The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  We came to the railings of a terrace and caught our breath. The night was calm but dark, and the streetlamps floundered in the cold black abyss that lay before us. I said nothing, and my heart leapt as I breathed the smell of it, wild and free. Cilia looked around her and pointed out to me a line of lights, their reflection quivering in the water. Was it a ship? A breakwater? We could hear waves splashing gently in the darkness. ‘Tomorrow,’ she breathed ecstatically, ‘tomorrow we’ll see it all.’

  As we made our way back to our hotel, Cilia clung tightly to my side. ‘How tired I am! George, it’s lovely! Tomorrow! I’m so happy! Are you happy, too?’ and she rubbed her cheek against my shoulder.

  I did not feel like that. I was walking with clenched jaws, taking deep breaths and letting the wind caress me. I felt restless, remote from Cilia, alone in the world. Halfway up the stairs I said to her: ‘I don’t want to go to bed yet. You go on up. I’ll go for another little stroll and come back.’

  7.

  That time, too, it was the same. How I hurt Cilia! Even now, when I think of her in bed as dawn is breaking, I am filled with a desolate remorse for the way I treated her.

  Yet I couldn’t help it! I always did everything like a fool, a man in a dream, and I did not realize the sort of man I was until the end, when even remorse was useless. Now I can glimpse the truth. I become so engrossed in solitude that it deadens all my sense of human relationships and makes me incapable of tolerating or responding to any tenderness. Cilia, for me, was not an obstacle: she simply did not exist. If I had only understood this! If I had had any idea of how much harm I was doing to myself by cutting myself off from her in this way, I should have turned to her with intense gratitude and cherished her presence as my only salvation.

  But is the sight of another’s suffering ever enough to open a man’s eyes? Instead, it takes the sweat of agony, the bitter pain that comes as we awake, lives with us as we walk the streets, lies beside us through sleepless nights, always raw and pitiless, covering us with shame.

  Dawn broke wet and cloudy. The avenue was still deserted as I wandered back to the hotel. I saw Cilia and the landlady quarrelling on the stairs, both in their nightclothes. Cilia was crying. The landlady, in a dressing gown, gave a shriek as I went in. Cilia stood motionless, leaning on the handrail. Her face was white with shock, her hair and her clothes in wild disorder.

  ‘Here he is!’

  ‘Whatever’s going on here, at this time in the morning?’ I asked harshly.

  The landlady, clutching her bosom, started shouting that she had been disturbed in the middle of the night because of a missing husband; there had been tears, handkerchiefs ripped to shreds, telephone calls, police enquiries. Was that the way to behave? Where did I come from?

  I was so weary I could hardly stand. I gave her a listless glance of disgust. Cilia had not moved. She stood there breathing deeply through her open mouth, her face red and distorted. ‘Cilia,’ I cried, ‘haven’t you been to sleep?’

  She still did not reply. She just stood there, motionless, making no attempt to wipe away the tears that streamed from her eyes. Her hands were clasped at her waist, tearing at her handkerchief.

  ‘I went for a walk,’ I said in a hollow voice. ‘I stopped by the harbour.’ The landlady seemed about to interrupt me, then shrugged her shoulders. ‘Anyway, I’m alive, and dying for the want of sleep. Let me throw myself on the bed.’

  I slept until two, heavily as a drunkard, then I awoke with a start. The light in the room was dim, but I could hear noises in the street. Instinctively I did not move. Cilia was there, sitting in a corner, looking at me, staring at the walls, examining her fingers, jumping up now and then. After a while I whispered cautiously: ‘Cilia, are you watching me?’ Swiftly she raised her eyes. The shattered look I had seen earlier now seemed engraved on her face. She moved her lips to speak, but no sound came.

  ‘Cilia, a husband shouldn’t be watched,’ I said in a playful voice like a child’s. ‘Have you had anything to eat today?’ The poor girl shook her head. I jumped out of bed and looked at the clock. ‘The train goes at half past three,’ I cried. ‘Come on, Cilia, hurry! Let’s try to look happy in front of the landlady.’ She did not move, so I went over and pulled her up by her cheeks.

  ‘Listen,’ I went on. ‘Is it because of last night?’ Her eyes filled with tears. ‘I could have lied, said I had got lost, smoothed things over. I didn’t do that, because I hate lies. Cheer up! I have always liked to be alone. Still, even I,’ and I felt her give a start, ‘even I haven’t enjoyed myself much at Genoa. Yet I’m not crying.’

  ‘Viaggio di nozze’

  This story was written between 24 November and 6 December 1936. It was first published shortly after Pavese’s death, in the magazine Comunità (IV, no. 9, September–October 1950) and then included in the collection Notte di festa (Einaudi, 1953).

  Goffredo Parise

  1929–86

  ‘Melancholy’ is part of Parise’s Sillabari, an ingenious work of literature consisting of fifty-four relatively brief, essential stories, grouped according to the letters of the alphabet and dedicated to a single emotion (a sillabario is the Italian word for a child’s spelling book, one of the first things that teaches us to read and write). The result is an artful glossary of the human heart. We begin with the letter A, for amore (love), and end with S, solitudine (solitude). Parise finished before getting to Z, explaining that he ended, in spite of his original intentions, where ‘the poetry abandoned him’.1 The writer Giuseppe Montesano compared the Sillabari to the work of Robert Walser and Truman Capote, and the critic Cesare Garboli called them ‘virtual novels’. Indeed, each contains a universe, suggestive of much larger dimensions, yet each is a marvel of concision that, like Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations, constitutes a series of interlocking yet autonomous texts, orderly yet emotionally anarchic. Parise worked as a journalist and screenwriter and also wrote several novels, but the Sillabari (there were originally two volumes, Sillabario n. 1 and Sillabario n. 2, published in 1972 and 1982, and published, respectively, in English, as Abecedary and Solitudes) are considered his finest achievement. He received the Strega Prize for the second volume. In a letter from that period, he writes about striving to achieve ‘a sort of limbo, a light and suffused exaltation in which, all told, you like life and at the same time feel nostalgic about it’. The structure of Parise’s sentences – fluid, multi-faceted, associative – have a characteristic looseness that permits one thought to always make room for another, infusing this story with profound ambivalence. Parise, an illegitimate child, never knew his father, and was the long-time companion of the painter Giosetta Fioroni, celebrated for her pop-art portraits of women.

  Melancholy

  Translated by Jhumpa Lahiri

  Every day that cool and distant summer, the children of the Bedin-Alighieri Colony, a camp for the poor managed by the equally poor Sisters of Saint Dorothy, were woken up bright and early and taken immediately on to the meadows or into the pine grove at the crest of the hill. Two young nuns watched over them, dressed all in white for summer instead of the black habit and bonnet; they too were quite young, and nearly as small as the children. There were boys and girls, and among the girls was a ‘guest’ named Silvia, referred to as a ‘guest’ because she was the granddaughter of one of the founders, a Socialist who was hardly poor.

  This is why Silvia – unlike everyone else, who wore the grey, collarless smock the camp required, made from cheap cotton – was able to choose, from her little trunk, her normal clothes every day: the shoes she always wore (and not the red rubber sandals that were part of the uniform), and even her own dolls or toys that she’d brought from home. She slept, however, in the dormitory with all the other girls, and so the rest of Silvia’s day was just like the others’: the same small breakfast, same lunch, same snack in the afternoon, same dinner. Even the white enamelled bed and the coarse sheets with thick stitching down the middle were the same as everyone else
’s.

  It was the first time Silvia was among other children in a camp and not alone, as usual, with her grandfather and the maid with whom she lived year round. Her grandfather had brought her there on the crossbar of his bike, which had a seat just for her. He was dressed, as always, in black: a black alpaca cape, floppy bow tie, big black hat and tall boots, also black, made of goatskin, with buttons up the side. He had entrusted her to the nuns, who seemed quite happy to receive her, treating her like a special guest.

  The great discovery for Silvia during her stay at the camp were the smells: she could clearly detect, in the meadows, the smells of various herbs and plants, without knowing the names of one from the other: wild mint, sage, rosemary or else simple weeds, dandelion or fern or crab grass or other weeds that stank instead, which the boys stuck under her nose on purpose. The grove of fir and larch trees at the crest of the hill, where they went in the afternoons, contained other, entirely different smells: pine cones, pine nuts, pine needles and certain bell-shaped berries that Silvia called ‘The Dead’, much to the children’s delight.

  Even the insects had a distinct smell: the grasshoppers Silvia expertly caught smelled of verbena, while certain bugs or stag beetles smelled of celluloid, or emanated this scent once trapped in little cages that one of the nuns had taught them to make from strands of grass. One of Silvia’s favourites was the smell of her bed and of the sheets that saturated the whole dormitory: it smelled like a thunderstorm, and mixed up with it at times was a faint smell of baby sweat and pee that she liked a great deal.

  Silvia thought of her grandfather now and then, but in a fleeting way, and she didn’t think she missed him. She thought of him in the late afternoons right after dinner, after the rosary in the small chapel when, still seated outside on the grass, she looked and, most of all, listened to the swallows who cried and flew quite low over their heads and over the camp while the oldest of the children sounded the bell. At dusk the swallows stood out sharply against the sky which was pale purple and yellow on the horizon, while a faint smell of incense emerged from the chapel door, and this, together with the damp smell that rose from the fields of tall grass just at the base of the chapel, aroused in Silvia an emotion she’d never felt and didn’t know what to call. And it was clear that this emotion, aroused by those smells rendered chilly at dusk, closed up her throat and made her want to cry.

  Silvia asked a nun if she could dress like all the others: in the grey canvas smock and red rubber sandals. But the nun, to Silvia’s astonishment, said No.

  ‘Did somebody say something to you about your clothes or your toys?’ the Mother Superior asked her. ‘Did they tease you, or scold you?’ Silvia said No. No one had said a thing, but without knowing how to explain it to the nun (she was only seven years old), Silvia felt estranged from the others, and in some sense she was ashamed of her dolls and toys as well as her clothes: in fact, she let the others take her toys, she didn’t care about them. Silvia felt estranged: but this didn’t mean that the other children treated her differently or excluded her from their games. No, on the contrary, she was always invited or coaxed or urged to do something, to play some role, even an important one, in their games and in building their little huts. Silvia didn’t feel estranged on account of her family – maybe precisely because, apart from her grandfather, she had no family – but on account of her birth. The other children were utterly amazed to hear this and, instead of considering her different, as she thought they would, they were filled with curiosity and questions that Silvia couldn’t answer.

  No, she had never met her father; her mother, maybe; she remembered, thanks to certain minor details, certain gifts, a young woman who must have been her mother: a little gold chain with a coral pendant, a young woman with blonde hair she’d seen two or three times. No brothers or sisters. At that point in the questioning, however, she spoke at length and with enthusiasm about her grandfather, whom all the other children had seen, since he had inspected the whole camp on the day of their arrival. They knew he was one of the founders.

  ‘Is your grandfather rich?’ one of the kids asked. He was the oldest one in the colony, a veteran who had been coming for a few years, and had scaly skin that smelled like fish and eggs.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Silvia replied.

  ‘But what does he do?’

  ‘He owns a bicycle factory.’

  ‘That means he’s rich,’ the boys and girls all said at the same time. ‘That’s why you have nicer clothes than we do.’

  Silvia didn’t like having a rich grandfather, or being better dressed than them. Not because the other children were poor, much poorer than she was, or because her grandfather’s presumed wealth or her different clothes made her an object of curiosity and questions, but because she felt estranged. And she mainly felt estranged because of her great sensitivity to smells which, furthermore, stirred up great excitement among the other children, who stuck weeds under her nose, a bay leaf, a butterfly, and she, blindfolded, could recognize everything, never once making a mistake. But she also felt estranged for another reason, and this reason, which was closely connected to her sensitivity to smells, was that twilight feeling, only now she felt it at other times, even during the day, and at night. She could only describe the feeling by saying to herself, ‘I feel like crying.’

  August arrived, and the ‘I feel like crying’ feeling got stronger, for some reasons that were quite clear and others that accumulated with the passing of days; in fact the smells had turned slightly colder, different from before. In some sense they were changing: maybe the sun warmed things less, and besides, it seemed to her that the cicadas and crickets no longer chirped as much. This evolution in the quality and substance of the smells and in the timbre of sounds and murmurs was more pronounced and perceptible at dusk, always at the same time, after the brief service in the chapel, and at that hour even the colours in the sky were no longer the same. For a few days Silvia was allowed to wear the clothes and sandals the others did, but – and this was something she would never have expected – her sense of estrangement grew. Dressed like the others, she felt even more different, and the ‘crying’ feeling increased. She went back to her own clothes. One day a thunderstorm turned the camp cold, then the sun returned, but it only occasionally poked through quickly moving clouds, grey and pink and beige. In those days of fluctuating weather Silvia wanted to cry very much and sometimes she went to cry in the lavatory.

  Photos were taken of the group: Silvia dressed in her clothes, her eyes hidden behind her bushy red hair, in the middle of all the others who were dressed the same way. The nuns explained that souvenir pictures were taken every year and Silvia asked to see the ones from previous years. The Mother Superior took her into her office, where other pictures like the one they’d just taken were hanging on the wall: she saw a group of boys and girls wearing the camp uniform, with the same nuns, against the same background. A few of the same children were in the camp that year too.

  ‘And the others?’ Silvia asked the Mother Superior.

  ‘The others have grown up,’ the Mother Superior said. ‘They don’t come to the camp any more.’

  Even this response, and those photos, each the same as the others, also the same as the one that they’d taken a few days before in the same corner of the big square under the flagpole, plunged Silvia into that ‘crying’ mood, which got worse day by day, so much so that Silvia had to go and cry in the lavatory. It was a moment; then it passed.

  August came to an end, and her grandfather came to get her. The children wanted to see him and clung to his trousers as he passed out sweets to everyone. Silvia’s suitcase was packed and they said goodbye to the Mother Superior in her office, along with all the other nuns. Naturally her grandfather asked the nuns how Silvia had liked her summer, and how she’d behaved.

  ‘I’d say she liked it very much, am I right?’ the Mother Superior asked, looking over at Silvia.

  ‘Oh yes, very much,’ Silvia replied.

  ‘A
re you sad to go back home?’ her grandfather asked.

  Silvia said No. She listened to what the nun and her grandfather were saying, and the Mother Superior, speaking of Silvia’s character, said a word Silvia didn’t understand: she said that she was a very good girl, very bright, and said many other kind things among which was the word melancholy, melancholic.

  Silvia didn’t say anything, but a little later, as her grandfather was pushing his bicycle towards the big gate next to the pine grove, between two high mossy walls, she asked him what melancholy meant.

  Her grandfather stopped to catch his breath (he was a bit winded) and waited before answering. Then he looked up at the sky here and there.

  ‘Melancholy? Let’s see now …’ and then paused at length.

  ‘The passage of time causes melancholy,’ he said. ‘Why? Did you feel melancholic?’

  Silvia hopped on to her seat on the crossbar. Now they were going downhill.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she replied.

  ‘Malinconia’

  First published as part of a series in Corriere della Sera (23 July 1978). It was later included in Sillabario no. 2 (Mondadori, 1982), republished along with Sillabario no. 1 under the title Sillabari (Mondadori, 1984, then Adelphi, 2004).

  Aldo Palazzeschi

  1885–1974

  The Futurist movement, founded by the poet F. T. Marinetti in 1909, sought to break with the past by dismantling syntax, grammar and punctuation and by setting words free. It embraced speed, immediacy, a spirit of aggression, military strength and war. It was thus bound up with the Fascist vision also gathering force in those years; the two movements, one cultural, the other political, were to be strange bedfellows. Palazzeschi, born Aldo Giurlani in Florence, adopted his grandmother’s surname, began publishing in Marinetti’s magazine, Poesia, and went on to become one of Futurism’s foremost literary protagonists. But he subsequently broke with that movement and all others; during his long and prolific writing life, he avoided any one style or trend. His earliest poetry was considered ‘crepuscolare’ (derived from the word ‘crepusculo’, which means ‘sunset’ in Italian) – a poetic school in turn-of-the-century Italy that celebrated free verse and eschewed sentimentality. Palazzeschi embraced freedom and avoided sentimentality in all his work, which consists of two stylistically distant poles, shifting from poetry to prose, from avant-garde writing to more traditional narrative forms, though always steeped in ambiguity and enigma. He divided his time between two cities, shuttling for decades between Venice and Rome. Always contradicting himself, Palazzeschi, whose homosexuality was an open secret, maintained a playful distance even from himself; in his poem ‘Chi sono?’ (‘Who am I?’) he describes himself as ‘il saltimbanco dell’anima mia’ (‘the acrobat of my soul’). He wrote shrewdly about isolated figures – often widows, bachelors and spinsters – perhaps most memorably in Sorelle Materassi (The Sisters Materassi), published in 1934 but significantly revised and re-released, in its definitive version, in 1960. This story, from his later phase, is novelistic in scope, with the theme of communication – or rather, the emphatic lack of it – at its centre. It is the tale of an unconventional coupling that transmits, elegantly and harrowingly, an ineluctable state of solitude.