The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  It all happened when we lingered by the gorilla’s cage. The gorilla was an extremely rare specimen. He sat there, huddled like an old carpet. Then he moved, and I saw that he wasn’t a male, but a female, with a baby in her arms. She was at least one metre eighty tall, maybe more, a big, vigilant beast with glossy black fur and aggressive tar-black eyes, but with her fingers tenderly clasping the little one in her lap. I hoisted Gilda on my back so that she could see better. Immediately I felt her shaking as if she’d been stricken with a high fever. She bent her little arms and squeezed my neck, and her breath in my ear sounded fractured with emotion, or with terror.

  ‘Good girl,’ I whispered to her. ‘Don’t you see how beautiful she is? A giant. Would you let me make ‘Bee-ba’ with her, eh?’

  I felt the slight touch of her nails around my neck, and then a big shudder that shook her in every vertebra.

  But when we got home, she shut herself in the bathroom and for a long time I heard her weeping desperately. I didn’t say anything, didn’t call her, because after three wives I know perfectly well how valuable silence is as a response to a female’s tears.

  She came out and served dinner, without the slightest sigh escaping her mouth. She obeyed each of my requests – the salt, the oil, a fruit knife – with her usual docility, but without the celebratory frenzy I know so well.

  After dinner, she immediately went off to bed, while I sat up to watch television.

  It’s only now, in the bedroom, that I discover she’s swallowed an entire tube of sleeping pills.

  From her mouth the breath emerges thin, already wheezing. I’ve telephoned the Red Cross, someone will be here soon. Maybe they’ll be able to save her for me.

  My head feels empty, my hands alternately dry and moist. I stand here looking at her, waiting for the doorbell to ring. Yes, maybe they’ll save her. But what then? Will she still be my Gilda, will she be what she was yesterday, what she’s always been? Or will she start to grow suspicious and hate me, the way my other wives did? What little acts of revenge will she come up with in the labyrinth of her female mind?

  But then, what do these women want of me, what do they expect, do they really not understand the efforts I make, just to keep going, to keep the peace? And yet … if I’m left alone, if Gilda dies, what will I be able to do with myself when I’ve become master of nothing?

  ‘La babbuina’

  Part of the collection La babbuina e altre storie (Mondadori, 1967).

  Corrado Alvaro

  1895–1956

  Alvaro is the only writer in this volume from Calabria, one of the poorest regions of Italy, and though he moved away from it as a young man – sent away to a Jesuit school outside Rome, serving in the army, studying and working in Milan, and eventually settling in Rome – that arid, insular landscape, the southern ‘toe’ of the Italian peninsula from which so many migrated, inspired him all his life. A transitional figure who fused Realism with Modernist and lyrical elements, he wrote poetry as well as prose. He was keenly attuned to tensions between rural and urban society, between the world of manners and the irrational realm. He started publishing stories in La Stampa in 1929, and followed up, a year later, with a powerful collection called Gente in Aspromonte (published in English under the title Revolt in Aspromonte). His novel Quasi una vita (Almost a Life) received the Strega Prize in 1951, but he remains finest in his stories, which are ambiguous, ardent, psychologically driven and morally charged. He was known for labouring intensely over drafts; the year before he died, he organized his short fiction in a definitive volume called Settantacinque racconti (Seventy-five Stories). A fierce and open opponent of Mussolini, he was among the intellectuals who signed Benedetto Croce’s Anti-Fascist Manifesto in 1925, and he hid under a false name in Abruzzo in 1943 after the regime fell. Alvaro also worked as a journalist throughout his life – he was an editor at the anti-Fascist newspaper Il Mondo – and was at one point dispatched to the Soviet Union, where he learned enough Russian to translate Tolstoy into Italian. In the last two months of his life he befriended Campo, who was at his side when he died. This story, a hybrid of conventional plot, intrigue and interior rumination, moves rapidly and unpredictably, its slippery structure mirroring the rootless gypsy at its centre. A recurrent female figure in Alvaro’s work, she symbolizes both desperation and freedom, and defies fixed notions of identity.

  Barefoot

  Translated by Jhumpa Lahiri

  At times, as soon as I’ve closed the door to my house, I hear the phone ringing in my room. I go down a few steps, slowly, listening all the while to a sound that gradually sounds more like a voice that’s calling. I climb back up the steps, open the door and go into my room. When I pick up the receiver, poof, the call vanishes, and in the Bakelite tube I hear that ‘crac’, like a knot being tied that no one can undo.

  I suppose it’s strange to hear me use an expression like that: a sound that ties a knot. But it does. You have to realize that, since I live alone, everything that surrounds me strikes me in a singular way. Other times, instead of turning back, I stop at the first landing. I hear the phone ringing even more intently, almost desperately. It implores in the solitude of the empty rooms. I go down a few more steps, and now other calls from neighbouring apartments layer on top of that one, all of them blending into a single plea, almost as if they’re asking to be freed from the device.

  When the cleaning lady’s here to tidy up my place in the mornings, she’s the one to answer the calls. Coming back home I find, written on a pad, the name of whoever has asked for me. It’s almost always people I don’t know. Maybe because the cleaning lady mangles the names. I wouldn’t know how else to interpret certain phenomena: certain people, a man or a woman, declare that they urgently need to talk to me, they say they’ll call back; but no one ever does, or almost never. So, what’s the hurry? I’ve noticed that this sort of thing tends to occur on specific days, on sunny days, for example.

  It doesn’t only happen with people who call me on the phone, but also with those who show up at my door. I’m often told that someone who absolutely must see me came by in a great hurry, and that he’ll come back, as usual; and as usual, this person never turns up again. I must say that under other circumstances – were I to live in a small town, for example – such things wouldn’t matter. But certain mechanical devices, like the telephone, have lent life a certain drama, and someone who calls you on that piece of equipment is nothing but the shroud of a man – his soul, his essence, all of him, reduced to that beseeching voice. As for why I care so much about who’s been trying to get in touch with me, and even feel a bit anxious about it, that’s another matter.

  It stirs up memories of when I was younger, when people asked after you not to get something, but rather, to give. You might say I’ve gauged my life with this device. Once they were people who augured kindness, unknown women who proposed a walk, given that it was a pleasant day. It didn’t matter that, later, they laughed at me. Not all of them, though. Others uttered scalding words into that tube, with brazen voices. Not to me, naturally, but to a stranger, to the unknown, to hope. Then, imperceptibly, the situation changed. Typically, the person who now calls asks for something. I’ve become a man. I expect nothing from others. I’ve got to give the little I can.

  And yet the wishful thinking of those days remains. And every time someone calls and then doesn’t show up, I remember that ancient longing. No, it doesn’t only happen to me. In my salad days I saw old men who’d already gone grey, nearly falling over, anxiously waiting for someone who’d called once to call again; and they, too, would wait in vain. A man never tires of waiting.

  Then lo and behold: after dropping by various times to no avail, someone turned up again. I opened the door – I was alone – and found a woman behind it, holding a child by the hand. I first took in the child. He was small, but possessed that adult air that the children of the poor have, also children in certain historic paintings: a tiny humanity, but the eyes, expression and experie
nce of grown-ups, which is the case among animals, and in the truer world of men. The woman took a bold step, furtive and light. She was already in my study. Lowering my eyes, I saw that she wasn’t wearing shoes; her feet were wrapped, instead, in some rags. I took a moment to consider those rags, and her silent step, and her sidelong gait, and only afterwards did I take in her thin, dark, resolute face, straight nose, whittled lips, small head at the top of her tall, straight body. I found myself behind my table; it was as if she’d cornered me against the wall. Her presence cut me off from the rest of the room; with her restless eyes she’d taken in everything around her, on the tables, on the furniture, on the shelves. I had a bad feeling and prepared, instinctively, to defend myself, when my eyes fell to her breasts, discreetly but confidently.

  She began speaking with a voice that sought to be reassuring, but betrayed concern: she’d heard of me, and she cited the names of two or three people I knew; she spoke about my life, and here she reminded me of one or two incidents; in short, she wanted me to put in a good word to the director of an institute for the needy, so that he would welcome her among its residents, since she was poor, and willing to adapt to the jobs that impoverished women did to pay for their keep in that charitable institution. I lifted my eyes to look at her, and again I encountered that face, frozen in its secret, rough beauty. I couldn’t help thinking of a man: I was convinced that some fellow had coached her preamble, and the things she’d said about me; the way she’d organized her speech, and that type of flattery, seemed to me of purely masculine inspiration. Moreover, while everything she’d said about my friends was true, she’d been wrong about one thing: I didn’t know the director of the institute she was talking about, not in the least. I’m a man, with a man’s thoughts. In fact, while looking at those strips on her feet, I was actually thinking that I’d never seen a woman so careless about her appearance. In other words, it struck me as a disguise. I must admit she spoke in polished sentences, and didn’t lack a certain refinement. Whoever her Svengali was, he would have gone out of his way to procure a pair of shoes for such a beautiful creature. Beautiful, yes, but also harsh, almost in revolt against her femininity, with those eyes, quick and furtive, that took in, took stock, of everything. Including me.

  She didn’t want to sit down. She looked with disdain at the armchair I offered her, her eyes trained on me as if expecting the unexpected. I looked once more at the child. He was barefoot, and he stared at me, clinging to his mother’s side, as if he, too, expected something inevitable to happen. Perhaps he was trembling, perhaps he was scared, but he controlled himself with the determination children are capable of.

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’ll see to this director, I’ll find someone among my friends who knows him. Why don’t you leave me your address.’ I motioned to offer her a pen; I wanted to see her writing. But the pen slipped from my hand, rolling on the table, and in the attempt to pick it up again, I gave it another nudge and it ended up falling on the floor. I heard a sudden cry, a shriek, and saw the child’s mouth: it was red, a commoner’s red, opened wide to reveal the few teeth among the gums. The fallen pen had ended up hurting the child’s small bare foot.

  I started to panic. The boy behaved as if he couldn’t breathe, he seemed on the verge of choking. She took him roughly in her arms, without sitting down, and looked at me, stunned. I sensed a tremendous, powerful vitality, and a fear of evil that only simple people know how to convey. I rooted around for a small bottle of disinfectant and found a vial of iodine. I was about to pour a few drops on the wound, which was barely a scratch grazing that little foot, sensing that it was fruit from the maternal tree. The child caught his breath and asked, in a grown-up voice, using an incredibly reasonable tone: ‘Will it sting?’

  ‘A bit,’ I replied.

  Then he let out another cry, even louder, baring his mouth down to his tonsils. ‘Calm down,’ I said, ‘I’ll look for a medicine that doesn’t sting,’ and I started to look for a bottle of hydrogen peroxide that I remembered keeping in a drawer.

  The boy quieted down at once and waited. When I came back, I saw a drop of blood creeping out of the wound: it was thick blood, bright vermilion, a perfect drop of it.

  With impressive ease the boy started shrieking: ‘Now it hurts, now it hurts.’ He pulled at his hair and scratched his cheeks. Then suddenly he turned quiet again, while his mother looked at me and him the way animals watch strangers who approach their young, a look that deems their young the strongest, most precious things on earth.

  I’d placed a cotton pad on the wound, and I watched it shrinking and staunching. While I did this I was seized by a violent feeling, due to some ancient memory, and I appraised that flesh dense with blood and strength, and those two pointlessly beautiful bodies, as if they were treasures that lay buried in residual gangue: a force of nature, hidden yet thriving at some unexplored depth. Looking around, at the things I’d accumulated in so many patient, lean years, everything seemed stupid and petty. These weren’t thoughts of mine, but rather, vague impressions; I was thinking about that woman’s silent steps through city streets, and the multiplicity of her life, unshackled from any law and norm, and about her mysterious affairs. At the same time, the woman’s language – civilized, sly, cajoling – stood in contrast to those screams, the turning pale, the trembling for nothing, the sudden self-control, the fickle mutability of gypsies. That drop of blood, alive, dark-red, almost protean, multi-hued, had faintly repulsed me, like something too intense to bear. And yet it had enticed me, like a memory of lost vigour.

  I’d barely managed to close the drawer with the bottle of disinfectant in it before something else happened, perhaps just what I’d been fearing and anticipating in the back of my mind. I heard the bustle of footsteps behind me, and the thud of that muffled stride: I saw the door open, and mother and son tumbling out, this time with the intelligence and accord that had already struck me when I’d observed the little boy next to his mother. They formed a single being. The little one must have been perfectly trained to make such an exit. I noticed, in a flash, that a silver vase that used to stand on a piece of furniture was missing. I’d thought about it all the while, mixed up with all my other thoughts. I moved towards the door and heard it close, violently. I stepped outside.

  The two of them were already on the stairs. I caught up to them on the landing of the first floor; they were incredibly fast. I found them among the shadows. This time the boy was perfectly silent. I plunged my hands towards them and felt two lips graze me. Now I saw that feminine face – above me, since she was taller – with a new expression, smiling and frighteningly secure. During that temptation, I wavered, once again envisioning vast spaces that gave on to to the prison of urban life: dangerous streets, dark stairwells, secret rooms guarded by some old woman, hoary and slow, with the voice of a ready accomplice. But at the same time, under those alluring eyes that fixed me like an asp, I was unable to look away. And as I felt, under my grip, two arms that had surrendered but remained strong, the doors to the apartments on the landing opened. Still holding her (and later I was told that my position was somewhat strange), I said:

  ‘She’s a thief.’

  The face above me clouded over. And then I saw another expression take possession of it, blooming once more like a distinct, stagnant shape on the surface of a suddenly agitated lake. Various voices were heard: ‘Ah, you finally caught her!’ ‘Search her. She must have my purse, my lipstick, too. I can spot the lipstick right away, I bought it in Zurich.’ ‘Ah, it’s her!’ She was passed from one person to another. With her pilgrim’s gait I saw her on the street, growing distant, in the grips of the porter and an officer.

  I’d forgotten, in the hubbub, about my silver vase. When I was summoned by the judge, who gave the stolen item back to me, I told him I didn’t want any harm to come to the woman. But I was told they’d been looking for her for a long time, and they thanked me for having brought her to justice. ‘Anyway,’ they added, ‘you can’t call a woma
n a thief without wanting to harm her.’ She followed me, with her dangerous eyes, as I went out, watching me all the way up to the door. She understood men. She knew how vain we were. She didn’t quit her act, even under those circumstances. As for me, I hope I never see her again. Men, as everyone knows, are tempted by mystery and deceit, riddles to solve and explain. But what mystery? Someone might say: we’re talking about a thief. True, but why does such a beautiful woman become a thief? To stay honest?

  ‘Piedi scalzi’

  First published in Incontri d’amore (Bompiani, 1940). Later published as part of the collection Settantacinque racconti (Bompiani, 1955).

  Notes

  THE SIREN

  1. William Shakespeare, The Tempest, act I, scene 2.

  2. William Shakespeare, The Sonnets, 119.

  3. The Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (National Recreational Club) was the Italian Fascist leisure and recreational organization.

  THE TOWER

  1. RAI3: RAI stands for ‘Radiotelevisione italiana’, which, until 1954, was called ‘Radio Audizioni Italiane’. It is Italy’s public broadcasting company. RAI3, among the principal RAI channels, was controlled by the Italian Communist Party and dedicated largely to cultural programming. It retains a left-leaning audience.

  2. San Francesco from the 1930s: San Francesco (Saint Francis), declared the patron saint of Italy by Pope Pius XII in 1939, was appropriated by Mussolini as a nationalist symbol. The Duce declared him ‘the most Italian of saints and the most saintly of all Italians’, and linked his evangelical missions in Palestine and Egypt to the Fascist regime’s colonialist aggression.