Tales of Madness by Luigi Pirandello Read Free Book Online

of it, since I knew everything. I then entered Mirina's room.
    I found her crying. As soon as she saw me, her face changed.
    "Don't be afraid," I told her. "Come with me."
    "Where?"
    "With me. You'll no longer feel any remorse."
    "What are you trying to say?"
    "I want to do, not say. And what you want. Come now, I'll show you."
    I took her by the hand, pulling her forward. Trembling, quivering, she let me drag her to the dead woman's room. I pointed out her sister to her.
    "See?" I said. "Now she'll forgive you. And you can repeat to me that you've killed her."
    "Me?"
    "Yes, just as you told him a little earlier from the window. Quiet, don't shout! I won't do anything to you. You'll just leave this house this very moment. Don't cry! It's your prison. I want to free you."
    She fell on her knees, her face on the ground, pleading for forgiveness, for compassion. I immediately helped her get up again, telling her to keep quiet. I pulled her out of the room.
    "Go where? Where?" she asked, full of anguish.
    "Wherever you want. Don't be afraid. And if you want to be punished, that will be your punishment; and if you can still enjoy yourself, you'll enjoy yourself freely. I'm freeing you! I'm freeing you!"
    I still had my shotgun on my shoulder. Oh, how she looked at it, understandably suspecting that I was trying to coax her outside in a friendly manner! I noticed that, laughed bitterly, and ran to put my weapon down in a corner of the living room.
    "I don't want to hurt you, no. What obligation do you have to love me unwillingly?"
    "Where are you taking me?"
    "To the man who is waiting for you."
    Upon entering a house, I was thinking at that moment, we have to content ourselves with the chair that the host can offer us, and not ponder whether, to suit our taste and size, we would have fashioned a more stylish or larger one from the tree used to make it. For Mirina the chairs in my house were too tall. When she sat, her legs dangled, and she wanted to feel the ground under her feet.
    But I promised to tell you only what I did. Fine, let's overlook this brief sample of madness. But how much quicker it would have been to fire a shot... Goodness knows!
    I was holding her hand and talking to her as we walked out in the open. I don't remember exactly what I said to her, but I know that, at a certain moment, she freed her wrist from my hand, and fled racing, racing through the trees as if she had been swept away by the wind. I was perplexed and surprised by her sudden flight. I had thought she was following me so submissively. I called out like a blind man:
    "Mirina! Mirina!"
    She had disappeared in the darkness among the trees. For a long time I wandered about looking for her, but to no avail. At daybreak I continued to look for her until I had not a single doubt that she had gone on her own to take refuge where I had wanted to bring her without resorting to any violence.
    I looked at the sky, veiled with scattered bands which were like the remaining traces of the great flight of clouds I saw the night before, and I felt dazed amidst a new, unexpected silence, getting the vague impression that something was now lacking in the land about me. Ah yes, that's it: the wind. The wind had subsided. The trees were immobile in the damp, squalid light of that dawn.
    What fatigue in that stupified immobility! I, too, was exhausted, and so I sat down on the ground. I looked at the leaves on the trees nearby, and I felt that if a breath of air had come to move them at that moment, they would have perhaps experienced the same feeling of sorrow that I would have felt if someone had come to tug at my hand.
    It suddenly occurred to me that the dead woman was alone in the little villa, and that her relatives had perhaps awakened and were asking about me and my wife. I jumped to my feet and away I ran.
    I consider it useless to describe to sane people what happened next. Those fine relatives rose up against my words, my explanations. They proclaimed me mad.