The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  Glowering like a beast about to pounce on its prey, while he delighted in admiring his glasses, Leonia paced around him.

  Some time later, at the same hour, Benedetto Vai arrived home with a second bundle, this time an extremely heavy one which he also placed, as was his habit, on the table in the bedroom.

  When he began to unwrap it, it revealed twelve antique plates of a most prestigious make, magnificently gilded, with stunning hand-painted miniature flowers. He could not get enough of looking at them, of placing them in every possible light and in every possible position so as to be able to enjoy them to the full.

  So the drinking was going to be accompanied by something solid – drink naturally goes with something to nibble on – a dessert probably, those plates undoubtedly suggested nothing less than a full entertainment. The arrival of a third package, a few days later, caused the woman to be even more taken aback. Was he hosting a lunch? The new dinner plates were splendid, the quality of the painting and gilding seemed exceptional. A lunch for whom? She wanted to look into the faces of those who would come to eat in a house where for twenty years an iron rule of silence had reigned. Leonia continued to glower, and became ever more sullen. The matter could not end there. At the right moment she too would open the floodgates, to make up for having stayed silent for so long. The neighbours had been right all along, and if everyone said so it had to be true: the master she had so recklessly loved, and followed blindly in every respect, was nothing other than a madman, a mental case fit for an asylum who just happened to be living in normal society.

  The master brought still more packages to the house. Twelve small glasses no less elegant than the others, engraved with images of flying doves. How delightful, what miraculous craftsmanship: prodigious; a dream.

  Nowadays the master did nothing else during the day but open and close his cupboard in order to admire, dust and rearrange to their advantage the extraordinarily beautiful objects that could be found inside: to accord each one an appropriate place, always more apposite, so as to facilitate and reduce the risk of removing and returning them.

  The mockery was becoming brutal. Leonia felt that she was being ignominiously mocked, with utter impunity. When would the great day arrive? She was out of practice as a cook, having been reduced to repeating the same old dishes year in, year out, with the accuracy of a chronometer. She felt out of sorts, offended and worried at the same time.

  More plates, and more glasses were brought to the house by the master: two large silver-handled carafes engraved with foxes, a little jug of eccentric design, a baroque soup tureen, a small vegetable dish and a pale-violet sauce boat in the shape of a tulip. It was immediately obvious that the master harboured a particular weakness for this trinket; a predilection, a favouritism, a genuine tenderness: holding it gently on his fingers he seemed as if he wished to play with it; bringing it close to his face he seemed inclined to kiss it, or even to eat it, he liked it that much. One day he seemed about to drop it, but with an agile twisting of his whole body managed at the last moment to catch it again. If only it had fallen: what joy! To see it shatter into smithereens: what satisfaction – what happiness! She would never agree to serve mayonnaise in a tulip.

  The pleasure of taking these objects in and out of the cupboard seemed to exude from this man’s every pore.

  And some time later he brought home a box so heavy that he came in panting, bathed in sweat, exhausted. Leonia did not rush to help him.

  The box contained a gilded silver cutlery service fit for a prince. Followed by a tablecloth as fine as butterfly wings, and twelve dainty napkins of cloth so thin and delicate they seemed to have been cut from the air itself: in his hands they seemed on the point of floating away, and were covered with posies of flowers so delicate in colour and design that they regaled the eye with all the freshness and vitality of a garden. And then, with a final flourish, a great bunch of roses made in mother-of-pearl and another in silver, obviously intended to complete a sumptuous table for a feast.

  The cupboard was completely full. Benedetto Vai was constantly coming and going, opening and closing it, in order to arrange, dust and admire each object, with an insatiable pleasure and exacting touch. Every so often he would extract one to admire it particularly and comprehensively. He would carry the piece to the window, only deciding with tiresome slowness to return it to its place again.

  Leonia watched him with a look that seemed to be getting more rebellious by the day. She would track him with the suspicious glare of a wild animal, and circle around him.

  Benedetto Vai, who throughout his long existence had enjoyed exceptionally robust health, began to feel unwell. He had retained the physique and complexion of his youth, but succumbed now to an unforeseen and sudden collapse.

  Leonia cared for him assiduously, lovingly, with complete dedication, and when he became confined to his bed she never left his side: at night she would stretch out beside him on an improvised cot placed close to his. She would prepare certain delicious drinks with which to refresh him, and concoct purees that were both nutritious and delectable.

  The doctor came, and respecting the rules of the house expressed his verdict with a mere shrug of his shoulders, as if to say: ‘When you’re old there’s nothing left to do but to die.’ The priest came too, and with a supplicant’s invocation before the speechless patient, spread his arms towards the heavens: ‘The Lord will forgive. His quarrel was not with God, but with the world.’

  In May, during a lukewarm sunset, the sun’s rays gradually invaded the room, during this period finding their way in every evening, as if bringing a greeting.

  Benedetto Vai had had a restless night, and his agitation had grown throughout the day. He was overcome by a sense of disquiet that he was only able to rein in through a superhuman effort of will: through a real and genuine act of heroism. His mind was still lucid, his will still his own. Only certain involuntary movements of his head betrayed the presence of his illness. Leonia would arrange the pillows under his head, clasp his hands, moisten his lips, wipe the sweat from his brow. In the face of the old man, pinched with suffering, the big blue eyes still gave to him a semblance of vitality and innocence. Those lovely eyes were even larger than usual, and his shipwrecked gaze drifted about the room constantly, searching for a point of reference he could not manage to locate. Leonia’s eyes were also beautiful, brimming with passion and sorrow, following the unmoored glances of her master. Then one day it was as if lightning had struck. She suddenly jumped up, as one does when remembering something important that has been overlooked. She rushed to the cupboard and flung it open. She brought out the tablecloth and carefully spread it over the round table that stood in the centre of the room. She took out twelve plates and arranged them around it in perfect order. The glasses followed. This corpulent woman now moved quickly and athletically, from the table to the cupboard, from the cupboard to the table, as if in setting it she had transcended her body and become weightless.

  Benedetto Vai watched her avidly, fixing his gaze on her with all his remaining strength, his whole life concentrated into that point, into staring at the woman as she worked. And every so often he would glance fleetingly at the door. His blue eyes were still large and clear, like those of a boy’s.

  Next to the plates, between the plates and the glasses, Leonia precisely arranged the elegant gilt cutlery; calmly, serenely – and continued to move around that table lightly, with expansive gestures, almost as if in setting it she was performing a choreographed dance. In the middle of the table she created a large bushy display with the mother-of-pearl and silver roses, and ran through the shuttered, deserted house looking for twelve chairs. As soon as her task had been completed she stood back to admire her handiwork, and smiled with her entire being.

  The sun, which had invaded the room at dusk, rendered the princely table even more resplendent, glittering in its violet light.

  The master looked at Leonia, who was staring tenaciously at the table, and every so often
he would become distracted and glance in the direction of the door instead.

  Someone came in as lightly as mist, and so white as to be indistinguishable from the air. Only Benedetto Vai was able to make out the pale apparition that advanced from the door to the festively laid table which was being fixed for all eternity in those wide blue eyes.

  ‘Silenzio’

  First published in the weekly magazine L’Europeo (IV, no. 51, 19 December 1948). Later included in Tutte le novelle (Mondadori, 1957).

  Anna Maria Ortese

  1914–98

  Ortese, who had little more than an elementary school education, was born to a poor family in Rome, spent three years in Libya as a child, and based herself, at eighteen, in Naples. One of her brothers drowned when she was nineteen – a trauma that inspired her first writing – and both her parents died by the time she was forty. She lived the rest of her years with her sister, who followed her from place to place as Ortese cobbled together writing-related work. Massimo Bontempelli was an early fan, and her first collection was published in 1937. She would go on to publish ten others, and six novels. This story, about a child’s perception of poverty, is now considered a touchstone of Italian short fiction, and opens Il mare non bagna Napoli (recently published in English under the title Neapolitan Chronicles), a collection published in 1953 in Vittorini’s Gettoni series (see Chronology). A great fresco cycle that depicts Naples, shattered, after the Second World War, it garnered Ortese the Viareggio Prize. But the last chapter, an attack on the city’s literary establishment, alienated influential critics and forced her to leave the city. She became an increasingly solitary literary figure who compared herself to a castaway and a cat. Economic difficulties plagued her; though she won the Strega Prize in 1967 she was forced to ask for help from the Legge Bacchelli, an organization created by the Italian government to support illustrious artists in need. Ortese both rejected reality and documented it. Her writing, she observed, ‘has something of the exalted and the feverish; it tends towards the high-pitched, encroaches on the hallucinatory, and at almost every point on the page displays, even in its precision, something of the too much’.1 She wrote a trilogy of novels in which animals were the main characters.

  A Pair of Eyeglasses

  Translated by Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee

  ‘As long as there’s the sun … the sun!’ the voice of Don Peppino Quaglia crooned softly near the doorway of the low, dark basement apartment. ‘Leave it to God,’ answered the humble and faintly cheerful voice of his wife, Rosa, from inside; she was in bed, moaning in pain from arthritis, complicated by heart disease, and, addressing her sister-in-law, who was in the bathroom, she added: ‘You know what I’ll do, Nunziata? Later I’ll get up and take the clothes out of the water.’

  ‘Do as you like, to me it seems real madness,’ replied the curt, sad voice of Nunziata from that den. ‘With the pain you have, one more day in bed wouldn’t hurt you!’ A silence. ‘We’ve got to put out some more poison, I found a cockroach in my sleeve this morning.’

  From the cot at the back of the room, which was really a cave, with a low vault of dangling spiderwebs, rose the small, calm voice of Eugenia:

  ‘Mamma, today I’m putting on the eyeglasses.’

  There was a kind of secret joy in the modest voice of the child, Don Peppino’s third-born. (The first two, Carmela and Luisella, were with the nuns and would soon take the veil, having been persuaded that this life is a punishment; and the two little ones, Pasqualino and Teresella, were still snoring, as they slept feet to head, in their mother’s bed.)

  ‘Yes, and no doubt you’ll break them right away,’ the voice of her aunt, still irritated, insisted, from behind the door of the little room. She made everyone suffer for the disappointments of her life, first among them that she wasn’t married and had to be subject, as she told it, to the charity of her sister-in-law, although she didn’t fail to add that she dedicated this humiliation to God. She had something of her own set aside, however, and wasn’t a bad person, since she had offered to have glasses made for Eugenia when at home they had realized that the child couldn’t see. ‘With what they cost! A grand total of a good eight thousand lire!’ she added. Then they heard the water running in the basin. She was washing her face, squeezing her eyes, which were full of soap, and Eugenia gave up answering.

  Besides, she was too, too pleased.

  A week earlier, she had gone with her aunt to an optician on Via Roma. There, in that elegant shop, with its polished tables and a marvellous green reflection pouring in through a blind, the doctor had measured her sight, making her read many times, through certain lenses that he kept changing, entire columns of letters of the alphabet, printed on a card, some as big as boxes, others as tiny as pins. ‘This poor girl is almost blind,’ he had said then, with a kind of pity, to her aunt, ‘she should no longer be deprived of lenses.’ And right away, while Eugenia, sitting on a stool, waited anxiously, he had placed over her eyes another pair of lenses, with a white metal frame, and had said: ‘Now look into the street.’ Eugenia stood up, her legs trembling with emotion, and was unable to suppress a little cry of joy. On the pavement, so many well-dressed people were passing, slightly smaller than normal but very distinct: ladies in silk dresses with powdered faces, young men with long hair and bright-coloured sweaters, white-bearded old men with pink hands resting on silver-handled canes; and, in the middle of the street, some beautiful automobiles that looked like toys, their bodies painted red or teal, all shiny; green trolleys as big as houses, with their windows lowered, and behind the windows so many people in elegant clothes. Across the street, on the opposite pavement, were beautiful shops, with windows like mirrors, full of things so fine they roused a kind of longing; some shop boys in black aprons were polishing the windows from the street. At a café with red and yellow tables, some golden-haired girls were sitting outside, legs crossed. They laughed and drank from big coloured glasses. Above the café, because it was already spring, the balcony windows were open and embroidered curtains swayed, and behind the curtains were fragments of blue and gilded paintings, and heavy, sparkling chandeliers of gold and crystal, like baskets of artificial fruit. A marvel. Transported by all that splendour, she hadn’t followed the conversation between the doctor and her aunt. Her aunt, in the brown dress she wore to Mass, and standing back from the glass counter with a timidity unnatural to her, now broached the question of the cost: ‘Doctor, please, give us a good price … we’re poor folk …’ and when she heard ‘eight thousand lire’ she nearly fainted.

  ‘Two lenses! What are you saying! Jesus Mary!’

  ‘Look, ignorant people …’ the doctor answered, replacing the other lenses after polishing them with the glove, ‘don’t calculate anything. And when you give the child two lenses, you’ll be able to tell me if she sees better. She takes nine diopters on one side, and ten on the other, if you want to know … she’s almost blind.’

  While the doctor was writing the child’s first and last name – ‘Eugenia Quaglia, Vicolo della Cupa, at Santa Maria in Portico’ – Nunziata had gone over to Eugenia, who, standing in the doorway of the shop and, holding up the glasses in her small, sweaty hands, was not at all tired of gazing through them: ‘Look, look, my dear! See what your consolation costs! Eight thousand lire, did you hear? A grand total of a good eight thousand lire!’ She was almost suffocating. Eugenia had turned all red, not so much because of the rebuke as because the young woman at the cash register was looking at her, while her aunt was making that observation which declared the family’s poverty. She took off the glasses.

  ‘But how is it, so young and already so near-sighted?’ the young woman had asked Nunziata, while she signed the receipt for the deposit. ‘And so shabby, too!’ she added.

  ‘Young lady, in our house we all have good eyes, this is a misfortune that came upon us … along with the rest. God rubs salt in the wound.’

  ‘Come back in eight days,’ the doctor had said. ‘I’ll have them for you
.’

  Leaving, Eugenia had tripped on the step.

  ‘Thank you, Aunt Nunzia,’ she had said after a while. ‘I’m always rude to you. I talk back to you, and you are so kind, buying me eyeglasses.’

  Her voice trembled.

  ‘My child, it’s better not to see the world than to see it,’ Nunziata had responded with sudden melancholy.

  Eugenia hadn’t answered her that time, either. Aunt Nunzia was often so strange, she wept and shouted for no good reason, she said so many bad words, and yet she went to Mass regularly, she was a good Christian, and when it came to helping someone in trouble she always volunteered, wholeheartedly. One didn’t have to watch over her.

  Since that day, Eugenia had lived in a kind of rapture, waiting for the blessed glasses that would allow her to see all people and things in their tiny details. Until then, she had been wrapped in a fog: the room where she lived, the courtyard always full of hanging laundry, the alley overflowing with colours and cries, everything for her was covered by a thin veil: she knew well only the faces of her family, especially her mother and her siblings, because often she slept with them, and sometimes she woke at night and, in the light of the oil lamp, looked at them. Her mother slept with her mouth open, her broken yellow teeth visible; her brother and sister, Pasqualino and Teresella, were always dirty and snot-nosed and covered with boils: when they slept, they made a strange noise, as if they had wild animals inside them. Sometimes Eugenia surprised herself by staring at them, without understanding, however, what she was thinking. She had a confused feeling that beyond that room always full of wet laundry, with broken chairs and a stinking toilet, there was light, sounds, beautiful things, and in that moment when she had put on the glasses she had had a true revelation: the world outside was beautiful, very beautiful.