The Experience of Pain

by Carlo Emilio Gadda

  Many years before, on graduating, his mother had wanted to give him one, in gold, which a Russian or perhaps Armenian refugee had offered her at a fairly good price. He became extremely upset: for there were more necessary expenses (this was how he justified his anger) and he wanted nothing to do with second-hand goods which had belonged to another. His mother, afraid, didn’t go ahead with the purchase.

  On that occasion he exploded with horrible insults against the Russians and Levantine people, and against ‘that’ Russian in particular. In his anger, he confused the geography, and so his mother, timidly, corrected him, as if holding out a hand to a naughty child: hoping that the correction, as on other occasions, would have diverted his attention. He much admired his mother’s memory and knowledge; he was touched by it, he was proud, pleased that she knew so many things and could recall them so promptly, so precisely! But this time it didn’t work. He raged at the idea. If that Russian turned up, he yelled, he would greet him with the shots of a revolver. There was no likelihood of him turning up. Since the Russian was in a small city in the provinces (towards the great bend in the Rio Tinto), where his mother had been the head of a secondary school. He grabbed a picture from the wall, a portrait (as he did in another outburst, years later), and threw it flat on the ground. The glass broke. After which he stood on it: trampling it as though pressing grapes in a vat, he reduced the glass to fragments. His heels drew what looked like moustaches on the portrait, two horrible bruises to the portrait. He accused his mother of using him, her son, as a means or ‘pretext’ for giving money to the Russian.

  His mother, disfigured by paleness, with bloodless lips that trembled convulsively and drank desperate tears, remained there with her hands clasped before her, not daring to look down at the torn memory of her husband. She looked before her, into what couldn’t be believed, rejecting the images as though the whole of life were an outrage: for someone who cannot be rescued from her silence!

  She had endured many sacrifices for her sons; to enable them to complete their studies, to study further, to graduate. Now she wanted to show him, through that gift, her affection and her pride for the successful outcome of a whole career of studying, for his degree: the only one completed, poor Mother! The other degree had been posthumous; the darkness had taken it for itself. But nothing happens without a reason. A mere whim of iniquity is hardly thinkable in an uncruel soul. Though we are obliged to give the severest censure to the aberrant violence de aquel perdido, tenemos todavía que abrir el ánimo al residuo de una duda; y este sobrante caritativo es en el concepto y quizás en la inquietud de que un mal tan profundo tuviese en alguna parte su origen, aún recóndito y obscuro: that perhaps there was some reason or cause, or several reasons or several causes, unknown to humans, irremediable, why the hidalgo’s mind should be so lacking in any joy.

  His graduation fizzled out without celebration and no one offered him even a Cinzano. The flower of the fake parchment had barely been picked before it began to wilt, with its embossed stamp, in the grand herbarium of received withworthiness.

  Now the new worry about the wall had come to join the worry about the terrace (it was losing its plaster, beneath the vaults, with the tyranny of winters and rain), about the damp stairs, about the centipedes, about the scorpions, about the unsafe doors and windows, about the rickety gates. He found people in the dining room, like grass snakes, allowed in by a kindly local tradition or by peasant licence, both of which threw him into a rage. The map of sadness had already been attached to the records; the scene of violence had already been drawn out, in every detail. The terrace on one side, i.e. towards the mountains and the contours of the Antarctic, was at the level of the garden, since the house seemed to be built on a drop. (The downward slope, in land kept from cultivation, is expressed in drops.) Around four metres, the height of one floor. So that, on the side of the house and the slope of the hill que los toscanos llaman a bacío, es decir en el declive de la colina hacia el Norte (en España), o hacia el Sur antártico (en Maradagàl), a small, triangular open space, with guijarrillos, gave every intruder direct access to the terrace from the iron gate, after a brief squeak-squeak. The perimeter wall, a symbol of private possession more than a defence, could easily be climbed on and over by any agile young lad, with only a few grazes to his knees, being so low and simple to ride, without even, on its saddle, the ritual shards of bottle-glass. Cantankerous lovers of the countryside tend to encrust their personal domains with them: ‘wholly devoted to his work and to his family’, as we later discover, one fine day, from the sudden announcement of their funeral. But the marquis, his father, with a guirlache parecido, felt it would have offended the right of introspection and the good faith of the people, who look, like, and do not touch. And the wall, as had also been noted, did not go parallel to the house (hence the triangle), but went at an angle to it, running down like a diagonal. So that one corner of the building, the one towards north and the evening, pointed as far as two metres from the boundary.

  On the other side of the wall, a rough lane. Gravelly, steep, with half-moons of broken plates or a bowl, among the stones, or remnants of a rusty tin, emptied (of course) of its ancient sauce or pickle: sometimes also, under the pale metal of a pair of drunken horseflies, shame extruded from Adam, rolled turpitude: this time, indeed, some of those guirlache de almendras, but those! … to be weighed on the scales, damn it, to see what they weigh; matters, in any event, about which the magnanimity of our sensory system, aided by an honourable embellishment of circumstances, can do nothing, in truth, other than pretend to have noticed.

  The lane was travelled by few pedestrians: and sometimes, on his way down, by a country cyclist with bicycle-mule; or by the intrepid postman, on his way up, plodding beneath the rain and heavy wind; or tramped in who-knows-what direction by various weekly beggars, male and female, limping, ragged apparitions in the great light of nothingness. With autumn fading, there were the steps of guileful, barefooted boys, en busca de higos y de ciruelas, who come to divine by telepathy on the other side of every domain: every vegetable plot (apart from that of the priest) or cultivated garden. Also venturing there, with September, was some fat whore of a motor car, worn out from overwork, from age, loaded up perhaps with a whole family of day-trippers, with two litres of wee-wee per head in store for the first stop, little kids, and the old cockerel behind, sprawled across the stern, suffocating with the authority of his paternal posterior the two blades of grass of his two elder daughters. It seemed like a mechanical bearer of prosciuttos were venturing against the absurd, bellowing, trumpeting, crunching, shooting stones from beneath its tyres, tearing apart the tenuous web of all philosophy with the roars of its engine and with the shrieks of its jounced women Argonauts.

  Grey granite bollards, outside, protected the wall from the jolts and long gouges of the axles of gravel carts, as well as compromising its already meagre stature; the wagons have protruding wheel hubs, blackened into a sludge, and travel down, jolting over the stones.

  Down, down, in the valley, was the charity of the village, which emitted the trembling smoke of the poor after the seasons and the sufferings: the blacksmith’s hammer could be heard on the anvil, through all the daylight, beating, beating: bending, bending, it marked the hour of the siesta; in the silence of everyone’s fatigue it continued its labour alone. From the hovel of the forge, its beating reached up to the mountain: the echo of the mountain precipitated upon all things, from empty time it drew the name of pain.

  And from the tower, after desolate intervals, the bronze number marked the dark or gleaming hour.

  VIII

  The son, on the terrace, having placed the small tray on the pedestal of the balustrade, gazing at the sadness of the hills, began sipping his coffee: which was strong and maternal, unlike the coffee usually made by the smarter gentlewomen of Pastrufazio. He seemed calm. He appeared at the kitchen to bring the things back: and at the same time to observe, bitterly, that the ceremony of cordiality and kindness was be
ing celebrated according to the customary programme. But he was calm. And the discussion, so strange, between the two clogged figures, interested him. His head was whirring with another thought, which had waylaid him as though in the storehouse, in the backroom of his brain. But what? oh! what? … hmm! since he was reading Parmenides? oh! yes, Peppa was spreading fleas around the house, which she’d picked up at the top of the league table from the ‘municipal’ washhouse … They were truly first-rate fleas, with an incredible energy, with rainbow leaps over the Eiffel Tower. Creeping into his mind, aroused by the alkaloids of the coffee, came the Gospels: ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself.’ But malice immediately intervened: ‘… does that include fleas? …’ He stood there, all the same, listening.

  The report was a bituminous saga, all roars and fractures. The wretched guttural expressions ended up flowing every now and then into a painful, monosyllabic, oxytone rhythm. Continual interjections and continual shrugs of the shoulders, to help along the drama, with ululations, grim assortments of Celtic ‘ü’s and gargled cackles: and, then, smiles and denials, with words of contentment. The demeanour of the male and the female narrator were part of the drama, like the chorus in Euripides, but strutting about here with critical feathers and with a rural bluster, with some probable pretence, sometimes neglecting, of course, the barber and knowing nothing of talcum powder, but duly exuding urea, lipoids, valerates, borneols and derivatives of caprylic acid and isobutyric acid.

  Those vocal emissions and those gestures, according to the basic theorem of modern physics, equated with conspicuous charges of energy released in (futile) labour: the chins and shoulder blades of Maradagàl imagine they can compensate for the non-existence of linguistic substance with such impressive use of all their muscles.

  The peon, at the most dramatic moments, would willingly have spat: but in the presence of the pseudo-master, he didn’t dare: inasmuch as the ejection of a yellowy liquid from the mouth (whether momentarily everted into a phallic proboscis or simply contracted) constitutes an act of such blatant and disgusting analogy that even a peon of the Cordillera Maradagalese could but understand its inappropriateness.

  The kitchen was dominated by the shiny futility of pensioned-off copper, hung on a wall: there was also the fish kettle, one metre twenty long; opposite, the fireplace: with no fire. The firedogs, numbed by the succession of past winters, kept guard over a small heap of ashes, awaiting eternity.

  The firedogs, the heavy chains, the wine tub, the straw-bottomed chairs, had been treated with the utmost respect in the marquis’s house: only the sons would disappear, before long, without a trace.

  They had grown up under the mantle of Maradagalese virtue.

  And the story gradually came out: in short, a theft at the Trabatta castle. The Nistitúo de Vigilancia para la Noche had made repeated visits there, during the fine weather, under the zephyrine guise of the most loquacious and brilliantined propagandists: oh! those weren’t Celts, no, no. Old Trabatta, with his polished lips, aspirators of fine syllogisms, had of course sent them each time to the devil. Their turtle-grey flannel trousers and their chalk-coloured shoes, at eight lire a pair, had not impressed him.

  With his combed white beard, parted in the middle, with a pince-nez on his slightly hawked nose that seemed to be sniffing the list among the rhododendrons, there was something polished and financially elegant about him. He was one of the most prosperous creatures in the whole province: sometimes closed up in his castle, admiring his pears as they ripened, though still hard as stones: he gave them copper sulphate, then sulphur, lime, and there were small pots of water and honey tied to the branches, where the worst wasps lay drowned, so that the pears, once ripe … which happens after the feast day of St Carlo and after St Ambrose … cost between eighty and one hundred and twenty lire each, like those of the late Marquis: except that he could afford certain luxuries, while the poor Marquis had a job making ends meet.

  Having abandoned the Celtic dialect in favour of correct Maradagalese, in his speech he expressed his views with clarity: he breathed concatenated polysyllogisms: going back to the beginning each time; to be even more polished and precise.

  And he had sent them to the devil. One hundred lire a month? But who did they take him for? And yet the proper rate would have been two hundred. For the night patrol of the castle, that’s right, yes indeed, Señor Trabatta, believe it or not, it was already a low offer, a special price: a sacrifice the Nistitúo was happy to undertake for the honour of ensuring he slept soundly and at the same time to satisfy … to unify requirements. That’s right … to comply with superior directives.

  ‘… But the law creates no obligation …’, said Trabatta immediately.

  ‘… Well, but you must consider, of course, Governor’s Order N° 5888.’

  They should have been asking two hundred, according to the proper rates, but had come down to a hundred: and this out of pure good-heartedness. A hundred: given the size of the tower: and given the fact that the lightning conductor also served on special occasions as a pole for the national flag. The two functions, according to the laws of Maradagàl, have to be kept distinct, in other words performed by separate structures: for as a matter of logic the national flagpole (and even less the flag) must never serve as a lightning conductor. It would be, in the language of Horace, a real ‘miscere sacra profanis’. However, the Nistitúo could turn a blind eye, seeing that the Governor had authorized it to turn a blind eye … And moreover, the flag measured 1.8m x 2.8m, in other words sufficient for Señor Caballero Trabatta’s means … And with a flag that size, it would have been appropriate … ‘… To pay more than the others? …’ interrupted the old man. ‘… Well then, out with it, that’s another tax. You get me to display the flag, then stick a tax on me for the flag: and one for the lightning conductor …’

  ‘… A tax? … Not in the least … The owner has every right to accept or cancel.’

  ‘… Then what’s that to you, I mean, what does the flag imply for them? …’ the financier had asked, removing his pince-nez and carefully wiping the lenses, studying them closely, qualifying the untidy phrase with the more polished one, and taking a deep breath.

  So that after much toing and froing they left disappointed, for an umpteenth time.

  Well, God is great.

  Like Thina, god of the ancient Etruscans, our own god is one of those types who know their job perfectly well: with certain rotten swine, he’s in no hurry: he lets them carry on, and even makes it seem as if he hasn’t noticed a thing: and looks the other way, like that, for in the meantime he’s dealing with others, since, if you start looking for trouble, then you’ll find more of it than the number of fleas on a dog’s back. And that swine carries on, carries on, thinking everything’s going his way: and all of a sudden, thwack, he thrusts manubia number one into his balls, the lightning warning, that is: a great, terrifying, filthy, yellow zigzag, with a blinding flash and then a sharp bang, to make your flesh creep.

  But he, hah! he pretends he doesn’t care … gives the impression he couldn’t care a damn … but meanwhile he’s begun to realize his legs have started to go heebie-jeebie. And sometimes he also feels a certain warm moisture in his pants, and, having changed his clothes, that sticky jam is left for the delectation of the washerwoman … After a while, since he sees that everything’s going as before, he starts all over again, the skunk … And that’s the very moment, then, that Thina deals him a second round, the peremptorium, and keeps the third one ready for immediately after: the savage, madcap lightning. This is the final flash of lightning that leaves you, in place of the delinquent, as a blackish patch on the ground, scorched, which gives out an occasional short whiff of sulphites and ammonia: and nothing else. Nothing else, you understand? Nothing else, nothing else except a short whiff of sulphites and ammonia, that a breath of wind annihilates into the air. Nothing else.

  That, more or less, is what happened to Trabatta, whose offence was impiety towards the Nistitúo para la Noche.r />
  And so Peppa the washerwoman arrived and could egutturate, with the Manzonian clucking of a turkey hen, that the previous night Señor Caballero Trabatta was in his bed asleep, as is usual every night. And while he was sleeping on the first floor, or rather while he was making ‘el ronfa me na pütasca’, to use her exact words, ‘they had broken into the study’, on the ground floor, and riffled through everything, taking their time, and had then made off through the garden, scratching and prickling themselves for sure on the thorn hedge, and, according to all the evidence, had reached the Iglesia road. This runs along the whole valley, alongside the Seegrün, which is a long and lonely lake where the tender reed-bed at one end croaks, in the evening, with frogs beneath the icy constellations of the Pole. And a car must certainly have been waiting for them on the Iglesia road, with its engine running: or, as they say in the Celtic-Turkassian dialect of Keltiké, ‘col motor pizz’. Which is nothing like the Maradagalese language.

  Caballero Trabatta had, by then, woken up, since he thought he’d heard, in his sleep, some footsteps downstairs: footsteps, though very quiet, of mountain boots. And perhaps it was a dream. He had nevertheless switched on the light, slipped into his underpants, slippers, and a zamarra with a Capuchin cord around the waist and two tassels, and inside, a certain manly pounding of the financier’s heart. He took the revolver from the bedside table, and an electric torch, and having released the safety catch, went first to wake Giuseppe, and they went down together, side by side, gradually switching on all the lights in the house, one after the other.

  Having reached the study, in that festive ballroom glow that had suddenly transformed the whole castle, one light after the other, by degrees, a glow that most certainly registered a night-time peak on the power-station dials, and however much Caballero Trabatta continued to hope it was a ‘sensory illusion’, everything, alas!, drawers and papers and books and accounts, had been turned upside down, with the letters from his poor, dear Teresa: the desk drawer forced, the letter opener and blotting pad on the floor, along with the portrait of his children at their First Communion, and everything in chaos. A havoc that ought to sicken this world. Meanwhile, despite the zamarra and the underpants, a cheeky little breeze blew from the window; the north-facing window, which was in fact wide open and whose frame was punctuated by the cold stars high above, like candles, over the black mark of the mountain. He, before going to bed … he remembered it well … had closed and barred the window. Damnation!