“The Trap” (“La trappola”)

Translated by Sarah Barret

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “The Trap” (“La trappola”), tr. Sarah Barrett. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2024.

”The Trap” was originally published in the Corriere della Sera on May 22, 1912. In 1915 it was then collected into a volume of stories to which it provided the title, The Trap (La trappola), published by Treves in Milan, before being added into the fourth Collection of Stories for a Year (Novelle per un anno), The Lonely Man (L’uomo solo; Florence: Bemporad, 1922).

One of Pirandello’s most philosophical short stories, “The Trap” uses the device of a first-person narrator speaking directly to the reader, whom he addresses as “my friend,” in a highly confessional tone. This provides an opportunity for him to unveil his inner thought process about the world, describing the “trap” into which he sees human life being led – the trap of assuming a fixed form that limits and confines life’s vital movement. While the first half of the story focuses on these reflections in a highly abstract and philosophical tone that may be more reminiscent of Pirandello’s theoretical writings, like his famous essay On Humor (L’umorismo, 1908), in the second part a narrative story gradually emerges. This shift provides us with some context for why the narrator holds such a negative view, or at least gives a concrete instantiation of that view in his account of how he feels a young woman has “entrapped” him. Thus while the first half might tempt readers to see the narrator as a stand-in for Pirandello himself, in the second half he becomes a clearly separate character, Fabrizio, with his own name and family history and passions – not to mention a strong dose of misogynistic stereotyping. However, what could be seen as a relatively banal “love triangle” motif in this second part of the story is shifted into the background under the cold philosophical insistence of the narrator, for whom life itself is a perpetual process of dying, losing vitality, becoming encrusted or rigid. In addition to resonating with his theoretical works, this story also resembles moments from across Pirandello’s corpus when other male raisonneur figures engage the reader or audience in similar philosophical reflections, from the Father in his play Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore, 1921/25) or Leone Gala in earlier The Rules of the Game (Il giuoco delle parti, 1918), to other first-person narrators like the titular Mattia Pascal in The Late Mattia Pascal (Il fu Mattia Pascal, 1904) or Vitangelo Moscarda in his last novel, One, No One and One Hundred Thousand (Uno, nessuno e centomila, 1926). The philosophical pessimism of these reflections, while perhaps only one side of Pirandello’s outlook, has often been an aspect that readers found pervasive or defining in his works.

The Editors

No, no, how should I resign myself? And why? If I had some duty towards others, perhaps. But I have none. So why, then?

Listen to me. You cannot tell me I’m wrong. Looking at the situation in the abstract, no one can tell me I’m wrong. What I feel is what you feel, what everyone feels.

Why are you all so afraid to wake in the night?[1] Because, for you, the reasons for living only appear in the light of day. In the illusions offered by the light of day.

Every one of you is terrified by darkness and silence. And you light candles. But it seems sad, does it not, that candlelight? Because it is not the light that you need. The sun, the sun! All of you desperately seek the sun. For in the artificial light created by your own trembling hand, illusions no longer appear spontaneously.[2]

Like your hand, your reality trembles. It seems to you imaginary, inconsistent. It is as artificial as the candlelight. And all your senses stand guard, unbearably tense. For you fear that beneath that reality, whose empty inconsistency you recognize, another reality will reveal itself, obscure and horrible. A breath... what is it? What is making that scratching sound?

And while you are suspended in the horror of waiting for the unknown, trembling and sweating in turn, you see before you, moving like a specter, your daytime illusions. Observe them well; they have your hollow eye sockets, your eyelids swollen with tears, your jaundiced, sleepless face, the pain of your arthritic limbs. Yes, the dull gnawing pain in your swollen finger joints.

And the look of the furniture in the room! These objects too seem suspended in an immobility which terrifies you.

You used to sleep with these objects around you.

But they do not sleep. They stand there, day and night.[3]

For now, it is your hands which open and close the doors, the drawers. Tomorrow, another hand will open and close them. Who knows who that hand belongs to? But for these objects, it is all the same. For now, they hold within them your clothes, your suspended garments, which are imprinted with the wrinkles and the creases made by your tired knees, your bony elbows. Tomorrow these objects will hold the crumpled garments of another. The mirror on the wardrobe door reflects your image, but will retain no trace of it; tomorrow, it will not retain the image of another.

The mirror itself sees nothing. The mirror is like the truth.

Do you think I’m talking nonsense, my friend?[4] That I’m away with the fairies? No, you understand me. And you also understand more than I’m saying, for it is very difficult to express this obscure feeling which dominates and disturbs me.

You know how I have lived until now. You know that I have felt revulsion, horror, at the idea that I take a certain form, at the idea of consolidating that existence, of fixing myself, even momentarily, in that form.[5]

I have always made my friends laugh for all... how can I put it?... confusing, that’s the word—all my confusing characteristics.[6] But you have been able to laugh about it, because you have never gone deeper, to consider my yearning need to present myself to myself in the mirror as another being, to persuade myself that I am not always the same being, to see myself as other!

It’s true! What have I been able to alter? I’ve gone so far as to shave my head, in order to see myself prematurely bald;[7] sometimes I’ve shaved my mustache, while leaving my beard—or the other way round; sometimes I’ve let my beard grow in one way, sometimes in another—pointed, parted at the chin, down to my collarbone...

I have experimented with my hair.

My eyes, my nose, my mouth, my ears, my torso, my legs, my arms, my hands—I’ve not really been able to alter these. Should I put on make-up, as if I were on the stage? Sometimes I’ve been tempted to do that. But then I thought that, behind the mask, my body remained the same... and was aging![8]

I tried to compensate by being witty. Ah, I could play better with wit.

The rest of you prize everything, and never tire of praising constancy of feelings and consistency of character.[9] And why? Always for the same reason, of course! Because you are cowards, because you are afraid of yourselves—afraid that, by changing, you will lose the reality you have given yourselves, and afraid of recognizing, therefore, that that same reality is nothing more than your illusion, and that therefore no reality exists apart from that which we create for ourselves.

But my question is: what does it mean to create a reality, other than to immobilize oneself in one way of feeling—to solidify, rigidify, become crusted over within that feeling? Thus we can halt that endless vital movement, turning ourselves into so many small, stagnant ponds awaiting putrefaction, while life itself continues its incandescent, indistinct flux.

There, my friend, that is the thought that distresses me and drives me wild!

Life is the wind, life is the sea, life is fire—not earth, which spreads and takes fixed form.

Every form is death.

Everything which detaches itself from this state of fusion and consolidates itself, in this continuous, incandescent, indistinct flux, is death.

We are all beings caught in a trap, separated from the never-ending flux, and immobilized by death.

In our separated, broken-off, fixed form, that movement of flux lasts in us for a brief space of time. But look, little by little it slows; the flame grows cold; our form dries out; until all movement ceases in our rigid bodies.

We have finished dying. And we have called this living!

I have the sense of being caught in this trap of death, which has snatched me from the flux of life in which I moved formlessly and has instead fixed me in time—in this time.

Why in this time?

I could have kept flowing, and been fixed further on, at least, in another form—further on. It would have been the same, don’t you think? Ah yes, sooner or later... I would become another, further away, who knows who and who knows how? Trapped in another destiny. I would have seen other things, or perhaps the same, but from a different perspective, in a different order.

My friend, you cannot imagine the hatred inspired in me by the things I see,[10] caught with me in this trap which is my time—all these things which will end up dying with me, little by little! Hatred and pity! But more hatred, perhaps, than pity.

Of course, it’s true that, once I’d fallen into the trap further on, I would have hated that form, as I hate this one; I would have hated that other time, as I hate this, and all the illusions of life that we dead of every era manufacture for ourselves using what little movement and warmth still lies within us, of the continuous flow, which is real life and which never stops.

We are the preoccupied dead, who delude ourselves that we are creating our life.

We copulate, a dead man and a dead woman, and believe we are giving life, while giving death... another being caught in the trap!

Here, my love, here! Start dying, my love, start dying... Are you weeping? You are weeping and squirming away. Would you have liked to go on flowing? Be good, my love. There is nothing you can do. Caught, co-a-gu-la-ted, fixed... It will only last a little while. Be good...

Ah, while we are little children, while our growing body is tender and light, we do not fully understand that we have been caught in a trap! But then the body gets tangled up; we begin to feel that we can no longer move as we once did.

In disgust, I watch my spirit struggling in this trap, trying to avoid being fixed in this body already heavy and marked by age. I chase away every idea that is beginning to become part of me; I quickly interrupt any action that seems to be developing into a habit. I want no duties, I want no affections, I do not want my spirit, too, to harden into a crust of fixed ideas. But I feel that my body, from day to day, struggles to find ways to follow the unquiet spirit; it is falling, falling, its knees are weary and its hands are heavy. It seeks rest. I will give it rest.

No, no, I don’t know, I don’t want to resign myself to being one of those pitiable spectacles offered by the old as they slowly die. No. But first... I don’t know, I would like to do something monstrous, unheard-of, to give vent to this rage which devours me.

At the very least, I would like—do you see these fingernails?—I would like to sink them into the face of every beautiful woman who passes by, teasing the men, inciting them.

Ah, women—what stupid, wretched, thoughtless creatures they all are! They decorate themselves, embellish themselves, turn their laughing gaze here and there, reveal the provocative shape of their bodies as much as they can, never realizing that they too are caught in this trap, they too are fixed until death, and that they hold within themselves the trap for those who are to come.

The trap, for us men, is in them, the women. They render us momentarily incandescent, in order to excavate from us another living being condemned to death. By what they do and what they say, in the end they make us fall, blind, blazing, and violent, into their trap.[11]

Even me, even me! They have caused even me to fall! Now, just now. This is why I am so ferocious.

A vile trap! If you had seen her—a little madonna. Timid, humble. As soon as she saw me, she lowered her gaze and blushed. Because she knew that otherwise I would not have fallen into the trap.

She came here to practice one of the seven corporal works of mercy: visiting the sick. It was my father she came for, not for me. She came to help my old housekeeper take care of my poor father back there, to wash him...

She lived in the neighborhood, and had befriended the housekeeper, to whom she complained about her stupid husband, who constantly reproached her for not providing him with a son.

But do you understand what happens, my friend? When a human being begins to stiffen up, when he can no longer move as he once could, he wants to see about him other little dead people, of a tender age, who move as he once moved when he was young like them, other little dead beings who resemble him and who can carry out all those tasks he can no longer perform.

It amuses him to wash the faces of these little dead ones, who don’t yet know that they are caught in the trap—to comb their hair, to take them on little walks.

So, she came to this house.

“I can imagine,” she said, lowering her gaze and blushing, “I can imagine, signor Fabrizio, what a torment it must be for you to see your old father in such a condition.”

“Indeed, madam,” I replied brusquely, turning my back on her and walking away.

I am sure, now, that the moment I turned away to leave, she laughed to herself, biting her lip to hold back that laugh.

I walked away because, despite myself, I was conscious of admiring this woman, not just for her beauty (she was very beautiful, and all the more seductive because she modestly pretended to set no store by her beauty). And I admired her because she refused to give her husband the satisfaction of bringing another unhappy soul into the trap.

I thought that the fault lay with her. On the contrary, she was not to blame; it was her stupid husband who lacked what was needed. And she knew that—or at least suspected it, without being certain. That was why she was laughing—at me, she was laughing at me for my admiration of her presumed incapacity. She laughed silently, in her wicked heart, and she waited. Until one evening...

It happened here, in this room.

It was dark. You know that it pleases me to stand at a window and admire the dying of the day, abandoning myself to the atmosphere and wrapping myself bit by bit in the shadows, and to think: I am no longer here... And think: If there were somebody in this room, they would get up and light a lamp. I am not lighting a lamp, because I am no longer here. I am like the chairs in this room, like the little table, the curtains, the wardrobe, the divan, which have no need of light and neither see nor know that I am not here. I want to be like them, so that I do not see myself, and I forget that I am here.

So, it was dark. She came in from over there, on tiptoe, from my father’s room, where she had left a night light on. Through a chink in the doorway, the soft glow just penetrated the gloom without dissipating it.

I did not see her; I did not realize that she was close to me. Perhaps she too was unaware. As she bumped into me, she cried out, and she pretended to faint in my arms, against my chest. I looked down at her; my cheek brushed hers; I felt the warmth of her yearning lips...

In the end, it was her laughter that shook me. Her diabolical laughter. I hear it still! She laughed and laughed, as she left the room. She laughed at the trap she had set for me with her modesty; she laughed at my rage; and she laughed for another reason, which I learned later.

Three months ago she left with her husband, who had been promoted to a teaching position in Sardinia.

Certain promotions are timely.

I will not face my remorse, I refuse to do so. But at certain moments I am tempted to swoop down on that wicked woman and to choke her before she can set the trap for that unhappy being extracted by her betrayal of me.

My friend, I am happy not to have known my mother. Perhaps, if I had known her, this ferocious feeling would not have arisen in me. But, since this feeling was born in me, I am happy not to have known my mother.

Come, come with me into the other room. Look!

That man is my father.

He has been there for seven years. He has become nothing. Two eyes which weep; a mouth which eats. He does not speak, he does not hear, he no longer moves. He eats and he weeps. He eats when he is spoon-fed, and he weeps. He weeps alone, for no reason; or perhaps because, even though he began to die seventy-six years ago, something in him does not want to be finished with life.

Do you not find it atrocious that he lies like this, in one place, still caught in the trap from which he cannot free himself?

He cannot think of his father, who seventy-six years ago set him on this path to a death which is so agonizingly slow to come to an end. But I, I can think of him; and I know that I am a seed of this man who no longer moves. The fact that I am trapped in this time and not in another, I owe that fact to him!

He weeps, do you see? He is always weeping like that... and he makes me weep too. Perhaps he wants to be liberated. I will liberate him, one evening, along with myself. Now it grows cold; on an evening like this we usually light a fire... Would you like that?

No? Thank you, but no? Yes, of course, let us go out, my friend. I see that you need to see the sun again, to be outside.