The Experience of Pain

by Carlo Emilio Gadda

  In the house, now. Common folk and fleas, which had moved the mother, after her younger son, long before, had watched the assembly. With eyes gleaming, open. Open, fixed. In the wonderment of the dream with no further answers. The fairytale. It was clear, now, splendid, boundless, as in the child’s book. Two lines of blood ran down from the nostrils over the half-open lips: open to the unmentionable truth.

  And the piss, of Poronga’s filthy, flea-ridden dog, over which Peppa clomped; in which the old woman with no knickers paddled, as if it had been hers, that piss. And the wafers of compressed dung that had squelched beneath the quadrupeding clogs were now left to soak in the piss. In the room where only he and his mother should enter and remain; and wait. Their souls, alone, should wait as if for the return of someone, over the years … of someone who hadn’t been able to finish … to finish his studies … Or perhaps they were just waiting for the kind angel modelled by the night, with mute eyelids, with shadowed wings …

  His studies, perhaps, had been finished … He had abandoned the degree course all the same, Colombofn5 … with the seals of Victor Emanuel … the honorary degree. The degree of the dead …

  In the house, the son would have preferred the jealous privacy of their two lone hearts to be preserved. Anger took hold of him. But the sight of that obscene plurality overwhelmed him: he felt humiliated, tired.

  Letters from various acquaintances had recently arrived. They were urging him to complete a certain work, which they, in perfect good faith, supposed to be a novel, and (what was more touching on their part) a fine novel. It seemed, according to their kind expressions, that Maradagàl was desperate to read his novel, whereas in fact the great landowners of the Serruchón, who had immigrated from Old Europe during the second half of the seventeenth century, were interested only in rearing and shearing Cordillera merinos.

  And he was, despite appearances and the cardboard suitcase, a man of fairly firm and, I would say, sober principle. No self-deception.

  He knew very well what would happen after all the effort and futility, after the war and the peace and the hideous pain; beneath, beneath everything, waiting for him, there was the long avenue of poplars, smooth as an oil. Poplars with quavering leaves, in the fair light, in Viale della Recoleta, on the asphalt, over which the large, electrified cockroaches slid in silence, which seemed like black shadows, with silvered, trapezoidal trunks. The zinc coffin, inside, which is compulsory by law in Maradagàl, constituted a municipal monopoly, costing eight hundred pesos to the grieving family. Eight hundred … No mourner, for sure, behind him, and he laughed to himself at the simple joy of thinking about it: absint inani funere neniae luctusque turpes et querimoniae; the municipal authority would have to lump it, this time. It would have to provide the zinc for nothing and carry him to the Recoleta gratis, and be quick about it as well: since his supposed nobility of mind after several hours, and among the scandal, would begin to emit an unbearable stench. The municipal authority would have to carry him to the Recoleta at its own expense, hah! hah! One of his ferocious laughs gurgled up from his stomach; he laughed from his belly. Eight hundred lire, the zinc coffin. This time, the Pastrufazio municipal authority had to lump it.

  He knew, he knew.

  Even so, he sometimes enjoyed letting his imagination wander: and he let it wander like a caress, from whom? from whom?, if not from the vain light of a thought, as fleeting as an autumn ray.

  He imagined that some acquaintance might have given him a small watch, a wristwatch, seeing that no woman had thought of it, never: no woman?, his mother, his poor mother. He fantasized about how his Maradagalese homeland would encourage him to polish up the rough notes for his novel:

  and importunately it urges you

  to complete The Day, for which,

  when sought, you are known abroad;

  But he knew perfectly well that no one cared about it, in the slightest, and the novel, linked to real characters and to a real setting, was as stupid as its characters and its setting. Enough of that! There was plenty else to do and to think about, in Maradagàl and in the whole of South America, in those moonlit moments. And above all, he was sure, or almost, that he ought to be considered a fool.

  A novel! With female characters! With that little, little experience that Christ had allowed, so as not to befuddle him, experience of the human mind! Of the mind! And also of his own.

  They barely saw him. He closed the door again in a hurry: from the staircase, cursing, he headed out on to the terrace. The chickens fluttered, madly. Feathers dropped down again, slowly, softly, on to the leaves of the osmanthus. The heat diminished. Clouds travelled over, from the mountain, in that sky, so calm and wide as to seem infinite. They crossed the distant ridges. They advanced, patient caravans: like generations of humans towards the future. The terrace, of cement tiles, worn and therefore porous, was dry and warm, caravanned by that interminable itch of ants. And from the thicket, perhaps, of ivy, there, there, where a panicle was swaying, Puck, perhaps: or the lizard-lightning to contemplate its leap. The son rested, bending (given the height of his person), on the wooden parapet. And looked; perhaps listened. In front of him, from the meadow, the almond trees, with branches straight into the sky, which the peon had ferociously beaten (at night, though), with almost no leaves left; the bold shoots of the plum trees, instead, bore a blue, bloom-coated drupe: the butirro pears, espaliered, were certainly harder than the hardest rock of the Serruchón. But St Carlo would take care of everything. The son watched, watched, as always. And also, of course, listened.

  For intervals suspended beyond any phrase, two notes came from the silence, as if from abstract space and time, two notes sustained and deep, like the experience of pain: dwelling in the earth, whenever lights and shadows migrated there. And, softly, he stifled the desperate sob that had come to him from the remote depth of the countryside.

  The foul invasion of the crowd … The clogs, the feet: in the house that should have been his … The manure-tinged heels, the toes, divisible by ten, with nails … and the piss of the vile, flea-ridden dog, with right eye full of jam, in which the quadrupeding soles of those clogs squelched click clack. An enormous belch, the years seemed a futility to him, after the stupidities his elders were stuffed with …

  The nose, certainly, was now worth more than the soul.

  Olfactory perceptions had sullied the years, the autumns, the months of school … The community; the others; the masculine plural … The interminable procession for a piss … From the drains blocked with croconsuelo rinds, it poured over the steps of blackish béola stone. ‘Of béola, of béola!’ he yelled from the terrace, towards the fields. The master masons, the practical men, had imbéolated the simplician city, industrious and hard-working Pastrufazio.

  The Marquis, the father, lovingly, every morning, had prepared his son’s lunch himself: in the wide-weave basket, which was the aerated, and yet rectangular, delight of hygienists and parents at that time. A slice of boiled beef, called mannso in Spanish, meaning tame animal, as stringy as a fraying hemp whip, with a pinch of kitchen salt over it: Serruchonese and Pastrufazian salt: a sandwich. Never any fruit or cake, since the Marquis, his father, was worried about any risk of the son having indigestion, even just imagined. And the small bottle of water and wine. With stopper. Heaven help the boy if he lost the stopper. Hours of anxiety, on certain dismal days, spent looking for the stopper: over the search for the stopper the shrill severity of the schoolmistress, who then entered with eyebrows raised, in a state of sadistic tension, drooling internally. Pastrufazian pedagogy allowed for no answering back. The boy’s entreaties were in vain. Too bad if the stopper had rolled under the furthest bench of the furthest corner, after having lightly, lightly, crossed the whole classroom, among the odour and the tramping of eighty-two feet. ‘I am thy stopper and thou shalt have no other stoppers before me …’.

  His educators had been great and, above all, perspicacious and sensitive, like all educators. Sparta: also called Lacedae
mon: Sparta and, at the same time, a certain modern and Pastrufazian visual latitude. The small water and wine bottle too, the stopper as well, for the young Master. While many poor beings wandered about alone, or in herds, in meadows, ragged, merry, with their bottoms sticking out of their trousers, with no bottle, with no stopper … And shot stones with their catapult, thwack, at sparrows, in the park. And they leave almond turds, under the bridges, and on the ruins of Spanish fortresses … disintegrating like dry nougat, saturated like a baba … The policeman runs after them; with what results! Authority …

  And, for the future, pears: espalier pear trees, that produce butirro pears, with the help of St Carlo. The spittle of Pastrufazio’s most garrulous magpies and lively and loquacious crows, invited to dinner, will have its effect on the buttery pulp of the butirro pears: and so they will shut up for five minutes, or at least hopefully. So that the butyric pulp of the butirro pears, on the croconsuelo-tongue of the old crows, is adorned with three words,fn6 between three teeth. The all-purpose noun is a patented legacy of Serruchonese descent. The future, according to the Marquis, was an elysium of butirro pears … Humanity, beneath the golden rays of autumn, was, without doubt, inclining towards the butyric …

  The son, from the terrace, saw those years again: people: trees and mountains, bells upturned to shake the great tower of glory. Producing sacred waves in the eardrums, like holy water, according to the poetical opinion of Abbé Zanella; and he thought it impossible that his life was turning into a filmic impression of such a nonsense. He thought it impossible that the narcissistic energies of his begetters would end up in the butirro pears, in the Giuseppes, in the bell tower of Lukones, at a time when they had two creatures, in the saw-toothed Serruchón. ‘So that there is no one, on first seeing it, provided he is viewing from the front, for example from the walls of Pastrufazio …’.

  But don’t get carried away: this, remember, is the Serruchón. And the walls were bastions with plumes to the modern century of green horse chestnuts over the shirts of speeding cyclists, with a shower of white flowers in the tousled hair of the women at night … Ding-a-ling. And the merry-go-rounds and the worn magic of the Spanish-style bastions, of carnival, were embarrassment and shame among the jostling of the crowd, in the vulgar cloud of confetti. Embarrassment, anguish, reduced the frightened child to a state of collapse, after hopes of fritters of the futile St José had risen and then vanished … The fritters of St José were too expensive, for the marquises of Lukones, occupied in the war of the butirro pears.

  The child implored God to put an end to the gaiety. Handfuls of chalk dust in his eyes: if gaiety had to be this, he wanted nothing of it.

  Doddering horses circled, rocking, round and round, their horns held by women riding with legs astride, knickers split: whether strips of lace or torn cloth, he couldn’t say, bits of bare flesh for sure … A nasal musical jingle came out from the pivot of the great machine, centuries of music, and there had to be respect for musical tradition, as if Poverty had caught cold. Years later, that celestial music came back to him with clearest drops of moonlight, and it was Norma … But at that time, from the merry-go-round, it seemed to him like the music of sweaty rags, of the snotty nose, of revolt, of nougat, of pushing and shoving, of fritters, of roasted peanuts that rapidly turn stomach-ache to shit.

  The cherished dream, with a fresh young girl on the flying trapeze, who blows kisses, to the child too, to him, to him, sunk in the aroma of stale almonds in mucilaginous egg white … ugh! Disgusting … Candyfloss, in the rough hands of the ugly brute, terrified him … The lout had hung his pitch-black coil of sugar on a hook the colour of rosin, and yelled: yelled out from his tumefied neck; everyone stopped; to hear his curses in dialect: and he stretched it, that sticky sugar, and spun it and twisted it, and then kneaded it again into a braid and reworked it into eight, the sugar, with his hands: and this coil that was prone to continual transformation and stretching also seemed guilty, deceitful: an accomplice in the obscenity: and the man spat into one hand then the other, to lubricate them, so they’d slip better into their task, the filthy swine …

  Melancholy magic, thin cotton curtains, faded stockings and vests, fringes, the hideous snake over the shoulders of the dancing girl, powdered thighs. The clown didn’t make him laugh, not in the slightest, with his red nose, his stupid face, powdered, filled with wretchedness … A cruel orang-utan had kidnapped Cleopatra, naked, waxen: and coiled around her hand she had an asp, to which she was offering her breast.

  She was naked and white, as women ought to be when they get out of the tub, after a good lathering …

  But there was no protection from the stench, from the hideous dialect, from the braggadocio … from the confetti, from the peanut and roast-chestnut shells, from orange peels, also called skins. Pink toasted almonds and young girls became foul, to the eyes of the child, with the disappearance of all courtesy …

  What the child suffered was not festivity but the bawling of a pack of devils, madmen, ragamuffins, in futile, bestial devilry … It certainly was, the son now thought, a sick childhood. The man tried to get over this delirium. It enabled him to diagnose a late development, a morbid, abnormal sensitivity: he concluded that he had been a sick child and that he was stupid. Only in this way could he establish a relationship with his fellow citizens.

  And besides, today, through psychiatry, these phobias of the child towards the multiplicity of bodies and impulses are fully recognized. But, then, other crowds arrived from all directions: they joined in the clamour, in the wild affray; they pressed in from every side, shouting: they surrounded him. He wasn’t a child, nor was he war-deaf. He dreamt, then, in the futility of that sunlight, while the ants patiently crossed the Ogaden, heroic caravans … He dreamt, standing up, in the sun. He could do nothing else.

  ‘He went up into the attic. From a crate, draped with fat cobwebs, he prised open the lid. Then, out, in packs, the whole collection of “Maradagàl Literario”, as much as had been left by the rats, one pack after the other, down to the bottom … His knees, his nose covered in dust … To the bottom, to the bottom, buried beneath the literature and the dust, there ought also to be … The pea-shooter, the one he had brought back from the trenches … It should be there, it should be there, if the rats hadn’t gnawed at that as well … There! He removed the light automatic rifle from the case, tested the unloaded mechanism … Everything was gleaming, as it had been, every cog greased, every ratchet, as it had been … the vaseline as though brushed on yesterday. Here was the loader and the spring: did they work? oh! if they worked! Clack, the spring! the catch. Like on the mountainside. The loaders were shiny, with sharp tips, like combs, just as when they decorated the red earth, at the emplacement of Faiti; or in the midday with no trenches, ready, in the stench, among the shards of rock, five minutes from the response.

  ‘He came down: the staircase of his own house, he came down. The room was full of churls. He took up his position there on the terrace, erect, legs apart on the terrace of his house, with the gun, as though he were holding a fine mandolin, to strum it!, to strum it really well, that mandolin. Clack: the spring, the ratchet, the catch. A shiny loader, a comb. The barrel of the mandolin slipped into the room. Oh! what a fine Romance, with mandolin and meeuzic, looking out over the clear blue sky, the house free! disinfected!’

  The mother appeared before him, bent, calm, gazing at him. Her face, with eyes swollen, skin sagging, almost yellow, could no longer express her inner tenderness: as if the inevitable had already distanced him from every possibility of expression: but her love was clearly apparent from her attempt at a smile, from the strain of her eyes, which age had made long-sighted.

  ‘Do you want a coffee?’ she asked gently. He looked at her without answering, then said, with a scowl: ‘Why all those pigs around the house?’

  His mother then took fright. She had thought him calm.

  ‘… They’ve come … a moment …’, she stammered: ‘… to bring me mushrooms … poor
folk …’, and she made to move away, as if she wanted to go back and get the basket, to show him. In fact she wanted to escape: in fright. He held her by the arm, roughly: ‘… I don’t want, I don’t want pigs in the house …’, he yelled, bringing his face ferociously close to that of his mother. His mother drew her head back a little, closed her eyes, unable to clasp her hands as she usually did, for he was holding her upraised arm: her arm ended in a hand, raised high, skin and bone, with no more strength: in a hand incapable of imploring. He released her immediately, and her arm then fell back to her side. But she dared not lift her eyelids.

  The upper part of her head, her high brow and temples, over the arches of her closed eyes, looked like the face of one who collects her thoughts in the silent and deep richness of her being, so as not to know the hatred: of those she loves so much!