The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  A kinder fate lay in store for those who died, one in the naval battle of Lissa. He was the eldest son, the one you thought resembled a David sculpted in bronze, as he stood there clutching his harpoon with the light from the flame of the lanterns playing about his features. Big and tall as he was, he too glowed with pleasure whenever you darted your brazen eyes in his direction. But he died a good sailor, standing firm at the rigging of the yardarm, raising his cap in the air and saluting the flag for the last time with the primitive shout of the islander bred and born. The other man, the one who was too timid to touch your foot on the island to free it from the rabbit trap where you got it caught in that heedless way of yours, was lost on a dark winter’s night, alone at sea amid the raging foam, when between his boat and the shore – where his loved ones awaited his return, rushing here and there as though possessed – there lay sixty miles of storm and darkness. You would never have guessed the amount of sheer dauntless courage that man was capable of, who allowed himself to be overawed by the handiwork of your shoemaker.

  The ones who are dead are better off. They are not eating ‘the king’s bread’, like the poor devil locked up on Pantelleria, or the kind of bread his sister is eating, nor do they go around like the woman with the oranges, living on the charity of God, which doesn’t flow too freely in Aci Trezza. At least the dead need nothing any more! That’s what the son of the woman who keeps the tavern said, the last time he went to the hospital to enquire about the old man and smuggle in some of those stuffed snails that are so good to suck for anyone who has no teeth, and he found the bed empty, with the blankets neatly folded upon it. He crept out into the hospital yard and planted himself at a door with a lot of wastepaper piled up against it, and through the keyhole he spied a large empty room, hollow-sounding and icy even in summer, and the end of a long marble table, with a thick, starched sheet draped over it. And thinking to himself that the ones inside no longer needed anything, and the snails were of no use to them any more, he began to suck them one after the other to pass away the time. It will comfort you to think, as you hug your blue fox muff to your bosom, that you gave a hundred lire to the poor old fellow.

  Those village kids who followed you like stray dogs and raided the oranges are still there. They are still buzzing round the beggarwoman, pawing at her clothes as though she’s hiding a crust of bread, picking up cabbage stalks, orange peel and cigar stubs, all the things thrown away in the street but obviously still having some value because the poor live on them. They live so well on them, in fact, that those starving, blown-out ragamuffins will grow up in the mud and the dust of the street, and turn out big and strong like their fathers and grandfathers. Then they in turn will populate Aci Trezza with more ragamuffins, who will cling on to life as long as they can by the skin of their teeth, like that old grandfather, wanting nothing else but simply praying to God they will close their eyes in the place where they opened them, attended by the village doctor who goes round every day on his donkey, like Jesus, to succour the departing ones.

  ‘The ambition of the oyster!’ you may say. Exactly, and the only reason we find it absurd is that we were not born oysters ourselves.

  But in any case, the tenacious clinging of those poor souls to the rock on to which fortune decreed they should fall, as it scattered princes here and duchesses there, their brave resignation to a life full of hardships, their religion of the family, reflected in their work, their homes and the walls that surround them, seem to me, for the time being at any rate, deeply serious and worthy of respect. It seems to me that the anxieties of our wandering thoughts would find sweet solace in the tranquil calm of those simple, uncomplicated feelings that are handed down, serene and unchanging, from one generation to the next. It seems to me that I could watch you passing by, to the sound of your horses’ trotting hooves and the merry jingling of their brasses, and greet you without a care in the world.

  Perhaps because I have tried too hard to penetrate the whirlwind that surrounds and pursues you, I have now learned to understand the inevitable need for that solid, mutual affection among the weak, for the instinct of the underprivileged to cling to one another to survive the storms of their existence, and I have tried to unravel the humble, undiscovered drama that has dispersed to the four winds its plebeian actors whom we once got to know together. The drama of which I speak, which perhaps one day I shall unfold to you in its entirety, would seem to me to depend essentially on this: that whenever one of the underprivileged, being either weaker, or less cautious, or more selfish than the others, decided to break with his family out of a desire for the unknown, or an urge for a better life, or curiosity to know the world, then the world, like the voracious fish that it is, swallowed him up along with his nearest and dearest. From this point of view you will see that the drama is not without interest. The main concern of oysters must be to protect themselves from the snares of the lobster, or the knife of the diver that prises them from the rock.

  ‘Fantasticheria’

  First published in the weekly magazine Il fanfulla della Domenica (14 March 1880), and, in the same year, in the collection Vita dei campi (Treves).

  Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

  1896–1957

  Tomasi di Lampedusa, born in Palermo, was a learned prince, and his literary legacy remains a cause-célèbre. His most celebrated published work was composed within the two years leading up to his death, including the novel, Il gattopardo (The Leopard), feverishly written between 1955 and 1956, only to be rejected by various publishers, including Vittorini, who didn’t think it was the right fit for his Gettoni series. It was another writer, Giorgio Bassani – having received a partial manuscript from the writer Elena Croce, daughter of the famous philosopher – who travelled to Palermo the year after Tomasi di Lampedusa’s death, obtained his papers from his Latvian widow and quickly published Il gattopardo. An engrossing historical and psychological novel about the decline of the Sicilian aristocracy as Italy moved towards unification, it sold over three million copies, was translated into twenty-seven languages, and was turned, in 1963, into a film by Luchino Visconti. In addition to Il gattopardo, Tomasi di Lampedusa had also left behind critical essays and a few short stories, including this one, unquestionably his most powerful. A story within a story, everything about it is doubled: it contains two narrative planes, two central protagonists, two settings, two tonal registers, two points of view. There are even two titles; though published as ‘La Sirena’ (‘The Siren’), it was originally called ‘Lighea’, (the title provided by the author’s wife), which refers to the name of the siren at the heart of this mysterious tale. Fusing elements at once carnal and intellectual, both pagan and modern, it is a story about the revitalizing and transformative things that can happen while learning another language – in this case, Ancient Greek. Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote it in the final months of his life, with certain knowledge of his imminent death from lung cancer.

  The Siren

  Translated by Stephen Twilley

  Late in the autumn of 1938 I came down with a severe case of misanthropy. I was living in Turin at the time, and my local girl no. 1, rifling my pockets in search of a spare fifty-lire note as I slept, had also discovered a short letter from girl no. 2. Spelling mistakes notwithstanding, it left no room for doubt concerning the nature of our relations.

  My waking was both immediate and violent. Outbursts of angry dialect echoed through my modest lodgings on Via Peyron, and an attempt to scratch my eyes out was averted only by the slight twist I administered to the dear girl’s left wrist. This entirely justified act of self-defence put an end to the row, but also to the romance. The girl dressed hurriedly, stuffing powder puff, lipstick, and a little handkerchief into her bag along with the fifty-lire note, ‘cause of so great a calamity,’ thrice flung a colourful local alternative to ‘Swine!’ in my face, and left. Never had she been so adorable as in those fifteen minutes of fury. I watched from the window as she emerged and moved away into the morning mist: tall, slende
r, adorned with regained elegance.

  I never saw her again, just as I never saw a black cashmere sweater that had cost me a small fortune and possessed the woeful merit of being cut to suit a woman just as well as a man. All she left were two of those so-called invisible hairpins on the bed.

  That same afternoon I had an appointment with no. 2 in a patisserie in Piazza Carlo Felice. At the little round table in the western corner of the second room – ‘our’ table – I saw not the chestnut tresses of the girl whom I now desired more than ever but the sly face of Tonino, her twelve-year-old brother. He’d just gulped down some hot chocolate with a double portion of whipped cream. With typical Turinese urbanity, he stood as I approached.

  ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘Pinotta will not be coming; she asked me to give you this note. Good day, sir.’

  He went out, taking with him the two brioches left on his plate. The ivory-coloured card announced that I was summarily dismissed on account of my infamy and ‘southern dishonesty.’ Clearly, no. 1 had tracked down and provoked no. 2, and I had fallen between two stools.

  In twelve hours I had lost two usefully complementary girls plus a sweater to which I was rather attached; I also had to pick up the bill for that infernal Tonino. I’d been made a fool of, humiliated in my very Sicilian self-regard; and I decided to abandon for a time the world and its pomps.

  There was no better place for this period of retreat than the café on Via Po where, lonely as a dog, I now went at every free moment, and always in the evening after my work at the newspaper. It was a sort of Hades filled with the wan shades of lieutenant colonels, magistrates and retired professors. These vain apparitions played draughts or dominoes, submerged in a light that was dimmed during the day by the clouds and the arcade outside, during the evenings by the enormous green shades on the chandeliers. They never raised their voices, afraid that any immoderate sound might upset the fragile fabric of their presence. It was, in short, a most satisfactory Limbo.

  Being a creature of habit, I always sat at the same little corner table, one carefully designed to provide maximum discomfort to the customer. On my left two spectral senior officers played trictrac with two phantoms from the appeals court; their military and judicial dice slipped tonelessly from a leather cup. On my right sat an elderly man wrapped in an old overcoat with a worn astrakhan collar. He read foreign magazines one after another, smoked Tuscan cigars, and frequently spat. Every so often he would close his magazine and appear to be pursuing some memory in the spirals of smoke; then he would go back to reading and spitting. His hands were as ugly as could be, gnarled and ruddy, with fingernails that were cut straight across and not always clean. Once, however, when he came across a photograph in a magazine of an archaic Greek statue, the kind with widespread eyes and an ambiguous smile, I was surprised to see his disfigured fingertips caress the image with positively regal delicacy. When he realized that I’d seen him, he grunted with displeasure and ordered a second espresso.

  Our relations would have remained on this plane of latent hostility if not for a happy accident. Usually I left the office with five or six daily papers, including, on one occasion, the Giornale di Sicilia. Those were the years when the Fascist Ministry of Popular Culture, or MinCulPop, was at its most virulent, and every newspaper was just like all the others; that edition of the Palermo daily was as banal as ever, indistinguishable from a paper published in Milan or Rome, if not by its greater share of typographical errors. My reading of it was accordingly brief, and I soon set it aside on the table. I had already begun to contemplate another product of MinCulPop’s vigilance when my neighbour addressed me: ‘Pardon me, sir, would you mind if I glanced at this Giornale di Sicilia of yours? I’m Sicilian, and it’s been twenty years since I came across a newspaper from my part of the world.’ His voice was as cultivated as any I’d ever heard, the accent impeccable; his grey eyes regarded me with profound indifference.

  ‘Be my guest. I’m Sicilian myself, you know. If you like, I can easily bring the paper every evening.’

  ‘Thank you, but that won’t be necessary; my curiosity is a purely physical one. If Sicily remains as it was in my time, I imagine nothing good ever happens there. Nothing has for the past three thousand years.’

  He glanced through the paper, folded it, and gave it back to me, then plunged into reading a pamphlet. When he stood to go, it was clear that he hoped to slip out unnoticed, but I rose to introduce myself; he quietly muttered his name, which I failed to catch, yet neglected to extend his hand. At the threshold of the café, however, he turned, doffed his hat, and loudly shouted, ‘Farewell, fellow countryman.’ He disappeared down the arcade, leaving me speechless while the shades at their games grumbled disapprovingly.

  I performed the magical rites necessary to conjure a waiter; pointing at the empty table, I asked him, ‘Who was that gentleman?’

  ‘That,’ he replied, ‘is Senator Rosario La Ciura.’

  The name said a great deal even to an ignorant journalist. It belonged to one of the five or six Italians with an indisputable international reputation – to the most illustrious Hellenist of our time, in fact. I understood the thick magazines and the caressing of the illustration, the unsociability and hidden refinement, too.

  In the newspaper offices the following day I searched through that peculiar drawer of the obituary file containing the ‘advancers.’ The ‘La Ciura’ card was there, for once tolerably well drafted. I read how the great man had been born into an impoverished petit bourgeois family in Aci Castello (Catania), and that thanks to an astonishing aptitude for Ancient Greek, and by dint of scholarships and scholarly publications, he had at the age of twenty-seven attained the chair of Greek literature at the University of Pavia. Subsequently he had moved to the University of Turin, where he remained until retirement. He had taught at Oxford and Tübingen and travelled extensively, for not only had he been a senator since before the Fascists came to power and a member of the Lincean Academy; he had also received honorary degrees from Yale, Harvard, New Delhi and Tokyo, as well as, of course, from the most prestigious European universities from Uppsala to Salamanca. His lengthy list of publications included many that were considered fundamental, especially those on Ionic dialects; suffice to say that he had been commissioned to edit the Hesiod volume in the Bibliotheca Teubneriana, the first foreigner so honoured, to which he had added an introduction in Latin of unsurpassed scientific rigour and profundity. Finally, the greatest honour of all, he was not a member of the Fascist Royal Academy of Italy. What had always set him apart from other exceedingly erudite colleagues was a vital, almost carnal sense of classical antiquity, a quality on display in a collection of essays written in Italian, Men and Gods, which had been recognized as a work not only of great erudition but of authentic poetry. He was, in short, ‘an honour to a nation and a beacon to the world,’ as the card concluded. He was seventy-five years old and lived decorously but far from lavishly on his pension and senator’s benefits. He was a bachelor.

  There’s no use denying that we Italians – original sons (or fathers) of the Renaissance – look on the Great Humanist as superior to all other human beings. The possibility of finding myself in daily proximity to the highest representative of such subtle, almost magical, and poorly remunerated wisdom was both flattering and disturbing. I experienced the same sensations that a young American would on meeting Mr Gillette: fear, respect, a certain not ignoble envy.

  That evening I descended into Limbo in quite a different spirit than that of the previous days. The senator was already at his spot and responded to my reverential greeting with a faint grumble. When, however, he’d finished reading an article and jotted down a few things in a small notebook, he turned toward me and, in a strangely musical voice, said, ‘Fellow countryman, from the manner in which you greeted me I gather that one of these phantoms has told you who I am. Forget it, and, if you haven’t already done so, forget the aorist tense you studied in secondary school. Instead tell me your name, because your introducti
on yesterday evening was the usual mumbled mess and I, unlike you, do not have the option of learning who you are from others. Because it’s clear that no one here knows you.’

  He spoke with insolent detachment. To him I was apparently something less than a cockroach, more like a dust mote whirling aimlessly in a sunbeam. And yet the calm voice, precise speech and use of the familiar tu radiated the serenity of a Platonic dialogue.

  ‘My name is Paolo Corbera. I was born in Palermo, where I also took my law degree. Now I work here for La Stampa. To reassure you, Senator, let me add that on my exit exams I earned a “5 plus” out of 10 in Greek, and I suspect that the “plus” was only added to make sure I received my diploma.’

  He gave a half smile. ‘Thank you for telling me this. So much the better. I detest speaking with people who think they know what they in fact do not, like my colleagues at the university. In the end they are familiar only with the external forms of Greek, its eccentricities and deformities. The living spirit of this language, foolishly called “dead,” has not been revealed to them. Nothing has been revealed to them, for that matter. They are poor wretches, after all: How could they perceive this spirit without ever having had the opportunity to hear Greek?’

  Pride is fine, sure, it’s better than false modesty, but it seemed to me the senator was going too far. I even wondered whether the years might have succeeded in softening somewhat his exceptional mind. Those poor things, his colleagues, had had just as much opportunity to hear Ancient Greek as he had – that is, none.