On Friday night there was some friction. They’d gone through almost all the money, and each blamed the other. The woman had paid the bills before leaving, while he’d been counting on that money. Only some spare change remained for her ticket. He and the daughter would go to his mother and sister’s, getting a ride with his cousin. The woman also asked him to lend her a copy of Don Quixote to read on the journey; she’d latched on to that book since the previous day. But he didn’t want to give it to her. He said it meant a lot to him. She felt unjustly deprived. And the hidden meaning of those petty actions also embittered her: the infantile hatred he harboured towards her, because he felt exposed by her. What he needed was to be surrounded by that aura, drowsy and ambiguous, which belonged to his family: the aura that sowed the seeds of his exile, in a world that called for definitions instead.

The next day it rained. The bus would be leaving at noon. The woman, as usual, got up before the others. In the kitchen, through the embrasures, a malevolent wind brought in the rain. She lit a cigarette, waiting.

‘La torre’

Part of the collection Arcangelo e altri racconti (Einaudi, 2005).

Luigi Pirandello

1867–1936

Pirandello, who won the Nobel Prize in 1934, is perhaps best known as a playwright who revolutionized theatrical conventions, but his astonishing output of short fiction was also a locus of ongoing experimentation. In 1922, the year after his groundbreaking play Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author) earned him international fame, he told his publisher, Mondadori, that he wanted to create a massive work called Novelle per un anno (Short Stories for a Year), consisting of three hundred and sixty-five tales that had originally appeared in newspapers and magazines. Fifteen volumes were published, a total of two hundred and forty-two stories, but the project was left incomplete. Pirandello was born in Agrigento, Sicily, but moved to Rome when he was twenty, and spent the next twenty-five years there teaching Italian language and literature. His personal life was tormented; economic hardship drove his wife insane, and she was committed to an asylum for four decades. In 1924, he sent Mussolini a telegram and publicly joined the Fascist Party, an allegiance providing Pirandello with financial backing to form a theatre company. And yet his work, obsessed with masks and doubles, interrogating the silence at the heart of existence, was subversive to the core. This story was published in 1912, more than ten years before his masterful novel Uno, nessuno e centomila (One, No one, One Hundred Thousand), a radical work about identity. Anguished and essential, it is stylistically distant from his earlier folkloric work. According to a dear friend from Palermo, ‘the soul of a Sicilian is in it’. Though he was eligible for a state funeral, Pirandello’s final wishes were to be carried in a humble wagon and cremated without ceremony. His last published work – a short story – appeared the day before he died.