“With Other Eyes” (“Con altri occhi”)

Translated by Jonathan Hiller

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “With Other Eyes” (“Con altri occhi”), tr. Jonathan Hiller. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2023.

“With Other Eyes” (“Con altri occhi”) was first published in the literary journal Il Marzocco on July 28, 1901 and later included in the collection of selected tales Two-faced Herm (Erma bifronte; Treves, Milan: 1906). In 1923, the short story became part of The Fly (La mosca), the fifth Collection of Stories for a Year (Novelle per un anno).

In “With Other Eyes,” Pirandello uses his humorous lens to de-construct the female protagonist’s certainties about her marriage, while showing how her initial devotion slowly gives way to a consuming suspicion over her husband’s callous behavior. Married for a few years, Anna and Vittore carry on their relationship despite their different personalities, until a seemingly insignificant event takes their life apart. When a photo of Vittore’s first wife slips from his suit, Anna is at first dismayed by her own jealousy for his past, almost despising the woman who was the recipient of his love before her. As she continues to observe the photograph, however, Anna can’t help but notice how the sad grimace on the face of Vittore’s former wife resembles her own. Incapable of chasing her unhappiness away, Anna decides to confront it, eventually locating its roots in the loneliness she has always felt because of her husband’s unemotional temperament. Just like the woman in the photograph, Anna realizes how she, too, was blinded by Vittore, an undeserving man who had taken advantage of her unconditional love and whom she is now seeing anew, “with other eyes.” In this story, Pirandello can also be seen as expanding on his interest in exploring bourgeois psychology, specifically with regard to issues of the bourgeois family and love; these themes were central to other short stories from the same period, such as “My Wife’s Husband” (“Il marito di mia moglie,” 1903) and “Without Malice” (“Senza malizia,” 1905). By delving into Anna’s subconscious and her search for personal happiness, Pirandello investigates the clutches of marital life and characters’ struggles to conform to external conventions, a creative vision that was likely shaped by the author’s own understanding of psychology and sharpened by reading such works as Les alterations de la personnalité (1892), by the French psychologist Alfred Binet. Similar themes would later be reworked in subsequent stories, such as “A Voice” (“Una voce”, 1904) and “Such Is Life” (“Pena di vivere così,” 1920).

The Editors

From the large window opening onto the little hanging garden of the house, one could see the branch of an almond tree in bloom, as if lounging on the vivid blue of that cool morning. One could hear, mixed with the low, burbling hum of the basin in the middle of the garden, the festive tolling of faraway church bells, and the twittering of the swallows, drunk on air and sun.

Withdrawing from the window with a sigh, Anna noticed that her husband had neglected to unmake the bed that morning, as was his wont, to voce,” 1904keep the servants from realizing he had not gone to sleep in his room.[1] So, she put her elbows on the untouched bed, then lay her entire chest on it, bending her pretty, blond head to the pillows, half-closing her eyes as if to extract from the fresh linen the slumber he so often took there. A flock of unruly swallows darted by, squawking outside the window.

You’d have been better off going to bed here, she murmured to herself, then rose wearily.

Her husband was to leave that very evening, and she had come into his room to prepare what he needed for the journey.

Opening the wardrobe, she heard something like a chirp come from the drawer inside, and immediately recoiled in fear. From the corner of the bedroom, she picked up a cane with a curved handle. Holding her dressing gown to her legs, she grasped the cane from the base and thus attempted to open the drawer from a distance. "But as she pulled, what slid out was not the drawer but rather a glinting, insidious blade from inside the cane. This startled her, and with repugnance she let go of the cover of the rapier, which was still left in her hand.

Just then, another chirp caused her to turn about abruptly, wondering whether the first one had not also come from a swallow squawking outside the window.

Moving aside the unsheathed weapon with her foot, she pulled out the drawer from between the two open wardrobe doors. It was full of old clothes her husband no longer wore. Out of a sudden curiosity, she began to rummage through it. As she put back a worn, faded old jacket, she felt something like a calling card poking out in the underlining at the hem, which had dropped there from a breast pocket that had given way. She wanted to see what this fallen card was, sitting there forgotten for who knows how many years. And so, by chance, Anna discovered a portrait of her husband’s first wife.

Blanching, her vision narrowing and her heart racing, she ran to the window and remained there awhile, entranced, gazing at this unknown image, with something of a sense of dread.

The voluminous coiffure atop the head and the old-fashioned attire prevented her at first from noting the beauty of that face. But as soon as she discerned the features and separated them from the clothing, jarring in its antiquity, and especially when she looked into the eyes, she felt almost offended. An impetus of hatred sprang from her heart to her brain; a hatred of posthumous jealousy, hatred mixed with the contempt she felt for this woman who had fallen in love with the man who was now her husband, eleven years after the connubial tragedy that had in an instant undone his first household.

Anna had hated that woman, unable to comprehend her infidelity to the man she herself now adored, and also because the woman’s relatives had opposed Anna’s marriage to Signor Brivio, as if he had been responsible for the disgrace and violent death of this unfaithful wife.

The portrait was of her, yes, certainly it was! Vittore’s first wife, she who had killed herself!

In this Anna was confirmed by the dedication written on the back of the portrait: To my Vittore, from his Almira––November 11, 1873.

Anna had but vague accounts of the woman’s death. She knew only that her husband, upon discovering her infidelity, had compelled the woman, with the impassivity of a judge, to take her own life.

Anna now recalled this sentence laid down by her husband with satisfaction, stung by that “my” and “his” in the dedication, as if the woman were boasting of the closeness of the ties that had bound her and Vittore together out of spite for Anna.

Following this first flash of hatred, springing as it did from a rivalry in which she was the last one standing, Anna’s soul was then taken by a feminine curiosity to examine the lineaments of that face. She almost refrained out of that strange consternation one feels when looking at an object that belonged to someone who died tragically, a consternation now keener, but familiar nonetheless, as it permeated all her love for a husband who had once belonged to another woman.

Examining her face, Anna noted instantly how little it resembled her own. In that same moment, the question rose from her heart of how it could be that her husband, who loved this woman, this girl whom he clearly thought pretty, could then fall in love with someone so different as she herself was.

It seemed prettier, that face, even to her, much prettier than her own, of a dark complexion judging by the portrait. And oh, those lips had joined his in kisses. But whence those pained lines at the corners of the mouth? And why was the look in those intense eyes so forlorn? The whole face betrayed deep sorrow. Anna felt something like vexation at the humble and true goodness conveyed by those lineaments. Then, she felt a pang of repulsion and disgust, suddenly recognizing the look in those eyes to be the same expression in her own when, thinking of her husband, she would look in the mirror after her toilette.

She had barely enough time to stash the portrait in her pocket. Her husband appeared, grumbling, at the threshold of the room.

“What did you do? The usual? Put everything in order, did you? Just my luck, now I’ll never find anything!”

Seeing the unsheathed weapon on the floor, he went on, “Oho! Did you also cross swords with the clothes in the wardrobe?”

And he laughed that laugh that arose in his throat, almost as if someone were tickling him. Laughing like this, he looked at his wife, as if asking what was so funny. While he looked, his wary, dark, restless eyes blinked rapid-fire.

Vittore Brivio treated his wife like a child incapable of anything beyond the naïve and almost puerile love by which he felt surrounded, often irritatingly so. He attended to this love but sparingly, even then displaying a condescension almost suffused with mild irony, as if to say, “Fine, why not? I too will act like a child with you awhile. It must be done, but let’s be quick about it!”

Anna had let the old jacket in which she had found the portrait fall to her feet. He picked it up, skewering it with the point of the rapier, then called out to the servant in the garden (also the coachman), who was currently hitching the cart to the horse. As soon as the boy appeared in the garden in his shirtsleeves, Brivio brusquely threw the skewered jacket in his face, adding, “Keep it, it’s yours!” to this hand-out. To his wife, he added, “Let’s hope that will give you less to brush, and less to pick up!”

And again, he broke into that strained laugh of his, fluttering his eyelids.

Anna’s husband had gone away from the city many other times, and for days on end, leaving at night as was now the case. But Anna, still shaken by the discovery of the portrait, felt a strange fear of being alone, and this she told her husband through tears.

Vittore Brivio, anxious about leaving too late and wholly absorbed in thoughts of his affairs, met his wife’s unaccustomed crying with ill humor.

“Now what? What’s this? Enough, enough, stop acting like a child!”

And out he rushed, without even taking his leave.

Anna started at the banging of the door, which he slammed behind him. She stood in the entryway, a lamp in her hand, and felt the tears well up in her eyes. Shaking it off, she hastily withdrew to her room, to go directly to bed.

In her room, already put in order, the nightlamp was burning.

“Go off to bed,” said Anna to the maid waiting on her, “I’ll manage. Goodnight.”

She put out the lamp, but instead of setting it down on the shelf, as was her wont, she put it on the night table, with a premonition that, despite herself, she might want it later. She began to undress with haste, her eyes fixed on the floor in front of her. When her dressing gown fell to her feet, she felt as if the portrait were there, looking at her and pitying her with those forlorn eyes that had so disconcerted her. She bent down resolutely to pick the dressing gown up off the rug, putting it on the armchair without folding it on the upholstered bench at the foot of the bed, as if the pocket concealing the portrait and the crumpled fabric could and would prevent her from reimagining the image of the dead woman.

Once Anna was in bed, she closed her eyes and forced herself to think of her husband on his way down the road to the railway station. She did this as a bitter rebellion against the urge that had overcome her all day to observe her husband, to study him. She knew whence this feeling had come and wanted to drive it out.

With an effort of willpower, which provoked a keen over-excitement of her nerves, she imagined in meticulous detail that long road, deserted by night, lit by the humming lamps, the tremulous light on the pavement that seemed to palpitate. At the foot of each lamp, a circle of shadow, the stores all closed. And there was the coach bearing Vittore. As if she were lying in wait for it, she began to follow its path to the station: she saw the lugubrious train, under the glass canopy, a jumble of people in that vast area under it.[2] It was smoking, dingy, making ominous, low noises. And lo, the train departed! As if she were really watching it speed off and disappear into the shadows, of a sudden she came to herself, opened her eyes in the silence of the room and felt an anguished sense of emptiness, as if something were missing inside her.

Then, confusedly, lost in her thoughts, she felt as though over the last three years, from the time she left her father’s house, she had been in this void, only beginning to become conscious of it now. She hadn’t noticed it before because she had filled that emptiness with her very self, with her love. Now she did notice it, because for that whole day she had practically held her love at abeyance, to see, to observe, to judge.

He didn’t even take his leave from me! She thought, and began to cry again, as if this thought itself were the cause of her tears.

She sat up in bed, but quickly stopped her hand in midair to take the handkerchief from her dress before rising. Come now, it was useless to forbid herself to reassess, to reexamine that portrait! She took it up. She relit the lamp.

How differently she had imagined the woman’s appearance! Looking now at the true image, she regretted the feelings her imaginings had suggested to her. She had first thought the woman rather portly and ruddy, with bright and smiling eyes, prone to laughter, to commonplace amusements. And now, here was a different person: a woman from whose pure features transpired a deep, suffering soul. Yes, different from Anna, but not in the coarse way guessed at earlier. On the contrary, that mouth seemed like it must never have smiled, while her own had been accustomed to gay laughter. Certainly, if the woman’s color was darker (as it appeared in the portrait), its air was less gay than her own, blonde and rosy.

Why, oh why such sadness?

An odious thought flashed into Anna’s mind, and at this she tore her gaze away from the image of the woman, perceiving not just a threat to her peace of mind, to her love, wounded as it had been on multiple occasions that day, but also to her proud dignity, that of an honest woman, which had never harbored even the remotest criticism of her husband. This woman had had a lover! Perhaps she was so sad because of him, because of that sinful love, and not because of her husband!

Anna hurled the portrait onto the bedside table and once again put out the lamp, hoping to fall asleep this time, to think no more of that woman, with whom she could have nothing in common. But as soon as her eyelids closed, she could not help but see the dead woman’s eyes and tried in vain to banish this vision.

“Not because of him, not because of him,” Anna muttered with nervous obstinacy, as if by demeaning the woman, she hoped to be free of her.

And she wracked her brains to recall every detail about that man, about this lover, almost willing the sad expression of those eyes to shift from herself onto the lover, whom she knew only by name: Arturo Valli. She did know the man had married a few years after the fact, as if to prove that he was innocent of the wrong that Brivio had laid at his feet. Valli had vigorously refused Brivio’s challenge, protesting that he would never fight a duel with a murderous madman. After being thus refused, Vittore threatened to kill the man wherever he should meet him, even in church. And so the man went away from his village with his wife, only to return once Vittore had remarried and moved away.

Yet, from the sadness of these events she recalled, from Valli’s cowardice, from her husband’s letting the matter pass into oblivion after several years (he who could go on living and remarry as if nothing had happened), from the joy she herself had felt at becoming his wife, from the three years she had spent without so much as a thought for that other woman, unexpectedly a reason to pity her came to Anna. She saw the image come to life before her, but as if very distant, and it seemed that with those eyes, hardened by pain, it said, with a slight nod:

I was the only one who died from it! The two of you are still alive!

Anna saw herself, felt herself as being alone in the house, and was frightened. Yes, she was alive, but for three years, from the day of the wedding, she had seen no more of her parents, of her sister, not even once. She who had adored them, who had always obeyed and trusted in them, who had rebelled against their will and their counsel out of love for this man. Out of love for this man, she had become deathly ill, and would have died had the doctors not prevailed upon her father to assent to the marriage. Her father had acquiesced, but withholding his blessing, indeed swearing that she would no longer exist for him or his household after the wedding. Beyond the gap in age (her husband was eighteen years her senior), the most serious stumbling block for her father was the man’s financial position, subject to sudden changes due to the risky ventures that he would leap into with reckless confidence in himself and in luck.

In three years of marriage, Anna, surrounded by comforts, could dismiss these paternal objections about her husband's finances as unjust, or dictated by reflexive prejudice; after all, she naively placed the same trust in him that he himself did. Whereas, regarding the age gap, to this point it had hardly been a subject which caused her distress or raised eyebrows, for Brivio showed not the faintest sign of aging in his lively, energetic body, and much less in his temperament, characterized by indefatigable energy, by restless zeal. Now, for the first time, looking (without even suspecting it) into her own life with the eyes of the dead woman, Anna had an entirely different reason to find fault with her husband. Yes, it was true; other times, she was hurt by his almost disdainful inattentiveness to her, but never like that day. Now, for the first time, she felt so painfully alone, separated from her kin, who seemed to her in that moment to have abandoned her there, to the point that, by marrying Brivio, she had something in common with the dead woman, and was no longer worthy of other company. And her husband, who should have consoled her, this very husband seemed uninclined to give her any recognition for the sacrifice she had made to him of her filial and fraternal love, as if it had cost her nothing, as if it was his right to expect this sacrifice, and he thus had no duty now to repay her. But oh…

Like this, forever! Anna felt as though she heard this lament from the pained lips of the dead woman.

She relit the lamp and once again, as she contemplated the picture, her attention was drawn to the expression of those eyes. Truly, had she too suffered because of him? Had she too, she too, realizing she was unloved, felt the same anguishing void?

“Did you? Did you?” Anna asked the picture, racked with sobs.

Then it occurred to Anna that those goodly eyes, intense with passion, commiserated with her in turn, pitying her for her husband’s abandonment, her unrepaid sacrifice; the love that was closed off to her like a jewel in a lockbox to which he alone held the key, and of which, like a miser, he never made use.