Read Online Her Husband by Luigi Pirandello - Free Book Online Page A

honesty and goodness were surely a sign that he had Him in His heart and just didn’t want to acknowledge it outwardly! Yes, those were her mother’s words. How many times after her mother’s death had she repeated them! To have God in her heart and not want to acknowledge it outwardly. As a child she had always gone to church with her mother, and after her death had continued to go alone every Sunday. But hadn’t the same thing happened to her that had happened to her father? Did she really acknowledge God outwardly? She followed religious practices externally, like so many others. But what did she have inside? Like her father, a deep and dark feeling, a dread, the same that both had discerned in the other’s eyes when they stood over her dying mother’s bed. Now, of course, she tried to believe. But wasn’t God perhaps a supreme fiction created by this deep, dark feeling to calm itself? Everything, absolutely everything, was a fictional contrivance that you mustn’t tear apart, which you had to believe–not out of hypocrisy, but out of necessity–if you didn’t want to die or go crazy. But how could you believe, knowing it a pretense? Alas, without a purpose what sense did life have? Animals lived just to exist, but human beings couldn’t and didn’t know how to. Human beings had to live, not just to exist but for something fictitious, illusory, that gave meaning and value to their lives.
    Back in Taranto the look of ordinary things, familiar to her from birth and becoming part of her daily life almost unconsciously, had never disturbed her very much, although she had discovered so many marvelous things hidden from others, shadows and lights that the others had never noticed. She would have liked to stay down there near her sea, in the house where she was born and grew up, where she could still see (but with the strange impression that it was someone else) another self that she struggled to recognize. She seemed to see herself from such a distance with another’s eyes and perceive herself as . . . she didn’t know how to put it … different … curious. . . . And that girl down there wrote? She had been able to write so many things? How? Why? Who had taught her? How could those things have occurred to her? She had read only a few books, and in none of them had she ever found a passage, an idea that had the vaguest resemblance to anything that had come to her to write, spontaneously, out of the blue. Perhaps she shouldn’t have written such things? Was it a mistake to write about them like that? She, or rather the girl down there, didn’t know. It would never have occurred to her to publish them if her father hadn’t discovered them and ripped them from her hands. At first she had been ashamed. She was afraid of seeming strange when she wasn’t at all. She knew how to do all the other things well enough: to cook, sew, look after the house, and she spoke so sensibly, then. . . . Oh, like all the other girls in town . .. However, there was something inside her, a crazy sprite that didn’t appear, because she herself didn’t want to hear its voice or follow its pranks, except at some leisurely moment during the day or in the evening before going to bed.
    More than satisfaction at seeing her first book favorably received and warmly praised, she had felt a great confusion, an anguish, a befuddling consternation. Would she know how to write as before? When no longer writing only for herself? The thought of praise occurred to her and disturbed her; it came between her and the things she wanted to describe or portray. For about a year she hadn’t touched her pen. Then … oh, how she had rediscovered that little demon of hers grown and how wicked, malicious, discontented it had become. It had become such a bad demon that it almost frightened her, because now it wanted to talk loudly when it shouldn’t, and laugh at certain things that she, like the others in the daily business of living, would like to consider