One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand ends with Vitangelo Moscarda in a beggars' asylum in the countryside, nameless, without a mirror and without memories, calling himself a tree, a cloud and the wind. The book does not conclude, and that is the meaning of the last chapter, which in the original is called "Does Not Conclude."
After Anna Rosa's shot, he is questioned at the hospital and, once back home, receives the judge in the armchair, under the green wool blanket. Moscarda refuses to repeat his considerations on life, speaks of a torrent that tears down the dikes and asks whether the blanket is not beautiful. Canon Sclepis then devises a plan for public penance: Moscarda gives everything away, the house included, to found, with what is left of the bank's liquidation, an almshouse with an economical kitchen, and lives there like any beggar. What burns him most is that this surrender is read as repentance.
The asylum is for beggars, not a madhouse, and the book never commits him as a madman. Anna Rosa is acquitted, in part because of the laughter that his appearance in court, in a cap, clogs and blue smock, caused. Everyone still wants to call him Moscarda. He says there is no name, that a name is an epitaph and suits the dead, those who have concluded. He is alive and does not conclude.
The last page is a morning in the countryside: he goes out at dawn, averts his eyes so that nothing comes to rest and dies in appearance, hears the bells from afar and says he dies every instant and is reborn new, alive and whole, no longer in himself, but in every thing outside. The text sustains two readings, liberation and dissolution, and does not choose.