«What he was doing in life was unknown. Perhaps he didn’t even know himself. He was simply there… He probably didn’t even suspect that one could live differently or that, by living differently, one could feel less the weight of boredom and sadness.»
In Italiano – Il lume dell’altra casa
En Français – La lumière d’en face
Em Portugues – A luz da outra casa
1909
The light of the house opposite
It was a Sunday evening, returning from a long walk.
Tullio Buti had rented that room for about two months. The landlady, Mrs. Nini, a good old-fashioned lady, and her spinster daughter, now faded, never saw him. He left every morning early and came home late in the evening. They knew he was employed at a Ministry; that he was also a lawyer; nothing more.
The small room, rather narrow and modestly furnished, showed no signs of his occupancy. It seemed as if he deliberately intended to remain a stranger there, as if it were a hotel room. Yes, he had arranged the linen in the chest of drawers, hung some clothes in the wardrobe; but then, on the walls, on the other furniture, nothing: neither a case, nor a book, nor a portrait; never on the little table was there a torn envelope; never on a chair a leftover piece of linen, a collar, a tie, to show that he considered it his home.
The Ninis, mother and daughter, feared he would not stay long. They had struggled so much to rent that room. Several people had come to see it; no one had wanted to take it. In truth, it was neither very comfortable nor very cheerful, with that one window overlooking a narrow side street, private, from which no air or light came, being overshadowed by the building opposite.
Mother and daughter wanted to compensate their long-desired tenant with care and attention; they had planned and prepared many things, waiting: – “We will do this for him; we will say that to him” – and so on; especially Clotildina, the daughter, had prepared so many sweet delicacies, so many lovely “civilities,” as her mother called them, oh, but just like that, without ulterior motives. But how to use them, if he never allowed himself to be seen?
Perhaps, if they had seen him, they would have immediately understood that their fear was unfounded. That sad, dark room, oppressed by the building in front, matched the tenant’s mood.
Tullio Buti always walked alone, without even the two companions of the most reserved solitary: the cigar and the cane. With his hands deep in the pockets of his coat, his shoulders hunched, frowning, the hat pulled down over his eyes, he seemed to brood over the darkest resentment against life.
At the office, he never exchanged a word with any of his colleagues, who, between owl and bear, had yet to determine which of the two nicknames suited him better.
No one had ever seen him enter a café in the evening; many, instead, hurriedly avoided the more crowded streets to immediately plunge back into the shadows of the long, straight, solitary roads of the upper neighborhoods, stepping away every time from the wall and circling around the circle of light projected by the street lamps onto the sidewalks.
Not a single involuntary gesture, nor even the slightest contraction of his facial features, nor a hint from his eyes or lips ever betrayed the thoughts in which he seemed absorbed, the deep sorrow in which he was so closed. The devastation that these thoughts and this sorrow must have caused in his soul was evident in the anguished stillness of his sharp, light eyes, in the pallor of his drawn face, in the premature graying of his unkempt beard.
He never wrote or received letters; he never read newspapers; he never stopped or turned to look at whatever happened on the street that might attract others’ curiosity; and if sometimes rain caught him off guard, he continued on his way at the same pace, as if nothing happened.
What he was doing in life was unknown. Perhaps he didn’t even know himself. He was simply there… He probably didn’t even suspect that one could live differently or that, by living differently, one could feel less the weight of boredom and sadness.
He had no childhood; he had never been young. The wild scenes he had witnessed in his father’s house since he was very young, due to the brutality and fierce tyranny of his father, had burned every germ of life in his spirit.
His mother died young from her husband’s atrocious torments, and the family fell apart: a sister became a nun, a brother ran away to America. He too fled home, wandering, managing to survive through incredible hardships until he formed that state.
Now he no longer suffered. He seemed to suffer; but even the feeling of pain had dulled in him. It seemed he was always caught up in thoughts; but no, he didn’t even think anymore. His spirit had remained as if suspended in a kind of stunned melancholy, which only made him barely sense a bitter feeling in his throat. As he walked alone in the evenings, he counted the street lamps; he did nothing else; or watched his shadow or listened to the echo of his footsteps, or sometimes stopped in front of the garden of the villas to contemplate the cypress trees, closed and gloomy like him, more nocturnal than night.
That Sunday, tired from the long walk on the ancient Appian Way, he unusually decided to go home. It was still early for dinner. He would wait in the room for the day to finish dying and for it to become evening.
For the Ninis, mother and daughter, it was a delightful surprise. Clotildina, out of happiness, even clapped her hands. Which of the many cares and attentions they had studied and prepared should they use first? Mother and daughter conferred: suddenly Clotildina stamped her foot, hit her forehead. Oh God, the light, in the meantime! First, they needed to bring him a light, that nice one they had set aside, a porcelain lamp with painted poppies and a frosted globe. She lit it and went to knock discreetly at the tenant’s door. She trembled so much from emotion that the globe, swaying, knocked against the stand, which risked being blackened.
– “May I come in? The light.”
– “No, thank you,” Buti answered from inside. “I’m about to go out.”
The spinster made a grimace, looking down, as if the tenant could see her, and insisted:
– “You know, I have it here. To keep you from being in the dark.” But Buti repeated, firmly:
– “Thank you, no.”
He had sat down on the small sofa behind the table, and his wide-open eyes gazed into the shadow that progressively thickened in the room, while the last dim light of twilight faded mournfully on the glass.
How long did he stay like that, inert, with his eyes wide open, without thinking, not noticing the darkness that had already enveloped him?
Suddenly, he saw.
Startled, he turned his eyes around. Yes. The room had suddenly brightened with a gentle discreet light, as if by a mysterious breath.
What was it? How did it happen?
Ah, there it was. The light from the other house. A light just turned on in the house opposite: the breath of an alien life that entered to dispel the darkness, the emptiness, the desert of his existence.
He remained a while gazing at that light as something miraculous. And an intense anguish tightened his throat at noticing how that gentle caress lay there on his bed, on the wall, and here on his pale hands, abandoned on the table. In that anguish, the memory of his oppressed childhood, of his mother, arose. And it seemed as if the light of a distant dawn breathed in the night of his spirit.
He stood up, went to the window, and, stealthily, looked behind the glass there, into the opposite house, at that window from which the light came.
He saw a little family gathered around the table: three children, the father already seated, the mother still standing, serving them, trying – as he could gather from their movements – to curb the impatience of the two older ones who were wielding their spoons and fidgeting on their chairs. The youngest craned his neck, turning his little blond head around: evidently, they had tied the napkin too tightly around his neck; but if the mother hurried to give him the soup, he would no longer feel the discomfort of that overly tight binding. There, there, indeed: oh, how eagerly he rushed to gulp it down! He stuffed the whole spoon into his mouth. And the father, amidst the smoke wafting from his plate, laughed. Now the mother was also sitting, right there opposite. Tullio Buti instinctively withdrew from the window upon seeing her raise her eyes toward the window; but he thought that, being in the dark, he could not be seen, and remained there watching that family dinner, completely forgetting about his own.
From that day on, every evening, instead of heading out for his usual solitary walks, Tullio took the way home; he awaited every evening for the darkness of his room to sweetly brighten with the light from the other house, and he would stand there, behind the glass, like a beggar, savoring with infinite anguish that sweet and dear intimacy, that familial comfort, that others enjoyed, that he too had enjoyed as a child, on some rare peaceful evening, when his mother… his mother… like that…
And he cried.
Yes. This miracle was wrought by the light from the other house. The stunned melancholy in which his spirit had remained suspended for so many years dissolved in that gentle glow.
Meanwhile, Tullio Buti did not think of all the strange assumptions that his staying in the dark must have raised in his landlady and her daughter.
Twice more, Clotildina had offered him the light, in vain. If only she had lit a candle! But no, not even that. Was he feeling unwell? Clotildina had dared to ask him with a tender voice from the door the second time she hurried with the light. He had replied:
– “No; I’m fine like this.”
In the end… yes, for heaven’s sake, perfectly understandable! she peeked through the keyhole, and, to her astonishment, also saw the glow from the lamp in the tenant’s room: from the house of the Masci; and saw him, standing behind the window glass, focused on looking into the house of the Masci.
Clotildina ran, all astir, to tell her mother about the great discovery:
– “In love with Margherita! With Margherita Masci! In love!”
A few evenings later, Tullio Buti, while staying there to watch, saw with surprise in that room opposite, where the little family was usually – but without the father that evening – having dinner, he saw Mrs. Nini, his landlady, enter, along with her daughter, welcomed as if they were old friends.
At a certain point, Tullio Buti jumped back from the window, disturbed, panting.
The mother and the three little ones had raised their eyes toward his window. Without a doubt, those two had started talking about him.
And now? Now everything might be over! The following evening, that mother or her husband, knowing that he was there so mysteriously in the dark in the opposite room, would draw the shutters; and from then on, that light, which he lived by, that light that was his innocent joy and his only comfort, would no longer come to him.
But it was not so.
That very evening, when the light from there was turned off, and he, plunged into darkness, after waiting a little longer for the family to go to bed, went to cautiously open the window to refresh the air, he also saw the window from there open; he saw shortly after (and felt a tremor of fear in the dark) a woman appear at that window, perhaps curious about what Mrs. Nini and her daughter had said about him.
Those two tall buildings, opening so closely across from each other, did not allow one to see either, up above, the bright strip of sky, or below, the dark strip of earth, closed at the entrance by a gate; they never allowed a ray of sunlight or a ray of moonlight to penetrate.
She, therefore, could not have appeared there except for him, and certainly because she had noticed he was languishing at his dark window.
In the dark, they could barely be distinguished. But he had known her beauty for some time; he already knew all her charms, the flickers of her dark eyes, the smiles of her red lips.
More than anything else, however, that first time, from the surprise that overwhelmed him and took his breath away in an almost unbearable tremor of anxiety, he felt pain; he had to make a violent effort on himself not to back away, to wait for her to withdraw first.
That dream of peace, of love, of sweet and dear intimacy, which he had imagined that family must enjoy; of which, by reflection, he had also enjoyed; was crumbling, if that woman was secretly, in the dark, coming to the window for a stranger. This stranger, yes, was him.
Yet before drawing back, before closing the window, she whispered to him:
– “Good evening!”
What had those two women who housed him fantasized about him to arouse and ignite such curiosity in that woman? What strange, powerful attraction had the mystery of his closed life exerted on her, that even from the first time, leaving her children behind, she had come to him, as if to keep him a little company?
Each faced the other, although they had both avoided looking at each other and had almost pretended in front of themselves to be at the window without any intention, both – he was certain of it – had vibrated with the same tremor of unknown waiting, dismayed by the enchantment that so closely enveloped them both in the dark.
When, late in the evening, he closed the window, he was certain that the next evening, when the light was out, she would lean out for him again. And so it was.
From then on, Tullio Buti no longer waited in his little room for the light from the other house; instead, he impatiently awaited for that light to be extinguished.
The love passion, never experienced before, flared up insatiably, tremendously in the heart of that man who had been outside of life for so many years, and enveloped, crushed, swept like a whirlwind that woman.
On the same day that Buti moved out of the Ninis’ room, the news broke like a bomb that the lady on the third floor of the house next door, Mrs. Masci, had abandoned her husband and three children.
The room that had hosted Buti for about four months remained empty; the room opposite, where the family used to gather for dinner every evening, remained dark for several weeks.
Then the light was lit again on that sad table, around which a father, stunned by misfortune, stared at the astonished faces of three children who dared not turn their eyes to the door, from which the mother used to enter every evening with the steaming soup pot.
That light, lit again on the sad table, then returned to illuminate, but ghostly, the empty room opposite.
Did Tullio Buti and his lover remember, after a few months of their cruel folly?
One evening, the Ninis, frightened, saw their strange tenant appear before them, distraught and convulsed. What did he want? The room, the room, if it was still vacant! No, not for himself, not to stay! Just to come for an hour, a moment at least, every evening, secretly! Ah, for pity’s sake, for pity’s sake for that poor mother who wanted to see her children from afar, without being seen! They would use all precautions; they might even disguise themselves; he would catch every evening the moment when no one was on the stairs; he would pay double, triple the rent, for that moment only.
No. The Ninis would not consent. Only, as long as the room remained unoccupied, they conceded that perhaps a rare time… – oh, for charity, provided no one discovered them! A rare time…
The next evening, like two thieves, they came. They entered almost gasping into the dark room and waited, waited for it to brighten again with the light from the other house.
From that light, they were now to live, like this, from afar.
Here it is!
But Tullio Buti could not initially bear it. She, however, with the sobs bubbling in her throat, drank it in as a thirsty person would, rushing to the window glass, pressing her handkerchief tightly to her mouth. Her children… her children… her children, there… there they were… at the table…
He rushed to support her, and they both remained there, close together, pinned down, spying.
In Italiano – Il lume dell’altra casa
En Français – La lumière d’en face
Em Portugues – A luz da outra casa
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