“The Changeling” (“Il figlio cambiato”)

Translated by Howard Curtis

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “The Changeling” (“Il figlio cambiato”), tr. Howard Curtis. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2022.

First published in the Riviera ligure in April 1902 as “The Grandmothers” (“Le nonne”), “The Changeling” (“Il figlio cambiato”) was given its definitive title only in 1923, when it appeared in the daily newspaper Corriere della Sera (on August 5th). In 1925, the story was included in From Nose to Sky (Dal naso al cielo), the eighth Collection of Stories for a Year (Novelle per un anno).

A mythic tale revisiting the theme of maternity through the lens of traditional folklore and superstitions, “The Changeling” marked an interesting distance from other works Pirandello was producing around the same time, many of which were largely influenced by Verga’s and Capuana’s rustic Sicilian realism (verismo). Instead, this story might be seen as approaching a style more like Grazia Deledda’s magically-inflected writing, in which realism is intertwined with fairy tale and local lore. Indeed, in “The Changeling,” Pirandello builds on his own childhood memories and the folk stories that were widespread in southern Italy at that time, reworking them in a mystical narrative where the horrendous acts of wicked nocturnal spirits put a strain on maternal love. The plot revolves around the tragic destiny of a healthy child who is “stolen” from his mother by fantastic creatures and replaced with a sick, “monstrous” infant. While the mother will have to accept this terrible exchange for the wellbeing of her own child, Pirandello’s symbolic narrative explores to what extent tolerance and hope can truly endure when love is marred by superstition and folk belief. This foray into the magical world of southern folklore could be seen as mirroring and complementing aspects of the interest in modernist occultism that emerged powerfully in Pirandello’s major novel from two years later, The Late Mattia Pascal (Il fu Mattia Pascal, serialized in 1904 and published in volume in 1905). He was also actively engaged with Roman circles interested in spiritualism and the paranormal and parapsychological, although his skeptical outlook made him a more ambivalent participant than Capuana, with whom Pirandello engaged in playful public polemics on the question of spirits, ghosts, and the supernatural in the early 1900s, as well.

A powerful example of narrative transcodification, “The Changeling” was adapted into a drama that had two distinct but overlapping afterlives. Most famously, Pirandello used it as a play-within-a-play in his unfinished work, The Mountain Giants (I giganti della montagna, posthumously premiering in 1937); there, the Countess Ilse’s acting troupe is traveling across Italy performing a theatrical adaptation of Pirandello’s story, which they ultimately bring before a magician, Crotone, who symbolically represents the artistic magic of the theatre itself. The play within this play also had its own independent (if less well-received) existence, though: between 1930 and 1932, Pirandello wrote The Fable of the Changeling (La favola del figlio cambiato), a verse libretto in three acts set to music by Venetian composer Gian Francesco Malipiero. The work had two premieres in 1934, in Germany, in the presence of Hitler, and in Italy, in the presence of Mussolini; both were disastrous, as it was rejected for its allegedly offensive content. This version of The Fable of the Changeling creatively reworked the themes from the short story by adding a hopeful finale celebrating the triumph of maternal love over the benefits of being brought up as a royal: despite his regal upbringing, the changeling in this play ultimately gives up his lavish yet sad and lonely life to live in the authenticity of his mother’s love.

The Editors

I had heard screaming throughout the night, and by some late hour between sleep and waking I could no longer have said if these screams were animal or human.

The following morning, I discovered from the local women that they had been the cries of despair of a mother (one Sara Longo), who, while she slept, had been robbed of her three-month-old son, and another substituted for him.

“Robbed? Who robbed her?”

“The ‘Women!’”

“The women? What women?”

It was explained to me that the “Women” were peculiar spirits of the night, witches of the air. Astonished and indignant, I asked:

“What? Does the mother really believe that?”

These good ladies were still all so genuinely terrified that they took offense at my astonishment and my indignation.[1] They yelled in my face, as if wanting to attack me, that when they heard the screams, they had run to Signora Longo’s house, half-naked as they were, and had seen the changeling—seen him with their own eyes—lying there on the brick floor of the room, at the foot of the bed. Signora Longo’s child had been as white as milk, as white as gold, a Baby Jesus; whereas this one was black, as black as liver, and ugly, uglier than a monkey. And they had learned exactly what had happened from the mother herself, who was still tearing her hair out; that is, that she had heard something like weeping in her sleep and had awakened; she had stretched her hand across the bed in search of her son and had not found him; she had then leaped out of bed, lit the lamp, and seen on the floor, instead of her child, that little monster, whom her horror and revulsion had actually prevented her from touching.

It is to be noted that Signora Longo’s baby was still in swaddling clothes. Now, could a baby in swaddling clothes, falling because his mother had been inattentive in her sleep, ever have moved so far, with his little feet toward the head of the bed, in other words, the opposite direction from that in which he should have been lying?

That could only mean that the “Women” had entered Signora Longo’s house in the night and replaced her son, taking the beautiful child and leaving her an ugly one just to spite her.

Oh, yes, they often played such pranks on poor mothers! Taking children from their cradles and leaving them on a chair in another room; having them found from one day to the next with their little feet all crooked, or cross-eyed!

“And look here! Look here!” one of them yelled at me, grabbing hold of the tiny head of a little girl she held in her arms and turning it to show me that the girl had a pigtail on the back of her neck, and if anyone tried to cut it off or disentangle it, the little thing would die. “What do you think this is? A pigtail, a pigtail done by the ‘Women,’ of course, that’s how they have their fun at night, giving these poor girls pigtails!”

Judging it pointless, faced with such tangible proof, to try convincing these women that this was superstition, I grew worried at the fate of the Longo baby, who was likely to remain a victim.

There was no doubt in my mind that some illness must have struck him during the night: perhaps an attack of infantile paralysis.

I asked what the mother intended to do now.

I was told that they had forcefully restrained her from leaving everything, abandoning the house, and setting off in search of her son, like a madwoman.

“And what about that poor little thing?”

“She doesn’t want to see him, or even hear about him!”

To keep him alive, one of them had given him a little wet bread and sugar to suck on, wrapped in a cloth shaped like a nipple. And they assured me that, out of pity, overcoming their shock and horror, they would take turns caring for him. Something which, in all conscience, at least in the early days, could not be asked of the mother.

“But she’s surely not going to let him starve to death?”

I was just wondering whether it might not be appropriate to draw the attention of the police to this strange case, when, that very evening, I learned that Signora Longo had gone for advice to a certain Vanna Scoma, who had the reputation of being in mysterious commerce with these “Women.”[2] It was said that, on windy nights, they would call to her from the roofs of the neighboring houses in order that she might go around with them. She would remain there on a chair, in her clothes and her shoes, like a dummy, while her spirit would go flying with those witches, Lord knows where. Many could bear witness to this, having indeed heard them calling to her in long-drawn-out, plaintive tones––“Auntie Vanna! Untie Vanna!”––from their own roofs.

So Signora Longo had gone for advice to this Vanna Scoma, who at first (as is understandable) had not wanted to speak to her; but then, having been implored over and over with clasped hands, had given her to understand, with a show of reluctance, that she had “seen” the child.

“Seen? Where?”

Seen. She could not say where. But the mother should not worry, because the child was fine where he was, provided, though, that she treat kindly the poor creature she had been given in exchange: in fact, the better she took care of this child here, the better her own child would be over there.

I immediately felt a kind of awestruck admiration for the wisdom of this witch. So that all should be right, she had used a mixture of cruelty and charity, punishing the mother for her superstition by obliging her to overcome, out of love for her distant child, the revulsion she felt for this other one, the reluctance she felt to even put her breast in his mouth to feed him, while at the same time not removing all hope that she might one day get her own child back. In the meantime, eyes other than hers were still on him, making sure that he was healthy and handsome.

What later became clear was that all this wisdom, so cruel and yet so charitable, was not employed by that witch so that things should be right, but because she drew a personal profit from the visits of Signora Longo, who called on her once a day and each time gave her something, both when she told her she had seen the child and when she told her she had not (more, in fact, when she told her she had not). This takes nothing away from her wisdom; nor have I said that, wise as she was, that witch was not a witch.

Things went on in this way until Signora Longo’s husband arrived on a schooner from Tunis.

He was a sailor, here today, gone tomorrow, and did not care much about his wife and son. Finding the former thinner and almost insane, and the latter all skin and bones and unrecognizable, and having learned from his wife that they had both been sick, he did not ask anything else.

The problem arose after his departure when Signora Longo, for her greater comfort, became genuinely ill. This was another punishment: a new pregnancy.

And now, in that state (she had difficult pregnancies, especially in the early months), she could no longer go to see Vanna Scoma every day and had to be content to care as much as she could for that wretch so that care should not be denied her lost son. This would not be fair, she kept thinking, given that it was she who had lost out in the exchange: her milk had turned to water, because of her grief, and now that she was pregnant, she would no longer be able to give it; it would not be right for her new child to grow up badly, as it seemed this one must grow. On his tiny, withered neck, his little yellow head would loll from one shoulder to the other, and he might perhaps be lame in both his little legs.

Meanwhile, her husband wrote to her from Tunis that, during the voyage, his shipmates had told him that tale of the “Women,” which was known to everyone except him; he suspected that the truth lay elsewhere, that is, that his son had died and that she had taken some foundling from a poorhouse to replace him, and he ordered her to go immediately and take him back, because he did not want bastards in his house. But on his return, his wife implored him to such an extent that she obtained, if not pity, at least tolerance for the unfortunate child. She tolerated him too, and even overdid it, in order not to harm the other one.

Things got worse when the second child was finally born, because then Signora Longo naturally began to think less about the first one and, as a result, to take less care of that poor wretch of a child who, as we know, wasn’t hers.

Not that she mistreated him. Every morning she would dress him and put him to sit outside the door, on the street, in the oilcloth baby rocker, with a few hunks of bread or some pieces of apple in its little front drawer.

And the poor innocent would sit there, with his rickety little legs, his little head lolling, his hair clotted, because the other children on the street would often yell at him and throw sand in his face, and he would shield himself with his little arm and not even say a word. He could barely manage to keep his eyelids open over his sorrowful little eyes. He was filthy, and the flies devoured him.

The female neighbors called him the son of the “Women.” If ever a child approached him and asked him a question, he would stare and not know what to reply. Perhaps he did not understand. He would reply with the sad, somehow distant smile of sick children, and that smile made lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth.

Signora Longo would appear at the door with her baby in her arms, pink and plump (like the other), turn a pitying look on the wretch—what was he still doing there?—and sigh:

“What a cross to bear!”

Yes, she would still shed a few tears every now and again, thinking of that other one, and Vanna Scoma would still come, unasked these days, to scrounge a little and bring her news. Good news: her son was growing up fine and healthy, and he was happy.