Luigi Pirandello reflects on the spirit of Christmas

As part of an annual tradition, Vintage has published a new collection of Christmas stories from Italy called An Italian Christmas: Festive Tales for La Dolce Vita. Classic works by Boccaccio and Pirandello are intertwined with more recent stories from Anna Maria Ortese and Nobel laureate Grazia Deledda, exploring themes of family chaos and Christmas cheer. 

The collection opens with “A Dream of Christmas” by Sicilian dramatist, novelist and short story writer Luigi Pirandello. First published in 1896, it is one of Pirandello’s earlier stories. It reflects on the spirit of the holidays and the way, perhaps, it has been lost in modern times, through the lens of a dream the narrator has in which he encounters Jesus. 

For some time, I felt something, like the soft graze of a hand, over my head as it hung between my arms—a touch at once tender and protective. But my spirit was elsewhere, wandering in the distance through all the places I had seen since childhood; the impression of them still throbbed inside me, but not enough to subdue the longing to revisit, if only for a minute, life as I imagined it might have unfolded in them.

There was celebration everywhere: in every church, in every home, around the hearth, in heaven above, by the manger below; faces known and unknown dined together, rejoicing; there was chanting, the sounds of bagpipes, the cries of exultant children, quarrels over games of cards…And the roads of cities great and small, of townships, of villages in the hills or by the sea, were empty in the inhospitable night. And it seemed I was hurrying down those streets, from one house to the next, taking pleasure in the revelries of others; at each, I stopped briefly, wished them “Merry Christmas,” then vanished…

I had already slipped into sleep unawares, and was dreaming. And in my dream, on those empty streets, I seemed to come upon Jesus wandering through the night, while the rest of the world, as usual, was celebrating Christmas. He walked almost furtively, pallid, withdrawn, with a hand holding his chin and his clear, sunken eyes staring intently into the void: he seemed suffused with the deepest sorrow, prey to an infinite sadness.

I turned onto the same road; but little by little, his image pulled me towards him, absorbing me, and it was as if he and I had become a single person. But my lightness disturbed me as I maundered, almost hovered, through the streets, and instinctively I stopped. Just then Jesus pulled away from me, and continued alone, still lighter than before, a feather adrift on a sigh; and I, earthbound like a swatch of black, became his shadow and trailed after him.

Then the city’s roads and byways disappeared: Jesus, like a white ghost vivid with inner light, glided over a hedge of brambles stretching on endlessly, a straight line through a black expanse. Gently, he dragged me along behind him, over the brambles, and I was as long as he was tall, and the thorns pierced me all over, but didn’t wound me.

From the barbs of the brambles I leapt at last onto the soft sand of a thin strip of shore; the sea was before me, and over the quivering waters, a luminous path thinned to a tiny dot against the immense arc of the horizon. Jesus took the path traced out by the moonlight, and I was behind him, like a shadowy skiff amid the flickers on the frozen waters. The light within Jesus died out: again, we were crossing the empty roads of a large city. Now and again, he stopped to call at the humblest doorways, where Christmas, from poverty and not austere devotion, offered no occasion for merriment.

“They aren’t sleeping,” Jesus murmured, and taken aback by hoarse words of hatred and envy uttered inside, recoiled as if in agony; and he moaned, the marks from the nails still visible on the backs of his folded hands: “For these, too, I died…”

We went on like this, occasionally stopping, for some time, until before a church, Jesus turned to me, his shadow on the earth, and said:

“Rise, and receive me. I want to enter this church and see inside.”

The church was magnificent, an immense basilica with three naves, with fine marble all over, gold gleaming in the vault, thronged with the faithful following along with the service conducted by officiants in clouds of incense on a lavishly adorned high altar. In the warm light of a hundred silver candlesticks, the gold brocades of the chasubles glinted with each movement just past the billowing of the precious lace altar cloth.

“And for them,” said Jesus, dwelling within me, “it would please me to be truly born for the first time this very night.”

We left the church, and Jesus, standing before me again and resting a hand on my breast, continued: “I am seeking a soul to live in again. As you see, I am dead to this world, though the world is bold enough to celebrate the day of my birth. Your soul wouldn’t be too narrow for me, were it not packed with things you should cast aside. You would have of me a hundred times over all you would lose if you followed me and left behind all you falsely deem necessary for you and yours: this city, your dreams, the comforts with which, in vain, you try to lighten your foolish suffering at the world…I am seeking a soul to live in again; it could be yours, it could be anyone’s, so long as his heart were pure.”

“The city, Jesus?” I replied in dismay. “What of my home, and my loved ones, and my dreams?”

“You would have of me a hundred times over all you would lose,” he repeated, removing his hand from my breast and looking at me firmly with those clear, sunken eyes.

“I can’t, Jesus…” I said, after a moment’s confusion. Ashamed and discouraged, I let my arms drop to my body.

As though the hand whose weight I felt on my bowed head at the beginning of my dream had thrown me into the hard wood of the table, I jerked awake, rubbing my numbed forehead. Here it is, Jesus, here is my torment! Here, forever, with no respite, I fret with a heavy head, morning, noon, and night.

A Dream of Christmas by Luigi Pirandello, 1896 (translation copyright © Adrian Nathan West 2018), as seen in An Italian Christmas: Festive Tales for La Dolce Vita (Vintage, £12.99).