The Oil Jar and Other Stories (8 page)

“You're throwing me out?” Professor Toti asks, almost tonelessly.

“No!” Giacomino hurriedly replies, in his sorrow. “But it would be good for you ... for you to go away, Professor ... ”

Go away? The professor plumps down on a chair. His legs seem to have been knocked out from under him. He takes his head in his hands and moans:

“Oh, God! Ah, what a catastrophe! And so this was the reason? What shall I do? What shall I do? But when? How? Without saying a thing? To whom are you engaged?”

“Here, Professor ... for some time,” says Giacomino. “To a poor orphan like myself ... a friend of my sister's ... ”

Professor Toti looks at him numbly, with his eyes dulled, his mouth open, and can't summon up his voice to go on speaking.

“And ... and ... and everything is abandoned ... like this ... and ... and no more thought is given to ... to anything ... no more ... no more account is taken of anything ... ”

Giacomino feels that he is being reproached with ingratitude, and he protests, gloomily:

“Just a moment! You wanted me to be a slave?”

“I ... a slave?” Professor Toti now bursts out, with a crack in his voice. “I? And you can say that? I, who made you master in my own house? Ah, this, yes, this is true ingratitude! And was it perhaps for my sake that I benefited you? What did I get out of it, except the mockery of all the fools who can't understand my feelings? And so you don't understand them, not even you have understood them, the feelings of this poor old man who is about to depart from the scene and who was calmly contented to leave everything arranged, a little family that was doing well, in comfortable circumstances ... happy? I'm seventy years old; tomorrow I'll be gone, Giacomino! You've lost your mind, son! I'm leaving you two everything, here ... What are you still looking for? I don't know yet, I don't want to know, who your fiancée is; I'm sure she's a respectable young woman, because
you
are so fine ... ; but just think that ... just think that ... it isn't possible for you to have found anything better, Giacomino, from any point of view ... I don't mean merely because of the guaranteed financial comfort ... But you already have your own little family, of which I'm the only superfluous member, and that not for long ... and I don't count at all ... What bother do I give you two? I'm like your father ... If you like, I can even ... for your peace of mind ... But tell me how it came about. What happened? How did your head turn so suddenly? Tell me! Tell me ... ”

And Professor Toti goes over to Giacomino and wants to take him by the arm and shake it; but Giacomino tenses up, as if shuddering, and wards him off.

“Professor!” he shouts. “How is it that you don't understand, that you don't realize that all this kindness of yours ... ”

“Well?”

“Let me be! Don't make me say it! How is it you don't understand that certain things can be done only clandestinely, and are no longer possible in the full light of the day, with you knowing about them, with all the people laughing over them?”

“Oh, it's on account of the people?” exclaims the Professor. “And you ... ”

“Let me be!” Giacomino repeats, at the peak of his excitement, waving his arms in the air. “Look! There are so many other young men in need of assistance, Professor!”

Toti feels hurt to the bottom of his heart by these words, which are a horrible, unjust insult to his wife; he turns pale, he becomes livid, and, trembling all over, he says:

“Little Maddalena is young, but she's respectable, damn it! And you know it! Maddalena may die of this ... because her pain is here, here, in the heart ... Where do you think it is? It's here, it's here, you ingrate! Ah, now you're insulting her, on top of everything else? And you're not ashamed? And you don't feel any remorse on my account? You have the nerve to say that to my face? You? You think she can change hands like that, from one man to another, and think nothing of it? The mother of this little one? But what are you saying? How can you talk that way?”

Giacomino looks at him, shocked and astounded.

“I?” he says. “But, Professor, forgive me, it's actually
you, you
—how can
you
talk like that? Are you serious? What am I? Am I the husband of your wife? And what are you? My father-in-law? Come, now!”

Professor Toti clasps both hands to his mouth, presses his eyes shut, shakes his head and breaks out into despairing tears. Then Ninì, too, starts to cry. The Professor hears him, runs to him, embraces him.

“Ah, my poor Ninì ... oh, what a disaster, my Nini, what a catastrophe! And what will become of your Mommy now? And what will become of you, my Nini, with a little mother like yours, inexperienced, with no one to guide her ... ? Oh, what hell!”

He lifts his head, and, looking at Giacomino through his tears: “I'm crying,” he says, “because the remorse is mine. I protected you, I took you into my home, I always spoke so well of you to her, I ... I removed all the scruples she had about loving you ... and now that she was safely in love with you ... the mother of this little one ... you ... ”

He breaks off and, sternly, resolutely, nervously:

“Watch out, Giacomino!” he says. “I'm capable of showing up at your fiancée's house hand in hand with this little one!”

Giacomino, in a cold sweat even though on hot coals from hearing him speak and cry like that, at that threat puts his hands together, moves in front of him and beseeches him:

“Professor, Professor, do you really want to cover yourself with ridicule?”

“With ridicule?” shouts the Professor. “And what difference do you want that to make to me, when I see the destruction of a poor woman, your destruction, the destruction of an innocent baby? Come, come, we're going, come now, Nini, we're going!”

Giacomino comes up to him.

“Professor, you won't do that!”

“I
will
do it!” Professor Toti shouts to him with a resolute expression. “And to prevent that marriage of yours, I'm even capable of having you thrown out of the bank! I give you three days' time.”

And, turning around on the threshold, holding the little one by the hand:

“Think it over, Giacomino! Think it over!”

I persist in my old habit of giving audience every Sunday morning to the characters of my future short stories.

Three hours, from seven to ten.

I almost always find myself in bad company.

I don't know why, but usually those who attend my audiences are the most discontented people in the world, either suffering from strange maladies, or entangled in the most singular situations, people with whom it's really a torment to deal.

I listen to them all with infinite forbearing; I take down each one's name and circumstances; I take into account their feelings and aspirations; I question them courteously and make the greatest possible effort to satisfy them; that is, to accept them in my own mind and in my writings just as they see themselves in their own mind as individuals.

But I must also add that, by my nature and to my misfortune, I myself am not easily pleased. Patience, courtesy—yes, I have those; but I don't like being hoodwinked. And it's my custom to get to the bottom of each matter, making a long, detailed investigation.

Now, it's often the case that at certain questions I pose they jib, they take umbrage, they resist furiously, because they think that I'm getting enjoyment out of demolishing the serious front with which they come to me.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

Using my patience and my courtesy, I do my best to make them see and perceive that my question was perfectly à propos, because it's easy for anyone to
wish
to be one kind of person or another; the real question is whether we
can
be the way we want to be. When the power to do so is lacking, the wish must necessarily appear ridiculous and vain.

They can't be convinced of this.

And then, being basically good-hearted, I'm sorry for them. But is it ever possible to feel sorry for certain misfortunes unless you can laugh at them at the same time?

Well, the characters of my stories go around spreading the word everywhere that I am an extremely cruel and merciless writer. It would take a critic possessed of good will to make people see how much sympathy underlies that laughter.

But where are the critics possessed of good will nowadays?

 

It should be noted that some characters at these audiences leap ahead of the others and make their presence felt with such self-importance that I sometimes find myself compelled to let them enter life out of turn, right on the spot.

A number of them later bitterly regret this furore of theirs and implore me to patch up whatever defect each one has. But I yell at them, saying that now they must atone for their original sin and wait until there is no longer such a big crowd around me and I have the time and the means to get back to them.

Among those who remain behind waiting, feeling overwhelmed, some sigh, some grow sullen, some get tired and go off to knock at some other writer's door. Not seldom I have happened to find in the stories of several colleagues of mine certain characters that had called on me first; just as I have also happened to recognize certain others, who, dissatisfied with the way I had treated them, decided to try and cut a better figure elsewhere.

I don't complain of this, because usually two or three come to see me every week, joining the far from tiny number of those waiting. And often there is such a mob that I have to give my attention to more than one at the same time. Unless, at some point, my mind becomes so distracted and bewildered that it rejects that double or triple nurturing and shouts in its exasperation: “Either one at a time, quietly and calmly, or all three of you can get lost!”

I always remember how meekly one poor old man awaited his turn, after coming a long way to see me: a certain composer named Icilio Saporini, who had emigrated to America in 1849 after the fall of the Roman Republic because he had set a patriotic hymn to music, and had come back to Italy to die forty-five years later, aged almost eighty. Ceremonious, with a tiny voice like a mosquito's, he would let everyone else get ahead of him. And finally, one day when I was still recovering from a long illness, I saw him come into my room, humble as can be, with a timid little smile on his lips:

“If I may ... If it isn't any trouble ... ”

Of course, dear old man! He had chosen the most opportune moment. And I had him die just as fast as possible in a little story titled “Old Music.”
⁹

This past Sunday I went into my study, for the audience, a little later than usual.

A long novel that had been sent to me as a gift and had been waiting over a month for me to read it kept me up till three in the morning because of the many reflections aroused in me by one of its characters, the only living one among a crowd of empty shadows.

His role was that of an unfortunate man, a certain Dr. Fileno, who thought he had found the most effective cure for every kind of ailment, an infallible prescription for consoling himself and all men for every public or private calamity.

To tell the truth, rather than a cure or a prescription, this discovery of Dr. Fileno's was a method, which consisted of reading history books from morning till night and of looking on the present as history, too—that is, as something already very remote in time. And with this method he had been cured of all his ills, he had freed himself from every sorrow and every annoyance, and had found peace without the necessity of dying: an austere, serene peace, permeated with that certain sadness without regret which the cemeteries on the earth's surface would still retain even after all the people on earth had died out.

Dr. Fileno hadn't even the slightest thought of deriving lessons from the past for the present, because he knew it would be a waste of time and a game for fools. History is an idealized amalgam of elements gathered together in accordance with the nature, likes, dislikes, aspirations and opinions of historians. How, then, can this idealized amalgam be applied to living, effective reality, in which the elements are still separate and scattered? Nor, similarly, did he have any thought of deriving from the present any norms or predictions for the future. In fact, Dr. Fileno did just the opposite. In his mind he placed himself in the future in order to look back at the present, which he viewed as the past.

For example, a few days earlier a daughter of his had died. A friend had come to see him to condole with him over his misfortune. Well, he had found him as consoled already as if that daughter had died a hundred years before.

He had just taken that misfortune of his, while it was still recent and painful, and had distanced it in time, had relegated it to, and filed it away in, the past.

But you had to see from what a height and with how much dignity he spoke about it!

In short, Dr. Fileno had made a sort of telescope for himself out of that method of his. He would open it, but now not with the intention of looking toward the future, where he knew he would see nothing. He convinced his mind that it should be contented to look through the larger lens, which was pointed at the future, toward the smaller one, which was pointed at the present. And so his mind looked through the “wrong” end of the telescope, and immediately the present became small and very distant.

Dr. Fileno had been looking forward for several years to writing a book that would certainly create a stir. And, in fact, the title of the book was
The Philosophy of Distance.

While reading the novel it had seemed evident to me that the author, exclusively concerned with artificially weaving one of the most well-worn plots, had been unable to become fully aware of this character, who, containing within himself alone the germ of a true and real creation, had succeeded to some extent in taking over from the author and, for a large part of the book, in standing out in powerful and extraordinary relief against the extremely humdrum events being narrated and performed; then, suddenly denatured, he had allowed himself to be molded and adapted to the exigencies of a false and foolish conclusion.

I had remained for some time, in the silence of the night, with the image of this character before my eyes, giving my imagination free rein. Damn it all, there was enough material in him to produce a masterpiece! If the author hadn't neglected and disregarded him so undeservingly, if he had made him the center of the narrative, all those artificial elements he had had recourse to would also have been transformed, would suddenly have taken on life. And a great sorrow and a great vexation had seized upon me for the sake of that miserably failed life.

 

Coming into my study late, I found it more crowded than usual. It was disorganized, a muddle. That Dr. Fileno had thrust himself into the midst of my waiting characters, who, angry and irritated, had jumped on him and were trying to drive him away, to pull him back.

“Hey!” I yelled. “Ladies and gentlemen, is this any way to behave? Dr. Fileno, I've already wasted too much time on you, you know! You don't belong to me. Let me now listen to my characters in peace and quiet, and go away. You surely understand that they are right in looking on you and treating you as an intruder and disturber of the peace. Go away!”

Such an intense, despairing anguish was portrayed in Dr. Fileno's face that suddenly all those others, those characters of mine who were still in the act of restraining him, turned pale with mortification and drew back.

“Don't throw me out, for heaven's sake don't throw me out! Grant me just five minutes' audience, and let me persuade you, I beg of you!”

Perplexed and yet filled with pity, I asked him:

“But persuade me about what? I am fully persuaded that you, dear Doctor, deserved to fall into better hands. What do you want me to do for you? I have already lamented your fate sufficiently; now I condole with you personally, and that's the end of it.”

“The end of it? No, by God!” exclaimed Dr. Fileno with a shudder of indignation all over his body. “You say that because I'm not one of yours! Believe me, if you showed nonchalance or contempt, it would be much less cruel than this passive pity, unworthy of an artist, if you allow me to say so! No one is in a better position than you to know that we are living beings, more alive than those who breathe and wear clothes; perhaps less real, but truer! There are so many ways of coming to life, sir; and you know very well that nature makes use of the human imagination as a tool for pursuing its work of creation. And anyone who is born thanks to this creative activity which has its seat in the human spirit is ordained by nature for a life that is higher than the life of those born from the mortal womb of a woman. Whoever is born as a character, whoever has the good fortune to be born as a living character, can even thumb his nose at death. He will no longer die! The man will die, the writer who was the natural instrument of his creation; but the creature will no longer die! And in order to live eternally, he hasn't the slightest need of extraordinary gifts or prodigious feats. Tell me, who was Sancho Panza? Tell me, who was Don Abbondio?
¹⁰
And yet they live eternally because—as living germs—they had the good fortune to find a fertile womb, an imagination that was able to raise and nourish them.

“Yes, yes, dear Doctor: all that is quite so,” I said. “I agree entirely. But, forgive me, I don't yet see what you want of
me.
”

“No? You really don't?” said Dr. Fileno. “Have I perhaps come to the wrong place? Have I by chance landed on the world of the Moon? What kind of writer are you? So you seriously don't understand the horror of my tragedy? To have the inestimable privilege of being born as a character, now of all times, when material life is so beset with tawdry difficulties which create obstacles for, denature and impoverish every existence; to have the privilege of being born as a living character, and therefore, petty as I may be, ordained for immortality and—just think of it!—to fall into those hands, to be condemned to perish unjustly, to suffocate in that artificial world in which I can't draw a free breath or take one step, because it's all made up, fake, contrived, a sham! Words and paper! Paper and words! If a man finds himself entangled in circumstances of living to which he is physically or mentally unable to adapt, he can escape, run away; but a poor character can't: he's stuck there, nailed to an endless martyrdom! Air! Air! Life! Just look ... ‘Fileno' ... He gave me the name ‘Fileno' ... Do you seriously think that I can be called Fileno? The imbecile, the imbecile! He couldn't even give me a proper name! I, Fileno! And then, I, I, the author of
The Philosophy of Distance,
I of all people had to end up in that wretched way in order to unravel that whole stupid tangle of incidents! Did
I
really have to marry her, that ninny Graziella, instead of the notary Negroni? Don't give me that! These are crimes, my good man, crimes that should be atoned for with tears of blood! Now, what will happen instead? Nothing. Silence. Or perhaps some bad reviews in two or three minor newspapers. Maybe some critic will exclaim: “That poor Fileno, what a shame!
He
really was a good character.” And that will be the end of the whole thing. Condemned to death—I, the author of
The Philosophy of Distance,
which that imbecile didn't even see his way to have me publish at my own expense! Otherwise, tell me, how could I have married that ninny Graziella after that? Oh, don't even let me think about it! Come, come, get to work, get to work, my dear sir! Redeem me, at once, at once! You, who have clearly understood all the life there is in me, let me live!”