“Tap Tap” (“La toccatina”)

Translated by Marella Feltrin-Morris

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “Tap Tap” (“La toccatina”), tr. Marella Feltrin-Morris. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2022.

Originally published in the literary journal Il Marzocco in 1906, “Tap Tap” (“La toccatina”) was then collected into the volume Naked Life (La vita nuda; Milan: Treves, 1910), which was later made into the second Collection of Stories for a Year (Novelle per un anno), Naked Life (La vita nuda), in the Bemporad edition (Florence, 1922).

Exploring one of the most recurrent themes in Stories for a Year, “Tap Tap” addresses the unpredictability of life by exploring the paradoxical aspects of disease and how it affects individual behavior and emotions. These reflections fit into the broader tendency in Pirandello’s work to examine existential crises and the ways in which human beings adapt and transform, even against their own intentions or stated beliefs and desires. As in other short stories including “The Fly” (“La mosca,” 1904) and “Death Is Upon Him” (“La morte addosso,” 1908), as well as plays like Think It Over, Giacomino! (Pensaci, Giacomino!, 1916), illness here takes the form of an impairing stroke, which affects two friends in different ways and times. If Beniamino Lenzi must deal with a dragging foot and Cristoforo Golisch with the aphasia that made him speak German and forget Italian, the common ground for the two friends is their ability to unconsciously come to terms with the illness that upset their lives. The story demonstrates that Pirandello was not just well-versed in the neuropsychiatric environment of his time (of which he had personal experience on account of his wife’s psychological condition), but also keenly attentive to how those who suffer from illnesses of both body and mind are altered, and how those who are not affected respond to their transformed state. The author’s compassion is evident in his detailed descriptions, as is his determination to explore the human struggle to accept the twists of fate and endure the hardships of life.

“Tap Tap” belongs to a group of stories written before 1910 in which Pirandello reworks motifs of unexpected suffering into a literary trope. By fictionalizing the instability of human existence and the overwhelming forces of destiny, the author shows his readers how we are prompted to develop a personal strategy of self-preservation in life. What emerges is a humoristic perspective, which perhaps allows for a kind of comfort by enabling us to evade our hardships in a provisional way. A similar approach in Pirandello’s poetics is visible in other stories from the period, such as “The Tight Frock-Coat” (“Marsina stretta,” 1901) and “That’s Fine” (“Va bene,” 1905).

This translation is a lightly revised version of the version previously published in Exchanges: Journal of Literary Translation, “Tether” issue (Fall 2020): https://exchanges.uiowa.edu/issues/tether/tap-tap/. We gratefully acknowledge their kind permission to republish it here.

The Editors

I.

With his shapeless white hat pushed far back on his head, its brim forming a halo around his face, which was large and red like a Dutch cheese wheel, Cristoforo Golisch stopped in his tracks right in the middle of the street, his legs spread apart and a little bowed from the weight of his colossal body. He raised his arms and called out:

“Beniamino!”

Almost as tall as he, but lanky and wobbling like a reed, his eyes strangely dazed, a bleak-faced man in his fifties slowly advanced towards him, leaning on a cane with a thick rubber tip. He was shuffling his left leg with noticeable effort.

“Beniamino!” Golisch called out again. This time his voice betrayed not just the surprise, but the pang of finding his friend, after so many years, in such a state.

Beniamino Lenzi blinked several times. His stare remained fixed as his eyes started glazing over with something like a veil of tears, but his facial expression did not change at all. Under his mustache, which had already turned gray, his droopy lips unpeeled and struggled for a while with his curled-up tongue to articulate a few words:

“Nn… nnow… I feeh beher… I ‘an wah…”

“Oh… atta boy…” Golisch remarked, petrified by the realization that the person in front of him was no longer a man. He was no longer Beniamino Lenzi, as he had known him, but someone closer to a young boy, a wretched young boy who must be lied to out of pity.

He moved beside him and made an effort to walk at his friend’s pace. (Ah, that foot that seemed glued to the ground and had to be dragged, as if it couldn’t free itself from a force that kept pulling it under!)

Golisch tried his best to hide the pain, the strange dismay that overwhelmed him as he watched, by his side, that man tapped by death, almost half dead, really, and utterly transformed. He started asking him questions—where he had been all this time, what had caused him to leave Rome, what he had done while he was away, when he had returned.

Beniamino Lenzi replied, but his slurred words were hardly intelligible, to the point that Golisch was left doubting whether his friend had even understood his questions. Only Lenzi’s eyelids, lowering frequently over his eyes, revealed his struggle and pain, and seemed to be trying to shake off their tense, hard, strange astonishment. But they couldn’t.

Death, passing by, had given him a casual tap, setting his face into that mask. And now, with that face, those eyes, that air of frightened suspense, all he could do was wait for it to pass by again and tap him a little harder, stiffening him completely and for good.

“That’s great, just great!” hissed Cristoforo Golisch.

He glared left and right at the people who turned and stared at the poor ill-fated man with a perfunctory expression of pity painted on their faces.

A pent-up anger seethed inside of him.

How spryly people strolled down the street! Spry necks, spry arms, spry legs... he, too! He could control his every movement, and he felt so strong... He clenched his fist. God! He could feel what a formidable blow it would deal if he brought it crashing down on someone’s back. But why would he do that? He didn’t know...

People irritated him, especially the young ones who turned around to look at Lenzi. He pulled a large blue cotton handkerchief from his pocket and mopped the sweat pouring from his large, burning face.

“Beniamino, where are you headed now?”

Lenzi had stopped, leaned his good hand on a lamppost, and now looked as if he was caressing it, staring at it with tenderness. He slurred:

“...’he ‘ohtor... Fooh es’cize...”

And tried to lift his bad foot.

“Exercise?” asked Golisch. “You’re exercising your foot?”

“Fooh,” Lenzi repeated.

“Atta boy!” Golisch exclaimed again.

He felt the urge to take hold of that foot, straighten it out, then grab his friend by the arms and rattle him violently, to shake off that horrible immobility.

He just could not, would not stand the sight of his friend reduced to that sorry state. There he was, his partner in crime during those carefree years of their youth, and the buddy with whom he later cavorted in the leisurely hours of their bachelor nights. Neither of them had ever married; one day a new career path had opened up for his friend, and Beniamino had set out on it—spryly, yes, as he could, too, back then. Oh, so spryly and boldly indeed! So many struggles, toils, hopes... and now, all of a sudden, here he was again. This was how he had returned—in this shape. Ah, what a joke, what a bad joke!

He would have liked to talk to him about so many things, but he didn’t know what or how. Countless questions pushed their way towards his lips, only to congeal before they came out.

“Remember,” he would have liked to ask, “all our famous bets at the Tuscan Tavern? And Nadina—remember her? She’s still around, you know. You were the one who dumped her on me when you left Rome, you rascal. Such a sweet girl, she really cared about you a lot... She still thinks about you, you know? She even talks about you sometimes. I’ll go and visit her tonight and tell her how I found you, poor wretch... But it’s no use asking you; you don’t remember anything anymore. Perhaps you don’t even recognize me at all, or barely.”

While Golisch was busy with these thoughts, his eyes brimming with tears, Beniamino Lenzi kept staring tenderly at the lamppost as he slowly, slowly dusted it with his fingers.

That lamppost marked for him one of the three stops of his daily walk. As he shuffled his way down the street, he didn’t see anyone, didn’t think of anything at all. Life whirled all around him, tossed about by so many passions, pressed by so many cares, and all the while he aimed any strength he had left first towards that lamppost, then, further down, towards the window of a general store, which marked the second stop. Here he lingered a little more to gaze with childish delight at a porcelain monkey on a swing suspended with red silk cords. The third stop was at the gate of the little courtyard at the end of the street, through which he then reached the doctor’s house.

In the courtyard of that house, among the flower vases and planters that contained orange, laurel and bamboo trees, several pieces of exercise equipment were arranged—flexible rods secured horizontally on top of sturdy posts. From one end of those rods hung a rope that was wrapped around a spool and tied to a wooden lever fixed to the ground with a stake.

Beniamino Lenzi would place his bad foot on that lever and push. The rod at the top bounced and vibrated, and the spool, held horizontally by two stops, would spin thanks to the rope.

Every day, half an hour of this exercise, and within a few months, he would get better. Oh, sure! He would get 100% better...

After watching this lovely spectacle for a while, Cristoforo Golisch strode out of the courtyard, snorting like a horse and swinging his arms with rage.

It looked as if death had playfully tapped his brain, and not poor Lenzi’s.

He felt disgusted.

Scowling, his teeth clenched, he marched down the street talking to himself and gesticulating like a madman.

“Is that so?” he would say. “You just tap me and you’re off? Ah, no, by God! I won’t end up like that! I’ll make you come back by force, I will! You think you can just stroll alongside me and amuse yourself watching how you roughed me up? Seeing me drag my foot? Slur my words? You steal half of the alphabet from me, you make me say fooh and dea’, and you even laugh about it? Ah, no, my dea’! Come over here! I’ll shoo’ mmassef, I sss-wea’ to God! I won’t be your fool! I’ll shoot myself, I’ll kill myself, I swear to God! I won’t be your fool!”

All that night and the following day, and for several days afterwards, he could think of nothing else and would talk of nothing else, either at home, on the street, at the cafe, or at the tavern. It was as if he had become obsessed. He would ask everyone:

“Have you seen Beniamino Lenzi?”

And if one of them replied he hadn’t, he would say:

“Struck! Half dead! Retarded... How can he keep going without killing himself? If I were his doctor, I would kill him—out of compassion! And instead, they make him spin a wheel. That’s right, a wheel! His doctor makes him spin a wheel in his yard, and he thinks he’s going to get better! Beniamino Lenzi, can you imagine? Beniamino Lenzi, who fought three duels, who, back in 1866, was in the War of Independence with me, when he was just a boy…[1] By God, when did we start caring so much about this damn life? Life is only worth what it gives you, am I right? I wouldn’t think twice…”

His friends at the tavern eventually had enough.

“I’ll kill myself… I’ll kill myself… Well, just go ahead, kill yourself and be done with it!”

Cristoforo Golisch flinched and put his hands out. “Er, no, I’m just saying, if ever…”

II.

About a month later, while Cristoforo Golisch was having dinner with his widowed sister and nephew, all of a sudden his eyes rolled back, his mouth drooped as if he were about to yawn, his head dropped against his chin, and he collapsed face down onto his plate.

There, just a soft tap tap on him, too.

In a flash, he lost his speech and the use of one side of his body: the right side.

Cristoforo Golisch had been born in Italy to German parents.[2] He had never visited Germany and spoke Roman dialect like a Roman native, to the point that his friends had even Italianized his last name as Golicci. His closest buddies even called him Golaccia, on account of his gut and formidable appetite.[3] Only with his sister would he occasionally exchange a few words in German when they didn’t want to be understood by others.

It just so happened that, once he managed, within a few hours but with considerable difficulty, to regain use of his speech, Cristoforo Golisch displayed a curious medical phenomenon: he could no longer speak Italian; he spoke only German.

Opening his terrified, bloodshot eyes, tensing his left cheek almost into a half-smile and stretching his mouth considerably wide on that side, having tried several times to untie his flaccid tongue, with his good hand he gestured towards his head and, addressing the doctor, he stammered:

“Hier… hier… wie ein Faustschlag…”[4]

The doctor didn’t understand, and had to ask his sister, who was still in shock from the sudden calamity, to act as interpreter.

In a single moment, Cristoforo Golisch had become German—that is, someone else, because really, he had never been German in the first place. Any memory of the Italian language—indeed, his entire Italian being—had been instantly jettisoned from his brain.

The doctor attempted to give a scientific explanation for the phenomenon. He diagnosed the motor disorder as “hemiplegia” and prescribed a cure. But Cristoforo’s sister, alarmed, took him aside and told him about the self-destructive intentions her brother had expressed after seeing his friend afflicted by the same illness.

“Oh, doctor, he went a month without talking about anything else, almost as if he had felt this doom hanging over his head! He’ll kill himself. He keeps a gun in his nightstand drawer. I’m so afraid…”

The doctor smiled sympathetically.

“Don’t be, Signora, don’t be! We’ll convince him it was just indigestion, and you’ll see that—”

“Oh, please, doctor!”

“I assure you he’ll believe it. Besides, luckily the stroke wasn’t too serious. I’m confident that within a few days he’ll regain the use of the affected limbs and, even if he doesn’t recover completely, he will at least be able to use them little by little… and with time, who knows! This was an extremely serious warning for him, that’s for sure. He’ll need to change his habits and stick to a very strict regimen to keep away, as far as possible, any new incursion of this illness.”

Cristoforo’s sister lowered her eyelids to hide her tears. Not trusting the doctor’s assurance, however, as soon as he left she made arrangements with her son and the maid to remove the gun from the nightstand drawer: she and the maid would approach his bedside with the excuse of propping up the mattress a little, and in the meantime the boy—carefully, for God’s sake!— would quietly open the drawer and—carefully, carefully—steal the weapon away.

And so they did. The sister congratulated herself quite a bit for this precaution, as it didn’t seem natural to her how quickly and effortlessly her brother had accepted the doctor’s explanation for his illness: digestive indisposition.

“Ja… ja… es ist doch…”[5]

He had indeed felt bloated for four days.

“Unver… Unverdaulichkeit… ja… ja…” [6]

But how is it possible—thought his sister—that he doesn’t feel half of his body is paralyzed? How, given how affected he had been by Lenzi’s recent case, can he believe that mere indigestion would do this to him?

On the very first vigil she kept over him and each time after that, she began prompting him, with the tenderness of a mother to a child, with the words of his forgotten language. She asked him why he didn’t speak Italian anymore.

He stared at her, dumbfounded. He hadn’t yet noticed he had been speaking German. It had just come to him all of a sudden, and now he didn’t think he could speak any other language. Still, he tried to repeat the Italian words after his sister. But he pronounced them in a different voice, with a foreign accent, just like a German struggling to speak Italian. He called his nephew, Giovannino, Chophanino, and the nephew—that idiot!—laughed about it, as if his uncle were joking.

Three days later, when news of Golisch’s sudden illness reached the Tuscan Tavern, the friends who rushed to visit him got a sorrowful sample of that new language of his. But he was not at all aware of the most peculiar impression he gave, speaking that way.

He seemed like a shipwrecked man floundering desperately to keep afloat after having been submerged for an endless instant into the life, utterly mysterious to him, of his people. And from that plunge he had re-emerged as someone else: a child again at forty-eight, and a foreigner, to boot.

And ecstatic. Yes, ecstatic, because that very same day he had started to move his arm and hand again, slightly. No, not his leg, not yet. But he felt that perhaps, in another day or so, with a little effort, he would be able to move that one, too. He was trying even now, yes, he was trying… couldn’t they tell? Didn’t his friends notice any movement?

“…anozah tay… anozah tay…”

“Yes, of course, another day, for sure!”

Although the spectacle he offered no longer caused any apprehension, one by one, before they took their leave, his friends deemed it wise to urge his sister to keep an eye on him.

“Any moment, you never know… His consciousness might awaken, and…”

Each one of them now thought, as Golisch had thought back when he was healthy, that the only option was to take a gun and do away with himself, so as not to be left like this—barely alive, and under the terrible, unavoidable threat of another stroke at any moment.

But they were the ones who thought so this time; not Golisch. Not anymore. Overjoyed, that’s how he felt, when about twenty days later, propped up by his sister and nephew, he was able to take his first steps around the room!

Granted, without a mirror he could not see what his eyes looked like—dazed, lost, just like Beniamino Lenzi’s. But his leg, heck, surely he must realize that he was barely dragging it… And still, how overjoyed!

He felt reborn. Once again he was filled with a child’s sense of wonder, and like a child, he would cry easily over the most insignificant thing. From every object in his room he derived a loving, familiar comfort he had never felt before; and the thought that now he could walk over, with his own feet, up to those objects, and caress them with his hands, touched him to the point that it made him weep with joy. From the doorstep, he would look at objects in the other rooms and pine with desire to go and caress those, too. Yes, off he went… easy, easy, supported by one arm and the other… Then he insisted on letting go of his nephew’s arm and would walk around holding on to his sister and propping himself up with a cane. Then, not holding on to anyone, just with the cane. Finally, he decided to take the ultimate test of his strength:

“Oh… oh… looh, looh… no haane…”

And indeed, lifting his cane off of the floor, he was able to walk two or three steps. But right away they had to rush over with a chair and help him sit down.

His body, all skin and bones, looked almost drained of flesh; he was a shadow of himself. Still, he did not have the slightest suspicion that his affliction might have been something other than indigestion. Now, sitting at the dining table again with his sister and nephew, condemned to drink milk instead of wine, he repeated for the umpteenth time that he had gotten quite a scare:

“…’uite a s-sare…”

However, the first time he was able to leave the house, accompanied by his sister, he secretly confessed to her that he wanted to be taken to the house of Beniamino Lenzi’s doctor. He, too, wanted to exercise his foot spinning the wheel in the courtyard.

His sister stared at him in shock. He knew, then?

“So… you want to go today?”

“Yes… yes…”

In the courtyard they found Beniamino Lenzi already at the wheel, right on time.

“Beiamìo!” Golisch called out.

Beniamino Lenzi showed no surprise at seeing his friend there, reduced to his same state; he unpeeled his lips from under his mustache, tensed his right cheek, and slurred:

“Yoo ooh?”

And went on pushing the lever. Two rods now bounced and vibrated, turning the spools with the rope.

The following day, Cristoforo Golisch, not wanting to be second to Lenzi, who walked to the wheel on his own, staunchly refused to be escorted by his sister. Initially, she ordered her son to follow his uncle from a distance, without making himself known; but eventually, feeling reassured, she let him go on his own.

Every day, now, at the same time, the two tapped men meet along the way and continue on together, making the same stops: first, the lamppost; then further down, the window of the general store to stare at the porcelain monkey on the swing; and finally, the gate of the courtyard.

Just today, Cristoforo Golisch came up with a funny idea, and now he’s telling Lenzi all about it. The two of them, leaning against their trusty lamppost, look into each other’s eyes and try to smile, one tensing his right cheek, the other the left. They confabulate for a while, with their numb tongues; then Golisch hails a coach driver with his cane. Helped by the driver, they get in his coach and they’re off to Nadina’s house at the Spanish Steps.

Seeing right before her eyes those two panting ghosts who can hardly stand on their feet after the enormous effort of climbing the stairs, poor Nadina is left mouth agape in bewilderment. She doesn’t know if she should cry or laugh. She rushes over to keep them from falling, helps them into her living room, sits them down next to each other, and starts scolding them harshly about such a crazy stunt, as she would with two unruly children who escaped their tutor’s supervision.

Beniamino Lenzi pouts, and bursts out crying.

Golisch, instead, very seriously, almost sulking, sets out to explain to her that all this was meant as a surprise for her.

“A nih sss-pize foh yoo…”

How cute! That’s how he speaks now, the big old Kraut!

“But of course, of course, thank you…” Nadina hastens to say. “Good boys! Good boys, really, both of you. You’ve made me so happy. I was just saying it for you… coming all the way here, climbing all those steps… There, there, Beniamino! Don’t cry, sweetheart. What’s the matter? Cheer up, cheer up!”

And she starts caressing his cheeks, her pretty hands all plump and milky, adorned with rings.

“What’s the matter? What’s the matter? Look at me! You didn’t want to come, is that right? He made you, this naughty boy! But he won’t even get a hug from me, no he won’t… You are my good little Beniamino, my big boy you are… Sweetheart, sweetheart… Come on, let’s dry these little tears… just like this, just like this… Look at this beautiful turquoise: who gave it to me? Who gave it to his Nadina? This handsome old geezer, that’s who! Here, this is for you, sweetheart!”

And she plants a kiss on his forehead. Then she springs up and quickly wipes away the tears from her eyes.

“What can I get you two?”

Cristoforo Golisch, still mortified and pouting, doesn’t want anything. Beniamino Lenzi accepts a cookie and nibbles at it, his mouth leaning towards Nadina, who holds it between her fingers and pretends she doesn’t want to give it to him, teasing him and giggling gently:

“No… no… no…”

How cute they are now, both of them, how they laugh and laugh at the joke…