The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  ‘She told me about her life below the sea, about bearded Tritons and glaucous caverns, but she said that these too were vain appearances and that the truth lay much deeper indeed, in the blind, mute palace of formless, eternal waters, without sparkle, without murmurs.

  ‘Once she told me she would be away for some time, until the evening of the following day. “I must travel far, to where I know I will find a gift for you.”

  ‘In fact she returned with a stupendous branch of deep red coral encrusted with shells and algae. For a long while I kept it in a drawer and every night I would kiss the spots where I recalled the Indifferent, that is the Beneficent, one had placed her fingers. Then one day my housekeeper, Maria – Bettina’s predecessor – stole it to give to one of her pimps. I later found it in a Ponte Vecchio jeweller’s shop, deconsecrated, cleaned up and smoothed to the point of being virtually unrecognizable. I bought it back and that same night threw it into the Arno: It had passed through too many profane hands.

  ‘She also spoke to me of the many human lovers she’d had during her thousand-year adolescence: fishermen and sailors – Greeks, Sicilians, Arabs, Capresi – including survivors of shipwrecks clinging to sodden debris, to whom she’d appeared in a flash of lightning during a storm to transform their last gasp into pleasure. “They all accepted my invitation and came to see me, some immediately, others after having lived what to them seemed a long time. Only one failed to show. He was a big beautiful young man with red hair and exceptionally white skin; I joined myself to him on a beach far away, where our sea flows into the great Ocean. He smelled of something stronger than the wine you gave me the other day. I believe that he failed to show not, surely, because he was happy, but because when we met he was so drunk as not to understand anything anymore. I must have seemed like one of his usual fisherwomen.”

  ‘Those weeks of high summer flew by as rapidly as a single morning; when they’d passed I realized that in fact I had lived centuries. That lascivious girl, that cruel little beast, had also been the wisest of Mothers; with her mere presence she’d uprooted faiths, dispelled metaphysics; with her fragile, often bloodstained fingers she’d shown me the path toward true eternal peace, and also toward an asceticism based not on sacrifice but on the impossibility of accepting other, inferior pleasures. I will certainly not be the second man to fail to heed her call, will not refuse this sort of pagan Grace that has been granted me.

  ‘In accordance with its own violence, that summer was short. Not long after August 20 the first clouds timidly gathered; a few isolated blood-warm drops of rain fell. The nights brought to the distant horizon slow mute flashes of lightning, deduced one from the other like the cogitations of a god. Mornings the dove-gray sea suffered for its hidden restlessness; evenings it rippled without any perceptible breeze, in gradations from smoke grey to steel grey to pearl grey, all extremely soft colours and more affectionate than the splendour before. Faraway shreds of fog skimmed the water; on the coasts of Greece, perhaps, it was already raining. The colour of Lighea’s mood also changed, from radiance to grey affection. She was silent more often; spent hours stretched out on a rock, staring at the no longer motionless horizon; spent less time away. “I want to stay here longer with you; if I were to take to the open sea now my marine companions would keep me there. Do you hear them? They’re calling me.” At times I truly did seem to hear a different, lower note among the seagull calls, to make out flashes of movement from rock to rock. “They’re blowing their conches, calling Lighea to the festival of the storm.”

  ‘This set upon us at dawn on the twenty-sixth day. From our rock we saw the approaching wind as it battered distant waters; closer by, sluggish leaden waves swelled ever larger. Soon the gusts arrived, whistling in our ears, bending the withered rosemary bushes. The sea churned below us and the first white-capped surge advanced. “Farewell, Sasà. You won’t forget.” The billow broke upon the rock; the Siren dove into the iridescent spray. I never saw her come down; she seemed to dissolve into the foam.’

  The senator left the next morning; I went to the station to see him off. He was surly and cutting as usual, but, when the train began to move, his fingers reached through the window to graze my head.

  The next day at dawn a telephone call came into the newspaper from Genoa: During the night Senator La Ciura had fallen into the sea from the deck of the Rex as it sailed toward Napoli; though lifeboats had been deployed immediately, the body was not found.

  A week later came the reading of his will: To Bettina went the bank account and furniture; the library was donated to the University of Catania; in a recently added codicil I was named legatee of both the Greek crater with the Siren figures and the large photograph of the Acropolis kore.

  I had the two objects sent to my house in Palermo. Then came the war and while I was stuck in Marmarica with a pint of water a day, the ‘Liberators’ destroyed my house. When I returned I found the photograph had been cut into strips and used by the looters for torches. The crater had been smashed to bits; the largest piece showed the feet of Odysseus tied to the mast of his ship. I still have it today. The books had been stored underground by the university, but, for lack of money for shelves, there they slowly rot.

  ‘The Siren’

  Written in the winter 1956–1957 and published posthumously (with the title ‘Lighea’) in Racconti (Feltrinelli, 1961).

  Antonio Tabucchi

  1943–2012

  Writing, for Tabucchi, was often an act of crossing borders, of switching from one set of coordinates to the next. Implicit to his creative journey was an enduring and transformative dedication to another language, its literature and its people. In his case, the language was Portuguese, first encountered in the work of the writer Fernando Pessoa, famous for creating separate literary identities known as heteronyms. In translating and introducing Pessoa’s work to Italy, Tabucchi fabricated a unique postmodern identity for himself. He travelled to Portugal, met and married a Portuguese woman, and founded, with his wife, a magazine dedicated to Portuguese literature. In Italy he taught Portuguese for decades, in Bologna, Genoa and Siena, and then became the director of the Institute for Italian Culture in Lisbon in the late 1980s. He wrote long novels and short ones, his style also crossing the borders of conventional narrative technique over the course of his creative career. He composed his novel, Requiem, directly in Portuguese, a book he did not himself translate into Italian. An outspoken public intellectual, Tabucchi collaborated with Italy’s major newspapers until his articles, fiercely critical of the Berlusconi government, marginalized him to the realm of overtly leftist publications. He wrote four books of short stories. This selection appears at the end of his final collection, Il tempo invecchia in fretta (Time Ages in a Hurry): nine cyclical, deeply elegiac tales in which time, place and memory form a thematic triad. Each is set in a series of different international cities. The book was published three years before the author’s death in Portugal. By then Tabucchi had been made a Portuguese national, and so his ashes rest in a tomb dedicated to Portuguese writers in Lisbon’s Prazeres Cemetery. His funeral was conducted in Italian, French and Portuguese.

  Against Time

  Translated by Martha Cooley and Antonio Romano

  It’d gone like this:

  The man had boarded at an Italian airport, because everything began in Italy, and whether it was Milan or Rome was secondary, what matters is that it was an Italian airport where you could take a direct flight to Athens, and from there, after a brief stopover, a connecting flight to Crete on Aegean Airlines, because this he was sure of, that the man had travelled on Aegean Airlines, so in Italy he’d taken a flight that let him connect in Athens for Crete at around two in the afternoon, he’d seen it on the Greek company’s schedule, which meant this man had arrived in Crete at around three, three-thirty in the afternoon. The airport of departure is not so important, though, in the story of the person who’d lived that story, it’s the morning of any day at the end of April of 2008, a splendid
day, almost like summer. Which is not an insignificant detail, because the man taking the flight, meticulous as he was, gave considerable importance to the weather and would watch a satellite channel dedicated to meteorology around the world, and the weather in Crete, he’d seen, was really splendid: 29 degrees Celsius during the day, clear sky, humidity within normal limits, good seaside weather, ideal for lying on one of those white beaches described in his guide, for bathing in the blue sea and enjoying a well-deserved vacation. Because this was also the reason for the journey of that man who was going to live that story: a vacation. And in fact that’s what he thought, sitting in the waiting lounge for international flights at Rome-Fiumicino, waiting for the boarding call for Athens.

  And here he is finally on the plane, comfortably installed in business class – it’s a paid trip, as will be seen later – reassured by the courtesies of the flight attendants. His age is difficult to determine, even for the person who knew the story that the man was living: let’s say he was between fifty and sixty years old, lean, robust, healthy-looking, salt-and-pepper hair, fine blond moustache, plastic glasses for far-sightedness hung from his neck. His work. On this point too the person who knew his story was somewhat uncertain. He could be a manager of a multinational, one of those anonymous businessmen who spend their lives in an office and whose merit is one day acknowledged by headquarters. But he could also be a marine biologist, one of those researchers who observe seaweed and micro-organisms under a microscope, without leaving their laboratory, and so can assert that the Mediterranean will become a tropical sea, as perhaps it was millions of years ago. Yet this hypothesis also struck him as not very satisfying, biologists who study the sea don’t always remain shut up in their laboratory, they wander beaches and rocks, perhaps they dive, they perform their own surveys, and that passenger dozing in his business-class seat on a flight to Athens didn’t actually look like a marine biologist; maybe on weekends he went to the gym to keep fit, nothing else. But if he really did go to the gym, then why did he go? To what end did he maintain his body, stay so young-looking? There really was no reason: it’d been over for quite a while with the woman he’d considered his life companion, he didn’t have another companion or lover, he lived alone, stayed away from serious commitments, apart from some rare adventures that can happen to everybody. Perhaps the most credible hypothesis was that he was a naturalist, a modern follower of Linnaeus, and he was going to a convention in Crete along with other experts on medicinal herbs and plants, abundant in Crete. Because one thing was certain, he was going to a convention of fellow researchers, his was a journey that rewarded a lifetime of work and commitment, the convention was taking place in the city of Retimno, he’d be in a hotel made of bungalows a few kilometres from Retimno, and a car service would shuttle him in the afternoons, but he’d have mornings to himself.

  The man woke up, pulled out the guide from his carry-on and looked for his hotel. What he found was reassurring: two restaurants, a pool, room service, the hotel had closed for the winter and had only reopened in mid-April, and this meant very few tourists would be there, the usual clients, the northern Europeans thirsty for sunlight, as the guide described them, were still in their little boreal houses. The pleasant voice from the loudspeaker asked everyone to buckle their seat-belts, they’d begun the descent to Athens and would land in about twenty minutes. The man closed the folding tray table and put his seat upright, replaced the guide in his carry-on and from the pocket of the seat in front of him pulled out the newspaper that the flight attendant had distributed, to which he’d paid no attention. It was a newspaper with many full-colour supplements, the usual weekend ones, the economics-financial supplement, the sports supplement, the interior-design supplement and the weekend magazine. He skipped all the supplements and opened the magazine. On the cover, in black and white, was the picture of the atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud, with the title: THE GREAT IMAGES OF OUR TIME. He began leafing through, somewhat reluctantly. First came an ad by two fashion designers showing a young man naked to the waist, which at first he thought was a great image of our time, but then there was the first true image of our time: the stone facade of a house in Hiroshima where the heat from the atomic bomb had liquefied a man, leaving only the imprint of his shadow. He’d never seen this image and was astonished by it, feeling a kind of remorse: that thing had happened more than sixty years before, how was it possible he’d never seen it? The shadow on the stone was a silhouette, and in this profile he thought he could see his friend Ferruccio, who for no apparent reason, on New Year’s Eve of 1999, shortly before midnight, had thrown himself from the tenth floor of a building on to Via Cavour. Was it possible that the profile of Ferruccio, squashed into the soil on the thirty-first of December in 1999, looked like the profile absorbed by stone in a Japanese city in 1945? The idea was absurd, yet that’s what passed through his mind in all its absurdity. He kept riffling the magazine, and meanwhile his heart began beating erratically, one-two-pause, three-one-pause, two-three-one, pause-pause-two-three, the so-called extrasystole, nothing pathological, the cardiologist had reassured him after an entire day of testing, only a matter of anxiety. But why now? It couldn’t be those images provoking his emotions, they were faraway things. That naked girl, arms raised, who was running towards the camera in an apocalyptic landscape: he’d seen this image more than once and it hadn’t made such a violent impression, and yet now it produced in him an intense turmoil. He turned the page. There was a man on his knees, palms together, at the edge of a pit, a kid sadistically pointing a gun at his temple. Khmer Rouge, said the caption. To reassure himself he made himself think that these things were also from faraway places and distant times. But the thought wasn’t enough: a strange form of emotion, almost a thought, was telling him the opposite, that the atrocity had happened yesterday, it’d happened just that morning, while he was on this flight, and by sorcery had been imprinted on the page he was looking at. The voice over the loudspeaker stated that the landing would be delayed by fifteen minutes due to air traffic, and meanwhile the passengers should enjoy the view. The plane traced a wide curve, banking to the right, from the little window opposite he could glimpse the blue of the sea, while in his own, the white city of Athens was framed, with a green spot in the middle, no doubt a park, and then the Acropolis, he could see the Acropolis perfectly, and the Parthenon, his palms were damp with sweat, he asked himself if it weren’t a sort of panic provoked by the plane going round in circles, and meanwhile he looked at the photo of a stadium where policemen in riot gear pointed submachine guns at a bunch of barefooted men, under it was written: Santiago de Chile, 1973. And on the opposite page was a photo that seemed a montage, surely retouched, it couldn’t be real, he’d never seen it: on the balcony of a nineteenth-century palazzo was Pope John Paul II next to a general in uniform. The Pope was without doubt the Pope, and the general was without doubt Pinochet, with that hair full of brilliantine, that chubby face, that little moustache and the Ray-Ban sunglasses. The caption said: His Holiness the Pope on his official visit to Chile, April 1987. He began quickly leafing through the magazine, as though anxious to get to the end, barely looking at the photographs, but he had to stop at one of them, it showed a kid with his back turned to a police van, his arms raised as though his beloved soccer team had scored a goal, but looking closer you could see he was falling backward, something stronger than he was had struck him. On it was written: Genoa, July 2001: Meeting of the eight richest countries in the world. The eight richest countries in the world: the phrase provoked in him a strange sensation, like something that is at once understandable and absurd, because it was understandable and yet absurd. Every photo was on a silvery page as though it were Christmas, with the date in big letters. He’d arrived at 2004, but he hesitated, he wasn’t sure he wanted to see the next picture, was it possible the plane was still going around in circles? He turned the page, it showed a naked body collapsed on the ground, a man apparently, though in the photo they’d blurred the pubic area, a s
oldier in camouflage extended a leg towards the body as though he were kicking a garbage can, the dog he held on a leash was trying to bite a leg, the muscles of the animal were as taut as the cord that held it, in the other hand the soldier held a cigarette. The caption read: Abu Ghraib Prison, Iraq, 2004. After that, he arrived at the year he found himself in now, the year of our Lord 2008, that is, he found himself in sync, that’s what he thought even if he didn’t know with what, but in sync. He couldn’t tell what image he was in sync with, but he didn’t turn the page, and meanwhile the plane was finally landing, the landing strip was running beneath him with the intermittent white bands blurring to a single band. He’d arrived.