My Civil Death

 Why, dear God, did you make me so sensitive? Without this imperfection, I would today be as rich as a millionaire. And in fact I was very rich for some time. But because of my extreme sensitivity, I had to give up my wealth. I was rich after the sudden triumph of my performance in the film A Civil Death. By chance I had entered the Olympus of silent film actors, and of necessity I had to leave it.

I lived in a village in Calabria. One day I was talking to a waiter in a cafe' there, and no sooner had he left than a gentleman who was sitting at the next table introduced himself to me. He had an American accent.

"I am a director with the Celestial Dumbplay Studio. I just heard you talking to the waiter, and I noticed that you have the makings of a fine silent film actor."

He went on to say that my appearance seemed particularly appropriate for the male lead in the film version of A Civil Death, the famous play by the nineteenth-century dramatist Paolo Giacometti. In fact, it was to shoot the film that he had come to Calabria, the setting of the play.

I hesitated. He insisted and offered me a prodigious sum. A few days later we began working. At once I entered deeply into the volcanic personality of the Sicilian protagonist, Corrado, a painter and impassioned lover who murdered his brother-in-law in a fit of anger. But I entered too deeply. I lost myself in him. For Corrado, the action is a series of intense and often agonizing experiences: love, jealousy, hatred, murder, imprisonment, escape, marital strife, and parental anguish, all of which force him to embrace a civil death - suicide. While I was acting, I felt every one of those tempests as if they were real. After each exhausting strain - that is, after each scene was filmed - I had to undergo a still greater strain, followed by long periods of rest to clear my mind of its disturbed state and prepare it for another day's shooting. This process wasted much time, but my interpretation of the role was such a huge success that the director gladly put up with the delays.

The worker proceeded calmly as long as we were filming Corrado before his easel amid the wild, natural scenery, or his meetings with Rosalia at the beginning of their affair. Her family didn't want me. For a little while I remained truly angry with the kind actor who played Rosalia's brother. Nonetheless, after the scene ended, I quickly managed to calm myself down. Then we began filming my abduction of the young girl, and I carried her away before the cyclopean eye of the camera. The zeal that had possessed me was so great that I kept on running and running, quite far from the set, and I leaped over a hedge while the leading lady was screaming in my arms. In the end my co-workers had to restrain me. Who knows where I would have carried her if they hadn't overtaken me and snapped me out of it, plunging me back into the innocent reality of the film.

The most unbearable part of my torture began with the scene in which I murdered my brother-in-law. That day I hated him with a passion. I killed him by smashing his skull with a huge club. (Fortunately, the editor left only the beginning of my action, my hand raising with the weapon.) I had become a wild animal, so they took me to a sanatorium and had me treated. For several weeks I trembled with hatred. I wasn't crazy. I knew perfectly well that my good friend wasn't the brother of Mara d'Ayala (my leading lady's stage name), and that he wouldn't have cared in the least if I had married her twice a day. Within me, in my nerves, in my blood, I felt every shudder of hatred that Corrado felt for his brother-in-law, but in my brain I was very much aware that I wasn't Corrado. This superimposition of two personalities, along with the experience of hatred without object-indeed, of hateless hatred- was even more lacerating.

After I returned to work I acted in the next scene, where policemen seize me, tie me up, drag me away, and throw me into prison.

Corrado's thirteen-year prison sentence (a morning's work) really wore me down, but a few weeks of wholesome nourishment restored my strength so I could carry out my celebrated escape from prison. When I had descended the rugged sides of a tower with the classic knotted sheet, and my foot touched the ground, I was free and alone on the open plain. As I joyfully opened my arms before the camera, I felt all the impetuous wind of creation blow into my face from the lens. Then, with my lungs full of air and my eyes turned heavenward, I began to march across the boundless plain.

"Cut!" shouted the director after I had taken a few steps. "Now you must act like you're exhausted."

I obeyed. And very rapidly fatigue conquered all my limbs, invading and crushing me.

"That's fine. You may get up now. Can you act like a victim of starvation for me?"

I began to gesture and swoon as if I were starving. At once an excruciating hunger tormented my stomach. I felt completely empty and like a punctured balloon I collapsed and fell to the ground. The workers on the set ran to help me, but at this point I couldn't stand any longer. I stammered faintly: "Ffffood..."

They ran to the kitchen tents, brought me plated heaped with rare roast beef and thick slices of bread and cheese and pitchers filled with wine, and I devoured everything--Corrado hadn't eaten in two days. I ate voraciously, in great haste and without interruption for I don't know how long, and finally I regained life and strength.

"Now let's start shooting that scene again, quickly, before we lose the light."

I stood up amid the empty plates, refreshed and full, and gulping down the last mouthful, I ran to the camera. The director said, "Let's get a close-up of that look of hunger on your face. It seemed so real. Do you want to try it again?"

I was brought before the camera. At one meter from the lens, between two white screens which the workers held under my face to focus the light there, I resumed the grimaces. They lasted only a minute, but already I felt their effects.

"Very good," said the America. "That's all for now."

Yet I had again slumped to the ground with weakness. Once more as a result of that famished expression on my face, I was actually suffering from starvation. My stomach gurgled unhappily, empty, stabbed by hunger pains. I begged. After some perplexity the workers had to bring me more to eat, and for a good while I again consumed food and drank like a deluge, a fire.

I need not go through the entire film up to Corrado's spasmodic death by strychnine. A more detailed account would postpone the amazing events that happened to me later, when the film had been finished for some time and was starting to be sent to theatres around the world.

They were amazing events. Incredible, perhaps. Certainly, if someone told me about them, I would find it hard to believe him. But I have no choice except to believe events that I myself experienced.

When the tormenting work was finished, I felt empty rather than exhausted, as if my soul had become a void. The actord had all left, and the American too had departed with his equipment and I don't know how many kilometers of film, but not without leaving me an enormous sum of money and promising me more when prints had been sold. He was very enthusiastic about the prospects for A Civil Death.

Time passed, and I didn't think about the American and his film anymore. That sense of emptiness and internal nothingness persisted in me. I no longer had any desires or feelings and hardly any sensations at all. (But every so often, at irregular intervals, I experienced brief attacks of confusion and anxiety which I could not explain. Still, they subsided immediately.)

One day, at the beginning of September, I received a very amiable letter from the American, telling me that he was in Rome. He added: "The film has finally been edited, and it has turned out to be quite beautiful. We shall give it a trial screening on the fifteenth of this month. I hope you will come to see it then." This letter left me cold. After a few days I answered that it was impossible for me to go to Rome on the fifteenth. On the fourteenth, I boarded the train and went to Rome.

The American gave me a warm welcome, but notwithstanding how much I wanted to return his cordiality, I couldn't overcome my indifference. I asked him very firmly not to introduce me to anyone. I arrived at the theater with him and hid myself in the back, alone, in a dark corner. Only about twenty people had been invited, and they were sitting in the center of the theater. The lights went out, and on the screen began the story of Corrado.

I had not foreseen what would happen.

I wasn't interested at the beginning, but as soon as the first scenes were over and Corrado appeared on the screen, I felt I had leaped out of the dull languor in which I had been immersed ever since work on the film had ended. It was as if I had fallen unconscious and was immediately revived, or as if I were some inanimate substance that had instantly jumped from nothingness into being at the touch of a god. All this happened in a moment, The moment when I saw the image of Corrado--that is, my image, calmly seated before an easel in the middle of a field. But a second later, in a flash of insight, I realized that the resurrection I had just experienced didn't occur in me, that it was in him, in that man who was now gazing at Rosalia with radiant devotion; yet although this emotion was expressed in his face, I felt it in me entirely. Much to my surprise, I suddenly found myself holding out my arms in the darkness of the theater, transported by our passionate love.

Then my image disappeared, and I felt empty again. In the same breath a violent rage possessed me, while on the screen Corrado, or rather I, argued bitterly with Rosalia's obstinate family. From this point on, there was a crescendo of anguish interrupted by brief intervals of emptiness: Everything that Corrado had suffered in the course of twenty years---and that I acted out in a few months--was now condensed into two horrible hours.

When Corrado finally rolled on the floor, fitfully jerking under the influence of the strychnine, I found myself lying on my back between the seats, writhing with pain, nearly dying. Suddenly the lights went on, and I was empty and motionless. The audience crowded around the director. Before they discovered me, I left the shadow of my corner, exited through a side door, and headed for my hotel. That same evening, the American found me and told about everyone's enthusiasm.

"We have already sold a print for Rome, one for Milan, and one in France. The film will premiere in Rome on Thursday, at the Splendor Theater, and next month it will open in Milan."

He handed me a check. The following day he returned with two new contracts, which he forced me to sign, and left me still more money.

I left Rome for my village, but without any hope of recovery. I had become empty once again. And now I was very much aware of my terrible predicament I wasn't too confident that I could escape it by not seeing my performance in A Civil Death. I understood perfectly that my life and sensibility had passed entirely into those two kilometers of film, and there they remained, still tied by some mysterious thread to their source in my heart. I understood beyond any possible doubt that every time the film was shown, anywhere in the world, I would feel its different phases and effects repeated in me during the screening.

In fact, a few days later, while I was sitting in my room at four in the afternoon, I wasn't amazed to feel the vigorous air of the countryside blowing around my head (it was the countryside where I was painting, far away in Rome on the screen of the Splendor Theater), and then I underwent my amorous transports for Rosalia, followed by the arguments, my insane anger, my imprisonment and escape. How much I wept for joy, sitting alone before the table, once again holding my wife in my arms! Next I felt the entire horrible sequel of tortures, jealousy, the loss of human dignity--how I sobbed in my empty room when my daughter was frightened and drew back in horror from me! And a few minutes later I rolled compulsively on the floor. This attack lasted two hours, and almost immediately began again. I had to endure Corrado's fate four more times between four in the afternoon and midnight, at regular intervals, conforming with the screenings in the Splendor Theater five hundred kilometers away. And the next day, and every day thereafter, from four in the afternoon until midnight, four times a day, the performances continued.

I took a train and returned to Rome. (I was careful to travel at night and in the morning so I wouldn't be seized by those ridiculous attacks on the train when the film was being screened.) The distinguished doctor to whom I turned for help wanted to observe my daily attacks repeatedly, until he was able to recognize the perfect synchronism of my movements, internal and external, during the periods of each screening. On the sixth day of October things grew more complicated.

At four o'clock that day, I seemed to notice a greater intensity in my sensations from the outset. After a few minutes the felt confused in strange ways; at a certain point, they were all mixed up an absurdly connected. The distinguished doctor said, "This is the beginning of a beneficial crisis." I, on the other hand, immediately understood what was happening and shouted, "Today, today it's being screened in Milan too!"

The film began again, and then the confused sensation began again. The two screenings were superimposed within me. At Milan, the intervals between each screening were shorter, and their speed was slightly faster. While (in Rome) my arms were delivering the murderous blow to my brother-in-law, my knees (in Milan) were nervously knocking together at the prospect of freedom as I climbed down the side of the prison tower. A little later my body violently jerked on the floor, while my face smiled with joy as I contemplated my newborn daughter. After midnight the attacks were over, and the distinguished doctor wanted me to take a walk with him. At Piazza Colonna we ran into the America who was ecstatic to see me.

"We've sold ten more prints--in America and Sweden. The film's going to be a big hit everywhere. Within a couple of weeks it will be shown simultaneously, in Italy and abroad, at twenty theaters, twenty, just think of it!"

I screamed in horror.

I resorted to the only possible remedy: I bought every print of A Civil Death, as well as the negative. The American was sick over it. Then I burned them all and returned to my village.

Since I didn't make enough money from the American, I raised the necessary sum by selling my sensitive heart to a medical school--for use after my death, of course. The distinguished doctor insists that the autopsy will be most interesting, and actually it was he who made the school pay me a considerable amount. I'm not at all ashamed to mention this transaction; in fact, I want everyone to know that my sensitive heart has already been sold and is no longer available.

Translated from the Italian
by Lawrence Venuti