Title:      Shoot! (Si Gira) (1926)
Author:     Luigi Pirandello
            Translated from the Italian by C. K. Scott Moncrieff
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook

Title:      Shoot! (Si Gira) (1926)
Author:     Luigi Pirandello
            Translated from the Italian by C. K. Scott Moncrieff




Shoot!
The Notebooks of Serafino Gubbio,
Cinematograph Operator





Translator's Dedication

To

O. H. H. and V. B. H.

Who have seen and survived

the Nestaroff






BOOK I

OF THE NOTES OF SERAFINO GUBBIO
CINEMATOGRAPH OPERATOR




1


I study people in their most ordinary occupations, to see if I can
succeed in discovering in others what I feel that I myself lack in
everything that I do: the certainty that they understand what they are
doing.

At first sight it does indeed seem as though many of them had this
certainty, from the way in which they look at and greet one another,
hurrying to and fro in pursuit of their business or their pleasure.
But afterwards, if I stop and gaze for a moment in their eyes with my
own intent and silent eyes, at once they begin to take offence. Some
of them, in fact, are so disturbed and perplexed that I have only to
keep on gazing at them for a little longer, for them to insult or
assault me.

No, go your ways in peace. This is enough for me: to know, gentlemen,
that there is nothing clear or certain to you either, not even the
little that is determined for you from time to time by the absolutely
familiar conditions in which you are living. There is a _something
more_ in everything. You do not wish or do not know how to see it. But
the moment this something more gleams in the eyes of an idle person
like myself, who has set himself to observe you, why, you become
puzzled, disturbed or irritated.

I too am acquainted with the external, that is to say the mechanical
framework of the life which keeps us clamorously and dizzily occupied
and gives us no rest. To-day, such-and-such; this and that to be done
hurrying to one place, watch in hand, so as to be in time at another.
"No, my dear fellow, thank you: I can't!" "No, really?  Lucky fellow!
I must be off...." At eleven, luncheon. The paper, the house, the
office, school. ... "A fine day, worse luck! But business...."
"What's this? Ah, a funeral." We lift our hats as we pass to the man
who has made his escape. The shop, the works, the law courts....

No one has the time or the capacity to stop for a moment to consider
whether what he sees other people do, what he does himself, is really
the right thing, the thing that can give him that absolute certainty,
in which alone a man can find rest. The rest that is given us after
all the clamour and dizziness is burdened with such a load of
weariness, so stunned and deafened, that it is no longer possible for
us to snatch a moment for thought. With one hand we hold our heads,
the other we wave in a drunken sweep.

"Let us have a little amusement!"

Yes. More wearying and complicated than our work do we find the
amusements that are offered us; since from our rest we derive nothing
but an increase of weariness.

I look at the women in the street, note how they are dressed, how they
walk, the hats they wear on their heads; at the men, and the airs they
have or give themselves; I listen to their talk, their plans; and at
times it seems to me so impossible to believe in the reality of all
that I see and hear, that being incapable, on the other hand, of
believing that they are all doing it as a joke, I ask myself whether
really all this clamorous and dizzy machinery of life, which from day
to day seems to become more complicated and to move with greater
speed, has not reduced the human race to such a condition of insanity
that presently we must break out in fury and overthrow and destroy
everything. It would, perhaps, all things considered, be so much to
the good. In one respect only, though: to make a clean sweep and start
afresh.

Here in this country we have not yet reached the point of witnessing
the spectacle, said to be quite common in America, of men who, while
engaged in carrying on their business, amid the tumult of life, fall
to the ground, paralysed. But perhaps, with the help of God, we shall
soon reach it. I know that all sorts of things are in preparation.
Ah, yes, the work goes on! And I, in my humble way, am one of those
employed on this work _to provide amusement_.

I am an operator. But, as a matter of fact, being an operator, in the
world in which I live and upon which I live, does not in the least
mean operating. I operate nothing.

This is what I do. I set up my machine on its knock-kneed tripod. One
or more stage hands, following my directions, mark out on the carpet
or on the stage with a long wand and a blue pencil the limits within
which the actors have to move to keep the picture in focus.

This is called _marking out the ground_.

The others mark it out, not I: I do nothing more than apply my eyes to
the machine so that I can indicate how far it will manage to _take_.

When the stage is set, the producer arranges the actors on it, and
outlines to them the action to be gone through.

I say to the producer:

"How many feet?"

The producer, according to the length of the scene, tells me
approximately the number of feet of film that I shall need, then calls
to the actors:

"Are you ready? Shoot!"

And I start turning the handle.

I might indulge myself in the illusion that, by turning the handle, I
set these actors in motion, just as an organ-grinder creates the music
by turning his handle. But I allow myself neither this nor any other
illusion, and keep on turning until the scene is finished; then I look
at the machine and inform the producer:

"Sixty feet," or "a hundred and twenty."

And that is all.

A gentleman, who had come out of curiosity, asked me once:

"Excuse me, but haven't they yet discovered a way of making the camera
go by itself?"

I can still see that gentleman's face; delicate, pale, with thin, fair
hair; keen, blue eyes; a pointed, yellowish beard, behind which there
lurked a faint smile, that tried to appear timid and polite, but was
really malicious. For by his question he meant to say to me:

"Is there any real necessity for you? What are you? _A hand that turns
the handle_. Couldn't they do without this hand? Couldn't you be
eliminated, replaced by some piece of machinery?"

I smiled as I answered:

"In time, Sir, perhaps. To tell you the truth, the chief quality that
is required in a man of my profession is _impassivity_ in face of the
action that is going on in front of the camera. A piece of machinery,
in that respect, would doubtless be better suited, and preferable to a
man. But the most serious difficulty, at present, is this: where to
find a machine that can regulate its movements according to the action
that is going on in front of the camera. Because I, my dear Sir, do
not always turn the handle at the same speed, but faster or slower as
may be required. I have no doubt, however, that in time, Sir, they
will succeed in eliminating me. The machine--this machine too, like
all the other machines--will go by itself. But what mankind will do
then, after all the machines have been taught to go by themselves,
that, my dear Sir, still remains to be seen."




2


I satisfy, by writing, a need to let off steam which is overpowering.
I get rid of my professional impassivity, and avenge myself as well;
and with myself avenge ever so many others, condemned like myself to
be nothing more than _a hand that turns a handle_.

This was bound to happen, and it has happened at last!

Man who first of all, as a poet, deified his own feelings and
worshipped them, now having flung aside every feeling, as an
encumbrance not only useless but positively harmful, and having become
clever and industrious, has set to work to fashion out of iron and
steel his new deities, and has become a servant and a slave to them.

Long live the Machine that mechanises life!

Do you still retain, gentlemen, a little soul, a little heart and a
little mind? Give them, give them over to the greedy machines, which
are waiting for them! You shall see and hear the sort of product, the
exquisite stupidities they will manage to extract from them.

To pacify their hunger, in the urgent haste to satiate them, what food
can you extract from yourselves every day, every hour, every minute?

It is, perforce, the triumph of stupidity, after all the ingenuity and
research that have been expended on the creation of these monsters,
which ought to have remained instruments, and have instead become,
perforce, our masters.

The machine is made to act, to move, it requires to swallow up our
soul, to devour our life. And how do you expect them to be given back
to us, our life and soul, in a centuplicated and continuous output, by
the machines? Let me tell you: in bits and morsels, all of one
pattern, stupid and precise, which would make, if placed one on top of
another, a pyramid that might reach to the stars. Stars, gentlemen,
no! Don't you believe it. Not even to the height of a telegraph pole.
A breath stirs it and down it tumbles, and leaves such a litter, only
not inside this time but outside us, that--Lord, look at all the
boxes, big, little, round, square--we no longer know where to set our
feet, how to move a step. These are the products of our soul, the
pasteboard boxes of our life.

What is to be done? I am here. I serve my machine, in so far as I turn
the handle so that it may eat. But my soul does not serve me. My hand
serves me, that is to say serves the machine. The human soul for food,
life for food, you must supply, gentlemen, to the machine whose handle
I turn. I shall be amused to see, with your permission, the product
that will come out at the other end. A fine product and a rare
entertainment, I can promise you.

Already my eyes and my ears too, from force of habit, are beginning to
see and hear everything in the guise of this rapid, quivering, ticking
mechanical reproduction.

I don't deny it; the outward appearance is light and vivid. We move,
we fly. And the breeze stirred by our flight produces an alert,
joyous, keen agitation, and sweeps away every thought. On! On, that we
may not have time nor power to heed the burden of sorrow, the
degradation of shame which remain within us, in our hearts. Outside,
there is a continuous glare, an incessant giddiness: everything
flickers and disappears.

"What was that?" Nothing, it has passed!  Perhaps it was something
sad; but no matter, it has passed now.

There is one nuisance, however, that does not pass away. Do you hear
it? A hornet that is always buzzing, forbidding, grim, surly,
diffused, and never stops. What is it? The hum of the telegraph poles?
The endless scream of the trolley along the overhead wire of the
electric trams? The urgent throb of all those countless machines, near
and far? That of the engine of the motor-car? Of the cinematograph?

The beating of the heart is not felt, nor do we feel the pulsing of
our arteries. The worse for us if we did! But this buzzing, this
perpetual ticking we do notice, and I say that all this furious haste
is not natural, all this flickering and vanishing of images; but that
there lies beneath it a machine which seems to pursue it, frantically
screaming.

Will it break down?

Ah, we must not fix our attention upon it too closely. That would
arouse in us an ever-increasing fury, an exasperation which finally we
could endure no longer; would drive us mad.

On nothing, on nothing at all now, in this dizzy bustle which sweeps
down upon us and overwhelms us, ought we to fix our attention. Take
in, rather, moment by moment, this rapid passage of aspects and
events, and so on, until we reach the point when for each of us the
buzz shall cease.




3


I cannot get out of my mind the man I met a year ago, on the night of
my arrival in Rome.

It was in November, a bitterly cold night. I was wandering in search
of a modest lodging, not so much for myself, accustomed to spend my
nights in the open, on friendly terms with the bats and the stars, as
for my portmanteau, which was my sole worldly possession, left behind
in the railway cloakroom, when I happened to run into one of my
friends from Sassari, of whom I had long lost sight: Simone Pau, a man
of singular originality and freedom from prejudice. Hearing of my
hapless plight, he proposed that I should come and sleep that night in
his hotel. I accepted the invitation, and we set off on foot through
the almost deserted streets. On our way, I told him of my many
misadventures and of the frail hopes that had brought me to Rome.
Every now and then Simone Pau raised his hat-less head, on which the
long, sleek, grey hair was parted down the middle in flowing locks,
but zigzag, the parting being made with his fingers, for want of a
comb. These locks, drawn back behind his ears on either side, gave him
a curious, scanty, irregular mane. He expelled a large mouthful of
smoke, and stood for a while listening to me, with his huge swollen
lips held apart, like those of an ancient comic mask. His crafty,
mouselike eyes, sharp as needles, seemed to dart to and fro, as though
trapped in his big, rugged, massive face, the face of a savage and
unsophisticated peasant. I supposed him to have adopted this attitude,
with his mouth open, to laugh at me, at my misfortunes and hopes. But,
at a certain point in my recital, I saw him stop in the middle of the
street lugubriously lighted by its gas lamps, and heard him say aloud
in the silence of the night:

"Excuse me, but what do I know about the mountain, the tree, the sea?
The mountain is a mountain because I say: 'That is a mountain.' In
other words: '_I am the mountain_.' What are we? We are whatever, at
any given moment, occupies our attention. I am the mountain, I am the
tree, I am the sea. I am also the star, which knows not its own
existence!"

I remained speechless. But not for long. I too have, inextricably
rooted in the very depths of my being, the same malady as my friend.

A malady which, to my mind, proves in the clearest manner that
everything that happens happens probably because the earth was made
not so much for mankind as for the animals. Because animals have in
themselves by nature only so much as suffices them and is necessary
for them to live in the conditions to which they were, each after its
own kind, ordained; whereas men have in them a superfluity which
constantly and vainly torments them, never making them satisfied with
any conditions, and always leaving them uncertain of their destiny. An
inexplicable superfluity, which, to afford itself an outlet, creates
in nature an artificial world, a world that has a meaning and value
for them alone, and yet one with which they themselves cannot ever be
content, so that without pause they keep on frantically arranging and
rearranging it, like a thing which, having been fashioned by
themselves from a need to extend and relieve an activity of which they
can see neither the end nor the reason, increases and complicates ever
more and more their torments, carrying them farther from the simple
conditions laid down by nature for life on this earth, conditions to
which only dumb animals know how to remain faithful and obedient.

My friend Simone Pau is convinced in good faith that he is worth a
great deal more than a dumb animal, because the animal does not know
and is content always to repeat the same action.

I too am convinced that he is of far greater value than an animal, but
not for those reasons. Of what benefit is it to a man not to be
content with always repeating the same action? Why, those actions that
are fundamental and indispensable to life, he too is obliged to
perform and to repeat, day after day, like the animals, if he does not
wish to die. All the rest, arranged and rearranged continually and
frantically, can hardly fail to reveal themselves sooner or later as
illusions or vanities, being as they are the fruit of that
superfluity, of which we do not see on this earth either the end or
the reason. And where did my friend Simone Pau learn that the animal
does not know? It knows what is necessary to itself, and does not
bother about the rest, because the animal has not in its nature any
superfluity. Man, who has a superfluity, and simply because he has it,
torments himself with certain problems, destined on earth to remain
insoluble. And this is where his superiority lies! Perhaps this
torment is a sign and proof (riot, let us hope, an earnest also) of
another life beyond this earth; but, things being as they are upon
earth, I feel that I am in the right when I say that it was made more
for the animals than for men.

I do not wish to be misunderstood. What I mean is, that on this earth
man is destined to fare ill, because he has in him more than is
sufficient for him to fare well, that is to say in peace and
contentment. And that it is indeed an excess, _for life on earth_,
this element which man has within him (and which makes him a man and
not a beast), is proved by the fact that it--this excess--never
succeeds in finding rest in anything, nor in deriving contentment from
anything here below, so that it seeks and demands elsewhere, beyond
the life on earth, the reason and recompense for its torment. So much
the worse, then, does man fare, the more he seeks to employ, upon the
earth itself, in frantic constructions and complications, his own
superfluity.

This I know, I who turn a handle.

As for my friend Simone Pau, the beauty of it is this: that he
believes that he has set himself free from all superfluity, reducing
all his wants to a minimum, depriving himself of every comfort and
living the naked life of a snail. And he does not see that, on the
contrary, he, by reducing himself thus, has immersed himself
altogether in the superfluity and lives now by nothing else.

That evening, having just come to Rome, I was not yet aware of this. I
knew him, I repeat, to be a man of singular originality and freedom
from prejudice, but I could never have imagined that his originality
and his freedom from prejudice would reach the point that I am about
to relate.




4


Coming to the end of the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, we crossed the
bridge. I remember that I gazed almost with a religious awe at the
dark rounded mass of Castel Sant' Angelo, high and solemn under the
twinkling of the stars. The great works of human architecture, by
night, and the heavenly constellations seem to have a mutual
understanding. In the humid chill of that immense nocturnal
background, I felt this awe start up, flicker as in a succession of
spasms, which were caused in me perhaps by the serpentine reflexions
of the lights on the other bridges and on the banks, in the black
mysterious water of the river. But Simone Pau tore me from this
attitude of admiration, turning first in the direction of Saint
Peter's, then dodging aside along the Vicolo del Villano. Uncertain of
the way, uncertain of everything, in the empty horror of the deserted
streets, full of strange phantoms quivering from the rusty reflectors
of the infrequent lamps, at every breath of air, on the walls of the
old houses, I thought with terror and disgust of the people that were
lying comfortably asleep in those houses and had no idea how their
homes appeared from outside to such as wandered homeless through the
night, without there being a single house anywhere which they might
enter. Now and again, Simone Pau shook his head and tapped his chest
with two fingers. Oh, yes! The mountain was he, and the tree, and the
sea; but the hotel, where was it? There, in Borgo Pio? Yes, close at
hand, in the Vicolo del Falco. I raised my eyes; I saw on the right
hand side of that alley a grim building, with a lantern hung out above
the door: a big lantern, in which the flame of the gas-jet yawned
through the dirty glass. I stopped in front of this door which was
standing ajar, and read over the arch:

CASUAL SHELTER

"Do you sleep here?"

"Yes, and feed too. Lovely bowls of soup. In the best of company.
Come in: this is my home."

Indeed the old porter and two other men of the night staff of the
Shelter, huddled and crouching together round a copper brazier,
welcomed him as a regular guest, greeting him with gestures and in
words from their glass cage in the echoing corridor:

"Good evening, Signor Professore."

Simone Pau warned me, darkly, with great solemnity, that I must not be
disappointed, for I should not be able to sleep in this hotel for more
than six nights in succession. He explained to me that after every
sixth night I should have to spend at least one outside, in the open,
in order to start a fresh series.

I, sleep there?

In the presence of those three watchmen, I listened to his explanation
with a melancholy smile, which, however, hovered gently over my lips,
as though to preserve the buoyancy of my spirits and to keep them from
sinking into the shame of this abyss.

Albeit in a wretched plight, with but a few lire in my pocket, I was
well dressed, with gloves on my hands, spats on my ankles. I wanted to
take the adventure, with this smile, as a whimsical caprice on the
part of my strange friend. But Simone Pau was annoyed:

"You don't take me seriously?"

"No, my dear fellow, indeed I don't take you seriously."

"You are right," said Simone Pau, "serious, do you know who is really
serious? The quack doctor with a black coat and no collar, with a big
black beard and spectacles, who sends the medium to sleep in the
market-place. I am not quite as serious as that yet. You may laugh,
friend Serafino."

And he went on to explain to me that it was all free of charge there.
In winter, on the hammocks, a pair of clean sheets, solid and fresh as
the sails of a ship, and two thick woollen blankets; in summer, the
sheets alone, and a counterpane for anyone who wanted it; also a
wrapper and a pair of canvas slippers, washable.

"Remember that, washable!"

"And why?"

"Let me explain. With these slippers and wrapper they give you a
ticket; you go into that dressing-room there--through that door on the
right--undress, and hand in your clothes, including your shoes, to be
disinfected, which is done in the ovens over there. Then, come over
here, look.... Do you see this lovely pond?"

I lowered my eyes and looked.

A pond? It was a chasm, mouldy, narrow and deep, a sort of den to herd
swine in, carved out of the living rock, to which one went down by
five or six steps, and over which there hung a pungent odour of suds.
A tin pipe, pierced with holes that were all yellow with rust, ran
above it along the middle from end to end.

"Well?"

"You undress over there; hand in your clothes...."

"... shoes included...."

"... shoes included, to be disinfected, and step down here naked."

"Naked?"

"Naked, in company with six or seven other nudes. One of our dear
friends in the cage there turns on the tap, and you, standing under
the pipe, _zifff_..., you get, free for nothing, a most beautiful
shower. Then you dry yourself sumptuously with your wrapper, put on
your canvas slippers, and steal quietly out in procession with the
other draped figures up the stairs; there they are; up there is the
dormitory, and so goodnight."

"Is it compulsory?"

"What? The shower? Ah, because you are wearing gloves and spats,
friend Serafino? But you can take them off without shame. Everyone
here strips himself of his shame, and offers himself naked to the
baptism of this pond!  Haven't you the courage to descend to these
nudities?"

There was no need. The shower is obligatory only for unclean
mendicants. Simone Pau had never taken it.

In this place he is, really, a schoolmaster. Attached to the shelter
there are a soup kitchen and a refuge for homeless children of either
sex, beggars' children, prisoners' children, children of every form of
sin and shame. They are under the care of certain Sisters of Charity,
who have managed to set up a little school for them as well. Simone
Pau, albeit by profession a bitter enemy of humanity and of every form
of teaching, gives lessons with the greatest pleasure to these
children, for two hours daily, in the early morning, and the children
are extremely grateful to him. He is given, in return, his board and
lodging: that is to say a little room, all to himself, clean and neat,
and a special service of meals, shared with four other teachers, who
are a poor old pensioner of the Papal Government and three spinster
schoolmistresses, friends of the Sisters and taken in here by them.
But Simone Pau dispenses with the special meals, since at midday he is
never in the Shelter, and it is only in the evenings, when it suits
his convenience, that he takes a bowlful or two of soup from the
common kitchen; he keeps the little room, but he never uses it,
because he goes and sleeps in the dormitory of the Night Shelter, for
the sake of the company to be found there, which he has grown to
relish, of queer, vagrant types. Apart from these two hours devoted to
teaching, he spends all his time in the libraries and the _caffè_;
every now and then, he publishes in some philosophic review an essay
which amazes everyone by the bizarre novelty of the views expressed in
it, the strangeness of the arguments and the abundance of learning
displayed; and he flourishes again for a while.

At the time, I repeat, I was not aware of all this. I supposed, and
perhaps it was partly true, that he had brought me there for the
pleasure of bewildering me; and since there is no better way of
disconcerting a person who is seeking to bewilder one with extravagant
paradoxes or with the strangest, most fantastic suggestions than to
pretend to accept those paradoxes as though they were the most obvious
truisms, and his suggestions as entirely natural and opportune; so I
behaved that evening, to disconcert my friend Simone Pau. He,
realising my intention, looked me in the eyes and, seeing them to be
completely impassive, exclaimed with a smile: "What an idiot you are!"

He offered me his room; I thought at first that he was joking; but
when he assured me that he really had a room there to himself, I would
not accept it and went with him to the dormitory of the Shelter. I am
not sorry, since, for the discomfort and repulsion that I felt in that
odious place, I had two compensations:

First; that of finding the post which I now hold, or rather the
opportunity of going as an operator to the great cinematograph
company, the Kosmograph;

Secondly; that of meeting the man who has remained for me ever since
the symbol of the wretched fate to which continuous progress condemns
the human race.

First of all, the man.




5


Simone Pau pointed him out to me, the following morning, when we rose
from our hammocks.

I shall not describe that barrack of a dormitory, foul with the breath
of so many men, in the grey light of dawn, nor the exodus of the
inmates, as they went downstairs, dishevelled and stupid with sleep,
in their long white nightshirts, with their canvas slippers on their
feet, and their tickets in their hands, to the dressing-room to
recover their clothes.

There was one man among them who, amid the folds of his white wrapper,
gripped tightly under his arm a violin, wrapped in a worn, dirty,
faded cover of green baize, and went on his way frowning darkly, as
though lost in contemplation of the hairs that overhung from his
bushy, knitted eyebrows.

"Friend, friend!" Simone Pau called to him. The man came towards us,
keeping his head lowered, as though bowed down by the enormous weight
of his red, fleshy nose; and seemed to be saying as he advanced:

"Make way! Make way! You see what life can make of a man's nose?"

Simone Pau went up to him; lovingly with one hand he lifted up the
man's chin; with the other he clapped him on the shoulder, to give him
confidence, and repeated:

"My friend!"

Then, turning again to myself:

"Serafino," he said, "let me introduce to you a great artist. They
have labelled him with a shocking nickname; but no matter; he is a
great artist. Gaze upon him: there he is, with his God under his arm!
It looks like a broom: it is a violin."

I turned to observe the effect of Simone Pau's words on the face of
the stranger. Emotionless. And Simone Pau went on:

"A violin, nothing else. And he never parts from it. The attendants
here even allow him to take it to bed with him, on the understanding
that he does not play it at night and disturb the other inmates. But
there is no danger of that. Out with it, my friend, and shew it to
this gentleman, who can feel for you."

The man eyed me at first with misgivings; then, on a further request
from Simone Pau, took from its case the old violin, a really priceless
instrument, and shewed it to us, as a modest cripple might expose his
stump.

Simone Pau went on, turning to me:

"You see? He lets you see it. A great concession, for which you ought
to thank him! His father, many years ago, left him in possession of a
printing press at Perugia, with all sorts of machines and type and a
good connexion. Tell us, my friend, what you did with it, to
consecrate yourself to the service of your God."

The man stood looking at Simone Pau, as though he had not understood
the request.

Simone Pau made it clearer:

"What did you do with it, with your press?"

Thereupon the man waved his hand with a gesture of contemptuous
indifference.

"He neglected it," Simone Pau explained this gesture. "He neglected it
until he had brought himself to the verge of starvation. And then,
with his violin under his arm, he came to Rome. He has not played for
some time now, because he thinks that he cannot play any longer, after
all that has happened to him. But until recently, he used to play in
the wine-shops. In the wineshops one drinks; and he would play first,
and drink afterwards. He played divinely; the more divinely he played,
the more he drank; so that often he was obliged to place his God, his
violin, in pawn. And then he would call at some printing press to find
work; gradually he would put together what he needed to redeem his
violin, and back he would go to play in the wine-shops. But listen to
what happened to him once, and has led, you understand, to a slight
alteration of his ... don't, for heaven's sake, let us say his reason,
let us say his conception of life. Put it away, my friend, put your
instrument away: I know it hurts you if I tell the story while you
have your violin uncovered."

The man nodded several times in the affirmative, gravely, with his
towsled head, and wrapped up his violin.

"This is what happened to him," Simone Pau went on. "He called at a
big printing office where there is a foreman who, as a lad, used to
work in his press at Perugia. 'There's no vacancy; I'm sorry,' he was
told. And my friend was going away, crushed, when he heard himself
called back. 'Wait,' said the foreman, 'if you can adapt yourself to
it, we might have something for you.... It isn't the job for you;
still, if you are hard up....' My friend shrugged his shoulders and
went with the foreman. He was taken into a special room, all silent;
and the foreman shewed him a new machine: a pachyderm, flat, black,
squat; a monstrous beast which eats lead and voids books. It is a
perfected monotype, with none of the complications of rods and wheels
and bands, without the noisy jigging of the fount. I tell you, a
regular beast, a pachyderm, quietly chewing away at its long ribbon of
perforated paper. 'It does everything by itself,' the foreman said to
my friend. 'You have nothing to do but feed it now and then with its
cakes of lead, and keep an eye on it.' My friend felt his breath fail
and his arms sink. To be brought down to such an office as that, a
man, an artist! Worse than being a stable-boy. ... To keep an eye on
that black beast, which did everything by itself, and required no
other service of him than to have put in its mouth, from time to time,
its food, those leaden cakes!  But this is nothing, Serafino!
Crushed, mortified, bowed down with shame and poisoned with spleen, my
friend endured a week of this degrading slavery, and, as he handed the
monster its leaden cakes, dreamed of his deliverance, his violin, his
art; vowed and swore that he would never go back to playing in the
wine-shops, where he is so strongly, so irresistibly tempted to drink,
and determined to find other places more befitting the exercise of his
art, the worship of his deity. Yes, my friends! No sooner had he
redeemed the violin than he read in the advertisement columns of a
newspaper, among the offers of employment, one from a cinematograph,
addressed: such and such a street and number, which required a violin
and clarinet for its orchestra. At once my friend hastened to the
place; presented himself, joyful, exultant, with his violin under his
arm. Well; he found himself face to face with another machine, an
automatic pianoforte, what is called a piano player. They said to
him: 'You with your violin have to accompany this instrument!' Do you
understand?  A violin, in the hands of a man, accompany a roll of
perforated paper running through the belly of this other machine! The
soul, which moves and guides the hands of the man, which now passes
into the touch of the bow, now trembles in the fingers that press the
strings, obliged to follow the register of this automatic instrument!
My friend flew into such a towering passion that the police had to be
called, and he was arrested and sentenced to a fortnight's
imprisonment for assaulting the forces of law and order.

"He came out again, as you see him.

"He drinks now, and does not play any more."




6


All the reflexions that I made at the beginning with regard to my
wretched plight, and that of all the others who are condemned like
myself to be nothing more than a hand that turns a handle, have as
their starting point this man, whom I met on the morning after my
arrival in Rome. Certainly I have been in a position to make them,
because I too have been reduced to this office of being the servant of
a machine; but that came afterwards.

I say this, because this man presented to the reader at this point,
after the aforesaid reflexions, might appear to him to be a grotesque
invention of my fancy. But let him remember that I should perhaps
never have thought of those reflexions, had they not been, partly at
least, suggested to me by Simone Pau's introducing the unfortunate
creature to me; while, for that matter, the whole of this first
adventure of mine is grotesque, and is so because Simone Pau himself
is, and means to be, almost by profession, grotesque, as he shewed on
that first evening when he chose to take me to a Casual Shelter.

I did not make any reflexion whatsoever at the time; in the first
place, because I could never, even in my wildest dreams, have thought
that I should be reduced to this occupation; also, because I should
have been interrupted by a great hubbub on the stair leading to the
dormitory, and by the tumultuous and joyful inrush of all the inmates
who had already gone down to the dressing-room to recover their
clothes.

What had happened?

They came upstairs again, still swathed in the white wrappers, and
with the slippers on their feet.

Among them, together with the attendants and the Sisters of Charity
attached to the Shelter and to the soup kitchen, were a number of
gentlemen and some ladies, all well dressed and smiling, with an air
of curiosity and novelty. Two of these gentlemen were carrying, one a
machine, which now I know well, wrapped in a black cover, while the
other had under his arm its knock-kneed tripod. They were actors and
operators from a cinematograph company, and had come about a film to
take a scene from real life in a Casual Shelter.

The cinematograph company which had sent these actors was the
Kosmograph, in which I for the last eight months have held the post of
operator; and the stage manager who was in charge of them was Nicola
Polacco, or, as they all call him, Cocò Polacco, my playmate and
schoolfellow at Naples in my early boyhood. I am indebted to him for
my post, and to the fortunate coincidence of my happening to have
spent the night with Simone Pau in that Casual Shelter.

But neither, I repeat, did it enter my mind, that morning, that I
should ever come down to setting up a photographic camera on its
tripod, as I saw these two gentlemen doing, nor did it occur to Cocò
Polacco to suggest such an occupation to me. He, like the good fellow
that he is, made no bones about recognising me, whereas I, having at
once recognised him, was trying my hardest not to catch his eye in
that wretched place, seeing him radiant with Parisian smartness and
with the air and in the setting of an invincible leader of men, among
all those actors and actresses and all those recruits of poverty, who
were beside themselves with joy in their white gowns at this
unlooked-for source of profit. He shewed surprise at finding me
there, but only because of the early hour, and asked me how I had
known that he and his company would be coming that morning to the
Shelter for a real life interior. I left him under the illusion that I
had turned up there by chance, out of curiosity; I introduced Simone
Pau (the man with the violin, in the confusion, had slipped away); and
I remained to look on disgusted at the indecent contamination of this
grim reality, the full horror of which I had tasted overnight, by the
stupid fiction which Polacco had come there to stage.

My disgust, however, I perhaps feel only now. That morning, I must
have felt more than anything else curiosity at being present for the
first time at the production of a film. This curiosity, though, was
distracted at a certain point in the proceedings by one of the
actresses, who, the moment I caught sight of her, aroused in me
another curiosity far more keen.

Nestoroff? Was it possible? It seemed to be she and yet it seemed not
to be. That hair of a strange tawny colour, almost coppery, that style
of dress, sober, almost stiff, were not hers.  But the motion of her
slender, exquisite body, with a touch of the feline in the sway of her
hips; the head raised high, inclined a little to one side, and that
sweet smile on a pair of lips as fresh as a pair of rose-leaves,
whenever anyone addressed her; those eyes, unnaturally wide, open,
greenish, fixed and at the same time vacant, and cold in the shadow of
their long lashes were hers, entirely hers, with that certainty all
her own that everyone, whatever she might say or ask, would answer
yes.

Varia Nestoroff? Was it possible? Acting for a cinematograph company?

There flashed through my mind Capri, the Russian colony, Naples, all
those noisy gatherings of young artists, painters, sculptors, in
strange eccentric haunts, full of sunshine and colour, and a house, a
dear house in the country, near Sorrento, into which this woman had
brought confusion and death.

When, after a second rehearsal of the scene for which the company had
come to the Shelter, Cocò Polacco invited me to come and see him at
the Kosmograph, I, still in doubt, asked him if this actress was
really the Nestoroff.

"Yes, my dear fellow," he answered with a sigh.  "You know her
history, perhaps."

I nodded my head.

"Ah, but you can't know the rest of it!" Polacco went on. "Come, come
and see me at the Kosmograph; I'll tell you the whole story.  Gubbio,
I don't know what I wouldn't pay to get that woman off my hands. But,
I can tell you, it is easier..."

"Polacco! Polacco!" she called to him at that moment.

And from the haste with which Cocò Polacco obeyed her summons, I fully
realised the power that she had with the firm, from which she held a
contract as principal with one of the most lavish salaries.

A day or two later I went to the Kosmograph, for no reason except to
learn the rest of this woman's story, of which I knew the beginning
all too well.




BOOK II

OF THE NOTES OF SERAFINO GUBBIO
CINEMATOGRAPH OPERATOR




1


Dear house in the country, the _Grandparents'_, full of the
indescribable fragrance of the oldest family memories, where all the
old-fashioned chairs and tables, vitalised by these memories, were no
longer inanimate objects but, so to speak, intimate parts of the
people who lived in the house, since in them they came in contact
with, became aware of the precious, tranquil, safe reality of their
existence.

There really did linger in those rooms a peculiar aroma, which I seem
to smell now as I write: an aroma of the life of long ago which seemed
to have given a fragrance to all the things that were preserved there.

I see again the drawing-room, a trifle gloomy, it must be admitted,
with its walls stuccoed in rectangular panels which strove to imitate
ancient marbles: red and green alternately; and each panel was set in
a handsome border of its own, of stucco likewise, in a pattern of
foliage; except that in the course of time these imitation marbles had
grown weary of their innocent make-believe, had bulged out a little
here and there, and one saw a few tiny cracks on the surface. All of
which said to me kindly:

"You are poor; the seams of your jacket are rent; but you see that
even in a gentleman's house..."

Ah, yes! I had only to turn and look at those curious brackets which
seemed to shrink from touching the floor with their gilded spidery
legs.  The marble top of each was a trifle yellow, and in the sloping
mirror above were reflected exactly in their immobility the pair of
baskets that stood upon the marble: baskets of fruit, also of marble,
coloured: figs, peaches, limes, corresponding exactly, on either side,
with their reflexions, as though there were four baskets instead of
two.

In that motionless, clear reflexion was embodied all the limpid calm
which reigned in that house.  It seemed as though nothing could ever
happen there. This was the message, also, of the little bronze
timepiece between the baskets, only the back of which was to be seen
in the mirror. It represented a fountain, and had a spiral rod of
rock-crystal, which spun round and round with the movement of the
clockwork. How much water had that fountain poured forth? And yet the
little basin beneath it was never full.

Next I see the room from which one goes down to the garden. (From one
room to the other one passes between a pair of low doors, which seem
full of their own importance, and perfectly aware of the treasures
committed to their charge.) This room, leading down to the garden, is
the favourite sitting-room at all times of the year. It has a floor of
large, square tiles of terra-cotta, a trifle worn with use. The
wallpaper, patterned with damask roses, is a trifle faded, as are the
gauze curtains, also patterned with damask roses, screening the
windows and the glass door beyond which one sees the landing of the
little wooden outside stair, and the green railing and the pergola of
the garden bathed in an enchantment of sunshine and stillness.

The light filters green and fervid between the slats of the little
sun-blind outside the window, and does not pour into the room, which
remains in a cool delicious shadow, embalmed with the scents from the
garden.

What bliss, what a bath of purity for the soul, to sit at rest for a
little upon that old sofa with its high back, its cylindrical cushions
of green rep, likewise a trifle discoloured.

"Giorgio! Giorgio!"

Who is calling from the garden? It is Granny Rosa, who cannot succeed
in reaching, even with the end of her cane, the flowers of the
jasmine, now that the plant has grown so big and has climbed right up
high upon the wall.

Granny Rosa does so love those jasmines! She has upstairs, in the
cupboard in the wall of her room, a box full of umbrella-shaped heads
of cummin, dried; she takes one out every morning, before she goes
down to the garden; and, when she has gathered the blossoms with her
cane, she sits down in the shade of the pergola, puts on her
spectacles, and slips the jasmines one by one into the spidery stems
of that umbrella-shaped head, until she has turned it into a lovely
round white rose, with an intense, delicious perfume, which she goes
and places religiously in a little vase on the top of the chest of
drawers in her room, in front of the portrait of her only son, who
died long ago.

It is so intimate and sheltered, this little house, so contented with
the life that it encloses within its walls, without any desire for the
other life that goes noisily on outside, far away. It remains there,
as though perched in a niche behind the green hill, and has not wished
for so much as a glimpse of the sea and the marvellous Bay. It has
chosen to remain apart, unknown to all the world, almost hidden away
in that green, deserted corner, outside and far away from all the
vicissitudes of life.

There was at one time on the gatepost a marble tablet, which bore the
name of the owner: _Carlo Mirelli_. Grandfather Carlo decided to
remove it, when Death found his way, for the first time, into that
modest little house buried in the country, and carried off with him
the son of the house, barely thirty years old, already the father
himself of two little children.

Did Grandfather Carlo think, perhaps, that when the tablet was removed
from the gatepost, Death would not find his way back to the house
again?

Grandfather Carlo was one of those old men who wore a velvet cap with
a silken tassel, but could read Horace. He knew, therefore, that
death, _aequo pede_, knocks at all doors alike, whether or not they
have a name engraved on a tablet.

Were it not that each of us, blinded by what he considers the
injustice of his own lot, feels an unreasoning need to vent the fury
of his own grief upon somebody or something. Grandfather Carlo's fury,
on that occasion, fell upon the innocent tablet on the gatepost.

If Death allowed us to catch hold of him, I would catch him by the arm
and lead him in front of that mirror where with such limpid precision
are reflected in their immobility the two baskets of fruit and the
back of the bronze timepiece, and would say to him:

"You see? Now be off with you! Everything here must be allowed to
remain as it is!"

But Death does not allow us to catch hold of him.

By taking down that tablet, perhaps Grandfather Carlo meant to imply
that--once his son was dead--there was nobody left alive in the house.

A little later, Death came again.

There was one person left alive who called upon him desperately every
night: the widowed daughter-in-law who, after her husband's death,
felt as though she were divided from the family, a stranger in the
house.

And so, the two little orphans: Lidia, the elder, who was nearly five,
and Giorgetto who was three, remained in the sole charge of their
grandparents, who were still not so very old.

To start life afresh when one is already beginning to grow feeble, and
to rediscover in oneself all the first amazements of childhood; to
create once again round a pair of rosy children the most innocent
affection, the most pleasant dreams, and to drive away, as being
importunate and tiresome, Experience, who from time to time thrusts in
her head, the face of a withered old woman, to say, blinking behind
her spectacles: "This will happen, that will happen," when as yet
nothing has ever happened, and it is so delightful that nothing should
have happened; and to act and think and speak as though really one
knew nothing more than is already known to two little children who
know nothing at all: to act as though things were seen not in
retrospect but through the eyes of a person going forwards for the
first time, and for the first time seeing and hearing: this miracle
was performed by Grandfather Carlo and Granny Rosa; they did, that is
to say, for the two little ones, far more than would have been done by
the father and mother, who, if they had lived, young as they both
were, might have wished to enjoy life a little longer themselves. Nor
did their not having anything left to enjoy render the task more easy
for the two old people, for we know that to the old everything is a
heavy burden, when it no longer has any meaning or value for them.

The two grandparents accepted the meaning and value which their two
grandchildren gradually, as they grew older, began to give to things,
and all the world took on the bright colours of youth for them, and
life recaptured the candour and freshness of innocence. But what could
they know of a world so wide, of a life so different from their own,
which was going on outside, far away, those two young creatures born
and brought up in the house in the country? The old people had
forgotten that life and that world, everything had become new again
for them, the sky, the scenery, the song of the birds, the taste of
food. Outside the gate, life existed no longer.  Life began there, at
the gate, and gilded afresh everything round about; nor did the old
people imagine that anything could come to them from outside; and even
Death, even Death they had almost forgotten, albeit he had already
come there twice.

Have patience a little while, Death, to whom no house, however remote
and hidden, can remain unknown! But how in the world, starting from
thousands and thousands of miles away, thrust aside, or dragged,
tossed hither and thither by the turmoil of ever so many mysterious
changes of fortune, could there have found her way to that modest
little house, perched in its niche there behind the green hill, a
woman, to whom the peace and the affection that reigned there not only
must have been incomprehensible, must have been not even conceivable?

I have no record, nor perhaps has anyone, of the path followed by this
woman to bring her to the dear house in the country, near Sorrento.

There, at that very spot, before the gatepost, from which Grandfather
Carlo, long ago, had had the tablet removed, she did not arrive of her
own accord; that is certain; she did not raise her hand, uninvited, to
ring the bell, to make them open the gate to her. But not far from
there she stopped to wait for a young man, guarded until then with the
life and soul of two old grandparents, handsome, innocent, ardent, his
soul borne on the wings of dreams, to come out of that gate and
advance confidently towards life.

Oh, Granny Rosa, do you still call to him from the garden, for him to
pull down with your cane your jasmine blossoms?

"Giorgio! Giorgio!"

There still rings in my ears, Granny Rosa, the sound of your voice.
And I feel a bitter delight, which I cannot express in words, in
imagining you as still there, in your little house, which I see again
as though I were there at this moment, and were at this moment
breathing the atmosphere that lingers there of an old-fashioned
existence; in imagining you as knowing nothing of all that has
happened, as you were at first, when I, in the summer holidays, came
out from Sorrento every morning to prepare for the October
examinations your grandson Giorgio, who refused to learn a word of
Latin or Greek, and instead covered every scrap of paper that came
into his hands, the margins of his books, the top of the schoolroom
table, with sketches in pen and pencil, with caricatures.  There must
even be one of me, still, on the top of that table, covered all over
with scribblings.

"Ah, Signor Serafino," you sigh, Granny Rosa, as you hand me in an old
cup the familiar coffee with essence of cinnamon, like the coffee that
our aunts in religion offer us in their convents, "ah, Signor
Serafino, Giorgio has bought a box of paints; he wants to leave us; he
wants to become a painter..."

And over your shoulder opens her sweet, clear, sky-blue eyes and
blushes a deep red Lidiuccia, your granddaughter; Duccella, as you
call her.  Why?

Ah, because.... There has come now three times from Naples a young
gentleman, a fine young gentleman all covered with scent, in a velvet
coat, with yellow chamois-leather gloves, an eyeglass in his right eye
and a baron's coronet on his handkerchief and portfolio. He was sent
by his grandfather, Barone Nuti, a friend of Grandfather Carlo, who
was like a brother to him before Grandfather Carlo, growing weary of
the world, retired from Naples, here, to the Sorrentine villa. You
know this, Granny Rosa. But you do not know that the young gentleman
from Naples is fervently encouraging Giorgio to devote himself to art
and to go off to Naples with him. Duccella knows, because young Aldo
Nuti (how very strange!), when speaking with such fervour of art,
never looks at Giorgio, but looks at her, into her eyes, as though it
were her that he had to encourage, and not Giorgio; yes, yes, her, to
come to Naples to stay there for ever with himself.

So that is why Duccella blushes a deep red, over your shoulder, Granny
Rosa, whenever she hears you say that Giorgio wishes to become a
painter.

He too, the young gentleman from Naples, if his grandfather would
allow him... Not a painter, no... He would like to go upon the stage,
to become an actor. How he would love that! But his grandfather does
not wish it....  Dare we wager, Granny Rosa, that Duccella does not
wish it either?




2


Of the sequel to this simple, innocent, idyllic life, about four years
later, I have a cursory knowledge.

I acted as tutor to Giorgio Mirelli, but I was myself a student also,
a penniless student who had grown old while waiting to complete his
studies, and whom the sacrifices borne by his parents to keep him at
school had automatically inspired with the utmost zeal, the utmost
diligence, a shy, painful humility, a constraint which never
diminished, albeit this period of waiting had now extended over many,
many years.

Yet my time had perhaps not been wasted. I studied by myself and
meditated, in those years of waiting, far more and with infinitely
greater profit than I had done in my years at school; and I taught
myself Latin and Greek, in an attempt to pass from the technical side,
in which I had started, to the classical, in the hope that it might be
easier for me to enter the University by that road.

Certainly this kind of study was far better suited to my intelligence.
I buried myself in it with a passion so intense and vital that when,
at six-and-twenty, through an unexpected, tiny legacy from an uncle in
holy orders (who had died in Apulia, and whose existence had long been
almost forgotten by my family), I was finally able to enter the
University, I remained for long in doubt whether it would not be
better for me to leave behind in the drawer, where it had slumbered
undisturbed for all those years, my qualifying diploma from the
technical institute, and to procure another from the liceo, so as to
matriculate in the faculty of philosophy and literature.

Family counsels prevailed, and I set off for Liege, where, with this
worm of philosophy gnawing my brain, I acquired an intimate and
painful knowledge of all the machines invented by man for his own
happiness.

I have derived one great benefit from it, as you can see. I have
learned to draw back with an instinctive shudder from reality, as
others see and handle it, without however managing to arrest a reality
of my own, since my distracted, wandering sentiments never succeed in
giving any value or meaning to this uncertain, loveless life of mine.
I look now at everything, myself included, as from a distance; and
from nothing does there ever come to me a loving signal, beckoning me
to approach it with confidence or with the hope of deriving some
comfort from it.  Pitying signals, yes, I seem to catch in the eyes of
many people, in the aspect of many places which impel me not to
receive comfort nor to give it, since he that cannot receive it cannot
give it; but pity. Pity, ah yes... But I know that pity is such a
difficult thing either to give or to receive.

For some years after my return to Naples I found nothing to do; I led
a dissolute life with a group of young artists, until the last remains
of that modest legacy had gone. I owe to chance, as I have said, and
to the friendship of one of my old school friends the post that I now
occupy.  I fill it-yes, we may say so-honourably, and I am well
rewarded for my labour. Oh, they all respect me, here, as a first rate
operator: alert, accurate, and _perfectly impassive_. If I ought to be
grateful to Polacco, Polacco ought in turn to be grateful to me for
the credit that he has acquired with Commendator Borgalli, the
Chairman and General Manager of the Kosmograph, for the acquisition
that the firm has made of an operator like myself. Signor Gubbio is
not, properly speaking, attached to any of the four companies among
which the production is distributed, but is summoned here and there,
from one to another, to take the longest and most difficult films.
Signor Gubbio does far more work than the firm's other five operators;
but for every film that proves a success he receives a handsome
commission and frequent bonuses.  I ought to be happy and contented.
Instead of which I think with longing of my lean years of youthful
folly at Naples among the young artists.

Immediately after my return from Liége, I met Giorgio Mirelli, who had
been at Naples for two years. He had recently shown at an exhibition
two strange pictures, which had given rise among the critics and the
general public to long and violent discussions. He still retained the
innocence and fervour of sixteen; he had no eyes to see the neglected
state of his clothes, his towsled locks, the first few hairs that were
sprouting in long curls on his chin and hollow cheeks, like the cheeks
of a sick man: and sick he was of a divine malady; a prey to a
continual anxiety, which made him neither observe nor feel what was
for others the reality of life; always on the point of dashing off in
response to some mysterious, distant summons, which he alone could
hear.

I asked after his people. He told me that Grandfather Carlo had died a
short time since.  I gazed at him surprised at the way in which he
gave me this news; he seemed not to have felt any sorrow at his
grandfather's death. But, called back by the look in my eyes to his
own grief, he said: "Poor grandfather..." so sadly and with such a
smile that at once I changed my mind and realised that he, in the
tumult of all the life that seethed round about him, had neither the
power nor the time to think of his grief.

And Granny Rosa? Granny Rosa was keeping well...  yes, quite well,...
as well as she could, poor old soul, after such a bereavement.  Two
heads of cummin, now, to be filled with jasmine, every morning, one
for the recently dead, the other for him who had died long ago.

And Duccella, Duccella?

Ah, how her brother's eyes smiled at my question!

"Rosy! Rosy!"

And he told me that for the last year she had been engaged to the
young Barone Aldo Nuti.  The wedding would soon be celebrated; it had
been postponed owing to the death of Grandfather Carlo.

But he shewed no sign of joy at this wedding; indeed he told me that
he did not regard Aldo Nuti as a suitable match for Duccella; and,
waving both his hands in the air with outstretched fingers, he broke
out in that exclamation of disgust which he was in the habit of using
when I endeavoured to make him understand the rules and terminations
of the second declension in Greek:

"He's so complicated! He's so complicated!"

It was never possible to keep him still after that exclamation.
And as he used to escape then from the schoolroom table, so now he
escaped from me again. I lost sight of him for more than a year. I
learned from his fellow-artists that he had gone to Capri, to paint.

There he met Varia Nestoroff.




3


I know this woman well now, as well, that is to say, as it is possible
to know her, and I can now explain many things that long remained
incomprehensible to me. Though there is still the risk that the
explanation I now offer myself of them may perhaps appear
incomprehensible to others. But I offer it to myself and not to
others; and I have not the slightest intention of offering it as an
excuse for the Nestoroff.

To whom should I excuse her?

I keep away from people who are respectable by profession, as from the
plague.

It seems impossible that a person should not enjoy his own wickedness
when he practises it with a cold-blooded calculation. But if such
unhappiness (and it must be tremendous) exists, I mean that of not
being able to enjoy one's own wickedness, our contempt for such wicked
persons, as for all sorts of other unhappiness, may perhaps be
conquered, or at least modified, by a certain pity. I speak, so as not
to give offence, as a moderately respectable person.  But we must,
surely to goodness, admit this fact: that we are all, more or less,
wicked; but that we do not enjoy our wickedness, and are unhappy.

Is it possible?

We all of us readily admit our own unhappiness; no one admits his own
wickedness; and the former we insist upon regarding as due to no
reason or fault of our own; whereas we labour to find a hundred
reasons, a hundred excuses and justifications for every trifling act
of wickedness that we have committed, whether against other people or
against our own conscience.

Would you like me to shew you how we at once rebel, and indignantly
deny a wicked action, even when it is undeniable, and when we have
undeniably enjoyed it?

The following two incidents have occurred.  (This is not a digression,
for the Nestoroff has been compared by someone to the beautiful tiger
purchased, a few days ago, by the Kosmograph.) The following two
incidents, I say, have occurred.

A flock of birds of passage--woodcock and snipe--have alighted to rest
for a little after their long flight and to recuperate their strength
in the Roman Campagna. They have chosen a bad spot. A snipe, more
daring than the rest, says to his comrades:

"You remain here, hidden in this brake. I shall go and explore the
country round, and, if I find a better place, I shall call you."

An engineer friend of yours, of an adventurous spirit, a Fellow of the
Geographical Society, has undertaken the mission of going to Africa, I
do not exactly know (because you yourself do not know exactly) upon
what scientific exploration.  He is still a long way from his goal;
you have had some news of him; his last letter has left you somewhat
alarmed, because in it your friend explained to you the dangers which
he was going to face, when he prepared to cross certain distant
tracts, savage and deserted.

To-day is Sunday. You rise betimes to go out shooting. You have made
all your preparations overnight, promising yourself a great enjoyment.
You alight from the train, blithe and happy; off you go over the
fresh, green Campagna, a trifle misty still, in search of a good place
for the birds of passage. You wait there for half an hour, for an
hour; you begin to feel bored and take from your pocket the newspaper
you bought when you started, at the station. After a time, you hear
what sounds like a flutter of wings in the dense foliage of the wood;
you lay down the paper; you go creeping quietly up; you take aim; you
fire.  Oh, joy! A snipe!

Yes, indeed, a snipe. The very snipe, the explorer, that had left its
comrades in the brake.

I know that you do not eat the birds you have shot; you make presents
of them to your friends: for you everything consists in this, in the
pleasure of killing what you call game.

The day does not promise well. But you, like all sportsmen, are
inclined to be superstitious: you believe that reading the newspaper
has brought you luck, and you go back to read the newspaper in the
place where you left it. On the second page you find the news that
your friend the engineer, who went to Africa on behalf of the
Geographical Society, while crossing those savage and deserted tracts,
has met a tragic end: attacked, torn in pieces and devoured by a wild
beast.

As you read with a shudder the account in the newspaper, it never
enters your head even remotely to draw any comparison between the wild
beast that has killed your friend and yourself, who have killed the
snipe, an explorer like him.

And yet such a comparison would be perfectly logical, and, I fear,
would give a certain advantage to the beast, since you have killed for
pleasure, and without any risk of your being killed yourself; whereas
the beast has killed from hunger, that is to say from necessity, and
with the risk of being killed by your friend, who must certainly have
been armed.

Rhetoric, you say? Ah, yes, my friend; do not be too contemptuous; I
admit as much, myself; rhetoric, because we, by the grace of God, are
men and not snipe.

The snipe, for his part, without any fear of being rhetorical, might
draw the comparison and demand that at least men, who go out shooting
for pleasure, should not call the beasts savage.

We, no. We cannot allow the comparison, because on one side we have a
man who has killed a beast, and on the other a beast that has killed a
man.

At the very utmost, my dear snipe, to make some concession to you, we
can say that you were a poor innocent little creature. There!  Does
that satisfy you? But you are not to infer from this, that our
wickedness is therefore the greater; and, above all, you are not to
say that, by calling you an innocent little creature and killing you,
we have forfeited the right to call the beast savage which, from
hunger and not for pleasure, has killed a man.

But when a man, you say, makes himself lower than a beast?

Ah, yes; we must be prepared, certainly, for the consequences of our
logic. Often we make a slip, and then heaven only knows where we shall
land.




4


The experience of seeing men sink lower than the beasts must
frequently have occurred to Varia Nestoroff.

And yet she has not killed them. A huntress, as you are a hunter. The
snipe, you have killed.  She has never killed anyone. One only, for
her sake, has killed himself, by his own hand: Giorgio Mirelli; but
not for her sake alone.

The beast, moreover, which does harm from a necessity of its nature,
is not, so far as we know, unhappy.

The Nestoroff, as we have abundant grounds for supposing, is most
unhappy. She does not enjoy her own wickedness, for all that it is
carried out with such cold-blooded calculation.

If I were to say openly what I think of her to my fellow-operators, to
the actors and actresses of the firm, all of them would at once
suspect that I too had fallen in love with the Nestoroff.

I ignore this suspicion.

The Nestoroff feels for me, like all her fellow-artists, an almost
instinctive aversion. I do not reciprocate it in any way because I do
not spend my time with her, except when I am in the service of my
machine, and then, as I turn the handle, I am what I am supposed to
be, that is to say perfectly _impassive_. I am unable either to hate
or to love the Nestoroff, as I am unable either to hate or to love
anyone. I am _a hand that turns the handle_. When, finally, I am
restored to myself, that is to say when for me the torture of being
only a hand is ended, and I can regain possession of the rest of my
body, and marvel that I have still a head on my shoulders, and abandon
myself once more to that wretched _superfluity_ which exists in me
nevertheless and of which for almost the whole day my profession
condemns me to be deprived; then... ah, then the affections, the
memories that come to life in me are certainly not such as can
persuade me to love this woman. I was the friend of Giorgio Mirelli,
and among the most cherished memories of my life is that of the dear
house in the country by Sorrento, where Granny Rosa and poor Duccella
still live and mourn.

I study. I go on studying, because that is perhaps my ruling passion:
it nourished in times of poverty and sustained my dreams, and it is
the sole comfort that I have left, now that they have ended so
miserably.

I study this woman, then, without passion but intently, who, albeit
she may seem to understand what she is doing and why she does it, yet
has not in herself any of that quiet "systematisation" of concepts,
affections, rights and duties, opinions and habits, which I abominate
in other people.

She knows nothing for certain, except the harm that she can do to
others, and she does it, I repeat, with cold-blooded calculation.

This, in the opinion of other people, of all the "systematised,"
debars her from any excuse.  But I believe that she cannot offer any
excuse, herself, for the harm which nevertheless she knows herself to
have done.

She has something in her, this woman, which the others do not succeed
in understanding, because even she herself does not clearly understand
it.  One guesses it, however, from the violent expressions which she
assumes, involuntarily, unconsciously, in the parts that are assigned
to her.

She alone takes them seriously, and all the more so the more illogical
and extravagant they are, grotesquely heroic and contradictory. And
there is no way of keeping her in check, of making her moderate the
violence of those expressions. She alone ruins more films than all the
other actors in the four companies put together. For one thing, she
always moves out of the picture; when by any chance she does not move
out, her action is so disordered, her face so strangely altered and
disguised, that in the rehearsal theatre almost all the scenes in
which she has taken part turn out useless and have to be done again.

Any other actress, who had not enjoyed and did not enjoy, as she does,
the favour of the warm-hearted Commendator Borgalli, would long since
have been given notice to leave.

Instead of which, "Dear, dear, dear..." exclaims the warm-hearted
Commendatore, without the least annoyance, when he sees projected on
the screen in the rehearsal theatre those demoniacal pictures, "dear,
dear, dear... oh, come ... no... is it possible? Oh, Lord, how
horrible ... cut it out, cut it out...."

And he finds fault with Polacco, and with all the producers in
general, who keep the _scenarios_ to themselves, confining themselves
to suggesting bit by bit to the actors the action to be performed in
each separate scene, often disjointedly, because not all the scenes
can be taken in order, one after another, in a studio. It often
happens that the actors do not even know what part they are supposed
to be taking in the play as a whole, and one hears some actor ask in
the middle:

"I say, Polacco, am I the husband or the lover?"

In vain does Polacco protest that he has carefully explained the whole
part to the Nestoroff.  Commendator Borgalli knows that the fault does
not lie with Polacco; so much so, that he has given him another
leading lady, the Sgrelli, in order not to waste all the films that
are allotted to his company. But the Nestoroff protests on her own
account, if Polacco makes use of the Sgrelli alone, or of the Sgrelli
more than of herself, the true leading lady of the company. Her
ill-wishers say that she does this to ruin Polacco, and Polacco
himself believes it and goes about saying so. It is untrue: the only
thing ruined, here, is film; and the Nestoroff is genuinely in despair
at what she has done; I repeat, involuntarily and unconsciously. She
herself remains speechless and almost terror-stricken at her own image
on the screen, so altered and disordered.  She sees there some one who
is herself but whom she does not know. She would like not to recognise
herself in this person, but at least to know her.

Possibly for years and years, through all the mysterious adventures of
her life, she has gone in quest of this demon which exists in her and
always escapes her, to arrest it, to ask it what it wants, why it is
suffering, what she ought to do to soothe it, to placate it, to give
it peace.

No one, whose eyes are not clouded by a passionate antipathy, and who
has seen her come out of the rehearsal theatre after the presentation
of those pictures of herself, can retain any doubt as to that. She is
really tragic: terrified and enthralled, with that sombre stupor in
her eyes which we observe in the eyes of the dying, and can barely
restrain the convulsive tremor of her entire person.

I know the answer I should receive, were I to point this out to
anyone:

"But it is rage! She is quivering with rage!"

It is rage, yes; but not the sort of rage that they all suppose,
namely at a film that has gone wrong. A cold rage, colder than a blade
of steel, is indeed this woman's weapon against all her enemies. Now
Cocò Polacco is not an enemy in her eyes. If he were, she would not
tremble like that: with the utmost coldness she would avenge herself
on him.

Enemies, to her, all the men become to whom she attaches herself, in
order that they may help her to arrest the secret thing in her that
escapes her: she herself, yes, but a thing that lives and suffers, so
to speak, _outside herself_.

Well, no one has ever taken any notice of this thing, which to her is
more pressing than anything else; everyone, rather, remains dazzled by
her exquisite form, and does not wish to possess or to know anything
else of her. And then she punishes them with a cold rage, just where
their desires prick them; and first of all she exasperates those
desires with the most perfidious art, that her revenge may be all the
greater. She avenges herself by flinging her body, suddenly and
coldly, at those whom they least expected to see thus favoured: like
that, so as to shew them in what contempt she holds the thing that
they prize most of all in her.

I do not believe that there can be any other explanation of certain
sudden changes in her amorous relations, which appear to everyone, at
first sight, inexplicable, because no one can deny that she has done
harm to herself by them.

Except that the others, thinking it over and considering, on the one
hand the nature of the men with whom she had consorted previously, and
on the other that of the men at whom she has suddenly flung herself,
say that this is due to the fact that with the former sort she could
not remain, _could not breathe_; whereas to the latter she felt
herself attracted by a "gutter" affinity; and this sudden and
unexpected flinging of herself they explain as the sudden spring of a
person who, after a long suffocation, seeks to obtain at last,
_wherever he can_, a mouthful of air.

And if it should be just the opposite? If _in order to breathe_,
to secure that help of which I have already spoken, she had
attached herself to the former sort, and instead of having the
_breathing-space_, the help for which she hoped, had found no
breathing-space and no help from them, but rather an anger and disgust
all the stronger because increased and embittered by disappointment,
and also by a certain contempt which a person feels for the needs of
another's soul who sees and cares for nothing but his own SOUL, like
that, in capital letters? No one knows; but of these "gutter"
refinements those may well be capable who mostly highly esteem
themselves, and are deemed _superior_ by their fellows. And then...
then, better the gutter which offers itself as such, which, if it
makes you sad, does not delude you; and which may have, as often it
does have, a good side to it, and, now and then, certain traces of
innocence, which cheer and refresh you all the more, the less you
expected to find them there.

The fact remains that, for more than a year, the Nestoroff has been
living with the Sicilian actor Carlo Ferro, who also is engaged by the
Kosmograph: she is dominated by him and passionately in love with him.
She knows what she may expect from such a man, and asks for nothing
more. But it seems that she obtains far more from him than the others
are capable of imagining.

This explains why, for some time back, I have set myself to study,
with keen interest, Carlo Ferro also.




5


A problem which I find it far more difficult to solve is this: how in
the world Giorgio Mirelli, who would fly with such impatience from
every complication, can have lost himself to this woman, to the point
of laying down his life on her account.

Almost all the details are lacking that would enable me to solve this
problem, and I have said already that I have no more than a summary
report of the drama.

I know from various sources that the Nestoroff, at Capri, when Giorgio
Mirelli saw her for the first time, was in distinctly bad odour, and
was treated with great diffidence by the little Russian colony, which
for some years past has been settled upon that island.

Some even suspected her of being a spy, perhaps because she, not very
prudently, had introduced herself as the widow of an old conspirator,
who had died some years before her coming to Capri, a refugee in
Berlin. It appears that some one wrote for information, both to Berlin
and to Petersburg, with regard to her and to this unknown conspirator,
and that it came to light that a certain Nikolai Nestoroff had indeed
been for some years in exile in Berlin, and had died there, but
without ever having given anyone to understand that he was exiled for
political reasons. It appears to have become known also that this
Nikolai Nestoroff had taken her, as a little girl, from the streets,
in one of the poorest and most disreputable quarters of Petersburg,
and, after having her educated, had married her; and then, reduced by
his vices to the verge of starvation had lived upon her, sending her
out to sing in music-halls of the lowest order, until, with the police
on his track, he had made his escape, alone, into Germany. But the
Nestoroff, to my knowledge, indignantly denies all these stories.
That she may have complained privately to some one of the
ill-treatment, not to say the cruelty she received from her girlhood
at the hands of this old man is quite possible; but she does not say
that he lived upon her; she says rather that, of her own accord,
obeying the call of her passion, and also, perhaps, to supply the
necessities of life, having overcome his opposition, she took to
acting in the provinces, a-c-t-i-n-g, mind, on the legitimate stage;
and that then, her husband having fled from Russia for political
reasons and settled in Berlin, she, knowing him to be in frail health
and in need of attention, taking pity on him, had joined him there and
remained with him till his death. What she did then, in Berlin, as a
widow, and afterwards in Paris and Vienna, cities to which she often
refers, shewing a thorough knowledge of their life and customs, she
neither says herself nor certainly does anyone ever venture to ask
her.

For certain people, for innumerable people, I should say, who are
incapable of seeing anything but themselves, love of humanity often,
if not always, means nothing more than being pleased with themselves.

Thoroughly pleased with himself, with his art, with his studies of
landscape, must Giorgio Mirelli, unquestionably, have been in those
days at Capri.

Indeed--and I seem to have said this before--his habitual state of
mind was one of rapture and amazement. Given such a state of mind, it
is easy to imagine that this woman did not appear to him as she really
was, with the needs that she felt, wounded, scourged, poisoned by the
distrust and evil gossip that surrounded her; but in the fantastic
transfiguration that he at once made of her, and illuminated by the
light in which he beheld her. For him feelings must take the form of
colours, and, perhaps, entirely engrossed in his art, he had no other
feeling left save for colour.  All the impressions that he formed of
her were derived exclusively, perhaps, from the light which he shed
upon her; impressions, therefore, that were felt by him alone. She
need not, perhaps could not participate in them.  Now, nothing
irritates us more than to be shut out from an enjoyment, vividly
present before our eyes, round about us, the reason of which we can
neither discover nor guess. But even if Giorgio Mirelli had told her
of his enjoyment, he could not have conveyed it to her mind. It was a
joy felt by him alone, and proved that he too, in his heart, prayed
and wished for nothing else of her than her body; not, it is true,
like other men, with base intent; but even this, in the long run--if
you think it over carefully--could not but increase the woman's
irritation.  Because, if the failure to derive any assistance, in the
maddening uncertainties of her spirit, from the many who saw and
desired nothing in her save her body, to satisfy on it the brutal
appetite of the senses, filled her with anger and disgust; her anger
with the one man, who also desired her body and nothing more; her
body, but only to extract from it an ideal and absolutely
self-sufficient pleasure, must have been all the stronger, in so far
as every provocative of disgust was entirely lacking, and must have
rendered more difficult, if not absolutely futile, the vengeance which
she was in the habit of wreaking upon other people. An angel, to a
woman, is always more irritating than a beast.

I know from all Giorgio Mirelli's artist friends in Naples that he was
spotlessly chaste, not because he did not know how to make an
impression upon women, but because he instinctively avoided every
vulgar distraction.

To account for his suicide, which beyond question was largely due to
the Nestoroff, we ought to assume that she, not cared for, not helped,
and irritated to madness, in order to be avenged, must with the finest
and subtlest art have contrived that her body should gradually come to
life before his eyes, not for the delight of his eyes alone; and that,
when she saw him, like all the rest, conquered and enslaved, she
forbade him, the better to taste her revenge, to take any other
pleasure from her than that with which, until then, he had been
content, as the only one desired, because the only one worthy of him.

_We ought_, I say, to assume this, but only if we wish to be
ill-natured. The Nestoroff might say, and perhaps does say, that she
did nothing to alter that relation of pure friendship which had grown
up between herself and Mirelli; so much so that when he, no longer
contented with that pure friendship, more impetuous than ever owing to
the severe repulse with which she met his advances, yet, to obtain his
purpose, offered to marry her, she struggled for a long time--and this
is true; I learned it on good authority--to dissuade him, and proposed
to leave Capri, to disappear; and in the end remained there only
because of his acute despair.

But it is true that, if we wish to be ill-natured, we may also be of
opinion that both the early repulse and the later struggle and threat
and attempt to leave the island, to disappear, were perhaps so many
artifices carefully planned and put into practice to reduce this young
man to despair after having seduced him, and to obtain from him all
sorts of things which otherwise he would never, perhaps, have conceded
to her.  Foremost among them, that she should be introduced as his
future bride at the Villa by Sorrento to that dear Granny, to that
sweet little sister, of whom he had spoken to her, and to the sister's
betrothed.

It seems that he, Aldo Nuti, more than, the two women, resolutely
opposed this claim. Authority and power to oppose and to prevent this
marriage he did not possess, for Giorgio was now his own master, free
to act as he chose, and considered that he need no longer give an
account of himself to anyone; but that he should bring this woman to
the house and place her in contact with his sister, and expect the
latter to welcome her and to treat her as a sister, this, by Jove, he
could and must oppose, and oppose it he did with all his strength. But
were they, Granny Rosa and Duccella, aware what sort of woman this was
that Giorgio proposed to bring to the house and to marry? A Russian
adventuress, an actress, if not something worse! How could he allow
such a thing, how not oppose it with all his strength?

Again "with all his strength"... Ah, yes, who knows how hard Granny
Rosa and Duccella had to fight in order to overcome, little by little,
by their sweet and gentle persuasion, all the strength of Aldo Nuti.
How could they have imagined what was to become of that strength at
the sight of Varia Nestoroff, as soon as she set foot, timid, ethereal
and smiling, in the dear villa by Sorrento!

Perhaps Giorgio, to account for the delay which Granny Rosa and
Duccella shewed in answering, may have said to the Nestoroff that this
delay was due to the opposition "with all his strength" of his
sister's future husband; so that the Nestoroff felt the temptation to
measure her own strength against this other, at once, as soon as she
set foot in the villa. I know nothing! I know that Aldo Nuti was drawn
in as though into a whirlpool and at once carried away like a wisp of
straw by passion for this woman.

I do not know him. I saw him as a boy, once only, when I was acting as
Giorgio's tutor, and he struck me as a fool. This impression of mine
does not agree with what Mirelli said to me about him, on my return
from Liege, namely that he was _complicated_. Nor does what I have
heard from other people, with regard to him correspond in the least
with this first impression, which however has irresistibly led me to
speak of him according to the idea that I had formed of him from it. I
must, really, have been mistaken.  Duccella found it possible to love
him!  And this, to my mind, does more than anything else to prove me
in the wrong. But we cannot control our impressions. He may be, as
people tell me, a serious young man, albeit of a most ardent
temperament; for me, until I see him again, he will remain that fool
of a boy, with the baron's coronet on his handkerchiefs and
portfolios, the young gentleman who _would so love to become an
actor_.

He became one, and not by way of make-believe, with the Nestoroff, at
Giorgio Mirelli's expense.  The drama was unfolded at Naples, shortly
after the Nestoroff's introduction and brief visit to the house at
Sorrento. It seems that Nuti returned to Naples with the engaged
couple, after that brief visit, to help the inexperienced Giorgio and
her who was not yet familiar with the town, to set their house in
order before the wedding.

Perhaps the drama would not have happened, or would have had a
different ending, had it not been for the complication of Duccella's
engagement to, or rather her love for Nuti. For this reason Giorgio
Mirelli was obliged to concentrate on himself the violence of the
unendurable horror that overcame him at the sudden discovery of his
betrayal.

Aldo Nuti rushed from Naples like a madman before there arrived from
Sorrento at the news of Giorgio's suicide Granny Rosa and Duccella.

Poor Duccella, poor Granny Rosa! The woman who from thousands and
thousands of miles away came to bring confusion and death into your
little house where with the jasmines bloomed the most innocent of
idylls, I have her here, now, in front of my machine, every day; and,
if the news I have heard from Polacco be true, I shall presently have
him here as well, Aldo Nuti, who appears to have heard that the
Nestoroff is leading lady with the Kosmograph.

I do not know why, my heart tells me that, as I turn the handle of
this photographic machine, I am destined to carry out both your
revenge and your poor Giorgio's, dear Duccella, dear Granny Rosa!




BOOK III

OF THE NOTES OF SERAFINO GUBBIO
CINEMATOGRAPH OPERATOR




1


A slight swerve. There is a one-horse carriage in front. "_Peu,
pepeeeu, peeeu_."

What? The horn of the motor-car is pulling it back? Why, yes! It does
really seem to be making it run backwards, with the most comic effect.

The three ladies in the motor-car laugh, turn round, wave their arms
in greeting with great vivacity, amid a gay, confused flutter of
many-coloured veils; and the poor little carriage, hidden in an arid,
sickening cloud of smoke and dust, however hard the cadaverous little
horse may try to pull it along with his weary trot, continues to fall
behind, far behind, with the houses, the trees, the occasional
pedestrians, until it vanishes down the long straight vista of the
suburban avenue. Vanishes? Not at all! The motor-car has vanished. The
carriage, meanwhile, is still here, still slowly advancing, at the
weary, level trot of its cadaverous horse. And the whole of the avenue
seems to come forward again, slowly, with it.

You have invented machines, have you? And now you enjoy these and
similar sensations of stylish pace.

The three ladies in the motor-car are three actresses from the
Kosmograph, and have greeted with such vivacity the carriage flung
into the background by their mechanical progress not because there is
anyone in the carriage particularly dear to them; but because the
motor-car, the machinery intoxicates them and excites this
uncontrollable vivacity in them. They have it at their disposal; free
of charge; the Kosmograph pays. In the carriage there is myself.

They have seen me disappear in an instant, dropping ludicrously
behind, down the receding vista of the avenue; they have laughed at
me; by this time they have already arrived. But here am I creeping
forward again, my dear ladies. Ever so slowly, yes; but what have you
seen? A carriage drop behind, as though pulled by a string, and the
whole avenue rush past you in a long, confused, violent, dizzy streak.
I, on the other hand, am still here; I can console myself for my slow
progress by admiring one by one, at my leisure, these great green
plane trees by the roadside, not uprooted by the hurricane of your
passage, but firmly planted in the ground, which turn towards me at
every breath of wind in the gold of the sunlight between their dark
boughs a cool patch of violet shadow: giants of the road, halted in
file, ever so many of them, they open and uplift on muscular arms
their huge palpitating wreaths of foliage to the sky.

Drive on, yes, but not too fast, my coachman!  He is so tired, your
old cadaverous horse. Everything passes him by: motor-cars, bicycles,
electric trams; and the frenzy of all that motion along the road urges
him on as well, unconsciously and involuntarily, gives an irresistible
impetus to his poor stiff legs, weary with conveying, from end to end
of the great city, so many people afflicted, oppressed, excited, by
necessities, hardships, engagements, aspirations which he is incapable
of understanding! And perhaps none of them makes him so tired as the
few who get into the carriage with the object of amusing themselves,
and do not know where or how. Poor little horse, his head droops
gradually lower, and he never raises it again, not even if you flay
him with your whip, coachman!

"Here, on the right... turn to the right!"

The Kosmograph is here, on this remote side road, outside the city
gate.




2


Freshly dug, dusty, barely traced in outline, it has the air and the
ungraciousness of a person who, expecting to be left in peace, finds
that, on the contrary, he is continually being disturbed.

But if the right to a few fresh tufts of grass, to all those fine,
wandering threads of sound, with which the silence weaves a cloak of
peace in solitary places, to the croak of an occasional frog when it
rains and the pools of rain-water mirror back the stars when the sky
is clear again; in short, to all the delights of nature in the open
and unpeopled country: if this right be not enjoyed by a country road
some miles outside the gate of the city, then indeed I do not know who
does enjoy it.

Instead of this: motor-cars, carriages, carts, bicycles, and all day
long an uninterrupted coming and going of actors, operators,
mechanics, labourers, messengers, and a din of hammers, saws, planes,
and clouds of dust and the stench of petrol.

The buildings, high and low, of the great cinematograph company rise
at the far end of the road, on either side; a few more stand up
farther off, scattered in confusion, within the vast enclosure, which
extends far over the Campagna: one of them, higher than all the rest,
is capped with a sort of glazed tower, with opaque windows, which
glitter in the sunlight; and on the wall that is visible from both
avenue and side road, on the dazzling whitewashed surface, in black
letters a foot high, is painted:

THE KOSMOGRAPH

The entrance is to the left, through a little door by the side of the
gate, which is rarely opened.  Opposite is a wayside tavern, pompously
surnamed _Trattoria della Kosmograph_, with a fine trellised pergola
which encloses the whole of the so-called garden and creates a patch
of green within. Five or six rustic tables, inside, none too steady on
their legs, and chairs and benches.  A number of actors, made up and
dressed in strange costumes, are seated there and engaged in an
animated discussion; one of them shouts louder than the rest, bringing
his hand down furiously upon his thigh:

"I tell you, you've got to hit her here, here, here!"

And the bang of his hand on his leather breeches sounds like so many
rifle shots.

They are speaking, of course, of the tigress, bought a short time ago
by the Kosmograph; of the way in which she is to be killed; of the
exact spot in which the bullet must hit her. It has become an
obsession with them. To hear them talk, you would think that they were
all professional hunters of wild beasts.

Crowding round the entrance, stand listening to them with grinning
faces the chauffeurs of the dusty, dilapidated motor-cars; the drivers
of the carriages that stand waiting, there in the background, where
the side road is barred by a fence of stakes and iron spikes; and ever
so many other people, the most wretched that I know, albeit they are
dressed with a certain gentility.  They are (I apologise, but
everything here has a French or an English name) the casual _cachets_,
that is to say the people who come to offer their services, should the
need arise, as _supers_.  Their petulance is insufferable, worse than
that of beggars, because they come here to display a penury which asks
not for the charity of a copper, but for five lire, in reward for
dressing themselves up, often grotesquely. You ought to see the rush,
on some days, to the dressing-room to snatch and put on at once a heap
of gaudy rags, and the airs with which they strut up and down on the
stage and in the open, knowing full well that, if they succeed in
_dressing_, even if they do not _come on_, they draw half-salary.

Two or three actors come out of the tavern, making their way through
the crowd. They are dressed in saffron-coloured vests, their faces and
arms plastered a dirty yellow, and with a sort of crest of coloured
feathers on their heads.  Indians.  They greet me:

"Hallo, Gubbio."

"Hallo, _Shoot_!..."

_Shoot_, you understand, is my nickname.

The difficulties of life!

You have lost an eye in it, and your case has been serious. But we are
all of us more or less marked, and we never notice it. Life marks us;
and fastens a beauty-spot on one, a grimace on another.

No? But excuse me, you, yes, you who said no just now... there now,
_absolutely_... do you not continually load all your conversation with
that adverb in _-ly_?

"I went absolutely to the place they told me: I saw him, and said to
him absolutely: What, you, absolutely..."

Have patience! Nobody yet calls you _Mr.  Absolutely_... Serafino
Gubbio (_Shoot_!) has been less fortunate. Without my noticing it, I
may have happened once or twice, or several times in succession, to
repeat, after the producer, the sacramental word: "_Shoot_!" I must
have repeated it with my face composed in that expression which is
proper to me, of professional impassivity, and this was enough to make
everyone here, at Fantappiè's suggestion, address me now as _Shoot_.

Every town in Italy knows Fantappiè, the comedian of the Kosmograph,
who has specialised in travesties of military life: _Fantappiè, C.
B_.  and _Fantappiè on the range; Fantappiè on manoeuvres_ and
_Fantappiè steers the airship_; _Fantappiè on guard_ and _Fantappiè in
the Colonies_.

[Footnote: Fantappiè, or fante a piede, is equivalent to the English
footslogger. C. K. S.  M.]

He stuck it on himself, this nickname; a nickname that goes well with
his special form of art. In private life he is called Roberto
Chismicò.

"You aren't angry with me, laddie, for calling you _Shoot_?" he asked
me, some time ago.

"No, my dear fellow," I answered him with a smile.  "You have stamped
me."

"I've stamped myself too, if it comes to that!"

All of us stamped, yes. And most, of all, those of us who are least
aware of it, my dear Fantappiè.




3


I go in through the entrance hall on the left, and come out upon the
gravelled path from the gate, shut in by the buildings of the second
department, the _Photographic_ or _Positive_.

In my capacity as operator I have the privilege of keeping one foot in
this, and the other in the _Art_, or _Negative Department_. And all
the marvels of the industrial and so-called artistic maze are familiar
to me.

Here the work of the machines is mysteriously completed.

All the life that the machines have devoured with the voracity of
animals gnawed by a tapeworm, is turned out here, in the large
underground rooms, their darkness barely broken by dim red lamps,
which strike a sinister blood-red gleam from the enormous dishes
prepared for the developing bath.

The life swallowed by the machines is there, in those tapeworms, I
mean in the films, now coiled on their reels.

We have to fix this life, which has ceased to be life, so that another
machine may restore to it the movement here suspended in a series of
instantaneous sections.

We are as it were in a womb, in which is developing and taking shape a
monstrous mechanical birth.

And how many hands are at work there in the dark!  There is a whole
army of men and women employed here: operators, technicians, watchmen,
men employed on the dynamos and on the other machinery, drying,
soaking, winding, colouring, perforating the films and joining up the
pieces.

I have only to enter here, in this darkness foul with the breath of
the machines, with the exhalations of chemical substances, for all my
_superfluity_ to evaporate.

Hands, I see nothing but hands, in these dark rooms; hands busily
hovering over the dishes; hands to which the murky light of the red
lamps gives a spectral appearance. I reflect that these hands belong
to men who are men no longer; who are condemned here to be hands only:
these hands, instruments. Have they a heart? Of what use is it?  It is
of no use here. Only as an instrument, it too, of a machine, to serve,
to move these hands.  And so with the head: only to think of what
these hands may need. And gradually I am filled with all the horror of
the necessity that impels me to become a hand myself also, and nothing
more.

I go to the store-keeper to provide myself with a stock of fresh film,
and I prepare my machine for its meal.

I at once assume, with it in my hand, my mask of impassivity. Or
rather I cease to exist. It walks, now, upon my legs. From head to
foot, I belong to it: I form part of its equipment. My head is here,
inside the machine, and I carry it in my hand.

Outside, in the daylight, throughout the vast enclosure, is the gay
animation of an undertaking that prospers and pays punctually and
handsomely for every service rendered, that easy run of work in the
confidence that there will be no complications, and that every
difficulty, with the abundance of means at our disposal, will be
neatly overcome; indeed a feverish desire to introduce, as though by
way of challenge, the strangest and most unusual difficulties, without
a thought of the cost, with the certainty that the money, spent now
without reckoning, will before long return multiplied an hundredfold.

Scenario writers, stage hands, scene painters, carpenters, builders
and plasterers, electricians, tailors and dressmakers, milliners,
florists, countless other workers employed as shoemakers, hatters,
armourers, in the store-rooms of antique and modern furniture, in the
wardrobe, are all kept busy, but are not seriously busy, nor are they
playing a game.

Only children have the divine gift of taking their play seriously. The
wonder is in themselves; they impart it to the things with which they
are playing, and let themselves be deceived by them.  It is no longer
a game; it is a wonderful reality.

Here it is just the opposite.

We do not play at our work, for no one has any desire to play. But how
are we to take seriously a work that has no other object than to
deceive, not ourselves, but other people? And to deceive them by
putting together the most idiotic fictions, to which the machine is
responsible for giving a wonderful reality!

There results from this, of necessity, and with no possibility of
deception, a hybrid game.  Hybrid, because in it the stupidity of the
fiction is all the more revealed and obvious inasmuch as one sees it
to be placed on record by the method that least lends itself to
deception: namely, Photography. It ought to be understood that the
fantastic cannot acquire reality except by means of art, and that the
reality which a machine is capable of giving it kills it, for the very
reason that it is given it by a machine, that is to say by a method
which discovers and exposes the fiction, simply by giving it and
presenting it as real. If it is mechanical, how can it be life, how
can it be art?  It is almost like entering one of those galleries of
living statuary, waxworks, clothed and tinted.  We feel nothing but
surprise (which may even amount to disgust) at their movements, in
which there is no possible illusion of a material reality.

And no one seriously believes that he can create this illusion. At the
most, he tries to provide _something to take_ for the machine, here in
the workshops, there in the four studios or on the stage. The public,
like the machine, takes it all.  They make stacks of money, and can
cheerfully spend thousands and thousands of lire on the construction
of a scene which on the screen will not last for more than a couple of
minutes.

Scene painters, stage hands, actors all give themselves the air of
deceiving the machine, which will give an appearance of reality to all
their fictions.

"What am I to them, I who with the utmost seriousness stand by
impassive, turning the handle, at that stupid game of theirs!"




4


Excuse me for a moment. I am going to pay a visit to the tiger. I
shall talk, I shall go on talking, I shall pick up the thread of my
discourse later on, never fear. At present, I must go and see the
tiger.

Ever since they bought her, I have gone every day to pay her a visit,
before starting my work.  On two days only have I not been able to go,
because they did not give me time.

We have had other animals here that were wild, although greatly
subdued by melancholy: a couple of polar bears which used to spend the
whole day standing on their hind legs beating their breasts, like
Trinitarians doing penance: three shivering lion cubs, always huddled
in a corner of the cage, one on top of another; other animals as well,
that were not exactly wild: a poor ostrich, terrified at every sound,
like a chicken, and always uncertain where to set its feet: a number
of mischievous monkeys. The Kosmograph is provided with everything,
including a menagerie, albeit its inmates remain there but a short
time.

No animal has ever _talked to me_, like this tiger.

When we first secured her, she had but recently arrived, a gift from
some illustrious foreign personage, at the Zoological Gardens in Rome.
At the Zoological Gardens they were unable to keep her, because she
was absolutely incapable of learning, I do not say to blow her nose
with a handkerchief, but even to respect the most elementary rules of
social intercourse. Three or four times she threatened to jump the
ditch, or rather attempted to jump it, to hurl herself upon the
visitors to the gardens who stood quietly gazing at her from a
distance.

But what other thought could arise more spontaneously in the mind of a
tiger (if you object to the word _mind_, let us say the paws) than
that the ditch in question was put there on purpose so that she might
try to jump it, and that those ladies and gentlemen stopped there in
front of her in order that she might devour them if she succeeded in
jumping it?

It is certainly an advantage to be able to stand a joke; but we know
that not everyone possesses this advantage. Many people cannot even
endure the thought that some one else thinks he is at liberty to joke
at their expense. I speak of men, who, nevertheless, in the abstract,
are all capable of realising that at times a joke is permissible.

The tiger, you say, is not placed on show in a zoological garden for a
joke. I agree. But does it not seem a joke to you to think that she
can suppose that you keep her there on show to give the public a
"living idea" of natural history!

Here we are back at our starting-point. This, inasmuch as we are not
tigers, but men, is rhetoric.

We may feel compassion for a man who is unable to stand a joke; we
ought not to feel any for a beast; especially if the joke for which we
have placed it on show, I mean the "living idea," may have fatal
consequences: that is to say, for the visitors to the Zoological
Gardens, a too practical illustration of its ferocity.

This tiger was, therefore, wisely condemned to death. The Kosmograph
Company managed to hear of it in time, and bought her. Now she is
here, in a cage in our menagerie. Since she has been here, her
behaviour has been exemplary.  How are we to explain this? Our
treatment, no doubt, seems to her far more logical. Here she is not at
liberty to attempt to jump any ditch, has no illusion of _local
colour_, as in the Zoological Gardens. Here she has in front of her
the bars of her cage, which say to her continually: "You cannot
escape; you are a prisoner"; and she lies on the ground there almost
all day long, resigned to her fate, gazing out through the bars,
quietly, wonderingly waiting.

Alas, poor beast, she does not know that here there is something far
more serious in store for her, than that joke of the "living idea"!

The scenario is already completed, an Indian subject, in which she is
destined to represent one of the principal parts. A spectacular
scenario, upon which several hundred thousand lire will be spent; but
the stupidest and most vulgar that could be imagined. I need only give
the title: _The Lady and the Tiger_. The usual lady, more tigerish
than the tiger. I seem to have heard that she is to be an English
_Miss_ travelling in the Indies with a train of admirers.

India will be a sham, the jungle will be a sham, the travels will be a
sham, with a sham _Miss_ and sham admirers: only the death of this
poor beast will not be a sham. Do you follow me? And does it not make
you writhe in anger?

To kill her in self-defence, or to save the life of another person,
well and good. Albeit not of her own accord, for her own pleasure, has
the beast come here to place herself on show among a lot of men, but
men themselves, for their pleasure, have gone out to hunt her, to drag
her from her savage lair. But to kill her like this, in a sham forest,
in a sham hunt, for a stupid make-believe, is a real iniquity and is
going too far. One of the admirers, at a certain stage, will fire
point-blank at a rival. You will see this rival fall to the ground,
dead. Yes, my friends.  But when the scene is finished, there he is
getting up again, brushing the dust of the stage off his clothes. But
this poor beast will never get up again, after they have shot her. The
scene shifters will carry off the sham forest, and at the same time
clear the stage of her carcase. In the midst of a universal sham, her
death alone will be genuine.

And if it were only a sham that could by its beauty and nobility
compensate in a measure for the sacrifice of this beast. But no. It is
utterly stupid. The actor who is to kill her will not even know,
perhaps, why he has killed her. The scene will last for a minute or
two at most, when projected upon the screen, and will pass without
leaving any permanent impression in the minds of the spectators, who
will come away from the theatre yawning:

"Oh Lord, what rubbish!"

This, you beautiful wild creature, is what awaits you. You do not know
it, and gaze through the bars of your cage with those terror-stricken
eyes in which the slit pupils contract and dilate by turns. I see your
wild nature as it were steaming from your whole body, like the vapour
of a blazing coal; I see marked on the black stripes of your coat the
elastic force of your irrepressible spring. Whoever studies you
closely is glad of the cage that imprisons you and checks in him also
the savage instinct which the sight of you stirs irresistibly in his
blood.

You cannot remain here on any other terms.  Either you must be
imprisoned like this, or you must be killed; because your ferocity--we
quite understand--is innocent; nature has implanted it in you, and
you, in employing it, are obeying nature and cannot feel any remorse.
We cannot endure that you, after a gory feast, should be able to sleep
calmly. Your very innocence makes us innocent of your death, when we
inflict it in self-defence. We can kill you, and then, like you, sleep
calmly. But out there, in the savage lands, where you do not allow any
stranger to pass; not here, not here, where you have not come of your
own accord, for your own pleasure. The beautiful, ingenuous innocence
of your ferocity makes the iniquity of ours seem disgusting here.  We
seek to defend ourselves against you, after bringing you here, for our
pleasure, and we keep you in prison: this is no longer your kind of
ferocity; it is a treacherous ferocity! But we know, you may be sure,
we know how to go even farther, to do better still: we shall kill you
for amusement, stupidly.  A sham hunter, in a sham forest, among sham
trees.... We shall be worthy in every respect, truly, of the concocted
plot. Tigers, more tigerish than a tiger. And to think that the
sentiment which this film, now in preparation, is intended to arouse
in the spectators is contempt for human ferocity! It will be part of
o'ur day's work, this ferocity practised for amusement, and we count
moreover upon making a handsome profit out of it, should the film
prove successful.

You stare. At what do you stare, you beautiful, innocent creature!
That is just how things stand.  You are here for no other purpose. And
I who love and admire you, when they kill you, shall be _impassively_
turning the handle of this pretty machine here, do you see? They have
invented it.  It has to act; it has to eat. It eats everything,
whatever stupidity they may set before it. It will eat you too; it
eats everything, I tell you! And I am its servant. I shall come and
plant it closer to you, when you, mortally wounded, are writhing in
your last agony. Ah, do not fear, it will extract the utmost penny of
profit from your death! It does not have the luck to taste such a
dinner every day. You can have that consolation.  And, if you like,
another as well.

There comes every day, like myself, in front of your cage here, a lady
intent on studying how you move, how you turn your head, how you look
out of your eyes. The Nestoroff. Is that nothing to you?  She has
chosen you to be her teacher. Luck such as this does not come the way
of every tiger.

As usual, she is taking her part seriously. But I have heard it said
that the part of the _Miss_, "more tigerish than the tiger," will not
be assigned to her. Perhaps she does not yet know this; she thinks
that the part is hers; and she comes here to study.

People have told me this, and laughed at it.  But I myself, the other
day, took her by surprise, on one of her visits here, and remained
talking to her for some time.




5


It is no mere waste of time, you will understand, to spend half an
hour in watching and considering a tiger, seeing in it a manifestation
of Earth, guileless, beyond good and evil, incomparably beautiful and
innocent in its savage power. Before we can come down from this
"aboriginality" and reach the stage of being able to see before us a
man or woman of our own time, and to recognise and consider him or her
as an inhabitant of the same earth, we require--I do, at least; I
cannot answer for you--a wide stretch of imagination.

And so I remained for a while looking at Signora Nestoroff before I
was able to understand what she was saying to me.

But the fault, as a matter of fact, was not only mine and the tiger's.
The fact of her addressing me at all was unusual; and it is quite
natural, when anyone addresses us suddenly with whom we have not been
on speaking terms, that we should find it hard at first to take in the
meaning, sometimes even the sound of the most ordinary words, and
should ask:

"Excuse me, what was it you said?"

In a little more than eight months, since I came here, between her and
myself, apart from formal greetings, barely a score of words have
passed.

Then she--yes, this happened too--coming up to me, began to speak to
me with great volubility, as we do when we wish to distract the
attention of some one who has caught us in some action or thought
which we are anxious to keep secret.  (The Nestoroff speaks our
language with marvellous ease and with a perfect accent, as though she
had lived for many years in Italy: but she at once breaks into French
whenever, if only for a moment, she changes her tone or grows
excited.) She wished to find out from me whether I believed that the
actor's profession was such that any animal whatsoever (not
necessarily in a metaphorical sense) could regard itself as qualified,
without preliminary training, to practise it.

"Where?" I asked her.

She did not understand my question.

"Well," I explained to her; "if you mean, practise it here, where
there is no need of speech, perhaps even an animal--why not!--may be
capable of succeeding."

I saw her face cloud over.

"That will be it," she said mysteriously.

I seemed at first to divine that she (like all the professional actors
who are employed here) speaking out of contempt for certain others
who, without actually needing, but at the same time not despising an
easy source of revenue, either from vanity or from predilection, or
for some other reason, had managed to have their services accepted by
the firm and to take their place among the actors, with no great
difficulty, that supreme difficulty being eliminated which it would
have been most arduous for them and perhaps impossible to overcome
without a long training and a genuine aptitude, I mean the difficulty
of speaking in public. We have a number of them at the Kosmograph who
are real gentlemen, young fellows between twenty and thirty, either
friends of some big shareholder on the Board, or shareholders
themselves, who make a hobby of playing some part or other that has
taken their fancy in a film, solely for their own amusement; and play
their parts in the most gentlemanly fashion, some of them even with a
grace that a real actor might envy.

But, reflecting afterwards on the mysterious tone in which she, her
face suddenly clouding over, had uttered the words: "That will be it,"
the suspicion occurred to me that perhaps she had heard the news that
Aldo Nuti, I do not yet know from what part of the horizon, was trying
to find an opening here.

This suspicion disturbed me not a little.

Why did she come to ask me, of all people, with Aldo Nuti in her mind,
whether I believed that the actor's profession was such that any
animal might consider itself qualified, without preliminary training,
to practise it? Did she then know of my friendship with Giorgio
Mirelli?

I had not then, nor have I now any reason to think so. At least the
questions with which I have adroitly plied her in the hope of
enlightenment have brought me no certainty.

I do not know why, but I should dislike intensely her knowing that I
was a friend of Giorgio Mirelli, in his boyhood, and a familiar inmate
of the villa by Sorrento into which she brought confusion and death.

"I do not know why," I have said: but it is not true; I do know why,
and I have already given a hint of the reason. I feel no love, I
repeat again, nor could I feel any, for this woman; hatred, if
anything. Everyone hates her here; and that by itself would be an
overwhelming reason for me not to hate her. Always, in judging other
people, I have endeavoured to break the circle of my own affections,
to gather from the clamour of life, composed more of tears than of
laughter, as many notes as I could outside the chord of my own
feelings. I knew Giorgio Mirelli; but how, in what capacity? Such as
he was in his relations with me. He was the sort of person that I
liked. But who, and what was he in his relations with this woman? The
sort that she could like? I do not know. Certainly he was not, he
could not be one and the same person to her and to myself. And how
then am I to judge this woman by him? We have all of us a false
conception of an individual whole.  Every whole consists in the mutual
relations of its constituent elements; which means that, by altering
those relations however slightly, we are bound to alter the whole.
This explains how some one who is reasonably loved by me can
reasonably be hated by a third person. I who love and the other who
hates are two: not only that, but the one whom I love, and the one
whom the third person hates, are by no means identical; they are one
and one: therefore they are two also. And we ourselves can never know
what reality is accorded to us by other people; who we are to this
person and to that.

Now, if the Nesteroff came to hear that I had been a great friend of
Giorgio Mirelli, she would perhaps suspect me of a hatred for herself
which I do not feel: and this suspicion would be enough to make her at
once become another person to me, I myself remaining meanwhile in the
same attitude towards her; she would assume in my eyes an aspect that
would hide all the rest; and I should no longer be able to study her,
as I am now studying her, as a whole.

I spoke to her of the tiger, of the feelings which its presence in
this place and the fate in store for it aroused in me; but I at once
became aware that she was not in a position to understand me, not
perhaps because she was incapable of doing so, but because the
relations that have grown up between her and the animal do not allow
her to feel either pity for it or anger at the deed that is to be
done.

Her answer was shrewd:

"A sham, yes; stupid too, if you like; but when the door of the cage
is opened and the animal is driven into the other, bigger cage
representing a glade in a forest, with the bars hidden by branches,
the hunter, even if he is a sham like the forest, will still be
entitled to defend himself against it, simply because it, as you say,
is not a sham animal but a real one."

"But that is just where the harm lies," I exclaimed: "in using a real
animal where everything else is a sham."

"Where do you get that?" she promptly rejoined.  "The part of the
hunter will be a sham; but when he is face to face with this _real_
animal he will be a _real_ man! And I can assure you that if he does
not kill it with his first shot, or does not wound it so as to bring
it down, it will not stop to think that the hunter is a sham and the
hunt a sham, but will spring upon him and _really_ tear a _real_ man
to pieces."

I smiled at the acuteness of her logic and said:

"But who will have wished such a thing. Look at her as she lies there.
She knows nothing, the beautiful creature, she is not to blame for her
ferocity."

There was a strange look in her eyes, as though she suspected that I
was trying to make fun of her; then she smiled as well, shrugged her
shoulders slightly and went on:

"Do you feel is to deeply! Tame her! Make her a stage tiger, trained
to sham death at a sham bullet from a sham hunter, and then all will
be right."

We should never have come to an under-standing; because if my
sympathies were with the tiger, hers were with the hunter.

In fact, the hunter appointed to kill the animal is Carlo Ferro. The
Nestoroff must be greatly upset by this; and perhaps she comes here
not, as her enemies assert, to study her part, but to estimate the
risk which her lover will be running.

He too, for all that he shews a scornful indifference, must, in his
heart of hearts, feel apprehensive.  I know that, in conversation with
the General Manager, Commendator Borgalli, and also upstairs in the
office, he has put forward a number of claims: the insurance of his
life for at least one hundred thousand lire, to be paid to his parents
in Sicily, in the event of his death, which heaven forbid; another
insurance, for a more modest sum, in the event of his being
incapacitated for work by any serious injury, which heaven forbid
also; a handsome bonus, if everything, as is to be hoped, turns out
well, and lastly--a curious claim, and one that was certainly not
suggested, like the rest, by a lawyer--the skin of the dead tiger.

The tigerskin is presumably for the Nestoroff; for her little feet; a
costly rug. Oh, she must certainly have warned her lover, with prayers
and entreaties, against undertaking so dangerous a part; but then,
seeing him determined and bound by contract, she must, she and no one
else, have suggested to Ferro that he should claim _at least_ the skin
of the tiger. "At least?" you say. Why, yes! That she used the words
"at least" seems to me beyond question. _At least_, that is to say in
compensation for the tense anxiety that she must feel for the risk to
which he will be exposing himself. It is not possible that the idea
can have originated with him, Carlo Ferro, of having the skin of the
dead animal to spread under the little feet of his mistress.  Carlo
Ferro is incapable of such an idea. You have only to look at him to be
convinced of it; look at that great black hairy arrogant goat's head
on his shoulders.

He appeared, the other day, and interrupted my conversation with the
Nestoroff in front of the cage. He did not even trouble to inquire
what we were discussing, as though a conversation with myself could
not be of the slightest importance to him. He barely glanced at me,
barely raised Ms bamboo cane to the brim of Ms hat in sign of
greeting, looked with Ms usual contemptuous indifference at the tiger
in the cage, saying to his mistress:

"Come along: Polacco is ready; he is waiting for us."

And he turned his back, confident of being followed by the Nestoroff,
as a tyrant by Ms slave.

No one feels or shews so much as he that instinctive antipathy, which
as I have said is shared by almost all the actors for myself, and
which is to be explained, or so at least I explain it, as an effect,
which they themselves do not see clearly, of my profession.

Carlo Ferro feels it more strongly than any of them, because, among
all his other advantages, he has that of seriously believing himself
to be a great actor.




6


It is not so much for me, Gubbio, this antipathy, as for my machine.
It recoils upon me, because I am the man who turns the handle.

They do not realise it clearly, but I, with the handle in my hand, am
to them in reality a sort of executioner.

Each of them--I refer, of course, to the real actors, to those, that
is to say, who really love their art, whatever their merits may be--is
here against his will, is here because he is better paid, and for work
which, even if it requires some exertion, does not call for any
intellectual effort.  Often, as I have said before, they do not even
know what part they are playing.

The machine, with the enormous profits that it produces, if it engages
them, can reward them far better than any manager or proprietor of a
dramatic company. Not only that; but it, with its mechanical
reproduction, being able to offer at a low price to the general public
a spectacle that is always new, fills the cinematograph halls and
empties the theatres, so that all, or nearly all the dramatic
companies are now doing wretched business; and the actors, if they are
not to starve, see themselves compelled to knock at the doors of the
cinematograph companies.  But they do not hate the machine merely for
the degradation of the stupid and silent work to which it condemns
them; they hate it, first and foremost, because they see themselves
withdrawn, feel themselves torn from that direct communion with the
public from which in the past they derived their richest reward, their
greatest satisfaction: that of seeing, of hearing from the stage, in a
theatre, an eager, anxious multitude follow their _live_ action,
stirred with emotion, tremble, laugh, become excited, break out in
applause.

Here they feel as though they were in exile.  In exile, not only from
the stage, but also in a sense from themselves. Because their action,
the _live_ action of their _live_ bodies, there, on the screen of the
cinematograph, no longer exists: it is _their image_ alone, caught in
a moment, in a gesture, an expression, that flickers and disappears.
They are confusedly aware, with a maddening, indefinable sense of
emptiness, that their bodies are so to speak subtracted, suppressed,
deprived of their reality, of breath, of voice, of the sound that they
make in moving about, to become only a dumb image which quivers for a
moment on the screen and disappears, in silence, in an instant, like
an unsubstantial phantom, the play of illusion upon a dingy sheet of
cloth.

They feel that they too are slaves to this strident machine, which
suggests on its knock-kneed tripod a huge spider watching for its
prey, a spider that sucks in and absorbs their live reality to render
it up an evanescent, momentary appearance, the play of a mechanical
illusion in the eyes of the public. And the man who strips them of
their reality and offers it as food to the machine; who reduces their
bodies to phantoms, who is he? It is I, Gubbio.

They remain here, as on a daylight stage, when they rehearse. The
first night, for them, never arrives. The public they never see again.
The machine is responsible for the performance before the public, with
their phantoms; and they have to be content with performing only
before it.  When they have performed their parts, their performance is
film.

Can they feel any affectio