“The Choice” (“La scelta”)

Translated by Julie Dashwood

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “The Choice” (“La scelta”), tr. Julie Dashwood. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2021.

“The Choice” first appeared in 1898, three years after it was written, in the pages of Ariel (April 10, 1898), a journal founded by Pirandello himself in collaboration with a group of literary friends in Rome. The publication was a short-lived weekly review, running from December 18, 1897 to June 5, 1898, that might be considered in relation to the category of “little magazines” that helped fuel and direct the dissemination of modernist literature. (The issues of Ariel have been collected and republished by Alfredo Barbina, with the exception of one missing number (14), in his Ariel, Storia d’una rivista pirandelliana, Rome: Bulzoni, 1984.) Pirandello did not collect “The Choice” into any of his subsequent volumes, including in the Stories for a Year that he had put together by the time of his death in 1936. It was thus republished posthumously, as a part of the Appendix (Novelle per un anno, vol. II, eds. Lo Vecchio-Musti and Sodini, Milan: Mondadori, 1938). The story includes material with considerable biographical resonance for the young Pirandello, including in the figure of the tutor, Pinzone – a character who would reappear in Pirandello’s important modernist novel, The Late Mattia Pascal (Il fu Mattia Pascal, 1905) – as well as the celebrations of the “day of the dead” and other features of Sicilian life.

In “The Choice,” typical Pirandellian themes and even obsessions recur, including the author’s fascination with puppets, marionettes, and dolls – figures which likewise become significant metaphors in The Late Mattia Pascal and take on an iconic status in Pirandello’s broader poetics, speaking to the relationship of reality and illusion. The description of the town festival in “The Choice” is biographical (the “festa dei morti” or “festival of the dead” was a long-running Sicilian tradition with standard ritual components including children receiving gifts “from their deceased relatives” overnight between November 1 and 2); at the same time, it reveals the influence of the realist poetics of verismo, especially during Pirandello’s early writing career when he was friends with Luigi Capuana and other proponents of that style.

This translation has not been previously published elsewhere.

The Editors

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: This is generally considered to be the first of Pirandello’s explicitly metanarrative short stories, in that the first-person narrator reveals himself as a writer of novels and short stories in search of material for his fiction. In its metaliterary self-consciousness “The Choice” can be seen as a precursor of three subsequent stories: “Characters” (“Personaggi,” 1906), “The Tragedy of a Character” (“La tragedia di un personaggio,” 1911), and “Conversations with Characters,” (“Colloquii coi personaggi,” 1915). It is thus also, like these three that came after it, an antecedent to Pirandello’s theatre trilogy, including Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore, 1921-1925), perhaps his most famous play. In the other works mentioned above, however, it is the characters who are in search of an author worthy of them, while the narrator/author in “The Choice” has the endlessly frustrating quest of seeking out characters and stories for himself.

Julie Dashwood

He was as thin as he was tall, and would, I swear, have been even taller if, at a certain point, his trunk, almost as though weary of straggling feebly upwards, had not bent over at his shoulders to form a real little hump from which his neck seemed to curve painfully outwards like a chicken’s, but with a huge, latch-like bulge which moved up and down every time he swallowed.

I can see him still in front of me dressed in dull grey, wearing an old, faded, quite shapeless hat into which his scrawny head would have sunk completely had it not been for his ears on which the brim rested. His entire forehead, however, together with his eyebrows, sank into it, so that his gaunt, angular little face seemed to start from that beaky, fleshless little nose like that of a bird of prey, which made his features so unmistakeable. He did his best to hold his lips between his teeth, as though to bite, punish, and hide a caustic little laugh peculiar to him; but the effort was somewhat in vain because this laughter, caught by his lips, could escape through his eyes, sharper and more mocking than ever.

He was my private tutor, and he was called Pinzone. [1]

The second of November is a feast-day for the children of Sicily. The Befana [2] (perhaps because the houses of the island’s towns and villages don’t have chimneys she can come down) doesn’t give presents down there. Instead the dead give them on the eve of their festival, at around midnight: dead relatives or friends bring a few coins and sweets and toys in their memory, only, though, to children who are good. In my opinion it would be better for the mothers not to inflame their children’s imagination with such terrible stories. My mother, of course, sent me to the toy fair with my tutor, Pinzone.

I remember that the choice at that fair cost me agonies of suffering as I feverishly contemplated all the things I desired.

Deafened by the hubbub of raucous cries coming from the many vendors, I hesitated, turning this way and that, and for a moment listened to each of them praising their wares, while other hands beckoned to me vigorously from the nearby stalls and other voices shouted to me not to trust the extravagant claims of that particular person; so that I should gather that I wouldn’t find what I wanted anywhere while, on the contrary, it could in fact be found at every stall.

Old Pinzone dragged me along by the arm, rescuing me forcibly from the blandishments of the various vendors.

“Don’t listen to them, come away! They want to cheat you… have a look round all the fair, and when you’ve seen all there is you can choose…”

The vendors were vying so furiously with each other that, seeing me being dragged away like that by the arm, they hurled insults and curses at poor Pinzone. He, however, sneered, shaking his head at the onslaught of abuse, and repeated, replying just to me:

“Don’t listen: they want to cheat you…”

Some were more aggressive and sprang from behind their counters with a toy in their hand and surrounded us and got in our way, one offering me a trumpet, for example, and another a tin steam-engine with two or three little carriages attached; and yet another a little drum, and all three yelled at Pinzone:

“You stupid old fool, let the boy buy what he wants. Does he have to choose what you like? Can’t you see that he wants the trumpet?”

“It isn’t the trumpet he wants! He wants the train-set! Look, it moves by itself…”

“It isn’t the trumpet or the train! He wants the drum: rub-a-dub-dub, rub-a-dub-dub… The drumsticks have ribbons… Here, take it, my lad! Don’t listen to this old fool.”

I looked Pinzone in the eye.

“Do you want it?” – he then asked me.

And I, still looking at him, replied with the ‘no’ that was in his eyes and in the tone of his question.

And so we went round the whole fair; then, as almost every year, we ended up back at the stall where they sold marionettes, which were my passion. [3] But alas, even here among the paladins of France and the Moorish knights, [4] shining in their copper and brass armour and displayed in long lines on thin wires, I was forced to choose, whereas I would have loved to take them all away with me. Which among so many?

“Take Orlando, [5] young sir!” – the vendor advised me – “France’s noblest champion: I’ll let you have him for ten liras fifty…”

At once Pinzone, warned by my mother, turned on him in a rage:

“What a nerve! Ten liras fifty? It isn’t even worth a few coppers. Look at it, my boy, its eyes are crooked! And then, some hero of France… he was driven mad by love…”

“Well, take Rinaldo da Montalbano…”

“Even worse… he was a thief!” - Pinzone exclaimed.

And Astolfo was a braggart and Gano a traitor … in short, Pinzone found some objection to every marionette the vendor showed me until he, in exasperation, shouted:

“But in the end, my dear sir, you can’t deny that we need the evil and the good, the faithful paladin and Gano the traitor, otherwise the show can’t go on…”

Very many years have gone by; Pinzone is dead. I should say that I don’t yet have any white hairs to cause me concern over what I previously desired so fervently; whiskers and a fine beard; but I confess that for some time now I have been looking with ever-growing pangs of envy at a little picture which shows me in short velvet trousers and with a trusty marionette in my hand, - I was such a charming little boy let me say! And I blame Pinzone for this feeling of envy I have as I look at this portrait of me as a child.

Because you should know that I still go to the fair. It’s no longer the toy fair (although there are a number of them, and the marionettes are still there): it is a much bigger fair, and I go there to choose the heroes and heroines of my novels and short stories. Now the envy I feel comes from this: whereas I, as a child, in the end stopped paying attention to the caustic observations of my dull tutor and gave way full of excitement to the allurements of the seller at the puppet stall, now I feel not only that Pinzone is still alive inside me but also exercises an almost tyrannical power over me, and spoils and stifles all my delight. Nor, however hard I try, can I any longer get rid of him.

“You see, my boy,” he keeps on saying in my ear, “you see how melancholy the fair is. Nor should you believe those who portray it to you as all golden: the sky golden, the trees golden, the sea… Fool’s gold, my boy! Gilded papier mâché! And you see what kind of heroes life offers you today? The robbers, hypocrites, and scoundrels are the only ones who win. Do you want to choose an honest hero? You will inevitably choose someone impotent, defeated, wretched, and your depiction will be boring and distressing. Since spending time with you without you knowing, I have gradually learnt a thing or two. Now I ask you: Do you believe that our descendants will accept the excuse that your art has mirrored the life of your times? Let’s be honest: what value would this same excuse have by our own aesthetic criteria if, to take one example, a bombastic, arrogant seventeenth-century writer made it to us?[6] We’d reply: ‘So much the worse for you, my friend.’

“At certain times, my son, life becomes so perfidious that writers can do nothing about it, and the more faithful they are in portraying it the more their work is destined to perish. What ability to endure do you think that the creatures of art, born of our rambling thoughts, our impulsive and almost uncontrollable actions, our incoherent feelings and among the cacophony of the most disparate counsels, can have against time: these wretched, inane, distressing puppets which are all the daily fair can offer you?” [7]

These and other such utterly disconsolate things are what Pinzone repeats to me over and over again. I look around and I have no reply. Ah, is there someone who, to shut him up, would be able to create for me a hero, not as he is, but as he should be? [8]