Book I: The nose and the mirror
It hangs? On me? My nose? And my wife, placidly: But of course, dear. Look at it closely: it hangs to the right.
Explanation and analysis
The novel opens with a commonplace gesture. Vitangelo Moscarda, twenty-eight years old, lingers before the mirror pinching one nostril, and his wife, Dida, asks what he is doing. He mentions a small pain he feels when he presses his nostril; she replies, smiling, that she thought he was looking to see which way his nose leans. The passage is what comes next: he repeats her word like someone who has been stepped on, and she confirms, without hurry, that the nose leans to the right.
The weight of the scene lies in its tone. Dida speaks calmly and with a "dear," with no intention to wound, and it is this calm that makes the fact irrefutable. Moscarda reacts like someone who has taken a blow, not like someone who has been informed: the start is of the body. He had always judged his nose, if not beautiful, at least decent, and the discovery irritates him like an undeserved punishment. Then come the eyebrows, the ear, the little finger, the right leg, and he checks everything and recognizes that it is true.
What wounds him, however, is not the flaw. It is having lived so many years with the same nose without knowing, and needing a wife to find out. The phrase carries in miniature the problem of the book: in each of us there is a figure that others see and we do not, and a distracted observation is enough for it to appear. Everything Moscarda will do next is born from this moment.
Instead, the thought took hold of me that I was not for others what until then, within myself, I had imagined myself to be.
Explanation and analysis
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When I stood before a mirror, a halt came over me; all spontaneity ended, and every gesture of mine seemed to me feigned or redone. I could not watch myself live.
Explanation and analysis
With the discovery of the hundred thousand Moscardas that I was, not only for others but also for myself, all with this single name of Moscarda, ugly even to cruelty, all within this poor body of mine that was one as well, one and none, alas.
Explanation and analysis
Who was he? He was nothing. No one. A poor, mortified body, waiting for someone to take it for himself.
Explanation and analysis
Book II: The reader and the house
I assure you, gentlemen, on the contrary, that he, at the very moment he was telling me politely from outside, good morning or good evening on the stairs, was inwardly making me live as a perfect fool.
Explanation and analysis
And let us hope, for the love of God, that no other close relative has died, for then you too would see all those dear cypresses as a cemetery.
Explanation and analysis
But what fault is it of ours, yours and mine, if words, in themselves, are empty? Empty, my dear sir. And you fill them with your meaning when you say them to me; and I, receiving them, inevitably fill them with mine. We thought we understood each other; we did not understand each other in the least.
Explanation and analysis
Man takes even himself as material, and builds himself, yes sirs, like a house.
Explanation and analysis
But of course she knew that Gengè of hers better than I knew him! She built him! And he was by no means a puppet. If anyone was the puppet, it was I.
Explanation and analysis
Book III: The Father and the One Hundred Thousand
The name, then: ugly even to cruelty. Moscarda. The fly, and the spite of its harsh, irritating buzz.
Explanation and analysis
It was an instant, but an eternity. I felt within me all the dread of blind necessities, of things that cannot be changed: the prison of time; being born now, and not before or after; the name and the body given to us; the chain of causes.
Explanation and analysis
Ah, there he is: a usurer, to others; a fool here, to Dida, my wife. Gengè I was; a fool here, in spirit and before my wife's eyes.
Explanation and analysis
Five fools. One in each. Five fools who stand before you, as they see him from outside, in me, who am one and five like the house.
Explanation and analysis
You sent away yourself, that one who is for your old friend, because you felt him to be totally different from what you are, or want to be, for the new one.
Explanation and analysis
Book IV: The first experiment
The problem is always this, gentlemen: that all of them had to be called by that single name, Julius Caesar, and that in a single male body so many had to cohabit, and even a woman.
Explanation and analysis
Or rather, this horror: the awareness of madness, fresh and clear, gentlemen, fresh and clear as an April morning, and lucid and precise as a mirror.
Explanation and analysis
And that one, no, he does not see it, because he sees something else, when you believe he should see your thing, the way it seems to you. He sees it the way it seems to him, and for him, then, the blind ones are you.
Explanation and analysis
This is where everything lies, I thought, in this subjugation. Each one wants to impose on the others the world he has inside him, as if it were outside, and wants everyone to see it his way, and wants the others to be in it only as he sees them.
Explanation and analysis
You, not me, understand? In front of your wife, understand? That is how it should be! And I, and he, and all of us, before the so-called madmen, like this!
Explanation and analysis
Book V: The vital point
I have lost, lost forever, in the eyes of others, my reality and that of all things, Bibi! I barely touch myself, and I am missing from myself.
Explanation and analysis
When the sight of others does not come to our aid, in some way, to constitute in us the reality of what we see, our eyes no longer know what they see; our consciousness is lost, because what we judge the most intimate part of ourselves, consciousness, means the others in us; and we cannot feel alone.
Explanation and analysis
Two, then, not in their eyes, but only for me, who knew myself, for those two, to be one and one; which for me did not make one more but one less, for it meant that, in their eyes, I as I was, was no one.
Explanation and analysis
Outside every image in which I could represent myself alive to myself, as someone also to myself, outside every image of me as I imagined I might be for others, a "vital point" in me was wounded so deeply that I lost the light of my eyes.
Explanation and analysis
Well then, but this, precisely this, was the "vital point" wounded in me, which blinded me and at that moment took away my understanding of everything: that I was no usurer, that usurer I had never been for myself, and now I no longer wanted to be one even for others, and would no longer be one, even at the cost of the ruin of all the conditions of my life.
Explanation and analysis
Stop with your Gengè, because that isn't me, it isn't me, it isn't me! Enough of that marionette! I want what I want, and as I want it, so it will be done!
Explanation and analysis
Book VI: Saying "I" to whom
I was becoming "one." I. I, who now wanted myself like this. I, who now felt myself like this. Finally. No longer a usurer (enough of that bank!), and no longer Gengè (enough of that puppet!).
Explanation and analysis
To whom should I say "I"? What good was it to say "I," if for others it had a meaning and a value that could never be mine; and for me, so far removed from others, to take on a meaning at once became the horror of this emptiness and this solitude?
Explanation and analysis
It was not me, I can assure you. So much so that, a moment later, before leaving, I barely turned my head to look at him again in that mirror, and I was already another, also to myself, with a diabolical smile in my sharp, glistening eyes.
Explanation and analysis
Book VII: The revolver and the bishop
A little later I had to climb back up to the Abbey to retrieve from the corridor, under the large window, that revolver, which was later to serve me.
Explanation and analysis
That vital point I had felt wounded in me, when my wife laughed on hearing me say I no longer wanted to be held as a usurer in Richieri, was God, without a doubt: God, who had felt wounded in me, God who in me could no longer bear that the others, in Richieri, held me to be a usurer.
Explanation and analysis
Spontaneously, without really meaning to, it escaped me to say: Like me.
Explanation and analysis
You can only know yourself by posing: a statue, not a living being. When someone lives, he lives and does not see himself. To know oneself is to die. You spend so much time looking at yourself in this mirror, in all mirrors, because you do not live; you do not know how, cannot, or will not live. You want too badly to know yourself, and so you do not live.
Explanation and analysis
You do not want your feeling to be blind. You force it to open its eyes and see itself in a mirror that you always keep in front of it. And the feeling, as soon as it sees itself, freezes within you. One cannot live before a mirror.
Explanation and analysis
Book VIII: Nameless and inconclusive
Ah, that business of the great current, Your Honor! You channeled it well into your affections, the duties you imposed on yourself, the habits you laid out; but then come the moments of flood, Your Honor, and the current overflows, overflows and sweeps everything away. I know. Everything submerged, for me, Your Honor! I threw myself into it, and now I swim, swim. And I am, if you only knew, already so far! I can hardly see you anymore.
Explanation and analysis
What stung me most was that this total surrender of mine should be read as true repentance, when I was giving everything away and resisting nothing.
Explanation and analysis
No name. No memory, today, of yesterday's name; of today's name, tomorrow. [...] It is nothing other than this, an epitaph, a name.
Explanation and analysis
I am this tree. Tree, cloud; tomorrow book or wind: the book I read, the wind I drink. All outside, vagabond.
Explanation and analysis
I no longer have this need, because I die at every instant, I, and am reborn new and without memories: alive and whole, no longer in myself, but in each thing outside.