The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  We spent our first wedding night in a hotel in a village not very far from our own. We were to continue on the following morning. I went up to the room while my husband took care of the petrol. I took off my hat and looked at myself in the big mirror which reflected everything. I was not beautiful – I knew that – but I did have a bright, lively expression and a tall, pleasant figure in my tailored dress. I felt ready to love that man, if he would only help me. He had to help me. I had to make him do this.

  Yet when we left the next day nothing had changed at all. We barely said a word to each other, and nothing happened to suggest there was any kind of understanding between us. As a young girl, I had always thought that an event of the kind we had experienced would transform two people, bring them closer or drive them apart forever. I now knew it was possible for neither of these things to happen. I huddled up, chilled inside my overcoat. I had not become a new person.

  We arrived home at midday, and Felicetta was waiting for us at the gate. She was a little hunched woman with grey hair and sly, servile ways. The house, the garden, and Felicetta were just as I had imagined them. In the house nothing looked gloomy, as is often the way in old houses. It was roomy and light, with white curtains and cane chairs. Ivy and rose plants climbed on the walls and all along the fence.

  Once Felicetta had given me the keys, stealing round the rooms behind me to show me every minute detail, I felt happy and ready to prove to my husband and everybody else that I was competent. I was not an educated woman and perhaps I was not very intelligent, but I did know how to keep a well-organized and orderly house. My aunt had taught me. I would apply myself diligently to this task and, in so doing, show my husband what I was really capable of.

  That was how my new life started. My husband would spend the whole day away while I busied myself around the house, took care of lunch, made desserts and prepared jams; I also liked working in the vegetable garden with the male servant. Though I squabbled with Felicetta, I got on well with the male servant. When he tossed his hair back and winked at me, there was something in his wholesome face which made me smile. Sometimes I would go for long walks in the village and talk to the peasants. I asked them questions, and they asked me questions too. But when I came home in the evenings and sat down next to the majolica stove, I felt lonely; I missed my aunt and sister and wanted to be back with them again. I thought about the time when my sister and I would get ready for bed; I remembered our bedsteads, and the balcony looking over the road where we would sit and relax on Sundays.

  One evening I started crying. All of a sudden my husband came in. He was pale and very tired. When he saw my dishevelled hair and tear-stained cheeks, he said to me, ‘What’s the matter?’ I stayed silent, my head lowered. He sat next to me and caressed me a little. ‘Are you sad?’ he asked. I nodded. He pressed me to his shoulder. Then all of a sudden he got up and went to lock the door. ‘I’ve been wanting to talk to you for a while,’ he said. ‘I find it difficult, that’s why it’s taken me so long. Every day I’ve thought, ‘Today will be the day,’ and every day I’ve put it off; it was as if I was tongue-tied, I was scared of you. A woman who gets married is scared of her man, but she doesn’t realize how much a man is also scared of a woman; she has no idea how much. There are lots of things I want to talk to you about. If we can talk to each other, get to know each other bit by bit, then perhaps we can love each other, and we’ll no longer feel sad. When I saw you for the first time, I thought, ‘I like this woman, I want to love her, I want her to love me and help me, and I want to be happy with her.’ Perhaps it seems strange to you that I should need help, but that’s the way it is.’

  He crumpled the pleats of my skirt in his fingers. ‘There is a woman in this village whom I have loved very much. It’s ridiculous to call her a woman; she’s not a woman, she’s just a child, nothing but a scruffy little animal. She’s the daughter of a local peasant. Two years ago I cured her of a bad bout of pleurisy. She was fifteen at the time. Her family is poor; not just poor but mean too; they have a dozen children and wouldn’t dream of buying medicine for her. So I paid for the medicine, and after she got better, I would go and look for her in the woods where she would go to gather wood and I would give her a little money, so that she could buy herself something to eat. At home she had nothing but bread and salted potatoes; she didn’t see anything unusual in this – her brothers and sisters, her mother and father, and most of their neighbours all lived like this. If I’d given her mother money, she would have quickly hidden it away in her mattress and wouldn’t have bought a thing. But I soon saw that the girl was ashamed of buying things, afraid that her mother would find out what was happening, and I realized that she too was tempted to hide the money away in her mattress as she had always seen her mother do, even though I told her that if she did not eat properly, she could get ill again and die.

  ‘I started taking food to her myself every day. To begin with she was ashamed to eat in front of me, but she soon got used to it and she would eat and eat, and when she was full she would stretch out in the sun, and we would spend hours like that, just the two of us. I got an extraordinary pleasure from watching her eat – it was what I most looked forward to during my day – and later when I was alone, I would think about what she had eaten and what I would bring her the next day. It was like this that I started making love to her. Whenever I could I would go to the woods and wait for her, and she would come; I didn’t even know why she came, whether it was to eat or to make love, or out of fear that I would get angry with her. Oh how I waited for her! When passion is penetrated by pity and remorse you’re done for; it becomes an obsession. I would wake up at night and think about what would happen if I made her pregnant and had to marry her, and the idea of having to share the rest of my life with her filled me with horror. Yet at the same time I couldn’t bear to imagine her married to another person, in somebody else’s house, and the love that I felt for her was unbearable, it took all my strength away. When I saw you I thought that by tying myself to you I would be freeing myself from her, maybe I would forget her because I didn’t want her. I didn’t want Mariuccia; it was a woman like you that I wanted, a woman like me, who was mature and responsible. I could see something in you that made me think you might forgive me, that you would agree to help me, and so it seemed to me that if I behaved badly with you, it wouldn’t matter, because we would learn to love each other, and all this would go away.’

  ‘But how will it go away?’ I said. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘I don’t know. Since we got married I don’t think of her any more in the way I did before, and if I see her I say hello calmly, and she laughs and goes all red, and so I tell myself that in a few years I’ll see her married to some peasant, weighed down with children and disfigured by hard work. But then something stirs inside me when I meet her, and I want to follow her to the woods again and hear her laugh and speak in her dialect, and watch her while she collects branches for the fire.’ ‘I want to meet her,’ I said. ‘You must show her to me. Tomorrow we’ll go for a walk and you can show her to me when she goes by.’ It was my first decisive act and it gave me a sense of satisfaction. ‘But don’t you feel bitter towards me?’ he asked. I shook my head. I didn’t feel bitter. I didn’t know what I felt. I was happy and sad at the same time. It was late, and when we went to have dinner we found all the food was cold: but we didn’t feel like eating anyway. We went down to the garden. It was dark and we walked for a long time on the grass. He took my arm and said, ‘I knew you would understand.’ He woke several times during the night and pulled me close, repeating, ‘You’ve understood everything!’

  When I saw Mariuccia for the first time she was coming back from the fountain, carrying a bucket of water. She was wearing a faded blue dress and black socks and she was stumbling along with a huge pair of men’s shoes on her feet. When she saw me red blushes appeared on her dark face, and she spilled a little water on the steps of the house as she turned to look at me. I was so overwhelmed by this meeting t
hat I asked my husband if we could stop, and we sat down on the stone bench in front of the church. However, just at that moment he was called away and I was left there alone. A deep discomfort came over me at the thought that perhaps I would see Mariuccia every day and that I would never be able to walk around those roads freely again. I had believed that the village where I had come to live would become dear to me, that I would belong in every part of it; now it seemed this had been taken away from me forever. And it was true. Every time I went out I would see her, either rinsing her laundry at the fountain or carrying buckets or holding one of her grubby little siblings in her arms. One day her mother, a fat peasant, invited me into their kitchen; Mariuccia stood by the door with her hands tucked into her apron; she gave me the odd sly and inquisitive look and then disappeared. When I got home I would say to my husband, ‘I saw Mariuccia today.’ He would ignore me and look the other way until one day he said to me in an irritated voice, ‘So what if you saw her? It’s all in the past, there’s no reason to discuss it any more.’

  In the end, I stopped venturing beyond the confines of our garden. I was pregnant, and I had become big and heavy. I sat in the garden sewing, and everything around me was calm; the plants were rustling and giving out shadows, the male servant hoed the vegetable garden, and Felicetta went back and forth in the kitchen polishing the copper. Sometimes I would think with amazement about the child that would be born. He belonged to two people who had nothing in common, who had nothing to say to each other and who sat beside each other for long periods of time in silence. Since that evening when my husband had spoken about Mariuccia he had stopped trying to come near me and had shut himself off in silence; sometimes when I spoke to him he would look at me in an empty, almost offended kind of way, as if I had disturbed him from some important thought with my ill-chosen words. Then I would tell myself that our relationship needed to change before the arrival of our baby. Otherwise what would the child think of us? But then I would be moved to laughter: as if a little baby would be able to think.

  The child was born in August. My sister and aunt came to stay, a party was organized for the christening, and there was a great deal of coming and going in the house. The child slept in his crib next to my bed. He looked quite red, with his fists closed and a patch of dark hair sticking out under his cap. My husband came to see him all the time; he was cheerful and smiling, and spoke about the child to everybody. One afternoon we found ourselves alone. I had lain down on the pillow, wearied and weakened by the heat. He looked at the child and smiled, stroking his hair and ribbons. ‘I didn’t know that you liked children,’ I said all of a sudden. He gave a start and he turned to me. ‘I don’t like children,’ he replied, ‘but I like this one, because he is ours.’ ‘Ours?’ I said to him. ‘He’s important to you because he is ours, you mean yours and mine? Do I mean something to you then?’ ‘Yes,’ he said as if lost in thought, and he came to sit on my bed. ‘When I come home and know that I will find you here, it gives me a feeling of pleasure and warmth.’ ‘Then what happens?’ I asked quietly, looking him in the eye. ‘Then, when I’m in front of you, and I want to tell you about what I have done during the day, what I have thought, and I just can’t do it, I don’t know why. Or maybe I do know why. It’s because there is something in my day, in my thoughts, that I have to hide from you, and so I can’t talk to you any more.’ ‘What is it?’ ‘It’s this,’ he said, ‘I’ve been meeting with Mariuccia in the woods again.’ ‘I knew it,’ I said. ‘I’ve known for a long time.’ He knelt down in front of me and kissed my bare arms. ‘Help me, I’m begging you,’ he said. ‘What am I going to do if you won’t help me?’ ‘But how can I possibly help you?’ I screamed, pushing him away, and burst into tears. Then my husband picked up Giorgio, kissed him, gave him to me and said, ‘Everything will be easier now, you’ll see.’

  Since I did not have any milk, a wet nurse was summoned from a nearby village. My sister and aunt left us and we went back to our old routine; I got up and went down to the garden and gradually took up my familiar old tasks again. But the house was transformed by the presence of the child; little white nappies hung in the garden and on the terraces, the velvet dress of the wet nurse swished through the corridors, and her singing echoed throughout the rooms. No longer a young woman, she was a rather fat and proud person who liked to talk a lot about the aristocratic houses where she had worked in the past. We had to buy her new embroidered aprons every month or pins for her handkerchief. When my husband came home I would go to meet him at the gate, and we would go up to Giorgio’s room together to watch him sleep; after this we would have dinner and I would tell him about how the wet nurse had bickered with Felicetta, and we would talk for a while about the baby, the coming winter, the supply of wood, and I would tell him about a novel I had read and what I thought about it. He would put his arm around my waist and stroke me while I rested my head on his shoulder. Truly the birth of the child had changed our relationship. Nonetheless, I still sometimes felt that there was something strained in our conversations and in his goodness and affection, although I couldn’t focus properly on the feeling. The child was growing up; he had started toddling and putting on weight, and I liked watching him, but at times I wondered if I really loved him. At times I didn’t feel like climbing the stairs to go to him. It seemed to me that he belonged to other people, to Felicetta or to the wet nurse maybe, but not to me.

  One day I learned that Mariuccia’s father had died. My husband had said nothing about it to me. I took my coat and went out. It was snowing. The body had been taken away in the morning. Surrounded by their neighbours in their dark kitchen, Mariuccia and her mother held their heads in their hands, rocking back and forth and letting out shrill cries, as is the custom in the country when a close relative dies; the children, dressed in their best clothes, warmed their cold blue hands against the fire. When I went in, Mariuccia stared at me for a moment with her familiar look of amazement, lit up by a sudden animation. But she quickly recovered herself and began mourning again.

  She now wore a black shawl when she walked around the village. Meeting her was still very difficult for me. I would return home unhappy: I could still see her dark eyes in front of me, those big white teeth which stuck out over her lips. But I hardly ever thought about her if we did not happen to meet.

  The following year I gave birth to another child. It was a boy again, and we called him Luigi. My sister had got married and gone to live in a city far away and my aunt never left her home, so nobody helped me when I gave birth except for my husband. The wet nurse who had fed the first child left and so a new one came – she was a tall and shy girl who got on well with us and stayed even after Luigi had been weaned. My husband was very happy to have the children. When he came home they were the first thing he asked about, and he would run to see them and play with them until it was bedtime. He loved them, and no doubt thought that I loved them too. It was true that I did love them, but not in the way that once upon a time I had thought a mother ought to love her children. There was something subdued inside me when I held them on my lap. They tugged my hair, pulled on my necklace, wanted to search through my little workbox, and I would get irritated and call the wet nurse. Sometimes I thought that maybe I was too sad to have the children. ‘But why am I sad?’ I asked myself. ‘What’s the matter with me? I don’t have any reason to feel this sad.’

  One sunny autumn afternoon my husband and I were sitting on the leather sofa in the study. ‘We’ve been married now for three years already,’ I said to him. ‘Yes, you’re right,’ he said, ‘and it’s been just as I thought it would be, hasn’t it? We have learned to live together, haven’t we?’ I remained silent and stroked his lifeless hand. Then he kissed me and left. After a few hours I went out as well, crossing the village roads and taking the path that ran alongside the river. I wanted to walk a little beside the water. Leaning on the wooden parapet of the bridge I watched the water run, still and dark, between the grass and the stones, and the sound made me
feel a little sleepy. I was getting cold and was about to leave when all of a sudden I spotted my husband scrambling up the grassy ridge of the slope, heading for the woods. I realized that he had seen me as well. He stopped for a moment, uncertain, and then carried on climbing, grasping at the branches of the bushes as he went, until he disappeared in the trees. I returned home and went to the study. I sat on the sofa where just a little while ago he had told me that we had learned to live together. I understood now what he had meant by this. He had learned to lie to me, and it didn’t bother him any more. My presence in his house had made him worse, and I too had got worse by living with him. I had become dried up and lifeless. I wasn’t suffering, and I didn’t feel any pain. I too was lying to him: I was living by his side as if I loved him, when really I didn’t love him; I felt nothing for him.

  All of a sudden the stairs resounded under his heavy steps. He came into the study, took off his jacket without even looking at me, and put on his old corduroy jacket which he wore around the house. ‘I want us to leave this place,’ I said. ‘I will ask to be moved to another practice, if you want me to,’ he replied. ‘But it’s you who should want it,’ I screamed. I realized then that it wasn’t true to say that I wasn’t suffering; I was suffering unbearably and I was shaking all over. ‘Once you said to me that I must help you, and that was why you married me; but why did you marry me?’ I sobbed. ‘Yes, why indeed? What a mistake it has been!’ he said, and sat down, covering his face with his hands. ‘I don’t want you to go on seeing her. You mustn’t see her again,’ I said, bending over him. He pushed me away with an angry gesture, ‘What do I care about you?’ he said. ‘You’re nothing new for me; there’s nothing about you which interests me. You’re like my mother and my mother’s mother, and all the women who have ever lived in this house. You weren’t beaten as a child. You didn’t have to go hungry. They didn’t make you work in the fields from dawn till dusk under the back-breaking sun. Your presence, yes, it gives me peace and quiet, but that’s all. I don’t know what to do about it, but I can’t love you.’ He took his pipe, filled it meticulously, and lit it, suddenly calm again. ‘Anyway, all this talk is useless; these things don’t matter. Mariuccia is pregnant,’ he said.