The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  No, it wasn’t fair. She felt guilty and deplored herself. In truth, Mrs X’s actual betrayals were limited to a tear or two shed over lines from an old sonata (written by a man dead some two hundred years) or a shiver over the refrain of a Spanish song. Then, after the last note faded, she realized that her steadfast, anguished, everyday love was actually expanding, absorbing every manner of feeling – that of a daughter, mother, sister, an eternally beloved – its roots growing ever more intricate and deep. Her emotions were overflowing to the point that she dared to ask what she had never before dared: ‘Do you love me?’ And she clung to his adored chest, took possession of it, insensitive now to the fear of annoying him. Her conquest had become solid as a rock, all doubts, regrets slipped away, disappeared: ‘We were born to be together,’ she said, inflamed, her ear pressed against his heart, every heartbeat ecstatic, her palm resting on his delicate, almost childlike upper arm.

  Ultimately, living day by day is easy if one isn’t too demanding. The world is a small stage and everyone has a role in the drama, even those behind the scenes, and, at worst, one can always sleep, and sleeping, dream. Mrs X dreams a lot of things – for example, when she has a migraine, she dreams of beautiful music. The sets change: singing lessons, tennis matches, incredibly boring games of bridge and canasta, with occasional friends whom she curiously observed. Terrible player that she was, she didn’t keep track of the cards. And she, who was silent once upon a time, began to chat. Without realizing it, this new loquaciousness of hers took on the rhythm of a storyteller: she recounted her childhood memories, the city where she spent her youth, and how much she loved her enchanting aunt who died so young. Talking, talking, digressing, telling fantastic tales. Somewhat dazed, the players ended up neglecting their spades and diamonds, and listened to her, riveted. Yes, there was no doubt, Mrs X was a terrible card player, but she knew how to tell a good story. This observation was not devoid of malice, the implication being that she revealed too much.

  Blunt arrows. A delightful spring swept away the green felt of the card table, the cards, the chips, the whisky and cigarettes. Midway through April, the garden behind the house was covered with violet and blue, the rose thorns as delicate as baby teeth. After having planted the seeds, watered them, played with the latest litter of kittens, she was able to sit outside, in the sun and under shade. Nothing was missing from that idyllic scene in which, like the protagonist of a George Sand novel, she decided to diligently play the role of the lonely noblewoman who had been wandering in a fog for thirteen years. Under a thicket of holly oaks and eucalyptus trees, a chaise longue was ready to welcome her, along with a book, its pages still uncut, a notebook and a fountain pen. She sat down but didn’t feel like reading, her attention captured by the blossoming azalea.

  It was at this point that fate intervened: the notebook fell from her lap to the ground and opened to a blank white page, almost as if waiting for a sign. While picking up the notebook, the fountain pen slipped from her hand and the top fell off; she didn’t put it back on, holding the pen instead for an instant over the paper. The midday sun peeping through the leaves highlighted their sinuous profiles with such grace that her hand, almost moving by itself, traced the leaves’ outlines weaving a lofty tapestry of pearly shadows. The page was entirely covered and all she could do was turn it over and give herself up to the game. A lively breeze had ruffled the foliage, but hadn’t dried the ink still flowing from the sharp golden pen point. Temptation triumphed and her tenuous scribbles became words: it was as if the pen were an invisible arrow aimed at the centre of the page, its purpose unclear, controlled by an external, benign force akin to the gentle deceptions that cause young children to obey. Words, words, words: now her agile hand was moving at the same rhythm as the stories she often told her ‘friends’ with whom she played bridge. She was living the story of her first encounter with death, the death of an amiable old woman who was courageous and Voltairian, and on to the piece of paper she crammed her spiky, hasty handwriting, the very same handwriting the ‘Miss’ had once used to take notes on venerable and difficult texts, an entirely different handwriting from the rounded letters used by Mrs X for the frivolous communications of a socialite.

  It started to rain and a thick drop spread on the page, diluting a ‘forever’ to the point of vanishing. The word was crossed out and written again where the page was dry, and the notebook was closed.

  Tucking the notebook and her book under her arm, she headed back inside, making her way slowly up the veranda steps, paying no attention to the rain as it drenched her hair and wrapped the silent stillness of the suddenly grey air in a silken rustle. Even once inside, the house was silent. Everyone had gone out. The study appeared abandoned, frozen in time. As on that singular day in the distant past, Mrs X rested her forehead against a windowpane and, her eyes closed, imagined a dusty classroom behind her. The present vanished. All that was left for her, or in her, was the act she had just carried out – tracing words she hadn’t summoned, unnecessary words but still urgent, almost pleading with her to write them down, to give voice to images on the brink of disappearing.

  Embarrassed, she realized that this was the secret of her anxieties – the dangerous conversation between the paper and the pen that promised a second life, and during her late years, if indeed they came, the only true peace. Her breath clouded the windowpanes streaming with rain. She blew on the ageing face of the neglected ‘Miss’.

  Her former self forgave her, but the price of redemption was high.

  ‘La signorina’

  Part of the collection Da un paese vicino (Mondadori, 1975).

  Giovanni Arpino

  1927–87

  In a 1981 interview, Arpino claimed that a real writer should write at least one hundred stories in his lifetime (he wrote nearly twice that number). He also compared the pressure felt by writers to fatten stories into novels to watering down a fine wine. Born in present-day Croatia, Arpino grew up in Liguria and spent summers in the Piedmontese city of Bra. He was a mediocre student, pressured by his father, a colonel in the military, to study law in Turin. He switched to literature and produced a slim book of poems. As he matured he wrote prose as well as verse. His first novel was published when he was twenty-five. He went on to write fifteen others, including L’ombra delle colline (The Shadow of the Hills), which won the Strega Prize in 1964. His most commercially successful work, the novel Il buio e il miele (1969), translated as Scent of a Woman in English, inspired a film starring Vittorio Gassman in the original 1974 adaptation, and Al Pacino in the 1992 remake. Arpino also was a prolific sports journalist (he covered the Olympic Games in Munich for La Stampa in 1972), published over a dozen books for children and wrote avidly about art and photography. While residing in Turin with his family, he rented a room without a telephone in Milan, nearly eighty miles away, commuting back and forth in order to write undisturbed. Racconti di vent’anni (Twenty Years of Stories) is an eclectic harvest of techniques, moods and styles: traditional, Surrealist, sarcastic, sincere, elegiac, farcical. This story, featuring an animal in a starring role, is a mixing of the absurd and the pathetic, of fable and verisimilitude. Call it a perverse, latter-day pygmalion, a mordant comment on chauvinism and possession; a paean, however oblique, to female desire.

  The Baboon

  Translated by Howard Curtis

  Poor devil. It’s really touching. She does all she can, whatever she knows, just to make me happy. There’s no end to her good intentions. I hate scolding her, but that only ever happens when I’m tired, rattled by work, by constantly rushing around the city, by taxes, business deals, sales, down payments, not to mention my lawyer, my stockbroker, my insurance agent, those who claim I owe them money and those who refuse to pay what they owe me.

  No sooner have I scolded her than I immediately regret it. She huddles in the corner of her armchair and weeps, she covers her eyes with her hand, then spreads her fingers and throws me a moist glance, and again she starts moaning in that shrill, d
esperate little voice of hers.

  ‘Look, forget it, I’m sorry, let’s make peace,’ I stammer, and immediately she’s a good girl again, she calms down, runs to me, empties and brings back the ashtray and stands there looking at me as I read the newspaper, sighing slightly. Then she remembers she hasn’t yet made the coffee and rushes madly into the kitchen, giving vent to her obsession with doing things, doing them quickly, making herself useful.

  I have to confess it: she’s the best of the wives I’ve had. She’s the fourth, I’ve been widowed three times, fortunately without the added burden of children. They all died on me when they were young: it seemed like a curse.

  ‘What did you do to her?’ my friends said after the funeral of the third. ‘You have to tell us now.’ They had become suspicious, unwilling to accept that it was a simple case of pneumonia.

  But this Gilda, I admit to myself, is a treasure. A good girl, as I said, docile, helpful, all she needs is a cheap little necklace a couple of times a year. She washes and irons her skirts for herself, and every day she combs and grooms herself with incredible care. The house gleams like a mirror. In the kitchen – well, there she doesn’t manage so well. She’s too predictable, she can’t figure out more than the same three or four dishes. But I knew that right from the beginning, when I bought her from that circus that had gone bust after a tornado destroyed the tent and broke the tamer’s leg.

  ‘She can do everything,’ the owner of the circus told me at the time. ‘Better than a maid. I swear I wouldn’t be selling her if it wasn’t for that disaster … We gave her a good training … She doesn’t eat much, you know? Nothing, really … You’re getting a good deal.’

  Gilda has been with me for three years now. She’s robust and healthy, and takes care of herself from her ears to the tip of her tail. She smells of cologne, soap and talcum powder.

  She loves me. Maybe even too much. Not that she expects me to be particularly effusive, sometimes all she needs is a caress, poor thing, but she moves around me with the huge weight of love that she feels, and I can smell its heat, its constant intensity.

  ‘Bee-ba,’ she says to me every now and again under her breath, closing her eyes and quivering, and then I know that I have to stroke her in a certain way, until her grunting gently fades into an almost imperceptible sigh.

  Or maybe I give in, and then for the next three or four days she bustles about like a madwoman, polishing the furniture, beating the cushions, scouring the pans, lighting my cigarettes, humming in the bath, blowing me anxious little kisses with the tips of her fingers from the end of the corridor. Or else she summons her courage and grooms me, smoothly moving the brush back and forth between the top of my skull and the back of my neck. She loves grooming me, and it’s a joy she knows she can obtain only in exceptional cases. As she moves the brush, I feel her warm breath blowing between my skin and my shirt collar, interspersed with the occasional very light, very shy kiss.

  When she does that, I say ‘Good girl’ and continue to read my newspaper, while she resumes brushing my hair, placated and contented by the masterful tone of my voice.

  Any comparison between this baboon, Gilda, and my first three wives might seem in bad taste. And yet when I think of them now, I remember them as three witches, always after money, things, words, diversions. Tired of staying in, but then immediately tired of being out for a walk, or at the cinema, or in a café, or by the sea. With sudden pains in their feet, or with headaches, snivelling for no reason. Lazy. And very stingy, when they weren’t being spendthrift. Sometimes badly washed, and maybe churlish towards friends of mine who came to the house for a chat, a drink, a Sunday poker game.

  Gilda doesn’t have even one of these defects. She’s limited, that much is true, but she’s no burden, she doesn’t make claims, she doesn’t answer back, she doesn’t argue, she couldn’t concoct the smallest whim. Home and a little love are absolutely everything to her. And that’s reassuring for a mature man like me, it makes him tougher, more solid, it doesn’t disturb the equilibrium of his days, or his work.

  Of course, there are a few bones of contention between Gilda and me, but they’re more a matter of nature than of conflicts of character.

  For example: Gilda is under the illusion, I don’t know how or why, that she can grow, that she can become at least as tall as me. She’s always thinking about it. Every now and again she takes me by the hand and drags me over to the mirror. She looks at our images standing side by side, me tall and strapping in my shirtsleeves, she in her little petticoat, barely coming up to my waist, and she shakes her head and her eyes grow dim with tears. Or else she takes the rolled-up tape measure from her workbasket and hands it to me, and I have to measure her against the wall as you do with children. But the mark on the wall is where it always was, it hasn’t got any higher in three years, and Gilda stares at it, studies it, then wipes away a tear.

  To console her at such times, but in a clearly playful tone, so that she won’t get the wrong idea, I say, ‘Bee-ba?’ And she shakes her head, I don’t know if it’s because of her despair at not having grown yet or because she has understood that in saying ‘Bee-ba’ I am only playing a game.

  For some time now, before going to bed at night, I’ve had to give her a mild sleeping pill. Since I suffer a little from insomnia, she gets nervous and worried, and would be quite capable of spending the night sitting watching me until I fall asleep. To avoid this needless complication, I give her the pill and take two of them myself, even though I know they have almost no effect on me these days, and then lie there for hours hearing her sleeping next to me.

  She doesn’t snore, although every now and again she lets out a long sigh. I have no idea if she dreams or not. They say dogs have the ability to dream, so why not creatures as evolved as baboons?

  She was born in captivity, in that wretched failed circus, so she has no memory of Africa, the forests, the elephants. If she does dream, maybe it’s about the circus, and the acts they made her perform, dressing her up as a grandmother knitting, a clown tumbling about, a sailor riding a bicycle, a waitress serving at a table … Or else, as is more likely, she dreams about her love, in other words, me. Because even at night her hand searches for me. She is content with a slight touch, I feel those fleshy, oh-so-delicate parts of her fingertips, and immediately I react, stiffening the muscles in my shoulder and in the arm she has touched, in order to calm her and lull her back into a deep sleep.

  At night, I’m more aware of how small she is. If she were taller, everything would be much more convenient. I hear her breathing, and in the dark, with my eyes open, I’m a little scared of that bristly, frail little body of hers, wrapped in a summer blouse that’s hardly any length at all. I bought a similar blouse in a large shop years ago, pretending it was for one of my daughters. Since then, Gilda has sewn herself another three, in different colours, and when she comes out of the bathroom in those few centimetres of cloth and gets ready for bed, I’m really touched.

  My insomnia, though, poisons these thoughts. For some nights now, I’ve actually been wishing that Gilda were taller. I realize that the image of a Gilda who’s at least one metre sixty tall is starting to upset me. You’re being stupid, I try to rebut myself, your life is perfect, don’t make it a matter of centimetres. And besides: how do you know what she thinks? How do you know that she doesn’t dream of a male baboon of her own who’s smaller and more efficient than you?

  These are troublesome thoughts that I can’t easily dismiss. And at such moments I am afraid to reach out my hand and feel that poor little heap of bones sleeping by my side.

  Then the insomnia loses its grip and starts to recede, and as I fall asleep I somehow manage to free myself of these idiotic ravings.

  I am cursed.

  Why does a man always manage – never deliberately, but simply out of inertia and madness – to ruin what he has that’s beautiful and good and useful?

  Or does my curse depend on a conjunction of the stars, which, as soon as they
see I’m at peace, immediately set about making me take the wrong step?

  To be brief: I went to the zoo yesterday. It was Sunday, and the first sunny day after a very long winter. I didn’t want to go alone, so Gilda went with me: she was a little reluctant, because she doesn’t like leaving the house, she’s scared of people and, especially, dogs. Seeing, though, that I insisted, and was laughing, and the sunlight in the kitchen was making me cheerful, she put on her best skirt and came with me, holding me by the hand.

  There were lots of children at the zoo, but surrounded as they were by all those animals in cages or scattered around the enclosures, they were hardly surprised to see me with Gilda by my side. The air by the river, where the zoo had been built, was stimulating, with gusts of wind that seemed like razor cuts, though only very slightly biting and not pitiless.

  Gilda seemed sulky, she let herself be carried here and there, and it was only when we came to the big monkey pit that she was reluctant to stop and her hand stiffened in mine. Obviously those dirty, mangy, quarrelsome apes embarrassed her.