The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  He had already realized why Attilio had confronted him this way, and oddly enough it didn’t seem at all absurd or bestial to him. Carlo understood Attilio even while the man was trying to break his arms.

  Now Attilio raised his head again and held it to one side, and Carlo saw his tight-shut eyes, his sharp cheekbones shining as though smeared with wax, and his mouth wide open to emit the smell of death. He too closed his eyes, no longer able to bear looking at that open mouth, and concentrated only on keeping his feet firmly planted on the ground and not loosening his hold.

  Although the station bell had begun ringing insistently, he could distinctly hear Attilio’s heartbeat banging against his ribs as though to break through and burst on Carlo like a projectile.

  He decided to put an end to it. That smell, he now smelled it everywhere inside him; it had passed through his nostrils, his mouth, his pores, as relentless as the very power that gave it off; already it must have enveloped his brain, for he felt crazed. He raised one leg and brought it forward to trip his opponent and knock him down into the gutter. But just then Attilio’s head slid slowly down Carlo’s belly, his hands too loosened their hold and came down along Carlo’s arms, now they grasped only his wrists, and gasping ‘Mhuuuh! Mhuuuh!’ he also let go of the wrists, and without Carlo even giving him a push, he ended up sitting on the ground. Then, toppled by the weight of his upturned head, he fell backward full length on the pavement.

  Carlo made no move to pull him up and prop him in a sitting position against the wall of the gasworks, for he couldn’t stand the smell. With Attilio lying on the ground, he forgot that he had understood him and opened his mouth to yell: What the hell’s the matter with you? But he remembered in time that he had understood and closed his mouth again.

  The train was near – judging by the sound it made, it was passing over the bridge. He looked down the street in search of the girl. She had left the shelter of the doorway and was standing in the middle of the street, looking from a distance at that heap of black-and-white rags that was Attilio lying on the pavement; then very slowly and cautiously she approached the two of them.

  Now Carlo could leave; he turned his back on Attilio and went to the grade crossing. The dispatcher was looking intently at the track where the train would arrive, but Carlo could see that he was watching him out of the corner of his eye. The dispatcher said nothing to him, and anyway he would have had to yell. The train went by with all its lights falling on Carlo; the passengers at the windows saw the expression on his face, and who knows what they may have thought.

  He walked away. With his arms crossed over his chest, he felt his muscles, which ached as though still encircled by iron rings, while before his eyes was Attilio’s pale, infected skin, and he was thinking that he would never again be the same as he was before this struggle. He stayed out of the light as he walked, his eyelids, mouth and knees trembling. An attack of nerves, and yet he felt that never again would he be able to feel nervous tension, since his nerves had been broken by clasping Attilio’s skinny arms.

  And still before his eyes the whiteness of that skin. To drive it away, he concentrated on imagining in the void his girlfriend’s body, naked, healthy and beneficent, but it refused to take shape and remained a white cloud added to and extending Attilio’s skin.

  He went to the bar of the railroad station but did not go inside; he signalled to the bartender from the doorway and ordered a brandy, a medicinal brandy if they had any.

  While he waits for them to bring him the brandy, he sees a yellow jacket appear from the path in the park. It is Attilio’s girl, walking much more slowly than before. She sees him, stops to think of something, and then comes up to him, still looking at the ground and with a guarded step. So Carlo has time to study her body, a very ordinary body but one that aspires to be possessed only by a healthy man.

  Now here she is. She looks at him with blue eyes and says in a disagreeable voice, ‘It was good of you not to hit him with your fists.’

  ‘Brandy,’ says the bartender behind him. He does not turn around and hears the sound of the saucer being set down on the open-air table.

  The girl says to him, ‘You’ve already figured it all out, haven’t you?’

  He says to her, ‘I think you’d already realized yourself that I’d made a mistake, that I took you for someone else. What’s sad is that he didn’t realize it.’

  She twists her hands and looks down and away. He says to her, ‘Excuse me, but how did he get the idea that someone wants to take you away from him?’

  ‘Because there is someone.’

  ‘Someone … healthy?’

  ‘Yes, someone healthy. We’re right, aren’t we? He wants me to be like before, but he’s the one who’s no longer like before. And besides, my family no longer approves.’

  ‘How is he now? Did you take him home?’

  Yes, but he’s in very bad shape, he’s having an attack, Attilio’s mother has sent her to get the doctor in a hurry, but Carlo can see she’s not the type to run through streets where the evening promenade is in full swing.

  She asks him, ‘Where does Dr Manzone live? Isn’t he in Via Cavour?’

  ‘Yes, at the beginning of Via Cavour.’

  The girl takes a step back; she has already thanked him and is about to turn when a horrible curiosity comes over him, and he puts out a hand to stop her. He would like to say: Excuse me, you are, you’ve often been, close to him – have you smelled that smell on him …? But then his hand drops and he only says goodnight, and she goes slowly away.

  He drank his brandy and went home. At home he stripped naked and washed himself under the tap, so long and energetically that his mother woke up and from her room cried not to use so much soap, which cost a lot of money.

  That night he dreamt of his struggle with Attilio, and in the morning at the employment office he heard that he’d been admitted to the infectious ward of the hospital.

  ‘Germany,’ said another jobless man like Carlo.

  ‘Who are you talking about?’ said someone who had just arrived. ‘Who’s this Attilio? Someone you know?’ he asked Carlo.

  ‘Me? I smelled the smell of death on him,’ Carlo replied, and the other drew back his head to look him in the face, but then he had to turn around to answer ‘Here!’ to the clerk who had begun the roll call.

  He dreamt again of his struggle with Attilio three weeks later, and in the morning, on his way as always to the employment office, he stopped at a wall along the street to strike a kitchen match, since he didn’t have enough money to buy the little wax ones, and saw Attilio’s name in big black letters on a funeral poster.

  ‘L’odore della morte’

  Part of the collection I ventitré giorni della città di Alba in the Gettoni series (Einaudi, 1952).

  Luce D’eramo

  1925–2001

  She is buried in Rome, along with John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Antonio Gramsci, in the non-Catholic cemetery. She was born Lucette Mangione in Reims, raised in a Fascist family living in Paris and moved to Rome to attend high school. At nineteen, against her family’s wishes, determined to learn the truth about the Second World War, she volunteered to work in a German labour camp, and became an active member of the Resistance. Shirking family connections when she was arrested, she ended up imprisoned in Dachau. She escaped and got as far as the city of Mainz, Germany, where, in the act of rescuing victims of a bombing, a wall fell on to her legs, partially paralysing her for the rest of her life. Upon return to Rome, she met writers like Moravia and Morante, began publishing in Nuovi Argomenti, and became a close friend of Amelia Rosselli, a trilingual poet whose life spanned Italy, France, Switzerland, England and the United States. D’Eramo’s best-known work is an autobiographical novel, Deviazione (Deviation), published in 1979 and made into a film in Germany. She wrote frequently about foreigners, about those displaced by the Second World War and its aftermath; Io sono un’aliena (I Am an Alien), the title of one of her collections of essa
ys, is the thematic underpinning of all her work. The author of three story collections, D’Eramo’s writing is impeccably clean, stripped down to its essentials. ‘Vivere in due’ is a tight shot of a literary couple, a masterful monologue that is also in some sense a dialogue. It opens slowly, lingering on the particulars and rhythms of a shared domestic interior, then shifts register, incorporating Rome, a sense of history and what lies beyond this mortal coil.

  Life as a Couple

  Translated by Howard Curtis

  He’ll be back at one again tonight, or two, or maybe even three. And I daren’t even tell him he’s wasting his time with all those meetings and discussions, because he gets so annoyed …

  Who said anything about being a hermit? It’s precisely because I have a social sense that I tell him to ease off if he doesn’t want his talking to get in the way of his doing. And what’s it got to do with being superior? There’s no way he can say that, he knows perfectly well it’s all about restraint.

  This world of couples. You end up by closing in on the person you’re talking to, from both sides. And at home? At home it’s different: we receive visitors together, but we have distinct roles; when we go out to see friends we go together, but as individuals, and once there we lose sight of each other, then bump into each other by chance. But when a discussion starts up, you just have to join in, you get heated, and then it’s hard to avoid ending up shoulder to shoulder, presenting a united front, which isn’t very nice. Or else you get into an argument you might as well be having in private.

  Wait a minute, you’re the one who’s always saying: ‘Respect is what matters, respect is everything.’

  Right now, though, I need to get some sleep. I have to get up early, I have a class first thing. He never feels sleepy in the evening, and in the morning, by the time he’s up, his coffee has gone cold … ‘Have you stirred the sugar?’ he mutters, making himself even more comfortable. He drives me up the wall. I have to tell him about the electricity bill, twelve thousand lire for two people is too much, he keeps the light on all night; although according to the electrician, it’s the boiler that really uses up energy … I stir the little spoon a dozen times at the bottom of the cup; no, I’ll tell him later. Right now, he needs to make up his mind to cut out those twenty lines that don’t work in the story, that monologue makes no sense, he’s so fond of it, he gets so carried away with these inane flights of fancy. ‘Listen,’ I begin, stirring the spoon nine times, but no, why must I always wake him up with some tiresome reminder? I lean over him, his eyelids are red, there are dark, hollow rings under his eyes, his mouth is weary, I wait; even if he sleeps for just another five minutes that’s something; I look at him, gently stir the spoon the number of months, years that I’ve known him; soon we’ll be old.

  He lacks judgement. The other night I wake up, the opaque whiteness of dawn is already casting stripes across the room (I’ve forgotten to close the blinds again, I’ll get up now, in a while), and what do I see? The light’s on, filtering beneath the door. ‘For heaven’s sake!’ I cry, throw back the blankets and jump out of bed, totally roused now by my anger. I go to his study and fling open the door: he’s sitting numbly behind the desk, his face haggard, green, the room foggy with smoke, the ashtrays overflowing with cigarette ends, the carton of milk balanced on the edge of the table. Of course I lay into him, and he looks at me distantly, resentfully, increasingly pale, startled in his solitude.

  ‘If I said that,’ I hesitated, ‘I didn’t mean …’ (His lips have tightened in a bitter smile.) ‘It’s because I don’t like it when –’

  ‘You always do this: you either shoot me down or you give in.’

  ‘Couldn’t you at least –’

  ‘Don’t take that tone with me, I’m not one of your stupid pupils.’ He points his finger at my chest. ‘You either shoot me down or you give in. There’s no middle ground. As far as you’re concerned, I’m an illogical person, someone who tortures himself for no reason, isn’t that what you think?’ (I hear his agitated breathing; he gets up laboriously from his chair, aching all over.) ‘As far as you’re concerned, all I do is count ants, isn’t that so? Ants!’ He takes a few stiff steps towards me: ‘I count ants,’ he says again emphatically.

  ‘No,’ there’s a pang in my heart, ‘what ants?’ (I caress his drawn face with my eyes.) ‘Where,’ I say, ‘what ants?’

  We look at each other and suddenly we see each other, him kneeling on the ground, pressing down on his hands, intent on counting a long column of black ants parading in front of him: ‘One, two, three … seven hundred and twelve, seven hundred and thirteen’, and me, standing there in my nightdress, my hair a mess, staring at all those little animals with their little feet, murmuring: ‘What ants, no, there aren’t any ants …’

  We’ve burst out laughing. We’re laughing so hard we’ve had to sit down, then I put on his slippers and we go in procession into the kitchen, to the refrigerator.

  Huddled on the hard chairs, we gobble down sandwiches, like birds perching on a treetop; like those palms on the Riviera, facing the sea, with their long scaly trunks and their miserly clumps on top, ruffled by the winter wind as the waves rose and unfurled on the sand.

  But what time is it? I need to sleep. God knows when he’ll be back, plus it’s raining so hard, it must be lashing down, it sounds like the cracking of a whip; what a downpour there was today, it sprouted like daffodils on the ground, such a shame to step on them, meadows full of silvery corollas of water on the asphalt, it was beautiful.

  I wonder if he’s eaten. Maybe I should have sliced some salami too: all those nice red circles on the plate, surrounded by white wedges of fennel, would have whetted his appetite, whereas the involtini I made are shrinking and turning brown, streaked with congealed tomato sauce; when they’re kept too long, they aren’t at all enticing. Yes, but what if he reprimanded me for letting the salami dry out when they should be sliced just before eating, why am I so wasteful, and so on? It’s best if he doesn’t drink wine. On Sundays, though, yes, we’ll have half a glass together, just a little, on those slow savoured afternoons, when I wander about the house, quietly enter the study, he doesn’t raise his head, stern in the shade behind the cone of light. That direct light, though, ruins his eyes, it’s an obsession of his, even though he can see perfectly well that I turned the lamp upwards; I think it’s less glaring, too, it softens the corners.

  But then he’s extreme in everything.

  When he opens the refrigerator, he almost takes the door off its hinges, then stands there engrossed; his legs crossed, his elbow leaning on the open door, his forehead in his hand, which he then rubs against his cheek down to the chin, to the stubble that scratches the skin of his palm; he supports his chin, in deep meditation as he looks at the ham in greaseproof paper, the long green courgettes sleeping in the lunar glow of the fluorescent light, the bars of the iron shelves.

  He pulls himself together, grabs the carton of homogenized milk and gulps it down, his head tilted back slightly. And of course he looks for the coffee. He drinks too much of it. That’s why he’s so on edge. He agrees, just as he agrees that he ought to smoke less, that the smoke scrapes his throat.

  ‘And you don’t eat.’

  ‘You’re obsessed with eating, you’d like to see me stuffed full.’

  All right, I’m going, it’s pointless, he’s sitting there perched on the corner of the table with one leg dangling, does he think I haven’t got the message?

  I hear him fiddle with the coffee pot, strike the match. I tiptoe back into the kitchen, stop at the door and place my temple against the lacquered wood of the door-frame, looking at him in silent disapproval as, with one hand in his pocket and the other down at his side, he stands by the gas cooker, monitoring the espresso pot. We watch the crown of blue tongues licking at the steel in the half-light. The pot shakes and starts to splutter and puff, the smell of coffee spreads. He heaves a big sigh and turns off the gas. He opens the cupboard, searches in the table
drawer, places cups, spoons and sugar bowl on the marble top, the porcelain and metal wobbling.

  ‘At least put the light on,’ he says, jumping up, ‘why are you just standing there watching?’

  I switch the light on, and at a dignified pace go back to the bedroom. I sit down at the table and place my hand on the open dictionary.

  He approaches with cautious, creeping steps, and I see him standing there stiffly, his forearms held out in front of him with the two full cups, scowling at them in turn, making sure the coffee doesn’t spill into the saucers.

  Then he goes away again with the empty cups, quickly, flinging things about, the crockery and cutlery jangle. ‘Don’t leave the cups around,’ I yell after him, ‘put them in the sink.’

  I go back to the study. He looks at me, dragging on his cigarette, he follows me with his eyes around the room. ‘Stay,’ he says, as I’m about to withdraw (my presence doesn’t bother him, it’s part of him).

  Instead, he suddenly flings my door open and stands there in the middle of the room, hair in disarray. ‘I’m disturbing you, aren’t I?’

  I turn towards him on my chair. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, I’ll come back later,’ and he turns his back on me.

  ‘Tell me.’

  He’s so impatient.

  ‘Why do you always have to keep the lift waiting?’ he cries irritably when we go out and at the last moment I realize I forgot to check the gas, the tap, something.