The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  The father and mother were also tired, but not from air, motion, sea and sun; they were tired of themselves, and they were even more tired of being together again, because of the daughter.

  Grappa had always kept them company in those final years: at first for the difficulty of being together, then for the boredom of being together again. Grappa when they had money, otherwise wine. And that night they still had some money.

  He’d taught her how to drink grappa and wine, and inebriation. He taught all this as if it were a form of bliss, as if it were a pledge. He’d accompany the initiation with a smile, now gentle and radiant, now winking with intelligence, now muffled with secret suffering, now airy and engrossing, now sorrowful, as if offended by the hardships of the world; it was the smile of perennial adolescence, though sometimes it turned mean, belonging to someone who couldn’t bear the weight of being unmasked. Then, more and more with the passing of years, the smile was darkened by the offences of misunderstanding and those, yet more serious, of understanding. A smile that had seduced her in the beginning because she’d warped it, that is to say, made it out to be more than it was, the way children do when they see beauty in ordinary faces, or enormity in the village piazza, or think that animals can talk. Or maybe it really had been beautiful back then, and life was what had distorted it.

  Now, occasionally, the smile seemed petty or afraid: not gentle but pusillanimous, not radiant but kitschy; the winking intelligence was still there, but it was ensnared by petty daily grievances – and if it rose to a higher plane, it seemed like a delirium or a trap set for others who were more naive; the sorrowful irony had become a tic, a sign of offences suffered and dealt. Then, more recently, nothing moderately appealing about that smile remained; instead it seemed to turn people away; and often it turned into a grimace, like someone who puts his hands over his ears because of a screeching sound, or covers his eyes from a blinding light. Tolerance had turned to cynicism, compassion to self-pity and acrimony.

  They wouldn’t be seeing each other this way, recalling, over a bottle of grappa, a world they’d shared, had it not been for the daughter. But this conviction – the woman thought – was also a salvation. She objected to the evasions of the past; deep down, in fact, she was severe. But how it weighed on her! He would have wanted her to be unhappy, in fact, like some men want their mothers to be. Mater Dolorosa. No, not her.

  At the start of their scheduled encounters she had always ended up drunk, because the effort of deciphering the enigma still flummoxed her: there it was in front of her, unfathomable, some meaning looming, dreadful, neither able nor willing to reveal itself. On either side a Yes and a No, leaning in, at loggerheads, among the falsely obliging fumes of alcohol; and this eventually left them exhausted, muddled by an ambiguous complicity.

  But now, for quite some time, everything had changed. On either side of the table there was only the obligation of staying together for the sake of their daughter; but at times the age-old habit of seeking an impossible, mutual understanding took hold of them, like a bad habit. Then they were bogged down in a perilous swamp of memories.

  Like all people who are profoundly alone, the woman was naive and violent. They hadn’t spoken to each other in a long time. So she fell back, again, into the bad habit of complicity, mistaking it for sharing. Their conversations seemed like ancient sophisms, harmful to the world and to themselves. Paltry ruins of ancient wisdom. She surrendered to the alcohol until she threw up, liberated. An acute discomfort followed.

  When the ritual had been carried out, she went to bed, next to her daughter. But the discomfort intensified. Waves rose up as if from a swamp, not from memory but from nothing; deep waves, and rapid fog. She wanted someone beside her to quell them, to shoo them away; the way her mother did.

  She got up, went to his bed, and hugged him tight, but kept to the edge of the mattress so she wouldn’t bother him, so she wouldn’t be pushed away; just like she would with her mother who, when she didn’t push her away, would indulgently call her ‘my little ivy-leaf’. That was how tightly she’d squeeze into her mother in bed.

  He tried to chase her away, he’d misunderstood. But she insisted, deaf, until the discomfort gave way to sleep.

  In the morning, father and daughter decided to go to back to the sea. The woman had a massive headache, as well as the morbid heat of her period, so she stayed in bed. But after a while she felt the urgent need to escape the distressing odour of her blood. She got up; the sun was coming in again through the embrasures, along with the din of the piazza. She read all day. She finished The Confessions of Zeno. She started One Hundred Years of Solitude.

  In the afternoon she went down to the piazza to buy food; people stared at the ‘foreigner’. Who knows what they take me for, she said to herself. Maybe they think I’m the wife of a new office worker, or a whore.

  She thought of him in the town, more of a foreigner than an office worker. Sheltered in that dilapidated abandoned tower none of his relatives would claim. Limited to spending time with only a few people: the gate-keeper – a woman who’d known him since he was little, when his parents had money, who now, seeing him poor, treated him with a calculated informality – and a boyhood friend, a decent man, a shopkeeper entirely devoted to work and family. She imagined him living for weeks on rice, olive oil from Puglia, and packs of Nazionali, as if he were in solitary confinement, in voluntary exile, after the suicide (or accidental death) of a friend.

  He spoke to the daughter, at length, about the mouse who lived in his drawer, his faithful companion fattened up on cheese rinds; the unusual light at certain hours or on certain days that unveiled or lit up the islands; old stories about the tower: traps, assassins, labyrinths. He spoke of a happy, hard-working future, when, who knew, he might plant basil, tomatoes, aubergines and lettuces in the tower’s dried-up moat – maybe even roses and geraniums.

  The daughter, one day, had asked her: ‘Why doesn’t he live with us?’ And she, lying, had replied: because he wants to be like a bird, free. Instead he seemed to her, in that tower, an ensnared bird who had lost its bearings and could no longer get out.

  It was late to shop for food. The market was empty. She found a little shop and chose something from the leftover fruits and vegetables. They threw in some wilting basil, bereft of its proud scent. She bought bread and cheese. Everything was complicated in that mistrustful town, where no one seemed to know anything, not even where the little shop was. Where eyes stared at her, half closed or still, like thick wax seals.

  She had to make dinner, set the table. The family triangle, there at the table. She was overtaken by frenzy. She had a wicked impulse. There was no one watching her. She undid the triangle: she stacked the three plates in the middle and put the silverware on top, next to the glasses, one inside the other. A kind of buffet. Father and daughter paid it no heed, they didn’t even notice. He merely recreated the triangle. And since the child didn’t like certain foods, he started to amuse her, to instruct her, to convince her that she had to try every new thing out of curiosity, not obligation.

  After dinner everyone was sleepy, for different reasons: the little girl because it had been an active day at the beach; the woman because she was hungover from the day before, and because of her period; as for him, who knew – in those days he fell asleep easily, maybe to thin his delirium down to a fog.

  The following Tuesday, after breakfast, that sunny din still came through the embrasures; but the sky was no longer as clear. The wind had picked up and clouds approached from the sea. The daughter went down to play at the gate-keeper’s. And while the woman settled down to read in the only armchair, by the only window adorned with lush reddish ivy, he called her into a room, an old chicken coop, where he’d set up a small desk. I’ve consulted the I Ching, he said. He’d looked up the word ‘wife’ and what came up was ‘damage and devastation’. Then the woman, reacting to his ambiguous smile, remembered how he’d interpreted her nocturnal act of lying down beside him a few nights a
go, reading it as nothing other than the behaviour of a woman who wants to sidle up to a man. Of course this hadn’t been the truth, nor could it ever be again. She turned sullen at their lack of understanding of each other. But she didn’t want to stoop to petty explanations. She left without a word.

  And she observed this silence, not as if it were a pact, or an order, but instinctively.

  Four more days went by. The air had turned chilly, and there were storms at night. In the morning, the sun-lit din no longer arrived through the embrasures: the sky was gloomy, the piazza deserted. The woman sat next to the window wrapped in blankets and shawls; the rain streamed down the wall of the house across the street; or it let up, and the drops glistened on the pigeons. The daughter kept playing her exciting games: up and down the tower stairs, with the cat; in the piazza, with the other children; she spent the evenings in front of the gate-keeper’s television. At times the father indulged her in her games – it was only with children that he resembled his former self. More frequently he sat at his desk in the chicken coop among crates of books, clothes and records he hadn’t bothered to open, though he’d been living there for several months.

  The woman read. Or, inevitably, she remembered. She abstained from alcohol; she drank the cold water of recollection.

  The tumult of the years spent in Milan, their cheerful ex-pat brigade: from one little job to another, one furnished room to the next, bar-hopping in the evenings. They’d left behind Posillipo, their neighbourhood in Naples. Ahead of them lay a future rich with promise. No one wanted to make money. Then those years ended for everyone. But he was still ensnared in his youth.

  Now and then, lifting her eyes from the book, she observed the little room where she was holed up for those days; it felt like a bow window, or a boudoir.

  Everything looked as if it had been salvaged from a shipwreck: the revolving bookcase saved from the ruin of his family, the mirror saved from the failure of their living together; the photograph of the young man she’d once loved; the photo of the daughter, about whom he’d once said: ‘It’s such a drag to raise a kid’; paintings by an old friend from their Brera days. But all this wreckage had been reorganized by a common aura she struggled to define: faded fabrics laid over the armchairs and beds; subdued light; rounded angles and nooks; a suffused pastel shade. A baroque disorder that evoked rosy children among the bushes; white skirts with thin sky-blue stripes that got snagged on the grass; playful, rotund priests; English profiteers and southern Italian viveurs; last rites, solemn and grotesque, because the dying had lived too long. Hence indefinably similar to his mother’s rooms, she around whom every place became an alcove or a boudoir, where every colour muted into a pastel hue, every sound sank into the carpets, every misfortune settled into good manners, every belief faded into a tolerance that seemed fatuous, but was actually insidious, lethal.

  On Friday night there was some friction. They’d gone through almost all the money, and each blamed the other. The woman had paid the bills before leaving, while he’d been counting on that money. Only some spare change remained for her ticket. He and the daughter would go to his mother and sister’s, getting a ride with his cousin. The woman also asked him to lend her a copy of Don Quixote to read on the journey; she’d latched on to that book since the previous day. But he didn’t want to give it to her. He said it meant a lot to him. She felt unjustly deprived. And the hidden meaning of those petty actions also embittered her: the infantile hatred he harboured towards her, because he felt exposed by her. What he needed was to be surrounded by that aura, drowsy and ambiguous, which belonged to his family: the aura that sowed the seeds of his exile, in a world that called for definitions instead.

  The next day it rained. The bus would be leaving at noon. The woman, as usual, got up before the others. In the kitchen, through the embrasures, a malevolent wind brought in the rain. She lit a cigarette, waiting.

  ‘La torre’

  Part of the collection Arcangelo e altri racconti (Einaudi, 2005).

  Luigi Pirandello

  1867–1936

  Pirandello, who won the Nobel Prize in 1934, is perhaps best known as a playwright who revolutionized theatrical conventions, but his astonishing output of short fiction was also a locus of ongoing experimentation. In 1922, the year after his groundbreaking play Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters in Search of an Author) earned him international fame, he told his publisher, Mondadori, that he wanted to create a massive work called Novelle per un anno (Short Stories for a Year), consisting of three hundred and sixty-five tales that had originally appeared in newspapers and magazines. Fifteen volumes were published, a total of two hundred and forty-two stories, but the project was left incomplete. Pirandello was born in Agrigento, Sicily, but moved to Rome when he was twenty, and spent the next twenty-five years there teaching Italian language and literature. His personal life was tormented; economic hardship drove his wife insane, and she was committed to an asylum for four decades. In 1924, he sent Mussolini a telegram and publicly joined the Fascist Party, an allegiance providing Pirandello with financial backing to form a theatre company. And yet his work, obsessed with masks and doubles, interrogating the silence at the heart of existence, was subversive to the core. This story was published in 1912, more than ten years before his masterful novel Uno, nessuno e centomila (One, No one, One Hundred Thousand), a radical work about identity. Anguished and essential, it is stylistically distant from his earlier folkloric work. According to a dear friend from Palermo, ‘the soul of a Sicilian is in it’. Though he was eligible for a state funeral, Pirandello’s final wishes were to be carried in a humble wagon and cremated without ceremony. His last published work – a short story – appeared the day before he died.

  The Trap

  Translated by Giovanni R. Bussino

  No, no, how can I resign myself? And why should I? If I had any responsibilities towards others, perhaps I would, but I don’t! So, why should I?

  Listen to me. You can’t say I’m wrong. No one reasoning in the abstract like this can say I’m wrong. What I’m feeling, you and everyone else feels too.

  Why are all of you so afraid of waking up at night? Because for you the reasons for living are strengthened by the light of day, by the illusions produced by that light.

  Darkness and silence terrify you. You light a candle but the candlelight seems dismal to you because that’s not the kind of light you need, right? The sun! The sun! All of you desperately seek the sun because illusions no longer arise spontaneously with the artificial light you yourselves procure with a trembling hand.

  Like your hand, all your reality trembles. It reveals itself to you to be fake and flimsy. Artificial like that candlelight. All your senses keep watch, painfully tense in the fear that beneath the reality that you discover to be flimsy and hollow, another reality may be revealed to you: an obscure and horrible one – the real one. A breath of air … What’s that? What’s that creaking sound?

  Suspended in the horror of that uncertain wait, amid chills and sweat, you see your daytime illusions in that light. They move about the room with the appearance and gait of ghosts. Look at them carefully. They have the same puffy and watery bags under their eyes that you have, the same jaundiced look brought on by your insomnia, and your arthritic pains too. Yes, the same dull torment caused by the gout in the joints of your fingers.

  What a strange appearance, what a strange appearance the pieces of furniture in your room assume! They too seem suspended in a bewildering stillness that troubles you.

  You slept with them around you.

  But they do not sleep. They remain there both day and night.

  For now, it’s your hand that opens and closes them. But tomorrow it’ll be another hand. Who knows whose other hand! … But for them it’s all the same. For now they contain your clothes: empty forms that have been hung up and that have taken on the shape and wrinkles of your tired knees and bony elbows. Tomorrow they’ll contain someone else’s forms hanging there.
The mirror on the wardrobe reflects your image now, but it doesn’t preserve a trace of it, nor will it preserve a trace of someone else’s image tomorrow.

  The mirror itself cannot see. The mirror is like truth.

  Do you think that I’m delirious, that I’m talking nonsense? Come on, you understand me, and you understand even what I am not saying since I find it very hard to express this obscure feeling that rules me and overwhelms me.

  You know how I’ve lived up till now. You know that I’ve always felt revulsion and horror about giving myself some sort of form, becoming congealed and fixing myself even momentarily in it.

  I’ve always made my friends laugh because of the great many … what do you call them? Alterations? Yes, alterations in my personal characteristics. But you’ve been able to laugh at them because you’ve never condescended to consider my urgent need to look at myself in the mirror, with a different appearance; to trick myself into believing that I was not always the same person, to see myself as someone else!

  But of course! What could I alter? It’s true that I went so far as to shave my head to see myself bald before my time. At times I shaved off my moustache, leaving my beard, or vice versa. At times I shaved off my moustache and beard, or I let my beard grow now one way, now another. A goatee, parted on the chin or running along the line of the jaw …

  I played around with the bristles.

  I couldn’t at all alter my eyes, nose, mouth, ears, torso, legs, arms or hands. Did I put on make-up like a theatre actor? I sometimes had that temptation. But then I thought that, under my mask, my body always remained the same … and was growing old!