Signor Dido Read online

A trap.

  Signor Dido returns to the extremely hard little bench, and as he bends to sit down, the lights suddenly go out all over the house.

  From there, repeated scales and trills, arpeggios and chords echo in the darkness. Light or no light, what’s the difference to a blind tuner?

  In the darkness, Signor Dido reflects.

  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.

  The valleys and mountains are full of people. Gods perhaps. Gods certainly. Invisible but given away by their voices. By the choral song that passes like a sublime, harmonious wind.

  The lights come back on: the valley is extinguished, the river is extinguished, the mountains are extinguished, the sky is extinguished.

  Even the arpeggios are extinguished. The stupid, idiotic arpeggios of the blind tuner testing the keyboard. Signor Dido pricks up his ears: the pelting of the rain has stopped.

  Signor Dido opens the front door. The gateway is empty. People and vehicles hurry up and down the bright street.

  Signor Dido closes the door.

  To go.

  But where? To whom?

  A trap.

  A Visit from K . . .

  THE ROOM THAT I’VE TURNED INTO a studio in my residence is a “conclusion.” Brain or intestine, as the case may be. Here the house ends. There’s no going beyond it. Outside the window begins the world of “the others”: the street, passers-by, vehicles, and, unfortunately, the uninterrupted, repeated, sputtering, “useless” passage of all the young lads of this “elegant” quarter, mounted singly, or in twos, or in threes, on birotae igneo liquido incitatae (Pontifex dixit).1

  A corridor, in direct communication with the front hall and the outside door, leads like a canal to my studio-brain, to my studio-intestine. Between studio and corridor, a door with a frosted glass window acts as a diaphragm.

  (Yesterday.) I was in my studio. Late morning. The young lads’ birotae were passing through my brain like ineffable saws. Unexpectedly, a yellow brightness lit up the frosted diaphragm from behind: the sign of an “important” passage down the corridor. (The light was lit in the corridor only for “important” passages, or else, early in the morning, for “the cleaning.”) Two voices were advancing along it: the voice of my wife, and a deep male voice. Who could it be?

  “No. It won’t disturb him at all.”

  My wife’s voice was by now at the threshold: too close for me to be able to inform her that this person, whoever it was, was indeed disturbing me, and very much so.

  A “complete” wife combines wife and mother in herself. On that side I’m in good order. My mother, to the last, and when I was already a forty-six-year-old child, never consulted me before having me do what she, in her judgment, had decided was good for me to do. She placed me Hitlerianly before the accomplished fact. For the dispensers of absolute good, freedom of judgment equals freedom to be wrong. And wives, mothers, dictators are so many dispensers of absolute good. The example, moreover, comes from on high.

  The door opened.

  “Signor K . . . has come to pay his respects.”

  “Good morning, professore . . . Am I disturbing you? . . . My respects . . . Don’t trouble yourself . . . I’ll stay a minute, then take my leave . . . You always have so much to do . . . Your time is precious . . .”

  Why “professore”? I’m not a professore. Those who call me professore and dottore prove to me, in the first place, that in their judgment my name alone is not enough to personalize me, and thus make a gaffe; they commit a falsehood, in the second place, because I have no right to any academic title; in the third place, they erect a barrier of embarrassment between me and themselves, which deprives our relations of any possibility either of usefulness or of pleasure.

  But how maintain one’s aggressiveness, or even defensiveness, before this big candle dressed in a shabby overcoat, his face and hands furrowed with tears of wax?

  The K above, followed by a three-point ellipsis, is the initial of a German surname which, in Italian, sounds like something indecent, and therefore I could not write it out in full. The name that precedes the unutterable surname is Erick.

  I got to know K . . . many years ago. (Twenty.) In Paris. He was a friend of a friend of mine. At that time K . . . was a candidate for suicide: for suicide on a prearranged date. It was then March 15. (After twenty years I cannot guarantee the exactness of the date. But what matter? It’s only an example.) He announced that he would kill himself a month later: on April 15.

  During the month of “waiting,” we were not troubled at all. Perhaps we did not believe in the sincerity of the statement. Perhaps out of indifference. Perhaps for that reason which we are usually ashamed to admit—that another person’s life is of little value to us. Above all that of an almost unknown person.

  Gabriele D’Annunzio,2 some years earlier, had forecast his own death several times. Of the publicity purpose of these forecasts no one had any doubt. Here it was different. It concerned quite another type of man.

  April 15 came and passed; more days passed. None of us was interested in whether K . . . had kept his promise or not. Then, by chance, we learned that he had not kept it. Out of fear? . . . No. He had only put it off to the next month. Without a trace of laughter. With inexorable seriousness. Besides, how imagine an act of K . . .’s not marked by inexorable seriousness? K . . .’s case is one of those that have demonstrated to me most profoundly the perfect interdependence between seriousness and stupidity on the one hand, and, on the other, between seriousness and madness.

  (Today.) K . . . is strolling around my studio. “Inspecting” my studio. Looking at each object. Looking closely at it. Examining it. More than looking at it, sniffing it. Perhaps searching for a favorable place to . . . Like dogs. It had not escaped me, moreover, that in the transformation that had come over him during the time in which we had lost sight of each other, the olfactory had taken a clear predominance over the other senses.

  (Then.) He kept putting off his own death month by month. Like putting off a departure. Like putting off a trip. Of the announced death of Erick K . . . we no longer thought. We lost sight of him.

  There are two K . . .s, Erick and a sister: Mariasibilla. Both children of a general of the ex-Austro-Hungarian empire, governor of a maritime and military city. The miserable end of the Austro-Hungarian empire was prolonged in these two “victims.” Old people now, in whom the stigmata of orphanism have not been erased. Pale orphans. Shaken by a feeble madness. Vienna. The Prater. Franz Joseph. The Sacher restaurant.3

  I met K . . . again in Italy. He no longer talked of killing himself. Of two solutions, he had chosen the worse: to live.

  Fifty years old, he had set himself to studying for a degree in jurisprudence. A “guarantee for the future,” he said. He was helped by a young lawyer who lodged in a furnished room. One day K . . . arrived at the lawyer’s, but the lawyer had gone out. K . . . waited. The lawyer was late. K . . . went away.

  He came back the next day. He was met by the landlady. After his visit the day before, ten thousand lire, kept in a drawer, had disappeared.

  Under this accusation, which, like an enormous white crow, unexpectedly descended upon this man of wax and clung to him, K . . . behaved himself in such fashion that in the end, to make him leave that house, it was necessary to call in four strong men, who carried him between them, each holding one extremity, like a sack in which a furious octopus is struggling.

  From Austria, from the broken-up paternal home, from the splendors d’antan,4 Erick and Mariasibilla came by stages to Rome, to a wretched village outside the porta San Giovanni. With them they brought a grand piano, once magnificent and powerful, some splendid pieces of silver plate, and a big drawing by Vincenzo Gemito.5 />
  I’ve seen it. It’s the head of a Roman girl. A stern goddess of the people. And the extraordinary draftsman’s line, so strong, so sure, so artfully interlaced, has difficulty restraining the full, profound life of this earthly divinity.

  Before the yellowed and decayed teeth of this faithful member of the great family K . . ., Mariasibilla sits and, accompanying herself with hands like the claws of a crustacean, sings the sweet and profound Lieder of Brahms, turning them sour. Exotic clothing, Mongolian capes, calf-length boots, enormous bell-shaped gowns, toilettes in which, despite the faint heat of the body in its musical excitement, the odor of the illustrious sweat of court balls reawakens. Escorted by her voice, the singer’s heart, her viscera, her soul, rusty and creaking organs, issue from their dark recesses; and the voice, which passion drives now right, now left, flaps like a window blind left hanging from a single hook and shaken by a storm.

  The four strong men will carry the sack with the furious octopus in it down the stairs, load it into a taxi, and unload it at the door of a hospital.

  (Now.) K . . . is sitting in front of me. Body leaning forward, neck tense, chin thrust out. As if to partake of my person. And of the desk I’m sitting behind. And of the various things placed on the desk. And I feel that, to partake even better, he would like to touch me, touch the desk, touch the various things. This man has need of “contacts.”

  He says:

  “Ten days ago they gave me the last electro-shock. I have a month off. I’m profiting from it to renew contacts. May I see your works, professore? I had lost all memory. Now it’s gradually coming back to me. And of the gentleman your brother? . . . I’m ready to pay. Not much, to be honest. Is it true that there is free admission to the Galeria d’Arte Moderna? Maybe you need a special permit. In that case I’ll show my student papers. I’m a student. A student of law. Excuse me, professore. I’ll take my leave. Now I can tell you this. I had no great esteem for Italian science. Now it’s different. Now I know. Electro-shock is the discovery of a genius. I’m not making believe. I have experience. In Vienna I was two years in the madhouse. They gave me insulin. A great professor. Horrible! Horrible! They flop you into bed like a dead man. Electro-shock is no comparison.”

  His “student papers” were two years spent in a Vienna madhouse, and coma from insulin. In this alone the Italian doctors were mistaken in his regard, in persistently considering him a schizophrenic (and him so learned in mental illnesses), when he is a fixated depressive.

  K . . . gets up from the armchair and moves forward, leaning his body across the desk, as if he wants to touch my face with his.

  I did not insist so much on preferring depressive fixation to schizophrenia, nor on the self-love, the pride contained in that preference, until I remembered that schizophrenia leads to brutishness, while depressive fixation is an intellectualistic form of madness. Crazy, yes, but in the most worthy form. K . . . is an intellectual. A phantasm of an intellectual. In Vienna, many years ago, he was a student of Schönberg. And now?

  “I’ve decided.”

  “In what way?”

  “Dreams. Vonderful, extraordinary dreams. All my life I’ve had vonderful, extraordinary dreams. What I compose in my dreams, in poetry, in painting, in music, is much more beautiful, much more pure above all, than what I do awake—than what all of you do awake.”

  In uttering this phrase, he turns spiteful.

  “You should write down your dreams.”

  “Dreams can’t be written down. Shouldn’t be. It would be absurd. Dreams can only be written down in dreams.”

  My wife comes into the studio from time to time on some pretext, “checks things out,” and leaves again.

  “Now, after the electro-shock, my dreams are different. Full of blood. I dream of men with tails. And I kill them. I kill a dozen per dream. These dreams give me an extraordinary euphoria.”

  At these words, my wife comes into the studio, but this time she places herself at my side and no longer moves. Marriage is such complicity! Even facing a poor man of wax who is being consumed, consumed, consumed inside and out. Marriage, an association for attack and defense, is the nucleus of egotistical, wicked, armed society.

  At intervals K . . . says again: “Professore, your time is precious. I’ll take my leave.” But he doesn’t move. He goes on talking. Either in monosyllables, or in paired words, separated pair by pair. His body leaning towards me. The force of concentration, the great will of persuasion, is manifest on his forehead, in his eyes. As if I were opposing a wall of doubt to his words. What wouldn’t I give to convince him that I’m convinced! Full of tears behind the wrinkled skin of his face. The desperate pain of not managing to make himself understood—of not managing to persuade me.

  And I understand. I understand perfectly. I understand profoundly. I understand those brief rending sounds. Those sounds that escape in a burst from his gray lips—from his blotting-paper lips. They fly a little. Drop down. Followed at a short distance by more rending sounds . . . A discourse in fragments.

  And I understand something else as well. I understand that these words in separate pairs, this posture of the body, this head, this thrust-out chest, this desperate will to convince me, this need to “renew contacts,” are the condition of a shipwrecked man. Of a shipwrecked man drifting aimlessly. And, today, the raft towards which this desperate man stretches his hands—today, that raft is me. Tomorrow it will be my “gentleman” brother. The day after tomorrow it will be the Galeria d’Arte Moderna. The sea is not stormy. It is calm. Extremely calm. “Seems” extremely calm. Like oil. But a profound, inexorable, invisible movement of this extremely calm sea carries the shipwrecked man further away, always further away. And it’s in vain that the man of wax holds out his hands of wax, down the carpus of which fat tears of wax worm their way.

  It is the raft, then, that should move, should go to meet the shipwrecked man, move to rescue the shipwrecked man.

  He says once again: “Your time is precious, professore. I’ll take my leave.” But this time, unexpectedly, he gets to his feet. It’s so quiet I can hear the breath of relief in my wife’s throat.

  I follow him down the corridor, escorted by my conjugal guard.

  A brief pause at the door, and a brief alarm. A last cascade of paired words. Fear of something . . . Of what?

  The door, rapidly and silently, closes on the back of the man of wax.

  From behind the window, in hiding, I see him moving off under a fine rain.

  He’s not walking: he’s being carried by the sea, black, invisible. Which separates him from his “contacts.” Which carries him far away. To the great shipwreck.

  I—his “raft” for that day—could save him.

  I don’t move.

  What swine! . . . And you call yourselves good Christians . . .

  Muse

  I HAVE TO MAKE A TYPEWRITTEN COPY of the French version of a book I wrote, and have been looking for a typist. Not an easy search. I’ve heard it said that everyone in Italy knows French: my personal experience shows that few know it.

  Three days ago, at last, the longed-for typist presented himself in my house. A neat and extremely orderly young man. A gray suit, a double-breasted jacket, a pince-nez, a very trim haircut, the pious face of a devoted son and the consolation of his parents. A face, I was about to say, such as is not seen anymore.

  And not only a good son, but a good husband.

  “So young and already married?”

  “Yes. And I have a fourteen-month-old baby.”

  Even a good father, then.

  My young typist told me his life in brief. He was born in France, of an Italian father and a French mother. He came to Rome four years ago. Here in Rome he found a beautiful and good young woman. They fell in love; they were united at the foot of the altar.

  “My wife,” the young typist told me, “is also my cousin. The daughter of one of my father’s brothers who stayed in Italy. Before the marriage was decided, two doctors examined the r
elations of both parties. They found no defects on either side. Our baby is wonderful.”

  It was a very beautiful day. The young typist looked at the sky through the window of my studio. He added: “Today my wife and son have gone to spend the day in Ostia. I’m alone in the house. I work from seven in the morning till ten in the evening. What a joy to have a baby in the house!”

  My young typist loves his work. He speaks of typing as Einstein does of curved space. He divides typists into typists who work with their hands alone and typists who work with their hands and their head. Extremely rare. He is one of them.

  He says to me: “I type with all ten fingers. I never look at the keyboard.”

  He accompanies word with deed. He pulls out a chair, sits down, brings his knees together, rests his hands on an imaginary keyboard, and turns his head to an imaginary page, placed to his left on an imaginary reading stand.

  I look at him. I remember.

  Fragson was the same: sitting at right angles on a swivel stool, his hands spread over the keyboard of the piano, his face to the public that crowded the hall of the Alhambra.1

  Many times, in Paris, in the years from 1910 to 1914, I had seen Fragson, the songwriter, sit like that on the stage of the Alhambra. The theater, I believe, no longer exists.

  Fragson had a father and a mistress. Fragson’s father was in love with his son’s mistress. One day, out of jealousy, he killed his own son. It was the spring of 1914. The funeral took place in the afternoon. The cortège left the church of Saint-Philippe-du-Roule. Behind the hearse came a long line of landaus, which transported, in tears, Mayol, Dranem, la Mistinguett, the stars of the café chantante. The cortège gradually swelled with seamstresses, milliners, salesgirls and salesmen who came in swarms from the shops, the laboratories of fashion, for the repast. One of them struck up a refrain by Fragson. In a short time the immense procession became an immense chorus. The songwriter, like a general in a funeral procession, went to his final rest accompanied by his own songs.