“Moon Fever” (“Male di luna”)

Translated by Steve Eaton

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “Moon Fever” (“Male di luna”), tr. Steve Eaton. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2021.

This story originally appeared on September 22, 1913 in the Corriere della Sera. It was then included in The Two Masks (Le due maschere) published by Quattrini in Florence in 1914 and later in Tu ridi (You Laugh) when the collection was renamed and abridged for the 1920 Treves publication in Milan. In that 1920 collection, “Moon Fever” appeared under the revised title “Quintadecima.” In 1925, “Moon Fever” was included in Stories for a Year as part of the collection From Nose to Sky (Dal naso al cielo).

In “Moonsickness,” Pirandello explores themes of superstition and local gossip and the ways these impact personal relationships; narrating the story of young Sidora, who discovers her husband’s lycanthropy on their twentieth wedding night, he brings them to a head. The man staring at the moon can also be seen as a metaphor for the human experience. Under the spell of an ambivalent lunar light, the characters struggle with opposed feelings of lust and desire, along with confusion and doubt. In fact Pirandello loved to dramatize and envision the moon as a thematic element in his work (for example, the stories “A Horse in the Moon,” “Ciaula Discovers the Moon,” “Wedding Night,” “The Jar,” but also famous plays like Six Characters in Search of An Author and The Mountain Giants). The moon is used not only to highlight the humorous relationship between man and nature but also to create a visual metaphor representing the fracture between the social self and the inner self.

“Moon Fever” was one of the four short stories by Pirandello that served as source material for the 1984 movie Kàos, directed by the Taviani brothers.

This translation is a slightly revised version of the one published in the journal Metamorphoses (Fall 2017, Smith College; Thalia Pandiri, editor) under the title “Moonsick.”

The Editors

Batà sat all hunched over on a bundle of hay in the middle of the farmyard.

Now and then Sidora, his wife, turned to look at him anxiously from the doorway in which she was sitting, her head leaning on the doorframe, her eyes half closed. Then, oppressed by the intense heat, she would turn to gaze out at the distant blue strip of sea, as if hoping, now that sundown was approaching, that a breath of air would rise up and lightly wash over her, from across the naked fields pocked with stubble.

It was so hot that, above the hay remaining in the yard after the threshing, you could see the air trembling as if heated by coals.

Batà would take a straw from the bundle on which he has sitting and listlessly slap his hobnailed boots with it. It was a pointless gesture. The stalk of hay snapped with the first strike. And Batà remained morose and absorbed, staring at the ground.

There was such a suffocating oppression in the gloomy, motionless radiance of the torrid air that this idle gesture, stubbornly repeated by her husband, brought on an insufferable irritation in Sidora. In truth, every act of that man, even just the sight of him, brought on that irritation, which she struggled to repress each time.

Married to him for just twenty days, Sidora already felt undone, destroyed. Inside and all around herself she was aware of a strange emptiness, heavy and excruciating. And it seemed almost unreal to her that she was led there just a short while ago, to that isolated old farm, house and stall together, in the midst of that desert of stubble, without a tree in sight, without a thread of shade.

There, just twenty days ago, barely smothering tears and disgust, she had abandoned her own body to that taciturn man, who was about twenty years older than her, and who now seemed to be weighed down with a sadness more desperate than hers.

She recalled what the women of her neighborhood said to her mother, who had announced the marriage proposal:

"Batà! Oh Lord, I wouldn't give him one of my daughters."

Her mother believed that they said this out of jealousy, because by her standards Batà was well off. And the more she persisted in telling them so, the more they, with an afflicted air, showed themselves reluctant to share her satisfaction with the good fortune that had befallen her daughter. No, to be fair, nothing bad was said about Batà, but nothing good either. Always holed up out there, on his distant piece of land, no one knew how he lived; he was alone, like another animal in the company of his animals, two mules, an ass and his watchdog, and he certainly had a strange air about him, grim and sometimes irrational.

There was another reason, perhaps the stronger one, for which her mother had insisted in giving her to that man. Sidora remembered that reason as well, even though it came from so far away, as though from another life, but still sharp, precise. She saw a pair of lips, cool and clever as two petals of a carnation, open up into a smile that made her quiver and made all the blood in her veins tingle. Those lips belonged to her cousin Saro, who in his love for her didn't know how to find the strength to turn serious, to free himself from the company of his sorry friends, to strip her mother of every pretext she had for opposing their marriage.

Oh sure, Saro would have made a terrible husband, but what kind of husband was this one, now? The worries that doubtless she would have had with the other one—weren’t they perhaps preferable to the anguish, the disgust, the fear that this one aroused in her?

Batà finally straightened up, but as soon as he was on his feet, nearly overcome by dizziness, he spun half a turn; his legs, as if hobbled, gave way; he struggled to stay up, arms in the air. A moan, almost of rage, escaped his throat.

It terrified Sidora to see this, but with his arms he motioned her to stay put. A continuous stream of saliva prevented him from speaking. Gasping, he held it down; he struggled not to sob, a horrible gurgling in his throat. And his face was blanched, dimmed, bloodless, the eyes veiled and unfocused, and behind their lunacy you could make out a fear that was almost infantile, still aware, limitless. With his hands he kept on motioning to her to hold on, and to not be afraid, and to stay away from him. Finally, with a voice no longer his own, he said:

“Inside. Lock yourself inside…good…don’t be afraid. If I knock, if I shake the door and scratch it, and shout…don’t be afraid. Don’t open it, no matter what. Go! Go!”

“But what’s wrong with you?” cried Sidora, shaken.

Batà moaned again. He was completely shaken by a powerful convulsion which seemed to multiply his arms and legs; then, flinging an arm up to point to the sky he shouted,

“The moon!”

Sidora, turning to run to the farmhouse, did in fact spy the full moon, heated, purplish, enormous, just emerging from the ashen heights of Crocca [1].

Locked inside, holding herself tightly as if to keep her limbs from breaking away from the constant, growing, unconquerable trembling, moaning as well, crazed with terror, she soon started to hear the howling, long and feral, from her husband, who was in convulsions outside, there in front of the door, in the grip of the horrendous lunar fever. He battered his head against the door, his feet, his knees, his hands, and he scratched it, as if his nails had become claws, and he was panting, as if frustrated in a bestial, enraged struggle, as if he wanted to tear it away, smash it, that door, and now he was barking, barking, as if his body were possessed by a dog, and once more he was scratching, foaming at the mouth, howling, and battering with his head, his knees.

“Help! Help!” she cried, though she knew that no one in that desert would hear her cry, “Help! Help!” and she pushed against the door with her arms, out of fear that at any moment, despite the many boards propped up against it, it would give way to the ceaseless, savage, tenacious violence, to that blind howling fury.

Oh, if she were able to kill him! Desperate, she turned, on the point of looking for a weapon in the room. But through the grating of a window, high up in the front wall, the moon appeared once more, now clear, rising in the sky, flooding it with a lunar dawn. At this sight, as if suddenly struck by the contagion of the fever, she let out a great shriek and fell backward, unconscious.

When she came to, still dazed, she didn’t understand why she had been thrown to the ground like that. The bolts across the door brought back her memory and immediately the silence which now reigned outside terrified her. She rose to her feet and approached the door trembling, putting her ear against it.

Nothing and still nothing.

Immediately she ran to the box beneath the bed; she dragged it out; she opened it; she pulled out a light cloak; went back to the door; listened again for a long stretch, then hurriedly, silently, lifted away the boards one by one and silently lifted the bolt, the shaft; she opened the door just a hair, peering through the crack at the ground outside.

Batà was there. Slumped like a dead animal, face down in his spittle, dark, swollen, arms splayed. His dog, crouching nearby, kept watch over him, under the moon.

Sidora went outside holding her breath, closing the door very slowly, making a fierce gesture at the dog not to move from there, and carefully, with wolf-like steps, with the cloak under her arm, took flight into the countryside toward her hometown, still in the middle of the night, all lit up by the brightness of the moon.

She arrived home, at her mother’s house, just before dawn. Her mother had risen a little earlier. The hovel, dark as a cave at the end of a narrow alley, was barely relieved by an oil lamp. Sidora appeared, utterly disheveled, throwing herself inside, wild, out of breath.

Seeing her daughter at that hour, in that state, the mother raised a cry that brought all the neighboring women running, oil lamps in hand.

Sidora began to cry loudly, and as she cried, she tore at her hair, pretending to be incapable of speech, the better to show her mother and the neighbors, and to let them gauge, the enormity of what had happened to her, the fear that possessed her.

“Moon fever! Moon fever!”

Superstitious terror of that obscure ailment seized the women upon hearing Sidora’s tale.

Ah, poor daughter! That man was not natural, they said to her mother, that man had to be hiding some sort of terrible defect; none of them would have given their own daughter to him. Barking, eh? Howling like a wolf? Scratching at the door? Lord, how frightening! How was she not killed, poor girl?

The mother, slumped in a chair, done in, with her head and arms dangling, said in a moaning chant, “Oh my daughter! Oh my daughter! Oh my poor little ruined daughter!

Towards sunset, pulling along his two mules by the halter, Batà presented himself in the alley, still swollen and livid, depressed, defeated, dazed.

At the clopping of the mules on the cobblestones of that alley which the August sun heated like an oven, and which blazed with reflections off the stones, all the women, with gestures and cries of fear, retreated with their chairs in a hurry into their little homes, and stuck their heads out of the entryways to spy and nod to each other.

Sidora’s mother appeared in the doorway, proud and trembling all over with rage, and she began to cry:

“Go away, bad man! You have the nerve to show up again here before me? Go away! Go away! Murderous traitor, you have ruined my daughter! Go away!”

And she kept braying like this for a while, as Sidora cried, huddled in a corner, pleading with her mother to defend her, to not let him in.

Batà listened to the threats and vituperations with his head bent. They touched him: he was at fault, he had hidden his disease. He had hidden it because no woman would have taken him, if he had confessed it beforehand. It was fair that now he paid the price for his guilt.

He kept his eyes closed and bitterly shook his head, without moving a step. Then his mother-in-law slammed the door in his face and bolted it shut. Batà stayed for a while, head bent, before that closed door, then turned and caught sight of so many bewildered and alarmed eyes spying on him from the doorways of the other huts.

Those eyes saw the tears on the face of the reviled man, and then alarm turned into pity.

First, one of the more courageous housewives set out a chair for him; the others, by twos and threes, came out and gathered around him. And Batà, after having thanked them with silent nods, began very slowly to relate to them his misfortune: that since childhood his mother, gone to work in the fields, sleeping in the farmyard under the stars, would leave her baby exposed to the moon all night long; and all that night, the poor innocent thing, belly up, his eyes wandering, would play with the beautiful moon, wiggling his little arms and legs. And the moon had “cast a spell” over him. The spell however had slept inside him for years and years, and it was only a little while ago that it had reawakened. Every time the moon was full, the fever overcame him. But the sickness affected only him; it was enough for others to watch over him: and that was simple to do, since it happened at fixed intervals and he would feel it coming on and warn someone; it lasted only one night, and that was it.

He had hoped that his wife would be more courageous; but since she was not, things could be handled like this: every time there was a full moon, she could come to town to stay with her mother, or her mother could come out to the farm, to keep her company.

“Who? My mother?” cried Sidora, jumping up at this point, flushed with rage, her eyes ferocious, flinging open the door behind which she had been eavesdropping. “You’re crazy! Do you want to frighten my mother to death as well?”

At that her mother also emerged, nudging her daughter with an elbow and urging her to stay calm and quiet inside the house. She approached the cluster of women, now filled with sympathy, and began to confer with them, and then with Batà alone.

From the doorway Sidora, upset and consternated, followed the gestures of her mother and her husband; and as it seemed to her that they were quite warmly making some promise to each other which the mother welcomed with evident pleasure, she began to shriek,

“Lord no! Forget it! Are you cooking something up between yourselves? Useless! It’s useless! It’s up to me!”

The neighboring women motioned emphatically for her to be quiet, to wait for the conference to finish. Finally, Batà bid goodbye to his mother-in-law, left one of the two mules in her care, and thanking the good neighbors, leading the other mule by the halter, left.

“Hush, fool!” said the mother immediately, softly, to her daughter, going back inside. “When the moon comes around, I’ll go up there, with Saro…”

“With Saro? Batà told you that?”

“I told him that, hush! Yes, with Saro.”

And, lowering her eyes to hide her smile, pretending to dry her toothless mouth with the corner of a kerchief she kept on her head, tied under the chin, she added,

“Maybe we have some other men besides him among our relations? He’s the only one who can give us help and comfort. Hush!”

And so, at dawn the next morning, Sidora departed for the countryside on the mule left behind by her husband.

She thought of nothing else, for the entire twenty-nine days that elapsed before the next full moon. She watched that moon little by little diminish and rise always later, and such was her desire that she would have speeded up the waning phases; then for a few evenings she didn’t see it anymore; she finally saw it again, soft, slender in the still-twilit sky, and little by little it began once more to grow ever larger.

“Don’t be afraid,” Batà told her, sadly, seeing her with her eyes ever fixed on the moon. “There’s still time, there’s time! The trouble starts when it loses its horns…”

With these words, accompanied by an ambiguous smile, Sidora felt a chill and looked at him stunned.

Finally, the evening arrived that was so longed for as well as so feared [2]. The mother arrived on horseback with Saro two hours before moonrise.

Batà remained curled up in the farmyard like the last time and didn’t even lift his head in greeting.

Sidora, beside herself with emotion, signaled her cousin and mother not to say anything to him and led them into the farmhouse. The mother immediately started snooping around in a dark little side room, where old farm implements were heaped, hoes, sickles, saddles, baskets, saddlebags, next to the big room which also housed the animals.

“You’re a man,” she said to Saro, “and you already know what it’s like,” she said to the daughter; “I’m old, I’m more afraid than anyone, and I’m going to hide myself in here, dead silent and all alone. I’ll lock myself inside nice and tight, and he can be the wolf outside.”

All three of them went out and spent a good while conversing in front of the farmhouse. As the shadows crept little by little across the countryside, Sidora threw glances ever more ardent and provocative. But during the meeting Saro, though lively as usual, spirited and good-humored, little by little felt himself growing pale, his smile turning to wax, his tongue becoming dry. As if there were thorns on the low wall on which he was sitting, he fidgeted continually and swallowed with difficulty. And gradually he raised his eyes to look across at that man waiting for the fever to attack; he even stretched his neck to see whether from behind the Crocca heights he could yet make out the fearful face of the moon.

“Nothing yet,” he said to the two ladies.

Sidora responded with a lively gesture of indifference and continued, laughing, to provoke him with her eyes.

It was because of those eyes, by now almost shameless, that Saro began to experience horror and dread, even more than from the man curled up there, waiting.

And he was the first to leap up and go flying inside the farmhouse, as soon as Batà let out a first groan of warning and with his hands signaled to the three to lock themselves inside immediately. Oh with such a fury did Saro apply himself, installing one buttress after another, while the whimpering old woman burrowed into the storeroom, and Sidora, irritated, crestfallen, kept telling him, in an ironic tone,

“Easy, easy…don’t be upset…You’ll see that it’s nothing.”

Oh, it’s nothing? Nothing? With his hair plastered on his forehead, at the first howls from the husband, at the first head-butts, the first kicks on the door, the first scratching and scraping, Saro, drenched in cold sweat, chills running up his spine, eyes bulging, was trembling like a leaf. Was that woman over there crazy? While her husband, outside, was creating this tempest at the door, here she was, laughing, sitting on the bed, wiggling her legs, holding out her arms to him, calling him:

“Saro! Saro!”

Yes, what? Angry, indignant, Saro leaped into the old woman’s storeroom in a single bound, grabbed her by an arm, dragged her out, pushed her down to sit on the bed next to her daughter.

“Here,” he cried. “This girl is crazy!”

And in retreating towards the door, he also saw, through the grating of the high window in the front wall, the moon that, though it seemed from out there to inflict so much illness on the husband, from in here seemed to be laughing, blissful and impudent, at the failed revenge of the wife.