The reader and the house

Summary of the book

Book II takes the discovery out of the mirror room and hands it to the reader, to whom Vitangelo Moscarda speaks throughout, asking permission to sit in his armchair and taking him for a walk. Across twelve chapters he argues that each person's consciousness is not enough, because there is also that of others; that the reality each one sees is a presumption that comes apart as soon as another person enters the same room; that words are empty and each person fills them with his own meaning; and that man builds himself as one builds a house, taking stones from the mountain and turning the tree into a chair. The last chapter turns the argument into a marriage scene: Dida loves a husband called Gengè whom she herself made; the jealousy Moscarda feels is for a man who is not him, and when he tries to undo that man, she leaves.

Chapter summary

An imaginary reader objects: why did Moscarda not think that others also do not see themselves live, and that if he was not what he supposed to others, they too might not be what he saw? He answers that he did think of it, but doubts that it occurred to the reader, and that if it had occurred to him and taken root, the reader would commit the same madnesses. The reader lives without wanting to see himself live; if someone tells him his nose leans, or that he lied yesterday, he at most thinks he has been misjudged and, if it matters to him, explains himself, and if it does not matter, he shrugs: I have my conscience, and that is enough. Moscarda replies that the reader's conscience has nothing to do with the case, because there is also that of others, so different from his own; if we were alone, there would be no conscience. Then who gives him the assurance that he acted well? He does, by imagining that others in his place would have done the same, on the basis of abstract principles everyone agrees with and no one recognizes in the concrete case. Solitude frightens him, and so he imagines many heads like his, which say yes and no as he pulls the thread.

Chapter summary

To prove that each person's reality has no more consistency for others than the smoke of a cigar, Moscarda describes the house he lives in with his wife, which his father had built after his mother's death, to get away from a house full of memories, and which the father left unfinished, with an arched gateway and no door. After the father's death, the neighborhood women begin to use the courtyard as their own, washing and hanging out laundry, and Moscarda, who never showed either annoyance or pleasure, lets it be; Quantorzo, in charge of the business, closes off the father's rooms with a partition and turns them into a small flat, which he rents to an elderly retiree, quiet and well dressed, to whom Moscarda has never paid any attention, and who always wishes him good morning and good evening, which makes him think the neighbor is very polite. One day the man complains about the mosquitoes that come from the rental stables, and Moscarda answers with an "oh, of course" that actually laments the stables, which he saw built when he was a boy, and not the man's annoyance; when the neighbor says he cannot stand mosquito nets, Moscarda smiles with astonishment and compassion, since he loves his own. The narrator then assures the reader that the neighbor, at the very moment he politely said "good morning" or "good evening" to him on the stairs, was making him live inside himself as a perfect imbecile, for tolerating the neighborhood women, the smell of laundry, and the mosquitoes; and that he, unaware, went on thinking how polite his neighbor was.

Chapter summary

Moscarda knocks at the reader's bedroom door, asks permission, and sits in an armchair. It is the armchair in which the reader's mother died: for Moscarda it would not be worth a penny, for the reader it has no price, and whoever sees it in the well-furnished room wonders why he keeps it, old, faded, and torn. He then describes the chairs, the little table, the window onto the garden with its pines and cypresses, the delightful hours the reader spent there; but because of this room the reader fell out with the friend who visited almost every day, and who now says around town that he is mad to live in a house with more than twenty cypresses lined up, as in a cemetery. The reader closes his eyes, shrugs, and says "to each his own!" because he thinks it is a matter of taste or habit and does not doubt the reality of dear things as he sees and touches them now. Moscarda suggests that he leave the house and return in three or four years, with a different mood, to see what remains of it, and wishes only that no other close relative has died, so that he will not also see those dear cypresses as a cemetery. He then asks why, if everyone knows that mood changes, the reader acts as if he did not know it, and becomes astonished, annoyed, and shouts that his friend is wrong.

Chapter summary

Moscarda asks to say one more thing and says he does not mean to offend: he acknowledges that, inwardly, the reader is not as he sees him from outside, that the reader knows himself and wants himself in a way of his own, judges his own fair and the other's wrong, and asks whether the reader's way could be his and his way the reader's. He offers a chair so that they can come to an agreement, and after an hour they understand each other perfectly; the next day the reader arrives with his hands to his face, shouting that it was not like that they had left it. It was exactly like that, but Moscarda explains that the reader will never know, nor can he communicate to him, how what the reader says is translated within him. They used the same language and the same words, which in themselves are empty, and each filled them with his own meaning: they believed they understood each other and did not. For him to be for the reader what the reader is for himself, and the reader for him what he is for himself, each would have to give the other, inside himself, the reality the other gives himself, and this is impossible; however hard he tries, the reader will always give him a reality in his own way, even while believing in good faith that it is his. There is no sovereign reality of his and a sovereign reality of the reader's, fixed and unchanging, outside them: there is the one each gives himself, and they will never be the same. All that remains is to console oneself that one is no more true than the other, and that both last an instant.

Chapter summary

Moscarda says he wanted to get to this: the reader must no longer say that he has his own conscience and that it suffices. He asks when the reader acted that way, yesterday, today, a minute ago, and then suddenly asks whether he himself is not now willing to admit that perhaps he would have acted otherwise. The reader turns pale, and Moscarda asks whether he does not recognize that a minute ago he was another. Not only another, but a hundred, a hundred thousand, and no one need be surprised at that; better to see whether he can be sure that tomorrow he will be what he assumes he is today. The truth, he says, is that they are all fixations: today a person fixes himself one way, tomorrow another. He promises to explain later how and why.

Chapter summary

Moscarda says he will explain right away and asks the reader whether he has seen a house being built. He himself has seen many in Richieri, and he thinks about what man is capable of: he mutilates the mountain, takes out its stones, squares them, and sets them one on top of another, and what was a piece of mountain becomes a house. He has the mountain answer that it is a mountain and does not move, and then refutes it: oxcarts already carry it away, and half of it is two miles off, on the plain, in the yellow, red, and white houses. The beeches, walnuts, and firs are in his own house, transformed into chairs, wardrobes, and shelves. The mountain and the tree are much bigger than man, but man is a little creature who has in himself something they do not have. He then tells a story of a few lines: the creature, standing, grew tired; lying on the ground like the others, it hurt itself; after it lost its fur, it saw the tree and thought of taking from it a place to sit; it found the bare wood uncomfortable and padded it, skinning animals and shearing others, and with leather and wool it lay down, satisfied. He ends with the goldfinch singing in its cage between the curtains, and with the walnut chair creaking to its song.

Chapter summary

The reader thinks this talk about the house does not matter, because now he sees his own, among the others that make up the town, with the furniture he chose, according to his taste and means, for his comfort. Moscarda describes that comfort: the furniture, animated by all the memories, is no longer things but almost intimate parts of the reader, in which he touches and feels what seems to him the secure reality of his existence. Whether beech, walnut, or fir, the furniture has the particular breath of each house, which is noticed only when it is missing, on entering another. He realizes he has upset the reader by reminding him of the beeches, walnuts, and firs of the mountain; as if the reader were beginning to share a little in his madness, he is disturbed by each thing Moscarda says and asks what it has to do with anything.

Chapter summary

Moscarda reassures the reader: he will not spoil his furniture, his peace, or the love of the house. He invites him to leave the city, by the gravel road where the street of houses opens onto the countryside, and he conducts the walk by naming what they see: the blue hills in the distance (he says "blue," and the reader says it too, "and do you see how we understand each other?"), the chestnut tree of the beech family, the green plain, and in the meadows a blaze of red poppies, which the reader corrects, and Moscarda accepts the correction, to red children's woolen jackets. He praises the freshness, notes the reader's gray felt hat, his sweat, the checks of his trousers. Then he asks where the peace of the countryside is, which the reader feels as relaxation. There, he says, he sees only what he feels within himself, an immense stupidity that makes the faces of both of them look like idiotic blesseds, and which they attribute to the earth and the plants, which live merely to live. Peace is therefore in us: it comes from having just left the city, from a world built not only of houses, streets, churches, and squares, but in which people do not live merely to live, rather for something that does not exist and that we place there, a meaning and a value for life. Here the reader loses him in part, or recognizes the distressing vanity of his own; languor, melancholy, and the wish to let oneself go arise.

Chapter summary

Lying in the grass, with his hands clasped behind his neck, looking at the white clouds and listening to the wind in the chestnut trees, the reader wishes, through Moscarda's mouth, to no longer be conscious of being, like a stone or a plant, and not to remember even his own name. Saying "clouds and wind," he is answered by Moscarda: clouds? wind? Is it not all just perceiving and recognizing that what drifts through the blue emptiness is clouds? Does the cloud know that it is a cloud? Neither the tree nor the stone knows it, nor knows itself, and they are alone. In recognizing the cloud, the reader can think of the water cycle, which a little schoolteacher of physics explains; but how to explain the why of the why?

Chapter summary

In the chestnut wood there are sounds of axes, and in the quarry, of pickaxes: man mutilates the mountain and fells trees to build houses, and so much effort serves only to reach a chimney from which a little smoke comes out, soon dispersed in the void, like every thought and every memory of men. In the countryside, with its languor, illusions and disappointments seem vain before the things that remain and are left over, impassive, and the reader, lying down, tosses his hat in the air and exclaims: "Oh, the ambitions of men!" Moscarda cites to him, for instance, the shouts of triumph over man's flying like a little bird: here is a real little bird, and its flight is the frankest ease, with a trill of joy; compare the clumsy, roaring apparatus, the fright and mortal anguish of the man who wants to imitate it, the engine that falters and stops: good-bye, little bird! The reader, in the grass, orders man to stop flying; Moscarda agrees, but only here. When he enters the city, he will understand at once why man wants to fly: here he has seen the real little bird and lost the sense of the false wings, which he will recover there, where everything is false and mechanical, a manufactured world of artifice and vanity, which has meaning and value only for the man who makes it. He helps the reader to his feet (he is stout; there are blades of grass on his back), and they leave.

Chapter summary

Entering the city, Moscarda shows the reader the trees of the Corso di Porta Vecchia, trimmed and combed, with a lost air, and imagines what they would say if they could speak; perhaps, to grow, trees need silence. He tells of the Olivella square, outside the walls, where every year the earth tries to take advantage of the silence and retake the square, sending threads of grass between the paving stones, and every year four or five street sweepers pull them up with little iron tools. The year before he saw two little birds, startled by the noise, ask with their heads what men were doing, and he told them they were shaving that old pavement; they fled in horror. Happy are those who have wings; the other beasts are caught, tamed, and made to pull the cart and the plow. Perhaps beasts, plants, and things have a meaning and value for themselves that man does not reach, shut up in those he gives them. Nature often destroys constructions (cyclones, earthquakes) and he rebuilds, a stubborn little creature: everything is building material for man, who takes himself as material and builds himself like a house. We know only what we manage to give form to, and that form is not the same for the one who gives it and the one who receives it, nor for each person at two moments. Outside the momentary form we give ourselves, others, and things, there is no reality: the one I have for the reader is in the form he gives me, but it is reality for him; the one he has for me is in the form I give him. The construction lasts as long as the material of the feelings does not crumble and the cement of the will holds; that is why firmness of will and constancy of feelings are so strongly recommended, for if one wavers and the others change, goodbye reality: we realize it was an illusion.

Chapter summary

Dida used to tell him he did not need to talk, because she knew what he liked and disliked, and Vitangelo Moscarda never paid attention. Now he understands: she knew that Gengè better than he did, because she had built him. It was neither subjugation nor substitution, for to subjugate someone, that someone must exist, and Moscarda, for her, did not exist: what existed was Gengè, with thoughts, feelings, and tastes that were not his and that he could not alter without becoming a stranger she would no longer understand or love. He had never given form to his own life, for lack of obstacles, because of a mind that dismantles every mental formation and a nature that gives way; so others know him, each in his own way, and see as many Moscardas as there are of them, all more real than he is to himself. The Gengè, whom he finds foolish, has defects that Dida pities, and she loves him truly: she sometimes weeps over the bitterness he causes, and when Moscarda asks what he did, he is told he said this or that, and he swears he did not. He was speaking for himself; she was speaking to Gengè, who answered through his mouth in a way Moscarda does not know. He would like to slap Gengè, but he cannot touch him.

The proof of love is the hairstyle. As a girl, Dida wore her hair in a way that pleased them both; after marriage she changed it, and he kept quiet. One morning she appears in a dressing gown with the old hairstyle and a flushed face, calls out "Gengè!", and he, dazzled, exclaims: "At last!" Dida undoes the hairstyle: it was a joke, she knows he does not like it; he protests; she covers his mouth and says he talks to please her, but that she does not need to please herself, only her Gengè. Moscarda, now understanding everything, becomes terribly jealous, not of himself, but of an imbecile who came between him and his wife, and who took his body in order to be loved. He reasons that the wife who kisses his lips is kissing another man's; his case is worse than that of a husband betrayed by a fantasy, because she held in her arms the reality of someone who was not him. And that reality was so strong that when he, exasperated, tried to destroy it by imposing one of his own, Dida, who had never been his wife but the wife of that other man, felt as if she were in the arms of a stranger, declared that she could no longer love him, nor live with him for a single minute, and went away.