LA "TOCCATINA" DI PIRANDELLO

"La toccatina" ("The Light Touch") referred to the title of Luigi Pirandello's short story arrived like a bolt from the blue: " ... mentre desinava con la sorella vedova e il nipote, Cristoforo Golisch improvvisamente stravolse gli occhi, storse la bocca, quasi per uno sbadiglio mancato; e il capo gli cadde sul petto e la faccia sul piatto.
Una toccatina, lieve lieve, anche a lui.
Perdette li' per li' la parola e mezzo lato del corpo: il destro.
Cristoforo Golisch era nato in Italia, da genitori tedeschi; non era mai stato in Germania, e parlava romanesco, come un romano di Roma. Da un pezzo gli amici gli avevano italianizzato anche il cognome, chiamandolo Golicci, e gl'intimi anche Golaccia, in considerazione del ventre e del formidabile appetito.
Solo con la sorella egli soleva di tanto in tanto scambiare qualche parola in tedesco, perche' gli altri non intendessero.
Ebbene, riacquistato a stento, in capo a poche ore, l'uso della parola, Cristoforo Golisch offri' al medico un curioso fenomeno da studiare; non sapeva piu' parlare in italiano: parlava tedesco.
Aprendo gli occhi insanguati, pieni di paura, contraendo quasi in un mezzo sorriso la sola guancia sinistra e aprendo alquanto la bocca da questo lato, dopo essersi piu' volte provato a snodar la lingua inceppata, alzo' la mano illesa verso il capo e balbetto', rivolto al medico: - Ih... ihr.. wie ein Faustschlag...
Il medico non comprese, e bisogno' che la sorella, mezzo istupidita dall'improvvisa sciagura, gli facesse da interprete.
Era divenuto tedesco a un tratto, Cristoforo Golisch: cioe', un altro; perche' tedesco veramente, lui, non era mai stato. Soffiata via, come niente, dal suo cervello ogni memoria della lingua italiana, anzi tutta quanta l'italianita' sua." ( ... while he was dining with his widowed sister and nephew, Cristoforo Golisch suddenly tumed up his eyes and twisted his mouth almost as if he were stifling a yawn; his head dropped to his breast and his face in his plate.
Just the lightest of touches had affected him, too.
"He immediately lost his ability lo speak, as well as one half of his body: the right.
"Cristoforo Golisch was born in Italy of German parents; he had never been to Germany, and spoke with the Roman dialect of a native Roman. For a good while his friends had also Italianised his surname by calling him Golicci, and his intimate friends even went so far as lo call him Golaccia (or "big throat") on account of the size of his stomach and his formidable appetite.
He occasionally exchanged some words of German but only with his sister, so that the others could not understand their talk.
"Anyway, after having struggled to recover his ability to speak over a period of a few hours, Cristoforo Golisch presented the doctor with a curious phenomenon to study: he no longer knew how lo speak Italian; he only spoke German.
"After having tried more than once to release his blocked tongue, he opened his bloodshot and fear-filled eyes, contracted his left cheek into what was almost a halfsmile, similarly opened just the left side of his mouth, raised his good hand to his head, turned to the doctor and stuttered:
"Ih.... ihr... wie ein Faustschlag...'
"The doctor did not understand and it was necessary for his sister, who was half-stupified by the sudden disaster, to act as interpreter.
"All of a sudden, Cristoforo Golisch had become a German: that is, somebody else - because German is something that he had never really been. His brain no longer held any trace of the Italian language or anything of his Italian nature; it had all simply been blown away as if it were nothing...".
"La toccatina" was published on 12 August 1906 in "Il Marzocco" (the rampant lion of Florence); it forms part of the "Novelle per un anno" ("Stories for a Year"), a work that plays a central role in Pirandello's literary output.
The general design of the collection is indicated by its title: it offers the reader one short story a day, without any pre-determined themes, theses to support or teachings to give. It simply tells of life as it passes, freely catching it in all of its unpredictable essence.
A life of which disease and death are an integral and unescapable part.
And so, the story "La mosca" (The Fly) refers to anthrax and, in "La morte addosso" (Death on Your Back'), the drama that causes the end of existence has "... un nome dolcissimo..., piu' dolce di una caramella: Epitelioma, si chiama... Pronunzii, pronunzii .... sentira' che dolcezza: epiteli-o-ma... La morte, capisce? E' passata. M'ha ficcato questo fiore in bocca e m'ha detto: 'Tienilo, caro: ripassero' tra otto dieci mesi!"... ("... the sweetest name..., sweeter than candy: it is called Epithelioma. Just say it, say it ... and you can hear its sweetness. E-pi-the-li-o-ma ... Death, you understand? It has just passed by. It stuck this flower in my mouth, saying 'Keep it, my dear: I'll be back this way in about eight or ten months' time!").
In "La toccatina", the disease takes on the typical appearance of polyglottal aphasia.
From the moment that Cristoforo Golisch is made aphasic by a stroke, he loses the ability to speak his acquired language and, as if all of his life's experience had been erased, goes back to stammering out the syllables of his native tongue: that German with which he had lost so rnuch contact that it seemed he could almost have forgotten it completely.





Polyglottal aphasia was first fully described in 1895 by Pitres, the first investigator who tried to define the altered mechanisms underlying the way in which such patients recover their ability to speak previously spoken languages.
He observed that polyglottal aphasia was an exception to Ribot's law concernine mnemonic (including linguistic) images, accordino to which "the new dies before the old".
Pitres found that polyglottal patients do not show any greater loss in their ability to speak the language learned at a later stage in their lives; nor, in the first instance, do they manifest any better preservation or greater recovery of their mother tongue. On the contrary, they tend to preserve better or recover first the use of the language that is more known and automatic, even if it was acquired as a second language.
It has more recently been observed that bilingual or polyglot patients with aphasia present approximately similar disturbances in relation to all of the languages they know, that the recovery of all of them takes place in more or less the same manner and that, for each individuai language, this recovery is proportional to the knowledge that they had of it before the occurrence of the stroke.
The exceptions to this rule are due to the fact that, in individuai patients, the recovery may be affected by a wide range of other factors, such as the clinical type of aphasia, the particular conversational circumstances, differences in the patients' social or affective situations, and the linguistic environment preceding and subsequent to the onset of aphasia itself.
Conclusions - None of which have anything to do with Pirandello.
The author was thirty-nine year old when the story was published, and the illness of his wife had certainly already obliged him to come into direct and personal contact with the neuropsychiatric environment of his time.
Technical analyses suggest that the writer was not describing an event that he had witnessed personally, but that he made us of what he knew of neurology in order to underline the strange and multiform nature of reality.
The fundamental theme of "La toccatina" is another: the ability of man to adjust to life and his desire to keep it within his grasp in any way possible.
Before being afflicted himself, Cristoforo Golisch had responded to the paralysis affecting a friend by saying: "Ah, si'? - diceva - Ti tocco e ti lascio? No, ah, no perdio! Io non mi riduco in quello stato! ... Mi sparo, m'ammazzo com'e' vero Dio! Questo spasso non te lo do." ("... 'Oh yes? he said. 'I touch you and leave you? No, by God no! You won't see me being reduced to such a state! ... I swear I'd shoot myself, I'd kill myself! I wouldn't give you that satisfaction ...").
And then it was his turn to confront the same situation, and he was in such a condition that: "... Chiamava Giovannino, il nipote, Ciofaio. E il nipote - scimunito!- ne rideva, come se lo zio lo chiamasse cosi' per ischerzo.
... Pareva un naufrago che si arrabattasse disperatamente per tenersi a galla, dopo essere stato tuffato e sommerso per un attimo eterno nella vita oscura, a lui ignota, della sua gente. E da questo tuffo, ecco, era balzato fuori un altro; ridivenuto bambino, a quarant'otto anni, e straniero.
E contentissimo era. Si', perche', proprio quel giorno aveva cominciato a muovere appena appena il braccio e la mano. La gamba no, ancora. Ma sentiva che forse il giorno dopo, con uno sforzo, sarebbe riuscito a muovere anche quella. Ci si provava anche adesso, ci si provava... e, no eh? non scorgevano alcun movimento gli amici?
- Tomai... tomai...
Ma si', domani, sicuro!"...
("... He called his nephew, Giovanni, 'Ciofaio'. And his nephew - little monkey! - laughed as if his uncle were calling him that for fun.
"... He seemed to be like somebody involved in a shipwreck, fighting desperately to keep himself afloat after having been tossed and submerged for a brief eternity inside what was to him the obscure and unknown life of his people.
And then it was someone else who surfaced; a forty-eight year old who had returned to being a child, a foreigner.
"And how happy he was. Yes! Because that very day, however slightly, he had begun to be able to move his arm and hand. His leg no, not yet. But he felt that perhaps, if he made an effort, he would also manage to nuove that on the following day. He was even trying now ... he tried ... but no, eh? His friends could not see any movement?
"'Tomai ... tomai...
"'Yes, of course! Tomorrow without a doubt!') ...
It is precisely this post-stroke behaviour of Cristoforo Golisch that reveals an aspect of the story that goes far beyond its deseription of the strangeness of aphasia in a polyglot.
The real theme is the capacity of man to adjust to the most difficult conditions in order to avoid being drowned in "an obscure life".
It is no surprise that one of the masterpieces of literature can contain such a complete representation of a sick man, his psychology, his ability to react or his self-abandonment.
There are no scientific means of measuring delight or suffering, just as there is no real way of measuring love or beauty; but if we allow ourselves to capture its essence at the right time, artistic expression can become a privileged means of understanding the human condition.

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