“Lucilla (Now that She’s Argued with the Nuns)”
(“Lucilla (Ora che s’è guastata con le monache)”)

Translated by Maria Enrico

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “Lucilla (Now that She’s Argued with the Nuns)” (“Lucilla (Ora che s’è guastata con le monache)”),, tr. Maria Enrico. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2026.

“Lucilla (Now that She’s Argued with the Nuns)” (“Lucilla (Ora che s’è guastata con le monache)” was first published in the pages of the Corriere della Sera on June 26, 1932 before being collected by Pirandello into Berecche and the War (Berecche e la guerra), the fourteenth collection of his Stories for a Year (Novelle per un anno), published by Mondadori in 1934.This makes it one of the later stories in Pirandello’s corpus.

As is the case for many of Pirandello’s late stories, “Lucilla (Now that She’s Argued with the Nuns)” breaks with the more drawn-out style of his earlier narrative, offering a laconic series of highly visual snippets or scenes to examine the protagonist and offer a psychological characterization that can be the source of both laughter and sadness. The plot is very simple, and the narrative world sparsely populated: in fact, the only two characters who have names in this story are Lucilla, the young woman who grew up in the convent but now sees herself as having outgrown it (hence her titular argument with the nuns), and Nino, a local pesant who she encounters in the fields outside the convent and who offers her a tantalizing, but perhaps dangerous, alternative to the cloistered life of her girlhood. The locations are likewise unspecific, and the setting could be almost anywhere, it seems. The result is a story that has elements of the fabulous, as well as elements of an almost oneiric mode of estranged narration that recounts events from a dreamlike distance.

In this respect, the story fits the narrative style of Pirandello's late short fiction, which is usually characterized by a dreamlike atmosphere in which the boundaries between reality and illusion become blurred, leading characters to move uncertainly between waking life and dream, often unable to distinguish one from the other. Likewise, here the central narrative event, which takes place when Lucilla attempts to flee the convent to meet Nino at his house in town, is a scene of ambiguous violence that is crucially laconic at the pivotal moment. What results is a hauntingly simple character study worked through in a sometimes lyrical voice, rife with vague symbols (the cross on the little convent, the shadows strethcing along its walls, the monstrously tall trees in the nighttime street…) and a bitter tale about the ironic ambivalance of desire: both Lucilla’s desire to grow up, to be treated like a woman, and to make her own way in life, and Nino’s countervailing desire to posses and harm her. These ambivalent and ironic elements are a sign of how even late into his career as a writer, Pirandello continued to work in the mode he had theorized in his seminal 1908 essay On Humor (L’umorismo): excavating the contradictions in life that are at once ironic (sometimes funny) and tragic, grappling with the inner conflicts of the human psyche.

The Editors

A sunny meadow, new grass, strands of sound; a seemingly wonderous silence. A wonder at how these little golden flowers light up here, while over there those red ones burn.

But already spreading over the meadow is the slanting, trembling, bluish shadow of the little convent, with its stubby little cross on the cusp. A shadow that lengthens until it runs into, and once broken, climbs up the white wall that surrounds the orchards.

Lucilla, who had been leaning against the little convent’s wall for some time, stops weeping, having suddenly become aware of the shadow of that little cross.  

Could it really be that long?

She had always thought, when gazing upward at the little cross, that they really could have tried to make it a bit less stubby.  Yet in the end, without admitting it to herself, even she consented to it crouching there on that pointed cusp without ever wanting to straighten out and become a slender, tall cross.

And now the sun, all on its own, has somehow accomplished this exaggeration blaring against the wall...  So if Lucilla puts herself in the sun, where will she end up?  

She moves out of the shadow and bares herself to the sun on the meadow.

Now what?

A distorted scrawl.

The vexation she feels, mixed with surprise and incomprehension at the phenomenon, turns into a ferocious rage. A rage that twists her insides like a rope, when, there, on the meadow appears the shadow of another person next to her own and it immediately gets bigger and bigger and, in an instant, makes hers even smaller than a child’s.[1]

She spins around (because she has recognized from the shadow the novice who has come to look for her) and with her small face contorted with rage and her eyes like those of a whipped cat, she raises her fists and yells at her:

“No! No! No! They can wait all they want, I am not going back! I am never going back!”

And she runs into the shadows, sits on the grass, her shoulders leaning against the walls of the little convent.

The novice, faced with that fury, stands still and follows her with her eyes. Then she starts toward her, but seeing her jump up ready to flee, she stops again:

“Come on, don’t be silly,” she says. “You’re not a child anymore!”

That’s all Lucilla needs at that moment.

Her entire body trembling, her face red from the blood rushing to her head at hearing those words, she raises her fists again and moves forward screaming:

“Oh yes? How would you know? Well, that’s precisely because I am no longer a child!”

The words themselves, as she speaks them, produce this gradual, horrific change in Lucilla’s eyes and mouth. Her eyes, bloodied from weeping and phosphorescent with rage, burst forth in tears and then, with those tears in her little girl’s face, they change into the eyes of a grown up; and meanwhile out of her grimacing mouth comes a voice, the voice of a woman who has seen it all.

The novice, faced with this sight, withdraws into herself with sadness. She seems to become yellower and thinner; she has nothing left to say. From the black shawl over her shoulders emerge her hands, two dried out hands that seem made of worn stone. She grasps them together in supplication.

“But what do you want to do?” She finally asks. “Where do you want to go?”

And Lucilla, with a shake:

“I know where. It’s none of your business!”

The novice moves towards the convent. She takes two steps, turns slightly to hide her tears, and pointing with one hand, sighs:

“Your little convent…”

And leaves.

What remains of her voice, in the emptiness of the air, is like the shadow of what had been: regret and reproach. And Lucilla gazes at the little convent.

She had been born there.  And truly, at her core, despite not wanting to admit it, she feels that it is dear to her. Dear because although they could have built it big, really big, they had instead made it small, really small, as if just for her. Just as her father, who had been its sexton for many years before his death, had made the little furniture for her small room. Little furniture as if for a dollhouse so she would not be sad. A little bed, little chairs, a little table, all her size. For her father, and her mother who was not able to bear children (as proven by the fact that she died soon after she gave birth to such a small, small daughter), she remained as if seen from a great distance, that of the moment of her birth, twenty years ago. And this increasingly fading image of a small child in her mother’s eyes over the passing of time never quite grew in size. Yes, she got a bit bigger, but not that much. She got older, but to look at her she was still a little girl, only so tall. Not a dwarf, in no way! She has nothing in common with a dwarf. In fact, everyone stops to look at her in amazement. She is so beautiful, with her little head covered with ringlets that fall on her slender neck. And she can turn her head this way and that, the ringlets moving like little snakes. Her body is perfect, a miniature. And she knows this. She knows better than anyone else the effect her body has. She learned it from the reaction of certain wild boys, those imbeciles!

What vexes her, and causes rage and tortures her, is that for her own part, when she thinks about herself and not her body, she thinks as an adult, as a woman like any other. So, to see herself treated as a little girl by those stupid veiled nuns, even the old ones with their milk toast faces, who look and talk and laugh and act like silly girls, to see herself treated as a doll, a toy, picked up and passed from one to another to caress and palpate, and no one of them wanting to acknowledge that she has the body of a woman – no, no, no, she can’t take it anymore. It has to stop, to stop, it is over. Even today she scratched three or four of them in a moment when she could feel her fingers sprouting claws, and she can’t even remember what insults and vileness she yelled at them while foaming at the mouth.

Had they been kind enough to keep her with them, in that little room, after her father died? Sure, thanks a lot. But it was so they could play with a living doll in their free time! Did they hand sew outfits, dresses, underwear, for their doll? Well, she would leave it all, all of it to them. She would not take anything with her. She would leave tonight, with nothing, and go to Nino.

To Nino, yes to Nino. Soon. At 7. As agreed with Nino.

She will live with him. She knows how to do everything: clean the house, prepare meals for him, take care of his clothes, mend and iron. She has her little iron. She has ironed loads of clothes for the convent!

And Nino knows very well that she is already a woman. Ever since the first time when to amuse himself he had picked her up. He had been passing through the meadow, returning from the horse corral, as he often did in the evenings, wearing his ugly herdsman hat, but looking like a gentleman with his shiny leggings and spurs. Holding under her armpits, he had lifted her up and immediately touched her breasts with his thumbs. Then, with a sly nod he had smiled in a certain way and uttered a ohhh of surprise and admiration and looked at her in a kind of daze. And she had raised her hands to his cheeks to push away his mouth that wanted to kiss her, right there on her breasts. Nino. What eyes! So black and laughing. Eyes that could pierce! And his teeth, when he laughs!

Is it already 7 o’clock?

She has spent so long in the meadow brooding, having decided to break off with the nuns, that Lucilla is by now as if drunk. She is no longer able to see anything. She is flying, flying like a little dazzled butterfly. Finally, when she finds herself at the entrance to Nino’s place, she is so giddy and dizzy that she feels like a spinning top. She is breathless and now, oh God, all those stairs, so many of them, to reach the top floor of that old decaying building.

In the end, a bit by leaning on the wall and a bit on the banister, she makes it. But once up there in front of the door, no matter how hard she stands on her tip toes her little arm can’t reach the too-high doorbell. So, she starts to bang on the door:

“Open, open Nino! It’s me! I am here!”

The room is so dark she cannot clearly see who comes to open. She catches a whiff of stable stench while a rough hand awkwardly reaches for hers to lead her forward, as one does with children, when presenting them to someone. But then confusion, or even worse, dismay overcomes her – not because of the stench from which she has instinctively pulled away, but because there is a lot of noise: voices and laughter coming from another room right beyond a slightly open door. Lucilla gets the sensation of a crackling, fiery oven from the glimmer of its light.

Lucilla starts trembling. She wants to flee. But the door swings open: brutish, drunk peasants dressed in velvet and wearing leggings and spurs at their feet and bestial, purplish faces. They are yelling, stumbling, with their large rough hands reaching out they pull her into a cloud of smoke. They are all sneering as if overcome by a wave of thick satisfaction. One puts down his pipe, another a bottle and glass. And they throw themselves on her. They too want to play with her, but in a different way! They squeeze her, grab her, try to undress her. And she screams, fights back. Then Nino, while sneering like them and twisting around, with tears in his eyes from too much laughter, with a big jerk frees her and sitting back down protects her between his legs he yells:

“Enough! Enough! I can feel her heart beating, oh God, yes, yes, I can feel her heart beating here on my knee!”

He has not realized that Lucilla has fallen on his knee and that if he spreads his legs she would crash to the floor, like a rag, in a faint.

He reaches out and grabs a dirty young peasant boy, about fourteen years old, a half-wit, who stands beside him all disheveled and softened with emotion (the very one who came to open the door), and shakes Lucilla to introduce him to her.

“Here he is, your little groom! We’ve prepared everything over there!”

Lucilla has lost track of time and of what really happened to her there. She had resisted, fought free, biting, scratching. And now she is wandering in the night, not knowing where. She is small, small, in the big, deserted, unknown streets. She is as if crazed, stunned. She feels so little and looks at the gigantic branches of trees whose tops she can barely see. She looks up, further up, at empty windows lit in the sky where she wants to disappear, disappear, if only God, she hopes, will finally grant her wings.