The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  One more day and I’ll never come back.’

  And what were the royal kitchens if they weren’t our kitchen, with the deep dark pantry and the great red-brick oven into which Fernanda was just at that moment placing a timbale of maccheroni, and into which a little while later, her hands and feet bound, the nasty Queen Mother would be tossed? As I read, beneath our kitchen windows, the zinnia bed and the spirea shrub were replaced with flowing water. It was so real to me that to this day when I return for a moment to that long-gone kitchen, the zinnias and the bridal-wreath spirea under the windows still appear so out of place, as if I were seeing them suddenly sprout up in the middle of a Venetian canal. And during those summer mornings kissed by a liquid sun, a stitching-together of Riccardo’s shears clicking among the boxwoods, of puppy paws pattering on the gravel, of the turtle doves’ gilded cooing from the Cedar of Lebanon, a voice would call to me from a French door that suddenly opened, causing me to jump like a gun, explode in my own skin, the golden skin that was my book. And having fallen to the ground, it lay there like the skin of the Serpent King when the spell is broken – and now the hatch in the middle of the lawn leading to lakes and subterranean islands and the moat beneath the kitchen windows – now the hatch and the kitchen were suddenly brutally severed from the book, robbed of their coat of arms, their secret noble weapons.

  At the time, I began to think that any incredible thing could befall my relatives while living their undeniable double lives. My thinking on the matter was such that soon, the entire house, already mysterious in and of itself, became twice as full of enigmas. Small things, such as the prohibition on speaking at the dinner table – above all, in the presence of my uncle, my mother’s silent, handsome brother around whom the whole house gravitated as if circulating around a black sun – shrouded our hours and encounters with a magic veil of restriction. Above the white oval of the table, during the summer evenings when the French doors were open on to the garden, the silence assumed its true value, which was the hoarding of power. And when my uncle, often exhausted from the many surgeries he had performed throughout the day, fell into a light reverie that no one dared disturb, and his beautiful hand, his pinky finger sporting a golden serpent ring with a tiny emerald eye, rested distractedly on the Baccarat bowl, another finger tracing the bowl’s rim and making a high-pitched sound similar to the groaning of a trapped spirit, the sweet atmosphere of the room transformed into a cavern in which a wizard, the Wizard of Latemar, for example, was lifting his lantern to the faces of prisoners in order to indicate if they had been pardoned or condemned. In reality, this was something that my uncle did every day and many times a day, the impenetrable implications of which only I, in those silences consumed by the crystal’s whine and refined by the glint of the serpentine ring, could predict. On the table, the glint from other rings resonated: the four pearls forming a kind of lunar bee on my mother’s ring finger, and the braided gold of my father’s ring that shone in the long sunsets as he silently tapped his pencil on the wide pages of music covered in the black marks of another language, more silent and impenetrable still.

  Among Gladys Vucetich’s books there was one slightly more modern than Fairy Nix and it was illustrated by a brilliant artist who drew his characters’ eyes without eyelids, leaving in those empty orbs a watery and funereal light so that they resembled the eyes of a mermaid or statue. The very presence of Gladys Vucetich, whose eyes were so light as to appear empty, was laden with new mysteries, as was her appellation of ‘Godmother’ – ‘Who is Gladys Vucetich, Mama?’ ‘She is your godmother.’ This nomenclature immediately evoked that horoscopic baptismal scene, occurring so often in fairy tales, in which each of the twelve fairies – indeed, the Fairy Godmother – brings her gift to the cradle of the newborn princess. However, the gift alluded to by the fairy tale was not, of course, the dolls given to me by Gladys Vucetich, but rather to be found within certain surprising phrases that escaped her while her watery eyes stared at me without batting an eyelash, her cane clearing the street like the Fairy Gambero’s wand in the magic forest Brocéliande on the night of the Secular Council: ‘You know you were born on a Sunday? You will see many things that others don’t.’ And placing a hard finger on the tiny blue vein that was still visible between my eyes, she said: ‘You are lucky, my little one. You have Solomon’s knot.’

  There were scenes, however, from fairy tales that, according to those illustrations, took place under the immense vaults of a crypt, decorated with palms and drapes, but they were really too monumental for me to remember any particular figure. Inserted behind these images, like a second slide in a magic lantern, was the great town, the great walled-in territory of the Certosa, the metropolitan cemetery to which I had been taken for several years on All Saints’ Day. It was an impressive landscape of graves, and the fact that it had once been a vast seventeenth-century monastery made it a cemetery like no other. The sombre structure encompassed great porticoes, corridors and courtyards, suggesting a scene out of a Spanish tragedy during the era of Alfieri – all romantic madness dedicated to exquisite malice, forbidden loves and redemptive wars, but for me it was eternally and exclusively a gloomy fairy palace.

  In the great noble chapels flanked by porticoes, in the immense covered passages stretching from cloister to cloister, wing to wing, pleading marble hands reached out from sepulchral monuments, their garlands still deteriorating, their flowers still dying. The hands of pale, crying women gripped truncated columns and stone medallions, their heads veiled by their arms or by the corner of a shroud. Oh, how I knew those hands. Palms lifted in prohibition: ‘Never sit on the edge of a fountain, don’t ever buy condemned meat …’ – fingers that sealed lips – ‘And you shouldn’t speak or laugh for seven years, seven months, and seven days …’ Tall figures stooped over, often holding a child, bringing the child reluctantly, shielding the child with great wings, like the unknown figure with the yellow headband – Fairy Nix, the godmother, leading the child, the little neophyte, fascinated and terrified, towards arcane places, her eyes empty, like those of Gladys Vucetich.

  Here too, however, one was not supposed to stop or ask questions. My mother was always in a hurry, speeding through the arches of the portico, through the pure winter air, shiny with hoarfrost and blue – the only colour in that world of greys. Her veil fell on to the collar of her fur coat, and she whispered to the bouquet of tea roses clutched in her hands: ‘Soon, in this place, we will be at the end, on the far side of the last cloister.’ It was impossible to understand those words exactly. All that was clear was that our destination was somewhere else, at the end of something, beyond the vaults and the gardens, beyond the great mossy arches and the distant relatives whom I never knew, each renowned in the sciences, literature and the military. They lay beneath enormous sepulchral statues – ‘Grief’ with her cracked zither; the ‘Ululaters’ who were pure wail wrapped in drapery; black ‘Time’, with his raised hourglass (like the Wizard of Latemar who lifted his fatal lantern to one’s face) – some of these statues having been sculpted by my relatives themselves.

  At a certain point, we would meet up with my older cousins, their lively little noses, Zarina’s laughing Japanese eyes, their kisses and perfume mixing oddly with the smell of fresh coffee, a smell everyone seemed to carry about them in that city. All of it was woven into an even more agonizing intrigue in that realm of dark angels, that enormous stony horror with its icy breath, and the marvellous gaiety of a morning beyond the city, the fragrance exuding from their bouquets of white carnations, the recollection of the large, shadowy rooms from which they had come and to which we would return for breakfast, with a charming table covered with flowers, where cupids dived into small silver bowls, and the deep walnut cupboards surely still contained treasures … My mother, arm in arm with my older cousins, forgot I was there. And the great hurry we had been in to get there, also forgotten.

  Every so often we passed a particularly large tomb and we stopped for a minute to read the inscrip
tion – Laudomiae Rizzoli, spe lachrymata; Federicus Comes Isolani sibe ipse et suis aedificavit: Vale, cara anima! – which inspired neither greater or lesser dread than other harrowing recitatives and declamations:

  Farewell, Falada, who ascends,

  Farewell, Queen, who descends,

  If your mother were to know

  Her pain would be her end …

  or:

  I wait, I wait in the night’s dark,

  And open the door if one knocks,

  Good luck follows bad,

  And comes without art …

  And everything took on terrifying life in the brief comments around me, behind the veils and furs: ‘Anna Pepoli, poor unhappy thing! How much suffering she endured for that scoundrel …’ Or: ‘Fabrizio and Bianca … a tragedy for the entire family, a moment of insanity’, and before my eyes spread abstract visions of classic massacres – Bluebeard, his seven wives immersed in their own blood, and Anna, sister Anna, who scans the horizon from the tower sadly and in vain.

  And suddenly, that world of arcane sayings, of petrifying acts that froze the heart (those acts that, I knew, if one day we had really gone to the end, in silence, without ever turning back, we might have been able to undo, thus freeing the entire place from its spell, making it into a huge illuminated ballroom), that world opened abruptly, turned a corner and in a well-lit courtyard, and then in the semicircle of a chapel closed off by a wrought-iron gate, and then on a white wall, blind and conclusive like the end of a horizon – there, a miracle happened. Suddenly substituted upon the delicate marble in the place of encoded names, of hieroglyphic inscriptions, were their names – and my very own, those which I myself had worn around my neck since birth on Gladys Vucetich’s gold pendant: Vittoria, Maria Angelica, Marcella, Cristina … That little chapel where the carnations and the roses added a freshness that was still more dazzling, like adding morning to morning, that was the true and only enigma, the crux of everything, not only of the great Certosa, but of everything – of the damsel led by the shoulders to the secret ball; of the room that transformed into a canal; of the empty eyes, the serpent ring, the underground caves; and of the blood, the silence and the prohibition. Of the girl with the rose in whom childhood and old age silently entwined their shared secret …

  My mother uttered her soft, habitual, bloodcurdling words: ‘There is Grandmother, and over there is Grandfather, pray for them …’ and I read, under the name of she whom I had seen so defenceless in her portrait as a girl – the great, heavy drapes ready to let monstrous love creep in, to let the Divine Prince force his way in to her – I read under her name, which was also mine, Maria Angelica, two words: ‘suavis anima’ and next to that, under the name of my grandfather, Marcello, a name which was also mine: ‘anima fortis’. ‘Pray for them,’ my mother repeated, with the look of someone compelled simply by the force of her heart to liberate the imprisoned couple, the heroic, bewitched love. And at those abstract and reverential words, the great velvet curtain of filial compassion closed over me too, a cloud of tears obscuring my eyes. That was the fairy tale, terrible and radiant, resolved one moment and unresolvable: the eternal, ever-returning in dreams, the provisions for a pilgrimage, the golden nut to conserve in your mouth, to crack between your teeth in a moment of extreme danger. I looked for my small handkerchief and muffled my sobs while my mother, her eyes remote, placed her gloved hand on the back of my neck.

  ‘La noce d’oro’

  Submitted for the Teramo Prize in 1964. Posthumously published in Sotto falso nome (Adelphi, 1998).

  Italo Calvino

  1923–85

  It is a particular challenge to introduce Calvino, an author who consummately introduced the works of innumerable authors, including his own. The copy he wrote in his many years working as an editor at Einaudi are capsules of literary criticism that turned editorial promotion into an art. Along with Umberto Eco, he remains the most widely read twentieth-century Italian author in English whose body of work yokes together folklore, neoRealism and postmodern literature. Almost all his writing, groundbreaking and intensely experimental, has been translated by the late, great William Weaver. This piece, one exception, was omitted from the novel Palomar (entitled, in English, Mr Palomar), published in 1983, in which the eponymous protagonist, who shares his name with a famous astronomical observatory in San Diego, California, describes the world with a philosopher’s detachment and a taxonomist’s precision. In the novel, the tortoise is described in the act of copulation, in an unforgettable chapter called ‘Mr Palomar in the Garden’. In this out-take, the same creature assumes a decidedly sagacious role, speaking for himself. This text is typical of Calvino’s double register: ironic and formal, phenomenological and playful, abstract and concrete. Structured as a formal dialogue that nods and winks both at Plato and Leopardi, it is about language, perception and point of view. It is also the only story in this volume that talks explicitly about translation. Calvino, who was born in Cuba, raised in San Remo and lived for thirteen years in France, was rooted to no single place or language. Obsessed with scientific lexicon, he looked repeatedly at the idiom of animals as a counterpart, and perhaps as an alternative, to human communication. One of the foremost literary luminaries of his time, he was invited to give the prestigious Norton Lectures in 1984 for Harvard University, posthumously published as Lezioni americane (in English as Six Memos for the Next Millennium), but died of a cerebral haemorrhage before he could deliver them.

  Dialogue with a Tortoise

  Translated by Jhumpa Lahiri and Sara Teardo

  When leaving or returning home, Mr Palomar often bumps into a tortoise. At the sight of this tortoise crossing the lawn, Mr Palomar, always keen to entertain any possible objection to his line of reasoning, momentarily halts his stream of thoughts, correcting or clarifying certain points, or in any case calling them into question and assessing their validity.

  Not that the tortoise ever objects to anything that Mr Palomar opines: the creature minds his own business and isn’t bothered by anything else. But the mere fact of his showing up on the lawn, trudging with claws that thrust his shell forward like the oars of a barge, amounts to asserting: ‘I am a tortoise’ or rather: ‘There is an I that is a tortoise’, or better still: ‘The I is also a tortoise’, and finally: ‘Nothing you think that purports to be universal is so unless it is equally valid for you, Man, and for me, Tortoise.’ It follows that, every time they meet, the tortoise enters Mr Palomar’s mind, crossing it with its steady stride. Mr Palomar continues to ponder his previous thoughts, but now they contain a tortoise, a tortoise who is perhaps sharing those thoughts, thus putting those previous thoughts to an end.

  Mr Palomar’s first move is defensive. He declares: ‘But I’ve never claimed to have a universal thought. I regard what I think as forming a part of thinkable things, for the simple fact that I am thinking it. Period.’

  But the tortoise – the tortoise in his head – replies: ‘That’s not true. You are inclined to attribute general validity to your reasoning, not because you choose to, but because the forma mentis that moulds your thoughts demands it.’

  Then Mr Palomar: ‘You’re not taking into consideration the fact that I have learned to distinguish, in what I happen to think, various levels of truth, and to recognize what is motivated either by particular points of view or the prejudices I hold. For example, what I think as a member of the fortunate class, that someone less privileged would not; or as someone who belongs to one geographical area, tradition or culture as opposed to another; or what is presumed to be exclusive to the male sex, which a woman would confute.’

  ‘In so doing,’ the tortoise interjects, ‘you attempt to distil, from biased and partial motivations, a quintessential I valid for all possible forms of I, and not just a portion of them.’

  ‘Let’s say that you’re right, and that this is the conclusion I’m after. What would your objection be, Tortoise?’

  ‘That even if you managed to identify with the to
tality of the human race, you would still be a prisoner of a partial, petty and – if I may say so – provincial point of view with respect to the totality of existence.’

  ‘Do you mean that I should assume responsibility, in all its presumed truth, not only for the entire human race, past, present and future, but also for all species of mammals, birds, reptiles and fish, not to mention crustaceans, molluscs, arachnids, insects, echinoderms, annelids and even protozoans?’

  ‘Yes, because there is no reason for the world’s reason to identify with yours rather than mine; with a man’s reason and not a tortoise’s.’

  ‘There could be a reason, one whose objective certainty cannot be cast into doubt: namely, that language is one of the faculties specific to man; consequently, human thought, based on the mechanisms of language, cannot compare to the mute thought of you tortoises.’

  ‘Admit it, Man: you think that I don’t think.’

  ‘I can neither confirm nor deny this. But even if we could prove that thought exists inside your retractable head, I must take the liberty of translating it into words to allow it to exist for others as well, besides yourself. Just as I am doing at this moment: lending you a language so that you can think your thoughts.’

  ‘I take it you manage effortlessly. Is it because you are generous, or because you are convinced that a tortoise’s capacity to think is inferior to your own?’

  ‘Let’s just say it’s different. Thanks to language, Man can conceive of things that are not present, things he hasn’t seen and never will, abstract concepts. Animals, one assumes, are imprisoned by a horizon of immediate sensations.’

  ‘Nothing could be further from the truth. The most basic of mental functions, the one governing the search for food, is triggered by a lack, by absence. Every thought rises from what’s not there, by comparing something seen or heard with a mental representation of what is feared or desired. What do you think the difference is between you and me?’