“Distraction” (“Distrazione”)

Translated by Ellen McRae

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “Distraction” (“Distrazione”), tr. Ellen McRae. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2025.

“Distraction” (“Distrazione”) was first published in La Riviera ligure in January of 1907. Three years later, Pirandello added it to a collection of stories called Naked Life (La vita nuda), published by Treves in Milan in 1910. It was then included in his Stories for a Year (Novelle per un anno) in the collection of the same name, Naked Life (Florence: Bemporad, 1922).

“Distraction” can be grouped with a number of stories set in Rome that provide snapshots of city life with a focused, up-close detail and realism. Here, the protagonist, an inattentive hearse driver named Scalabrino, is tasked with guiding a funeral “procession” consisting of only a single mourner as they make their way through a semi-deserted cityscape on a hot August day. Pirandello traces the route of the carriage, along with the reactions of passersby and local inhabitants, with a precision and local flair that remind us he is writing about his own adopted city and its people. Indeed, many of Pirandello’s stories set in Rome feature characters from different social strata, in consonance with the style of social realism that was especially popular at the end of the nineteenth century. In “Distraction,” this involves the use of phrases and even sentences in dialect, which communicate both the local setting as well as the educational and class status of the characters. At the same time, Pirandello’s focus on providing a realistic map of the city and a true vision of its inhabitants is blended with a more impressionistic style that mimics the carriage-driver’s sleepy mental state by inserting a gap in the narrative corresponding to his dozing off. Using narrative form to represent mental experience in this way connects the story to Pirandello’s developing modernist poetics. Similarly, the story’s content provides not just an account but also a light caricature of the various people it examines, using humor to highlight social conventions around mourning and death as well as to depict the disaffected state of the protagonist, who is alienated from his work and has floated through a series of dead-end jobs that lead to the story’s unexpectedly comedic conclusion. What might seem like a lighthearted sketch of contemporary social life thus resonates with many of the themes and techniques that are important across Pirandello’s corpus and in the broader modernist context, as well.

The Editors

Black amid the dusty glare of an August sun that gave no respite,[1] a third-class funeral carriage stopped before the open front door of a new house on one of the many new streets of Rome, in the Prati di Castello district.[2]

It may have been three o’clock in the afternoon.

All those new houses, most of them not yet occupied, seemed to be looking at that black carriage through their unadorned window openings.

Built so recently for the express purpose of welcoming life, instead of life—look here—they were seeing death, which was coming to plunder precisely there.

Before life, death.

And it had come slowly, at a pace, that carriage. The coachman, who was collapsing from drowsiness, with his shabby top hat slanted over his nose, and one foot on the footboard in front of him, at the first door that seemed to him to be left ajar as a sign of mourning, had given a tug on the reins and a stop to the brake lever, and had lain down to sleep more comfortably on the coachman’s box.

From the door of the only shop on the street, a bare-chested, sweaty, sanguine brute of a man, with his shirtsleeves rolled up over his hairy arms, peered out, pushing aside the filthy, rumpled burlap curtain.

“Pst!” he called, turning toward the coachman. “Ahò![3] Farther along...”

The coachman bent his head backwards to look under the brim of the top hat resting on his nose; he released the break; he shook the reins on the horses’ backs and moved beyond the grocer’s shop, without saying anything.

Here or there, for him, it was the same.

And in front of the door of the house farther along, which was also open, he stopped and went back to sleep.

“Idiot!” muttered the grocer, shrugging his shoulders. “He doesn’t realize that all the doors are left ajar at this hour. He must be new at his job.”

Which he actually was. And Scalabrino didn’t like it at all, that job. But he had been a doorman, and had quarreled first with all the tenants and then with the landlord; a sacristan at San Rocco,[4] and he had quarreled with the parish priest; he had proceeded to work as a cab-driver and had quarreled with all the coach house managers, up until three days ago. Now, not finding anything better in that dead season, he had found employment at a funeral parlor. He would have quarreled with this one too—he was sure of it—because he could not tolerate things going wrong. And then he was unfortunate, you see. You just had to look at him. Shoulders hunched, eyes half-closed; a yellow face, like wax, and a red nose. Why red, the nose? So everyone would take him for a drunkard; when he didn’t even know what wine tasted like.

“Pah!”

He had had it up to here, that beastly meager life. And one day or another, he would have the final quarrel well and truly with the river water, and buona notte, that would be it.[5]

For now over there, eaten by flies and boredom, under the sun’s scorching blaze, to wait for that first load stood the dead body.

And it even emerged, after a good hour, from another door further down, on the other side of the street.

“Damn you...”[6] (to the dead man) he exclaimed through his teeth, hastening with the carriage, while the undertakers, gasping under the weight of a wretched coffin clothed in black muslin, braided at the edges with white ribbon, were blaspheming and complaining:

“Damn you...” (to him), “hope you drop dead—Ain't they told you the address or what ?”

Scalabrino made the turn without breathing a single word; he waited for them to open the door and insert the load in the carriage.

“Move off!”

And he moved, slowly, at a pace, as he had arrived: still with his foot up on the footboard in front of him and his top hat on his nose.

The carriage, bare. Not a ribbon, not a flower.

Behind, only one mourning woman.

She walked with a black embroidered veil, for Mass, lowered over her face; she wore a dark dress, of smooth muslin, and little yellow flowers, and a light-colored parasol, shining under the sun, was open and resting on her shoulder.

She was accompanying the dead man but shielded herself from the sun with her parasol. And she kept her head low, almost more out of shame than out of grief.

“Enjoy your walk, eh Rosi’!” the shirtless grocer, who had reappeared at the door of his shop, yelled after her. And he accompanied his greeting with a coarse guffaw, shaking his head.

The mourning woman turned to look at him through her veil; she raised her hand with the fingerless lace gloves to wave at him, then she lowered it to pull her skirt back, showing her worn-down shoes. Yet she had the fingerless lace gloves and the parasol.

“Poor Mister Bernardo, like a dog,”[7] somebody said loudly from the window of a house.

The grocer looked up, continuing to shake his head.

“A professor, with just the serving wench following...” yelled another voice, an old woman’s, from another window.

In the sun, those voices from up high rang out in the silence of the deserted street, eerily.

Before turning  Scalabrino thought of suggesting to the mourner that she hire a carriage in order to go faster, given not even a dog had come to join the procession of that funeral.

“With this sun... at this hour...”

Rosina shook her head under the veil. She had taken an oath that she would accompany her master on foot as far as the beginning of Via San Lorenzo.[8]

“But ya know he can’t see ya, don’t ya?”

Nothing! An oath. The carriage, if at all, she would have taken up there, as far as Campoverano.[9]

“And if I pay for it?” insisted Scalabrino. Nothing. An oath.

Scalabrino muttered another curse under his top hat and continued apace, first along the Cavour bridge, then along Via Tomacelli and along Via Condotti and along Piazza di Spagna and Via Due Macelli and Capo le Case and Via Sistina.[10]

Thus far, more or less, he held himself upright, alert, in order to dodge the other carriages, electric trams and automobiles, considering that no one would have given way and shown respect for that funeral.

But when, having crossed Piazza Barberini still at pace, he entered the steep street of San Niccolò da Tolentino, he put his foot back up on the footboard, lowered the top hat over his nose again, and settled back down to sleep.[11]

At any rate, the horses knew the way.

The rare passersby would stop and turn to stare, half astonished and half indignant. The sleeping of the coachman on the box and the sleeping of the dead man inside the carriage: that of the dead man, cold and in the dark; that of the coachman, warm and in the sun; and then that single mourner with the light-colored parasol and the black veil lowered over her face: the entirety of that funeral, in short, so very quiet and so very lonely, at that scorching hour, was just downright disheartening.

That, no that wasn’t the way to depart to the other world! The day, the hour, the season poorly chosen. It appeared that that dead man there had refused to give death an appropriate gravitas. It was frustrating. The coachman was almost right to be sleeping his way through it.

And thus Scalabrino had continued to sleep as far as the beginning of Via San Lorenzo![12] But the horses, as soon as they had passed over the steep rise, while turning onto Via Volturno, thought it best to speed up their pace a bit; and Scalabrino woke up.

Now, to wake up, to see standing on the sidewalk to his left a lanky, bearded gentleman with big black eyeglasses, in an ill-fitted gray suit, mousy, and to feel coming at his face, on his top hat, a large bundle, all at once!

Before Scalabrino had time to come back to his senses, that gentleman had thrown himself in front of the horses, had stopped them and, brandishing menacing gestures, almost as if he wanted to hurl his hands, not having anything else to hurl, was screaming, shouting:

“To me? To me? Wretch! Scoundrel! Rogue! To a father of a family? To a father of eight children? Rogue! Lowlife!”

All the people who found themselves passing along the street and all the shopkeepers and the customers crowded together in a rush around the carriage, and all the residents of the nearby houses looked out their windows, and other curious people hastened toward the clamor from the neighboring streets, and unable to learn what had happened, moved anxiously about, approaching this one and that one, and stood on their tiptoes.

“But what happened?”

“Hmm... it seems that... they say that... I don’t know!”

“But is there a dead person?”

“Where?”

“In the carriage, is there?”

“Hmm!... Who is dead?”

“They’re giving him a fine!”

“To the dead man?”

“To the coachman...”

“And why?”

“Who knows!... it seems that... they say that...”[13]

The lanky gray gentleman continued in the meantime to shout by the window of a café, where they had dragged him; he was demanding the bundle hurled at the coachman; but it was still not possible to understand why he had hurled it at him. On the carriage, the ashen-faced coachman, with his squinting myopic eyes, set his top hat right again and replied to the police officer who, amid the crowd and the noise, was taking notes on a notepad.

Finally, the carriage moved among the clamoring crowd, which gave way to it; but, as soon as that single mourner emerged again, under the light-colored parasol, with the black veil lowered over her face—silence. Only a few rascals whistled.

What, then, had happened?

Nothing. A little distraction. Cab-driver until three days ago, Scalabrino, bewildered by the sun, suddenly awoken, had forgotten he was on a funeral carriage: it had seemed to him that he was still on the box of a one-horse cab and, accustomed as he had been for so many years now to inviting people on the street to avail themselves of his rig, seeing himself observed by the mousy gentleman standing still there on the sidewalk, he had gestured to him with his finger if he wanted to climb aboard.

And that gentleman, because of a mere gesture, all that uproar...