New Italian Women: A Collection of Short Fiction

by Anna Banti

  Let’s take things in order. It was a Thursday of this year, of this summer. The slogans and the publicity continued to tell us to keep our regular partner, because it is dangerous to move out from the couple circuit, to look elsewhere. I was on my own, in the company of an old castrated cat who sat like an idol on the terrace and who thought only of eating when he came back into the apartment. After, he would go to sleep and not consider me at all. If I spoke to him, he’d open one eye, turn over and go back to sleep.

  Food was the bond between the cat and me. How well I understood his cravings, since I had them too. At times I would have cruelly beaten him, tortured him, but instead I rushed out and went to the freezer compartments of the supermarket where the ice cream was in ordered stacks, shiny with the frost that decorated them. I extricated my carton from the others, already tasting with pleasure that fleeting flavor, its pink and white sweetness. I pronounced to myself those two colors, sounding out consonants and vowels, and next to me, behold, a Nordic giant putting his hands there in the middle, touching the cartons and my bare arms.

  He was blond with blue eyes, his skin fair, untanned by the sun, and the fact that he was so child-like pleased me. He laughed and looked at me provocatively. Or did I misinterpret his simplicity, inventing meanings that weren’t there? He, too, had taken a carton of ice cream and he followed me to the check-out. While I was paying, he handed the cashier the money for his purchase and left with me, all with the skill of a juggler.

  Though tall and big, he moved gracefully all the same. Suddenly a curious warmth invaded my body as if it were already in contact with his. “Schon,” he said, and I wasn’t sure what he was referring to. I felt that all was beautiful around us, the mountains, the greenery, life, every step I took, the timelessness of that Thursday, the noise of a helicopter above us. I looked up trying to catch sight of it but it was hidden from view by the trees. The drone of its motor faded and the two of us (no longer I alone but I with the giant) went up the usual Concordia route, each carrying his and her respective ice cream package.

  It was comical, though not to me, but I felt very weak, devoid of strength, just the way Eve walked before they threw her out of Paradise. Long hair over her bare shoulders, that supple body of first woman of the world, progenitrix of a degenerate species, of horrible fat women, devourers of ice cream, with swollen greedy mouths and anteater tongues.

  Who knows why I envisioned so distinctly that toothless mammal like one I’d seen in a magazine a few days ago. It came to mind with its long snout and its threadlike, sticky tongue which it thrusts into antholes. I had a feeling of disgust, my mouth filled with saliva, I felt like vomiting. I stopped and screamed.

  The giant with the blue eyes, white of skin, blond of hair, suddenly changed. He was rapidly transformed – massive, vulgar, with little red veins on his cheeks, evident wrinkles, balding, his fingernails bordered in black, and those ridiculous short pants showing calves, repulsive thighs. An undershirt beneath his short-sleeved shirt, even the plastic sandals and socks like his countrymen.

  His eyes, his glance. Could perhaps the enchantment stay fixed in the pupils and from there spread with tenderness, the very thing every creature unconsciously desires, waits for, wants for himself? On beds in summertime, sweating together, loving each other, that is schon, even if your partner is occasional, even if he’s unfamiliar, unknown. One needs to begin an adventure in order to break the solitude, to stop eating ice cream, to communicate.

  I looked at him, terrorized because even his eyes were changing. Smaller they were, tired, insipid, without spark or light. They did not express one fleeting thought, feeling or desire. A dead fish with those eyes.

  And now I was running, because my ice cream was melting. I wanted to halt its dissolution.

  Translated by Barbara Dow Nucci

  * * *

  Rita’s Trip

  by

  Marina Mizzau

  Until it happened, Rita would never have believed that it could happen, that there would have been a moment when she would have wanted to do something without Giulio. At most, at various times she had wanted to want to do it, to put some distance between them, out of vindictiveness, or out of helplessness, from exasperation or desperation, or maybe also from a vague yearning for freedom; but it was always a matter of an abstract desire, too easily perishable, that dissolved at the mere sound of a doorbell.

  Rita used to wait for Giulio’s arrival with a book in hand, but if Giulio was late she couldn’t go on reading. Rita closed the book, or whatever else she might have had open when Giulio arrived. Rita said, “They’ve said that this weekend will be sunny,” and she waited for Giulio to suggest going to the beach; but she herself could never suggest it directly, because she was too afraid that Giulio might say no, and this wouldn’t have had to do just with going to the beach. Rita didn’t express desires. She always tried instead to anticipate Giulio’s, including his desire that she should not make him see that she wanted him too much.

  Rita didn’t have friends. Not because Giulio prevented her; rather, he urged her to have them. But to find herself in the predicament of having to give up spending time with Giulio on account of having taken on another obligation, since that would have left him unexpectedly free, was an idea that filled her with intolerable anxiety. She had nevertheless decided, after some wavering, that surrendering him once and for all cost less than the attrition and piecemeal loss of struggling to keep him, cost less than victories that made her much more unhappy than did defeats.

  After all, Rita did love Giulio, she lived for Giulio, she waited for Giulio, she cross-examined herself on the subject of Giulio, on her mood and her love, and she thought too that Giulio might not like all this love and availability, but she couldn’t do otherwise.

  Rita had an uninteresting job that hardly distracted her from thinking about Giulio. It happened though that she was asked to go to New York on business, replacing a co-worker – a ten-day separation from Giulio not wanted by him, as usual, but initiated by her. Rita’s first reaction was to think that it was impossible: the second was dismay because she found that it was indeed possible.

  Rita had to decide. She wasn’t obliged to go, but her boss wanted her to. Unexpectedly one evening – she was waiting for Giulio, who was late as usual – she realized that she herself wanted to go. She felt guilty and thought that she was bound to lose Giulio: she couldn’t get over her fixation, her wretched worry over Giulio, and over Giulio’s absences, or square it with an absence of her own.

  Then there were many other phases: excitement, fear, denial, euphoria, fear again, anxiety, indifference. Finally, without joy, but with stoic determination, she told herself that she had to make this gesture of autonomy, to prove the point to Giulio. Rita decided that she had to go.

  A week or so later, as the date of her departure drew near, she wasn’t quite sure whether she was glad to be going to New York, or to have been able to decide to go, and so to leave Giulio. She quit asking herself about it when she found she was pleasurably involved in anticipating what she might do in New York, her thoughts for the first time far removed from Giulio.

  It was then that Giulio said to her: “I’d like to see New York, I’ve never been there; I think I could go with you.”

  Rita was dumbfounded not to feel instantly overjoyed. Perhaps it was panic at seeing a structure miraculously stable despite the imbalance of its parts, or perhaps stable just because of that imbalance, sway; or it might have been the disorientation of seeing a project involving long-term change cancelled out by a change that was too abrupt, or it might have been – who knows? – a heady sense of freedom squelched just as it was barely beginning to take shape. In any case the effect of Giulio’s proposal at first provoked in Rita only bewilderment.

  Then, almost out of guilt for this first reaction, Rita began to consider the matter in another light. At once the somewhat heroic fantasy of herself alone in New York was replaced by a divergently seductive one of hersel
f in New York with Giulio.

  Rita now thinks about the ten days in New York with Giulio, and already she regrets the time that she’ll have to devote to work and to being apart from him. If not for this it would really be a great carefree holiday. Now she is happy over this prospect that has come her way without even having to deal with her own desire. That at its inception the project of the trip was hers alone, she has already forgotten. She has forgotten the euphoria that her choice of going it alone had brought her.

  A few days before the date set for departure, Giulio says to her: “You know, I’ve reconsidered, I’m not going to New York. I think it’s better if you go alone; it’ll do you good to be away from me for a while, to do something completely on your own.”

  Rita will leave tomorrow for New York and she searches in vain for some feeling. She no longer expects anything – not from the trip nor from the return, and not much from her life, either.

  Translated by Blossom S. Kirschenbaum

  * * *

  The Salt for Boiling Water

  by

  Marina Mizzau

  “Salt for cooking spaghetti goes in when the water’s cold,” one of the two women was saying, the not-so-young one.

  From her post the cashier heard everything that took place at the tables. Not that she particularly cared to hear, but she could hardly help it. The restaurant was small and at least two of the tables were quite close to the cashier’s booth, which moreover was almost hidden by a screen; not hidden to the degree that the patrons might fail to know of her presence, but enough so that they might forget they knew and might not realize they were being overheard. She therefore could hardly help hearing, and this was her misfortune, for she disliked arguments, and besides, after so many experiences, she could no longer even try to persuade herself that no, there was nothing beyond the commonplaces, and once those people had gone away from there, not a trace of them would remain.

  That evening the nearest table was occupied by three individuals, two women and a man.

  “No, it goes in when the water is about to boil, that way it speeds up the boiling,” replied the younger woman, rather satisfied, it seemed, to contribute to the conversation, even if by contradicting. The cashier hoped that would end it, and perhaps this time around she really would be able to dismiss what she had heard. But the truce was quite brief.

  “Why no, that doesn’t speed it up, just the opposite, that slows it down,” replied the other woman, and at this point it could be inferred that other motives were at stake beyond keeping up the conversation.

  “But yes, that speeds it up, right she is,” said the man, with the tone of confirming a truth always known but never uttered, and as though the moment had only now arrived to say it.

  The not-so-young woman eyed the man with suspicion, and so that he should get the point of the suspicion, she underscored it with a fluttery laugh. “But you know you’ve always put it in when the water’s cold,” she said.

  “I? Well, yes, could be, I don’t recall.” There is a touch of complaisance in the man’s voice, as though to indicate the irrelevance of facts before universals, or as though he were already bored with the discussion and wanted to end it. “However,” he adds, “right she is; salt put into hot water speeds up the boiling.”

  “It speeds it up if it’s already boiling, but it doesn’t make it boil if it’s not boiling,” says the not-so-young woman, underscoring the difference with a patiently didactic tone, like someone who pretends to believe she has not made herself clear, rather than admit the unpardonable indignity that the other person really meant what he said.

  Obviously the younger woman does not take advantage of the way out. “Believe me, salt speeds up the boiling,” she says, in a tone equally calm, as if she had to convince a stubborn little girl, or as if in her turn she wanted to pretend not to believe in the sincerity of the other woman’s conviction.

  “We, in fact, always put the salt in cold water.” The voice of the not-so-young woman now has a nuance of challenge. She says, “we” accompanying the fusion of the first-person-plural pronoun with a nod of her head in his direction, and she says it without looking at him, looking rather at the other woman. She doesn’t ask his agreement; she asks the other woman to take note of the facts of the matter.

  “All right, fine, as you please,” says the younger woman. “As you both please,” she amends. But she has winked at him. Certainly she has done that. The other woman, at least, knows that she has done that, even if she isn’t looking at him.

  It was not an unfounded suspicion, then. Now in fact it’s clear that what she was afraid of has happened. Her claim of a united front has done nothing else than provoke a catastrophic alliance. Two currents of purpose, opposed to her own, are flowing in the same direction, are seeking each other out, are joining, are making a barrier against her. They have agreed to give in for now. But they are not quits, let her not have delusions, poor naive girl, does she really think that he thinks the salt goes in when the water is about to boil? Hasn’t she figured out that he has only taken advantage of the situation?

  But moreover, even if it’s so, if he is in bad faith, what advantage can be gained from it?

  “God, that tableful of students. Listen to the filth they’re talking. That collegiate rowdiness is really making a comeback.” The man is evidently trying to find a neutral zone, a ground on which a united front might be inevitable. Finger-pointing: that’s the thing that’s easiest. But it’s too easy. She, the not-so-young woman, cannot accept it.

  “Why not?” she says. “After all, they’re having a good time. They don’t do any harm.” She has to see how far she can get, offer herself as a target.

  “What’s getting into you?” says the younger woman. “This wave of nostalgia has swept you back into the Fifties.”

  “Lay off,” says the man nervously, “don’t you see she’s joking?” An offer of escape, or a threatening order to retreat; whichever one it may be, she, the not-so-young woman, cannot accept it.

  “Just so,” she says, “I’m joking; like them, the students, and they’re doing just fine.”

  Evidently the man thinks this is the chance to follow her, whichever direction she may be going. “There’s nothing wrong in having a good time,” he announces, as though on stage. Thus all possibilities are open, including the one that she may accept the joke, recognize it and make one of her own, even that she may, on this basis of impartial exchange of irony and self-irony, make a united front between the two of them. Especially if the other, the younger woman, does not fall into line, as in fact occurs.

  “But you two are crazy,” she says, “it’s anything but a longing for those days.”

  The not-so-young woman holds her tongue. Evidently she’s unsure. Should she pick up on the proposed alliance he is offering? Declare that yes, she was joking. Stop taking sides, encompass the other woman too in the reconstituted united front. Oh god, if she were to do it. It would be enough were she just to laugh.

  In fact, she laughs. But what laugh is it? Bitter, indulgent, parental, sarcastic?

  No, the cashier fails to understand, and can’t let it go at that. They can’t leave her this way, she must understand, they must understand that she must understand.

  By now they have asked for the check and are getting up. They leave. As always, nothing has been settled.

  It would be nice, just this evening, not to hear any more and not to know any more.

  But already the silence that has taken over at the first table allows the voices from the second one to emerge. They are two couples.

  “Since when do you put cheese in your soup?” says one of the men.

  “Why? I like it,” replies one of the women.

  “Matter of fact, it’s good that way,” agrees the other man.

  “But you never put it in,” the other woman says.

  Translated by Blossom S. Kirschenbaum

  * * *

  Berlin Angel

  by


  Giuliana Morandini

  She walked past as she had done so many times before. Her hands were rather cold. As usual she kept them in her pockets, holding the passport tightly in her right hand to feel safer; she might get lost just like that, by magic, under an evil spell.

  The young soldier looked her over while pretending he was engaged in something else; her features seemed to puzzle him.

  Erika took the passport and permit out of her pocket and raised them fan-like before her cold face. The soldier took them and stepped back inside; she saw him light a cigarette behind the window pane.

  Crossing a border always gave her a strange feeling. As a child she felt somehow thrilled when she was tossed about from one country to another. She walked across the border, looking for the vague difference between one side and the other. After all, she could turn back at the very last minute or keep going: this free choice appealed to her.

  In these days to pass the frontier meant to experience how deeply the city was affected by the division, a wound that didn’t heal.

  In the sunshine the broken window panes of empty houses mirrored deserted rooms. Walled-up windows demanded freedom through the crevices that some roots of shrubs had opened in the cracked bricks.

  A child-faced sentinel was standing still by the box; he was holding a machine gun bigger than himself, as they say. The weapon hung down across his chest and seemed to hamper his movements; his arms were short. His superiors hadn’t taken into consideration the fact that killing requires skill and speed; they were satisfied with determination to strike, to let no one go through.