Black Shawl, by Luigi Pirandello 2/5

Black Shawl

Scialle nero – From the collection “Black Shawl” of 1922 – in Short Stories for a Year by Luigi Pirandello

Translated into English by Enzo Martinelli

©️ 2023 – Enzo Martinelli

Black Shawl, by Luigi Pirandello 1/5

After two months of horrendous anguish, that confession of her state relieved her, unexpectedly. It seemed to her that the most was now done.

Now, having no more strength to fight, to resist that torment, she would abandon herself to fate, whatever it might be.

Would her brother soon come in and kill her? Well: so much the better! She was no longer entitled to any consideration, to any pity. She had done, yes, for him and for that other ingrate, more than her duty, but in a moment then she had lost the fruit of all her favours.

She squinted, seized again by revulsion.

In the secret of her own conscience, she also felt miserably responsible for her foulness. Yes, she, who for so many years had had the strength to resist the impulses of youth, she, who had always harboured pure and noble feelings within herself, she, who had regarded her own sacrifice as a duty: in a moment, lost! Oh misery! misery!

The only reason she felt she could adduce in her defence, what value could it have before her brother? Could she say to him: ‘Look, Giorgio, that I have perhaps fallen for you’? – Yet the truth was perhaps this.

She had been his mother, had she not? to that brother. Well, as a reward for all the kindnesses she had happily lavished on him, as a reward for the sacrifice of her own life, she had not even been granted the pleasure of seeing a smile, even a faint one, of satisfaction on his and his friend’s lips. It seemed as if their souls were poisoned with silence and boredom, oppressed as if by a wretched anguish. After graduating, they had immediately thrown themselves into their work, like two beasts; with so much commitment, with so much fervour that in a short time they had managed to be enough for themselves. Now, this haste to pay their debts in some way, as if they both didn’t seem to have the time, had really wounded her in the heart. Almost all of a sudden, she had found herself without a purpose in life. What was left for her to do, now that the two young people no longer needed her? And she had irretrievably lost her youth.

Not even with the first earnings from her profession had the smile returned to her brother’s lips. Did he still feel the weight of the sacrifice she had made for him? Did he feel bound by this sacrifice for the rest of his life, condemned to sacrifice in turn his own youth, the freedom of his feelings to his sister? And she had wanted to speak to him with an open heart:

– Don’t take any notice of me, Giorgio! I only want to see you happy, content… do you understand?

But he had immediately cut the words off in her mouth:

– Shut up, shut up! What are you saying? I know what I must do. Now it’s up to me.

– But how? Like this? – she would have wanted to shout at him, she who, without a second thought, had sacrificed herself with a smile always on her lips and a light heart.

Knowing his closed, hard stubbornness, she had not insisted. But in the meantime, she did not feel like lasting in that suffocating sadness.

He doubled her earnings from day to day; he surrounded her with comforts; he had wanted her to stop giving lessons. In that forced idleness, which disheartened her, she had then unhappily welcomed a thought that, at first, had almost made her laugh:

“If I found a husband!”.

But she was already thirty-nine, and then with that body – oh come on! – she would have had to make herself a husband on purpose. Still, it would have been the only means to free herself and her brother from that oppressive debt of gratitude.

Almost without meaning to, she then took on an unusual self-care, assuming a certain air of nubility that she had never had before.

Those two or three who had once asked her in marriage now had wives and children. Before, she had never cared; now, thinking back on it, she felt spite; she felt envy of so many of her friends who had succeeded in obtaining a state.

She alone had remained so…

But perhaps she was still in time: who knows? Should her ever-active life have ended like this, in this void, should the vigilant flame of her passionate spirit have been extinguished like this, in this shadow?

And a profound regret had invaded her, exacerbated at times by certain cravings, which altered her spontaneous graces, the sound of her words, her laughter. She had become prickly, almost aggressive in her speech. She herself was aware of the change in her character; at times she felt almost self-loathing, repulsion for her vigorous body, revulsion at the unsuspected desires in which it now suddenly aroused and deeply disturbed her.

Her brother, meanwhile, had recently bought a farm from his savings and had built a beautiful little villa on it.

Prompted by him, she had first gone there for a month on holiday; then, reflecting that her brother had perhaps bought the estate to get rid of her from time to time, she had decided to retire there for good. In this way, she would leave him completely free: she would no longer give him the trouble of her company, of her sight, and she too would little by little get that strange idea out of her head of finding a husband at her age.

The first few days had passed well, and she had believed that it would be easy for her to continue like this.

She had already got into the habit of getting up at dawn every day and taking a long walk through the fields, stopping from time to time, enchanted, now to listen in the astonished silence of the plains, where a few blades of grass nearby shivered in the coolness of the air, to the crowing of the cocks, calling from one yard to another; now to admire some tiger-strewn boulder of green grommets, or the velvet lichen on the old, twisted trunk of some Saracen olive tree.

Ah, there, so close to the ground, she would soon have rebuilt another soul, another way of thinking and feeling; she would have become like that good wife of the sharecropper who was so happy to keep her company and who had already taught her so many things about the countryside, so many simple things about life that nonetheless reveal a new, profound, unsuspected meaning.

The sharecropper, on the other hand, was unbearable: he boasted of having broad ideas, he: he had travelled the world, he; he had been in America, eight years in Benosaire; and he did not want his only son, Gerlando, to be a cowardly hoe-breeder. For thirteen years, therefore, he had kept him at school; he wanted to give him ‘a little letter’, he said, and then send him to America, there, to the great country, where he would undoubtedly make his fortune.

Gerlando was nineteen years old and in thirteen years of schooling had barely made it to the third grade. He was a big, rough lad, all of a piece. His father’s fixation was a real martyrdom for him. By practising with his schoolmates, he had unwillingly acquired a certain city air, which, however, made him more awkward.

He used to drench his shaggy hair with water every morning, and then he managed to straighten it on one side; but then, when it was shaved off, his hair stood up compactly and hirsute here and there, as if it had sprouted from the skin of his skull; even his eyebrows seemed to sprout a little further down from his low forehead, and the first hairs of his moustache and beard began to sprout from his lip and chin, in little bushes. Poor Gerlando! He was pitiful, so big, so hard, so shaggy, with an open book in front of him. His father had to sweat through a shirt some mornings to shake him out of his tasty, deep sleep of a sated and satisfied piglet, and send him off, still groggy and staggering, with dumbfounded eyes, to the nearby town, to his martyrdom.

When the young lady came to the country, Gerlando had her mother beg her to persuade her father to stop tormenting him with this school, with this school! She couldn’t take it anymore!

And in fact, Eleonora had tried to intercede; but the sharecropper, – ah, no, no, – deference, respect, all respect for the young lady; but also, a prayer not to meddle. And so she, a little out of pity, a little out of laughter, a little out of dedication, began to help the poor young man as far as she could.

She made him come up with his schoolbooks and exercise books every after lunch. He would come up awkwardly and ashamedly, because he realised that his mistress was taking a liking to him because of his bawdiness, his hardness of mind; but what could she do? His father wanted it that way. For the study, eh, yes: beast; he had no difficulty in recognising it; but if it had been a question of knocking down a tree, an ox, eh by golly … – and Gerlando’s arms were bare, with certain tender eyes and a smile of strong white teeth…

Suddenly, from one day to the next, she had cut those lessons short; she no longer wanted to see him; she had the piano brought from the city and for several days she had shut herself away in the villa, playing, singing, reading, obsessively. Finally, one evening, she realised that the big boy, deprived so suddenly of her help, of the company she kept him and the jokes she played with him, was lurking about to spy on her, to hear her sing or play music: and, giving in to a bad inspiration, she had wanted to surprise him, suddenly leaving the piano and rushing down the steps of the villa.

– What are you doing there?

– I’m listening…

– Do you like it?

– Very much, yes ma’am… I feel in paradise.

She had burst out laughing at this statement; but suddenly, Gerlando, as if lashed in the face by that laughter, had jumped on her, there, behind the villa, in the thick darkness, beyond the patch of light coming from the open balcony up there.

So it had been.

Overwhelmed in this way, she had not been able to repel him; she had felt herself lacking – she no longer knew how – under that brutal impetus and had surrendered, yes, giving in without wanting to concede.

The next day, she had returned to the city. And now? How was it that Giorgio did not come in to deflower her? Perhaps D’Andrea had not told him anything yet: perhaps he was thinking of ways to save her.

But how?

She hid her face in her hands, as if not to see the emptiness that opened up before her. But that emptiness was within her. And there was no remedy. Death alone. When? How?

Suddenly, the door opened, and Giorgio appeared on the doorstep, dishevelled, very pale, his hair untidy and his eyes still red with tears. D’Andrea held him by the arm.

– I just want to know this,’ he said to his sister, through clenched teeth, in a whistling voice, almost sounding out the syllables: – I want to know who did it.

Eleonora, with bowed head, eyes closed, slowly shook her head and resumed sobbing.

– You will tell me,’ cried Bandi, approaching, held back by his friend. – And whoever he is, you will marry him!

– But no, Giorgio! – she then moaned, lowering her head and twisting her hands in her lap. – No! it’s not possible!

– Is he married? – he asked, leaning in closer, his fists clenched tight, terrible.

– No,’ she hastened to answer. – But it’s not possible, do you think!

– Who is it? – resumed Bandi, all trembling, clutching her close. – Who is it? At once, the name!

Feeling her brother’s fury upon her, Eleonora clutched her shoulders, barely lifted her head and groaned under his angry eyes:

– I can’t tell you…

– The name, or I’ll kill you! – Bandi then roared, raising his fist on her head.

But D’Andrea interposed, pushed his friend aside, then said sternly:

– You go. She will tell me. Go, go… And he forced him out of the room.