“Paper World” (“Mondo di carta”)

Translated by Marella Feltrin-Morris

How to cite this work:

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

“Paper World” first appeared in the Corriere della Sera on October 4, 1909 and was later included in the Collection The Fly (La mosca) as part of the 1923 Bemporad edition of Stories for a Year. The story would also appear years later in Volume I of the special Mondadori Omnibus Collection that Manlio Lo Vecchio-Musti and Angelo Sodini edited in 1937. 1909 was a prolific year for Pirandello, who, besides contributing three short stories to the Corriere della Sera – “Paper World”, “The Jar” (“La giara”), and “The Light in the House Across the Street” (“Il lume dell’altra casa”) – also started working on his seminal novel One, No One and One Hundred Thousand (Uno, nessuno e centomila). Though he started work on it in 1909, the novel had a long and difficult period of gestation lasting almost two decades; it was finally published in 1926. Interestingly, “Paper World” marked the beginning of Pirandello’s life-long collaboration with the Corriere della Sera, which continued until his death in 1936.

The plot of “Paper World” revolves around the tension between vision and imagination. This tension is captured by the experiences of a blind man who realizes that he has known reality through his books. Pirandello's humorous lens highlights the clash between real life and its imagined counterpart, the “reality” lived only in a "paper" world.

The Editors

Who was shouting? A crowd rushed to one end of Via Nazionale [1] and gathered around two people who were squabbling: a rascal of about fifteen and a bristly-looking man with a yellowish face like a carved melon on which glimmered a pair of oversized spectacles, thick like the bottoms of glass bottles.

Straining his thin, cracked voice, the man insisted on defending himself, and kept waving his hands, one of which brandished an ebony walking stick with an ivory knob. In the other he gripped a heavy, antique-looking tome.

The young rascal hollered, stomping on the broken pieces of a cheap clay figurine and its bronzed plaster pedestal.

Among the people around them, some burst out roaring with laughter, others frowned, still others looked on sympathetically. And the street urchins, leaning lazily against the lampposts, made mocking sounds, barking, hooting, and blowing raspberries.

“It’s the third time! The third time!” the man screamed. “Whenever I walk by reading my book, he blocks my way with his lousy figurines and forces me to crash into them. It’s the third time! He stalks me! He ambushes me! First in Corso Vittorio, then in Via Volturno, and now here.” [2]

For his part, the figurine seller protested his innocence and tried to win the closest bystanders’ support.

“Nonsense! It’s him! And it’s not true that he’s reading! He steps right on them! Either he can’t see, or he’s got his head in the clouds, or who knows what, but the fact of the matter is—

“But three times? Three?” asked the others, still laughing.

In the end, two officers, huffing and puffing, managed to make their way through the crowd. And since at their arrival each disputant started screaming even louder to prove his point, the officers decided to put an end to the spectacle and escort them both into a cab headed to the nearest police station.

But as soon as he got into the cab, the bespectacled man sat up straight and started jerking his head left and right, up and down. Then he slumped in his seat, opened his big book and buried his face in it until his nose touched the page. He looked up, dismayed, then pulled his glasses over his forehead and plunged into the book again trying to read without them. At the end of this pantomime, he fell into a terrible frenzy, his face horribly distorted with panic and desperation.

“Oh, God, my eyes! I can’t see anymore! I can’t see anymore!”

The driver stopped abruptly. The officers and the figurine seller were dumbfounded, they couldn’t tell if the man was serious or if he had gone mad. Their mouths hung open in bewilderment, a smile of near disbelief appearing on them.

There was a pharmacy nearby. A couple of people among those who had run after the car and the others who had stopped to take a peek at what was going on propped him over their shoulders and walked him inside.

He looked disheveled and deathly pale. He was moaning. After they sat him down in a chair, he started nervously bobbing his head about and rubbing his hands on his trembling legs, paying no attention to the pharmacist who was trying to check his eyes, or to all the people who kept offering words of comfort, encouragement and advice: calm down, it’s nothing, just a temporary indisposition, that fit of anger earlier must have affected your eyes. All of a sudden, he stopped bobbing his head, raised his hands and started balling them up and opening them again.

“My book! My book! Where’s my book?”

Everybody looked at each other, confused, then they started laughing. Really? He had a book with him? And the courage, with those eyes of his, to walk around reading? What, three figurines? Is that so? And who? That boy? That boy would put those figurines right in front of him on purpose? A good one, really funny!

“I’ll sue him!” shouted the man, springing up, his hands stretched out in front of him as he strained to open his eyes wide, his face a grotesque, pathetic grimace. “You all are my witnesses, I’ll sue him! He’ll pay for my eyes! Murderer! There are two officers here; take down our names, right away, mine and his. You’re all my witnesses. Officer, write down: Balicci, yes, Balicci, that’s my last name. Balicci Valeriano, yes, Via Nomentana 112, top floor. And the name of this rogue—where is he? Is he here? Detain him! Three times he took advantage of my weak eyes, of my distraction, yessir, three lousy figurines. Oh, good, my book, thank you so much, yes, I’m indebted to you. Call a cab, please. Home, home! I want to go home! Let him consider himself sued.”

He put his hands forward, trying to walk out. He staggered. They propped him up, put him inside a cab and two charitable souls took him back to his house.

That was the humorous, spectacular epilogue of a quiet tragedy that had been unfolding for many, many years. Innumerable times the eye doctor had advised Balicci to stop reading; it was the only method to slow down the course of an illness that would inevitably leave him blind. But each time Balicci had reacted to this advice with that vague smile that one puts on before some blatant nonsense.

“You won’t?” the doctor had said at last. “Then go ahead, keep reading, and let me know how that works out for you! You’ll lose your eyesight, I’m telling you! And when that happens, don’t come and say ‘Oh, if only I had known!’ because I warned you!”

Nice warning! But to him, to live meant to read! If he couldn’t read anymore, he might as well die.

From the time he had first learned how to spell, he had become completely obsessed. Cared for, through many years, by an elderly maid who loved him like a son, he would have been able to provide for himself more than adequately if the purchase of countless books, which had turned his house into an overcrowded mess, hadn’t left him in debt. When he could no longer afford to buy new books, he started reading the old ones over and over, chewing them one by one from the first to the last page. And like those animals that have evolved to take on the colors and qualities of the places and plants where they live, little by little, his face, hands, beard and hair practically turned into paper. Having descended to the lowest digits on the nearsightedness scale for years now he looked as if he were actually eating books, so close did he press his face into them.

After that terrible spell, the doctor condemned him to spend forty days in complete darkness, though by then Balicci himself doubted that such a remedy would do him any good. As soon as he was able to get out of his room, he had someone lead him to his study and walk him up to the first shelf. He felt around for a book, picked it up, stuffed his face into it, first wearing glasses and then without them, as he had done that day in the cab. Then he quietly started to cry inside the book. Taking slow steps, he walked around the large room, feeling here and there for the bookshelves. There it was his whole world! A world where he could no longer live, except to the extent that his memory would assist him.

He had not really lived his life. In all honesty he could say he had never truly seen anything: at the table, in bed, on the street, on park benches—all the time and everywhere he had done nothing but read, read, read. And now he was blind not just to the concrete reality that he had never seen, but also to the fictional reality portrayed in books he could no longer read.

The disarray in which he had always left his books, scattered around or piled up here and there on chairs, on the floor, on the coffee tables or on the shelves, now made him despair. So many times, he had vowed to tidy up that Babel a bit, to organize the books by subject… But because he didn’t want to waste any time, he had never done it. If he had, now he would feel less lost, his spirit less confused and scrambled.

He put an ad in the paper asking for someone with library experience to take on a classification project. Within two days, a young know-it-all showed up at his house and was quite surprised to find himself before a blind man who wanted his library reorganized and even insisted on giving him directions. It didn’t take long for him to come to the conclusion that the poor man must have gone mad, since every time the young assistant read off a book title to him, he would jump for joy, start crying, then have the assistant hand the book over to him so he could caress the pages and hug the book like an old friend.

“Professor,” the young man snorted, “If you keep doing this, we’ll never be done!”

“Yes, yes, here you go, here you go,” Balicci said, relenting, “but put this one over here—wait, let me feel where you put it. Good, good, right here, so I can find my way around.”

Most of them were books about travel, folklore and traditional customs, natural science, entertainment, history and philosophy.

When the project was finally completed, Balicci felt that the darkness around him had receded into less murky shadows, as if he had managed to pull his world out of chaos. And for a while he remained as if in a cocoon, nursing that world.

Leaning his forehead against the spine of the books lined up on the shelves, he now spent his days as if waiting for the printed matter to pour itself into him through that physical contact. Scenes, episodes, descriptive passages took shape in his mind with minute vividness. He could see again, in his own world, some of the details that had impressed themselves most memorably when he re-read the books: four red headlamps still lit, as dawn just started to appear over a deserted harbor with only one docked ship, its mast and ropes standing out skeleton-like against the ashen bleakness of the early light; or the top of a steep road, with two big black horses with feedbags around their heads silhouetted on the fiery backdrop of an autumnal dusk.

But he did not hold out very long in that anguished silence. He wanted his world to have a voice again, to speak to him and tell him what it was truly like instead of having to remember it in such a desultory way. He put another ad in the paper asking for a reader, male or female. A young woman showed up, quivering with puzzlement and perpetual agitation. She had spent her life until then restlessly fluttering around the world, and even the way she spoke called to mind a lost lark that keeps trying to fly, tentatively, this way and that, then stops all of a sudden furiously flapping its wings, and hops around, turning every which way.

She burst into his study, loudly announcing her name:

“Tilde Pagliocchini. And you? Ah, yes... I remember— sure, Balicci, it said so in the paper... on the door, too... O God, please, no! Listen, Professor, please don’t do that thing with your eyes. It scares me. No, nothing, nothing. Sorry, I’m leaving.”

That was her first entrance. She didn’t leave. The good old maid, with tears in her eyes, convinced her that the place was perfectly safe and proper.

“No danger?”

Danger? Never, absolutely never! He was just a little odd because of the books. That’s right, because of those darn books even she, poor old bag, could no longer tell whether she herself was a woman or a dust cloth.

“As long as you read well to him.”

Signorina Tilde Pagliocchini stared at her and pointed her finger at her own chest: “Who, me?”

She then went on to exhibit a voice that would have made heaven jealous.

But when she gave the first sample of it to Balicci, with certain inflections, modulations, sprints, slides and sudden stops, accompanied by such gestures that were as vehement as they were superfluous, the poor man clasped his hands over his head, recoiled and writhed as if to shield himself from a pack of dogs that wanted to maul him.

“No! Not like that! Not like that! Please!” he screamed.

Signorina Pagliocchini, looking as naïve as ever, asked:

“Am I not reading well?”

“It’s not that! Softly, please! As softly as you can! Almost voicelessly! Keep in mind that I used to read with just my eyes!”

“A very bad habit, Professor! Reading aloud is healthy. Otherwise, one might as well not read at all. Excuse me, but what’s the use, then? Listen—” and she would knock loudly on the book. “It doesn’t make a sound! It’s dull. Now, Professor, let’s suppose that, right at this moment, I gave you a kiss.”

Balicci froze, his face suddenly pale. “Don’t you dare!”

“No, no, don’t worry! Are you afraid I might give you one for real? I won’t! I was only saying it so you could grasp the difference. Fine, I’ll try and read almost without a sound. But Professor, I have to warn you that, when I read like that, my S’s tend to hiss.”

At this new attempt, Balicci squirmed in pain worse than before. But he realized that it would be more or less the same with any other reader, male or female. Any voice other than his own would make his world sound completely different.

“Signorina, look, do me a favor: try reading with just your eyes, without making a sound.” Signorina Tilde Pagliocchini turned and stared at him in astonishment.

“I beg your pardon? Without making a sound? But how do you mean, then? On my own?”

“Yes, that’s right, on your own.”

“On my own, great!” snapped the woman, jumping up from her seat. “Are you making fun of me? Why would I want to read your books, if you’re not supposed to hear me?”

“Here, let me explain,” answered Balicci calmly, with a bitter smile on his face. “It gives me pleasure to have someone read in my place. Perhaps it’s a pleasure you can’t understand, but I’ve already told you: this is my world. It comforts me to know that somehow it’s not empty, that someone lives in it. I will hear you turn the pages, I will listen to your focused silence, every now and then I’ll ask you what you’re reading, and you’ll tell me... oh, I’ll only need a hint, nothing more... and I’ll follow you with my memory. Your voice, Signorina, ruins everything for me!”

“But I assure you, Professor, that my voice is very beautiful!” protested the woman, quite incensed.

“I know, I believe you,” Balicci hastened to say. “I didn’t mean to offend you. But you paint it all differently for me, do you understand? Instead, I need for everything to remain unaltered, to stay just the same. Go ahead, read. I’ll tell you what you need to read. Is it a deal?”

“Fine. It’s a deal. Hand me the book.”

As soon as Balicci assigned a book for her to read, Signorina Tilde Pagliocchini would tiptoe out of the study and go chat with the old maid. In the meantime, Balicci reveled in the book he had assigned her and savored the pleasure he imagined she must be drawing from it. Occasionally, he would ask her: “Nice, huh?” or: “Have you turned the page?” As he couldn’t even hear her breathe, he pictured her completely engrossed in the reading and figured that she wasn’t replying so as not to get distracted.

“Go on, go on, keep reading...” he would then encourage her softly, almost voluptuously.

Sometimes, when she returned into the study, Signorina Pagliocchini would find Balicci with his elbows on the armrests, his face buried in his hands.

“Professor, what are you thinking about?”

“I see...” he would answer with a voice that seemed to resound from far, far away. Then, he would rouse himself from his daydreaming and sigh: “And yet, I remember they were pepper!”

“What was pepper, Professor?”

“Trees, some pepper trees along a boulevard... Over there, the third bookcase, second shelf, it may be the third-to-the-last book.”

“You want me to look for them now, these pepper trees?” snorted the young woman, in a panicked voice.

“If you would.”

As she searched, the woman would leaf furiously through the book, irritated by his admonishment to be gentle. Frankly, she was starting to be sick and tired of it all. She was used to flying, that’s right, to traveling, riding trains, automobiles, bicycles, sailing ships. Riding, living! She already felt suffocated by that paper world. And one day when Balicci assigned her to read a certain memoir of life in Norway, she could no longer restrain herself. He asked her if she liked a passage that described the Trondheim Cathedral, [3] next to which, among the trees, there is a cemetery where every Saturday night the relatives of the deceased bring offerings of fresh flowers.

“Enough! No! No!” she burst out with exasperation. “I was there, you know! And I can tell you that it’s not the way it’s described here!”

Balicci stood up, dismayed and shaking with rage:

“I forbid you to say it’s not the way it’s described!” he screamed to her, raising his fists. “I don’t give a damn if you’ve been there! It’s the way it’s described, period! It must be, and that’s it! You want to ruin me! Go away! Go away! You can’t stay here anymore! Leave me alone! Go away!”

Alone again, Balicci picked up, after groping around for it, the book that the young woman had thrown on the floor. He sank down in his chair, opened the book and caressed its creased pages with trembling hands. He immersed his face in it and rested like that for a long time, rapt in the vision of Trondheim with its marble cathedral and the cemetery where, every Saturday night the pious relatives bring their offerings of fresh flowers—just like that, just the way it’s described. One must not touch anything. The cold, the snow, those fresh flowers and the blue shadow of the cathedral. Nothing there must be touched. It was that way, period. His world. His paper world. His whole world.