“At Nightfall, A Geranium” (“Di sera, un geranio”)

Translated by Marella Feltrin-Morris

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “At Nightfall, A Geranium” (“Di sera, un geranio”), tr. Steve Eaton. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2024.

“At Nightfall, A Geranium” (“Di sera, un geranio”) was first published on May 6, 1934 in the Corriere della Sera, only seven months before Pirandello was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (December 10, 1934) for his bold innovation in the theater. Right after its publication, the story was included in Berecche and the War (Berecche e la guerra, 1934), the fourteenth Collection of Stories for a Year.

As in other stories composed during the last years of his life, in “At Nightfall, A Geranium” Pirandello lets his thoughts wander through the ambivalent feelings produced by sense experience and imagery from the threshold moment when life is coming to an end. The dreamlike atmosphere recalls that of other late stories, such as “A Breath” (“Soffio,” 1931), “The Visit” (“Visita,” 1936), or “A Day” (“Una giornata,” 1935), where the main character is consumed by his own hallucinatory state of mind, making it difficult to separate life from death. Likewise, in “At Nightfall, A Geranium” visions evoke a sense of melancholy that pervades the story, a sort of tension the author dramatizes in order to portray the nameless character as he struggles to make sense of transience. His bewildered spirit fights with the awareness that material life will soon be a memory, forcing him to look for some brief permanency in the beauty of the outer world. Objects become in fact immaterial, yet living, flesh that the mind and senses elaborate into the illusion that their structure will defy eternity. Even the redness of a blossoming geranium can serve as the symbolic celebration of the evanescent essence of this presentness, a flickering moment the dying spirit can embrace to briefly prolong life. “At Nightfall, A Geranium” summarizes the author’s lifelong exploration of the tension arising from the attraction and repulsion that individuals feel in regard to death, an exploration starting as early as 1905, with “Death Is Upon Him” (“La morte addosso”), and continuing through “A Single Day” and “The Visit” some thirty years later. Reflections on the ephemeral nature of life, seen through the meditation on death, provide Pirandello an occasion to expand on his critique of identity as a construct, which runs across his production.

The Editors

He broke free in his sleep, he doesn’t know how; perhaps like when one is drowning and has the sensation that the body will then resurface on its own, but instead what resurfaces is only the sensation, a floating shadow of the body that has remained down below.

He was sleeping, and now he’s no longer in his body. He can’t say he woke up; and what he’s actually inside of right now, he doesn’t know. It’s as if he were hovering in the air of his enclosed room.

Estranged from his senses, he retains, more than their impressions upon him, their memory, the way they were—not yet far away, but already apart:[1] there’s his hearing, in a barely audible nighttime sound; here’s his vision, in nothing more than a glimmer. And then the walls, the ceiling (how dusty it seems from up here), and the floor down below with its rug, and that door, and the almost forgotten shock of that bed with its green comforter and yellowish blankets, beneath which one can make out a body lying inert. The bald head, sunken into scattered pillows; the eyes closed, and the mouth open amongst the reddish hairs of the mustache and beard—thick hairs, almost metallic—a black, dried-up hole; and one wisp of eyebrow so long that, if he doesn’t keep it in place, it falls over his eye.

Him, that one! One who’s no more. One on whom that body already weighed so much. How hard it was to breathe, too! His whole life, confined to this room; and feeling, little by little, everything failing him, and keeping himself alive by staring at one object or the other, afraid of falling asleep. And indeed, as he slept...

How strange they sound, in that room, the last words of his life:

“Do you reckon that, in the state I’m in, such a risky surgery ought to be attempted?”

“At this point, the risk, really...”

“It’s not the risk. I mean is there any hope.”

“Oh. Very little.”

“Well, then...”

The rose-colored lamp, hanging in the middle of the room, kept shining in vain.

But after all, now he has broken free, and he feels towards that body of his over there less aversion than resentment.

Really, he never saw the reason why others should acknowledge that image as the thing that belonged to him more than any other.

It wasn’t true. It isn’t true.

He was not that body of his. In fact, there was hardly anything of him in it; in life, that’s where he really was—in the things he thought, that stirred within him, in everything he saw outside once he stopped seeing himself. Houses, streets, sky. The whole world.

Indeed, but with no more body, he is now this pain, this dismay of its dissolving and dispersing into each thing he clings to once more for support. But with the clinging comes that fear again—not of falling asleep, but of vanishing into the thing that remains there on its own, without him: object: clock on the nightstand, small picture on the wall, rose-colored lamp hanging in the middle of the room.

He is now those things—no longer as they were when they still held meaning for him, but things which for themselves have no meaning, and which therefore are no longer anything to him.

And this is to die.

The wall of the villa. But how can it be, he’s already outside? The moon shines down from above, and below is the garden.

The basin, bare, hangs from the boundary wall. The wall is clothed top to bottom in green with climbing miniature roses.

The water in the basin cascades in droplets, now a bubbly spurt, now a glassy trickle, crystalline, fine, motionless.

How clear this water is as it falls! Once in the basin, it immediately turns green. And how fine the trickle, how infrequent the droplets at times that, looking into the basin, the dense volume of water already fallen resembles an ocean-like eternity.

Floating on the water, a multitude of tiny white and green leaves, not quite yellowing. And peeking through the surface, the mouth of the iron drainpipe, which would quietly drink the excess water if it weren’t for these leaves that crowd all around, attracted to the opening. The undertow of the mouth as it clogs up sounds like a rasping rebuke to these hasty, hasty little fools which seem so eager to be swallowed and disappear, as if it weren’t nice to swim, light and so white on the glassy, dark green surface of the water. And still they’ve fallen! And they’re so light! And you’re right there, mouth of death, keeping score!

To disappear.

An astonishment that becomes greater and greater, infinite: the illusion of the senses,[2] already scattered, that little by little is drained of things that appeared to be there but were not. Sounds, colors—they weren’t there. Everything was cold, everything was silent. Nothing was; and death, this nothingness of life as it was. That green... Ah, how he desired to be grass once, at daybreak along a riverbank, as he gazed upon the bushes and breathed in the fragrance of all that greenery, so fresh and new![3] A tangle of white, live roots clinging to the black earth to suck the lymph out of it. Ah, how life is of the earth, and wants no sky except to give breath to the earth! But now he’s like the fragrance of grass being dissolved in this breath, vapor still sentient thinning out and vanishing, but reaching no end, with nothing nearby anymore—yes, perhaps some pain, but if he can still do as much as picture it to himself, it’s already far away, timeless now, lost in the infinite sadness of such a futile eternity.

One thing—to still subsist in one thing, even if it’s hardly anything—a rock. Or even a short-lived flower: here, this geranium... [4]

“Oh, look, down there in the garden, that red geranium. How it lights up! Why?”

At nightfall, sometimes, a flower suddenly lights up in a garden; and no one can fathom the reason why.