Her Husband

by Luigi Pirandello

  She knew nothing, nothing at all, about the famous witch of Colchis. Yes, she had read that name somewhere, but she had no idea who Medea was or what she had done.

  “I told him! I told him!” shouted Giustino. “I couldn’t stop myself. Maybe I shouldn’t have said it. In fact, Signora Barmis, who was there, didn’t want me to say anything. Medea? Euripides? Out of curiosity, tomorrow morning, as soon as Signora Faciolli arrives from Catino, have her lend you this blessed Medea. They say it’s a tragedy of … of … something … I said it a moment ago. Study them, study these blessed Greek things, Myce … I don’t know what they’re called … Mycenaeans … study them! It’s the fashion today! Do you realize that a phrase tossed out like Medea translated into Tarentino dialect can destroy you? That has to stop! There are so many imbeciles who don’t know anything, less than I do! Now I know them. Ah, yes, now I know them!”

  Signora Velia, very worried about Silvia’s condition these last days, lovingly insisted she leave the house after supper with her husband. It was already late and no one would see them. A slow walk would do her good. She shouldn’t have stayed in so much all this time.

  Silvia let herself be talked into it. But when Giustino, at a street corner in the light of a flickering yellowish street lamp, pointed out the poster of the Valle Theater, with the title of the play, her name, and the list of characters in large letters and, emblazoned underneath, A New Play, she felt faint. She grew dizzy and leaned her cold, pale forehead on his shoulder: “What if I die?” she murmured.

  4

  Giustino Boggiolo arrived late at the theater, distraught and almost feverish, this time in a carriage.

  As far as the little Piazza of Sant ‘Eustachio,, the road was blocked by carriages with impatient drivers trying to get through. In order not to get stuck in line, Giustino paid the driver and slipped between the carriages and crowd of pedestrians. On the run-down facade of the theater the large electric lamps vibrated and hummed, almost as if participating in the frenzy of that extraordinary evening.

  Attilio Raceni was standing in the doorway. “Well?”

  “Don’t ask!” panted Giustino, with a desperate gesture. “It’s her time. Labor pains. I left her with labor pains!”

  “Good heavens!” Raceni said. “It was to be expected…. The excitement …”

  “Like hell!” replied Giustino, fiercely exasperated, rolling his eyes and trying to get to the box office ahead of those crowding around to buy tickets.

  He rose on tiptoes to see the announcement in the box office window: Sold Out.

  In his hurry a man bumped into him. “Pardon me… .”

  “That’s all right. But, you know, it’s useless, I tell you. There are no more seats. Sold out. Come back tomorrow evening. There’ll be another performance.”

  “Come on, Boggiolo!” Raceni called to him. “Better to let them see you on the stage.”

  “Two … four … one … two … one … three …” the ushers in festive livery shouted as they took the tickets at the entrance.

  “But where can all these people find seats?” asked Giustino, on pins and needles. “How many tickets have they given away? I should have been here earlier… . But luck’s against us! And I’m worried, really worried, believe me. I have an awful feeling.…”

  “Don’t talk like that!” Raceni urged.

  “About Silvia, I’m talking about Silvia!” Giustino explained. “Not about the play. I left her in a bad way, believe me. And then, look, all these people … where will they sit? They’ll be uncomfortable, impatient, unruly… . When they pay for something, they want to enjoy themselves…. But they can come the second night, for heaven’s sake! There will be other performances… . Let’s go.”

  The whole theater buzzed in noisy confusion, like a gigantic beehive. How to satisfy the hunger for pleasure, the curiosity, the tastes, the expectations of all these people gathered together and thereby lifted to a more expansive, warmer, more united level of life than usual?

  As he looked from the entrance to the orchestra seats, Giustino became anxiously aware of the swarm of spectators. His face, ordinarily ruddy, had now become purple.

  On the stage, barely lit by a few electric lights shining behind the backdrop, the stagehands and the property man gave the last touches to the scene while, with mournful mewing, the small orchestra tuned up. The stage director rushed around, with the bell in his hand, ready to give the signal to the actors.

  Some of the actors were ready. Little Grassi was dressed as Mita and Grimi as Padron Dodo, with a gray, short false beard, his face blackened like a pepper-cured ham, horrible to see up close. His sailor’s cap was folded over one ear, his trousers were rolled up, and he wore a flesh-colored sweater. Both were talking with Tito Lampini, who was in tails, and with Centanni and Mola. As soon as they saw Giustino and Raceni, they come over to greet them boisterously.

  “Here he is!” shouted Grimi, arms outstretched. “Well, how’s it going?”

  “A full house!” exclaimed Centanni.

  “Happy, eh?” added Mola.

  “Wonderful!” Signora Grassi said, shaking his hand vigorously.

  Lampini asked: “Your wife?…”

  “Not well, not well at all …” Giustino began.

  But Raceni, opening his eyes wide, made a rapid gesture with his head. Giustino understood, lowered his eyes, and said: “They must understand that… she can’t be too . .. well.”

  “But she’ll be fine! She’ll be just fine! Very fine, indeed!” Grimi said in his mellow voice, tossing his head and grinning.

  “Come on, Lampini,” Centanni said. “The customary good wish: Break a leg!”

  “Where’s Signora Carmi?” Giustino asked.

  “In her dressing room,” Signora Grassi answered.

  Through the curtain came the incessant din from the large hall. The rumble of a thousand voices near and far mixed with doors banging, keys screeching, and feet shuffling. The sea in the backdrop and Grimi dressed like a sailor gave Giustino the impression that there was a large wharf there with many steamers ready to depart. His ears suddenly started ringing and his mind went completely blank.

  “Let’s look at the audience!” Raceni said, taking him by the arm and drawing him to the peephole in the curtain. “Don’t let it get out, for heaven’s sake!” Then he added softly, “… that your wife is about to deliver.”

  “I understand, I understand,” replied Giustino, who felt his legs go numb so near the footlights. “Listen, Raceni, you have to do me the favor of running to my house at the end of every act …”

  “But of course!” interrupted Raceni. “You don’t have to tell me.”

  “For Silvia, I mean,” added Giustino, “so I’ll know how she is. She’ll understand you can’t tell her anything. Ah, what a terrible coincidence! Thank goodness I had the foresight to ask my mother to come! And her uncle’s with her. And I’ve also asked poor Signora Faciolli to give up the performance tonight she wanted to see so badly.”

  Putting an eye to the peephole, he was amazed as he looked down first at the orchestra seats, then around the boxes, and finally up at the galleries swarming with heads. They were restless and impatient up there. They shouted, clapped their hands, stamped their feet. A furiously ringing bell startled Giustino.

  “It’s nothing!” Raceni said to calm him. “It’s a signal for the orchestra.”

  Then the little orchestra began tuning up.

  All the boxes were unusually crowded and there wasn’t an empty place in the orchestra, and what a throng in the small standing room area! Giustino felt burned by the hot breeze from the bright theater, by the tremendous spectacle of such an expectant multitude. The innumerable eyes wounded him, pierced him. All those restless glittering eyes made the crowd terrible and monstrous. He sought out a familiar face there in the stalls. Ah, there was Luna looking up at the boxes and nodding his head with a smile… . And over there was Betti looking through binoculars. Who knows how many times by now he h
ad repeated that phrase in his lordly, offhand way: “Medea translated into Tarentino dialect.”

  Imbecile! He looked again at the boxes and, following Raceni’s directions, looked for Gueli in the first tier, Donna Francesca Lampugnani and Signora Bornè-Laturzi in the second. But he could spot none of them. He swelled with pride now, thinking that the full theater was already a splendid and magnificent spectacle in itself. And it all was due to him: his wife’s reputation and fame was his work, the fruit of his constant, tireless efforts. The author, the real author of it all, was himself!

  “Boggiolo! Boggiolo!”

  He turned. A radiant Dora Barmis stood before him. “Really splendid! I’ve never seen a theater like this! A magician, you are a magician, Boggiolo! Truly magnificent, à ne voir que les dehors. And what a miracle. Did you see? Livia Frezzi came! They say she’s terribly jealous of your wife.”

  “Of my wife?” Giustino exclaimed in surprise. “Why?”

  He was so infatuated with himself at that moment that if Signora Barmis had said that Gueli’s friend and every woman in the theater was wild about him, he would have understood and easily believed it. But his wife … “What does my wife have to do with it? Livia Frezzi jealous of Silvia? Why?”

  “Does it bother you?” said Signora Barmis. “Who knows how many other women will soon be jealous of Silvia Roncella! What a shame she isn’t here! How is she? How is she?”

  Giustino didn’t have time to answer her. The bells were ringing. Dora Barmis squeezed his hand and ran off. Raceni dragged him behind the scenes to the right.

  The curtain went up, and Giustino Boggiolo felt as if his soul was being exposed and that the suddenly silent multitude was prepared for the fierce enjoyment of his torture, his unspeakable suffering, almost a drawing and quartering, but with something shameful about it, as if he had been stripped naked. As if at any moment, through some unexpected false move, he might appear terribly ridiculous and disgusting.

  He knew the whole play inside out, each actor’s part from the first line to the last. Involuntarily he nearly repeated them aloud, while, almost as though reacting to continual electrical shocks, he would suddenly turn this way or that with his eyes gleaming, cheeks aflame, tormented by the actors’ slow delivery of every line–on purpose, it seemed to him, to prolong his agony, as though they were enjoying it.

  At a certain point Raceni kindly tried to tear him away, to lead him to the dressing room of Revelli, who had not yet made his entrance, but he couldn’t get him to move.

  Gradually, as the play progressed, a weird compulsion, a frightful fascination froze Giustino in his tracks, like the sight of something monstrous. The play that his wife had written, that he had memorized word for word, that he had almost gestated, was detaching itself from him. From everyone. It was rising, rising over the crowd like a paper balloon that he might have brought there on this gala evening, that he had for a long time and with trembling care inflated by holding it over the flames issuing from him. Then he had lit the wick. It was detaching itself from him, it was liberating itself. Palpitating and luminous, it rose, rose to the sky, pulling with it his whole lurching soul and almost ripping away his vital organs, his heart, his breath, in the anxious fear that a puff of air, a blast of wind would hurl against it and it would burn, devoured there in the sky by the very fire he had lit.

  But where was the crowd’s reaction to that ascent?

  The hideous thing was this terrible silence the play was passing through. It alone was living there, by itself and for itself, suspending, or rather, absorbing, the life of everyone, tearing words from his mouth, and with the words, his breath. And that life whose extraordinary independence he now felt, that life one moment floating calm and powerful, the next quick and frantic amid such silence, aroused his dismay and horror, mixed with increasing resentment. Almost as if the play, delighting in itself, delighting in living for itself and for itself alone, scorned the pleasure of others, prevented others from showing their pleasure. It was as if it had assumed a too prominent and serious part, disregarding and diminishing the infinite care he had given it up to now, until it made his concerns appear ineffectual and ridiculous, compromising those material interests that were his greatest concern. If no applause broke out … if everyone sat like that until the end, hesitant and stupefied … But what was that? What happened? Soon the first act would be over… . No applause whatever … Not one sign of approval … Nothing! He thought he was going crazy…. He opened and closed his hands, dug his nails into his palms, scratched his forehead that was burning and yet damp with cold sweat. He stared at Raceni’s transformed face, totally absorbed in the play, and he seemed to read there his same dismay… . No, a different dismay, almost astonishment … Perhaps the same kind that held all the spectators … For a moment he was afraid that the play was an atrocious, horrid thing never before created, and that at any moment a fierce insurrection would break out among the indignant, offended spectators. Ah, that silence was truly terrible! What was it? What was it? Were they disturbed? Were they entertained? No one was breathing… . The actors’ shouts in the last scene were echoing on stage. There, now the curtain was falling….

  After an endless moment of agonizing suspense, Giustino felt that he alone, there by the footlights, with his anxiety, with his longing, with all his soul, in a tremendous, supreme effort, tore the applause from the theater, the first applause: dry, labored, like the crackle of dry twigs, of burned stubble, then a burst of flame, a fire: loud, hot, long, clamorous, deafening… . And then he felt his whole body relax, almost falling in a faint, drowning in the frenzied roar that went on and on, incessantly growing and endless… .

  Raceni held him in his arms, sobbing against his chest, while the actors went to the footlights four, five, times toward the eruption out there…. He sobbed, laughed and sobbed, and trembled with joy. From Raceni’s arms he fell into Signora Carmi’s, and then Revelli’s, and then Grimi’s. Grimi imprinted the colors of his makeup on Boggiolo’s lips, on the end of his nose, on his cheeks, because in an emotional outburst he was determined to kiss him at any cost, in spite of the fact that Boggiolo, knowing what a mess it would make, tried to fend him off. With his smeared face he continued to fall into the arms of the journalists and everyone he knew who rushed onstage to congratulate him. He could do no less. He was so exhausted, done in, finished–it was the only way he could find relief. And now he abandoned himself to everyone almost automatically. He would have fallen into the arms of the firemen, stagehands, scene changers, if Signora Barmis hadn’t finally come to divert him from that comic and pitiful gesture by giving him a good shake and leading him to Signora Carmi’s dressing room to make him wash his face. Raceni had slipped out to get news of his wife.

  In the aisles, in the boxes, there was shouting, excitement, turmoil. The entire audience, for three quarters of an hour enthralled by the powerful fascination of this new and extraordinary creation, so alive from start to finish with a quick, violent life that gave no respite, flashing with unexpected spirit, seemed to be liberated from their enchantment by that frantic, interminable applause. Now everyone felt an overpowering joy, an absolute certainty that that life, which in its innovative spirit and expression showed such a diamond-hard strength, could never be shattered by differences of opinion, because now every judgment, as in reality itself, would seem necessary, controlled, and made logical by the inevitability of the action.

  This was exactly what constituted the miracle of art, a miracle in which they participated this evening almost with trepidation. It did not seem to come from a writer’s premeditated concept, but from the uncertain, unpredictable action born minute by minute in the clash of savage passions, in the freedom of a life unhampered by laws or even by time, in the arbitrary choices of so many wills that overpowered each other in turn, of so many beings left to themselves who acted in the full independence of their nature, that is, against whatever end the author might have intended.

  Many people, among those mos
t excited and yet no less worried that their impression might not accord with the judgment of competent critics, searched the orchestra and boxes to read the faces of drama critics from the most widely circulated newspapers. Critics from other cities were pointed out and carefully scrutinized. Eyes were especially fixed on a box in the first tier: the box of Zeta, the terror of all actors and playwrights who came to face the judgment of the Roman audience.

  Zeta was in animated conversation with two other critics, Devicis from Milan and Corica from Naples. Did he approve? Disapprove? And of what? The play or the actors’ interpretation? Another critic entered the box. Who was he? Oh, Fongia from Turin … How he was laughing! And then he was pretending to cry, leaning first on Corica’s chest and then on Devicis’. Why? Zeta jumped to his feet with a furious gesture of indignation and shouted something that made the other three burst out laughing. In the nearby box, a gloomy, dark woman, with deeply circled green eyes and a very dignified, somber manner, got up and went to sit in the corner of the box. While in the back a gentleman with gray hair … ah, Gueli, Gueli! Maurizio Gueli! leaned out to look into the critics’ box.

  “Pardon me, Maestro,” Zeta said to him, “and pardon me, Signora. But this is very unfortunate, Maestro! This is the ruin of that poor girl! If you are fond of Signora Roncella …”

  “I? For heaven’s sake!” said Gueli, and his angry face drew back, looking into his lady friend’s eyes.

  With the flicker of a cutting laugh on her dark lips, and narrowing her eyes almost as if to dim their green flashes, she bowed her head several times toward the journalist and said: “Oh, very … very fond …”

  “Signora, with reason!” the other exclaimed. “Silvia Roncella is the true daughter of Maurizio Gueli! I say it, I have said it, and I will say it. This is a great thing, my dear lady! A great thing! Signora Roncella is great! But who will save her from her husband?”

  Livia Frezzi smiled as before and said: “Don’t worry…. She’ll have help … paternal, of course.”