The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  Sometimes in summer (Arturo being away on business) she sat in the soft flower-patterned armchair, in front of the window, and, half naked because of the intense heat, dreamt of being suspended amid the clouds with handsome Arturos around her making a breeze. And she even saw herself in Paris running a grand fashion house: Chez Arthur. Or, in the suffocating heat that came from the neighbourhood, she got lost on a paradise-like market day amid the carts of the gelato-makers; and every gelato-maker had a strange, vague, Arturo-like expression. The lovely outings in a carriage on important occasions, one day on the river, another to the villa of the Four Towers. The bocce players, envious, stopped and watched them pass by. One of them said: ‘How I’d like that pretty kept woman, I’d take her to Milan and show her a good time, she’d have no peace with me.’ And the others laughed, while he was holding her tight around the waist. One year they went to the beach in mid-August. But she didn’t like it and wanted to return immediately, to see the pretty lace-trimmed counterpane on the bed again. He let his moustache grow, a black moustache. One night, as usual, he said goodbye, and told her that he would be away for two days on business. She fell asleep blissful, woke in the morning, and worked for two days without rest, since beautiful, elegant ladies were waiting for their hats. Arturo didn’t return, she never saw him again, she never heard anything about him. The women of the city had to find a new milliner. Elvira’s shop closed.

  She drew a long sigh and rose slowly to her feet: large and heavy, in a long, full black-striped grey skirt and a dark embroidered shirt that smelled of a closed cupboard with biscuits left forgotten inside. She hobbled across the room. She managed to reach the work table, her heart beating hard and her throat constricted. She looked, from a distance and fleetingly, in the mirror on the wall: she was so tall, and such dark eyes she had! In the table drawer there was a piece of butcher paper. Something was written on it. Maybe: ‘What nice legs, Signora,’ or ‘Tonight I’ll come to you, kisses.’ She read for a long time. Then slowly she went back to the soft flower-patterned chair. The white lace-trimmed counterpane on the bed was yellowed and, merely looked at, gave off a bad smell. It was suffocating. Signora Elvira couldn’t go back in time.

  ‘La modista’

  First published in the magazine Oggi (1933, no. 11) and later included in Il ricordo della Basca: Dieci racconti e una storia, initially published by Parenti in 1938. The collection was reissued by Einaudi in 1982 and by Garzanti in 1992.

  Grazia Deledda

  1871–1936

  Deledda’s work combines the sublime realism of Leo Tolstoy and the moral framework of Greek tragedy. Among her running themes are arranged marriages, forbidden love, public humiliation, intergenerational conflicts, the old world clashing with the new. Her authorial domain is society and family, but she also writes blistering, haunting descriptions of the natural world. To all this one must add a gothic sensibility, given that her work is full of witches, evil spirits, malevolent winds. Deledda learned to write in Italian, as opposed to the Sardinian language that shaped her childhood and early life. She was raised in the mountainous Barbagia region of Sardinia, in the town of Nuoro, which is named for the prehistoric Nuragic structures that dot its spectacular landscape. Entirely self-taught, she never attended school. The title of one of her first published stories, in a Roman fashion magazine in 1888, is ‘Sangue Sardo’ (‘Sardinian Blood’), and her first novel, Stella d’oriente (Oriental Star), was published in instalments under the pseudonym Ilia de Saint Ismail. In 1900, after meeting her husband in the Sardinian capital of Cagliari, she moved with him to Rome, a city that traumatized her at first, and stayed there. And from that distance, from mainland Italy, she wrote most frequently about Sardinia: the overwhelming, archaic beauty of the place, its mysterious energy, its population that kept either to land or to sea, producing one of her most important novels, Canne al vento (Reeds in the Wind) in 1913. Deledda writes as Rembrandt painted: majestically, intimately, in sombre hues. She wrote over forty novels, one published nearly every year, alongside copious short stories, all while upholding her responsibilities as a wife and mother. D. H. Lawrence adored Deledda and translated some of her work into English, including the novel La madre (The Mother). The story included here has an almost pagan sensibility, and the fervently desired animal at the centre is totemic. Deledda’s Nobel Prize in Literature confirms that her regional artistic focus was, in fact, of universal resonance.

  The Hind

  Translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell

  ‘At one time,’ Baldassare Mulas’ servant Malafazza was saying to the cattle dealer who had come to the Mulas’ place to acquire certain bullocks, ‘my master was what you could call a proper gent. He used to live in that tall house with the wrought-iron balcony that’s next to the church of San Baldassare, and his wife and daughter wore cloth skirts and embroidered shawls, like real ladies. The young girl was supposed to marry a nobleman, in fact, a moneybags who was so afraid of God that he hardly ever opened his mouth for fear of committing a sin. But the day before the wedding the master’s wife, who was a beautiful woman and still young at the time, was seen behind the church kissing a lad of no more than twenty, a soldier home on leave. What a scandal that was! We’d never seen the like of it in these parts before. The daughter was dumped after that, and died of a broken heart. From then on, my master started to spend weeks and months and whole seasons with the sheep, not going back to town at all. He hardly ever speaks, but he’s all right – a bit of a simpleton, to tell the truth! The dogs, the cat, other animals are all his friends! He even gets on with wild deer! At the moment he’s befriended a young hind whose fawns were probably stolen from her soon after they were born, and who came all the way here desperately looking for them. My master is so placid that this creature comes right up to him. When she catches sight of me, though, she’s off like the wind. And it’s just as well, since I’d catch her if I could and sell her to some hunter or other. But here comes my master now …’

  Baldassare Mulas advanced across the green plain wearing a cap and sporting a great white beard, as short in stature as a woodland gnome. In response to his call the lovely fat cows and still wild red bullocks approached docilely, letting him touch their flanks and open their mouths, and the fierce-looking mastiff wagged its tail as if recognizing a friend in the cattle dealer.

  A deal, however, could not be concluded. For although the servant Malafazza – a filthy scoundrel, as dark as a Bedouin – had portrayed his master as a fool, the latter proved to be well enough equipped to handle his own business affairs, not budging from the high price he’d originally quoted to the dealer, and obliging him to leave empty-handed.

  The servant, who was heading back to town as he did every evening, kept the dealer company for some of the way, and the master saw from a distance how he was gesturing and laughing – having some fun at his expense, perhaps – but he was past caring about what others thought of him. Left alone, he headed back to the hut, placed a bowl of milk on the grass in the clearing, and, sitting on a rock, began to cut strips from the skin of a pine marten.

  All around the vast plain, green with the new grass of autumn, there was a biblical calm; the sun was setting rose-coloured above the violet line of the plateau of Goceano; the rose-coloured moon was rising from the violet woods of the lands of Nuoro. The herd was grazing tranquilly, and the hides of the heifers were lit by the sunset, as if dyed red. The silence was such that if some distant voice reverberated, it seemed as if it were coming from underground. A man of aristocratic appearance passed in front of the hut, wearing a moleskin suit, but with a Sardinian beret, leading two reddish oxen dragging an ancient plough with its silvery shares turned upwards. He was an impoverished gentleman farmer who was not above ploughing and planting the land himself. Without stopping, he greeted old Baldassare.

  ‘So, have you seen your sweetheart today?’

  ‘It’s still too early: if she isn’t hungry that little she-devil won’t put in an appearance.�
�

  ‘What are you doing with that pelt?’

  ‘Making laces for my shoes. I’ve discovered that the skin of a marten is more durable than dogskin.’

  ‘It can take more rain, you’ll see! Well, God be with you.’

  ‘And Mary with you.’

  Once the man with his plough shining like a silver cross had vanished, everything was silent again; but as the sun was going down the old man gazed a little anxiously towards the line of scrub at the far end of the plain, and finally stopped what he was doing and remained motionless. The cows were retreating into their herds, turning first to look at the sun suspended above the line of the horizon: red and blue mists were rising, and everything, lightly veiled in them, seemed to give a shudder of sadness; the grass blades that moved despite there being no wind resembled eyelids blinking over eyes that were on the verge of tears.

  The old man kept looking at the patches of invasive vegetation at the far end of the plain. It was around this hour that the hind would approach the hut. The first time he had seen her she had leapt terror-stricken out of the overgrown weeds, as if pursued by a hunter. She had paused for a moment, looking around her with big, gentle, chestnut-coloured eyes like those of a girl, before vanishing again swiftly and silently, crossing the clearing as if flying over it. She was fawn-coloured, with legs that looked like polished wood, and grey horns as delicate as the stems of dried asphodels.

  The next day her visit lasted hardly longer than the first. The hind spotted the old man; looked at him, and fled. He would never forget that look, which had about it something almost human, at once pleading, tender and diffident. At night he would dream of the young deer fleeing across the plain. He would pursue her, manage to catch her by her back legs and hold her tightly in his arms, afraid and with her heart racing. Never before – not with an ailing newborn lamb, or with a calf condemned to be butchered; not with an injured marten or with a leveret – had he been moved to such burning tenderness. The palpitations of the creature connected directly with his own heart. He would return with her to his lonely hut, and it seemed to him that he was no longer alone in the world, mocked and derided by everyone, even by his own servant.

  But in reality, unfortunately, things did not turn out like this. The hind came a little closer each day, but as soon as she would spot the manservant or some other stranger, or if the old man gave any sign of movement, she would launch herself into the distance like a low-flying bird, leaving in her wake a faint silver groove between the reeds on the other side of the clearing. When on the other hand the old man was sat motionless on his stone stool, she would linger, still diffident as ever, grazing on the grass but lifting her beautiful delicate head every so often, startled by every sound, turning tail and sprinting from side to side before leaping into the cover provided by the weeds – then returning, advancing and looking at the old man.

  Those eyes filled the shepherd with tenderness. He smiled at her across the silence, just as the god Pan must have smiled at the hinds in mythological forests: and the creature continued to advance, treading lightly with her slim legs, as if she was actually fascinated by that smile, lowering her muzzle from time to time as if to smell the treacherous earth.

  She was lured by the milk and bread that the old man would place at a certain distance. One day she took a small piece of ricotta and fled; on another, she reached the bowl, but no sooner had she brushed the surface of the milk with her tongue than she started, springing into the air with all four hoofs off the ground, as if it was scorching underfoot, then took flight again. But she returned immediately. A series of more frequent flights and returns followed, becoming less timorous, almost flirtatious. She would leap into the air, turn around on herself as if trying to catch her own tail between her teeth, scratch her ear with her hoof, peer at the old man giving him the impression that she had become less fearful and stressed – and that she was returning his smile.

  One day he placed the bowl just a few steps’ distance from his seat, almost at the threshold of the hut, shooing away the cat that was intent on getting his share of the milk. The hind soon approached calmly, drank the milk and peered inquisitively inside. He was keeping dead still, watching her, but when he saw her so close, glossy and palpitating, he was overcome by the desire to touch her and reached out his hand. She leapt, all four dainty legs leaving the ground, her muzzle dripping milk, and fled. But she came back, and from then on he refrained from attempting to lay a hand on her again.

  By now he had come to know her ways, and was confident that she would eventually stay with him of her own free will. There is no more sweet-tempered and sociable creature than a young hind. As a boy he had kept one that had taken to following him around wherever he went, and to sleeping next to him at night.

  So as to better attract his new friend and keep her with him all day without using force of any kind, he had the idea of searching for a litter of fawns, taking one and tying it next to the hut so that, on seeing a potential companion, she would yield more readily to being domesticated. But no matter how much he searched, his plan was not easily achieved: one needed to head towards the mountains, to the lower slopes of the Gonare itself, in order to find fawns – and he was unaccustomed to hunting. He found nothing but a crow with one damaged wing, flapping the other pitifully in a vain attempt to fly off. He took it in to look after, holding it tight to his chest; but when the hind caught sight of him with that ugly bird she fled without ever coming close. She must have been jealous. So the old man hid the crow behind the herds: his servant found it and took it to town to give to some lads who were acquaintances of his, and retorted when his master rebuked him for it – ‘If you don’t keep quiet, I’ll lasso that hind as well, and sell it to some out-of-luck hunter.’

  ‘If you so much as touch her, I swear on the cross I’ll break every rib in your body.’

  ‘You?’ laughed the lout. ‘You and who else? What are you good for anyway? For supping on bread and honey, that’s what!’

  That day, after the servant and the dealer had left, the old man waited in vain for the hind. Night was falling, and even the sound of the rustling wind made no impression on the silence of the misty evening. The old man was overcome with sadness. He had no doubt that the servant had got a rope around the creature and dragged it to town.

  ‘You see, if you had only let yourself be caught! You see, if you had only stayed here with me!’ he grumbled, sitting before the fire in his hut, while the cat lapped the milk from the bowl, oblivious to his master’s sorrow. ‘Now they will have tied you up, they will have butchered you. This too was your fate …’

  And all his most bitter memories came back to him; came back horrible and deformed, like corpses washing up on a shore. The next day, and in those that followed, he began to argue with his servant, forcing him to quit.

  ‘Get out, and may you break your legs as you must have shattered those of the poor hind.’

  Malafazza sniggered scornfully.

  ‘Yes, I broke them! I caught her with the rope, I trussed her up and carried her to a hunter. I got three francs and nine reali: here they are, look!’

  ‘If you don’t leave now, I’ll shoot you.’

  ‘You? Like you shot your wife’s boyfriend! Like you shot the man who betrayed your daughter!’

  With a face darker than his hood, his green eyes bloodshot with fury, he unhooked the musket and fired. Through the purple gunpowder smoke he saw the servant leap up like the hind and take to his heels, howling.

  Then he sat down again in front of the hut, with the weapon across his knees, without regretting what he had done and ready to defend himself if he came back. But the hours passed and nobody came. Night fell, gloomy and still: the mist enveloped the horizon with a grey ribbon, and the cows and the bullocks lingered with their muzzles in the grass, unmoving, as if already asleep.

  A rustle of the bushes startled the old man, but instead of his nemesis he saw the hind jump out, coming up close to him until her muzzle brushed ag
ainst the stock of the musket. He thought he must be dreaming. He kept perfectly still, and the creature, on not seeing the milk, craned her neck to peer into the hut. Displeased, she turned tail and swiftly retreated. For a moment everything was silent again.

  The cat which was sleeping next to the fire woke up, turned around himself and settled back down again like a border of black velvet trim.

  Once again there was a commotion within the line of overgrown scrub, once again the hind popped out, leaping across the clearing. Immediately behind her, a buck leapt into view (the old man recognized the male by its darker skin and branching antlers), chasing and catching up with her. They leapt one on top of the other, in the most lively fashion, tumbling together, getting up again and resuming the race, the pursuit, the assault. The entire ancient landscape, pale in the autumn evening, seemed to rejoice in their coupling.

  A little later the gentleman farmer passed by, with his plough covered with soot-black earth.

  ‘Baldassà, what have you done?’ he said in a voice that was grave but tinged with irony. ‘The law is out looking for you.’

  ‘Here I am!’ replied the old man, calm again.

  ‘But what made you injure your servant?’ the other insisted, determined at all costs to discover the reason behind their falling-out.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ the old man said at last. ‘Well if you must know, it was because of that little creature: In her eyes I saw the eyes of my poor daughter Sara.’

  ‘La cerbiatta’

  Part of the collection Chiaroscuro (Treves, 1912).

  Alba De Céspedes

  1911–97

  De Céspedes is a wonder: a Cuban citizen who married at fifteen to become Italian, sought Mussolini’s help to get an annulment and later became a friend of Fidel Castro. Her first novel, Nessuno torna indietro (published in English with the title There’s No Turning Back), sold five thousand copies in three days and was made into a film. Her work was translated into nearly thirty languages before being almost entirely forgotten. Daughter of a man who was briefly president of the Republic of Cuba, she was raised in Europe in the homes of relatives while her father and Italian mother lived in America. In 1943 she left Rome, where she was born, and went to Abruzzo and to Puglia where, under the name Clorinda, she broadcast passionate Resistance messages for Radio Bari. When she returned to a liberated Rome the following year she founded the influential journal Mercurio, dedicated to art and politics. It lasted only four years, but published the most important writers of the time, including Alberto Moravia, Natalia Ginzburg, Corrado Alvaro and Giuseppe Ungaretti. And yet, pigeon-holed as a ‘woman writer’, seeking perhaps to redefine herself, perhaps to maintain a distance from her Italian public, she began basing herself partly in Paris. She ended up living there, writing in French, and dying there. She published her first novel in French in 1973, and translated it herself back into Italian. She spent the last ten years of her life working on an ambitious autobiographical novel, also written in French, about her Cuban family. She was a close friend of the writer Paola Masino, who was the companion of Bontempelli; both women wrote critically about marriage and motherhood, institutions idealized by Fascism in order to promote nationhood. This story, with its brief temporal arc, encapsulates an entire period of history. Set in the home of a bourgeois Roman family, it highlights the difference between how Italy was perceived after the Second World War, and how it perceived itself.