‘Maybe they weren’t good enough. I have nine diopters,’ she replied timidly.
The marchesa arched an eyebrow, but luckily Eugenia didn’t see it.
‘They were good, I’m telling you,’ the marchesa said obstinately, in a slightly harsher voice. Then she was sorry. ‘My dear,’ she said more gently, ‘I’m saying this because I know the troubles you have in your household. With that difference of six thousand lire, you could buy bread for ten days, you could buy … What’s the use to you of seeing better? Given what’s around you!’ A silence. ‘To read, maybe, but do you read?’
‘No, Signora.’
‘But sometimes I’ve seen you with your nose in a book. A liar as well, my dear. That is no good.’
Eugenia didn’t answer again. She felt truly desperate, staring at the dress with her nearly white eyes.
‘Is it silk?’ she asked stupidly.
The marchesa looked at her, reflecting.
‘You don’t deserve it, but I want to give you a little gift,’ she said suddenly, and headed towards a white wooden wardrobe. At that moment the telephone, which was in the hall, began to ring, and instead of opening the wardrobe the marchesa went to answer it. Eugenia, oppressed by those words, hadn’t even heard the old woman’s consoling allusion, and as soon as she was alone she began to look around as far as her poor eyes allowed her. How many fine, beautiful things! Like the store on Via Roma! And there, right in front of her, an open balcony with many small pots of flowers.
She went out on to the balcony. How much air, how much blue! The apartment buildings seemed to be covered by a blue veil, and below was the alley, like a ravine, with so many ants coming and going … like her relatives. What were they doing? Where were they going? They went in and out of their holes, carrying big crumbs of bread, they were doing this now, had done it yesterday, would do it tomorrow, forever, forever. So many holes, so many ants. And around them, almost invisible in the great light, the world made by God, with the wind, the sun, and out there the purifying sea, so vast … She was standing there, her chin planted on the iron railing, suddenly thoughtful, with an expression of sorrow, of bewilderment, that made her look ugly. She heard the sound of the marchesa’s voice, calm, pious. In her hand, in her smooth ivory hand, the marchesa was holding a small book covered in black paper with gilt letters.
‘It’s the thoughts of the saints, my dear. The youth of today don’t read anything, and so the world has changed course. Take it, I’m giving it to you. But you must promise to read a little every evening, now that you’ve got your glasses.’
‘Yes, Signora,’ said Eugenia, in a hurry, blushing again because the marchesa had found her on the balcony, and she took the book. Signora D’Avanzo regarded her with satisfaction.
‘God wished to save you, my dear!’ she said, going to get the package with the dress and placing it in her hands. ‘You’re not pretty, anything but, and you already appear to be an old lady. God favours you, because looking like that you won’t have opportunities for evil. He wants you to be holy, like your sisters!’
Although the words didn’t really wound her, because she had long been unconsciously prepared for a life without joy, Eugenia was nevertheless disturbed by them. And it seemed to her, if only for a moment, that the sun no longer shone as before, and even the thought of the eyeglasses no longer cheered her. She looked vaguely, with her nearly dead eyes, at a point on the sea, where the Posillipo peninsula extended like a faded green lizard. ‘Tell Papà,’ the marchesa continued, meanwhile, ‘that we won’t do anything about the child’s mattress today. My cousin telephoned, and I’ll be in Posillipo all day.’
‘I was there once, too …’ Eugenia began, reviving at the name of that place and she looked, spellbound, in that direction.
‘Yes? Is that so?’ Signora D’Avanzo was indifferent; the name of the place meant nothing special to her. In her magisterial fashion, she accompanied the child, who was still looking towards that luminous point, to the door, closing it slowly behind her.
As Eugenia came down the last step and out into the courtyard, the shadow that had been darkening her forehead for a while disappeared, and her mouth opened in a joyful laugh, because she had seen her mother arriving. It wasn’t hard to recognize that worn, familiar figure. She threw the dress on a chair and ran towards her.
‘Mamma! The eyeglasses!’
‘Gently, my dear, you’ll knock me over!’
Immediately, a small crowd formed. Donna Mariuccia, Don Peppino, one of the Greborios, who had stopped to rest on a chair before starting up the stairs, the Amodios’ maid, who was just then returning, and, of course, Pasqualino and Teresella, who wanted to see, too, and yelled, holding out their hands. Nunziata, for her part, was observing the dress that she had taken out of the newspaper, with a disappointed expression.
‘Look, Mariuccia, it’s an old rag … all worn out under the arms!’ she said, approaching the group. But who was paying attention to her? At that moment, Donna Rosa was extracting from a pocket in her dress the eyeglasses case, and with infinite care, she opened it. On her long red hand, a kind of very shiny insect with two giant eyes and two curving antennae glittered in a pale ray of sun amid those poor people, full of admiration.
‘Eight thousand lire … a thing like that!’ said Donna Rosa, gazing at the eyeglasses religiously, and yet with a kind of rebuke.
Then, in silence, she placed them on Eugenia’s face, as the child ecstatically held out her hands, and carefully arranged the two antennae behind her ears. ‘Now can you see?’ Donna Rosa asked with great emotion.
Gripping the eyeglasses with her hands, as if fearful that they would be taken away from her, her eyes half closed and her mouth half open in a rapt smile, Eugenia took two steps backward, and stumbled on a chair.
‘Good luck!’ said the Amodios’ maid.
‘Good luck!’ said the Greborio sister.
‘She looks like a schoolteacher, doesn’t she?’ Don Peppino observed with satisfaction.
‘Not even a thank you!’ said Aunt Nunzia, looking bitterly at the dress. ‘With all that, good luck!’
‘She’s afraid, my little girl!’ murmured Donna Rosa, heading towards the door of the basement room to put down her things. ‘She’s wearing the eyeglasses for the first time!’ she said, looking up at the first-floor balcony, where the other Greborio sister was looking out.
‘I see everything very tiny,’ said Eugenia, in a strange voice, as if she were speaking from under a chair. ‘Black, very black.’
‘Of course: the lenses are double. But do you see clearly?’ asked Don Peppino. ‘That’s the important thing. She’s wearing the glasses for the first time,’ he, too, said, addressing Cavaliere Amodio, who was passing by, holding an open newspaper.
‘I’m warning you,’ the cavaliere said to Mariuccia, after staring at Eugenia for a moment, as if she were merely a cat, ‘that stairway hasn’t been swept. I found some fish bones in front of the door!’ And he went on, bent over, almost enfolded in his newspaper, reading an article about a proposal for a new pension law that interested him.
Eugenia, still holding on to the eyeglasses with her hands, went to the entrance to the courtyard to look outside into Vicolo della Cupa. Her legs were trembling, her head was spinning, and she no longer felt any joy. With her white lips she wished to smile, but that smile became a moronic grimace. Suddenly the balconies began to multiply, two thousand, a hundred thousand; the carts piled with vegetables were falling on her; the voices filling the air, the cries, the lashes, struck her head as if she were ill; she turned, swaying, towards the courtyard, and that terrible impression intensified. The courtyard was like a sticky funnel, with the narrow end towards the sky, its leprous walls crowded with derelict balconies; the arches of the basement dwellings black, with the lights bright in a circle around Our Lady of Sorrows; the pavement white with soapy water; the cabbage leaves, the scraps of paper, the garbage and, in the middle of the courtyard, that group of ragged, deforme
d souls, faces pocked by poverty and resignation, who looked at her lovingly. They began to writhe, to become mixed up, to grow larger. They all came towards her, in the two bewitched circles of the eyeglasses. It was Mariuccia who first realized that the child was sick, and she tore off the glasses, because Eugenia, doubled over and moaning, was throwing up.
‘They’ve gone to her stomach!’ cried Mariuccia, holding her forehead. ‘Bring a coffee bean, Nunziata!’
‘A grand total of a good eight thousand lire!’ cried Aunt Nunzia, her eyes popping out of her head, running into the basement room to get a coffee bean from a can in the cupboard; and she held up the new eyeglasses, as if to ask God for an explanation. ‘And now they’re wrong, too!’
‘It’s always like that, the first time,’ said the Amodios’ maid to Donna Rosa calmly. ‘You mustn’t be shocked; little by little one gets used to them.’
‘It’s nothing, child, nothing, don’t be scared!’ But Donna Rosa felt her heart constrict at the thought of how unlucky they were.
Aunt Nunzia returned with the coffee bean, still crying: ‘A grand total of a good eight thousand lire!’ while Eugenia, pale as death, tried in vain to throw up, because she had nothing left inside her. Her bulging eyes were almost crossed with suffering, and her old lady’s face was bathed in tears, as if stupefied. She leaned on her mother and trembled.
‘Mamma, where are we?’
‘We’re in the courtyard, my child,’ said Donna Rosa patiently; and the delicate smile, between pity and wonder, that illuminated her eyes, suddenly lit up the faces of all those wretched people.
‘She’s half blind!’
‘She’s a halfwit, she is!’
‘Leave her alone, poor child, she’s dazed,’ said Donna Mariuccia, and her face was grim with pity, as she went back into the basement apartment that seemed to her darker than usual.
Only Aunt Nunzia was wringing her hands:
‘A grand total of a good eight thousand lire!’
‘Un paio di occhiali’
First published under the title ‘Ottomila lire per gli occhi di Eugenia’ in the magazine Omnibus (May 1949). Later included in Il mare non bagna Napoli in the Gettoni series (Einaudi, 1953).
Alberto Moravia
1907–90
A quintessentially Roman writer, Moravia, born Alberto Pincherle, wrote more works about that city’s people, streets and soul than any other. His 1952 collection, called simply I racconti (Stories), won the Strega Prize. His complete Racconti romani (published in English as Roman Tales and More Roman Tales) collected in 1954 and then in 1959, number well over one hundred. This story comes from a lesser-known collection, published in 1976, called Boh (an untranslatable expression one often hears in Rome, to express a general state of befuddlement). All are told in the first person from the female point of view. Together, these snapshots form a collective portrait of Roman women on the threshold of something new, like the protagonist of this selection, caught between traditional roles and a nascent feminist consciousness. The collection, coming as it did after Moravia had settled into his reputation as a celebrated man of letters and author of iconic novels like La noia (Boredom), represents another side to the author. But Moravia, at once a classical and subversive writer, embodied a spirit of contradiction from the very start. He had little formal schooling. A childhood illness confined him to bed and books, an experience fundamental to his becoming a writer. His early efforts included stories written in French for Bontempelli’s magazine, 900, and his first novel, Gli indifferenti (translated as The Time of Indifference), a scathing portrait of a bourgeois family that enraged Fascist critics, published when he was just twenty, is still considered by many to be his best. He wrote with equal facility about working-class and middle-class characters, about shopkeepers and bank clerks. Moravia was the founding editor of Nuovi Argomenti, one of Italy’s most prestigious literary journals and still a forum for short stories. Involved romantically with literary women, he was the husband of Elsa Morante, and the companion for many years of the writer Dacia Maraini.
The Other Side of the Moon
Translated by Michael F. Moore
I am two persons in one or, if you prefer, a double-faced person, with two sides, like the moon. And like the moon, I have one side that everyone knows, always the same, and a side unknown not only to others but also, in a sense, to myself. This second completely unknown side might not even exist: if you think about it, the things we ignore do not exist. But they do. Even if I don’t know it or allow it to be known, the other side of the moon is something I ‘sense’. And this obscure sense that the other side exists, invisible and different, behind my apparent face, at the back of my head, and is looking at the world behind me, means that in everyday life I am always scrupulously, dutifully occupied and, at the same time – how how can I put this? – ‘unglued’. Yes, unglued. That is to say, detached from the things I am doing at the very moment that I’m doing them. Have you ever seen an antique table from which a piece becomes suddenly unglued? A piece that until then had seemed to belong to the whole? When you look at it you see that on the surface of the old dry wood there is a kind of dull sheen of old glue. The table was damaged who knows how many centuries ago. Someone, who has likewise been dead for centuries, glued it back together. But one fine day, the glue no longer holds and the broken piece becomes unglued. Now it needs a new application of glue, as good as the former one, but who knows what kind? Well, in everyday life, I am that fragment that seems to stick but, in actuality, is detached.
Unglued and diligent, from eight in the evening until six in the morning I am the perfect beautiful young wife of an older judge; from six in the evening until nine at night the perfect stepmother to the judge’s two children by his first wife; and from eight-thirty until one-thirty the perfect bank clerk. Why do I keep this schedule? Because there is no time in my life except for the time I see on my watch; all the other times are off-limits to me. Every day I get up at six, wash and dress myself, wake the children, help them to wash and get dressed, and I then prepare breakfast for everyone. After that my husband leaves in his car. First he’ll drop the children off at school, with the nuns, where they are day students. Then he’ll drive to the courthouse. I walk to the bank, not far from home. At the bank, so serious and diligent that my colleagues jokingly call me Miss Dutiful, I keep myself busy until one-thirty. Then I walk back home. The part-time maid has already done the shopping from a list that I prepare every night before turning in. I go to the kitchen, open up bags and boxes, turn on the burners, and prepare a light lunch for my husband and me. My husband arrives. We sit down at the table. After eating I wash the dishes and put everything back in its place. Then we move to the bedroom. It’s time to make love, and my husband likes it at that hour because at night he’s too tired. At four o’clock he leaves and a few minutes later the children arrive. Without taking a break, I prepare a snack for them, watch TV with them, help them do their homework, cook them dinner, put them to bed. By now it’s eight o’clock and my husband arrives home. He sits down to read the newspaper. I run to the bedroom, put on a fancy dress, put on my make-up, fix my hair, and then we go out to dinner at a restaurant or a friend’s house, and then to the cinema. At this point, however, I collapse because, for years, I’ve been losing about two hours of sleep a day. So I doze off wherever I happen to be: at the dinner table, at a restaurant, in my seat at the cinema, next to my husband while he’s driving the car. Do I love my husband? Let’s just say that I’m fond of him. Besides, I don’t have time for thoughts like this.
And yet, despite this life as Miss Dutiful, I don’t stick to the things I do. I always feel, as I said, unglued. By the way, I said that my other side of the moon is unknown not only to others, but also to me. That’s not exactly true: if you know how to read it, this unknown side can be inferred from my facial features. I’ll describe myself, you be the judge. I’m blonde, tall and thin, with a slightly Germanic face, like the ones that peer out from the niches
of old gothic churches. I have a triangular face, with the wide part that is my forehead, hard and bony, and the pointed part, my chin, which is fleshy and soft. I have an aquiline nose and thin lips, both of noble design. But my ugly eyes, a washed-out blue, counter the severe nobility of my face, with a gaze so sullen it’s frightening. My eyes have a fleeting, furtive, cold expression, as if lying in wait, like the gaze of an animal that will bite at the first chance.
That opportunity arose, finally, in the fourth year of my marriage. One November morning, on my way to work beneath a pelting grey rain, I saw a man at the wheel of a big black car, parked in front of my bank, taking photographs. I had already seen him from a distance: he would hold a tiny camera to his eye and snap the pictures – three, four, five at a time – with a calm and expert fury. After this he would hide his hand and, for a few moments, stare into space. But all of a sudden he would start snapping pictures again. What was he taking pictures of? It was obvious: the entrance to the bank. I came a little closer and got a better look at him. From behind, he seemed to be a man of short stature. He had a broad forehead, a hook nose, and a well-drawn mouth. He reminded me of certain prints portraying the young Napoleon. Then I passed him. He put his hand down and looked at me, as if waiting for me to disappear. Then, inexplicably, I don’t know what impulse made me wink at him. He saw the wink and nodded, to show me that he’d noticed. I crossed the avenue with a determined step, wrapped in my bright red trench coat. I joined the group of employees at the entrance to the bank. When I turned around, the car was gone.
Fifteen days went by. One morning I came out of the bank to go home. While walking, I realized that I did not feel any part of the relief and joy that swept through the streets in waves, like on Sundays, as the offices and schools emptied out for the day and the people who had been holed up in them, forced to work or study, were leaving, emancipated, and hurrying home. I felt no relief or joy: I was already thinking of the lunch I would cook, the dishes I would wash, the love-making I would perform. Then, suddenly, I looked up and saw, right next to me, the photographer who, at the wheel of his car, was following me step by step. Our eyes met. And then he propositioned me with a short sentence of an unrepeatable obscenity. I didn’t hesitate. I nodded yes. He stopped the car, opened the door, and I got in.
The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories Page 22