‘Marchesa, my respects.’
That was the voice of her father. Covered by a ragged shirt, his back, which until that moment had been framed by the doorway of the basement apartment, could no longer be seen. The voice of the marchesa, a placid and indifferent voice, now said:
‘You must do me a favour, Don Peppino.’
‘At your service … your wish is my command.’
Silently, Eugenia slid out of bed, put on her dress, and, still barefoot, went to the door. The pure and marvellous early morning sun, entering the ugly courtyard through a crack between the buildings, greeted her, lit up her little old lady’s face, her stubbly, dishevelled hair, her rough, hard small hands, with their long, dirty nails. Oh, if only at that moment she could have had the eyeglasses! The marchesa was there, in her black silk dress with its white lace neckpiece. Her imposing yet benign appearance enchanted Eugenia, along with her bejewelled white hands; but she couldn’t see her face very well – it was a whitish oval patch. Above it, some purple feathers quivered.
‘Listen, you have to redo the child’s mattress. Can you come up around ten-thirty?’
‘With all my heart, but I’m only available in the afternoon, Signora Marchesa.’
‘No, Don Peppino, it has to be this morning. In the afternoon people are coming. Set yourself up on the terrace and work. Don’t play hard to get … do me this favour … Now it’s time for Mass. At ten-thirty, call me.’
And without waiting for an answer, she left, astutely avoiding a trickle of yellow water that was dripping down from a terrace and had made a puddle on the ground.
‘Papa,’ said Eugenia, following her father, as he went back inside, ‘how good the marchesa is! She treats you like a gentleman. God should reward her for it.’
‘A good Christian, that one is,’ Don Peppino answered, with a meaning completely different from what might have been understood. With the excuse that she was the owner of the house, the Marchesa D’Avanzo constantly had the people in the courtyard serving her: to Don Peppino, she gave a wretched sum for the mattresses; and Rosa was always available for the big sheets; even if her bones were burning, she had to get up to serve the marchesa. It’s true that the marchesa had placed Rosa’s daughters in the convent, and so had saved two souls from the dangers of this world, which for the poor are many, but for that basement space, where everyone was sick, she collected three thousand lire, not one less. ‘The heart is there, it’s the money that’s lacking,’ she loved to repeat, with a certain imperturbability. ‘Today, dear Don Peppino, you are the nobility, you have no worries … Thank … thank Providence, which has put you in such a condition … which wanted to save you.’ Donna Rosa had a kind of adoration for the marchesa, for her religious sentiments; when they saw each other, they always talked about the afterlife. The marchesa didn’t much believe in it, but she didn’t say so, and urged this mother to be patient and to hope.
From the bed, Donna Rosa asked, a little worried: ‘Did you talk to her?’
‘She wants me to redo the mattress for her grandson,’ said Don Peppino, in annoyance. He brought out the burner on a tripod to warm up some coffee, a gift of the nuns, and went back inside to fetch water in a small pot. ‘I won’t do it for less than five hundred,’ he said.
‘It’s a fair price.’
‘And then who will go and pick up Eugenia’s glasses?’ Aunt Nunzia asked, coming out of the bathroom. Over her nightgown, she wore a torn skirt, and on her feet, slippers. Her bony shoulders emerged from the nightgown, grey as stones. She was drying her face with a napkin. ‘I can’t go, and Rosa is ill.’
Without anyone noticing, Eugenia’s large, almost blind eyes filled with tears. Now maybe another day would pass without her eyeglasses. She went up to her mother’s bed, and in a pitiful manner, flung her arms and forehead on the blanket. Donna Rosa stretched out a hand to caress her.
‘I’ll go, Nunzia, don’t get worked up … In fact, going out will do me good.’
‘Mamma …’
Eugenia kissed her hand.
Around eight o’clock there was a great commotion in the courtyard. At that moment Rosa had come out of the doorway: a tall, lanky figure, in a short, stained black coat, without shoulder pads, that exposed her legs, like wooden sticks. Under her arm, she carried a shopping bag for the bread she would buy on her way home from the optician. Don Peppino was pushing the water out of the middle of the courtyard with a long-handled broom, a vain task because the tub was continually leaking, like an open vein. In it were the clothes of two families: the Greborio sisters, on the second floor, and the wife of Cavaliere Amodio, who had given birth two days earlier. The Greborios’ servant, Lina Tarallo, was beating the carpets on a balcony, making a terrible ruckus. The dust, mixed with garbage, descended gradually like a cloud on those poor people, but no one paid attention. Sharp screams and cries of complaint could be heard from the basement, where Aunt Nunzia was calling on all the saints as witnesses to confirm that she was unfortunate, and the cause of all this was Pasqualino, who wept and shouted like a condemned man because he wanted to go with his mamma. ‘Look at him, this scoundrel,’ cried Aunt Nunzia. ‘Madonna bella, do me a favour, let me die, but immediately, if you’re there, since in this life only thieves and whores thrive.’ Teresella, born the year the king went away and so younger than her brother, was sitting in the doorway, smiling, and every so often she licked a crust of bread she had found under a chair.
Eugenia was sitting on the step of another basement room, where Mariuccia the porter lived, looking at a section of a children’s comic, with lots of bright-coloured figures, which had fallen from the fourth floor. She held it right up to her face, because otherwise she couldn’t read the words. There was a small blue river in a vast meadow and a red boat going … going … who knows where. It was written in proper Italian, and so she didn’t understand much, but every so often, for no reason, she laughed.
‘So, today you’ll put on your glasses?’ said Mariuccia, looking out from behind her. Everyone in the courtyard knew, partly because Eugenia hadn’t resisted the temptation to talk about it, and partly because Aunt Nunzia had found it necessary to let it be understood that in that family she was spending her own … and well, in short …
‘Your aunt got them for you, eh?’ Mariuccia added, smiling good-humouredly. She was a small woman, almost a dwarf, with a face like a man’s, covered with whiskers. At the moment she was combing her long black hair, which came to her knees: one of the few features that showed she was a woman. She was combing it slowly, smiling with her sly but kind little mouse eyes.
‘Mamma went to get them on Via Roma,’ said Eugenia with a look of gratitude. ‘We paid a grand total of a good eight thousand lire, you know? Really … my aunt is …’ she was about to add ‘truly a good person’, when Aunt Nunzia, looking out of the basement room, called angrily: ‘Eugenia!’
‘Here I am, Aunt!’ and she scampered away like a dog.
Behind their aunt, Pasqualino, all red-faced and bewildered, with a terrible expression somewhere between disdain and surprise, was waiting.
‘Go and buy two candies for three lire each, from Don Vincenzo at the tobacco store. Come back immediately!’
‘Yes, Aunt.’
She clutched the money in her fist, paying no more attention to the comic, and hurried out of the courtyard.
By a true miracle she avoided a towering vegetable cart drawn by two horses, which was coming towards her, right outside the main entrance. The carter, with his whip unsheathed, seemed to be singing, and from his mouth came these words: ‘Lovely … Fresh,’ drawn out and full of sweetness, like a love song. When the cart was behind her, Eugenia, raising her protruding eyes, basked in that warm blue glow that was the sky, and heard the great hubbub all around her, without, however, seeing it clearly. Carts, one behind the other, big trucks with Americans dressed in yellow hanging out of the windows, bicycles that seemed to be tumbling over. High up, all the balconies were cluttered with flower
crates, and over the railings, like flags or saddle blankets, hung yellow-and-red quilts, ragged blue children’s clothes, sheets, pillows and mattresses exposed to the air, while at the end of the alley ropes uncoiled, lowering baskets to pick up the vegetables or fish offered by peddlers. Although the sun touched only the highest balconies (the street a crack in the disorderly mass of buildings) and the rest was only shadow and garbage, one could sense, behind it, the enormous celebration of spring. And even Eugenia, so small and pale, bound like a mouse to the mud of her courtyard, began to breathe rapidly, as if that air, that celebration and all that blue suspended over the neighbourhood of the poor were also hers. The yellow basket of the Amodios’ maid, Rosaria Buonincontri, grazed her as she went into the tobacco shop. Rosaria was a fat woman in black, with white legs and a flushed, placid face.
‘Tell your mamma if she can come upstairs a moment today, Signora Amodio needs her to deliver a message.’
Eugenia recognized her by her voice. ‘She’s not here now. She went to Via Roma to get my glasses.’
‘I should wear them, too, but my boyfriend doesn’t want me to.’
Eugenia didn’t grasp the meaning of that prohibition. She answered only, ingenuously: ‘They cost a great amount; you have to take very good care of them.’
They entered Don Vincenzo’s hole-in-the-wall together. There was a crowd. Eugenia kept being pushed back. ‘Go on … you really are blind,’ observed the Amodios’ maid, with a kind smile.
‘But now Aunt Nunzia’s gotten you some eyeglasses,’ Don Vincenzo, who had heard her, broke in, winking, with an air of teasing comprehension. He, too, wore glasses.
‘At your age,’ he said, handing her the candies, ‘I could see like a cat, I could thread needles at night, my grandmother always wanted me nearby … but now I’m old.’
Eugenia nodded vaguely. ‘My friends … none of them have glasses,’ she said. Then, turning to the servant Rosaria, but speaking also for Don Vincenzo’s benefit: ‘Just me … Nine diopters on one side and ten on the other … I am almost blind!’ she said emphatically, sweetly.
‘See how lucky you are,’ said Don Vincenzo, smiling, and to Rosaria: ‘How much salt?’
‘Poor child!’ the Amodios’ maid commented as Eugenia left, happily. ‘It’s the dampness that’s ruined her. In that building it rains on us. Now Donna Rosa’s bones ache. Give me a kilo of coarse salt and a packet of fine …’
‘There you are.’
‘What a morning, eh, today, Don Vincenzo? It seems like summer already.’
Walking more slowly than she had on the way there, Eugenia, without even realizing it, began to unwrap one of the two candies, and then put it in her mouth. It tasted of lemon. ‘I’ll tell Aunt Nunzia that I lost it on the way,’ she proposed to herself. She was happy, it didn’t matter to her if her aunt, good as she was, got angry. She felt someone take her hand, and recognized Luigino.
‘You are really blind!’ the boy said, laughing. ‘And the glasses?’
‘Mamma went to Via Roma to get them.’
‘I didn’t go to school; it’s a beautiful day, why don’t we take a little walk?’
‘You’re crazy! Today I have to be good.’
Luigino looked at her and laughed, with his mouth like a money box, stretching to his ears, contemptuous.
‘What a rat’s nest.’
Instinctively Eugenia brought a hand to her hair.
‘I can’t see well, and Mamma doesn’t have time,’ she answered meekly.
‘What are the glasses like? With gold frames?’ Luigino asked.
‘All gold!’ Eugenia answered, lying. ‘Bright and shiny!’
‘Old women wear glasses,’ said Luigino.
‘Also ladies, I saw them on Via Roma.’
‘Those are dark glasses, for sunbathing,’ Luigino insisted.
‘You’re just jealous. They cost eight thousand lire.’
‘When you have them, let me see them,’ said Luigino. ‘I want to see if the frame’s really gold. You’re such a liar,’ and he went off on his own business, whistling.
Re-entering the courtyard, Eugenia wondered anxiously if her glasses would have gold frames or not. In the negative case, what could she say to Luigino to convince him that they were a thing of value? But what a beautiful day! Maybe Mamma was about to return with the glasses wrapped in a package. Soon she would have them on her face. She would have … A frenzy of blows fell on her head. A real fury. She seemed to collapse; in vain she defended herself with her hands. It was Aunt Nunzia, of course, furious because of her delay, and behind Aunt Nunzia was Pasqualino, like a madman, because he didn’t believe her story about the candies. ‘Bloodsucker! You ugly little blind girl! And I gave my life for this ingratitude … You’ll come to a bad end! Eight thousand lire, no less. They bleed me dry, these scoundrels.’
She let her hands fall, only to burst into a great lament. ‘Our Lady of Sorrows, Holy Jesus, by the wounds in your ribs let me die!’
Eugenia wept, too, in torrents.
‘Aunt, forgive me. Aunt …’
‘Uh … uh … uh …’ said Pasqualino, his mouth wide open.
‘Poor child,’ said Donna Mariuccia, coming over to Eugenia, who didn’t know where to hide her face, now streaked with red and tears at her aunt’s rage. ‘She didn’t do it on purpose, Nunzia, calm down,’ and to Eugenia: ‘Where’ve you got the candies?’
Eugenia answered softly, hopelessly, holding out one in her dirty hand: ‘I ate the other. I was hungry.’
Before her aunt could move again, to attack the child, the voice of the marchesa could be heard, from the fourth floor, where there was sun, calling softly, placidly, sweetly:
‘Nunziata!’
Aunt Nunzia looked up, her face pained as that of the Madonna of the Seven Sorrows, which was at the head of her bed.
‘Today is the first Friday of the month. Dedicate it to God.’
‘Marchesa, how good you are! These kids make me commit so many sins, I’m losing my mind, I …’ And she collapsed her face between her paw-like hands, the hands of a worker, with brown, scaly skin.
‘Is your brother not there?’
‘Poor Aunt, she got you the eyeglasses, and that’s how you thank her,’ said Mariuccia meanwhile to Eugenia, who was trembling.
‘Yes, Signora, here I am,’ answered Don Peppino, who until that moment had been half hidden behind the door of the basement room, waving a piece of cardboard in front of the stove where the beans for lunch were cooking.
‘Can you come up?’
‘My wife went to get the eyeglasses for Eugenia. I’m watching the beans. Would you wait, if you don’t mind?’
‘Then send up the child. I have a dress for Nunziata. I want to give it to her.’
‘May God reward you … very grateful,’ answered Don Peppino, with a sigh of consolation, because that was the only thing that could calm his sister. But looking at Nunziata, he realized that she wasn’t at all cheered up. She continued to weep desperately, and that weeping had so stunned Pasqualino that the child had become quiet as if by magic, and was now licking the snot that dripped from his nose, with a small, sweet smile.
‘Did you hear? Go up to the Signora Marchesa, she has a dress to give you,’ said Don Peppino to his daughter.
Eugenia was looking at something in the void, with her eyes that couldn’t see: they were staring, fixed and large. She winced, and got up immediately, obedient.
‘Say to her: ‘May God reward you,’ and stay outside the door.’
‘Yes, Papa.’
‘Believe me, Mariuccia,’ said Aunt Nunzia, when Eugenia had gone off, ‘I love that little creature, and afterward I’m sorry, as God is my witness, for scolding her. But I feel all the blood go to my head, believe me, when I have to fight with the kids. Youth is gone, as you see –’ and she touched her hollow cheeks. ‘Sometimes I feel like a madwoman.’
‘On the other hand, they have to vent, too,’ Donna Mariuccia answered. ‘They’re
innocent souls. They need time to weep. When I look at them, and think how they’ll become just like us –’ she went to get a broom and swept a cabbage leaf out of the doorway – ‘I wonder what God is doing.’
‘It’s new, brand new! You hardly wore it!’ said Eugenia, sticking her nose in the green dress lying on the sofa in the kitchen, while the marchesa went looking for an old newspaper to wrap it in.
The marchesa thought that the child really couldn’t see, because otherwise she would have realized that the dress was very old and full of patches (it had belonged to her dead sister), but she refrained from commenting. Only after a moment, as she was coming in with the newspaper, she asked:
‘And the eyeglasses your aunt got you? Are they new?’
‘With gold frames. They cost eight thousand lire,’ Eugenia answered all in one breath, becoming emotional again at the thought of the honour she had received, ‘because I’m almost blind,’ she added simply.
‘In my opinion,’ said the marchesa, carefully wrapping the dress in the newspaper, and then reopening the package because a sleeve was sticking out, ‘your aunt could have saved her money. I saw some very good eyeglasses in a shop near the Church of the Ascension, for only two thousand lire.’
Eugenia blushed fiery red. She understood that the marchesa was displeased. ‘Each to his own position in life. We all must know our limitations,’ she had heard her say this many times, talking to Donna Rosa, when she brought her the washed clothes, and stayed to complain of her poverty.
The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories Page 21