The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  I tried to make up for it with my spirit. Oh yes, with my spirit I was able to play around better!

  Above all, you value and never tire of praising the constancy of feelings and the coherence of personality. Why? Always for the same reason! Because you are cowards. Because you’re afraid of yourselves. That is, you’re afraid that if you change, you’ll lose the reality you have given yourselves and you’ll recognize, therefore, that it was nothing more than an illusion of yours and, consequently, that no reality exists other than the one we give ourselves.

  But, I ask, what does giving oneself a reality mean if not fixing oneself in a feeling, becoming congealed, stiff and encrusted in it? Therefore, arresting in ourselves the perpetual vital movement, making of ourselves so many small miserable pools destined for putrefaction, while life is a continuous flux, incandescent and indistinct.

  See, this is the thought that perturbs me and makes me furious!

  Life is wind. Life is sea. Life is fire. Not earth, which becomes encrusted and takes on form.

  All form is death.

  All that is removed from the state of fusion and congeals amid this continuous flux, which is incandescent and indistinct, is death.

  We are all beings that have been caught in the trap, separated from the ceaseless flux and fixed to die.

  The movement of this flux is in us, in our form, which is separated, detached and fixed, and will last for a brief moment more. But, see, little by little, it slows down. The fire cools down. The form dries up and finally movement ceases completely in the form, which has become rigid.

  We have finished dying and we have called this life!

  I feel caught in this death trap that has separated me from the flux of life in which I flowed without form, and has fixed me in time, in this time!

  Why in this time?

  I could still have flowed on and become fixed a little later, at least in another form, a little later … You think it would have been the same, right? Well, yes, sooner or later … But I would have been someone else a little later. Who knows who and who knows how! Trapped in another fate. I would have seen other things or, perhaps, the same things but with different appearances, arranged differently.

  You can’t imagine what hatred the things I see arouse in me, the things caught with me in the trap of this time that is mine. All the things that end up dying with me, a little at a time! Both hatred and pity! But more hatred, perhaps, than pity.

  Yes, it’s true, if I had fallen into the trap a little later, I would then have hated that other form as I now hate this one. I would have hated that other time as I do this one now, and all the illusions of life that we the dead of all time fabricate for ourselves with that small amount of movement and heat that remains shut up within us and that comes from that continuous flux that is true life and that never stops.

  We are so many busy corpses who are deceiving ourselves into believing that we are creating our lives.

  We copulate, a dead man with a dead woman, and we think we are giving life but we give death … Another being in the trap!

  ‘Here, my dear, here. Begin to die, dear … Begin to die … You’re crying, eh? You’re crying and wriggling about … You would have liked to flow on some more? Relax, my dear! What can you do about it? Caught, co-ag-u-la-ted, fixed … It won’t last but a short while! Relax …’

  Oh, as long as we’re very young, as long as our body is fresh and grows and weighs little, we do not clearly realize that we are caught in the trap! But then the body becomes a tangled mass and we begin to feel its weight. We begin to feel that we can no longer move as we did before.

  With disgust I see my spirit struggling in this trap to avoid, it too, being fixed in a body already worn out by the years and grown heavy. I immediately drive away every idea that might become stale in me. I immediately interrupt every act that might become a habit in me. I don’t want responsibilities, I don’t want tender attachments and I don’t want my spirit to harden into a crust of concepts either. But I feel that from day to day my body finds it ever more difficult to follow my restless spirit. It continually slumps. It has tired knees and heavy hands … It wants rest! I’ll give it that.

  No, no, I’m unwilling and unable to resign myself to offering, me too, the miserable spectacle given by all those old people who end up dying slowly. No. But first … I don’t know what, but I’d like to do something enormous, something unheard of, to give vent to this rage that’s devouring me.

  I’d like at least … See these fingernails? I’d like to dig them into the face of every beautiful woman who passes down the street, teasing men provocatively.

  What stupid, miserable and thoughtless creatures all women are! They dress up, put on their fineries, turn their laughing eyes here and there and show off their provocative shapes as much as they can. But they don’t realize that they too are in the trap and are fixedly formed to die, and have the trap in themselves for those that are to come!

  For us men the trap is in them, in women. For a moment they put us once again in a state of incandescence to wrest from us another being who is sentenced to death. They say and do so much until they finally make us fall, blind, passionate and violent, into their trap.

  Me too! Me too! They made me fall too! In fact, most recently. That’s why I’m so furious.

  An abominable trap! If only I had seen it … A demure young lady. Timid, humble. As soon as she would see me, she would lower her eyes and blush because she knew that otherwise I would never have fallen.

  She used to come here to put into practice one of the seven corporal works of mercy: to visit the sick. She used to come for my father, not for me. She used to come to help my old governess look after and clean my poor father, who’s in the other room …

  She used to live here in the adjoining apartment and had become friends with my governess, to whom she would complain about her idiotic husband, who always reproached her for not being able to give him a son.

  But do you understand how it is? When you begin to stiffen and you can no longer move as before, you want to see other small corpses around, very young corpses that still move as you did when you were very young; other small corpses that resemble you and do all those little things that you can no longer do.

  There’s nothing more amusing than to wash the faces of small corpses that still don’t know they are caught in the trap, and to comb their hair and take them out for a little stroll.

  As I was saying, she used to come here.

  ‘I can imagine,’ she would say, blushing, her eyes downcast, ‘I can imagine what a torment it must be, Signor Fabrizio, to see your father in this condition for so many years!’

  ‘Yes, Signora,’ I would answer gruffly and I would turn around and go away.

  I’m certain now that as soon as I would turn around and go away, she would laugh to herself, biting her lip to hold back her laughter.

  I would go away because, in spite of myself, I felt that I admired that woman. Not indeed because of her beauty – she was very beautiful, and the more she showed she had no regard for her beauty, the more seductive she was – but because she didn’t give her husband the satisfaction of putting another unfortunate in the trap.

  I thought she was the one. Instead, no, it wasn’t her problem. It was his. And she knew it or, at least, if she didn’t actually have the certainty, she must have entertained the suspicion. That’s why she laughed She laughed at me because I admired her for that presumed incapacity of hers. She laughed silently in her evil heart and waited. Until one evening …

  It happened here, in this room.

  I was here in the dark. You know that I like to go to the window and watch the day die and let myself be taken and wrapped gradually by the darkness, and to think, ‘I’m no longer here!’ To think, ‘If there were someone in this room, he would get up and light a lamp. I won’t light the lamp because I’m no longer here. I’m like the chairs in this room, like the little table, the drapes, the wardrobe, the couch, that don�
�t need light and don’t know and don’t see that I’m here. I want to be like them and not see myself and forget I’m here.’

  Now then, I was here in the dark. She came tiptoeing in from my father’s room, where she had left a small night-lamp lit whose glimmer came through the small opening in the door and faintly spread through the darkness, almost without diminishing it.

  I didn’t see her. I didn’t see that she was about to bump into me. Perhaps she didn’t see me either. When we collided, she let out a cry and pretended to faint in my arms, on my chest. I lowered my head. My cheek brushed up against hers. I felt the ardour of her eager mouth, and …

  After a while, her laugh roused me. A diabolical laugh. I can still hear it! She laughed and laughed as she ran off, that wicked woman! She laughed because she had set a trap for me with her modesty. She laughed because my ferocity was vanquished. And she laughed because of something else that I learned about later.

  She went away three months ago with her husband, who was assigned to the position of high-school teacher in Sardinia.

  Certain assignments come in the nick of time.

  I will never see my remorse. I will not see it. But at certain moments I am tempted to run off and find that wicked woman and choke her before she puts into the trap that unfortunate whom she wrested from me with such treachery.

  My friend, I’m happy I never knew my mother. Perhaps if I had known her, this ferocious thought would not have arisen in me. But since it has, I’m happy I never knew my mother.

  Come, come, come here with me into this other room. Look! This is my father.

  For seven years he has been here. He’s nothing any more. Two eyes that cry, a mouth that eats. He can’t speak, can’t hear and can’t move any more. He eats and cries. He is spoonfed. He cries in private without reason or, perhaps, because there’s still something in him, a vestige of something that, though it began to die seventy-six years ago, doesn’t want to end yet.

  Don’t you find it atrocious to remain still caught in the trap like that because of a single remaining moment and not to be able to free yourself?

  He cannot think of his father who, seventy-six years ago, fixed him for death, which is so frightfully late in coming. But I, I can think about him, and I think about the fact that I am a germ of this man who can no longer move, and that if I am trapped in this time and not in another, I owe it to him!

  He’s crying, see? He always cries like that … and he makes me cry too! Perhaps he wants to be freed. I’ll free him some evening together with myself. It’s now beginning to get cold. One of these evenings we’ll light a little fire … If you’d like to join us …

  No, eh? You’re thanking me? Yes, yes, let’s go outside, let’s go outside, my friend. I can see that you need to see the sun again, on the street.

  ‘La trappola’

  First published in the newspaper Corriere della Sera in 1912 (23 May). It was later part of the collection La trappola (Treves, 1915), in the fourth volume of Novelle per un anno (L’uomo solo) (Bemporad, 1922), and in the final edition of Novelle per un anno (Mondadori, 1937).

  Cesare Pavese

  1908–50

  Pavese’s version of Moby Dick, translated at the age of twenty-three with a rudimentary knowledge of English, has come to be criticized by many for its errors, omissions and liberties. And yet it speaks volumes about Pavese, a tormented genius from Turin who was an obsessive student of the English language and wrote his university thesis on Walt Whitman. His visionary love for American literature, both aesthetically and politically motivated, opened a floodgate, forever altering the course of Italian writing. He spent time interned for anti-Fascist activity in Calabria, a setting for some memorable stories, and upon return to Turin, after the war, became a legendary editor at Einaudi, working alongside Vittorini (they were born in the same year), and mentoring Italo Calvino, whose writing career Pavese essentially launched. He turned to fiction only in the last creative phase of his life; it followed his prodigious activity as translator, poet, critic and editor. Much of his work, occupying sixteen volumes, is autobiographical, and has a primordial underpinning of nature, myth and sacrifice. Like Hemingway, he was a master of the lacuna, the unsaid. And again, like Hemingway, he had an ear for just how people spoke, with a particular penchant for slang. Pavese’s stories can be bleak, astringent. The selected story was written in 1936, but not published until after the author’s death. The first-person narrator, rueful and self-critical, sheds light on Pavese’s perpetually conflicted relationships with women. He set his final novel, La luna e i falò (The Moon and the Bonfires), published the year he died, partly in America, powerfully evoking the California landscape without having ever gone there. Until 1950, Pavese was a figure both aloof and at the very centre of post-war Italy’s literary world. In August of that year, two months after winning the Strega Prize, he killed himself in a hotel room; the note he left asked people to ‘not gossip too much’.

  Wedding Trip

  Translated by A. E. Murch

  1.

  Now that I, shattered and full of remorse, have learned how foolish it is to reject reality for the sake of idle fancies, how presumptuous to receive when one has nothing to give in return, now – Cilia is dead. Though I am resigned to my present life of drudgery and ignominy, I sometimes think how gladly I would adapt myself to her ways, if only those days could return. But perhaps that is just another of my fancies. I treated Cilia badly when I was young, when nothing should have made me irritable; no doubt I should have gone on ill-treating her, out of bitterness and the disquiet of an unhappy conscience. For instance, I am still not sure after all these years, whether I really loved her. Certainly I mourn for her; I find her in the background of my inmost thoughts; never a day passes in which I do not shrink painfully away from my memories of those two years, and I despise myself because I let her die. I grieve for her youth, even more for my own loneliness, but – and this is what really counts – did I truly love her? Not, at any rate, with the sincere, steady love a man should have for his wife.

  The fact is, I owed her too much, and all I gave her in return was a blind suspicion of her motives. As it happens, I am by nature superficial and did not probe more deeply into such dark waters. At the time I was content to treat the matter with my instinctive diffidence and refused to give weight or substance to certain sordid thoughts that, had they taken root in my mind, would have sickened me of the whole affair. However, several times I did ask myself: ‘And why did Cilia marry me?’ I do not know whether it was due to a sense of my own importance, or to profound ineptitude, but the fact remains that it puzzled me.

  There was no doubt that Cilia married me, not I her. Oh! Those depressing evenings I endured in her company – wandering restlessly through the streets, squeezing her arm, pretending to be free and easy, suggesting as a joke that we should jump in the river together. Such ideas didn’t bother me – I was used to them – but they upset her, made her anxious to help me; so much so that she offered me, out of her wages as a shop assistant, a little money to live on while I looked for a better job. I did not want money. I told her that to be with her in the evenings was enough for me, as long as she didn’t go away and take a job somewhere else. So we drifted along. I began to tell myself, sentimentally, that what I needed was someone nice to live with; I spent too much time roaming the streets; a loving wife would know how to contrive a little home for me, and just by going into it I should be happy again, no matter how weary and miserable the day had made me.

  I tried to tell myself that even alone I managed to muddle along quite well, but I knew this was no argument. ‘Two people together can help each other,’ said Cilia, ‘and take care of one another. If they’re a little in love, George, that’s enough.’ I was tired and disheartened, those evenings; Cilia was a dear and very much in earnest, with the fine coat she had made herself and her little broken handbag. Why not give her the joy she wanted? What other girl would suit me better? She knew what it was to work
hard and be short of money; she was an orphan, of working-class parents; I was sure that she was more eager and sincere than I.

  On impulse I told her that if she would accept me, uncouth and lazy as I was, I would marry her. I felt content, soothed by the warmth of my good deed and proud to discover I had that much courage. I said to Cilia: ‘I’ll teach you French!’ She responded with a smile in her gentle eyes as she clung tightly to my arm.

  2.

  In those days I thought I was sincere, and once again I explained to Cilia how poor I was. I warned her that I hardly ever had a full day’s work and didn’t know what it was to get a pay packet. The college where I taught French paid me by the hour. One day I told her that if she wanted to get on in the world she ought to look for some other man. Cilia looked troubled and offered to keep on with her job. ‘You know very well that isn’t what I want,’ I muttered. Having settled things thus, we married.

  It made no particular difference to my life. Already, in the past, Cilia had sometimes spent evenings with me in my room. Love-making was no novelty. We took two furnished rooms; the bedroom had a wide, sunny window, and there we placed the little table with my books.

  Cilia, though, became a different woman. I, for my part, had been afraid that, once married, she would grow vulgar and slovenly – as I imagined her mother had been – but instead I found her more particular, more considerate towards me. She was always clean and neat, and kept everything in perfect order. Even the simple meals she prepared for me in the kitchen had the cordiality and solace of those hands and that smile. Her smile, especially, was transfigured. It was no longer the half-timid, half-teasing smile of a shop-girl on the spree, but the gentle flowering of an inner joy, utterly content and eager to please, a serene light on her thin young face. I felt a twinge of jealousy at this sign of a happiness I did not always share. ‘She’s married me and she’s enjoying it,’ I thought.