The Experience of Pain

by Carlo Emilio Gadda

  The good doctor chuckled as he thought about that mad greed, mixed with such gaucheness, that he would have liked to keep pharmacists down to a profit of a hundred per cent.

  He, the son, claimed to have translated the savings from ten years’ work – in truth, ten years’ stinginess – into bismuth. In local myth and folklore, and despite repeated denials by men of science, first among them he himself, the doctor, and immediately after him the tax official, third the librarian head of the pear-growers’ association, and on and on, fourth, fifth and sixth many others, the people of Lukones continued to believe and to claim that it was the swordfish that pierced the wall of his duodenum, where it reaches an extremely dangerous bend, which the anatomists, generally speaking, call the duodenal loop or duodenal lobe of the gastric tract, or the ansiatic neck of the perigurdium, to use the most recent terminology.

  ‘Poor entrails of humanity!’ thought the good doctor, whipping his calf with the cane. ‘And even those of marquises, who have their coats of arms on the battlements.’ From arms to arms, entrails to entrails: tripe to tripe! And, along the same line, thought to thought, and, perhaps, soul to soul. But there’s no magistery for the wrong souls: their wounds know no power. – The good doctor tested the first cobbles of the last stony stretch: a rough lane sunk between two walls y por suerte in the shade of robinias and several elms, for the final patience of his heroic feet.

  Oh!, along the path of generations, the light! … that recedes, recedes … opaque … of unaltered becoming. But in days, in souls, what calculating hope! … and abstract faith, stubborn charity. Every practice is an image, … zendado, motto, banner in the wind … The light, the light receded … and the endeavour urged its quarterings onwards, onwards: wanting to reach the fugitive west … And the breath of generations suffered, de semine in semen, from arms to arms. Until the incredible point of arrival.

  In his villa with no lightning conductor, surrounded by pear trees, and consequently by pears, the last hidalgo was reading the foundations of the metaphysics of morals.

  Hah! Hah!

  He was directly descended along the male line from Gonzalo Pirobutirro d’Eltino, one-time Spanish governor of Néa Keltiké and notorious, in the history books, for his thirst for justice, his great stature, lean face, punitive nature, relentless and predatory rule. In collecting tolls from the ferries that plied the waters of the colonial borders, or at the gates that opened from the city fortifications, he had failed to heed any mitigating caution, any moderating or contrary plea, any human or political distinctions. ‘¡Buscador de plata!’ the people had greeted him. What are people grumbling about? You don’t let fish wriggle out, from the net of the idea, through the broken mesh of reprieve. But he allowed not a single hair of a person to be harmed, nor a single centavo to be extracted, never!, except in enforcement of a decree by Don Felipe, el Rey Católico (and then Don Fernando) or, failing that, his own; and every centavo returned full-sail into the glorious exchequer of the Crown of Castille, by virtue of the said decree, royal or his own. For himself he had never received a peso, nor skimmed off a doblón, nor shorn a merino, nor sniffed a pinch of snuff. He had died poor, with one ear missing, and half blind: having lost an eye in battle. ‘¡A los Reyes salud! ¡Y levántenos a los cansados, Dios caballero, en Su luz! … con los demás caballeros …’.

  Having spoken these words, he had expired on 14 April 1695, stone dead, loathed by everyone. The Kingdom where the sun never reached the west had elevated him to the dignity of a stipend, had consigned various letters patent to him, crammed with wax seals and royal congratulations, granting the hereditary title of Marquis of Eltino, many ribbons, y algunas brazas de tierra beneath the new bastions of Pastrufazio (known at that time as San Juan), where his bones were to be laid; which were, despite everything, the longest in the Kingdom. Insofar as honour and duty, what they were, how to carry them out, while continuing to cultivate his fingernails, he had never hesitated, never trembled, never despaired: since, high above the waves, in turning the wheel of the helm, he had fixed his sight only and always on his own star. A source of shame, for him, and immedicable regret through the whole vast course of the years, was not to have had the chance to hang on the public gallows a certain Filarenzo Calzamaglia, or Enzo as everyone called him, who’d escaped from the hand of his fair justice; justice which had put handcuffs around his wrists during certain riots at San Juan in November ’88. He, from one arson to another, and having listened to the jabber of certain reprobates, had made a fool of himself, beyond any conceivable grant of pardon from the Governor, or favour of Sovereign Clemency.

  It was thought by some, particularly by an eminent Pastrufazian genealogist, whom some considered to be a visionary, and others as an impostor and grafter, and a manufacturer of dukes with no dukedoms, that the Pirobutirro family could rightfully claim their nobility and blood from the Borgias, and in honour of St Francis Borgia and Don Pedro Ribera, nicknamed Lo Spagnoletto, they received not infrequently, at the Font, the baptismal names of Pedro, or Francisco. In the November 1930 issue of the pear-growers’ association periodical ‘The Pear’, the librarian head of the association (based in Pastrufazio), who had his villa and pears, needless to say, in Lukones, developed indeed a curious philological theory, it wasn’t clear whether in honour of the Pirobutirros or of the butirro pears – namely, that the Castilla la Vieja expression ‘hacer una pera’ meant ‘carry out a great action’.

  The cicada on the shadeless elm was chirruping at full throttle towards midday, dilating the clear immensity of the summer. The good doctor, having negotiated the worst of the stones, had reached the gate: in his eager mind, filled with curiosity and recollection, these memorable figures of the illustrious dynasty unfolded with the swiftness of a dream: the image of his patient came back to him, like that ancestor of his, in an absurd light.

  His patient, on his mother’s side, came from barbarian, Germanic and Hun, as well as Longobard stock; but Hungarianness and Germanism hadn’t ended him up in white socks, double soles, and nor even his knees, which bore little resemblance to those of Siegfried; and he seemed to have fairly little to offer even in the part of Magyar lion reawakening. And yet … and yet … one never knows …

  He was Germanic in certain fixations about order and silence, in his aversion to greasy paper, egg shells, and lingering at the doorway when saying goodbye. In a certain restless inner urge to go against the flow of meanings and causes, in a certain scorn for superficial veneer, in a certain slowness and opaqueness of judgement, which seemed in him like an intake of breath before a sneeze, and dark and delayed synthesis, and never a canary-yellow-coloured lightning-ray. Germanic, above all, a certain pedantry more stubborn than the solitary worm – and disastrous for him, as much at the barber’s shop as at the printer’s. ‘You have to muddle along!’ they used to tell him. ‘Carry on as best you can,’ they would add. He wasn’t cut out for muddling along or carrying on as best he could, in which he found himself more ham-fisted than a seal frying fritters. Wearied by the noise from the radio, he would have liked an appointment from God, not to manage Néa Keltiké for the stipend of Don Felipe el Rey Católico, but to write a commentary to Timaeus, in silence, under the pay of no one.

  And there was, for him, the problem of evil: the story of the disease, the strange story propagated by the conquistadors, who had the task of collecting the dying words of the Incas. According to whom death arrives for nothing, surrounded in silence, like an unspoken, final combination of thought.

  It is the ‘invisible evil’ that Saverio López describes in the final chapter of his Mirabilia Maragdagali.fn1

  II

  As the cloud passed, the hornbeam fell silent. Its companion is the elm, and in Néa Keltiké they pollard it ruthlessly until each grows into a pole with turban, along the footpaths and the dust. With rough bark, and thus stripped of any branches, they have miserable and shabby leaves, almost lacerated, that sprout from those gnarls on top. The robinias fell silent, without t
he nobility of an ode, unknown to the fleeting fear of the Dryads, as it was to Pan’s flute in ancient times: a practical and propagative root introduced into that countryside from Australasia and the fast-leafing and thorny protector of walled gardens, the support for steep slopes. This was through the attentions of a horticulturalist who had an eye for Progress and gave it a sure future, predicting the end for oak trees, elms or, in the lime kilns, the ancient dream of beeches. These non-fabled giants, towards the end of the eighteenth century, were still golden and purple beneath the autumn skies covering the shoulder beyond the dolomite of Terepáttola, while on this side it is sheer, radiating down over the level turquoise at the foot of the valley, which we know to be a lake. The lime, needless to say, for building villas, and the perimeter walls of villas: with espalier pear trees.

  The lane the doctor had to climb went much in the shadows, not just of sparse hornbeams, but of endless robinias. The sprigs of leaves from the branches divided innumerably, laudably green and yet highly judicious, animated by the prospect of being an example to man and bringing delight to the reborn municipal authorities, with that idea of order and money well spent that their symmetrical layout continually suggested. The small ovate leaves, identical like all Standard and Australasian creatures, seemed rationed to the stelae by a shrewd Administration and were surely fit for a station avenue with an equestrian statue of General Pastrufacio; the victor at Santa Rosa. And every stem, of each one of those leaves, two long thorns like two tie pins, one each side: which did not prevent it from being tasted, when chance arose, by the optimistic tongue of the donkey. And so, around the villa and the pear trees, all was robinia, as well as banzavóis. The robinia enclosed that white, rectangular block, wide open to the winds and the clomping feet of the Peppas, with its verdant siege. During the Pirobutirro household’s georgic siesta, the robinia triumphed over every image. Many considered its unexceptional smell to be useful; like all useful products with little smell, it became indispensable to the collective economy, one fine day towards the end of the nineteenth century, when there were improved hopes for life in Maradagàl. And also in Lukones.

  A quadrupeding sound on the cobbles distracted the doctor from his thoughts: looking up, he saw Battistina coming down. The woman had a small package under her straight arm, and was holding a dish in both hands, covered by another upturned plate: her face was skewed to the left, seeming as though they had made a mistake in fixing it to her body, almost like a proud puppet looking west: in reality to make space for her goitre, three or four hundred grams. She seemed rather distrustful and cautious, with that lunch she was clasping in her hands, like an animal that might be robbed of its food; and the goitre itself had the appearance of an animal which, having sunk its teeth into her windpipe, was drinking out half of her breath, hiding itself under her skin like a photographer under his cloth. So much that its owner was panting slightly, even though she was coming downhill, with a barely perceptible gurgle, like a touch of catarrh. The doctor motioned her to stop: and both then stopped. A ‘good day, Doctor’ frothed forth from the woman’s goitre, so soft and damp that it sounded like a cabbage and a carrot in a cooking pot from which the lid had been momentarily removed.

  ‘What’s he got?’ asked the doctor, peering down with heavy eyes, swollen as if from tiredness: meanwhile, with his cane, he was shifting some of the less obstinate stones in the ground. The growth of his beard gave him the face of a pensioned-off thief from Golgotha. ‘I’m late today, any moment and midday’s already here.’ The word for ‘here’, in terms of place, is ‘scià’ in Keltiké dialect.

  ‘I was talking about Señor Gonzalo.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know: he wanders the house like a madman, the few hours he’s there: that house is no place to live …’

  ‘To live … to live …’

  ‘The Seňora’s gone to the cemetery with flowers and with Pinina behind, who had the key … Poor woman, she too! … after all she’s been through … reduced to such a state; to be frightened of her son …’

  ‘… Frightened! … it will be some disagreement, their differences in character …’

  ‘… No, no, Doctor … it’s fear … When he starts wandering the house like a ghost, the Señora gets frightened sick … believe me, Doctor, I’ve known her quite a while; … poor woman! … after all she’s been through! …’

  ‘… But frightened of who? … of what? …’

  ‘Frightened of being alone in the house when he’s there … I tell you … She always wants me to stay, wants me to stay, cooks for me … just so that I stay … and never lets me go home … like today … it’s now almost midday … But I can’t, you understand, I have my own things to do … and all the jobs … I’ve still got to make the mash for the chickens … and it’s already midday …’

  ‘True,’ pondered the doctor, ‘the house is rather out of the way, rather isolated … with all these trees around’; he whipped the undergrowth with his cane.

  ‘… Oh! for being isolated it would be nothing,’ egutturated the goitre. ‘But she’s scared of her own son … she, his mother! … when he starts wandering the house with his hands in his pockets … There, Doctor, that’s how it is … What can you say …’

  ‘… Come, come … You women always have ideas of your own! … What do you suppose she’s frightened of? … He’s just a man like all the rest! … He’ll shout a bit, from time to time, when he’s in a bad mood … when the soup’s overdone … Like all men …’

  ‘If it were only for the shouting … but when he says something much worse to her! … to an old woman of seventy-three! … his mother! … who to see her going to the Cemetery, with flowers, with Pina behind, it seems she’s going there to book her place … Last time she even had courage to say to her, to Pina, when I’m here too, you’ll come, won’t you … from time to time, to say an Ave Maria, for me too …’

  ‘… Well, poor woman, these are things people say …’

  ‘… And he starts wandering about … and goes from room to room … and looks at her … that’s when she gets frightened … and it seems he’s staring at her earrings …’

  ‘… But you’re mad! … why should he have any interest in earrings? …’

  ‘… I don’t know, Doctor, what can I say? But even this morning I saw him staring at the diamonds … he’s been keeping an eye on the diamonds for quite some time …’

  ‘… What diamonds! …’

  ‘… In the earrings, which the Señora can’t be without for a minute … as you know … And he carried on staring, staring … I’m … I am frightened as well, at times … I’m a poor old woman too, like her … and with this trouble here, you understand …’ (meaning her goitre) ‘… I too am getting on for sixty-eight …’

  ‘… Sixty-eight, eighty-eight … it’s all the same …’: he shrugged his shoulders and whipped the robinias with his cane.

  ‘… And that’s true as well, Doctor! … we folk have nothing to lose … that’s for sure … And he kept his eyes fixed on the diamonds … the Señora was going about the house: and he was walking behind her … and he’d carry on gazing at one ear … then the other … and she’d go into the big room, and he behind her … and she’d come back into the kitchen to clean the coffee machine, the one with the whistle that she won’t let even me touch, no way! no way! … and him behind into the kitchen …

  ‘Ah! what a life, what a life!’ she continued, ‘with that fear always there, the whole day! … without a minute’s peace! And all the time he’s telling her not to lose them, to be careful … and he grits his teeth and says: ¡anda, anda! … diamonds won’t save you! Save her from what? you tell me … She has every right to wear her own earrings, poor woman, that her husband gave her … and after all the work she’s done! …’

  The doctor remained silent, staring at the ground: with the tip of his cane he had found a stone more cussed than the others, set in the ground like a precious stone: and you needed two hands to pull it out.

/>   ‘… And sometimes, all of a sudden, to her face, he yells that they cost five thousand pieces, five thousand pieces! the diamonds, he shouts … and that they’ve suffered cold and hunger for the pears: not even he knows what he’s talking about: for the pears? cold? hunger? … and then he bursts out with a sound only he can make, as though it were the devil laughing, at the feet of a dead man that he’s just snaffled and is about to smuggle away: and he says that women who have five thousand pieces on them are beasts, and nothing but beasts; he says, stingy beasts … and that meanwhile the dead have packed out the cemeteries, so there’s no longer anyone who wants to die, not even the beasts …

  ‘You should see her then, Doctor!, that poor old woman, crying! … crying in secret … perhaps with the windows banging away’ (that’s what she said) ‘… with all that wind, blowing through the house … And then she gets me to call Giuseppe, but she also comes following behind me, frightened to stay there alone with her son, I tell you! …

  ‘And he says women are like the blacks in Africa … like the Arabs, he says, with pearls in their noses, women, with rings through their noses … through the middle’ (she lifted the two plates a little) ‘between the holes, you know … for that’s what he says the blacks do … their women, those of the blacks …’

  ‘… What stories!’, complained the doctor, shrugging his shoulders: and began swinging his leg: ‘… he’s a very decent old devil! Who knows what you women understand … what you women dream up …’