“Farewell, Leonora!” (“Leonora, addio!”)

Translated by Scott Belluz

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “Farewell, Leonora!” (“Leonora, addio!”), tr. Scott Belluz. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2022.

“‘Farewell, Leonora!’” was first published in the newspaper Corriere della Sera on November 6, 1910 and was then collected in the volume of stories Tercets (Terzetti; Milan: Treves, 1912). Pirandello later added it to The Trip (Il viaggio; Florence: Bemporad, 1928), the twelfth Collection of his Stories for a Year (Novelle per un anno).

On the surface, “‘Farewell, Leonora!’” might seem to fall into the category of verismo, the tradition of Sicilian realism typified by Verga and Capuana. The plot follows the story of a family in an unnamed Sicilian town (which nevertheless resonates significantly with Pirandello’s own hometown, Girgenti, modern-day Agrigento); the girls flirt and philander with officers stationed in the area who are from the Italian mainland, the Continent, justifying their unconventional behavior with the refrain that “this is how it’s done on the Continent.” However, when the eldest daughter, Mommina, decides to marry a Sicilian suitor, Rico Verri, she becomes the victim of the stereotypical jealousy of her husband and his patriarchal drive to control her life. In this plot we see several themes typical in some form or another of both nineteenth-century realism and also the melodramatic tradition of nineteenth-century opera. Visions of oppressive love accepted by rural patriarchal society abound in other stories by Pirandello and in works by his Sicilian contemporaries. Likewise, the victimhood of women in these traditional societies is a recurring Pirandellian trope. But more than that, the operatic melodrama of the story becomes part of a fictional game where the boundaries of art and life are broken down and the theatricality itself is thematized: Mommina, an aficionado (like her sisters and mother) of Continental opera, marries her (it turns out abusive) husband because she views his proposal as a romantic event, and his temper as an operatic gesture of love; she then is left with nothing but the opera plots and songs she remembers, which she sings and performs for her daughters until, in the end, she dies dramatically, acting out the melodramatic storyline of the operas she has been performing in private. This realist narrative thus also engages typical themes of fin de siècle decadence (the fusion of art and life in a melodramatic pairing of love and death) together with the meta-representational use of fictional form to thematize itself typical of modernism.

The story has had a rich afterlife in other genres and adaptations. Pirandello’s famous work of metatheater, Tonight We Improvise (Questa sera si recita a soggetto, 1930) takes “‘Farewell, Leonora!’” as a point of departure for a series of modernist transformations and adaptations. In the play, a German director (Pirandello wrote the play while a “voluntary exile” in Germany in 1928-29), Dr. Hinkfuss, wants to stage an adaptation of Pirandello’s story; in the process, the realist-flavored short story becomes the centerpiece of a series of theatrical reflections on the theater and theatricality, a subject to which it is well-suited given the confluence of art and life already at the core of “‘Farewell, Leonora!’” in its reworking of motifs and songs from nineteenth-century operatic melodrama.

The story has subsequently been given a kind of echoing afterlife in film by Paolo Taviani. The second film he directed independently after the death of his brother, Vittorio (with whom he collaborated on a number of Pirandellian features throughout the twentieth century), takes the story’s title as its own: Leonora addio (2022). This film, representing the historical drama of Pirandello’s death and the return of his ashes to Sicily, interspersed with an adaptation of another Pirandello story, “The Nail” (“Il chiodo,” 1936), is an homage to Pirandello in many ways. Though it does not directly adapt the plot of “‘Farewell, Leonora!’” there are strong resonances in the overt theatricality and meta-reflection on representational form.

The Editors

Rico Verri, a twenty-five-year-old petty officer, enjoyed the company of the other officers in his regiment, all of whom were from the Continent.[1] Unsure of how to occupy themselves in that dusty city of central Sicily, they gathered like flies around the only hospitable family in town, the La Croce family, made up of the father Don Palmiro, a mining engineer (whom everyone called Sampognetta as he was always whistling absent-mindedly);[2] the mother Donna Ignazia, who was from Naples and known as La Generala [3] in town but whom the officers called Donna Nicodema for some reason; and their four beautiful daughters, who were plump and tenderhearted, lively and passionate: Mommina and Totina, Dorina, and Meme.

With the excuse that “this is how it is done on the Continent,” the officers undeterred by the scandal and slander of the other families in town, had managed to convince the four daughters to commit the most reckless and ridiculous acts; taking certain liberties with them that would have made any other woman blush – and indeed the daughters themselves would have blushed too if they hadn’t been completely certain that this was truly how things were done on the Continent and that, there, no one would have said a thing about it. When the officers took them to the theater they sat in the officers’ box, each sister between two officers, and while the one on the left was fanning her, the one on the right popped candy or chocolate into her mouth. This was how it was done on the Continent. If the theater was closed, the La Croce house became a school of gallantry and dancing and performances every evening: the mother played up a storm on the piano, sounding out all the “opera pieces” they’d heard last season, while the four sisters, who had reasonably good voices, would dress in improvised costumes and sing all the parts including the male roles, giving themselves moustaches of burnt cork and wearing feathered caps and the coats and sabers of the officers. Mommina, the plumpest one of all, was a sight to see in the role of Siebel in Faust:

You speak to her of love – o dear flowers…[4]

They all sang the choruses at the top of their lungs, even Donna Nicodema at the piano. This is the way it was done on the Continent. And in order to always do things the way they were done on the Continent, when the military band played at the town garden on Sunday nights, each of the four sisters would wander off, arm in arm with one of the officers down the most secluded paths to catch fireflies (no harm done!) while “La Generala” sat enthroned, guarding the circle of now empty rental chairs and glaring at any townspeople who shot her looks of scorn or contempt; they were nothing but ugly savages, idiots who didn’t know the way things were done on the Continent.

Everything was fine until Rico Verri, who had at first shared Donna Ignazia’s hatred for these island savages, gradually fell genuinely in love with Mommina, and turned into a savage himself. And what a savage!

At the parties, he had never really joined in the escapades of his fellow officers; he’d merely watch them in amusement. When he began trying to act like the others and fool around with the girls, as a good Sicilian he suddenly took the game very seriously. And so, goodbye fun! Mommina was no longer allowed to sing or dance, to go to the theater or even laugh as she once had.

Mommina was a good girl, the wisest of the four sisters, the one who sacrificed, arranging the others’ amusements but unable to enjoy them herself on account of hard work, sleepless nights, and nagging thoughts. She was the one who carried the burden of her family entirely on her shoulders, as even when Don Palmiro was home from the sulfur mine, her mother was the man of the house.

Mommina understood so many things: above all, that the years were passing by; that with all the chaos at home her father hadn’t been able to save even a penny that no man in town would settle down with her, nor would any of the officers ever let themselves be nabbed by one of the sisters. But Verri did not joke around; quite the contrary! She was certain that he would marry her if she obeyed all his prohibitions, resisted at all costs the provocations, the influence, the rebellions of her sisters and mother. He would stand there, pale and quivering, watching them swarm around her, never taking his eyes off her, ready to explode at the slightest remark from one of his fellow officers. And explode he did one night, there was an uproar: chairs flying through the air, broken glasses, shouts, cries, convulsions; three challenges, three duels. He wounded two adversaries then was wounded by the third. When he returned to the La Croce house a week later with his wrist still bandaged, he was assaulted by a furious Generala. Mommina was crying; her three sisters tried to hold back their mother. Certainly it would be more appropriate if their father intervened to put the officer in his place, this officer who without any authority had dared to lay down the law in another man’s house. But Don Palmiro, deaf, was off somewhere whistling. Once the initial fury had faded, Verri made a point of promising that as soon as he had completed his service as a reserve officer, he would marry Mommina.

La Generala had already made inquiries in the neighboring town on the southern coast of the island and learned that he was indeed from a wealthy family, but that his father had a reputation both as a loan shark and as a severely jealous man who after only a few years of marriage had caused his wife to die of a broken heart. Faced with his proposal, she therefore wanted her daughter to have a few days to think it over. Both she and the sisters advised Mommina not to accept. But despite her awareness of all these things, Mommina had a passion for melodrama; and Rico Verri… Rico Verri had fought three duels for her; Raul, Emani, don Alvaro…[5]

Nor can I efface

his image from my heart…[6]

She was adamant and married him.

She didn’t know what agreements he’d conceded to with his father the loan shark as a result of the senseless fights he picked with his fellow officers, or what conditions he had agreed to with himself, not just to repay the cost of his own stubbornness, but also so he could restore his standing among his fellow villagers, who were well aware of the reputation that his wife’s family enjoyed in the neighboring town.

She was then imprisoned in the highest house in the town, on an isolated and windy hill facing the African sea. The windows were all hermetically sealed, both the panes and the shutters. Only one small window was open and looked out over the distant countryside and the faraway sea. All she could glimpse of the desolate town was the roofs of houses and the bell towers of the churches: only yellowish tiles, some higher, some lower, sloping in every direction. Rico Verri had two special locks sent from Germany; it wasn’t enough for him to lock the door every morning with two keys; he’d stand there violently shaking it with both hands to ensure it was tightly locked. He was unable to find a servant willing to stay in that prison and had charged himself with the task of going into town every day to do the shopping while his wife was condemned to the kitchen and the humblest of household chores. Returning home, he wouldn’t even allow the errand boy to enter the house; he would load himself up with all the packages and parcels from the basket, close the door behind himself with one shoulder, and once free of his load, would immediately run to inspect all the shutters, even though they were locked from the inside with padlocks for which he alone had the keys.[7]

Right after the wedding, a jealousy even more ferocious than his father’s had flared up within him, augmented by relentless regret and by the certainty that there was no way he could defend himself, no matter how many bars he put on the windows or the door. There was no relieving his jealousy: it was a jealousy of the past, the betrayal locked up there in that prison; it was alive inside his wife, incessant and indestructible, in her memories, in those eyes that had seen, in those lips that had kissed. Nor could she deny it; she could only weep fearfully when she saw him looming over her, livid because one of those memories had ignited the sinister sight of his vile suspicions.

“Was it like this, then?” he roared in her face. “He held you like this… Your arms, like this? Your waist… How did he squeeze it… like this? And your mouth? How did he kiss it? Like this?”

And he kissed her and bit her and tore out her hair, that wretched hair that she never combed because he didn’t want her to tend to it anymore, nor to wear a corset, nor to take the slightest care of her body.

The birth of one daughter and then another did not help matters; in fact, her martyrdom increased over the years as the poor little children gradually began to understand. In terror they watched those sudden attacks of insane fury, those wild scenes, their faces growing pale and their eyes becoming inordinately large.

Ah those eyes on those pale faces! It seemed that they only grew from the fear that kept them forever wide open.

Delicate, pale, and mute, they trailed their mother in the darkness of their prison, waiting for him to leave the house so that together they could look out the one small open window, to take in some fresh air, to look at the distant sea and on clear days count the sails of the fishing boats; to look at the countryside and count the white villas scattered among the vineyards, the almond trees, the olive groves in their various shades of green.

They had never left the house and wanted so badly to be out there, in all that green. They asked their mother if she had ever been in the country, and they wanted to know what it was like.

When she heard them speaking like that, she couldn’t keep herself from crying; but she wept silently, biting her lip and stroking their little heads, until her grief caused such unbearable shortness of breath that even though she would have liked to leap up eagerly, she could not. Her heart! Her heart was pounding headlong like a galloping runaway horse. Ah, her heart! It couldn’t take anymore, perhaps partly because of all the fat she carried, the load of all that bloodless flesh.

Incidentally, it almost seemed like cruel mockery that this man was jealous of this woman whose shoulders, no longer supported from behind by a corset, dropped forward, her enormous belly rising as if to support her huge flabby breasts; this woman who wandered around the house with slow laborious steps, gasping for air, disheveled, stunned by grief and almost lifeless. But he always saw her as she had been so many years before, when he had called her Mommina, or even Mummì, and would squeeze the cool, white flesh of her arms beneath the transparent black lace of her blouse, tightly, tightly, with all the urgency of desire, until she let out a little cry. The regimental band would play in the town garden and in the hot breeze of the evening, the strong, sweet perfume of jasmines and orange blossoms was intoxicating.

Now he just called her Momma or else “Mo!” when he wanted to strike her with his voice as well.

Fortunately, he had not been staying home much lately; he was out in the evenings as well and didn’t come home before one o’clock.

She hadn’t the slightest interest in knowing where he went. His absence was the greatest relief she could hope for. Every night, having put the girls to bed, she’d look out the little window, waiting for him. She looked at the stars. The whole town lay below her, a strange sight: there in the light dispersed by lamps in the narrow streets, short or long, winding, sloping, a multitude of roofs appeared like shimmering black dice; she could hear footsteps echoing in the deep silence of nearby alleys; the voice of some woman who was perhaps waiting as she was, the barking of a dog, and more distressingly, the ringing of the bell tower in the closest church. Why did that clock measure time? For whom did it count the hours? All was dead and vain.[8]

Withdrawing from the window late one night, she noticed that the suit her husband usually wore had been thrown carelessly over a chair (he had gone out earlier than usual that evening wearing a different suit which he reserved for special occasions); and before hanging it up in the wardrobe, curiosity led her to search the pockets. She found a theater notice, the kind they distribute in coffee shops and on the streets. It announced that the first performance of La forza del destino would take place that very night in the town theater.

It happened all at once: she saw the announcement, she read the title of the opera, she broke into a desperate cry. Her blood pressure dipped, dropping suddenly to her heart then rushing back to her head: the town theater flashed before her eyes, the memories of evenings past, the carefree joy of youth spent with her sisters.

The two girls woke suddenly and came running, frightened in their nightgowns. They thought their father had returned. They were stunned to see their mother crying alone with that little piece of yellow paper on her knees. Unable to utter a single word, she started waving the announcement, and then, gulping back tears and contorting her tearful face dreadfully to muster a smile, her sobs turned into strange fits of laughter, and she began to speak:

“The theater… the theater… here look, the theater… La forza del destino. Ah, my little ones, my poor darlings, you don’t know. I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you. Get back to bed so you don’t catch cold. I’ll show you. Yes, yes, I’ll show you, the theater. Come.”

Having put the little girls back to bed, still flushed and shuddering with sobs, she began to describe the theater, the performances given there, the proscenium, the orchestra, the scenery, and telling them the plot of the opera, describing the various characters and how they were dressed; finally, to the amazement of the little girls who sat on the bed watching her, their eyes wide with fear that she had gone mad, she began to sing the various arias, the duets, the choruses, gesturing awkwardly and interpreting all the roles of La forza del destino in its entirety until, exhausted and blue in the face from the effort, she reached Leonora’s last aria, “Pace, pace, mio Dio.”[9] She began to sing with such passion that she was unable to continue beyond the verses

My deep suffering has lasted for so many years

as it was at first [10]

She burst into tears again. But she recovered immediately; she got up and made her astonished little girls lie back down in their beds. While kissing them and tucking them in, she promised that the next day, as soon as their father went out, she would perform another opera for them, an even more beautiful one, Les Huguenots, yes, and then another, one a day! That way her dear little girls could at least experience her past life.

When he came home from the theater, Rico Verri immediately noticed that his wife’s face was unusually radiant. She was afraid he would touch her and notice she was still shaking and shuddering convulsively. He became suspicious the next morning when he noticed something unusual in the girl’s eyes too. He said nothing but decided to find out whether they had a secret understanding, by returning home unexpectedly.

His suspicion was reaffirmed the following evening when he found his wife exhausted, wheezing like a horse, eyes bulging, face puffy, unable to stand; even the girls were bewildered. Not only had she sung the entire Les Huguenots for them from start to finish, she had performed all the parts one by one and even two or three at a time. The girls still had Marcel’s aria in their ears:

Pif, paf, pif

scattered may go

the black band [11]

and the theme from a chorus she had taught them to sing:

To the peaceful shade

of green beeches

run, oh youths,

longing beauties…[12]

Knowing that his wife had been suffering from a weak heart for some time, Rico Verri pretended to believe she was suffering a sudden attack.

The next day he came home two hours earlier than usual and, as he slid the German keys into their locks, he thought he could hear strange shouts coming from inside the house. He listened closely, glowering at the closed windows… Who was singing in his house? “Miserere d’un uom che s’avvia…”[13] His wife? Il Trovatore:

I pay with my blood

For the love I placed in you!

Do not forget, do not forget me

Leonora, farewell![14]

He hurried into the house, leaping up the stairs. Behind the bedroom curtain his wife’s enormous body lay flung on the floor, an ugly feathered hat on her head, a moustache of burnt cork on her lip. The two girls sat nearby, motionless on their little chairs, hands on their knees, eyes and little mouths wide, waiting for their mother’s performance to continue.

With a shout of rage Rico Verri rushed over to the fallen body of his wife and rolled it over with his foot.

She was dead.