Signor Dido Read online

  SIGNOR

  DIDO

  Copyright © 2014 by The Estate of Alberto Savinio

  Translation copyright © 2014 by Richard Pevear

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Savinio, Alberto, 1891–1952.

  [Short stories. Selections. English]

  Signor Dido : stories / Alberto Savinio.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-61902-358-1

  I. Title.

  PQ4809.H45A2 2014

  853'.912—dc23

  2013042659

  COUNTERPOINT

  1919 Fifth Street

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  Contents

  A Note on the Author and His Book

  Signor Dido’s Afternoon

  A Visit from K . . .

  Muse

  Parents and Children

  Family

  A White and Luminous House

  A Head Goes Flying

  Orpheus the Dentist

  I, Daphne

  Solitude

  Diké

  The Bearded Gentleman

  The Children Speak Softly

  The Small Plate

  Berenice

  A Strange Family

  The House on the Hill

  The Feeling of Ravenna

  Five Trees

  A Villa in Rapallo

  The Health Spa

  The Kiss

  The Pizza

  Charon’s Train

  The Night Watchman

  No Brakes

  A Mental Journey

  The Disappearance of Signor Dido

  Notes

  A Note on the Author and His Book

  With the increase of years, the will to work also increases in me and plans gather ever more thickly in my head. But time restricts me in the same proportion. What a strange error life is!

  —Alberto Savinio

  THE STORIES COLLECTED IN Signor Dido are among the last works of one of the most gifted and singular Italian writers of the twentieth century. They were published in the newspaper Corriere della Sera from 1949 to 1952; the last to be written, “A Mental Journey,” was sent to the paper on May 2, 1952, just four days before the author’s death. But the collection, which was originally scheduled for publication a few years later, did not come out until 1978.

  The stories have the feeling of being last works, though Savinio was only sixty-one when he died (his older brother, the painter Giorgio de Chirico, lived to be ninety). Composed with an extreme economy of means, they are the summing up of a rich and complex life, told now in the first person, now through the figure of Savinio’s double, Signor Dido. The circumstances and surroundings are Savinio’s. The family members sometimes have the real names of Savinio’s family—his wife Maria, his children Angelica and Ruggero—and sometimes alliterating alternatives like Marta, Armida, and Rinaldo. (In one story an anti-Dido also appears, a certain Signor Dodi, who represents everything that Dido is not.) The stories contain haunting premonitions and at times a piercing solitude, but they are all graced with Savinio’s high comic sense, his fine self-humor, and that stylistic irony which, as he once said, is both a mask for modesty and “a subtle way of insinuating oneself into the secret of things.”

  Savinio’s mother was a baroness of the Genoese nobility; his father was a Sicilian baron who worked as a civil engineer constructing railways in Greece. Savinio was born in Athens. With the death of his father in 1905, when Savinio was fourteen, the baroness moved the family to Munich, where he studied music under Max Reger, while his brother attended the fine arts academy. They moved to Paris in 1910, and the young men soon became part of the Apollinaire-Picasso circle. It was there that de Chirico painted the first “metaphysical paintings” and Savinio gave concerts and published his first writings. In 1915 the brothers returned to Italy for military service. In the postwar years they moved to Rome, where in 1924 they collaborated with Luigi Pirandello in founding the Teatro d’Arte, and Savinio met his future wife, the actress Maria Morino. They moved to Paris in 1927, where Savinio, who had abandoned music after the war, continued to write and also took up painting. The family (now including their daughter Angelica) returned to Italy definitively in 1933. From then on, Savinio’s production flourished more and more richly in various fields: painting, fiction, journalism, biography, criticism, playwriting, stage and costume design, philosophical reflection, political commentary. In relation to fascism, as he wrote in his Nuova Enciclopedia, he once proposed “the creation of a league whose members would pledge to remain unaware of Mussolini and never speak his name. If more people had the will, the resoluteness, and above all the ‘hygienic concern’ necessary to keep such a pledge,” he added, “the rise of men like Mussolini and Hitler would be like a balloon trying to rise in an airless space.”

  All the phases of Savinio’s past are present in the stories of Signor Dido. His world is laced with memories, which erupt suddenly, unexpectedly, in the midst of the most banal circumstances. Savinio-Dido is interviewing a young man who is going to do some typing for him; the young man demonstrates how he sits at the typewriter; the angle of his position suddenly reminds the author of the tragic death of a famous music-hall performer he had seen in Paris before the First World War, and he is briefly transported back into that world. There are many similar moments in the book. And yet, paradoxically, we are told in another story, “Signor Dido keeps the door of his memories shut. Memories are dangerous. They bring shame and remorse with them. Signor Dido opens it very rarely.” He does not dote on the past; his memories have nothing to do with nostalgia. On the contrary, “things in formation attract Signor Dido’s attention more lovingly than things already formed and petrified.” In the first story in our collection, caught in the dark during a momentary power failure, Dido has a vision that takes him out of the “trap” of his everyday life in Rome: “Amidst the green valley sparkling with flowers flows the clear and silent stream. What freedom! What freedom to go! To go over the fields. To go down the rivers. To go across those blue mountains, shining at their summits with the last spring snows. To go over the white clouds that pass in flocks. To go into the infinite depths of the sky.” And in the last story, he finally does go.

  A cumulative self-portrait, then, but much more as well. The world of Signor Dido is a world of intersections and transformations. The trivia of daily life yield to the visionary; reality suddenly turns fantastic; fantasy is interrupted by a discussion of etymology; the ordinary is transformed by myth; the myth devolves into satire. Savinio’s method of composition is avowedly digressive. Writers can be divided into two sorts: those who revel in puns and those who abhor them. Savinio revels in puns; he calls them “extemporaneous philology.” He loves the accident that produces a new meaning, typing errors, grammatical “mistakes” that lead him somewhere he had not thought of going. He undercuts his narrative but maintains it at the same time, and the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief” is replaced by a participation in the composition itself. This is all a stylistic rendering of the freedom he celebrated in that momentary vision during the power failure.

  In the introduct
ion to a new edition of Tommaso Campanella’s utopian treatise The City of the Sun (first published in 1602), Savinio comments: “Working in this utopian atmosphere, I have ended by believing utopianly that my readers have all overcome the prejudice of seriousness, which spreads so much darkness over matters of culture and life in general, and know now that seriousness is an obstacle and a limitation, and therefore a form of unintelligence.” His own writing, as in the final distillation of Signor Dido, is always blessedly free of that prejudice.

  —Richard Pevear

  SIGNOR

  DIDO

  Signor Dido’s Afternoon

  IN THE AFTERNOON, THE HOUSE surrounding Signor Dido is a trap. Usually the morning is freer. But today even the morning went badly. Signor Dido woke up with a slight headache. He took a pill. The pain hid itself behind a veil, but the veil also extended to Signor Dido’s head, his arms, his legs. In the newspaper the usual void, the usual tedium. In the world the usual stupidity. The mail brought him an invitation to the concert of a Hungarian pianist and a circular urging people to contribute with prayers and offerings to a Votive Temple of Peace. Two telephone calls: one for his son Rodolfino, who at that hour was in school; the other from the Vasco Company, requesting payment of the balance for a supply of firewood from last year. Even the imagination was sterile this morning. Signor Dido’s minute handwriting had barely reached the bottom of the first page when the voice of Paolina announced from the doorway: “It’s on the table.” Agnese and Rodolfino were already immersed in the pasta. There was also Matteo, Agnese’s “fiancé,” and Signora Mariangela, Signor Dido’s sister-in-law. The place of Signora Matilde, Signor Dido’s wife, was empty, because Signora Matilde had suffered a synovial discharge in her left knee and was in bed. Signor Dido would have liked to speak of lofty and poetic things—would have liked above all to speak of himself and hear himself spoken of—and instead he had to be silent. The conversation at the table is dominated by young Matteo. The soul of Agnese’s fiancé tends towards mechanics, and he can tell the cylinder capacity of an automobile by listening to the sound of the motor, just as a musician can tell the notes of a chord without looking at the keyboard. All that’s left of the soup is the grease in the bottoms of the bowls. Paolina comes in carrying the main dish and dragging her big, aching feet. A sound darts across the avenue. Young Matteo shouts: “Eight cylinders.” To which Mariangela, slow and severe, replies: “Just as I said!” At Signor Dido’s table, Signora Mariangela represents popular wisdom descended from the mountains of the Abruzzi; this wisdom is expressed in the affirmation: “Just as I said,” which Signora Mariangela repeats for all purposes, above all in regard to things, and they are many, which she has never heard of. Into the wisdom of Signora Mariangela the notion of thrift also enters, extended to the alimentary field. Signora Mariangela ostentatiously eats what the others have refused, the green leaves of cauliflower, the sinewy parts of meat, the heads of fish. Signor Dido would like, above all at the noon meal, to eat lightly and in conformity with the diet for diabetics. But in Signor Dido’s house, the arguments of Signor Dido are not taken seriously. The meal, today as well, has been heavy and full of starches. Current in the Dido household are such precepts as the following: “Growing children cannot skip the soup.” Signor Dido is weak. And what courage, to eliminate the reasons for reproaching oneself, above all for pitying oneself . . . Today as well Signor Dido yielded to the abundant pasta, rich in carbohydrates. And afterwards he felt sleepy. And he slept. And after sleeping he had to go to the bathroom and do everything he had done in the morning. And when he was in a condition to sit down at the desk, it was already evening and he had to turn on the light. He read over three times, attentively, the page he had written that morning, to get back into its spirit; after which, without much fervor, he drew a small 2 on a new sheet of paper and began to write. He had gone a couple of lines when the door to the studio opened and a man appeared on the threshold, bearing behind him, like a cloak of eternity, all the darkness of the corridor. He did not linger on the threshold, but came in. Came in with his head high. Inexorable. He was blind. Two days earlier, Signor Dido had telephoned Signor Tottuccio, the piano tuner, asking him to come and fix the hammer of the low C, which had broken, but meanwhile he had forgotten the phone call. Signor Tottuccio’s entrance was an unexpected apparition. “Here I am, professore,”1 said Signor Tottuccio, advancing resolutely and looking up with his blank eyes. Signor Tottuccio knew no obstacles. He was about to bump into the desk, but within a finger of the sharp corner, he stopped. Suddenly. If you look at Signor Tottuccio straight on, you don’t see the guide who controls his confident steps. Small of stature and hidden behind the mass of her husband, Signora Tottuccio holds on to the folds of his jacket with both hands, as if it were a steering wheel. Signor Dido’s piano was quickly flayed by the expert hands of Signora Tottuccio, shamelessly revealing its stripy golden viscera. The cover of the keyboard was placed on the day-bed. The scores passed from the top of the piano to the easy chair. Signor Dido’s armchair was occupied by Signora Tottuccio, who, while her husband, inspired in his darkness, worked on the instrument’s innards, sat waiting, her eyes bent over a yellow book. There was no seat left for Signor Dido. But even if there had been one, Signor Dido would still have left the studio, because his irreducible timidity would consent to cohabitation only with persons of consummate intimacy. Besides, in the studio the tried and retried notes began to strike repeatedly, insupportably, and from the person of Signora Tottuccio, tiny and in a state of repose as she was, the smell of sebaceous secretions began to spread. Signor Dido left.

  He left the studio but not the trap.

  Now Signor Dido is in the corridor. He opens a door to the left. The children’s room. Four or five faces turn suddenly: little, astonished, hostile, nasty. Like five creatures, five little monsters. Signor Dido does not know who these children are. Rodolfino’s friends, no doubt. He does not understand what they are doing, bunched up in that corner. And they have covered the light. He does not even have time to see if Rodolfino is among these boys. Timid, fearful, Signor Dido hurriedly closes the door. An “Excuse me” dies in his teeth.

  A trap.

  He opens another door. Matilde is in bed. In the faint light of the shaded bulb, suffering eyes look at him without brightness, with reproach. He, in this house, is the cause of everything. Therefore also of the synovial discharge. Signor Dido shuts the door again.

  Where to take refuge?

  The third door is to the dining room. The heat does not reach that far. The room is like ice. But what else is left? Signor Dido opens . . . There, by the window, drinking up the last glow of the winter twilight, Estella, the cook, pushes the piece of cloth under the vertical needle of the machine and rocks the pedal with her foot.

  A trap.

  Where to go? . . . Try the “facilities.” Despite the freezing temperature, despite the dampness of the evening, see about the terrace in the courtyard. Signor Dido opens the door to the kitchen. Beside the icebox in winter disuse, big as a half-inflated Montgolfier on her low seat, Paolina, her aching feet immersed in a tub of warm salted water, turns to look at him with the eyes of a bitch that has just given birth.

  Signor Dido withdraws to the front hall. Sits on an extremely hard little bench made of wood and straw, on which coats are usually thrown. From down the corridor an F minor chord rings out again and again . . . The smell of fish glue, which will be used to glue the hammer of the low C, spreads through the house.

  A trap.

  And if he leaves the house? If he leaves the trap?

  On his feet Signor Dido is wearing thick fur-lined slippers with ears. On his legs his “house” trousers, American army issue, bought by his wife that past summer in Livorno from the leftovers in Tòmbolo.2 On his shoulders an old doublet knitted by his sister-in-law. And he hadn’t shaved that morning. So as not to be tempted to go out. To force himself to work. Alfieri-style.3 But how work in this trap?

  Facing the ha
rd little bench is a wardrobe. Signor Dido opens the wardrobe, takes out a pair of shoes. To substitute them for the slippers, Signor Dido leans his back against the wall and raises a foot. While he is in this stork-like position, Paolina comes moaning from the “facilities,” goes down the corridor, bumps into him with her enormous and soft breast as she passes by, and almost knocks him over. From there, now, an arpeggio chord in B major rings out. Again and again . . .

  Before venturing onto the street, Signor Dido judges it prudent to visit the bathroom for a moment.

  Inside the door, “something” warm and agile, damp and soft, jumps on him. It is Gidi, the little mongrel bitch, in an affectionate mood, locked in the bathroom by the boys so that she would not disturb them at their incomprehensible games.

  If Gidi were a male, it would be different. But how to do in front of a female what Signor Dido has come to the bathroom to do?

  Signor Dido opens the door and tries nicely, then firmly, to make Gidi leave. But the little bitch is starved for affection. She makes extremely high leaps around Signor Dido, as if the floor tiles were red hot; she nips at the trousers from Tòmbolo.

  Yielding to his powerlessness, overcoming his modesty, Signor Dido approaches the toilet, places himself so that his back is turned to Gidi. Anxious but functional.

  Agile and silent, the little bitch circles around the toilet; all at once Signor Dido finds her in front of him. He turns with a jerk, hurriedly puts things right . . . Too hurriedly. Dampness runs down his leg, turns cold.

  A trap.

  Signor Dido returns with tense steps to the front hall. Slips on his overcoat, winds a scarf around his neck to hide his lack of a tie. Opens the front door, and from the threshold, he who lives on the ground floor sees people crowding under the gateway, obscure, unknown, before sheets of rain falling silvery and straight and beating on the shiny pavement in liquid spatters.