New Italian Women: A Collection of Short Fiction

by Anna Banti

The old man, who went on understanding everything in his own way, touched the sleeve of his torn jacket, which was shiny with grease. “Dirty? It’s the custom. People who are well off don’t have to make a show of it.”

  As a matter of fact, the doctor observed that the cleanest people in town were the poor; the rich paid no attention to their clothes, scorning appearances, and also finding it convenient perhaps. Here, one day, was Zia Lenarda, waiting for the doctor in the courtyard, dressed like a servant, though she too was a woman of means, with property and flocks, so rich that in spite of her forty-three years she had married a handsome boy of twenty.

  “Good morning, doctor, your honor. I’d like to ask a favor of you. My husband Jacu is off on military service: now it’s shearing time and I want him to come home on leave. Your honor doesn’t know anyone at the Court?”

  “No, unfortunately, my good woman.”

  “I asked our regular doctor about it. Take care of it, I said, if you pass through Rome. But he always says yes, then he forgets. My Jacu is a handsome boy (I’m not boasting just because I’m his wife) and just as good as honey...with a little pushing he could get everything....”

  She made a gesture of pushing with her spindle, but the doctor went off, sighing.

  “It’s not enough to be handsome and good in this world to get what we want, my dear lady.”

  And he went back to his oasis, thinking of Zana and of many things in his past. He was thinking that in his youth he had been handsome and good and yet he had got nothing, not love, or wealth, or even pleasure. True, he had not hunted for them; perhaps he had been waiting for them to offer themselves spontaneously; and as he had waited and waited, time had passed into futility. But in the past few years he had been seized sometimes by fits of mad rebellion; he sold his property and went off to search urgently for love, wealth, pleasure. But one day he realized that these cannot be bought, and when his wallet was empty, he went back to his few patients, joked with them good-naturedly, took long, absent-minded walks, and read yellow-backed French novels.

  Zia Lenarda, on her side, convinced that good looks can obtain everything, seeing that the doctor went to the Acchittus’ every day even though the old man was well, turned to Zana.

  “You tell him, treasure! Everyone’s getting ready for the shearing. What can I do, with everything turned over to the hired hands? The doctor looks at you with eyes as big as doorknobs.... How can he help it, dear heart? If you tell him to ask for Jacu’s leave, he can’t say no.”

  But Zana didn’t promise; and when, after the tedium of those long days when the warm wind, the empty blue sky, the bright sun created an ineffable sadness, the doctor went at evening to the courtyard of Ziu Tomas, where he sat astride the painted chair in front of the hedge, full of fireflies and stars, she joked with him and asked him what causes certain diseases, how poisons are made, and she spoke calmly of many things, but she didn’t ask the favor her neighbor wanted.

  Sometimes Zia Lenarda herself, seated on the low wall, spun in the dark and joined in the conversation. This annoyed the doctor, who wanted to be alone with Zana after he had convinced the old man to go to bed early because the night air was bad for the deaf. The older woman spoke of nothing but the shearing.

  “If you could just see the celebration, your honor! Nothing is more fun, not even the feast of San Michele and San Constantino. I’d invite you if Jacu came, but without him the feast would be like a funeral for me.”

  “Well, my good woman, do you want to know the truth? They’d give Jacu leave only if you were ill, and you’re as healthy as a goat.”

  Then she began to complain; she had had so many aches since Jacu left, and now that shearing time approached, she really was suffering mortally. To convince the doctor more readily, she took to her bed. He was touched. He wrote out the certificate and ordered some medicine. Zana waited on her neighbor, poured out the dosage, looking at it in the reddish light of the oil lantern, and murmured: “It’s not poison, is it?”

  Then she went back to the courtyard, where the doctor was sitting on the painted chair. It was an evening in early June, warm already and scented. Night of love and memories! And the memories came, sweet and bitter, from the doctor’s dark tortuous past, as from the dark and tortuous valley came the sweet and bitter odor of the oleander. He drew his chair closer to the low wall where Zana was sitting, and they began their usual conversation. Occasionally a shepherd passed in the lane, without too much surprise at hearing the doctor’s voice in the courtyard of Ziu Tomas. By now everybody believed that the doctor was regularly courting Zana, and they were sure that Zana would accept him, otherwise she would have kept him at a distance. But the two of them spoke of matters apparently innocent, of grasses, poisonous plants, medicaments.

  “Oleander? No, that isn’t poisonous, but hemlock is. Do you know what it looks like?”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “It’s called the sardonic plant. It makes people die laughing...like you!”

  “Let go of my wrist, doctor. I don’t have the fever like Zia Lenarda.”

  “I have the fever, Zana.”

  “Well, take some quinine. Or is that poison, too?”

  “Why do you keep talking about poisons tonight? Are you planning to kill somebody? If you are, I’ll kill him for you at once...but...”

  “But?”

  “But...”

  He took her wrist again, and she allowed it. It was dark anyway, and nobody could see from the lane.

  “Yes, I do want some poison. For the fox.”

  “What? She comes this close?”

  “She certainly does! Let go of me,” she added in a whisper, twisting threateningly, but he took her other hand and held her fast, as if she were a thief.

  “Give me a kiss, Zana. Just one.”

  “You can go and kiss a firebrand. Well, all right, if you give me the poison. That fox even comes and steals our newborn lambs....”

  When Jacu’s application for leave had been mailed off, along with the doctor’s certificate, Zia Lenarda recovered and went back to minding her neighbors’ business. And without any surprise she realized that the doctor was aflame like a field of stubble. He went back and forth in the lane like a boy, and even twice in a day he visited Ziu Tomas, claiming he would cure the old man’s deafness before his colleague came back from the mainland. Zana seemed impassive; often she wouldn’t make an appearance, but stayed shut in her room, like a spider in its hole.

  On Sundays, the only day she went out – to go to mass – the doctor waited for her in front of the church.

  One after another, the women came up the winding lane, stiff in their holiday clothes, their hands folded on their embroidered aprons, or carrying their babies on their arms, in red cloaks marked with a blue cross. When they reached a certain spot they turned toward Mount Nuoro, guarded by a statue of the Redeemer, and blessed themselves. The sun gleamed on the gold of their sashes and illuminated their fine Greek profiles. But the doctor, as if bewitched, looked only at Zana, and the old gossips thought: “The daughter of Tomas Acchittu has given him mandrake to drink....”

  One day, among the few men who took part in the women’s procession, there was Jacu, home on leave. He was really handsome, no two ways about it: tall, ruddy, clean-shaven, with green eyes so bright that the women lowered theirs when they went by him, even if he were paying no attention to them. Military life had given him the air of a conqueror, but of things far more serious than mere women. As soon as he arrived, he had gone up to the doctor’s to thank him, bringing him a young kid and an invitation to the famous shearing. The doctor spoke to him in dialect; he answered in proper Italian. And when the doctor asked, rather pointedly: “Are you inviting many people?” he answered: “Yes, because it’s a big family, and a man like me – well, I may have many enemies, but I also have many friends. Besides, I’m broad-minded, and I’m inviting even the relatives of Lenarda’s first husband. They can kill me, if I’m lying. And if she had had three husbands, I
’d invite the relatives of them all.”

  “You’re a man of the world, I see. Good for you. I suppose you’ll invite your neighbors, too.”

  Being a man of the world, Jacu pretended to know nothing of the doctor’s madness over Zana.

  “Of course, a neighbor is more than a relative.”

  The day of the shearing came, and Zana, Zia Lenarda, and the other women took seats in the cart that Jacu drove.

  The sheepfold was on the plateau, and the heavy vehicle, drawn by two black steers, scarcely broken, bounced up along the rocky path; but the women weren’t afraid, and Zana, her hands clasping her knees, was calmly crouched down as if in front of her own hearth. She seemed sad, but her eyes gleamed with a kind of hidden lightening, like a far-off blaze, shining on a dark night in the heart of a forest.

  “Neighbor,” Jacu said good-humoredly, “hang me, but you have a face like a funeral. He’ll come, he’ll come. He’s coming later, with the priest, as soon as mass is over....”

  “Cheer up, Zana,” the women said then, joking a little maliciously, “I hear a horse now, trotting like the devil himself.”

  “Cheer up, girl. I can see his watch chain shining.”

  “What a chain that is! How much would that chain cost? Nine reali?”

  Then Zana grew angry. “Evil take you all. Leave me alone. I can’t bear him. The crows can pluck out my eyes if I even look at that man’s face today....”

  The doctor and the priest arrived a little before noon, welcomed with shouts of joy. In the shade of a cork tree Jacu, the servant, and his friends sheared the sheep, laying them out, carefully bound, on a broad stone that looked like a sacrificial altar. The dogs chased one another through the grass, birds chirped in the oak, an old man who looked like the prophet Elijah gathered the wool into a sack, and all around the asphodel and the wild lilies, bent by the scent-laden wind, seemed to lean forward, curious to see what was happening in the midst of that group of men who stooped down, the shears in their hands. Once they were sheared and released, the sheep jumped up from the heap of wool, as from a foaming wave, and bounded off, shrunken, their muzzles rubbing the earth.

  For a while the doctor stood watching, his hands clasped behind him, then he turned to the hut, where the women were cooking, assisted by Jacu’s old father, who reserved for himself the honor of roasting a whole kid on the spit. Farther on, the priest, stretched out on the grass in the shade of another cork tree, was telling a Boccaccian tale to a select group of youths. The women nudged Zana and pointed to the doctor; and all at once, with a change of mood, she began to joke with him, asking him to make himself useful at least, by going to get some water at the spring. He went along with her jokes and, taking a cork pail, walked off in the bright sunlight that scorched the grass and the sage and made a perfume that was enough to intoxicate a man.

  The group around the priest sent whistles and shouts after the doctor, and the old man roasting the kid caught his thumb in his fingers as a gesture of contempt. A learned man, a grown man, letting himself be made a fool of like this by the women! Then Zana cursed and ran off, holding her kerchief to her head, until she caught up with the doctor and took the pail out of his hand. From a distance, the women saw the man follow her along the path that led to the spring and Jacu’s old father began to spit furiously on the fire, as if he wanted to put it out.

  “The granddaughter of Tomas Acchittu – you see her? She wanted to be alone with the man. If she was my daughter, I’d put my foot on her neck.”

  “Let her be, father-in-law,” Zia Lenarda said kindly. Ah, she knew what love was, how it made you mad, like drinking bewitched water.

  The doctor, in fact, dazed by the bright sun, followed Zana into the thicket around the spring and again he tried to take her in his arms. She looked at him with those eyes of hers, like the Queen of Sheba’s; but she pushed him away, threatening to pour the pail full of water on his head. Always the same, since the first evening there by the low wall of the courtyard; she led him on and repulsed him, half ingenuous, half treacherous, and asked him always for the same thing: some poison.

  “All right, then, Zana, I’ll make you happy. Tonight I’ll come to your house, and I’ll bring one of those little bottles with a skull on it. But be careful you don’t end in jail.”

  “It’s for the fox, I tell you. All right, but leave me now. You hear? Someone’s coming.”

  In fact, the thicket around the fountain shook as if a boar were crashing through, then Jacu appeared. His face was overwrought, although he pretended that finding the two of them was a joke.

  “Hey! What are you doing there in the dark? It’s time to eat, not to be courting....”

  “You’re not so hungry, you’re thirsty,” Zana said sarcastically, lifting the pail, “have a drink, handsome....”

  But Jacu threw himself full-length on the ground and drank, panting, from the spring.

  During the banquet the doctor laughed, while the priest threw bread crumbs at him and hinted maliciously. He laughed, but from time to time he was distracted, struck by a new idea. After the banquet was over he went off to lie down in the shade among the rocks behind the hut; from there he could see without being seen, and he commanded a view of the area down to the oak in whose shade the shepherd went on shearing. The priest and the others, nearer by, had begun a singing contest, and the women were listening, seated in a row, their hands in their laps.

  In the intense silence, the voices, the songs, the laughter were dispelled like the thin white clouds in the blue vastness; and the doctor could hear a horse cropping the grass beyond the rocks, a dog gnawing a bone inside the hut, where Jacu came every so often to empty the sheared wool.

  All at once Zana, as the song contest grew more lively, got up and came into the hut. The doctor was smoking; he observed the blue thread that rose from his cigar, and a kind of grin raised his upper lip, showing the gold fillings of his teeth.

  Finally Jacu arrived, and Zana’s choked voice came like a moan through the cracks in the hut.

  “I swear...may I be eaten by the hawks...if he’s even touched my hand. I have my own reasons for smiling at him.... It’s all for our own good.... But this suffering will end...end....”

  The man, intent perhaps on emptying the wool, was silent. She went on, exasperated, her voice filled with hate: “What about me? Am I ever jealous of your wife? The old crow, the fox. But it’s going to end...soon....”

  Then Jacu laughed; and again there was heard the laughter, the singing, the grazing horse.

  But the doctor wanted to enjoy himself a little. He leaped to his feet and began to shout: “Hey! a fox! a fox!”

  And the two lovers ran out of the hut, amazed, while below, the group stopped their singing, the women looked all around them, and the dogs started to bark as if a fox had really gone past.

  Translated by William Weaver

  * * *

  Carnival Time

  by

  Paola Drigo

  Ursule, Teresine, and Catinùte leapt up and ran to open the door. A comical-looking group burst in, jumping and dancing their way into the kitchen. There were five or six players in masks obviously homemade but meant to be scary or grotesque. One was fiery red and with charcoal markings, and it was meant to represent the devil. A second one consisted of an extremely long nose protruding above an equally long raggedy beard of coarse fibers. A third one had a pig’s snout. The others in the troupe had been content with sticking a colored rag or a piece of paper fringe onto their everyday clothes, or simply turning their jackets inside out and putting nightcaps on their heads.

  The devil vaulted about like a young stag. The old man walked on his hands with his head down and his legs in the air. As for the pig, he sang crowing cock-a-doodle-doo with the voice of a rooster. They were youths from the neighboring farms, habitual visitors of the filò, and probably rivals amongst themselves for the girls, linked by the common desire to “celebrate carnival time.”

  The merry party was
led by a slim blond fellow without a mask, a bit lame, calm and collected, who had a fine accordion with painted decorations slung across his shoulders. With a vigorous pulling out of the bellows, he launched into a dancing tune and the cue for a song.

  It was a magnificent success. And since supper was finished anyway, everyone, except the two older men and Barbe Zef intent on draining the last wine from a jug, quit the kitchen and amid laughing remarks and applause moved out into the barn with the new arrivals.

  The barn was newly whitewashed, roomy, and well tended. Thirty or so reddish-brown cows with albino eyes, small but with sleek hides, populated it along with their numerous calves, and they spread throughout its interior a rather moist and heavy warmth. Along the walls narrow wooden benches, a few rough-hewn tables, and some chairs had been prepared for the filò. The lighting, consisting of two old kerosene lanterns hung from the ceiling, was not excessively bright, but the company made do with it.

  Before everyone could find a suitable place to stand or sit – and in the company that he or she preferred – there was a moment of confusion and jostling during which the hunchback, with the pretext of escorting her, was at Mariutine’s heels rubbing up against her as much as he could. He squeezed her elbow, he touched her arm, and with a blade of straw he tickled her on the neck, but as though by accident and without ulterior motive, eyeing her, as though inadvertently, out of the corner of his eye.

  And all at once, above the uproar, there resounded a blast of nose-blowing, long and penetrating like the summons blared out by a hunting horn.

  “Make way! Make way!” he set up a shrill shout, his sharp voice in falsetto.

  At once the crowd drew back along the walls, and the accordion player lit into a spirited mazurka. Compare Guerrino, tossing his hat in the air and catching hold of Mariutine’s waist, went spinning off into the middle of the little crowd of spectators. Although for a hunchback he was strangely tall and very long-legged, his head hardly came up as high as Mariutine’s breast, and yet he lifted her almost up into the air and whirled her around so dizzily that it seemed as though her feet never touched the ground.