“The Train Has Whistled” (“Il treno ha fischiato”)

Translated by Bradford A. Masoni

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “The Train Has Whistled” (“Il treno ha fischiato”), tr. Bradford A. Masoni. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2023.

“The Train Has Whistled” was first published in the prominent Milanese newspaper the Corriere della Sera on February 22, 1914, and was then collected into the volume of short stories The Trap (La trappola), published by Treves in 1915. Pirandello recollected the story as part of the fourth Collection of his Stories for a Year, entitled The Lonely Man (L’uomo solo, 1922).

This story plays on a series of tropes from across Pirandello’s work, highlighting the existential plight of a man, Belluca, who is trapped in a life he does not desire to live – as an accountant who slaves away all day to try and support a large and unhappy family. As a result, he has become alienated from himself and his existence. However, Belluca undergoes a sudden transformation one day, triggered by the sound of a train whistle that reminds him of the expansive world beyond the confines of his daily existence, while recalling a liberating image of life to his mind. The story is thus a reflection on both the constraints of life and also on the sweeping and freeing possibilities of the imagination. At the same time, because this sudden transformation makes him unrecognizable to his coworkers and others around him, it also brings up another recurring theme in Pirandello’s work: that of madness. In other works, like the short story “When I Was Crazy” (“Quand’ero matto,” 1902) and the famous play Henry IV (Enrico IV, 1922), apparent madness is linked to seeing the world more truly. Likewise, this opening to the possibilities of life, which resembles madness, can be triggered in many accidental ways: in his novel One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand (Uno, nessuno e centomila, 1926), for instance, it is triggered by the protagonist seeing a physical defect in the mirror; in “The Forgotten Mask” (“La maschera dimenticata,” 1918), it is the return of repressed feelings; in his last complete play One Knows Not How (Non si sa come, 1934), it is apparently the mere glance of sunlight in the open air (and that play was itself an adaptation of several short stories with similar themes, including “In the Whirlpool” (“Nel gorgo,” 1913); “The Reality of the Dream” (“La realtà del sogno,” 1914); and “Cinci” (1932)). This triggering of sudden change is here tied to another recurring image in Pirandello’s works: that of the train as a loaded symbol. Other writings in which the train plays a symbolic role include the stories “War” (“Quando si comprende,” 1919) and “A Single Day” (“Una giornata,” 1935) as well as his popular one-act play, “The Man with the Flower in His Mouth” (“L’uomo dal fiore in bocca,” 1922). In “The Train Has Whistled,” the existential transformation provoked by the train, and the character’s apparent overreaction to it, bordering on madness from the perspective of those around him, can also be seen as an example of Pirandello’s poetics of humor, where the initial perception of something not fitting with expectations becomes a more profound “feeling of the opposite” that involves a form of empathetic understanding.

The Editors

He was raving. Early stages of brain fever, the doctors said. And all his office mates kept repeating it too, as they walked in groups of two or three back from the hospital where they had just been to visit him.[1]

They seemed to particularly enjoy announcing the news using scientific terms—only just learned from the doctors—to any late-coming colleagues they met along the way:

“Delirium, delirium.”

“Encephalitis.”

“Meningitis.”

“Brain fever.”

And they tried to look distressed, but deep down they were so happy, not least because they had fulfilled their duty. In the fullness of health, they exited that sad hospital into the merry blue of the clear winter morning.

“Will he die? Will he go crazy?”

“Who can say?”

“Die? I doubt it…”

“But what’s he saying? What’s he saying?”

“The same thing over and over again. He’s delirious.”

“Poor Belluca!”

And it didn’t occur to any of them that, given the very particular conditions in which that unfortunate man had lived for so many years, his case could also be considered completely natural—that everything Belluca was saying, which seemed to everyone like delirium, a symptom of his madness,[2] could rather be the simplest explanation for his completely natural condition.

In reality, the previous evening, Belluca had proudly rebelled against his manager, and then, following the manager’s bitter reproach, had all but hurled himself at him. That fact itself lent considerable weight to the idea that Belluca was experiencing a profound mental breakdown.

Because it was impossible to imagine a man more meek and submissive, more methodical and patient than Belluca.

Constrained… yes, who had called him that? One of his colleagues. Poor Belluca was constrained within the very narrow limits of his arid accounting job, with no memories beyond those of open accounts, single-entry, double entry, reversing entries. Deductions, withdrawals, and settlements. Notes, master ledgers, meeting minutes, and on and on. He was a walking filing cabinet, or even better, an old mule pulling his cart, never complaining, always at the same pace, always on the same road, always wearing blinders.

Well, this old donkey had been whipped a hundred times, whipped mercilessly, just for laughs, for the sake of seeing if they could get him to react even a little; prick up his dejected ears, maybe, or even better, give a sign that he wanted to lift a foot and fire off a few kicks. Nothing! He had always submissively taken their unjust lashes and cruel shots without so much as a word, as if he deserved them, or rather, as if he no longer felt them, accustomed as he had become over years and years to the continuous and solemn beatings fate had doled out.[3]

His rebellion was all the more inconceivable, therefore, unless, of course, it was the result of a sudden mental breakdown.

All the more so since the previous evening he had actually deserved to be reprimanded—his office manager had genuinely had the right to tell him off. Already that morning he had turned up to work with an unusual, new air about him, and—and this was truly enormous, comparable, I don’t know, to the collapse of a mountain—he had come in more than half an hour late.

All of a sudden, it seemed that his face had grown wider. It seemed that his blinders had suddenly fallen off, and in a moment the spectacle of life opened wide all around him.. It was as if his ears had suddenly become unblocked, allowing him to perceive for the first time voices and sounds he had never heard before.

And that is how he had presented himself at the office that morning: so happy, overflowing with a vague, dazed happiness. And all day long he had done nothing.

That evening, the manager had walked into Belluca’s office having examined the books and registers and then,

“But how on earth? What have you been up to all day?”

Belluca had looked at him smiling, almost with an air of impudence, opening his hands.

“What is that supposed to mean?” the office manager had then exclaimed, approaching him and taking him by the shoulder and shaking him. “Hey, Belluca!”

“Nothing,” Belluca replied, still with that smile that sat somewhere between impudence and imbecility on his lips. “The train,[4] Signor Cavaliere.”[5]

“The train? What train?”

“It whistled.”

“What in the hell are you talking about?”

“Last night, Signor Cavaliere. It whistled. I heard it whistle…”

“The train?”

“Yessir. And if you only knew where I ended up! Siberia… or, or… the rainforests of the Congo … It only takes an instant, Signor Cavaliere!”

Hearing the shouts of the enraged office manager, the other employees had entered the room and, when they heard Belluca talking like that, had burst into mad bouts of laughter.[6]

Annoyed by all that laughter, the office manager—who must have been in a bad mood that evening—had flown into a rage and began to beat that timid man, who had been the victim of so many of his cruel pranks.

Except this time, the victim, to everyone’s astonishment and almost terror, had fought back. He had railed against the office manager, continuing to shout that nonsense about the train having whistled and that now, by God, not anymore, now that he had heard the train whistle he just couldn’t anymore, he could no longer stand to be treated this way.

They had seized him by force, restrained him, and dragged him to the psychiatric ward.

Even here, he was still going on and on, talking about that train. He imitated its whistle. And what a plaintive whistle it was, as if it were far away in the night, wailing. And immediately after, he added:

“All aboard! All aboard... Where to, gentlemen? Where to?”

And he looked at everyone with eyes that were no longer his. Those eyes—usually dark, dull, furrowed—now laughed at them and shone with complete clarity, like those of a child or a happy man. Meaningless sentences escaped his lips. Unheard of things—poetic, imaginative, bizarre expressions, which were all the more astounding because it was impossible to explain by what miracle they flowed so freely from the mouth of a man whose world up to now had been limited to figures and registers and catalogs. A man who had always lived as if he were blind and deaf to life. An accounting machine.[7] Now he spoke of the blue foreheads of snowy mountains raised to the sky; he spoke of teeming schools of slimy cetaceans wagging their tails on the bottoms of seas. Things, I repeat, unheard of.

But whichever of his coworkers it was that came to relate them to me together with the news of his sudden mental breakdown was disconcerted, for—not surprisingly— he could not understand why I did not share his astonishment.

In fact, I kept silent when I heard the story.

And my silence was full of grief. I shook my head, and with the corners of my mouth turned down, I said bitterly:

“Belluca, gentlemen, is not crazy. Rest assured he's not crazy. Something must have happened to him, but nothing could be more natural. The only reason no one has been able to explain it is no one really knows how this man has lived up to now.[8] I, who do know, am sure I'll be able to explain everything very naturally just as soon as I've seen him and talked to him.”

As I walked to the hospital where the poor man had been taken, I reflected to myself: [9]

For a man who lives as Belluca has lived thus far, that is, an “impossible” life, the most obvious and minor thing—the most ordinary accident, any very slight, unexpected stumbling block, say, a pebble on the road—can produce extraordinary effects. And no one can explain these effects without taking into account the fact that the life of this man is just that: “impossible.” For therein is precisely where the explanation lies, attached to those conditions of his impossible life. Once that is taken into account, everything will seem simple and clear. Anyone who sees only a tail and disregards the monster to which it belongs may well see the tail as being monstrous in itself. Once it is reattached to the monster, however, it will no longer seem so; it will be seen for what it must be: a thing belonging to that monster.

A perfectly natural tail.

I had never seen a man live like Belluca.

I was his neighbor, and I was not alone among the other tenants of the building in wondering how that man could endure those living conditions.

He had living with him three blind women: his wife, his mother-in-law, and his mother-in-law's sister. These last two, who were very old, were blind as a result of cataracts. His wife did not suffer from cataracts but was simply permanently blind: walled-up eyelids.[10]

All three women demanded to be served. They screamed from morning till night because no one was serving them. There were also two widowed daughters, who had returned home after the deaths of their husbands. One daughter had four, the other three children, but neither ever had the time or desire to look after the little ones; if either lifted a finger, it was only to help their mother.

How could Belluca feed all those mouths with the meager income from his accounting job? He got himself extra work copying out documents, which he did at home in the evenings. And copy he did, amidst the wild screams of those five women and those seven children until they—all twelve of them—found themselves space in the only three beds in the house.

Large, double beds to be sure, but only three.

Violent scuffles, chases, overturned furniture, broken dishes, crying, screaming, tumbling, because one of the children had run away in the dark and hidden himself in the separate bed his grandmothers shared. Those three old blind women, meanwhile, also quarreled every night among themselves because none of them wanted to sleep in the middle and each rebelled furiously when it came to be her turn.

Eventually, the house was silent and Belluca continued to copy until late into the night, until his pen fell out of his hand and his eyes closed of their own accord.

He would then throw himself, often fully clothed, on the rickety sofa and immediately sink into a leaden sleep from which every morning he would barely be able to rouse himself, more dazed than ever.

So you see, gentlemen, what happened to Belluca was completely natural, given his living conditions.

When I went to see him in the hospital, he told me about it himself in the greatest detail. He was still impassioned, to be sure, but that was completely natural given what had happened to him. He laughed at the doctors and nurses and at all of his colleagues who thought he was crazy.

“I wish!” he said. “I wish!”

Gentlemen, Belluca had forgotten for many, many years—truly forgotten—that the world existed.

Immersed in the continual torment of his unfortunate existence, absorbed all day long in his ledgers at the office, without even a moment of respite, like a blindfolded beast yoked to the pole of a waterwheel or a mill, yessir, he had forgotten for years and years—truly forgotten— that the world existed.

Two nights before, he had thrown himself onto that shabby couch in a fit of exhaustion, but perhaps due to his excessive tiredness, he hadn't been able to fall asleep right away. And suddenly, in the deep silence of the night, he heard a train whistle from afar.

It had seemed to him that after so many years—who knows how—his ears were suddenly unblocked.

The whistle of that train had suddenly and violently taken away the misery of all those terrible hardships that defined his life, and, almost as if from an uncovered tomb, he had found himself moving around and gasping for air in the expansive void of the world that had opened up wide all around him.

He had instinctively clung to the blankets he threw over himself every night and had run with his thoughts after that train flying off into the night.

There was … Oh! … there was, outside that horrendous little house, far from all his torments, there was the world! So much world, so far away, but toward which that train was heading … Florence, Bologna, Turin, Venice … so many cities, cities he had visited as a young man and whose lights must certainly still be sparkling on the earth that night. Yes, he knew the kind of life people lived there! It was the same life he had led once, long ago. And that life had gone on. It had always gone on, while he remained here like a blindfolded beast turning the shaft of a mill. He had forgotten all about it! He had closed himself off from the world, in the torment of his house, in the arid, prickly narrowness of his accounting job … But now—behold!— the world was violently pouring back into him, into his spirit. When that moment struck him, here, in this prison of his, an electric thrill coursed through the world, and he could follow it with his suddenly awakened imagination. Yes, he could follow it through cities known and unknown, moors, mountains, forests, seas … This same thrill, this same rush of time. While he was living his “impossible” life here, there were so many millions of men scattered all over the earth who lived differently. At the very moment that he was suffering here, there were solitary mountains covered in snow raising their blue foreheads to the night sky … Yes, yes, he could see them, he could see them, he could see them all so clearly … there were oceans … forests …

And so, now that the world had entered his spirit again, he could find some small consolation! Yes, rising from time to time from his torment, he could breathe the air of the wider world using his imagination.[11]

That was enough for him!

It only stood to reason that on that first day he had gone too far. He had gotten drunk. The whole world all at once: a cataclysm. Gradually, he would pull himself together. He was still drunk from too much air, he could feel it.

As soon as he had completely composed himself, he would apologize to the office manager and would resume his bookkeeping as before. Only now the office manager wouldn’t expect too much of him, as he had in the past. And from time to time—between one account entry and the next—he would have to grant him a quick visit to, yes, Siberia … or, or … to the rainforests of the Congo.

“It can be done in an instant, my dear Signor Cavaliere. Now that the train has whistled…”