New Italian Women: A Collection of Short Fiction

by Anna Banti

  Your son Alberico came here once. But afterwards so many things happened that I forgot to tell you about it. I don’t know if I like this son of yours. I don’t understand him very well. He gave his name to that girl’s baby. Of course he did it to be the opposite of you, to be what you don’t want to be, the father of a child coming into the world.

  Send me your news. And tell me what’s happening to you. Let me know if you’re still sleeping in the room with the bear cubs.

  Lucrezia

  *

  Giuseppe to Lucrezia

  Princeton, 4th August

  Dear Lucrezia,

  Your letter moved me a great deal, so much so that I couldn’t work for the whole day. You know I’m writing a novel, I think I’ve mentioned it to you. Your letter got so tangled up with my thoughts that I couldn’t free myself from it, and I found your face and your voice everywhere inside me. I didn’t answer immediately. I let a few days pass, because it upset me to answer you.

  You are in love with Ignazio Fegiz, or with I.F. as you call him. This should not mean anything to me, or rather it should please me, because falling in love is a splendid thing and because a person is pleased if something splendid happens to someone he is fond of. Instead, I felt uneasy as I read your letter. You want to leave Piero and go and live with I.F. and take your children with you. You tend to think of your children as if they were furniture or luggage. Besides, there are five of them, not just one. If there were one you could put everything into reassuring him. But it’s not easy to reassure five children. And for I.F., too, five children is not going to be a small undertaking. You say that “he’s not afraid of anything.” As for yourself I have to tell you that at the very least I think you are being reckless. And I have to think the same about him.

  What you say about us, about you and me, “our adultery was a bloodless affair,” seems ridiculous to me. No adultery is bloodless. And then according to you we have had a son together. I don’t think that’s true, but if it is true our adultery was not a bloodless affair. Children are blood, and they are born surrounded by blood.

  I felt there was something lurking behind your whole letter, something that hurt me deeply, an obscure desire to compare I.F. and me with each other, and to see me as someone inferior, less noble, less valued. Your dogs barked for him. The coatstand fell down for him. Then you say that he is about the same height as you. You know very well that I hardly come up to your shoulders, and that this always upset me.

  You say “I got on with you well enough, I felt happy enough, it was all on the level of enough.” How nasty you can be. How cruel. You know how to make someone suffer. I don’t believe that you don’t know.

  As for your dithyrambs about our friendship, I have to tell you that I find them hard to believe, and so I don’t know how to respond to them. Real friendship does not scratch and bite, and your letter scratched and bit me.

  What shall I tell you about myself. I get along well. Well enough. On the level of enough, of course. I’m content. The school is closed at the moment. I’m on holiday. I start again in September. I’m writing my novel. Anne Marie gets back from the Institute around six in the evening. I watch her while she’s making the dinner, a complicated dinner, big rissoles that have to be cooked slowly, with carrots and stock, soups made with beetroot and cream. Russian dishes that I’ve learnt to love. Anne Marie had a Russian grandmother. We say very little. Anne Marie is someone who says very little, and always in a low voice, and I like that. I find it restful to live with someone who weighs her words, who speaks sparingly and judiciously. Anne Marie smiles all the time and I have learnt to smile all the time too while she is there. Sometimes my mouth is a little tired with the effort of all that smiling. But I think that little by little we shall finally stop smiling.

  No, I don’t sleep in the room with the bear cubs. I sleep upstairs. But I don’t sleep with Anne Marie, if that’s what you want to know.

  Giuseppe

  *

  Piero to Giuseppe

  Monte Fermo, 25th August

  Dear Giuseppe,

  I haven’t had any reply to a letter I wrote you about two months ago. Perhaps you didn’t receive it, or perhaps you didn’t think it necessary to answer me. The latter seems more likely to me. At the moment I tend to think no one can be bothered with me.

  Lucrezia has gone. I don’t know where she’s gone, she didn’t tell me. I’m alone in this house which I loved so much, and which I now hate. My mother and children are away. I don’t know where Lucrezia is. It’s terrible to think about someone all the time and not know where she is. She just jumped into her Volkswagen one morning. I saw her swimming flippers sticking out of her bag. I asked her where she was going and she said she didn’t know. She said she would phone me. I asked her if she had enough money and she said she had. It’s been eight days now and she hasn’t phoned yet.

  I get in my car every morning and go to Perugia. I haven’t got anything to do at the office but I go there just the same. At least it’s air-conditioned there. Doctor Corsi is on holiday and so are both our secretaries. I eat in a little café nearby. This is what my life is going to be like when Lucrezia has gone for good.

  She told me she would take the children with her. I told her I would never allow her to. This isn’t true, I know very well that she will do whatever she’s decided on. She has a strong character. I’m a weak person. I’ve trailed this feeling of being weak around with me since I was a child. She will give me the children one day a week and for a month in the summer. It happens like this for lots of people, lots of men. Normally when a marriage goes to pieces the women take the children. In the summer the children will be with me. I won’t know what to say to them, because you don’t know what to say to children when they’re with you for one month a year. There are too many things you want to tell them, and they stick in your throat. I think that during that month one would try and be as kind and easygoing as possible so that they will love you and have good memories of you throughout the winter. I think that this effort to be kind and easygoing with your own children must be very exhausting. And it must be something that makes you feel contemptible. And then it’s a mistake because children don’t like an easygoing atmosphere. They like to have strict, authoritative people around them. People suspect it’s a mistake, but they do it anyway. That’s what I shall do too.

  You had a long relationship lasting several years with Lucrezia. This will seem strange to you, but it never upset me. I stayed calm. I knew that we weren’t going to be hurt by it. You’re not someone who hurts people, you are someone who is careful not to hurt people as he goes by, not to trample on or destroy anything. You and I are birds of a feather. You are one of those who always loses.

  I realize that I’ve written without giving you any explanation, as if you already knew everything. But I imagine that Lucrezia has already told you. We have decided to separate. Or rather, she has decided. I haven’t decided anything. I bowed my head and accepted.

  My mother will come back in a few days. She and I will be alone. The children are all at Forte dei Marmi at the moment, with my sister. My mother doesn’t know anything. I shall have to tell her and I dread it. She will cry, she’ll be full of pity for me and it’s very difficult to put up with pity from one’s parents. It’s much easier to put up with pity from one’s children. Goodness knows why.

  My mother will cry. I shall have to comfort her. I shall have to tell her that I’m all right. Reasonably all right. I shall have to tell her that these things often happen.

  I’m always thinking of you.

  Yours,

  Piero

  *

  Giuseppe to Piero

  Princeton, 30th August

  Dear Piero,

  I had heard what you wrote to me from Lucrezia.

  I did get your other letter. I didn’t reply not because I didn’t think it necessary to answer you, but because I found it difficult to do so, as I had sensed from a distance things that you didn’t
mention, and as I had had letters from Lucrezia that said everything.

  Even now it’s not easy for me to write to you and tell you what I went through as I read your last letter. It isn’t easy to tell you how close I feel to you in this disaster that’s overtaken you. I think of it as a disaster for both of you, even though only you are suffering at the moment, and she perhaps is happy, or thinks she is.

  I’m sorry not to be with you at Monte Fermo, not to go for walks with you in the woods and over the little hills there as we have done so many times. You know that you have a loyal friend in me, even though in the past I betrayed you – though we stayed friends – in the way you know about. It’s not that I’m someone who is careful not to hurt anyone as he goes by, not to trample on or destroy things. It’s not true. I have destroyed and trampled underfoot a great many things that were in my way. In fact when I get up in the morning I find in myself a deep disgust for what I am, for my feet in their slippers, for my sad face in the mirror, for my clothes draped over the chair. As the day goes on this disgust becomes gradually more and more stifling.

  As you know I’m not returning to Italy for the moment. I’m writing a novel and I want to finish it. Besides, I have a relationship here with someone, a strange relationship that’s quite different from all the others I’ve previously had with women. It’s a woman I’m talking about. It’s Anne Marie, my brother’s widow. My brother was very fond of her and for this reason I am very fond of her. But she and I don’t talk to each other, or we say very little. It’s a relationship of smiles and murmurs. It’s a relationship that seems calm, but inwardly it is shaken by continual shocks.

  I too am always thinking of you.

  Yours,

  Giuseppe

  *

  Translated by Dick Davis

  * * *

  The French Teacher

  by

  Geda Jacolutti

  Ne jetez aucun object par la fênetre.

  Do not throw anything out of the window.

  In junior high school all my classmates were in love with the French teacher.

  At that time refined and vampish men were the fashion and our French teacher interpreted the type with a lavish style and a little disengagé. In class the girls watched him in fascination, madness. I observed the desk and the actor who rested his moist, pseudo-distracted look upon us from the platform and, annoyed at seeing how the others admired him, I found it easier to play the insolent student. He spoke slowly, in a nasal voice, putting out his half-smoked cigarette before beginning to read a poet, and from time to time interrupting his reading to make some ironic or sentimental comment. The girls gazed at his eyes and hair and whispered “a mouth to bite” among themselves, according to the manner of that age. I chose the moment of highest enchantment to act: I let a dictionary crash to the floor with a calculated clatter and responded with dry provocation to the rebuke from the desk.

  Ganeglio jumped and turned excitedly to look at me. She was the most inflamed of the enamored group and spent the hour trying to find a pretext to go up to his desk or start a conversation, and she was even willing to be questioned without being prepared.

  One day she was hanging around near his desk when the teacher began to ask her questions about the lesson. Ganeglio, who studied very little, didn’t even try to answer, and began looking at him with mischievous eyes, but he was insistent. So she leaned against the wall, and with her eyes closed she sighed. Then in submissive tones she breathed, “Professor, leave me alone,” amid the snickers of the boys and to the embarrassment of her companions who were ashamed for her.

  Anyway Ganeglio was very provocative and broad-minded. She was a skater and wore very short skirts, but she was also a practicing Catholic who often went to confession, describing to the confessor the type of kisses she had received from her fiancé (there seemed to be three different categories involved and one had to pay close attention to what was permitted and what was not). The next day between classes she would avidly tell us all the details of her confession.

  I couldn’t listen to her; I would have burst into childish laughter, but I was no longer the age for that, so I would just return home in a fury.

  In the afternoons I spent hours translating Greek and Latin with ritualistic persistence. I relished my severe aloneness, and modelled my will on the lives of illustrious men. Casual glances at the mirror reflected the image of a too thin face with heavy, smoothly-combed braids. The sternness of that face made me proud. And yet I sometimes surprised myself when, looking out the window at the sky broken by chimney tops, a dizzy void would suddenly open up in my heart. Then it was as if my future life fell unknown and fearful upon me; and when my mother’s voice called me to supper, I would start with the sensation of having been caught crossing a forbidden boundary.

  It happened one morning during recess when we were in high school. The halls were crowded as usual and swarming with the many troops of boys running around, cutting up and laughing boisterously.

  We girls were chatting as we leaned against a radiator in front of a locker room, a place we considered our territory for our own uninterrupted use. It was then I saw the French teacher cross the hall calmly and quietly in the midst of the uproar of those awkward adolescents, and I realized I hadn’t seen him for months, not since I had graduated from junior high school. Released from the conventional role that we had assigned him, he looked for a moment like a stranger, and at the same time he seemed an old friend who had for years taught me to read and study with a taste both sharp and a bit nonchalant.

  An old friend, now I saw it clearly, and I also clearly saw his age. He was a little bent and seemed tired, and that silent and courteous passage suddenly put him in a generation far removed from mine. I felt a sharp pain together with guilt for having caught those signs of aging by surprise.

  That pain returned to bother me later, when I realized that I was thinking about him, and curious about what was happening to me I began to reflect upon myself, upon my soul. Inadvertently I was opening the door to a sickness of the imagination (even now I cannot call it sentiment), to a sickness that was to condition my life and my choices for many years.

  During the day my actions, interests, conversation, were completely like those of my contemporaries: the new dress, the tennis game, school work, but in the evenings I filled the pages of my diary well into the night. My desires were naive and literary and the model for them was derived from famous examples, but the hold that that feeling had on me sprang from a kind of intellectual intensity that grew in strength as I continued writing, and from an exercise of concentration that made everything inside and outside me real and new.

  All I ever dreamed of was a contemplative life where I was the anchorite and he the object of adoration. His handwriting discovered in an old notebook acquired the power of a talisman from which inexhaustible images, situations, traces of memory emanated. But I know for certain that I never thought of that sentiment as an attainable project; there was only one thing I was unable to accept: that that fervor could, with the passage of time, be extinguished in me; it would have been like accepting the loss of a part of my soul.

  Besides, nearly all the young men of my own age seemed clumsy and unkempt, and I didn’t understand how anyone could like them. I thought that only in the tranquil fullness of maturity was it possible to be in “control of the situation,” and therefore among my contemporaries I was only interested in those who made a pretense of being mature, sophisticated, skeptical – the exact opposite of what I really wanted. I didn’t know then that men seldom reached a tranquil maturity, and I took it for granted that the French teacher had.

  But the reason for that, which I certainly did not know at the time (knowing too little about psychology), was perhaps because he was exactly the age of my father.

  And so for many years he was my standard of reference. Even when I had finished high school and the opportunities for meeting the French teacher had become rarer (and by now that love was only a
memory), I realized that my feelings continued to be due to a kind of forced concentration, on a comparison – not with him, his person or qualities, but with the feeling I had had for him. It seemed to me that without that absolute no feeling could be guaranteed as genuine, and a feeling didn’t deserve to be experienced if it wasn’t assuredly genuine.

  For a good part of my life the desire for love was marked by perplexity, and if that often saved me from disappointments, giving me a kind of consolation at the conclusion of every affair, it also resulted in a discontent with myself, as though I were maimed and incapable of living fully.

  But above all, behind those early fantasies I could see openly revealed the insufficiency of reality and the transforming, hypnotic power of the imagination. I wanted to overcome such a state of indecision and subjection, but only much later was I able to, and with much suffering.

  When I encountered the French teacher for the last time (il était très âgé), he must have been truly old, and yet his style and figure canceled the disagreeable effect of old age.

  He was very happy to see me, and we sat at an open air cafe under the trees: the sun was reflected in the glasses and some children were running around and shouting, but his whole person was still wrapped in silence. Then his voice took me back to my adolescence, and for a moment it was as though I heard him call on me from his desk. I noticed that he addressed me by my surname, as he had in class, and I was moved by the affection I sensed in his tone.

  I told him that I had been thinking of him the past few days because I was re-reading Stendhal and I remembered how much he loved him, and after all, what I knew I had learned from him.