“Zafferanetta” (“Zafferanetta”)

Translated by Patricia Stumpp

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “Zafferanetta” (“Zafferanetta”), tr. Patricia Stumpp. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2024.

“Zafferanetta” was first published in the Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera on May 27, 1911. Pirandello then added it to a miscellaneous collection of his short stories published the following year as Tercets (Terzetti) by his Milanese publisher, Treves. It was then included in the twelfth Collection of his Stories for a Year (Novelle per un anno), The Trip (Il viaggio, 1928).

This story explores a familiar Pirandellian theme through a somewhat less common lens. It is a tale emphasizing the ways in which an individual’s inner experience separates them from others, making communication and mutual understanding difficult or even impossible. On a deeper level, it also examines that difference through the lens of colonial adventurism, mixed-race offspring, as well as linguistic and cultural differences that both alienate and draw together different individuals according to their own attachments. The protagonist here, Sirio Bruzzi, has joined the Belgian colonial army in the Congo where he has become a colonial military administrator; in the process, he has fathered a child with a local black girl. Now, back in Italy, he is betrothed to an Italian fiancé but also wants to reunite with his mixed-race daughter, who comes to stand in also for his nostalgia for living in Africa. While the white Italians around him abhor the daughter’s “grotesque” (in their eyes) skin color, giving her the nickname “Zafferanetta” (a reference to what they see as her “saffron” colored skin), he appreciates her beauty in the same way that he pines for his life back in Africa. That Pirandello makes Titti/Zafferantta the title character speaks to the centrality of this dual perspective on her: her difference makes her an object of fear and dislike for the Italians who have never left home while also making her the prized love of her father, who is drawn to that foreignness in the same way the others are repelled by it. This theme of foreignness and misunderstanding is pushed further throughout the story by the use of foreign words, which punctuate the text and make it at turns comically hybrid and at other times hard for the intended audience to understand without interpretative glossing, which Pirandello generally provides himself. More research would be needed to track down where Pirandello found the words that he is using here, which he simply attributes to “Congolese” – though there are in fact hundreds of spoken dialects in the Congo region. We have included footnotes here on the various words and phrases he has integrated, but without archival evidence of where Pirandello found these words we cannot say for certain what language he is using and how he is modifying it. The story’s themes of cultural difference, alienation, nostalgia, and the perspectival relativity of life also come to the fore in other stories by Pirandello, such as “Far Away” (“Lontano,” 1902). However, this is one of the only works to focus that investigation of cultural difference and identity on African colonialism and race.

The Editors

Sirio Bruzzi ran joyously into his mother’s room, shaking the letter from his cousin that had just arrived, postmarked from Banana at the mouth of the Congo.[1]

“He’s bringing her, Mamma! Ah, my sweet little Mommy, I’m so happy! My Titti! My Titti! Giongo is going up river, the steamer is leaving![2] My poor Giongo! My dear little Gionghicello! He has to go… where I don’t know anymore because of some damn bureaucratic mess, the usual kind! In about forty days he’ll be in Mesània;[3] maybe he’s already there by now. He’ll run to Mokàla, pick up my Titti and come back home, and he’ll come home too for always![4] Come on Mamma, go, go tell Aunt Nena about it! Who knows how happy she’ll be about it too! I’m going to run over to Nora’s. When you leave Aunt’s house, come to Nianò’s too, to pick me up, OK? I’ll wait for you!”

He leaned down to kiss his mother and dashed away, letter in hand.

Poor Signora Bruzzi was left stunned for a moment, as was wont to happen with each new onslaught of that blessed boy of hers. But her happy smile, brought on by his jubilation, faded little by little from her pale lips.

She thought that Norina, Sirio’s fiancée, to whom he had run to have her read the letter, could not possibly rejoice in her heart at the news the way he did. Rather she would only be distressed by it, even more so when she saw him laughing and shouting with joy. Wasn’t all this joy at the expense of a sacrifice on her part? Yes, Norina had resigned herself to it; but Sirio shouldn’t have made such a spectacle of his joy because of this, almost insisting that she share in it. Ah, that blessed boy, he wasn’t really thinking logically anymore!

But to tell the truth, when had her Sirio ever thought things over logically?

He had learned from his father, who had died young and tragically in a duel, to rush headlong into the riskiest adventures. It seemed that deep down inside of himself he had a storm for a soul: he steamrolled over everything, creating confusion. When he couldn’t control himself, he mangled people’s names, threw out incoherent phrases, meaningless words; he jumbled the syllables of words, turning them topsy-turvy: Nora, Nianò, Rorina, Elinanò.[5]

Signora Buzzi herself didn’t know anymore how she had managed to deliver him safe and sound from infancy to young adulthood. She had had him arrested the first time when as a youth he had run away from home to join the Garibaldian expedition in Greece;[6] then a second time when he was already on his way to Africa to help defend the Boers.[7] Finally, with the Congo, she had had to close her eyes and bow her head.

Sirio had already come of age.

Having finished six months of reserve officer service together with his cousin Lelli, the two of them had gone to Belgium to take the colonial course and had enrolled in the militia of the Congo Free State.[8] After six years he had come home on leave, unrecognizable, covered with sores and with dysentery. And yes, my friends, as soon as he was back on his feet, he wanted to go back there. And he would have gone back; all the tears, the incantations, the worry of his mother, already old with a bad heart, couldn’t have kept him at home. She certainly would have died of it, they would never have held him back, if that excellent Norina, Norina Rua, with her fascinating grace and her music, had not come to her rescue at Nocera where she had taken him to recuperate and take the waters.

As soon as she realized that Signorina Rua had managed to win his heart, she had hovered around them, almost as if she were hatching the nascent passion.

As the end of his leave approached, Sirio, already feeling tied down by love, had begun to grow restless, to fall into periods of dark melancholy, until one night Signora Bruzzi saw him entering her room in a desperate state. He started to cry, to cry like a baby. He was in love, eaten up by remorse for having unsettled the heart of that dear young girl with empty flattery. And he had to leave, no question about it.

“But why?”

Ah, because… down there in the Mokàla sector, where he was the boss, he had a little daughter of five, born of a young black girl who one day had presented herself to him, having fled from a faraway village. She had been with him for about two years and then had disappeared during one of her treks into the forest, abandoning the baby.

So anyway: he loved that little baby of his, that wildflower of his adventurous life, more than he loved himself. No other love could have won out over that one.

And continuing to cry, he told his mother about all the care, all the hardships of bringing up that little abandoned child, who for five years had filled the atrocious solitude of his life down there. He could no longer disengage himself from her; he had to leave, to go back to her.

He would have been able to remain only on one condition: if his cousin Lelli, who in a few months had to return to Italy on leave as well, brought his Titti to him and if Signorina Rua… but how could he hope that she would still want to accept him now, with that child?

She had accepted it all, Signorina Rua. She had gone, the mother, to implore her, and Norina had accepted, notwithstanding the fact that her aunt, the only relative she had, had tried to persuade her, with much sage advice, to at least think hard about the seriousness and the consequences of her sacrifice before saying yes. Without a doubt, his affection for the little one was proof of his goodness and loyalty, the only proof that one could rely on, to tell the truth, since the young man, come on, was honest, yes, but flighty, impetuous, unruly…

Ah, what scratches Signora Bruzzi would have liked to have gouged into the wrinkled face of that old mummy with the glasses! Scratches as long and as deep as her acknowledgment, in her heart, that the aunt’s advice and observations were really sound.

But, fortunately, Norina was really in love.

Certain by now that the little one would be arriving soon with his cousin, Sirio wanted to speed up the wedding day.

His tempestuous impatience to make Norina his own, after having strained to keep her at a distance until then out of fear that his cousin might possibly create difficulties, exploded as usual in such vehement haste that Norina, while happy to feel herself carried away by it, as if she were in a whirlwind, was almost dismayed. She closed her eyes and gave into it.

Now Sirio was proposing to dedicate himself to farming.

He wanted to rent a property in the Roman countryside and improve it. Over there, in his district in Mokàla, he had learned colonial management of the blacks very well. Here, instead of the blacks, he would rule over the Sabine people.[9]

He waited for the first flush of love to cool a little, and he waited for something else, with a restlessness that his mother would have liked to see him keep at least a little concealed.

“When is she coming? When is she coming?”

And he would nervously wave all ten fingers of his hands in the air or bang them as fast as possible on his forehead, on his nose, on his chin, to the point where he would scratch himself. And he would snort and run and grab the aunt’s spectacles from her nose, or hug his mother so hard that he would almost suffocate her, or squeeze his little wife’s arms, yelling at her frenetically while squeezing her harder and harder, and would lift her up off the floor:

“Nianò, Nianò, Nianò, mother-of-pearl nose, tortoiseshell comb, little prairie grapevine!”

“Let me go… no! ouch! You’re bad… look, the bruises…” moaned Norina.

“And this is nothing! You’ll see!” he yelled at her then. “You’ll hoe, I’ll hoe. Sabine people, listen to the announcement! Sirio Bruzzi, Congolese bungiu,[10] benefactor of the Roman countryside! King of a peaceful world, of an infinite land, I want to give life to a fruitful people! You will sing to your lute; I will sleep peacefully.”

And he would throw himself onto the divan to sleep.

Norina still hadn’t succeeded in getting him to tell her about his colonial activities, to get a description of the places where he had been. Upon seeing her so intent on listening while he was describing the great wild river, or village life among the palm trees and the bananas, or the canoe race over the rapids, or crossing the swamps inside the endless forest, or hunting leopards and elephants, at the most beautiful part of the story, with a straight face and without changing his tone, he would calmly begin inserting his incoherent phrases little by little:

“… and then, there, do you understand? On all that leafy mulch, among the tangle of the creeping vines, what it is? What isn’t it? a little, a very little spot like a cross, with the acrobatically-designed grasshoppers, with baby blue tassels and black bows, my dear, behind the outstretched index finger of your mokungi savior…”

Norina would rebel, she would get angry, but there was no way to call him back to the narrative that had been so cruelly interrupted.

Norina was already one month pregnant when cousin Lelli—Giongo, as Sirio called him, using the nickname that the blacks down there had given him—finally arrived with the little Congolese girl.

Norina had already noticed that Sirio joked about everything and would garble all their names, with the exception of his little daughter’s, which he never joked about. Titti was always Titti, and every time he said her name his eyes would shine, wet with emotion. She had also been able to assess how much he loved her from what he had told her about her language. Titti understood Italian and spoke it too. But she spoke Congolese better which, in his opinion, was a language for children. How do children talk? They say bombo, they say booboo. Well, that’s how the Congolese talk; molenghe ti bungiu means children of white people. If they wanted water? They would say n’gu.[11]

She understood, she saw the enormous folly of his partiality from the first moment, as soon as Sirio, having run to the station to meet the little one, came into her room with the arms and the legs of the little monster entwined around his neck and chest. At first, she saw only those legs and those arms, thin, saffron-colored, and the curly hair, thick, rather long, fluffy and almost metallic. When he finally managed to disentangle her from himself, speaking to her in that strange childish language, and she could see her face, also the color of saffron, with that curly black head of hair, almost piled on top of her head, the protuberant oval forehead, the big dark eyes, truculent, darting, lost, the little bullet-shaped nose and the curved little open lips, not swollen, a little purplish, she froze. She instinctively composed herself with an expression of pain and disgust on her face:

“Sweet… the poor little thing…” She couldn’t say anything else, straightening her arms in front of her chest with her hands raised and fists clenched, almost for fear that he would bring the child over to her to be kissed.

Meanwhile he was exclaiming, with tears in his eyes, “Here she is! Here she is, my Titti! You think she’s ugly, right? You too, Mamma? But she’s not ugly, my Titti isn’t ugly! You’ll see… you’ll get used to her… Look, this little nose isn’t ugly at all… these sweet lips here, they’re not really ugly with these little teeth… that’s right, that’s right, because Baba was bungiu, my Titti, even if your Mamma was black![12] My Titti! My Titti! Come on, come on, let’s hear your little voice, dear! Can you say who I belong to? Whose am I? Say it, say it, whose am I? Answer.”

The little one, in the middle of the room, lost, so strikingly different from everything that surrounded her, like a strange painted wax doll, responded in a mechanical way, with a voice that didn’t seem to be her own:

“Mine.”

The father rushed over to her, greedy with love after so many months of waiting, and pressed her to his chest passionately, his mouth on hers, almost as if sucking her answer out of her.

“No, no,” he resumed. “Say it the way you know how, dear, how do you say ‘mine’? Can you answer? Whose am I?”

Then the child, in her own very sweet voice, and with an undefinable smile, holding out her arms, responded:

“Ti m’bi…”[13]

He quickly grabbed her and ran off into another room, followed by his cousin.

Nora, his mother and the aunt remained silent for awhile, overwhelmed with astonishment. Then Nora hid her face in her hands, shuddering. Ah, the way that little thing there had said mine in her strange language absolutely eliminated the possibility that he could belong to anyone else, at least to the same degree.

The mother got up, approached her daughter-in-law, bent to kiss her on her head without saying anything, and had her rest her head against her side.

The aunt, with her eyes fixed behind her glasses, sighed:

“Didn’t I tell you?”

No, it wasn’t jealousy. It was another feeling, hard, gnawing, undefinable, that Norina was experiencing, one that made her feel her heart turning in her chest: cold anger, envy, disrespect, disgust, and pity all at the same time, on seeing him, there, before her very eyes, already a father to that little monkey.[14] And without even a thought for the other child that was already beginning to live in her belly: another child for him, but not for her, for her the only child, the true son.

There it is, it was this, this that Norina couldn’t stand: That her son, tomorrow, could be for him just another child, next to that copper-colored little puppet. And that it was while he was away from her, she who was his wife, thousands and thousands of miles away, in another world that she didn’t even know how to imagine but that must be filled with a great burning fascination, that the sense of paternity he made such a spectacle of had come to him.

She also felt ashamed of how much strangeness and awkwardness there was in that sense of paternity.

It seemed as if he wasn’t aware of it. Perhaps he truly wasn’t aware of it, because around his little girl he could see that whole faraway world, still alive in him, and so he couldn’t see the strangeness of it which instead assaulted the eyes of everyone else.[15] There it is, and he, happy, would take that exotic little monster of his out for a walk.

Of course everyone would turn around in the street, and the town urchins would likely follow him. In the cafè his friends would ask him:

“And your wife, what does she say about it?”

And he of course had to show them that he couldn’t care less what she said about it.

In the eyes of everyone and there at home, that little girl was a grotesque outrage. It seemed that she herself, the poor little thing, felt it and suffered from it.

In her big, dazed eyes, no longer truculent but rather profoundly sorrowful, almost as if clouded with soot, there was an anguished bewilderment. Her lips were tightly pursed and her hands were clenched, and she shook all over at the slightest noise, at every sensation; doubtless, she found no corresponding image in her mind that could explain it, or to calm herself. She must have been filled with dread, that poor, savage little soul.

Norina would gaze at her in silence when Sirio wasn’t there, and gazing at her, she noticed that Zafferanetta (the aunt and the maid had so baptized her) wasn’t really so ugly after all.[16] It was just the color, that coppery color, that was repugnant.

And Zafferanetta, motionless, seated on her little bamboo seat, let herself be gazed at, batting her eyelids almost painfully over her big sooty eyes. Ah, what an impression that batting of the eyelids made, that real and common and natural movement, in that poor little being who seemed make-believe, not real, different, and foreign.

Signora Bruzzi offered to persuade Sirio to bring the little one to her house; but Norina didn’t want that.

She was sure that Sirio then would have spent the whole day at his mother’s house.

He had noticed that the little one was wasting away, wasting away more every day, and he no longer knew how to separate himself from her for a moment. He didn’t think anymore about the arrangements that had already been started for renting the farm. He spent almost the whole day closeted with her and Cousin Lelli in the study, among all the strange souvenirs brought back from down there, talking, talking...

They would break off their discussions as soon as she entered; and from the way he turned to look at her, Norina understood that not only was her presence not appreciated, it actually irritated him. She would often surprise him seated on the floor with the child asleep on his knees, his eyes red from crying.

“What is he doing? Is she sick?” she asked not him but Cousin Lelli, who looked up at her as if excusing himself.

“She’s sick, she’s sick!” responded Sirio irascibly, almost rancorously.

Then, changing his tone, leaning over the little girl and shaking her gently, he asked her:

“What’s the matter, my Titti? Tell Baba, tell Baba what’s the matter…”

The child opened her eyes slightly and responded:

“Kubela…”

(“Sick,” Cousin Lelli translated softly for Nora.)

“Kubela ti nie?” Sirio hurriedly asked the little one.[17]

Then, closing her eyes again and barely raising a little hand onto which a big tear of her father’s had fallen, she sighed:

“M’bi ingalo pepè…”[18]

“What’s she saying?” Norina asked.

“She’s saying that she doesn’t know why she’s sick,” responded Cousin Lelli.

But he knew, he, Sirio, what his little one was sick from. She was sick from the same sickness he had. She was pining away for Mokàla, for the life there that she was missing, for the forest, the river, the immense solitude, the African sun.[19] She was sick from missing them! Ah, go! go! go!

“Listen… on just one condition…” he came to tell her one day, all distraught, trembling, almost out of his mind. “That you come down there with me… that you follow me… if not, I’m leaving you! I can’t, I can’t watch her die on me like this… Dying, my Titti’s dying! Please, my Norina, please!”

“But you’re crazy! Me, down there, with you?” Nora yelled at him.

“Crazy, yes, crazy! Whatever you say! I have been crazy, I will go crazy, and I ask your forgiveness, but…”

“For that one there? For that one there?” Nora lashed out, burning with rage and indignation. “You want to sacrifice me, my baby, for that one there?”

“No, no!” he interrupted her. “You’re right! But me, what am I supposed to do? You understand that I can’t see her die on me like this? That I can’t stay here anymore either? I’m going crazy, I’m going crazy! I’m dying too, with her. Please, let me go… when I’m far away, maybe I’ll come back. Of course I’ll come back, because then you’ll be the stronger one… But for now let me leave with my Titti so that she doesn’t die here, so that she doesn’t die here… She’ll die on the voyage, I’m sure of it! But at least I’ll be able to console myself thinking that I wanted to help her and that, for her, I even was able to bring myself to leave you, here, in this state! Let me go, please, Nora. Say yes, say yes!”

By this time Nora understood in her heart that it would have been useless to say no to him, even if he had remained.

“Go,” she said to him.

And Sirio Bruzzi left for the Congo two days later with the sick child and Cousin Lelli.

He never returned.