“Oblivious” (“Ignare”)

Translated by Steve Eaton

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “Oblivious” (“Ignare”), tr. Steve Eaton. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2026.

“Oblivious” (“Ignare”) was likely composed in 1910, although it was published only in 1912 by Treves in Milan as part of the miscellany collection Tercets (Terzetti). In 1928, the story became part of The Trip (Il viaggio), the twelfth collection of Stories for a Year (Novelle per un anno).

In “Oblivious,” the plot focuses on the violent collision between an ideal spirituality and the brutality of physical reality. Four young nuns are rescued after the massacre of a mission in a foreign land and wake up in a quiet infirmary, convinced that the nightmare of assault, murder, and shipboard transport might have been only a bad dream. Although their bodies are bandaged and their memories confused, the peaceful silence of the convent seems to erase what has happened. As the truth gradually reasserts itself in the most unforgiving way, three of the nuns will tragically discover that the “other” wound, the invisible one, has left a lasting trace on them. As the narrative follows the nuns’ convalescence and the slow, terrifying return of their awareness and memory, Pirandello explores how each of them reacts to the violence they have suffered. Faith, memory, and self-image begin to fracture under the pressure of a traumatic experience the nuns cannot fully process. Pirandello plays with the passing of time as a narrative device marking the inexorable transformation of a place of recovery that gradually becomes instead a space of inner torment, where endurance, denial, rebellion, and innocence take drastically different forms.

Placed within Pirandello’s broader poetics, this story dramatizes his central preoccupation with the fracture between “form” and “life.” The religious habit, which can be seen as a symbol of purity and sacrifice, is a rigid form that life has brutally violated. Pirandello seems less interested in the external scandal of the story than in the inner collapse of identity experienced by its protagonists: the nuns no longer know who they are, struggling to recognize themselves in their conflicting roles as missionaries, victims, martyrs, sinners—and mothers. Their faith is shaken not by doubt but by the intolerable contradiction between the image of a just, providential God and the brutal evidence of their own lived experience. This is very much in line with Pirandello’s typical critique of what society presumes to be stable, fixed roles and moral certainties. Across his corpus, he shows repeatedly how reality always dismantles any fixed definition we try to impose on it. At the same time, the story exemplifies Pirandello’s psychological realism and his tragic compassion. In fact, the nuns’ horrific experience is never sensationalized, but it is filtered through their feelings, fragmented memories, silences, and small gestures. While exposing the absurdity and cruelty of the situation, Pirandello grants each character an intimate and human interiority.

The Editors

Translator’s Note:

I first came across this story a few years ago, when I was working on an article about the beginning of the relationship between the American film producer David O. Selznick and the Italian director Vittorio De Sica.[1] Negotiations between the two for a film deal had ebbed and flowed since the fall of 1947 without result. In the spring of 1949, De Sica proposed three film ideas to Selznick. For the first two, he simply suggested the names of existing works that might be adapted: Luigi Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author, and Massimo Bontempelli’s novel People in Time. But the third suggestion came in the form of a six-page treatment of an original idea written by De Sica’s longtime collaborator, the screenwriter Cesare Zavattini. The story, entitled “Immacolata,” is about a young, innocent nun whose isolated convent is trapped in no man’s land between two opposing armies. The convent is invaded at night by soldiers who brutally beat and rape its inhabitants. The nun, ironically named Immacolata, later discovers she is pregnant, without knowing who assaulted her or even which army her attacker belonged to. She is forced to decide whether to give up her lifetime of service to Christ and leave the convent for the outside world, or give up her baby. (The proposal appeared to be driven by De Sica’s desire to direct Jennifer Jones, who was under contract to Selznick at the time. But Jones expressed disinterest, and the project proceeded no further.) After reviewing a draft of my article, the Pirandello scholar Dr. Daniela Bini remarked that Zavattini’s idea may have been inspired by an earlier story by Luigi Pirandello.

After reading “Ignare” myself, I agreed with Dr. Bini. There are, however, interesting differences between the two stories. The conclusion of Zavattini’s treatment is ultimately more hopeful and aligned with more modern attitudes towards women’s agency and motherhood than those portrayed here. Also, the brutal atrocity which sets the stage for Zavattini’s story does not take place in a “distant foreign island” and is not perpetrated by “savage hordes,” but is set in the Apennine Mountains, and presumably committed by Axis or Allied troops.

 On the white cots taken from the dormitory and placed side by side in that isolated room of the convent, full of light and silence, the four young nuns lay still. Their simple canvas skullcaps, without any lace or ribbons, knotted under their chins with two strings, outlined the roundness of their heads and framed their pale, almost childlike faces. From time to time they would open their eyes, at first a bit tentatively in the light, then stunned and confused; they would soon close them again with slow weariness, but now with a feeling of relief.

They no longer cared to find out whether, lying so still on those cots, they awaited recovery, or death.

All four were injured and bandaged up. But how serious the injuries were, they didn’t know. Lying still, they felt nothing. Each one felt all right, and could believe that at worst, none of the four was in mortal danger.

But then, who knows?

They were no longer sure of anything, not even whether that room belonged to a hospital or the infirmary of a convent, nor did they remember how, when, or by whom they’d been brought there.

There was an abyss in their memory. A real inferno had suddenly yawned before them, swallowing them and dragging them down, where so many monsters had clawed and torn their immaculate flesh. They had the vague impression of having gone on a long sea voyage, and every so often they still had in their nostrils that peculiar stench, stale and nauseating, which breeds in the hold of a ship; in their ears, the creaking of the enormous floating hulk, struck by the loud, powerful, blows of the sea; and they had the confused image of a busy harbor, of tall masts with loose rigging, under swollen, luminescent clouds motionless above the harsh blue of the water. And less blurred, the memory of strange faces, strange voices, sounds of winches and chains.

Now they were here. And in the light and silence of that bright room which gave them, with the cool fragrance of clean linens, the consolation of vague pleasure and a sense of infinite blessing, they almost wondered whether that inferno and that long voyage and that harbor and those strange faces were all a horrendous nightmare.

Not only their bodies, but also their minds, had to endure that listlessness. If by some unthinking movement, or even by drawing a very deep breath, their body felt a stab, the mind too felt immediately stung by the memory of what had been done to that body. They had fallen prey to the shameful desires of vicious people, enemies of the faith which they’d gone to show by example,  on a distant foreign island.[2] Their peaceful sanctuary had been taken by force one night, invaded and profaned by savage hordes. The sisters had seen their patients massacred before their very eyes. The horror of wounds cut into their flesh with steel was answered with the greater horror of an incurable wound, which bled their souls more than their bodies.

The last to leave her bed, even though her chest and arm were still bandaged, was Sister Erminia. The other three had thought that they were kept in the infirmary to await the recovery of their companion, in order to set off together for the retreat in Naples. But it wasn’t so. With Sister Erminia well, the Mother Superior of the convent where they had recovered and healed came to announce that only Sister Erminia would be leaving that same night for Naples.

As all four of them listened with downcast eyes to this command, Sister Erminia silently asked herself why it was her fate alone; and each of the other three, why theirs might be different from that of their companion, who had struggled the most to recover. Might she need some treatment not available here?

But then why make her travel alone? And why were the three of them staying, if they were completely cured?

They found out the next morning at dawn when, along with an elderly nun and an old lay sister, they were made to board a market vendor’s giardiniera,[3] swaying and flapping its burlap curtains in the wind.

Under the wide fluttering wings of their cornettes,[4] all three were dressed in habits that were new, but too big for their bodies, already spare and now reduced more than ever by suffering.

They felt in their breasts, hidden in shame for so many years under a wimple,[5] finally breathing in the open air, a kind of resistance and at the same time a strange sense of reawakening that disturbed them.

Before leaving, they’d seen their old habits, the ones they’d worn when they arrived, wounded and dying, from a port in Crete.[6] Faded, torn, stained with blood, the clothes had aroused in them that bewilderment and distress one feels on seeing the belongings of someone tragically killed. And their shock was even greater since the traces of terrible violence, so clearly present, no longer corresponded to a clear memory for them, brought back to life.

Leaving behind the last houses of the city, the carriage began to run along a main road, flanked here and there by thick groves of orange and lemon trees.

It was October, and it still seemed like the height of summer, though sometimes within that warmth, heavy with intoxicating scents, a few early shivers of autumn coolness drifted in from the sea, which could be glimpsed nearby through the continuous dense blur of all those tree trunks.

But the three convalescents couldn’t enjoy the delights of that hour and those places for long. The lurching of that worn-out carriage began to make them deeply uncomfortable. It finally got so bad that one sister, Agnese, unable to bear it any longer, asked whether for pity’s sake the carriage couldn’t slow down.

The carriage slowed almost to a walk.

All three of them, accustomed for so many years to utterly disregard their own body, to barely feel it, to suppress its needs, to conquer fatigue, now felt deeply discouraged, oddly confused, keenly anxious over this bodily suffering. Sister Ginevra, the youngest and the scrawniest, finally asked whether she could try to follow on foot, since the carriage was moving so slowly. She tried, but soon had to reboard, since her legs couldn’t sustain the effort of walking uphill.

To comfort them, the elderly sister accompanying them declared that they had almost arrived.

The carriage indeed stopped soon afterwards before the gate of a large, isolated villa[7] at the top of a hill, surrounded by a wall. It was the convent’s farmhouse. The lay sister rang the bell and, standing on tiptoe to look over the panel that covered the lower part of the gate, shouted, “Rosaria!”

Rosaria was the wife of the peasant who managed the farmhouse where orphans were brought for a holiday in the summer.

Instead of Rosaria, a big guard dog replied by howling furiously.

“That’s Bobbo,” said the elderly nun, smiling at the lay sister.

“Bobbo, Bobbo, we’re home,” added the lay sister, ringing the bell again.

Finally the housekeeper ran out. She was bare-armed, disheveled, her wide face animated, gilded by the sun, covered in sweat, with two big gold hoops on her ears and a bright red kerchief on her breast. Her pregnant belly, pushing out her heavy woolen skirt,[8] exposed the calves of her legs, stuffed into big blue cotton stockings filthy with clay.

“Oh, my dear Sister Sidonia, Sister Sidonia!” she began to shriek, gesturing furiously with wonder and joy. “How was it, with such company? You too, Donna Mita? How are you? I was doing the washing, and… you see?” she added, pointing to her swollen belly. “After eight years, dear Sister Sidonia! Ah well! And these? Three new sisters?”

The three convalescents stood a bit apart, looking confusedly at the villa’s old windows, and its primeval cistern at the near end of a long arbor that led to the green entryway. They turned, hearing themselves being pointed out by the housekeeper. They saw the old nun and the lay sister talking quietly, mysteriously, and the housekeeper taking her head between her hands with a shocked expression and turning, opening her arms a bit, to look at them in horror, openmouthed.

“And they know? Do they know?”

The three convalescents anxiously looked each other in the eye. One of the three, Sister Leonora, who hadn’t opened her mouth during the trip, had something like a glint of madness in her eyes. She covered her face with her hands and began to moan softly as her shoulders and arms trembled.

“Why?” asked Sister Ginevra, turning her blue childlike eyes to the other companion, who’d brought her hand to her lips and stood wide-eyed, as if teetering before a suddenly opened abyss.

Sister Sidonia came to them along with the lay sister and, soon after, the housekeeper with the keys to the villa.

Going up the stairs, where the stagnant country air mingled with the rank odor of the nearby farmyard and the dampness exhaled by the adjacent cistern, Sister Leonora grabbed the old nun’s arm and quietly asked, for herself and her companions, if what she’d guessed from the housekeeper’s horrified reaction was true.

The woman closed her eyes and nodded several times, sighing. Sister Leonora stumbled on the staircase. Sister Agnese, standing up against the wall, closed her eyes, gushing fat tears. The youngest, the blue-eyed girl, remained oblivious. She saw the silent tears of her companion, leaning against the wall; heard the sobs of the other, crouching on the stairs; heard the comforting words and encouragement of the other three; and still did not understand the reason.

There was something mournful about the villa, in the stunned silence that surrounded it, with all those bands of sunlight stretching out symmetrically across the corridors. You could see the dust slowly trembling in each one of those bands. Every so often the rooster’s song seemed to be trying to break the spell of that mysterious silence; and another rooster, replying from a distant farmyard, seemed to say that the same spell of mysterious silence bore down there as well, there and still further on.

How far?

The three sisters, leaning out of the windows, felt lost in the remoteness of that mysterious quiet. They didn’t know where to direct their souls, whom to turn to for comfort, how to hide from their own eyes the shame of that martyrdom.

For two of them, it was in that remoteness, but further on, much further on, where the view disappeared and the soul didn’t dare to venture. Up in Tuscany, further up in Lombardy, in houses left behind so many years ago. Sister Leonora and Sister Agnese couldn’t knock on the doors of those houses for comfort. Neither the aged father, nor the brother, nor the sister-in-law of Sister Leonora must know, and especially, good Lord, the sister-in-law’s brother! Sister Agnese’s aged mother mustn’t know, nor Agnese’s sister, in that peaceful town on the Po River near Mantua[9]. Blessed was Sister Ginevra, who hadn’t the remotest idea of either home or family! She only knew that she was born in Sorrento,[10] she didn’t know to whom. She’d been raised by the nuns in a hospice, and had been made a nun, so the habit that covered her was everything. The present misfortune didn’t draw blood from the injured flesh with memories of an outside life, outside affections, which the other two had been violently torn away from.

The habit worn by Sister Leonora represented a sacrifice. The violence she’d had to do to herself against the wiles of her own flesh, to keep her purity intact, had been wasted by the brutal violence of others. And God had allowed that habit, symbol of her sacrifice, to weigh on her now, as if to mock her. God had allowed a disgraceful fruit to be welcomed and to ripen in that body, and under that habit grew the shame, the disgust, the horror of an appalling motherhood. How could God allow such a thing?

And until, before their eyes, the chastity of their habits began to appear insulted by the growing deformity of their bodies, the three of them clung together in their shared grief. They felt more at home inside that spacious rustic dwelling of long echoing corridors, lined with all those windows to let in the salt air and the continuous rumble of the sea, the various odors of the countryside, the buzzing of insects, the rustle of plants. They went down together to pray in the little chapel, but their prayers were often interrupted by Sister Leonora, sobbing almost angrily as she ran away. Then the other two would follow her and try to calm her down in the shade of the long arbor in front of the villa, or along the little paths that ran through the orchard, where at vespers so many birds gathered to chatter gaily.

Sister Ginevra had found a little corner there, where a certain bitter odor of blackthorns, and another of mint, heavy and pungent, reminded her of the hospice in Sorrento, where she’d spent her childhood. Often she’d sit there, as if to nurture that memory, feeling happily surrounded by her old, sweet innocence. She still seemed dazed by her misfortune. She had no conception of the horror felt by the other two. She watched them and studied their faces, as if suspended in fearful, oblivious expectation, suffering the dark, agitated despair of one and the ardent tears of the other.

Sometimes Rosaria the housekeeper joined them and, without realizing the jarring impertinence of her words, would start to talk to them like comrades in misfortune who needn’t feel shy anymore about looking at their obscene bellies, or having a talk about their common state. She regretted having given away to other peasants poorer than herself the little blouses, the swaddling, the bonnets, the bundles of necessities, since she never expected to need them again. And now she had no time to spend in preparing new things. She’d purchased the cloth—ah! such rough cloth for the tender skin of a baby; but poor folks’ children, of course, had better learn quick to feel the roughness of life.

Sister Ginevra immediately offered to help her sew the items. Sister Agnese said she would help too. Sister Leonora wanted nothing to do with it.

As winter came, each one stayed shut in a little room among the many that opened onto the long corridor. The windows looked out on the vegetable garden, and over the outer wall one could make out the intense blue of the sea, which met the empty, vaporous blue of the sky. But now sky and sea often lost their distinctive blueness, turbulently mixed up in dark fog, and in the gloomy silence of the isolated villa, the tapping of raindrops on the windowpanes persisted for days on end.

Sister Agnese would sew, forcing herself not to have feelings at the sight of those little blouses, those bonnets, those bundles, thinking of the baby she herself would give birth to. Those blouses would be for another baby, who would grow up there. Hers would quietly disappear, naked. And she might not even see him at all.

She mustn’t have feelings: that was precisely her martyrdom, to welcome and raise, in a body offered to God, that disgraceful fruit. But it was in her; she held it in her womb, oh God, and she herself was nourishing it! Oh God, oh God! Wasn’t there anything she could, or should do for him, to rescue him from the villainy he was born from? Maybe her milk, maybe her care would redeemed him! Taken from her, raised in a hospice, without love, how would he grow up, conceived as he was in the horror of an atrocity, the monstrous fruit of sacrilege?

But surely God, in His infinite mercy, had willed that her martyrdom, the length of her suffering, would benefit her unborn child, would suffice to cleanse him of his original sin, and the tears she was shedding now, out of shame and torment, would suffice to wash him forever of that obscene blood. So her martyrdom would not have been in vain.

But the other one, Sister Ginevra, lifted up with her pale hands a little blouse she had just finished sewing into the light from the window, bent her head to one side, considered it, and smiled.

They descended now to the little chapel at different times, each one praying alone; they would take their meals in their rooms and, when they tired of sewing and praying, would face the window, already oppressed by the weight of their bodies, to look at the deserted vegetable garden and the nearby sea.

Spring came, and one fine morning, along with the sun, Rosaria entered the old villa, smiling and thinned down, holding up a fat rosy baby in her rough hands and shouting down the corridor, “Here he is! He’s born! He’s born!”

First she went to the cell of Sister Agnese, who barely opened her lips in a smile of infinite sadness, contemplating the baby with eyes red from crying and lifting her white hands in front of her breasts like a shield.

“Cheer up, cheer up, dear Sister! It’s over quick, see? You’ll see it’s over quick! See how handsome he is? He’s got his father’s eyes. And look here, look how much hair he was born with!”

Then she ran to Sister Ginevra and promptly placed the little one in her lap.

“Take him, here he is, you see what he’s like? Heavy, isn’t he? Heavy. With the bonnet you made for him. And the little blouse too, see?”

Sister Ginevra dared to place her lips on the baby’s pink chest, which the mother had exposed, and then to lift the precious weight in her hands, and with curiosity mixed with sadness watched the movements of the newborn’s eyelids, adjusting his eyes against the light. There it is: soon she would give birth to one of those. And she still didn’t know how. One of those!

Rosaria took him away to show to Sister Leonora; but she rejected him, twisting her face and crying furiously that she didn’t want to see him: Go away! Go away! Go away!

She’d taken off her habit. She no longer went down to pray. She would spend the whole day sitting on her bed, inert, her teeth clenched, staring at the ground with a cold, threatening expression. At night her two companions would catch sight of her through the doorways of their rooms, walking up and down the corridor lit up with moonbeams, bulky, enormous, with her masculine head and bare feet.

She was delirious.

And the dull thud of her sleepwalking feet in the long corridor frightened Sister Ginevra.

That fear became terror on one of those nights when, jarred from her sleep, she heard lacerating cries and long howls and the moans of a wounded beast. She wanted to run over but was stopped at the doorway by the lay sister who declared that it wasn’t Sister Leonora crying out like that, but the other one, the other one: Sister Agnese.

“It’s her time. She’s in delivery now, poor girl…”

And Sister Ginevra was struck with horror, supported by the doorframe, on hearing those cries that didn’t sound human and that, issuing from the silence of the countryside, symbolized the fearful mystery taking place there. Would she too be crying out like that, soon? How would she manage, weak and thin as she was, to withstand the pain that forced out those cries?

And cries, more cries, and more cries still, just after dawn, wilder, longer, reached her ears through a great tumult in the corridor. Frozen, terrified, kneeling before her bed, rosary in hand, Sister Ginevra listened and trembled from head to toe, without daring to rise and knock on the door, which the lay sister had locked shut.

She found out in the afternoon that both of her companions had given birth, and were now resting peacefully. One anguished question was on her lips, which immediately vanished in the mournful silence of the villa. She wasn’t hearing any tiny squall. The lay sister spread her hands and, closing her eyes, sadly shook her head.

Instead, birdsong rose from a tree in the garden, in the tranquil delight of the spring evening.

Three days later, as evening fell, it was Sister Ginevra’s turn.

Then it fell to the other two, knowingly, now, to tremble at the desperate cries of their little companion. Cries, cries, that forced other cries of pity and revulsion, as if reacting to the terrifying spectacle of the merciless subjugation of a defenseless weakling who surrenders in vain.

Suddenly, the cries went silent in the night. There was, for a few eternal minutes, a horrible silence. Then you could hear, through the moaning, hurried steps in the corridor, and the sounds of grim voices through labored breaths, there in the little cell at the end of the corridor. The two companions could no longer withstand the anguish that was suffocating them. They got out of bed, threw on the first clothes that came to hand, and hesitantly approached the cell.

No one spoke. The old lay sister was arranging the limbs of the dead woman, in whose pale, leaden, drawn little face the gentle blue eyes were still half-open. And in that pallor the dead girl seemed to be smiling over her delivery.

Abruptly seized by a fit of sobbing, Sister Agnese fell to her knees next to the bed. But Sister Leonora, turning her maddened gaze from side to side, spied a convulsive movement in the corner, inside a bloody sheet balled up on the floor. Moving like a wild animal, she sprang to that corner, scooped up the purplish infant from the ground as it emitted a raucous squall, and fled to her cell. There she locked herself in, and with wild joy gave her overflowing breast to that little baby.

The Mother Superior, arriving some hours later from the city, had to struggle for a good while to persuade her to reopen her door. She appeared crazed; she held the little baby tightly to her breast and cried, “I’ll take the baby! I’ll take her! Or give me mine! I’m throwing my habit away! God asked too much, too much, too much!”

Slowly, gently, she found a way to melt that proud knot of madness with her tears; and the baby girl was made to vanish.

Soon after, the two surviving companions wept and prayed, kneeling on either side of the bed of the dead girl, who surely had reopened her gentle, sky-blue eyes in heaven.