“Christmas on the Rhine” (“Natale sul Reno”)

Translated by Jacob DeCarli

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “Christmas on the Rhine” (“Natale sul Reno”), tr. Jacob DeCarli. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2022.

Initially published in the monthly literary journal Roma letteraria (year IV, no. 25) on December 25, 1896, as a timely tale to entertain readers during the holiday festivities, “Christmas on the Rhine” (“Natale sul Reno”) was never included by Pirandello himself in one of his collections of stories. After the author’s death, the story was added by the editor Mario Lo Vecchio-Musti to the Appendix (Appendice) in his edition of Novelle per un anno (Milan: Mondadori, 1966).

An autobiographical story, “Christmas on the Rhine” is inspired by the years Pirandello spent in Bonn (1889-1891) to complete his doctoral studies in philology after he left the University of Rome, following a disagreement with one of his professors. The story revolves around the author’s reflections on the meaning of Christmas and the melancholic feelings that may accompany this time of year. In fact, the narrative explores the festive atmosphere in contrast with the author’s homesickness and the cultural differences he sees when comparing Italian and German traditions, as well as the characters’ personal family histories. Clearly modelled on real people, the characters in this story bring their own emotional contribution to the unfolding of the events. While the narrating ‘I’ – an evident authorial alter ego – abandons himself to the nostalgic memories of his hometown, Jenny – the female character modeled on Jenny Schultz Lander, the girl Pirandello fell in love with while in Bonn – is caught up, together with her mother and little sisters, in a trip down memory lane, full of nostalgia for her late father. Here, Pirandello’s storytelling focuses more on the characters’ emotions than their mental ruminations, resulting in a more human psychological approach in contrast to what critics sometimes portray as the author’s overly “cerebral” and speculative writing style. At the same time, the story also prefigures tendencies that would emerge in Pirandello’s later narrative: in the back-and-forth movement between the false joy people are forced to feel during the holidays and the characters’ own nostalgia and mourning, we can see elements of Pirandello’s future tendency to explore the clash between being and appearance.

“Christmas on the Rhine” is situated as the opening tale within a group of emotional stories reflecting on and exploring the theme of the nativity beyond its religious meaning; these include “A Christmas Dream” (“Sogno di Natale,” 1896) and “This Year’s Mass” (“La messa di quest'anno,” 1905). But this story also anticipates Pirandello’s interest in the theme of suicide across his creative works. We see this element in the episode of Jenny’s stepfather killing himself after expressing the desire to see a sunrise for the first time, which appears in “Christmas on the Rhine” and was actually narrated to Pirandello by Schultz Lander herself. This same combination returns in a later story, “Sunrise” (“La levata del sole,” 1901), where it is reworked in a humorous guise: there, the protagonist expresses the same desire to take his life after watching a sunrise, but he then finds himself falling asleep and snoring loudly instead.

The Editors

Bonn am Rhein, 1890 [1]

“Mom”, yelled Jenny,[2] entering my bedroom triumphantly and clapping her hands, “Mom agreed to please you!”

I turned to look at her with an astonished air from the fireplace, where I had been for about an hour all curled up from the cold, with my hands and my feet at the warmth of the fireplace, and my mind... oh, the mind, who can tell where it goes in certain moments, almost separated from our inert senses, while our eyes seem to look and yet they don’t?

“Uh!” Jenny started talking quickly, like she was frozen from my own coldness. “You seem like an old person! Can you imagine if the snow had really fallen here!”

And so saying, she ruffled my hair.

I took her beautiful hands, and I held them between mine for a long time:

“I’ll warm them up for you, wait! What is mom agreeing to?

“To celebrate Christmas!” exclaimed Jenny, regaining the excitement she had when she entered my room, and hiding beneath it the confusion she felt from me holding her hands. “We will buy a beautiful, little tree, tall... tall... let me show you how...”

“How?” I asked her smiling, holding her hands even more tightly.

But she removed one, and she did it quickly:

“This tall.”

“Oh good! It will be beautiful...”

“As much as you are ugly... we don’t joke, you know, about these things... let go of my other hand. What were you thinking?”

I closed my eyes, and I shrugged my shoulders, taking a long breath through my nostrils.

Was the wind whistling through the parched throat of the chimney, or was I truly hearing, far in the distance, the slow, nasal, cadenced sound of a bagpipe? Was that sound coming from the tearful words that I had inside of me? Those words that would certainly have found their way to my eyes before my lips, because of the lump that was choking my throat? Was that distant bagpipe swollen with deep sighs of my profound melancholy? And wasn’t that fire in front of me the Gregale[3] blaze of bundles of oats by a rustic altar in a square of my distant hometown,[4] in the freezing cold evenings of the pious novena?[5] Was the fire striker jingling? Was the bagpipe truly playing, far away?

Just as sometimes, or rather often, in our society we even get to the point of being ashamed of the dignity of our soul, so a certain restraint, or false modesty, prohibits us from revealing certain feelings even to a kind, close friend. These feelings seem to us too frail and almost too childlike for their delicate innocence. We suspect that they could be received with derision or, in the best hypothesis, not appreciated, having been born in us from special states of mind. For this reason, I didn’t say to Jenny what I was thinking.

“This wind oppresses me!” I said instead. “I cannot listen to it anymore… It’s like that all day, lamenting inside my room through the tunnel of the chimney… At night, you know, in the silence, in the loneliness, it becomes really intolerable…”

“I understand!” said Jenny at that moment, grabbing a chair. “Here I am next to you, grumpy! Come on, come on, another log for me in the fireplace! Wait!... I’ll take it: you are all bundled up… There you go. Therefore, mom agrees, you heard her! And she agrees because of you! It’s been two years, I told you, since we have celebrated Christmas in our home. This year we want to make up for it: imagine how happy the little girls will be!...”

The three little girls who Jenny was alluding to were triplets. Christmas had not been celebrated for two years in L***’s house as a sign of mourning for the violent death of the second husband of Mrs. Alvina, Jenny’s mother. Mr. Fritz L***, after a life of debauchery, shot himself in the head, in Neuwied, on the right bank of the Rhine. Jenny had told me several times the gory details of the suicide, followed by a series of horrible family feuds. She had portrayed to me the personality and the manners of her stepfather so vividly, it seemed to me almost like I knew him. I had read his last letter to his wife, from Neuwied, where he went to carry out his horrendous resolution; and I didn’t recall having ever read more beautiful and sincere words of farewell and repentance. Neuwied has a reputation that one can enjoy the sunrise better there than from anywhere else along the Rhine. “I have seen and experienced everything,” the husband wrote to the wife, “except only one thing: in forty years of life, I have never seen the sun rise. Tomorrow, I will watch, from the riverbank, this spectacle, which the very clear night promises will be enchanting. I will see the sun rise, and under the kiss of its first ray, I will end my life.”

“Tomorrow we will buy the tree…” continued Jenny. “The vat is still around it is up in the attic, and inside there must also be the lights, the multicolored decorations, as he left them the last time. Because, you know, each Christmas Eve it was him who decorated the tree, secretly, in the room below, next to the dining room; and he really knew how to decorate it well for his girls! He became joyous once a year, during those nights.”

Jenny, upset by the memory, wanted to hide her face by leaning her forehead on the armrest of my chair, and of course, silently, she prayed.

“Dear Jenny!” I said tenderly, placing my hand on her blond head.

When she got up from her prayer, her eyes were full of tears; and, sitting next to me again, she said:

“We all turn good when the Holy Night is approaching, and we forgive! I become good too even if I always say that I am not able to forgive him because of the condition he left us in… Let’s not talk about it! So then, tomorrow listen: I will go first to Frau R***, here nearby, for an apron full of sand from her garden: we will fill the vat with it and put the tree in it, which they will bring us early tomorrow morning, before the girls get out of bed. They’re not supposed to know about it! Then we will go out together to buy sweets and small presents to hang on the branches, and fruits and nuts: Frau R*** will give us flowers from her greenhouse… you will see, you will see, how beautiful our tree will be… Are you happy?”

I nodded my head several times. And Jenny stood up.

“Let me go away now… see you tomorrow. Otherwise, your neighbor will gossip about us. He is there, you know, in his bedroom, and he surely must have heard that I came to visit you.”

“So, will he also be here for the party?” I asked her, annoyed.

“Oh no! You’ll see, he’ll go off to celebrate with his deserving associates… goodbye, see you tomorrow!”

Jenny tiptoed away, closing the door slowly. And I slipped back into the grip of my sad thoughts, until the intolerable, lamenting cry of the wind kicked me away from the fire’s song. I went to the window, and clearing the fogged glass with my finger, I looked outside: it was snowing, still snowing wildly.

Looking out across the clear part of the fogged window, it suddenly reminded me of a memory of my first years, when, as a naïve child on the night of Christmas Eve, unhappy with the illuminated nativity scene in the room, I looked out to see if, in that sky full of mystery, the new, fabled comet would appear…

*

The next day we bought the sacred tree of the holiday; then we went up into the attic to see what decorations remained up there that could still be useful to us, before going out to buy new ones.

The old Christmas tree from three years ago was in a dark corner, all dried up, looking like a skeleton.

“Here it is,” said Jenny, “this is the last tree that he decorated. Let’s leave it there, as he had left it, so it won’t have the fate of John Christian Andersen’s Christmas tree,[6] which ended up cut-up inside a furnace. Here’s the vat. Look, it’s full. Let’s hope that the humidity hasn’t made the glass balls and lights lose their shine and color.”

Everything was in good shape.

Later, Jenny and I went out together to buy toys and sweets.

I was thinking while walking, who knows how much the intense cold, the fog, the snow, the wind, the squall of nature, would contribute to make the Christmas celebration in these towns more intimate and profound, more delicately sad, and poetic, and religious, than back home![7]

At night when the girls had just gone to bed, after having cleaned out the room next to the dining room, Jenny and I made the servant bring down the vat. We put it down in the corner and filled in sand around the trunk of the tree it with sand.

We worked into the night to decorate the Christmas tree, which seemed happy about all the decorations and grateful for our lovely care for it, extending its branches to support the gold and silver paper festoons, the garland, the ornaments, the lights, the small baskets of sweets, the toys, the nuts.

No, not these nuts! the tree was maybe thinking. These nuts don’t belong here: they are fruits of another tree.

Silly tree! You do not know that this is our most common tradition, this tradition of making ourselves beautiful with what doesn’t belong to us, and that all too often we don’t hesitate to take the fruit of others’ labors…

“Wait: the comet!” exclaimed Jenny, when the tree was fully decorated. “We forgot the comet!”

And with the help of the stepladder, I stuck a golden paper-star on top of the tree.

We admired our work for a long time; then we locked the door, so that tomorrow no one would see the decorated tree before the end of the day, and we went to bed, looking forward to the praises of the mother and the joy of the girls tomorrow, as a reward for the cold, for being awake, and for our effort.

Instead… oh no, no, for Jenny who worked so much, for her poor girls, the good old Mrs. Alvina did not have to cry as she did when she saw the splendid, illuminated tree on the flower carpet!

The Christmas Eve dinner had gone so well, until the last course, with the plum cake and the goose stuffed with chestnuts. Then the girls stood behind the door to the room where the tree was placed, and with their cold, little hands joined in prayer, they sang the sweet and melancholy chorus:

Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht…[8]

I will never forget that Christmas tree, which I decorated more for everyone else than for myself, and that celebration ending in tears; nor will I ever erase from my eyes that group of three orphan girls clinging to their mother’s gown and pleading for their father! father! while the sacred tree, loaded with toys, illuminated that room strewn with flowers with a mysterious light.