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

Ellen McRae / Luigi Pirandello
“Inside…shut yourself inside…completely… Don’t be
afraid… If I knock, if I shake the door and scratch it and cry out…
don’t be afraid…don’t open it… Not for anything… Go! Go!”
“But what’s wrong with you?” Sidora cried at him, horrified.
Batà moaned again, shook all over with a powerful, convulsive
jolt that seemed to make his limbs multiply; then, with a flash of
his arm, he pointed to the sky and roared:
“The moon!”
Sidora, while turning around to run to the house, actually
glimpsed in the dreadful scene the full moon, enflamed, purple,
enormous, only just risen from the leaden hills of Crocca.
Barricaded inside, holding herself tight as if to prevent her
limbs from breaking off from their incessant, mounting, uncontrollable
shaking, she too moaning, out of her mind with terror, soon
after heard the drawn-out, feral howls of her husband writhing
outside, there in front of the door, a victim of the horrendous sickness
coming at him from the moon, and he was beating his head, his
feet, his knees, his hands, against the door, and he was scratching
it, as if his fingernails had become claws, and he was panting, as if
in the fever pitch of a raging bestial toil, as if he wanted to pull that
door out, tear it off, and now he was baying, baying, as if he had a
dog inside his body, and once again he was scratching, snorting,
howling, and beating his head, his knees against it.
“Help! Help!” she cried, even though she knew that no one in
that wasteland would hear her cries. “Help! Help!” and she held
the door with her arms, in fear lest, at any moment, despite the
many latches, it would yield to the repeated, ferocious, relentless
force of that blind, howling fury.
Oh, if only she could have killed him! Feeling helpless, she
turned around, as if to search for a weapon in the room. But through
a window grating, high up, on the opposite wall, she again caught
sight of the moon, now translucent, as it rose in the sky, suffused
by a tranquil pallor. At the sight, as if suddenly struck down by
contagion from the sickness herself, she let out a great cry and fell
on her back, unconscious.
When she came to, at first, in her stupor, she didn’t understand
why she had been thrown to the ground like that. The door latches
brought back her memory and she was immediately terrified by
the silence now prevailing out there. She rose to her feet; she approached
the door unsteadily, and listened carefully.
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