Her Husband by Luigi Pirandello Read Free Book Online

the mineral kingdoms were somewhat ravaged by age; however, the vegetable kingdom still gave him great satisfaction. For that reason he, who had always done everything with care and wanted it toappear so, would point to his beard and gravely reply, “Gardening,” when anyone asked him–like that parrot: “Signor Ippolito, what are you doing?”
    He knew he had a bitter inner enemy: a rebellious rascal who couldn’t keep from spitting the truth in everyone’s face as a wild watermelon squirts its purgative juice. Not to offend, of course, but to put things in order.
    “ You’re an ass. I’ve got your number. Don’t speak about it again .”
    “ This is stupid. I’ve got your number. Don’t speak about it again .”
    That enemy inside him loved things to be dispatched in short order. A put-down and that was that. Thank goodness that for some time he had managed to lull it to sleep a little with poison, smoking that long-stemmed pipe from morning to night while stroking the ribbon on his bersagliere’s hat. From time to time, however, terrible coughing fits warned him that his enemy was rebelling against the poisoning. Then Signor Ippolito, choking, purple in the face, eyes popping, would pound his fists, kick his feet, twist and turn, struggling madly to conquer, to tame, the rebel. In vain the doctor told him that his psyche had nothing to do with it, but that the cough came from his poisoned bronchi, and that he should quit smoking or not smoke so much if he didn’t want to get something worse.
    “My dear sir,” Signor Ippolito had replied, “consider my scales! On one side all the weight of old age. On the other I have only my pipe. If I take that away there’s nothing to balance the scales. What’s left? What can I do if I don’t smoke?”
    And so he continued to smoke.
    Dismissed from a job unworthy of him at the local school office for that explicit and impartial judgment he made of his boss, he hadn’t returned to his home town Taranto, where, after his brother’s death, he had no living relatives. Instead, he had stayed on in Rome with his small pension to help his niece, Silvia Roncella, who had come to Rome about three months ago with her husband. But he already regretted it. And how!
    He especially couldn’t stand that new nephew of his, Giustino Boggiolo.For many reasons, but most of all because he was oppressive. Like sultry weather. What is sultriness? Low-lying stagnation, a dull light. Well, then. His new nephew toiled slowly when it came to making light, the most vexing light in the biosphere: he talked too much, he explained the most obvious and most mundane things, as if only he could see them and that without his illumination others wouldn’t be able to see them. What a strain, how exhausting to hear him talk! Signor Ippolito at first would huff and puff softly two and three times in order not to offend him. Finally, when he couldn’t take it anymore, he would snort loudly and even clap his hands to extinguish all that useless light and make the air fresh and breathable.
    As for Silvia, he knew that from the time she was a child she had this little vice of scribbling; and that she had published four or five books and maybe more, but he really never expected that she would come to literary Rome already famous. And just the day before some other crazy scribblers like her had even given her a banquet. Nevertheless, Silvia was not basically bad. No. In fact, the poor thing didn’t seem at all like someone sick in the head. She had, she really had a kind of talent, that little woman. And in many ways the two of them were alike. Naturally! The same blood … the same Roncella way of thinking.
    Signor Ippolito closed his eyes and nodded his head, very slowly, so as to not disturb his beard.
    He had made a special study of that infernal machine, a kind of filtered pump that put the brain in communication with the heart and drew ideas from feelings, or, as he said, drew out the concentrated