The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  We went a short way, to a deserted spot on the Lungotevere, parked, and he immediately tried to kiss me, as if he were following a pre-established plan. When he wasn’t moving, as I said, he resembled a young Napoleon. But as soon as his face lit up in any expression, it immediately revealed the vulgarity, though not without grace, of a small-town gangster. I pushed him away and said, ‘Quit pawing me, there’s time for that. Now tell me what you want from me.’

  Undeterred, he answered, ‘I want you.’

  ‘No, you don’t want me. If you wanted only me, then it would mean that you’re a fetishist.’

  ‘A fetishist? What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘Someone who, like you, loves not only the person but also the things around her. For example, the door of the bank where I work.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what. Two weeks ago, at eight-thirty in the morning. How many pictures did you take? I’d say at least twenty.’

  ‘I can’t hide anything from you. Who are you? The devil?’

  So began our story that, in the end, filled the newspapers with bold headlines. There’s no sense in my telling you how the robbery took place. It was a ‘classic’ of the genre, according to reporters. If you want to know how it went, you can check the crime pages of that year’s newspapers. Nor do I want to tell you the prominent part that I played. It would be dangerous for me, since there’s been no further mention of it in the papers. For my colleagues at the bank, I am still the same old Miss Dutiful. The only thing I’d like to add is that the robbery took place in the early afternoon, when there are only a few employees and the bank is closed to customers. It was about four o’clock and I had escaped from home, right after the usual love-making with my husband. And with just an hour to spare before the children came home from school. I had to wait, at the wheel of the classic stolen car, on a solitary street, for my gangster and his buddy to arrive right after the robbery. Well, wouldn’t you know it? Despite my palpitations, the usual fatigue made me fall asleep at the wheel, in an amazing, invincible, blessed sleep. In sleep I took part in the robbery in my own way. I dreamt I was locked in the vault of the bank and then, all of a sudden, my gangster opened it and I, with a cry of joy, fell into his arms. But at that same moment, voilà, he was waking me up, shaking me by the arm, cursing between his teeth. Immediately, like a robot, without even looking around, I started the car and we took off.

  After the robbery we didn’t see each other again for six months. He didn’t want us to. He said that the police were definitely enquiring into the life of every employee of the bank. We did, however, agree that after these six months, I would go and live with him, turning myself from Miss Dutiful to Machine-Gun Mama, or a similar moniker that, without a doubt, my former co-workers would give me, with a snicker, as soon as they found out.

  So I resumed my usual life, shuttling between home and the bank. On one such day, I realized I had run out of cologne. That same afternoon I drove my husband to the airport. He was going to Cagliari on a business trip. On my way back I remembered the cologne and so I stopped the car on a suburban street, in front of a cosmetics shop named after the Parisian perfume house that made my cologne. The moment I entered, I was bedazzled by the gleaming of the many decanters, phials and teardrop-shaped bottles of eau de toilette and lotions lined up in glass cabinets against every wall. So for a moment I didn’t notice my gangster. Standing behind the counter, he was helping a middle-aged customer who wanted some rare shade of lipstick. My gangster had various little tubes scattered on the counter between himself and the customer. And as he gradually uncapped one and then the other, and rubbed a tiny smudge on the back of his hand, he enlarged the mark with his thumb and then showed it to the customer, speaking with her at length all the while, softly, gently, patiently. But the customer would look and then shake her head: it still wasn’t the shade she was looking for.

  My gangster hadn’t told me that he owned this magnificent shop. The only thing I knew about him was that he lived with his elderly mother and two children, and that his wife had left him and was living in Milan with another man. But then I realized he had been a cosmetics salesman for a while, maybe years, because his conversation with the customer was that of a professional; you can’t improvise it. For me the precision of his speech was like a flash of lightning in the night, illuminating the tiniest details of a landscape, even if just for a moment. I realized, in other words, that I had been wrong. I had mistaken him for a predatory falcon. He was instead a sly mole. So in that flash of awareness, I made a quick calculation and realized that he was no better than my husband. He, too, had two children that I would have to take care of. He, too, would expect me to slave away in the house. As for work, it was better to be a bank clerk than a cosmetics saleslady, if for no other reason than that I only had to work at the bank in the morning. There was love, it’s true. But I realized now, after discovering the shop, that I felt just as unglued around him as I did around my husband. So I didn’t wait for the customer to find the right lipstick. I did an about-face and walked out. At the door, however, I glanced back. Now he was looking at me from over his customer’s shoulders, and I shook my head no. He wasn’t stupid, and he must have understood, because he never came looking for me after that. Maybe, who knows, he didn’t trust me as a cosmetics saleslady. After all, there’s no difference between a shop and a bank. He must have feared that I, incorrigible, would repeat the robbery, but this time against him, and maybe in cahoots with a genuine gangster, the kind that holds up a bank to commit a real crime and not to buy a cosmetics shop.

  ‘L’altra faccia della luna’

  Part of the collection Boh (Bompiani, 1976).

  Elsa Morante

  1912–85

  A photo of Elsa Morante from the 1960s shows her seated at Caffè Rosati in Rome’s Piazza del Popolo, with her then husband, Alberto Moravia, and the writer Pier Paolo Pasolini, a close friend. Caught in profile, she seems to be saying something, and looks like she may be scratching a mosquito bite on her arm. Morante, too poor to finish her university degree, remains the literary queen of that city. Her mother was a Jewish school teacher, and her biological father – her mother would marry another man, who raised her – worked in a post office. One of five children, she grew up in the neighbourhood of Testaccio and left home at eighteen to support herself. Her first novel, Menzogna e sortilegio (Lies and Sorcery, which was published in English under the title House of Liars), is a sprawling masterpiece, demonic in its energy. It was typical of her complex, choral novels, including La storia (History), but she made her literary debut with a collection of short stories called Il gioco segreto (The Secret Game) in 1941. Among her most revered works is a novel called L’Isola di Arturo (Arturo’s Island). It won the Strega Prize in 1957. Active in cultural and literary delegations, she visited the Soviet Union, China, India, the United States and Brazil, often in Moravia’s company. But by 1960 she had set up a separate home for herself, while still married, and had befriended Bill Morrow, a young American painter whom she took under her wing. She was laid low following Morrow’s suicide in 1962 (he jumped from a skyscraper). In 1983, Morante herself attempted suicide. She remains a major writer who had tiny penmanship and a grand, tragic vision. She wrote with particular power about parent–child relationships, a theme central to the selection here. Posthumously published, it demonstrates her wit and her dense, virtuosic prose.

  The Ambitious Ones

  Translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell

  When I first met the Donato women, a few years ago now, the falling-out between the mother and her eldest daughter was already well advanced. Angela Donato, the widowed mother, had three daughters, and of these, Concetta, the eldest, was by far the most beautiful as well as the one who resembled her most. In those southern Italian villages women mature early; sweet and languorous humours run through their veins, and their bodies bloom with the fleshy elegance of a tuberose, while the primitive ardour
in their eyes is concealed with a veil of tenderness. Concetta was still an adolescent, radiant in her litheness; Angela was already in decline, and above her majestic matronly corpulence her face with its clear-cut, determined features was languidly fading. But mother and daughter shared a similar smile, at once flirtatious and fervid; similar too was the shape of their eyes, in which an inclination to affection mingled with what one might venture to call ferocity; also similar was the shape of their lips, which when they weren’t laughing revealed a proud determination. And similar, finally, were their hands: white, plump and soft; so beautiful as to resemble the hands of aristocratic women. Both mother and daughter took loving care of their hands, delegating the roughest tasks to Concetta’s younger sisters. Mother and daughter, evidently, were both vain, especially with regard to these exquisitely beautiful hands of theirs. The mother would habitually kiss her daughter’s hands, I recall, giving a kiss to every dimple, and one to every finger – and in response the daughter would kiss the hands of her mother.

  Both mother and daughter had clear, high singing voices, and among their ambitions was the ambition, precisely, to sing: but whereas the mother had dreamt of a career on the stage, her daughter yearned to sing sacred motets, in church, with choirs of nuns and organ accompaniment. Both Concetta and Angela loved festivities and the pomp of an occasion; but whereas Angela fantasized about crowded avenues, carriages, balls, carnivals in the piazzas, Concetta had a predilection for solemn ceremony in cathedrals; the lilies, the candle flames, the stories illuminated in stained glass. Angela liked elegant clothes, earrings and necklaces; Concetta would go into ecstasies over embroidered chasubles, golden tabernacles, splendid stoles. It was here that the source of the difference between mother and daughter was to be found. To which we must add that when Concetta turned fifteen her mother had begun to promise herself a grand marriage for her daughter: one that would bring to the family all the distinction and elegance that she’d always yearned for in vain. Instead Concetta, having talked with her nuns about their heavenly spouse, never wanted to hear about any other kind of husband again.

  Even as a young girl, at times, when she’d found herself alone in a room, the sound of the gentle smack of her particularly resonant kisses could be heard in the next room; and if you hovered at the door to spy on what she was up to, you would catch sight of her blowing kisses into thin air and smiling, enraptured. Kisses that were directed, of course, to her intended: that is to say, the Lord. Her mother would shake her by the arm and say: ‘So this is what I have to put up with, you silly, stupid girl!’ – and Concetta, eyes blazing with fury, would free herself from the maternal grasp and run.

  The four women lived in the centre of the village, on Piazza Garibaldi to be precise, in an apartment with two small rooms and a kitchen, with a little balcony overlooking the square. The rooms were decorated with those tapestries peddled at fairs by travelling salesmen, depicting the Madonna of the Chair, or the Discovery of America, or the Landing of the Thousand in Sicily. In addition to this the walls were adorned with cuttings from magazines, with old photographs and postcards. On the beds were covers of fake scarlet damask. There were no maids, and they lunched in the kitchen, beneath a beaded paper lampshade, at a table covered with oilcloth.

  When I first met the Donato women, Concetta’s hand in marriage had been asked for by the son of the most important hotelier in the city; and this offer, coming from such a suitor as this, in every way so very flattering, had electrified Angela. She could already see Concetta installed in the entrance of the hotel, in a velvet wedding dress, with a brooch of rubies, welcoming the guests with sovereign affability; and herself wearing a fur stole, feathers and bracelets, visiting her daughter, fanning herself in the drawing room

  But instead Concetta rejected the offer made by the hotelier’s son. And she repudiated that offer as if it were obviously out of the question – with a promptness so offensive that the young man had sworn eternal enmity towards the Donatos. If he crossed paths with the widow in the street he would ostentatiously overtake her with a martial gait, without acknowledging her, while she in turn would snub him with a disdain worthy of an empress. Soon this suitor was engaged to another young lady, and would deliberately parade with her beneath the windows of the Donato household, showing them how elegantly turned out his new fiancée was, and what heels and what necklaces she sported. Her eyes darkened with envy, an indifferent smile on her lips, the widow Donato would peer at him from behind the windowpanes. ‘Well, it’s something rather better than him that my daughter deserves!’ she would tell me, with supreme disdain: ‘My daughter was born to live in style – to drive around in a luxury car, with a chauffeur, a nanny and a pram!’

  It was frequently the case at this time that Concetta’s dainty shoes, and those of her sisters as well, were down-at-heel. I would notice this when she was kneeling in church. I could not see her eyes, but I knew that they would be directed towards the altar like two tiny larks taking flight towards the sun. Concetta had numerous sacred images, given to her by the nuns, and she would spend all day in contemplation of them. One of these showed a graceful young novice, no longer wearing the habit of a nun but bedecked in exquisitely brocaded vestments, extending her hand towards an affable-looking, chubby-cheeked infant who, given the golden aura that crowned his head, was none other than the Baby Jesus. With a loving smile he was placing a gold wedding ring on her plump index finger; while, suspended above them, an angel in a tunic covered in precious gems was depositing a garland on her head. In another image there was an extremely tall colonnade covered with unfolding edifying scenes, in front of which a humble nun was holding the hand of the Lord of Heaven. A venerable old man dressed as splendidly as a Pope was witnessing these nuptials, gently urging the little virgin with a gesture towards her spouse. The nuns would explain to Concetta that the precious colonnade in the background was nothing less than the entrance to the ‘mansion’ (for they were prone to express themselves in such terms) – the mansion into which she would be welcomed as a young bride. Churches, explained the nuns – even those cathedrals glittering with mosaics – are merely God’s houses on earth. Imagine then what His heavenly mansions must be like in comparison. The floors are carpeted with meadows of flowers, but these flowers are made of precious stones. In the gardens, angels with the wingspan of eagles fly about instead of birds, producing a melodious sound with the beating of their wings. Life passes there with continuous music, dances and smiles of love. Angels hidden amongst the trees, like shepherds, sing the praises of the young bride. Others bring her regal vestments, others still slip elaborately decorated sandals on to her feet. She needs only to raise a finger and the whole of paradise will fall silent and listen to her.

  Concetta glowed with pride on hearing such promises; every day she would flee her home to visit the nuns, and as soon as she came of age she entered the convent. I was out of town at the time, so was not present when she took her vows, in a ceremony that her mother and sisters refused to attend. When I returned, her sisters whispered to me a warning that she was never to be spoken of again in front of her mother; Angela had sworn that, as far as she was concerned, her daughter had ceased to exist. She did mention her to me, on just one occasion. She placed a hand on her heart, and with dark eyes and the portentous tone of someone about to pronounce an anathema, she said: ‘My whole heart was devoted to that daughter of mine; and now, where my heart used to be, there is nothing but stone.’ Then she flung a glance of haughty commiseration in the direction of her other two daughters, who were both short and stout, with lank hair and thick, coarse hands.

  Meanwhile, from the convent, Concetta was attempting to pay court, so to speak, to her mother. She would frequently send her gifts, such as sweet pizzas, topped with confectionery, that her mother refused to taste and passed on to us; or strips of white silk on which a red heart pierced by an arrow had been embroidered. These bits of embroidery transported to the house a redolence of the domesticity and piety of a mona
stic enclosure, and the mother would throw them into a corner with a gesture of ironic contempt. At Easter a cardboard box arrived, containing a figurine of a nun made of sweet pastry, more than forty centimetres tall, wearing a habit made of chocolate. It was the product of a collective effort by the whole convent, and they had not failed to include such realistic details as the thin rope around her waist from which a minuscule cross was hanging, done in red sweets. At the sight of this nun the mother was overcome with sheer, cold fury, and ordered that it should be thrown into the fire. Her other two daughters obeyed, though not without a pang of regret.

  In the evening, behind the grates of the convent, Concetta would hold a cross in her hands and look at the star-studded sky. She would fantasize that the stars were the lit windows of her future abode, trying to imagine which one of them belonged to her future spouse’s room. Concetta had reached the age of twenty-three. And it was at this time that she fell ill with typhus and died.

  The sisters rushed to inform me breathlessly that Concetta was in her final agony, and to beg me to persuade her mother to visit her at least this one last time. I ran to the widow’s home, but quickly realized that Angela had already made up her mind to go, and that she only pretended to need to be begged to do so. With pupils sparkling, and two vermilion stains on her cheeks, she walked ahead of me towards the convent, and without even stopping to acknowledge the nun who acted as doorkeeper, swept upstairs to her daughter’s cell with the proprietorial air of a mistress. To the murmuring nuns who came to her side it seemed that she was saying, ‘Out of my way, she’s my daughter and mine alone; I’m the only one with any right to cry for her.’ She approached the bed, and in the theatrical, passionate manner that my female compatriots assume when afflicted, she exclaimed: ‘Ah, my little Concetta, my own Concetta!’, and kneeling down by the side of the bed she grasped her daughter’s hands and showered them with a flurry of kisses.