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Luigi Pirandello: Shoot! (13)
Shoot! (Si Gira, 1926). The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator by Luigi Pirandello. Translated from the Italian by C. K. Scott Moncrieff.
BOOK III
2
Freshly dug, dusty, barely traced in outline, it has the air and the ungraciousness of a person who, expecting to be left in peace, finds that, on the contrary, he is continually being disturbed.
But if the right to a few fresh tufts of grass, to all those fine, wandering threads of sound, with which the silence weaves a cloak of peace in solitary places, to the croak of an occasional frog when it rains and the pools of rain-water mirror back the stars when the sky is clear again; in short, to all the delights of nature in the open and unpeopled country: if this right be not enjoyed by a country road some miles outside the gate of the city, then indeed I do not know who does enjoy it.
Instead of this: motor-cars, carriages, carts, bicycles, and all day long an uninterrupted coming and going of actors, operators, mechanics, labourers, messengers, and a din of hammers, saws, planes, and clouds of dust and the stench of petrol.
The buildings, high and low, of the great cinematograph company rise at the far end of the road, on either side; a few more stand up farther off, scattered in confusion, within the vast enclosure, which extends far over the Campagna: one of them, higher than all the rest, is capped with a sort of glazed tower, with opaque windows, which glitter in the sunlight; and on the wall that is visible from both avenue and side road, on the dazzling whitewashed surface, in black letters a foot high, is painted:
THE KOSMOGRAPH
The entrance is to the left, through a little door by the side of the gate, which is rarely opened. Opposite is a wayside tavern, pompously surnamed ‘Trattoria della Kosmograph’, with a fine trellised pergola which encloses the whole of the so-called garden and creates a patch of green within. Five or six rustic tables, inside, none too steady on their legs, and chairs and benches. A number of actors, made up and dressed in strange costumes, are seated there and engaged in an animated discussion; one of them shouts louder than the rest, bringing his hand down furiously upon his thigh:
“I tell you, you’ve got to hit her here, here, here!”
And the bang of his hand on his leather breeches sounds like so many rifle shots.
They are speaking, of course, of the tigress, bought a short time ago by the Kosmograph; of the way in which she is to be killed; of the exact spot in which the bullet must hit her. It has become an obsession with them. To hear them talk, you would think that they were all professional hunters of wild beasts.
Crowding round the entrance, stand listening to them with grinning faces the chauffeurs of the dusty, dilapidated motor-cars; the drivers of the carriages that stand waiting, there in the background, where the side road is barred by a fence of stakes and iron spikes; and ever so many other people, the most wretched that I know, albeit they are dressed with a certain gentility. They are (I apologise, but everything here has a French or an English name) the casual ‘cachets’,
that is to say the people who come to offer their services, should the need arise, as ‘supers’. Their petulance is insufferable, worse than that of beggars, because they come here to display a penury which asks not for the charity of a copper, but for five lire, in reward for dressing themselves up, often grotesquely. You ought to see the rush, on some days, to the dressing-room to snatch and put on at once a heap of gaudy rags, and the airs with which they strut up and down on the stage and in the open, knowing full well that, if they succeed in ‘dressing’, even if they do not ‘come on’, they draw half-salary.
Two or three actors come out of the tavern, making their way through the crowd. They are dressed in saffron-coloured vests, their faces and arms plastered a dirty yellow, and with a sort of crest of coloured feathers on their heads. Indians. They greet me:
“Hallo, Gubbio.”
“Hallo, ‘Shoot’!…”
‘Shoot’, you understand, is my nickname.
The difficulties of life!
You have lost an eye in it, and your case has been serious. But we are all of us more or less marked, and we never notice it. Life marks us; and fastens a beauty-spot on one, a grimace on another.
No? But excuse me, you, yes, you who said no just now… there now, ‘absolutely’… do you not continually load all your conversation with that adverb in ‘-ly’?
“I went absolutely to the place they told me: I saw him, and said to him absolutely: What, you, absolutely…”
Have patience! Nobody yet calls you ‘Mr. Absolutely’… Serafino Gubbio (‘Shoot’!) has been less fortunate. Without my noticing it, I may have happened once or twice, or several times in succession, to repeat, after the producer, the sacramental word: “‘Shoot’!” I must have repeated it with my face composed in that expression which is proper to me, of professional impassivity, and this was enough to make everyone here, at Fantappiè’s suggestion, address me now as ‘Shoot’.
Every town in Italy knows Fantappiè, the comedian of the Kosmograph, who has specialised in travesties of military life: ‘Fantappiè, C. B’. and ‘Fantappiè on the range; Fantappiè on manoeuvres’ and ‘Fantappiè steers the airship’; ‘Fantappiè on guard’ and ‘Fantappiè in the Colonies’.
[Footnote: Fantappiè, or fante a piede, is equivalent to the English footslogger. C. K. S. M.]
He stuck it on himself, this nickname; a nickname that goes well with his special form of art. In private life he is called Roberto Chismicò.
“You aren’t angry with me, laddie, for calling you ‘Shoot’?” he asked me, some time ago.
“No, my dear fellow,” I answered him with a smile. “You have stamped me.”
“I’ve stamped myself too, if it comes to that!”
All of us stamped, yes. And most, of all, those of us who are least aware of it, my dear Fantappiè.
Luigi Pirandello: Shoot! (13)
kempis.nl poetry magazine
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Luigi Pirandello: Shoot! (12)
Shoot! (Si Gira, 1926). The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator by Luigi Pirandello. Translated from the Italian by C. K. Scott Moncrieff
BOOK III
1
A slight swerve. There is a one-horse carriage in front. “Peu, pepeeeu, peeeu.”
What? The horn of the motor-car is pulling it back? Why, yes! It does really seem to be making it run backwards, with the most comic effect.
The three ladies in the motor-car laugh, turn round, wave their arms in greeting with great vivacity, amid a gay, confused flutter of many-coloured veils; and the poor little carriage, hidden in an arid, sickening cloud of smoke and dust, however hard the cadaverous little horse may try to pull it along with his weary trot, continues to fall behind, far behind, with the houses, the trees, the occasional pedestrians, until it vanishes down the long straight vista of the suburban avenue. Vanishes? Not at all! The motor-car has vanished. The carriage, meanwhile, is still here, still slowly advancing, at the weary, level trot of its cadaverous horse. And the whole of the avenue seems to come forward again, slowly, with it.
You have invented machines, have you? And now you enjoy these and similar sensations of stylish pace.
The three ladies in the motor-car are three actresses from the Kosmograph, and have greeted with such vivacity the carriage flung into the background by their mechanical progress not because there is anyone in the carriage particularly dear to them; but because the motor-car, the machinery intoxicates them and excites this uncontrollable vivacity in them. They have it at their disposal; free of charge; the Kosmograph pays. In the carriage there is myself.
They have seen me disappear in an instant, dropping ludicrously behind, down the receding vista of the avenue; they have laughed at me; by this time they have already arrived. But here am I creeping forward again, my dear ladies. Ever so slowly, yes; but what have you seen? A carriage drop behind, as though pulled by a string, and the whole avenue rush past you in a long, confused, violent, dizzy streak.
I, on the other hand, am still here; I can console myself for my slow progress by admiring one by one, at my leisure, these great green plane trees by the roadside, not uprooted by the hurricane of your passage, but firmly planted in the ground, which turn towards me at every breath of wind in the gold of the sunlight between their dark boughs a cool patch of violet shadow: giants of the road, halted in file, ever so many of them, they open and uplift on muscular arms their huge palpitating wreaths of foliage to the sky.
Drive on, yes, but not too fast, my coachman! He is so tired, your old cadaverous horse. Everything passes him by: motor-cars, bicycles, electric trams; and the frenzy of all that motion along the road urges him on as well, unconsciously and involuntarily, gives an irresistible impetus to his poor stiff legs, weary with conveying, from end to end of the great city, so many people afflicted, oppressed, excited, by necessities, hardships, engagements, aspirations which he is incapable of understanding! And perhaps none of them makes him so tired as the few who get into the carriage with the object of amusing themselves, and do not know where or how. Poor little horse, his head droops gradually lower, and he never raises it again, not even if you flay him with your whip, coachman!
“Here, on the right… turn to the right!”
The Kosmograph is here, on this remote side road, outside the city gate.
Luigi Pirandello: Shoot! (12)
kempis.nl poetry magazine
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Luigi Pirandello: Shoot! (11)
Shoot! (Si Gira, 1926). The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator by Luigi Pirandello. Translated from the Italian by C. K. Scott Moncrieff
BOOK II
5
A problem which I find it far more difficult to solve is this: how in the world Giorgio Mirelli, who would fly with such impatience from every complication, can have lost himself to this woman, to the point of laying down his life on her account.
Almost all the details are lacking that would enable me to solve this problem, and I have said already that I have no more than a summary report of the drama.
I know from various sources that the Nestoroff, at Capri, when Giorgio Mirelli saw her for the first time, was in distinctly bad odour, and was treated with great diffidence by the little Russian colony, which for some years past has been settled upon that island.
Some even suspected her of being a spy, perhaps because she, not very prudently, had introduced herself as the widow of an old conspirator, who had died some years before her coming to Capri, a refugee in Berlin. It appears that some one wrote for information, both to Berlin and to Petersburg, with regard to her and to this unknown conspirator, and that it came to light that a certain Nikolai Nestoroff had indeed been for some years in exile in Berlin, and had died there, but without ever having given anyone to understand that he was exiled for political reasons. It appears to have become known also that this Nikolai Nestoroff had taken her, as a little girl, from the streets, in one of the poorest and most disreputable quarters of Petersburg, and, after having her educated, had married her; and then, reduced by his vices to the verge of starvation had lived upon her, sending her out to sing in music-halls of the lowest order, until, with the police on his track, he had made his escape, alone, into Germany. But the Nestoroff, to my knowledge, indignantly denies all these stories.
That she may have complained privately to some one of the ill-treatment, not to say the cruelty she received from her girlhood at the hands of this old man is quite possible; but she does not say that he lived upon her; she says rather that, of her own accord, obeying the call of her passion, and also, perhaps, to supply the necessities of life, having overcome his opposition, she took to acting in the provinces, a-c-t-i-n-g, mind, on the legitimate stage; and that then, her husband having fled from Russia for political reasons and settled in Berlin, she, knowing him to be in frail health and in need of attention, taking pity on him, had joined him there and remained with him till his death. What she did then, in Berlin, as a widow, and afterwards in Paris and Vienna, cities to which she often refers, shewing a thorough knowledge of their life and customs, she neither says herself nor certainly does anyone ever venture to ask her.
For certain people, for innumerable people, I should say, who are incapable of seeing anything but themselves, love of humanity often, if not always, means nothing more than being pleased with themselves.
Thoroughly pleased with himself, with his art, with his studies of landscape, must Giorgio Mirelli, unquestionably, have been in those days at Capri.
Indeed–and I seem to have said this before–his habitual state of mind was one of rapture and amazement. Given such a state of mind, it is easy to imagine that this woman did not appear to him as she really was, with the needs that she felt, wounded, scourged, poisoned by the distrust and evil gossip that surrounded her; but in the fantastic transfiguration that he at once made of her, and illuminated by the light in which he beheld her. For him feelings must take the form of colours, and, perhaps, entirely engrossed in his art, he had no other feeling left save for colour. All the impressions that he formed of her were derived exclusively, perhaps, from the light which he shed upon her; impressions, therefore, that were felt by him alone. She need not, perhaps could not participate in them. Now, nothing irritates us more than to be shut out from an enjoyment, vividly present before our eyes, round about us, the reason of which we can neither discover nor guess. But even if Giorgio Mirelli had told her of his enjoyment, he could not have conveyed it to her mind. It was a joy felt by him alone, and proved that he too, in his heart, prayed and wished for nothing else of her than her body; not, it is true, like other men, with base intent; but even this, in the long run–if you think it over carefully–could not but increase the woman’s irritation. Because, if the failure to derive any assistance, in the maddening uncertainties of her spirit, from the many who saw and desired nothing in her save her body, to satisfy on it the brutal appetite of the senses, filled her with anger and disgust; her anger with the one man, who also desired her body and nothing more; her body, but only to extract from it an ideal and absolutely self-sufficient pleasure, must have been all the stronger, in so far as every provocative of disgust was entirely lacking, and must have rendered more difficult, if not absolutely futile, the vengeance which she was in the habit of wreaking upon other people. An angel, to a woman, is always more irritating than a beast.
I know from all Giorgio Mirelli’s artist friends in Naples that he was spotlessly chaste, not because he did not know how to make an impression upon women, but because he instinctively avoided every vulgar distraction.
To account for his suicide, which beyond question was largely due to the Nestoroff, we ought to assume that she, not cared for, not helped, and irritated to madness, in order to be avenged, must with the finest and subtlest art have contrived that her body should gradually come to life before his eyes, not for the delight of his eyes alone; and that, when she saw him, like all the rest, conquered and enslaved, she forbade him, the better to taste her revenge, to take any other pleasure from her than that with which, until then, he had been content, as the only one desired, because the only one worthy of him.
‘We ought’, I say, to assume this, but only if we wish to be ill-natured. The Nestoroff might say, and perhaps does say, that she did nothing to alter that relation of pure friendship which had grown up between herself and Mirelli; so much so that when he, no longer contented with that pure friendship, more impetuous than ever owing to the severe repulse with which she met his advances, yet, to obtain his purpose, offered to marry her, she struggled for a long time–and this is true; I learned it on good authority–to dissuade him, and proposed to leave Capri, to disappear; and in the end remained there only because of his acute despair.
But it is true that, if we wish to be ill-natured, we may also be of opinion that both the early repulse and the later struggle and threat and attempt to leave the island, to disappear, were perhaps so many artifices carefully planned and put into practice to reduce this young man to despair after having seduced him, and to obtain from him all sorts of things which otherwise he would never, perhaps, have conceded to her. Foremost among them, that she should be introduced as his future bride at the Villa by Sorrento to that dear Granny, to that sweet little sister, of whom he had spoken to her, and to the sister’s betrothed.
It seems that he, Aldo Nuti, more than, the two women, resolutely opposed this claim. Authority and power to oppose and to prevent this marriage he did not possess, for Giorgio was now his own master, free to act as he chose, and considered that he need no longer give an account of himself to anyone; but that he should bring this woman to the house and place her in contact with his sister, and expect the latter to welcome her and to treat her as a sister, this, by Jove, he could and must oppose, and oppose it he did with all his strength. But were they, Granny Rosa and Duccella, aware what sort of woman this was that Giorgio proposed to bring to the house and to marry? A Russian adventuress, an actress, if not something worse! How could he allow such a thing, how not oppose it with all his strength?
Again “with all his strength”… Ah, yes, who knows how hard Granny Rosa and Duccella had to fight in order to overcome, little by little, by their sweet and gentle persuasion, all the strength of Aldo Nuti. How could they have imagined what was to become of that strength at the sight of Varia Nestoroff, as soon as she set foot, timid, ethereal and smiling, in the dear villa by Sorrento!
Perhaps Giorgio, to account for the delay which Granny Rosa and Duccella shewed in answering, may have said to the Nestoroff that this delay was due to the opposition “with all his strength” of his sister’s future husband; so that the Nestoroff felt the temptation to measure her own strength against this other, at once, as soon as she set foot in the villa. I know nothing! I know that Aldo Nuti was drawn in as though into a whirlpool and at once carried away like a wisp of straw by passion for this woman.
I do not know him. I saw him as a boy, once only, when I was acting as Giorgio’s tutor, and he struck me as a fool. This impression of mine does not agree with what Mirelli said to me about him, on my return from Liege, namely that he was ‘complicated’. Nor does what I have heard from other people, with regard to him correspond in the least with this first impression, which however has irresistibly led me to speak of him according to the idea that I had formed of him from it. I must, really, have been mistaken. Duccella found it possible to love him! And this, to my mind, does more than anything else to prove me in the wrong. But we cannot control our impressions. He may be, as people tell me, a serious young man, albeit of a most ardent temperament; for me, until I see him again, he will remain that fool of a boy, with the baron’s coronet on his handkerchiefs and portfolios, the young gentleman who ‘would so love to become an actor’.
He became one, and not by way of make-believe, with the Nestoroff, at Giorgio Mirelli’s expense. The drama was unfolded at Naples, shortly after the Nestoroff’s introduction and brief visit to the house at Sorrento. It seems that Nuti returned to Naples with the engaged couple, after that brief visit, to help the inexperienced Giorgio and her who was not yet familiar with the town, to set their house in order before the wedding.
Perhaps the drama would not have happened, or would have had a different ending, had it not been for the complication of Duccella’s engagement to, or rather her love for Nuti. For this reason Giorgio Mirelli was obliged to concentrate on himself the violence of the unendurable horror that overcame him at the sudden discovery of his betrayal.
Aldo Nuti rushed from Naples like a madman before there arrived from Sorrento at the news of Giorgio’s suicide Granny Rosa and Duccella.
Poor Duccella, poor Granny Rosa! The woman who from thousands and thousands of miles away came to bring confusion and death into your little house where with the jasmines bloomed the most innocent of idylls, I have her here, now, in front of my machine, every day; and, if the news I have heard from Polacco be true, I shall presently have him here as well, Aldo Nuti, who appears to have heard that the Nestoroff is leading lady with the Kosmograph.
I do not know why, my heart tells me that, as I turn the handle of this photographic machine, I am destined to carry out both your revenge and your poor Giorgio’s, dear Duccella, dear Granny Rosa!
Luigi Pirandello: Shoot! (11)
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(to be continued)
More in: -Shoot!, Archive O-P, Pirandello, Luigi, Pirandello, Luigi
Luigi Pirandello: Shoot! (10)
Shoot! (Si Gira, 1926). The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator by Luigi Pirandello. Translated from the Italian by C. K. Scott Moncrieff
BOOK II
4
The experience of seeing men sink lower than the beasts must frequently have occurred to Varia Nestoroff.
And yet she has not killed them. A huntress, as you are a hunter. The snipe, you have killed. She has never killed anyone. One only, for her sake, has killed himself, by his own hand: Giorgio Mirelli; but not for her sake alone.
The beast, moreover, which does harm from a necessity of its nature, is not, so far as we know, unhappy.
The Nestoroff, as we have abundant grounds for supposing, is most unhappy. She does not enjoy her own wickedness, for all that it is carried out with such cold-blooded calculation.
If I were to say openly what I think of her to my fellow-operators, to the actors and actresses of the firm, all of them would at once suspect that I too had fallen in love with the Nestoroff.
I ignore this suspicion.
The Nestoroff feels for me, like all her fellow-artists, an almost instinctive aversion. I do not reciprocate it in any way because I do not spend my time with her, except when I am in the service of my machine, and then, as I turn the handle, I am what I am supposed to be, that is to say perfectly ‘impassive’. I am unable either to hate or to love the Nestoroff, as I am unable either to hate or to love anyone. I am ‘a hand that turns the handle’. When, finally, I am
restored to myself, that is to say when for me the torture of being only a hand is ended, and I can regain possession of the rest of my body, and marvel that I have still a head on my shoulders, and abandon myself once more to that wretched ‘superfluity’ which exists in me nevertheless and of which for almost the whole day my profession condemns me to be deprived; then… ah, then the affections, the memories that come to life in me are certainly not such as can persuade me to love this woman. I was the friend of Giorgio Mirelli, and among the most cherished memories of my life is that of the dear house in the country by Sorrento, where Granny Rosa and poor Duccella still live and mourn.
I study. I go on studying, because that is perhaps my ruling passion: it nourished in times of poverty and sustained my dreams, and it is the sole comfort that I have left, now that they have ended so miserably.
I study this woman, then, without passion but intently, who, albeit she may seem to understand what she is doing and why she does it, yet has not in herself any of that quiet “systematisation” of concepts, affections, rights and duties, opinions and habits, which I abominate in other people.
She knows nothing for certain, except the harm that she can do to others, and she does it, I repeat, with cold-blooded calculation.
This, in the opinion of other people, of all the “systematised,” debars her from any excuse. But I believe that she cannot offer any excuse, herself, for the harm which nevertheless she knows herself to have done.
She has something in her, this woman, which the others do not succeed in understanding, because even she herself does not clearly understand it. One guesses it, however, from the violent expressions which she assumes, involuntarily, unconsciously, in the parts that are assigned to her.
She alone takes them seriously, and all the more so the more illogical and extravagant they are, grotesquely heroic and contradictory. And there is no way of keeping her in check, of making her moderate the violence of those expressions. She alone ruins more films than all the other actors in the four companies put together. For one thing, she always moves out of the picture; when by any chance she does not move out, her action is so disordered, her face so strangely altered and disguised, that in the rehearsal theatre almost all the scenes in which she has taken part turn out useless and have to be done again.
Any other actress, who had not enjoyed and did not enjoy, as she does, the favour of the warm-hearted Commendator Borgalli, would long since have been given notice to leave.
Instead of which, “Dear, dear, dear…” exclaims the warm-hearted Commendatore, without the least annoyance, when he sees projected on the screen in the rehearsal theatre those demoniacal pictures, “dear, dear, dear… oh, come … no… is it possible? Oh, Lord, how horrible … cut it out, cut it out….”
And he finds fault with Polacco, and with all the producers in general, who keep the _scenarios_ to themselves, confining themselves to suggesting bit by bit to the actors the action to be performed in each separate scene, often disjointedly, because not all the scenes can be taken in order, one after another, in a studio. It often happens that the actors do not even know what part they are supposed to be taking in the play as a whole, and one hears some actor ask in the middle:
“I say, Polacco, am I the husband or the lover?”
In vain does Polacco protest that he has carefully explained the whole part to the Nestoroff. Commendator Borgalli knows that the fault does not lie with Polacco; so much so, that he has given him another leading lady, the Sgrelli, in order not to waste all the films that are allotted to his company. But the Nestoroff protests on her own account, if Polacco makes use of the Sgrelli alone, or of the Sgrelli more than of herself, the true leading lady of the company. Her
ill-wishers say that she does this to ruin Polacco, and Polacco himself believes it and goes about saying so. It is untrue: the only thing ruined, here, is film; and the Nestoroff is genuinely in despair at what she has done; I repeat, involuntarily and unconsciously. She herself remains speechless and almost terror-stricken at her own image on the screen, so altered and disordered. She sees there some one who is herself but whom she does not know. She would like not to recognise herself in this person, but at least to know her.
Possibly for years and years, through all the mysterious adventures of her life, she has gone in quest of this demon which exists in her and always escapes her, to arrest it, to ask it what it wants, why it is suffering, what she ought to do to soothe it, to placate it, to give it peace.
No one, whose eyes are not clouded by a passionate antipathy, and who has seen her come out of the rehearsal theatre after the presentation of those pictures of herself, can retain any doubt as to that. She is really tragic: terrified and enthralled, with that sombre stupor in her eyes which we observe in the eyes of the dying, and can barely restrain the convulsive tremor of her entire person.
I know the answer I should receive, were I to point this out to anyone:
“But it is rage! She is quivering with rage!”
It is rage, yes; but not the sort of rage that they all suppose, namely at a film that has gone wrong. A cold rage, colder than a blade of steel, is indeed this woman’s weapon against all her enemies. Now Cocò Polacco is not an enemy in her eyes. If he were, she would not tremble like that: with the utmost coldness she would avenge herself on him.
Enemies, to her, all the men become to whom she attaches herself, in order that they may help her to arrest the secret thing in her that escapes her: she herself, yes, but a thing that lives and suffers, so to speak, ‘outside herself’.
Well, no one has ever taken any notice of this thing, which to her is more pressing than anything else; everyone, rather, remains dazzled by her exquisite form, and does not wish to possess or to know anything else of her. And then she punishes them with a cold rage, just where their desires prick them; and first of all she exasperates those desires with the most perfidious art, that her revenge may be all the greater. She avenges herself by flinging her body, suddenly and coldly, at those whom they least expected to see thus favoured: like that, so as to shew them in what contempt she holds the thing that they prize most of all in her.
I do not believe that there can be any other explanation of certain sudden changes in her amorous relations, which appear to everyone, at first sight, inexplicable, because no one can deny that she has done harm to herself by them.
Except that the others, thinking it over and considering, on the one hand the nature of the men with whom she had consorted previously, and on the other that of the men at whom she has suddenly flung herself, say that this is due to the fact that with the former sort she could not remain, ‘could not breathe’; whereas to the latter she felt herself attracted by a “gutter” affinity; and this sudden and unexpected flinging of herself they explain as the sudden spring of a person who, after a long suffocation, seeks to obtain at last, ‘wherever he can’, a mouthful of air.
And if it should be just the opposite? If ‘in order to breathe’, to secure that help of which I have already spoken, she had attached herself to the former sort, and instead of having the ‘breathing-space’, the help for which she hoped, had found no breathing-space and no help from them, but rather an anger and disgust all the stronger because increased and embittered by disappointment, and also by a certain contempt which a person feels for the needs of another’s soul who sees and cares for nothing but his own SOUL, like that, in capital letters? No one knows; but of these “gutter” refinements those may well be capable who mostly highly esteem themselves, and are deemed ‘superior’ by their fellows. And then…then, better the gutter which offers itself as such, which, if it makes you sad, does not delude you; and which may have, as often it does have, a good side to it, and, now and then, certain traces of innocence, which cheer and refresh you all the more, the less you expected to find them there.
The fact remains that, for more than a year, the Nestoroff has been living with the Sicilian actor Carlo Ferro, who also is engaged by the Kosmograph: she is dominated by him and passionately in love with him. She knows what she may expect from such a man, and asks for nothing more. But it seems that she obtains far more from him than the others are capable of imagining.
This explains why, for some time back, I have set myself to study, with keen interest, Carlo Ferro also.
Luigi Pirandello: Shoot! (10)
kempis.nl poetry magazine
(to be continued)
More in: -Shoot!
Luigi Pirandello: Shoot! (9)
Shoot! (Si Gira, 1926). The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator by Luigi Pirandello. Translated from the Italian by C. K. Scott Moncrieff
BOOK II
3
I know this woman well now, as well, that is to say, as it is possible to know her, and I can now explain many things that long remained incomprehensible to me. Though there is still the risk that the explanation I now offer myself of them may perhaps appear incomprehensible to others. But I offer it to myself and not to others; and I have not the slightest intention of offering it as an excuse for the Nestoroff.
To whom should I excuse her?
I keep away from people who are respectable by profession, as from the plague.
It seems impossible that a person should not enjoy his own wickedness when he practises it with a cold-blooded calculation. But if such unhappiness (and it must be tremendous) exists, I mean that of not being able to enjoy one’s own wickedness, our contempt for such wicked persons, as for all sorts of other unhappiness, may perhaps be conquered, or at least modified, by a certain pity. I speak, so as not to give offence, as a moderately respectable person. But we must,
surely to goodness, admit this fact: that we are all, more or less, wicked; but that we do not enjoy our wickedness, and are unhappy.
Is it possible?
We all of us readily admit our own unhappiness; no one admits his own wickedness; and the former we insist upon regarding as due to no reason or fault of our own; whereas we labour to find a hundred reasons, a hundred excuses and justifications for every trifling act of wickedness that we have committed, whether against other people or against our own conscience.
Would you like me to shew you how we at once rebel, and indignantly deny a wicked action, even when it is undeniable, and when we have undeniably enjoyed it?
The following two incidents have occurred. (This is not a digression, for the Nestoroff has been compared by someone to the beautiful tiger purchased, a few days ago, by the Kosmograph.) The following two incidents, I say, have occurred.
A flock of birds of passage–woodcock and snipe–have alighted to rest for a little after their long flight and to recuperate their strength in the Roman Campagna. They have chosen a bad spot. A snipe, more daring than the rest, says to his comrades:
“You remain here, hidden in this brake. I shall go and explore the country round, and, if I find a better place, I shall call you.”
An engineer friend of yours, of an adventurous spirit, a Fellow of the Geographical Society, has undertaken the mission of going to Africa, I do not exactly know (because you yourself do not know exactly) upon what scientific exploration. He is still a long way from his goal; you have had some news of him; his last letter has left you somewhat alarmed, because in it your friend explained to you the dangers which he was going to face, when he prepared to cross certain distant tracts, savage and deserted.
To-day is Sunday. You rise betimes to go out shooting. You have made all your preparations overnight, promising yourself a great enjoyment. You alight from the train, blithe and happy; off you go over the fresh, green Campagna, a trifle misty still, in search of a good place for the birds of passage. You wait there for half an hour, for an hour; you begin to feel bored and take from your pocket the newspaper you bought when you started, at the station. After a time, you hear what sounds like a flutter of wings in the dense foliage of the wood; you lay down the paper; you go creeping quietly up; you take aim; you fire. Oh, joy! A snipe!
Yes, indeed, a snipe. The very snipe, the explorer, that had left its comrades in the brake.
I know that you do not eat the birds you have shot; you make presents of them to your friends: for you everything consists in this, in the pleasure of killing what you call game.
The day does not promise well. But you, like all sportsmen, are inclined to be superstitious: you believe that reading the newspaper has brought you luck, and you go back to read the newspaper in the place where you left it. On the second page you find the news that your friend the engineer, who went to Africa on behalf of the Geographical Society, while crossing those savage and deserted tracts, has met a tragic end: attacked, torn in pieces and devoured by a wild beast.
As you read with a shudder the account in the newspaper, it never enters your head even remotely to draw any comparison between the wild beast that has killed your friend and yourself, who have killed the snipe, an explorer like him.
And yet such a comparison would be perfectly logical, and, I fear, would give a certain advantage to the beast, since you have killed for pleasure, and without any risk of your being killed yourself; whereas the beast has killed from hunger, that is to say from necessity, and with the risk of being killed by your friend, who must certainly have been armed.
Rhetoric, you say? Ah, yes, my friend; do not be too contemptuous; I admit as much, myself; rhetoric, because we, by the grace of God, are men and not snipe.
The snipe, for his part, without any fear of being rhetorical, might draw the comparison and demand that at least men, who go out shooting for pleasure, should not call the beasts savage.
We, no. We cannot allow the comparison, because on one side we have a man who has killed a beast, and on the other a beast that has killed a man.
At the very utmost, my dear snipe, to make some concession to you, we can say that you were a poor innocent little creature. There! Does that satisfy you? But you are not to infer from this, that our wickedness is therefore the greater; and, above all, you are not to say that, by calling you an innocent little creature and killing you, we have forfeited the right to call the beast savage which, from hunger and not for pleasure, has killed a man.
But when a man, you say, makes himself lower than a beast?
Ah, yes; we must be prepared, certainly, for the consequences of our logic. Often we make a slip, and then heaven only knows where we shall land.
Luigi Pirandello: Shoot! (9)
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Luigi Pirandello: Shoot! (8)
Shoot! (Si Gira, 1926). The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator by Luigi Pirandello. Translated from the Italian by C. K. Scott Moncrieff
BOOK II
2
Of the sequel to this simple, innocent, idyllic life, about four years later, I have a cursory knowledge.
I acted as tutor to Giorgio Mirelli, but I was myself a student also, a penniless student who had grown old while waiting to complete his studies, and whom the sacrifices borne by his parents to keep him at school had automatically inspired with the utmost zeal, the utmost diligence, a shy, painful humility, a constraint which never diminished, albeit this period of waiting had now extended over many, many years.
Yet my time had perhaps not been wasted. I studied by myself and meditated, in those years of waiting, far more and with infinitely greater profit than I had done in my years at school; and I taught myself Latin and Greek, in an attempt to pass from the technical side, in which I had started, to the classical, in the hope that it might be easier for me to enter the University by that road.
Certainly this kind of study was far better suited to my intelligence. I buried myself in it with a passion so intense and vital that when, at six-and-twenty, through an unexpected, tiny legacy from an uncle in holy orders (who had died in Apulia, and whose existence had long been almost forgotten by my family), I was finally able to enter the University, I remained for long in doubt whether it would not be better for me to leave behind in the drawer, where it had slumbered
undisturbed for all those years, my qualifying diploma from the technical institute, and to procure another from the liceo, so as to matriculate in the faculty of philosophy and literature.
Family counsels prevailed, and I set off for Liege, where, with this worm of philosophy gnawing my brain, I acquired an intimate and painful knowledge of all the machines invented by man for his own happiness.
I have derived one great benefit from it, as you can see. I have learned to draw back with an instinctive shudder from reality, as others see and handle it, without however managing to arrest a reality of my own, since my distracted, wandering sentiments never succeed in giving any value or meaning to this uncertain, loveless life of mine.
I look now at everything, myself included, as from a distance; and from nothing does there ever come to me a loving signal, beckoning me to approach it with confidence or with the hope of deriving some comfort from it. Pitying signals, yes, I seem to catch in the eyes of many people, in the aspect of many places which impel me not to receive comfort nor to give it, since he that cannot receive it cannot give it; but pity. Pity, ah yes… But I know that pity is such a difficult thing either to give or to receive.
For some years after my return to Naples I found nothing to do; I led a dissolute life with a group of young artists, until the last remains of that modest legacy had gone. I owe to chance, as I have said, and to the friendship of one of my old school friends the post that I now occupy. I fill it-yes, we may say so-honourably, and I am well rewarded for my labour. Oh, they all respect me, here, as a first rate operator: alert, accurate, and ‘perfectly impassive’. If I ought to be grateful to Polacco, Polacco ought in turn to be grateful to me for the credit that he has acquired with Commendator Borgalli, the Chairman and General Manager of the Kosmograph, for the acquisition that the firm has made of an operator like myself. Signor Gubbio is not, properly speaking, attached to any of the four companies among which the production is distributed, but is summoned here and there, from one to another, to take the longest and most difficult films.
Signor Gubbio does far more work than the firm’s other five operators; but for every film that proves a success he receives a handsome commission and frequent bonuses. I ought to be happy and contented. Instead of which I think with longing of my lean years of youthful folly at Naples among the young artists.
Immediately after my return from Liége, I met Giorgio Mirelli, who had been at Naples for two years. He had recently shown at an exhibition two strange pictures, which had given rise among the critics and the general public to long and violent discussions. He still retained the innocence and fervour of sixteen; he had no eyes to see the neglected state of his clothes, his towsled locks, the first few hairs that were sprouting in long curls on his chin and hollow cheeks, like the cheeks of a sick man: and sick he was of a divine malady; a prey to a continual anxiety, which made him neither observe nor feel what was for others the reality of life; always on the point of dashing off in response to some mysterious, distant summons, which he alone could hear.
I asked after his people. He told me that Grandfather Carlo had died a short time since. I gazed at him surprised at the way in which he gave me this news; he seemed not to have felt any sorrow at his grandfather’s death. But, called back by the look in my eyes to his own grief, he said: “Poor grandfather…” so sadly and with such a smile that at once I changed my mind and realised that he, in the tumult of all the life that seethed round about him, had neither the power nor the time to think of his grief.
And Granny Rosa? Granny Rosa was keeping well… yes, quite well,…as well as she could, poor old soul, after such a bereavement. Two heads of cummin, now, to be filled with jasmine, every morning, one for the recently dead, the other for him who had died long ago.
And Duccella, Duccella?
Ah, how her brother’s eyes smiled at my question!
“Rosy! Rosy!”
And he told me that for the last year she had been engaged to the young Barone Aldo Nuti. The wedding would soon be celebrated; it had been postponed owing to the death of Grandfather Carlo.
But he shewed no sign of joy at this wedding; indeed he told me that he did not regard Aldo Nuti as a suitable match for Duccella; and, waving both his hands in the air with outstretched fingers, he broke out in that exclamation of disgust which he was in the habit of using when I endeavoured to make him understand the rules and terminations of the second declension in Greek:
“He’s so complicated! He’s so complicated!”
It was never possible to keep him still after that exclamation. And as he used to escape then from the schoolroom table, so now he escaped from me again. I lost sight of him for more than a year. I learned from his fellow-artists that he had gone to Capri, to paint.
There he met Varia Nestoroff.
Luigi Pirandello: Shoot! (8)
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Luigi Pirandello: Shoot! (7)
Shoot! (Si Gira, 1926)
The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio,
Cinematograph Operator
by Luigi Pirandello
Translated from the Italian by C. K. Scott Moncrieff
BOOK II
1
Dear house in the country, the ‘Grandparents’, full of the
indescribable fragrance of the oldest family memories, where all the
old-fashioned chairs and tables, vitalised by these memories, were no
longer inanimate objects but, so to speak, intimate parts of the
people who lived in the house, since in them they came in contact
with, became aware of the precious, tranquil, safe reality of their
existence.
There really did linger in those rooms a peculiar aroma, which I seem
to smell now as I write: an aroma of the life of long ago which seemed
to have given a fragrance to all the things that were preserved there.
I see again the drawing-room, a trifle gloomy, it must be admitted,
with its walls stuccoed in rectangular panels which strove to imitate
ancient marbles: red and green alternately; and each panel was set in
a handsome border of its own, of stucco likewise, in a pattern of
foliage; except that in the course of time these imitation marbles had
grown weary of their innocent make-believe, had bulged out a little
here and there, and one saw a few tiny cracks on the surface. All of
which said to me kindly:
“You are poor; the seams of your jacket are rent; but you see that
even in a gentleman’s house…”
Ah, yes! I had only to turn and look at those curious brackets which
seemed to shrink from touching the floor with their gilded spidery
legs. The marble top of each was a trifle yellow, and in the sloping
mirror above were reflected exactly in their immobility the pair of
baskets that stood upon the marble: baskets of fruit, also of marble,
coloured: figs, peaches, limes, corresponding exactly, on either side,
with their reflexions, as though there were four baskets instead of
two.
In that motionless, clear reflexion was embodied all the limpid calm
which reigned in that house. It seemed as though nothing could ever
happen there. This was the message, also, of the little bronze
timepiece between the baskets, only the back of which was to be seen
in the mirror. It represented a fountain, and had a spiral rod of
rock-crystal, which spun round and round with the movement of the
clockwork. How much water had that fountain poured forth? And yet the
little basin beneath it was never full.
Next I see the room from which one goes down to the garden. (From one
room to the other one passes between a pair of low doors, which seem
full of their own importance, and perfectly aware of the treasures
committed to their charge.) This room, leading down to the garden, is
the favourite sitting-room at all times of the year. It has a floor of
large, square tiles of terra-cotta, a trifle worn with use. The
wallpaper, patterned with damask roses, is a trifle faded, as are the
gauze curtains, also patterned with damask roses, screening the
windows and the glass door beyond which one sees the landing of the
little wooden outside stair, and the green railing and the pergola of
the garden bathed in an enchantment of sunshine and stillness.
The light filters green and fervid between the slats of the little
sun-blind outside the window, and does not pour into the room, which
remains in a cool delicious shadow, embalmed with the scents from the
garden.
What bliss, what a bath of purity for the soul, to sit at rest for a
little upon that old sofa with its high back, its cylindrical cushions
of green rep, likewise a trifle discoloured.
“Giorgio! Giorgio!”
Who is calling from the garden? It is Granny Rosa, who cannot succeed
in reaching, even with the end of her cane, the flowers of the
jasmine, now that the plant has grown so big and has climbed right up
high upon the wall.
Granny Rosa does so love those jasmines! She has upstairs, in the
cupboard in the wall of her room, a box full of umbrella-shaped heads
of cummin, dried; she takes one out every morning, before she goes
down to the garden; and, when she has gathered the blossoms with her
cane, she sits down in the shade of the pergola, puts on her
spectacles, and slips the jasmines one by one into the spidery stems
of that umbrella-shaped head, until she has turned it into a lovely
round white rose, with an intense, delicious perfume, which she goes
and places religiously in a little vase on the top of the chest of
drawers in her room, in front of the portrait of her only son, who
died long ago.
It is so intimate and sheltered, this little house, so contented with
the life that it encloses within its walls, without any desire for the
other life that goes noisily on outside, far away. It remains there,
as though perched in a niche behind the green hill, and has not wished
for so much as a glimpse of the sea and the marvellous Bay. It has
chosen to remain apart, unknown to all the world, almost hidden away
in that green, deserted corner, outside and far away from all the
vicissitudes of life.
There was at one time on the gatepost a marble tablet, which bore the
name of the owner: Carlo Mirelli. Grandfather Carlo decided to
remove it, when Death found his way, for the first time, into that
modest little house buried in the country, and carried off with him
the son of the house, barely thirty years old, already the father
himself of two little children.
Did Grandfather Carlo think, perhaps, that when the tablet was removed
from the gatepost, Death would not find his way back to the house
again?
Grandfather Carlo was one of those old men who wore a velvet cap with
a silken tassel, but could read Horace. He knew, therefore, that
death, ‘aequo pede’, knocks at all doors alike, whether or not they
have a name engraved on a tablet.
Were it not that each of us, blinded by what he considers the
injustice of his own lot, feels an unreasoning need to vent the fury
of his own grief upon somebody or something. Grandfather Carlo’s fury,
on that occasion, fell upon the innocent tablet on the gatepost.
If Death allowed us to catch hold of him, I would catch him by the arm
and lead him in front of that mirror where with such limpid precision
are reflected in their immobility the two baskets of fruit and the
back of the bronze timepiece, and would say to him:
“You see? Now be off with you! Everything here must be allowed to
remain as it is!”
But Death does not allow us to catch hold of him.
By taking down that tablet, perhaps Grandfather Carlo meant to imply
that–once his son was dead–there was nobody left alive in the house.
A little later, Death came again.
There was one person left alive who called upon him desperately every
night: the widowed daughter-in-law who, after her husband’s death,
felt as though she were divided from the family, a stranger in the
house.
And so, the two little orphans: Lidia, the elder, who was nearly five,
and Giorgetto who was three, remained in the sole charge of their
grandparents, who were still not so very old.
To start life afresh when one is already beginning to grow feeble, and
to rediscover in oneself all the first amazements of childhood; to
create once again round a pair of rosy children the most innocent
affection, the most pleasant dreams, and to drive away, as being
importunate and tiresome, Experience, who from time to time thrusts in
her head, the face of a withered old woman, to say, blinking behind
her spectacles: “This will happen, that will happen,” when as yet
nothing has ever happened, and it is so delightful that nothing should
have happened; and to act and think and speak as though really one
knew nothing more than is already known to two little children who
know nothing at all: to act as though things were seen not in
retrospect but through the eyes of a person going forwards for the
first time, and for the first time seeing and hearing: this miracle
was performed by Grandfather Carlo and Granny Rosa; they did, that is
to say, for the two little ones, far more than would have been done by
the father and mother, who, if they had lived, young as they both
were, might have wished to enjoy life a little longer themselves. Nor
did their not having anything left to enjoy render the task more easy
for the two old people, for we know that to the old everything is a
heavy burden, when it no longer has any meaning or value for them.
The two grandparents accepted the meaning and value which their two
grandchildren gradually, as they grew older, began to give to things,
and all the world took on the bright colours of youth for them, and
life recaptured the candour and freshness of innocence. But what could
they know of a world so wide, of a life so different from their own,
which was going on outside, far away, those two young creatures born
and brought up in the house in the country? The old people had
forgotten that life and that world, everything had become new again
for them, the sky, the scenery, the song of the birds, the taste of
food. Outside the gate, life existed no longer. Life began there, at
the gate, and gilded afresh everything round about; nor did the old
people imagine that anything could come to them from outside; and even
Death, even Death they had almost forgotten, albeit he had already
come there twice.
Have patience a little while, Death, to whom no house, however remote
and hidden, can remain unknown! But how in the world, starting from
thousands and thousands of miles away, thrust aside, or dragged,
tossed hither and thither by the turmoil of ever so many mysterious
changes of fortune, could there have found her way to that modest
little house, perched in its niche there behind the green hill, a
woman, to whom the peace and the affection that reigned there not only
must have been incomprehensible, must have been not even conceivable?
I have no record, nor perhaps has anyone, of the path followed by this
woman to bring her to the dear house in the country, near Sorrento.
There, at that very spot, before the gatepost, from which Grandfather
Carlo, long ago, had had the tablet removed, she did not arrive of her
own accord; that is certain; she did not raise her hand, uninvited, to
ring the bell, to make them open the gate to her. But not far from
there she stopped to wait for a young man, guarded until then with the
life and soul of two old grandparents, handsome, innocent, ardent, his
soul borne on the wings of dreams, to come out of that gate and
advance confidently towards life.
Oh, Granny Rosa, do you still call to him from the garden, for him to
pull down with your cane your jasmine blossoms?
“Giorgio! Giorgio!”
There still rings in my ears, Granny Rosa, the sound of your voice.
And I feel a bitter delight, which I cannot express in words, in
imagining you as still there, in your little house, which I see again
as though I were there at this moment, and were at this moment
breathing the atmosphere that lingers there of an old-fashioned
existence; in imagining you as knowing nothing of all that has
happened, as you were at first, when I, in the summer holidays, came
out from Sorrento every morning to prepare for the October
examinations your grandson Giorgio, who refused to learn a word of
Latin or Greek, and instead covered every scrap of paper that came
into his hands, the margins of his books, the top of the schoolroom
table, with sketches in pen and pencil, with caricatures. There must
even be one of me, still, on the top of that table, covered all over
with scribblings.
“Ah, Signor Serafino,” you sigh, Granny Rosa, as you hand me in an old
cup the familiar coffee with essence of cinnamon, like the coffee that
our aunts in religion offer us in their convents, “ah, Signor
Serafino, Giorgio has bought a box of paints; he wants to leave us; he
wants to become a painter…”
And over your shoulder opens her sweet, clear, sky-blue eyes and
blushes a deep red Lidiuccia, your granddaughter; Duccella, as you
call her. Why?
Ah, because…. There has come now three times from Naples a young
gentleman, a fine young gentleman all covered with scent, in a velvet
coat, with yellow chamois-leather gloves, an eyeglass in his right eye
and a baron’s coronet on his handkerchief and portfolio. He was sent
by his grandfather, Barone Nuti, a friend of Grandfather Carlo, who
was like a brother to him before Grandfather Carlo, growing weary of
the world, retired from Naples, here, to the Sorrentine villa. You
know this, Granny Rosa. But you do not know that the young gentleman
from Naples is fervently encouraging Giorgio to devote himself to art
and to go off to Naples with him. Duccella knows, because young Aldo
Nuti (how very strange!), when speaking with such fervour of art,
never looks at Giorgio, but looks at her, into her eyes, as though it
were her that he had to encourage, and not Giorgio; yes, yes, her, to
come to Naples to stay there for ever with himself.
So that is why Duccella blushes a deep red, over your shoulder, Granny
Rosa, whenever she hears you say that Giorgio wishes to become a
painter.
He too, the young gentleman from Naples, if his grandfather would
allow him… Not a painter, no… He would like to go upon the stage,
to become an actor. How he would love that! But his grandfather does
not wish it…. Dare we wager, Granny Rosa, that Duccella does not
wish it either?
Luigi Pirandello: Shoot! (7)
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Luigi Pirandello: Shoot! (6)
Shoot! (Si Gira, 1926)
The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio,
Cinematograph Operator
by Luigi Pirandello
Translated from the Italian by C. K. Scott Moncrieff
BOOK I
OF THE NOTES OF SERAFINO GUBBIO
CINEMATOGRAPH OPERATOR
6
All the reflexions that I made at the beginning with regard to my wretched plight, and that of all the others who are condemned like myself to be nothing more than a hand that turns a handle, have as their starting point this man, whom I met on the morning after myarrival in Rome. Certainly I have been in a position to make them, because I too have been reduced to this office of being the servant of a machine; but that came afterwards.
I say this, because this man presented to the reader at this point, after the aforesaid reflexions, might appear to him to be a grotesque invention of my fancy. But let him remember that I should perhaps never have thought of those reflexions, had they not been, partly at least, suggested to me by Simone Pau’s introducing the unfortunate creature to me; while, for that matter, the whole of this first adventure of mine is grotesque, and is so because Simone Pau himself is, and means to be, almost by profession, grotesque, as he shewed on that first evening when he chose to take me to a Casual Shelter.
I did not make any reflexion whatsoever at the time; in the first place, because I could never, even in my wildest dreams, have thought that I should be reduced to this occupation; also, because I should have been interrupted by a great hubbub on the stair leading to the dormitory, and by the tumultuous and joyful inrush of all the inmates who had already gone down to the dressing-room to recover their clothes.
What had happened?
They came upstairs again, still swathed in the white wrappers, and with the slippers on their feet.
Among them, together with the attendants and the Sisters of Charity attached to the Shelter and to the soup kitchen, were a number of gentlemen and some ladies, all well dressed and smiling, with an air of curiosity and novelty. Two of these gentlemen were carrying, one a machine, which now I know well, wrapped in a black cover, while the other had under his arm its knock-kneed tripod. They were actors and operators from a cinematograph company, and had come about a film to take a scene from real life in a Casual Shelter.
The cinematograph company which had sent these actors was the Kosmograph, in which I for the last eight months have held the post of operator; and the stage manager who was in charge of them was Nicola Polacco, or, as they all call him, Cocò Polacco, my playmate and schoolfellow at Naples in my early boyhood. I am indebted to him for my post, and to the fortunate coincidence of my happening to have spent the night with Simone Pau in that Casual Shelter.
But neither, I repeat, did it enter my mind, that morning, that I should ever come down to setting up a photographic camera on its tripod, as I saw these two gentlemen doing, nor did it occur to Cocò Polacco to suggest such an occupation to me. He, like the good fellow that he is, made no bones about recognising me, whereas I, having at once recognised him, was trying my hardest not to catch his eye in that wretched place, seeing him radiant with Parisian smartness and with the air and in the setting of an invincible leader of men, among all those actors and actresses and all those recruits of poverty, whowere beside themselves with joy in their white gowns at this unlooked-for source of profit. He shewed surprise at finding me there, but only because of the early hour, and asked me how I had known that he and his company would be coming that morning to the Shelter for a real life interior. I left him under the illusion that I had turned up there by chance, out of curiosity; I introduced Simone Pau (the man with the violin, in the confusion, had slipped away); and I remained to look on disgusted at the indecent contamination of this grim reality, the full horror of which I had tasted overnight, by the stupid fiction which Polacco had come there to stage.
My disgust, however, I perhaps feel only now. That morning, I must have felt more than anything else curiosity at being present for the first time at the production of a film. This curiosity, though, was distracted at a certain point in the proceedings by one of the actresses, who, the moment I caught sight of her, aroused in me another curiosity far more keen.
Nestoroff? Was it possible? It seemed to be she and yet it seemed not to be. That hair of a strange tawny colour, almost coppery, that style of dress, sober, almost stiff, were not hers. But the motion of her slender, exquisite body, with a touch of the feline in the sway of her hips; the head raised high, inclined a little to one side, and that sweet smile on a pair of lips as fresh as a pair of rose-leaves, whenever anyone addressed her; those eyes, unnaturally wide, open,
greenish, fixed and at the same time vacant, and cold in the shadow of their long lashes were hers, entirely hers, with that certainty all her own that everyone, whatever she might say or ask, would answer yes.
Varia Nestoroff? Was it possible? Acting for a cinematograph company?
There flashed through my mind Capri, the Russian colony, Naples, all those noisy gatherings of young artists, painters, sculptors, in strange eccentric haunts, full of sunshine and colour, and a house, a dear house in the country, near Sorrento, into which this woman had brought confusion and death.
When, after a second rehearsal of the scene for which the company had come to the Shelter, Cocò Polacco invited me to come and see him at the Kosmograph, I, still in doubt, asked him if this actress was really the Nestoroff.
“Yes, my dear fellow,” he answered with a sigh. “You know her history, perhaps.”
I nodded my head.
“Ah, but you can’t know the rest of it!” Polacco went on. “Come, come and see me at the Kosmograph; I’ll tell you the whole story. Gubbio, I don’t know what I wouldn’t pay to get that woman off my hands. But, I can tell you, it is asier…”
“Polacco! Polacco!” she called to him at that moment.
And from the haste with which Cocò Polacco obeyed her summons, I fully realised the power that she had with the firm, from which she held a contract as principal with one of the most lavish salaries.
A day or two later I went to the Kosmograph, for no reason except to learn the rest of this woman’s story, of which I knew the beginning all too well.
Luigi Pirandello: Shoot! (6)
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Luigi Pirandello: Shoot! (5)
Shoot! (Si Gira, 1926)
The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator
by Luigi Pirandello
Translated from the Italian by C. K. Scott Moncrieff
BOOK I
5
Simone Pau pointed him out to me, the following morning, when we rose from our hammocks.
I shall not describe that barrack of a dormitory, foul with the breath of so many men, in the grey light of dawn, nor the exodus of the inmates, as they went downstairs, dishevelled and stupid with sleep, in their long white nightshirts, with their canvas slippers on their feet, and their tickets in their hands, to the dressing-room to recover their clothes.
There was one man among them who, amid the folds of his white wrapper, gripped tightly under his arm a violin, wrapped in a worn, dirty, faded cover of green baize, and went on his way frowning darkly, as though lost in contemplation of the hairs that overhung from his bushy, knitted eyebrows.
“Friend, friend!” Simone Pau called to him. The man came towards us, keeping his head lowered, as though bowed down by the enormous weight of his red, fleshy nose; and seemed to be saying as he advanced:
“Make way! Make way! You see what life can make of a man’s nose?”
Simone Pau went up to him; lovingly with one hand he lifted up the man’s chin; with the other he clapped him on the houlder, to give him confidence, and repeated:
“My friend!”
Then, turning again to myself:
“Serafino,” he said, “let me introduce to you a great artist. They have labelled him with a shocking nickname; but no matter; he is a great artist. Gaze upon him: there he is, with his God under his arm!
It looks like a broom: it is a violin.”
I turned to observe the effect of Simone Pau’s words on the face of the stranger. Emotionless. And Simone Pau went on:
“A violin, nothing else. And he never parts from it. The attendants here even allow him to take it to bed with him, on the understanding that he does not play it at night and disturb the other inmates. But there is no danger of that. Out with it, my friend, and shew it to this gentleman, who can feel for you.”
The man eyed me at first with misgivings; then, on a further request from Simone Pau, took from its case the old violin, a really priceless instrument, and shewed it to us, as a modest cripple might expose his stump.
Simone Pau went on, turning to me:
“You see? He lets you see it. A great concession, for which you ought to thank him! His father, many years ago, left him in possession of a printing press at Perugia, with all sorts of machines and type and a good connexion. Tell us, my riend, what you did with it, to consecrate yourself to the service of your God.”
The man stood looking at Simone Pau, as though he had not understood the request.
Simone Pau made it clearer:
“What did you do with it, with your press?”
Thereupon the man waved his hand with a gesture of contemptuous indifference.
“He neglected it,” Simone Pau explained this gesture. “He neglected it until he had brought himself to the verge of starvation. And then, with his violin under his arm, he came to Rome. He has not played for some time now, because he thinks that he cannot play any longer, after all that has happened to him. But until recently, he used to play in the wine-shops. In the wineshops one drinks; and he would play first, and drink afterwards. He played divinely; the more divinely he played, the more he drank; so that often he was obliged to place his God, his violin, in pawn. And then he would call at some printing press to find work; gradually he would put together what he needed to redeem his violin, and back he would go to play in the wine-shops. But listen to what happened to him once, and has led, you understand, to a slight alteration of his … don’t, for heaven’s sake, let us say his reason, let us say his conception of life. Put it away, my friend, put your instrument away: I know it hurts you if I tell the story while you have your violin uncovered.”
The man nodded several times in the affirmative, gravely, with his towsled head, and wrapped up his violin.
“This is what happened to him,” Simone Pau went on. “He called at a big printing office where there is a foreman who, as a lad, used to work in his press at Perugia. ‘There’s no vacancy; I’m sorry,’ he was told. And my friend was going away, crushed, when he heard himself called back. ‘Wait,’ said the foreman, ‘if you can adapt yourself to it, we might have something for you…. It isn’t the job for you; still, if you are hard up….’ My friend shrugged his shoulders and went with the foreman. He was taken into a special room, all silent; and the foreman shewed him a new machine: a pachyderm, flat, black, squat; a monstrous beast which eats lead and voids books. It is a perfected monotype, with none of the complications of rods and wheels and bands, without the noisy jigging of the fount. I tell you, a regular beast, a pachyderm, quietly chewing away at its long ribbon of perforated paper. ‘It does everything by itself,’ the foreman said to my friend. ‘You have nothing to do but feed it now and then with its cakes of lead, and keep an eye on it.’ My friend felt his breath fail and his arms sink. To be brought down to such an office as that, a man, an artist! Worse than being a stable-boy. … To keep an eye on that black beast, which did everything by itself, and required no other service of him than to have put in its mouth, from time to time, its food, those leaden cakes! But this is nothing, Serafino! Crushed, mortified, bowed down with shame and poisoned with spleen, my friend endured a week of this degrading slavery, and, as he handed the monster its leaden cakes, dreamed of his deliverance, his violin, his art; vowed and swore that he would never go back to playing in the wine-shops, where he is so strongly, so irresistibly tempted to drink, and determined to find other places more befitting the exercise of his art, the worship of his deity. Yes, my friends! No sooner had he redeemed the violin than he read in the advertisement columns of a newspaper, among the offers of employment, one from a inematograph, addressed: such and such a street and number, which required a violin and clarinet for its orchestra. At once my friend hastened to the place; presented himself, joyful, exultant, with his violin under his arm. Well; he found himself face to face with another machine, an automatic pianoforte, what is called a piano player. They said to him: ‘You with your violin have to accompany this instrument!’ Do you understand? A violin, in the hands of a man, accompany a roll of perforated paper running through the belly of this other machine! The soul, which moves and guides the hands of the man, which now passes into the touch of the bow, now trembles in the fingers that press the strings, obliged to follow the register of this automatic instrument!
My friend flew into such a towering passion that the police had to be called, and he was arrested and sentenced to a ortnight’s imprisonment for assaulting the forces of law and order.
“He came out again, as you see him.
“He drinks now, and does not play any more.”
Luigi Pirandello: Shoot! (5)
kempis.nl poetry magazine
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Luigi Pirandello: Shoot! (4)
Shoot! (Si Gira, 1926)
The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio, Cinematograph Operator
by Luigi Pirandello
Translated from the Italian by C. K. Scott Moncrieff
BOOK I
4
Coming to the end of the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, we crossed the bridge. I remember that I gazed almost with a religious awe at the dark rounded mass of Castel Sant’ Angelo, high and solemn under the twinkling of the stars. The great works of human architecture, by night, and the heavenly constellations seem to have a mutual understanding. In the humid chill of that immense nocturnal background, I felt this awe start up, flicker as in a succession of spasms, which were caused in me perhaps by the serpentine reflexions of the lights on the other bridges and on the banks, in the black mysterious water of the river. But Simone Pau tore me from this attitude of admiration, turning first in the direction of Saint Peter’s, then dodging aside along the Vicolo del Villano. Uncertain of the way, uncertain of everything, in the empty horror of the deserted streets, full of strange phantoms quivering from the rusty reflectors of the infrequent lamps, at every breath of air, on the walls of the old houses, I thought with terror and disgust of the people that were lying comfortably asleep in those houses and had no idea how their homes appeared from outside to such as wandered homeless through the night, without there being a single house anywhere which they might enter. Now and again, Simone Pau shook his head and tapped his chest
with two fingers. Oh, yes! The mountain was he, and the tree, and the sea; but the hotel, where was it? There, in Borgo Pio? Yes, close at hand, in the Vicolo del Falco. I raised my eyes; I saw on the right hand side of that alley a grim building, with a lantern hung out above the door: a big lantern, in which the flame of the gas-jet yawned through the dirty glass. I stopped in front of this door which was standing ajar, and read over the arch:
CASUAL SHELTER
“Do you sleep here?”
“Yes, and feed too. Lovely bowls of soup. In the best of company. Come in: this is my home.”
Indeed the old porter and two other men of the night staff of the Shelter, huddled and crouching together round a copper brazier, welcomed him as a regular guest, greeting him with gestures and in words from their glass cage in the echoing orridor:
“Good evening, Signor Professore.”
Simone Pau warned me, darkly, with great solemnity, that I must not be disappointed, for I should not be able to sleep in this hotel for more than six nights in succession. He explained to me that after every sixth night I should have to spend at least one outside, in the open, in order to start a fresh series.
I, sleep there?
In the presence of those three watchmen, I listened to his explanation with a melancholy smile, which, however, hovered ently over my lips, as though to preserve the buoyancy of my spirits and to keep them from sinking into the shame of this abyss.
Albeit in a wretched plight, with but a few lire in my pocket, I was well dressed, with gloves on my hands, spats on my ankles. I wanted to take the adventure, with this smile, as a whimsical caprice on the part of my strange friend. But Simone Pau was annoyed:
“You don’t take me seriously?”
“No, my dear fellow, indeed I don’t take you seriously.”
“You are right,” said Simone Pau, “serious, do you know who is really serious? The quack doctor with a black coat and no collar, with a big black beard and spectacles, who sends the medium to sleep in the market-place. I am not quite as serious as that yet. You may laugh, friend Serafino.”
And he went on to explain to me that it was all free of charge there. In winter, on the hammocks, a pair of clean sheets, solid and fresh as the sails of a ship, and two thick woollen blankets; in summer, the sheets alone, and a counterpane for anyone who wanted it; also a wrapper and a pair of canvas slippers, washable.
“Remember that, washable!”
“And why?”
“Let me explain. With these slippers and wrapper they give you a ticket; you go into that dressing-room there–through that door on the right–undress, and hand in your clothes, including your shoes, to be disinfected, which is done in the ovens over there. Then, come over here, look…. Do you see this lovely pond?”
I lowered my eyes and looked.
A pond? It was a chasm, mouldy, narrow and deep, a sort of den to herd swine in, carved out of the living rock, to which one went down by five or six steps, and over which there hung a pungent odour of suds.
A tin pipe, pierced with holes that were all yellow with rust, ran above it along the middle from end to end.
“Well?”
“You undress over there; hand in your clothes….”
“… shoes included….”
“… shoes included, to be disinfected, and step down here naked.”
“Naked?”
“Naked, in company with six or seven other nudes. One of our dear friends in the cage there turns on the tap, and you, standing under the pipe, zifff…, you get, free for nothing, a most beautiful shower. Then you dry yourself sumptuously with your wrapper, put on your canvas slippers, and steal quietly out in procession with the other draped figures up the stairs; there they are; up there is the dormitory, and so goodnight.”
“Is it compulsory?”
“What? The shower? Ah, because you are wearing gloves and spats, friend Serafino? But you can take them off without shame. Everyone here strips himself of his shame, and offers himself naked to the baptism of this pond! Haven’t you the courage to descend to these nudities?”
There was no need. The shower is obligatory only for unclean mendicants. Simone Pau had never taken it.
In this place he is, really, a schoolmaster. Attached to the shelter there are a soup kitchen and a refuge for homeless children of either sex, beggars’ children, prisoners’ children, children of every form of sin and shame. They are under the care of certain Sisters of Charity, who have managed to set up a little school for them as well. Simone Pau, albeit by profession a bitter enemy of humanity and of every form of teaching, gives lessons with the greatest pleasure to these
children, for two hours daily, in the early morning, and the children are extremely grateful to him. He is given, in return, his board and lodging: that is to say a little room, all to himself, clean and neat, and a special service of meals, shared with four other teachers, who are a poor old pensioner of the Papal Government and three spinster schoolmistresses, friends of the Sisters and taken in here by them. But Simone Pau dispenses with the special meals, since at midday he is never in the Shelter, and it is only in the evenings, when it suits his convenience, that he takes a bowlful or two of soup from the common kitchen; he keeps the little room, but he never uses it, because he goes and sleeps in the dormitory of the Night Shelter, for the sake of the company to be found there, which he has grown to relish, of queer, vagrant types. Apart from these two hours devoted to teaching, he spends all his time in the libraries and the ‘caffè’; every now and then, he publishes in some philosophic review an essay which amazes everyone by the bizarre novelty of the views expressed in it, the strangeness of the arguments and the abundance of learning displayed; and he flourishes again for a while.
At the time, I repeat, I was not aware of all this. I supposed, and perhaps it was partly true, that he had brought me there for the pleasure of bewildering me; and since there is no better way of disconcerting a person who is seeking to bewilder one with extravagant paradoxes or with the strangest, most fantastic suggestions than to pretend to accept those paradoxes as though they were the most obvious truisms, and his suggestions as entirely natural and opportune; so I behaved that evening, to disconcert my friend Simone Pau. He, realising my intention, looked me in the eyes and, seeing them to be completely impassive, exclaimed with a smile: “What an idiot you are!”
He offered me his room; I thought at first that he was joking; but when he assured me that he really had a room there to himself, I would not accept it and went with him to the dormitory of the Shelter. I am not sorry, since, for the discomfort and repulsion that I felt in that odious place, I had two compensations:
First; that of finding the post which I now hold, or rather the opportunity of going as an operator to the great cinematograph company, the Kosmograph;
Secondly; that of meeting the man who has remained for me ever since the symbol of the wretched fate to which continuous progress condemns the human race.
First of all, the man.
Luigi Pirandello: Shoot! (4)
kempis.nl poetry magazine
to be continued
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Luigi Pirandello: Shoot! (3)
Shoot! (Si Gira, 1926) The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio,
Cinematograph Operator by Luigi Pirandello
Translated from the Italian by C. K. Scott Moncrieff
BOOK I
OF THE NOTES OF SERAFINO GUBBIO CINEMATOGRAPH OPERATOR
3
I cannot get out of my mind the man I met a year ago, on the night of
my arrival in Rome.
It was in November, a bitterly cold night. I was wandering in search
of a modest lodging, not so much for myself, accustomed to spend my
nights in the open, on friendly terms with the bats and the stars, as
for my portmanteau, which was my sole worldly possession, left behind
in the railway cloakroom, when I happened to run into one of my
friends from Sassari, of whom I had long lost sight: Simone Pau, a man
of singular originality and freedom from prejudice. Hearing of my
hapless plight, he proposed that I should come and sleep that night in
his hotel. I accepted the invitation, and we set off on foot through
the almost deserted streets. On our way, I told him of my many
misadventures and of the frail hopes that had brought me to Rome.
Every now and then Simone Pau raised his hat-less head, on which the
long, sleek, grey hair was parted down the middle in flowing locks,
but zigzag, the parting being made with his fingers, for want of a
comb. These locks, drawn back behind his ears on either side, gave him
a curious, scanty, irregular mane. He expelled a large mouthful of
smoke, and stood for a while listening to me, with his huge swollen
lips held apart, like those of an ancient comic mask. His crafty,
mouselike eyes, sharp as needles, seemed to dart to and fro, as though
trapped in his big, rugged, massive face, the face of a savage and
unsophisticated peasant. I supposed him to have adopted this attitude,
with his mouth open, to laugh at me, at my misfortunes and hopes. But,
at a certain point in my recital, I saw him stop in the middle of the
street lugubriously lighted by its gas lamps, and heard him say aloud
in the silence of the night:
“Excuse me, but what do I know about the mountain, the tree, the sea?
The mountain is a mountain because I say: ‘That is a mountain.’ In
other words: ‘_I am the mountain_.’ What are we? We are whatever, at
any given moment, occupies our attention. I am the mountain, I am the
tree, I am the sea. I am also the star, which knows not its own
existence!”
I remained speechless. But not for long. I too have, inextricably
rooted in the very depths of my being, the same malady as my friend.
A malady which, to my mind, proves in the clearest manner that
everything that happens happens probably because the earth was made
not so much for mankind as for the animals. Because animals have in
themselves by nature only so much as suffices them and is necessary
for them to live in the conditions to which they were, each after its
own kind, ordained; whereas men have in them a superfluity which
constantly and vainly torments them, never making them satisfied with
any conditions, and always leaving them uncertain of their destiny. An
inexplicable superfluity, which, to afford itself an outlet, creates
in nature an artificial world, a world that has a meaning and value
for them alone, and yet one with which they themselves cannot ever be
content, so that without pause they keep on frantically arranging and
rearranging it, like a thing which, having been fashioned by
themselves from a need to extend and relieve an activity of which they
can see neither the end nor the reason, increases and complicates ever
more and more their torments, carrying them farther from the simple
conditions laid down by nature for life on this earth, conditions to
which only dumb animals know how to remain faithful and obedient.
My friend Simone Pau is convinced in good faith that he is worth a
great deal more than a dumb animal, because the animal does not know
and is content always to repeat the same action.
I too am convinced that he is of far greater value than an animal, but
not for those reasons. Of what benefit is it to a man not to be
content with always repeating the same action? Why, those actions that
are fundamental and indispensable to life, he too is obliged to
perform and to repeat, day after day, like the animals, if he does not
wish to die. All the rest, arranged and rearranged continually and
frantically, can hardly fail to reveal themselves sooner or later as
illusions or vanities, being as they are the fruit of that
superfluity, of which we do not see on this earth either the end or
the reason. And where did my friend Simone Pau learn that the animal
does not know? It knows what is necessary to itself, and does not
bother about the rest, because the animal has not in its nature any
superfluity. Man, who has a superfluity, and simply because he has it,
torments himself with certain problems, destined on earth to remain
insoluble. And this is where his superiority lies! Perhaps this
torment is a sign and proof (riot, let us hope, an earnest also) of
another life beyond this earth; but, things being as they are upon
earth, I feel that I am in the right when I say that it was made more
for the animals than for men.
I do not wish to be misunderstood. What I mean is, that on this earth
man is destined to fare ill, because he has in him more than is
sufficient for him to fare well, that is to say in peace and
contentment. And that it is indeed an excess, _for life on earth_,
this element which man has within him (and which makes him a man and
not a beast), is proved by the fact that it–this excess–never
succeeds in finding rest in anything, nor in deriving contentment from
anything here below, so that it seeks and demands elsewhere, beyond
the life on earth, the reason and recompense for its torment. So much
the worse, then, does man fare, the more he seeks to employ, upon the
earth itself, in frantic constructions and complications, his own
superfluity.
This I know, I who turn a handle.
As for my friend Simone Pau, the beauty of it is this: that he
believes that he has set himself free from all superfluity, reducing
all his wants to a minimum, depriving himself of every comfort and
living the naked life of a snail. And he does not see that, on the
contrary, he, by reducing himself thus, has immersed himself
altogether in the superfluity and lives now by nothing else.
That evening, having just come to Rome, I was not yet aware of this. I
knew him, I repeat, to be a man of singular originality and freedom
from prejudice, but I could never have imagined that his originality
and his freedom from prejudice would reach the point that I am about
to relate.
Luigi Pirandello: Shoot! (3)
kempis.nl poetry magazine
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Luigi Pirandello: Shoot! (02)
Shoot! (Si Gira. 1926)
The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio,
Cinematograph Operator
by Luigi Pirandello
Translated from the Italian by C. K. Scott Moncrieff
BOOK I
OF THE NOTES OF SERAFINO GUBBIO, CINEMATOGRAPH OPERATOR
2
I satisfy, by writing, a need to let off steam which is overpowering.
I get rid of my professional impassivity, and avenge myself as well; and with myself avenge ever so many others, condemned like myself to be nothing more than ‘a hand that turns a handle’.
This was bound to happen, and it has happened at last!
Man who first of all, as a poet, deified his own feelings and worshipped them, now having flung aside every feeling, as an
encumbrance not only useless but positively harmful, and having become clever and industrious, has set to work to fashion out of iron and steel his new deities, and has become a servant and a slave to them.
Long live the Machine that mechanises life!
Do you still retain, gentlemen, a little soul, a little heart and a little mind? Give them, give them over to the greedy machines, which are waiting for them! You shall see and hear the sort of product, the exquisite stupidities they will manage to extract from them.
To pacify their hunger, in the urgent haste to satiate them, what food can you extract from yourselves every day, every hour, every minute?
It is, perforce, the triumph of stupidity, after all the ingenuity and research that have been expended on the creation of these monsters, which ought to have remained instruments, and have instead become, perforce, our masters.
The machine is made to act, to move, it requires to swallow up our soul, to devour our life. And how do you expect them to be given back to us, our life and soul, in a centuplicated and continuous output, by the machines? Let me tell you: in bits and morsels, all of one pattern, stupid and precise, which would make, if placed one on top of another, a pyramid that might reach to the stars. Stars, gentlemen, no! Don’t you believe it. Not even to the height of a telegraph pole. A breath stirs it and down it tumbles, and leaves such a litter, only not inside this time but outside us, that–Lord, look at all the boxes, big, little, round, square–we no longer know where to set our feet, how to move a step. These are the products of our soul, the pasteboard boxes of our life.
What is to be done? I am here. I serve my machine, in so far as I turn the handle so that it may eat. But my soul does not serve me. My hand serves me, that is to say serves the machine. The human soul for food, life for food, you must supply, gentlemen, to the machine whose handle I turn. I shall be amused to see, with your permission, the product that will come out at the other end. A fine product and a rare entertainment, I can promise you.
Already my eyes and my ears too, from force of habit, are beginning to see and hear everything in the guise of this rapid, quivering, ticking mechanical reproduction.
I don’t deny it; the outward appearance is light and vivid. We move, we fly. And the breeze stirred by our flight produces an alert, joyous, keen agitation, and sweeps away every thought. On! On, that we may not have time nor power to heed the burden of sorrow, the degradation of shame which remain within us, in our hearts. Outside, there is a continuous glare, an incessant giddiness: everything flickers and disappears.
“What was that?” Nothing, it has passed! Perhaps it was something sad; but no matter, it has passed now.
There is one nuisance, however, that does not pass away. Do you hear it? A hornet that is always buzzing, forbidding, grim, surly,diffused, and never stops. What is it? The hum of the telegraph poles? The endless scream of the trolley along the overhead wire of the electric trams? The urgent throb of all those countless machines, near and far? That of the engine of the motor-car? Of the cinematograph?
The beating of the heart is not felt, nor do we feel the pulsing of our arteries. The worse for us if we did! But this buzzing, this perpetual ticking we do notice, and I say that all this furious haste is not natural, all this flickering and vanishing of images; but that there lies beneath it a machine which seems to pursue it, frantically screaming.
Will it break down?
Ah, we must not fix our attention upon it too closely. That would arouse in us an ever-increasing fury, an exasperation which finally we could endure no longer; would drive us mad.
On nothing, on nothing at all now, in this dizzy bustle which sweeps down upon us and overwhelms us, ought we to fix our attention. Take in, rather, moment by moment, this rapid passage of aspects and events, and so on, until we reach the point when for each of us the buzz shall cease.
(to be continued)
Luigi Pirandello: Shoot! (02)
kempis.nl poetry magazine
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