“The Red Booklet” (“Il libretto rosso”)

Translated by Shirley Vinall

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “The Red Booklet” (“Il libretto rosso”), tr. Shirley Vinall. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2024.

“The Red Booklet” (“Il libretto rosso”) was first published in the Corriere della Sera on October 2, 1911 and then added to the volume Tercets (Terzetti), which was published the following year by Treves in Milan. Pirandello later added it to the twelfth Collection of his Stories for a Year, The Trip (Il viaggio), published by Bemporad in Florence in 1928.

This story is one of many set in Pirandello’s hometown region, although here the city of Porto Empedocle is renamed as the fictional “Nisia.” Defined by the sulfur industry (which was the source of the author’s family wealth as a boy, and then his financial ruin as a young man) and the maritime shipping trade that built up around it, this town and its environs are often represented in Pirandello’s prose in starkly realist terms that capture the suffering and difficulty of life for peasants and the poor living there. Likewise, there is sometimes an aspect of almost melodramatic tragedy that marks these tales. “The Red Booklet” is no exception here, recounting a tragic story of loss while also depicting the economic misery and desperation of people so much in need of money that they have taken to the practice of adopting orphaned children so as to receive payment from the municipality. This payment arrives in the form of the titular “little red book,” which entitles its bearer to payment and in turn is sought after by local Maltese cloth merchants, who are willing to exchange their goods to obtain them. In other words, the society Pirandello is depicting here is one where caring for foundlings becomes a kind of trade, a way of obtaining the cloth that a young woman needs in order to put together a dowry and be married off. This exchange of something that would seem fundamentally human for something that can be read as either a cold economic calculation or a way of fulfilling a socially and economically necessitated role colors the story as a kind of social realist critique of the institutions and material conditions in southern Sicily. At the same time, the story also displays traits of Pirandello’s typical humor (umorismo), giving insight into the psychology of the various characters in a way that evokes pity or understanding from the reader. The final turn of events, where a tragic death is quickly supplanted by an ironic undermining of that tragedy, can be seen as the darker side of Pirandellian humor at work.

The Editors

Nisia.[1] A large, busy town, set on a strip of beach along the African sea.

Being born in the wrong place is not just a human prerogative. Even a town is not born where and how it would wish, but rather, there where life requires it, in response to a natural need. And if too many people, forced by this need, converge on that place, and too many are born there, and the place is too cramped, then the town’s growth will inevitably be blighted.

In order to grow, Nisia had to climb, house by house, up the steep chalky rocks of the nearby plateau that juts out threateningly over the sea just above the town. It could have expanded freely over this vast, airy plateau; but to do this it would have had to move away from the sea. A house forced to be situated up there might, perhaps, one day, have crept down to the shore, like a duck, under its tiled hat and wrapped in a shawl of whitewash. Because it is there, on the shore, that life makes its pressures felt.

The plateau is where the people of Nisia have established their cemetery. There is air up there, for the dead.[2]

“We will be able to breathe up there,” say the people of Nisia.

They say this because down below, on the shore, they cannot breathe. In the tumult of the dusty trade in sulfur, coal, wood, cereals and salted goods, they cannot breathe. If they want to breathe, they must go up there. They go up there when they are dead, and they imagine that, when they are dead, they will be able to breathe.

This is a source of great consolation.

One must show great indulgence towards the people of Nisia, because honesty is not very easy when life is hard.

Those suffering houses―more like animals’ dens―harbor a sad, damp, bitter stench, which eventually corrupts all goodness. The corruption is intensified―and the stench made worse―by the presence of a piglet, hens, and sometimes even a frisky little donkey. There is no outlet for the smoke, and, trapped in those dens, it blackens the walls and ceiling. And from their poor, soot-covered prints appended to those walls, the patron saints grimace in disgust!

The men are less aware of it, as they spend the whole day, like animals, tied up at the docks or on the ships. The women, in contrast, sense it the whole time, and it makes them angry: it seems that they give vent to their anger by having children. And how many they have! Some have twelve, others fourteen, and some even sixteen… The truth is, though, that not more than three or four of these manage to reach adulthood. But those three or four―it’s not clear whether they are more or less fortunate―are helped to grow up by the ones who die in infancy, because as soon as one of them dies, each woman rushes to the home for foundlings and collects one of the children who, when accompanied by a little red book, is worth thirty lire a month for several years.

All the cloth merchants in Nisia are Maltese. Even if they are born in Sicily, they are Maltese. “To go to the Maltese,” in Nisia, means to go to buy fabric. And the Maltese, as they measure out the cloth by the mezzacanna, do great business in Nisia:[3] they buy up the red booklets, exchanging each one for fabric to the value of two hundred lire―enough for a bride’s trousseau. This is how all the Nisia girls get married, with the help of the booklets from the foundlings, whom the mothers are expected to breastfeed in return.

It is splendid to watch the procession of silent, pot-bellied Maltese, in embroidered slippers and black silk berets, a large turquoise handkerchief in one hand and a bone or silver snuffbox in the other, as they march to the Nisia town hall at the end of every month, each brandishing seven, or ten, or fifteen nurslings’ booklets. They sit in a row on the bench in the long, dusty corridor leading to the tax office counter, quietly waiting their turn by dozing, taking snuff, or slowly chasing away the flies. By now it is traditional in Nisia for the nursing children’s allowance to be paid to the Maltese.

“Marenga, Rosa!” shouts the tax officer.[4]

“Here I am,” answers the Maltese man.

Marenga, Rosa De Nicolao, is well known at the Nisia town hall. For over twenty years she has been feeding the greed of the Maltese with an almost uninterrupted supply of those red booklets.

How many of her children died as babies? Not even she remembers the number anymore. She has managed to see four grow up, all girls, and has got three of them married. Now she has to deal with the fourth one.

But it’s not clear now whether she is a woman or a wet rag. As a result, the Maltese, whom she turned to for help in getting her first three daughters married, have refused to give her credit for the fourth one.

“Rosie, sweetheart, you won’t manage.”

“What do you mean? I won’t manage, me?”

As a creature who for years has been good for breeding and producing milk, her dignity was offended, and, since it is not possible to reason with the taciturn Maltese, she burst out with a savage scream outside their shops.

If the orphanage has entrusted her with a foundling, does that not show that they consider her able to raise it?

But at this idea, the Maltese, in the shadows behind the shop counter, smiled to themselves and shook their heads.

One might think that they did not have much faith in the doctor or the council officer responsible for overseeing the fate of the foundlings from the orphanage. But that is not the case. The Maltese are well aware that, in the eyes of that doctor or that officer, the duty of a mother who must marry off her daughter and has no means of doing so apart from using the red booklet has much more weight, and requires greater consideration that the duty to bring up a foundling. If a foundling dies, who is harmed? And if a foundling suffers, who complains?

A daughter is a daughter; and a foundling is a foundling. And if the daughter does not get married, there is a risk that she too will add to the number of foundlings, for whom the town will then have to provide.

But if the death of a foundling benefits the municipality, for the Maltese merchant it is bad business to say the least, even if he manages to recover the goods which he had handed over in advance. So at certain times of the day it is not uncommon for the Maltese, under cover of a little charity call, to conduct thorough searches in those filthy alleyways swarming with naked, sunburnt children, mud-encrusted piglets and chickens, where all those mothers with the red booklets gossip, or rather, quarrel with each other on their doorsteps.

The Maltese take care of the foundlings much as the women take care of the piglets.

One of the Maltese, in extreme dismay, even got his own wife to give a little milk, for half an hour a day, to a foundling who was seriously wasting away.

At last. Rosa Marenga finally found a second-rate Maltese, a young Maltese in training, who promised to give her, a bit at a time, goods to the value―not of the usual two hundred lire―but of one hundred and forty lire. The daughter’s fiancé and his family were satisfied with this, and the marriage was arranged.

Now the famished foundling, in a sort of sack suspended by two ropes in a corner of the hovel, cries from morning to night, while Tuzza, Rosa Marenga’s engaged daughter, flirts, chats to her fiancé, laughs, sews her trousseau, and occasionally pulls on the cord attached to the primitive cradle to rock it.

“Hey, c’mon luv! Mother of God! 'E's a proper little 'eretic, this kid!”

“‘eretic” comes from heretic and means that the baby is restless, difficult, fussy, and never happy.[5] You can’t say that this isn’t a very mild way for Christians to judge heretics. With a little milk, that baby would immediately become a Christian! But Mamma Rosa has so little milk.

Tuzza will have to resign herself to getting married to the accompaniment of those desperate cries. If she had not had to get married, in all conscience Mamma Rosa would not have taken a foundling from the orphanage this time. She took it for Tuzza, and it is on her account that the baby is crying, in order that she can make love. And love is such a powerful force that it muffles the cries of the hungry child.

Tuzza’s fiancé, moreover, who is a dock worker, arrives in the evenings, when his work at the harbour is over; and if the weather is fine, mother, daughter and fiancé go up to the high plateau to breathe in the moonlight. The foundling is left crying in the darkness all alone, in the closed-up hovel, hanging in his makeshift cradle. The neighbors listen, agitated, irritated, and distressed, and, out of pity, all in agreement, they wish that he would die. The constant crying takes one’s breath away.

Even the piglet gets fed up with it and snorts and snuffles; while the chickens, huddled by the oven, become fretful.

What are the chickens muttering about among themselves?

One of them, a mother hen, had once felt anguish when she heard one of her chicks, who had got lost, calling to her from far away. She flapped her wings, darted here and there, with the points on her comb standing upright, and did not rest until she had found it again. Now, how is it that the mother of this little one, who must surely also be lost, does not hurry in response to those desperate cries?

Hens are so stupid that they will even hatch other hens’ eggs, and when these other eggs develop into chicks, they cannot distinguish them from those born from their own eggs, and they love them all and care for them all in the same way. They don’t understand, therefore, that a mother’s warmth alone is not sufficient for human chicks, and they need milk as well. The piglet knows this, for he too needed milk, and had plenty of it, and how much of it there was, oh! For his mother, though only a sow, provided him with it, with all her heart, night and day, for as long as he wanted. So he cannot understand how a baby can cry like this for lack of milk, and as he roams through the darkness of the hovel, the greedy piglet grunts in protest at the little baby hanging in the cradle, who for him too seems a “heretic.”

Come on, little one, let the plump piglet sleep, for he is tired. Let the hens sleep, and the whole neighborhood. You too believe that Mamma Rosa would give you milk, if she had any; but she has none. If your real, unknown mother had no pity for you, how can you expect her to have any, when her concern must be for her own daughter? Let her breathe for a while up there, after a difficult day of hard work; let her rejoice in the happiness of her daughter, who is in love, and who is strolling in the moonlight, arm in arm with her fiancé. If you only knew how the moonlight up there casts its shining veil over everything, and the dew sparkles and silvery birdsong fills the air! And under this delightful spell, there naturally blossoms a fervent desire for goodness. In her heart Tuzza promises herself that she will be a loving mother to her children.

Come on, poor little one, suck on your tiny finger, suck on that instead and go to sleep. Your little finger? Oh God! What have you done? Your left thumb has become so big that it’s almost impossible for you to put it in your mouth! This is all that is big, in your tiny, freezing, shrunken little hand; it is the only big part of your tiny little body. As you sucked this thumb, you sucked all the strength out of your whole body, leaving nothing but the skin around the little bones of your skeleton. How, where do you find in yourself the energy to carry on crying like this?

It’s a miracle! One evening, when they return from the moonlight, mother, daughter, and fiancé find a completely silent house.

“Keep quiet, for goodness’ sake!” the mother urges the young couple who would like to carry on talking outside the door.

They don’t talk, but Tuzza cannot restrain herself from giggling at something that her fiancé whispers into her ear. Is it a word, or a kiss? Impossible to tell in the dark.

Mamma Rosa has gone into the hovel: she goes up to the cradle, and listens. Silence. In the darkness, a ray of moonlight stretches across the floor through the darkness like a ghost, from the door to the oven, where the hens are perched. It disturbs one of them, who clucks quietly. Damn it! And damn him too, her old husband who as usual is coming home drunk from the tavern and stumbles over the doorstep to avoid the two lovers.

But what is the matter? None of the noises wakes the child. And usually he is such a light sleeper that a passing fly is enough to wake him. Mamma Rosa gets worried; she lights the lamp; she looks into the cradle; she tentatively touches the child’s forehead and at once breaks out into a scream.

Tuzza rushes over, but her fiancé remains at the door, alarmed and perplexed. What is Mamma Rosa shouting to him? Telling him to come as fast as he can and undo one of the ropes holding the cradle in the corner? Why? Come on, hurry, hurry up! Mamma Rosa knows why! But the young man, suddenly paralyzed by the child’s deathly silence, cannot move an inch, and, troubled, stays in the shadows by the door, looking on. And then, before the neighbors come flocking, Mamma Rosa leaps up onto a chair herself and snaps the rope, shouting to Tuzza to dress the little dead baby.

What a disaster! What a disaster! The rope just snapped, goodness knows how! It snapped, and the baby fell out of the cradle and died! They found him on the ground, dead, cold and stiff. What a disaster! What a disaster!

All through the night, even after the last neighbors who had rushed to see what the noise was about have returned to their homes, she carries on crying and shrieking; and once the new day dawns, she starts again to tell anyone who comes to the door about the disaster.

But how could he have fallen? His little dead body shows no wound, no bruise, nor any mark at all. He is just disgustingly thin, and his left thumb is huge!

The medical examiner visits and goes away with a shrug and a scornful expression. The whole neighborhood is in agreement that the baby has died of hunger. And the fiancé, though aware of how upset Tuzza must be, does not show his face. On the other hand, his mother and one of his married sisters turn up very quietly, tight-lipped and aloof, to witness the Maltese man, the young apprentice, storming furiously around the hovel to recover the goods he had provided. Rosa Marenga screams, tears her hair out, punches herself in the face and chest, bares her breast to show that she still has milk, begs for pity and mercy on her daughter who is getting married, pleads for time until the evening, time for her to rush to the mayor, the council officer, and the orphanage doctor, please! Please! And off she runs, shouting, dishevelled and gesticulating amid the whistles and jeers of the local urchins.

The whole neighborhood is in turmoil at the doorstep, around the young Maltese man who stands guarding his property, and the fiancé’s mother and sister, waiting to see how this story will end. A benevolent neighbor has gone into the house and, with the help of Tuzza who is bursting into tears, washes and dresses the tiny body.

The wait is long. The neighbors grow tired, the fiancé’s relatives grow tired, and all go off to their homes. Only the young Maltese remains on guard, immovable.

As evening comes, they all crowd around again to watch the arrival of the municipal hearse, which will take the dead child to the cemetery.

They have already nailed up the little spruce coffin and are lifting it up to place it in the hearse, when, to cries of amazement and more jokes and whistles from the crowd, a smiling Rosa Marenga arrives triumphantly, bearing in her arms another little foundling.

“Here it is! Here it is!” she shouts, brandishing it in her daughter’s direction from a distance. Tuzza smiles through her tears, as the hearse slowly makes its way to the cemetery.