Interviews with Characters” (“Colloquii coi personaggi”)

Translated by Steve Eaton

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “Interviews with Characters” (“Colloquii coi personaggi”), tr. Steve Eaton. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2026.

“Interviews with Characters” (“Colloquii coi personaggi”) was first published in the daily news periodical Giornale di Sicilia in two installments, on August 17 and August 18, 1915. Pirandello then republished it in his volume Berecche and the War (Berecche e la guerra; Milan: Facchi, 1919). While the author never added it to Stories for a Year (Novelle per un anno) before his death, it was included as a posthumous editorial addition in the Appendix by Manlio Lo Vecchio-Musti and Angelo Sodini in the second volume of the Omnibus collection of the text published by Mondadori in Milan in 1938.

“Interviews with Characters” is the last in a series of three meta-literary short stories that Pirandello wrote in the years leading up to his famous metatheatrical masterpiece, Six Characters in Search of an Author (Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore, 1921). The previous two, “Characters” (“Personaggi,” 1906) and “A Character’s Tragedy” (“La tragedia di un personaggio,” 1911), begin with a similar premise as this one: an author, who is autobiographically related to Pirandello himself, is in his study holding “audience” and receiving proposals from characters who come to pitch their own lives to him as material for his next literary work. The direct relation between this metafictional situation and the development of his later play is obvious enough, and it was further hammered home when Pirandello added a “Preface” (“Prefazione,” 1925) to the republication of his play. There, he replicates aspects of these short stories directly, including the presence of a personified Fantasy who works as the author’s servant and is responsible for ushering in these preexisting characters for the author’s consideration.

In contrast to the previous two metafictional stories, however, “Interviews with Characters” is even more explicitly autobiographical, particularly in its second installation. That autobiographical element is in turn tied to the story’s historical situation: written after the outbreak of World War I, when Pirandello’s eldest son Stefano was already fighting on the front lines (where he would be captured and held as a prisoner of war), the story is closely involved with political and personal events. At the opening of this story, the author declares that he will no longer grant “interviews” (or audience) to would-be characters at this moment of national crisis. All the same, he finds his study invaded by a petulant fictional figure who is indifferent to the crisis of the war; he instead insists on teaching Pirandello about the relativity of historical struggle and suffering. This account of the author’s refusal to grant audience, which itself turns into a kind of interview of its own, is followed by another encounter, this time with a character who emerges from the shadows of his study and reveals herself to be none other than Pirandello’s own mother, Caterina Ricci Gramitto (1839-1915), who had in reality passed away just a few days before, on August 13, 1915. The second half of the story thus shifts toward a mode of memory and elegy that is deeply personal and intensely fresh. His mother appears as a living presence, recounting her and her family’s ties to the Risorgimento past, which prefigured Italy’s eventual involvement in the Great War. She likewise urges her son toward a form of moral endurance while offering him comfort over his own recent loss (of her). The story thus unfolds as a meditation on the autonomy of fictional beings, the persistence of life in the face of historical catastrophe, and the fragile reciprocity grounding personal identity in relations of care. Ultimately, Pirandello suggests that what we mourn in others’ deaths is in fact the loss of our own reflected reality, tying the story’s autobiographical and metafictional elements to a repeated theme in his own philosophical outlook, where one’s personal identity is knotted together with the multiple ways in which others view them.

In addition to these close ties to other works by Pirandello, this short story has also had a rich afterlife, furnishing the material for the final sequence in the Taviani brothers’ cinematic adaptation of a selection of Pirandello’s stories for their film Kaos (1984). There, the directors envision the mother’s story of her own childhood, when the family was forced to flee to exile in Malta after their participation in a failed uprising against the Bourbon monarchy ruling Sicily before the Risorgimento. It is a poignant and powerful closing to a beautiful film, partly because of the unusual degree to which Pirandello’s short story connects to his deep, personal response to and autobiographical reflection on the events of his life.

This translation was previously published in the pages of PSA: The Journal of the Pirandello Society of America, Vol. 31 (2019), pp. 99-113. The publication there included a number of endnotes written by the translator.[1] Here, we have replaced those with notes added by the Editors of Stories for a Year, in keeping with the other stories collected in this digital edition.

The Editors

I

I had stuck a note on the door to my study with this:

NOTICE

Starting today, interviews suspended with all characters, men and women, of all classes, of all ages, of every profession, who have made inquiries and proposed titles to be considered for some novel or story.[2]

Note: Those esteemed characters who are not ashamed to expose their particular miserable circumstances at a time like this are free to make inquiries and propose titles to other writers, if they can even find any.

The next morning it was my fate to endure a bitter argument with one of the most petulant,[3] who had been clinging to me for about a year, trying to persuade me to draw from him and from his adventures material for a novel that would turn out to be—so he believed—a masterpiece.

That morning, I found him in front of the door to the study, deciphering the notice with the aid of his glasses and on his tiptoes, short and half blind as he was.

I know that as a character, I mean as a being enclosed within his own idealized reality, outside of the transitory contingencies of the time, he was under no obligation to be aware of the horrendous and miserable mess in which Europe found itself in those days.[4] So he stopped at the words in the notice “at a time like this”, and demanded an explanation from me.

Those were still the days of confused agony that preceded our declaration of war with Austria,[5] and I was entering my study in a rage with a sheaf of newspapers, anxious to read the latest news. He appeared before me:

“Excuse me… if you’ll permit me?”

“I’m not permitting a damn thing!” I shouted at him. “Get out of my way! Did you read the notice?”

“Yes sir, that’s exactly it… if you’d please explain…”

“I have nothing to explain! I have no more time to waste on you! Get out! You want your papers, your documents? Come on, come on in, take them and leave!”

“Yes sir… but look, couldn’t you at least just tell me what’s happened?”

Hoping to make him vanish into thin air, into dust, as if firing a cannon at point-blank range, I screamed in his face:

“The war!”

He remained there, impassive, as if I hadn’t said a thing. “The war? What war?”

I got him out of the way with a violent shove and went into the study, slamming the door in his face. Throwing myself on the sofa, I ran my eyes over the latest news from the papers. Had war finally been declared, had the ambassadors of Austria and Germany left Rome, had the first shots already been fired at sea or along the border? Nothing! Still nothing! And I was shaking.

“But how, how can this be?” I said. “What are we waiting for? And what are the honorable ambassadors still waiting for, after the solemn assemblies of the Chamber and the Senate and the delirium of the entire population, shouting “war! war!” on the streets of Rome for so many days? Have they become deaf? Blind? German presumption, Austrian arrogance, have they ever been worse? Four, five times, in the morning papers, in the afternoon papers, in the evening papers it has been announced that the special trains are ready for them. Nothing. Deaf. Blind.[6] And meanwhile in Trieste, in Fiume, in Pola, all over Trentino province,[7] the massacres and torture of our brothers who are waiting for us; and we allow them to depart in peace and quiet, the honorable Austrian and German subjects!”[8]

While I was having these thoughts, shaking, I happened to raise my eyes from the paper, and what did I see? Him, that petulant, insufferable character, who had gotten in who knows how, who knows where, and was peacefully seated in an armchair by one of the two windows that looked out onto my little garden. It was full of laughter and trills in those days of May,[9] full of yellow roses, white roses, red roses and of carnations and geraniums.

He was looking out with a blissful face at the cypresses and pines of Villa Torlonia[10] opposite, gilded by the sun, glowing under the intense blue of the sky, and he was listening intently with obvious delight to the rapid twittering of the baby birds born happily with the season, and to the gurgling of the fountain in my little garden.

That oblivious gaze, that attitude of delight fed a rage in me that I can’t even describe, a rage that should have made me go after him, and instead I remained there as if crushed by the weight of an astonishment that was also nausea and humiliation. Suddenly I saw him turn that blissful face towards me. Still listening intently and with a hand slightly raised:

“Do you hear?” he said to me, “do you hear what a lovely trill? It’s a blackbird, that one, surely.”

I clutched the papers spread on my knees, seized with the desire to fall upon him and bludgeon him with them, screaming in my furor all the insults, all the vituperations that were forming on my tongue. And then? It would have been useless. I hurled the newspapers to the floor, put my elbows on my knees, my head between my hands.

After a bit, in a placid voice, he continued to speak: “And pardon me, but how is it my fault if the blackbird sings? If the rose smiles in your garden? Run to put a muzzle on that blackbird, if you can, and uproot that rose! You know, I don’t believe the little birds will let you muzzle them, and you’ll hardly be able to uproot all the roses of May in all the gardens so easily! You want to make me jump out of this window? You won’t hurt me; and I’ll come back into your study through the other one. What is your war supposed to mean to me, to the birds, the roses, your garden fountain? Chase the blackbird from that acacia; it will fly to the next garden, to another tree, and will keep on singing there, tranquil and happy. We don’t know anything about war,[11] dear sir. And if you’ll listen to me and give the heave-ho to all these newspapers, I believe you’ll be glad later on. Because they are all things that pass, and even if they leave a trace, it’s as if they hadn’t, because over those very traces, always, spring. Look: three more roses, two less, it’s always the same, and man needs to sleep and eat, to cry and laugh, to kill and love, to cry over yesterday’s laughter, to bury today’s dead with love. Rhetoric, isn’t it? But so it must be, because that’s how you are. For the moment you innocently believe that war changes everything. What’s supposed to change? What do events matter? As enormous as they are, they’re still events. They pass. They pass, along with the individuals who don’t manage to survive them. Life remains, with the same needs, the same passions, the same instincts, always the same, as if nothing had ever happened. Life has an ugly and almost blind persistence, painful to watch. The land is tough, and life comes from the land. A cataclysm, a catastrophe, war, earthquakes drive it away from somewhere; it soon returns there, the same, as though nothing happened. Because life, as tough as it is, coming from the land as it does, wants itself there and not elsewhere, still and always the same. And it wants the sky too, for so many things; but above all, believe me, to give breath to this land. You’re upset right now; you’re shaking; you’re enraged against those who don’t feel like you, against those who don’t take action; you’d like to cry out, to be able to make everyone else feel the same way. But what if the others don’t? You imagine that all is lost; and maybe all will be lost, for you…but for how long? This is hardly going to kill you. Look: you breathe the air, and doesn’t that tell you that you are alive, when you breathe? This chirping of baby birds born now this May in these flower gardens, you’re hearing it, and aren’t these birds and these gardens telling you that you live, when you hear the chirping and inhale the perfume? You are absorbed in a misery of thought. You take no notice of so much life that enters you through your open senses. So you’re grieving; over what? Over those miserable thoughts, that unsatisfied desire, an adversity already passed. And meanwhile all the goodness of life is slipping away from you! But it’s not true. It’s slipping away from your conscious mind, not from that obscure depth where—with-out knowing it—you really live and savor the ineffable taste of life, which is what preserves you and lets you accept all the adversity, all the conditions which thought deems the most miserable and intolerable. This is truly what counts. Imagine that this mess is over, the massacres done with. History will be written tomorrow, of the gains and losses, of the victories and defeats. We hope that justice triumphs… But what if it does not? It will triumph a century from now, justice will. History has deep lungs, and shortness of breath is a momentary thing. You may even tell yourself, for that matter, that justice will look different a century from now. Don’t count on it; and believe me, that’s not what matters. What really matters is something infinitely smaller and infinitely greater; a cry, a laugh, which you, or if not you someone else, will know how to give life to, beyond time, I mean transcending the transitory reality of your momentary passion; a cry, a laugh, it doesn’t matter whether it’s over this war or another, since all wars are more or less the same war, and that cry will be one, that laugh will be one.”

I heard him speak this way at length, with an agitation that steadily increased the more I held my tongue, since it seemed to me that he was basically right. I didn’t want to listen him, and yet I listened to the end.[12] When I jumped to my feet, scornful and embittered, I naturally no longer saw him before me. Like a black mood he had reoccupied my brain: I had fallen back into the clutches of my burning rage.

Around that time my son had to leave for the front.[13] I wanted, yet could not manage, to feel proud. Like so many of his age and situation, he could have avoided his obligations, at least for the moment; instead he had answered the call immediately, voluntarily. Crushed and rather mortified, I watched him. The disgust at more than thirty years of a hateful alliance,[14] fed now by the indignation and horror over the atrocities committed by our allies of yesterday, had been corroding the restraint of a superhuman patience for ten months.

And now that this restraint was finally showing signs of breaking, now that the suffocated disgust of thirty and more years was about to rupture and explode, well now, it’s not me, not us, the ones of this wretched generation who bore the shame of this patience, the ignominy of that alliance with an irreconcilable enemy, we weren’t the ones who had to rush to the front, but our sons, who perhaps weren’t trembling with disgust and weren’t boiling with hate like us. First our fathers, and not us! Now our sons, and not us! Myself, I had to stay home, and watch my son leave.[15]

For the moment I could see nothing beyond this rage, this anguish. I had to stifle within myself a violent affliction: the anger, the bitter resentment for what had happened, for those who could not, or didn’t know how, or would not act, and who put on such grotesque airs. They would have deserved in response our best wishes for defeat, had not our own kind been unfortunately involved. I had to stifle the unrelenting fear for my son, who would be up there, exposed to his own fear, while I would be here, forced unfortunately to attend to all the petty needs of daily life, tormenting myself in vain. Every moment I spent like this might be his last; and it would fall to me then, afterwards, to keep on living this appalling life.

However, a shadow had been coming, slow and tired after those very long oppressive summer afternoons, invading my room little by little, as though instilling a sad coolness, a regret over a lost far-away tenderness. For some days I had no longer felt alone. Something was swarming in that shadow, in a corner of my room. Shadows within the shadow, which continued to commiserate with my worry, my ravings, my breakdowns, my outbursts, all of my rage, from which perhaps they had been born or were now being born. They watched me, they spied upon me. And they would keep watching me until finally I would have to face them.

With whom could I really communicate, at a time like that, if not with them? And I approached that corner, and forced myself to discern, one by one, those shadows born of my rage, to slowly begin speaking with them.

II

And approaching for the first time the corner of the room where the shadows were already coming to life, I happened to find among them one whom I was not expecting, a shadow only since yesterday.[16]

“But how, Mama? You, here?”

A small woman, she is sitting in the big armchair chair not from here, not from my room here, but in the one from the far-away home, where indeed the others no longer see her sitting and where not even she, here, now, sees herself surrounded by the things she’s left forever: the light of a warm sun, the fragrant singing light of the sea, and over here the glass case gleaming with fine tableware, over there the balcony which looks out onto the wide street of the harbor town,[17] along which noisy carts pass all day, monotonously, the usual life of commerce for others and tedium for her. Nor does she still see before her those dear grandchildren with their sweet eyes absorbed in her tales, nor those other eyes that pained her more, I’m sure, to leave behind: the longtime companion of her life, her favorite daughter,[18] the one who surrounded her to the end with watchful adoration.

Bent, completely doubled over in order to relieve the internal spasms, her fists on her knees and on the fists her forehead, she remains there, in that armchair of hers that reminds her of all the cares of the house and the torment of long reflection in this enforced idleness, travelling in spirit among distant memories and long suffering and also, yes, the final joys of being a grandmother.

To my question: “But how, Mama? You, here?” she lifts her forehead from her knees and watches me with those eyes that still have the light of a twenty-year-old, but set in a pale face, drawn and haggard from illness and age; she looks at me and nods yes, that she wanted to come and tell me what she could not because of my distance, before breaking free from life.

“You’re telling me to be strong, Mama, in this moment of supreme trial for everyone? Maybe so… but you, Mama? To leave me right at this moment, to leave your little nook up there, where I would come in my mind to find you every day, when life at its gloomiest and coldest pained me, to venture out and warm myself in the light and heat of your love, which turned me back into a little boy every time…”

She lifts her eyelids with effort, and wears a pained smile on her face, holding on her lap her two poor little hands that have worked so much, almost as if to hide the illness where it has tortured and insulted her the most. And not only does she hold her hands this way, but also her spirit within, to hide where the experiences of life have injured her most deeply, where some words from someone have touched her to the quick, and to keep from saying through that pained smile what is unseemly, not for herself but for others. And she says:

“Wasn’t I supposed to? But I didn’t want to, son, even so tired, you know, and with such a need to rest from too much sickness during my too-long life,[19] ah long beyond any inkling of so much pain… it’s happened! I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to, for you and for all the others, but mostly for you who, I know, rightly asked for my heart to accompany you in this grievous anxiety for your son who is fighting up there… And it has accompanied you, son, my heart, and maybe even that’s why… No, no, it’s not your fault. It couldn’t run like it should have, old thing, to keep up with your anguish, and it’s stopped. But it’s better for me this way, better, believe me. I’m saying this for you, so that you find in this some relief from the pain of my death. I wasn’t able to rest; see how my body is shriveled? The spirit, yes… that! But also my heart, you know? Even though it was so tired of beating… even that, inside, was the same as always, with everything still inside it, its whole life, even childhood, you know? My whole life, even the games I used to play as a child with my little brothers, and all the faces and appearances of things then, so alive, but alive in the sense that they had life for me then. So that this later life is the one that often seemed like a dream around me, not the one already so far away but so present here, in my heart. Oh! because you know, son, we give a life to our children so that they live it, and we content ourselves if a bit of it reflects back to us; but it no longer seems ours; ours, for us, within, remains forever not the one we give but the one we were given, in our turn; the one which, for however long it lasts, always cherishes the first taste of infancy and the faces and attention of our mama and our father and the house like it was then, as they made it for us. You’re able to know what my life was like because I told you about it so many times; but it’s another thing to live it, son, a life…”

She shakes her head and her eyes shine vividly from the thrill of the memories within her.

“It is mine! Yes, it was sad, at first…The tyranny… The Bourbons…[20] At thirteen, with my brother, my mother, my sisters, one even younger than me as well as two younger brothers, eight of us and yet so alone at sea, on a big fishing boat, a tartana,[21] into the unknown. Malta… My father was there, in exile, compromised by the conspiracies and excluded from the Bourbon amnesty because of his political poetry after the revolution of 1848.[22] And maybe then I couldn’t understand it, I didn’t understand all of my father’s pain. Exile—it makes mama cry so, and the fear, and tearing so many children away from home, from their toys, their comforts—that’s what it meant. But also it meant that sea voyage, with the great white sail of the tartana flapping happily in the wind, way up in the sky, as if signaling the stars with its peak, and nothing but sea all around, such a deep blue that it seemed almost black, and still frightening to look at. But also that infantile pride at the misfortune which makes a little child dressed in black say, “Did you know I’m in mourning?” as if it were a privilege over the other little children not dressed in black. And also the impatience to see so many new things, things we were hoping to see with straining eyes, that for now see nothing but mama crying there between the two oldest children who know and understand, they do, yes… and then we little ones, we think maybe those things to see out there, in the unknown, won’t be pretty. But first the isle of Gozzo,[23] then Malta… pretty! With that great big gulf, a harsh blue color, a glittering surface of trembling shards. With that little white village of Bùrmula[24] in one of those blue coves. Pretty things to see, if it wasn’t for mama here who kept on crying. And then soon we little ones were made to understand, soon we weren’t so little. The grownups came to our house to see our father, and they were all sad and gloomy, as though deaf. It seemed as if each one was talking to himself about what he was seeing: the distant motherland, where the restored despotism was again an agony for everyone; and every one of their words seemed to dig a grave in the silence. They were here now, impotent. Nothing to be done about it! And to keep from wasting away there in wrathful desperation, anyone who could would leave as soon as possible for the Piedmont,[25] for England.[26] They would leave us. With seven children and a wife, what else could my father do, except to say goodbye to all those who were leaving, goodbye as well to the life that was leaving him? The rage and the burden of that impotence, the humiliation of living off the charity of a brother who had been forced to sing the Te Deum for Ferdinand[27] along with the rest of the Cathedral’s priests, on the very day of his departure into exile. A grief without end, the doubt that he would ever see the day of vengeance and of liberation, consuming him little by little, at forty-six years of age. He called all of us to his bedside on the day of his death and made us promise and swear as his children that we would never have a thought except for the motherland and that we would spend our lives without rest for her liberation. She returned a widow, we returned as seven orphans to our homeland, begging at the door of that uncle who up to now had supported us in exile. A true saint, a true saint, because the good that he did for us, that he continued to do with never a complaint, was at the cost of overcoming fear every day, of suffering insults while pretending not to notice them, insults to his habits, his opinions, his feelings. And also at the cost of over-looking petty grievances, which made him all the dearer, the more we saw that he was trying to brush them off with comical subterfuges, with silly tricks that made us smile with pity. So many times you’ve heard me say: “My uncle, the one who was a priest!”

But what can you know about that old house, what it was like, the taste of life that breathed there, how small he was (big-chested, short-legged), so very small that standing up he was shorter than sitting down, but with a handsome face. And those odd exclamations of his: “Càttari! Càttari! [28] I could have sworn, actually…” while he gazed down at his fingernails. And the fear he had of thunder! And a kind of overwhelming yet forbidden curiosity that led him to read the history of the popes in The Battle of Benevento[29] in secret, and from time to time we would hear him shout, as he slammed the book shut and raised a fist: “But this man is crazy!” And soon after he would read it again from the start. Poor uncle! And sometimes we were unkind… for example that time when the Bourbon police came to search the house, because my brothers were now grown up and plotting, and little me, seeing him too frightened and too obedient, trembling before their ugly faces, cried out, “But don’t be afraid! They all know that you went to sing the Te Deum at the Cathedral when your brother was sent into exile!” And the poor man, so very discouraged, walked off exclaiming and looking at his fingernails: “Càttari, càttari!”—his Sicilian way of saying “what a woman, what a woman!” Oh yes, all too true that it pained me to be a woman then, unable to follow my brothers! In near darkness under the stairs, I sewed the tricolor flag with which my youngest brother, together with the other plotters, took up arms against the Bourbon garrison on the 4th of April 1860.[30] At the same time, in Palermo, another of my brothers was supposed to break out of the Gancia monastery.[31] And out here in the country, of all those who swore to descend on the piazza with arms only five showed up against two thousand Bourbons! You can understand now our mortal fear on that day for these two brothers, one here, the other there… Yes, and now you fear for your son; but our mama was also with us then, and her fear was also for us. When, after my brothers’ miraculous escape, the police returned to search the house, my mother arranged us, her daughters, each one on a balcony and commanded us: “If they put their hands on you, throw yourselves off.” Proud woman, the old-fashioned kind, my moth-er! For months and months, just imagine, during the whole time in which the Garibaldini[32] were imprisoned after Aspromonte,[33] she didn’t want to give any news of the family to my youngest brother who found himself, an infantry officer, in the king’s army, all just because of the possibility that he had been among those shooting at Garibaldi[34] and at the other brother who on that accursed day had the luck to pick up the General’s shot-up and bloody boot. What a day that was—and perhaps your lives too, my children, depend on it! When that brother of mine returned from the prison at the barracks of San Benigno in Genoa,[35] the entire population here led him as if in triumph to his mother and to us who were waiting for him in celebration; and it was then that I met your father for the first time. He was also captured at Aspromonte, also a follower of Garibaldi in the Sixties, a Genoese carabiniere. I was twenty-seven by then and no longer wanted to marry; I got married because he wanted it, he who was able to move my heart with his fine figure and even more, in those fervent years, with the spirit that you children know; he who, an old man, still exults and is moved like a child by any act that brings honor to the motherland. With that spirit and with mine, the life we’ve given you, my children, in the lifeless and deaf times that followed, couldn’t have been pleasant, I know! And now I also know your pain, son, perhaps the same that so burned in my soul, a woman’s soul: the pain of being unable to act and seeing the others do what we wished we could do and which would have been nothing for us, while it seems so much and makes us suffer so, for the others to do… But look, that’s just why I’ve come, my son, to tell you this: that you wished for this war,[36] while so many others were against it, and you knew that if it wouldn’t be much of a sacrifice in your life, well, it would cost you that much and more by putting your son’s life in danger. And you wanted it. So you do pay, by suffering more than if you had gone yourself… That’s what you get, and God spare your son! Even in pain, I wish I could have lasted until victory. But have patience! It isn’t pain I have given up; I will miss the joy, because victory is certain. It’s enough for me that your father is left to see it. For that matter, you have always been distant from me, so from a distance, think of me as still living! Aren’t I really alive for you still?”

“Oh Mama, yes!” I tell her. “You’re alive, alive, yes! But that’s not it! If the fact of your death had been hidden from me out of kindness, I might still be unaware of it and imagine you, as I do imagine you, still living up there, sitting in your armchair in your usual corner, small, surrounded by your grandchildren, or absorbed in some domestic chore. I could keep on imagining you like that, a living reality that could not be sharper, that same living reality that for so many years, even so far away, I gave you, knowing you were really sitting there in that corner of yours. But I am crying for another reason, Mama! I cry because you, Mama, you can no longer give me a reality. It was for me, for my reality, a support, a comfort. When you were sitting up there in your little corner, I would say: ‘If she, from far away, thinks of me, I am alive for her.’ And this sustained me, comforted me. Now that you’re dead, I’m not saying that you’re no longer alive for me; you’re alive, as alive as you were, with the same reality that for so many years I gave you from a distance, thinking of you, without seeing you in person, and you will always be alive as long as I live, but do you see? It’s this, it’s this, that now I’m no longer alive, and will never again be alive for you! Because you can no longer think of me as I think of you, you can no longer feel for me as I feel for you! And that’s why, Mama, that is really why those who believe themselves to be alive also believe they’re crying for their dead but instead they’re crying for their own death, their own reality which is no longer felt by those who are gone. You’ll still have it, always, in my feelings: I, Mama, will no longer have it in you. You are here, you’ve spoken to me: you are really alive here, I see you, I see your brow, your eyes, your mouth, your hands; I see you knit your brows, blink your eyes, the smile on your mouth, the gesture of your poor little worn hands, and I hear you speak, truly speak your own words, because you are here before me, a true reality, alive and breathing; but who am I, now, for you? Nothing. You are and will always be my mother; but me? I, your son, was and am no longer, will no longer be…”

The shadow darkens in the room. I no longer see myself or hear myself. But I hear as though from a great distance a long continuous rustling of leaves, which almost deceives me into thinking of the dull roar of the sea, that sea by which I still see my mother.

I get up; I approach one of the windows. The tall young shoots of the acacias in my garden, from out of the trees’ thick crowns, lazily abandon themselves to the wind which dishevels them and seems about to break them off. But they girlishly enjoy feeling the crowns opened up and rumpled, and they follow the wind with elastic flexibility. It’s the motion of waves or of clouds and doesn’t awaken them from the dream in which they’ve enclosed themselves.

I hear her voice within me, but as from a distance, whispering:

“Look at things also with the eyes of those who no longer see them! You’ll grieve for them, son, and that will make them more sacred and more beautiful.”