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One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand · Book V

The vital point

Appearance and RealityMoney and WealthMadnessIdentityLoneliness and Isolation

Summary of the book

After hearing the crowd shout that he is mad, Vitangelo Moscarda discovers the practical price of his experiment: the bank wants to have him committed, his wife laughs at him, and the only witness left to him is a dog. The book runs in two stages. In the first seven chapters, all short, Vitangelo's self empties out: he hides so as not to be looked at, realizes that his own eyes know only what they see because others see along with them, and enters the sitting room of the house to find two people who look at him and, for himself, none. In the eighth, the largest in the novel, the same discovery stops being mere horror and becomes will. The laugh of Dida wounds him at a vital point, and Vitangelo orders the bank closed so as not to be, not even for others, the usurer they have always seen in him. The question the book leaves is whether this will is born from within or is only the first solid "I" that appears to him after so much emptiness.

Chapter I: Firbo Wants to Have Him Committed

Madness

Chapter summary

Just after the eviction, Vitangelo learns what the bank thinks of his act. Firbo insists at all costs that he must be locked in a madhouse, or at least placed under interdiction, if the bank's credit, compromised by the senseless act, is to be saved. Quantorzo replies that Moscarda's father also had his "luxuries of kindness," and that no one thought of interdicting him. Vitangelo immediately sees the hole in the defense: his father proved in business that he had his head on straight, while he, who declared himself a fool and lost interest in everything, looks like nothing but a madman to be tied down, capable of destroying what his father built with care. But Quantorzo's logic has another face, which Vitangelo presumes without having heard it: since he is the absent owner, the real owners are the two of them, and his folly is what serves them; it is better to keep quiet until he commits another madness. Vitangelo is left with his tail between his legs, crushed by the proof he has just given, not knowing whether Firbo's desire for revenge for the affront he suffered before the employees will prevail, or Quantorzo's self-interested indulgence.

Analysis

Vitangelo weighs the two arguments with the same coolness:

Ah, non c’è che dire, stava tutta dalla parte di Firbo la logica. Ma non stava meno, se vogliamo, dalla parte di Quantorzo, ah, there is no denying it, the logic was entirely on Firbo's side. But it was no less, if you like, on Quantorzo's side.

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Chapter II: Dida's Laugh and the Embrace

Chapter summary

At home, Vitangelo curls up in the role that gives him the best chance of escape: that of Gengè, the foolish and stubborn husband of Dida, so that the act passes for the whim of a harmless fool and not for madness. While Dida scolds her Gengè, inside he alternates between dejection and a wish to laugh that he cannot hold back, and he fears the secret anguish will burst out in a cry, through the mouth or the eyes of the husband she sees. Dida tells him to sit down, calls him Gengè, asks him to look her in the eyes, grabs his hair with one hand and settles onto his lap; he feels the weight of her body and is horrified by the eyes that look at him, laughing and sure, certain that he is what they see. For Vitangelo, the embrace of two is the embrace of two strangers, not only one toward the other, but each toward himself, inside the body the other holds. Dida, for her part, laughs at the "brutal pastime" Gengè allowed himself, convinced it was a prank, and reproaches him for the eviction of Marco di Dio in the rain and for having watched it; she agrees with Firbo that the prank, so bad, deserves a madhouse, and sends him to take Bibi for a walk. Vitangelo stays there like a fool, goes out and leans against the wall of the landing, wishing to sit on the first step and never get up again.

Analysis

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Chapter III: Talking to Bibi in the Empty Lot

Loneliness and Isolation

Chapter summary

With the dog Bibi pulling at her red leash, as if she too did not want to go, Vitangelo walks along the walls not knowing where to put his eyes, and goes to hide a few steps from home, in the enclosure of a plot sold for a house that has not yet been built: trenches for the foundations, heaps of earth, building stones scattered in the weeds as if fallen and old before ever being used. He sits on one of them, facing a white wall blinded by the sun, and talks to Bibi as if she were a person. He says he came to hide because people look at him, that he can no longer bear being looked at, not even by her, that he has lost forever, in the eyes of others, his reality and that of all things, and that he does not know who says the words he is saying to her. Bibi gets frightened and runs off after a white cat, trips on her leash, rolls over, sneezes; Vitangelo laughs, strokes her again, suggests they close their eyes together, and the dog lies down at his feet and sighs with boredom. He hides from a universal audience and can only confide in someone who does not answer; the animal does not speak, but he does not spare it either: even from the dog's gaze Vitangelo is afraid.

Analysis

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Chapter IV: Others' Gaze and the Kick

IdentityLoneliness and Isolation

Chapter summary

After more than an hour sunk in meditation, in the enclosure, wondering whether this might be the moment to end it all, not so much to be rid of the torment as to astonish the envy many held for him and prove the imbecility others attributed to him, Vitangelo asks himself a question that brings the torment back to the surface: why does someone who thinks of killing himself imagine himself dead not for himself, but for others? In trying to answer, imagining the dismay of his wife, Quantorzo and Firbo, he sees that in his own eyes there is no view of his own with which to see how he sees himself without the view of others, and that his eyes alone would no longer know what they see. He remembers a childhood fright, when he found himself lost in the countryside, far from any trace, and understands that the astonishment of that time was the horror of something revealing itself to him alone, outside the sight of others. He gets up in panic, sees his own horror in Bibi's eyes, and, to get it out of his sight, kicks her; at her yelps he grabs his head and shouts that he is going mad. In this gesture of despair he sees himself again, and the weeping turns to laughter: he calls the dog, half-lame, lame in play as well, says he was only joking and wants to carry on, and answers her sneezes with sneezes of his own, which seem to say "I refuse."

Analysis

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Chapter V: The Game of Others' Illusions

Appearance and Reality

Chapter summary

Vitangelo answers the remorse over the kick by denying it. "A kick? Me?" It was a boy lost in the countryside, he says, seized by a wonder at nothing, at a nothing that could suddenly become something and that only he would see. There in the city, in the street, that danger does not exist: each one lives inside the other's illusion, and can be sure that others deceive themselves if they say otherwise, that is, that each one is not as the other sees him. Vitangelo feels like shouting to everyone "Let's play!", waving at those who peer out of their windows, even throwing open the window to hurl himself out. He imagines the fun there would be in returning for a moment, after death, to see the world in which he had supposed himself to live, from within the illusions of those who go on living. The problem is that he is still alive and sees this game among the other living without being able to enter it, and this impossibility of entering a game he knows is in everyone's eyes leads him to a fierce joy, that of wanting to fire at everyone the kick he gave the dog.

Analysis

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Chapter VI: Eight People in a Room for Three

Chapter summary

Returning home, Vitangelo finds Quantorzo in serious conference with Dida in the small, bright sitting room in the half-light: he, fat and dark, sunk in the green sofa; she, slender and white, in an armchair, with an arrow of sunlight on her nape. They were certainly talking about him, for on seeing him come in they exclaim together, "Ah, there he is!" Since there are two watching him come in, the temptation comes over him to turn and look for the other who enters with him, for he knows that Quantorzo's "dear Vitangelo" is in him as Dida's Gengè is, and that he himself, for each of them, is nothing but that figure. Two, then, for him alone, who knows himself as one and one for them; and this, instead of one more, is one less, because it means that in their eyes, he as himself is no one. When Dida notices the gesture and asks whom he is looking for, he answers with a smile, "no one, dear," and they, not understanding, suppose that the "here we are" includes both of them, convinced that in the room they are now three. Vitangelo does the sum: Dida as she is to herself, Dida as she is to him, Dida as she is to Quantorzo, Quantorzo as he is to himself, to Dida and to him, plus Dida's Gengè and Quantorzo's dear Vitangelo: nine, or eight, since he, for himself, no longer counts. A fine conversation is about to take place among eight people who believe they are three.

Analysis

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Chapter VII: The Gaze That Does Not Know What It Sees

Loneliness and Isolation

Chapter summary

Before the conversation begins, Vitangelo thinks, in parentheses, about the effect his gaze may have on the two: will they not suddenly feel the loss of their fine confidence, seeing themselves looked at by eyes that do not know what they see? It is enough to look at someone doing the most ordinary thing in life, and to let the doubt be born in him that we do not know what he is doing, and perhaps he does not know either, for his confidence to cloud and waver. Nothing disconcerts more than two empty eyes that show they do not see us, or do not see what we see. Whoever receives that gaze asks "why are you looking at me like that?", and no one thinks that we should all always look like that, each with eyes full of the horror of one's own solitude with no escape.

Analysis

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Chapter VIII: The Laugh That Wounds the Vital Point

Money and WealthIdentity

Chapter summary

Quantorzo becomes flustered as soon as his eyes meet Vitangelo's, and Vitangelo quickly learns the reason: Quantorzo read in the boss's eyes that he had guessed the purpose of the visit, which is to tie him hand and foot, according to Firbo, by threatening to leave the bank's management if he commits further arbitrary acts. Vitangelo decides to unsettle him, this time slowly, for the pleasure of showing that a word and a tone suffice to topple the firmness and the reality the other feels as solid. He provokes with "Still?" and challenges Quantorzo to ask what he found on the shelf of papers he rummaged through: a palm's breadth of dust. "I observe everything," he says, without needing spies, and asks who answers for the bank's acts before the city. It is he, the one who signs; the two want his signature on everything and deny their own on the only act he commits. Quantorzo says the act was that of a madman; Vitangelo gets up, points his index finger at his chest and asks whether he judges him mad. Quantorzo denies it and immediately regrets it, and Dida, seeing the two of them, begins to doubt him too. Vitangelo laughs, asks whether Quantorzo has ever weighed on his conscience what the "normal" acts of the bank weigh on others, and complains that he is the one who hears outside that he is called a usurer. Quantorzo makes a furious pantomime of astonishment and points at the wife, who laughs until she comes apart. Dida's laugh wounds Vitangelo at a vital point, and he loses the light in his eyes: he orders her to stop and demands that the bank be closed that very night. Quantorzo protests that the name is the father's, the money is invested, the wife and the father-in-law would be ruined; Vitangelo only repeats "I want." Quantorzo asks why, and he sees that he could not say: the first reason, that he had never seen himself as they saw him, a calm usurer, had already been received as an implausible naivety. Dida reprimands him, almost hiding her face in her hands; he grabs her by the wrists, pushes her back into the armchair, shouts at Gengè, asks Quantorzo whether he understood, and leaves the room.

Analysis

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Reading of the book

Analysis

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