“The Destruction of Man” (“La distruzione dell’uomo”)

Translated by Jonathan Hiller

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “The Destruction of Man” (“La distruzione dell’uomo”), tr. Jonathan Hiller. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2026.

“The Destruction of Man” was first published in 1921, in a special Christmas edition of the literary magazine Novella, edited by Mondadori. Two years later, in 1923, the story was included in the fifth collection of Stories for a Year, titled The Fly (La mosca), published by Bemporad in Florence.

Among the darkest and most tragic tales in Stories for a Year, “The Destruction of Man” treats murder as a philosophical provocation. This emerges in the disturbing case of Nicola Petix, a man who has committed a terrible homicide with no apparent reason and then cloaked his motives in absolute silence. Pirandello plays on Petix’s refusal to motivate his actions, dramatizing the rumors and moral judgments swirling around the character, depicting him as a brutal animal, a mad fanatic, or a violent criminal. The author’s lens is not focused on disentangling the usual facts a judge might consider, but rather on framing the impossibility of explaining human actions rationally, a theme that recurs throughout his corpus. Here, that idea is pushed further, highlighting how the usual kinds of motives (which might be typical in detective stories or crime stories) fail to capture the reality of the contradictory forces that influence human behavior. Petrix instead embodies the Pirandellian idea of unstable identity as a man acting beyond any imposed “form,” whether social or legal or rational. In a way, his terrible act is horrifying precisely because it attacks normativity by questioning the “form” of the family, the state, and perhaps even the human species itself.

Interestingly, in this story the environment becomes a crucial force that shapes the protagonist’s alienation and helps drive him toward his tragic final act. Petix’s actions are closely tied to the way Rome has grown and changed around him. The rundown building where he lives reflects both the city’s chaotic urban expansion and his own inner displacement. This same connection between the metropolitan context and the character’s extreme actions recurs in later stories such as “The Nail” (“Il chiodo”) and “A Challenge” (“Una sfida”), both from 1936: there, the city becomes not just a setting but an active presence that unsettles individuals, distorts their perceptions, and amplifies impulsive or irrational behaviors. In these stories, as in Petix’s case, the pressures and disorienting rhythms of urban life help to shape a feeling of estrangement that ultimately pushes characters toward absurd acts that defy ordinary logic.

The Editors

The one thing I would like to know is whether His Honor, the examining magistrate[*], honestly believes that he has hit upon one motive that can somehow explain what he is calling “premeditated murder” (which should, if anything, be double murder, as the victim was about to bring her last month of pregnancy to a happy conclusion).

As is known, Nicola Petix has barricaded himself in an impenetrable silence, first with the chief of police at the time of his arrest; then, with him, meaning His Honor the examining magistrate, who vainly attempted to interrogate the man over and over in every possible way; and finally, with the young attorney appointed to his case, given that to the very last Petix declined to hire someone to whom he could entrust the duty of his defense.

It seems to me that such obstinate silence should be given some kind of interpretation.

They say that in jail, Petix displays the absentminded indifference of a cat, who, after ripping apart a mouse or a chick, cheerfully basks in a sunbeam.

But clearly, this theory, which would have it that Petix committed the crime like a senseless beast, was not credited by the examining magistrate, since he believed it necessary to acknowledge and maintain that the murder was premeditated. Wild beasts do not premeditate. Although they do lie in wait, their act of ambush is an instinctual, natural part of their entirely natural drive to hunt, which makes them neither thieves nor murderers. The fox is a thief to the hen’s owner, but to itself, the fox is no thief; it is hungry, and when hungry, snatches a hen and gobbles it up. And after gobbling it up, fare thee well, not a second thought.

Now Petix is no wild beast. So firstly, we need to see whether this indifference is genuine. Because if so, then this indifference should also be taken into account, just as that stubborn silence, which – the way I see it – would be its most natural consequence, both the former and latter finding confirmation in the explicit refusal of an attorney.

But I don’t want to pass judgment in advance, or for the moment put forward my opinion.

I shall continue to debate with His Honor, the examining magistrate.

If His Honor the examining magistrate believes that Petix should be punished with the full force of the law, because to him the man is no vicious imbecile on par with a wild beast, nor a madman who killed a woman for no reason a few weeks before she was to give birth, what motive for the crime, for this “premeditated murder”, could there be?

Not a secret infatuation for the woman, to be sure. The young public defender would need only give the gentlemen of the jury a moment’s glance at a portrait of the poor victim. Signora Porrella was forty-seven years old, and at that point might have been said to resemble anything but a woman.

I remember seeing her a few days before the murder, near the end of October, arm-in-arm with her husband, a man of fifty, slightly shorter than she, but he too, the Signor Porrella, proudly sporting a belly. They were going along the boulevard in the Nomentano neighborhood [1] at sunset, in spite of the wind, which tossed about the dead leaves in warm, noisy gusts. 

I tell you upon my word of honor that it was a provocation to see the couple taking a stroll on such a day, with all that wind, amid the swirl of all those dead leaves, appearing so small under the tall, bare sycamore trees blowing about in the stormy sky, the branches a chaotic tangle.

The couple thrust their feet forward in lockstep, gravely, as if they had been dispatched on some mission.

Perhaps they thought they simply could not do without that stroll, now that her pregnancy was in its last days. Prescribed by the doctor? Suggested by the local ladies?

Perhaps that wind was bothersome, yes, but it was quite natural to them that it should pick up now and again, such that it tossed all those crushed leaves about with a fury, though never managing to blow them entirely off the road. Perhaps it was natural that those sycamores, just as they had in due course regained their leaves, were now losing them in due course, and would soon take on the appearance of death until the coming spring. Perhaps it was natural that over there, a stray dog was condemned by each sniff to stop at nearly all the trunks of those sycamores and to raise a leg in exasperation, to squeeze out but a few drops, after frantically going around and around in an effort to find a suitable spot.

I swear it was not only me, but everyone passing by that day on the boulevard in the Nomentano, who found it incredible that this little man could be so pleased at taking such a wife in such a state for a stroll. Even more incredible was that the wife would allow herself to be taken, with a stubbornness that seemed in equal measure self-inflicted cruelty and resignation to the unbearable effort it must have cost her. She tottered, panted, her eyes seemingly hardened in anguish, not from this inhuman exertion, but from the fear that she would fail to bring to fruition that obscene encumbrance in her stomach, which was falling over her waistline. It is true that she would intermittently close her livid eyelids over her eyes. But she did so not so much out of shame, but rather out of distress at being forced to feel that shame, in the eyes of whoever looked at her and saw her in that state, at her age, an old hag still in use for a purpose that made her so conspicuous. Indeed, holding her husband’s arm, with a few subtle squeezes, she could have broken the spell of the satisfaction of his position, to which he, so diminutive, so bald, a man of fifty, often and too freely gave rein as the author of all this trouble. She did not do so because she was indeed happy that he was brave enough to show such satisfaction, while it was her lot to show shame.

I can still picture her, when, at some more violent gust of wind hitting her from behind, she brought those squat, broad legs to a stop, her dress wantonly clinging to them and revealing their contours, while bulging out in front. Just then she was unable to decide what to protect first with her free arm, whether to push down on the bulge in her dress, which put her at risk of exposing everything in front, or to hold onto the brim of her old hat made of purple velvet, whose melancholy black feathers the wind had given a desperate impetus to take flight.[2]

But let us come to the incident in question.

I urge you (if you’ve a bit of time) to go visit that old apartment building in Via Alessandria,[3] home to the Porrellas and also, in two little rooms on the floor below, to Nicola Petix.

It is one of many apartment buildings that are all ugly in the same way, as if stamped with the imprint of the common vulgarity of the times in which they were so hastily built, following the prediction (later acknowledged to be mistaken) that there would be a precipitous and massive influx of unwashed southerners [4] to Rome after the proclamation of the city as the third capital of the Kingdom in 1871.[5]

Many private fortunes, not only of the nouveaux riches but also of men of illustrious lineage, and all the loans made by the banks to those builders, who seemed for years to be carried away by an almost fanatical frenzy, were then wiped out in one enormous crash, which people still remember.

And so, where once stood ancient patrician parks, magnificent villas, and, across the river, gardens and meadows, one now saw the rise of buildings and buildings and buildings, entire blocks, along newly laid out, irregular roads; many of which were suddenly left—newly minted ruins—built up to the fourth floor, exposed to the rain without roofs, all their window frames undefended; the remains of abandoned scaffolding still set up in the holes of the unfinished walls, blackened and rotting from the rain; and other blocks, already completed, left deserted along entire streets of new neighborhoods where no one ever ventured; and as the months went on, grass began to poke out the joints of the sidewalks, against the walls, and then, wispy, tender, trembling at every puff of air, to cover the entire roadway.

And then, many of these buildings, built with all the amenities to attract tenants of means, for the sake of extracting whatever profit could be had, were opened up to the invasion of the masses. This invasion, as one might well imagine, wreaked havoc in short order. Thus a few years later, the new owners who had acquired the buildings at bargain prices from the lending banks of the original, bankrupt builders, when Rome eventually did face a housing shortage (which had been feared too soon in earlier days and was now remedied too late due to a general fear of new construction as a result of the earlier calamity), taking stock of how much they would have to spend to make repairs and bring them to a decent enough state to lease them out to tenants willing to pay higher rents, instead deemed it preferable to do nothing. They contented themselves with staircases left half-built, walls defaced with obscene graffiti, windows with drooping shutters and broken glass festooned with dirty, patched up rags, left out on lines to dry.

Except that now, in a few of these large, wretched buildings, a number of dissipated noble and middle-class families, white-collar workers and professors, began to seek shelter there, this despite the presence of those tenants who stayed on to complete the demolition work on the walls, doors, and floors. This was out of a lack of other options, or of need, or of a love of thrift, requiring them to overcome a repugnance for all that squalor and even more for being mixed up with those who, goodness me yes, are indeed neighbors, you cannot deny it, yet who, if you care even a little for cleanliness and good manners, it is unpleasant to have to keep too close. And, besides, it cannot be said that this dislike is not mutual; so much so that these newcomers were initially met with defiant glares, and then, little by little, if they wished to be regarded more favorably, they were required to put up with certain liberties, imposed rather than accepted.

Now the Porrellas had been living in that building in Via Alessandria for around fifteen years when the murder took place; Nicola Petix for around ten. But whereas the former had begun to enter into the good graces of all the longest-tenured neighbors, Petix had instead garnered a mounting general hostility. This was due to the disdain with which he regarded everyone, down to the heedless doorman. He not only never condescended to offer a word to anyone, but failed to make even the slightest hint of a greeting. Nothing.

I said, let us come to the incident. But an incident is like a bag: when empty, it doesn’t hold its shape. His Honor the examining magistrate will realize this if (as seems the case) he wishes to try to make it stand up without first filling it with all the motives that have doubtless given it definition, of which he may be entirely unaware.

Petix’s father was an engineer who had left the country long ago and died in South America, leaving his entire fortune, earned over many years of professional activity down there, to another son, two years Nicola’s senior and also an engineer, with the stipulation that the younger brother be paid a monthly allowance of a few hundred liras as long as he should live as a kind of charitable act, not because Nicola had any legal claim to it. For, according to the will, “any amount required by law” had already been “consumed in a shameful idleness”.

It is only fair to consider Petix’s idleness not only from his father’s perspective, but also from his own, because in truth Petix frequented university lecture halls for years and years, going from one course of study to another, from medicine to law, from law to mathematics, thence to literature and philosophy. He never sat any exams, it’s true, as he never dreamed of becoming a doctor or lawyer, a mathematician or a man of letters or a philosopher. In truth Petix never wished to do anything at all; but it doesn’t follow that he lived in idleness, much less that this idleness was “shameful.” He was always contemplating, studying the vicissitudes of life and the customs of men in his own way.

The fruits of these ongoing meditations? An infinite ennui, an unbearable ennui, both of life and of men.

To do something for the sake of doing it? One would need to be inside the thing to be done, like a blind man, without seeing it from the outside.[6] Or, if not, to ascribe a purpose to it. What purpose? Only that of doing it? But yes, good God, as people do. Today one thing, tomorrow something else. Or even the same thing every day. According to inclinations and abilities, according to intentions, according to feelings or instincts. As people do.

The trouble comes when one wants to see from without the purpose of those inclinations and abilities and intentions, of those feelings and instincts (observed from within because one has and feels them), which indeed are no longer found when sought thus from without, since nothing is left to find.

Nicola Petix arrived quickly at this nothingness, which must be the quintessence of every philosophy.[7]

Every day he saw the hundred or more tenants of that squalid, gloomy building, people who were living for the sake of living, unaware of being alive except for that little they seemed condemned to do every day: the same things, always. Soon that sight became a source of ennui, a restless loathing, which worsened from one day to the next.

Most intolerable of all to him was the sight and the din made by the many small children who would swarm about the courtyard and the stairwells. He could not look out from his window onto that courtyard without seeing four or five of them squatting in a line to do their business out there while they gnawed on a rotten apple or a crust of bread seasoned by the snot dripping from their noses.[8] Nor, on the broken-up cobblestone road, where puddles of putrid water (if it was even water) stagnated, could he miss three little boys splayed on hands and knees and peeking to see whence and how a three-year-old little girl, inattentive, grave, unaware, with a bandaged eye, went pee. And the spitting, the kicking, the clawing at one another, the hair-pulling, the resulting shrieks, in which the mothers joined from all the windows of the five floors, all while the schoolmarm with a wasted face and drooping hair crossed the courtyard with a large bunch of flowers, a gift of the smiling beau at her side.

Petix was tempted to run to the drawer of the nightstand to fire off a shot from his revolver at the schoolmarm, such was his indignant rage at the provocation of the beau’s flowers and smile, this affectionate cooing in the midst of the stomach-turning obscenity of that whole dirty mass of children, to which the schoolmarm would soon be adding one of her own.

Now, consider that in that building, every day for ten years, Nicola Petix had witnessed the periodic, clockwork pregnancies of Signora Porrella, who, upon reaching the seventh or eighth month with attendant morning sickness, fear, and suffering, putting her own life at risk every time, would miscarry. In nineteen years of marriage, that husk of a woman had already tallied fifteen miscarriages.

The most frightening thing to Nicola Petix was this: he failed to see the reason why, with such blind and ferocious pertinacity against themselves, the couple wanted a child.

Perhaps because eighteen years earlier, at the time of the first pregnancy, the woman had prepared all the little supplies for the unborn baby: swaddling clothes, bonnets, shirts, bibs, long gowns with ribbons, woolen booties still waiting to be used, already yellowed and stiffened in their form, like little cadavers.

By then a sort of dispute had arisen among all the women of the building who had given birth relentlessly for ten years and Nicola Petix, who hated their dirty offspring relentlessly: the women would declare that Signora Porrella would successfully bear a child this time, and Petix would say no, that she wouldn’t do it this time either. And as the women’s nurturing increased, with endless care, advice, and attention brooding over the woman’s belly, which grew month by month, so Petix felt his irritation, agitation, and anger grow. During the last days of each pregnancy, to his overexcited imagination, the entire building took on the aspect of one enormous womb, desperately tormented by the gestation of the man to be born. It was no longer for him a question of Signora Porrella’s imminent childbirth, which must count as a defeat for him; it was a question of the man, the man that all those women wanted to be born from that woman’s womb; of the man who can be born out of the brute urge of the two sexes when they mate.

Yes, this was the man Petix wished to destroy when he was certain that, at long last, this sixteenth pregnancy would come to fruition. Man. Not one among many, but all in that one; in that one so as to take revenge on the many that he saw there, the little brutes who lived for the sake of living, unaware of being alive, except for that little they seemed condemned to do every day: the same things, always.

And so it happened, a few days after I saw the two Porrellas in the boulevard of the Nomentano, amid the swirl of all those dead leaves, thrusting their feet forward in lockstep, gravely, with solemnity, as if they had been dispatched on some mission.

The destination of their daily stroll was a large rock beyond the customs barrier,[9] where the road, turning yet again after Sant’Agnese[10] and narrowing a bit, descends toward the Aniene Valley.[11] Every day, sitting on that rock, they took half an hour’s respite from their long, slow walk, Signor Porrella looking at the somber bridge and certainly thinking about the ancient Romans who had passed through; Signora Porella, her eyes following some old woman picking greens in the grass on the slope alongside the course of the river, to be found down there in a small area beyond the bridge; or, looking at her hands and idly rotating the rings around her squat fingers.

That day too, they decided to make their way to this destination even though due to recent, heavy rains the river was overflowing, spilling up the slope in a threatening way almost to the height of their rock; even though they spied, from a distance, their neighbor Nicola Petix, sitting on the rock, crouching, all huddled up within himself like some great owl.

Once they caught sight of him they stopped short, dismayed for an instant and uncertain whether to find another place to sit or to turn back. But the very same dismay and diffidence pushed them to approach, because it seemed irrational to suspect that the unwelcome presence of that man, and also his apparent intention of coming there on purpose to find them, could represent something so serious that they should give up their usual place to stop, which the pregnant woman particularly needed.

Petix said nothing. Everything happened in an instant, almost in silence. Just as the woman approached the rock to sit down on it, he seized her by the arm, wrenching her with a jerk over to the edge of the overflowing water. There, he gave her a mighty shove and sent her into the river to drown.

[*] We’re speaking about the Petix murder case. [This is a footnote that Pirandello has added as part of the original Italian text and is not an editorial addition. In printed editions it would normally appear at the bottom of the page, not as an endnote, and so would be immediately visible to the reader while reading the text on which it comments.]