A few days later I went to the coast with the children and the wet nurse. We had planned this trip for a long time, as the children had been ill and they both needed the sea air; my husband was going to accompany us and stay there with us for a month. But, without needing to mention it, it was now understood that he would not come. We stayed by the sea for the whole winter. I wrote to my husband once a week and received a punctual response from him each time. Our letters contained just a few short and rather cold sentences.
We returned at the beginning of spring. My husband was waiting for us at the station. While we travelled through the village in the car I saw Mariuccia pass us with a swollen belly. She walked lightly in spite of the weight of her belly, and the pregnancy had not changed her childish smile. But there was something new in her expression, some sense of submission and shame, and she blushed when she saw me, but not in the same way as she used to blush, with that happy impudence. I thought that soon I would see her carrying a dirty child in her arms, wearing the long clothes which all peasant children have, and that child would be my husband’s son, the brother of Luigi and Giorgio. I thought that it would be unbearable to see that child with the long clothes. I wouldn’t have been able to continue living with my husband or carry on living in the village. I would leave.
My husband was extremely dispirited. Days and days passed during which he barely uttered a word. He didn’t even enjoy being with the children any more. I saw he had grown old and his clothes had become scruffy; his cheeks were covered in bristly hair. He came home very late at night and sometimes went straight to bed without eating. Sometimes he didn’t sleep at all and spent the entire night in the study.
On our return I found the house in complete chaos. Felicetta had grown old; she couldn’t remember anything, and argued with the male servant, accusing him of drinking too much. They would exchange violent insults and often I had to intervene to calm them down.
For several days I had a lot to do. The house had to be put in order so that it would be ready for the coming summer. The woollen blankets and cloaks needed to be put away in the cupboards, the armchairs covered in white linen, the curtains taken out on the terrace; the vegetable garden needed sowing, and the roses in the garden needed pruning. I remembered the pride and energy I had given to all these tasks in the early days after we had got married. I had imagined that every simple job was of the highest importance. Since then hardly four years had passed, but how I now saw myself changed! Even physically I looked more like an older woman now. I brushed my hair without a parting, with the bun low down on my neck. Looking at myself in the mirror, I sometimes thought that having my hair combed like that didn’t suit me, and it made me look older. But I didn’t care about looking pretty any more. I didn’t care about anything.
One evening I was sitting in the dining room with the wet nurse, who was teaching me a knitting stitch. The children were sleeping and my husband had gone to a village a few miles away where somebody had fallen seriously ill. All of a sudden the bell rang and the servant went barefoot to see who it was. I went downstairs as well: it was a boy of about fourteen, and I recognized him as one of Mariuccia’s brothers. ‘They sent me to call the doctor; my sister is not well,’ he said. ‘But the doctor isn’t here.’ He shrugged his shoulders and went away. After a while, he came back again. ‘Hasn’t the doctor returned yet?’ he asked. ‘No,’ I told him, ‘but I’ll let him know.’ The male servant had already gone to bed, so I told him to get dressed and go and call for the doctor on his bicycle. I went up to my room and started to undress, but I was too anxious and on edge; I felt that I should do something as well. I covered my head with a shawl and went out. I walked through the empty, dark village. In the kitchen Mariuccia’s brothers were dozing with their heads resting on the table. The neighbours were huddled by the door talking among themselves. In the room next door Mariuccia was pacing up and down in the small space between the bed and the door; she was crying and walking, leaning against the wall as she went. She went on walking and screaming, and stared at me but didn’t seem to recognize who I was. Her mother gave me a resentful and hostile look. I sat on the bed. ‘The doctor won’t be long, will he, Signora?’ the midwife asked me. ‘The girl has been in labour for some hours now. She had already lost a lot of blood. The delivery is not going well.’ ‘I’ve sent for him to be called. He should be here soon,’ I said.
Then Mariuccia fainted and we carried her on to the bed. They needed something from the chemist’s and I offered to go myself. When I returned she had come round and had started screaming again. Her cheeks were hot and she struggled around, throwing off the covers. She clung to the headboard of the bed and screamed. The midwife came and went with fresh bottles of water. ‘It’s a terrible business,’ she said in a loud, calm voice. ‘But we must do something,’ I said to her. ‘If my husband is late, we must alert another doctor.’ ‘Doctors know lots of clever words, but not much else,’ her mother said, and she gave me another resentful look, clutching the rosary to her breast. ‘Women always scream when the baby is about to come,’ one of the women said.
Mariuccia was writhing on the bed and her hair was all dishevelled. Suddenly, she grabbed hold of me, squeezing me with her dark, bare arms. ‘Mother of God,’ she kept saying. The sheets were stained with blood; there was even blood on the ground. The midwife did not leave her side now. ‘Be strong,’ she said to her from time to time. Now she was making hoarse sobbing noises. She had bags under her eyes, and her face was dark and covered in sweat: ‘It’s not good, it’s not good,’ the midwife kept repeating. Finally, she received the baby in her hands, lifted it, and shook it. ‘It’s dead,’ she said, and she threw it down into a corner of the bed. I saw a wrinkled face. It looked like a little Chinese person. The women took it away, bound up in a wollen rag.
Now Mariuccia had stopped screaming; she lay there looking extremely pale, and the blood continued to flow from her body. I saw that there was a little mark of blood on my blouse. ‘It’ll come out with some water,’ the midwife said to me. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘You’ve helped me a lot tonight,’ she said. ‘You’re a very courageous lady – truly the wife of a doctor.’
One of the neighbours insisted that I should have a little coffee. I followed her into the kitchen and drank a cup of weak, tepid coffee from a glass. When I returned Mariuccia was dead. They told me she had died like that, without having come round from her drowsiness.
They plaited her hair and straightened up the blankets around her. At last my husband arrived. He was holding his leather briefcase; he looked pale and out of breath, and his overcoat was open. I was sitting next to the bed, but he did not look at me. He stood in the middle of the room. The mother stood in front of him, tore the briefcase from his hands, and threw it to the ground. ‘You didn’t even come to see her die,’ she said to him.
I gathered up his briefcase and took my husband’s hand. ‘Let’s go,’ I said to him. He let me lead him across the kitchen, through the murmuring women, and he followed me out. All of a sudden I stopped; it seemed to me right that he should see the little Chinese-looking baby. But where was he? God knows where they had taken him.
As we walked I held him tight, but he did not respond to me in any way, and his arm swung lifelessly by my side. I realized that he was not taking any notice of me and I understood that I mustn’t speak, and that I had to be extremely careful with him. He came upstairs with me to the door of our room but then left me and went off to the study, as he had done recently.
It was already nearly light outside; I heard the birds singing in the trees. I went to bed. All of a sudden I realized that I was overcome with a feeling of immense joy. I had no idea that somebody’s death could make you so happy, yet I didn’t feel guilty for it at all. I had not been happy for some time, and for me this was a completely new feeling, which amazed and transformed me. I also felt full of foolish pride for the way I had conducted myself that night. I knew that my husband could not think of it now, bu
t one day, when he had composed himself a little, he would think of it again, and perhaps he would realize that I had performed well.
All of a sudden a shot rang out through the silence of the house. I got up from my bed screaming and went down the stairs, screaming all the way. I burst into the study and shook his large body, which lay motionless on the armchair; his arms were hanging down lifelessly. There was a little blood on the cheeks and lips of that face I knew so well.
Afterwards the house filled up with people. I had to speak and answer every question. The children were taken away. Two days later I accompanied my husband to the cemetery. When I came home I wandered around the rooms in a daze. That house had become dear to me, but I felt as though I didn’t have the right to live there, because it didn’t belong to me, because I had shared it with a man who had died without uttering a single word to me. Yet, I didn’t know where I should go. There wasn’t a single place in the world where I wanted to go.
‘Mio marito’
Written in 1941 and first published (under the pseudonym A. Tornimparte) in 1942 in the journal Lettere d’oggi (IV, 2–3, March–April), then included in La strada che va in città e altri racconti (Einaudi, 1945).
Carlo Emilio Gadda
1893–1973
Gadda both intimidates and exasperates; those who don’t worship him tend to throw up their hands, as if he were the later Henry James or the Joyce of Finnegans Wake. For those not reading him in Italian, he also poses a particular challenge, in that many claim he is untranslatable (I disagree). He began his professional life as an electrical engineer, but imprisonment as a soldier in the First World War, which killed his brother, inspired him to start writing. The word ‘macaronic’ is key to appreciating Gadda – it stems from a poetic genre that combined Latin metres with vernacular words, and found its most famous interpreter in Teofilo Folengo, whose Baldus was to inspire Rabelais. Gadda, too, kneaded together high and low registers, mixing dialect with literary language, and this collision is central to his aesthetic. The result was a voice, quintessentially unique, that never ceased to confound, to challenge, to upend. His approach to genre was equally playful; story, novella, novel were restrictive terms Gadda rejected. Like Pasolini, Gadda learned Roman dialect and worked with it; he also shared, with Pasolini, a homosexual identity and themes of prostitution and life on the urban periphery (most famously explored in the novel Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana; in English, That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana). Gadda lived briefly in Argentina, and translated the work of the New Spanish dramatist Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, who wrote during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He had a difficult relationship with his mother and lost his father when he was sixteen. This story – plotless, careening, terrifying – appears both in a short-story collection and as a chapter in the autobiographical novel, La cognizione del dolore (most recently published as The Experience of Pain). Set in an invented South American country, it is a marriage of chaos and coherence. Gadda began writing it after his mother’s death, and it was left intentionally unfinished. The author’s footnotes form an integral part of the story. Indeed, they are not really footnotes at all, but digressions.
The Mother
Translated by Richard Dixon
She wandered about, alone, in the house. And those walls, that copper: were they all she had left? of a life. They had told her the exact name, cruel and black, of the mountain: where he had fallen: and the other name, desolately serene, of the ground where they had taken and left him, with face restored to peace and oblivion, devoid of any response, for ever. The son who had smiled at her, brief springtimes!, who had so sweetly, passionately, hugged, kissed her. A year later, at Pastrufazio, a military non-commissioned officerfn1 had presented her with a diploma, had given her some kind of book, asking her to sign her name in another register: and on doing so he handed her a copying pencil. First he had asked her: ‘Are you Señora Adelaide François?’ Turning pale on hearing mention of her name, the name that tormented her, she had replied: ‘Yes, I am she’. Trembling, as if at the savage harshening of a sentence. To which, after the first hideous cry, that dark voice of eternity continued calling her.
Before he left, when with a clink of the chain he picked up the register and then the gleaming sword, she had asked as if to detain him: ‘May I offer you a glass of Nevado?’, clasping her bony hands together. But he didn’t want to accept. She thought he strangely resembled the person who had occupied the brief splendour of time: of time consumed. The beating of her heart told her so: and with a quiver of the lips she felt the need to love once more the re-emergent presence: but she knew well that no one, no one ever returns.
She drifted about the house: and sometimes unlatched the shutters of a window, to let the sun in, into the main room. The light then met her modest, almost shabby clothing: the small expedients she had managed to repair them with, holding back the tears, the mean dress of her old age. But what was the sun? What day did it bring? over the baying of the darkness. She knew its sizes and its essence, its distance from the earth, from all the other planets: and their movement and orbit; she had learned and had taught many things: and Kepler’s formulations and squarings that pursue the ellipse of our desperate pain into the vacuity of senseless space.fn2
She drifted about, in the house, as though searching for the mysterious path that would have taken her to meet someone: or perhaps just to solitude, devoid of any pity and of any image. From the kitchen, now fireless, to the rooms where voices were no longer heard: occupied by just a few flies. And surrounding the house she still saw the countryside, the sunshine.
Sometimes the sky, so vast over vanished time, was overshadowed by its ominous clouds; which flowed plump and white from the mountains and gathered and then blackened, and suddenly seemed to threaten the person alone in the house, her sons far, terribly far, away. This occurred once again at the close of that summer, one afternoon in early September, after the long heatwave that everyone said would never end: ten days after she had called for the keeper, with the keys: and had wanted to go down, with her, to the cemetery. That menace hurt her deeply. It was the clash, it was the scorn of powers or of beings unknown, and yet bent on persecution: the evil that rises again, again and for ever, after the clear mornings of hope. What always upset her most was the unexpected malevolence of those who had no reason to hate her, or to insult her: of those to whom her trust, so pure, was so unreservedly given, as to equals and to kindred beings in a superior society of souls. Then every consoling experience and memory, value and labour, and support from the city and the people, was suddenly cancelled by the devastation of mortified instinct, the inner strength of awareness was lost: like a child struck by the crowd, knocked down. The barbarized crowd of lost ages, the darkness of things and souls, were a grim enigma, before which she wondered anxiously – (ignorant like a lost child) – why, why?
The storm, that very day, would drive with long howls through the dreadful mountain gorges, and then flow out into the open against people’s homes and factories. After each sombre build-up of its bitter spite, it unleashed its thunderbolts through the whole sky, like the havoc and pillage of a marauding corsair among sinister flashes and shots. The wind, which had carried her son away towards forgetting cypresses, seemed to be searching at every window for her as well, for her as well, inside the house. From the small window over the staircase, a gust of wind, breaking in, had snatched her by the hair: the creaking floors and their wooden beams seemed about to collapse: like planking, like a ship in a tempest: and its hatches closed, battened down, swollen by that fury outside. And she, like a wounded animal, if it hears the barbarous hunting horns above it again and again, does what it can in its exhausted state to find a refuge, below, beneath the staircase: going down, step by step: into a corner. Timidly overcoming that emptiness of each step, trying them one after the other with her foot, clinging to the banister with her hands that could hardly grip, step by step, down, down, towards the darkness and dampness below. Th
ere, a small ledge.
And the gloom nevertheless allowed her to feel her way to a candle, softened, a saucer with some matches, left there for the night hours, for anyone coming home late. No one came home. She struck a match several times, another, on the glass-paper: and here, at last, in the yellowness of that tremulous recognition of the brick floor, here a sliver of horrific darkness, fleeing further, but then suddenly recovering in the stillness of a snare: the blackness of a scorpion. She drew back, shut her eyes, in her final solitude: raising her head, like one who knows there’s no point pleading for kindness. And she shrank within herself, close to annihilation, a painful spark of time: and in time she had been a woman, a wife and a mother. She stopped now, terror-stricken, before the faithless weapon that still she used to push back the darkness. And the blasts and the rampaging glory of the storm followed her there, where she had gone down, down, into the dark depth of every memory, and savagely they hurled themselves at her. The repugnant snare of obscurity: the blackest stain, born from dampness and from evil.
The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories Page 29