The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  Outside the warehouse, Odone found the day labourers waiting for him with a consignment of oranges in crates, and he forgot himself easily in the task of labelling and supervision; then he wrote out some invoices; he transcribed into fine commercial handwriting a long letter of which the boss had given him a rough draft; he went to run an errand on the other side of the city; returned with the reply, and had to go out again to the Adria shipping company to pay a bill for shipment; he washed the canvas sheets and put the letters in the press; finally, he helped the caretaker to close up. He ought also to have hurried to the central post office to make sure the correspondence should leave within the day, but that evening, as soon as he was out of sight of the boss, he threw it into an ordinary letterbox (the first he found); and he arrived home almost at a run. His mother, who had been waiting for him at the window, opened the door without asking: ‘Who is it?’ She took his hat from his hand, handed him his spare jacket and then said with a smile:

  ‘Thank you for the nice gift you gave me. How much did it cost you?’

  ‘Three Kronen fifty,’ Odone replied cheerfully, ‘plus a twenty-heller tip. Not much, is it?’ He was happy and surprised that his mother had welcomed with pleasure, and as a gift for her, that forbidden animal, in truth more adapted to a farmyard than a dwelling, which soiled everything in its path.

  ‘Where is she?’ he said. ‘Let me see her.’

  She opened a door. Behind it, the hen hung on a nail, already plucked, in the rigidity of death. The sight froze Odone’s heart.

  ‘I don’t know,’ his mother said, ‘how you managed to find such a nice fat one. It looks more like a capon than a hen. It really was a lucky find. Tomorrow, I’ll add a bit of beef and make you an excellent broth. For this evening, you’ll have to be content with an omelette. The poor beast was so full of eggs, it was almost a sin to kill it.’

  Odone did not want to hear any more and ran to take shelter in his room. His heart was pounding and tears of grief stung his eyes, not only for the miserable end of the fowl – which had served a purpose so different from the one for which he had bought it – but at the thought that his mother – his own mother! – had not understood. Was it possible that a mother did not understand her son? That a son, to make himself understood by his mother, had to explain himself as if to a stranger? Was that how mothers (ten years later he would say ‘women’) were, or only his? He felt no great desire to talk; nevertheless, when the guilty party entered his room, with the oil lamp already lit in her hand, Odone tried to explain the misunderstanding: the immense pain she had caused him, however involuntarily.

  Signora Rachele shrugged her shoulders, surprised and annoyed, and said that a boy who was going to be fifteen in two months’ time does not play with hens. Then she advised him to go out for a while, because dinner was not ready yet and a little walk would do him good.

  ‘Who killed her?’ Odone asked.

  ‘I did. Why do you ask me that?’

  ‘Because I didn’t think you had the courage to kill poultry.’

  ‘When I was a girl,’ Signora Rachele said, ‘I wouldn’t have killed a bird even for a hundred francs. But since I became a mother, it’s stopped having any effect on me. When you were recovering from typhoid, I really relished wringing a fowl’s neck, thinking of the fine nourishing broth it would make for my son.’

  Odone fell silent, feeling that what he had to say on the matter was more for himself than for others. But from that evening on, he loved his mother less and less.

  ‘La gallina’

  Written in 1912–13. First published in the journal La tribuna (15 November 1913), then included (with significant changes) in Ricordi-Racconti, the fifteenth volume of Saba’s complete works (Mondadori, 1956).

  Lalla Romano

  1906–2001

  Romano’s first book of prose shares the title of the Roman poet Ovid’s magnum opus, which celebrates the act of transformation: Le metamorfosi (The Metamorphoses). She began her creative life as a painter before becoming a writer (soon after her Turin home and studio were bombed in the Second World War). Her canvases are moody, murky, full of greys. Towards the end of her life, this intensely visual writer had gone nearly blind. She continued writing, on enormous sheets of paper, sometimes just a word. These tenacious efforts are collected in the Diario ultimo (Last Diary), posthumously published. In it she writes, ‘La mia cecità = un punto di vista’ (‘My blindness = a point of view’), an aphoristic equation as paradoxical as it is profound. All of Romano’s prose is startling for its spareness, its incisiveness. She was contradictory in that she maintained a boundary between her public and private selves – she was not called Lalla but Graziella, her given name, by friends and family – and yet she wrote in a deeply autobiographical, even confessional vein. Nei mari estremi (In Extreme Seas), written after her husband’s death, is a plangent work about the physical loss and decline of a companion, while in Le parole tra noi leggere (The Light Words between Us), for which she won the Strega in 1969, she wrote frankly about her troubled relationship with her son. Though Romano settled in Milan after the war, this story is set in the mountains of Cuneo, her place of origin. Its carefully gauged point of view reveals the attitude of an artist alert to gestures and nuance. Discreetly erotic, it is a celebration, albeit ironic, of the female gaze, and also a study of political and class distinctions. In addition to being a writer and painter, Romano worked as a librarian and translated Flaubert’s Three Tales, an experience, according to Romano, which inspired her to turn to writing prose.

  The Lady

  Translated by Jhumpa Lahiri

  In the hotel dining room, the lady started to observe the gentleman seated at the table across from her, and upon preliminary inspection, surmised that he was interesting.

  The essential thing – that is to say, the hands – were perfect. The lady never gave a second thought to men who had rough, neglected hands. The man at the opposite table took excellent care of his hands. They were slender, anxious hands, and the noble curve of the nails was free of impurities. His hair was smooth, grey at the temples, and moulded to his round, rather small head. As the lady factored each new element into her analysis, approval mounted in her heart, and her whole being was poised for happiness.

  The gentleman had finished lunch without raising his head, so the lady hadn’t been able to catch his eye. He got up and left the room, not only without glancing at the lady, but without even a nod. For a moment the morsel of food that the lady had just swallowed stuck in her throat, but she hastened to think that maybe she’d been mistaken, and then she abandoned herself to pleasant daydreams, looking out the window at the slope of the mountain where small fields of rye seemed to be fleeing below steady gusts of wind.

  Someone brought the lady a note. The lady had been waiting for it, because she hadn’t seen Nicola Rossi when she’d arrived on the morning coach. Nicola Rossi apologized for not being there, and invited the lady to come up to his hotel. Nicola Rossi was a music critic and a friend of the lady’s husband. The whole afternoon, Nicola Rossi talked about the stomach ailment that had kept him from coming to meet her. It was the altitude that gave him this trouble, and unfortunately the pharmacy in town didn’t carry effective remedies. Nicola Rossi talked about nothing else all afternoon, and in the evening the lady was grateful to the man at the opposite table for being there.

  After three days, the lady had only managed to make eye contact with the man two or three times, though she hadn’t been able to hold his gaze for even an instant. Later, questioning herself about that look, which had made a distinct impression on her, the lady tried to discern some warmth in it, a flash of kindness or sensuality, but she doubted this had been the case.

  A certain restlessness began to take root in the lady’s spirit. But it was still linked to a subtle joy, owed in part to the sheer difficulty of the undertaking. And yet the lady realized that this particular joy or, rather, pleasant excitement, was growing much less spontaneous, so that she
had to seek it out, provoke it; and so the joy was turning less vivid, maybe even a little insincere and false.

  On previous occasions, a unique quality of this joy was that the lady felt it precisely when she exchanged more or less neutral glances or words with the new individual in question. This time, though, the strangest thing was that she couldn’t feel joy in the gentleman’s presence. Meanwhile she fell prey to an inexplicable embarrassment that could only be called shyness. That was the strangest thing. The lady was certain, however, that she would regain full control once she could speak.

  At this point the lady burned with curiosity to know who the man was, and what his profession might be. His anxious hands suggested a pianist, or a surgeon.

  Inventing an excuse, the lady asked to see the hotel register, but all she learned was that the gentleman was forty years old. The box for profession was left blank. The lady was irked that she’d written, on her part, ‘set-designer’ – she gave advice to her architect husband – so she now replaced it with ‘painter’, which struck her as less odd. She also regretted having put down her exact age, but she didn’t dare correct it. Besides, compared to the gentleman, the lady was still quite young.

  The lady had just stood up from the table and was looking, leaning against the window, at the small fields of rye rippling in the wind. The gentleman was finishing his lunch, and the window was behind his back. Now and then the lady looked away from the landscape and stared at the gentleman’s neck, which wasn’t rigid or straight, but pliant, like a boy’s. It was impossible to detect cruelty in it.

  The gentleman stood up and, rather than head for the door as he usually did, turned towards the lady and, without saying a word, offered her a cigarette. The lady was both delighted and disturbed, as if she were a shy teenager, and the way the gentleman brought the lit match up to her cigarette felt like a small gesture of intimacy.

  It wasn’t a real conversation; just a few words about the hotel, the location. Mulling over it later, the lady noted that a cue hadn’t been lacking, in fact, the gentleman had provided one, and she regretted not having picked up on it. That evening in bed, for the twentieth time, the lady repeated the morning’s exchange, and with no trouble at all, she found infinite ways of starting up an interesting conversation. The gentleman had mentioned that the hotel manager had got married that very year, but it was only because his mother had died and he needed a woman in the hotel; otherwise he would have remained a bachelor, because he and the gentleman had similar thoughts about marriage. She could have asked him to elaborate on this topic, thus getting to know what he thought about women.

  On the other hand, the lady knew that it wasn’t just the brevity of the gentleman’s conversation that had disappointed her. She knew he had a lovely voice, but that his pronunciation was marred, betraying the fact that he spoke dialect. Above all, she knew it was too late. The moment of realizing that she’d been deceived, a moment she’d been through on other occasions – during which she’d always made a quick decision – was somehow already behind her, without ever having been reached.

  The lady began envisioning favourable scenarios, ranging from the adventurous to the catastrophic. For example, a fire at night in the little hotel: mayhem, people scrambling to escape. She remembered that similar fantasies had consoled her in childhood, when she wanted to be noticed by an older classmate who paid her no attention. Back then those imaginary disasters served as pretexts for rescues, heroic actions, feats of self-sacrifice. Whereas now they served as occasions for escaping in one’s pyjamas, or wearing even less. The lady ended up falling asleep to these fantasies, and her dreams almost always picked up the cue, granting it unexpected developments.

  On her solitary walks – she avoided going to see Nicola Rossi, who was still stuck in his hotel with stomach troubles – the lady reflected at length on the fragmented escapades of her dreams. The dreams ended up creating some sort of complicity between herself and the gentleman. But they only managed to intrigue her further, without ever instilling confidence in her, not only because she was aware of their one-sided nature, but because they weren’t enough to convince her, even in an illusory way, of a change in the gentleman’s attitude, since he’d always behaved, even in her dreams, implacably like himself.

  These dreams weren’t lacking a more playful side – though what it meant escaped the lady – that may have represented a sort of unconscious revenge.

  One took place in the museum. When she was a little girl, the lady had visited a sculpture museum and had been quite taken by a statue of a male nude that didn’t have the customary fig leaf over its sex. But the reason for her astonishment, and the mild discomfort she felt, wasn’t because she’d seen what was usually hidden, but rather because it looked so small and slender compared to figure’s stature. At the time, her knowledge of the subject was rather vague, and she wasn’t precocious by nature. The matter had upset her unconsciously, and she had ended up forgetting the whole episode.

  In the dream, the statue appeared to her at night, in a garden that was very dense and dark. It was extremely tall, and the head was lost in the shadows. The lady recognized the statue, and once again felt that same discomfort, though it was much stronger and more distressing. Her gaze hastened to the place that had upset her, but there was no trace of what she’d glimpsed back then. There was only the customary fig leaf. The lady knew it was the man in the hotel.

  In another dream, the man turned up in an even more obvious manner. The whole town was on fire, and a terrified crowd was fleeing to the mountains. The lady tarried because she was looking for someone. At this point the gentleman entered the scene. He moved with long, slow strides, even though he was running. He ran fluidly, like someone filmed in slow-motion. The lady immediately recognized the gentleman’s legs, and their strange movements didn’t surprise her because she was used to observing the gentleman when he got up from the table. She’d noticed that he had long, agile legs, like a boy, but that his stride was slow and pliant, almost springing at the knees. The embarrassing thing was that the gentleman was wearing a flowing white nightshirt, the kind the lady had never seen, other than perhaps in some silent comedy from her childhood. All of a sudden, the lady knew she was dreaming, and she took advantage of this to satisfy her curiosity. She approached the gentleman and extended her hand, with the intention of lifting up the flowing gown, but just as she did this she woke up; or at least, that was the part of the dream she remembered.

  There was a second conversation. The gentleman said he was waiting for a friend to arrive, to go up the glacier. This conversation was also very brief, but it didn’t end like the earlier one, because the gentleman didn’t leave. Instead something else happened.

  The lady and the gentleman were seated across from each other, close to their usual window. All of a sudden, even before finishing his cigarette, the gentleman leaned his head against the window jamb and closed his eyes. The lady wasn’t offended, but she felt her heart clench in a brief burst of anguish. She looked at the gentleman’s face, nobly agitated even in sleep, and felt like crying. Then she turned towards the mountain, where the familiar fields of rye rippled in the wind like small lakes in a storm.

  The gentleman really was sleeping, but he soon roused himself, and said that in order to sleep well, one needed to go and lie out on a meadow, under the sun. The lady went to change and get a dressing gown. She put on her shorts and didn’t forget to bring a book; because she assumed, though she was rushing, that nothing would happen.

  The lady climbed up a path behind the hotel, until she reached a small meadow hemmed by the shadow of a beech forest. She opened her dressing gown on the grass, and she had just lain back when the gentleman reached her, then went on ahead, working his way through the bushes, perhaps in search of another meadow higher up. The lady was grateful that the sun was hot.

  A good deal of time passed. The shade of the beech trees reached the lady, and she started to shiver. The sun already looked sad above the snowcaps. She
heard the sound of shifting stones: the man was slowly coming down the path. The lady looked at his naked torso, on the thin side, graceful. Without thinking, she impulsively said hello. The gentleman stopped, and the lady thought he was looking at her legs, as she saw him blushing discreetly below his tan. She felt no pleasure, just a sharp sense of shame. She stood, and picked up her dressing gown.

  In the evening the seat across from the gentleman was occupied. A large man dressed in brown corduroy, with his back to the lady, prevented her from gazing at her idol and intercepting his distracted glances. Through the window, above the man’s massive shoulders, the lady no longer saw the neighbouring mountain, only a pink blade of sunlight about to be extinguished on the patches of snow on the facing valley.

  After lunch, the new man introduced himself. He was friendly and had big, stubby, good-natured hands. With him was his eighteen-year-old son. The lady went up to her room and chose, from among her dresses, a white evening gown she’d set aside the first day, deeming it inappropriate for that sort of hotel. It was a dress that exposed her shoulders, to be worn with a short red velvet cape. The lady put it on and changed her hairstyle, gathering it at the top of her head with little combs. She applied her make-up carefully, then went back down to the room. No one paid attention to her.

  The small group was gathered around the radio, dominated by a giant man, the chief technician of the power plant, who was in charge of making the device work. The friend’s son started staring persistently at the lady, and then, encouraged by a nod, asked if she liked the music and invited her to dance. The large friend winked over at them now and then, and the gentleman was deep in conversation with him. Between dances, the lady could hear the man’s voice, and the unpleasant inflection of his dialect. She realized at a certain point that she could hear what they were saying, and she started listening.