November 27 – The scene which took place the other night at the Cisterna, in Trastevere, between the drunk Martian and a popular film actor disgusted me. It seems that the actor insisted on the Martian agreeing to eat some spaghetti at his table. Naturally the paparazzi did not miss this chance to photograph the Martian wolfing down spaghetti, hand fed by the actor. The afternoon papers publish the photographs. The meaning of the vulgar comments is this: the Martian appreciates Roman cuisine very much, and is happy to be living in Rome, where life is undoubtedly better than in every other city on the planet.
November 28 – I stop by the offices of Il Mondo to say hello to my friends. The photographer arrives with the package full of new stuff. They reprimand him because he brings many photographs of the Martian. It seems that Pannunzio has decided to no longer publish photographs of the Martian. Enough!
December 2 – F. calls me to invite me to a cocktail party he’s throwing today in honour of the Martian. I respond, imitating the voice of the maid, saying that I’m not home. Meeting the Martian seems useless to me, among people who want to get their hands on him, some to tell him how things really are in Italy, some to invite him to another cocktail party, some to involve him in a literary prize.
December 6 – Finally I saw the Martian. It was last night, at 2 a.m., Pierino Accolti-Gil and I were quietly smoking when we saw him coming, in the company of two girls, tall, leggy, maybe two chorus-girls. He was laughing and speaking in English. He quit laughing when he passed by, even though we were purposefully not watching him. Near the news stands in Via Lombardia the Martian ran into the ex-King Faruk, who was walking slowly, bored. They did not greet each other. The ex-King Faruk was looking for some cigarettes, and he gestured at the old man who was there selling them. ‘Here you are!’ answered the old man, running towards his client.
We later passed by two prostitutes who were muttering. One was saying: ‘Will you go with the Martian? Come on, already!’ The other appeared nervous and put out: ‘Not me. You go with him. I’m not going with the Martian.’ I did not understand if her refusal was due to a fear of the unknown, or only misguided nationalism.
December 7 – Ercole Patti tells me that the Martian, invited to the Ciampino airport to welcome a movie star, was asked by the photographers to get out of the way. It seems, in fact, that his presence in a photograph may prevent their sale to magazines. ‘Hey, Mr Mars, will you move your ass?’ they said to him, laughing, but resolutely. And the Martian, sweet, smiling, without fully understanding what was being said to him, was shaking his head and his hands, waving hello.
December 18 – Vittorio Ivella and I, the other night, were speaking about Italy, when Ivella shared his hypothesis with me. I don’t know why it really amused me. He said: ‘But for what reasons would he have landed here of all places? I say he didn’t come on purpose, he fell here!’ The thought of the Martian forced to make an emergency landing, then behaving like a discoverer of new worlds, was, I repeat, very amusing to me. All night I did nothing but laugh thinking about it. Attilio Ricci claims, instead, that the Martian is a typical case of idolization of the unknown. He predicts that the Martian will end up lynched.
They also say, and I take notice of it as a matter of record, that the Martian has fallen in love with a ballerina, who plays hard to get, and speaks of him in despicable terms.
December 20 – Today for the first time I spoke with the Martian. I was in Fregene, and I recognized him immediately. He was walking along the sunny, but windy beach. He was watching the sea and stopping to pick up sea shells: some he put in his pocket. Since we were alone on the beach, he walked up to me to ask for a match. I pretended not to recognize him, so as not to offend him with my curiosity, and also because in that moment I wanted to be alone with my thoughts. It was he who told me, pointing a finger at his chest: ‘Me, Martian.’ I feigned surprise. Then the idea popped into my head that I should interview him. I intended to jot down an interview different from the rest, something a bit literary, if you know what I mean, to coax him into broader reflections than usual, which could have been justified by the proximity of the sea, if it’s true what Flaubert says that the sea inspires deep thoughts in the bourgeois. Then laziness stopped me. I should have asked questions, insisted, explained. No – I told myself – let’s content ourselves to watch him up close. His excessive height struck me in a bad way. He’s too tall, so much that he appears defenceless, like certain elderly men from the north who look younger than their real age, but who, in their childish smile, reveal an existence led without great pains and far from sin, or rather, totally uninteresting to my eyes. I invited him to get a drink. At the bar he asked for a whisky and, certainly to thank me, he placed a hand on my shoulder, smiling. For just a moment, a fleeting and slight impression, I was certain that he was unhappy.
December 21 – Last night, in a café in Via Veneto, a table of young pederasts were talking about the Martian: so audibly that one could not avoid hearing what they said. Thus it seems that the Martian has befriended a young and unknown film actor. But it also seems that the Martian lives in the preoccupation of appearing politically orthodox to the (invisible) eyes of his fellow planetsmen, who certainly monitor him with the means they possess which we cannot even imagine. Maybe some remote-controlled microphones? All hypotheses are possible. Hence, the Martian, locked in his hotel room with the young actor, after having amused himself at length, would have got up and, with the attitude of someone who intends to address a visible listener, would have said aloud, articulating his words clearly: ‘But why don’t you come live on Mars, Home of True Democracy?’
December 22 – The Martian agreed to play a small role as a Martian in a film, which would be directed by Roberto Rossellini, who is pushing for the participation of a Martian company in the financing of the film. Mario Soldati, whom I saw today at Rossetti’s, spoke to me about the new book he wants to write before beginning his new film. It’s a story that takes place in Turin, in 1932. He was very happy, Soldati, telling me the plot. He left because he was rushing to get shaved. He had purchased some paper goods. I saw him disappear like a butterfly.
January 6 – The Christmas holidays went by, as usual, melancholically. And it’s hot! I was out a little late last night in Via Veneto, because I was not sleepy. At a table at Rosati’s, there were Pannunzio, Libonati, Saragat, Barzini and other political journalists. They were speaking about proportional representation. At another table, the Martian with Mino Guerrini, Talarico and Accolti-Gil. It was obvious that they were mocking him in good humour. A bus boy was already dumping sawdust on the floor, and when I walked by I heard Accolti-Gil saying this to the Martian: ‘If you come to Capri for Easter, I will introduce you to Malaparte. Great brain, more than Levi. Insightful connoisseur, central and northern question.’ The Martian was nodding, courteous and distracted. Because a waiter, quite rudely, made it clear that it was closing time, everyone stood up. Even the Martian exited, and said goodbye to us from the doorway, then headed towards the Hotel Excelsior. Sitting at the last table, next to the gas pump at the corner of Via Lombardia, there was Faruk. He was whistling, watching the sky filled with pink clouds, he too absorbed in a melancholic thought of his own. Leaning his elbows on the wicker chair, he held his hands together in front of his mouth; he fidgeted slowly with his fingers and whistled. But softly, like a king in exile might whistle, or a Muslim who imagines the notion of pleasure. Two tables away, some taxi drivers were discussing football; and further down the old cigarette guy was bouncing around, waiting for someone to call on him. This is, for me, such a familiar picture that it never fails to move me, and in fact I smiled, thinking of this sweet Rome that mixes the most distinct destinies in a maternal, implacable whirl.
To this picture the Martian has been added, who walked past the drivers and Faruk, happily ignoring them, but sticking his chest out a bit. At the Excelsior he stopped and retraced his steps. He did not feel like going to sleep, I understood this well. The boredom of the night
, the fear of the bed, the horror of an unfriendly room that repulses you, were now keeping him glued to a display window full of toys, now in front of a flower-shop window. It seems that beautiful flowers like ours do not grow on Mars … he decided finally to cross the street, and, at this point, in the grey silence, someone yelled out ‘Hey, Martian! …’ The Martian turned around immediately, but once again the silence was broken, and this time by a long sound, lacerating, vulgar. The Martian remained still and scanned the darkness. But there was nobody there, or rather, no one to be seen. He resumed his walk; an even louder sound, multiple, roaring, nailed him to the pavement: the night seemed to be ripped open by a concert of devils.
‘Scoundrels!’ yelled the Martian.
An outburst of sounds, prolonged, crackling like an atrocious firework, which later extinguished itself in a flowery vibrato only when the Martian managed to blend in with the small crowd which loitered in front of the Caffé Strega. We were able to deduce that the youngsters were in a big group, hiding behind the news stand in Via Boncompagni.
Later on, returning home, I saw Koont, heading alone towards Villa Borghese with long, soft steps. Above the tips of the pine trees the red dot of Mars was shining, almost solitary in the sky. Koont stopped to look at it. There is, in fact, talk of an imminent departure, if only he will be able to get his spaceship back from the hotel owners who, they say, had it distrained.
‘Un marziano a Roma’
First published in the weekly magazine Il Mondo (2 November 1954) and then included in Diario notturno (Bompiani, 1956).
Beppe Fenoglio
1922–63
Fenoglio created two literary alter egos: ‘Johnny’ and ‘Milton’. Together, the names of these protagonists, Italian characters who are stand-ins for Fenoglio, add up to an Americanized version of John Milton. The seventeenth-century English poet (who also composed in Italian) was a touchstone for Fenoglio, who never graduated from university, served in the Partisan Army, and wrote about the Resistance in an unsparing key. But perhaps Fenoglio’s first act of literary resistance was to not write at all: when required, in school, to write an essay celebrating Mussolini’s March on Rome, he left the page blank. Apart from his years in the military, Fenoglio lived in the Piedmontese city of Alba, in the Langhe, where he was born. This isolated region and its peasant culture provided him with inspiration for his work. ‘The Smell of Death’ is one of twelve stories in his debut collection, I ventitré giorni della città di Alba (The Twenty-three Days of the City of Alba), published in 1952 in Vittorini’s Gettoni series. The collection, widely considered a quintessential work of literature about the Italian Resistance, describes the trauma of the partisan struggle without rhetoric, and with exceptional acuity. It was deemed a political betrayal by the Left, given that it was more truthful than ideological. Fenoglio’s knowledge of English, a language he fell passionately in love with as a teenager, was strong enough to translate Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Gerard Manley Hopkins. He also conceived and drafted his own work directly in English, saying that the last novel published in his lifetime, Primavera di bellezza (Beautiful Spring), was a ‘mere translation’ for the Italian reader. The novels Una questione privata (most recently published as A Private Affair) and Il partigiano Johnny (Johnny the Partisan) perhaps his most powerful, were published after his death from lung cancer at forty. The first draft of Il partigiano Johnny was composed in an anomalous blend of English and Italian dubbed ‘Fenglish’ by Italian literary critics.
The Smell of Death
Translated by John Shepley
If you rub the fingers of one hand on the back of the other long and hard, and then smell your skin, what you smell is the smell of death.
Carlo had learned this as a child, maybe from his mother’s conversations with other women in the courtyard, or more likely in those gatherings of children on summer nights, in that interval that falls between the last game and the first job, where from slightly older companions one learns so many things about life in general and about the relations between men and women in particular.
He smelled a definite odour one evening in another summer, when he was already a man, and that it was precisely the smell of death was demonstrated by the facts.
That evening Carlo was waiting at the end of the street where the San Lazzaro Hospital stands and opposite the grade crossing just outside the railroad station. The last train for T. left, puffing its black smoke into the evening sky and giving off a fine odour of coal and steel under friction; from its windows came a yellow light, as soft and soothing as the light from the windows of one’s home. Eight-fifteen, he said to himself, as he excitedly watched the dispatcher turning the crank to raise the barrier.
Inside the house against whose corner he was leaning, a woman, who from her voice seemed to be his mother’s age, started singing a song of her youth:
Mamma mia, dammi cento lire,
Che in America voglio andare …
Mamma mia, gimme a hundred lire,
’Cause I wanna go to America …
It would be nice to be in America, he thought – especially in Hollywood. But not tonight, tonight I want to make love in my own country. And he stuck his fists in the pockets of his trousers.
Carlo was waiting for his eighteen-year-old girlfriend, to take her out towards the fields, and there is no need to dwell on his desire, nor on the way time went by on the illuminated face of the station clock. And still she didn’t come. But it should be said that her body represented Carlo’s only riches at this harsh moment in his life, and if she didn’t show up this evening he would have to live another whole week of tension and constraint to have her again.
Thus, even when her usual hour had passed, he was reluctant to discard all hope and go away, and remained standing there superstitiously, almost as though she could not fail to come if he held out long enough. But now it was eight-forty, and looking around he saw the old people sitting on benches in the public park, half obscured by the darkness, but those who were smoking were all pointing the red tips of their cigars at him. And that woman who had been singing before – she was surely the one who had been singing before – was now out on her balcony and for some time had been gazing down at the top of his head.
From the city’s bell-towers the stroke of nine o’clock came to his ears, and so he set out for the centre of town, where other young men stroll in the piazza or sit in cafés, trying to brush women from their minds like flies from their noses.
He kept walking and every five paces he turned around to look back at that corner. He met two or three very young couples, swaying from side to side on the pavement like little drunkards, and clasping each other or separating depending on whether they were in or out of the areas of shadow between the street lamps. Carlo envied these boys with their girls, but then he said to himself: I wonder if they’re going to do what we would have done if only she’d come. Otherwise there’s no reason to envy them.
He made a slight detour to drink from the fountain in the park. He drank deeply then, raising his head, looked back one last time at that corner and saw a tall girl appear, as tall as she, with a canary-yellow jacket – then a fashionable colour and she had the same kind of jacket – and she was walking quickly towards the grade crossing.
He dashed away from the fountain, giving a long whistle in the girl’s direction as he ran along the path in the park. The old people, their legs comfortably outstretched on the gravel, hastily drew them back under the benches as he ran past whistling again.
The girl did not turn around nor slow her pace; he ran faster, almost bumping into the dispatcher, who was about to lower the barriers for the last arriving train. He jumped across the tracks and came up behind the girl.
She was walking stiffly and rapidly past the gasworks, and he stopped, for he had just realized that it wasn’t she, but another girl with more or less the same build and wearing the same kind of jacket. But by the time he realized this, he had already whistled a third time and the girl
, hearing him, looked back over her shoulder without stopping and saw him standing in the middle of the street, his arms drooping at his sides. She turned her head and proceeded still more rapidly towards the dark end of the street.
He was out of breath and failed to see the man whom the dispatcher saw bend down to pass under the barriers and run up behind Carlo. But instead of hitting Carlo from behind, the man circled halfway around until he was ahead of him and with bony fingers clutched Carlo’s biceps – all this without saying a word.
At that moment Carlo knew nothing about him except that his name was Attilio, that he had been a soldier in Greece, then a prisoner in Germany, and people said he had come back with TB.
Carlo in his turn clutched the other man’s arms and they began to struggle. Looking over Attilio’s shoulder, he had a brief glimpse of the girl, who had shrunk into a doorway in an effort to hide but was betrayed by the exposed edge of her yellow jacket.
Attilio had attacked him but didn’t look him in the face; indeed, he had lowered his head on Carlo’s chest and his hair kept brushing his chin. He squeezed the muscles of Carlo’s arm and Carlo squeezed his, but Carlo was unable to open his mouth and cry out: What the hell’s the matter with you? For now he smelled – he saw it enter his nostrils like dirty white smoke – the smell of death, that smell that can be reproduced, if much too lightly, by doing what we said at the beginning. So he kept his mouth clamped shut, and when at the height of his exertions he could no longer breathe enough air with his nose, he twisted his head away until his neck bone creaked. It was while twisting his head that he saw the dispatcher, standing there watching and making no move to intervene. Couldn’t he understand that they were fighting, when the two of them looked like a couple of drunkards leaning on each other for support? But what the dispatcher couldn’t imagine was how they were gripping each other’s muscles. Carlo was wondering how Attilio’s frightfully skinny arms were able to resist his grasp and not turn into pulp. But Attilio’s grip was terribly strong too, and if he hadn’t had to keep himself from swallowing the smell of death, Carlo would have cried out in pain.
The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories Page 32