Black Shawl, by Luigi Pirandello 3/5

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 2/5

The brother was adamant.

In the few days before the wedding, when the ritual banns had to be published, he became more and more involved in the scandal. To forestall the mockery he expected from everyone, he fiercely took the course of disavowing his shame, with horrible crudities of language. He seemed to have gone mad; and everyone pitied him.

He had to fight with the sharecropper for a while to get him to agree to his son’s marriage.

The old man, though broad-minded, at first seemed to fall from the clouds: he did not want to believe such a thing was possible. Then he said:

‘Your worship, don’t doubt it: I’m going to crush him under my feet; do you know how? Or rather, let’s do this: I’ll hand him over to you, bound hand and foot; and Your Lordship will take all the satisfaction you want. I’ll get him the sinew, for the nerfs, and first I’ll keep it soaking for three days, so that it will be firmer.

When he realised, however, that his master did not mean this, but wanted something else, marriage, he was shocked again:

– What! What do you say, Your Ladyship? A lady like that with the son of a vile farmer?

And he opposed a sharp refusal.

– Forgive me. But the young lady had judgment and age; she knew right from wrong; she should never have done with my son what she did. Do I have to speak? She brought him up in the house every day. Your Lordship means… A bad boy… At that age, you don’t think, you don’t care… Now I can lose my son, God knows what it’s costing me? The young lady. With respect, she can be his mother…

Bandi had to promise the dowry of the farm and a daily allowance to his sister.

So, the marriage was arranged, and when it took place, it was a real event for the town.

It seemed that everyone took great pleasure in publicly making a mockery of the admiration and respect that had been paid to that woman for so many years; as if between the admiration and respect, of which they no longer esteemed her worthy, and the mockery with which they now accompanied her to that shameful wedding, there could be no room for a little pity.

The pity was all for her brother, who, of course, did not want to take part in the ceremony. D’Andrea did not take part either, excusing himself that he had to keep his poor Giorgio company on that sad day.

An old doctor from the city, who had already been at the home of Eleonora’s parents, and to whom D’Andrea, freshly arrived from his studies, with all the fumes and sophistries of the new therapeutics, had taken away a large part of his clientele, offered himself as a witness and took another old man, his friend, with him as a second witness.

With them Eleonora went in a closed car to the town hall; then to a small church outside the city for the religious ceremony.

In another car was the groom, Gerlando, turbid and ingrown, with his parents.

The latter, festively dressed, were puffed up and serious, because, in the end, their son was marrying a real lady, the sister of a lawyer, and bringing him a dowry of countryside with a magnificent villa, and money to boot. Gerlando, to make himself worthy of his new status, would continue his studies. At the farm, he would wait for his father, who knew all about it. The bride was a little old? So much the better! The heir was already on the way. By the law of nature she would die first, and Gerlando would then remain free and rich.

These and similar reflections were also made, in a third car, by the groom’s groomsmen, peasant friends of his father, in the company of two old maternal uncles. The groom’s countless other relatives and friends waited in the villa, all festively dressed, the men in their turquoise cloths, the women in their new capes and brightly coloured handkerchiefs, as the broad-minded sharecropper had prepared a lavish treatment.

At the town hall, Eleonora, before entering the civil status room, was assailed by a convulsion of weeping; the groom, who was standing apart, in a huddle with his relatives, was urged by them to hurry; but the old doctor begged him not to be seen, to stay away for the moment.

Not yet well recovered from that violent crisis, Eleonora entered the room; she saw that boy next to her, made shaggy and clumsy by her clumsiness and shame; she had an impulse of rebellion; she was about to shout: – No! No! – and she looked at him as if to urge him to shout so too. But shortly afterwards they both said yes, as if condemned to an inevitable punishment. After the other service in the lonely little church, the sad procession hurried to the villa. Eleonora did not want to break away from her two old friends, but she was forced to get into the car with her husband and in-laws.

On the way, not a word was exchanged in the car.

The sharecropper and his wife seemed astonished: they raised their eyes from time to time to glance at their daughter-in-law; then they exchanged a glance and lowered their eyes again. The groom looked out, all narrowed inwardly, frowning.

At the villa, they were greeted with a resounding burst of firecrackers and festive shouts and clapping. But the bride’s appearance and demeanour chilled all the guests, no matter how much she even tried to smile at the good people, who intended to celebrate her in their own way, as is customary at weddings.

She soon asked permission to retire alone; but in the room where she had slept during the holiday, finding the bridal bed laid out, she stopped abruptly on the threshold: – There? With him? No! Never! Never! – And, seized with revulsion, she fled into another room: she locked herself there; she fell to sit on a chair, pressing her face hard, hard, with both hands.

Through the door, she heard the voices and laughter of the guests, who were cheering Gerlando, praising him, more than his bride, for the good family he had made and the beautiful countryside.

Gerlando stood at the balcony and, in response, full of shame, shrugged his mighty shoulders from time to time.

Honour indeed, he felt honoured at being the husband of that lady in that way: there! And all the fault was his father’s, who, because of that damned school fixation, had made him treat him like a stupid and inept bad boy by the young lady who had come on holiday, enabling her to make certain jokes that had hurt him. And here, meanwhile, was what had come of it. The father thought of nothing but the beautiful countryside. But how was he going to live from now on, with that woman who was so awe-inspiring, and who certainly wanted him out of shame and disgrace? How would he have dared raise his eyes to her face? And on top of that, his father demanded that he continue attending school! Imagine the baja his classmates would have given him! She was twenty years older than him, his wife, and she looked like a mountain, like….

While Gerlando toiled with these reflections, his father and mother waited for the final preparations for lunch. Finally, one and the other triumphantly entered the hall, where the table was already set. The table service had been provided for the event by a tractor from the town, who had also sent a cook and two waiters to serve the meal.

The sharecropper came to see Gerlando at the balcony and told him:

– Go and warn your wife that it will be ready soon.

– I’m not going, no sir! – grunted Gerlando, stamping his foot. – You go there.

– It’s up to you, donkey! – his father shouted. – You’re the husband: go!

– Thank you very much… No sir! I’m not going! – repeated Gerlando, stubbornly, shielding himself.

Then his irate father pulled him by the lapels of his jacket and gave him a shove. –

Are you ashamed, you big beast? Did you get into it before? And now you are ashamed? Go! It’s your wife!

The guests rushed to make peace, to persuade Gerlando to go.

– What’s the harm? Tell her to come for a bite to eat…

– But if I don’t even know what to call her! – cried Gerlando, exasperated.

Some of the guests burst out laughing, others were ready to hold back the sharecropper who had jumped up to slap his imbecile son who was thus spoiling the feast prepared with so much solemnity and expense.

– You will call her by her first name,’ his mother told him in the meantime, softly and persuasively. – What is her name? Eleonora, is it? and you call her Eleonora. Is she not your wife? Go, my son, go… And, saying so, she led him to the bridal chamber.

Gerlando went to knock on the door. He knocked once, softly. He waited. Silence. How was he going to tell her? Did he have to call her by her first name? Ah, damned nuisance! And why didn’t she answer in the meantime? Perhaps she had not understood. He hung up louder. He waited. Silence.

Then, all awkward, he tried to call out in a low voice, as his mother had suggested. But such a ridiculous Eleonora came out, that immediately, as if to cancel it, he called loudly, frankly:

– Eleonora!

He finally heard her voice asking behind the door of another room:

– Who is it?

He approached the door, his blood all stirred.

– I,’ he said, ‘I Ger… Gerlando… He’s ready.

– I can’t,’ she answered. – Do it without me.

Gerlando returned to the hall, relieved of a great weight.

– She is not coming! She says he’s not coming! She can’t come!

– Long live the beast! – exclaimed his father, who did not call him otherwise. – Did you tell her he was at the table? And why didn’t you force her to come?

The wife interposed: she made her husband understand that it would perhaps be better to leave the bride alone for that day. The guests approved.

– Emotion… discomfort… you know!

But the sharecropper, who had intended to prove to his daughter-in-law that he knew how to do his duty when necessary, remained sullen and ordered with ill grace that lunch be served.

There was a longing for the fine dishes that were now to come to the table, but there was also a serious consternation in all the guests for all the superfluous things they saw glittering on the new tablecloth, dazzling them: four glasses of different shapes and forks and forks, knives and small knives, and some nibs inside the tissue paper rolls.

Sitting well away from the table, they sweated even through the coarse cloth clothes of the feast, and looked at each other in their hard, haggard faces, eviscerated by the unusual cleanliness; and they did not dare raise their large hands, deformed by the work of the countryside, to pick up those silver forks (the small or the large?) and those knives, under the eyes of the waiters who, walking around with the servants, with their white thread gloves, instilled in them a terrible awe.

The sharecropper, meanwhile, was eating, looked at his son and shrugged his head, his face set in derisive pity:

– Look at him, look at him! – he muttered to himself. – What does he look like, standing alone at the head of the table? How could his bride have any consideration for such an ape? She is right to be ashamed of him. Ah, if it had been me in his place!

Once the meal was over amidst the general sulkiness, the guests, with one excuse or another, left. It was already almost evening.

– And now? – said the father to Gerlando, when the two waiters had finished clearing the table, and everything in the villa was quiet again. – What will you do now? You’ll take care of it!

And he ordered his wife to follow him to the farmhouse where they lived, not far from the villa.

Left alone, Gerlando looked around, frowning, not knowing what to do.

He felt in the silence the presence of the one who was shut away. Perhaps, by now, not hearing any more noise, she would have left the room. What was he to do then?

Ah, how gladly he would have run away to sleep in the farmhouse, with his mother, or even out in the open. Under a tree, perhaps!

And what if, in the meantime, she expected to be called? If, resigned to the condemnation her brother had wished to inflict on her, she considered herself in the power of him, her husband, and waited for him to … yes, invite her to…

She strained her ear. But no: all was silence. Perhaps she had already fallen asleep. It was already dark. The moonlight entered the room through the open balcony.

Without thinking of lighting the lamp, Gerlando took a chair and went to sit on the balcony, which overlooked, from above, the open countryside sloping down to the sea far below.

In the clear night, the major stars shone clearly; the moon shone on the sea in a fervid band of silver; from the vast yellow plains of stubble rose trembling crickets, like a dense, continuous chime. Suddenly, an owl, close by, uttered a languid, heart-rending cry; from afar another answered it, like an echo, and both of them continued for a while to sing like that, in the clear night.

With one arm leaning on the balcony railing, he then instinctively, to escape the oppression of that eager uncertainty, stopped to listen to those two men talking to each other in the silence enchanted by the moon; then, catching sight of a stretch of the wall that surrounded the entire estate, he thought that all that land was now his; those trees were his: olive, almond, carob, fig and mulberry trees; that vineyard was his.

His father had good reason to be happy about this, that from now on he would no longer be subject to anyone.

In the end, the idea of letting him continue his studies was not so strange. Better there, better at school, than here all day, in the company of his wife. He would take care of those classmates who wanted to laugh behind his back. He was a gentleman now, and he no longer cared if they kicked him out of school. But that was not going to happen. On the contrary, he intended to study hard from now on, so that one day soon he would be able to be among the ‘gentlemen’ of the village, without being in awe of them, and to talk and deal with them as equals. He only needed another four years of schooling to get his licence from the Technical Institute: and then, an agronomist or accountant. His brother-in-law then, Mr Lawyer, who seemed to have thrown his sister to the dogs, should have taken his hat off to him. Yes, sir. Then he would have had every right to say to him: ‘What did you give me? Me, that old woman? I have studied, I have a gentleman’s profession, and I could aspire to a beautiful young woman, rich and of good birth like her!”

So, thinking, he fell asleep with his forehead on the arm leaning against the railing.

The two men continued, one near here, the other far away, their alternating voluptuous moaning; the clear night seemed to make its moon veil flicker over the earth, resounding with crickets, and now came from afar, like a dark rebuke, the deep mumbling of the sea.

Late at night, Eleanor appeared, like a shadow, on the threshold of the balcony.

She did not expect to find the young man asleep there. She felt pity and awe at the same time. She thought for a while whether she should wake him up to tell him what she had decided between herself and get him out of there; but, on the point of shaking him, of calling his name, she felt her spirits fail her and she slowly withdrew, like a shadow, into the room she had left.