“Requiem Aeternam Dona Eis, Domine!”

Translated by Steve Eaton

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “Requiem Aeternam Dona Eis, Domine!”, tr. Steve Eaton. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2022.

This story originally appeared in the newspaper Corriere della Sera in 1913 and was then included as a part of the volume The Trap (La trappola; Milan: Treves, 1915). In 1922 it was published as part of the Stories for a Year in the third Collection, A Prancing Horse (La rallegrata).

This story focuses on the conflict of opposing forms of power that face-off over a decision of life and death. On the one hand there is a conflict between the power of the rich, noble class and the poor villagers in a rural mountain community. At the same time, there is also a conflict between temporal power of the law, enforced by armed police, and the moral and religious power of the clergy. At stake is the right of a poor group of shepherds who work the land to bury their dead in that very land, and Pirandello’s perspective can in part be seen as offering a harsh critique of the corrupt social and political order that would deny them that right, supported by institutions such as the carabinieri who are loyal to the baron. There is also a revolutionary ethos expressed by the priest, who speaks on behalf of the poor and downtrodden villagers in a language that might seem like a resonant precursor of modern-day liberation theology – though it bears noting that the figure of the priest, too, is subject to a critical gaze in Pirandello’s prose. As such, the story can be seen not only as a realist social critique but also as an instance of Pirandello’s tendency to expose the limits of both sides of an issue, a pervasive element of his special humor (umorismo) as well as his skepticism of forms of order.

This short story served as the basis for one of the scenes in the Taviani brothers’ film, Kaos (1984), though they took liberty in adapting the source material. Their version offers a different conclusion, granting the dying old villager the right to burial in the land he so desires. The success of the villagers in the film contrasts with the unhappy ending in the story, where the police enforce the strict rule of social hierarchy and political power.

This is a lightly revised version of a translation that originally appeared in the fall 2017 issue of the journal Metamorphoses (Smith College, Thalia Pandiri, editor). We are grateful for permission to republish the story here.

The Editors

There were twelve of them in the delegation, ten men and two women. With the priest who led them, thirteen.

In the antechamber packed with other people who were waiting, they hadn’t all found places to sit. Seven remained standing, up against the wall, behind the six with seats, among these the priest in between the two women.

Those women were crying, with their mantles of black cloth pulled up to their eyes. And the eyes of the ten men, even those of the priest, glassed over with tears whenever the soft crying of the women showed signs of becoming more labored, suddenly spurred by thoughts which they could easily guess.

“All right… all right,” the priest would then caution them, under his breath, his voice also swollen with emotion.

The women would barely lift their heads, revealing eyes burned from crying, and turn around for a quick glance full of confused and furtive anxiety.

All of them, including the priest, exuded a stench of goats, mixed with a rich scent of manure, so strong that the other petitioners either screwed up their faces, disgusted, or wrinkled their noses; one even puffed out his cheeks and snorted.

But they did not take the hint. That was their odor, and they weren’t aware of it, the odor of their life among the beasts of plow and pasture, in the distant fields burned by the sun and without a rivulet of water. To keep from dying of thirst, they had to go with mules every morning for miles and miles to a murky millpond at the floor of the valley. So how could they be expected to waste any water on keeping clean? They were sweaty, too, from the long journey on foot, and the exasperation to which they were prey caused a kind of garlicky sourness to well up from their bodies like a sign of their wildness.

Even if they had taken notice of those stares, they would have attributed them to the enmity which, by now, they believed was felt by all the fine people, conspiring against them.

They came from the rocky heights of the feudal holding of Màrgari,[1] and they had been on the road since the previous day: the priest, proudly, between the two women at the head, the other ten flocking behind.

The paving stones of the roads had shed sparks all day to the joyless clatter of their hobnailed leather boots, coarse, heavy, slipping on the pavement.

On the hard faces of these farming people, bristling with beards not trimmed for many days, in their wolfish eyes staring in somber grief, they showed a grim expression of rage difficult to contain. They seemed driven by the urgency of a cruel need, from which they feared there was no escape except into madness.[2]

They had been to see the mayor the day before, and all the assessors and town councilmen; now, for the second time, they returned to the Office of the Prefect.

The Prefect, the day before, had not wished to receive them; but they, amidst cries and howls and furious gestures, imploring and threatening, had outlined their claim against the owner of the holding to his assistant counselor, who in vain had gotten himself all worked up by demonstrating that neither the mayor, nor the Prefect, nor His Excellency the Minister and not even His Majesty the King had the power to satisfy them in what they were requesting; finally, out of desperation, he had had to promise that they would get an audience with the Prefect, that morning, at eleven, with the owner of the holding as well, the Baron of Màrgari.

Eleven o’clock had passed some time ago, it was almost noon, and the baron was still nowhere in sight.

Meanwhile the door to the hall where the Prefect gave audiences remained closed even to the others in waiting.

“He’s talking to people” the ushers responded.

Finally the door opened, and out of the hall there came, after an exchange of niceties, the man himself, the Baron of Màrgari, with his big red face and handkerchief in hand, stocky, big-bellied, his shoes squeaking, together with the assistant counselor.

The six who were seated jumped to their feet, the two women raising sharp cries, and the proud priest stepped forward, shouting emphatically, shocked:

“But this… this is treachery!”

“Father Sarso!” called the usher loudly from the still-open doorway of the hall.

The assistant counselor turned to the priest:

“You are hereby summoned for the decision. Come in, just you. Stay calm, dear gentlemen, stay calm!”

The priest, agitated, upset, remained perplexed over whether or not to rush to their summons, while his men, no less agitated and upset than he, demanded, crying with rage at the injustice, which seemed obvious to them:

“What about us? What about us? What do you mean? What decision?”

Then, all together, in great confusion, they took to shouting:

“We want the graveyard!” “We’re good Christians!” “On the back of a mule, Signor Prefect, our dead!” “Like slaughtered animals!” “Rest for the dead, Signor Prefect!” “We want our graves!” “A handful of earth to throw our bones into!”

And the women, in a deluge of tears:

“For our father who is dying! For our father who wants to know, before he closes his eyes forever, that he will sleep in the grave dug for him! Beneath the grass of our land!”

And the priest, the loudest of all, with arms raised, before the Prefect’s entrance:

“And the supreme supplication of the faithful: Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine!”[3]

Ushers, guards, and employees came running from every direction towards that pandemonium, and at a command shouted by the Prefect from the doorway, violently cleared the antechamber, throwing everyone out onto the steps, even those who had nothing to do with it.

A large crowd gathered as all those howling people from the palace of the Prefecture filled the main street. Father Sarso, at the peak of indignation and exaltation, pressed by questions which rained on him from all sides, began to wave his arms like a drowning man and to signal with his head, his arms, that he wanted to answer everyone, right now… that’s right… quiet down, a little room… thrown out by the authorities… that’s right… for the people, for the people….

And he began to harangue:

“I speak in the name of God, O Christians, who stands above any law that others may boast, and is lord of everyone and all the land! We are not here only to live, O Christians! We are here to live and to die! If a human law, unjust, denies to the poor man the right to a handful of earth while he lives, upon which, placing his foot, he can say ‘This is mine!’ he cannot be denied, in death, the right of the grave! O Christians, these people are here, on behalf of another four hundred unhappy ones, to reclaim the right of burial! They want their graves! For themselves and for their dead!”

“The graveyard! The graveyard!” they cried again all together, with their arms in the air and eyes full of tears, those twelve Màrgarians.[4]

And the priest, his ardor renewed by the astonishment of the crowd, tried to raise himself up as far as he could on his tiptoes in order to overlook the crowd:

“Here, over here, look, O Christians, at these two women here... where are you? Show yourselves! Here: look at these two women whose father is about to die, who is father to all of us, our head, the founder of our village! Now he’s more than sixty, this man, now he’s dying, he went up to the lands of Màrgari and on the stony spine of the mountain raised the first house of reeds and clay with his own hands. Now there are more than one hundred and fifty houses up there; more than four hundred inhabitants. The nearest town, O Christians, is about seven miles away. Every one of these men, upon the death of their father or mother, brother or sister, must suffer the torment of seeing the corpse of the relative lashed, O Christians, onto the back of a mule, to be transported, sliding around in the casket, for miles and miles of steep travel through the rocks! And many times it has been the case that the mule has slipped and the casket has split open and the deceased been flung among the rocks and mud of the riverbed! This has happened, O Christians, because the Baron of Màrgari barbarically denies us permission to bury our dead in a spot by our own village, to be able to watch over them and care for them! Until now we have suffered this torment without protest, contenting ourselves with prayer, with beseeching this barbaric gentleman with hands joined in prayer! But now the father of all of us is dying, O Christians, our elder, who wishes only to be assured that he will be buried there, near so many homes whose hearths were first lit by him. Thus we have come here to claim a right, truly not a right of law, but of… what? What is it? I say of humanity, of hu…”

He was not able to continue. A thick knot of guards and carabinieri broke into the crowd and, after much confusion, amidst shouts and whistles and applause, managed to disperse it. A deputy grabbed Father Sarso by the arm and brought him along with the other twelve Màrgarians to the police station.

Until now the Baron of Màrgari had stayed back among a clutch of associates, wheezing as if he himself felt suffocated and crushed little by little under the weight of the public scandal of that priest’s arrogant sermonizing, trying to break away many times from the arms that held him back to throw himself at the haranguer. But when the crowd began to disperse, he made his move. Surrounded by people in ever growing numbers, and ashen and panting as if he had just now escaped from a deadly struggle, he began to recount how he, and before him his father Don Raimondo Màrgari, depicted by those people and by that charlatan priest simply as barbarians who denied them the right of burial, were instead victims for the past sixty years of a quiet takeover, on the part of the father of those two women there, a terrible man, a bully and a deep pit of every kind of mischief. He said that for years and years he had no longer been the master able to walk on his own lands, where those sorts had built their houses, and that priest his church, paying neither royalties nor rent, without even asking permission to invade his property like that. He could have sent his hired men to kick them all out like so many dogs, and appropriated their houses; he hadn’t done so; he wasn’t doing so; he let them live and multiply, worse than rabbits. Every one of those women brought one or two dozen children into the world, so that in less than sixty years, a whole population had grown up there. But that wasn’t enough, you see, they weren’t content. That priest-lawyer, who was living off of their backs, who had imposed a tax on them for the upkeep of his church, put them up to this, and here they were: not only did they want to stay on his land, alive, they also wanted to stay there dead. Well, no! This, no! This, never! He tolerated them, alive; but being bullied into also having them dead in the ground, never! Just because they had taken over, they weren’t about to take root underground with their dead as well! The Prefect had agreed with him; he had even promised to send police and carabinieri up there to prevent any sort of violence, since the old man, dying for a month now from dropsy,[5] was the sort who, as soon as the two daughters and that priest had informed him the request was denied, would have himself buried alive. He’d already dug a grave for himself in the place where he dreamed that the graveyard should rise.

That afternoon in fact, when Father Sarso and his gang were restored to liberty and approached the depot where they had left their mules the day before, they encountered a small army of mounted police and carabinieri, charged with escorting them up to the heights of Màrgari, to the village.

“This too?” raged Father Sarso, seeing them. “This too? Why? What are we, a bunch of criminals, to be escorted with such a force? Fine though… better even… you can even put us in handcuffs if you like… come on, let’s go! Mount up, mount up!”

It seemed that he had faced and endured martyrdom. Puffed up with what he had done, he couldn’t wait to arrive at the village with that escort, which would demonstrate to everyone up there how much fervor, how much violence, he had engaged in to obtain the old man’s burial.

It was already getting late, and they were aware that they had been impatiently expected since the previous evening. Who knows if the old man is still alive! Everyone wished in their hearts that he were dead.

“Oh dear father… Oh dear father…” the two women sniffled.

Oh yes, better off dead in uncertainty, with at least the hope that they had managed to wrest from the baron the right to a graveyard!

Come on, let’s go, let’s go…. The evening shadows were descending, and the longer their delay in returning, the more that hope of everyone up there might take root and grow. And then how much greater would be their disappointment.

Jesus Christ! What a racket those horses made! It seemed they were marching off to war. Who knows how they would react at Màrgari, seeing them accompanied by such a force!

The old man would notice it immediately.

He was dying out in the open, among his people, seated in front of the door of his earthly home, no longer able to stay in bed, suffocated as he was by the enormous swelling caused by his dropsy. He stayed seated there even at night, gasping, his eyes to the stars, attended by the entire village, which had not tired of watching over him for a month.

If it were possible at least to keep all those police out of his sight….

Padre Sarso turned to the marshal, riding beside him:

“Couldn’t they stay back a little?” he asked him. “Keep themselves a little way off? If the old man could be mercifully made to believe that we have obtained the concession!”

The marshal was a little slow to respond. He distrusted that priest; he was afraid of compromising himself by giving in. Finally he said:

“We’ll see, Father, we’ll see when we get there.”

But when, after a weary walk of many hours, they started to ascend the mountain, they spied in the distance, despite the already thick darkness, such extraordinary things that no one could still think of playing that merciful trick on the old man.

It was up on the high stony ridge of the mountain like a swarm of lights. Bundles of hay burned here and there, from which dense spires of flaming smoke arose, as for the Christmas Novena.[6] And they were singing up there, yes, just like during the Christmas Novena, by the light of those flames.

What had happened? Go on, move! move!

The entire village up there was assembled almost as if in celebration of a savage funeral rite.

The old man, no longer able to control his impatience with waiting, hoping for relief from the discomfort of his suffocation, had had himself transported on a chair to the place where the cemetery would arise, in front of his grave.

Washed, combed, and made up for death, he had, next to the chair on which he had been set like an enormous wheezing bundle, his pine casket, ready for several days now. Set out on the lid of that casket were a little cap of black silk, a pair of slippers, and a handkerchief, also of black silk, rolled up to make a strap which, passing under his chin and tied to the cap, would serve to keep his mouth closed as soon as he died. In short, everything needed for his final dress.

Surrounding him with their lights were all the people of the village, singing the litanies to the old man.

“Sancta Dei Genitrix,”[7]

“Ora pro nobis!”[8]

“Sancta Virgo Virginum,”[9]

“Ora pro nobis!”

And the immense dome of the sky responded to the swarm of all those lights with the dazzling sparkle of its stars.

The few hairs on the old man’s head, still damp and straight from the unaccustomed combing, trembled in the soft nocturnal breeze. Barely moving his swollen hands, which were laid one atop the other, he moaned through his death rattle, as if to give himself comfort and relief,

“The grass!... the grass…”

That’s what would well up out of the ground, shortly, there on his grave. And he stretched his feet towards it, feet deformed by swelling, like two balloons squeezed into big blue cotton socks.

He tried to lift himself back onto his feet as soon as the people around him began to cry out, seeing such a big horde of riders rushing up the slope, their sabers making a racket. He heard the cry and the panting responses of the invaders and, comprehending, tried to throw himself headlong down into the grave. He was held back; everyone pressed in around him as if to protect him from the armed force; but the marshal managed to break up the crowd and ordered that the dying man be immediately transported home and for everyone to clear off.

The old man was lifted on the chair like a holy beggar on his bier, and raising up their lights, shouting and crying, the Màrgarians turned toward their huts, gleaming white on the heights above, scattered among the rocks.

The escort remained in the dark, under the stars, guarding the empty grave and the pine casket left there with that little cap and that handkerchief and those slippers set upon the lid.