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Who Pays for Paradise?
Pirandello and the Soul Squatters Riot
Pirandello’s novella “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine!” (1913) stages a dispute between the Baron of Màrgari and a community of peasants who have lived for sixty years, some three generations, on one of his estates. There they have built first their houses and then even a church, all without permission and without paying their lord any dues, while the baron lays claim to a noble title that has long since lapsed. The pretext for the legal quarrel is the burial of the village’s old patriarch, the man who half a century earlier raised the first illegal hut at the top of the hill and who now, on his deathbed, asks to rest in that soil. What he wants, in short, is the right to be buried on the spot, something never allowed until then, since the settlement is unlawful. Coffins had to be hauled for miles on muleback, at the risk of tumbling down the ravines. The baron refuses to allow a cemetery, which in time would cost him still more land beyond what the peasants’ houses and the house of God have already taken from him. The prosecutor’s office sides with him, and the affair ends in defeat for the peasants, who are forced to carry off their dying man while carabinieri stand guard day and night over the empty grave.
In 1984 the Taviani brothers adapted the novella as one of the episodes of Kaos, a work highly regarded…
