The Experience of Pain

by Carlo Emilio Gadda

  And the gloom nevertheless allowed her to feel her way to a candle, softened, a saucer with some matches, left there for the night hours, for anyone coming home late. No one came home. She struck a match several times, another, on the sandpaper: and here, at last, the yellowness of that tremulous recognition of the brick floor, here a sliver of hideous darkness, fleeing away: but then suddenly returning in the stillness of a snare: the blackness of a scorpion. She drew back, shut her eyes, in her final solitude: raising her head, like one who knows there’s no point pleading for kindness. And she shrank within herself, close to annihilation, a painful spark of time: and in time she had been a woman, wife, and mother. She stopped now, terror-stricken, before the faithless weapon that still she used to push back the darkness. And the blasts and the rampaging glory of the storm followed her there, where she had gone down, down, into the dark depth of every memory, and savagely they hurled themselves at her. The repugnant snare of obscurity: the blackest stain, born from dampness and from evil.

  Her mind no longer knew why, why!, forgetting, in her extreme distress, that a supplication, or love, can be sought from the charity of the peoples:fn3 she no longer recalled anything: all previous assistance from her people was long gone, distant. In vain she had given birth to infants, had given them her milk: no one would realize it in the sulphurous glory of the storms, and of the chaos, no one gave it any further thought: other events had fallen across those distant visceral years, across the torment, across the forgotten tenderness: and the clamour of victory, and the rhetoric and the pomp of victory: and, for her, old age: this last solitude to close the final heavens of the spirit.

  Molten wax dripped on to her trembling hand, burning it: the icy breath of the storm, from the window of the staircase, inflected and laminated the flame, making it flicker over the pool and over the grease of the wax: that glimmer of the wick grew dim, in a deathly farewell.

  She no longer saw anything. Everything was horror, hatred. The thunder loomed over everything and the electric flashes plummeted in anger, gridded repeatedly by the slats of the closed shutters, high up. And here the scorpion, awake, had moved on, as if to one side, as if to avoid her, and she, trembling, had drawn back inside her lone being, stretching out a damp and weary hand, as though wanting to stop it. Her hair hung over her brow: she dared not say a thing, with lips dry, bloodless: no one, no one would have heard her, beneath the clamour. And who could she call, in these changed times, when, after so many years, there was now so much hatred towards her? If those infants themselves, over the years, had been a pointless suffering, pride of cemeteries: lost! … in the vanity of the earth …

  Why? Why?

  From the dark depth of the staircase she looked up from time to time, and even during those hours, to distinguish silent interludes in the storm, the stupid nothingness of space: and of the intervening evening, from the eaves outside, drops, like tears, or the compassionate silence. She imagined that the sudden thrusts of each blast, having hurtled through each room, had left almost like a tardy tribe to regroup towards the plain and the night, where they rejoined their migrant flock. A shutterfn4 was banging, striking, against the wall of the house. The trees, outside, she heard, gave off light droplets, towards night, cleansed as if from weeping.

  No one saw her, in the depth of fear, down there, alone, where the yellow light of the wick flickered, paled into the shadows, from the shelf, slowly dying in its liquefied wax. But if someone had happened to see her, oh! even a landsknecht! he would have felt that this face raised upwards, petrified, was not even attempting to plead, from far-off distances. Her loose hair rose from her brow, like a breath of horror. Her face barely emerged from the sombre swathe, her cheeks were a channel to the impossibility of tears. Her scraping fingers of old age seemed to be pressing down, down, into the plasma of the dark, the features of someone drawn to solitude. That face, like a spectre, turned away from the underground darknessfn5 to the supernal society of living beings, looking perhaps, without hope, for some assistance, for the voice of a man, of a son.

  This name rested lightly on her mind: and was a welcome appearance, a suggestion almost of morning and of a dream, a wing that flew high above, a light. Yes: there was her son, in the time, in the certainty and in the experience of the living: and even after the transformation, after the precipitation of the years. He walked among the living. He walked along the paths of men. Her first son. The one whose young body she had yearned to see, oh! days!, the proof of nature’s deficiency, a failed experiment of the womb after the accepted fraud of the seed, reluctant to have suffered, to have generated something not its own: in a long and untreatable eclipse of her whole being, in the weariness of the mind, of the womb opened then to the slow shame of birth, in the derision of shrewd traffickers and merchants, under the constriction of the duties they impose, so nobly promoting the common good, to the pain and misery of honest people. And now there was the son: just the one son. He wandered the parched roads along the fleeing elms, after the dust towards the evenings and the trains. Her first son. Oh! only the rain cloud – whistling skies lashing over the bent trees of the countryside – only terror could have separated her in such a way from the truth, from the sound security of memory. Her son: Gonzalo. Gonzalo, no, no!, he had not been awarded the funerary honours of darkness; his mother was appalled at the memory: away, away!, from the empty funeral, the dirges, the vile tears, the wailing: no candles had burnt down from on high, for him, between the pillars of the cold nave and arches darkened by the centuries. When the song of the abyss, among the candles, calls for those sacrificed to go down, down, into the verminous pomp of eternity.

  The sound of a horn, from the highway: and emptiness. All went silent, at last. The cats, at the usual time, of course, had come here into the house, from where only they could enter: velvet presences were staring at her from halfway down the staircase, with eyes like topazes in the dark, but cleaved with a cut, their pupils lined with hunger: and, meowing, they gave her a timid greeting, a cry: ‘it’s time.’ Order and domestic charity urged her up. And she, forgetting her own suffering, concerned herself immediately, as always, with that of others: she went upstairs. The clomping stride of the peasant sounded on the brick floor above: back from buying tobacco, and perhaps, she hoped, some salt: he called out to her in the darkness, spoke to her about the provisions and the fire, told her what time it was, about the devastated crops: he moved around, still jabbering, opening the shutters, the windows. Relieved, once again she saw the sweet and distant resplendence of the village, and those everlasting words blossomed in her sweet memory: ‘open the balconies – open the family terraces and loggias’: almost as though the reconstituted society of men had reappeared to her after a long night. And the faithful retainer, here, in front of the cats, was moving about the house: from his own hearth to this other, so spacious and gelid: carrying sparks, thyrsi: and then on the stairs: doors and windows banged behind the quadrupedal flight of clogs. And twigs and branches dropping more or less everywhere along the masculine cadence of the route. And the wind had lost itself towards the plain, in the direction of Pequeño.

  From the terrace, on summer evenings, she could see the smoke from the houses on the far horizon, which she imagined populated, each one, with the wife keeping house, the husband in the cattle shed, and the children. Girls were returning, in droves, from the factory, the looms, or winding rooms, or dying-vats at the silk mill: bicycles had brought apprentices back from the anvil: or they had come back behind their father with swaying oxen from the field, and he guiding and controlling his low cart by the shaft: a cart with short, sloping, open sides, with small wheels on slick and silent axles, piled up with implements and with labour, with logs and with grass: on which tired scythes lay, as though forgotten, in the evening shadow.

  Rustic offspring back numberless from work to the hearth, to a spoon: to the poor, chipped bowls that compensated their day.

  Far-off gleams of light, and song, reached her from outsid
e the house. As if a housewife had taken her copper pot outside to dry in the yard, to reflect, glinting, the sunset. Perhaps to greet her, the Señora!, who herself had once, like them, been a woman, a wife, and a mother. She envied no one. She wished all of them, all of them, the joy and calm strength of sons, that they would have work, health, peace: good marches in the morning where the captain commands them:fn6 that they would soon find a bride, once back from the regiment, in the fragrant throng of girls.

  And so, each morning, she found some reason or pretext to call for the washerwoman, the baker’s daughter, the woman who sold lemons or sometimes a rare Tierra Caliente orange, the retainer’s eighty-six-year-old mother, the fishmonger’s wife. (She had reason to think that the last of these didn’t have a complete set of clothes on her person.) They were poor, dark pikes, whose gloomy noses were pointed with the desire of poor people; pikes that had swum and swum through green poverty towards the silvery flash of Durendal; or tench, large, yellow lake fish with a greasy and vapid slime, which, even with carrots and celery, still had a muddy taste; harpooned up by line after the hour of sunset from the Seegrün, or from that other valley, most sweet in autumn, of the abbé-poet, or that other valley still further away, of the painter disciple, when it mirrors, beneath liquefied clouds, the upturned indentation of the mountain.

  With carrots and celery, on a slow flame, in the long pike kettle; she stirred that sludge with a wooden spoon: out of which came something full of bones, of celery, but fairly appetizing. Once it was cooked she tasted it, was pleased; offered it all to the women. The women told her what a good cook she was, rewarded her for her kindness.

  She envied no one. Perhaps, after so much courage and concern, after having striven and suffered, and having produced her offspring without tears, so that they, the strategists of the Republic, might have her finest blood at their disposal!, to do whatever they commanded; perhaps after the fiery precipitation of every day, and of the years, tired eclipse, perhaps the time was right: gentle assuager of every sacrifice: oh! it would take her to the place where people forget and are forgotten, beyond the houses and the walls, along the path awaited by cypresses.

  Rustic progeny, raising perpetual bread: let them grow up, let them love. She considered her story to be at its end. The sacrifice had been performed. In purity; for which God alone is knowledge. She was happy that other men and women might pick up the vital sense of the tale, deluded still, with their hot blood, in regarding it as necessary truth. Smoke issued from the houses on the far horizon. No one would have borne her spirit, or her blood, any longer in the empty days.

  But Gonzalo? Oh, the marvel of life!, a continuity fulfilled. Once again, from the terrace, she seemed to see the curve of the world: the sphere of lights, revolving; they vanished in a periwinkle-coloured mist towards the quietness of the night. On the world, bringer of wheat, and of song, the tranquil lights of midsummer. She seemed still to be witnessing it, from the terrace of her life, oh! still, for a moment, to be part of the calm evening. A sweet lightness. And, high in the sky, the sapphire of the ocean: which Alvise had gazed at, in trepidation, and Antoniotto de Noli, doubling capes of nameless reality towards the emergent dream of archipelagos. She felt drawn into the event, into the ancient flow of possibility, of continuation: like all, close to all. By giving herself, with her concern, with her sons, she had overcome the darkness: gifts of good works and of hopes for the sanctity of the future. Her consummate labour took her back on to the path of souls. She had learned, taught. Late chimes: and silence had drunk the slow-burning wick of the vigils. Dawn crept in between the lines: noble paragraphs! and she, in sleep, repeated its sentence. Generations, chirruping of springtime, game of perpetual life beneath the gaze of the towers. Thoughts had stirred thoughts, souls had stirred souls. Grieving nations ferried them towards the shores of knowledge, ships by the Dark Sea. Thus, perhaps, to God, the atrocity of her pain would not be without purpose.

  She put her hands together.

  Gonzalo, with his work, made enough to live on. Recently, he had been to Modetia,fn7the seamstress at Modetia had to make him some plain woven shirts: she had indeed written: she would cut them with the greatest care, such was the obligation she felt, dear Señora, for her kindness and courtesy.

  Gonzalo! Her older son was not a state pensioner, except for a trifle, for a paltry medal: the last and most ludicrous of medals. (But this is what the experts might believe, not his mother’s certainty.) There was, in any case, no reason for him to be a state pensioner. His eardrums were affected, now, by an ailment other than some traumatic wound – ruined, it could be said, by another tedium that was not the impenetrable mist of deafness. She couldn’t say how he had reappeared to her, oh!, in an ashen dawn: among the commerce and the mire of Pastrufazio, and the indomitable motor cars. He was unscathed, with few years inside the grey epaulettes he wore on his return. Perhaps his war had not been hazardous for him. He never ever told stories: he never talked about it to anyone: certainly not to the children, when they gathered round him during a moment’s rest, warriors or admirals, grazed, hot, with tin bayonets: nor to the ladies in the villas, who were, he said, among the noblest women of Pastrufazio, those most thirsty for epic sagas: and consequently the most enthusiastic imbibers of tall stories.

  It seemed, indeed, that he looked upon children with hatred. A glum severity came over his face on finding even a single one of them in the house, like that poor dimwit – the mother smiled – of the caillou, bijou. Oh! ‘her’ Gonzalo! It was too obvious that the arsenal of glory had refused to take care of him. In him, Plautus wouldn’t find his character, perhaps Molière. The poor mother, without wishing it, saw once again the distant figures of Le Misanthrope and L’Avare, all lace and frills to the knees, in the old book, in two columns, of her adolescent mornings, of her so fervid wakenings: when the circle of the small oil lamp, on the table, was the orb of thought and clarity in the safety of the silence. In the old book, smelling of old French ink, with bonnets, lace, and Maître Corbeau.fn8 It was clear. After salvaged victories, the printers of funereal glory no longer had enough of their mortuary woodcuts for the odes of a veteran without hendecasyllables: funerary lamps and phrases and flames and perennis ardee: all used up for the woodcuts, on the covers of cadaverous poems. Never, never, would he, Gonzalo, have used dead comrades for such glorious poetizing, his brother, a distant smile! The name, the desperate memory, closed up within him.

  The haberdashers had no frills to sell to him at any price, nor caballero braid, nor ribbon, nor buckles, for his quiet existence. The hidalgo kept away from salons, from the opinions of patriotic ladies. If that were not enough, instead of weak tea he preferred the solitary Recoleta road. After such regrettable observations, serious people began indeed to form the view that he should be avoided. And one fine day, indeed, having completed his courses in humanities, and in engineering, his native city of Pastrufazio couldn’t wait to be rid of him.

  But these points were external to his mother’s love, as also to her language: in the misery of her dull days she had never taken part in the conversations, in the tinkling conglomerations of fine society.

  She thought of this elder son of hers, seeing him as a child, intent and studious. And now already hunched, bored of wandering the footpaths. She returned, from the terrace, into the main room. The flies were back, now that the storm was over, buzzing over the table: where the newspapers lay, with new events, that had taken the place of others. And likewise from year to year, from day to day; for the whole succession of years, of days. And the pages, soon, turned yellow. When the flies ceased their merry-go-round, for a moment, and even the fat green fly, for an instant; then in the labile cosmos of that unexpected suspension she could hear the woodworm more distinctly crunching, crunching laboriously, in short spurts, in the old walnut secrétaire that she could no longer unlock. The key had worn down after repeated attempts, or, perhaps, in the painful shadows of memory. The portrait must be there … the portraits … the
mother-of-pearl cufflinks … perhaps, two letters as well … the last! … her work scissors, the black lace fan … The one they’d given her in the marshes, a leaving present from her colleagues, from the few girls she had taught … several of them excited … all wanting a kiss from her … but she had no shortage, por suerte, of spare scissors: three pairs, in fact.

  And there had been the wedding.

  If her thoughts moved down, from the recollection of those two children, to recent years, to today … the cruelty seemed to her too great: akin, savagely, to scorn.

  Why? Why? Her face, in those intervals, petrified her in anguish: no stirring of the soul was any longer possible: perhaps she was no longer the mother, as in the distant, lacerated, howls of childbirth: she was no longer a person, but a shadow. She paused like that, in the room, with eyes blind to every compassionate return, fleshless immobility of old age; for long swathes of time. And the cloak of poverty and of old age was like an extreme sign of the existence brought before the faces of the portraits, where fatuous flying insects, in the emptiness, will orbit inside what is left of tomorrow. Then, almost a seasonal rite, all of a sudden, the hour struck from the tower; liberating its lost, equal chimes into the emptiness. And to her it seemed an unnecessary, cruel reminder. In the finished time of every summer, across the world that had forsaken her in this way. The flies traced a few circles in the main room, in front of the portraits, beneath the horizontal rays of the evening. Then, with one weary hand, she tidied her hair whitened by the years, spilling over her forehead, unstroked like the hair of King Lear. Survivor of all misfortune. And now in the silence, as dusk descended, the storms of possibility vanished. She had learned so much, read so many books! By the small oil lamp, Shakespeare: and she still recited several verses, like forgotten syllables scattered from a shattered stele, and were once a light of knowledge, and now the horror of the night. In the sky the vapour, the smoke, had vanished from above chimney pots, beneath cooking pots, of the frugal suppers of the people. It had vanished like a bounty of the earth: towards the evening star, through the bluish September air: up, up, to the blond light, from the black chimneys; which rise with the strength of towers beyond the shadows and the blue-tinted hills, behind trees, above the distant chimney pots of the houses.