“Romulus” (“Romolo”)

Translated by Robin Pickering-Iazzi

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “Romulus” (“Romolo”), tr. Robin Pickering-Iazzi . In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2022.

First published in the volume And Tomorrow, Monday (E domani, lunedì), a miscellany edition printed by the Milanese editor Treves in 1917, the short story “Romulus” (“Romolo”) was later included in Candelora (Candelora), the thirteenth Collection of Stories for a Year (Novelle per un anno) in 1928.

In this story, Pirandello reworks the myth of Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome, adapting it to a more modern logic to explore the birth and social evolution of a city where living in a collectivity is ultimately posited as the remedy to human solitude. Yet the story also entails an investigation into the value of memory and its place in the struggles that historians undertake to faithfully excavate the past. Indeed, the narrator engages in a fruitful conversation with a modern Romulus whose resourceful, energetic attitude many years ago had led to the birth of a new city out of a deserted land. The opportunity to talk to the old founder preserves not just memory but also the chance to recount the effects of time’s passage on the new urban core. Progress is seen as a force that transforms and eventually will cancel the city’s origins and the imaginary efforts made by its founder to envision the land’s potential when it was just a barren desert. However, the conflict between city and rural life are not the only oppositions a work here: the presence of other human beings turns out to invite conflict of its own, giving rise to a battle for the rights and power each wants to hold in relation to one another and to the (now developed) land. The story’s finale thus reveals the downsides of human ambition, which we think of as “civilization,” highlighting the inevitable risks and tradeoffs of living in community with a final, humorous touch. In this respect, the story might be seen as suggesting themes similar to Freud’s analysis of Civilization and its Discontents (1930), although with less focus on the psychological mechanisms at work in this process of navigating the conflicting human impulses to live together and to live apart.

The plot and moral of “Romulus” can be seen in conversation with the earlier short story “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine” (1913), which explores the expectations of a small group of people living in a community that arises thanks to the resourceful initiative of its founder, a kind of alter- ego of Romulus. Likewise, Pirandello will continue building on the mythological trope of the far-sighted founder who invests all his energy in giving birth to a new community, culminating in his seminal plays The New Colony (La nuova colonia, 1928) and Lazarus (Lazzaro, 1930).

In the years when he was most attracted by the lucrative potential of the film industry, Pirandello also drew up a script based on “Romulus”, which he reworked together with “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine” (1913). The script was later adapted for the screen by Stefano Landi (penname of Pirandello’s son) and Pirandello’s close friend Corrado Alvaro to become a movie titled Terra di nessuno (Nobody’s Land), directed by Mario Baffico in 1935 and starring Mario Ferrari and Laura Solari.

The Editors

In so-called civil societies, sometimes also called historical, legends—as we know—can no longer be born. A legend could be born and often even is born, but humble, timidly slithering among the common people: a small snail that has its eyes on its horns and immediately draws them in through the bubble of vain slime as soon as a history professor touches them with his stiff, ink-stained finger.[1]

He, the history professor, believes that the Holy truth is in that stiff, ink-stained finger of his, and it’s a good thing to make the small snail draw in its horns. Poor wretch! And even more wretched are the descendants who minute by minute must have documented the facts about their grandfathers and fathers that perhaps, like all distant things abandoned to memory and imagination, would slowly become tinged with blue in a few poems.

History, history. Let’s be done with poetry.

Here he is, without a she-wolf, without his brother Remus, without the flight of vultures, Romulus, as historians present him to us, as I met him myself, yesterday, in the living flesh.[2]

Romulus, a founder of cities.

Yet, by looking carefully in his wolfish eyes—what a pity!—one could easily believe a she-wolf had really suckled him as a baby, around ninety years ago. He really had faced his Remus, a rival, though not his brother. He had not killed him, but only because Remus had seen to dying in time on his own. But don’t go looking through maps now in search of the city founded by this Romulus. You wouldn’t find it. Our descendants will surely find it three or four hundred years from now, marked even with one of those small circles that indicate the capital city of a province, I’m happy to say. And with its worthy name beside it: Riparo,[3] in which everyone will be able to imagine the beautiful things that must be there—streets, piazze, buildings, churches, and monuments, with its Signor prefect [4] and Signora prefectess, if our sage social order still lasts and an earthquake hasn’t made the city collapse at its very foundations (with the help of God who castigates men’s ambitions). But let’s hope not.

For now, it is more than a hamlet, already a beautiful village that will soon have two small churches.

One of them is this church here. It used to be a stable before. On Romulus’s advice it was adapted into a little church, with just one small altar inside made of old wood, swollen by the hot stench of manure, and a print of the sacred heart of Jesus hung on the wall with nails as best possible, understandably, but what does it matter? Jesus really feels his birth here inside.

Every Sunday a priest comes with his mule from miles and miles away to say mass, all sweaty and dusty in summer, and wrapped up clear to his eyes, carrying a big green silk umbrella in winter, as in those stock paintings. His mule, tied by her halter to the ring beside the door, waits, snorting and kicking away the horseflies. Right here on the ground are the hoof marks. Poor beast, she doesn’t know the priest is conducting the Liturgy of the Hours.[5] To her it seems like a huge bother that takes a thousand years to end.

The other church, the new one, will be finished soon and will be truly exquisite, with a bell tower, three small altars, the pulpit, and sacristy, everything in short, a real church built according to design plans with each of the villagers kicking in a bit.

Now then, when all this will be a city, none of its offspring will know about this Romulus, their first father, about how and why the city was born, why here and not somewhere else. On the land, in a place—people can no longer see this land and this place as they were before the city rose there. To erase the signs of life is difficult when life in a place is expressed and imposed with so many cumbersome, heavy features: homes, streets, piazze, and churches.

There used to be a desert here, a blessed desert. Men who from far far away unfurled their lives like a ribbon passed by, stretching the ribbon out through the desert. A wide road. Carts slowly began to pass through this wide road all alone, and a few men on horseback, armed, who each looked warily around, alarmed that the sight of so much solitude so far away and unknown to everyone else was discovered for the first time by him alone. Silence and open space all around, under the vast dark sky.

Four hundred years from now, when electric streetcar bells are ringing and car horns are honking, clamoring amidst the confusion of the crowded streets lit by arched street lights, with the shimmers and sparkles of windows, of mirrors in the wooden shutters on the display windows of lush shops, who will think about one lone light in the sky—the moon, which in silence and solitude looked down upon the white ribbon of wide road in the middle of the immense desert, and about the crickets and tree frogs whose voices rang out alone?[6] Amidst the vain chatter in cafés, who will think about the angry cicadas here among the chopped off stalks whose voices would cut through the immense, still, sultry air during the endless summer days?

Carts, men on horseback, a few rare people on foot, would pass through; and at that solitude, everyone felt a dismay that gradually became an intolerable sense of oppression. What was that wide road to them? A distance to cover. A way to go forward. Who could think of stopping there?

One man. This old man here. Back then, one summer’s day when he was about thirty, while giving rein to thoughts that pulled him away from other men to search for his fortune in solitude, he had the courage to bring his own shadow to a halt in the middle of this wide road. He felt that perhaps at that point many people passing along had felt or would have felt the need to rest a bit, as he did, to have a bit of comfort and help. Here, he said.

He looked all around to observe what he had only seen distractedly, through the eyes of someone who is passing along and not thinking about stopping. He looked with the sense of his being present here not just for a moment, but permanently. He tried to breathe in the air, wide open back then, and envision what was around him as something that would have to be his everyday air and sight. As his courage rose within, stretching out and imposing itself around him, he measured it against the infinite sadness of that solitude, and whether his courage would have been able to withstand it and last when, not now, but in winter, under the gloomy sky and the cold during endless days of rain it would become more wretched and frightening.

The old man speaks through fables and tells the story of when he was a boy and had a sickly little sister with a poor appetite, who made their mother suffer so much as she tried to please her.

Now one day, while he was playing a furious game with his friends in the street, his mother, who was sitting on the step in front of their home, called him over so that he could very slowly take a careful sip from an egg that she was holding in her hand, sipping only the egg white, lightly cooked, only the white, the part that disgusted his sickly little sister with a poor appetite.

Well then, as he took that small sip that was supposed to slightly strip away the top of the egg, in the fury of the interrupted game he unintentionally sucked out the entire egg, the white and the yolk, the whole thing, leaving his mother and little sister with their eyes wide open in surprise and an empty eggshell in their hands.

It is the same here and now, with the wide road.

When he said “here,” he certainly did not have in mind the village of today or the city of tomorrow. He thought he would have always remained there alone to offer help to everyone who would have passed through that spot. But within that first breath he took in the middle of the wide road there wasn’t air just for one straw roof alone; there was air for all this village of today, and the city of tomorrow. And he had so much courage to raise that first straw roof that of course other people had to feel attracted by it.

However, when an unanticipated necessity appears in the face of an illusion, the necessity seems a betrayal.

He had defied the horrors of solitude for months and months alone, and had been able to make the carts passing by stop in front of his straw roof, and then had built his small stone home little by little, and had his wife and dear children come to live there. Then after he had succeeded at having the cart drivers sit under the pergola and drink some wine, with its tasting bottle hanging from a branch sign at the door, and eat foods cooked by his wife from crude country bowls, while he took care of repairing a wheel or a spring on one of the carts or shoeing a mule or horse, another man had come on the wide road, a short ways down, to build another house opposite his.

Because this is how a town is born (now the old man is well aware of it and can say so based on experience).

It is not true at all that men join together to give each other comfort and help in turn. They join together to fight against each other. When a house sits on one spot, another house certainly doesn’t stand beside it, like a companion or good sister.[7] It stands on the opposite side, like an enemy, robbing the view and open air.[8]

He did not have the right to forbid that a house stand in front of his. The land on which it stood was not his. But this land was a desert before. What life did it have then? He was the one who gave the land life. The usurpation and fraud that man came to commit was not against the land, but against the life that he had given to this land.

“This isn’t yours here!” the other man could just say.

“Yes. But what was here before for you?” he could yell back. “And would you have come here if I hadn’t come first? There wasn’t anything here. And now you come along to rob me of what I put into it myself!”

But he had put too much into it really—he had to recognize it—too much for one person alone.

All the carts that passed that way, often in a long line, now stopped there for a regular break. His wife could not keep up with serving everyone and was too tired to stand on her feet anymore. He too had only the two arms that God had given him, and by evening they were numb with fatigue. So there was enough room and work for not only one more person, but maybe for three or four others too.

The old man now says he would have preferred that. Three or four others together would have been companions, and they would have divided up the work. And perhaps then his wife would not have died from toil. But that other man was an enemy of course, an enemy to drive back, even with a knife in fist, from the life that he had created on the wide road and that was his. Facing three or four other men together, he would have tried to establish an agreement. Certainly they would have recognized and respected him as the leader. Instead, he had to defend his life fiercely, to not let him take any of it, or just the little that his arms could no longer contain. But the effect was this: his wife died from too much toil.

“God!” says the old man now, lifting his hand and pointing his forefinger.

He leaves facts and events in the shadows of the past, recognizing God as the cause and therefore men’s obligation to obediently accept them and resign themselves, no matter how painful and cruel they may seem. Things that happen pass, and it’s a form of vanity to remember them in the face of this certainty: God’s justice always triumphs.

Romulus cannot say otherwise. Romulus must recognize that his wife’s death was an act of God’s justice, that is, with that death God wanted to punish him for desiring too much. Because ultimately, Romulus must point to the triumph of divine justice within himself, for after Remus’s death, he married his brother’s wife in a second marriage. And why did Remus die? He also died as God’s punishment, from a deep fear that God instilled in him. He died because he understood that the man whom he had now come to set himself against, crushed by his own wife’s death, would certainly have poured his furious desperation onto him.

Could God permit one of his punishments to become excessive and therefore unjust, by letting that other man now profit from what he had lost with the death of his wife? The punishment, which was pain for him, had to be fear for the other man, and it was so great that he died from it. Romulus has nothing else to say about it.

But he does add that back then in the two houses facing each other, both filled with dear children who had never before been allowed to go near each other to play their games together, in those two facing houses there remained a man without a woman over here and a woman without a man over there. And the man dressed in black saw the woman dressed in black, and in the heart of the one and the other, behold that God then made charity bloom, a reciprocal need for help and comfort.

And the first war ended.

Romulus shakes his head and smiles.

He pictures in his mind how the other houses in this village came into being after the first two, when the children on one side and the other grew up and some of them got married to one another while others brought their wife or their husband from far away.

Ah, those houses, one on this side and one on the other! Not exactly enemies. No. Sullen. They did not turn their backs on each other, but one house was situated slightly to the side and the other slightly askew, as if they did not want to look each other in the face. Until years passed and a third house was built in the middle, like a peacemaker, to unite them.

“That’s why,” Romulus says, “the ancient streets in small towns are all crooked, every house ducks away from them.”

Yes, that is why. But then, oh Romulus, civilization comes along with urban plans that obligate the houses to stand straight in a row.

“Drawn up battle lines,” you say.

Yes. But civilization means precisely the recognition of this fact: among man’s many other instincts that bring him to make war, he also has what’s called the herd instinct, which drives him to live only with his fellow man.

“And so then,” you conclude, “see from this if man can ever be happy!”