Journal of Italian Translation - Brooklyn College - Academic Home ...

Ellen McRae / Luigi Pirandello
MOONSICKNESS
Batà was all crouched up on a bale of straw in the middle of
the threshing yard.
Sidora, his wife, turned to look at him with concern every so
often from where she was sitting on the threshold, her head leaning
against the doorpost and her eyes half-closed. Then, overwhelmed
by the oppressive heat, she went back to stretching her gaze towards
the blue strip of the far-off sea, as if she were waiting for a
breath of air to rise from there, now that it was near sunset, and
softly make its way over to her, across the naked earth bristling
with burnt stubble.
So great was the heat, the air was visible above the straw left
in the yard after the threshing, trembling like the breath of burning
embers.
Batà had drawn out a stalk from the bale where he was sitting,
and with a listless hand was trying to beat it against his hobnailed
boots. The gesture was futile. Freshly mown, the stalk of straw
kept bending. And Batà remained sombre and absorbed, staring
at the ground.
In the dismal and motionless brilliance of the scorching air,
there was an oppression so suffocating that her husband’s repetitive,
futile gesture was making Sidora feel unbearable agitation.
In truth, the man’s every action, even just the sight of him, made
her feel an agitation she could barely repress.
Married to him just twenty days, Sidora already felt wornout,
exhausted. She felt a strange emptiness, inside and around
her, heavy and terrible. And it seemed almost unreal, that such
a short time ago she had been brought there, to that old, isolated
property, with its stable and house in one, in the middle of that
stubble wasteland, without a tree about, without a strip of shade.
There, for twenty days, barely stifling her tears and revulsion,
she had only just managed to surrender her body to that taciturn
man, who was about twenty years older than she and who seemed
to be weighed down now by a sorrow more desperate than her own.
She remembered what the neighbor women had said to her
mother, when she had announced the marriage proposal to them.
“Batà! Good lord, I wouldn’t have a daughter of mine marry
him.”
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