The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  Invitation to Dinner

  Translated by Michael F. Moore

  The story I am about to tell concerns an event that is not very important in itself. Nowadays, however, our lives are filled with events like this that burden our days.

  It was a few nights ago. We had invited a British officer to dinner who had helped my brother-in-law Lello to come to Rome immediately after the north had been liberated. We had been very worried about Lello. We considered him a quick, intelligent boy, who could always get himself out of a jam, but we hadn’t heard anything from him for twenty months. That’s why my husband and I were unable to fully enjoy the pleasant spring evenings or the thrill of being back home, finally, and able to start work again, and to relax together, reading, by the window. We were always oppressed by an anxiety that kept us in a state of discontent, of agitation. So we said to each other, ‘We won’t be happy until we find out what happened to Lello.’

  He returned unexpectedly. I went to open the door, thinking it was the doorman with the newspapers, and instead it was him, smiling, holding out his hand, as if he had just left a few hours earlier. There were big hugs, exclamations, chiding; great joy, in other words, together with regret at being caught off guard, denying us the pleasure of looking forward to his arrival. We blamed this on the sense of oppression we still felt inside even though Lello had returned. We immediately uncorked a bottle, as one does on such occasions, and then I showed my brother-in-law a new lamp we had at home and some photographs and two plants in bloom on the balcony. For some reason I couldn’t find anything more to say to him after so many months of his being away and after so much had happened, but, despite myself, a feeling of uneasy melancholy crept up on me. I wanted to cry, not laugh. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘that we don’t have a nice little dinner prepared for tonight. Tomorrow …’

  At which Lello said, ‘Tomorrow night, if you don’t mind, I’d like to invite Captain Smith to dinner.’ He explained that Smith was a British captain who had brought him, by car, from Turin to here. On the spur of the moment we agreed, as an expression of our appreciation: we rushed to the telephone and were overjoyed to hear Captain Smith accept our invitation to dinner the next night.

  Our house is very big and beautiful. Once upon a time there were always flowers everywhere, matching the colour of the upholstery. Today one can no longer bother with such things, but that night we felt as if we were back in the old days. There were flowers in the sitting room and on the table we laid the sky-blue tablecloth rather than the usual straw placemats used every day to save on soap.

  We had everything ready too early. While waiting for our guest, we relaxed on the sofas, sipping vermouth as if we had stopped by for a visit, and I was pleased to observe that my husband had dressed up for dinner, as he used to do before the war. Now the war is over and I thought it would be normal for us to resume our old ways. ‘He’s a very nice man, Captain Smith,’ Lello said, ‘I think you’ll like him.’ I said nothing, but I was happy that our house was so luminous at that hour and I hoped that our guest wouldn’t arrive too much later since the red clouds of sunset were about to fade. I imagined that the British officer, as he left his hotel on Via Veneto, would notice the boys bent over their shoe-shine boxes, certain men standing on the corners, looking around warily, their pockets filled with cigarettes, the girls with eye-catching hairdos smiling at the soldiers and strolling on cork high heels, and the streets littered with paper, orange and lemon peels, and every kind of trash. I realized, however, that to arrive at our house he would have to walk slightly uphill, as if we rose contemptuously above that pocket of misery and could even ignore it. And then, I have to confess, I was pleased with the three of us: my husband’s suit was well tailored – although he had pointed out to me on numerous occasions that the shoulders were threadbare – and his tie had been purchased on Bond Street. I felt, in short, that our appearance, our house, our books and our English would leave our guest with a very pleasant impression of the people from around here.

  We relaxed into a bourgeois feeling of well-being. Since Lello’s return we had realized that, in the midst of the general ruin, we were a truly lucky family. We were all alive, our houses intact, not even a crack, not even a broken window. At that moment, for the first time, I no longer felt that sense of oppression inside, and my husband didn’t either, I could tell, since he was so lively in his speech, he who was always so serious and taciturn. This meant that our spirits were intact, too. We were young and we could start over.

  Captain Smith arrived a little late. He was a tall man with grey hair who laughed and gestured abundantly, and his cordiality smoothed over the first moments of embarrassment that always accompany encounters between people who have nothing, not even a language, in common. I accompanied him to the balcony and showed him the panorama, which is vast and serene, surrounded by undulating mountains whose names he wanted to know, one by one, with a thoroughly Anglo-Saxon meticulousness. I don’t know all of them. I’ve been living here for many years and I never thought to ask what they were. For me it’s enough to contemplate the landscape and see it change colour with the time of day. To avoid admitting my ignorance, however, I made up a few names that he wrote down in a little notebook. This gave me a childish joy. I laughed. Maliciously, among the trees below, the fireflies lit up and faded.

  When we sat down to the table, I felt a little exhilarated, like a girl at her first ball. I was happy to live in this house, in this season, in this country. Beyond the window you could see the tops of the cypress trees and a dim blue light lingering in the sky. The table was lovely, decorated with short-stemmed flowers interspersed with antique Capodimonte figurines of dancing cupids. The food had been carefully prepared. We hadn’t eaten this well in ages, but we wanted to celebrate the great occasion of Lello’s return. We spoke about the usual things one speaks about in such circumstances. Our English, first, and then our stays in London, and finally our guest’s family, who we declared we couldn’t wait to meet. The moment also arrived, without fail, when he showed us, with obvious pride, the photographs of his children. They were passed around the table, each of us demanding them from the other. Lello, who was the last to get them, really had to struggle to find, in English, a new expression of admiration, after the ones my husband and I had used. Especially since the children were so ugly.

  Next, the roast, with red wine, then politics came up, as it always does with the British: and I knew that this subject would entertain us until the moment the guest took his leave. I had no desire to speak about politics that night. It would have taken me back fatally to the troubles of the present. Indeed the conversation narrowed down, turned local, and by the time the fruit arrived, all we talked about was Italy. Or rather, the Italians. And our guest, who was a hearty drinker, felt so comfortable in our house that he was almost led to believe – also since he could express himself quickly in his own language – that he was among old friends. That is to say, he spoke about the Italians the same way he would once he was back home and dining at the club. Nothing he said was inexact. He really was a good man. The only thing he said was, ‘You Italians are like this and like that.’ And since he was filled with the best intentions and wanted above all to be courteous, every so often he would repeat, ‘Do you mind,’ asking if he could speak freely, and we would answer, ‘Please, go right ahead.’ Nothing he said was bad, I repeat. Not even a tenth of what we tend to say about ourselves. At a certain point, in a paternal and affectionate way, he said, ‘You have to wait for the world to form a better opinion of you, or rather for it to regain a certain trust after the twenty years of Fascism. For the moment, it’s best not to rush things. You have to work hard and demonstrate through your politics, through your civilization, that you’re a people who deserve to be helped. In the meantime, the friends of Italy – and I count myself among them – will work for you, lend you a hand.’ He smiled, waiting for us to thank him, to say something to him, or at least to smile ourselves. I couldn’t bear it any mor
e. Under cover of the long drop of the tablecloth, I twisted my fingers, one by one, until my knuckles cracked. I couldn’t stand the idea that we were still a people to be judged, a people to whom any old Captain Smith felt obliged to deliver his opinion. At that moment he was adding that we were a population of good people, despite some of our shortcomings – Do you mind? But it’s true, isn’t it? Please, go right ahead – despite some of our mistakes. A people that deserved to be helped. And I lowered my eyes, humiliated at the thought that we, that all of us – all forty-five million healthy and very intelligent people – really did need the help of Captain Smith.

  The men listened seriously, attentively: maybe because he was expressing himself in a foreign language and they didn’t want to miss a word. It was as if they were listening to a lecture. Then they rebutted, debated, contradicted, cited facts, conditions, that should have changed Captain Smith’s opinion. Lello, who had seen what had happened in the north, spoke of houses gutted by bombs, families that went from one village to the next with mattresses on their backs, seeking shelter, innocent Jews deported and stuck into ovens, alive, partisans hung from trees along the avenues and left there, dangling, their tongues black between their teeth, their mothers not allowed to cut them down from the branches and carry them away. I stared at him, hoping he would meet my gaze and realize that he should stop talking. We shouldn’t speak about all that. About us, our wounds, I was gripped by a steely restraint, feminine, jealous. I couldn’t allow them to be discussed like that, between one course and the other. And above all I sensed that the foreign officer wouldn’t have understood the motives that had driven us to do certain things, or not to do them, that he wouldn’t have been able to appreciate our efforts, our suffering. What did he know about all this? He had set his cigarettes and lighter on the tablecloth, very fine cigarettes that were sold around here on the black market, on street corners, by people risking prison every day. Ours were the events and the miseries of a poor people, of illiterate peasants that eat bread and onions, of a bitter earth that only yields fruit, flowers and children. All of this, when you read about it in books, is very picturesque. But it dug an unbridgeable divide between us and him. My brother-in-law continued to speak and I appealed to him with my eyes. I begged him: Be quiet, Lello, be quiet. How could our guest understand all this? Captain Smith had been educated at the best boarding school in the world, and he travelled across continents with nonchalance, in shorts, as if he were in a colony wherever he went. On the tablecloth I could see his arm, naked to the elbow and densely covered with red hairs. I asked myself why he had come dressed like this, while my husband would never dare, even in August, to sit down at the table with me without a jacket. And I was irritated with myself at the fact that he could take such a liberty in my home.

  By now it was dark outside and from the window you could no longer see the tops of the cypress trees. The flowers on the tablecloth had started to wilt. I didn’t understand why we were sitting with that stranger or why we had spent so much money on that dinner, getting all dressed up, decorating the table with those dancing cupids that, ordinarily, were kept in a curio cabinet. There were no more festive occasions for us: not even Lello’s return could really be festive. I wanted to sweep away everything with a gesture, glasses flowers figurines, cross my arms over the tablecloth, bury my head and cry. It wasn’t enough, as proof of civilization, to have manufactured that porcelain or to have written those books squeezed into the shelves that lined the walls of the library. We had to demonstrate once again, to prove, to pass, all forty-five million of us together, a lengthy exam. I suddenly felt great compassion for myself. And the two men of my family overwhelmed me with feelings of pity. I didn’t want them to keep conversing, explaining. To me they seemed to be demeaning themselves through their honest arguments, being beaten, humiliated: maybe because they weren’t very big and Captain Smith was a whole head taller than them. ‘Let’s go away again,’ I wanted to say. ‘Let’s flee, abandon the house and the city once more, let’s go into hiding.’ Only this could be our fate, the experience of the past few years. To flee from house to house, town to town, crouched behind the thickets, watching our backs, plotting, fighting, even dying, but under fake names. How was it possible to go back to wearing nice clothes, to sitting in comfortable armchairs, reading or listening to music? We were not three people like any others who might host a visiting foreigner at their house. We were three of those poor Italians who, basically, despite many shortcomings, one was supposed to help.

  We moved to the living room, continuing the conversation. But little by little, I went back to feeling the anguish that had accompanied me for many years now. It hadn’t dissipated even with the return of Lello, so I realized that it would not go away any time soon. It didn’t depend on a house or a person. It was everywhere, in the air. The certainty of being safe and young, and of still having books on the shelves and flowers on the table, wasn’t enough to expel it: and we couldn’t rejoice that the hard times were over, only that we no longer had to face them under false names.

  So when the English officer took his leave and said, ‘Goodnight,’ it came as a great relief. He promised to come back before his return to England, which, he added with a smile, would be very soon. I knew we would never see him again. We were old enough to have already experienced many times, at home and abroad, other useless and polite encounters like this one. Captain Smith was a good man, filled with sympathy for our country and for us, as Lello had said. But as soon as the door was closed behind him I said, ‘Goodnight, guys.’ They did not detain me, and headed straight for their bedrooms. I watched them walking down the hall with deep tenderness. And I could not help but notice that the shoulders of my husband’s navy-blue suit were threadbare, really threadbare. And he was quite right to say that, nowadays, there was no sense in getting dressed up for dinner.

  ‘Invito a pranzo’

  Written in 1945 and part of the collection Invito a pranzo: Racconti (Mondadori, 1955).

  Silvio D’arzo

  1920–52

  Born in Reggio Emilia, traditionally a Socialist stronghold in northern Italy, Ezio Comparoni was an illegitimate son who wrote a collection of seven short stories and a volume of poetry, published under a partial pseudonym, when he was just fifteen. He studied the history of languages and graduated from the University of Bologna in 1942. The following year he was summoned by the army. Captured by Germans after Italy surrendered, he was destined for a concentration camp. He managed to escape en route and to return to Reggio Emilia. Nevertheless, endangered for his refusal to support the Salò government – an Italian puppet state set up by Adolf Hitler – he lived in and out of hiding until the war ended. During this period he wrote a series of articles which were published under different pseudonyms: critical essays on authors including Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson, all of whom he adored. The story ‘Casa d’altri’ (‘The House of Others’), now regarded as his masterpiece, was published in its final form in a magazine in 1952, the year he died from leukaemia at thirty-two. It formed part of a collection of the same name that had been rejected by three major Italian publishers, one of whom complained of its ‘lack of architecture’, and not published until 1980. The title story was deemed by Nobel Prize-winning poet Eugenio Montale ‘un racconto perfetto’: a perfect story. It was also included in the first edition of Siciliano’s anthology for Mondadori, exposing D’Arzo to a wider audience. This selection is a somewhat shorter story from the same volume. Here, as in all his work, is an example of his heterodox vision, his elusive rhythms, his rarified style. His invented last name, ‘D’Arzo’, means ‘from Reggio’ in Emilian dialect.

  Elegy for Signora Nodier

  Translated by Keith Botsford

  It is said that, for a certain period at least, we live a life that is not properly our own; then, suddenly, ‘our day’ dawns, as might a rebirth, and only then does each of us have his own, unconfoundable life.

  I have managed to
observe this in more than one person. However, in the case of Signora Nodier, who owns the land next to ours, it seems to me that she always lived her own life.