Something that in itself is perhaps comical, but practically speaking, dreadful, is a house completely overrun by ants. And this mad thought: that the wind had joined in with them. The wind with the ants. Joined in, with the lack of consideration that characterizes its nature, so that in its drive, it can’t pause to reflect upon what it’s doing even for a moment. In a split second it started gusting, at the very moment he was deciding to set fire to the anthill in front of his door, and in a split second his house was completely enveloped by the flames. As if to rid his house of the ants, he had found no better remedy than fire, that is, to set the house on fire.
But before coming to this crucial point in our story, we should call to mind many other previous events that can somehow explain how the ants had been able to invade the house to that extent, and how bizarre thought of an alliance between the ants and the wind could occur to him.
Reduced to hunger from the affluent position in which he had been left by the death of his father, he was abandoned by his wife and children, who managed to get along on their own as best they could, finally freed from his abuses, which could be characterized in so many ways, but above all as being incongruous. He, on the other hand, felt victimized by them on account of his all too submissive disposition and because not one of them had ever supported his peaceful pleasures and judicious opinions. He lived alone on a small parcel of land, the last of the possessions he had once had, including all his houses and fields. It was a small parcel of reclaimed land, below the town, at the edge of the valley, with a shack of a house consisting of barely three rooms where a peasant who formerly leased the land had once lived. Now he lived there, the master worse off than the most miserable peasant, and still wearing his high-class suit that on him seemed more horribly ragged and soiled that it would have on a beggar who had received it in charity. Nonetheless, his urbane, frightening poverty at times seemed almost cheerful, like certain colorful patches on the clothes worn by the poor, that almost make such people look like they’re wearing a flag.
In his long, lifeless face, in his dark though lively eyes, there was a touch of gaiety that harmonized with the tousled curls, half gray and half red, covering his head. There were mirthful flickers in his eyes which were suddenly extinguished at the thought that, if someone were to catch sight of them, they would cause him to be taken for a madman. He himself realized that it was quite easy for others to form such a concept of him, but he really enjoyed doing everything for himself and exactly as he wanted. And he relished with infinite pleasure the little or practically nothing that his poverty could offer. He couldn’t even afford to light a fire every day to cook himself a bean or lentil soup. He would have liked to do so, because no one knew how to make one better than he, sprinkling the salt and pepper so artfully into it and mixing in certain necessary vegetables so that, while it was cooking, just smelling the soup was enough to intoxicate him—not to mention eating it, which was all honey. But he also knew how to do without it. In the evening it sufficed him to take a few steps outside his door and pick a tomato or an onion in his vegetable garden to go along with the hard loaf of bread that he meticulously sliced with a small knife, lifting it piece by piece to his mouth with two fingers as if it were a delicacy.
He had discovered this new wealth, having learned that one needs very little to live and yet remain healthy and carefree. He had also learned that you have the whole world to yourself when you have neither a house nor a family, neither responsibilities nor business to take care of. You may indeed be dirty and have ragged clothes, but you’re left in peace. How delightful it is to sit on the doorstep of your shack on a starlit night and, if a dog approaches, lost like you, to have it curl up beside you and to pet it on the head: a man and a dog, alone on this earth, under the stars.
But it wasn’t true that he was carefree. A little later, throwing himself down like an animal on a straw mattress laid out on the ground, he would bite his fingernails instead of sleeping, and inadvertently tear out his hangnails to such an extent that they would bleed. His fingers would then smart for several days, being swollen and discharging pus. He would mull over everything he should have done and didn’t do to save his possessions, and he would writhe with anger or whine from remorse as if his ruin had occurred yesterday, as if yesterday he had pretended not to notice that it would occur before too long, and that nothing could prevent it. He couldn’t believe it! One by one he had allowed his fields to be taken away from him by his creditors, and one by one he had allowed them to take away his houses in order to have a little money to pay for a few inexpensive and occasional pastimes behind his wife’s back (actually they were neither inexpensive nor occasional; it was useless for him now to seek mitigating circumstances; he had to confess to himself, unequivocably, that he had secretly lived for years like a real pig. Yes, he had to admit that; like a real pig: whoring, drinking, gambling), and yet it had sufficed him to know that his wife had not yet noticed anything for him to continue living as if not even he were aware of his imminent ruin. In the meantime he had taken out his anger and secret frustrations on his innocent son, who was studying Latin. Yes sir. Incredible as it might seem, he, too, had taken up Latin again in order to monitor and help his son. As if he had had nothing else to do, and this attention and concern of his could actually compensate for the disaster that in the meantime he was preparing for his entire family. He had been secretly exasperated by the thought that his son would face this same disaster if he didn’t succeed in grasping the function of the ablative absolute or of the adversative form. Consequently he had tirelessly attempted to explain them to him, while the whole house trembled at his cries and fits of anger over the bewilderment of the poor boy, who eventually perhaps would have managed to grasp them by himself.
With what eyes had his son looked at him once, after a slap! In the throes of remorse, and recalling the look on his son’s face, he now scratched his face with his fingernails and insulted himself: pig, pig, beast, taking it out like that on an innocent creature!
He would leave his straw mattress, give up the idea of sleeping, and return to sitting on the doorstep of his shack, where the self-forgetful silence of the countryside immersed in the night would gradually calm him. The silence, rather than being disturbed, seemed to deepen as the distant, rhythmic chirping of the crickets arose from the depths of the great valley. The melancholy of the declining season already permeated the countryside. And he loved those first foggy humid days when light drizzles begin to fall that gave him a vague inexplicable feeling of nostalgia for his long-gone childhood, those first sad, yet sweet, sensations that make one feel close to the earth, to its smell. The emotion he would feel made his breast swell. He would be choked up with anguish and start crying. It was his destiny to end up in the country, but he really didn’t expect it to be like this.
Having neither the strength nor the means to cultivate his bit of land by himself, a parcel that barely yielded enough to pay the burdensome land tax, he had turned it over to a peasant who leased the adjoining field. The condition was that he pay the tax and give him something to eat: very little, a sort of handout, and only what the earth itself produced (bread and vegetables), and once in a while, prepare him some soup, if he felt like doing so.
Once this agreement was made, he began to consider everything he saw around him, the almond and olive trees, the grain, the vegetable gardens, as things that no longer belonged to him. Only the shack was his, but whenever he would view it as the only property he owned, he couldn’t help smiling about it with the most bitter delight. The ants had already overrun it. So far, he had enjoyed seeing them advance in endlessly long processions up onto the walls of the rooms. There were so many of them that at times it seemed that all the walls were quivering. But he enjoyed it more when they acted like they owned the place, going every which way on the odd high-class furniture that came from the house he once owned in the city and that, having survived the shipwreck of his family, was now heaped up against the wall haphazardly,
every piece covered with an inch of dust. Having nothing else to do, he had even begun to study these ants for hours on end to amuse himself.
The ants were very tiny and as thin as you could imagine. They were pink and so light that a puff of breath could wipe out more than a hundred of them. Yet a hundred others would immediately appear from every direction. And how busy they were! There was order in their haste: teams of them coming here, and teams of them going there. They came and went incessantly and would bump into one another, detour for a while, but again find their way. They certainly understood and consulted one another.
But, perhaps because of their thinness and smallness, it had not yet seemed to him that they could eventually be feared, that they actually wanted to take over his house and his body, and deprive him of his life. Yet he had found them everywhere. They were in all his drawers. He had seen them come out of the most unexpected places. Sometimes, while he was eating a piece of bread left for a moment on the table or elsewhere, he even found them in his mouth. The idea that he should seriously defend himself against them, that he should seriously fight them, had not yet occurred to him. It occurred to him suddenly one morning, due perhaps to the mood he was in after a horribly restless night, one that was worse than all the others.
He had taken off his jacket to bring some sheaves of grain into his shack. There were about twenty of them that his neighbor had left out here in the open after the harvest, not having had time to carry them over there to his own property. During the night the sky had become overcast and rain seemed imminent. Because he was used to never doing anything, the task left him quite tired. How foolish he was to worry about those sheaves of grain that, after all, like everything else, belonged to his neighbor, not to him! When he was just about ready to find a place in his crowded shack for the last sheaf, he was exhausted, so he left it in front of his door and sat down to rest a while.
With his head bowed and his elbows resting on his knees, he let his hands dangle between his open legs. At a certain moment he saw some ants come out of his shirtsleeves and proceed down along his dangling hands. Evidently those ants had taken shelter under his shirt and were strolling about his body as if it were their home. Oh, that was probably the reason why he had been unable to sleep at night, and why all those worries and feelings of remorse had again begun to bother him. He became angry and decided to exterminate them on the spot. The anthill was only a short distance from his door. He would set it on fire.
How is it he didn’t think of the wind? That’s easy. He didn’t think of it because there was no wind, none at all. The air was still, in anticipation of the rain that hung over the countryside in that suspended silence that precedes the fall of the first large drops. Not a leaf quivered. The gust of wind arose unexpectedly and treacherously as soon as he lit the small bundle of straw that he had gathered up from the ground. He held it in his hand like a torch. When he lowered it to set the anthill on fire, the gust of wind, striking it, carried the sparks over to the sheaf that had been left in front of the door. The sheaf, bursting immediately into flames, spread the fire to the other sheaves sheltered in the house, and the fire suddenly flared up, crackled, and filled the whole place with smoke. Like a madman, shouting with his arms in the air, he flung himself into that furnace, hoping perhaps to extinguish the fire.
When the people who had run over to help him dragged him out, everyone was filled with fright since he appeared horribly burned and yet still alive. As a matter of fact, he was quite hysterical and his arms were groping wildly while the flames continued to burn his clothes and the tousled curls on his head. A few hours later he died in the hospital where he had been taken. In his delirium he spoke unintelligibly about the wind, the wind and the ants.
“Joined in… joined in…”
But they already knew he was mad, and so they did pity him for the terrible end he had met, though with a knowing smile on their lips.
CHRONOLOGY
According to the date of composition:
1896 Who Dit It? Chi fù
1898 If… Se…
1901 When I Was Crazy Quand’ero pazzo
1903 The Shrine Il tabernacolo
1903 Pitagora’s Misfortune La disdetta di Pitagora
1904 Set Fire to the Straw Fuoco alla paglia
1907 A Horse in the Moon Un cavallo nella luna
1910 Fear of Being Happy Paura d’essere felice
1913 In the Whirlpool Nel gorgo
1914 The Reality of a Dream La realtà del sogno
1014 The Train Whistled Il treno ha fischiato
1915 Mrs. Frola and Mr. Ponza, La signora Frola e il
Her Son-in-Law signor Ponza, suo genero
1916 The Wheelbarrow La carriola
1923 Escape Fuga
1926 Puberty Pubertà
1935 Victory of the Ants Vittoria delle formiche
About the Author
Luigi Pirandello was born on June 28,1867 near Agrigento, Sicily. The son of a prosperous sulphur mine owner, he was reared in a moderately rich but provincial environment. Although his father encouraged him to enter the business world, Pirandello from his earliest years demonstrated a remarkable talent for literature. At age twelve he tried his hand at playwriting, and when he was fifteen he began composing verses. He attended the universities of Palermo and Rome, and completed his studies at the University of Bonn, where he earned a doctorate in Romance Philology.
Upon his return to Italy in 1891, he settled in Rome. Since he received a generous allowance from his father, he was able to devote himself fully to his literary pursuits. He frequented a small group of writers with whom he exchanged ideas, and wrote poetry, plays, and especially short stories, which he contributed to various periodicals.
In 1894 he married the daughter of his father’s business partner, and soon thereafter his wife bore him three children. In these years he taught stylistics at the Istituto Superiore di Magistero, a women’s college in Rome. Later, in 1908, he obtained the chair of Italian language at this same institution, a position which he was to keep until the early postwar years.
In 1903 his father’s mine was abruptly shut down because of flooding. This disaster, which entailed the loss both of Pirandello’s patrimony and his wife’s dowry, left the young author virtually penniless. Forced to come to grips with this serious financial crisis, Pirandello began for the first time to request payment for his writings, and he increased his literary output. As a further consequence of this calamity, his wife suffered a trauma which affected her physically and mentally, and which ultimately destroyed the couple’s happy home life.
The works Pirandello published in the following few years include his famous novel I1 fu Mattia Pascal (The Late Mattia Pascal, 1904), which exemplifies the contrast between reality and illusion, and his essay L’umorismo (Humor, 1908), which contains his original poetics. During this period he also produced many short stories, some of which served as a basis for his future plays and novels. Having decided to write a total of 365 stories, beginning with the year 1921 he began issuing a complete collection of his tales in a series of volumes entitled Novelle per un anno (Short Stories for a Year)
Although Pirandello had made sporadic attempts at drama earlier in his life, he turned in earnest to the theater only when he was about fifty years old. After an initial success in 1917 with Così e (se vi pare) (It Is So (If You Think So), he wrote a flood of technically and aesthetically innovative plays which soon won him universal acclaim. Besides such renowned works as Enrico IV (Henry IV, 1922), Vestire gli ignudi (Naked, 1922), and Come tu mi vuoi (As You Desire Me, 1930), he is best known for his play-within-a-play trilogy consisting of Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1921), Ciascuno a suo modo (Each in His Own Way, 1924), and Questa sera si recita a soggetto (Tonight We Improvise, 1930), as well as for his trilogy of “myths,” La nuova colonia (The New Colony, 1928), Lazzaro (Lazarus, 1929), and the unfinished I giganti della montagna (The Mountain Giants, 1937). Perceivi
ng his theater as a means by which to peer through the fictional roles assumed by the individual in society, he entitled his collected plays Maschere nude (Naked Masks).
In 1925 Pirandello founded an Art Theater in Rome, which he personally directed. Together with his troupe he traveled throughout Europe, staging performances mainly of his own works. He also embarked on a tour of South America, bringing his plays to audiences in Argentina and Brazil. After disbanding his company in 1928, he left Italy to live for extended periods in Berlin and Paris, where he continued to write and publish.
During the last decade of his life, Pirandello became keenly interested in cinema. He published articles concerning the nature of the new art, wrote original film treatments, and met with producers and directors, many of whom expressed interest in his work. His novel The Late Mattia Pascal as well as several of his plays and short stories were adapted for the screen; but only one of his treatments, Gioca, Pietro! (Play, Peter!), was made into a film: Acciaio (Steel, 1933).
In 1934 Pirandello was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Two years later, on December 10,1936, he died, bequeathing to the world an immense literary and cultural heritage.
Tales of Madness Page 17