The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  So as not to weigh down her weary head, Concetta’s nun’s bands had been removed. Her short hair was thick with curls, like a child’s. But although her face had become more gaunt, it was clear that the illness had struck her at the point when her beauty was maturing and expanding, as you regularly see in brides in those parts. Her big healthy chest heaved beneath the sheet; her face, with its languishing gaze and dark circles beneath her eyes, had the warm, richly hued pallor of jasmine flowers; with every breath from between her blanched lips her small beautiful teeth were revealed, with an animal grace but now shadowed by her illness. ‘She’s dying like a saint,’ the Mother Superior told me, shaking her head. Angela overheard this and darted a vitriolic look at the Mother Superior: the look of a rival. Then she grabbed hold of that basic iron bedstead, and with a strident voice, shaken by sobbing, she began to scold her daughter thus: ‘Oh, how beautiful you used to be, my little daughter!’ she said, ‘Oh, how beautiful you were! You were like a garden of roses. You should have married a gentleman, instead of dying in this garret. Ah, daughter of my flesh, my own flesh and blood, who has murdered you? You should have stayed with your mother, who kissed your lovely mouth and would not have let you die. Everything about you was beautiful, such lovely small feet, such precious little hands. Concetta, Concetta, come back to your mother!’

  All of those standing around her were silent, as if watching a show. But Concetta gave no sign of being aware of her mother’s presence. She parted her lips slightly in an exhausted and ecstatic smile that still had an irrepressible trace of flirtatiousness. And with a childish and almost extinguished voice, as frail as a spiderweb, she began to utter: ‘I see, I see …’

  All of those around her held their breath. She was lowering her eyelashes, with an amorous demeanour, and her voice could barely be heard, sighing out: ‘I see a meadow, of lilies, I see saints, and angels. This beautiful palace, it’s mine, Lord! What a beautiful palace, how many crowns, for me …’ She seemed to pause as if searching for words with which to express her gratitude. Her mouth was still half open, but she was quiet now. I noticed that her fellow nuns who had gathered around her seemed to have assumed a triumphant air, as if in victory. I looked at Concetta’s graceful hand, lying lifeless now on the sheet, and realized that her elegantly oval nails had turned violet. Angela looked devastated: her silent face was as bloodless as her daughter’s, but it was wet with dense, heavy tears. She let go of Concetta’s hand and covered her face. When she looked up again, her eyes were dry and she had assumed a dignified, set expression.

  Soon after, she was giving orders in the convent relating to Concetta’s funeral, which she imagined would be a sumptuous affair: ‘My daughter was a real lady!’ she declared, haughtily, to the nuns, who, in that convent, were almost all daughters of peasants and artisans. They listened with lowered heads, and nodded humbly, almost as if they were in the presence of the Abbess herself.

  And so we retired, leaving to the nuns of the convent, according to established custom, the task of keeping vigil over their sister. She was dressed again in the clothes that identified her as belonging to God: the black skirt; the wooden crucifix; the wimple, black wings on her head. The next day, having stayed at Angela’s home so as not to leave the mother on her own, I saw, from the window, Concetta’s procession towards her longed-for mansion. Despite any efforts to the contrary, the funeral was a modest one. The coffin was carried to the cemetery, with just three small wreaths, followed by chanting priests, and then the nuns. Bringing up the rear were the Daughters of Mary, wearing their immaculate bridal veils, beneath which their everyday, brightly coloured felt dresses and their down-at-heel ankle boots could be glimpsed.

  Angela was watching the cortège with a fixed look. At a certain point, shaking her fist, she said: ‘She didn’t even spare a last word for her poor mother!’ And she turned her face to one side, with a sob of bitter jealousy, then resumed her careful scrutiny of the wreaths, the procession, the Daughters of Mary bearing long candles in their hands. From behind the glassy veil of her tears a mundane curiosity peered, and her lips formed a childish pout that culminated in a lachrymose outburst: ‘Ah, my beautiful daughter,’ she cried, with desperate vanity, ‘look how they’re taking her! She deserved a send-off worthy of a queen! And she was a queen, that wretched girl!’ And with disdain she withdrew from the window, while the short procession disappeared behind Piazza Garibaldi.

  ‘Le ambiziose’

  First published in the magazine Oggi (6 December 1941), and posthumously published in Racconti dimenticati (Einaudi, 2004).

  Giorgio Manganelli

  1922–90

  Manganelli, who detested Realism and conventional narrative, was a member of the ‘Gruppo 63’, a neo-avant-garde literary movement founded in Palermo in 1963. In opposition to the intellectual mainstream and the post-war vision of writers such as Carlo Cassola, the group, which never wrote a manifesto, insisted on experimental writing with a strong linguistic focus. Born in Milan, Manganelli, a gifted student, joined the Partisan War in 1944. Captured and condemned to die a year later, he was set free by his executioner after being beaten with a rifle. He began his literary career by translating Henry James’ Confidence and also translated the works of T. S. Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe and W. B. Yeats. He worked as an editor for various publishing houses and taught English literature at La Sapienza University, in Rome, but grew bitterly disillusioned with academia. He was a passionate traveller and wrote perceptively about India. A Jungian analysand for many years, he had a tormented relationship with his possessive mother and incorporated mythic archetypes into his work. Notes from his psychoanalysis inspired his first book, a linguistically ornate, brazenly stylized monologue called Hilarotragoedia, published when he was over forty, after his mother’s death. Centuria (published in English as Centuria: One Hundred Ouroboric Novels), which received the Viareggio Prize in 1979, is a volume of one hundred extremely short, anguished, trenchant tales – the same number contained in Boccaccio’s Decameron. They are recondite and relentless, rigorously on the edge. Each segment is to be savoured slowly and, given their intricately wrought nature, not necessarily all at once. Here are a few examples of his refined register, his experimental sensibility, his aspect at once audacious and kempt.

  Sixteen, Twenty-one, Twenty-eight and Thirty-seven from Centuria

  Translated by Henry Martin

  Sixteen

  The gentleman dressed in a linen suit, with loafers and short socks, looks at the clock. It is two minutes to eight. He is at home, seated, slightly uneasy, on the edge of a stiff and demanding chair. He is alone. In two minutes – by now no more than ninety seconds – he will have to begin. He got up a little early in order to be truly ready. He washed carefully, attentively urinated, patiently evacuated, meticulously shaved. All of his underwear is new, never worn before, and this suit was tailored more than a year ago for this morning. For a whole year he has not dared. He has frequently got up very early – in general, moreover, he’s an early riser – but at the moment when all preparations were completed and he took his place on the chair, his courage had always failed him. But now he is about to begin. Fifty seconds remain before eight o’clock. Properly speaking, there is absolutely nothing he must begin. From another point of view, he stands at the beginning of absolutely everything. In any case, there is nothing he must ‘do’. He must simply go from eight o’clock to nine o’clock. Nothing more: traverse the space of an hour, a space he has traversed innumerable times, but now he must traverse it as pure and simple time, nothing else, absolutely. Eight o’clock has already passed, by a little more than a minute. He is calm, but feels a slight tremor gather within his body. At the seventh minute, his heart begins little by little to accelerate. At the tenth minute, his throat begins to close, while his heart pulses at the brink of panic. With the fifteenth minute, his whole body douses itself in sweat, almost instantaneously; three minutes later, the saliva in his mouth begins to dry; his lips grow white. At the t
wenty-first minute, his teeth begin to chatter, as though he were laughing; his eyes dilate, their lids cease to beat. He feels his sphincter open, and all his body hairs erect, immobile in a chill. Suddenly, his heart slows, his vision clouds. At the twenty-fifth minute, a furious tremor shakes him through and through for twenty seconds; when it stops, his diaphragm begins to move: his diaphragm now grips his heart. Tears flow, though he does not cry. A roar deafens his ears. The gentleman dressed in a linen suit would like to explain, but the twenty-eighth minute deals him a blow on the temple, and he falls from the chair; upon striking the floor, absolutely without a sound, he disintegrates.

  Twenty-one

  At every awakening, every morning – a reluctant awakening, which might also be described as lazy – this gentleman begins the day with a rapid inventory of the world. He realized some time ago that he always awakens in a different point of the cosmos, even if the earth, the capsule in which he dwells, does not look extrinsically modified. As a child he was convinced that the movements of the earth through space direct it from time to time into the near vicinity or even through the interior of hell, whereas it is never permitted to pass through paradise, since that experience would render all further continuance of the world impossible, superfluous and ridiculous. So paradise must avoid the earth at all cost, so as not to wound Creation’s plans, which are meticulous and incomprehensible. Even now – as an adult man who drives and owns an automobile – something of that childhood hypothesis has remained with him. By now he has cast it in slightly more secular terms, and the question he asks himself is more metaphoric and apparently detached: he knows that while he sleeps the whole world moves – as dreams demonstrate – and that every morning the pieces of the world, no matter if involved in a game or not, are arrayed differently on the board. He claims no right to know what this shift may mean, but he knows that at times he can feel the presence of abysses, the temptations of sheer cliffs, or rare, long plains on which he’d like to roll – there are times when he comes to see himself as a spherical celestial body – on and on. There are moments, too, of confused impressions of grasses, and as well of the exciting but not infrequently unpleasant sensation of being illumined by several suns, suns not always reciprocally friendly. At other times, he clearly hears the sound of waves, sent by either storm or calm; and on occasion he is brutally reminded of his own position in the world: for example, when cruel and attentive jaws take him by the back of the neck, as must have happened countless times to doomed and exhausted forebears between the teeth of beasts whose faces they never saw. He learned some time ago that you never wake up in your own room: he has concluded in fact that there are no such things as rooms, that walls and sheets are illusions, a fakery; he knows that he is suspended in the void; that he, like every other person, is the centre of the world, from which infinite infinities radiate. He knows he could not hold his own in the face of so much horror, and that the room, and even the abyss and hell, are inventions intended to defend him.

  Twenty-eight

  Excited by a strange and senseless design of the clouds at dawn, the Emperor arrived in Cornwall. But the voyage had been so strenuous, so tortuous and errant, as to leave him with a very unclear memory of the place from which he had first set out. He had departed with three squires and a menial. The first squire had run off with a gypsy woman, after a desperate discussion with the Emperor during a night charged with strokes of lightning. The second squire had fallen in love with the plague, and would hear no reason to abandon a village devastated by advancing death. The third squire had enrolled into the troops of the following emperor, and had tried to assassinate him. The Emperor was forced to consider him condemned to death, and pretended to carry out the sentence by cutting his throat with his little finger; they both had laughed, and bade farewell to one another. The menial had remained with the Emperor. Both of them were silent, melancholy men, aware of pursuing a goal which was not so much improbable as irrelevant; they both had metaphysical notions which were highly imprecise, and whenever they came to a temple, a church, a sanctuary, they did not enter, since both of them were certain, for different reasons, that inside such places they could only encounter lies, equivocations, disinformation. Once they had arrived in Cornwall, the Emperor made no secret of his discomfort: he did not understand the language, he did not know what to do, his coins were examined with suspicious care by diffident villagers. He wanted to write to the Palace, but did not remember the address. An emperor is the only man who can, or must, be ignorant of his own address. The menial had no problems: remaining with the disoriented Emperor was his only way of establishing orientation. As time passed, Cornwall opened to merchant traffic and the tourist trade. And a history professor from Samarkand, Ohio, recognized the Emperor’s profile: by now he passed his days at the pub, served by his taciturn drudge. News of the Emperor’s presence in Cornwall spread rapidly, and even though no one knew what an emperor might be, nor with respect to what part of the world, the locals found it flattering. Beer was served to him for free. The village in which he resided put one of his coins in its coat of arms. The menial was given a generic noble title, and the Emperor, who speaks by now a little of the local language, is in a few days time to marry the beautiful daughter of a depressed warrior; he now has a watch and eats apple pie; they say that at the next elections he’ll be a candidate for the liberals; and he will lose with honour.

  Thirty-seven

  The woman for whom he was waiting has not come to the appointment. He, all the same – the man attired more youthfully than suits him – does not feel offended. Indeed, it does not bother him at all. If he were more observant, he would have to admit to feeling a slight but indubitable pleasure. He can shape a number of hypotheses on the reasons why the woman has not appeared at their rendezvous. As he sounds out these reasons, he does not desert their meeting’s appointed place, but only steps off slightly to one side of it, as though it were a den in which some part of her, or the whole of her, sat concealed. Perhaps she has forgotten. Since he likes to think of himself as an insignificant person, he is pleased with such a hypothesis, which would mean that she too has identified him as exiguous, aleatory and thus of such a kind that forgetting him is the only way to remember him. She might have reached her decision in a moment of caprice – or perhaps of pique – since she is an impetuous woman; and in that case she will have recognized his function as a nuisance, as a minuscule bother, surely no longing of the heart, but something no longer removable from her life, or at least from a few of the days of it. She may have mistaken the hour of the appointment, and in that moment he realizes that he is not clear, he himself, as to what that hour may have been. But this realization does not disturb him: he finds it natural for the hour to be imprecise, since he sees himself as having a perpetual appointment with the woman who has not arrived. Or has there perhaps been an error of place? He smiles. Might that not mean that she has taken repair, gone into hiding in some secret place, and that her absence is therefore fear, flight or even a game, a summons? Or that the appointment was everywhere, so that neither one, in reality, could fail the other, for either the place or the time? So he might conclude that in fact the appointment has been not only respected, but obeyed with absolute precision, indeed has been interpreted, understood, consummated. His slight feeling of pleasure is beginning to transmute into an overture of joy. He decides, indeed, that the appointment has been so thoroughly experienced that now he has nothing higher or more total to give of himself. Brusquely, he turns his back on the meeting place and tenderly whispers ‘Adieu’ to the woman he is preparing to meet.

  ‘Sixteen’, ‘Twenty-one’, ‘Twenty-eight’ and ‘Thirty-seven’ from Centuria.

  (Rizzoli, 1979).

  Primo Levi

  1919–87

  Levi hated labels. Throughout Il sistema periodico (The Periodic Table), a work of literature impossible to define, he talks about the Germans’ love for classifying things. Levi survived Auschwitz, and he resists classification
. He was a human polyhedron who contemplated the act of transformation throughout his life: the conversion of elements, and the double nature of things. He was a writer who worked in multiple genres and a chemist who worked for years at a paint factory. Born to a Jewish family in Turin, Levi was a young man of letters long before his deportation in 1943 – a lover of adventure stories, of Herman Melville, of François Rabelais. The story included here, at once cruel and magical, features a centaur as a character and celebrates life, desire and the animal aspect of man. It comes from Storie naturali (Natural Histories), published in 1966. The collection was dismissed as science fiction, and Levi published it under the pseudonym, Damiano Malabaila, perhaps to evade the label which had been affixed to him as a ‘Holocaust writer’ after the publication of Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man), an account of his time in Auschwitz. Poorly received when first published, Se questo è un uomo was reprinted and widely appreciated only in 1958, with the flap copy anonymously written by Calvino, and is now required reading for every high-school student in Italy. The flap copy of Storie naturali, which Levi composed himself, was also anonymous, but more or less reveals his identity: ‘I would not publish them if I had not noticed (not immediately, to tell the truth) that a continuity – a bridge – existed between the Lager [camp] and these inventions.’ Levi received the Strega Prize in 1979 for La chiave a stella (published in English as both The Wrench and The Monkey’s Wrench), a novel in the form of interlinked stories featuring a manual labourer as one of its main characters and incorporating Torinese dialect. He ended his life eight years later, throwing himself down the stairwell of the apartment building where he had been born.