“Formalities” (“Formalità”)

Translated by Andrew M. Hiltzik

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “Formalities” (“Formalità”), tr. Andrew M. Hiltzik. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2024.

“Formalities” (“Formalità”) was first published in a collection of Pirandello’s short stories that came out in 1904, Whites and Blacks (Bianche e nere), printed by the Turin-based publisher Streglio. It was then added to the very first Collection of Stories for a Year, Black Shawl (Scialle nero), which was published by Bemporad in Florence in 1922.

This long short story was written during a tumultuous time in Pirandello’s life, and the biographical connections are clear throughout the plot. In 1903, Luigi Pirandello’s family suffered a grave financial disaster. His father Stefano’s fortune came from a sulfur mine in Porto Empedocle, near his hometown of Agrigento, Sicily; in that year, a flood tragically wiped out the mine, and with it not only his father’s wealth, on which Luigi and his young family had been relying to pay for their life in Rome, but also the wealth of his father’s business partner, Calogero Portulano, who happened to be the father of Luigi’s wife, Antonietta. As a result, Luigi and Antonietta went from being well-off to a state of sudden precarity. This, in turn, triggered a nervous collapse for Antonietta, who began a process of mental decline that ultimately led to her institutionalization in 1919. This dramatic turn of events clearly sets the backdrop for “Formalities,” where the sudden loss of a fortune invested in a sulfur mine takes center stage. At the same time, other elements of the story go beyond biography and touch on key tropes and interests that run throughout Pirandello’s corpus. The comically grotesque character of Lapo Vannetti, for instance, with his strange speech impediment, is typical of Pirandello’s recourse to such humorous characters, who often play important roles – one might think of Madame Pace in his most famous play, Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore, 1921/25). Likewise, the love-triangle motif that enters into the story as it develops reflects both a typical form for nineteenth and early-twentieth-century literature as well as Pirandello’s own recurring interest in the theme of life as a vital surge that pushes against the confining restrictions imposed by convention and the forms of social propriety. Ultimately, the story turns out to reflect Pirandello’s own theory of humor, or umorismo, by combining the tragically serious with the ridiculous in a way that provokes both laughter and compassion or pity. The story is at once an account of sudden loss and desperation, the revelation of a hidden illicit love and betrayal, and the happy coincidence of a solution presented, ironically, in the figure of the grotesque imp who stands in for the strange chance of human destiny.

The Editors

I.

In the Orsani Bank's ample office, with his nightcap on his head, his spectacles perched on the tip of his nose as if squeezing out those two tufts of grey hair, the old clerk Carlo Bertone was about to calculate a rather formidable sum, standing before a tall writing desk on which a massive ledger lay open. Behind him, Gabriele Orsani, deathly pallid and with sunken eyes, followed the operation, now and then vocally prodding the old secretary, who, as the sum began to grow larger, seemed increasingly to dread reaching the bottom.

“These spectacles... Damn them!” he exclaimed with a burst of impatience at a certain point, flinging the spectacles with a finger from the tip of his nose onto the ledger.

Gabriele Orsani let out a laugh:

“What do those spectacles show you? My poor old chap, bah! Zero times zero, zero...”

At that point Bertone, in a fit of vexation, hefted the massive book from the table:

“Will you permit me to move to the other room? With you carrying on in here, I tell you, I simply cannot... I must have peace!”

“Well done, Carlo, very well,” Orsani approved ironically. “Peace, peace... And yet,” he added, indicating the ledger, “you take the stormy sea with you when you go.”

He threw himself onto a lounge chair next to the window and lit a cigarette.

The turquoise drapes, which kept the room in welcome shade, swelled now and then when a gust of wind blew in from the sea. Then with the sudden light came the scent of the sea that broke on the shore.

Before taking his leave, Bertone suggested that his superior grant an audience to a “curious” gentleman who was waiting outside: in the meantime, he would attend to the rather tangled accounts in peace.

“Curious?” Gabriele asked. “And who might that be?”

“I don’t know. He’s been waiting for half an hour now. Doctor Sarti sent him.”

“Well, send him in, then.”

Shortly afterward entered a diminutive man in his fifties, with fluttering grey hair parted like a butterfly. He seemed almost like a marionette whose exaggerated bows and comical gestures were effected by the pulling of invisible strings.

Hands, he still had two; eyes, but one; and yet he seemed earnestly to believe he could give the impression of having two by embellishing his glass eye with a monocle, which must have struggled terribly to correct that minor defect in sight.

He handed Orsani his calling card, which appeared as follows:

LAPO VANNETTI

Inspector of the

London Life Assurance Society Limited

(Share capital L. 4,500,000–Paid-in capital L. 2,559,400)[1]

“Most esteemed zzentleman!” He began, and then never stopped.

Aside from the defect of sight, he also had one of speech; and as he sought to hide the former behind a monocle, he sought to hide the latter beneath a small chuckle over every mispronounced consonant.

Orsani tried to interrupt him several times, but in vain.

“I am paying a call to your most respectable establishment,” the little man charged ahead undaunted, with vertiginous loquacity, “where at the behest of our Azzency, the oldest and most distinguished of any that exist of its kind, I have drafted up the most excellent, excellent contracts, yes indeed, in all the unique variations that we offer to our members, whizz is not even to speak of our exceptional advantazzes, whizz I shall shortly expound to you in every detail if you should so please.”

Gabriele Orsani's heart sank, but Mister Vannetti sprang swiftly to his rescue. He began to play both parts himself–questions and answers, proposing doubts and offering reassurances:

“Here, you, most esteemed zzentleman, oh, I know! You might very well inquire, object even: See here, yes, my dear Vannetti, all well and good; full faith in your firm; but how can I afford it? These fees are a little too steep for me, one might say; I haven’t that kind of marzzin on my balance, and so forth... (Every man knows the affairs of his own house, and here you are quite right: on this point, my dear Vannetti, there can be no further discussion). You see, however, I, my most esteemed zzentleman, permit myself to make an observation to you: what of the special advantazzes that our Firm can offer? Oh, I know, you say: every firm offers the same terms, more or less. No, no, beg pardon, good sir, if I may dare to cast doubt on this assertion. The advantazzes...”

At this point, Orsani, seeing him extract a bundle of printed brochures from a leather folder, threw up his hands as if in self-defense:

“Pardon me,” he cried. “I read in the papers that one firm insured, for I don’t know how much, the hands of a celebrated violinist: is that true?”

Mister Lapo Vannetti was perplexed for a moment; then he smiled and said,

“So very American! Yes indeed. But we...”

“I only ask,” Gabriele resumed, without wasting a moment, “because I too, one time, you know...?”

And he mimed the act of playing a violin.

Vannetti, still struggling to regain his composure, believed it opportune to congratulate him:

“Ah, very good! Very good! But, beg pardon, in truth we do not deal in these kinds of accounts.”

“It would be quite useful, though!” Orsani sighed, rising to his feet. “To be able to insure all those things one loses or leaves behind along the road of life: one's hair! One's teeth, for instance! And one’s head? One can lose one’s head so easily...There you have it: The violinist his hand, the dandy his hair, the gourmand his teeth, the businessman his head... Think about it! That's an idea!”

He turned to press an electric bell on the wall next to the writing desk, adding:

“Just one moment, my good sir.”

Vannetti bowed, mortified. It seemed to him that Orsani, to throw him off balance, had intended to make a truly indelicate allusion to his glass eye. Bertone reentered the office with a considerably more distraught air about him.

“In the drawer on the shelf of your writing desk,” Gabriele said to him, “under the letter S...”[2]

“The sulfur mine account?” Bertone asked.

“The latest files, since the construction of the ramp...” Carlo Bertone nodded his head several times:

“I took them into account.”

Orsani gazed into the old clerk's eyes. He stood frowning, absorbed. Then he asked:

“Well?”

Bertone, abashed, glanced at Vannetti.

The latter grasped that he was an interloper in that moment and, resuming his obsequious demeanor, took his leave.

“There is no need for anything further from me. I understand perfectly well. I shall retire. That is to say, if it please you, I shall go take a small repast in the vicinity, and then I shall return. Worry not. At your leisure, if you please. I know the way out. Good day, sir.”

Another bow, and he was gone.

II.

“Well?” Gabriele Orsani asked the old clerk again, as soon as Vannetti had left.

“That... That construction... As of now,” Bertone replied, almost babbling.

Gabriele grew irritated.

“How many times have you told me? What did you want me to do instead? Rescind the contract, is that it? But if that sulfur represents the last hope of my solvency for all my creditors ... I know! I know! By now I’ve sank more than thirty thousand liras into that pit with nothing to show for it. I know better than you!... Don't make me shout.”[3]

Bertone passed his hands several times over his weary eyes; then, brushing off his sleeve, where there was not even a speck of dust, he said softly, as if to himself:

“If only there were some way, at least, to pull together enough money to move all that machinery that... that is not even entirely paid off. But we also have the promissory notes at the Bank expiring...”

Gabriele Orsani, who had begun to pace around the room with his hands in his pockets, frowning, stopped short:

“How much?”

“Ah...” Bertone sighed.

“Ah...” Gabriele repeated; then, he snapped: “Enough, already! Tell me everything. Speak plainly: are we finished? Kaput? Thanks and praise be to the dear, blessed memory of my father! I am only here at your insistence: I did only what you asked of me: Tabula rasa: end of discussion!”

“Why, no! Don't give in to despair now...” said Bertone, deeply moved. “This certainly is a fine state of things... I must say!”

Gabriele Orsani lay his hands on the old clerk's shoulders:

“But what can you say, old friend? What can you say? You’re trembling all over. Don’t be like this, now; before, before, with the authority vested in you by those white hairs, you could question me, my plans, counsel me then, knowing that I was a novice in business. Will you try to deceive me again, now, like this? You’re pathetic!”

“What could I do?...” said Bertone, with tears in his eyes.

“Nothing!” Orsani cried. “And neither could I. I just need to take it out on somebody, don't you worry. But how did I get here? Me, me, a businessman? If I can’t even see, deep down, where I went wrong... Enough with all this about the ramp construction, which makes me feel like I'm up to my neck in water... Can you tell me where I went wrong?”

Bertone shrugged his shoulders, closed his eyes, and spread his palms as if to say: What good will that do now?

“Above all, the solutions...” he suggested with a dull, plaintive voice.

Gabriele Orsani let out another laugh.

“I know what the solution is! To take up my old violin, the one my father snatched from my hands when he damned me to this place, to this delightful lark, and go about like a blind beggar from door to door, fiddling for a piece of bread to feed my children. How does that sound?”

“I must say,” Bertone repeated, half-closing his eyes. “All told, if we can just get past these next few deadlines, naturally restricting all, I mean all, our expenses (including... I beg your pardon!... household ones), I believe that... At least we can stay ahead of our debts for four or five more months. In the meantime...”

Gabriele shook his head and smiled; then, drawing a deep sigh, he said:

“Mean Old Time, my dear friend, is trying to pull the wool over my eyes!”[4]

But Bertone insisted on his forecasting and left the office only to come back to lay out the whole book of accounts.

“I will show you. Give me one moment.”

Gabriele went to throw himself once more on the lounge chair by the window, and with his hands interlocked behind his head he began to think.

No one yet suspected a thing, but for him, now, there was no doubt: a few more months of desperate measures, then collapse, ruin.

For nearly twenty days, he had not set foot outside that office, as if there, from the drawers of his desk or the great ledger books, he expected some idea to show its face. Bit by bit, however, despite all his efforts, the violent, impotent tension of his mind slowed, his will failed him; and he became aware of it only when he ultimately found himself lost and absorbed in strange thoughts, far from his relentless torment.

With growing exasperation, he again began to rue his blind, spineless obedience to his father's wishes, which had plucked him from his preferred study of mathematical sciences, and his passion for music, and hurled him into that insidious, turbid sea of commercial affairs. After so many years, he again experienced that piercing anguish he had felt upon leaving Rome. He had come to Sicily with a doctorate in physical and mathematical sciences, a violin, and a nightingale. Blessed ignorance! He had hoped to continue with his preferred studies, and his preferred instrument, in whatever scraps of time his father's complex affairs left him to spare. Blessed ignorance! Only once, around three months after his arrival, had he removed the violin from its carrying case, only to replace it, as if interred in a worthy tomb, with the dead, mummified nightingale.

And he still asked himself how in the world his father, so expert in his dealings, had failed to recognize his son’s complete ineptitude. Perhaps the passion he had for commerce, his desire that the old Orsani family business should carry on, was like a veil over his eyes, and he had perhaps flattered himself that, with the practice of commerce and the allure of great profits, little by little his son would have managed to adapt and develop a taste for that kind of life.

But why should he blame his father, when he had bowed to his wishes without offering even the merest resistance, without risking even the most timid observation, as if it were a pact signed and sealed since birth and no longer up for discussion? When he himself, just to deny the temptations that could arise from the idea of the much different life he had dreamed of till then, d had resigned himself to taking a wife, to marrying the one to whom he had been destined for so long: his orphan cousin Flavia?

Like all the women of that detestable land, where the men, with their labors, with the assiduous consternation of risky affairs, never found time to dedicate to love, Flavia, who could have been for him the only rose among the thorns, had set herself immediately, without protestation, as if understood, to playing the modest part of the lady of the house, so that her husband should lack nothing for comfort when he returned weary, exhausted, from the mine or the bank or the sulfur depots along the coast, where, under the scorching sun, he had attended all day to the exportation of that mineral.

His father died quite unexpectedly, and he was left the head of the company, in which he still had not yet found his way. Alone, with no guidance, he had entertained the fleeting hope of liquidating everything and retiring from commerce. But no! Almost all his capital was tied up in the extraction of sulfur. So, he resolved to carry on down that path, taking as his guide the good fellow Bertone, the bank's old clerk, in whom his father had always placed the most supreme trust.

How astray he had gone under the weight of the responsibility thrust on him so suddenly, rendered all the more grave by his remorse over having brought into the world three children whose welfare, whose very lives, were now endangered by his ineptitude! Ah, until now he had not thought of that: a blindfolded ass at the shaft of a millstone. His love for his wife and children had always pained him, living testaments as they were to his renunciation of another life; but now it poisoned his heart with bitter compassion. He could no longer stand to hear those children cry or suffer the least discomfort. He said to himself forthwith: “Why, it’s all because of me!” And there was so much bitterness left sealed up in his heart, with no means of venting it. Flavia had never even made an effort to find the way into his heart; but perhaps seeing him forlorn, distracted, and taciturn, she had never supposed that he had any thoughts in his head other than business. She too, perhaps, deep in her heart, rued the loneliness in which he left her; but she could never bring herself to reproach him, supposing that he was absorbed in complicated dealings, in the tormentuous concerns of his business.

And some nights, he saw his wife leaning on the rail of their home’s broad terrace, where the waves came close enough almost to lick at the walls.

From that terrace, which almost resembled the bow of a ship, she gazed, absorbed in the night that glimmered with stars, full of the eternal mournful lament of that infinite expanse of sea, before which men had with constructed their little homes with unflinching faith, putting their lives almost at the mercy of other distant peoples. Now and then from the port came that deep, coarse, melancholic howl of some steamboat preparing to set off. What was she thinking, standing there? Perhaps to her, too, the sea, with the lament of its restless waters, confided some dark foreboding.

He did not call to her: he knew, he well knew, that she could never be a part of his world, as they had both been forced to leave their lives behind. And there, on the terrace, he felt his eyes fill with silent tears. Thus, forever, until we die, with no change whatsoever?[5] In the intense commotion of those dismal nights, the immobility of the condition of his very existence grew intolerable, and strange thoughts came to him unbidden like flights of fancy. How could a man, knowing he has but one life to live, possibly bear to pursue a life so hateful to him? And he thought of so many other wretches consigned by fate to occupations even more bitter and hateful than his own. At times a plaintive wail, the cries of one of his children, recalled him suddenly to the present. Flavia too was broken from her reverie; but he hastened to say: “I’ll go!” He took the baby from the bed and began to pace around the room, rocking him in his arms to lull him back to sleep and at the same time almost as if to lull his own pain into dormancy. Bit by bit, as the little creature dozed, the night grew calmer for him as well, and placing the baby back in his crib he stopped a while to gaze out through the glass window into the sky, at the stars that gleamed ever brighter...

Thus did nine years pass. At the dawning of the new year, just when his financial situation had begun to grow dim, Flavia’s spending in certain areas of luxury had grown excessive; she wanted a new carriage for herself, and he found it impossible to say no to her.

Now Bertone was advising him to limit all his expenses, including, especially, household expenses.

To be sure, Dr. Sarti, his close friend since infancy, had advised Flavia to change her lifestyle, to find some source of amusement, to conquer the nervous depression that so many years of isolated, monotonous existence had engendered. Upon this reflection, Gabriele shook his head, rose from the lounge chair, and began to pace around the office, thinking now of his friend Lucio Sarti with a sense of envy and spite.

They had been students together in Rome.

Neither one could go longer than a day without seeing the other, and until quite recently that old bond of fraternal friendship had not diminished one iota. He absolutely refused to believe that the reason for such a shift was related to an impression he had had during the most recent illness of one of his children; that is, that Sarti had shown a somewhat exaggerated concern for his wife; an impression and no more, certain as he was of the rigorous honesty of both his wife and his friend.

Yet it was true and undeniable that Flavia always and completely complied with the doctor's way of thinking: in conversation, for some time and quite frequently, she would agree with a nod to what he said, she who never spoke a word at home. It gnawed at him. But if she approved of those ideas, why had she never brought it up before? Why had she never broached the subject of their children's education, for instance, if she approved of the doctor's rigorous curriculum over his own? And he had even gone so far as to accuse his wife of caring little for the children. Still, he had to say something, if she, believing in her heart that he was raising their children poorly, had remained silent, waiting for another to broach the subject.

Sarti, for his part, should never have stuck his nose in it. For some time now, it seemed to Gabriele that his friend was too forgetful: he forgot, for one thing, that he owed everything, or almost everything, to him.

Who, if not he indeed, had allayed the misery into which Sarti’s parents’ faults had thrust him? His father had died in prison a thief; he ran away from his mother, who had brought him to the neighboring city, no sooner than his powers of deduction had led him to divine to what wretched means she had turned to survive. And yet, he had plucked him from that sorry little tavern in which he had been reduced to serving and found him a position in his father’s bank; he had lent him his books, his school notes, to help him study; he had opened the way, birthed his future.

And now, look: Sarti had forged himself a secure and peaceful life with his work, with his natural gifts, without having to renounce a thing: Sarti was a man; while he... he dangled over the rim of an abyss!

Two knocks at the glass door which led to the rooms reserved for habitation recalled Gabriele from these bitter reflections.

“Enter,” he said.

And Flavia entered.

III.

She was wearing a dark blue dress that seemed painted onto her lithe and shapely figure, which made her blonde beauty stand out magnificently. On her head she wore an elegant yet simple dark hat; her gloves were still buttoned.

“I wanted to inquire,” she said, “whether you have need of your carriage today, as the bay cannot be hitched to mine, today.”[6]

Gabriele stared at her, as if she came, so elegant and graceful, from some fantastical, nebulous world of dreams, where they spoke some language he could not understand.

“Pardon?” he said. “How come?”

“Why, it seems they misdrove a nail while shoeing him, poor thing. Lame in one hoof.”

“Who?”

“The bay. Are you listening?”

“Ah,” said Gabriele, shaking his head. “What a shame, by Jove!”

“I didn't intend to upset you,” said Flavia, indignant. “I just asked to borrow your carriage. I’ll go on foot.”

And she moved to leave.

“You can take it. I have no need of it,” Gabriele hurried to add. “Are you going alone?”

“With Carluccio. Aldo and Titti are being punished.”

“Poor things!” Gabriele sighed, almost without meaning to.

It seemed to Flavia that this commiseration was some sort of reproach aimed at herself, and she begged her husband to let her do things her way.

“Why, yes, yes, if they have been naughty,” he added. “I was just thinking that, having done nothing at all, in a few short months they will have a far greater punishment fall on their heads.”

Flavia turned to glare at him.

“And that would be?”

“Nothing, my dear. A trifling thing, like a breeze or the plume of your hat. No more than the total ruination of our house. Will that suffice?”

“Ruination?”

“And poverty, yes. And worse, perhaps, for me.”

“What are you saying?”

“Why yes, perhaps even... Have I shocked you?”

Flavia approached her husband, troubled, with her eyes fixed on him, as if in doubt that he was speaking seriously.

Gabriele, with a nervous smile on his lips, replied softly, calmly, to her trepid questions, as if they were not speaking of their own ruin; then seeing his wife in a state of distress:

“Oh, my dear!” he cried. “If you had spared even a little care for me, if you had, in all these years, sought to understand how little pleasure this fine job brings me, you would not be so surprised today. Not all sacrifices are possible. And when a sorry fool is forced to sacrifice beyond his capacity…”

“Forced? Who has forced you?” said Flavia, interrupting him, as his voice had landed with emphasis on that word.

Gabriele stared at his wife, as if dazed at the interruption and the tone of defiance that she, now mastering her inner turmoil, had assumed towards him. He felt a surge of bile in his throat, and his mouth grew dry. Still, reopening his lips in the same nervous smile as before, now more wretched, he asked:

“Spontaneously, then?”

“Not I!” Flavia added forcefully, looking into his eyes. “For my part, you could have spared yourself everything, all this sacrifice. The most miserable squalor would have been a thousand times better than...”

“Be quiet!” he cried in annoyance. “Don’t you say that! You don't even know what it means!”

“Poverty? Well, what has life given me?”

“You? What about me?”

They stood there a moment, tense and incensed, one before the other, almost in shock at the reciprocal intimate loathing they had cultivated for years in secret and which now burst forth against their will.

“What right do you have to lay the blame on me?” Flavia replied impetuously. “If you say I’ve never cared about you, when have you cared about me? You throw this sacrifice in my face now, as if I had not also sacrificed, and am condemned now to serve as a reminder of the life you’d dreamed of and rejected! Is this all life was to be for me? Had I no dreams as well? You had no duty to love me. The chain that imprisoned you here, to your forced labor. Can one love a chain? And I should have been happy, is that it? That you had work, and never asked any more of you. I have never said a word. But now you have gone too far.”

Gabriele hid his face in his hands, muttering from time to time: “That too!... That too!...” And in the end, he erupted:

“And my children too, is that it? Will they come now to throw my sacrifice in my face like a useless rag?”

“You're twisting my words,” she replied, turning her shoulders.

“Why, no!” Gabriele continued with caustic rage. “I deserve no other thanks than that. Call them! Call them! I have ruined them, and they have every right to throw it in my face!”

“No!” Flavia hurried to say, overcome with tenderness for her children. “Poor little ones, they will not throw their poverty in your face... No!”

She dried her eyes, clasped her hands, and thrust them in the air.

“What will they do?” she cried. “Growing up like this...”

“Come again?” he interjected. “Without guidance, is that it? You want to throw that in my face, as well? Go, go tell them! And Lucio Sarti's reproaches, too, for good measure?”

“What does Lucio Sarti have to do with it?” said Flavia, stunned by the unexpected question.

“You parrot his words,” Gabriele pressed, pale and distraught. “The only thing left is for you to put his eye-glasses on your nose.”

Flavia drew a long sigh and, closing her eyes in quiet indignation, said:

“Anyone who set foot for a moment inside the intimacy of our home could see...”

“No, him!” Gabriel interrupted with even greater agitation. “He alone! He who grew up as his own jailer because his father...”

He halted, regretful of what he was about to say, and resumed:

“I lay no blame on him; but I will say that he was right to live as he lived, being vigilant, fearful, and rigid about his every slightest movement: he had to lift himself up under the watchful eyes of all from the poverty, the ignominy, into which his parents had thrust him. But my own children, why? Why should I have had to be a tyrant to my own children.”

“Who said you were a tyrant?” Flavia attempted to reply.

“But free, free!” he interrupted. “I wanted my children to grow up free, since I had been damned to this place, to this torment, by my father! And as a reward, I promised myself–just one reward!–that they would enjoy their freedom, at least, procured at the cost of my sacrifice, my shattered existence... pointlessly, now, pointlessly shattered...”

At this point, as if a slowly mounting agitation had suddenly burst from within him, he broke out in uncontainable sighs; then, in the middle of that strange, convulsive, almost rabid wail, he raised his trembling arms, gasping, and collapsed, bereft of his senses.

Flavia, bewildered and terrified, called for help. Bertone and another clerk came running from the bank offices. Gabriele was lifted and laid down carefully on the sofa, while Flavia, seeing his face suffused with a cadaverous pallor and bathed in the sweat of death, ranted desperately:

“What’s wrong? What’s wrong? Good Lord, look at him... Help!... Oh, it’s all my fault!” The clerk ran to call Dr. Sarti, who lived nearby.

“It’s all my fault!... All my fault!” Flavia rambled.

“No, madam,” Bertone said, holding Gabriele's head tenderly in his arms. “Since this morning... Why, indeed, for some time now... Poor boy... If you only knew!”

“I know! I know!”

“What does he need, then? For God's sake!”

And so she urged, urged for a remedy to be found. What to do? Moisten his temples? Yes... But all the better if he took some ether. Flavia rang the bell; an attendant appeared:

“The ether! The vial of ether: Go, quickly!”

“What a blow... What a blow, poor boy!” Bertone lamented, contemplating his master’s visage through his tears.

“Ruin... truly?” Flavia asked with a shudder.

“If he had only listened to me!...” Sighed the old clerk. “But he, poor thing, was not born for this life...”

The attendant returned from his errand with the vial of ether.

“In the handkerchief?”

“No, better from the vial itself! Here... here...” suggested Bertone. “Put your finger on it... Like so, so it releases a little bit...”

Lucio Sarti arrived shortly after, anxious, followed by the clerk.

Tall, with a rigid aspect that deprived the refined beauty of his almost feminine features of any grace, Sarti wore a pair of diminutive spectacles adhering closely to his keen eyes. Barely noting Flavia’s presence, he motioned everyone aside and knelt to examine Gabriele. Then, turning to Flavia, who was overflowing with exclamations and anxious energy, he spoke harshly:

“Please desist, I pray you. Let me listen.”

He undressed the patient's chest and placed his ear upon it in the vicinity of the heart. He listened for a bit; then he rose, perturbed, and patted his chest as if searching his inner pockets for something.

“Well?” Flavia asked.

He drew out his stethoscope and asked:

“Is there any caffeine in the building?”

“No... I don’t know,” Flavia rushed to reply. “I sent for ether...”

“That will be no help.”

He approached to the writing desk, scribbled a prescription, and handed it to the clerk.

“There. Quickly.”

Shortly after, Bertone too was dispatched in haste to the pharmacy for a hypodermic needle, which Sarti did not have with him.

“Doctor...” Flavia pleaded.

But Sarti, without paying her any heed, returned to the sofa. Before kneeling to reexamine the patient, he said, without turning:

“Make arrangements to take him upstairs.”

“Go, go!” Flavia ordered the attendant; then, as soon as he had gone, she clutched Sarti's arm and asked, fixing him with her eyes: “What’s wrong? Is it serious? I must know!”

“I am still not quite certain myself,” Sarti replied with forced calm.

He placed his stethoscope on the patient’s chest and positioned his ear to listen. He kept it there for some time, closing his eyes now and again, contracting his face, as if to impede the thoughts, the sentiments, that plagued him during this examination. His troubled conscience, perturbed by what he perceived in his friend’s heart, was itself in that moment incapable of mirroring those thoughts and sentiments, nor did he wish them to be mirrored, as if he feared them.

He felt like one who, left alone in a dark room with a fever, suddenly hears the wind slam open the window shutters, shattering the glass with a horrible clamor, and finds himself immediately bewildered, raving, out of bed, battling the flashing, tempestuous fury of the night. As if struggling with feeble arms to close the shutters, Sarti sought to suppress the intrusive thoughts of what was to come, so that the sinister light of a tremendous hope would not erupt within him at that moment.That very hope, which for so many years, since he was first liberated from the horrible nightmare of his mother, flattered by youthful recklessness, had become like a luminous beacon, a goal to which he felt had some right to aspire, owing to all that he had had to suffer, through no fault of his own. Back then, he had had no idea that Flavia Orsani, the cousin of his friend and benefactor, was wealthy, and that her father, upon his death, had entrusted all of his daughter’s means to his brother: he believed her an orphan adopted by her uncle out of charity. And thus, emboldened by the testimony of every act of his life, believing it could erase the mark of infamy that his father and mother had carved upon his brow, when he returned to the town with his medical degree and established himself in a respectable practice, could he not have asked Orsani, in token of the affection that he had always shown him, for the hand of that orphan, whose affection he believed he had won? But Flavia, not long after he returned from his studies, had married Gabriele, who, it must be said, had never showed any sign of affection for his cousin. Yes; and yet he took her; and without ensuring his own happiness, nor hers. Ah, the wedding had been a crime in itself and not just for him; the calamity of their three lives began that day. For so many years, as if nothing was the matter, he had attended to his friend's new family in his capacity as a doctor, on every occasion concealing beneath a rigid, impenetrable mask the anguish that the sorry intimacy of that loveless house caused him, the sight of that woman abandoned to herself, who yet through her eyes let it be known what tokens of affection she kept locked in her heart, unasked for and unsuspected by her husband; the sight of those children who grew up without paternal guidance. And he had refused even to look Flavia in the eye or accept in some word a fleeting sign from her, a proof however small that she, since childhood, had known of the affection she had inspired in him. But this proof, unsought, unwanted, had been offered on one of those occasions in which human nature shatters and rattles every imposition, breaks free of all social reins and reveals the truth, as a volcano that for so many winters has let snow fall and fall and fall upon it suddenly throws off that frigid mantle and reveals to the sun its fearsome, flaming bowels.[7] And that very occasion was a child's illness. Immersed as he was in his business, Gabriele had hardly suspected the gravity of the illness and had left his wife alone to worry over the fate of the child; and Flavia, in a moment of supreme, almost delirious, anguish had spoken, vented herself on him, allowed him to infer that she had understood everything, always, always, since the very first moment.

And now?

“Tell me, for goodness’ sake, Doctor!” Flavia insisted, exasperated, seeing him so perturbed and taciturn. “Is it quite serious?”

“Yes,” he replied, darkly, brusquely.

“What's wrong? His heart? And so suddenly? Tell me!”

“Will it do you any good to know? Scientific terminology: what would it mean to you?” But she wished to know.

“Incurable?” She asked then.

He removed his spectacles, rubbed his eyes, and then exclaimed:

“Oh, not that, not that, believe me! I wish I could graft some of my own life onto his.”

Flavia grew very pale; she looked at her husband and said, more with a gesture than with her voice:

“Be quiet.”

“I want you to know that,” he added. “But you already know that, do you not? Anything, anything that would be within my power... Without thinking of myself, of you...”

“Be quiet,” she repeated, horrified. But he pressed on:

“Have faith in me. We have done nothing deserving of reproach. He has no inkling of the wrong he has done me, nor will he ever. He will have all the care that his most devoted friend can provide.”

Flavia, anxious, trembling, did not take her eyes off her husband.

“He moved!” she exclaimed suddenly. Sarti turned to look. “No...”

“Yes, he moved,” she added, softly.

They remained there a moment motionless, watching. Then he approached the sofa, kneeled next to the patient, took his pulse, and called:

“Gabriele... Gabriele...”

IV.

Pale, still somewhat weary from all his belabored, gasping breathing as he had come around, Gabriele asked his wife to leave.

“I feel perfectly fine, now. Take it, take the carriage, and go on your errands,” he said to reassure her. “I wish to speak with Lucio. Go.”

Flavia, so as not to give him any indication of the gravity of his affliction, feigned to accept the invitation: she begged him in any case not to overexert himself, took her leave of the doctor, and returned to the house.

Gabriele remained for a moment engrossed, gazing in the direction she had left; then he rested a hand on his breast, on his heart, and keeping his eyes fixed in that direction, he muttered:

“Here, is that right? You were listening... I... What a funny thing! I felt like that gentleman... What was his name?... Lapo, yes: that little man with the glass eye, had tied me down here, and I couldn’t free myself; you laughed and said: Insufficiency... Is that right?... Insufficiency of the aortic valve...”

Lucio Sarti, hearing those words he had spoken to Flavia repeated, grew pale. Gabriele shuddered, turned to look at him, and smiled:

“I heard you, you see?”

“What... What did you hear?” Sarti stammered, with a squalid smile on his lips, struggling to contain himself.

“What you said to my wife,” Gabriele replied calmly, again seeming to stare off at nothing in particular. “I saw... I seemed to see, as if with open eyes... yes! Tell me, I pray you,” he added with a shiver, “tell it to me straight, no pathetic lies: how much longer do I have to live? The shorter, the better...”

Sarti stared at him, struck by astonishment and dismay, troubled especially by that calmness. Rebelling with supreme force against the anguish that rendered him speechless, he spat,

“Why, what has gotten into your head?”

“An idea!” Gabriele cried, with a glint in his eye. “By God!”

And he leapt to his feet. He rushed to open the entryway that led to the bank offices and called in Bertone.

“Listen, Carlo: if that little man who showed up this morning comes back, keep him here. In fact, send for him straight away, or better yet: go yourself! Quickly, eh?”

He closed the door behind him and turned to look at Sarti, rubbing his hands together mirthfully:

“You sent him to me. Ah, I’ll grab him by that flapping hair of his and stick him right here between you and me. Tell me, explain to me briefly how it's done. I want to be certain. You are the company doctor, correct?”

Lucio Sarti, tormented by the terrible notion that Orsani had understood all that he had said to Flavia, was stunned by his sudden resolve: it seemed to him to come out of nowhere, and he exclaimed, momentarily relieved of a great burden:

“But this is madness!”

“No, why?” Gabriele replied promptly. “I can pay for four or five months. I don't have long to live, I know it!”

“You know?” said Sarti, forcing himself to laugh. “And who has given you such an infallible prognosis? Come on! Get out of here!”

Somewhat heartened, he thought it might be some kind of prank to make him reveal what he thought of his health. But Gabriele, assuming a solemn air, set himself to discussing his imminent, inevitable doom. Sarti felt a chill run through him. Now he saw the cause and reason for that unexpected resolve, and he felt himself caught in the snare, a terrible pitfall, that he himself had unknowingly laid that morning in sending to Orsani that inspector from the Insurance Agency, of which he was the doctor. How to tell him, now, that he could not in good conscience lend his aid, without at the same time letting on to the desperate gravity of his illness, which had revealed itself all in one stroke?

“But you.. with your condition,” he said, “you could still live quite some time, some time, my friend, as long as you take a little care...”

“Care? How?” cried Gabriele. “I'm ruined, I tell you! But you maintain that I could still live for some time? Very well. In that case, if that is true, you will have no difficulty...”

“And your calculations, then?” Sarti observed with a smile of satisfaction, and added, almost out of pleasure in clarifying for himself that felicitous loophole, which had come to him out of the blue: “If you say that you could only pay up for three or four months...”

Gabriele stood for a moment lost in thought.

“Enough, Lucio! Don't try to pull one over on me, don't lay this stumbling block at my feet to dishearten me, to prevent me from doing something you disapprove of, is that it? And in which you wanted no part, whether you bear little or no responsibility...”

“You're mistaken!” Sarti blurted. Gabriele smiled bitterly then.

“So, it is true,” he said. “So, you do know that I am doomed, not long now, perhaps even before the time allotted me. But yes, I heard you. Enough, then! All that remains is to save my children. And I will save them! If I am mistaken, you had best believe that I shall find a way to procure my own death, in private.”

Lucio Sarti rose, heaving his shoulders, and his eyes roamed in search of his hat.

“I can see you are not in your right mind, my friend. Allow me to take my leave.”

“My right mind?” said Gabriele, grasping him by the arm. “Come here! I tell you I'm talking about saving my children! Do you understand?”

“But how do you mean to save them? You seriously mean to save them like this?”

“With my death.”

“Madness! Honestly, do you expect me to stand here and listen to you say such things?

“Yes,” Gabriele said forcefully, without releasing his arm. “Because you have to help me.”

“To kill you?” Sarti asked, with a derisory tone.

“No. As to that, if necessary, I will see to it myself...”

“So then... To defraud? To... To steal, pardon?”

“Steal? Steal from who? Steal for me? We're talking about an agency established for the express purposes of exposing itself to such risks... Allow me to finish! What they lose on me, they will earn back on a hundred others. But call it theft... if you must! I will settle my accounts with God. You need not concern yourself.”

“You’re mistaken!” Sarti repeated more forcefully.

“Might that money find its way to you, perhaps?” Gabriele asked him them, locking his eyes with Sarti's. “My wife and those three poor innocents will have it. What would you be responsible for?”

Suddenly, under Orsani's keen glare, Lucio Sarti understood everything; he understood that Gabriele had heard well and hastened now to be first to accomplish his goal: that is to put an insurmountable obstacle between him and the wife, making him an accomplice in that fraud. Indeed, as the company doctor, after declaring Gabriele now of sound body, he could no longer lay claim to the widow Flavia, to whom the insurance payout, the fruit of his fraud, would be disbursed. The Agency would undoubtedly take action against him. But why so much and such fierce hate even from beyond the grave? If he had heard everything, he must also know that there was nothing, nothing, for which to reproach his wife or himself. Why, then?

Enduring Orsani's gaze, resolving to defend himself to the end, he asked with a shaky voice:

“My responsiblity, you say, to the Company?”

“Wait!” Gabriele interrupted, as if stunned by the dazzling effectiveness of his reasoning. “You must remember that I have been your friend long before you became the doctor of this Company. Correct?”

“It's true... But...” Lucio stammered.

“Don't worry! I don't mean to throw anything in your face; but only to remind you that, in this moment, in these circumstances, think not just of me, as you should, but of the Company...”

“Of my error!” Sarti replied darkly.

“Many doctors err!” Gabriele immediately rebutted. “Who could blame you? Who could say that in this moment I am not sound? I'm the picture of health! I may die in five or six months. The doctor cannot foresee that. You cannot foresee it. On the other hand, your error, for you, for your conscience, lies in your love for your friend.”

Crushed, with head bowed, Sarti removed his spectacles, rubbed at his eyes; then, dubiously, with eyelids half closed and voice trembling, he attempted one final defense:

“I would prefer,” he said, “to demonstrate it otherwise, what you call my love for my friend.”

“And how would that be?”

“Do you remember where my father died and how?”

Gabriele stared at him, stunned. He murmured to himself:

“What does that have to do with it?”

“You are not in my position,” Sarti replied, resolute, bitter, replacing his spectacles. “You cannot judge. Remember how I grew up. I pray you, allow me to act justly, without regrets.”

“I don't understand,” Gabriele replied coldly, “what regret you might feel at helping provide for my children...”

“By harming another?”

“I never meant to do such a thing.”

“But you know you are doing it!”

“I know something else that is far closer to my heart, and should also be close to yours. There is no other solution! For the sake of your scruples, which I cannot share, you mean to reject this means offered to me spontaneously, which indeed you, you yourself, have thrown at me?”

He moved to the entryway to listen, gesturing at Sarti not to respond.

“Wait, he’s coming!”

“No, no, it's useless, Gabriele!” Sarti then cried with resolve. “Do not make me do it!”

Orsani grabbed him by the arm:

“Enough, Lucio! It's my only remaining salvation.”

“Not like this, not like this!” Sarti protested. “Listen, Gabriele: Let me make this solemn oath before you. I promise you that your children...”

But Gabriele did not let him finish:

“Charity?” he said with a sneer.

“No!” Lucio replied promptly. “I would give them all that I have received from you!”

“In what capacity? How could you provide for my children? You? They have a mother! In what capacity? Not out of simple gratitude, am I right? You lie! There is another reason for your recusal which you cannot confess.”

That said, he grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him, ordering him to speak softly and demanding to know to what degree he had dared to deceive him. Sarti struggled to free himself, defending himself and Flavia from the heinous accusation and still refusing to cede to such violence.

“I want to see you!” Orsani suddenly roared through his teeth.

With a leap he opened the door and called Vannetti. He quickly masked his extreme agitation with tumultuous mirth:

“A bonus, a bonus!” he cried, attacking the obsequious little man, “a fat bonus, Mr. Inspector, for our friend, our doctor, who is not only the Company's doctor but its most eloquent advocate. I had almost changed my mind; I didn't want to hear it... And yet, he, he persuaded me, he won me over... Give it to him, give him the medical declaration to sign right now: make it quick, he must be going. Then we will discuss the how and how much...”

Vannetti, delighted, bursting with congratulations and expressions of admiration, extracted a printed form from a folder, and repeating: “Formalities... Formalities...” handed it to Gabriele.

“Take it, sign,” he said, handing the form to Sarti, who took in that scene as if in a dream, and saw now in that petty, almost doll-like, supremely ridiculous little imp the personification of his whole wretched destiny.