The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  Everybody swore that they had the necessary cash, down to the last lira.

  ‘Get aboard then,’ said Signor Melfa. And suddenly each of the travellers became a formless mass, a confused bundle of luggage.

  ‘Christ! – and have you brought the kitchen sink with you as well?’ Signor Melfa began to blurt out curses, only stopping when the whole cargo – men, bags and baggage – had been bundled into the boat, at the risk of persons or luggage ending up overboard. For Signor Melfa, the difference between a person and an item of luggage was that the person had two hundred and fifty thousand lire on him, stitched into his coat or held between his shirt and skin. He knew them; he knew them only too well: these peasant bastards, these louts.

  The journey did not last as long as expected: eleven nights, including the one on which they’d left. And the nights were counted rather than the days, because they were nights of suffocating, atrocious overcrowding. They felt submerged in the combined reek of fish, diesel and vomit – as if in a hot, black, bituminous liquid. They were oozing it at daybreak, exhausted as they climbed on deck seeking light and air. If for them the idea of the sea was associated with a verdant, undulating plain stirred by the wind, the real sea terrified them: their insides clenched and knotted, their eyes were painfully blinded if they so much as attempted a glance towards the horizon. But on the eleventh night Signor Melfa ordered them on deck. At first they thought they could see dense constellations that had descended on to the sea, like flocks – but these turned out to be towns; the towns of wealthy America glittering like jewels in the night. And the night itself was enchanting: calm and gentle, a half-moon sailing amidst a transparent fauna of clouds, with a lung-clearing breeze.

  ‘This is America,’ said Signor Melfa.

  ‘Is there any danger it might be some other place?’ someone asked, since he had spent the entire journey thinking about the fact that there are no roads or tracks on the sea, and that it was a godlike feat to find the right route, without mistakes, steering a boat between sky and water.

  Signor Melfa gave him a pitying look, and asked everyone else: ‘Have you ever seen a skyline like this one, in your neck of the woods? Can’t you feel that even the air is different? Can’t you see how brilliantly the towns here sparkle?’

  Everyone agreed, looking with pity and resentment at that companion of theirs who had dared to ask such a stupid question.

  ‘Let’s settle the bill,’ said Signor Melfa.

  They fumbled beneath their shirts and extracted the money.

  ‘Get your things ready,’ said Signor Melfa, after stashing it away.

  They only needed a few minutes: having almost exhausted the provisions they’d supplied themselves with for the journey, all they were left with was the odd item of linen and the presents for their relatives in America: a chunk of pecorino, a well-aged bottle of wine, something embroidered to put at the centre of a table or on the back of a sofa. They disembarked walking on air, weightless, laughing and humming tunes – and one burst into full-throated song just as soon as the boat began to move off.

  ‘So you’ve understood nothing,’ hissed Signor Melfa angrily. ‘You’re determined to land me in it? … As soon as I’ve put you ashore you can rush up to the first cop you see and get yourselves deported on the next available boat: I don’t give a shit, you’re free to kill yourselves in any way you like … I’ve kept to my side of the bargain: this is America and I’ve dumped you here … Now, for Christ’s sake, give me the chance to get back on board!’

  They gave him more than enough time to get back on board: they remained sitting on the fresh sand, undecided, not sure of what to do next, blessing and cursing the night which gave them protection as long as they stayed still on the beach, but that would turn into a terrible ambush if they dared to leave it.

  Signor Melfa had advised them to ‘scatter’, but no one felt inclined to separate from the others. Who knew how far away Trenton was, and how long it would take to get there?

  Then they heard in the distance, sounding unreal, a song. ‘It sounds like one of our own carters,’ they thought – and that the world must be the same everywhere: that everywhere man expresses in song the same melancholy, the same sorrow. But they were in America now: the cities that blazed beyond the horizon of sand and trees were the cities of America.

  Two of them decided to head off as scouts. They went in the direction of the lights that the nearest town cast into the sky. Almost immediately they found a road: ‘Tarmaced, well maintained – how different roads are here compared to back home!’ But really they had expected it to be wider and straighter. They kept away from it to avoid meeting anyone: they walked alongside it, through the trees.

  A car passed. ‘It looks like a seicento.’ Then another, looking like a millecento, and then another. ‘They keep cars like ours for amusement; they buy them for their kids like people back home buy bicycles for theirs.’ Two deafening motorbikes passed, one chasing the other. It was the police, they couldn’t afford to make any mistakes – thank goodness that they’d stayed off the road.

  And there, finally, were the signs. They looked along the road in both directions, stepped on to it and went near enough to them to read: Santa Croce Camarina/Scoglitti.

  ‘Santa Croce Camarina: I’ve heard of the place before.’

  ‘It sounds familiar to me too; and even Scoglitti rings a bell.’

  ‘Maybe one of our relatives lived there – perhaps it was my uncle, before he moved to Philadelphia. If I remember rightly he was living in a different city before Philadelphia.’

  ‘My brother also lived some place before heading for Brucchilin … But I really can’t remember what it was called. And anyway, we’re saying ‘Santa Croce’, we’re saying ‘Scoglitti’, but we’ve no idea how they pronounce these words here: American isn’t pronounced like it’s written.’

  ‘That’s true, and the great thing about Italian is just that: it sounds exactly like it’s written … But we can’t spend the night out here, we’ve got to take a risk. The next car that passes, I’m stopping. I’ll just say ‘Trenton?’ … People are more polite here … Even if we don’t understand what they’re saying they’re bound to point, to give a sign, and that way we’ll work out where to find this blasted Trenton.’

  Around the curve, twenty metres away, a cinquecento emerged: the driver saw them dart out with their arms raised, waving for him to stop. He slammed on the brakes, cursing: he didn’t think it could be a hold-up in an area as quiet as this, and opened the door thinking that they wanted a lift.

  ‘Trenton?’ one of them asked.

  ‘Che?’ asked the driver.

  ‘Trenton?’

  ‘What effing Trenton are you on about!’ the driver exclaimed, cursing.

  ‘He speaks Italian,’ they both said, looking at each other to see what to do next: if perhaps the time had come to reveal their situation to a fellow countryman.

  The driver shut the door and switched the engine back on. The car jerked forwards: and only then did he shout out to the two men standing in the road like statues, ‘Drunkards, drunken cuckolds, cuckolds and sons of—’ The rest was drowned out as he accelerated away.

  There was a protracted silence.

  ‘Now I remember,’ said the one, a moment later, who’d thought the name Santa Croce sounded familiar, ‘my father went to Santa Croce Camarina one year when things had gone badly in our region. He went there for the harvesting.’

  Then they flung themselves down as if they had been knocked into the ditch at the side of the road. There was no hurry, after all, to deliver the news to the others that they had disembarked in Sicily.

  ‘Il lungo viaggio’

  First published in the newspaper l’Unità (21 October 1962), then included in Racconti siciliani, a non-commercial edition of Sciascia’s short stories published in Urbino in 1966. It was subsequently published in Il mare colore del vino (Einuadi, 1973).

  Alberto Savinio

  1891–1952
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br />   A man who refused to stick to any one identity, Savinio titled his first book Hermaphrodito: a diary that oscillates between genres (poetry and prose), languages (French and Italian, in addition to a little Greek) and tones (high and low). An accomplished musician, painter and writer – though he claimed to be a dilettante in all three – he was born Andrea Francesco Alberto de Chirico, in Athens. He studied classical piano and composition in Greece and Germany, then moved to Paris when he was nineteen, along with his older brother, who would become the world-renowned painter Giorgio de Chirico. As André Breton later admitted, the brothers’ artistic activity in Paris at the time sowed the seeds for the Surrealist movement which would explode in the 1920s. Savinio initially wrote in French, and Guillaume Apollinaire sponsored his first avant-garde recital in 1914. He became Alberto Savinio for the occasion. The new name was fundamental not only to inaugurate his creative self, but to distinguish himself from Giorgio. The following year the brothers left Paris for Ferrara to serve in the First World War – it was the easiest way to gain Italian citizenship – and it was there that Savinio abandoned music for writing. But in 1926, back in Paris, he started painting seriously, and his first exhibit was presented by Jean Cocteau. His paintings are oniric, with allusions to travel, classical antiquity, animals, childhood toys. They are also whimsical (he depicted his parents fused into their favourite armchairs, partially transformed into birds). In 1931, upon his return to Italy, he shifted gears again, and began writing seriously. He became a luminary of the avant-garde, but remained in the shadow of Giorgio’s greater fame. The selected story below, from a 1945 collection called Tutta la vita (The Rest of Life) exemplifies the Surrealists’ love of confounding the animate and inanimate worlds.

  Bago

  Translated by Michael F. Moore

  ‘Good morning, Bago.’

  This is what Ismene says every day the moment she wakes up, and every night before going to bed she says, ‘Goodnight, Bago.’ Otherwise she’d feel as if she had started or ended the day wrong, indeed as if she had not started or ended it at all. The same way she would have felt in the past if she hadn’t said ‘Good morning’ and ‘Goodnight’ to Daddy and Mummy. And then only to Mummy after Daddy died. Then only to Bug after Mummy died too. Then only to Bago, after the death of Bug, with all that hair over his eyes and oh so human look. Sometimes Ismene forgets to say ‘Good morning’ or ‘Goodnight’ to her husband, but that doesn’t make her feel as if she has begun or ended the day wrong. Besides, Rutiliano is so rarely at home, so often on a trip … One morning when Rutiliano opened the door and asked, ‘Who were you speaking to?’ Ismene answered, ‘Maybe in my sleep’, an answer she had no trouble inventing. She didn’t even have the impression she was lying. The best part of her life is like a dream she dreams when she’s awake and when she’s asleep, and her secret conversations with Bago belong to the dream world, too. When she said that by saying ‘Good morning, Bago’ she was talking in her sleep, Ismene wasn’t lying.

  ‘Good morning, Bago.’

  Ismene is sitting on the bed, her head leaning to one side, her hands clasped together and still warm from the night, smiling in the direction of Bago, as if he were a strong, protective father. She sits there listening. The bedroom smells of dreamt dreams, like wilted flowers. The only trace the dreams leave behind is this smell, and if the bedroom stinks in the morning it’s because we’ve had bad dreams. The morning light peeks through the blinds in stripes, shining like the rungs of a golden ladder through the drawn curtains. The furniture is a heavy shadow emerging from the pallor of the wall. Ismene’s undergarments glow white on a chair. A crown of light of unknown origin trembles on the ceiling, a halo within which the head of an angel might appear. But Billi is no angel.

  What is Ismene waiting to hear? What does she hear? What did she hear?

  (Ismene alights from the bed and races barefoot to open the window.)

  Nothing echoed in the room, yet Ismene has still heard and is content. This morning she is more impatient than usual for the awaited voice, more happy that she has heard it. Today Billi is coming back from his long trip. Today more than other days Ismene needs to feel the presence and protection of Bago.

  Now the room is bright, the smell of withered dreams has dissipated. Ismene lingers at the window; down in the valley some vapours are still floating. She is content. Beneath her nightgown her body turns pink, and darkens at the fold of her thighs and hips in a triangular shadow like the eye of a mysterious god. But who apart from Bago can see the skinny body of Ismene beneath the veil of her nightgown, like a big pink fish beneath a sliver of water? Ismene isn’t embarrassed by Bago … Yet she is. But it’s another kind of embarrassment. It’s the fear of doing something to Bago that shouldn’t be done to Bago. Before opening Bago’s doors Ismene stands there, unsure of herself, like when she was a little girl and was about to unbutton her daddy’s jacket and fish his pocket-watch out of his vest to hear it chime the hours and quarter hours.

  Daddy, Mummy, Bug, Bago, Billi. Rutiliano was a name so different from those names, which seem to have been shaped deliberately by the mouth of a child, a stutterer, a weak little baby. What a strange name, Rutiliano!

  The moments of embarrassment are another matter. When Rutiliano comes to Ismene at night, Ismene gets out of bed, pulls out the big folding screen, and opens it up between the bed and Bago, in order to hide the bed. Rutiliano is always dismayed by this gesture, and he asks for an explanation. Ismene says she is afraid of the air. The air? Yes, the air that passes under the door. And to reinforce the shelter, Ismene drapes a coverlet over the screen, which she folds back up and places on a chair at night. Rutiliano watches these actions with an uncomprehending eye. Well, what does Rutiliano understand anyway? What does he understand about her? Rutiliano is serious and distant. He never laughs and he busies himself with mysterious jobs that require frequent trips. Despite the mystery that envelops them, Ismene has no interest in finding out about Rutiliano’s jobs. For as far back as her childhood memories can reach, Ismene remembers Rutiliano. He was as much a part of the household as a sofa is part of the living room, as a sideboard is part of a dining room. For Christmas and the Epiphany, Rutiliano used to arrive with an armload of packages, from which he would meticulously extract presents. Ismene would then kiss him on the forehead and say, ‘Thank you, Uncle Rutiliano.’ Uncle was an honorary title and, for Ismene, a synonym for ‘old’. Ismene didn’t like kissing the forehead of Uncle Rutiliano and especially didn’t like being kissed by him. Yet when Mummy died, too, the only thing she could do was marry Uncle Rutiliano. Whom did this marriage benefit? Certainly not Uncle. At least that’s what he said. He no longer expected anything from life. To Ismene, instead, the marriage assured her of a comfortable life and protection. ‘People like us don’t get married just for pleasure.’ This is what Uncle Rutiliano said. He spoke so rarely, but the very few times that he did he uttered indisputable truths. ‘Lucky he speaks so rarely!’ said Billi to Ismene, and he bowed his head. The silk dress, the white veil, the presents, the guests, the dinner could have made their wedding day a happy day, but on that very day Billi left to enlist in the navy. ‘How happy your poor mummy would be, how happy your poor daddy would be!’ said Uncle Rutiliano, who on that day was even quieter than usual.

  At the table, in front of the thirty guests who were stuffing their faces, Ismene called her husband ‘Uncle Rutiliano’, and immediately the ice cream went down the wrong way. A few days later, to keep Ismene from making the same mistake, Rutiliano changed his name and had everyone call him Ruti. But it wasn’t true that Ruti was always right. Ismene did not find in her husband the security, the confidence that she had felt with her parents, things she’d hoped to regain in marrying him. She found them instead in Bug, with all that hair over his eyes and oh so human look, and after Bug’s death she found it in Bago. And it was impossible for Bago to die. One day Ruti talked about getting new bedroom furniture, putting in furniture that was lighter, fresher, m
ore suitable for the bedroom of a young bride. Ismene defended ‘her’ furniture with an obstinacy that shocked Ruti. He was dismayed by such a strong attachment to furniture that was worth so little, but deep down he was pleased that he did not have any new expenditures. Ismene, especially when her husband was home, would spend the day in her room, near Bago. The ‘old’ armoire had witnessed her birth, safeguarded her clothes as a little girl and then as a young lady, and now it safeguarded her clothes as a woman. She sits next to the partially closed doors, as if to hear the beating of that dark but profoundly good heart. She confides in him. She tells him things she would never tell others and especially Ruti. She tells him about the return of Billi.

  Ruti appeared at the door and announced with a gloomy air that he was leaving in the car and would not be back until the next day. Ismene kissed him on the forehead, just like when Ruti was still ‘Uncle Rutiliano’ and brought her Christmas presents.

  Now Ismene and Billi are sitting quietly across from each other, as if they have nothing to say. Was Billi perhaps embarrassed to find himself in Ismene’s bedroom? She wanted to feel close to Bago, especially now that Billi was in her bedroom.

  The loud rumble of an automobile arriving. The crunching of the gravel beneath the wheels. The yanking of the hand-brake in front of the main door.

  The alarmed voice of Ancilla in the hall. ‘The signor has come back! The signor has come back!’

  Billi jumps to his feet. He’s pale as a sheet. He looks around. Why is Ancilla’s voice so alarmed? What is so dangerous about the return of the ‘signor’?

  A howl. A deep howl. More powerful than the most powerful human voice, but completely ‘inside’. A howl that is ‘embodied’ and circumscribed within a tight radius. A howl for local consumption. A ‘domestic’ howl. A ‘cubicular’ howl. A howl ‘for close friends only’.