Who She Is
Anna Rosa is an orphaned young woman, a friend of Dida, who lives with an elderly aunt in a house that seems crushed by the towering walls of the Badìa Grande, the old castle where the town's few old nuns still live (chapter II of Book VII). One of these nuns, Sister Celestina, is her aunt, her father's sister, and people say she is half mad. Vitangelo Moscarda knows her little and hears her named in passing in the first chapters (chapter III of Book I), until, in Book VII, she becomes the person on whom everything depends: she is the one who calls him, who tells him what Dida and the bank's partners are plotting, and who, in the end, shoots him. She wants Vitangelo to go all the way as a perfect madman, and takes pride in having sensed in him a man out of the ordinary (chapter VIII of Book VII). What drives her is impatience with anything that lasts, and she has already been tempted to try on herself the revolver she found in her father's waistcoat (chapter IV of Book VII). She knows what Dida thinks of her husband and what the bank is preparing (chapter IV of Book VII). Where she is wrong, and why: she takes his experiment for a spectacle in which she can take part without paying, and only in the instant when she finds herself dragged along by what he says does she realize what it asks of her.
Trajectory
In chapter I of Book VII Vitangelo receives her little note, inviting him to come to the house at once. He weighs the possible reasons, knowing that she turned down several advantageous marriages out of contempt for money, and concludes that she could not be the advocate of Dida's advantage; it is an exact line of reasoning that keeps him from seeing the reason for the invitation.
Per questo “vantaggio„ da salvare Anna Rosa non poteva esser dunque l’avvocato più adatto., For this "advantage" to be saved, Anna Rosa could not therefore be the most suitable advocate.
In chapter II of Book VII, at her house, the maid sends him to the Abbey, where Anna Rosa is with her aunt the nun, and he senses the warning of what is to come. The narrator, who knows the end, tells the reader in advance, as he has already told the judges, whose fault it was:
Nessuna colpa da parte sua. Fui io, o piuttosto ciò che finora è stato materia di queste mie tormentose considerazioni, se l’improvvisa e inopinata avventura a cui quasi senza volerlo mi lasciai andare per un ultimo disperatissimo esperimento, rischiò d’avere una tal fine., No fault on her part. It was I, or rather what has so far been the matter of these tormented considerations of mine, if the sudden and unexpected adventure to which I almost unwittingly let myself go, for one last desperate experiment, risked having such an end.
In chapter III of Book VII, in the dark parlor, he imagines in a flash Anna Rosa in the garden he cannot see, as he has never seen her. She suddenly opens the door, face aflame, arms full of flowers, runs down the corridor and, as she climbs a step, drops her little purse: the revolver goes off and wounds her foot. He carries her in his arms to her house, without it crossing his mind that she carried the revolver because of him.
Mi folgorò in quel bujo il sole che doveva esserci in quell’orto della badìa, che non sapevo dove fosse, ma che certo doveva essere verdissimo; e d’improvviso mi s’illuminò in mezzo a quel verde la figura d’Anna Rosa come non l’avevo mai veduta, tutta un fremito di grazia e di malizia. Fu un baleno., In that darkness the sun that must be in that Abbey garden, which I did not know where it was, but which must certainly be very green, flashed through me; and suddenly, in the midst of that green, the figure of Anna Rosa was lit up as I had never seen it, all a tremor of grace and mischief. It was a flash of lightning.
In chapter IV of Book VII she explains the revolver: she found it in her father's waistcoat, dead six years, small, with a mother-of-pearl grip, and in moments of alarm she was tempted to try it on herself; that it bit her foot and not her temple gives her a strange displeasure, and she calls the weapon wicked. She also explains the invitation: she knew the bishop would visit the nuns that morning and wanted Vitangelo to speak with him in time to prevent the commitment, for which Firbo, Quantorzo, her father, and Dida herself gathered evidence and witnesses, among them Turolla and Marco di Dio. She approves of his madnesses, the greatest being leaving the bank and a woman who has always been his enemy, and says that for some time she has been trying to make Dida understand that he is not the fool she imagines. Dida, for her part, had confided to her, smiling, that the Gengè felt an ardent liking for Anna Rosa, and from this assertion Vitangelo drew the general law:
Perchè, se ci pensate bene, questo è il meno che possa seguire dalle tante realtà insospettate che gli altri ci dànno. Superficialmente, noi sogliamo chiamarle false supposizioni, erronei giudizii, gratuite attribuzioni. Ma tutto ciò che di noi si può immaginare è realmente possibile, ancorchè non sia vero per noi. Che per noi non sia vero, gli altri se ne ridono. È vero per loro. Tanto vero, che può anche capitare che gli altri, se non vi tenete forte alla realtà che per vostro conto vi siete data, possono indurvi a riconoscere che più vera della vostra stessa realtà è quella che vi dànno loro. Nessuno più di me ha potuto farne esperienza., because, if you think about it, this is the least that can follow from the many unsuspected realities that others give us. On the surface, we tend to call them false suppositions, mistaken judgments, gratuitous attributions. But everything that can be imagined of us is really possible, even if it is not true for us. That it is not true for us, others laugh at. It is true for them. So true that it may even happen that others, if you do not hold firmly to the reality you have given yourselves on your own account, can lead you to recognize that the reality they give you is truer than your own. No one has been able to undergo this experience more than I have.
And it was in hearing her speak of Dida that he saw a Dida different from his own, and equally true:
Insomma un’altra Dida; una Dida veramente nemica. Eppure, sono certo certissimo che col suo Gengè ella non fingeva: era col suo Gengè quale poteva essere per lui, perfettamente intera e sincera. Fuori poi della vita che poteva avere con lui, diventava un’altra: quell’altra che ora le conveniva o le piaceva o veramente sentiva di essere per Anna Rosa., In short, another Dida; a Dida truly hostile. Yet I am quite certain that with her Gengè she was not pretending: she was with her Gengè as she could be for him, perfectly whole and sincere. Outside, however, the life she could have with him, she became another: that other who now suited her, or pleased her, or whom she truly felt she was for Anna Rosa.
In chapter VIII of Book VII she is in bed, with her foot bandaged and the pallor that has given her a new grace. Impatient with anything that lasts, she takes pleasure only in her body, and tries herself on before the little mirror like an actress. When she studies a pitying smile and rehearses it for him, Vitangelo reacts, and tells her that it is not her mirror: to see oneself, life has to stop, pose, become a statue.
Perchè bisogna che lei fermi un attimo in sè la vita, per vedersi. Come davanti a una macchina fotografica. Lei s’atteggia. E atteggiarsi è come diventare statua per un momento. La vita si muove di continuo, e non può mai veramente vedere se stessa. - E allora io, viva, non mi sono mai veduta? - Mai, come posso vederla io. Ma io vedo un’immagine di lei che è mia soltanto; non è certo la sua. Lei la sua, viva, avrà forse potuto intravederla appena in qualche fotografia istantanea che le avranno fatta. Ma ne avrà certo provato un’ingrata sorpresa. Avrà fors’anche stentato a riconoscersi, lì scomposta, in movimento., Because you must stop life for an instant within yourself, in order to see yourself. As in front of a camera. You pose. And posing is like becoming a statue for a moment. Life moves continuously, and can never truly see itself. - So I, alive, have never seen myself? - Never, as I can see you. But I see an image of you that is mine alone; it is certainly not yours. Yours, alive, you may have glimpsed only in some snapshot they took of you. But you must surely have felt an ungrateful surprise. You may even have struggled to recognize yourself there, disheveled, in motion.
The lesson goes as far as it frightens her:
Lei non può conoscersi che atteggiata: statua: non viva. Quando uno vive, vive e non si vede. Conoscersi è morire. Lei sta tanto a mirarsi in codesto specchio, in tutti gli specchi, perchè non vive; non sa, non può o non vuol vivere. Vuole troppo conoscersi, e non vive., You can only know yourself posed: a statue, not alive. When someone lives, they live and do not see themselves. To know oneself is to die. You spend so long gazing at yourself in that mirror, in all mirrors, because you do not live; you do not know how, cannot, or do not want to live. You want to know yourself too much, and you do not live.
She thinks for a long time, and for the two of them there opens the vision of irremediable solitude. She asks him to keep talking, and in his uncertainty she finds amusement. When the amusement turns into great pity, he says words to her that he no longer remembers, in which she feels the longing to give all the life that is in him so as to be one as she would wish, and for herself, no one. She stretches out her arms and draws him to her. Shortly afterward he rolls off the bed, wounded by the revolver she kept under her pillow.
Da quel letto poco dopo rotolai, cieco, ferito al petto mortalmente dalla piccola rivoltella ch’ella teneva sotto il guanciale., From that bed, shortly afterward, I rolled, blind, mortally wounded in the chest by the small revolver that she kept under the pillow.
In chapter I of Book VIII she confesses to the judge, under oath, that there was no assault, only the fascination that his considerations about life exercised over her, and Vitangelo, who gives the judge a version of an accident, hears that the court already has her confession:
se Anna Rosa stessa non avesse assicurato con giuramento il giudice che non c’era stata veramente nessuna aggressione da parte mia, ma solo quel tale fascino involontariamente esercitato su lei con le mie curiosissime considerazioni sulla vita: fascino da cui ella s’era lasciata prendere così fortemente, da ridursi a commettere quella pazzia., if Anna Rosa herself had not assured the judge under oath that there had been really no assault on my part, but only that certain fascination exercised involuntarily over her by my most curious considerations about life: a fascination by which she had let herself be so strongly taken that she came to commit that madness.
In chapter III of Book VIII Canon Sclepis speaks of her as the excitable young woman in whose eyes Vitangelo would have wanted to make himself handsome, when he protested that he no longer wanted to be called a usurer. In chapter IV of Book VIII she is acquitted, and Vitangelo believes the acquittal was due in part to the laughter that spread through the courtroom when he appeared in a cap, clogs, and an almshouse smock.
Themes Embodied
Anna Rosa is the person who takes Vitangelo's thesis seriously and tests it on herself. Appearance and reality is in her a pose: the little mirror and the drawer of photographs in chapter VIII of Book VII, the coquetry that tries on attitudes, the life she knows only by posing. When he tells her that to know oneself is to die, he is not explaining a theory; he is saying what she does every day. That is why she also embodies Solitude and isolation: in chapter VIII of Book VII the vision that opens for the two of them is that of irremediable solitude, and it is the point at which the novel stops being about him and becomes about two people. Madness is, for her, a quality: she approves of his madnesses and sees in Vitangelo a man out of the ordinary.
She is the only one who gives him back an image that does not wound him: that of a man out of the ordinary, capable of going to the ultimate consequences. It is the most comfortable image anyone gives him in the book, and it is also the one that requires him to be, for her, someone. The novel does not say that this is why the shot comes, but it places both things in the same chapter.
Divergent Readings
The text gives two reasons for the shot and leaves both standing. The first is Anna Rosa's, which the narrator calls true: the sudden, instinctive horror of the act to which she felt herself dragged by the fascination of what he told her. On this reading she shoots herself, or the impulse, and Vitangelo is the body that happened to be in the line of fire. The second, which the text allows without affirming, is that what frightens her is the whole life he offers her, to be one as she would wish, the surrender without remainder, and the shot is the refusal. The first version of the court would be a third one, that of brutal aggression on his part, and Anna Rosa denies it under oath (chapter I of Book VIII).
What separates the two readings is the gesture of stretching out her arms. If it is the gesture of one who has compassion, the shot comes from a fright at her own gesture, and the first reading suffices. If it is the gesture of one who agrees to receive the whole life he offers, the shot comes from the weight of the offer: no one can be one for another person without the other being no one for themselves, and that is what Vitangelo has just described in the same chapter. The question the book leaves is whether she shot because she understood the lesson or because she felt unable to follow it.
Relationships
- Vitangelo Moscarda: the man she calls and draws to her (chapter I of Book VII, chapter VIII of Book VII), wounded by her in the chest (chapter VIII of Book VII), and protected by her before the judge (chapter I of Book VIII).
- Dida: the friend who takes her as a confidante (chapter IV of Book VII), and to whom she wants to prove that she was right about her husband (chapter VIII of Book VII).
- Firbo and Quantorzo: those who gathered the evidence for the commitment, of which she warns Vitangelo (chapter IV of Book VII).
- Marco di Dio: the tenant who is among the witnesses for the commitment and who, she assures, will not lose the house even if Vitangelo is declared mad (chapter IV of Book VII).
- Monsignor Partanna: the bishop who visits the Abbey and whom she wants Vitangelo to seek out (chapter IV of Book VII).