The Experience of Pain

by Carlo Emilio Gadda

  As Suetonius describes Caesar, who raises his toga to his head, before the sudden flash of the blades.

  The son’s mind was filled with a desperate pain: the tired sweetness of September seemed unreal, a fleeting image of things lost, impossible. He would have liked to kneel and say: ‘forgive me, forgive me! Mother, it’s me!’ He said: ‘If I find you once more among pigs, I’ll slit your throat and theirs …’ The sentence made no sense, but that’s what he actually said (like when the boat sometimes, on drawing up, overshoots the landing stage).

  He crossed the terrace and the room, turned the basket with all the mushrooms on to the floor; threw from the plate the yellow slime of the creature, without touching it.

  He went up to his room, where the book was waiting for him, open at the page. Instead he took the suitcase, filled it haphazardly with what he needed, poor belongings, returned all the way downstairs, went out from below. The Lares called out to him, unable to follow, they called to him from the bedroom: ‘Farewell! Farewell.’

  The mother, from the terrace, saw him go off and down the path through the fields, from the terrace where she was standing. She said goodbye, in her mind, calling him, calling him, with the name she had given him, distant sweetness of the years. When the chestnuts grew more luxuriant and green, along the avenues of the Spanish bastions.

  Then the smoke of the houses rose from the chimneys, on the edge of the distant west. Half an hour later the train whistled, rolling over the peat bog: as over a world that was deaf, lost, already lapped by tongues of darkness.

  IX

  The two cousins hired by Caballero Trabatta, as night guards at the castle, where all they had to do was sleep and, if they snored, they could snore as much as they wanted, and nothing else, had the appearance of two exceptionally sturdy lads. Sturdy and well built and tough, and with parched skin, or rather burnt, even in comparison to those who were already like that by nature or by reason of their trade. They had a lavatory and a washbasin, with water tap and a flush which, strangely, actually worked, with cataracts of water over the escaping turds.

  Bruno Olocati, one of the two, had managed to stab a maternal uncle in the thigh … the wound rather too close, perhaps, to the femoral artery. The reason is unknown. According to popular rumour at least, it seems the uncle was doing his best, moneyed as the old man was, and a shopkeeper to boot, to filch a certain pretty asparagus of a girl from him, in his spare time, or on Sundays, though she too was variously described, by some people or by others.

  To earn a living, they had then been helped, both of them, by their legs. Along dark gorges and cliffs of the Renesquetera, over howling depths, against the chill of sleet and wind, ruthlessly penetrating fear and the night, they had smuggled here more sacks of coffee, the two of them, and of tobacco and sugar, from the paradise of Parapagàl, than the whole of Gutiérrez’s notorious band of muchachos perdidos: perhaps because Gutiérrez’s muchachos, already officially written into legend, were taking it rather too easily with excessive premiums on the real cost of the goods they smuggled. So that the two of them ended up making twice the effort and taking twice the risk: to keep clear of the customs guards and to keep clear of the official smugglers who called them blacklegs and had already promised they would bump them off some day or other. The official smugglers were to be feared more than the customs guards. ‘C’est de la concurrence.’

  As for Caballero Trabatta, as already suggested, he was someone who kept his eye on people and what was going on and, despite being a financier, still had a certain humanity. In 1932, all of a sudden, overnight, the altered ratios between prices and exchange rates, and unforeseen tax laws introduced by the government of Parapagàl, had allowed all the smugglers of the Renesquetera quite unexpectedly to put their feet up during the sweet season of repose. Some of them, the younger and more restless, sitting by the cashier at a tobacconist’s shop, or after they had tightened their belts month by month, started talking about joining up (before being drafted) in the Republican Customs Corps at the frontier: and the two unemployed cousins, Bruno Olocati and Ermenegildo Gomez, were there among them when finally, thank God, like manna from Heaven, that story arrived about the theft of eleven thousand lire from the drawer on the left, the second from the top, locked, of the desk in the ground-floor study of the castle, with portraits of poor Señora Teresa on the floor, unrecognizable beneath the feet of the thieves. Who had then escaped through the window.

  The two young men, therefore, as private guards for the time being in Trabatta’s employment, would take a walk around the garden each evening, before ending up playing briscola at the slate table and lantern; in the small room on the ground floor, by the entrance, that the Caballero had set aside for their sleep, so sound, though susceptible at times to sudden interruption, waking in armed defence of the sacred private bolted property: they slept in their underpants, like firemen in American films, ready to jump: and to ward off the perils of the darkness.

  The garden, to the west, in its lower and flatter part, which was planted with fruit trees, and where the famous pears were, with small pots and San Pellegrino magnesia bottles filled with water and honey to trap wasps, and also, from time to time, a few actual pears, though hard as rocks, enclosed by a wall of little purpose, which ran over the hillock and divided it from a small field of banzavóis: beyond that foliage, of shiny banzavóis, beneath high, faraway stars, a gently sloping roof could be glimpsed, the house of the mother and son; silent and meek, and as if abandoned in the night, which was silence punctuated with lost, cruelly distant sapphires. A narrow path cuts through this field and emerges on the aforesaid public lane, which skirts the aforesaid plum-tree wall: this public thoroughfare, described on the land-registry maps as ‘public road from lakes’, which passes along the low plum-tree wall, is a kind of cataract of pebbles, and stones as large as tennis balls, and some even like watermelons, but much harder, with sharp-cutting crescents of broken plates and the bases of glasses and bottles, a few empty jars, various lumps of shit of varying colour and consistency, and one or two worn-out toothbrushes, abandoned, of course, to the fate of worn-out things.

  No one ever goes along there at night, since the lane, which eventually drops down to Lukones, after many twists and stones and large lizards darting from the brambles, is not linked directly to any village. It serves only a few small fields of emaciated banzavóis and the mock-Swiss villas; inhabited by gentlewomen and gentlemen, mostly widows and widowers: Caballero Trabatta, Commendador Ponzoni, Señor Tolommei; Señora Carpioni and the various Sapia di Saracinos who had so nicely gentrified those lovely hillocks around 1890–1900. The latter, as well as being widowed and sometimes deaf, were also fairly unkempt, claiming that ‘in the country you can do as you please, with this fresh air!’ and the other even better excuse that ‘in our company, you don’t stand on ceremony’. These women, to encourage good works among local craftsmen and keep them from idleness, would commission stools, rusticated console tables from time to time, and other gadgets and contraptions from Poronga, who, having taken the order, then made them in a few months and for a few lire each; elements of a domestic bazaar ever-more tattered and forlorn as the years went by, though it brought delight, along with the fresh air, to those crazy old women. To satisfy all of them, he, the craftsman, worked up to eighteen hours a week: with large pencil and handsaw, plane and hammer, before Saturday arrived!: and painted them as well; with a paint which, then, woe betide anyone who handled the stool. When autumn came, after the September feast of Our Lady, when the swallows had already left or were about to leave, and the Sapias were about to leave the fresh air for the rather more musty, typographic, inky air of Bottonuto and Pasquirolo, with large utilitarian bunches of bedraggled roses and utilitarian rosemary on tram 28, Poronga then arrived, bringing them the stool or the console table, one evening when it had almost been forgotten: and he found them in the kitchen, half hidden in the infernal darkness and smoke, wearing a blacksmith’s apron, stained and sticky, l
icking their fingers, first all ten of them, and then, immediately after, the large wooden spoon with which they were stirring their dark and bubbling pulp in a large pot over the fire, crying into it from the reek of the smoke, tomato sauce or plum jam: which they habitually cook, as they say, ‘over a slow fire’, namely with two or three stingy, damp sticks under the large cooking pot, and then triumphantly ladle it out, smoky and sour, and very bitter, so as to save on sugar: since they are miserly and foolish like all the gentlewomen-cooks of Maradagàl. (There, indeed, the sugar companies are exempted from half the sugar tax, to sweeten their jams: and can therefore easily beat any gentlewoman-cook, even the most stupid.)

  Poronga then appeared, all of a sudden, as if the twilight had produced him, from the kitchen doorway. He had the air of a stray dog, with a ruffled coat, with bare, heavy-hanging folds: but one that doesn’t bite, and in fact emanates trust and the good aroma of life: a somewhat grubby life. He arrived in person, in shirtsleeves very damp at the armpits, to bring the hand-worked and painted stool, still tacky, and woe betide anyone who handles it … in combination with the spectacle of his loose trousers, uh oh, yet still held up by the belt, for another few minutes, yes, yes, in doubtful probability: between yes and no: from which, moreover, exuded healthy artisan effluvia, from the better provinces of his person. Once paid, after long discussions and sometimes after a glass of wine, from the servant’s flask, he would bid a cordial goodbye and leave.

  One of these mad Sapias, an immigrant from Lombardy, was also a poetess and charitable to the poor: she grew pears, plums and cornelian cherries: she made insipid medlar jam: gave alms to imbeciles on St Joseph’s Day, as much as she could: and rhymed ‘Ambrogio’ with ‘orologio’ and ‘mogio mogio’: she died amid general mourning, in the Pastrufazio provincial mental asylum, on 22 September 1926; in other words, several years before the autumn season when the events we have undertaken to recount took place.

  No one therefore passed along that road in the silent hours of the night: except perhaps, sometimes, Palumbo, on his bicycle with no light, who had to slip the piece of paper into some point or other of the gates, of every alternate villa.

  One night, as he was about to place his trump card, the seven, over a black ace, in that moment of suspense and silence with the card still in the air before being banged down on the table, he, Bruno, and then Ermenegildo, seemed to hear, or they imagined, footsteps, way down, on the gravel of a footpath; which seemed to be following the route through the garden taken several nights before by the thieves, when they had come and left, with the eleven thousand lire, along the Iglesia road.

  The two looked at each other: with the last card of the round still in their hands, they stopped to listen. The footsteps seemed to go down, unless it was a hallucination, towards the furthest and lowest part of the garden, where the pergolas stood, with the pears.

  They stared at each other, stood up, threw down the cards.

  ‘You stay here,’ said Bruno. ‘If I need help, I’ll whistle …’: he took the revolver, the electric torch: and he dashed into the entrance hall, then out into the darkness, not bothering to close the door. That night, Caballero Trabatta was away: in Pastrufazio, for these were turbulent days for the stock market in the whole of Maradagàl.

  The other couldn’t resist: he ran up, taking four steps at a time, to waken Battista; he woke the women, who immediately started shrieking. He came back down at breakneck speed, armed himself, and rushed out behind his cousin, he too with an electric torch and revolver.

  He caught up with him, panting, when they had almost reached the pergolas, perhaps because the other had stopped to look around. He called, ‘Bruno, Bruno!’ almost in a whisper, as if they had the customs guards at their heels, among the crags and howling winds of the Renesquetera. Companions in the darkness and the wind, and in the howling of the valleys. Bruno had squatted down by a lime tree: ‘I’m here, don’t shoot, mocoso!;fn1 you were supposed to stay put …’.

  ‘I’ve woken Battista …’; in a certain way he had mobilized the reserve, to defend the bases.

  ‘You’ve drawn attention … it’s gone quiet. Mocoso!’ The throb of the young man’s sharp, ruthless instinct could be felt, even in the darkness: one might have said, even in the darkness, a dog pointing, galvanized by a rustling in the undergrowth.

  ‘We’d better be careful,’ said Gildo, who was more placid: he usually did what his cousin said.

  With rapid, instantaneous flashes of the two lights, they set about searching, almost ferreting, but where?, in the foliage of the bushes, among the population of old trees, laden with sleep and darkness. Or perhaps with ancient peace. They looked like two fireflies in June searching for each other. The irons of the pergola, abandoned in that cheerless night, supported pears (among the curved leaves) drawn out suddenly from the darkness by the beam of the torch, shiny and hard as stones. Certain pears and leaves, bearing the bluish bloom of copper sulphate. Wasps and flies in the syrupy water of the small pots, a rotting ragout of wasps and flies. No one: ‘What do we do? … I tell you, we’ve imagined the whole thing,’ said Gildo. They were on the point of returning to the castle.

  But they had an idea, that someone, having walked along the avenue, might have climbed over the nearby wall. And the Iglesia road, empty, funereal, came once again into their minds, accustomed to the night and to the silent footsteps that travel through it, over dark cliffs. They imagined a motor car, on the road, waiting for its prey and predators undisturbed. Headlights switched off. Of course. But how did it get there! Or perhaps the shadow, black and silent, that had emerged on the terrace: there was no knowing who it was: it crossed over fields and walls, like an image. But the footsteps, by God! they’d heard them. They were no shadow!

  Their master’s villa had been raided just a few days before. Now, for sure, it was someone else’s turn. Someone who had not signed up, of course. This was the idea that unconsciously guided them, and which later they would fail to recall, and still less put into words.

  At that moment, in their hearts so free of fear and uncertainty, and so inured to risk beneath the weight and sweat of smuggled hauls, there was the simple, commendable wish to go where they were most needed, to be useful at least to someone, to earn their money, which, in those first few days of slackened belts, they felt they’d received for doing nothing.fn2

  With a single leap, each of the two young men was over the wall. They emerged from the path on to the lane, walked slowly, lifting their feet. Each careful to be as quiet as possible. Sometimes they shone their lights, on the stones. A door banged inside, they distinctly heard it, in the house of the mother and son, perhaps because a gust of wind was blowing, at intervals, from the northern gorge of the Seegrün. The walnuts and the almonds and the robinias then heaved something like a sigh, almost a lament and a caress and a shudder, which came from far away, conveyed to them from the rustle of pines, from the lime trees: and it was the acknowledgement of the night, the wind patrolling beneath the distant stars. The door banged again: the house’s brief response towards the hill: the noise came from a small window over the staircase: they knew, more or less, the internal layout of the house, like everyone in Lukones, having entered from time to time: to take a basket, deliver a message, drink a glass of wine, which the Señora would offer on first arrival (when Gildo was a child, the Señora had given him a jersey and a few coins). On reaching the small iron gate, they tried it: it was locked. They weren’t expecting this; they felt sure they’d find it open. What do we do? they wondered. Caballero Trabatta, on hiring them, had instilled certain legal principles into their brains, along with appropriate comments ‘pro domo sua’: private property, quiet enjoyment, trespass, etc. etc. Climbing over someone else’s gate was not allowed, they thought, less still at such an hour.

  They hung around like that for some time, their torches keenly scanning, watching; like children with no money at the fair. The house seemed quiet, as though it were the house of the dead, beneath the
silent stars: which a hand had suspended high up from the glacial lights of eternity. The wooden door to which the gate led seemed shut: they flashed the two luminous circles of their lights up, through the bars of the gate; the brass of the handles glistened. All was in order: the window shutters all closed. No light appeared through them. What should they do? Wake the peon? Call? But why, for what reason, they wondered, out of a notion that had occurred to them, just like that? The fear of seeming ridiculous determined the sequence of their actions: it is very strong among the Celts of Keltiké, it frightens them much more than danger. They decided to continue on, down to Lukones, no longer worried about being seen. The large stones shifted on the road, as they passed, as if slipping away, under their shoes. Were they thinking perhaps (though later they didn’t know how to explain their decision) of going to Lukones and climbing back up the Iglesia road so as to intercept the supposed motor car, with revolvers drawn? But then they could have got there from the garden, from the other side of the garden. Yet no, since now they were at the Señora’s house, in quite a different place. Did they think their task was over, or were they intending to pursue the suspected night wanderer, or go to the village to wake the people? Many times, even in war, in the darkness, patrols don’t know which road to take. Sounds, going back and forth between the villas and the hillside, when the wind has stopped, are peculiarly localized. They hadn’t gone far from the villa when they seemed to hear a key being thrust into a lock, a heavy key, which gave out the sound of iron in iron: it was the iron lock of the gate, of that damned gate. Now they stopped. Both of them had been startled, since the key turned ominously, creaking in the arid, rusty lock: the gate made a rapid squeak, on grating hinges: then there was silence; but it squeaked once more and closed again, and the key rattled once more, to lock it again. They were quite sure of all this. A footstep … though they weren’t so sure about that … seemed to head off into the darkness, but all immediately fell silent.