Th Fish Trap

What a drink! No. Barely three glasses.

Perhaps the wine excited him more than usual, because of the mood he had been in since the morning, and also because of what he was planning to do, although he was still not quite sure.

For quite some time already he had had a certain secret thought, as if lurking and ready to snap out at an opportune moment.

He kept it stowed away, almost unaware of all his duties that stood like hirsute sentinels guarding the recluse of his conscience. For about twenty years, he had been incarcerated there, serving a crime that, after all, had done no harm except to him.

But yes! Who had he finally killed, if not himself? Who throttled, if not his own life?

And, on top of that, jail time. For twenty years. He had locked himself in it, by himself; he had planted all those hirsute duties to guard himself, with his bayonet in the barrel, so that, not only did they never let him glimpse a probable distant way out, but they no longer even let him breathe.

Had any pretty girl smiled at him on the way?

– On the alert, watchguard!

– On the alert!

Had some friend proposed running away with him to America?

– On the alert, watchguard!

– On the alert he stood!

And who was he anymore, now? There you have it: one who sucked, properly sucked, at himself, when compared to what he could and should have been.

A great painter! Yes, sirs: not one of those who paint to paint… trees and houses… mountains and seascapes… rivers, gardens and naked women. Ideas he wanted to paint; living ideas, in living bodies of images. Like the great ones!

Drunk-uh, a tad yes, he had been drinking. But still, he spoke well.

– Nardino, you speak well.

Nardino. His wife called him that, Nardino. By God, that took courage! A name like his: Bernardo Morasco, became in his wife’s mouth Nardino.

But, poor woman, so she understood him…. ino, ino… ino, ino…

And Bernardo Morasco, passing over the bridge, from Ripetta to the Lungotevere dei Mellini, recoiled with a handful of his hat over his thick curly hair, already grizzled, and planted his hilar speaking wide eyes in the face of a poor, elderly lady, who passed by him, followed by a black, tearful poodle, holding a wrapper in its mouth.

The lady gasped in fright and the poodle dropped the wrapper from his mouth.

Morasco remained for a moment mortified and puzzled. Had he perhaps said something to that lady? Oh God! He had not had the slightest intention of offending her. He was talking to himself; – about his wife, he was talking…. – Poor woman, too!

He shrugged. But what a poor woman now! His wife was rich, his four sons were rich now. Her father-in-law had finally croaked. And so, after twenty years in jail, he had finished serving his sentence.

Twenty years ago, when she was twenty-five, she had kidnapped her daughter from a moneylender. Poor thing, what a pity! Shy shy, pale pale and with her right shoulder a tad higher than the other. But he had to think about Art; not women. Women, he, had never been able to suffer them. For what from a woman she might have needed, that poor thing, too, was enough. Now and then, with eyes closed, there and farewell.

The dowry, which he expected, had not come, however. That usurer of a father-in-law, after the robbery, had not given himself up; and everyone then had expected him to abandon that wretch to her father’s wrath and “dishonor!” after the heist had failed. Buffoons! As in an opera libretto. Him? Here it was, instead, how he had reduced himself, so as not to give this satisfaction to the people and that infamous usurer!

Not only had he never had a harsh word for the poor little girl, but in order to keep his bread from failing first her, then the four children who had been born to him – away, dreams! away, art! away, everything!

There, thrushes, for all the shopkeepers of genre pictures: feathered, silk-clad knights dueling in a cellar; cardinals decked out in full regalia playing chess in a cloister; country girls making love in the Spanish Steps; cowboys on horseback behind a fence; little temples of Vesta with egg-yolk coloured sunsets; ruins of aqueducts in tomato sauce; then, all the worst facts of news for the coloured pages of illustrated newspapers: fleeing bulls and collapsing bell towers, fighting finance guards and smugglers, heroic rescues and boxing in the House of Representatives…

They were spitting on it, now, wife and children, at these fine labors of his, from which for so many years had come to them such meager bread! This, too, touched him: the derisive commiseration of those for whom he had sacrificed, battered, destroyed. Become rich, what more respect, what consideration could they have for one who had labored to put on filthy puppets and caricatures to leave them so many years almost starving?

Ah, but, by golly, he wanted to have the pride to spit now, too, at that wealth, and to feel disgust at it; now that it could no longer serve him to fulfill that dream that had once made him long for it. He was rich, too, then, rich in soul and dreams!

What a mockery, his father-in-law’s inheritance, all that money now that the feeling of life had hardened to him in that shaggy, dreary reality, as in a barren ground, full of thorny thistles and sharp stones, nest of snakes and owls! On this ground, now, the rain of gold! What a consolation! And who anymore gave him the strength to pluck all those thistles, to carry away all those stones, to crush the heads of all those snakes, to hunt down all those owls? Who more gave him the strength to break that soil and rework it, so that the flowers once dreamed of might be born there? Ah, what flowers more, if it had even lost its seed! There, the plumes of those thistles….

Everything was now over for him.

He had noticed it well, wandering that morning; free at last, out of his prison, for his wife and children no longer needed him.

He had left home, with the firm resolve never to return. But he still did not know what he would do, nor where he would end up.

He wandered, he wandered; he had been on the Janiculum, and he had eaten in a trattoria up there … and drank, yes, drank … more, more than three glasses … the truth! He had even been to the Villa Borghese. Tired, he had lain down for several hours on the grass of a meadow, and yes, perhaps because of the wine… he had even cried, feeling lost as if in an infinite distance; and he had seemed to remember so many things, which perhaps had never existed for him.

Spring, the intoxication of the first warmth of the sun on the tender grass of the meadows, the first shy little flowers and the singing of the birds. When had the birds ever sung so joyfully for him?

How heartbreaking, in the midst of that first green, so vivid and fresh from childhood, to feel his hair gray, his beard parched. Knowing himself old. To recognize that no more cries could erupt to him from the soul, which had the joy of those trills, of that chirping; no more thoughts, no more feelings arise to him in the mind and heart, which had the gentle timidity of those first little flowers, the freshness of that first meadow grass; to recognize that all that delight for young souls, was converted for him into an infinite anguish of regret.

Gone forever, its season.

Who can tell, in winter, which among so many trees is dead? Everyone seems dead. But, as soon as spring comes, first one, then another, then so many together, blossom again. Only one, whom all others so far had been able to believe as they did, remains bare. Dead.

It was him.

Fosco, distressed, had left Villa Borghese; he had crossed Piazza del Popolo, taken Via Ripetta; then feeling by this route suffocated, he had crossed the bridge, and down the Lungotevere dei Mellini.

Mortified still at the unintentional rudeness done to that lady with the black poodle, he met there a mortal proceeding sluggishly under the greened trees, with the band at the head. God, how out of tune that band was! Good thing the dead man could no longer hear her. And all that queue of escorts…. Ah, the life!

There, one could happily call it, life: the chord of the bass drum with the cymbals. In funeral marches, bass drum and cymbals no longer play in accord. The bass drum rolls, at times, on its own, as if it had dogs in it; and the saucers, cling! and clang! on their own.

Having made this beautiful reflection and saluted the dead man, he started to go again.

When he was at Ponte Margherita, he stopped again. Where was it going? He could no longer stand on his legs from exhaustion. Why had he taken the Ripetta Street? Now, passing Ponte Margherita, he found himself again almost in front of Villa Borghese. No, away: he would follow this other way along the Lungotevere to the new Flaminio Bridge.

But why? What did he want to do, in short? Nothing… Go, go, as long as there was light.

Beyond Flaminio Bridge the embankment ended; but the avenue followed spaciously, high over the river, scarp on the natural banks, with a long fence for a parapet. At one point, Bernardo Morasco spotted a little path, going down among the thick grass of the escarpment down to the bank; he passed under the fence and went down to the bank, quite wide there and also covered with thick grass. He lay down there.

The last flames of twilight shone from the cypresses of Monte Mario, there almost opposite, and gave to the things that in the waning shadows still briefly retained their colors like a suavest glaze that gradually darkened more and more, and mother-of-pearl reflections to the calm waters of the river.

The deep, almost astonished silence was there near though, not broken, but as it were animated by a certain somber cadenced thud, followed each time by a living drip.

Intrigued, Bernardo Morasco stood up on his torso to look, and saw from the bank stretching out into the river like the tip of a black barge, terminated in a solid plank, holding two fish traps, two sort of iron pots turning by the very force of the water. As soon as one trap dipped, the other came out on the opposite side, dripping.

He had never seen that fishing tackle; he did not know what it was, nor what it meant; and he stood for a long time astonished and frowning at it, comprised almost by a sense of mystery at that slow cadenced motion of those two crocks there, plunging one after the other into the water, to take nothing but water.

The futility of that monotonous turning of such a thick, somber warp gave him infinite sadness.

He slumped back down on the grass. It seemed to him that everything was as vain in life as the turning of those two crocks in the water. He looked at the sky, in which the first stars had already emerged, but pale from the impending moonrise.

A delightful May evening was heralding itself, and the blacker and more bitter Bernardo Morasco’s melancholy grew by turns. Ah, who lifted those twenty years of jail time from his shoulders anymore, so that he too could enjoy that delight? Even if he had managed to renew his soul, chasing away all the memories that would now always embitter his meager pleasure in life, how could he renew his already worn-out body?

How to go more with that body in search of love? Without love, without any other good had passed for him life, which could, oh yes, could have been beautiful! And it would soon be over… And no trace would remain of him, who had once dreamed of having within himself the power to give a new expression, an expression of his own to things… Ah, what! Vanity! That crock that the river of time spun, plunging into the water, to take nothing but water….

All of a sudden, he stood up. As soon as he was on his feet, it seemed strange to him that he had stood up. He sensed that it had not risen of its own accord, but had been set up by an inner urge, not his own, perhaps of that thought reposed, as if lurking within him, for so many years.

Had the time therefore come?

He looked around. There was no one there. There was the silence that, formidably suspended, waited for the rustling of the grass at a first step of his toward the river. And there were all those blades of grass, which would remain there, just as they were, under the damp, bland glow of the moon, even after his disappearance from that scene.

Bernardo Morasco moved for the bank, but only almost out of curiosity to take a closer look at that strange fishing device. He climbed down onto the barge, in which a pole stood confined vertically, by the two rotating roof tiles.

There it was: holding on to that pole, he could have taken a leap, leapt into one of those traps, and been bowled into the river.

Beautiful! New! Yes… And he grasped the pole with both hands, as if to test it; and, smiling convulsively, he waited for the bonnet that was now plunging that way into the water to make the turn. As it came out this way, gradually rising as the other one dived, truly he made a leap and threw himself into it, his eyes squinted, his teeth clenched, his whole face contracted in the pang of horrible anticipation.

But what? Had the weight of his body arrested the movement? Did he remain poised inside the crock?

He reopened his eyes, stunned at that chance, quivering, almost laughing…. Oh God, was he no longer moving?

But no, there, there… The force of the river was winning… the crook resumed turning…. Gosh, no… he had waited too long… that hesitation, that momentary halting of the warp by the weight of his body had already seemed like a joke to him, and he had almost laughed at it… Now, oh God, looking up, as the bonnet rose, he saw as if crashing all the stars in the sky; and instinctively, in an instant, seized with terror, Bernardo Morasco stretched out one arm to the pole, both arms, clung to it with such a desperate effort, that at last he sprang from the bonnet standing on the barge.

The bonnet, with a violent thud from the tearing, plunged back, splashing a blast of water at him.

He shuddered and laughed, almost whinnied again, convulsing, turning his eyes around, as if he had made, now, a joke of the river, of the moon, of the cypresses of Monte Mario.

And the enchantment of the night appeared to him rediscovered, with the stars well and bright in the sky, and those banks and that peace and silence.

 

 

Black Shawl, by Luigi Pirandello 1/5

Short Stories for a Year, by Luigi Pirandello 🖋️ 🇮🇹 🇺🇸

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