“Ciàula Discovers the Moon” (“Ciàula scopre la luna”)

Translated by Howard Curtis

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “Ciàula Discovers the Moon” (“Ciàula scopre la luna”), tr. Howard Curtis Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2023.

“Ciàula Discovers the Moon” (“Ciàula scopre la luna”) first appeared in the Corriere della Sera on December 29, 1912, together with two other stories, “Certain Obligations” (“Certi obblighi”) and “Who Pays the Piper” (“Chi la paga”). The story was later included in the edited volume of stories The Two Masks (Le due maschere), printed by Quattrini in Florence in 1914. “Ciàula Discovers the Moon” became part of Stories for a Year (Novelle per un anno) in 1925, when it was included in the eighth Collection, From Nose to Sky (Dal naso al cielo). In recognition of its significance as one of Pirandello’s most iconic stories, “Ciàula Discovers the Moon” was republished in the Corriere della Sera on March 4, 1951, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the newspaper’s foundation.

Despite its evident thematic links to the school of Italian realism centered in Sicily and known as verismo, particularly the seminal short story by Giovanni Verga “Rosso Malpelo” (1878), “Ciàula Discovers the Moon” is written in an original narrative style, privileging the investigation of the protagonist’s emotional displacement. Pirandello builds the story around his own memories, as well as a reflection on the disconcerting forces at play in an individual’s process of self-discovery. Inspired by his recollections of the harsh life of sulfur miners in nineteenth-century Sicily, Pirandello explores the effects of abuse and dehumanization on young, illiterate Ciàula, a miners’ “gofer” who has spent all his life working and living in a sulfur cave. His nickname itself, which translates as “crow” in Sicilian dialect, is a marker of his bestiality, both in his manners and speech, a symbol of the brutality he has endured all his life. His nickname fully replaces the character’s legal name and becomes his identity, a familiar pattern seen in other of Pirandello’s stories both preceding and following this one, such as “God, My Master” (“Padron Dio,” 1898) and “The Shadow of Remorse” (“L’ombra del rimorso,” 1914). Interestingly, in this tale Ciàula’s depersonalization is explored humorously, through the graphic juxtaposition of light and dark and the emotions elicited by that contrast. Even if Ciàula feels at ease in the obscurity of the mine caves, which he perceives as reflecting the comfort of the maternal womb, he is nonetheless incapable of managing the blackness of the open night sky. The symbol of an unknown, uncontrollable space, the night forces Ciàula to face his emotions and come to terms with the disquieting light of the moon, which he ”discovers” for the first time here. Pirandello used the trope of the moon abundantly throughout his short stories to frame the uncertainty of the specific moment when its light clashes with the darkness in which individuals find themselves. These dynamics are at work in compositions including “Wedding Night” (“Prima notte,” 1900), “Paper World” (“Mondo di carta,” 1909), “The Journey” (“Il viaggio,” 1910), “The Fish Trap” (“Il coppo,” 1912), and “The House of Agony” (“La casa dell’agonia,” 1935). In all these stories, as in “Ciàula,” the protagonists’ processes of self-discovery are triggered by the moon and its seductive effect. Across Pirandello’s works, the moon also represents a dominating, controlling force that watches over human beings and unveils their deficiencies with a judgemental smirk. See for example, “The Illustrious Deceased” (“L’illustre estinto,” 1909) and “The Two Partners” (“I due compari,” 1912), but also some of his early lyrics collected in the Rhenish Elegies (Elegie renane, 1895). This aspect of the moon is reworked in “Ciàula” with an original twist, as the finale frames a merciful moon watching indulgently over the young gofer, in recognition of his unjust victimization.

The Editors

That evening, the miners wanted to stop work before they had finished extracting the many crates of sulfur needed to load the furnace the following day.[1] Cacciagallina, the armed supervisor,[2] was there at the entrance to the Cace mine,[3] waving his revolver at them, yelling angrily, trying to stop them coming out.

“Damn and blast you, get back, all of you, get back down into the quarries and sweat blood till dawn, or I’ll shoot!”

“Bang!” someone cried from the bottom of the hole. “Bang!” others echoed, and with laughter and curses and yells of derision they pushed their way out, some shoving with their elbows, some with their shoulders. They all went by, all except one. Who? Why, Uncle Scarda, that poor fellow, blind in one eye, over whom Cacciagallina could lord it as he wanted. My God, what a fright! He pounced on him like a lion––worse than a lion––grabbed hold of him by the chest and, almost as if he were holding the others too, shook him furiously and screamed in his face:

“Get back, all of you, you scum! Down into the quarries, or I’ll kill the lot of you!”

Placidly, Uncle Scarda let himself be shaken. That poor gentleman simply had to vent, and it was only natural that he should take it out on him, since, old as he was, he wouldn’t offer any resistance. Besides, he too had someone weaker below him, someone on whom he could take his revenge later: Ciàula, his caruso.[4]

The others… here they were, already walking away down along the little road that led to Comitini,[5] laughing and yelling:

“That’s right! Hold on to that one, Cacciagallì! He’ll fill the furnace for you for tomorrow!”

“Young people!” Uncle Scarda sighed with a sad, indulgent smile at Cacciagallina.

Still held by the chest, he tilted his head to one side, stretched his lower lip toward the other side, and remained like that for a while, as if waiting.

Was he making a face at Cacciagallina? Or was he mocking the youth of his fellow workers’ over there?

For the fact was that, in these surroundings, that good cheer of theirs, that attempt at youthful bravado jarred. With their hard faces almost extinguished by the cruel darkness of the underground quarries, their bodies exhausted by the daily toil, their torn clothes, they matched the colorless desolation of this land without a single blade of grass, this land honeycombed with sulfur deposits as if with so many huge anthills.

But no: Uncle Scarda, fixed in that strange attitude of his, wasn’t mocking them, nor was he making a face at Cacciagallina. It was the usual, rather difficult way he had of letting a big tear, which emerged every so often from his one good eye, fall slowly into his mouth.

He had taken a liking to that salty taste, and never let a single tear escape him.

It wasn’t much: a single drop, from time to time. But stuck down there, two hundred or more meters below ground, from morning to evening, with his pickaxe in his hand, every blow drawing something like a roar of anger from his chest, Uncle Scarda found that his mouth was always burning hot: and that tear, for his mouth, was what a pinch of snuff would have been for his nose.

A pleasure and a respite.

Whenever he felt his eye filling up, he would put down his pickaxe for a while and, looking at the small, smoky-red flame of the lantern embedded in the rock, which lit up a few flakes of sulfur here and there in the darkness of that infernal hole, or the steel of the pole or the pickaxe, he would tilt his head to one side, jut out his lower lip, and stand waiting for the tear to fall down, slowly, along the furrow dug by the previous ones.

Of the other miners, some were addicted to cigarettes, some to wine; he was addicted to his tears.

It was an infirmity of the lachrymal sac, rather than weeping, that caused those tears; although Uncle Scarda had swallowed plenty of the other kind four years earlier, when his only son had died in a mine explosion, leaving him with seven orphans and a daughter-in-law to support. Even now, certain tears would come that were saltier than the others; he would recognize them immediately and, when he did, he would shake his head and murmur a name:

“Calicchio…”

Out of respect for the dead Calicchio, and also because of the eye he had lost in the same mine explosion, they had kept him on as a worker. He worked harder and longer than a young man; but every Saturday evening they would pay him his weekly wage as if doling out charity––and to tell the truth he himself took it in the same spirit, even saying under his breath, almost shamefully, as he pocketed the money:

“God bless them.”

Because it was generally assumed that someone of his age was no longer able to work hard.

When Cacciagallina finally let him go so that he could run after the others and politely persuade some of them to work through the night, Uncle Scarda begged him to at least get one of the men returning to the village to go to his house and warn them that he was staying behind in the mine, so they shouldn’t wait for him or worry about him; then he turned to call his gofer, who was over thirty (and was so stupid, he might have been any age from seven to seventy); and he called him as one might call a tame crow:

“Hey, boy! Here, boy!”[6]

Ciàula was about to get changed so that he could return to the village.

For Ciàula, getting changed meant, first of all, removing his shirt, or rather, what had once been a shirt: the only garment which, in a manner of speaking, covered him as he worked. Having removed his shirt, he would put on over his bare torso, on which you could count all his ribs one by one, a beautiful, long, ample vest, which had been a charitable donation and must once have been very elegant and exquisite (by now it was so encrusted with filth that when you put it down it would stand erect). With great care, Ciàula would fasten the six buttons, three of which dangled, and then look at it on him, passing his hands over it, because he still considered it better than he deserved: something fit for a gentleman. During that admiring inspection, his thin, bare, lopsided legs, turned blue by the cold, would break out in goosebumps. If any of his fellow workers gave him a shove or a kick, yelling at him, “How handsome you are!” he would open his toothless mouth from one of his protruding ears to the other in a laugh of pleasure, then would put on his pants, which had more than one window open on his buttocks and knees, wrap himself in a coarse, much patched woollen coat, and, barefoot, wonderfully imitating at every step the call of the crow––crah! crah!––(that was why he was nicknamed Ciàula, which was dialect for crow), set off for the village.

“Crah! crah!” he replied as usual that evening to his master’s call; and he came and stood before him, stark naked apart from that gentlemanly vest duly buttoned up.

“Go get changed again,” Uncle Scarda said to him. “Put your shirt and your sack back on. No sleep for us tonight on God’s earth.”

Ciàula did not say a word; he stood there for a moment looking at him with his mouth open, with the eyes of an idiot; then he placed his hands on his loins, wrinkled his nose in a twinge, stretched, and said:

“Gna bonu, all right.”[7]

And he went and took off his vest.

If it had not been for his tiredness and his need for sleep, working through the night would have been nothing, because it was always night down in the mine anyway. At least for Uncle Scarda.

But not for Ciàula. Ciàula, with the oil lantern tucked into the sack on his forehead, and his neck crushed beneath the load, would go up and down the steep, slippery underground ladder, with its broken rungs, and as he went up, gradually weakening, short of breath, making that croak of his with every rung, almost a strangled moan, he would see the light of the sun again with each ascent. At first, it would blind him; then, as he freed himself of his load and drew breath, the familiar appearance of all the surrounding things would leap out in front of him; he would stand, still panting, looking at them for a while and, without being fully aware of it, would feel comforted by them.

The curious thing was that Ciàula was not scared of the muddy darkness of the deep caves, where death lay in wait behind every bend; nor was he scared of the monstrous shadows which the lanterns would cause to surge up along the tunnels, nor of the sudden leaping out of a reddish reflection here and there in a puddle, a pool of sulfurous water: he always knew where he was; he would touch the bowels of the mountain with his hand in search of support and be as blind and safe as in his mother’s womb.

What did scare him, though, was the empty darkness of night.

He knew the darkness of day, down there, alternating with glimmers of light, beyond the funnel of the ladder up which he climbed so many times a day with that deceptive croaking of his like a strangled crow. But he did not know the darkness of night.

Every evening, once work was over, he would go back to the village with Uncle Scarda; and there, as soon as he had finished gorging on what was left of the soup, he would throw himself down to sleep on the straw mattress on the ground, like a dog; in vain the children, those seven orphaned grandchildren of his master’s, would step on him to keep him awake and laugh at his stupidity; he would immediately fall into a leaden sleep, from which, every morning, at the crack of dawn, he was usually roused by a familiar foot.

His fear of the darkness of night derived from that time that the son of Uncle Scarda, already his master, had had his belly and chest torn apart in the mine explosion and Uncle Scarda himself had lost an eye.

Down there, in the various places where they dug for sulfur, they had been about to stop work, it being already evening, when the terrible roar of that exploding mine had sounded. All the miners and their gofers had rushed to the site of the explosion; Ciàula alone had fled in terror and taken shelter in a hole known only to him.

In his haste to get there, his terracotta lantern had smashed against the rock, and when in the end, after a length of time he could not have determined, he had emerged from the hole into the silence of the dark, deserted caves, he had groped his way with great difficulty along the tunnel leading to the ladder; but he had not been afraid even then. The fear had only taken hold of him when he emerged from the hole into the black, empty night.

Feeling lost, he had started trembling, with a shudder at every vague, indistinct breath in the mysterious silence that filled the endless emptiness, where an infinite swarm of tiny, densely packed stars was unable to spread any light.

The darkness where there should have been light, the solitude of the things that lay there looking changed and almost unrecognizable, when there was nobody there to see them, had thrown Ciàula’s bewildered soul into such turmoil that he had suddenly burst into a mad run, as if someone were pursuing him.

Now, having gone back down into the hole with Uncle Scarda, as he waited for the load to be ready, he felt his terror of the darkness he would find when he emerged from the mine gradually grow in him. And it was that darkness, rather than that of the tunnels and the ladder, that made him carefully refill the terracotta lantern with oil.

The rhythmic grinding and thudding of the pump, which never rested, day or night, reached them from a distance. And the rhythm of that grinding and thudding was interspersed with Uncle Scarda’s hoarse roar, as if the old man were letting the force of that distant machine help him move his arms.

Finally, the load was ready, and Uncle Scarda helped Ciàula to arrange it and pile it in the sack tied behind his neck.

As Uncle Scarda loaded, Ciàula felt his legs give way beneath him. After a while one of them started to shake convulsively, so much so that, fearing he would no longer be able to bear the weight with all that trembling, Ciàula cried:

“Enough! Enough!”

“What do you mean, ‘enough,’ you bastard?’” Uncle Scarda retorted. And he continued loading.

For a moment, Ciàula’s fear of the darkness of night was overcome by dismay at the thought that, thus laden, and feeling as tired as he did, he might not be able to climb all the way up there. He had worked relentlessly all day. It had never occurred to Ciàula that you could feel sorry for your own body, nor did it occur to him even now; but he certainly felt as if he could not take it anymore.

He moved beneath the enormous weight, which also demanded an effort at balance. Yes, he could move, at least as long as he was on level ground. But how to lift that weight when the ascent began?

Luckily, when the ascent did begin, Ciàula was once again seized by his fear of the darkness of night, which he would soon have to confront.

Walking along the tunnels that evening, what came out of him was not the usual crow noise, but a protracted, guttural moan. Now, as he climbed the ladder, even that moan failed him, cut short by his terror of the black silence he would find in the intangible emptiness outside.

The ladder was so steep that, having reached the last stretch, however much Ciàula, with his head extended and flattened beneath the load, tried to look up, he could not see the hole gaping up there.

Stooped, with his forehead almost touching the rung above him, on whose slipperiness the swaying lantern barely reflected a dim blood-red light, he came up, up, up, from the belly of the mountain, feeling no pleasure but rather fear of his imminent release. And he could not yet see the hole opening like a bright eye all the way up there, with a wonderful silvery brightness.

He only noticed it when he reached the last rungs. At first, strange as it might seem to him, he thought these were the last glimmers of daylight. But the brightness grew and grew, as if the sun, which he had seen set, had come back up again.

Was it possible?

As soon as he emerged into the open, he stood there dumbfounded. The load fell from his shoulders. He raised his arms a little and opened his black hands in that silvery brightness.

There, facing him, large and placid, as if floating on a cool, luminous ocean of silence, was the Moon.

Of course, he knew what it was; but in the way we know many things that have never mattered to us. And what could it matter to Ciàula that there was a Moon in the sky?

It was only now, having emerged like this, at night, from the belly of the earth, that he discovered her.

In ecstasy, he fell back so that he sat on his load, in front of the hole. There she was, there she was, the Moon… The Moon was there! The Moon!

And without realizing it, without wanting to, Ciàula began to weep, from the great solace, the great sweetness that he felt, having discovered her as she rose in the sky, the Moon, with her vast veil of light, unaware of the mountains and plains and valleys she illuminated, unaware of him, although it was because of her that he was no longer afraid or tired, out here in the night that was now full of his awe.