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

Saying "I" to whom

Money and WealthMadnessIdentityLoneliness and Isolation

Summary of the book

A short book, six chapters that together come to a little under two thousand six hundred words, in which almost everything happens inside. Vitangelo Moscarda has just pushed his wife, ordered the bank closed, and felt in his hands the horror of the violence that made him, for a moment, "one." Locked in his room, he measures what he has gained (a will, a bestial body, the absence of two papers) and what he has lost: Dida has left with Quantorzo, and saying "I" no longer has anyone to say it to. The next morning turns inside out: with the father-in-law in the parlor, horror gives way to the pleasure of playing, and Vitangelo amuses himself by inventing himself as doctor, lawyer, teacher and deputy, until the father-in-law flees shouting "Pazzo!". The two tones, the bottomless solitude and the humor of one who tests how far he can be another, are the two sides of the same question: what to do with an "I" that no one recognizes, not even himself.

Chapter I: Locked in His Room, He Wants to Be One

Money and Wealth

Chapter summary

Shut in his room like a beast in a cage, Vitangelo still gasps from the violence against his wife, the first, and cannot shake from his eyes the light, white figure of Dida, who seemed to come apart under the shoves, broken like a fragile doll: all the life he had with her, the game of that doll, broken perhaps forever. What trembles in his hands is not only the horror of violence; it is the blind awakening of a feeling and a will that have finally given him a body, a bestial body that frightened him and made his hands violent. He becomes "one": I, who now want myself like this, who now feel myself like this; no longer a usurer, no longer Gengè. His heart pounds, he clenches his hands until his nails dig in, paces the room like a horse that cannot bear the bit, and raves: "but I, one, who?" He keeps seeing the eyes of others on him, without knowing how they would see him in this newborn will, and sees that he wanted to be another, but that inside he has only the torment that revealed him as no one and one hundred thousand. He tries to imagine what he could build from the little blood that came from that wound: a skinny little man, frightened of others' eyes, with the bag of money from the bank's liquidation in his hand, money he did not earn and that withdrawing from the bank does not cleanse of the usury it came from. What work would he know how to do? And Dida? She too, he now feels, is no longer at home with him, and she is a vital point in him: he loves her, despite the torment of not belonging to himself, in his own body, as the object of her love.

Analysis

Vitangelo feels, with the violence, what he wants to be born:

Diventavo “uno„. Io. Io che ora mi volevo così. Io che ora mi sentivo così. Finalmente. Non più usurajo (basta con quella banca!): e non più Gengè (basta con quella marionetta!)., I was becoming "one." I. I who now wanted myself like this. I who now felt myself like this. At last. No longer a usurer (enough of that bank!), and no longer Gengè (enough of that puppet!).

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Chapter II: The Emptied House

IdentityLoneliness and Isolation

Chapter summary

Returning to the sitting room, drawn by the silence that has fallen there, Vitangelo has the horrible impression of emptiness before the armchair where Dida was sitting, the sofa where Quantorzo had sunk, the lacquer table, the chairs and the curtains, and turns to the servants Diego and Nina, who tell him that the mistress has left with Mr. Quantorzo, leaving orders to collect all his things, pack them in trunks and send them to his father's house. The two stare at him with open mouths and empty eyes. Their look irritates him; he shouts that they should carry out the order, which, in that emptiness, is at least something for the others and for himself, for he rids himself of the two for the time being. Alone, suddenly almost cheerful, he thinks "I am free!", but cannot believe it and feels that she went away in order to furnish him with proof of the rightness of his discovery, which seems to him so great and absolute that beside it the rest becomes small and relative, to the point of losing his wife; or rather, precisely because of this. The proof is terrible; the rest, the departure with Quantorzo, his own revolt against those who judged him a usurer, may seem ridiculous. He asks himself whether he can no longer take anything seriously, and where the wound of a moment before was: in him? Touching himself, clenching his hands, he says "I", but to whom? He is alone in the whole world, alone for himself, and in the instant of the shiver he feels the eternity and the ice of this infinite solitude.

Analysis

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Chapter III: The Mirror That Winks

Chapter summary

The next morning, the father-in-law comes to visit him. Vitangelo notes that he ought to tell how far his imagination went, raving most of the night, drawing conclusions from the place he had put himself in before others and before himself, but he will not tell. He had escaped with difficulty into a brief, leaden sleep, with the sensation of the hostile gravity of all things, even of the water gathered in his hands to wash; at the announcement of the visit, he suddenly feels relieved, seized by that cheerful spirit which, like a beneficial wind, still airs his mind at times. He throws down the towel, has Nina make the father-in-law wait in the parlor, and looks at himself in the wardrobe mirror with such confidence that he winks at that Moscarda there, to say that the two of them understand each other marvelously well; and the one in the mirror, to tell the truth, winks back. Vitangelo warns the readers, who will say that this happened because the Moscarda in the mirror was he: he was not. An instant later, before going out, he turned his head slightly to look at him again, and already he was another, also for him, with a diabolical smile in his sharp, shining eyes; he greeted him with his hand and the other greeted him back too. With this begins the comedy that will continue in the parlor with the father-in-law, in which he promises to show how many different Moscardas he amused himself producing that morning.

Analysis

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Chapter IV: Doctor, Lawyer, Teacher, Deputy?

Money and WealthMadness

Chapter summary

The father-in-law is what rekindles Vitangelo's high spirits, through the perhaps irreverent reality he always gave him: that of a most stupid man, always pleased with himself. Described as meticulous in dress, hair and moustache, fair, of ordinary appearance, he wears an impeccably cut suit that does not seem to be his own, his hair combed and his shapely hands that could be wax in the windows of a barber's and a glover's: a tailor's dummy and a barber's shop-window head. To find him agitated and undone, rather than as he expected, only awakens in Vitangelo the wish to try the delicious risk of advancing, disarmed and smiling, against an armed enemy. The high spirits put on his lips a smile of defiance and on his brow an air of distraction, for the very dangerous game he wants to continue, with so many interests at stake (the bank, the family), and to have more proof that he will seem mad, with the speeches he is prepared to make. Conscience, which he thought he used as an excuse, is no longer worth even for himself: he could not feel real remorse for a usury he had never meant to practice; he had signed out of formality and lived off the profits without thinking, and now, realizing it, he would withdraw the money from the bank to put himself at peace, founding a charitable work. The father-in-law asks whether it is true that he has gone mad, what he will do with his daughter, what he will live on. Vitangelo replies that this, at least, seems important to him, and gives him something to study; he says he has six years of university, that he could be a doctor (he began it, three years in), a doctor of letters and philosophy, a lawyer, and that Dida might prefer the professor; that by giving away his father's money the people would elect him deputy. The father-in-law, purple from the effort of listening, flees the room shouting at every word that he is mad.

Analysis

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Chapter V: Why the Father-in-Law Fled

Chapter summary

Vitangelo admits that the tone was mockery, because of the damned high spirits, and that he may have sounded terribly full of himself. But the proposals of a Gengè who could be a doctor, lawyer, teacher and even deputy, if they could make him laugh, should at least have won from the father-in-law the consideration and respect the province accords to those noble professions, practiced by so many mediocrities with whom it would not be hard to compete. The reason for the flight was another, and he knows it: the father-in-law did not see him in this figure either, but for reasons quite different from his own. He could not bear that Vitangelo should take from him his son-in-law (that Gengè he saw in Vitangelo, heaven knows how), from the comfortable consistency of a puppet in which he, his daughter and all the partners of the bank had kept him. He should be left as he was, that good, fierce son, living without a thought for the usury of a bank he did not run.

Analysis

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Chapter VI: The Laugh of the Professions

Chapter summary

Vitangelo also knew that, even if he put himself in new conditions of life and presented himself to others the next day as a doctor, lawyer or teacher, he would find neither a single self for everyone nor himself in the dress and acts of any of those professions. He is too overcome by the horror of locking himself in the prison of some form or other. Even so, the proposals he made to the father-in-law as a joke, he had made in earnest to himself during the night, overcoming the laughter that the images of himself as lawyer, doctor and teacher provoked. He had thought he would have to accept one of them, or some other, as a necessity, if Dida came back to him as he wanted and imposed on him the obligation to provide as best he could for her new life with a new Gengè. From the fury with which the father-in-law fled, however, Vitangelo deduces that for Dida no new Gengè could be born from the old one: the father-in-law showed him that he had gone irredeemably mad, if for nothing he wanted to tear himself out, in a moment, of the conditions in which he had lived happily until then.

Analysis

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Analysis

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