The Experience of Pain Read online

  Carlo Emilio Gadda

  * * *

  THE EXPERIENCE OF PAIN

  Translated from the Italian by Richard Dixon

  Contents

  PART ONE

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  PART TWO

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  APPENDIX

  The Publisher justifies his salvaging of the text requesting the intervention of the Author

  Autumn

  Essential Explanations

  Follow Penguin

  Part One

  * * *

  I

  In those years, between 1925 and 1933, the laws of Maradagàl, a country of limited resources, gave landowners the choice whether or not to join provincial associations for night vigilance – (Nistitúos Provinciales de Vigilancia para la Noche); and this despite the fact that they were already weighed down by taxes and obliged to pay various duties, whose overall sum, in several cases, reached and even exceeded the value of the small amount of banzavóis that the rural property managed to yield, Ceres and Pales permitting, every leap year: namely, the one year in four when there was no drought, no persistent rain at seed time and harvest, and when the crop hadn’t been afflicted by a whole caravan of diseases. More dreaded than every other disease was the inescapable ‘Peronospera banzavoisi’ described by Cattaneo: this causes the roots and stalk of the unfortunate plant to dry up and crumble during the very months of development: and leaves the desperate and hungry people with, instead of maize, a powder similar to that which a woodworm leaves behind, or a gimlet, in an oak beam. Some areas have to reckon with hailstorms as well. This other scourge, in truth, doesn’t have a particular effect on the wrapped cob of the banzavóis, which is a sugary type of maize peculiar to that climate: climate or sky, in certain regions, that is just as prone to hail as the sky looming over certain half-perches of our unforgettable Brianza: a land, if nothing else, meticulously measured by the perch.

  In 1924, Maradagàl, as is well known, came out of a bitter war with Parapagàl, an adjoining state with a population of the same ethnic origin who had immigrated there little by little from Europe since the early decades of the seventeenth century. This too is well known. The few Indios who survived the Reconquista and reached as far as this century and the blare of the radio exist in tribes and almost in packs in the remote ‘Territorios’, blessed with their own special tuberculosis and their own special syphilis, as well as by the distance from the gendarmerie: some of them taken care of, and with great difficulty, by the persistence of some Piedmont missionary, in the Garden of the Faith of Christ; from which, nevertheless, they then still go missing, from time to time, for one of those reprehensible bouts of caña drinking, which leaves them flat out for a couple of days on the ground, along a footpath, like pebbles. Each of the two countries claims to have won the war and puts the terrible blame for it on the other. And so, in the years from 1924, there were just as many war veterans in Maradagàl as in Parapagàl, some of whom belonged and still belong to the worthy category of the war-wounded: and they would limp, or had scarred faces, or a rigid limb, or had a foot or an eye missing. It is not uncommon, in the more voluble cafés of Maradagàl or Parapagàl, to be stared at by a glass eye. Certain veterans, it was known, had been wounded even though it didn’t show; the scars, hidden by clothing, were thus deprived of their rightful share of admiration. Then there were the war-deaf.

  The use of the noun ‘war’ as an adjective expressing cause or origin, followed by a hyphen and another adjective such as ‘invalid’, ‘maimed’, ‘blind’, ‘deaf’, ‘impaired’, and so forth, had given rise to a certain jocularity, in doubtful taste it is true: and yet not against the law, being innocuous. It sometimes happens, alas, that garrulous talk goes beyond the sacred laws of deference and propriety. And so at Terepáttola, in the foothills of the Cordillera, when some swell allowed his hands to wander too far, the Terepattolese girls would call out, ‘War-moron!’, though after ten minutes’ sulking they would eventually forgive him and make their peace, as the plenipotentiaries of Maradagàl had with the plenipotentiaries of Parapagàl.

  ‘Moron’ in Maradagalese is ‘mocoso’ with a single ‘c’, and so the actual expression is: ‘¡Mocoso de guerra!’

  Now, when it came to enlisting officers for the Nistitúos de Vigilancia para la Noche, preference was given to war veterans, without excluding from this category the glorious wounded, provided of course they appeared fit for the task: that is to say, still physically capable: and sufficiently smart, in fact, to carry out a job of that kind, which may require interventions ‘manu armata’ and yet presumes, in the officer, a certain robustness and therefore authority, so that the officer can effectively persuade the offender that he has no choice but to follow him to the next guard post. Follow him, or rather precede him, given that it’s better to keep certain types in front than behind.

  The truth is that in Maradagàl there are also officers no taller than twopence worth of cheese: but this, as well as being a fine Tuscan expression, is more the exception than the rule. And then one suspects they might, however small they are, display an unforeseen strength when need arises. Genuine dwarves, in any event, as well as hunchbacks, are strictly prohibited from day and night patrol services and from being recruited at all. Another requirement for night patrolmen is acuteness in hearing suspicious sounds that might be, for example, the cloth shoes of a couple of thieves padding over the mosaics on the ground floor of a villa or the jingle of a silver fork falling into a sack at night – inside the same villa, of course. Theoretically, the night patrolman, the standard patrolman, ought to be equipped with first-rate ears and to have all five senses in perfect order: this means having the nose of a bloodhound and the retina of a cat, which can even spot mice scuttling around, they say, in pitch-black cellars. A deaf, or half-deaf, patrolman is barely imaginable: and in fact even in Maradagàl, and even after the war, it was hard to imagine. But the fabric of the community, perhaps everywhere in the world to some extent, and in Maradagàl more than elsewhere, has a happy tendency to forget, at least now and then, the imperative purpose for which the cells perpetually labour. Then, in the tightly knit social fabric, exceptional instances of charity emerge. Moral purpose and carnal benevolence towards the human creature give out conflicting signals. If the second of these wins, a new series of circumstances opens up, bursting forth like a bud, and then a branch, from the teleological pole.

  And so uncertainty reigned as to the recruitment of the war-deaf in the Nistitúos de Vigilancia: and various cases in which interested and rejected parties had thought fit to take legal action, as injured parties, ended up encountering, from the law itself, ambiguous responses. At Terepáttola yes, and at Pastrufazio no. Even these two courts, where appeals had been lodged that were in some respect more distinguishable, had occasion to make inconsistent rulings, in the elaborate judgements delivered by their more palaverous magistrates – who felt it necessary, from one case to another, to deliver divergent decisions: in other words, conflicting decisions. And that led to adjournments and appeals to the Supreme Court and to remitting the case for fresh consideration, lasting for ever: a stroke of luck for the street-corner stationer! Some very strange instances then arose: ascribable perhaps to the mechanism of electoral favour, which becomes a proxy for those who are incompetent and unworthy but have a vote: and figures among the less savoury and more persistent of democratic and republican customs, throughout almost the whole of South America. – In the province of Zigo-Zago, for example, in 1926, a patrolman on bicycle was recruited to keep watch over an area two kilometres long: a place, it is tru
e, almost never visited by thieves, where there was nothing they could steal, apart from stubble. The poor wretch had a stiff leg: and had managed to pass it off as a stiff leg caused by a war-wound, whereas in fact it was a fusion of the knee joint, of probable though obscure syphilitic origin. He used a bicycle with a single pedal, on the right, for the healthy leg: and on the other, port side, he let the straight left leg sway, like a gangplank over a ship’s side. After a while, in local legend and folklore, the rigid and non-pedalling leg was indeed turned into an aluminium leg. When chickens were stolen, everyone said, ‘Och! It’s only a chicken theft!’: and when something more serious happened, everyone said: ‘He too, poor devil! has to watch half the district! and with that aluminium leg!’ Others said: ‘He has a wife and kids!’ Others, with a shrug: ‘Live and let live!’ They’re good people, in Maradagàl.

  And then there was the petty rural scandal at Lukones, in the arrondimiento of Serruchón, in the province of Novokomi. Lukones: a village with an oficina de correos (post office), a telephone, midwife, tobacconist, district doctor, Leon d’Oro hotel, public washhouse and, of course, parish church: crossed by several bends of the provincial highway that winds from the station and poplar groves of Prado up to Iglesia. Prado is connected by rail to Novokomi as well as to Pastrufazio: the railway line continues on as far as Cabeza (still on a single track), where a red beret on the head of a man of forty waits for the panting of the train. Pastrufazio, the country’s most lively city, spews its rather clammy and grimy suburbs west and south for a hundred kilometres or so beyond the succession of moraines that enclose Prado: into the green plain.

  Serruchón, from which the arrondimiento takes its name as the most conspicuous of its features, is a long, steep mountain, all triangles and points, almost the rounded hump-menace of the dinosaur: of more or less horizontal stature except for the ferocious up and down of those peaks and relative saddles, wind portals. A tall and grey wall looms suddenly over the idyll, with dark precipices: and gullies, between the towers, where cold shadows hide in the dawn, and linger there, in their iciness, for the whole first part of the morning. Behind black peaks the sun bursts unexpectedly: its rays break over the jagged ridge and spread here and there towards Prado, dropping down to gild the mists of the land, out of which emerge hills, between the veiled lakes. Something similar, for its name and more for its appearance, to Manzoni’s Resegone. Some of the more intrepid towers there (with morning bells) rip the golden veil of mist; the vapour, a white tuft, is drawn out into a thread; it is lost; it whistles through far-off intermediaries among the hills, and twists and turns: it carries the teeming, black crowd of poor men who flow through it towards the mills and the factories, or the forge on the meagre river.

  The scandal was not so serious: indeed, it was fairly paltry for a scandal, and it all came out around the time of the September Madonna, thanks to an unknown cloth trader and the doctor at Lukones, who then gleaned more exact information from a military doctor on holiday.

  One fine day, all of a sudden, it became universal knowledge that a certain Pedro Mahagones, in other words the bicycle patrolman for that area, whom everyone knew as Manganones or Pedro, was in actual fact neither Manganones nor (more exactly) Mahagones, nor even Pedro: but this was the first name and surname of a maternal great-uncle and his real name, instead, was Gaetano Palumbo. During those two years on patrol he had commemorated at length – and more or less with everyone – the kindness of his uncle, and a godfather as well, whose first name and surname he had carried around in the world, to honour him all the more; and every so often, with emotion, and perhaps with the glint of half a tear in his manly smile, he would drink his health, which meant and could only mean the health of his soul, in other words, his true, final and everlasting health, the only health that really matters; given that the mortal remains of his dear uncle had already been underground for eight years.

  But his uncle had brought him up, little Pietruccio who then became Pedro: and cared, loved, looked after, nursed him (from a bottle), protected, educated, counselled, caned: oh! for his own good, and indeed he deserved it, sometimes! … and even took him to wee-wee, and to poo-poo, and then washed his botty, you understand, like a wet nurse. Just as though he were a son.

  So many tears and bitter to recall, but most of all free cigarettes, at all the tobacconist shops in the area.

  The new name caused a certain surprise among the villagers as well as among the holiday-makers, some of whom had reason to find ‘that there was a certain something in his face …’ Over the corpulent grandeur of his person, and on the closed collar of his uniform, it was a broad and paternal face with a short, red toothbrush moustache under his short, straight nose: small, gleaming, sunken eyes, moving swiftly and with the keenest sparks of a blade of light in his gaze, which the peak of his cap softened but couldn’t entirely hide. When he raised his cap, as if to let his cabeza give off steam, his forehead seemed high, but narrower than his cheekbones, and receded with several modulations of colour into the dome of his skull, which was bald and white and, to be truthful, very clean, in other words with no flecks of grease mixed with dust. Then, with no cap, his eyes kept sole command, assailed his interlocutor with a questioning and expectant expression, stirred the notion of an absolute duty to pay some thing, some kind of virtual fine, by law: for that was what the law required: receiving in suitable exchange a red or light blue slip of paper as a receipt, torn from the counterfoil of a small block that he could extract from a side pocket of his jacket with an extraordinary ease. In any case, everyone, or at least almost everyone, in the Lukones area, tried hard and as best they could – seeing they had paid – to imagine those hazardous patrol rounds in the dark: and had eventually resigned themselves to the importance and delicacy of the task that weighed on his shoulders, since the night is long and dark, and everyone now recognized it, its importance: for a man’s good name, in South America, or an official’s reputation, doesn’t always depend on the futility of his duties.

  Mahagones-Palumbo had in due course – this news spread swiftly, and was the essence of the scandal – received, in 1925, a sixth-grade, fifth-category pension, in other words almost the top category, for having found himself left deaf in both ears, from a ‘penetrating and lacerating’ grenade explosion. At the Battle of Hill 131.

  He had thought up those two adjectives there and then, in rehashing the event for the benefit of the people of Lukones when he felt forced into it at last by the nods and winks of the villagers. And he uttered them with such a firm and authoritative voice, helped by the uniform, that he froze the smiles that had formed here and there, each time, on the lips of his listeners. It genuinely seemed to everyone that, in wartime, there were common, ordinary grenades (the ones that had killed their brothers or sons) which were not penetrating nor even lacerating; but that Palumbo’s grenade had been a special, top-class grenade: and from a deluxe cannon, far more fearsome than the normal cannons, which were good enough, of course, on weekdays, for killing peasants in one way or another.

  That was the way they were obliged to imagine it. Those two adjectives, then, were taken most seriously and, I would say, appreciated in a most particular way by the girls and women in the village: and by the ladies in their villas, who pondered over it for weeks, having nothing better to do at that time, notwithstanding the undeniable and multifarious resources of their brains.

  The Battle of Hill 131, the Battle of Hill 131.

  For quite some time, the whole arrondimiento of Serruchón knew no other hill than Hill 131. Palumbo’s story was given credence. As for any possible incompatibility between deafness and vigilance, this was a problem cancelled out by the religion of memory. Valour has its own true cult, of true souls. Everyone repeated, ‘The Battle of Hill 131, the Battle of Hill 131,’ as though it were a universally known event – Waterloo, Abukir, Porta Tosa. And this regardless of the fact that Hill 131, lost and recaptured a couple of times a week through an entire six-month period, had, alone,
witnessed more than ninety-two battles, each more deadly than the last.

  Pedro smoked a lot, perhaps more for appearance and vanity than out of habit or need. Smoking helped him much in front of women, who enjoy smoke, since they consider it also, perhaps rightly, a pleasant foretaste of fire. It turned out that the battle – about which the people of Lukones preferred to smile, though in the end they had to get him, Palumbo, against his will, to tell his story in the tiniest, interminable detail, overcoming his extreme reluctance to talk about himself – had been an attack. It was preceded by commensurate fire from the Maradagalese artillery and followed by a ‘bombardment’ (so he said, most pitifully) from the Parapagalese, behind which was a counterattack. There was then a ‘counter-bombardment’ and a second counterattack, this time by the Maradagalese, and finally a thunderstorm, which had the true characteristics of a deluge, and was welcomed as saviour by both sides. The story, which drew a most attentive gathering of listeners at every tobacconist’s in the area, and ended up as a fixed formula without too many contradictions, as well as reasonably polished even if thus watered down, was interspersed with true soldierly, I would say manly, expressions, quite devoid of all rhetoric, such as ‘heaped with corpses’, ‘risked our skins’, ‘they’d almost got us’, and suchlike: expressions that gave the people of Lukones and Serruchón, already half convinced by the oppressive heat caused by the late new moon, an idea of the nature of seriousness, simplicity, and true valour, which, when genuine, and not winched out on a hoist, is also suffused with modesty and shuns fine phrases. Pedro wasn’t a gentleman with a villa, like those whose villas he patrolled at night: nor even – God forbid! – a writer: a convoluted, baroque writer like Jean Paul, or Carlo Gozzi, or Carlo Dossi, or some other Carlo even worse than these two, though they alone are sad enough; good perhaps at using war, and the pain of war, to shilly-shally and nitpick with their sterile words, on the tips of their pen. No, Pedro was a simple man, pure in heart: and so people had to believe his crude, vivid words, his ‘turn him into mincemeat’, tossed out on to the zinc bar of the tobacconist’s shop amid the rinsing of glasses, like a counter-drink or a counter-packet; ‘his’ war was to be believed in full. He had a leather belt with holster and pistol: it was obvious he knew how to use weapons.