“The Lodgers of Memory” (“I pensionati della memoria”)

Translated by Marella Feltrin-Morris

How to cite this work:

Pirandello, Luigi. “The Lodgers of Memory” (“I pensionati della memoria”) , tr. Marella Feltrin-Morris. In Stories for a Year, eds. Lisa Sarti and Michael Subialka, Digital Edition, www.pirandellointranslation.org, 2025.

First published in the literary journal Aprutium: rassegna mensile di lettere e d’arte in January 1914, “The Lodgers of Memory” (“I pensionati della memoria”) was later included in the collection A Horse in the Moon (Un cavallo nella luna), published by Treves in Milan in 1918. On November 1, 1924, the story was reprinted with a new title, “Somber and Joyful Ideas of Luigi Pirandello” (“Idee funebri e gaie di Luigi Pirandello”), in the magazine Le Grandi Firme, using the original version from Aprutium. In 1925, the story was finally incorporated into Donna Mimma, the ninth Collection of Stories for a Year (Novelle per un anno), published in Florence by Bemporad. Drawing on themes from both “The Lodgers of Memory” and “The Waiting Room” (“La camera in attesa,” 1916), Pirandello would go on to develop his three-act tragedy The Life I gave You (La vita che ti diedi) in early 1923. The play premiered on October 12 of that year at the Teatro Quirino in Rome and was published the following year.

In this deeply reflective and ironic story Pirandello reflects on the meaning of death and the power of memory to shape a subjective experience of reality. The plot revolves around the emotions of a first-person narrator who compares the typical experience of mourning, such as accompanying the dead to the cemetery and returning home relieved, with his own belief that the dead never leave him. They return home with him, not physically, but in memory and in his own illusion of their presence. To the protagonist, the dead retain a form of reality in his mind, as he continues to give them life through his memory and imagination. He recalls, for example, a long-deceased German hat-maker named Mr. Herbst, whose memory is more vivid and real to him than any new "reality" that may have replaced Herbst's presence in the actual shop where he used to work. Even the protagonist’s house is filled with these spectral presences, the titular “pensionati della memoria” (“lodgers of memory”).

The story repeatedly focuses on and develops Pirandello’s notion that is reality never fixed and objective but rather is constructed by an individual subject through their perception. The protagonist will in fact conclude that when we weep for the dead our tears are not shed because they are gone, but because they can no longer feel us, diminishing an aspect of our own reality. This idea of a subjective reality molded by our projections and perceptions builds on the theory developed in Pirandello’s seminal essay On Humor (L’umorismo, 1908), where he contrasts “form” (the roles, masks, or ideas we live by) and “life” (the inner truth that is elusive and unstable). In “The Lodgers of Memory,” the dead continue to live because the first-person narrator continues to “give them a form” through his own thought and imagination. The role of subjective memory in the creation of such personal realities recurs in a number of works across Pirandello’s corpus, including short stories such as “The Train Has Whistled” (“Il treno ha fischiato,” 1914) and The Wheelbarrow” (“La carriola,” 1917), where subjective perception overrides external reality; as well as novels like The Late Mattia Pascal (Il fu Mattia Pascal, 1904)  and One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand (Uno, nessuno e centomila, 1925), which blur the boundary between life and death while examining the power of individual perception and memory to reshape our experience of identity and intersubjective truth.

The Editors

How lucky you are! You get to accompany the dead to the graveyard and make your way back home—maybe even with great sadness in your soul and great emptiness in your heart, if the deceased was dear to you; and even if not, with the satisfaction of having fulfilled a loathed duty, and with an eagerness to dispel, by getting back into  the cares and bustle of life, the dismay and anguish that the thought and the spectacle of death always arouse. Regardless, all feel a sense of relief, because—let’s face it—even to their closest of relatives, the dead, with their frozen, motionless rigidity unperturbedly opposed to all the fuss we make and all the tears we cry over them, are a horrible encumbrance. Even the act of grieving, as much as it suggests and strives for the determination to hang on desperately to that burden, deep down yearns to rid itself of it. 

And indeed you do, you manage to rid yourselves of at least that horrible material encumbrance by going to leave your dead at the graveyard. It may be a heartache, it may be an inconvenience, but then you see the funeral procession scattering, the casket being lowered into the grave. There, farewell. All done. 

Don't you think that’s lucky? 

As for me, all the dead that I accompany to the graveyard make their way back to me. 

They play dead, inside the casket. Or perhaps they really are dead to themselves. But not to me, believe me! When everything is over for you, for me nothing is. They come back with me, all of them, to my house. I have a house full of them. With dead people, you say? But what dead people? They’re all alive. Alive, like me; like you; more alive than before.  

Except that—to be fair—they’re disillusioned. 

Because—just think about it: what about them has died? That reality they had given—and not always the same one—to themselves, to life. Oh, a quite relative reality, rest assured. It wasn’t yours; it wasn’t mine. Indeed, you and I see, feel, and picture, each in our own way,[1] ourselves and our lives. Which means that, to ourselves and to life we each give, in our own way, a reality. We project it outward and believe that, in the same way as it is ours, it must also be everyone else’s. And merrily we live in it and stroll upon it with confidence, walking cane in hand, a cigar between our lips.[2]

Ah, gentlemen, don’t put too much trust in it! All it takes is a puff of air, and it’s swept away, this reality of yours! Can’t you see that it’s constantly changing inside of you? It changes as soon as you start to see, to feel, to think in a slightly different way from just a moment ago. So that what a moment ago to you was reality, you now realize was instead an illusion. And yet, alas, is there any other reality beyond this illusion? What else is death, then, if not total disillusion? And yet, what I mean is, if the dead are a sorry, disillusioned bunch because of that illusion they had created of themselves and of life, thanks to the illusion that I still create of them for myself, they can have the consolation of living on, as long as I live. And they take advantage of it! Oh, I can assure you they take advantage of it.  

Judge for yourselves. Over twenty years ago, in Bonn, on the Rhine, [3] I met a certain Mr. Herbst. Herbst means autumn, but Mr. Herbst was, in winter, spring, and summer, too, a hat maker, and had his shop in a corner of Market Square, by Beethovenhalle.[4] I picture that corner of the square as if I were still there, at nightfall; I smell the mixed scents wafting out of the brightly-lit shops—greasy scents; and I see the lights turned on also in front of Mr. Herbst’s store window, him standing on the doorstep, legs apart and hands in his pockets. He sees me walk by, nods, and wishes me, with the unique singsong quality of the Rhenish dialect: 

“Gute Nacht, Herr Doktor.”[5]

Over twenty years have gone by. Mr. Herbst was, at least, fifty-eight at the time. Well, he may be dead by now. But he may be dead for himself—not for me, believe me. And it’s useless, perfectly useless for you to argue that you recently visited Bonn, on the Rhine, and that, in the corner of Market Square by Beethovenhalle, you found no trace of either Mr. Herbst or his hat shop. What did you find instead? Another reality, yes? And you believe it’s truer than the one I left there twenty years ago? Dear sir, swing by there in another twenty years, and you’ll see what’s remained of that reality you left there just now.  

What reality? Do you suppose perhaps that mine from twenty years ago, with Mr. Herbst on the doorstep of his shop, legs apart and hands in his pockets, is the same one that he, Mr. Herbst, had fashioned of himself, his shop, and Market Square? Who knows how Mr. Herbst saw himself, his shop, and the square! 

No, no, dear gentlemen: that was my own reality, uniquely my own, which can neither change nor perish as long as I live, and which may even live forever, if I have the energy to immortalize it on some page; or, at least, let’s shoot for another hundred million years, according to the calculations just made in America regarding the duration of human life on earth.[6]

Now, in the same way as it is with Mr. Herbst who is so far away—if he has by now passed on—so it is with the many dead that I accompany to the graveyard and that, in turn, go off on their own, much further away, to who knows where. Their own reality has vanished—but which one? The one they used to give to themselves. And what could I possibly have known about that reality of theirs? What do you all know about it? I know about the one I used to give to them myself. An illusion, mine and theirs.  

But if they, poor dead, have become completely disillusioned about theirs, mine still lives on, and it is so powerful that, as I said, after I’ve accompanied them to the graveyard, I see them coming back to me, all of them, looking just as I left them. Slowly, slowly, out of the casket and by my side.  

“But why,” you ask, “don’t they return to their own homes instead of coming to your house?” 

That’s a good one! Well, clearly because they don’t really have a reality of their own that would allow them to go anywhere they please. Reality is never for oneself. They have one, now, through me, and so they have no choice but to go along with me.  

Poor lodgers of memory, their disillusion pains me beyond words.[7]

At first, that is as soon as the last show is over (I mean after the funeral procession), when they get off the bier to walk back with me from the graveyard, they have a certain bold, disdainful spiritedness, like someone who has shaken off—with little dignity, granted, and at the price of losing everything—a heavy burden. After spending all that time in the worst possible condition, they want to breathe again, too. That’s right! At the very least, heave a nice sigh of relief. So many hours they lay there in a bed, stiff, motionless, stock-still, playing dead. Now they want to stretch: they turn their necks this way and that; they lift one shoulder, then the other; they reach, twist, swing their arms about. They want to move their legs quickly, and they even leave me a few steps behind. But they cannot get too far; they know very well that they’re bound to me, that at this point it’s only in me that they have their reality, or illusion of life, which is essentially the same thing.   

Others—their relatives, a few friends—weep over them, mourn them, remember this or that trait of their personality, suffer their loss. But this weeping, this mourning, this remembering, this suffering are over a bygone reality, one that they believe has disappeared along with the deceased, because they have never pondered the value of that reality. 

To them, it’s all about a body being or not being there.  

It would be enough of a consolation if they believed that the body is no longer there, not because it’s already been buried, but because it has left, it’s gone on a journey, and it will return who knows when.  

Come on, leave everything as it is: the room ready for its return; the freshly-made bed with the blanket folded back and the nightshirt laid out on top; the candle and the matchbox on the nightstand; the slippers in front of the armchair, at the foot of the bed.  

“It has left. It’ll return.” 

That would be enough. You would be consoled. Why? Because you’re the ones who give a reality to that body, which instead, for itself, has none. So much so that, once dead, it crumbles, it vanishes. 

“Exactly!” you now exclaim. “Dead! You say that once it’s dead it vanishes. But what about when it was alive? It had a reality then!” 

My friends, are we back to where we started? Yes, yes, it did have a reality—that reality that the dead gave himself, and the one that you gave to him. But didn’t we prove that it was an illusion? The reality he gave himself, you don’t know it, you cannot know it because it was inside of him and out of reach to you; you only know the reality you gave him yourself. And couldn’t you still give it to him, even without seeing his body? Of course you could! So much so that you would immediately find consolation, if you managed to believe that he has left, that he’s gone on a journey. You say no? But didn’t you insist on giving him that reality many times, when you knew he had gone on a real journey? And isn’t it the same reality that, from afar, I give Mr. Herbst, who I don’t know whether for himself is alive or dead?  

There, there! Do you know, really know, why you’re weeping? You’re weeping for another reason, my friends, one that you cannot even begin to imagine. You’re weeping because he, the dead, can no longer give a reality to you.[8] You’re frightened by his shut eyes, which can no longer see you; those hard, frozen hands of his, which can no longer touch you. You cannot cope with his absolute lack of feeling, precisely because he, the dead, can no longer feel you. Which means that, along with him, what has collapsed for you is a support, a comfort to your illusion: the reciprocity of illusion.  

When he was gone on a journey, you, his wife, used to say: 

“If he thinks about me, even from far away, I’m alive for him.”[9]

And this supported you and comforted you. Now that he’s dead, you no longer say: 

“I’m not alive to him anymore!” 

Instead, you say: 

“He’s not alive to me anymore!” 

But of course he’s alive to you! As alive as he can be alive—that is, within the extent of the reality that you have given him. The truth is that you always gave him a very ephemeral reality, a reality all made for you, for the illusion of your own life, and none or very little for that of his. 

That’s why the dead come to me, now. And with me—poor lodgers of memory—they sullenly ponder life’s hollow illusions, towards which they’ve grown utterly disillusioned, but towards which I cannot yet grow utterly disillusioned myself, even though I, like them, recognize them as hollow.