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

Ellen McRae / Luigi Pirandello
Nothing. Nothing more.
She remained listening for a long time, now oppressed by
fear of that enormous, mysterious silence, of the entire world. And
finally she thought she heard a sigh from nearby, a mighty sigh,
as if it emanated from a mortal agony.
Straightaway she ran to the chest under the bed; she drew
it forward; she opened it; she pulled out her woolen cape; she
returned to the door; she listened carefully again for a long time,
then, one by one, hurriedly, silently, lifted up the latches, silently
lifted the bolt, the crossbar; she opened one door wing just slightly,
fearfully eyed the ground through the narrow opening.
Batà was there. He was lying like a dead animal, flat on his
face, in his drool, black, swollen, his arms outspread. His dog,
squatting close by, was guarding him, under the moon.
Sidora came outside holding her breath; very slowly, she
half-closed the door, made an angry sign to the dog to not move
from there, and, warily, with the tread of a wolf, her cape under
her arm, fled across the countryside towards the village, in the still
deep night, fully imbued with the radiance of the moon.
She arrived at her mother’s house in the village a little before
dawn. Her mother had just gotten up. Dark as a cave, the hovel at
the end of a narrow alley was barely illuminated by an oil lamp.
As she rushed inside, disheveled, breathless, Sidora seemed to fill
the whole space.
Upon seeing her daughter at that hour, in that state, the mother
raised a cry and caused all the neighbor women to come running
with their oil lamps in hand.
Sidora began to weep loudly and, while weeping, she tore her
hair, pretended to be unable to speak, so that her mother, and the
neighbors, would better understand and take in the enormity of the
event that had befallen her, of the fear that had taken hold of her.
“The moonsickness! The moonsickness!”
At Sidora’s recounting, the superstitious terror of that mysterious
sickness took hold of all the women.
Oh, poor girl! They had told her mother so, that the man was
not natural, that the man must be hiding some great defect, that not
one of them would have had their own daughter marry him. He was
baying, was he? Howling like a wolf? Scratching at the door? Good
heavens, how frightening! And why wasn’t she dead, poor girl?
The mother, collapsed on a chair, spent, her arms and head
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