The Father and the One Hundred Thousand

Summary of the book

In Book III what others see in Vitangelo Moscarda stops being the nose and becomes everything he did not choose: the surname, which he hears as the buzz of a fly; the inherited body; the family; the idleness he thought was his and that was his father's money. The central scene is the vision of the father: the man who smiled with tenderness becomes, seen from outside, a stranger with too much gold on his fingers and a cold grimace, and the title the son gave his father at school, banker, is in the city that of usurer. Dida laughs when he asks her what his profession is, and the laugh dissolves the horror without giving him anything back: for her he is Gengè. In the middle of the Book comes a long digression on facts, forms, and acts as prisons, in which Moscarda asks the reader to give five people the same house and the same man, to see five different imbeciles come out. The last chapter turns the mirror on the reader: upon receiving a second visit, he sends away the old friend and, without noticing, himself.

Chapter summary

Moscarda warns that, before going on, he wants to recount briefly the madnesses he began to commit in order to discover the other Moscardas who lived in his closest acquaintances and to destroy them one by one. They were madnesses by necessity: never having built a Moscarda of his own for himself, he could not act with logical coherence, and each time he had to show himself as the opposite of what he was, or supposed himself to be, to this or that acquaintance. But some aspect, meaning, and value he must have had for others, beyond the features he did not see. To think about this and to feel a surge of fierce rebellion were one and the same thing.

Chapter summary

The name comes first: ugly to the point of cruelty, Moscarda, from mosca, with the spite of its harsh buzz. His spirit had no name or civil status, it held a world inside it, and he did not stamp the things he saw with a name; but for others, outside, in their world, he was a determinate piece of reality, not his own, called Moscarda. Speaking with a friend was nothing strange; only the tone that the friend's voice had for him was not the one the friend knew, and the friend's appearance was what he gave him, looking at him from outside. In the same way, for the friend, Moscarda was an impenetrable body, represented with features that meant nothing to the friend, and Moscarda was also his shadow, if they saw him eat, smoke, walk, blow his nose. The name, however odious, could be set aside, since he had been accustomed to it from birth; in Richieri there was a Sardinian named Porcu, who answered cheerfully and with a smile to anyone who called him Mr. Porcu. He sets aside the features as well. But what of the conditions, which did not depend on him? Birth, family: he had never placed them before himself to judge them as others did, each with his own scale, weighed by envy, hatred, or disdain. He had judged himself a man in life, and that was enough, as if he had made himself; but the body, the name, and the life had been given to him by others, and many other things, of which he had never thought, now came to him with a strange, hostile image. The history of the family, of which he was the last, was in him and in his body, and others recognized it in his way of walking, laughing, greeting. Even the idleness he thought was his was not his for others: it depended on his father's wealth, and it was a ferocious idleness, because his father... Ah, what a discovery: the father!

Chapter summary

The father appears to him, evoked: tall, fat, bald, and in the bluish, almost glassy eyes the smile he always had, of a strange tenderness, part compassion, part mockery, but affectionate, as if he liked that his son deserved it, treating him like a luxury of kindness that he could afford with impunity. Only now that smile, in the thick red beard, is a mute, cold grimace, hidden, to which Moscarda had never paid attention, and the tenderness is horribly malicious. The gaze holds him, fascinated, to keep him from thinking about these things. The father speaks: the son was and still is a fool, a poor ingenuous one who runs after thoughts without fixing on any, and that is why he loved him. And the hands? The red hairs, the rings (how many?), the thick tiepin, the watch chain, too much gold? The son's anguish shifts from the eyes to the bluish veins on the pale forehead and the shiny skull among the red hair, "red like mine," and the skull fades away as if swallowed by the void. In the void there remains a terrified silence, and in it Moscarda feels the dread of blind necessities: the prison of time, being born now and not before or after, the name and the body that are given to us, the chain of causes, the semen cast by that man without meaning to, he himself an involuntary fruit, bound to that branch, expressed through those roots.

Chapter summary

Moscarda sees his father as he never had: from outside, in his life, not as the father was for him, which he could never know, but as a stranger, in the reality that others could give him. He then moves from "I" to "we" and describes what must happen to all sons: noticing something obscene that mortifies where the father should be respected, realizing that others do not give that father the reality we give him, discovering that he lives as a man outside us, in his relations, when for a moment they forget we are present and let slip the man they know, another. Soon the father makes a gesture, with his hand or his eyes, to show that we are there, and that small furtive gesture digs an abyss within us: what was so close leaps far away, glimpsed as a stranger. Life seems torn apart entirely, except at one point through which it remains tied to that man, and that point is shameful: birth, a common case, perhaps foreseen, but involuntary in the life of that stranger, the proof of a gesture, the fruit of an act. Also in the father's eyes, when they meet ours, one notices a sharp spite: we are for him what he, in the release of a passing need or pleasure, did not expect, the semen cast out, now standing upright, with two slug's eyes that feel their way along, judge, and keep him from being still free, another even for us.

Chapter summary

Moscarda had never separated his father from himself like this. He had always thought of him as a father, and thought little of it, for his mother died early and he was sent to a boarding school far from Richieri, then to another, then to a third, where he stayed until eighteen, and he spent six years at university moving from one course to another without profit; so he was called back to Richieri and soon, he does not know whether as a reward or a punishment, married. Two years later the father died without leaving him anything more alive than that smile of tenderness, part compassion, part mockery. What had the father been to himself? Now he dies for good. And what had he been to others? So little to him. The smile, he now understands, also came from the reality others gave the father, which the father suspected. At school, when schoolmates asked what his father was, he answered: banker, because for him his father was a banker. He asks the reader what would happen if his father were an executioner, and imagines the love of such a father for a son, the trembling tenderness of the thick hands buttoning his little shirt, and the next day at dawn the same hands on the scaffold. A banker, too, rises from ten to twenty percent and from twenty to forty percent as he grows in the city, and with others' disdain comes the reputation for usury, which tomorrow will weigh as shame on the son who does not yet know and gets distracted by strange thoughts, a poor luxury of kindness, which that smile well deserved.

Chapter summary

With his eyes full of the horror of the discovery, veiled by a dejection that put an empty smile on his lips, Vitangelo Moscarda presents himself to Dida, who in a bright room is arranging her spring dresses in the white and gold wardrobe. With effort, he asks whether she knows what his profession is. Dida, with a hanger in her hand, looks at him first as if she did not recognize him and repeats, bewildered: his profession? He insists, what do I do?, and she laughs out loud: what are you saying, Gengè? The laugh shatters his horror. He understands then that he is a usurer to others and a fool to Dida, Gengè in the soul and before the eyes of his wife, and who knows how many other Gengès in the eyes of the people of Richieri. If he cannot recognize as his this contemptible reality, he must recognize that, even if he gave himself one, it would be no truer than the others'; and the body before Dida did not even seem his, since her Gengè had taken it. He says softly, "a luxury of kindness," and she comes close, takes him by the arms, and blows into his eyes as if to put out a look that was no longer Gengè's, one which knew, as she did, that he had to pretend not to know how the father's trade was translated in the city. Moscarda wonders whether he was not worse than his father: the father at least worked, while he talked about the nose and the other side of the moon, and the bank, in the hands of his two friends Firbo and Quantorzo, prospered while he merely signed. They had not killed him, because until then he had lived like a blind man in the conditions in which he had been placed, and it was natural to others that he should be so. All of them? Suddenly he feels four poisoned daggers fixed in his soul: the eyes of Marco di Dio and of his wife, Diamante, whom he met every day on the way home.

Chapter summary

Marco di Dio and Diamante were, as Moscarda recalls, the first victims of the experiment to destroy a Moscarda. But with what right does he speak of them, giving them an appearance and a voice outside himself? He makes the same mistake he complains about, with the small difference of the fixations: the way each one wants himself, building himself, and for which he pays. The reader protests: and the facts? They exist, Moscarda says: to be born is a fact, at such a time, of such a father, in such a condition, male or female, handsome or ugly, with or without a hump; to lose an eye is a fact. Time, space, necessity, luck, chance: traps of life. To want to be is to accept this: in the abstract one is not, it is necessary for being to be caught in a form, and each thing, while it lasts, carries the penalty of its form, the penalty of being such and not being able to be otherwise. Like forms, acts: once an act is done, it is that one, and it does not change; it weighs like a prison, with its consequences, the responsibility assumed. But the reader who concludes that acts and forms determine his reality or Moscarda's is asserting nothing against him, for Moscarda says precisely that they are a prison, and the most unjust that can be imagined. So-and-so: he knows him and gives him a reality; the reader does too; each in his own way; and so-and-so himself has as many realities as he has acquaintances, with the illusion of being one for everyone. We perform an act, we believe we are wholly in it, and we realize that it is only one of the many we are, and that judging ourselves by it, keeping ourselves tied to it in the pillory for an entire existence, is an atrocious injustice: "But I am also this and that!" Past realities, which when the facts are light we call mistakes. Every reality is a mistake; being acts through forms, which are the appearances it creates itself and to which we give the value of reality, and there will never be a reality for everyone, nor forever. The faculty of deceiving ourselves that today's reality is the true one sustains us and, at the same time, throws us into an endless void, for today's will be an illusion tomorrow.

Chapter summary

Moscarda thinks he has climbed too high and proposes to come down a little: the ball is elastic, but to bounce it must touch the ground. What facts does the reader want to talk about? That he was born on such a year, month, and day, in Richieri, the son of So-and-so and So-and-so; baptized at six days old, sent to school at six, married at twenty-three, 1.68 meters tall, red-haired. These are the signs, the given facts, says the reader, and he wants to draw his reality from them. But these data by themselves say nothing; are they worth the same to everyone? And even if they represented him in full, where would they represent him? In the reader's reality, which is not that of another. He then invites five people to go with him to the house where he was born: for someone who lives in a shack it seems a fine palace; for someone with artistic taste, a vulgar house; for someone who avoids the street because of a sad episode in life, something to look at askance; and for someone who looks at it with affection, because across the street lived his mother's friend. And he, born there: if an imbecile had been born, would he be the same imbecile to all five? One takes him for an imbecile for leaving Quantorzo as director of the bank and Firbo as legal adviser, which is why another finds him most shrewd, and this one sees plain imbecility in walking his wife's little dog every day. Five imbeciles, one in each of them, in Moscarda, who is one and five like the house, all with the name Moscarda, which in itself is nothing. Each of his acts is, for the five, the act of one of the five: one will say he did this; another, that he did something else; the third, that he did very well; the fourth, that he did very badly; the fifth, that he did nothing. And they will come to blows over it, without understanding that one's Moscarda is not the other's Moscarda; six, if the poor Moscarda also sees and touches himself as one for himself, one and no one, alas for me.

Chapter summary

Moscarda promises to make an effort to give the reader the reality he believes he has, that is, to want him inside himself as the reader wants himself. It is not possible, as is well known, for however much he tries to represent him in his own way, it will always be a way of his own, for Moscarda, and not a way of his for the reader and for the others. If for the reader Moscarda has no other reality than the one the reader gives him, and if the reader is ready to recognize that this is no less true than what he might give himself, indeed that it is for the reader the only true one, can the reader complain about the one Moscarda will now give him, with all good will to represent him in his own way? Moscarda does not presume the reader is as he represents him. He has already said that the reader is neither that one who represents himself, but many at once, according to the possibilities of being, the cases, the relations, and the circumstances. What harm does that do him? The harm is the reader's, who believes that Moscarda has no other reality than the one he gives him; and that is only the reader's, an idea he has made, a possibility of being as he feels it, for of what Moscarda may be for himself, not only the reader can know nothing, but not even he himself.

Chapter summary

Moscarda says he is pleased, because right now, while the reader reads this "little book" with the sly smile that has accompanied him from the start, two visits, one inside the other, have shown how foolish that smile was. The reader is still disconcerted, irritated, and mortified by the poor figure he cut with his old friend, sent away right after the new one arrived, with a petty excuse, because he could no longer bear to see and hear him speaking and laughing in front of the other. But how, sending him away like that, when before the other arrived the reader took pleasure in talking and laughing with him? Who was sent away? The friend? The old friend, in himself and by himself, had no reason at all to be sent away; the two, between them, did not know each other, had been introduced by the reader, and could have chatted for half an hour in the sitting room without embarrassment to anyone. The embarrassment was the reader's, and all the more alive and intolerable the more he saw the two getting along and coming to terms. He broke it off at once. Why? Because with the arrival of the new friend the reader discovered himself to be two, so different from one another that at a certain point he had to send one away. Not the old friend: he sent away himself, the one who is for the old friend, because he felt him to be other than the one he is, or wants to be, for the new one. It was not that the two were incompatible, strangers to each other and courteous, perhaps made to get along marvelously, but the two in the reader that he discovered in himself. He could not bear that the things of one should mix with those of the other, for he has one reality for the old friend and another for the new, so different that, addressing one, the other would stand staring at him, bewildered, unable to recognize him. In the unbearable awkwardness of finding himself two at once, he looked for a petty excuse to be rid, not of one of them, but of one of the two he was being forced to be. Moscarda tells him to go back to his reading without smiling, because if the experience caused him some distress, that is nothing, my dear fellow: he is not only two, but who knows how many, without knowing it, always believing himself to be one.