And there had been the wedding.

If her thoughts moved down, from the recollection of those two children, to recent years, to today … the cruelty seemed to her too great: akin, savagely, to scorn.

Why? Why? Her face, in those intervals, petrified her in anguish: no stirring of the soul was any longer possible: perhaps she was no longer the mother, as in the distant, lacerated, howls of childbirth: she was no longer a person, but a shadow. She paused like that, in the room, with eyes blind to every compassionate return, fleshless immobility of old age, for long swathes of time. And the cloak of poverty and of old age was like an extreme sign of existence brought before the faces of portraits, where fatuous flying insects, in the emptiness, will orbit inside what is left of tomorrow. Then, almost a seasonal rite, all of a sudden, the hour struck from the tower; liberating its lost, equal chimes into the emptiness. And it seemed to her an unnecessary, cruel reminder. In the finished time of every summer, across the world that had forsaken her in this way. The flies traced a few circles in the main room, in front of the portraits, beneath the horizontal rays of the evening. Then, with one weary hand, she tidied her hair, whitened by the years, spilling over her forehead, unstroked like the hair of King Lear. Survivor of every fate. And now in the silence, as dusk came down, the storms of possibility vanished. She had learned so much, read so many books! By the small oil-lamp, Shakespeare: and she still recited several verses, like forgotten syllables scattered from a shattered stele, once a light of knowledge, and now the horror of the night.

In the sky the vapour, the smoke, had vanished from above the fireplaces, beneath cooking pots, of people’s frugal suppers. They had vanished like a bounty of the earth: towards the evening star, through the bluish September air: up, up, to the golden light, from the black chimneys; which rise with the strength of towers beyond the shadows and the blue-tinted hills, behind trees, above the distant chimney pots of the houses.

She had heard the rolling of the train … the arriving whistle … She would have liked someone to be near, as darkness approached.

But her child appeared only rarely at the doorway of the house.

‘La mamma’

Originally published as part of La cognizione del dolore in Letteratura (IV, no.1. January–March 1940). As the original project was temporarily abandoned, Gadda included the short story in Novelle dal ducato in fiamme (Valecchi, 1953) and in Accoppiamenti giudiziosi (Garzanti, 1963). It then appeared as the fifth chapter of La cognizione del dolore (Einaudi, 1963).