The Experience of Pain

by Carlo Emilio Gadda

  With this, the examination came to an end.

  From the open window the light of the countryside; streaked by the sound of endless crepitation.

  The patient pulled himself back together, got off the bed; his useless figure recovered itself from an indignity not justified by the circumstances; the doctor, with a tone of mild shame, confessed that he had found nothing to worry about: he shook his head: nothing, absolutely nothing. He prescribed Sedobrol cubes, each to be dissolved in a cup of warm water, twice a day, between meals. Warm water … that’s right … Water, water. He grew impatient when the engineer asked him a couple of foolish questions; or perhaps he was distracted. In a teacup … yes, yes, of course … but certainly … so as to make a good broth … yes, in short … a cup of broth. The bismuth, if he thought fit, he could leave out.

  And the cicadas, population of the external immensity, masters of the light.

  The son thanked him for the advice. He took the prescription from the doctor, read the few words on it, and the name and telephone number, put it down on the table on the far side of the beds, by the first window; on it he placed a small, clear polyhedron of sparkling, polished crystal. He appeared to have given no importance to the doctor’s observation, nor, now, to the ceremony that had preceded it: indeed, on buttoning himself up, he appeared to have forgotten his ailment. ‘Le mal physique’, in this case: le mal visible.

  There was nonetheless something else: his eyes remained sad, somewhat mute in expression, as though on the return of some painful thought momentarily allayed; over his whole face could be seen a dismay, an anguish, that the doctor had not a moment’s hesitation in privately ascribing ‘to a new crisis of confidence in life’: and also, most certainly, ‘to the consequences of the gastric dysfunction that had so disturbed him the year before’. Besides, for some time he had recognized the abrupt changes in that appearance and in the whole of the patient’s demeanour. His eyes seemed to desire and at the same time to reject every word of comfort. An inscrutable opaqueness and, it might be said, a general sensory obtuseness gave a note of quiescence to that characterless countenance: then, all of a sudden, disagreeable prominences, even protuberances. His eyes lit up into a keenness veiled with shyness, into a sort of childish readiness, his speech came alive before unexpectedly drying up, as if suddenly overwhelmed at the harangues of his fellow man. At times the rigour of his questionings took on tones that were abrupt, curt, harsh, becoming fearful where he had detected some practical superiority, whether it be hatred, wealth, power, authority.

  At that moment his eyes seemed to show the certainty of poverty, to view solitude with a desperate dignity. The doctor and father, nevertheless, remained of the opinion that even a drowning man, if he really wishes it, can be fished from the waves, from the howling night: the social fabric then comes to his rescue: and it acts against the asphyxia of the individual with a vigour not dulled by charity; it works like artificial respiration, which, after the blue breath of hope, restores the red warmth of life to the prostrate man. The patient fell silent. So the doctor decided to meet him halfway by venturing an invitation, and he did so in that rather gruff though nonetheless cordial manner of his: and so, putting his head out of the window for a moment, he praised the season and the countryside: ‘… days like these! … but look! … it’s a crime to waste them … as you are doing’. Once again he praised the mountains, some of which he named. Then the waters. Then the climate and the coolness of the Serruchón, zephyrs and balms. Then from the salubriousness of the air he moved up, up, little by little, to the blueness of the skies, to the new asphalting of the main roads, to the Romans of long ago and the Chryslers of today; until so casually, and vaguely, as though talking to himself, or between one cloud and another, he finally came out with the suggestion of a short excursion by motor car the following day, with Giovanna and Pina.

  ‘My Pina will drive … You should see her! … For that matter, everyone says so … but that one there was born at the wheel! … But then … you know Giuseppina … a demon! … A demon in petticoats …’

  The male descendant of Gonzalo Pirobutirro d’Eltino didn’t bat an eyelid: he looked beyond objects, beyond chattels: an unexplainable sorrow came over his face and indeed almost his whole person. Like those who have a brother or a son there: and they see the Alpine peaks steaming, steaming, with no return, filled with clouds of cumulus, in a distant thunder. The woodworm corkscrew had not given up its progress; after the accumulation of each interval it fell to self-commemoration.

  ‘Alone so much, reading: or, worse still, writing! But what the devil do you read, then! … What do you write? … Your memoirs? … You can wait a while before writing those, until you’re ninety! … On days like these! In places like these! … Enjoy the air, the light. Move about, move about … go … become intoxicated with air, you too, like everyone else … look at the others and how they can take things philosophically … look at Borella … Tabacchi … Pedroni …’

  These were recent immigrants and expert cultivators of lettuce; undoubtedly of Aryan race, to judge from their names. Their intimacy with their villa – each their own, of course – had led them to that form of irreversible anaesthesia, though ruddy-cheeked and cheered by celery, which is one of the great benefits of a stay in the Serruchón area.

  From dusk to dawn an unmuzzled dog barked over them in the happiest moments of their sleep, while the night patrol kept watch from outside.

  ‘But don’t you see? what days? what sunlight? … Come, come! … You too should learn to drive … Pina can give you a lesson … a demon like her … You’ll see, you’ll see …’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right, Doctor, and I thank you;’ he objected ceremoniously: ‘but tomorrow morning once again I must be … that is … I could leave at eleven …’ His voice failed him halfway, between his throat and lips. He listed various commitments that would take him away that very next day from the peace of the villa (immersed in that marinade of cicadas and light), that would deprive him, to his unspeakable regret, of such a delightful excursion ‘with your young ladies’. He added, almost to complete the justification, that he felt real regret that he didn’t know how to drive. But now he’d put his foot in it. The stupidity of that comment, after the paternal suggestion of driving lessons, would have seemed obvious to anyone less absent-minded or less blundering than he.

  ‘… But I tell you again, there’s my Pina … yes, yes … Giuseppina … You remember her, no? … you’ve spoken to her many times! …’ The Pirobutirro son seemed rather vague: he easily confused the Giovannas with the Giuseppinas, even with the Teresinas: but most of all, he was terrorized by the salad of Marias and proclitic Marias, that is the Marys, Mays, Maria Pias, Anna Marias, Marisas, Luisa Marias and Maria Teresas, all the more when they turned out to be sisters, five together, who had to be told apart, there and then, in the hubbub of social gatherings, after only the briefest introductions. ‘Anyway, it doesn’t matter, I tell you,’ continued the doctor; ‘you’ll be sitting there like a father; maybe in the front, where it’s not so bumpy … viewing the countryside … savouring it in all its gentleness … And Pina will drive. Don’t you trust my Pina?’

  Oh! of course! He completely trusted ‘Señorita Giuseppina’. (That onomastic abstraction gave him no way of finding his bearings.) He thanked him once again; most heartily. ‘… But it’s not possible …’ He let out a sigh. He was very worried. Almost irritated. He was very courteous. A sense of tedium, of vexation ran in his blood: an indescribable leaden anxiety in his gastric system, in the region of his duodenum: a sense of guilt, of dereliction, in his attitude. Things painful, distant – too distant from that exchange of words – gathered in his now tired and misty eye.

  Meanwhile, after twelve enormous chimes, the midday bells had sent the full clang of glory into the hills, beyond the roof-tiles and the smoke of the chimneys. Twelve drops, like immense, celestial bronze, had continued to fall one after the other, unrelenting, on the shiny leaves of th
e banzavóis: yet unheeded by the coil of the asp, the soft, tobacco-speckled terror. Overcoming robinias and cicadas, and hornbeams, and everything, the mothers of sound hurled themselves into their own propaganda, all of a sudden: which broke into the infinite blindness of the light. The screeching of the beasts of light was submerged in a propagation of waves of bronze: they radiated into the countryside of sunshine, the desperate progress of the roads, the large, green leaves, infinite laboratories of chlorophyll: five hundred lira of waves, of waves! five hundred, five hundred!, enough enough, Señor Francisco, but this here does no harm … of waves, of waves! from the bell tower: from the stocking-coloured spire, author of that Tridentine bacchanal. Frenzied sikinnis, they offered up the entrails and then tossed them against the mountain, in waves, tumult of the Lord made matter, androgynous Bacchantes to the municipalistic lust of every white-haired officiant. Upside down in folly and immodesty, alternately they displayed their clappers, like wild, pounding pistils, or for the hunger of the poor, the intractable inanity of the cervix: and the wheel, beside each bell, complicated the pattern: and they were the bindweed of the Enormous Bronze, that would swing up, a tumult of dementia. Intoxicated with sound, they seesawed for some time, discharging the glory; glory! glory! with which they were sated: ringing out into every field, for some puchero. And chopped chiquoréa dressed with linseed oil.

  The two left the bedroom. The doctor seemed unwilling to relent: ‘… we, in any event, can wait …’: he relied on the ultimate value of that indication, on the solid reality of the fait accompli: ‘… you, then, can arrange matters as you wish …’: and his tone this time was the quiet tone of the just man, of the weak man who cannot counter imposition. ‘Tomorrow morning at seven, seven-fifteen … departure!’ But reference to that golden hour brought only exasperation to the recoiling patient, for whom every genial expression of happiness seemed to create inexplicable alarm.

  ‘… Seven-thirty at the latest … when the Seegrün is still in shadow … You should see it! … And you’ll also find out, at last, whether Pina can drive … whether or not … and how she can drive! …’

  They began walking downstairs, slowly, the doctor in front. He paused on each step, without turning, talking almost to himself: ‘it can be said that she knows them all, all the roads of the Serruchón! … From Iglesia down, down to Prado: from Novokomi to Terepáttola. A thunderbolt! You just have to see her coming. Or perhaps from a distance, how she takes a bend: how casually, with such elegance! … that you know straightaway: it’s her!’

  A few days before, on the main road to Iglesia, Señorita Giuseppina had just taken a bend (with her engine off) at kilometre nine, when she found Recalcati in her headlights, in other words, in her way: a mountain villager from Iglesuela, walking down with cheeses for the markets, and regarded as a man of character, like most mountain folk. But, with the empty basket on his back, and encountering a lorry with sacks of cement, she suddenly halved that smooth glide that should have taken her as far as the first houses of Prado without burning a cent.

  Forced to find a solution there and then, the girl, as usual, approached it with masterful lucidity. And after the sacrifice of having to brake (and her heart pounding right down to her stockings) she still had enough thrust to give him, Recalcati, a light shove, with the help of the mudguard, but so gracefully, so well calibrated, that she landed her fellow and his basket, without further ado, on the other side of the ditch, right against the wall of Villa Giuseppina itself. Sharing the same name had brought her good luck. The sturdy mountain lad, having felt the taste of the wall, consulted the doctor (another one, not her father, of course), consulted the magistrate: all three immediately saw there was no evidence – no hubo elemento – for claiming ‘even a centavo of damages’: neither from her, Higueróa Giuseppina di Felipe y Carlotta Morelli, nor from Señor Bertoloni, the legal administrator of Villa Giuseppina.

  ‘… Muy bien, la muchacha … muy bien … muy bien …’, the young man muttered broodily, through gritted teeth, thinking back over what had happened: as if masticating a toothpick. The doctor must have had some suspicion: ‘… Last week … Thursday the 22nd … you’ll have heard about it as well … an hour later everyone knew … it would have been just about five, five-thirty … after the kilometre sign near the hostería, after the pergola, you know? it’s the worst bend in the whole arrondimiento … where there’s also the Bertoloni caretaker’s lodge … well, after all, you might say she saved his life … Recalcati, you know, the cheese man …’ The son had to allow the cheeses to enter the painful circle of apperception as well. It was the baggage of the world, of the world of phenomena. The evolution of a sequence that becomes richer, with time: among the peals of the great bell, oblation: (from òbfero, òbtuli). And those things told by time and by the spirits sink down in the evidence of the day, from their foolish limb: as from a full cornucopia, a marvellous cataract of apples, peaches, dried figs.

  He arranged them, the cheeses, as best he could, in that offensive field of non-forms: in that caravanserai of impediments of every kind: cicadas onions clogs, nebephrenic bronzes, palaeo-Celtic Giuseppes, Battistinas faithful for decades, goitred imbeciles from birth: the whole Acheron of the mala suerte dribbled down from the wisdom and prescience of the fathers, who blithely and cheerfully read there, in that river of tar, the dear normality of contingency, the healthy naivety of country custom.

  And in his blitheness he saw once more that fine rural scene of the basket and the mudguard, a fine tapestry dream: a rather updated Louis Quinze: ‘Les quatre saisons. L’été’. All scythes, baskets, crops, cows, country folk: and Giuseppina hurtling into him. Oh! that acceleration, so measured and reasonable, inflicted – via buttocks – on the lagging step of mulishness!

  But for him, all of time became weariness, stupidity.

  The conversation showed no sign of coagulating. ‘Besides, my girls could give you a few driving lessons. Who doesn’t know how to drive, these days? … Even Manoel Torre’s aunt has learned, the old lady! And how she gallops! … you should see her driving down to Prado every Saturday, to the market, as soon as they need any peas, any tomato … I’m sure on the third or fourth try you’d manage wonderfully …’: he raised his shoulders: ‘… don’t you reckon?’ Then he lowered his voice as if to share some secret: ‘… with your intelligence … with all the mechanics you have in your head …’

  The idea of lessons wasn’t so bad, poor doctor. ‘And believe me: you’d enjoy it … What more do you want? my dear Señor Gonzalo, at their age … they’re a live spark …’ Even the live spark was greeted by the son with a smile: they were brief, circumspect smiles, which took the discussion no further. Having reached the area at the foot of the stairs that served as a lobby, they began to shuffle their feet on the paving, both of them, as if they wanted to test the brick: the doctor collected his cane, which he had left to one side.

  They went out on to the terrace, from where the summer could be seen, to the south and to the west. The bells were silent: the cicadas filled the immensity, the light. A sense of puchero being swallowed down at family dinner tables followed the unifying metallic clang of the liturgy. The terrace is at the same level as the small back garden, with which it communicated directly, after the single obstacle of a serizzo stone step. This triangular garden, with a small vegetable patch, of minimal size, with onions and vines, and fig tree, all cool and shady in the morning, enabled anyone to enter the house from the back, pushing through the green-painted iron gate, from which the doctor had arrived and was now about to leave. The white house stood squarely on the hillside, and indeed at the top, facing south, just by the last slope: which was 4.25 metres high: the height of one storey. To the front, against the sun, there was an extra level.

  The view from the terrace stretched out until it was lost among the distant hills, and perhaps further, into the sun. It disappeared among the late horizons; and among the last fumes of the factories, barely distinguishable in the haze: it rested on th
e villas, and the gardens, bright green, age-old tufts, surrounding the mild and familiar company of those small lakes.

  They were bright blue levels, opaque, future peat bogs, among the insurgence of the thousand agreeable incidents in a serene orography that the passage of the Graces had known. A land clothed in August: spread over it were names, towns. And it was a land of people and of populations, a land clothed for work.

  Meanwhile, the doctor and the son paused: they had reached the parapet, attracted by that evidence of life. All had still to carry on, and to be accomplished: all works. Tomorrow, peering out from the eastern ridges edged with gold, would find things as they were: like the blacksmith who finds his hammer in the place where he’d left it in the forge. Shoulders hunched, gazing intently, the son had both hands on the wooden balustrade, his arms open and apart, like tired wings. He looked out sadly. ‘… My mother has grown old …’, he said. Then with violence: ‘… It’s been years … I despair …’ He spoke these last words as if in a dream: and the hour chiming from a distant tower seemed to suggest: ‘all has been accomplished’. An extraordinary anticipation brought that false sequence down upon those chicken houses beyond the village boundary, like a cruel jest: but not for long, not for long!, and the true hour would strike, the serious truth: the incontrovertible decree from Lukones. He drew back. The doctor looked at him. He had now joined his hands beneath his belly, as monks do, fingers between fingers, as though in prayer, white, long, slightly swollen at the knuckles: unpractised, it was clear, at any mechanics, or engine, or pump, or dirty labour. His face sad, somewhat childish, with eyes misty and full of sadness, with nose prominent and fleshy like an animal from a foreign land (something between a kangaroo and a tapir), he looked over the perimeter wall towards the mountain, and the blueness beyond the mountains: perhaps, further, the skies and the monasteries, and nothingness. His mother, returning from the cemetery, would have to appear from behind the corner of the house, with the old umbrella that she used to steady herself: his mother! Having gone down the steps to the small gate through which everyone entered, the woman would perhaps support her, by the arm, so that she wouldn’t stumble. After having walked slowly along the path by the wall, quietly, announcing herself with the light crunch-crunch erosion of her slow footsteps. ‘… I can’t think what came over me … I complained to her about no flowers on the grave … and then she wanted to go herself … with these roads!’ He walked up to the corner of the house: looked across to the lane that came down from the villas higher up, down which his mother would have to walk, one stone after another, on her way back from the cemetery … He returned to the terrace. ‘… I’d told her so that she could tell José, her dear José, the peon … our beloved fellow citizen whose taxes we pay … whom we pay …’: the doctor, head bowed, whipped his right calf with his cane: ‘… electricity … lodging … firewood … ink … as of right … so that he deigns to clomp about the house in the filthiest clothing he can find … Two small geranium plants, surely, on that grave! … but he says they won’t take root there … So my mother wanted to go there herself, frightened that I would shout …’