New Italian Women: A Collection of Short Fiction

by Anna Banti

  The boy soldier was looking at her. He knew that with the permit she would safely go ahead into the neutral zone. The other soldier outside the hut was checking and stamping the papers.

  A sign revealed that there had been a hotel here once; it was still there, though it wasn’t recognizable as one any longer. It was a dead place, and yet offices lived inside it, rooms received and sent news, papers and files piled up. Soldiers went in and out – they were so young that none of them stopped to think what sort of building it had once been.

  A few small plants tried to grow in between two stones by a window roughly walled up with heaped bricks and stones. The stones had been used to support a machine gun, and the house in front of it, which belonged to the other side, was pockmarked from the bursts: a face incurable from the smallpox caught when young, when the tissue is delicate and the infection leaves larger pits. The contaminated skin made the holes appear in relief. The sun was laying some reflections carefully on the ravaged surface and eating away its outline, while seeking the most visible parts and pausing on the edges where the virus had carved its mark. Rain had made the sound parts of the face flabby – the eyelids, which, by a special disposition of nature, were left untouched by the disease. The eyes under them were clearer, like those of sick people before they die, when they want to see a bit more before leaving life; they gaze at the way they will be going; perhaps someone behind their eyelids points it out to them. Who knows!

  Berlin is a non-stop construction site. A meaningless building race to decide who builds first and who does it higher and better.

  Budapesterstrasse is nothing like it used to be. Erika hated it at once. Years have gone by since the street was built, and the trees of nearby Tiergarten still claim space for their roots. After the war dust is all that is left of the garden the Elector wanted back in the eighteenth century; and yet, the plants have avenged themselves by mixing pollen and seeds in the air and by continuing to grow in the ancient design. Sometimes excavators dig up centuries-old roots clinging to one another like human bodies.

  When Erika passed by at midday there was already no through traffic. Cars were being diverted and people had stopped to watch others at work, as in the old days. It had happened just then, during the midday break. The huge drill had ceased to thrust its woodworm-like tool into the ground, and the crane was hanging halfway up in the air like an elephant’s trunk. A small boy had seen it first. Then, in a few minutes a youthful crowd had rushed there from the hotels in the skyscrapers, the doorways of the air-travel agencies, the automobile showrooms, the nearby Europa Center. At first people thought of a big accident, then of something funny: the zoo was close by and maybe one of the animals had come down toward the public without waiting for visitors to be attracted by the image carved in the pink stones of the entrance. But it was only the ancient roots, dark and twisted, as though the remains of Roman legions. “It’s an old story that roots look like bodies,” somebody said. “It’s nothing strange.” The crane kept silent, motionless in the air.

  The young people in jeans have gone back to the Europa Center; they tarry in front of the water clock and its glass pipe. Colored liquids flow through them marking a rhythm.

  The man began to tell a story long impressed in his memory, an old tale in the dead of the evening.

  “So our love began, on a day like many, in a season like any other. Seasons follow each other in a natural pattern, outside ourselves and our disorder. It was a month like any other. It was cool and raining. A love was born in a corner of wounded Europe. How can I describe Sophie and the way she loved? There was no one like her, she was unique. I didn’t care about her lunacy.... It might show up when her clear eyes darkened, and fear haunted her forehead, lining it with shadows. Her mouth went livid and phantoms shook her body. Then I could love her, make love to her as to no other woman. She embraced me tenderly, and when she held me tighter, I knew a fit was about to come. Still, could I help getting into her and touching her white body, her swelling breasts? I didn’t have to love her insane spells, I had to stay by her and wait for her orgasms to melt like snow. Everything was natural in her, a sweet fluid which lingers on the skin long after it is washed away. Sophie came to me, entered the room, and I no longer knew what went on outside. I listened to her voice, the words were like drops of an elixir deposited in my memory. I touched her hair and felt grass rustling on her skin; I caressed her neck and perceived her veins pulsing like a newly-hatched bird, unable to live without a warm nest. I half closed her eyelids and brushed the wings of swallows....

  “She had the strength of an angel, a golden quiver, and then icy cold. You know, she told me, an angel hindered Jacob from climbing the ladder, led Joseph and Peter beyond narrow destiny; it was an angel, too, who flew head-down over hosts and scattered them. Yes, she knew it, angels rise from the soul, and she would say over and over, their rustling wings suspend all memory.

  “She showed me an angel. It stood at the head of a bridge over the Elbe, as though set apart from a bygone migration. You see, she whispered, the water has offered the marble the majestic flow of its stream and the fear of its whirlpool....

  “Sophie used to talk to the angel,” he went on and his voice sounded like fluttering wings. “Angels herald messages and sometimes their sign chills, it can’t be avoided.... Yes, if only you knew how Sophie stared at the water.... It was an afternoon in spring, not long before, or a few days earlier, I don’t know: this is maybe the only detail I can’t remember so well. No,” he added, while touching his wrists and knee joints, “a few days earlier, now I remember, it’s just as if it were here and now.”

  “Sophie said,” he added almost coolly, “‘The river will turn into blood.’ When she said these words, I had the feeling I could make love to her no more, get into her. I don’t know why, but I suddenly realized her mind would never trace its way back to me, not even on reaching orgasm. ‘What did you say, Sophie?’ I asked, and that was one of the few times I questioned her, as a child speaks to a dumb toy. Her face was leaning against the window pane, only her forehead...her high and slightly curved forehead with bluish shades on her right temple. Again the light quiver of an angel vibrated in her, his crystal prophecy resounded. ‘Leonard,’ she called to me, ‘look over there at the river, our people will be there, they will cling to one another just like the clothes on the angel we love so much. The wind will roll them over, one over the other; their mouths will have no lips, they will be united in the abyss.’

  “Sophie’s madness had seen, her mind was shaping, something certain. Soon the angel’s voice would change into a blade that would come down as on the Assyrian camp before Jerusalem’s walls; sleep would turn into fire and then cold and silence.”

  Translated by Margherita Piva

  * * *

  The Mirrors

  by

  Elsa Morante

  Aracoeli. In the first years of our cohabitation, this name of hers, obviously, had a completely natural sound to me. But when we were taken, she and I, out into the world, I became aware that it set her apart from the other women in the city. In fact, the women of our acquaintance were called Anna, Paola, or Luisa, or in some cases Raimonda, Patrizia, Perla, or Camilla. “Aracoeli!” the ladies would cry. “What a lovely name! What a strange name!”

  I learned later that in Spain it is common to baptize girls with such names, even Latin ones, from the church or from the liturgy. Nevertheless, gradually, as I grew up, that name Aracoeli became stamped in my memory as a sign of distinction, a unique title: in which my mother remains separate and enclosed, as in a heavy tortile frame painted with gold.

  Perhaps this image of a frame comes to me from the mirror that did actually exist in our first, clandestine room, whence it then followed us into our new, legitimate house in the Heights. And there it stayed, in my parents’ bedroom, large and conspicuous in the center of the wall, until our financial collapse. After that I don’t know where it ended up, whether it was handed on to a relative or sol
d off with the rest of our furniture to some antique dealer or junk man. In all likelihood, however, it still exists, and survives the family that has vanished.

  Its face was shiny and of recent manufacture; but the frame, old and fading in its gilt, was of a majestic seventeenth-century style. That style contrasted with the very modern (then called rational) tone that prevailed in our house; and in fact, like the French carpet at its feet, and like a few other pieces scattered here and there, it had come, through Raimonda, from my paternal grandparents in Turin.

  According to some necromancers, mirrors are bottomless chasms, which swallow, but never devour, the lights of the past (and perhaps also of the future). Now, the very first posthumous view of myself, which serves as background for all of my years, appears to my memory (or perhaps pseudo-memory?) not directly, but reflected in that mirror, and enclosed by the well-known frame. Is it possible that it remained fixed there, in the subaqueous worlds of the mirror, to be returned to me today, its atoms reassembled, from the void? They say, in fact, that our recollections cannot go farther back than our second or third year; but that intact and almost immobile scene returns to me from an earlier time.

  In it you see, seated on a little armchair of yellow-gold plush (already known to me, familiar) a woman with an infant nursing at her breast. She is resting a bare foot on the bed; and on the floor, on the French carpet, there is an overturned slipper. I cannot clearly make out her dress (a long dressing gown, of a fuchsia color), but I recognize her way of opening its fastenings over her bosom, taking care to expose barely the tip of her breast, with a downright comical modesty: a mother who is modest even in front of her own puppy. We are, in fact, alone, the two of us, in the bedroom; and I am that infant with the little black head, who every so often raises his eyes to her.

  There. At this moment the mirror vanishes, with its frame. Now from that mirrored sight, which seemed painted, there approach me, growing in physical concreteness, the intimate details, as if the me of today had again the very pupils of that ecstatic little being clinging to the breast. Can this be one of my apocryphal memories? In its constant working, the restless machine of my brain is capable of manufacturing for me visionary reconstructions – at times as remote and fictitious as a fata morgana, and at times so close and possessive that I am incarnate in them. It happens, in any case, that some apocryphal memories later prove more true than the truth.

  And this is such a one. From the half-closed eyelids of the me of that time I see again her breast, bared and white, with its little blue veins and, around the nipple, a little halo of orange-pink color. The breast is round, not big but swollen; and often my little pawing hands seek it as I suck on it, encountering her hand which holds it out, revealing and covering it at the same time. Her hand, like her neck and face – later, with time, they paled – compared with the breast is of a much darker hue, and is short and stubby, the nails also stubby in their almost rectangular form. From some girlhood wound, the knuckles of the little finger and the ring finger have remained swollen and slightly misshapen.

  Her milk has a sweetish taste, tepid, like that of the tropical coconut just plucked from the palm. Every now and then, my enamored eyes are raised to thank her face, which bends, enamored, toward me, among the black, uneven bunches of curls that touch her shoulders (she never wanted to cut them; it was one of her disobediences).

  Her forehead is covered with curls down to her eyebrows. When she brushes her hair from her face, baring her brow, she acquires a different physiognomy, of strange intelligence and unaware, congenital melancholy. Otherwise, hers is the intact physiognomy of nature: between trust and defense, curiosity and peevishness. In her blood, all the same, there vibrates continually a delight, in the simple fact of being born.

  “Eyes like a starry night” seems a literary phrase. But I could think of no other way to describe her eyes. Their irises are black, and as I remember it, this black expands beyond the iris, in a tremor of tiny drops or glints. The eyes are big, somewhat oblong, the lower lid heavy, as in certain statues. The thick brows (only later would she learn to thin them with a razor) meet on her forehead, making a circumflex accent, giving her at times, when she looks down, a stern expression, dark and almost surly. The nose is well-shaped and straight, not whimsical. The outline of the face is a full oval, and the cheeks are still a bit plump, like a child’s.

  Even today I think that it would be difficult for nature, in all its variety, to produce a more beautiful face. And yet, if I hammer with special insistence at my memory – shouting to myself a uniqueness that cannot be repeated – there are certain irregularities and flaws in that face: the little scar from a burn on the chin; the too-small teeth, somewhat separated; the lower lip that juts below the upper, giving her, when serious, a suspended or interrogative air, and when smiling, a helpless or dazed quality. And similarly, of her body in those days, the first aspects revived for me, with irreparable affection, are a certain asymmetry, or clumsiness, even certain defects, not perceived by me at that time: the head perhaps too big for her thin shoulders; the stocky, rural legs, with their overdeveloped calves, in contrast with the still-frail arms and body; a certain awkwardness in her walk (especially when she practiced wearing high heels); and the short, broad feet, the toes uneven and a bit twisted, the toenails ill-formed. Even after she had borne me, her body remained almost virginal, with certain girlish angularities and the suspicious, gawky movements of an animal taken from its habitat.

  And then I look myself in the eyes. We rarely look into our own eyes, and apparently in some cases this amounts to an extreme exercise. They say that, plunging into our own eyes in the mirror – with crucial attention and at the same time with abandonment – we can discern in the depth of the pupil the ultimate Other, indeed the one and true Oneself, the center of every existence and of ours, in short that point that should bear the name God. Instead, in the watery puddle of my eyes I glimpse nothing but the little diluted (as if shipwrecked) shadow of that usual backward niño who vegetates, isolated, inside me. Unchanging, with his claim to love by now obsolete and useless, but obdurate to the point of indecency.

  El niñomadrero. The mama’s-boy fairy tale is stagnant, typical retrieval of a psychoanalytic session, or subject of an edifying pop song. Once upon a time there was a mirror where, looking at myself, I could fall in love with myself; it was your eyes, Aracoeli, that crowned me king of beauty in their little bewitched pools. And this was the mirage that you fabricated for me at the beginning, projecting it on all my future Saharas, beyond your horrors and your death. Your body has dissolved, with no eyes now or milk or menstruation or saliva. It has been rejected by space, is nothing but a base raving; whereas I survive, white-haired Narcissus who will not die, misled by your mirages. Surely it was you who forbade me girls as an adult, jealous of them because they were fresh and beautiful, while you were no more than a livid ghost. And you instilled in me your envy and voluptuousness, until I was made your cheap performer. You condemned me to mime your motherly role, flinging me into the pursuit of one beardless Narcissus after another, following the usual mirage of your betrayed little boy, what I had been. And so, I was surprised to find myself dazed, playing the doll, in imitation of you (had I not been your doll?); and poisoned forever by your milk, I humiliated myself in maniacal imploration, I prostrated myself, I moaned. Jester, thanks to your ghostly game, to the little nighttime toughs of the streets, subject to their mockery, disgust, blackmail, blows, and lynching. If you had at least given birth to me among them, one of their class. Instead you made me a bourgeois, which today means lackey.

  And now, where are you taking me? Perhaps El Almendral doesn’t exist. It is one of your conspiracies to set me on false trails, after having deceived me as a child. Now you have slipped away like a thief; and I find myself here, alone and naked, before this ropero de luz – espejo de cuerpo entero, which quite unceremoniously flings into my face my real form. And who would not be disgusted by this monkey, when I disgust myself
first of all?

  Every creature on earth offers himself. Pathetic, ingenuous, he offers himself: “I am born! Here I am! with this face, this body, and this smell. Do I appeal to you? Do you want me?” From Napoleon to Lenin and Stalin, to the last streetwalker, to the mongoloid child, to Greta Garbo and Picasso and the stray dog, this in reality is the one perpetual question of every living being to the other living beings: “Do I seem beautiful to you? I, who to her seemed the most beautiful?” And each one then takes to displaying his own beauties; whence our desperate vanities are explained: The publicity ravings of starlets, and the grimaces of generalissimos, and powers, and finance, and kamikazes and mountain-climbers and tightrope-walkers; and every achievement, every record (“For her I was the most beautiful of all”). Orphans, never weaned, all living creatures suggest themselves, like people of the street, at another’s signal of love. A crown or a title or applause or a curse or alms or a piece of trade. You pay me, and so you accept my body. You kill me, and so you damn yourself for me.

  Always for the same demand, or boast, or claim, we hand ourselves over to the slaughter and to the cross and to sadism and algolagnia, to looting and rubble. No one can elude the birth-sentence, which tears you from the uterus and at the same time glues you to the nipple. And who, once housed in that nest and nourished by that free fruit, can adapt himself to the common territory, where you have to fight for any food and any shelter? Accustomed to an enchanting fusion, believing it eternal, and certain of a joyous gratitude for his own ingenuous offer, the beginner will blanch, amazed, at his encounter with alienness and terrestrial indifference; and then he will turn into brute or servant. Even stray animals seek, more than food, caresses, spoiled, even they, by the mother who licked them as cubs day and night, above and below. For her teat and her tongue, no merits were required. Nor was adornment needed to appeal to her.