Her Husband by Luigi Pirandello Read Free Book Online Page A

extract, the sublimated corrosive of logical deductions.
    Famous pumpers and filterers, the Roncella family. All of them, from time immemorial!
    But no one up to now, to tell the truth, had thought of setting himself up in the poison business professionally like that girl now seemed to want to do, that blessed child, Silvia.
    Signor Ippolito couldn’t stand women who wore glasses, walked like soldiers, were employed as postal workers, telegraph and telephoneworkers, or who aspired to electoral offices. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? Next they’ll want to be senators and even army officers.
    He would have liked Giustino to keep his wife from writing, or if he couldn’t stop her (because Silvia really didn’t seem the type to let herself be imposed on by her husband), at least not encourage her, for heaven’s sake! Encourage her? More than encourage her. He was by her side from morning to night, prodding her, urging her, stimulating that damned obsession in every way. Instead of asking her if she had straightened up the house, had supervised the maid’s cleaning or cooking, or even if she had had a nice walk at the Villa Borghese, he would ask her if and what she had written during the day while he was at the office, how many pages, how many lines, how many words. . . . Really! Because he even counted the words that his wife had scrawled, as if he had to send them off by telegraph. And look there: he had bought a secondhand typewriter, and every evening after dinner until midnight or one o’clock, he played on that little piano in order to have ready, retyped, the material –as he called it–to send to the newspapers, magazines, editors, translators with whom he was in active correspondence. And there was the shelf with cubbyholes for scripts, copies of letters…. Bookkeeper to the nth degree, impeccable! Because the poison was beginning to sell. Ah, yes indeed! Even outside Italy … It’s only right! Don’t they sell tobacco? And what are words? Smoke. And what is smoke? Nicotine. Poison.
    Signor Ippolito couldn’t take much more of this family life. He had been very patient for three months, but he could already see the day was not far off when he wouldn’t be able to stand it anymore and would tell off that young man. Not to offend him, of course, but to get things straight, as was his way. Speak his mind and that would be the end of it. Then maybe he would go live by himself.
    “May I come in?” just then a soft little woman’s voice asked. Signor Ippolito recognized it immediately as belonging to old Signora Faciolli (or the “Lombard,” as he called her), owner of the parrot and the apartment house.
    “Come in, come in,” he muttered without moving.

2

    This was the same old lady who had accompanied Silvia to the banquet the day before. Every morning from eight to nine she came to give Giustino Boggiolo English lessons.
    Free of charge these lessons, naturally. Just as Signora Ely Faciolli, the landlady, always granted free use of her own parlor if her dear tenant Boggiolo needed to receive some literary figure.
    The old signora was worm-eaten, too. Not so much by the solitary worm of literature as by the termite of history and the moth of erudition. She was attentive to Giustino Boggiolo, making a continual and insistent fuss after Giustino allowed her a glimpse of the mirage of an editor in the distance, and perhaps even a translator (German, of course) for her voluminous unpublished work: On the Last Lombard Dynasty and on the Origins of the Popes’ Temporal Power (with unpublished documents), in which she clearly demonstrated how the unfortunate family of the last Lombard kings had not completely died out after Desiderius’s imprisonment or with Adelchi’s exile to Constantinople, but instead how the family had returned to Italy, hiding behind a false name in a corner of this classical land (Italy) to save it from the ire of the Carolingians, and there continued to live on for a very long