The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  The lady’s husband was a leftist intellectual, as were Nicola Rossi and all the lady’s friends. The conversation the gentleman and his friend were having was unbelievably reactionary, especially on the part of the gentleman, while the friend seemed less convinced and, above all, less rabid. The chief technician also joined the conversation and, to the lady’s astonishment, loudly proclaimed his opinions, which were even more backward. Since she was obviously following their conversation, the lady was questioned. She tried to respond in kind, and felt strange pleasure at the thought that none of her friends was there to witness her degradation.

  During a pause, the gentleman started to study the lady’s sandals, then praised them soberly. The lady felt acute pleasure, but was also embarrassed, as always, and she then observed, in turn, the gentleman’s shoes. The gentleman’s shoes were marvellous. They were made of white suede, with raised spirals in brown. The lady expressed her amazement and her admiration, and thus, for the first time, she saw the gentleman smile unabashedly. At that point, the friend said that if the gentleman didn’t have beautiful shoes, who would? Given that he made them.

  The gentleman clarified that he worked in leather, cutting uppers, and gave the lady some advice about buying shoes.

  Though she suffered, the lady didn’t feel anything close to spite or rancour towards the gentleman. And she didn’t despise herself either: in truth she was so consumed by passion that she didn’t have time to dwell on peripheral feelings. She knew nothing would happen, and yet she experienced the anguished sensation – though not entirely disheartening – of risk, as if she were walking on the edge of an abyss. She had the great clairvoyance to sense that, for the first time in her life, something terrible had been born inside of her, no less strong for that, but destined inevitably to defeat her. So great was her revelation that it would forever alter and undermine her certainty, her every illusion. The lady even felt a vague self-respect, or rather, respect for what she recognized was happening inside her. She knew it wasn’t a matter of a stubbornness, but something that went beyond vanity and pride. All her faculties were thus taut, in a state of useless expectation.

  The friend’s presence was of no use to the lady. The son brought her flowers when he returned from his walks and, looking deep into her eyes, confided his disappointment in the immaturity of his classmates. The lady thought he was boring, but in those moments preferred him to Nicola Rossi and to anyone else.

  Nicola Rossi, meanwhile, still felled by his stomach troubles, decided to go back to the city, and the lady told him to tell her husband that she was bored.

  The gentleman and his friend had organized their trip to the glacier. The hotel manager, also a guide, was accompanying them. The boy pleaded with the lady to join them. The lady harboured no illusions of lending the least bit of substance to their adventure, but she couldn’t help but daydream about this trip to the glacier and imagine endless scenarios. But she didn’t make up her mind.

  The night before, in the hotel lobby, she saw ice axes, ropes, crampons. They needed to leave before dawn. Around four o’clock in the morning, the lady thought she heard a car. After an hour, since she couldn’t get back to sleep, she got out of bed, thinking she’d go up the mountain on her own. But she found everyone in the lobby, with the ropes and crampons. No one said hello. The car that was supposed to take them up to the cable car hadn’t come, and now they were waiting for the milk truck.

  The hotel manager surveyed the street and called them after half an hour. The milk truck was enormous, without side rails, and was already crammed with people sitting on milk canisters. The lady nodded yes when the guide called her, and this was how she let herself be hoisted on to the truck.

  Keeping balance on the truck was extremely difficult: the road snaked uphill, and as the truck rounded each turn, it would veer to one side. The villagers, with their baskets, were anchored to the vehicle, but the gentlemen, including the guide, were an endangered bunch, and they clutched the shoulders of older women who seemed to be made of stone. The lady, seated on a basket between two canisters, was the most stable, and she was already starting to forget about herself and about her affliction. She was intent on drinking in, at every turn, apparitions of the tall white mountain, continually swallowed up by the dark pine forests. But she was aware that the gentleman was close to her, looking uncomfortable, because he was searching with one hand for something to hold on to. She was quick to grab the hand. She glanced at him and saw, through the wind, that he, a bit embarrassed, was thanking her.

  As soon as she made contact with his hand, the lady experienced intense pleasure. The hand was smooth, dry and warm, and it clasped her own only as a means of support, that was all. The lady knew he could give her nothing more. But rather than feeling the usual humiliation, she felt a calm sense of possession.

  That clasp, untethered from the ground, in the middle of the whirlwind of jolts, sharp turns and the ghostly backdrop of the unfurling mountains, was closer to the deceptive intimacy of their encounters in her dreams, as opposed to real contact. But even though, as in those dreams, it contained a precariousness and, above all, a sense of solitude, the warmth it gave off was real and comforting, almost familiar.

  When it was time to step down from the truck, she sensed that the gentleman hurried to pull back his hand. She had already dismissed him, in any case. A car accompanied her back to the hotel, where she found a telegram from her husband. She had just enough time to pack her bags, and left on the afternoon coach.

  ‘La signora’

  Written in 1948, first published in the collection La villeggiante (Einaudi, 1975).

  Fabrizia Ramondino

  1936–2008

  Ramondino is the youngest writer in this anthology, and Althénopis, a fugue-like autobiographical first novel, inspired by her itinerant childhood, is her masterpiece. A leftist intellectual and community organizer, she was raised largely outside Italy, in Spain, France and Germany. Her father, a diplomat, died when she was young. In her mid-twenties she came to Naples and made it her base. Despite her vagabond nature, or perhaps because of it, she was fascinated by spaces that contained and confined, writing a meditative book called L’isola riflessa (The Reflected Island), about the time she spent, in a period of acute crisis, on Ventotene, a tiny island off the coast between Rome and Naples where the Emperor Augustus banished one of his daughters for adultery, where Mussolini interned enemies nearby and where, in 1941, the confined writer Altiero Spinelli, in collaboration with others, wrote a pioneering manifesto that paved the way for European unification (and the European Union). Ramondino dedicated another work to the experiences of women in a mental institution in Trieste. Spatial constriction is central to this story, which focuses tightly on a handful of characters simultaneously bound together and splintered. Despite being a chamber piece, it comments broadly and caustically on the effects of the economic boom that followed the Second World War, the consequences of the great migration of southern Italians to the north, and the dissolution of the traditional family structure. Ramondino writes with exceptional lucidity about states of emotional and physical distress. She also writes candidly about her struggle with alcoholism. In 1996 she joined a film crew that shot a documentary, partly commissioned by Unicef, about the exiled Sahrawi community in West Africa. Ramondino loved the sea, such that it was an element in nearly everything she wrote. She died suddenly after feeling ill while swimming close to the shore of southern Italy. Her last novel, La via (The Way), was published the following day.

  The Tower

  Translated by Jhumpa Lahiri

  The bus dropped them off on Saturday: the father, the mother, the cat in its basket, the daughter. The house, the father’s, was like his others. On the kitchen table, the woman set out a few of the provisions she’d brought with her, along with some other things she’d found in the house, including lots of wine. They ate cheerfully. The father said: ‘It’s like an Easter antipasto.’ Indeed, there were hard-boiled eggs, chees
e and olives. The woman was tired – her menstrual period had just started – and she went to bed with a novel and the radio, that alternated between opera arias and programmes on RAI3.1 Daughter and father, armed with flashlights, went to explore the tower. ‘Careful not to fall, there’s a step missing!’ the father said, or: ‘A thousand years ago, soldiers kept watch through these embrasures,’ just as children were told thirty years ago. At the top of the tower: wind, stars, the cat between their feet, disoriented by strange smells.

  Sunday morning, the woman woke up to find the daughter next to her in bed. She left the bedroom. She went to the kitchen. Light filtered in through the embrasures, constricted but intense. She moved around the room. From every slit, on each wall, that dazzling sun, and segments of the town, immersed in a din that merged with the light. The woman took a tranquillizer, because the left side of her chest was hurting, and she made herself some coffee, which she drank from a bowl, without sugar, with a little milk. Then she started to smoke.

  They’d already used up the water in the bathroom. It shut off at seven, they would turn it on again in the evening. She washed up with what was left in the tank and glanced, with remote satisfaction, at the voluminous hairstyle, Geisha-like, that the hairdresser had given her the day before, which still looked good.

  The house was familiar to her, like his previous ones.

  While she smoked and drank coffee in the narrow kitchen, waiting for the tranquillizer to get rid of the tightness in her chest – enveloped by the din of voices that came from down below – the others woke up. There wasn’t much in the house for breakfast. And so they decided to go to the sea, and to have breakfast at a bar. But before heading out, the daughter wanted her mother to explore the tower the way she had, excited, in the dark, the night before. The woman didn’t want to; she felt crabby, and didn’t want to pretend to be charmed. But she went.

  The light, which had been broken up, in the rooms, by the slender contours of the embrasures, reassembled in a circle at the top of the tower: the red roof-tiles of the town, the ilex-lined avenue, the piazza in front of the castle with a horrid white statue of San Francesco from the 1930s2 (replacing the usual unknown soldier), the orange and yellow fields, the lakes formed by the distant lagoon, the narrow strip of beach, the sea, the islands; all of it bathed in the clear, fresh, strong September light.

  They went into town. A few small shops, built up around the castle, replacing the old stables and oil mills. The bar, the dairy, the barber. They entered the bar thronged with men: the woman ordered a brandy, the daughter had a buondì snack and a fruit juice, the father a coffee. While waiting for the bus they walked around the little streets: houses painted white, with peppers and tomatoes hung out to dry, and chairs, those too hung up high, on hooks; there were large plates of figs exposed to the sun, and conserves kept safe from children and animals. They felt a bit uncomfortable walking there, because every tiny alley was like a house, and people in those nestled towns weren’t used to tourists. They proceeded to walk along the walls, which had small dwellings built into them. The daughter was tired of walking and seeing stones, fields, houses.

  The bus wasn’t due for another hour, and while they waited in the piazza, they bought the newspaper. The festival for L’Unità3 was taking place, and on page one of the newspaper they read that some thousand copies had been sold, and that the Metalworkers’ Union had declared that civil disobedience was a legitimate way to protest against the rise in transportation fares, and maybe also electricity rates.

  The bus finally arrived. They skirted orange and yellow fields, vineyards and olive groves, the red-tiled roofs of a town that ran along the single road that passed through it, up to the rail-yard, where the sea was. The bus left immediately. The daughter wanted to wait, to watch a train go by, but none arrived – the train and bus schedules almost never coincided. Beyond the platforms, a few buildings, deserted by now: restaurants, bars, hotels open in August, destined for the boisterous tourism of southern labourers who had migrated north, and who, in dance halls, bars and cheap hotels, had twenty days at best to revel, love, relax and spend all their money in an ongoing clamour of car horns and transistor radios. Apart from these migrants, tourism didn’t flourish here. This was also the case along other parts of the Adriatic coast, because of the state forest situated along the shoreline.

  That Sunday in late September there was hardly a soul: four young people, who clambered out of a Fiat 500, rapidly undressing and diving into the water; a prudent mother and child holding hands, both impeccably dressed, strolling along the water’s edge.

  Father and daughter went into the sea and started up endless shenanigans, splashing each other, diving in, racing, swimming.

  The woman lay out in the sun, at first with her clothes on; then she took them off, since the black bra and underpants weren’t that unlike a real bathing suit. Her body was thin, youthful, adorned by her puffy Geisha hairstyle. Reassured by her appearance, she wanted to abandon herself to the sun. But the feverish warmth of her period, which held her in a state of levitation and discomfort, didn’t mix well with the sun, brazen and direct but not powerful enough to vanquish her inner heat. That sun, broken up by the wind, called for races and swims, not distraught levitations. She was stretched out, her arms spread, before the sea. Her body formed a cross. Many kilometres in the distance, she thought, to the left and right of her, on both sides, were two other places on the Adriatic she knew well.

  Ten years ago, in Rimini, in September, before they had a daughter, when they’d hitchhiked carefree on three hundred lire a day, they’d stayed with some friends in an abandoned cabin, breaking in through a window. The next morning she’d woken up on a vast desert of sand and cabins. A drunken lifeguard, taking advantage of a moment in which she’d hung back from the others, had grabbed her breast: that cold September, deprived of women, his eyes had popped from the orbits of his ruddy face, while a little boy dragged a wooden spool at his feet by a string.

  And just fifteen days ago, further south, beyond the lagoon lakes, she’d carved out the time for a youthful weekend getaway. She’d left without her daughter, going with three friends who fished underwater, they, too, without girlfriends or wives. They’d tooled around in a small car through camping grounds, bays, Saracen towers, fields of prickly pear, white towns, abandoned plains; sun gave way to stormy weather, wind and sea took turns riling one another up, discouraging her companions from fishing, either by skin diving or scuba diving. And so in the end, in addition to being on their own, they were also rudderless. In the deserted camping ground, two of the friends had engaged for hours in a fight, like warriors in the Iliad, making shields out of the plastic lids of garbage cans, jousting with leafy torn-off branches, or even iron bars pried off the roof of the diving shop, among battle cries confused by the wind. At night, inside her small tent, she’d heard one of the men complaining; he wanted a woman. And he only calmed down on the third day, as they rode back, when each of them was immersed in thoughts of everyday hassles, and the loved ones they’d left behind.

  The woman thought back to those two adolescent moments – each so far apart in years, both so turbulent and raw. She thought back to that friendly camaraderie with men – at first it had drawn out a spell of eternal, unscathed expectation, but then it had led to disenchantment.

  Sun, sea, wind and the daughter’s frenzied playing, which the father continued to indulge, were poorly suited that day – she saw this more and more clearly – to that sense of mild levitation and illness. So she got dressed and headed over to the small establishment managed by the person who had once administered the assets since squandered by her ex-boyfriend’s parents.

  She had to chat with the wife, a thin blonde woman, mother of two children: chat about the car, her husband, the new stove she wanted, having seen it in the pages of Grazia, and about hairdressers, holidays, the dishwasher, her kids’ school, Emmanuelle,4 the pill, her family. She also exchanged a word or two with the woman’s mother-in-
law, an elderly peasant nostalgic for conversations that would take place on the little street she’d long since left behind, who showed her bobbin lace, pulling them out from a box, lace destined for the countless children and grandchildren who got rich in the north during the boom; lace that was previously scorned but, now that the family had grown sophisticated, was highly coveted. Just like the oils and preserves that the other old women who still lived in the village sent to their children and grandchildren, factory workers in Milan who, back in ’55, used to be ravenous for them. But then, in later years – years, precisely, of economic growth – hand-made goods would only be barely tolerated, out of sentimentality – Sasso oil was better, it didn’t ruin your liver, so were jellies from Massalombarda, and Pavesini biscuits, and zampone wrapped in aluminum foil and hermetically sealed – only to be fancied again, when it became fashionable, in motels along the highways, to have fake rustic genuine preserves, sealed in old glass jars, with hand-written labels glued to them.

  This was the chit-chat; and the woman was gripped by an aristocratic yearning to be sitting in a café in Istanbul or Vienna, where nobody knew her, where no one would say a word to her or divert her from her state of weary concentration.

  Then a huge racket arose, from the clearing between the pier and the sea: children, not joyful but petulant, asking for gelato, a cookie, gum, and: ‘When, when can we watch TV?’

  After that there was the trip back in the car; the daughter, still full of energy, who wanted to go down to the gate-keeper’s house and watch TV, who wanted gelato, a cookie, gum. Dinner at home because, as everyone knew, kids had to eat. But there wasn’t much in the kitchen. The father went out to buy some milk and a fancy tin of cookies – also a bottle of grappa for the two of them. The girl had dinner, she frolicked a bit on the tower steps and with the cat; she fell asleep, exhausted, reading the same comic books she’d been reading all week.