“Candelora (“Candelora”)

Translated by Robin Pickering-Iazzi

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “Candelora” (“Candelora”), tr. Robin Pickering-Iazzi. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2022.

“Candelora” was first published in the Giornale di Sicilia, February 23-24, 1916; the following year it was collected into a volume of short stories titled And Tomorrow, Monday… (E domani, lunedì…; Milan: Treves, 1917), before being subsequently included as the title story of Collection thirteen of Pirandello’s Stories for a Year (Novelle per un anno; Florence: Bemporad, 1928).

The story is notable for its style as well as its elaboration of typical Pirandellian themes reflecting on the nature of art, life, and the suffering and illusions (or delusions) inherent to human interactions. Written with many short, almost staccato sentences, “Candelora” might remind readers of other stories in which Pirandello takes a highly visual artistic approach to painting a scene, like his very first short story, “Little Hut. Sicilian Sketch” (“Capannetta. Bozzetto siciliano,” 1884), where many short sentences seem to fragment the narrative structure; or even his critical writings on the nature of art that apply a similar approach, like his short essay on “The Image of the ‘Grotesque’” (“L’immagine del ‘grottesco’,” 1920). It is interesting that this story about a painter makes use of a writing style typical of Pirandello’s reflections on the visual arts. Likewise, the themes of the story are typically Pirandellian. Tracing the relationship between the painter, Nane Papa, and his beautiful but unhappy companion, Loretta/Candelora, the story slowly reveals more about the nature of their success and shame, as well as the differing or incommensurate perspectives they each hold in relation to that success and shame – Nane Papa’s innovative artistic production becomes notable thanks to Candelora’s willingness to romance critics and patrons. A story of unhappy love, it bears striking resemblance to aspects of Pirandello’s later play, Diana and Tuda (Diana e la Tuda, 1926), in which a sculptor is obsessed with trying to capture the perfections of his beloved model, who in turn begins to understand the sacrificial nature of her own love for him. Other themes in the story also resonate across Pirandello’s corpus, including the theme of suicide, which is prevalent in a number of other stories (“Sun and Shade,” “The Black Shawl,” “Sunrise,” “That Makes Two,” “Into the Sketch,” and “In Silence,” to name a few) as well as novels (such as The Late Mattia Pascal) and plays (To Clothe the Naked, for instance). The suffering of love, escape through art and suicide, and the dialectic interplay of life’s amorphous surge of change and form’s constraining fixity, all mark the humoristic double-vision of this story in a tragicomic vein.

The nickname of the female protagonist, Loretta, is ‘Candelora’, from which the story takes its title. The term has specific meaning in Sicilian culture, referring to one of the most celebrated religious feasts. A massive votive candle in the shape of a portable altar, a Candelora is beautifully adorned and carried in procession through the streets of Catania by twelve men. Just like the female protagonist in the story, the large Candlemas is “a wonder of shapes and colors,” and creatively reflects Pirandello’s ability to construct his characters around the folklore and traditions of his island. Celebrating St. Agatha, Catania’s patron saint, a Candelora may also be seen as the symbol of female determination as reflected by the personal story of Agatha, a Christian martyr whose breasts were torn off for her resolute faith and miraculously healed.

The Editors

Nane Papa, with his plump hands holding the brim of his old, shapeless panama hat, tells Candelora,[1] “It’s better if you don’t. Listen to me, dear. It’s better if you don’t.”

Furious, Candelora yells at him, “So what’s better for me then? To stay with you? To drop dead here of anger, of disgust?”

Nane Papa calmly pulls his panama further down on his head. “Yes, dear. But without dying. Just be a little patient. Look at Chico, to tell it like it is...”

“I forbid you to call him that!”

“Isn’t that what you call him?”

“It’s precisely because that’s what I call him!”

“Oh, okay. I thought you’d be pleased. So do you want me to call him the Baron? The Baron. I’m telling you the Baron loves you, my Candelora, and he spends money on you...”

“Oh, he spends money on me, does he? You buffoon! Scoundrel! Doesn’t he spend a lot more on you?”

“If you’d just let me finish... The Baron spends money on me and on you. But don’t you see? If he spends so much more on me, what does that mean? Be reasonable. It means he puts a price on you solely because you get prestige from me. You can’t deny it.”

“Prestige?” Candelora yells again in a towering rage. “Yes, the prestige of these...” She lifts her foot, showing him her shoe. “Shame is all I get! Shame! Shame!”

Nane Papa smiles and, calm as can be replies:

“No, excuse me. If anyone is cast in shame, it’s me. I’m your husband. That’s all that counts, believe me, Loretta. If I weren’t your husband and, above all, if you weren’t here together with me anymore, under this hospitable roof, all their zest for it would disappear, you see, don’t you? They can come here to honor you with impunity, everyone experiencing a pleasure that’s all the greater the more dishonor and shame you cast on me. Without me anymore, you, Loretta Papa, would immediately become a trifle bearing little value and a lot of risk, so that Chico... the Baron, wouldn’t spen... What are you doing? Crying? No, come on! I’m joking...”

Nane moves up close to Candelora. He is about to run his hand under her chin. But she grabs his arm, opens her mouth like a wild beast, and sinks her teeth into that arm, never relenting but furiously biting down ever harder for a long, long time.

Bent over to keep his arm comfortably at the height of her mouth, Nane bares his teeth too, but to smile mutely at the spasm that blanches his face.

Moment by moment, his eyes become glassier, more piercing.

Then, when Candelora’s teeth let go, what bliss! His arm feels like it’s been branded with fire.

He doesn’t say a thing.

He pulls up the sleeve of his jacket very slowly; his shirt sleeve won’t budge. The cloth is buried in his raw flesh. The middle of the white sleeve is spattered with red. Blood stains marking a set of teeth. Candelora’s set of strong teeth, each and every one imprinted on the cloth. It’s excruciatingly hard to lift it![2] But finally, still smiling and deathly pale, Nane manages to do it himself. His arm looks pitiful. Forming a circle, each tooth mark is a wound, and the flesh is black inside.

“You see?” says Nane, showing her the wound.

“I’d eat your heart just like that!” roars Candelora, all hunched on the chair.

“I know,” says Nane. “And that desire is exactly why you’ll see that you’ll convince yourself to stay. Take off your hat, come on. A little iodine, to clean out the poison. The sterile cotton and a gauze bandage. Hurry up, it’s in my desk drawer, Loretta, the second one on the right. I know you’re one of the little beasts that bite, so I keep a supply of emergency treatments on hand.”

Candelora lifts the arm and looks at it, giving it a sideways glance. Nane admires her for that act.

Candelora is a wonder of shapes and colors, a troublesome challenge for his painter’s eye, which always discovers her anew and different.

Now she looks frightening, here in the small villa’s garden under the midday, dark August sun, which turns everything into violent, jagged shadows. Back this morning from swimming in the sea, her skin is rough, baked by the sun and salty water, and there’s an air of a languidly sleeping she-goat in her light, sunburnt eyes, slightly weak chin, and coarse golden hair. With those bare, smooth, sturdy arms and powerful hips, at each movement it seems as if she’ll rip through the flimsy, tight frock made of blue voile, which clashes with her sunburned skin.

Oh, that dress is so ridiculous!

Candelora swam naked for entire mornings; then naked on the deserted beach under the sun, her firm flesh was sprinkled and spotted by burning sand while she felt the cool waves of sea foam wash up against the soles of her feet. How can that flimsy blue frock hide her bursting nudity anymore now? Worn out of decency, it actually makes her look more indecent than if she were naked.

She angrily notices his eyes admiring her and instinctively smiles with pleasure, which, however, immediately exasperates her. Her smile becomes a smirk, a smirk that suddenly dissolves into sobbing.

And Candelora runs away toward the small villa.

Almost without meaning to, Nane Papa screws up his face in a mischievous grimace, following her with his eyes. Then he looks at his wounded arm, which burns intensely under the sun. Then, who knows why, he feels tears stinging his eyes too.

During a break in the middle of a muggy August afternoon, it’s truly atrocious to unexpectedly feel life weighing on you loaded with shame and disgust, and while sweating, to feel pity for the weight of that shame and disgust on the soul.

In the gloominess of all that scorching sunlight, the garden shot through with jagged shadows, Nane Papa now has the sense (a sense that oppresses, irritates, and almost dismays him) of the presence of so many immobile things astonishingly suspended in front of him: the trees, those tall acacia trunks, the pond with that artificial rock border, and the green mirror of stagnant water, the chairs.

What are they waiting for?

He can move. He can also go away. But how strange! He feels as if he’s being watched by all those immobile things around him. And not only watched, but also bound to the spot by the hostile, almost ironic, fascination that emanates from their amazed immobility and makes his ability to go away seem useless, stupid, even comical.

That garden represents Baron Chico’s wealth. He, Nane Papa, has been staying there for about six months. It was only this morning when Candelora returned from the beach that he felt the irresistible need to bare all of his naked shame and Candelora’s before his own eyes and hers, but laughing, because she expected to leave this shame behind now that, in her opinion, they could.

Of course! Because Nane Papa’s paintings are selling well now, and the value of his new, extremely individual art commands respect, naturally not because it was really understood, but because the art reviews had forced the idiocy of rich people touring art shows to stop in front of his canvases.

Art criticism? Come on! Criticism is just a word! A word that isn’t alive unless clothed in a critic’s pants. And the critic that Candelora insisted on going to see out of desperation one day, so she could yell in his face if it was fair that an artist like Nane Papa was starving to death, that critic (the most influential of all) surely agreed to call the imbeciles’ attention to the new, extremely individual art of Nane Papa with a masterly article, but he also expected that this recognition of the artist would be, let’s not say paid for, but graciously compensated with Candelora’s most heartfelt gratitude.[3] Drunk with the victory that had perhaps seemed as if it might cost her who knows how much, Candelora immediately showed how very grateful she was, not only to that critic, but to all the most fanatical admirers of her husband’s new art. Very grateful to everyone, and to Baron Chico in particular, who—there you have it—went so far as to accommodate them in his small villa, in order to have the honor of giving shelter to a wondrous artist, a son of glory... And what treatment! What gifts! What parties!

If it didn’t cost her anything to do that, no harm done, poor Candelora!

Poverty frightened her, that’s what. She says it didn’t. She says it made her angry, not afraid. Because that poverty wasn’t hardship, it wasn’t humiliation; it was an injustice, given his merit. She wanted to vindicate that injustice. And how? That’s how: the small villa, the car, the canoe, gold jewelry, gems, trips, clothes, parties... And she was deeply annoyed with him, because he remained just the same, neither sad nor happy, shabby as before, with no other joy than his paints, with no other desire than to keep digging, digging into his art driven by the always unsatisfied need to go deeper into it, as deep as possible, so deep that he didn’t see anything in the comic, phantasmagoric life stirring around him.

Perhaps, or rather, certainly, that comic phantasmagoria represented his glory: the gems, Loretta’s luxuries, the invitations, the parties. His glory and also (why not?) his shame. But what did it matter to him?

His whole life, everything that is alive in him, he puts it all, gives it all, spends it all in the pleasure of making a leaf fleshy, making himself part of the fleshy substance, fibers and veins, of that leaf, or making a stone hard and bare, so that he feels and lives as a stone on the canvas. That is all that matters to him.

His shame? His life? The lives of others? Extraneous, transitory things that it’s useless to consider. His art, she alone lives, the work that powerfully takes form from the light and from his tormented soul.

If that was his fate, it’s a sign that it couldn’t have been otherwise. On reflection, it seemed so far away!

It seemed just as distant when that very morning he told Loretta he would have liked—oh, but certainly without giving the comment any weight—he would have liked a good companion living beside him, who wouldn’t have gotten so angry about poverty; a humble, mild companion, to be able to lay his head on her breast and rest, whose suffering would have inspired the same sorrow that his disregarded art had inspired in him back then.

Loretta, naturally, jumped all over him like an angry cat.

But what’s she been doing all this while? Isn’t she coming back with the iodine, the cotton, and the bandage? She ran off crying, poor little thing...

Loretta wants to be loved now. Loved by him, perhaps out of spite for his indifference. Isn’t it sheer madness? If he really loved her, he would have to kill her. That indifference is needed as an essential condition for bearing the shame that she represents living at his side. To leave that shame behind? How is it still possible if by now both of them have shame inside, outside, all round them? The only thing to do is to not attach any importance to it, to carry on, with him painting and her having a good time, with Chico for now, then with another man, but also with Chico and another man together, happily. Things that are part of life, trifles... One way or another, they pass and don’t leave any traces. Laughing, meanwhile, about all of the things that were born wrong, and remain in constant suffering in their awkward or ugly forms until they crumble to ashes with the passage of time. Each thing bears within the pain of its form, the pain of being a certain way and not being able to be otherwise.[4] Precisely herein lies the newness of his art, in making the pain of form felt. He knows perfectly well that every hunchback must resign himself to bear his hump. And facts are like forms. When something is done, it is that fact, it doesn’t change anymore. Candelora, whatever she might do, won’t ever be able to become pure again like she was when poor, for example. Even though Candelora was perhaps never pure, not even as a little girl. She wouldn’t have been able to do what she did and be delighted about it afterward.

But why all this nostalgia for purity all of a sudden; to be with him, now, isolated, calm, modest, loving? With him, after all that has happened? Almost as if he were now more able to take something seriously in life. And love of all things! And then a love that is all spoiled, like hers, with that silly image of Chico and that critic and so many others who would start playing ring around the Rosie, with Candelora and him locked in an idyllic embrace at the center of the circle.

Hah, out in the sun the blood has all clotted and crusted over the bite marks. His wrist and a bit of his hand are swollen, his veins stiff.

Nane Papa shakes off his thoughts and heads up toward the small villa. He calls out twice, first from the stairs, then from the entrance hall: “Candelora! Candelora!” His voice thunders through the empty rooms. No one answers. He goes into the room next to his art studio, where the desk is, and jumps back. In the bright light of the white room, Candelora lies still, outstretched on the floor, her clothes in disarray, as if she had rolled over. One of her thighs is exposed. He rushes to her and lifts her head. Oh God, what did she do? Her mouth, chin, neck, and breasts are stained blackish yellow. She drank the vial of iodine.

“It’s nothing! It’s nothing!” he screams at her. “My Candelora, but what silly thing have you done? My little girl... But it’s nothing! Your stomach will burn a little... Get up! Get up!”

He tries to lift her up but can’t, because the poor girl’s body stiffened with a spasm. But he doesn’t call her poor girl. “My little girl... my little girl...” he says, because it seems a bit funny that she drank the iodine. “My little girl...” he repeats, and he also calls her his sweet silly girl... He tries to pull the frail blue dress over her bare thigh, which offends him, looking away so he won’t see her mouth all black like that... The light frock rips at the tug of his convulsive hand, exposing her thigh even more.

He’s alone in the villa. When Loretta returned from her swim that morning she insisted on firing the maids before leaving. So, no one can help him lift her off the floor; no one can run to call a car to take her to the hospital for emergency treatment. But luckily, from the street there’s the sound of the horn of Chico’s, the Baron’s, car. Shortly after, Chico appears, stunned, with the yellowish face of an old fool atop his young beanpole body, dressed up so very elegantly.

“Hey! What’s going on?” His eye with the monocle instinctively juts out to stare at that exposed thigh.

“Help me lift her up for God’s sake!” Nane yells at him, exasperated after all his useless efforts.

But as soon as they lift her up, a pistol drops to the floor from her hand, which had been stuck under her hip, and right there, where her hip had been, they discover a blood stain.

“Oh! Oh!” groans Nane, as he and Chico move her toward the bedroom.

Loretta’s body didn’t become stiff with a spasm, but with death. As if he’d gone crazy, as soon as the corpse is laid out on the bed, Nane Papa yells at Chico, “who was at the beach swimming with all of you? Tell me! Who was at the beach with you this summer?”

Chico, bewildered, names some people.

“Ah, good God!” Nane then exclaims enraged, running at him, grabbing him around the chest and shaking his entire body. “But how can all of you possibly be so stupid, all of you who have a bit of money?”

“So stupid? Us?” says Chico, more stupefied than ever, recoiling at every strong shake.

“But yes! But yes! But yes!” Nane Papa carries on ranting. “So stupid as to arouse this poor girl’s desire to be loved by me! Do you understand? By me! By me! Loved by me!”

And he breaks out in a desperate sob, collapsing on Loretta’s corpse.