“Prudence” (“Prudenza”)

Translated by Patricia Santos

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “Prudence” (“Prudenza”), tr. Patricia Santos. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2023.

“Prudence” (“Prudenza”) first appeared in the literary journal Il Marzocco on March 17, 1901. It was later included in the 1902 miscellany of selected stories When I Was Crazy … (Quando ero matto …). In 1938, the story became part of the Appendix (Appendice), the collection gathering those tales that Pirandello initially decided not to include in Stories for a Year.

A story situated at the boundary between autobiography and self-exploration, “Prudence” explores themes of identity, self-discovery, and deception. The title of the story can be seen as making reference to the Roman goddess Prudentia.[1] But the focus of the story is actually a moment of imprudence, perhaps, where the first-person narrator determines to make a major life change that is symbolized or given concrete form in the decision to shave his beard and cut his hair. This change, which represents the decision to take on a new job, leave his old lover, and embrace a new life or new sense of self, thus plays on a familiar Pirandellian trope where identity is tied to a person’s physical features, and where changing those features represents casting off an old identity in search of a new one. In his novel The Late Mattia Pascal (Il fu Mattia Pascal, 1904-5), for instance, this theme is explored at great length. Likewise, in Pirandello’s final novel, One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand (Uno, nessuno e centomila, 1926), the protagonist offers intense existential reflections tied to cutting his beard and seeing his face in a defamiliarized reflection that does not represent the self he used to know. Such moments of defamiliarization also occur in other stories, such as "Best Friends” (“Amicissimi,” 1902), where seeing oneself in the mirror is the moment at which one discovers the transitory and unfixed nature of self-identity.

The Editors

April 12, 1891 was a memorable date for me.

I had been thirty-four years old for about a month. For some time, I had noticed on my face, and precisely at the corner of my eyes and on my forehead, certain faint lines that I felt could not yet be called wrinkles. I believed that my age at least could allow me to not call them wrinkles. Momentary ripples of the skin, which–under the action of thought, laughter, habitual posture of the physiognomy–had become permanent. But not wrinkles, no.

For some time I also noticed in my beard and within my thick and flowing poetic head of hair (poor poetry, lost with the hair, like the strength of Samson!) some... yes, white hairs, well... more than one. And I subjected myself every morning, in front of the mirror, to the same torment that was practiced by civilized people of antiquity or the Middle Ages whose names now escape me: the torture of depilation.

How many times, alas, along with a few white hairs of my beard, did I not extort from my eyes sincere tears of sharp, stabbing pain!

I was enraged with myself.

Each hair, deeply rooted, escaped from my cruel fingers, resisting my ripping two or three times. I wiped away the tears on my face, which was tensed up from the pain, and there I was again, trying more violently for the fourth time.

But the more I tore, the more I discovered day by day. “Oh, my magnificent beard, once my pride, now my torment!”

I had now reached the turning point. That daily torment was no longer bearable. Between looking old or looking ugly, I had to come to a decision in the end, absolutely not wanting to resort to the useless and filthy easy way out of dying my hair.

I must add that, in those days, vanity was joined by prudence, which is the most cordially unpleasant, the most poisonous, the most cowardly of the many, many virtues that vex mankind. Of course, as the moralists would say, what a virtue! She is the moderator of virtues, the ordinator of spirits, the teacher of morals. And they have given her three eyes on her head:[2] imagine how pretty she must be! [*]

If she had a body, I’d happily kick that virtue today! But unfortunately, at that time I was foolish enough to listen to her. Having met her on my way, I took her as my bride and immediately became my own father; I began to give myself advice and warnings and to call myself: my son.

I had been living for about three years in the company, in addition to the nine Muses, of a woman who never tired of repeating to me that she adored my long hair and beard. Good taste![**] However, for quite some time I no longer liked her at all. And I didn’t know how to rid myself of her.

A benefactor had promised me a decent job on the condition that I cut off that relationship; a pretext for so many negative comments and at least to cut my hair, since the mop of hair was not appropriate at all - he said -for the quality of the job he got me.

And so I said, having already become a father of that praised virtue, and not even remotely suspecting that the benefactor had premeditated a plan to give his daughter a, “wonderful monster in a skirt,” in marriage to me:

“Cosimo, my son, what are you doing? Have you seen the verses? Poetry is not an art that will earn you a living. You are already thirty-four years old. That woman is deadly annoying and damaging to you. The job is good: dignified and lucrative. Come, come on my son! Away with your long hair and your beard too, if you really don’t like walking around all white: prematurely, as you believe.”

Since my childhood (you can well imagine) I have never been friendly with barbers. As a matter of fact, I believed that they all hated me, and with good reason. Thus, on the morning of that memorable April 12th, I had already decided to sacrifice myself; it seemed to me that I was going to surrender myself to the discretion of an enemy. What would he do with me? I absolutely did not know how to perceive myself shaved and with short hair.[3] And as I went along, I polished and stroked my beautiful, dying beard for the last time.

I don’t know how long I wandered around, suspended, trying to choose my executioner. Not a single Barbieria in the city: all Salons, all of them, even the humblest and most cramped little shop! And for every presumptuous Parrucchiere, an anachronism dressed and shod, at least one hundred Coiffeurs, one hundred Hair Cutting’s.[4]

“Imbeciles! Impoverishers of our language!”[5]

I would pause a little, yes and no, in front of the glass doors, eagerly peering through the curtains.

“No: too much luxury! Too many mirrors! This is a salon for pretty boys... Elsewhere! Elsewhere!”

I felt disheartened and intimidated by not only those dogs, but also their clients: I felt with that mop of mine I would certainly have been an object of ridicule for them. Finally tired to death and at the height of my exasperation, having discovered (a miracle!) the modest sign for a Barbieria in a small remote square, I threw myself into the dreadful, tiny shop, frowning ferociously.

The old barber, his helper and the two customers currently under the scissors turned to look, all four at once, as if a savage had entered. After having observed me well from head to toe, the old man said to me:

“Be patient for a moment, sir. Here, take a seat.”

And he pointed me to a worn-out sofa under a wall mirror, graciously decorated with a myriad of black dots that looked like dead flies.

I noticed the gentlemen’s confidence, the familiarity with which those skinners treated their customers.

Would I be treated like this, shortly? I thought, pitying myself bitterly: Yes, but what am I going to say in the meantime? What if I said I was returning from a long journey?

From time to time the young man would give me an icy glance, scissoring at the air, as if to keep his instrument of torture from losing its appetite.

My turn finally came.

“Would the gentleman like his hair shortened a little?”

I looked right into the eyes of that young man to make him understand that I was not a man to be mocked by him, and I answered by emphasizing the words:

“I want my hair cut, not shortened. And I also want my beard shaved.”

At this explicit order, the young man became quite shocked and, as if in search of advice, glanced at his boss who, having happily prepared his victim, was ready to leave, rubbing his hands together. Certainly, the suspicion had crossed his mind that I was a shady man, and that I wanted, after some mischief, to alter my features.[6]

“Completely shaved?” he asked, perplexed.

“Well, can it be shaved in half?” I asked him, irritated.

“Obey the gentleman’s commands,” the old barber said, but more to appease me than to rebuke the helper. And then he walked away.

Without adding anything else, he then wrapped me up in the barber’s cape with little courtesy. He poured the warm water from the jug into the basin; took a pair of scissors; and... snip! he took off half of my beard.

“What are you doing?” I shouted. “I said shaved! Shaved!”

“Yes sir,” he answered, looking at me with a certain wonder mixed with pity. “But understand, if you don’t cut it first you can’t shave it ...”

And he continued to cut. I didn’t have the courage to look at myself in the mirror. He took to soaping me carelessly, rubbing all his fingers together with the brush on my face. This first operation, which seemed too intimate, lasted about a quarter of an hour. As if in the meantime his rotten mood had calmed, the young man put down the brush and asked me:

“It hasn’t been shaved in many years, has it?”

“Never!” I replied. “This is the first time.”

“And it shows, you know! Huh, we’ll need to let it soften a while with soap. In the meantime, I will sharpen the razor. In fact, I’ll sharpen two of them.”

When I saw barber’s rag resting on my shoulder, I closed my eyes and sighed.[7] But then my curiosity became stronger. Should I or should I not make new acquaintance with myself? And I looked at myself in the mirror that stood before me, with all my soul in suspense.

“Oh God,” I moaned, when half my face was already shaved. “God, how ugly I am... No, no... Damn! Too ugly... And what can I do?”

The young man tried to comfort me that little by little I would get used to it.

“Impossible! No!”

But since there was no longer any remedy, I closed my eyes. I didn’t want to deal with myself anymore; I abandoned myself to fate.

“Done!” announced the man at the end.

The first sacrifice was therefore made. I tried to look at myself in the mirror: I saw a poor mournful imbecile, whom I did not want to recognize.

“Let’s get to the hair,” continued the barber. “How do you want it?”

“Finish me off as you wish,” I answered. “I don’t care anymore.”

“Shall we do it alla Guglielmo, since that’s in fashion?”[8]

“Do it alla Guglielmo, but quickly. “

When the first strand fell on the cape, I wanted to look at it and say goodbye, without lifting my eyes towards the mirror. My poor hair! Farewell, youth! Farewell, poetry!

Meanwhile, that executioner thought I was asleep. More than once he suspended his operation to look at himself in the mirror... I don’t know, his nose or the tip of his tongue. I allowed him to do it. At a longer pause, however, I awoke to question him:

“Well?”

“There,” he responded with an air of confusion and a nervous chuckle trembling on his lips. “I gave... yes, I gave... excuse me, a... what is it called?... A slightly risky flick of the scissors... and, and I realized that it’s no longer possible to do it alla Guglielmo... Shall we do a buzzcut?”

“Whatever, I told you. As long as you do it quickly!”

“Very quickly, have no doubt. And this hairstyle is easier to maintain. Quicker and more serious.”

He went at it over and over. Those damned scissors didn’t stop for a second, and it deafened my ears. To complete the work, a company of acrobats with a cruel, out-of-tune trumpet and a thunderous bass drum descended on the square like the wrath of God. The young man could not contain himself any longer. He stretched out his neck here and there, and stood on the tips of his toes. With my eyes closed I guessed at his movements of curiosity; but, in the state of depression into which I had fallen, I could no longer find the strength to call him to his duty.

At a certain point I heard the scissors being put down, and immediately afterwards I felt something prickly roll on my head, which made me jump up on the chair. It was a black, rotating scrubbing brush.

“Finished?” I asked.

“Eh, no, sir: I wanted to see... because, you know? From this side...”

I looked him square in the face:

“Have you perhaps given another risky flick of the scissors?”

“No, sir,” he hastened to reply. “It’s a consequence of the first, you know? I believed I could fix it... But I see... I see with regret that we can’t even brush it anymore, you know!”

“And so how?” I said, struggling to restrain my anger, for fear that he might laugh when he saw the face he had created at that very hour.

“We can try... that’s it, yes; at the scissors’ tip... At any rate summer is coming… it will be comfortable for you, you’ll see... Do you want to?”

“It doesn’t matter whether I want it or not,” I answered, snorting. "You can’t just reattach the hair that you have already taken away. Hurry up instead, without looking outside.”

“No way! Please... One moment, and we’ll be done.”

Snip, snip, snip. This time I really fell asleep. How much longer did my torture last? I couldn’t say. Maybe hours and hours: an eternity! I know that at a certain point I woke up to the sound of a pair of scissors being thrown on the floor, and I saw the barber throwing himself on the sofa with his face in his hands.

“What was that?” I shouted at him. He uncovered his tear-stained face:

“Sir! I don’t know... such a thing has never happened to me.... someone has put a curse on me today... Forgive me, pardon me... I don’t know where my head is... that is, I know perfectly well: my wife is ill at home... about to have a baby...”

I instinctively brought my hands to my head... Naked! Scalped!

“And what have you done to me?” I shouted and looked at my hands.

“Nothing! Nothing!” moaned the man. "Don’t be afraid! But we have nothing left to shave, sir... Forgive me!”

I sprang to my feet, furious; I rushed at him, on the sofa, with a raised fist:

“You wretch! Were you making fun of me?”

But, in that moment, I discovered myself in the other mirror that was covered in fly-like black dots, and I remained petrified, with a fist suspended and that white cape making me look like a murdered ghost.

“Have mercy... have mercy...” he cried from the little sofa, trembling.

I tore off my cape; I grabbed my hat; and I ran away, cursing. The hat sank down to my neck. It seemed to me a mortal offense. I was about to return to the shop, fierce with anger, but I threw myself into a carriage, to avoid committing a crime, and went home.

Needless to say, my lover, watching through the peephole, wouldn’t open for me.

“Thank you, dear!” I shouted to her. "You’re right: it’s not me anymore! Goodbye forever, my dear!”

And I rushed back down the stairs, exploding in so many sneezes along the way that I lost count.