The first experiment

Summary of the book

After three Books of argument, Book IV puts the thesis to the test. Vitangelo Moscarda wants to destroy at one blow the usurer the city sees in him, and he chooses as his guinea pig the man who hates him most: Marco di Dio, a sculptor condemned for an act of a single instant, who lives on dreams of wealth and on the scorn of others. The experiment, which seems simple (to give Marco di Dio a house that is his own), requires Moscarda to act against himself, and all the scenes of the Book show the effect: the notary who looks at the canary, the bank employees who do not even look up at him, the two partners who see him as another, the crowd that, faced with the donation, shouts that he is mad. What changes compared with the earlier Books is the audience: it is no longer the reader who is set before the mirror, but those who know Moscarda, and their astonishment gives him back, instead of relief, the lucid awareness of his own madness.

Chapter summary

Moscarda says "were," but perhaps Marco di Dio and his wife, Diamante, are still alive; he no longer has a world of his own and knows nothing of theirs. He could have asked them who they were and they would have answered, as in an Ollendorff grammar, and that was enough for him then, as it is enough for the reader now, to establish the reality of the two of them and of the street. They seemed to him two unfortunates whom poverty excused from washing their faces in the morning, but not from trying everything to become millionaires overnight, "mil-lion-aires," as he used to say, syllable by syllable, with wide eyes. Moscarda used to laugh then, along with everyone; now he is horrified, because he laughed only because he had never doubted the regularity of the experiments. Marco considered himself an inventor. Many remember him as a savage who came from the countryside to Richieri, taken into the studio of one of the best local artists, where he learned to work marble; the master took him as a model for a group, "Satyr and Boy," famous in plaster. One sweltering summer afternoon, while carving, the apprentice translated into movement the vision the master had fixed in clay; the real boy cried for help, and Marco was caught in an animal act and condemned forever. Moscarda asks the reader whether, for so many other honest acts, he was not also the good lad the master said he was; and, to anyone who objects that the temptation proves the opposite, he recalls Julius Caesar, Calpurnia, and King Nicomedes. Released from prison, Marco plotted bizarre projects arm in arm with a woman who one day turned up; Marco had been saying for ten years that he would leave for England the following week, and he carried an English grammar open always at the same page; he asked his wife questions in English, and she answered promptly and seriously. They planned odorless toilets for countries without water, and their seriousness was ferocious because everyone laughed. That is why the greatest enemy of the two of them had been Moscarda's father, who gave them money up to a certain point, "How much?" "A little," and then stopped, and none of them called him a usurer with more fury than Marco did. When the father died, Marco transferred this hatred onto the son, and with reason: Moscarda continued, almost without knowing it, to benefit him, housing him in a little hut of his own whose rent neither Firbo nor Quantorzo collected. That little hut gave him the means to attempt the first experiment.

Chapter summary

Moscarda says the experiment was "total": it was enough to move within himself, as a game, the will to represent himself differently to one of the hundred thousand in whom he lived, for all his other realities to change in a hundred thousand ways. And inevitably this game was going to give him madness, or rather the horror of the consciousness of madness, fresh and clear as an April morning, lucid and precise as a mirror. For, on setting out for the first experiment, he was going to put the will outside himself, like a handkerchief taken out of a pocket: he wanted to perform an act that should not be his, but that of that shadow of himself who lived in another person, so solid that he could take off his hat and greet it. He was going to meet Mr. Vitangelo Moscarda to play a nasty trick on him, making him perform an act contrary to himself and incoherent, which, by destroying at a stroke the logic of his reality, would annihilate him in the eyes of Marco di Dio and of many others. He did not understand that the consequence would not be asking everyone, "see now that I am not the usurer you want to see," but hearing, astonished, that the usurer Moscarda had gone mad. For the usurer Moscarda could go mad, but he could not destroy himself at a stroke: he was a gentleman to be treated with respect, 1.68 meters tall, red-haired like his father, founder of the bank, with circumflex eyebrows and a nose leaning to the right like that of the poor fool Gengè of Dida, and who, by going mad, risked dragging into the asylum all the other Moscardas he was for others, the poor Gengè and himself as well. They all risked the asylum on that first occasion; and they still had to risk their lives, so that he might recover and at last find the path to health. But, he says, let us not get ahead of ourselves.

Chapter summary

Moscarda goes to the office of the notary Stampa, on Via del Crocefisso, number 24, where, on such a date, during the reign of Victor Emmanuel III, the knight Elpidio Stampa, fifty-two or fifty-three years old, had his office. He asks the reader whether he knows him (everyone knows him) and says that for that reason they can be sure not to go wrong; but he entered there in a state of mind the reader cannot imagine, and he proposes the experiment: to penetrate the frightening joke beneath the peaceable naturalness of everyday relations, the joke over which the reader gets irritated and shouts at the friend who does not see it. He goes in loaded with reflections, wanting to keep a cold fixity, with the urge to laugh in front of the serious notary, who is unaware that Moscarda might not be for himself what he appears to him. He asks whether the notary does not hear the scratching of the canary's little claws in the zinc cage; the notary does not hear it, and says the canary does not sing. As the notary starts to look at him in a certain way, Moscarda leaves the canary alone so as not to compromise the experiment, and asks about an empty house belonging to a certain Moscarda Vitangelo, son of Francesco Antonio Moscarda: "And is that not you?" It was so pleasant, in the office, among yellowed papers, to talk about that house at a distance of centuries, while imagining how the notary saw that office, what smell he sensed, and himself in the notary's world. He follows with a eulogy of history: everything in it is determined and fixed, unlike life. So as not to spoil things, he goes back to the notary, leans toward him, and confides in a low voice the act he wants to perform, under professional secrecy. The notary says he needs data and documents that are at the bank, with Quantorzo. Annoyed, he gets up, wanting to ask how the notary sees him walk, and restrains himself; but as he opens the glass door he says he is going with his own step, and tells of a horse that laughs with its rump. He acknowledges that this had nothing to do with the matter; but when he puts himself in the state of mind he was in then, feeling people's eyes on him seemed a horrible oppression, and gave him the urge to commit follies, roll in the street, dance. And he goes down the street as seriously as, indeed, the reader does.

Chapter summary

Moscarda then needs to go to the bank to fetch the house papers the notary requires. They are his, for the house is his and he may dispose of it; but if one thinks about it, he could only have them by stealing them or snatching them, with demented violence, from another who in everyone's eyes was the rightful owner: the usurer Mr. Vitangelo Moscarda. For Moscarda this is obvious, because he sees that usurer outside himself, alive in others and not in him; but for others, who see in him only the usurer, he would be going to the bank to steal from himself the papers, or snatch them from his own hand in madness. Could he say that it was not he, or that it was another? Nor was it a case to reason with an act that in everyone's eyes wanted precisely to appear contrary to him and incoherent. And so he proceeded, with perfect awareness, along the royal road of madness, which was the road of his reality, now opening before him with all its images, his own, alive, mirrored, walking with him.

Chapter summary

At the bank, the theft is not possible at once: Moscarda does not know where the papers are, and the last clerk working under Quantorzo or Firbo is more the master of the place than he is; the employees do not even look up, and they work zealously to reinforce the reputation as a usurer that the city gives him. He describes the bank with rigorous boredom: frosted glass partitions, little yellow windows, worn brick floors, figures on the walls, the smell of age, and a few old chairs in which no one sits. Today he finds the employees laughing at an argument between Firbo and a certain Turolla, whom everyone mocks, over a loan request that Turolla vouched for and Firbo refuses. Moscarda feels a surge of rebellion and shouts at Firbo by what right he wants to impose himself on another; Firbo asks whether he has gone mad, and he answers with an insult: yes, like Firbo's wife, whom it suits Firbo to keep locked up in the asylum. Firbo turns pale; Moscarda stands as if turned to stone, and Quantorzo drags him into the boardroom. There he thinks of Firbo as an elegant false hunchback and sees at once that each one wants to impose on others the world he carries inside, and that oppressors can only impose words, such as "usurer" and "madman." When Firbo comes back, an enemy, demanding an account, Moscarda kneels and touches his forehead three times to the floor: it is Firbo who should be kneeling like this, before his wife, and everyone before those called madmen. He grabs him by the lapel, laughing; Firbo, forced to look him in the eyes, confesses his fright: he seems mad to him. Moscarda laughs for a long time, stops suddenly, and to compose himself asks after Marco di Dio, who has not paid rent for years. They do not understand; he speaks as to another, the Moscarda they were expecting, and says the words the two were about to say. He places his hand on Quantorzo's shoulder, warns him that he is not his father, orders the eviction and a list of his houses with the papers, takes the papers to the cabinet, and puts them out. Behind the door, he is sure, they will say he has gone mad.

Chapter summary

Alone in the cubicle of the cabinet, Moscarda feels the presence of the piece of furniture, so old, heavy and worm-eaten, like an inviolate guardian of all the papers. There is a window there, an old straw chair, a bare, black, dusty little table. Suddenly he thinks that his father's hands, heavy with rings, were raised there to take papers from the shelves, and he sees them waxen, white, fat, with red hairs on the backs of the fingers, and sees his father's eyes, glassy, blue and mischievous. To banish the specter, he imposes on himself the bulk of his own body, dressed in black, come there to steal; the hands opening the doors give him a shiver. He starts pulling out bundles of papers by the armful and throwing them on the table; his arms ache, and he does not know whether to laugh or cry: is it not a joke, stealing from oneself? He is about to commit an act, but was it he? The idea comes back to him that all the strangers inseparable from him entered there, and that he commits the theft with hands that are not his. He looks at them: they were the ones he knew, but did they belong only to him? He hides them behind his back and closes his eyes; he feels a will that dissolves outside any consistency, and feels such horror that he nearly faints. He opens his eyes and says he is doing it "without any logic," and searches on. When weariness overcomes him, he sits on the chair with a pile of papers on his knees and wishes to die; from far off he hears the cackle of a hen that has laid an egg, which takes him to a place of his own he has not visited since childhood, and the creak of the shutter. Two knocks at the door startle him; he shouts that they should leave him alone and resumes, furiously. When he finds the bundle belonging to the house, he feels free and exults; but he passes so quickly from exultation to suspicion that he sees himself, and shivers: a thief, he was really stealing. He leans against the door, unbuttons his waistcoat and shirt and stuffs the bundle into his chest. A cockroach scurries out from under the cabinet; he crushes it with his foot. He puts the other papers down any old how and leaves; Quantorzo, Firbo and the employees have already gone, only the old guard remains, and Moscarda tells him to clean the floor in there because he has crushed a cockroach. He hurries to Stampa's notary office.

Chapter summary

Moscarda still has in his ears the gush of water from a gutter in front of Marco di Dio's hovel, in the alley already dark, and sees the people standing still along the walls to watch the eviction: the heap of miserable household junk exposed to the rain, the cries of Diamante, who now and then comes to the window to hurl imprecations, the barefoot urchins dancing around. The comments run: more disgusting than his father, in the rain, to persecute like that a poor madman, a usurer. Moscarda is there on purpose, protected by a police officer and two guards, and smiles, a little pale, with a voluptuousness that suspends his insides; now and then his eyes fix on the lintel of the hovel's door. That pleasure in alienating himself nearly costs him dearly: Marco di Dio, coming out with his wife and seeing him, hurls at him the old carver's mallet, and only fails to kill him because the officer pulls him back in time. The crowd protects Marco and is about to turn on Moscarda when a little man in black, shabbily dressed and of fierce appearance, a young clerk from Stampa's notary office, climbs onto a small table among the household junk and shouts that he has come to tell Marco of a gift: "This usurer Moscarda..." Moscarda trembles, awaiting his transfiguration in everyone's eyes, but the thrill is cut off by whistles and insults, for no one understands that the gift was his, after the cruelty of the eviction. Instinctively he raises his arms, sees himself in an attitude of begging, and lowers them. The young man confirms it: a house on Via dei Santi, number 15, and ten thousand lire for a laboratory. The crowd is astonished. Moscarda does not see what follows: he hides in the hallway of the house, waiting for Marco. Marco arrives, followed by the crowd, opens the door with the notary's key, sees Moscarda pressed against the wall like a specter and leaps on him with the death rattle of an animal, made of sobs and laughter, slamming him against the wall and shouting: "Madman! Madman! Madman!" It was the same cry the crowd had raised at the door.