The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  In that howl, the doors of the armoire burst open. Billi takes a leap and dives inside the armoire, which suddenly closes its doors. Did Billi jump voluntarily inside the armoire or was he sucked into the armoire? The moment the doors of the armoire opened, all of Ismene’s clothes flew out in swarms, and now they were lying scattered all around the room, like laundry day in the countryside.

  Ruti appears at the door, gloomier than ever.

  ‘Impossible people,’ said Ruti. ‘They make me drive one-hundred-and-fifty kilometres and then don’t … What’s this mess? Why are your clothes spread out on the furniture, on the floor? With what a dress costs today!’

  Ismene looks at her clothes spread around the room. But are they really her clothes? Now all her clothes are white. Ismene looks at her evening dress draped over the back of the armchair, like a castaway flattened against a cliff. The shape is the same, but the colour is no longer red but white. While Ismene, astonished, looks at her dress and struggles to recognize it, the dress starts to turn red and little by little regains the colour that fear had drained away.

  Ismene instead doesn’t regain her colour: fear is still blanching her when Ruti opens the armoire to put back, in his very meticulous way, the scattered clothes.

  Ruti says, ‘Neatness is the first quality of a good lady of the house. Remember that.’ And he leaves.

  Now Ismene starts to turn pink in the midst of the scattered clothes, which little by little regain their colour: red, light blue, green, orange, violet.

  When Ismene has regained her colour, too, she goes to open the armoire. The armoire is empty.

  From that day Ismene stayed right next to the armoire. She refused food and the few hours that she did sleep she slept on the armchair next to Bago’s half-closed doors.

  She lived for fifteen days in all. When they removed the blanket that had covered her legs, they found a card with childish handwriting resting on her knees. ‘I want to be locked inside the dark and good body of Bago too. The clothes mustn’t be removed: they are my friends.’ At the bottom of the card was a reminder. ‘Bago is the name of the armoire in my bedroom.’

  Rutiliano hated absurdity in all its forms, but since custom demanded respect for the wishes of the deceased, no matter how absurd, Rutiliano ordered that the arrangements be followed as written on the card.

  Ismene was placed inside the armoire and the armoire was lowered into the grave: a tomb with double doors that was too big for such a small body. Like a father folding a daughter against his chest.

  ‘Bago’

  First published in the newspaper La Stampa (3 July 1943) and then in the magazine Il risveglio (6–13 February 1946). It was included in the collection Tutta la vita (Bompiani, 1945).

  Umberto Saba

  1883–1957

  The heart of Trieste contains one of the most magnificent piazzas in Italy, with one side that looks out onto the sea. Around the corner is a beautiful secondhand bookshop that Saba purchased in 1919 and worked in for most of his life. Grouped with Eugenio Montale and Giuseppe Ungaretti as one of the three most influential Italian poets of his time, Saba was born with the surname ‘Poli’ (he adopted ‘Saba’, which means ‘Grandfather’ in Hebrew, in his late twenties). His best-known work in verse, Il canzoniere (Songbook), is a vast container of successive collections of poems that he structured as an ongoing autobiography. But he had an equally sophisticated control of prose. Scorciatoie e raccontini (Short-cuts and Very Short Stories) is a dense, aphoristic text of micro-narratives, at once intellectually rigorous and immensely readable. His posthumous autobiographical novel, Ernesto, about an adolescent boy’s sexual awakening with an older male worker and a female prostitute, is a distressing masterpiece. Bisexual, Jewish on his mother’s side, and raised without a father, he wrote moving poems both to his wife and in memory of his young male muse, Federico Almansi. In 1938, when the Racial Laws targeting Jews took effect, he and his wife changed various domiciles, including Ungaretti’s apartment in Rome. Saba’s mental health plagued him; he suffered his first crisis at twenty-one and underwent psychiatric treatment throughout his adulthood. He spent the last two years of his life institutionalized, and died in a clinic outside Trieste, of a heart attack, while writing Ernesto. This story below, about an adolescent boy’s love for an animal, is a powerful account of the loss of innocence. Saba is one of the few authors in this volume who was deeply sceptical of translation.

  The Hen

  Translated by Howard Curtis

  Odone Guasti, who was later, under another name, to acquire a degree of fame in the republic of letters, was, at the age of not yet fifteen, an office and warehouse apprentice in a small firm in Trieste dealing in citrus fruits. Thinking himself perhaps a born merchant, he had been overjoyed to abandon his classical studies, to which he believed himself unsuited, in favour of a commercial career. But he had not spent even a month in his new life when, faced with crates of oranges to be marked and letters to be copied into the book, the restlessness fundamental to his nature had caught up with him just as it had over the Ministry-approved Greek and Latin texts which he had defaced with caricatures in the margins. He hated his boss, the ‘exploiter’ of his clear handwriting and his long adolescent legs, with a hatred very similar to that which he had borne the class monitor; and he felt as much contempt for his only workmate, an elderly clerk, as he had felt at school for his classmates, who always got good marks at the end of the year and were always well treated by the masters. This hatred was, of course, unjust, but many years were to pass, and many sorrows overcome, before Odone, thinking over the past and comparing it with the present, realized that the blame was entirely his, that he had done too much and too little to succeed either as a good pupil or, later, as a good employee. It is an inestimable privilege of maturity to find the roots of our ills only in ourselves, whereas the young man cannot help but blame the outside world, and with all the more ferocity the greater his own defects. And besides, who was there to explain Odone to himself and provide him with constructive criticism when his own father had gone, God alone knew where, even before he was born and had never returned, and he lived alone with his mother, a poor, deeply unhappy woman who understood little of life beyond the need for her only son to be physically well and to soon earn enough to relieve the two of them of a humiliating dependence on their relatives? Signora Rachele (that was Odone’s mother’s name) loved the boy with an almost sinful intensity, with that exaggerated maternal love peculiar to women who have married in vain; and the loved one had until then returned a similar affection, although tinged with selfishness; because parents love for what they give, and children for what they receive. There comes a moment in the life of a young man when filial love, before burning itself out in reaction to the family, to be replaced by love in the strictest sense of the word, flares up one last time in the most resplendent fashion: so it was that, on the afternoons of feast days, the few loving couples in the half-deserted Passeggio Sant’Andrea would see Odone, already in long trousers and with the beginnings of a moustache on his lips, walking arm in arm with his mother, who was much shorter than he and wore a black veil and such a strange, tiny hat as to make the observer feel sorry for her. In the same way, after dinner, mother and son would indulge in the tenderest of conversations, in which their differences of opinion, already beginning to become marked in the young man, were not yet such, compared with the certainty of a common future, as to cause his filial submission to degenerate into open revolt, and their romance into quarrels. As far as his mother was concerned, Odone was still a child who every evening, before going to bed, never forgot to thank God in his prayers for having granted him the most beautiful, the best, the wisest of all the many mothers who have inhabited, for the happiness of their sons, the splendid and never sufficiently praised work of creation.

  It was, therefore, thinking of how pleased his mother would be that the young man replied to his employer with a touched and grateful ‘Thank you’ when the latter, one eve
ning at the end of the month, threw a banknote down on his desk and informed him: ‘From today, you’re on the payroll. You’ll get ten crowns a month.’ These were his first wages: how would the dear, hitherto unrewarded creature react when he put the money in her hand and said: ‘Take this, Mother, it’s for you!’ with the implication: Though all this is nothing compared to what I’ll be able to give you one day. Those ten crowns dispelled the doubts that, in his several months of apprenticeship, he had begun to have about his commercial vocation; they also dispelled that touch of remorse that he could not help but feel when, being out on an errand, he met a former classmate on the street and tried – alas, in vain! – to convince him of the immense good that had befallen him in leaving school for work, and the other either replied rudely or kept silent, as if to say: We’ll see about that in a few years, you poor drudge! His day over, he ran home, walked upstairs with the beating heart of a man in love taking a first gift to his beloved and, stammering and kissing his mother, gave her the great news. Signora Rachele seemed touched (less so, though, than Odone had hoped) and even forgave him for having made her angry at lunchtime by refusing to eat his soup, the memory of which had made the thought of the satisfaction he would give her when he came home all the dearer to him. She suggested that Odone put aside half the amount for himself, for whatever he pleased, although not without advising him to spend it as well as he had earned it and warning him of certain dangers about which young men are more typically taught by their fathers than their mothers; but to her, who never uttered certain words or never indicated them with a periphrasis without first spitting on the ground (such was the disgust she felt towards them), fell the burden of having to speak of such things to her son; and she did her best, even in such a sad task; so that she might, when it so pleased the Lord, sleep in peace and without any regrets on her conscience.

  Her advice was unnecessary: Odone did not yet turn to look at women, and never passed down certain alleyways crowded in the evenings with sailors and raucous-voiced women without hurrying on; and besides, he had already decided how to spend his five crowns: he would use them to buy his mother a gift: only, he was torn between a round tobacco tin with silver decorations and a black fan with sequins. But as long as man proposes and God disposes, nobody has the right to believe himself safe from temptation, however strong he feels in broad terms. For Odone, the temptation did not come in the form of a human female, but came instead in that of a beautiful hen; and I will now recount how and why he was unable to resist this temptation, and how cruelly he was subsequently punished.

  Passing at about two in the afternoon of the following day through the Piazza del Ponterosso, where there was, and still is, a market for birds and live poultry, Odone, who had left home to return to work and loiter a little on the way, quite determined not to go back to his prison a moment too soon, stopped to observe the merchandise displayed in the cages. First, he was struck by certain exotic little birds with bright shiny colours, which reminded him of the stamps from the English colonies and the barbaric states which he often admired in his modest collection; then his desire came to rest on a blackbird, a totally mysterious-looking animal, from whose golden beak half a dozen little worms were struggling to escape, while the bird swallowed them no more than one at a time, at regular intervals, half closing with pleasure its round little eyes encircled with the same fine gold as the beak; he looked with scant sympathy at the parrots, and with revulsion at a monkey; finally, his attention was drawn to the chickens, packed closely together in their cramped wooden cages, from which their necks stuck out alternately, and where they complained bitterly or took it out on one another for the thirst and lack of space. It was not the glutton in him that was moved by this spectacle: Odone liked live hens very much, but they were a matter of more than indifference to him when served at table. When on a solitary walk in the country, one of those adolescent walks that have the length of a forced march and the solemnity of a conquest, he would spot crests and wattles in front of a farmhouse or amid the green of the meadows, he would cheer up at the sight, as if they were brushstrokes in which the feeling of the landscape was concentrated; and he would gladly stroke the hen who was sufficiently tame or rendered so awkward by fear as not to escape in time from his lovingly held-out hand. Where others hear only monotonous, unpleasant sounds, Odone listened to the voices of the henhouse as if they were constantly varied music, especially as evening fell and the drowsy hens would complain in a very gentle manner. He did not like roosters as much. The pride and magnanimity of these sultans of the farmyard, shown when faced with a caterpillar or some other exquisite morsel which is lusted after and then, not without a visible inner struggle, left to the females, can only be appreciated by a man already expert in life, capable of understanding the nobility of that renunciation and the masculine lordliness that lies behind every true sacrifice. If at that time anyone had asked him why he was so fond of those stupid birds, which others only associate with thoughts of gastronomy, the young man might not have known what to reply. To the many who did in fact ask him, he only replied twenty years later, in a poem; only, that, too, was little understood. He felt that those feathered bodies were genuinely imbued with air and countryside and the different hours of the day: add to this aesthetic reason a sentimental one: for a long time, in his childhood devoid of siblings and friends, Odone had played with a hen. His mother had bought it to kill and eat; but Odone had cried and begged so much that Signora Rachele had finally agreed to keep it alive and let it roam freely about the house, like a dog. From that day on, as well as sucking its warm eggs, the boy had company; and even his mother ended up enjoying watching the way the bird leapt against the glass door of the kitchen, where it was shut in on the rare occasions that she had visitors; and when, sweaty and panting, she came back from the market carrying her shopping basket, Cò-Cò (as mother and son had agreed to call the hen) would run to meet her, beak open, wings outspread and fluttering. ‘And they say hens are stupid,’ Signora Rachele would say admiringly. But often she would become irritated, seeing her son talking to a fowl as if it were a person: that struck her as almost a sign of idiocy. For Odone, on the other hand, the hours he spent with the hen were truly his, he would make the bird ‘sit’ (perch) next to him on the steps leading from the kitchen to the dining room, brick steps that turned strangely red in the sunset and reminded him of those of ante-purgatory, as he had seen them depicted in a sacred image; he would clasp the hen to his heart so tightly that it shrieked, thinking with joy that he had so much time ahead of him to live and enjoy in this world (and then he would still have eternity); he would talk to Cò-Cò of journeys and adventures, of joys to come, of everything, in short, that went through his head. But after two years of domestic seclusion and excessively tasty and warming food, the heart of this strange companion of a sacrificed, ecstatic childhood burst (according to a female neighbour who knew about such things) – burst from being too fat (it looked like an odalisque); in short, it died, and was buried by its friend. Odone would have liked another immediately; a wish his mother absolutely refused to grant: he was already too old for that kind of diversion: his stamp album and an occasional stroll with her were – had to be – sufficient recreation. But a wish ungranted is a wish protracted; and Odone recalled it now as he stood looking at these cages of poultry with his first wages in his pocket. There was one animal in particular that he liked: a really beautiful specimen, with a tiny expressive head, shiny black plumage and a long arched tail, which reminded Odone of the feathers on the caps of the Italian Bersaglieri. He asked the price, at first more out of curiosity than with the firm intention of acquiring it (God knows how much he thought it cost); and the poultry merchant, surprised because this customer was not the usual sex and age, answered rudely, and as if certain of taking his breath away: ‘Three Kronen and fifty heller.’

  ‘So little?’ Odone exclaimed. The other man looked at him more offended than astonished, and more than ever convinced that he was being made
fun of by a brat. Then, realizing that the latter was serious, he opened the cage, took out the bird and breathed into its feathers to show off how fat it was, how appetizing the colour of the meat.

  ‘Enough, enough!’ Odone exclaimed, pained by the shrill cries the victim was emitting and the efforts it was making to hold its head up and not die of suffocation. ‘I’ll buy her,’ he said, ‘if you can send her to my house right away.’

  ‘Right away,’ the awful man replied; he called the boy who worked for him and handed him the fowl, holding it by the legs. Odone paid, gave his address, plus twenty heller as a tip for the boy, and instructed the latter to give his name to whoever opened the door. Then he looked at his watch. It was almost a quarter past two, and he hurried back to the office, trying to persuade himself that he had spent his own money well. With that aim in mind, he exaggerated to himself the joy he would feel when he got home and found Cò-Cò reborn. But the more he tried to dismiss the thought, the more afflicted he was by the suspicion that he had done something pointless, if not actually ridiculous. Cò-Cò had died once and for all, he felt, and could not be replaced by all the hens in the world; his childhood had also died, and it was a foolish thing to want to bring its sweet aspects back to life other than in memory; his mother’s hair had already turned completely white, she grew tired ever more quickly, and she might die before she could enjoy the affluence that he, Odone, had promised her; he had done the wrong thing in leaving school for work; an error had been committed in his life, he could not say what or when, a mistake, a sin that distressed his heart more every day, one that he believed was his alone, not yet knowing (as he was to know only too well later) that such pain was the pain of man, of any creature living as an individual; it was the pain that religion calls original sin.