The mystery of an abandoned horse, and what thoughts its mind might contain, are the subject of this week’s Translation Tuesday feature. With the acuity that earned him his Nobel Prize, Luigi Pirandello pores over its gaunt, overworked body and peers into its blankly staring eyes, searching for traces of animal thought.
The stable is there, behind the closed door, just past the entrance to the rustic, downward-sloping courtyard with its worn cobblestones and water tank in the center.
The door has become porous. It was green once, but now it has lost almost all its color, like the house, with that pale-yellow plaster, which makes it look like the oldest and most miserable one in the suburb.
This morning at dawn, the door was locked from the outside with a huge rusty chain, and the horse that was in the stable was taken out and just left there. Who knows why? With no reins, or saddle, or saddlebag, without even a halter.
He’s been standing there patiently, almost immobile, for a long time. Through that door, he can smell his stable, right there, close by, and the courtyard. And when he breathes in through his dilated nostrils, it’s as if he’s sighing.
With every sigh there comes, curiously enough, a nervous twitch of the hide on his back, where the mark of an old saddle can be seen.
Free as he is from any kind of horse tack, his head and his whole body, it’s easy to see what time has done to him: His head, when he lifts it, is noble still, but sad. His body is pitiful: the back is knotted; his ribcage sticks out; his flanks are pointy. His mane, however, is still thick and his tail, although somewhat thin, is long.
A horse that can be of no use anymore, to be honest.
What is he waiting for, there, in front of that door?
Those who, while passing, see him and know his master has taken away all the household possessions and moved to another town, think maybe he’ll send someone to come get him. Even though, left there like that, stripped of everything, he looks pretty much like an abandoned horse.
Other passersby stop to look at him. One of them says that, before leaving, his master tried his best to get rid of him. First, he tried to sell him, even for next to nothing. Then he tried to give him away to anyone who would take him. To him too. But no one wanted him, not even for free. Not even him.
Maybe if a horse didn’t eat, but he does. And, well, considering the service that decrepit old horse can still render, let’s be fair, you think he’s worth the price of hay or even straw needed to feed him?
Having a horse and not knowing what to do with him has to be quite a predicament.
To get rid of him, lots of people would just kill him. A bullet doesn’t cost much. But not everyone has the heart to do it.
You have to wonder, though, if it isn’t crueler to just abandon him like that. Certainly, seeing him there in front of the locked door of an empty, deserted house, poor beast, breaks your heart. You almost feel like going up to him and whispering into his ear that it’s useless to stand there waiting.
If they’d at least left a halter around his neck so he could be led away somehow. But no. They obviously had no problem selling the horse tack: it’s useful. In any case, the person taking him would probably have sold the tack too, and then left him naked in the middle of some other road.
And meanwhile, look, oh, just look at the flies. No doubt they’ll never abandon him, sad state or not. And the poor horse, if he does move, it’s only to wave the flies away with his tail when they bite harder, which seems to happen more often now that it’s not easy to get at the little blood he has left.
But he’s tired of standing there now, and he bends down painfully on his knees to rest on the ground, his head still turned towards the door.
He really can’t grasp the fact that he’s free.
But then, is a horse, even when he’s really free, able to understand the meaning of freedom? He has it and enjoys it without thinking about it. When they take it away from him, at first, he rebels, instinctively. Then, once he’s domesticated, he resigns himself and adapts.
Maybe that horse, born in some stable somewhere, has never been free. Yes, probably in the countryside when he was young and left to graze in the fields. But supposed freedom: the fields were enclosed by fences. And even if he had a bit of freedom then, what memories could he possibly have of it?
He stays kneeled there until hunger forces him to struggle to his feet. And since, after such a long wait, he doesn’t hope to get any help from that door anymore, he turns his head towards the long road there in the suburb. He neighs. He scratches the ground with his hoof. He can’t do much more than that. But he must know it’s useless, because after a bit, he snorts. He shakes his head. Then, uncertain, he moves a few steps.
By now, more than one busybody is watching him.
If you can’t have a horse walking around freely in the countryside where the land is cultivated, can you imagine one in the center of a residential area where there are women and children?
A horse isn’t like a dog who can live on its own without a master and who can walk around without anybody noticing. A horse is a horse. And even if he doesn’t know it, the people who see him do. His body is much, much bigger than a dog’s. And bulky. It’s the kind of body that never inspires total confidence, and everyone is careful around it because at any instant, you never know, it can shy for any reason. And then with those eyes, with the whites that are, at times, ferocious and bloodshot, eyes so shiny, with such darting liveliness and, sometimes, flashes of light, which no one can understand, of a life lived in anxiety, which can go dark for no reason at all.
Not to be unfair, but they are hardly the eyes of a dog, human, which ask for forgiveness or pity, which can pretend too, with certain looks, sometimes, that not even our hypocrisy could improve upon.
In the eyes of a horse, you can see everything, but you can read nothing.
It’s true, this horse, decrepit as he is, doesn’t seem at all dangerous. But, in any case, why get involved?
Let him be. Then if he bothers someone, they’ll worry about pushing him aside or driving him away. Or the guards will.
Hey kids, don’t throw stones. Can’t you see he doesn’t have anything on him? Free and unrestricted as he is, if he bolts, how will anybody stop him?
Let’s just stand here calmly and see where he goes.
Well now, first, to a man making pasta and hanging it to dry in the open air on mesh cloths stretched over wobbly racks.
Oh God, if he gets close, he’ll make them fall.
But the pasta-chef runs out just in time to block him and push him away. Godda…whose horse is this?
Some of the kids can’t contain themselves anymore, and they run after him, shouting, laughing.
“A run-away horse?”
“No: abandoned.”
“What do mean abandoned?”
“Just abandoned. His master left him. Free.”
“Really? So, a horse just goes roaming around on his own on the streets of the town?”
About a man, well, you want to know he isn’t crazy. But what do you want to know about a horse? The only thing a horse knows is hunger. Now, over there, he’s stretching his mouth towards a fine head of lettuce sitting among lots of other ones on a stand in front of the greengrocer’s.
They push him violently away from there too.
He’s used to beatings and wouldn’t mind if it meant being allowed to eat. But they just don’t want him to eat. The more he resists, to prove he doesn’t care about the beating, the more they twist his neck to keep his mouth from that fine head of lettuce. His obstinacy makes them laugh. What does it take to understand the lettuce is there to be sold to someone who wants to eat it? It’s so simple really. And, since the horse doesn’t seem to understand this, bursts of laughter.
Bestia! Not a straw to eat and he’d like to have the lettuce.
No one imagines that a beast, for his part, can see the whole thing in a totally different, much simpler, way. But it’s useless.
And the horse goes away followed by all those bratty kids. Who can contain them now that they’ve seen how well, how calmly he takes a beating? They surround him, making an infernal racket, such a racket, in fact, that at a certain point, the horse stops, dazed, as if trying to find a way to make it stop. An old man rushes up to warn the brats there’s no messing with horses.
“You see how he stopped?”
And the old guy raises his hand to the horse’s neck to calm and reassure him. But the horse suddenly jumps sideways, straightening his ears. The old man, who isn’t expecting this, first gets upset and then sees how the reaction proves his point. He repeats:
“You see?”
It proves useful for a moment. The brats start following the horse again but at a distance now. Where’s he going?
Straight ahead. Without daring to go near other shops, he travels the length of the suburban road on top of the hill, and when it starts to descend, uninhabited for a long stretch, he stops, unsure what to do.
It’s obvious he doesn’t know where to go anymore.
There is, in that stretch of road, a light breeze. And the horse raises his head as if to drink it in. He closes his eyes, maybe because he can smell the grass in the distance, in the fields.
He stands there for a long, long time with his eyes half closed and his forelock gently brushing his hard forehead at every breath of wind.
But we mustn’t get worked up. Let’s not forget how lucky that horse, and every other one, is: lucky to be a horse.
If that first group of bratty kids finally got tired of watching him and left, others, many, many others crowd merrily around him when, later that evening, he comes spryly along, as if out of nowhere, strangely exalted by, well, a sort of drunken impatience due to his hunger. Head held high, he goes to the middle of main road and stops there, scratching the hard cobblestone pavement with his hoof, as if to say: I demand you bring me something to eat here this very instant, here, right here.
Shrieks, applause, laughter, various cries ring out at the sight of this imperious gesture. People flock from all around, leaving their tables in the Café, and the shops. Everyone wants to know about that horse―run away―not run away―abandoned―until two guards make their way through the crowd. One grabs the horse’s mane and drags him away while the other stops the brats from following him, making them back off.
Escorted out of the residential area, past the last houses and factories, over the bridge, the horse, who doesn’t understand what’s going on, does understand one thing: the smell of grass, close by this time, there on the side of the road that leads to the countryside, beyond the bridge.
Because you see, of the many misfortunes he may have, when governed by man, a horse still has at least one fortune: he thinks of nothing. Not even of being free. Nor where or how he will end up. Nothing. Will they chase him away from everywhere? Will they send him crashing into a ditch?
Now, for the moment, he’s eating the grass on the side of the road. The evening is mild. The sky is star-studded. Tomorrow, whatever happens, happens. He doesn’t think about it.
Translated from the Italian by Matilda Colarossi
Luigi Pirandello was born in Agrigento, Sicily, in 1867. Among his numerous works, we find poems, novellas (collected under the title Novelle per un anno, 1922-37), six works of fiction, three works of non-fiction, two translations, and numerous plays. In 1934 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Luigi Pirandello died on December 10, 1936.
Matilda Colarossi is a Canadian literary translator living in Tuscany. Her work can be found in numerous magazines such as Asymptote, Lunch Ticket Org., Poetry International Org., Ilanot Review, Sakura Review, Anomaly, AALITRA Review, and Azonal. She has been managing paralleltexts.blog since 2014. Forthcoming is her translation of Excluded by Luigi Pirandello (Noumena Press).
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