The Experience of Pain

by Carlo Emilio Gadda

  In truth, in the Maradagàl–Parapagàl war, there were plenty of Hill 131s – or 151s or 171s – due to the conflicting resolutions of the rival strategists, who sent the massacred battalions up the hills, scouring them like sulphur matches: and any veteran with a little imagination, and even perhaps an Indio deserter, had ample choice.

  The first rumours about the true identity and the pension and therefore also the heroism of Pedro, now Gaetano once again, and his former deafness or, rather, restored hearing, spread around Lukones, as stated earlier, thanks to a ‘merchant’ with a fairly loose tongue, who travelled third class as far as Prado and then came up on foot, followed by some kind of cousin or helper, and with a heavy cubic sack on his back; full (as soon became apparent) of bargain lengths of cloth; of a fabric very soft to the touch, and an extremely fine nap. The marvellous news then spread on to the grapevine through the natural process of absorption, made possible by an active endosmosis: the fresh and biting greed of the uncorrupt, the vital toil of the cells that have no better epic story to elaborate.

  And more or less everyone, male and female, eagerly helped it along. Among the first was the washerwoman Peppa, her basket brimful of wrung sheets: a woman-man, harder and stronger than any porter had ever been, with that top-heavy load in her arm, so that the axis of her person tilted to the other side; steadfast and poor and yellow-faced along the stony misery of the rough lanes that climbed towards the turreted villas with their lightning conductors and sometimes, in the wind, a flag; stopping from time to time – basket on the ground – to rest and catch her breath, but not so out-of-breath to prevent her making good use of her tongue, if she could share that same stop with a friend or someone on their way down.

  After her mother’s death, now a long time ago, she had raised not only herself but her seven siblings, whom in fine weather she had taught to go without shoes and therefore socks, and some of whom had been working for several years in the mills, or on the land: and for one, the oldest, she already had his black wedding suit, kept in mothballs, given to her by the Señora’s son, who had inherited the suit from his elders at the age of five, but at forty-five still hadn’t found a wife.

  During those days her cow had taken sick, and she had cured it: but it caused her continual worry.

  Second, or among those who came next, was Beppina, the barefoot fishwife, famous throughout Lukones and the neighbouring villas, not so much for her trade in whitefish, as for her brisk and fairly Amazonian way of pissing (time is money): which moreover she used, her piss, for a nobly agronomical purpose, as will be explained later. This second Giuseppa, or Beppa, was brisk also in her language, indeed relentless, or even blunt, and yet no less effective than the other women. And then – they always come in threes – there was Pina, also known as Pinina del Goeupp, officially Giuseppina Voldehagos, married name Citterio, who was the dwarf wife of the chief gravedigger and always dressed in black, either due to her husband’s profession or perhaps as beneficiary of mourning dresses from various impenitent benefactresses.

  These three had immediately taken it upon themselves, with other women and husbands and priests and innkeepers and coachmen and with the postman of Lukones, each in their own way, to spread word of that deception brought this far by the ‘merchant’, garbling it up even further, if that were possible: and Peppa had also been the first to bring it to the ear of the Señora, at Villa Pirobutirro. Behind whose walls, along the rough stone road, brave shoots, like whips, put forth fleshy blue drupes against the blue September sky – plums, of course, on espalier plum trees: forbidden to passers-by.

  The cloth merchant (to finish this stupid story and be rid of it once and for all) was, as is obvious, not a dealer from that area; he came from far away and had far to journey back, by reason of his trade. He managed to sell a few cuts of fine-napped cloth to the more discerning Lukonese and after a few hours he vanished.

  In the way that dealers of his kind and category vanish. They spread out their cloths and fine invitations, señores!, señores!, outside the church, on a fine September morning, they argue and banter at length, tirelessly, with sudden hush-hush words for those standing silently in the front row, and like this for the whole morning as long as it lasts, until, having repacked their sack, around that time when the stomach has become a cavern, they vanish: as an apparition of the Madonna might vanish: and from that moment you have no further news, either of them or their cousin.

  Pedro had been late that morning. He’d been delayed at several villas filling out the payment slips, had had to wait for the money, argue over a slight increase, and then get two or three signatures on two or three blue forms, one per villa; an operation, that of the signature, rather less easy than pulling his receipt book from his pocket.

  Eight o’clock had arrived. And he’d come slowly down, pushing his bicycle, sleepy after the night patrol, making sure that his soles and his tyres kept out of the greenish, slimy splatter of cow pats along the rough lane of stones that leads to the village agora, to the corner by the tobacconist’s. There, right in the doorway of the shop, he bumped into the trader, who, breathless and exhausted, had left his cousin-assistant some distance away to guard the sack, and was about to go in, after a long inner struggle, and ask ‘to be served a tamarind’. He had also removed his starched collar, which was now in his hand and appeared soaked with sweat and stained by the aniline green of his tie.

  The two looked at each other and, it seems, recognized each other as neighbours (as one would have said in the 1300s), in other words as fellow villagers or countrymen, as we put it today. Both hesitated: then a sudden and mutual yelp; the first interjections were followed by a whole showering of wonderment, excitement, requests for news, which drew several women to their windows, including Peppa, in the alley just before the street corner. She watched, all eyes and ears, as she hung out her stockings, and appeared to drink up every word. After which, once the surprise was over, the two passed on to a more relaxed and jovial chit-chat, though Mahagones kept himself rather more to himself; and they even held each other by the arm. Then there were fresh pieces of news, recollections, reminiscences, but now in more measured tones: and plenty of names like José, Pedro, Gonzalo and Fernando (the same as someone in Italy talking about Pasquale and Peppino), each and every one with its own question mark, the one who had married, the one who’d shot himself; and remembering girls with names like Inés, Mercedes, Dolores, Carmelite, ¡niñas queridas! ¡y qué guapas! youngsters then, and now already grandmothers at the age of twenty-six; and they eventually finished up going into the small, grimy hole that sold tallow candles and pieces of washing soap, as well as various tobaccos with a Greek, or Macedonian, or Tuscan name, used by the Turkish-Celtic population of Serruchón. From the other side of the filthy windowpanes, they greeted the clear morning sun, which had then just appeared in the valley, with an amarena and a small grappa, raised high in a toast from the puddle of liquid on the zinc trough. Neither of them paid, each supposing, diplomatically, that the other would.

  Then they said goodbye. The tobacconist, who still had to wash his face and take his trousers off again so that he could slip into the underpants he’d forgotten to put on, said nothing.

  Though a natural and I would say necessary code of silence tends inevitably to establish itself between fellow countrymen, or villagers, or neighbours, or what you will, the wish to appear knowledgeable and worthy, and with no clear interest in the ‘societas bonorum vinorum’ then wins, at times, over the wink of the natural code of silent complicity.

  The trader, shortly after, while selling his bargain lengths in the square, and reeling out the cloth – oh! certainly not from England, nor from Biella – before the yellow faces and the jewelled curiosity of the gazes, as he swirled his tongue for entire half-hours so that it was hard to understand how the devil he drew the necessary saliva, and after having smattered jokes and wisecracks of common currency, though extremely rare for the open-mouthed Lukonese, along with fallacious war rec
ollections and hackneyed slogans from the time of the Reconquista, and fake memories with sighs, and sighs with cheeky compliments, some perhaps witty and delivered into an ear, with a searing quiver of passion to fragrant farmwomen from the Keltiké – (they didn’t catch his meaning, these buxom girls, but blushed quand même and nudged each other, laughing, necks writhing, covering their faces with their hands, as if in shame, but with their hands slightly apart; and behind those gaps and their fingers were their lips, their eyes) – after allowing his spirit-tongue to pirouette in that way for almost the length of a full Mass – he allowed some comment to slip out here, some word there, another half-sentence, directed at Pedro, while he carried on chattering, gesticulating, ducking down, resuming, waving his lengths of cloth about. Pedro had gone off, then passed back through the square, but had stopped some distance away, with his bicycle, and was contemplating the scene from afar, hearing only ‘¡Señores Señores!’, but not the comments and mumbled propositions that his tickety-tack slipped at you quick smart between one chapter of his business and the next. As his story proceeded, so deftly interpolated into ‘the business of our firm that aims to satisfy people’s needs’, some turned round from time to time to look at Pedro, seeming, little by little, to view him in a new light: though still in the same uniform, namely leggings, belt-holster and peaked cap, with metal badge: and then the seller smiled at him, at Pedro, and Pedro smiled back, from a distance, paternally, with a sharp glint in his eye, at his smiling friend.

  Just past eleven, the trader managed to captivate several Celtic farmers, and to persuade them to buy: a certainly uncommon triumph. Having caught them in the net of ‘my special and top-secret information’, he managed to palm off on those further forward a few half-lengths of best cloth, dark chestnut, and green, to be sewn into a baggy jacket, or a ‘pantalon’, despite the heavy nap. But those half-sentences and pieces of half-news hadn’t fallen there without effect: spun properly and woven together, they already turned into almost a full story. And they were filled out and rounded off in the hostería towards noon, where, in exchange for a fuller account, in private, in the small room with the green rugs, and having sent the cousin off on some pretext, the landlord Manoel Torre offered him, the trader, several drinks: and two splendid portions of croconsuelo. (This is a Maradagàl variety of Roquefort cheese, but rather less mature: creamy, strong, stinking enough to make an Aztec vomit, with a rich, dark green mould in its ignominious crevices, most delicious when spread with a knife on the water-lily-tongue and then chewed for quarter-hours into a foul pulp between sips of red wine, to restore a market trader’s gift of the gab and regenerate saliva.)

  And so it was that Mahagones once again became Palumbo for those whom he night-patrolled at Serruchón – as, indeed, he had always been in the Central Registry Office of the Republic and in his original papers. And not only that: it was discovered that as well as having the maximum pension for his category in 1925, he had also lost it immediately after – although he had lost his hearing on Hill 131, he had then had it miraculously restored. Veneration of his uncle also died, little by little, among the people of Serruchón. Physically, in 1933, he had already been dead eight years.

  Villas, villas! small villas, eight rooms with two bathrooms; princely villas forty rooms large terrace overlooking the lakes panoramic view over Serruchón – garden, orchard, garage, porter’s lodge, tennis, drinking water, septic tank of over seventy thousand litres: – facing south, or west, or east, or south-east, or south-west, protected by elms or the antique shade of beech trees against the north wind and the pampero, but not from the monsoons of mortgages, which blow full force against the morainic amphitheatre of Serruchón and along the poplar groves of Prado; villas! pretty villas!, overstuffed mansion villas, lonely villas, double villas, homely villas, rustic villas, villa rustics, the Pastrufazian architects had embellished, little by little, more or less all the delightful and peaceful pre-Andean hillsides, which, needless to say, ‘slope gently down’: to the mild basins of their lakes. One villa was built for a nouveau riche motorcycle-saddle maker, one for a bankrupt dealer in silk cocoons, and one for some repainted count or faded marquis. Of these, one failed to grow the tapered fingers of refinement, and the other to grow rich, or even to go bankrupt, alas, since his nobility of spirit would have sustained him in the land of floundering silk cocoons and prospering motorcycles. When the villas emerged more ‘coquettishly’ than usual from the robinias, or from the luxuriant foliage of the banzavóis, seeming like a banana plantation in the Canaries, it could rightly be said, if the need arose, and a clever writer happened to be at hand, that ‘they peeped out from among the verdant hill-slopes’. Since greens are not our forte, we will content ourselves with pointing out how some of the more conspicuous of those polytechnical products, with their roofs all eaves, and eaves all pointed, with garish northern glacial triangles, had pretensions to being Swiss chalets, though continuing to bake in the expanse of the American mid-August: but the Oberland timber was merely painted (on to the Serruchón whitewash) and also rather too faded by the downpours and the monsoons. Other small villas, where the corner juts further out, rose up, nice and prettily, into a mock-Sienese or Norman Pastrufazian turret, with a long black pole on top, for the lightning conductor and the flag. Others were decorated with various small domes and pinnacles, of the Russian sort, or almost, rather like upturned radishes or onions, with overlapping tiles that were often multicoloured, like the scales of a carnivalesque reptile, half yellow and half blue. So they looked like the pagoda and the spinning mill, and were also halfway between the Alhambra and the Kremlin.

  For everything, everything!, had passed through the heads of the Pastrufazian architects, except perhaps the notions of Good Taste. Umberto had passed … and Wilhelm and the neoclassical and the neo-neoclassical and Empire and Second Empire; Liberty, art nouveau, Corinthian, Pompeian, Angevin, Sommarugan Egyptian and Coppedè-Alessio; and candy-plastered casinos at Biarritz and Ostend, the Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée and Fagnano Olona, Montecarlo, Indianopolis, the Middle Ages, namely a Filippo Maria happily arm-in-arm with the Caliph: and Queen Victoria (of England), lying sprawled over a Turkish ottoman: (sic). And now the functional 1900s were at work, with their extremely functional leg-breaking pink marble staircases: and not to mention bull’s eyes, true quarterdeck portholes, for the ironing room and the kitchen; with a small dining area called an office (this foreign word office caused unimaginable fascination for the new Vignolas of Terepáttola). With toilets so rationally designed, measuring fifty-five by forty-five, that couldn’t be understood unless you were stuck there inside; or, once inside, you couldn’t even begin to imagine how to get out: that is, through any manifestation of personal free will. Which, however free it may be, is yet urgent at times and demands, in any case, a certain amount of manoeuvre. With a gymnasium for the children, if the fancy ever takes them; since they don’t seem fit and lithe enough between one exam failure and the next, between July and October. With a roof terrace for sunbathing for the señora, and the señor, who had both strived so long, though in vain, to have a permanent tan (of the brain cells), so fashionable today. With sash windows one-sixty wide in cement frames, to usher in the mountain and the lake, into the hallway, to which moreover they give a delicious warmth: of hardboiled eggs.

  But enough of the list of functional excogitations.

  Among the villas of the San Juan hillside, along the Prado highway (red reflections of their windows flashed against the taciturn twilight), there was also, somewhat dilapidated, and at the same time strangely gaunt, Villa Maria Giuseppina; owned by Bertoloni. The twilight, and its melancholic and distant front, appeared streaked, from time to time, by long, horizontal lines, of ash and blood-red. The villa had two towers, and two lightning conductors at the extremities of a low, long central section; such as to bring to mind two Siamese sister giraffes, or one giraffe incorporated into the other after a rear encounter of bottoms followed by a unification of buttocks. Of the two
lightning conductors, one seemed to be pondering a special mischief of its own to the north-west, oh! a bright idea: but diabolically functional: and the other with exactly the same idea to the south-east; namely, of sending the lightning, as soon as it struck, to the ‘neighbour’ to the right: and the other to the one on the left: to Villa Enrichetta and Villa Antonietta respectively. Huddled there below, in a most unassuming posture, just below the two prostheses of Villa Giuseppina, and brightly painted, they had that mild and lymphatic air that excites, or seems to excite, increasingly cruel elemental sadism.

  This fanciful tension of ours turned into a burst of reality on 21 July 1931, during a hailstorm of a force unprecedented in this century, that filled the coffers of all the glaziers in the arrondimiento.

  To describe the fright and the shards of such an unexpected thunderbolt is not even thinkable. But the buck-passing behaviour of the two lightning conductors had legal consequences – immediately set towards eternity – in the civil courts – with claims for damages and interest, technical reports, counter-reports from the other side, and reports ordered by the court, though never accepted by both parties at the same time – as well as in the criminal courts, for criminal negligence and damage to the property of others. And all this since the cause, from the very beginning, was most hotly contested. ‘What can I do’, protested old Bertoloni, an immigrant from Lombardy, ‘if that little scamp didn’t even know which way to go?’ The lightning, in fact, when it realized it could no longer hold itself back, plunged down on to the small lightning conductor; but as that rod didn’t seem large enough, it immediately rebounded like a demonic ball and crashed on to that other rather longer rod, on the higher tower, and thus finally distancing itself from earth, something hardly credible. There, on the platinized gilt coil, it had blinded for a moment the terror of the chestnut trees, under the new guise of an oval ball – mad fire poised on the point – as though seized by a sinister rage, in its impotence: but in reality unwinding and rewinding a skein and counter-skein of elliptic orbits in alternate directions a couple of million times a second; all around the fake gold of the coil, and it merged, together with the platinum, and even with the iron: and also dripped, down the shaft, almost as though it were candle-wax.