“Little Hut. Sicilian Sketch” (“Capannetta. Bozzetto siciliano”)
Translated by Patricia Stumpp
How to cite this work:
Pirandello, Luigi. “Little Hut. Sicilian Sketch” (“Capannetta. Bozzetto siciliano”), tr. Patricia Stumpp. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2022.
“Little Hut. Sicilian Sketch” (“Capannetta. Bozzetto siciliano”) was Pirandello’s very first short story, composed in Palermo in 1883, when he was only seventeen years old, as the author himself reports at the end of the manuscript. The story was first published in the Gazzetta del Popolo della Domenica on June 1, 1884 and became part of Stories for a Year in 1938, when the editors placed it in the Appendix (Appendice), the supplemental tome comprising all the stories that had not been included in the previous Collections.
As the subtitle, “Sicilian Sketch” (“Bozzetto Siciliano”), suggests, the story offers a realist description of the life and heartbreak of two young lovers in a rural village in the South. The Naturalist elements in the narrative recall the verista prose of Luigi Capuana and Giovanni Verga, two prominent Sicilian writers whose works and style Pirandello admired and tried to emulate in this early phase of his literary career. The protagonists’ names themselves, Màlia and Jeli, are an evident tribute to this verista legacy. Jeli, for instance, is also the title character of one of Verga’s short stories, “Jeli the Shepherd” (“Jeli il pastore”); likewise, Màlia is the protagonist of another story of Verga’s, published in the same year that Pirandello reports having written “Little Hut,” the story “The Canary in Number 15” (“Il canarino del n. 15”) which was printed as part of Verga’s collection Through the Streets (Per le vie; Milan: Treves, 1883). While Pirandello later moved to Rome in search of a more robust literary and intellectual environment, the sirens of his native land continued to lure his imagination; his interest in the storytelling of his fellow Sicilian literati hardly ended with this first foray into the literary world. However, “Little Hut” is not just drawn from the model of these Sicilian masters but also resonates with Pirandello’s own personal experience. The father in the story, depicted in an angry and menacing form, resonates with the author’s difficult relationship with his own father, Stefano Pirandello – a resonance that makes all the more sense when we recall that he wrote the story as a teenager. Despite being the first short story he wrote, composed years before Pirandello would begin working on a collection of tales, “Little Hut” nevertheless displays characteristic tropes that emerge throughout his later work, such as the relentless force of love, the unstoppable flow of life as a surge of becoming, and a penchant for highly visual storytelling that can be linked to Pirandello’s lifelong interest in the visual arts, especially painting. Indeed, the story’s plot is fragmented, using dashes and ellipses throughout as well as asterisks to create mini-divisions, all of which produces the effect of a narrative tableaux – precisely the “sketch” style signaled in the work’s subtitle. It is thus not just an early tale but also a work prefiguring years of material to come.
The Editors
A dawn unlike any other.
A little girl emerged from the little black hut, her unkempt hair falling onto her forehead and a faded red kerchief on her head.
As she was buttoning her tattered little dress, she yawned, still half asleep, and looked: looked far away, eyes staring, as if she saw nothing.
Far, far away, a long fiery red streak entwined itself in a bizarre way with the emerald green of the trees, the wide expanse of which was lost to view in the distance.
The whole sky was seeded with little clouds of bright saffron-yellow. The child ambled along, and there it was… easing off gradually, a little hill that arose on the right opened up to her gaze the immensity of the waters of the sea.
The child seemed struck, moved, by the scene before her and she stayed to watch the little boats that flew over the waves, tinted a pale yellow.
All was silent. —The sweet gentle breeze of nighttime was still blowing, making the sea shiver, and slowly, slowly, there rose up a delicate scent of earth.
Soon after, the child turned—she wandered through that tenuous dim light, and reaching the high ground, sat down.
She gazed distractedly at the lush green valley that laughed at her from below, and she began to croon a delicate little song.
But all at once, as if struck by an idea, she stopped singing and yelled as loudly as she could:
“Uncle Jeli![1] Oh Uncle Jee…”
And a rough voice responded from the valley:
“Ehh…”
“Come up… the master wants you!...”
*
In the meantime, the child went back toward the little hut, her head down. —Jeli, still sleepy, came up the hill with his jacket slung over his left arm and his pipe in his mouth—the pipe that he always left sleeping between his teeth.
Màlia on the other hand had the face of a noble lady from a Paolo Veronese painting, and one could clearly see in her eyes the blissful simplicity of her heart.[4]
“Listen, Jeli,” said Papa Camillo, “gather some fruit because tomorrow the family is coming back from the city. —And mind you, be good!... if not… as God is my witness!...”
“Oh! Always the same story,” responded Jeli, “as if these were things to say … later… to me!...”
“In the meantime,” Papa Camillo started up again—and grabbing him by the arm led him outside the hut. “In the meantime… if you take it into your head again to… Enough. You understand me...”
Jeli was left speechless.
Papa Camillo went down into the valley.
There couldn’t have been a better opportunity, and the young man burst into the little hut.
“We’re lost!” said Màlia.
“Silly!” said Jeli, “if we can’t manage it politely…”
“Oh! Jeli, Jeli, what do you mean?”
“What, you don’t understand me? We’ll run away.”
“Run away?” said the young girl, taken by surprise.
“Or…” added Jeli—and he hung the shiny sickle around his neck…
“My God!” exclaimed Màlia, as if a shiver had run up and down her whole body.
“Tonight, mind you, at seven!” said Jeli, and he disappeared.
The girl let out a scream.
*
It was getting dark.
The agreed upon hour was drawing near, and Màlia, pale, oh so pale, with her lips like two little leaves on a dried rose, was seated in front of the door.
She looked at the verdant plain being swallowed up by the dark—and when from far away the church bells from the village sounded the Ave,[5] she prayed too.
And that solemn silence seemed like Nature’s divine prayer!
After a long wait, Jeli arrived. This time he had left his pipe behind, and he was a little heated and very resolute.
“So soon?” said Màlia, trembling.
“Fifteen minutes before, fifteen minutes after, we’re buying time either way,” responded Jeli.
“But…”
“Damn it! It’s time to put an end to all these ‘buts’… Don’t you know, my love, what’s at stake?...”
“Of course I know! I know very well…” Màlia hastened to reply, although she couldn’t adjust to his ill-advised resoluteness.
Meanwhile a faraway whistle told Jeli that the wagon was ready.
“Let’s get going!” he said. “Courage, Màliella mia! Joy is calling to us…”
Màlia let out a scream—Jeli took her by the arm, and they started running…
As he stepped onto the cart: “as fast as you can!” he shouted.
The two young people embraced and kissed each other freely for the first time.
*
When the bells tolled nine, Papa Camillo came back from the valley and whistled loudly.
The little girl came quickly and before she had reached him:
“Where’s Jeli?” he asked her. “Have you seen Jeli?”
“Master!... Master!...” she responded, her voice breathless, almost suffocating.
“What do you want to tell me? Little Mummy!” roared Papa Camillo.
“Jeli… has left… with Màliella…”
—…
And a guttural… savage sound erupted from Papa Camillo’s throat.
He ran… flew to the hut. He took the shotgun and fired into the air. The girl looked on, stunned.
The insane anger of that man was a strange spectacle. A frenetic laugh exploded from his lips and was lost in a choking gasp. —He no longer knew what he was doing… And, beside himself, he set fire to the little hut as if to destroy everything that reminded him of his daughter. —Then, shotgun in hand, he ran furiously down the wide road, where perhaps he hoped to find the lovers.
*
Into that lugubrious night tongues of fire rose up into the bloody sky…
The little black hut burned, burned and crackled, as if with its slow sputtering it wanted to say goodbye to the child who, pale, horrified, watched it, transfixed.
It seemed that all her thoughts followed the column of smoke that rose up from her modest dwelling…
The little black hut burned, it burned and crackled, and the child stood there mute, resting her gaze upon the dark ash.
Palermo ‘83
Endnotes
1. This name makes reference to “Jeli the Shepherd” (“Jeli il Pastore”), a short story by verista author Giovanni Verga (1840-1922), which was part of his 1880 collection The Life of the Fields (Vita dei campi). Verga played a crucial role in shaping Pirandello’s predilection for a naturalistic writing style in his early career. Pirandello publicly acknowledged his admiration for Verga on multiple occasions: in a speech he gave in Catania in 1920 for Verga's eightieth birthday, and eleven years later at the Italian Royal Academy in Rome for the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Verga’s 1881 seminal novel, I Malavoglia. Verga’s novel would appear in its English edition in 1890 as The House by the Medlar-Tree.
2. Likewise, the name Màlia seems to be a reference to another of Verga’s protagonists, this one, Màlia, in his story “The Canary in Number 15” (“Il canarino del n. 15”), printed in Through the Streets (Per le vie; Milan: Treves, 1883), in which the young girl suffers from a sickness that renders her unable to walk and so views life passing by her window. The name was a popular one in Sicilian verista works, as a few years later Màlia would also become the title character of a libretto and play by the other great author of the movement, Luigi Capuana. Capuana wrote the libretto for Malìa, an opera set to music by Francesco Paolo Frontini in 1891, though it was not staged until 1893 (in Bologna at the Teatro Brunetti). Interestingly, Malìa is one of the rare instances of an opera that inspired a play (1891) in the same year as the libretto, which was even translated in Sicilian dialect in 1902. Malìa is among the major plays written by Luigi Capuana and considered a staple of the verista theater.
3. The term ‘steward’ translates the Italian ‘castaldo’, a term coming from the medieval period and referring to a specific kind of administrative agent overseeing agricultural lands as a part of the feudal system. The legacy of that system in rural Sicily, years after the Unification movement (the Italian Risorgimento), is a testament to the uneven development of Italy’s economy and social and political structures in the period of modernization at the end of the 19th century.
4. Paolo Veronese (1528-1588) was the pseudonym of famous Italian Renaissance painter Paolo Cagliari. Born in Verona, he got his name from his native city. Veronese was celebrated for his superb use of color and his naturalist style of painting, which was influenced by Titian.
5. Pirandello often refers to the daily ringing of the bell in his stories. Here, the evening bell is calling the villagers to prayer.