The Experience of Pain

by Carlo Emilio Gadda

  ‘Haven’t you joined the Nistitúo? …’, interrupted the doctor drily. He threw in the question in the most cursory way, to stop all this idle nonsense once and for all, which was too, too tedious. For three pesos!fn1 Come! This was too much. He seemed to be falling asleep on his feet, with eyelids jutting. Legs apart, hands resting on his stick, like a drowsy Roland on the hilt of a stunted Durendal. His speech, this time, had the short, dry words of one who is sleeping, yet too profoundly not to overlook the human situation and man’s notorious babble. And of one who comes out at the appropriate moment with two words, short and cutting, but full of worth. Or rather, of wisdom. His eyelids, upper and lower, almost entirely covered his reddened bulbs, which jutted out in line with his transient gaze.

  ‘The Nistitúo?’, asked the son, with renewed apprehension in his face.

  ‘Yes … the Nistitúo … That’s the only thing to do, I reckon … Can’t be safer than that … for anyone asleep … at night … in a lonely villa …’

  ‘… And where is this Nistitúo? … Who would I need to talk to in order to sign up? …’: the doctor fell silent: ‘… yes, I mean … where do you pay … is there an office where you go to apply: do I want that slip of paper stuck in the keyhole, every night? … In practical terms, I mean, where do I have to go? … To Prado? … To Iglesia? …’

  He was asking all those questions just for the sake of asking: (or, at least, this was what the doctor thought): to appear rather more respectable in that umpteenth crossing from delirium to reason: or just to be obstructive: since in reality he knew perfectly well where you had to go to pay. You paid Palumbo, he came to the house, he’d look after everything, even the signing, in his capacity as the Institute’s representative, proxy, night patrolman, and collector. Yet, gripped by a certain inner vexation, the good doctor wanted to add a final worry for the man so reluctant to woo his daughter Pina.

  ‘… Where do you have to go? … Why, to the Vigilancia para la Noche … which has an office in Prado … Excuse me … But … you really are making a mountain out of a molehill … In Prado, in Prado … At the top of the town, high up, Calle de los Pájaros … you’ve never been? … You know … at the far end of Corso Pastrufazio, but some way before the monument … right-hand side … those thirty steps or so … where you start getting out of breath for Nuestra Señora de los Milagros … Well: on the first level, to the left, where that doorway is …’. The son couldn’t remember, or hadn’t been up that far. ‘But of course you remember! But of course! By the barber … and just opposite there’s that other one, and a door, green, with a spy-hole, and just inside, all those majolica tiles … of course you know.’

  Majolica meant porcelain. The son greeted the porcelain with an automatic question mark, formed by his eyebrows, which moved on their own initiative towards the centre of his forehead. The rest of his face was inert. ‘It’s more for hygiene …’, muttered the doctor under his breath. ‘… Well … There opposite is the Nistitúo … Señorita Gamberoni,’ he shrugged his shoulders, ‘… Dolores! … Who doesn’t know Dolores? … They call her the conscript’s godmother …’: his manner became abrupt, offhand: ‘… You go there to Dolores: and once you’re there, there on your two feet, tell her you want the night patrol, you too … that you want the same as everyone else … Hand her your pájaro … and it’s as good as done … Go, go, and you’ll see: afterwards you’ll feel much happier …’

  Pájaro is the Maradagalese word for the twenty-peso banknote: and it comes, they say, from the springtime colour of the paper, somewhere between sparrow and canary: but others say it comes from the fact that the republican eagle, perching on the sword of Republican Justice, looks rather like a little sparrow: being so fat, cunning, and greedy.

  They were approaching the gate; Señor Don Gonzalo fell silent, having noted the quack’s insolence. The gravel, under their shoes, was doing its job, for its lord and master as well as for the guest. From encouragements to liven up, with Pina at the wheel, they were now down to the scorn, to the exasperation of the disappointed father; yes! to Dolores, the conscripts! And yet, the idea of the doctor’s leaving brought him an increasing sense of pain. The white walls would carry on baking in their hot inanity, caravans of ants were marching over them: tiny black specks of movement and of being.

  His mother was not back!

  He was also suffering, en masse, for all the other insolences, from others, far away, people with money. He suspected that even his mother, even she!, must hold him in contempt: he remembered certain kindnesses she had shown to people truly worthy of respect, such as the violinist: despite being a dwarf, with a large nose, and very loutish. That year they’d taken a liking to him, and invited him to Lukones. Welcomed him into the glory of the villa, the dwarf!, surrounded by chicken livers. He, a boy, had turned up with a circular hole in the top part of his right shoe, where he had a corn: peremptory, plaintive, he had dissected the Calliopean syndrome.

  And generously glug-glug went the wine flask; from the neck; tipped horizontally straightaway; among the splendours of the tablecloth.

  At the whitefish, he began whistling between his teeth, since he was removing bones from his labial commissures, with his fingers, spitting them on to the floor; which was, all around, full of globs, and bones. When it came to the croconsuelo, he used his knife to lay the croconsuelo on his tongue: (and slurped both of them together, the soft mess and the blade, in a single lick). He, the son, had some fairly harsh words at that time, though still a child. ‘Use the fork!’ He protested that the knife was better for croconsuelo. He told him to go and eat in the kitchen, with Carolina, and the violinist turned pale, but the mother, with great tact, defended his sacrosanct status, which was that of guest. More than as a guest, he was sacrosanct through the mother’s choice.

  That sudden memory made his heart beat with anger: he clenched his jaws: he imagined desperately ordering a special consignment of strong rope from the hemp mill, with a breaking strength of five hundred kilos.

  But his mother, where was she? perhaps the short stretch of road, in her weary state, was an endless walk. His mother had gone, from the house, from the sun.

  His anguish seemed to turn to fear, like a stray dog who wanders about aimlessly, following the first smell that the road offers; and all of a sudden a burning ember falls on his back. The doctor realized he had gone too far. He regretted that stupid comment about Dolores. Walking ahead, he turned, now at the gate. The peon came and went without looking at them, clomping about, holding a small bowl, for the chickens, busy with his chores.

  ‘In any event, there’s no need to go all the way up there … as I said … up to Señorita Gamberoni. Just talk to Pedro, I mean to Gaetano, the first morning you hear him pass here … He’ll give you the payment slip straight away … Once you’ve made the first payment, it’s just the same as if you’ve signed the contract to join up … They give an undertaking for twenty-five years …’

  Those twenty-five years immediately became an obsessive idea for someone so fanatical about freedom, who’d have preferred to choose, to shape his own destiny, minute by minute.

  ‘Because they have just the one contract … a standard contract … no doubt based on the regulations … since they stick to the regulations … Indeed, if I remember correctly, there must be some requirement of law …’

  ‘… Of law … I don’t think so …’ the son spluttered, turning red, with harsh severity. When it came to the law, his concept was sui generis; it didn’t come from interpretation of the edict, but was part and parcel of his very being, biologically inherited. And he found it difficult to recognize the presence of the law in an abuse or arbitrary use of power and, above all, in oppression. But, in judging this provision of the patrolman to be an abuse, he was certainly mistaken. Perhaps his condition was what Sérieux, Capgras, and other contemporary psychiatrists have appropriately called ‘interpretative delirium’: distinguishing it from classical or hallucinatory delirium, as well as from imaginat
ive delirium.

  ‘Whether it’s law or not,’ replied the doctor, ‘… what does it matter to you?’

  ‘… But that canker there, isn’t he enough? …’ said the son, ‘for whom I pay lodging, taxes, wood, electricity, services? … so that he might deign to stir himself … when someone comes stealing … and in any event, when they did actually come, they’d catch him … with a stick, beating down those few almonds … then putting the blame on the frost, on the fog, on hailstones …’.

  ‘… But they’re all like this …’

  ‘… And after his pilfering, do I have to pay the Nistitúo as well? …’ Once again he had changed his idea, attitude, tone: his anguish was once again harshness. ‘… There’s nothing to steal! … What do you think they’re going to steal, in this poorhouse? … An odd fork here or there? … My Cervantes? … What do you reckon thieves would make of him, a Cervantes in Serruchón? …’

  The doctor could manage nothing better than a shrug.

  ‘… So that I can be left in sacred peace to enjoy my Ariosto, in bed, my Boccaccio, when even the clappers of the church bells have quietened down, after the propaganda; so that I can enjoy my classics reclining in my bed, stretched out full-length like a caliph, why do I have to pay a pájaro a month to Gaetano? (Over the past few years he had acquired a reasonable knowledge of the Italian language …) ‘… for the Nistitúo’s invisible patrol? … When crickets are all there is, in the pitch-black countryside, to mark out the time in the world? …’

  ‘… Who knows?’ said the doctor; ‘if they get it into their heads … that there’s something to steal … You can be sure, they don’t worry about how to get in … there’s always some money in the house … There’s the silver … The Señora, your mother, then, she has those diamonds … given that everyone sees them … and even from a distance …’

  The ordinary man, even though he’s a doctor, easily forgets he’s talking to someone who is sick. The son, in his pain, saw a bride from the time of Presidente Uguirre, when there were still horse-drawn trams, and her husband, and the glitter of the presents, bringing her a blush of joy, a smile. Filled with hope, she looked forward to the years ahead, she questioned the warm breath of the future with the quivering flower of her person. But old women, in the dark lanes of winter, have diamonds snatched from their earlobes. (Dead sons, lost elsewhere, oblivious, beneath the crosses of the Cordillera, cannot defend them.) Their poor person, from whom the torment of childbirth has been cancelled out, and the torment of death, hunched, debilitated, is unworthy of pearls. A dung heap opens up in the darkness.

  The doctor repeated: ‘Who knows? … In any event, it’s safer …’

  ‘You’re afraid we’re not safe? …’ the son insisted; ‘these are peaceful places …’

  ‘… Oh!’ the other man scoffed, ‘… if they were all baptized here at Lukones … those who will flash the light in your eyes! … There’s even a stolen motor car or two … this world … No? … And they know how to drive a motor car, you can be sure! … Even with its lights off …

  ‘Last year at the Carpioni house, up at the farm, then the Brocchi … They didn’t steal much at the Brocchi, I admit … half a dozen rabbits … a few hens … it wasn’t even clear whether they’d done it to silence them … they must have slit their throats there and then … This year at the Brugnoni, at the Carpioni and another attempt at the Teresotti, two months ago … Now, I reckon the Carpioni and the Brugnoni were two masterstrokes … No? And they, of course, were downstairs eating salad, the Carpioni!, on the ground floor … You know? lettuce from their garden, which had been given an honourable mention at the fruit and vegetable show at Terepáttola … honourable mention, first class …’ The son’s face brightened up, a ray of good humour emerged. The doctor continued undeterred: ‘… Then, at the Brugnoni, they found the German shepherd dog dead … One of those poisoned titbits … And so they could clean the place up … Silver, napkins, tablecloths … It’s not like in the city, I can tell you, where someone, once he starts thieving, has people out on the staircases … and on the roads, then, all of a sudden, he has the crowd at his heels … so that even when they get there late … the police … But here!, before people get out of bed! … they think twice! … Here you’re alone, in the dark, in the middle of the countryside … that’s right … as you just said … Except that the crickets have nothing to do with it …’

  The peon clomped about once again in the brief space of the garden-triangle, before the whiteness of the house, busy, wearing trousers tied roughly around his hips, sweating, scattering wafers of compressed manure behind him, over the crunch-crunch, as if to mark out his route; which broke up beneath that quadrupeding of clogs, so worn down that they had become slippers. A cat followed and then trotted past him. The man went into his employers’ house by the main entrance, not bothering to close the glass door, which suddenly slammed behind him. The cat had slipped nimbly into the house, a velvet shadow between the man’s feet.

  The doctor, with those stories, seemed to want to amuse himself by frightening a child. In reality he wanted to be seen as well informed, to surprise Señor Gonzalo with the accuracy of his news: and then to point out how, despite everything, the police in the arrondimiento were highly efficient at keeping watch at night. He was a public official, working for the health department: he shared a fellow feeling, to some extent, with all the other employees and officials in the Province, and perhaps the Republic: he enjoyed special benefits from the official environment of Serruchón, save for that of earning a salary adequate to meet his living requirements. His dentist’s surgery, at Prado, was patrolled free of charge by the Vigilancia; the rotten teeth he pulled from the mouths of the Pradesi, every Tuesday and Friday, had not excited greed; no motorized gang had yet moved in at night, to ransack it.

  Gonzalo, in that being of his, an oscillating graph of extreme elongation, consisting of an alternation of conflicting moods, of a succession of opposing states of mind, now Saturnine now Dionysian now Eleusinian now Corybantic, was perhaps far from having a conception of thieves as thieves – ut jugulent homines surgunt de nocte latrones – but the thought of his mother distressed him. In his state of anguish, thieves were symbolic of an offence that could be committed against his mother or, more precisely, of a failure to assist her indigent solitude. But there was a failure in everything, for his mother.

  ‘… Certainly … croaking frogs are no use …’ pondered the doctor. ‘… There’s him!’ replied the son, ‘to satisfy whatever the law desires … He’ll have to do’: he pointed to the doorway through which the peon had vanished. ‘He has the revolver, the one my mother has given him; he has the shotgun; the one he’s borrowed from Besteiro; for me, he’s a brute … So I reckon that’s enough …’

  ‘… All right … but it’s a question of cooperating for the best … each according to their abilities; … of everyone coming together with a sense of solidarity … yes, in short … of public spirit …’

  ‘I’m paying no more: either to the Celts, or to the Indios …’ The doctor was fast coming to the conclusion that Señor Don Gonzalo was mad. ‘No. I don’t believe in the patrolman, in the same way that I don’t believe in the omniscience of the volcano Akatapulqui, which, as you know, is the volcano god that the Incas worship, the god of sulphur and flames … that rises up and shoots fire, there, in the darkness … after the bleakness of the Cordillera …’

  ‘… So what do you believe in? …’

  ‘… In the Institute for Progress in the Arts … certainly not …’ (This was an inter-American institute, now in poor shape: it was run by the League of Nations and gave a living, during those years, to a good hundred or so officials.) ‘I don’t believe in the patrolman … who flits about … like a shadow … sticking his slip of paper in the lock … of the gate; who has two hundred and fifty villas, and surrounding woodland, to cycle around, in the dark … spread across three or four municipal districts …’

  ‘… Well: at leas
t you know there’s someone who’s patrolling … and he’s a public official …’

  ‘… What’s he patrolling, with two hundred and fifty villas to patrol? Villas, fortifications, church buildings, and monasteries, for both sexes? Tell me, what’s he patrolling?

  ‘Once he slips away along the wall where the Besteiro live, they can dance the tango at Lukones for as long as they wish, no? the villa ransackers … Once he reaches San Juan, on the way out, I suppose, or Lukones, let’s say the stables of Manoel Torre, who’s to know what the devil is going on at Villa Brocchi, or Villa Teresotti? And while he’s slipping his bit of paper in at Villa Brocchi, what’s happening to the toothbrushes at Villa Giuseppina? The ghost … it’s the moment when he can amuse himself with whatever comes to mind, under the nose of all the assize courts in Maradagàl: mark my words: that’s the very moment when he can have as much fun as he likes … They say he’s a kleptomaniac … that he has a weakness for toothbrushes …’

  The doctor smiled at this reference to the theft, which was thought to be supernatural: not so much because of the words themselves, as for the tone of stern violence and indignation with which Don Gonzalo had hurled his invective, mistaking the ghost for a personal political enemy. The most popularly accepted versions as to the methods and possible perpetrator of the theft of the relics (toothbrush, slippers and rubber bulb) also included the version that the ghost himself had stolen them, on a night of Friday the 13th. The theory, moreover, had done much to benefit the coffers of the ‘lotería nacional’.

  ‘I don’t believe in this piece of paper … I don’t believe in it! And then this infernal Nistitúo is for the night … only for the night … They could just as well come during the day … Or as soon as the cockerel has seen the egg-white of the dawn … There … between the mountains to the east …’fn2