“Night” (“Notte”)

Translated by Marella Feltrin-Morris

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “Night” (“Notte”), tr. Marella Feltrin-Morris. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2021.

Originally published in Corriere della Sera (August 1, 1912), “Night” was later included in the volume The Trap (La trappola, Milan: Treves, 1915) before eventually being collected as a part of Stories for a Year (Novelle per un anno) in the third Collection, A Prancing Horse (La rallegrata), published in Florence by Bemporad in 1922.

This short story articulates a familiar Pirandellian theme focusing on the isolation and loneliness of the individual subject in the modern world, a theme that resonates with the existential aspects of Pirandello’s output. The protagonist, Silvestro Noli, has moved for work and now finds himself married in a distant land, cut off from family and his native home. The theme of individual identity and existential sadness thus overlaps with a consideration of the north/south dynamic in Italy, also raising questions about the relationship of urban and rural life. However, where in Pirandello’s other stories the South, especially Sicily, is frequently depicted as the more authentic, happy, or wholesome location relative to the cold/impersonal urbanized north, here that relationship is flipped. Similar themes and dynamics can be found in the story “Far Away” (“Lontano”), among many others.

The story also has a strong descriptive visual component, as the protagonist and his reunited old friend, Nina Ronchi, go out to observe the silent night together. The theme of nature as a common ground and calming factor that both emphasizes and helps (temporarily) silence existential angst recurs in many of Pirandello’s works, from his autobiographical short story “Interviews with Characters” (“Colloquii coi personaggi”) to his last novel, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand (Uno, nessuno e centomila, 1926). The specific image of the night evaporating into dawn, which functions like a kind of visionary glimpse into another possible way of being for the characters, can likewise be seen in numerous other stories, including “Chants the Epistle” (“Canta l’epistola”), “Ciàula Discovers the Moon” (“Ciàula scopre la luna”), “The Wheelbarrow” (“La carriola”), and “The Train Whistled” (“Il treno ha fischiato”).

The Editors

After the train passed Sulmona, [1] Silvestro Noli found himself alone in the filthy second-class railcar.

He glanced one last time at the smoky little flame of the lantern that flickered and threatened to burn out as the jerky ride made the oil splash around in the concave glass screen. He closed his eyes, hoping that exhaustion from the long journey (he had been traveling for one day and one night) would let him sleep away the anguish into which he felt he was sinking deeper and deeper as the train brought him closer to his place of exile.

No more! No more! No more! How long had the rhythmic clang of the railroad tracks been repeating those two words throughout the night?

No more, no more joyful youth; no more carefree times with his friends under the busy porticos of his beloved Turin; no more comforting, warm, familiar air of his old home; no more loving solicitude from his mother; no more tender smiles lighting the protective countenance of his father.

He might never see them again, his dear old folks! His mom—his mom especially! The way she had looked to him on this last visit! Bent over, much smaller since his last trip seven years earlier. Like a toothless wax figurine. Only her eyes still sparkled. Poor, dear, blessed, beautiful eyes!

Looking at his mother and father, listening to their conversations, wandering around the rooms and glancing here and there, he had felt very clearly that life in his old home was over, and not just for him.

When he had left, seven years earlier, life had been extinguished for the others, too.

Had he taken that life with him, then? And what had he done with it? Where had his life gone? Others might think he had taken it with him, but he knew he had left it there, when he had moved. And now, not finding it anymore, and hearing others say he would no longer find anything there because he was the one who had taken everything away, he had felt, in that emptiness, the coldness of death.

With that same feeling of coldness he was now returning to Abruzzo, at the end of the fifteen-day leave he had been granted by the headmaster of the all-male high school of Città Sant’Angelo,[2] where he had been teaching art for the last five years.

Before Abruzzo he had taught a year in Calabria and then another year in Basilicata. In Città Sant’Angelo, overpowered and blinded by the burning, restless need for some affection to fill the emptiness in his life, he had been foolish enough to get married, and in doing so he had pinned himself there, forever.

His wife had been born and raised in that humid village perched high up in the mountains, with no running water, ridden with distressing prejudice, pettiness, and the gruffness and languor of drowsy, stolid small-town existence. Rather than becoming his companion, she had intensified his loneliness, making him feel, again and again, that he was ever further from the intimacy of a family that should have been his own. On the contrary, she was impervious to any thought or sentiment that came from him.

She had borne him a baby boy and—what agony! From the very first day his boy, too, had felt to him like a stranger, as if he belonged exclusively to his mother, not to him.

Perhaps his son could have become his own if he had managed to steal him away from that house, that village. And perhaps his wife, too, could truly have become his companion and he would have felt the joy of having his own house, his own family, if only he could have asked for and obtained a transfer somewhere else. But the very hope for it, even in some distant future, had been denied him. His wife had refused to leave her town even for a brief honeymoon, not even to go and meet his mother and father and other relatives in Turin. If he were ever to be transferred, rather than leave her family, she would most likely leave him instead.

And so, there he was. Growing moldy, waiting in that horrible loneliness for his spirit to slowly cake with idiocy. He had such great love for theatre, music, all the arts, that he almost couldn’t talk about anything else. He would forever thirst for them, yes, as for a glass of pure water! Ah, he couldn’t drink that heavy, raw, earthy tank water. They said it wasn’t bad for you, but for a while now he had been feeling there was something wrong with his stomach. Hypochondria? That’s right. Now he was being ridiculed, too.

His closed eyelids could no longer hold back the tears. Gnawing at his lip to keep from sobbing, Silvestro Noli pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket.

It hadn’t occurred to him that his face would be sooty from the long journey, and now, looking at the handkerchief, he felt hurt and irritated by the filthy imprint of his tears. In it he saw his life, and he bit into the handkerchief as if he wanted to tear it apart.

Finally, the train stopped in Castellammare Adriatico. [3]

Before he could get on another train for the last twenty-minute stretch, he would have to wait over five hours at the station. It was the fate of the travelers who arrived on the night train from Rome and continued on either northwards to Ancona or southwards to Foggia.[4]

Thankfully, the station had a café that was open all night, large and well lit, with tables already set. In its light and bustle, one could somehow forget the boredom and bleakness of a long wait. But the travelers’ swollen, pale, filthy, strained faces reflected a dreary anguish, an oppressive malaise, a sour loathing for life which, removed from the usual relationships and habits, revealed itself to them all as empty, foolish, pitiful.

Perhaps many, many of them had felt their hearts ache as they heard the mournful whistle of the train racing through the night. [5] Perhaps each of them was thinking that even at night human afflictions have no respite. Indeed, it is especially at night that these afflictions seem most pointless, since they are deprived of the illusions offered by the daylight. The souls of travelers are kept hanging from a sense of woeful precariousness that makes them feel lost upon the earth. And so, each of them was perhaps thinking that folly conjures up fires in those dark machines, which steam through pitch-black plains, dash over bridges underneath the stars, and wind their way into long tunnels, every so often letting out a desperate cry over having to do this—drag human folly through the night along iron rails laid out to unleash man’s restless, raging frenzy.

Silvestro Noli, having slowly sipped a cup of warm milk, got up and headed across the large room to the opposite door of the cafe. He planned to walk down the wide boulevard that traversed the sleeping town towards the beach and take in the night sea breeze.

But as he passed by one of the tables, he heard his name called respectfully by a tiny, slender lady, pale and thin, dressed in mourning clothes.

“Signor Noli...”

He stopped, perplexed, surprised.

“Signora... oh, is that you, Signora Nina? But, how...?”

It was Nina Ronchi, the wife of one of his colleagues. Noli had met him six years earlier, in Matera, Basilicata, at the technical school. He had died, yes, that’s right, he had died—he knew it—just a few months earlier in Lanciano, [6] still young. He had read the obituary in the education bulletin, and the news had taken him aback and made him sad. Poor Ronchi, he had finally found a position at the high school after so many rejections, and then, out of the blue, he had collapsed and died. Too much love, they said, for that minuscule wife that he, like a gigantic, violent, headstrong bear, always dragged along with him.

Now the tiny widow had pressed her black-trimmed handkerchief against her lips and was looking at him with dark, beautiful eyes sunk into puffy, ashen rings, as she told him, her head shaking slightly, about the cruelty of her recent tragedy.

Seeing two big tears fall from those lovely dark eyes, Noli invited her to walk with him outside the cafe, so they could talk more freely as they walked along the deserted boulevard to the sea.

Her meager, fidgety body was shuddering, she seemed to jolt along and every movement she made—with her shoulders, her arms, her very long hands almost stripped of flesh—was jerky. She started talking frenziedly, and her temples and cheeks were immediately flushed with red blotches. Out of habit, she doubled every “f’” at the beginning of words, which made it sound as if she were puffing. Oddly, because of her frantic way of talking, she constantly had to dab at the perspiration on the tip of her nose and upper lip. Her mouth would fill up so much with saliva that sometimes her voice seemed to drown in it.

“Ah, Noli, you see? Here, dear Noli, he left me here, alone, with three children, in a town where I don’t know anybody, where I had been ffor only two months... Alone, alone... Ah, what a terrible man, Noli! He destroyed himself, and he destroyed me, too, my health, my life, everything... On me, Noli, you know? He ffell and died on me... right on me...”

She was overcome by a long shiver that ended with something like a neigh. She kept talking:

“He took me ffrom my town, where I don’t have anyone left, only a sister who’s married and has her own life... What would I do there? I don’t want to be a spectacle of misery to all those who envied me back then... But here, all alone with three children, a complete stranger, what will I do? I’m desperate... I ffeel lost... I went to Rome to plead ffor some support... I’m not eligible ffor anything: he had only eleven years of teaching, so I’m only entitled to eleven months of salary: just a ffew thousand lire... They hadn’t even bothered to pay them to me! I screamed so much when I got to the Ministry they must have thought I was crazy.... Dear lady, they said, a cold shower! Take a cold shower! That’s right, I might actually go crazy... I have a constant pain here, right here, like something gnawing, pulling at the back of my head, Noli... And I’m so angry, yes, yes, I’ve been so angry... burnt inside... like a ffire, a ffire in my whole body... but instead you’re so ffresh, Noli, so ffresh!”

As she said that, in the middle of the deserted, humid boulevard, under the pale electric lampposts that were so far apart from each other they hardly brightened the night with their weak, opal-like glow, she clasped his arm and hid her face, cloaked in her black crèpe mourning bonnet, against his chest, burrowing as if she wanted to drown in it, and breaking into uncontrollable sobs.

Bewildered, dismayed, moved, Noli instinctively recoiled to shake her off of him. He realized that the poor woman, in her state of forlornness, would have clung desperately to the first man of her acquaintance who had come along.

“There, there, Signora,” he said to her. “Fresh? Yes, well, not that fresh. I already have a wife, my dear Signora.”

“Oh,” exclaimed the little lady, withdrawing immediately. “A wife? Did you get married?”

“That’s right, Signora, four years ago. I have a child, too.”

“Here?”

“Close. In Città Sant’Angelo.”

The tiny widow let go of his arm.

“But aren’t you ffrom Piedmont?”

“Yes, from Turin.”

“What about your wife?”

“Oh, no, my wife is from here.”

The two of them stopped under one of the lampposts and looked at each other with mutual understanding.

She was from the furthest edge of Italy, Bagnara Calabra. [7]

Each saw their own reflection in the other, lost in the night on that broad, long boulevard, deserted and melancholy, that headed to the sea among the sleeping villas and houses of that town so far away from their early, true loves, and yet so close to the places where the cruelty of fate had located their dwellings. And each felt, towards the other, a profound, desolate empathy that, rather than urge them to come together, persuaded them to keep apart, each in their inconsolable anguish.

They walked on in silence to the sandy beach, and approached the sea.

The night was placid, the coolness of the sea air delectable.

The sea, immense, remained invisible, but one could feel it breathe and pulsate in the black, endless, tranquil abyss of the night.

The only sight that could be glimpsed in a faraway corner, through the mist resting on the horizon, was something crimson and murky quivering above the water: perhaps the last quarter of the waning moon, enveloped in fog.

Over the beach the waves stretched and spread foamlessly, like silent tongues, leaving here and there, on the smooth, glistening sand, a few shells which, as the tide ebbed, immediately sank in.

High above, the spellbinding silence was pierced through by an intense, incessant sparkle of countless stars so bright they seemed to want to say something to the earth, across the deep mystery of the night.

The two of them continued walking for a long while, still in silence, on the damp, yielding sand. Each of their footprints lasted only a brief moment: one disappeared as soon as another one formed. The only sound was the rustling of their clothes.

A rowboat, gleaming white against the darkness, had been pulled ashore and laid upside down on the beach. Drawn towards it, they sat down, one at each end, and remained a while longer in silence watching the glasslike waves spread placidly over the gray, spongy sand. Then the woman raised her beautiful black eyes towards the sky, and the light of the stars bared to him the pallor of her tormented brow, of her throat most certainly choked with anguish.

“Noli, don’t you sing anymore?”

“Me... sing?”

“Sure, you used to sing once, on ffair nights... in Matera, don’t you remember? You did, I can still hear it, the sound of your soft, harmonious voice... you used to sing countertenor... it sounded so sweet, so passionate and gentle... You don’t remember?”

At that sudden recollection, something stirred at the very core of his being; in his hair, down his spine he felt the shivers of an ineffable tenderness.

Yes, yes, it was true: he used to sing, back then... all the way down there, in Matera, he still had in his soul the sweet, passionate songs of his youth, and on clear nights, walking with one friend or another under the stars, those songs would pour again from his lips.

It was true, then, that he had carried that life with him from his father’s house in Turin; and so he must still have had it down in Matera, if he used to sing... next to this poor little friend, with whom he had probably flirted a bit during those long-gone days, not meaning anything, just an affinity between them, nothing equivocal... just his need to feel, next to him, the warmth of a little affection, the amiable tenderness of a female friend.

“Do you remember, Noli?”

His eyes fixed on the emptiness of the night, he whispered:

“Yes, yes, Signora... I remember...”

“Are you crying?”

“I’m remembering...”

They were silent again. Staring into the night, they both felt their unhappiness almost dissolving, it was no longer just their own unhappiness, it belonged to the whole world, to every being and every object, to that dark, sleepless sea, to those stars glimmering in the sky, to all life that has no answers as to why one must live, love, and die.

The cool, placid darkness, dotted with so many stars and stretched out above the sea, enfolded their grief, which radiated into the night and pulsated with those stars and those waves that washed up over and over, slowly, softly, against the silent beach. The stars, too, as they cast their flashes of light into the abyss of space, asked why; the sea asked it with its tired waves; and so did the tiny shells scattered here and there on the sand.

But little by little the darkness started to disperse, and the first pale light of dawn began to spread coldly over the sea. The grief of those two leaning against the sides of that rowboat upturned on the sand was stripped of any arcane, gauzy, almost velvety substance. It came into focus, stark and bare, like the features of their faces in the uncertain, squalid early morning light.

He felt drawn in by the familiar triviality of his nearby house, where he would soon be; he could see it, as if he were already in it, with all its colors and details, his wife and child eager to welcome his return. And she, too, the little widow, no longer saw her fate so dark and desperate: she had several thousand lire, which would guarantee her livelihood for some time. She would find a way to provide for her future and for that of her little ones. She fixed her hair over her forehead and said to Noli, smiling:

“I must look such a mess, my dear ffriend, isn’t that right?”

They both started walking back to the station.

In the most profound recesses of their souls the memory of that night was now sealed. But perhaps, who knows, it might reappear some day in their distant remembrance, with that placid, dark sea and those quivering stars, like a gleam of unfathomable beauty and unfathomable bitterness.