The Experience of Pain

by Carlo Emilio Gadda

  She had heard the rolling of the train … the arriving whistle … She would have liked someone to be near, as darkness approached.

  But her child appeared only rarely at the entrance to the house.

  VI

  His tall figure formed a black outline through the French window, on the terrace, like the shadow of a stranger: and, behind him, in the sky, two stars seemed to have guided him there. Dioscuri shining over an amaranthine band, far away, in the quadrant of beauty and knowledge: brotherhood saved! His mother caught sight of him, but couldn’t see his face against the rectangle of light. He came in, carrying a small suitcase, the usual one, made of yellow cardboard, costing forty centavos, like a street neckerchief seller. In the same hand, rolled up, the old umbrella. His mother said, ‘Oh! Gonzalo, how are you? oh! look!’ and named the two stars with a sob of joy, her hands together, in the form of a welcome. But for her only the first star counted, in the conjuncture of fortune and of stars symbolizing an earthly presence; since the other, so bright, so pure, was no more than a distant thought of the night.

  The son barely greeted her, as usual, tired. Nor did he smile at her. She didn’t persist in trying to catch his gaze, she didn’t ask about his journey, nor about the storm. Her heart pounded with uncertainty, she went about preparing, on the table, the small paraffin lamp. But she didn’t succeed at first, and fumbled: with damp matches: she coughed, lighting another: which immediately went out against the blackened cone of the lamp. Her hands rigid, almost inert, couldn’t hold with precision; she found it difficult to put the glass cylinder exactly into its ring, of polished brass, like the lace on outmoded costumes: and yet this had to hold it to the base. She would have sat down, she was trembling … but she had to think of her son … As soon as the lamp could brighten the room, at last, she felt she was going to collapse … The last glimpse of the twilight, already in the far distance, was leaving the furniture, with low and cold reflections on the dresser, on several metal trays. The pallor of the oil lamp hadn’t, in truth, added very much. She closed the casements as best she could; of a very high window, over the terrace; shivering.

  The son, upstairs, was washing: putting a hairbrush back in a drawer. She heard his footsteps, muffled, above the ceiling.

  She went into the kitchen to prepare him something for supper. It was entirely necessary, and a demonstration of the functional validity of the villa: all the more so, then, as the villa had no cook or any kind of maid. Otherwise he would have used that pretext to flare up about the inanity of the countryside: and it would have thrown him into the worst of tantrums and strange notions: (this, now, a sad ritual: his poor mother well knew it). He would have repeatedly condemned and re-cursed the villa, along with the furniture, with the candlesticks, with the memory of his father who had built it; culminating in obscene insults against the lineage of all the fathers and all the mothers who had gone before him, up, up, up, as far as Adam’s maker. He would have continued his blasphemies, which she couldn’t abide: his accusations too true, perhaps, to be bearable: including in the mad turpitude that roused him in those moments even the sacred name of Pastrufacio (the Garibaldi of Maradagàl) and Prado, and Lukones, and Iglesia, and their respective bell towers, with their bells, mayors, parish priests, coachmen, and eventually the whole accursed and blockheaded Serruchón (this, more or less, is what he said); all the countless villas of the Serruchón, the filthy, gutturaloid Calibans of Néa Keltiké, whom he would have willingly hanged, if he could, from first to last.

  His mother, on the other hand, from the moment the builders set to work in 1899, had absorbed within herself, immediately – blushing splendour of youth – the serpentine triumph of ‘her’ villa over her rivals, the Keltikese girls who didn’t think a villa possible: (for the rag-tattered Pirobutirro family).

  And this pride, this thyrsus of embers that had been built for her, in a bygone day, so that she could thrust half of her soul into the faces of her pseudo-sister-in-laws and pseudo-nephews, this had then grown to elation and radiant omnipotence, in a bright, dazzling age, beyond measure or limit: the idea of possession and of supposed victory swallowed down like a cognac of fire and of life each new morning, each magnificent day.

  For forty years, it had been enough to keep her from despair, to drive back each torment and each misery, each torn jersey of her children, each tolling of bells, each glory, each tench, the filthy grin of death. She had appropriated the Root Idea of the villa like a rubescent organ or prime entelechy consubstantial with the intestines, and thus inalienable from the sacred wholeness of her person: almost like a De Chirico wardrobe or hat rack, carnal and eternal within the dreaming heart of the Lars. The actual, objective villa corresponded to that supreme, recondite, noumenical pituitaryfn1 jewel or wattle outside the confines of the psyche. Operating in her, for forty years, the tireless hormones of anagenesis: whatever woman takes, in life she remakes: that undaunted constancy, that happy ignorance of the abyss, of the stone bollard, so that, with much insistence, from a cucumber they manage to produce an engineer; the extraordinary capacity for absorption, for injection of nonsense into reality, characteristic of some of the best women: those of most determination and strongest intellect. Such women, even if they are not hysteric, use their milk, and the obstinacy of a whole lifetime, to transform whatever is produced from their encounter with human stupidity into a certain, historically real thesaurum: the first man they happen to find beneath their feet, not to say between their legs, the vainest: fleeting symbol of an emulation or reverence or attraction that will count for nothing: a large diploma, a villa, yes, Señora; plumage. It must then be added that most men behave in exactly the same way as them. And it is a characteristic of the marvels of nature, if we choose to consider its ways and its results, this process of accumulation of will: it is the automatic way in which the sleepwalker moves towards her triumph-catastrophe: from a certain moment the hysteria of petty vengeance becomes, for such women, their only raison d’être, it leads them into lying, into crime: and then the banner of uselessness, with the fake determination of falsity, is carried onwards, onwards, ever-more obstinately, ever-more pointlessly, against the desperate anger of the adversary. The liberating darkness arrives, which resolves matters on all sides.

  There was an impotent anger in him, in the son: when given a pretext, it was immediately released in a tumultuous crescendo of vain and foul words: in brutal threats. Like the cry of a madman from a prison dungeon.

  Something for supper! The mother, trying to collect herself, looked around the kitchen, empty and cold, opened a door of the dresser where the shadows had slumbered over that slight smell of bacon fat and leftovers: in the kitchen there was almost nothing, not even an egg, that she could prepare for him. The stentorian posterior of Giuseppe’s hens managed such a glorious emission fairly infrequently. He kept more than one, but they laid their egg in turns: and then they often skipped their turn. This too would have infuriated the son: and so the question, of the eggs, had to be avoided. He had flown into a rage, once before, for that failure on the part of the hens belonging to the Serruchón swine: and he had accused the cockerel of genetic deficiency and perversion, the hens of being lesbians, and whores; then his fury had subsided into a recollection of Livy ‘gallinam in marem, gallum in foeminam se se vertisse …’ And, cruelly, with a guffaw, he had drunk the health of the cockerel! but he didn’t actually say ‘health’, he referred to a part of its anatomy: he had toasted the catamite cockerel (sneering at her, his mother) better than all the fathers of filthy Keltiké, he had yelled, ‘This way he didn’t produce Keltiké brats.’ She trembled again, ashamed; his jeering still echoed in her ears. He had then cursed his relatives again and again, including those who had never existed before the law, for fear of missing someone out; male or female. No, no: her son’s desperation, at times, knew no limit.

  Inside the table drawer, in the other room, were his three pieces of cutlery, silver, which she had bought for him as a child, second-hand,
from kindly old Señora Teotòpuli, slathered with make-up. She smiled vaguely, at the memory. Rather dented even then, yes, ‘this is true’: and the fork with its tines rather bent, ‘yes, perhaps’. But the son would have mocked with new obscenities, and barbed jokes, through clenched teeth, the fork, as well as Señora Teotòpuli,fn2 whose carmine – such weaknesses! but who doesn’t have them? – became a wet mush every time her eyes watered and she blew her nose, at every small tear, dribbling down her wrinkled face, like macaroni sauce. But this, was it anything to worry about? … Gonzalo might, perhaps, have been worried about the fork, on seeing those tines so bent, so pliable … He might have got up from the table, he might have … he might perhaps have flung the knife … at a portrait, maybe at one of those most in view … his uncles … at the portrait of his father! … Perhaps … No, no! … he’d never have done that! She had always used this cutlery without a second thought: for years. Back in the dining room, the mother searched about, now, in that half-light, inside the table drawer: but, her eyes and her hands, weakened with age, weren’t able to identify them, among many, and pick them out immediately. The clattering irritated Gonzalo: who, from his room, upstairs, shouted to her: ‘Stop that!’ She stopped, holding her breath. In her anxiety she thought of calling for someone, for Giuseppe: for him to help her; she was feeling ill; she’d had something to eat half an hour before, a cup of broth with some slices of plain bread, half an egg bought for her in the village. That small amount she now brought back up, making a mess on the shoe-cleaner, which was a threadbare doormat at the side of the dining room: though it was hardly noticeable. A few spots had also splashed the brick floor, a little further on. The son must have heard her retching, more or less, and thought they were fits of coughing, for he swore once again from upstairs: ‘You got TB?’ The mother busied herself cleaning the floor with a few ashes, with the besom, before he came back down. There was some sawdust in the kitchen, but she hadn’t the strength to pull the bucket out, from where it was kept, beneath the table by the wall, to lift it over the low crossbar: that connected the two front legs. She cleared away the signs of the mess, hurriedly, as best she could: with the besom, with a few ashes.

  For years she’d had a feeling, about her son. In the city, too: where she lived, except during the summer. The rare times that he appeared, the lost son, each time the same grim idea.

  The poor mother had slowly understood. Now she saw the darkness of that soul. Slowly, having fought long in her hope, so vivid, in her joy: before giving way to understanding. An impious feeling, and it might be said a deep, far-distant bitterness, was growing steadily larger in the mind of the son: the only son who still appeared to her, occasionally, smiling at her when they met, and calling her ‘Mother, Mother,’ assuming it wasn’t a dream, on the streets of the city and of the earth. This grievous agitation, stronger than any moderating urge of will, seemed to emerge on occasions and pretexts from an unredeemable area deep down, of hidden truth: from an unacknowledged torment.

  It was the obscure sickness about whose cause, whose ways, the histories and the laws and the universal disciplines of the great teachers are still ignorant: carried within for the whole hurtling thunderbolt of a life, more oppressive every day, unmedicated. Perhaps the ‘invisible sickness’ that Saverio López narrates: described to him with the dying words of the Incas: and he speaks of it, with the authority of his superiors, in the final chapter of his Mirabilia Maragdagali.

  He knew no peace, Gonzalo, nor would he know it: his mother, busying herself with the crockery, seemed to despair: his face, distraught, revealed, at certain moments, that he could not master his delirium.

  He never drank spirits. He didn’t smoke. Nor could it be imagined, after the laborious hardship of his days, so parsimoniously rewarded by the Compañía de Destribución, that there would be money enough for the costly alkaloids reported, until then, in more or less every newspaper, in victorious Maradagàl as well as defeated Parapagàl; raked up, as soon as it emerged, by a certain kind of subversive or satanic avant-garde literature that had appeared in the station kiosks. In any event, he worked, however grudgingly, in just the way that mothers with working sons dream of, namely giving out orders to his staff: in his rest hours, having distributed millions of kilowatts per hour to all the cotton mills of Nevado Bajo, to its unconquered factories, then, having found a minute for himself, he would open his books, tired, without then the opportunity of reading them whole.

  At certain times he seemed malevolent. ‘A little goodwill …’, his mother would say, smiling, trying to cheer him up, and bring some serenity to that face. ‘Will …’, he would answer, ‘is crucial to murderers …’ This frightened her; she tried to change the subject. Maybe he was tired. The war had most probably altered him, and, even more, the news that his brother would not be coming back. And yet he didn’t complain about the war: he never discussed it with anyone: he hadn’t been wounded.

  Certainly, no one, none of the fledglings whom, due to their tender youth, Mars had spared for later,fn3 had questioned him about the ‘glorious deeds’. They gained nothing, these youths, from allowing their grey-haired rivals this preferential status, in the competition, an all too valid mitigating factor in the Scales. Mitigating factor, that is, with regard to errors, shortcomings: a loss of way. The Scales of highly measured Scruple were used, in those years, only for balancing hither or thither the disputed identity of Martin redivivus, known as Martin Guerre or Martin La Veuve,fn4 passed month by month through the eye of the finest legal needle: while the stubborn Gendarmerie fought over him with the no less stubborn marital bed, which was just as eager to creak for him.

  But it is right that everything, everything, is weighed up.

  The son seemed to have forgotten beyond all imagining the torment of those years, his ashen youth. His grievance came from a bleaker distance, as if between him and his mother there were something irreparable, crueller than any war: and than any fearful death.

  When he came down, with a book, the soup seemed to be awaiting him at the table, at his place, in the circle of the paraffin lamp: from whose tenuous domain the steam of the bowl vaporized until lost in the gloom, among the ribs of the ceiling, dark planking. The Spanish-style beams were draped with cobwebs, like reserve sails, hung up, on their way to the Sea of Darkness.

  That small flame, so impoverished and weary, immobility closed inside its glass cylinder, beneath the glass shade – (a cone of opaque whiteness around the mechanism of the laced metal ring) – seemed to him to be all that his mother would allow: in the house inhabited by woodworm, deep in the solitary countryside. It was, in any event, all that his father and mother had considered sufficient, as well as useful, for the life, for the progress,fn5 for the happiness of their sons. And yet they too were well aware, damn it!, what memberships, or invitation cards, what kind of grease-stained pentacles or talismans were valid at doorways, to unlock them for mortals, and even for maize-fed pithecanthropi, doorways decorated with gold and solid ivory,fn6 the revolving doors of the Odéons. Throngs of men, and of women!, in which luxury hairdressers, brothel keepers, manufacturers of motorcycle accessories, and cockades could be seen, all adrift. Towards the cans of Liebig peptone trainloads of cattle, from the north-west; open wagons with central gangways along which walks the gaucho, supervising, with melancholic eyes. Such did fortune seem to them, in South America. Tempestuous sea against the battered rafts of people lost, pale, with sargassos of Chinese or African arms above the foaming of the waves: Armenians, Russians, White and Red, Arabs who had captured a boat at knifepoint, true Levantines with, on their shoulders, a load of fake rugs, from Monza: and over the loose howl of that tobogganing horde no longer with Christ or the devil, a multitude thrown against the shore by the hurling of the wave, here, here, at last! the pallid triumph of certain funeral directors, very few, one in each city of Maradagàl, who benefited from the most lucrative of Maradagalese licences and franchises: the monopoly on corpses. So, for example, the firm of
Flejos. Zinc coffins resold for thirty times their cost, to the distress of the grieving, for over thirty years, had made them rich through the most legitimate of all charitable undertakings. And then again women, women, after the zinc and the Recoleta; women!, like coastal vessels fitted out like new, heavily painted, with Bassarid smiles opening on thirty-two teeth as far as the ears; a flimsy, crumpled skirt, half wool, to swathe with a ten-peso mystery (fifty-five of our currency) the pitiful mechanism of their wiggling hips: the shitty rags of a slave girl would have been more stylish. Or else, at the other extreme, the fat pork-butchers, like mice with whiskers, mouse sausage-makers; towering over their high marble, with cleaver, butcher-scimitars; or purple-faced wholesalers, in the forum, bawling sobre el ganado; or silk merchants in tailcoats puffed up with the pomposity of Keltikese virtue in its entirety, with eleven chins, though incapable of articulating a single zed between their teeth: electrical engineers as short-sighted as artichokes; priests (Presbyterians) in ballgowns, brachyschelicfn7 grocers with trousers full of contraband saccharine, cuckolded engineers, bowel doctors, kidney doctors, tantara specialists: security guards, thieves, gasmen, asthmatic bawds, male and female bores of every kind!, and the ghost of the Poet to terrorize the chickens, after midnight, in the chicken pen at Villa Giuseppina! Filthy Jonah! This relentless sea, outside, washed against the shore of insanity, crashed upon the insane coasts offering its perpetual foam, drinking back its vile backwash. Mercurial ointment or apocryphal gospels, there, there, towards the haunted splendour of the Odéons: and behind, the storehouses of Messrs Flejos, y compañeros.