A Brilliant Darkness

Suicide, however, is only one possibility. There’s a good reason why the Suicide Party likes to discount the Pirandello influence on Ettore and overvalue his interest in Schopenhauer. Schrödinger was also a one-time Schopenhauer admirer: in the aftermath of the Great War, while he was undernourished and battling tuberculosis. But later the traitor changed his philosophical tack, once his health improved and he embarked upon the long chain of unbridled sex affairs that characterized his life. Without knowing it, Schrödinger’s existence became somewhat Pirandellian.

Luigi Pirandello was born in the aptly named Agrigento suburb of Kaos in 1867. He is perhaps best known for his plays, but he was also a prolific writer of short stories and novels. His works feature a staggering array of delicious characters: monomaniacs, cuckold fetishists, blasphemers—a zoo often identified with the Sicilian human fauna. My favorite of his creations is the man who can’t start a conversation without bursting out in laughter—for being unable not to conjure up the image of his interlocutor taking a shit.

In 1904 he wrote The Late Mattia Pascal, today compulsory school reading in Italy. One, No One and One Hundred Thousand is another of Pirandello’s novels contemplating the same obsession: vanishing and identity change. It’s not new, this thing of disappearing in Sicily. It’s been said that many are, have been, and will be the mysterious disappearances in Sicily. Andrea Camilleri’s La Scomparsa di Patò recounts the story of an Easter performance of the Passion of Christ,⁶⁷ during which the amateur actor playing Judas disappears through the stage trap before hundreds of spectators, never to be seen again dead or alive. In Australia they call it “going walkabout”; in the hands of Pirandello, Sicily meets the outback.

Pirandello is the pinnacle of Sicilian literature, and there’s nothing more Sicilian than cuckolding and vanishing. I doubt Ettore had much to do with the former, but he loved Pirandello. Did Ettore, in his final act, plagiarize his beloved author?

The character Mattia Pascal is a poor devil, the loser who gets the wrong end of the stick in a quintessentially Pirandellian multicornuto web. A crook has financially ruined his family; to get revenge, Mattia doubly cuckolds the crook (wife and niece). When the scandal breaks out, he finds himself forced by honor to marry the crook’s niece, beforehand betrothed to his best friend (an idiot who’s nonetheless dear to him). His new wife and mother-in-law then make his domestic life hellish. He gets by, playing the fool, because he’s madly in love with his baby daughter, born in the meantime. But when by a stroke of fate his beloved mother and daughter simultaneously die, he can’t take it anymore. Maddened by bereavement and directionless, Mattia leaves the town on the sly, intent on moving to America, Argentina perhaps, to start a new life.

But as he drifts he ends up in Monte Carlo’s famous casino. Mattia has never played roulette or any other such game, and out of curiosity buys a book to learn the rules. Providence, having taken his loved ones, cynically begs to assist him as he tries his hand at the game. In an unlikely series of lucky strikes, he becomes immensely rich. A bit bewildered, Mattia decides to return home, determined to recover his lost property and put his life back on track.

On the train home, however, something ghastly happens: He picks up an abandoned newspaper and reads notice of his own suicide. The decomposed corpse of a drowned man has been found in his town, and since Mattia had gone missing and was known to be depressed, it didn’t take much for the whole town to attribute the corpse to him.

At first he’s indignant, and thinks of going back to confront those who so easily recognized him in a corpse. Then, with his pockets stuffed with cash, he has second thoughts. He hates his wife and still owes money to the crook. Here is indeed a chance to start anew. And thus he makes a clean break with his past by inventing an alter ego—Adriano Meis—with the looks of a German philosopher and an alternative biography passing through Argentina, conveniently having no living relatives in Italy. For months Mattia leads a nomadic life of pleasure, journeying throughout Europe, impersonating the wealthy Adriano as he moves from hotel to hotel. His identity is never questioned.

But as time passes, the orgy of freedom begins to lose its appeal. Adriano feels lonely and in need of settling down but realizes that he can never own property or have a family. Meaning to acquire a sedentary life, he takes up lodgings with a Roman family, full of eccentrics who are happy to welcome him as one of them. He is contented until he becomes aware of the dodgy dealings that go on in the house: séances and spiritualism, thievery interweaving with the afterlife and illicit sex. His nightmare is compounded when he falls in love with his host’s daughter, but because he’s officially dead, he can never marry her. It’s as if he kisses her “with the lips of a corpse.”

When her much-hated brother-in-law robs him of a large sum of money, he finds himself in an impossible position. He cannot report the theft to the police, because he doesn’t officially exist. But worse than that, by not doing so he mortally offends his loved one, who frantically wants the family to get rid of the rogue. She confronts him, but he can’t explain himself. Desperate, Adriano goes for extreme measures. In a double-crossed deceit of reality he fakes the suicide of his alter ego, leaving his coat and hat by a Roman bridge, a suitable suicide note folded in.

The only flaw is that he takes all his money with him. A bit like what happened with Ettore. And in these pages, Mattia gives us what could be great insights into Ettore’s “afterlife,” should he have plagiarized Pirandello: his curiosity for what those left behind were now thinking, for what the press said about him and what the police might have done. “Bustle, amazement, morbid curiosity of strangers, hasty investigations, suspicions, wild hypotheses, insinuations, vain searches; my clothes and books examined with that consternation inspired by objects belonging to someone who has tragically died.”

But, unlike (possibly) Ettore, Mattia isn’t only faking a suicide: He’s expunging his alter ego by suicide in order to resuscitate his real self, officially dead by suicide! He returns where he can never return. After his family has recovered from the shock of seeing a ghost, it emerges that his wife is now married to his best friend—whom he’d cuckolded in the first place. A glorious mess. Furthermore, a legal technicality would nullify the second marriage and force him to take back his ex-wife.

For a while, he toys with availing himself of the law, exacting a wild revenge upon those who were so keen to see him in that corpse. But then he meets the baby daughter born to his wife and friend while he’d been away. He remembers his own dead daughter, whom he loved so much, and his heart softens. In the end he lets the happy family be, for which, of course, he has to remain officially dead. Which he willingly does.

The only dark cloud for Mattia is the tombstone in the local cemetery with his name carved upon it. He regrets its existence not because he finds it gruesome, but because someone else really is dead underneath it. Perhaps the dead man has a family somewhere, not knowing where he is or what happened to him. God knows what extremes of despair drove the man in his tomb to commit suicide.