“Dead Center” (“Nel segno”)

Translated by Steve Eaton

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “Dead Center” (“Nel segno”), tr. Steve Eaton. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2025.

“Dead Center” (“Nel segno”) was first published in the literary journal Il Marzocco on February 14, 1904. It was later included in the miscellany collection Naked Life (La vita nuda), published in 1910 in Milan by Treves, alongside seventeen other stories. In 1922, the story was incorporated into the second Collection of Stories for a Year, still titled Naked Life; but this edition featured only fifteen of the stories from the original Milanese publication.

In “Dead Center” Pirandello combines psychological analysis with themes of personal suffering and social pressure that are typical of his exploration of complex human emotions and the fragility of identity. The plot revolves around Raffaella Òsimo, a young woman who has endured great suffering in her life. She is in a hospital recovering from anemia and is awaiting the arrival of medical students, including Riccardo Barni, with whom she was once involved in a romantic relationship and who eventually betrayed her. Pirandello builds his narrative around Raffaella’s deep emotional turmoil by first exploring her reaction to seeing Riccardo with a young lady who is a foreign medical student, culminating in the dramatic moment of recognition when Riccardo sees Raffaella again in the middle of an embarrassing medical demonstration, where her physical and emotional vulnerability is exposed. The story, unlike many later narratives that mix tragedy and comedy in Pirandello’s particular blend of umorismo, is structured as a classical tragedy in this sense; and indeed, the final, brief epilogue to this tragic recognition traces out that typical narrative arc. While the story is not typical of Pirandello’s tragicomic humor, it does resonate with a number of key Pirandellian themes that recur throughout his work. The conflict between what Raffaella once believed about her relationship with Riccardo and the harsh reality of his abandonment exemplifies the author’s treatment of illusions as a fantastic construct that individuals generate in their minds to cope with painful realities. In addition to frequently portraying the disillusionment that accompanies unmet expectations, Pirandello also often explores the burden of social roles that contribute to this basic human suffering. Raffaella’s humiliation in front of the students highlights the superficial judgments that people make based on appearances and the tension between internal identity and external perception. In this respect, gender dynamics are also powerful elements in this story, which exemplifies the broader theme of the vulnerability of women and how they must submit to power dynamics in relationships. Likewise, Raffaella’s rival here is a higher class, foreign-born woman with distinctly different physical traits (a blond medical student, compared to Raffaella’s darker hair and southern Italian features), and this too highlights the ways in which social standards and prejudices come into play in alienating her from those around her.

Interestingly, “Dead Center” was composed during the period in which Pirandello was becoming increasingly involved with the burgeoning film industry. Film scholar Francesco Càllari (Pirandello e il cinema; Marsilio: Venice, 1991, pp. 90-92) describes how between 1896 and 1904 the Sicilian playwright frequently visited film studios, such as the Le Lieure studio, which were established near his home. By 1910, Pirandello began offering his works to producers as stories for potential adaptation into screenplays; and “Dead Center” was among these. Between 1911 and 1913, Pirandello approached his friend Nino Martoglio, who had founded his own production company, Morgana Film, to propose two subjects based on “Dead Center” and another of his stories from the same period, “Far Away” (“Lontano,” 1902). Pirandello requested that Martoglio choose one of these two short stories and give him an advance of 500 liras to help alleviate the financial difficulties that plagued him at that time.

The Editors

Since she knew that the medical students would be returning to the hospital the next morning, Raffaella Òsimo asked the head nurse to admit her to the chief surgeon’s ward, where the lectures in medical diagnosis were held.

The head nurse gave her a look.

“You want to be seen by the students?”

“Yes please, take me.”

“But you look like a lizard, you know.”

“I know, I don’t care. Take me!”

“Well aren’t you something! And what do you think they’ll do with you in there?”

“Like they did with Nannina,” replied Miss Òsimo. “No?”

Nannina, discharged from the hospital the previous day, had occupied the bed next to hers. She had shown her as soon as she returned to the ward from the lecture hall in back. Her whole body was outlined like a geographical map. Her lungs, her heart, her liver, her spleen were all outlined with a surgical pencil.

“And you want to go there?” replied the nurse. “I’m at your service. But be warned, the markings won’t come off for many days, not even with soap.”

Miss Òsimo shrugged and smiled:

“Take me, and don’t worry about it.”

A bit of color had returned to her face, but she was still so thin—all eyes and hair. Those eyes, though… dark, beautiful, shining again, penetrating. And in that cot her little girl’s body, tiny, didn’t even show through the folds of her blankets.[1]  

She was an old acquaintance of the head nurse, and of all the nurses, this Raffaella Òsimo.

She’d been to the hospital twice before, the first time for… oh, these blessed girls! They let themselves get hoodwinked,[2] and after that, who wants to be stuck with a poor innocent baby? It ends up in the home for foundlings.

To be honest, Miss Òsimo had also paid dearly for her misstep. About two months after giving birth, she’d returned to the hospital, more in the next world than this one, with three mercury chloride tablets in her system. Now she’d been here for a month with anemia. With the help of iron injections, she had already recovered, and in a few days would be dismissed from the hospital.

They loved her dearly in that ward. They treated her with compassion and tolerance, thanks to her shy and smiling good nature in spite of her dejection. Moreover, her desperation never showed, not with sullen manners nor with tears.

The first time, she had told them with a smile that nothing was left for her but to die. But since she was the victim of a fate shared by so many girls, that vague threat didn’t cause them any particular sympathy or concern. As everyone knows, all the seduced and betrayed women threaten suicide, … they weren’t so easily fooled.

But Rafaella Òsimo had said it, and done it.[3]

So, in vain, the good sisters on duty had tried to comfort her through faith. She had acted just like this before: listening attentively, smiling, saying yes, but you could tell that cajoling her didn’t melt away or loosen the knot that bound her heart.

She had nothing left to look forward to in life. She realized that she’d fooled herself, that the real deception had come more from her inexperience, from her passionate and credulous nature, than from the young man she’d abandoned herself to, who could never be hers.

But resign herself? No, she couldn’t.

If her story was nothing special to anyone else, that didn’t make it any less painful for her. She had suffered so much! First, the trauma of seeing her father betrayed and killed, and then the irreparable collapse of all her hopes.

She was a poor seamstress now, deceived like so many others, abandoned like so many others; but one day… Yes, it’s true, all the others talked the same way: But one day… and they were lying. For the poor, the defeated, the need to lie grows spontaneously from an oppressed heart. [4]

But she hadn’t been lying.

Still youthful, she would certainly have obtained her teacher’s license, if it hadn’t been for the sudden loss of her father, who had lovingly kept her in school. He was murdered down there, in Calabria,[5] not out of personal hatred, but during the political elections, at the hands of a still-unidentified killer hired, no doubt, by the faction opposed to Baron Barni. Her father had been his zealous and loyal secretary.

Once elected deputy, knowing that she was motherless already and now completely alone, Barni (playing the man of charity, for the voters) had welcomed her into his home.

And so she came to Rome, her status uncertain: they treated her like family, yet at the same time she acted as governess to the baron’s youngest children, and sometimes as a lady’s companion to the baroness. Without pay, naturally.

She worked. The baron took credit for his charity.

But what did that matter to her? She put her heart into her work, to secure the paternal benevolence of her host, with a secret hope: that her affectionate care and unpaid services, on top of her father’s sacrifice, would be enough to overcome the baron’s possible opposition to his eldest son Riccardo when, as he’d already promised, he openly declared his love for her. Oh, Riccardo was quite certain that his father would concede wholeheartedly, but he was barely nineteen, still a student in the lyceum. He didn’t have the nerve to make that announcement to his parents; better to wait a few years.

Waiting, then, for now… But how could they, there, in the same house, always together, inundated with flattery, after so many promises, so many vows…

Passion had blinded her.

And finally, when her misstep could no longer be hidden… kicked out! Yes, you could say she was really kicked out, with no mercy, without any concern for her state. Barni had written to an old aunt of hers to come get her and take her away, back down to Calabria, promising a check. But the aunt had begged the baron to at least wait for her niece to give birth in Rome, to avoid a scandal in her small town. Barni had agreed, but on condition that his son wouldn’t find out, still believing that Raffaella had already left Rome. But after the birth, she didn’t want to go back to Calabria. The baron, infuriated, threatened to withhold the check, and he did in fact withhold it after the suicide attempt. Riccardo had left for Florence; miraculously surviving, Raffaella had begun as a seamstress’ apprentice to support herself and her aunt.[6] A year had passed; Riccardo was back in Rome, but she hadn’t even tried to see him again. Since her violent attempt had failed, she’d gotten it into her head to die little by little. Her aunt lost her patience one fine day and went back to Calabria. Then, a month ago, after fainting in the house of the seamstress she worked for, Raffaella had been taken to the hospital and remained there, recovering from anemia.

And then one day, from her cot, Raffaella had seen the medical students pass through her ward, on their way to the class on diagnosis. And among these students she saw Riccardo, for the first time in about two years, with a young woman beside him. Blond, pretty, by all appearances a foreigner, she must have been a student too. And from the way he looked at her… – no, Raffaella couldn’t fool herself! – it seemed obvious he was in love. And how she smiled at him, practically hanging on his glance…

She followed them with her eyes to the end of the ward and stayed like that, eyes wide open, raised on one elbow. Nannina, in the next bed, started to laugh.

“What did you see?”

“Nothing…”

And she had smiled too, sinking back into her bed, because her heart was pounding as if it wanted to leap out of her chest.

Then the head nurse came to ask Nannina to get dressed, because the professor wanted her back there for the student lecture.

“Well what are they going to do to me?” Nannina asked.

“They’ll eat you up, what do you think?” the nurse had answered. “It’s your turn, everyone takes a turn. Now you, since you’re leaving tomorrow.”

At first, Raffaella trembled at the thought that her turn might also come. So low, so lost, how could she reappear before him, there? For some mistakes, there’s neither mercy nor commiseration, once beauty has vanished.  

Surely Riccardo’s friends, seeing her so pathetic, would ridicule him.

“What? You got involved with that little lizard?”

There would be no revenge. Nor, for that matter, did she want to avenge herself.

However, when Nannina returned to her cot after about an hour and explained what they’d done to her, and showed her body all marked up, she suddenly changed her mind. And that was that: now she trembled with impatience, waiting for the return of the students.

They arrived, finally, around ten. Like the other day, Riccardo was there, again beside that foreign student. They were looking at each other and smiling.

“Should I get dressed?” Rafaella asked the head nurse, excitedly popping up and sitting on the bed as soon as the students entered the hall at the back of the ward.

“Why such a hurry? Lie down,” the nurse commanded her, “and wait until the professor gives the order.”

But Rafaella, as if the nurse had told her, “get dressed!” secretly started to pull on her clothes.

She was ready to go, under the covers, when the head nurse called on her.

Pale as a corpse, every inch of her miserable little body shivering, smiling, with her eyes glittering and her hair cascading in all directions, she entered the hall.

Riccardo Barni was talking to that young student lady and didn’t notice her at first. Lost among so many youths, she was looking for him and didn’t hear the head surgeon, guest lecturer in diagnosis, who was telling her:

“Here, over here, my girl!”

At the professor’s voice, Barni turned and saw Raffaella staring at him, blushing. He was shocked, and turned quite pale. His vision clouded over.

“Coming or not?” shouted the professor.

Raffaella heard all the students laughing and found herself even more lost. She saw Riccardo retreating to the back of the hall, towards the window. She looked around, smiled nervously and asked:

“What do I have to do?”

“Here, here, lie down here!” commanded the professor, who was standing at the head of a little table on which a sort of pad was laid out.

“Yes sir, coming!” Raffaella hurried to obey. But since she was struggling to pull herself up and sit on the table, she smiled again and said, “I can’t make it…”

A student helped her up. Sitting before lying down, she looked at the professor, a handsome man, tall, clean-shaven, with gold-rimmed glasses. Pointing to the foreign student, she said, “If you could have her draw on me…”

“Why? You’re ashamed?”

“No sir. But I’d be happier.”

And she turned to look towards the window across the hall, where Riccardo was cowering with his back to the room.

The blond student instinctively followed her gaze. She had already noticed Barni’s sudden agitation.  When she realized that he’d retreated to the back, she became visibly agitated too.

But the professor called to her:

“Go to her then, Miss Orlitz. Let’s make the patient happy.”

Raffaella stretched out on the table and watched the student as she lifted the veil over her forehead. Oh how beautiful she was, white and delicate, with such gentle sky-blue eyes. There, she was taking off her cloak, she was taking the surgical pencil the professor held out to her, she was bending over Raffaella to expose her breast with unsteady hands.

Rafaella Òsimo shut her eyes out of shame for her meager breast, exposed to the gaze of so many young men there, around the table. She felt a cold hand placed on her heart.

Immediately the young lady said “Beating, too much…” in a thick exotic accent, and pulled back her hand.

“How long have you been in the hospital?” asked the professor.

Raffaella answered without opening her eyes, though her eyelids were twitching nervously.

“Thirty-two days. I’m almost cured.”

“Listen for anemic breathing,” continued the professor, handing the student a stethoscope.

“Breathing, all right… the palpitations, is too much.”

“Let’s go on, do the manual examination,” the professor coaxed her.

With the first pokes Rafaella bent her head to one side, clenched her teeth, and tried to open her eyes. She immediately closed them again, making a violent effort to contain herself. From time to time the student stopped prodding for a bit in order to draw a short little dash below her middle finger, with a pencil dipped in a glass of water held out by a male student next to her. Then Raffaella would laboriously release the breath she’d been holding back, through her nostrils.  

How long did that torture last? And he was still there, by the window… Why wasn’t the professor calling him over? Why didn’t he invite him to see her heart, which his blond companion was so slowly tracing on her miserable breast, so withered because of him?

There, finally. The manual examination was over. Now the student lady joined all the dashes to complete the outline. Raffaella was tempted to look at herself, at that heart of hers, drawn out. But suddenly she couldn’t hold back any longer. She broke out in sobs.

The professor, annoyed, sent her back to the ward, ordering the head nurse to send him another invalid, not so hysterical, not so silly.

Miss Òsimo calmly withstood the scolding she got from the head nurse and returned to her cot. She waited, trembling all over, for the students to leave the hall.

Would he at least glance around for her as he passed through the ward? But no, no. What did it matter to her anymore?  She wouldn’t even lift her head to be noticed. He didn’t need to see her again. It was enough that she had made him understand how wasted she’d become, because of him.

She grasped the turned-down bedsheet in her trembling hands and pulled it over her face, as though she were dead.

For three days Rafaella Òsimo was very careful not to erase the outline of a heart on her breast.

Released from the hospital, in front of a small mirror in her shabby little room, she propped a dagger against the wall and impaled herself, there, dead center in the outline her unwitting rival had traced.