who knows how and
where the good notary perceived his own office. What odor did he smell, totally different from the one reaching my nostrils? And who knows how and where, in that notary’s world, that particular house was, the one I was talking to him about with a distant voice. And me, me in that notary’s world, how unbelievably strange…

  Oh, the joys of history, my friends! Nothing more relaxing than history. Everything in life constantly changes right before your eyes. Nothing is for certain. And this non-stop worry about how everything is going to resolve, about seeing how events will turn out, keeps you in such a panicky state of anxiety. On the other hand, everything in history is settled, established—no matter how painful the events, or how sad the stories, there they are at least, nice and neat, captured in 30 or 40 little pages of a book. And there, in those books, they’ll never change again, at least until some judgmental evil spirit comes along, taking malicious joy in upending that perfect order where all the elements had fit together so perfectly allowing you to sit back and relax in admiration of how every effect obediently followed its cause with perfect logic, and how every event unfolded precisely and consistently in every minute detail, with my Lord, the Duke of Nevers, who on a particular day, in a particular year, etc.

  To avoid spoiling everything, I needed to get back to our notary Mr. Stampa’s interrupted, temporary, jumbled reality.

  “Me, yes,” I blurted out. “That would indeed be me, sir. And the house won’t be a problem, right, for you to establish as mine, like the entire inheritance of the late Francesco Antonio Moscarda, my father? Sure! And the house is currently vacant, Mr. Stampa. Oh, it’s small, you know… there must be five or six rooms with a couple of low wings—is that what they’re called?—low wings are lovely… Unoccupied then, Mr. Notary, so I can do with it as I please. Now then, you…”

  And at that point I leaned forward, and in a very serious whisper, confided to Mr. Stampa the sort of contract I wanted drawn up, which at the moment I can’t reveal here.

  I told him: “This must remain between you and me, Mr. Stampa, a matter of professional confidentiality until I say otherwise. Do we have an agreement?”

  We did. But the notary informed me that in order to draw up this contract, he needed certain information and documents that I’d have to get from the bank, from Quantorzo. I was annoyed, but I stood up anyway.

  As I moved, a damnable urge rose up in me to ask Mr. Stampa: “How do I walk? Sorry, I mean could you at least tell me how it looks to you?” I could barely restrain myself. But I couldn’t help but turn around as I opened the glass door and remark with a pitying smile: “Of course, at my own pace, thank you!”

  “Say what?” replied Mr. Stampa, bewildered.

  “Oh, nothing. I was just saying that I walk away at my own pace, Mr. Stampa. But do you know that I once saw a horse laugh? Yes sir, I did, as the horse was walking by. Now if you go and look at a horse’s face to see him laugh, you’ll come tell me you didn’t see him laugh at all. Well, if you wanted to see him laugh, why did you look at his face? Horses sure don’t laugh with their face! Do you know what horses laugh with, Mr. Stampa? With their buttocks. I can assure you that when a horse walks, he laughs with his buttocks. Sure he does, when he sees certain things sometimes or when certain things come to mind. If you want to see a horse laugh, look at his buttocks and you’ll be fine!”

  I realize I shouldn’t have been talking to him that way. I understand everything. But recalling my state of mind at the time, seeing all those people staring at me, it felt like a horrible injustice was being imposed upon me, what with all those eyes assigning me an image that was definitely unfamiliar and out of my control. Then the urge came to not only say crazy things, but to do them as well—crazy things like doing somersaults or skipping down the street like a bouncing ball, winking here, sticking out my tongue and sneering there… But instead, I put on my serious face, completely serious, and walked down the street. You all did the same thing, too. How wonderful seeing you all walking along so seriously…

  4 ~ On the Road to Madness

  So I ended up having to go to the bank for those papers that the notary needed regarding the house.

  Those papers were unquestionably mine since the house was mine, and I had every right to them. But if you really thought about it, although technically belonging to me, the only way I was going to get my hands on those papers was either by stealing them or going crazy and violently snatching them from the person everyone considered to be their legitimate owner—I’m referring to Mr. Vitangelo Moscarda, the loan shark.

  This was obvious to me because I could clearly see him, Vitangelo Moscarda, the loan shark, from the outside, live and in person as others saw him, but I couldn’t see him inside me. But for everyone else who could only see me as that loan shark—as far as they were concerned, I was going to the bank to either steal those papers from myself or to insanely rip them out of my own hands.

  Maybe I could say that I wasn’t me? Or that I was somebody else? There was no rational explanation for an action which everyone would see as a deliberate attempt to do something inconsistent and out of character.

  As you can see, I was perfectly aware that I was proceeding along the road to madness—identical to the path of my reality—which now stretched out all shiny and crystal clear in front of me. And all the flawless, living, breathing images and versions of myself were marching along beside me.

  But it was precisely this sharp, reflective awareness that was driving me crazy. All of you who’re walking along this same path without even bothering to notice it—you’re the sane ones, and the saner you are, the louder you scream at those walking beside you:

  “This is me? This is how I am? You’re blind! You’re crazy!”

  5 ~ Bullying

  Meanwhile, theft wasn’t possible, at least not right then. I didn’t know where the papers were. The newest of Quantorzo’s or Firbo’s underlings knew more about that bank than I did. Whenever I was asked to come in and sign things, the employees wouldn’t even look up from their ledgers, and if someone did happen to glance at me, his expression made it abundantly clear that he held me in low regard.

  Still, there they were, zealously working away for me, with all that diligent effort serving to further cement the unfortunate opinion around town that I was a predatory loan shark. And not one of them gave the slightest thought to the possibility that all their zeal, instead of making me grateful and garnering my praise, would offend me.

  Oh, that bank was so rigid and tedious and dreary! All those glass partitions running along the length of three large side-by-side rooms—frosted-glass partitions, each with five yellow teller windows, the same yellow as the molding and frames of the wide panes of glass; ink stains here and there; random strips of paper affixed to cracks in the plate glass; the old terracotta brick floor, worn down in the center in a path along the front of the three large rooms as well as in front of each of the teller windows. A sad corridor, with those glass partitions here and the glass of the two broad windows there, in each of the rooms, all of it dusty; strings of numbers along the walls, in pen, in pencil, on ink-stained tables, between one window and the next, under the peeling frames of second-rate, smoke-blackened paintings that were dusty and puffy in spots; a stale old moldy smell everywhere, mixed with the acrid odor of the ledgers and the parched smell emanating from the furnace down on the ground floor. And the agonizing gloom of those few antique-style armchairs next to the desks. No one ever sat on those chairs, they just shoved them out of the way and left them there, where they didn’t belong. And for those poor useless chairs, it must’ve been an insult and a punishment to be treated like that.

  How often when I was coming in had I been tempted to comment: “What’s up with those armchairs? What are they being punished for, stuck over here where no one ever uses them?”

  But I’d held my tongue, partly because I’d realized just in time that in a place like this, feeling sorry for armchairs would’ve flabbergasted everyone and possibly riske
d appearing cynical as well. But mostly I’d held back because I realized everyone would’ve laughed at me for noticing something that definitely would’ve seemed peculiar to anyone who knew what little attention I paid to business matters.

  When I went in that day, I found all the clerks crowded into the big room at the end of the corridor. They were erupting into occasional bursts of laughter as they watched Stefano Firbo arguing with a certain Turolla, who everyone made fun of mostly for the way he dressed.

  That poor guy, Turolla, would always say that since he was so short, a long jacket would only have made him look even shorter. And he was right. Squat and stocky, deadly serious, with a big, bushy, brigadier’s moustache, he was totally unaware how ridiculous his short little jacket made him look, however, with his firm rear end exposed.

  Humiliated, red in the face, and baffled by his colleagues’ laughter, he was on the verge of tears. He raised his stubby arm, focusing on Firbo, and said: “Oh, God, how you blather on!”

  Firbo was looming over Turolla, shouting in his face, shaking him furiously by that raised arm of his. “What do you know? What do you know? You don’t even know him, even though you look just like him!”

  I came to find out that they were arguing about some man who’d come to the bank for a loan, introduced, as a matter of fact, by Turolla, who’d said he knew him to be an upstanding gentleman. As Firbo claimed just the opposite, I felt a wave of rebellion sweep over me.

  Unaware of my hidden mental anguish, no one could fathom my motives, so when I suddenly stepped in and pulled two or three of the clerks aside, they all stood there basically petrified.

  “What about you?” I yelled at Firbo. “What do you know? What gives you the right to bully someone like this?”

  Astonished, Firbo turned to look at me, finding it hard to believe he was seeing me right up in his face. He shouted: “Are you crazy?”