The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  It seems that things had gone well for the ‘couple’ at the beginning of their life together. Nikolai Vassilevitch had been content with Caracas and slept regularly with her in the same bed. He continued to observe this custom till the end, saying with a timid smile that no companion could be quieter or less importunate than she. But I soon began to doubt this, especially judging by the state he was sometimes in when he woke up. Then, after several years, their relationship began strangely to deteriorate.

  All this, let it be said once and for all, is no more than a schematic attempt at an explanation. About that time the woman actually began to show signs of independence or, as one might say, of autonomy. Nikolai Vassilevitch had the extraordinary impression that she was acquiring a personality of her own, indecipherable perhaps, but still distinct from his, and one which slipped through his fingers. It is certain that some sort of continuity was established between each of her appearances – between all those brunettes, those blondes, those redheads and auburn-headed girls, between those plump, those slim, those dusky or snowy or golden beauties, there was a certain something in common. At the beginning of this chapter I cast some doubt on the propriety of considering Caracas as a unitary personality; nevertheless I myself could not quite, whenever I saw her, free myself of the impression that, however unheard of it may seem, this was fundamentally the same woman. And it may be that this was why Gogol felt he had to give her a name.

  An attempt to establish in what precisely subsisted the common attributes of the different forms would be quite another thing. Perhaps it was no more and no less than the creative afflatus of Nikolai Vassilevitch himself. But no, it would have been too singular and strange if he had been so much divided off from himself, so much averse to himself. Because whoever she was, Caracas was a disturbing presence and even – it is better to be quite clear – a hostile one. Yet neither Gogol nor I ever succeeded in formulating a remotely tenable hypothesis as to her true nature; when I say formulate, I mean in terms which would be at once rational and accessible to all. But I cannot pass over an extraordinary event which took place at this time.

  Caracas fell ill of a shameful disease – or rather Gogol did – though he was not then having, nor had he ever had, any contact with other women. I will not even try to describe how this happened, or where the filthy complaint came from; all I know is that it happened. And that my great, unhappy friend would say to me: ‘So, Foma Paskalovitch, you see what lay at the heart of Caracas; it was the spirit of syphilis.’

  Sometimes he would even blame himself in a quite absurd manner; he was always prone to self-accusation. This incident was a real catastrophe as far as the already obscure relationship between husband and wife, and the hostile feelings of Nikolai Vassilevitch himself, were concerned. He was compelled to undergo long-drawn-out and painful treatment – the treatment of those days – and the situation was aggravated by the fact that the disease in the woman did not seem to be easily curable. Gogol deluded himself for some time that, by blowing his wife up and down and furnishing her with the most widely divergent aspects, he could obtain a woman immune from the contagion, but he was forced to desist when no results were forthcoming.

  I shall be brief, seeking not to tire my readers, and also because what I remember seems to become more and more confused. I shall therefore hasten to the tragic conclusion. As to this last, however, let there be no mistake. I must once again make it clear that I am very sure of my ground. I was an eyewitness. Would that I had not been!

  The years went by. Nikolai Vassilevitch’s distaste for his wife became stronger, though his love for her did not show any signs of diminishing. Towards the end, aversion and attachment struggled so fiercely with each other in his heart that he became quite stricken, almost broken up. His restless eyes, which habitually assumed so many different expressions and sometimes spoke so sweetly to the heart of his interlocutor, now almost always shone with a fevered light, as if he were under the effect of a drug. The strangest impulses arose in him, accompanied by the most senseless fears. He spoke to me of Caracas more and more often, accusing her of unthinkable and amazing things. In these regions I could not follow him, since I had but a sketchy acquaintance with his wife, and hardly any intimacy – and above all since my sensibility was so limited compared with his. I shall accordingly restrict myself to reporting some of his accusations, without reference to my personal impressions.

  ‘Believe it or not, Foma Paskalovitch,’ he would, for example, often say to me: ‘Believe it or not, she’s ageing!’ Then, unspeakably moved, he would, as was his way, take my hands in his. He also accused Caracas of giving herself up to solitary pleasures, which he had expressly forbidden. He even went so far as to charge her with betraying him, but the things he said became so extremely obscure that I must excuse myself from any further account of them.

  One thing that appears certain is that towards the end Caracas, whether aged or not, had turned into a bitter creature, querulous, hypocritical and subject to religious excess. I do not exclude the possibility that she may have had an influence on Gogol’s moral position during the last period of his life, a position which is sufficiently well known. The tragic climax came one night quite unexpectedly when Nikolai Vassilevitch and I were celebrating his silver wedding – one of the last evenings we were to spend together. I neither can nor should attempt to set down what it was that led to his decision, at a time when to all appearances he was resigned to tolerating his consort. I know not what new events had taken place that day. I shall confine myself to the facts; my readers must make what they can of them.

  That evening Nikolai Vassilevitch was unusually agitated. His distaste for Caracas seemed to have reached an unprecedented intensity. The famous ‘pyre of vanities’ – the burning of his manuscripts – had already taken place; I should not like to say whether or not at the instigation of his wife. His state of mind had been further inflamed by other causes. As to his physical condition, this was ever more pitiful, and strengthened my impression that he took drugs. All the same, he began to talk in a more or less normal way about Belinsky, who was giving him some trouble with his attacks on the Selected Correspondence. Then suddenly, tears rising to his eyes, he interrupted himself and cried out: ‘No. No. It’s too much; too much. I can’t go on any longer,’ as well as other obscure and disconnected phrases which he would not clarify. He seemed to be talking to himself. He wrung his hands, shook his head, got up and sat down again after having taken four or five anxious steps round the room. When Caracas appeared; or rather when we went in to her later in the evening in her Oriental chamber, he controlled himself no longer and began to behave like an old man, if I may so express myself, in his second childhood, quite giving way to his absurd impulses. For instance, he kept nudging me and winking and senselessly repeating: ‘There she is, Foma Paskalovitch; there she is!’ Meanwhile she seemed to look up at us with a disdainful attention. But behind these ‘mannerisms’ one could feel in him a real repugnance, a repugnance which had, I suppose, now reached the limits of the endurable. Indeed …

  After a certain time Nikolai Vassilevitch seemed to pluck up courage. He burst into tears, but somehow they were more manly tears. He wrung his hands again, seized mine in his, and walked up and down, muttering: ‘That’s enough! We can’t have any more of this. This is an unheard-of thing. How can such a thing be happening to me? How can a man be expected to put up with this?’

  He then leapt furiously upon the pump, the existence of which he seemed just to have remembered, and, with it in his hand, dashed like a whirlwind to Caracas. He inserted the tube in her anus and began to inflate her … Weeping the while, he shouted like one possessed: ‘Oh, how I love her, how I love her, my poor, poor darling! … But she’s going to burst! Unhappy Caracas, most pitiable of God’s creatures! But die she must!’

  Caracas was swelling up. Nikolai Vassilevitch sweated, wept and pumped. I wished to stop him but, I know not why, I had not the courage. She began to become deformed and shortly ass
umed the most monstrous aspect; and yet she had not given any signs of alarm – she was used to these jokes. But when she began to feel unbearably full, or perhaps when Nikolai Vassilevitch’s intentions became plain to her, she took on an expression of bestial amazement, even a little beseeching, but still without losing that disdainful look. She was afraid, she was even committing herself to his mercy, but still she could not believe in the immediate approach of her fate; she could not believe in the frightful audacity of her husband. He could not see her face because he was behind her. But I looked at her with fascination, and did not move a finger.

  At last the internal pressure came through the fragile bones at the base of her skull, and printed on her face an indescribable rictus. Her belly, her thighs, her lips, her breasts and what I could see of her buttocks had swollen to incredible proportions. All of a sudden she belched, and gave a long hissing groan; both these phenomena one could explain by the increase in pressure, which had suddenly forced a way out through the valve in her throat. Then her eyes bulged frantically, threatening to jump out of their sockets. Her ribs flared wide apart and were no longer attached to the sternum, and she resembled a python digesting a donkey. A donkey, did I say? An ox! An elephant! At this point I believed her already dead, but Nikolai Vassilevitch, sweating, weeping and repeating: ‘My dearest! My beloved! My best!’ continued to pump.

  She went off unexpectedly and, as it were, all of a piece. It was not one part of her skin which gave way and the rest which followed, but her whole surface at the same instant. She scattered in the air. The pieces fell more or less slowly, according to their size, which was in no case above a very restricted one. I distinctly remember a piece of her cheek, with some lip attached, hanging on the corner of the mantelpiece. Nikolai Vassilevitch stared at me like a madman. Then he pulled himself together and, once more with furious determination, he began carefully to collect those poor rags which once had been the shining skin of Caracas, and all of her.

  ‘Goodbye, Caracas,’ I thought I heard him murmur, ‘Goodbye! You were too pitiable!’ And then suddenly and quite audibly: ‘The fire! The fire! She too must end up in the fire.’ He crossed himself – with his left hand, of course. Then, when he had picked up all those shrivelled rags, even climbing on the furniture so as not to miss any, he threw them straight on the fire in the hearth, where they began to burn slowly and with an excessively unpleasant smell. Nikolai Vassilevitch, like all Russians, had a passion for throwing important things in the fire.

  Red in the face, with an inexpressible look of despair, and yet of sinister triumph too, he gazed on the pyre of those miserable remains. He had seized my arm and was squeezing it convulsively. But those traces of what had once been a being were hardly well alight when he seemed yet again to pull himself together, as if he were suddenly remembering something or taking a painful decision. In one bound he was out of the room.

  A few seconds later I heard him speaking to me through the door in a broken, plaintive voice: ‘Foma Paskalovitch, I want you to promise not to look. Golubchik, promise not to look at me when I come in.’

  I don’t know what I answered, or whether I tried to reassure him in any way. But he insisted, and I had to promise him, as if he were a child, to hide my face against the wall and only turn round when he said I might. The door then opened violently and Nikolai Vassilevitch burst into the room and ran to the fireplace.

  And here I must confess my weakness, though I consider it justified by the extraordinary circumstances. I looked round before Nikolai Vassilevitch told me I could; it was stronger than me. I was just in time to see him carrying something in his arms, something which he threw on the fire with all the rest, so that it suddenly flared up. At that, since the desire to see had entirely mastered every other thought in me, I dashed to the fireplace. But Nikolai Vassilevitch placed himself between me and it and pushed me back with a strength of which I had not believed him capable. Meanwhile the object was burning and giving off clouds of smoke. And before he showed any sign of calming down there was nothing left but a heap of silent ashes.

  The true reason why I wished to see was because I had already glimpsed. But it was only a glimpse, and perhaps I should not allow myself to introduce even the slightest element of uncertainty into this true story. And yet, an eyewitness account is not complete without a mention of that which the witness knows with less than complete certainty. To cut a long story short, that something was a baby. Not a flesh-and-blood baby, of course, but more something in the line of a rubber doll or a model. Something, which, to judge by its appearance, could have been called Caracas’ son.

  Was I mad too? That I do not know, but I do know that this was what I saw, not clearly, but with my own eyes. And I wonder why it was that when I was writing this just now I didn’t mention that when Nikolai Vassilevitch came back into the room he was muttering between his clenched teeth: ‘Him too! Him too!’

  And that is the sum of my knowledge of Nikolai Vassilevitch’s wife. In the next chapter I shall tell what happened to him afterwards, and that will be the last chapter of his life. But to give an interpretation of his feelings for his wife, or indeed for anything, is quite another and more difficult matter, though I have attempted it elsewhere in this volume, and refer the reader to that modest effort. I hope I have thrown sufficient light on a most controversial question and that I have unveiled the mystery, if not of Gogol, then at least of his wife. In the course of this I have implicitly given the lie to the insensate accusation that he ill-treated or even beat his wife, as well as other like absurdities. And what else can be the goal of a humble biographer such as the present writer but to serve the memory of that lofty genius who is the object of his study?

  ‘La moglie di Gogol’

  First published in the magazine Città (14 December 1944), later included in Ombre (Vallecchi, 1954) and then in Racconti (Vallecchi, 1961).

  Natalia Ginzburg

  1916–91

  Ginzburg was a young bride and recent mother when she left Turin, where she was raised, to follow her husband, an anti-fascist dissident, who had been interned in a small village in Abruzzo. It was there, in a place she both loved and detested, that she wrote several short stories which she published under a false name, Alessandra Tornimparte, necessary protection for a Jewish writer at the time. After the fall of Mussolini and the liberation of Italy, Einaudi published a volume called La strada che va in città (The Road to the City) under her real name. This story comes from that book. Ginzburg wrote it at night, as her children slept. In 1943, her daughter Alessandra was born, named after the pseudonym that had protected and in some sense ‘given birth’ to Ginzburg the writer. Her most famous work, Lessico famigliare (the most recent English version is called Family Lexicon), which received the Strega Prize in 1963, is an amalgam of truth and invention that both anticipates the literary memoir and surpasses it. Reading Ginzburg, one understands that all memory is constructed. In 1937, she was approached by Einaudi, where Leone was among the first and most prominent editors, to join the group of writers entrusted to translate the complete works of Marcel Proust (she translated the first volume, Swann’s Way). Ginzburg also worked for years as an editor at Einaudi (where she famously rejected Levi’s manuscript of Se questo è un uomo). This tale, characteristic of Ginzburg’s delicate, unblinking style, and her love of first-person narration, is composed with a placidity that contains violent emotional currents. It was Natalia’s daughter Alessandra who suggested I include this particular story in this volume.

  My Husband

  Translated by Paul Lewis

  Let every man give his wife what is her due: and every woman do the same by her husband.

  (I Corinthians 7:3)

  I was twenty-five years old when I got married. I had always wanted to get married but had often thought, with a sort of gloomy resignation, that there was not much prospect of it happening. I was orphaned as a child and lived with an elderly aunt and my sister in the country. Our existence was monotonous; be
sides keeping the house clean and embroidering large tablecloths, which we didn’t know what to do with once they were finished, we didn’t have much to keep us occupied. Ladies would come to visit us sometimes and we would all talk all day about those tablecloths.

  The man who wanted to marry me came to our house by chance. He had come to buy a farm which my aunt owned. I don’t know how he came to know about this farm. He was just a local district doctor for a little village out in the country, but he was fairly well off as he had private means. He came in his car, and as it was raining, my aunt told him to stay for lunch. He came a few more times and in the end asked me to marry him. It was pointed out to him that I was not rich, but he said this did not matter.

  My husband was thirty-seven years old. He was tall and quite smart, his hair was going a little grey, and he wore gold-rimmed glasses. He had a stern, reserved and efficient manner; one could recognize in him a man accustomed to prescribing treatments for his patients. He was incredibly self-assured. He liked to stand motionless in a room, his hand resting underneath his jacket collar, silently surveying everything around him.

  I had barely spoken to him at all when we got married. He had never kissed me or brought me flowers; indeed he had done none of the things which fiancés usually do. All I knew was that he lived in the country with a rough young male servant and an elderly female one called Felicetta in a very old big house surrounded by a large garden. Whether something in my personality had attracted or interested him or whether he had suddenly fallen in love with me, I had no idea. After we had taken leave of my aunt, he helped me into his car, which was covered in mud, and started to drive. The level road, flanked by trees, would take us to our home. I took the opportunity to study him. I looked at him for a long time with some curiosity, and perhaps even a certain impertinence, my eyes wide open underneath my felt hat. Then he turned towards me and smiled. He squeezed my bare, cold hand and said, ‘We’ll have to get to know each other a little.’