Cruelty, Fear, and Bureaucratic Conscience in Dino Buzzati’s “Una cosa che comincia per elle”

 

🪶 Introductory Note to the Reader      I bumped into Dino Buzzati’s short story “Una cosa che comincia per elle” by mere chance, not because I was looking for it, but probably because it was time to read some more modern literature from Italy beyond Dante Alighieri.      What I found was not just a story, but a quiet moral earthquake. After finishing it, I had the unsettling sensation that there was something morally rotten within it, a discomfort that lingered for days. This unease compelled me to dissect the story, to understand the roots of that gut feeling I had toward its plot and its three haunting figures: Cristoforo Schroder, Dr. Lugosi, and Don Valerio Melito.      What started as mere curiosity evolved into a reflection on power, fear, and the tragic ease with which morality collapses under the weight of authority. The essay that follows is both my analysis and my attempt to make peace with that moral disquiet.

Cruelty, Fear, and Bureaucratic Conscience in Dino Buzzati’s “Una cosa che comincia per elle”

Introduction

Dino Buzzati’s “Una cosa che comincia per elle” (A thing that begins with L) presents a chilling moral allegory about power, fear, and human cruelty. Through the characters of Cristoforo Schroder, Dr. Lugosi, and Don Valerio Melito, Buzzati exposes how social hierarchies and moral cowardice deform human relationships when confronted with contagion, both literal and symbolic. The intention of my essay is to analyze the three figures following the structure of a Character Analysis Worksheet I created for my literature classes at the university where I work and to integrate critical interpretations from modern Italian literary scholarship. The annex at the end of this paper details the physical, social, and psychological profiles and objectives of each character, demonstrating how Buzzati constructs a moral fable that remains profoundly relevant in discussions of authority and exclusion.

Cristoforo Schroder: The Self-Made Man Undone by Fear

Cristoforo Schroder, a middle-aged timber merchant, embodies the rational self-assurance of the bourgeois man in early twentieth-century Italy. Physically robust, confident, and accustomed to comfort, his health initially falters in a minor way, a prelude to moral collapse. He dresses with care but also with the practicality of a tradesman who measures worth in material success. His profession situates him within the upper-middle class, a man respected for his wealth but not for compassion. Educated through commerce rather than culture, Schroder treats human interaction as transaction; his sense of class privilege gives him authority even over those he barely knows. Within the community, he represents efficiency and self-sufficiency, visiting Sisto as part of routine business. His leisure is limited to the self-satisfaction of routine prosperity, Buzzati’s subtle critique of bourgeois inertia (Keon, 2004).

Psychologically, Schroder is confident yet morally impoverished. His moral standard is utilitarian: “good deeds are measured by cost.” He pays the “poor devil” two lire and considers his conscience clear. His philosophy of life values control, productivity, and measurable reward, while his ambition is to remain a successful, self-reliant man untouched by misfortune or unseen events. Disappointment comes only when that self-image is fractured by public humiliation in the hand of Valerio Melito. His chief complex lies in fearing dependency and loss of respectability. His ability to adapt, evident in his swift, businesslike application of the leeches, contrasts with his total inability to adapt to disgrace, something he has to undergo at the end of the short story. Peculiarly proud of competence but ignorant of empathy, Schroder symbolizes what Moravia (1968) called “la disumanizzazione dell’uomo borghese” (the dehumanization of the bourgeois spirit). His ultimate objective, the preservation of autonomy and dignity, collapses the moment society marks him as impure due to leper. Schroder’s downfall is not his contact with leprosy but his inability to imagine solidarity beyond the self.

Dr. Lugosi: The Physician as Cowardly Bureaucrat

Dr. Lugosi, an aging country doctor, probably better of than other people in the town, serves as the moral intermediary in Buzzati’s parable. Physically, he is frail and habitually cautious, a man whose body mirrors his reluctance to act. His clothing, professional but worn, denotes both respectability and fatigue. Socially, he belongs to the educated middle class, respected but dependent on patronage from men like Schroder or officials like Don Valerio. His profession gives him access to truth; he knows disease but not the moral courage to defend it. His role in the community is that of a mediator between the sick and the healthy, yet he functions more as an agent of institutional order than of healing. His amusements are minimal, perhaps limited to social politeness and gossip.

Internally, Dr. Lugosi is governed by fear and conformity. His moral standards center on discretion rather than justice; he avoids conflict even at the cost of integrity. His philosophy of life prioritizes self-preservation: to remain useful, compliant, and respected. His ambition, to maintain his reputation as a competent doctor, is modest but absolute. His disappointment lies in realizing his impotence before the system he serves and that he dares not to oppose. His complex is one of dependency on authority; he prefers complicity to moral isolation. His ability lies in observation and procedure, yet his peculiarity is his aversion to direct confrontation, symbolized by his inability to touch leeches, a grotesque parallel to his aversion to suffering. As Moser (2010) notes, Buzzati’s postwar fiction often portrays “the functionary as both victim and perpetrator of fear,” and Dr. Lugosi epitomizes this duality. His objective is to avoid scandal and preserve the appearance of normalcy, but this objective turns him into an accomplice of institutional and systematic cruelty. Dr. Lugosi’s moral paralysis, his whispered “It was an accident!”, is not redemption but self-justification.

Don Valerio Melito: The Magistrate as Moral Executioner

Don Valerio Melito enters the story as a jovial acquaintance but emerges as the embodiment of bureaucratic sadism and social cruelty. Physically, he is ruddy-faced, thick-set, and coarse; his ample cloak conceals both a pistol and a moral void. His clothing and weapon are props of state power, signs of official legitimacy and latent violence. Socially, Melito is an upper-class official, educated and secure in his authority as alcade, the local magistrate. Within the community, he represents law and order, though his demeanor borders on vulgarity, suggesting the corruption of moral and civic ideals. His amusements lie in control and intimidation; he enjoys the theatricality of punishment, something that is quite notorious when addressing Cristoforo Schroder.

Psychologically, Melito’s moral standard, if that can be labeled like that, rests on perverted duty. He convinces himself that purging contamination protects society, transforming cruelty into civic virtue. His philosophy values order over empathy, law over conscience. His ambitions are rooted in dominance and the maintenance of social hierarchy; his disappointment is the absence of recognition or gratitude for his “service.” His complex lies in the projection of his own insecurity onto others: he eradicates what he secretly fears within himself, impurity, weakness, moral decay. His ability lies in manipulation, rhetoric, and coercion; his peculiarity is his relish for public humiliation, evident when he forces Cristoforo Schroder to wear and ring the bell. As Keon (2004) observes, Buzzati’s officials are “not monsters by nature but by function”, a chilling insight into Melito’s psychology. His objective is absolute control, his will unyielding. The magistrate is not merely the enforcer of law but the dramaturge of shame, orchestrating a ritual that reaffirms his power through another’s degradation.

Conclusion

Together, Schroder, Lugosi, and Melito form a tragic triad of moral failure. Schroder represents egocentric individualism; Lugosi, bureaucratic cowardice; and Melito, institutional cruelty. Each reveals a different response to fear: denial, submission, and domination. Their convergence produces what Barthes (1972) would call a “mythology of contamination”, a social narrative in which purity is maintained only through spectacle and exclusion. The bell Schroder is forced to ring becomes a symbol of civilization’s complicity in its own dehumanization. Buzzati thus portrays not only one man’s condemnation but society’s ritual need to condemn, to define itself against the outcast. The story ends with Schroder’s bell ringing “den, den,” its sound both pure and accusatory, a reminder that, in Buzzati’s moral universe, those who enforce purity are the most contaminated of all.

📚 References

Barthes, R. (1972). Mythologies. Hill and Wang.
Buzzati, D. (1966). Una cosa che comincia per elle. In Sessanta racconti. Milano: Mondadori.
Keon, P. (2004). The moral parables of Dino Buzzati. University of Toronto Press.
Moravia, A. (1968). L’uomo come fine. Bompiani.
Moser, K. (2010). Fear and bureaucracy in postwar Italian fiction. Modern Language Review, 105(3), 650–668.
[Character Analysis Worksheet]. (n.d.). Unpublished instructional material.

Some creative writing in a drama-like style to explore the story beyond the surface

Dialogue: The Witness Narrator and Don Valerio Melito
Setting: A desolate courtroom in Sisto, years later. The narrator, representing the collective conscience of the story, confronts Don Valerio Melito, now aged and weary.
WN:	Don Valerio, it’s been years since that morning at the inn. People still whisper about the merchant with the bell. Do you ever think of him?
Melito:	(sighs) The law doesn’t allow sentiment. My duty was clear. He was a leper.
WN:	Was he? Or did you need him to be? The doctor was uncertain. You decided before the truth arrived.
Melito:	In doubt, one must act for the safety of all. Fear spreads faster than disease. If I had hesitated, the town would have turned on itself.
WN:	Yet it was you who made them turn on him. You watched as they drew back while he crossed the square.
Melito:	Order requires example. Without the spectacle, no one learns. The bell warned them, protected them.
WN:	Or entertained you? You smiled when he trembled. You mocked him as “a fine leper.” What kind of justice laughs at its own sentence?
Melito:	(voice hardens) Justice must be feared to be believed. If pity governed us, every contagion would triumph.
WN:	Then you believe compassion is weakness.
Melito:	Compassion breeds anarchy. The strong must shield the weak, even from their own sympathy.
WN:	You speak like a priest of fear. But tell me, when you sleep, do you still hear the bell?
Melito:	(pause) I do. Not always. Sometimes it stops just before dawn. Then starts again, softer. You wouldn’t understand; the sound is clean. It absolves me.
WN:	Absolution doesn’t come from noise, Don Valerio. It comes from repentance.
Melito:	(bitterly) And who would forgive the judge? The law doesn’t forgive; it only ends cases.
WN:	But this case never ended. Schroder’s bell still echoes in the square, though the cobblestones have been replaced. Children play where he walked. None know his name, but the air remembers. And so do you.
Melito:	(defeated) I thought I served the state. I see now I served my fear. The bell was not his; it was mine. Each ring announced my cowardice.
WN:	Then perhaps you are finally cured, not of leprosy, but of blindness. Tell me, if you could relive that morning, what would you do?
Melito:	(after a long silence) I would let him wash. Feed him. Sit beside him. Even if it killed me.
WN:	Then the sound you hear is not a curse, but a call, to remember what men become when they mistake obedience for virtue.
(The magistrate lowers his head. The narrator turns toward the open window. Outside, a faint bell rings once, clear, distant, almost merciful.)

Short Story: Something Beginning with ‘L’ by Dino Buzzati

Reader’s Handout - Dino Buzzati’s “A Thing That Begins with L”