...And Dreams Are Dreams

Instead, I listened to the chambermaid’s vacuum cleaner, which had suddenly started up in the corridor, to the plumber, repairing the faucet in the room next door. When I ordered in a coffee so as to avoid going outside into the light of the street, the bellboy who brought it up to me and set it on my table, full of high spirits, said:

“Still working, are we?”

“Still working,” I replied. “What else?”

“Yesterday it almost snowed, and today the weather is so beautiful,” he said, just to say something.

I didn’t want to show that he was interrupting me, so I said: “That’s precisely the problem.”

He pretended to understand, though even I didn’t know what exactly I had meant. (What problem?

Whose problem? Why?) He went, leaving behind him that air of assurance that always comes with a precise job (whereas mine was intangible and nonexistent), and ruining, with his passage, the atmosphere of a mausoleum that had reigned in my small room. Poor Pirandello stood there, imprisoned forever in his white, translated prison, while I, having been awakened by the departing bellboy from the torpor of reading, was only just discovering that Pirandello had written my story, all those years ago, but in reverse.

In his story, a Scandinavian sailor falls ill during a voyage and his companions take him off the ship to a village on the coast of Sicily. He is taken in by a fisherman who also plays the role of consul, since he had picked up some words of French during the Napoleonic wars. The Scandinavian sailor is tall and blond, like a Nordic deity. He is taken care of by the whole neighborhood, while the fisherman’s daughter begins, little by little, to fall in love with him. They get married. They have two children. But to the end, the blond god cannot adapt to the harshness of the sun, the rocks, the people.

One by one, I was discovering all the similarities.

In my short story, the Nordic woman would give me occasion to describe the habits and customs of southern Crete. In Pirandello, it is the Nordic man who makes him describe the habits and customs of southern Sicily. (And what a master of description! How full of intensity and life are his characters and dialogues!

From beneath the great Sicilian playwright an even greater novelist was revealed to me.) The same story, the same plot. I was shaken.

“You’re not going to start writing a novel of manners now, are you?” I asked myself. That style of prose is dead and buried. Nowadays, people are after other things. Nowadays, it’s space, and comets, like Haley’s, which is going to reappear, and (I had read all this recently and it came pouring back into my head) the Soviets were getting ready to welcome it by sending two sputniks equipped with ultramodern telescopes and computers, while the French were going to send a three-meter-long test tube with an investigative photoradar, which, if it was not destroyed by the dust of unclean snow that is said to make up the tail of the comet, would send us information about the chemical composition of the universe. Nowadays, everybody is waiting with mammoth telescopes for Haley’s comet, whereas when it had appeared in 1910, about the time that Pirandello’s short story was written, people were terrified and thought the end of the world was at hand.

Somehow, Haley’s comet, which reappears every seventy-six years, corresponded inside me with Pirandello and his short story, and I tried desperately to convince myself that between 1910 and 1986 the way we approach the same phenomenon changed. But it was no use. Perhaps it’s because man is not a comet but a fixed star that, though fixed, passes like a comet through life. Only life doesn’t change. Intellectual developments (psychoanalysis, sociology, and biophysics) do not help us in the least to understand the phenomenon of human existence. It is only the knowledge of the mechanics of the text, its translation so to speak, and the naïveté of the narrator in describing and analyzing his hero’s reactions, that undermines our confidence. That is why the idea of a transplant excited me. It was something modern.

Something that no Pirandello had ever touched because it simply did not exist in his day. Whereas the story of the Nordic goddess and the southern satyr, or, in his short story, the Nordic god and the southern siren, was outdated, and I was thankful to him for writing it so well as to rid me of my desire to write it.

Around half past one, not being able to hold out any longer, I called her. Rosa herself answered the phone. She had just gotten back from work, she said.

Would she like to see me? Of course she would! Did she want me to come over? Right away. She was staying in the Parioli quarter. She gave me the address.

I took a taxi and soon I was with her.

The Aldo Brandini residence was chic. As a rule, all people connected to fashion and clothes stayed here when visiting the city. In the foyer downstairs, I saw a crowd of models and photographers meeting for lunch.