“The Wealthy Woman” (“La ricca”)

Translated by Marella Feltrin-Morris

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “The Wealthy Woman” (“La ricca”), tr. Marella Feltrin-Morris. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2021.

“The Wealthy Woman” was first printed November 13, 1892 in the Neapolitan periodical La Tavola Rotonda, a weekly publication focused on literature and music that had significant distribution at the time. Pirandello did not, however, collect it into any of the subsequent volumes of his stories, and it was not republished until the editors at Mondadori added it to the Appendix of Stories for a Year that was issued in 1938.

The early date of publication makes this one of Pirandello’s first short stories, written the same year that Pirandello left Bonn (1892) and established himself in Rome, which would be his new home for most of the rest of his life. At this point he was still living off his father’s wealth as he went in search of literary success. Critics consider “The Wealthy Woman” the first complete short story by Pirandello, following on his “sketch,” “Little Hut: Sicilian Sketch,” written in 1884 when he was only 17 years old. Written during the period when Pirandello was most heavily influenced by the Sicilian school of realism, verismo, the story shows precise attention to details of setting and the landscape; at the same time, though, it also begins to introduce typically Pirandellian characteristics such as his particular form of humor (umorismo) as well as thematic foci including the crisis of identity and the weight imposed by the fictions we represent to one another in our social lives. Thus already at this early moment, the theme of the social or existential “mask” that we all inevitably wear is visible in the analysis of how the characters play “roles” in life. In this respect, it might be compared to other stories from the 1890s in which Pirandello’s narrative evidently takes distance from verismo as he develops his own approach to analyzing the existential drama of modern life, for example “Sun and Shade” (1896) and “Who Did It?” (1896). The humorist elements emerge especially in the ironic shift in the plot, as the rich woman of the title, Giulia Montana, the fourth daughter of a rich banker, is first forbidden from marrying her beloved because his financial situation is inferior to hers and then, after a reversal of her own financial fortunes, nevertheless herself refuses to marry him.

The Editors

The favorite subject of gossip for Giulia Montana’s three sisters, who had rushed to marry according to their patrimony and social status rather than wait for love, was their sister, who instead adamantly insisted on remaining a spinster. Flaunting, albeit under their breath, a series of cautionary adages, they would comment ruefully on the most attractive marriage proposals she had turned down. And being the good daughters they were, they would pity their elderly father, who was always sour and cold, marble-like, towards that youngest daughter—and pity her, too, poor Giulia, over that affliction of hers, as they called it.

Poor Giulia’s affliction was a misguided, incautious love; in other words, a love that, from the height of the sumptuous family carriage, looked down upon the common people strolling around on foot.

Maria, the youngest of the three, sighed:

“She turned down Nicola Pàncamo! What a shame!”

Nicola Pàncamo was brother-in-law to the second sister, docile Anna. Barely five feet tall and almost bald at just thirty years of age, he had a pair of skinny, finger-like legs that he always held spread apart to better support the weight of his early paunch—the same build after all as his brother Giorgio, Anna’s husband.

“Madness! Let’s hope to God she never comes to regret it,” added Elena, the eldest. “She’s not a young girl anymore: twenty-six and still in this state. It would have been a blessing for her and Father.”

Anna was always about to join the conversation, but her blue eyes, shaded by her long blond eyelashes, would unintentionally turn to the one sister who had yet to speak, and her docile gaze would seem to give the sister permission to say what she meant to say herself. Nodding and smiling at every sentence as if she herself had uttered it, from time to time, almost mechanically, she would repeat the other’s last words: “Twenty-six… a blessing for her and Father.”

“And for whom, after all? Enrico Santagnese!” lashed out Maria, the most relentless of the three, opening fire against poor Enrico, Giulia’s beloved. In the end, however, none of them had it in for the bony young man enough to draw blood with their invectives. Alas, the poor man looked so pale and sickly that he seemed to hardly have any blood. Besides, before his father, Carlo Santagnese, one of Sicily’s wealthiest ship owners, lost his entire fortune, Enrico and his sisters had been their neighbors, childhood friends, and playmates.

“Enrico’s been forced to work as a shipper.”

“…as a shipper…,” echoed Anna, as she spun her rings round and round her fingers.

“He just lives from one day to the next, poor soul, and everyone knows he also has his mother and sisters to provide for.”

Still, they wouldn’t accept the possibility that Enrico Santagnese might be hanging on to Giulia’s love simply because he had an eye on her dowry—no, they just said that, although he had no ulterior motives, that additional little perk must not be completely indifferent to him. But even with her dowry, how could they afford to live in the city and mingle with high society? No doubt, considering Giulia’s taste for fineries, things would soon become awkward. Was it acceptable, then? No, it wasn’t.

“But ultimately,” Elena continued, “I’d be curious to know what Giulia finds so special about Enrico. Ugly he’s not, that’s true. But my gosh, he looks like a dying Christ…”

“He’s unpleasant,” was all Anna cared to add.

And Maria:

“Such a feeble little heart! No vigor, no breath… Kind-hearted, poor man, but nothing more than a thread of straw—so dull! Disagree with me all you want, but frankly, I’ve never been able to stand that faded blond hair… and he even has black eyes: a real beauty!”

For his part, Felice Montana, their hard and inflexible father, would only break his customary gloomy silence to say, “As long as I’m alive, she won’t marry him.”

Those words appeared etched in his perpetually-frowning eyebrows.

*

It was her sisters’ veiled pity and her father’s stern opposition that fueled, so to speak, Giulia Montana’s love for Enrico Santagnese. The strength of her love was precisely the tension produced by that insurmountable obstacle.

To her father’s strict, obdurate intransigence, Giulia responded with an intransigence of her own, equally strict and obdurate.

Despite the fact that for the past six years they had been the only ones still living in the house, between them not a single word was exchanged beyond perfunctory remarks. He kept managing the banking and sulfur business, and she still devoted herself to her usual occupations: painting, playing music, reading, embroidering.

After she turned down Pàncamo, her father stopped informing her of any other marriage proposals, and so they came to an open confrontation:

“It’s useless to talk about it. Not Pàncamo, nor anyone else. I don’t want to marry anyone, and never will,” declared Giulia.

“Either Enrico Santagnese…”

“Either Enrico Santagnese, or no one.”

Suit yourself, her father had retorted. The current law now allowed her to rebel against paternal authority, and so she was free to do as she pleased. But he would not grant her any dowry money. She would receive her lawful share of inheritance upon his death, but his consent—never!

After that day, Giulia retreated into herself, into an immovable state of mind with no hope for any change of events.

She never saw Enrico Santagnese except on rare occasions, either from high up in her carriage as she and her father took a ride down the promenade that bordered the English Garden,[1] where Enrico, standing among the trees, would unfailingly wave at the elderly banker without ever receiving any acknowledgment of his greeting, or on certain afternoons, along Corso Scinà, while she looked out of the window.[2]

They were fleeting encounters, mere glances, really. Meek like an anxious, subdued question were those cast by Enrico, while Giulia’s were firm, almost solemn.

Still? asked Enrico’s eyes.

Still! answered Giulia’s, brimming with ardor and authority.

This was how, for eleven years, she had loved her meek adorer. A love made up almost exclusively of pride and pity: pride for herself, pity for him. Certainly, for her part, it bore no trace of the sentimentality that characterized ordinary, bland romances. Giulia Montana loved luxury and wealth, and she knew well that being in power requires handling both with skill and taste. She loved consorting with people of her rank, though she deemed them, for the most part, foolish and banal, and suffered every affected display of courtesy and all vain, worldly pride like an injunction. For instance, she found it comforting to think that, if Enrico Santagnese regained his former wealth, he would know how to live and spend like a true gentleman. Many people, including her own family, wrongly regarded her as a cold, unperturbed creature. Sometimes it really seemed as if she had assigned herself a role, and that she never stopped playing it, either at home or outside, even to herself.[3] It seemed as if nothing could fill her eyes or her soul with wonder. Always her own mistress, and endowed with extraordinary intuition, she could fathom everything, and in her presence everyone was like a child. Nobody could say a single thing that she didn’t expect, or that she hadn’t almost predicted. Walking into a room, she knew, and made it clear she knew, that many of the guests had been thinking about her, that they had been waiting for her, and that her being there brought pleasure to them all, despite the fact that virtually no one found her rather serious countenance amiable—certainly not breezy or lighthearted. Her charm emanated from her locked-up soul, like a liquid fragrance from a sealed vial.

It was a scent of elegance that she disseminated in social circles in exchange for mundane triumphs, but those triumphs only delighted her because her mind was constantly focused on him, Enrico Santagnese, and also because they constituted yet another thing she could sacrifice for his sake.

*

Now, for some time Felice Montana had been looking much gloomier than was his custom, and the furrow that his taciturn, brooding nature had etched between his eyebrows had grown deeper. He would often sit with his eyes closed, surely concocting some secret way out, and in those moments it seemed as if his long, feathery strands of white hair were standing up on his head from the heavy tension of his strained brow. It could not possibly be his preoccupation with his daughter or her stubbornness that caused him to be worried so.

His daughter had noticed it, and would scrutinize him with piercing eyes, gripped by an inexplicable apprehension.

They no longer went out every day as they used to. Reading in her room with the door intentionally open and the curtains pulled back, Giulia would wait until late at night for her father to step out of his study. She would see him walk by, hunched over in his lavish dressing gown, his hands clasped behind his back and his head hanging down on his chest, but she wouldn’t dare go and talk to him. She would hear the door of the bedroom across from hers being shut, and then she would sigh and just sit there hesitantly, deep in thought, forgetting about her book and the late hour.

One night, instead of going into his room, Felice Montana walked into his daughter’s. Giulia rose from her seat in surprise. Her father stopped in the middle of the room, lifted his head, and said to her: “Sit down,” as if her movement had bothered him. A velvety black moth, suddenly awoken by Giulia’s rising, started flying around frantically and bumping repeatedly against the opaque glass of the desk lamp. That, too, clearly annoyed the old man. He waited for the moth to settle down, then spoke:

“Things are bad,” he said, shaking his head. “How could that be? After running down all the figures, it turns out the sulfur export has been much lower than any other year. I checked the registers: only one third of the average. At this point, sulfur is considered an inferior material: it’s worth nothing. In the hinterland some people are starving. Most everyone’s to blame—especially us. I’ve always said so. In the large sulfur mine of San Cataldo I had to order all extraction to be suspended.[4] What do we do with all that useless material weighing on us? It doesn’t even cover the expenses! But that’s nothing, I’m not even worried about that. There’s worse.”

He was talking as if to himself, as if carrying on with a thought that had come to him in his study. He was now expressing it without any clarifications, and it didn’t even occur to him that his daughter might not understand.

“Some serious rumors have been circulating about the Trinacria shipping company.[5] I still think they’re unfounded, just a plot devised by a new company that’s trying to take over. But I confess they’re starting to worry me.”

He fell quiet, lost in thought. He dragged his hand roughly across his forehead, shrugged his shoulders and murmured, as he left: “It would be my demise.”

Giulia remained standing by the desk, gazing perplexedly. She had been taken aback, hadn’t understood anything except for the last words her father had uttered upon leaving: my demise. When she recovered from that strange sense of dizziness, she walked to the door and looked out into the hallway—all was dark and quiet, her father’s bedroom door shut. Had she seen a ghost? she wondered. My demise! Those had been his exact words. How was it that he had gone to her—why? What had he been trying to convey, with those words?

“He’s in a lot of pain!” she exclaimed aloud, and was immediately shocked to hear her own voice, as if it had come from somebody else in the room. “He must be in a lot of pain,” she repeated softly, her eyes fixed on a single point. Those last words kept resurfacing insistently from her memory to her lips as if their sound were knocking upon her still-dormant consciousness: my demise! ... my demise! ...

She sat down with her elbows on the desk and her head in her hands. Mechanically, she read a few lines of the book that lay open before her, almost drawn by force to the whiteness of the page glowing under the light. Then she stirred, and with her hand she pushed the book aside in irritation. That gesture temporarily distracted her, and her mind started wandering as if in a dream.

It was a gray autumn day. She was walking with her elderly governess down Via del Borgo Nuovo.[6] When they reached the little church of Santa Lucia, by the sea, she heard someone calling her from a window above.[7] A thin voice on the wind. She looked up. She really didn’t want to go in, but how could she say no? They might think that she, wealthy as she was, now despised the friendship of the poor, and their home. After all, at that time of day he certainly wasn’t there.

“Ah, if Father found out!” she said to herself as she climbed the stairs that led to the Santagneses’ house.

In her mind, she could still feel the agitation and discomfort she had experienced as she walked up those steps—gray, dusty, their rise too steep. And, like a sting, the memory of her own reproach still pierced her: “If Father found out!”

With a heavy heart she pictured the squalor of those bare walls, the meager furnishings that almost looked lost on that floor newly repaved with clay bricks still specked here and there with plaster. And the melancholy of those pretentious jute curtains hanging from the doors and balconies, which seemed to let in the entire sea and the gray, fluttering sky. And the embarrassment, the embarrassment of those poor girls, Enrico’s sisters, and their old mother! They popped in one by one, smiling awkwardly, from an adjacent room where no doubt they had retreated to quickly put on a clean apron, or an embroidered woolen shawl, or a headkerchief with a flower pattern, all so they could give their wealthy guest, their old playmate, a proper welcome.

And then, all of a sudden, Enrico arrived. She could still see the astonishment on his pale face and sorrowful eyes; his timorous, faint smile almost a grimace of surprise. She now understood the words he had then said to her, which, in her anxious pressure to get out of that house, she had barely heard. Yes, Enrico had told her about the Trinacria shipping company, she remembered very well. She now also understood her father’s agitation, his showing up in her room—everything, everything.

That night she couldn’t sleep at all.

A few weeks later, Felice Montana received a letter from Enrico Santagnese, who, while apologizing repeatedly for his boldness, etc., implored him to get rid, as soon as possible, even with a 70% loss, of all the stocks he had invested in the Trinacria shipping company. But on the same day he received that letter, still firmly convinced that such an important company couldn’t possibly crash like that, from one day to the next, for no apparent reason, and both encouraged and betrayed by people he trusted who were in charge of Trinacria, Felice Montana contributed 400,000 lire to the company’s management, hoping it would help raise its prestige.

Within three days, the company declared bankruptcy, and Montana went down with it. The poor old man now barely had any money left for him and his family to live a life of seclusion. He was on the verge of madness; he insisted on rushing to get rid of all his possessions—the grand mansion, the carriage house—and dismissed all the servants, as if he had fallen prey to a raging fever and saw this sudden cutting of expenses as the only way to save himself.

“Want to know something?” he said to his daughter. “Your Santagnese had warned me with a letter. Now you may marry him, if you want. That will be our way of saying thank you.”

And he let out a ghastly laugh.

*

Their carriages had been taken away, one after the other on a rainy winter morning, all closed up and covered like hearses. Oh, the mournful sound of wheels rolling one last time on the cobblestone driveway as they brought them out of the carriage house and into the courtyard!

Giulia watched it all from behind the windowpanes.

Even their eight horses, “the most beautiful in the whole city,” had been taken away, hitched in pairs, down the lane still wet from the night dew. The haughty animals had gone off swishing their tails, almost swaying their shiny hips, their ears pricked up, prancing in their thick, golden blankets. Carriages and horses moved, along with their coachmen and grooms, into the stables and carriage houses of other gentlemen.

So many passersby stopped to admire those horses, and then turned towards the Montanas’ house. Some shook their heads, while others, unaware or unaffected, just went on about their business.

Giulia’s eyes wandered around the house, still brimming with a tearful dream.

“Easy! Easy!” she would hear from a room nearby. “Watch the mirror! Yes, like that… Move that armchair! Now set it down… Easy! Ah, this feels nice!”

Someone had flopped down in the armchair with a groan and was now rudely testing its springs.

Meanwhile others were dismantling the grand ballroom, taking everything away.

Giulia went there every now and then, as if in a dream, to salvage some beloved object from ruin; but every time she returned to her bedroom emptyhanded, feeling even more lost. She would stand by the ballroom door, look in, and freeze. All the furniture had been amassed in the center of the room, the curtains had been taken down from every door and window, the chairs stacked by twos and some straw scattered on the rug… straw shavings everywhere, on the armchairs, on the sofas… What about her music scores? No, not those! Not those! The pianoforte was gone. And the large plates she had painted? The two embroidery looms? Those, too? She felt the heat rising to her face. She called her old governess—was she gone, too?

She would lock herself in her room, but even there she no longer felt like the mistress of her own place. She would pace back and forth with her head down, then suddenly stop in her tracks, bewildered by her own image, her white gown crudely reflected in a full-length mirror placed away from the light. She would look around and see that same lost expression in two other long mirrors. She would then sit in the armchair by her canopy bed, close her eyes and feel a sense of void, as if the house were collapsing under her feet. She would grab onto the armrests, press herself against the back of the chair and stare straight ahead, her eyes wide open but strangely immobile.

“Nothing! Nothing left!” she murmured, her gaze still fixed as two warm tears welled up in her eyes and slowly, slowly, rolled down her cheeks. The sound of her own voice had softened her.

It wasn’t only the house that was collapsing—it was also her dream, her love. She had dreamed about giving, bestowing her magnificent body and wealth upon her meek adorer. Her plans, generously forged by her wealth and even bolstered by so many obstacles, were now foundering. Along with the dowry, there went love, too. For a moment she pictured again the Santagneses’ meager house in Borgo Nuovo, the way it had appeared to her on that gray autumn day.

“To walk into that house? No, no, never. To walk into it like this, emptyhanded, indebted to my husband for his loyalty, his steadfastness, and living there like the Santagnese sisters, inside those bare walls, with the gray sea and the dust from the street—ah, impossible! Impossible!”

Would Enrico Santagnese’s eyes still be asking that anxious, subdued question, as they did during the days of their thwarted love as she rode next to her father in their sumptuous carriage down the promenade by the English Garden: Still?

Oh, yes, of course! But to what end, now? She was neither young, nor wealthy—what for, then?

*

Two months after the Montana house was foreclosed, Enrico Santagnese formally asked for Giulia’s hand in marriage. Her old father hastened to inform his daughter about the proposal, which he imagined she was eager to receive.

Giulia Montana said no.