The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  I run zealously, slowly, because the lift is involved. I slip inside. He snaps the doors shut.

  ‘Do you love me?’ I ask him softly, as the coin clicks in the metal slit.

  ‘What about you?’ he says, immediately aggressive.

  ‘Yes,’ I let out.

  ‘Hmm,’ he says, mouth closed; he presses the button, the lift starts and he stands facing the door, leaving me behind.

  ‘You haven’t answered,’ I mutter. ‘You haven’t answered,’ I repeat.

  We’ve reached the ground floor. The old lift squeals and shakes. I take advantage of the din: ‘So why do you always ask me?’ I say resentfully.

  We walk out of the lift.

  ‘Because I need to hear you repeat it,’ and with a jerk he closes the doors and slams the little iron gate behind him.

  We pass the caretaker one after the other, as stiff as two German soldiers, and wave to her with the deference of the distracted. She follows us out of the corner of her eye. Under the arch of the main entrance, his impatient voice articulates sonorously, ‘You should know it by now.’

  Then (but the caretaker can no longer hear him): ‘You don’t know,’ he says to himself, ‘it’s a dream.’

  What time is it now? This interdependence isn’t right. I’d have done better to read, to do something useful, instead of being here in the warmth, idle, in this total lethargy, in the dark.

  He doesn’t understand that it’s much healthier to go to bed early and work at dawn. The lucidity you feel in the evening, when your body is worn out, isn’t the same at all, it’s a tense, abstract, disembodied intellectual clarity, not the fine, full calm of the mind getting down to work in the morning, with the body relaxed, restored, responsive; there’s more space. Instead of which, he does everything on the edge, he has to tire himself out, that’s his temperament, feeling hassled.

  He phones me from the office, someone or other has done something or other to him and he takes it out on me. Oh, yes? I think, now I’ll show him, and as I answer him curtly, a warmth spreads through me, and maybe he senses it, because his voice grows softer and he can’t remember what it was he wanted to tell me, he’ll call me again later.

  Like when he comes home. He sits down at the table, casts a hypercritical circular glance at the dishes, unfolds his napkin, and mutters, examining the spaghetti, ‘Any news?’ and I tell him the events of the morning, ‘Today Class 3C … That colleague you know … I didn’t tell you, the father of …’ I get excited and laugh ever more loudly.

  ‘It’s impossible to understand you when you laugh and speak at the same time,’ he says, chewing with diligent haste.

  He cuts the red meat, stabs his fork into the side dish of light green curly salad, pours himself a drink and breaks the bread with calculated gestures, every now and again shooting me a glance that sizes me up and stabs me like a mouthful of food and then looking down again. I feel like one of those odalisques who are there to enliven the pasha’s meal as he bends over his food and peers every now and again to see if the little finger of that dancer arching her back in the third row is gracefully crooked.

  The lift rises, squeaking, screaming, but no, it’s stopped on the floor below. I almost get dressed again so that I can wait for him in the entrance.

  This time it’s definitely him, the lift jerks at every floor, now he’ll come in and switch on the big light: ‘Were you sleeping? Oh, I’m sorry,’ he’ll say. (I keep my eyes closed and hear him standing in the middle of the room, tense and tired, with his coat on.) ‘I didn’t mean to wake you,’ he insists in a loud voice (the hypocrite); then, as if realizing that he’s standing there exposed, he starts to undress with the gestures that are part of my sleep, then sits on the bed, causing it to sink, crushing me a little, but I don’t shift: ‘You don’t know,’ he says softly, ‘it’s raining.’

  ‘Did you get wet?’ the words brush against me.

  ‘Mmm,’ he mutters. As he speaks, his sentences run over me like clouds in a dream.

  It isn’t him. It’s someone from the apartment opposite who’s come in. I could go out. When I went to pick him up from the last but one conference – another one on ‘Literature and Society’ or some such thing – he didn’t seem annoyed with me, on the contrary, he was quite pleased, I couldn’t see him at first with all those people jammed together, I squeezed my way into the crush, and suddenly there he was, right in front of me. That evening, going home, he was cheerful; as we reached the car park, he declaimed, he speeded up so that I had to run after him, then stopped suddenly, yes, he was cheerful. But his mood changes suddenly, I don’t know why, he takes offence over trifles, withdraws and freezes. It was beautiful, though, that night, we sped in the car along the deserted streets, and all at once we slowed down to a snail’s pace on the Aventino, down Via dei Fori Imperiali, past those walls of dry bare brick, lapped by the golden glow of the discreet, considerate floodlights; then we got out in the crisp autumn air and sat down at the foot of the Basilica di Massenzio, in silence, motionless, until it was late.

  The moon rose in an arc of night, surrounded by the vaults of clay kneaded by men, the high vaults of earth as porous as the surface of the moon, old; one day, we, too, will grow old, and then, like the arid, rough, desolate moon, all you’ll have left of me will be a soft image, faded, you know how: with restraint.

  ‘Vivere in due’

  First published in the magazine Tempo presente (December 1966), and then included in the anthology Voci: Antologia di testi poetici e narrativi di autori italiani iscritti all’ENAP (1993).

  Antonio Delfini

  1907–63

  Few Italian writers intersected with the Surrealist movement, but Delfini was one of them. He was born and died in Modena, a city he both loved and detested. Although he wrote mostly in prose, he also produced two collections of experimental poetry, a very short plaquette self-published at the very beginning of his literary career and a longer volume published by Feltrinelli two years before his death. Largely self-taught, he sketched, wrote on matchbooks and created verbal collages from cut-up published texts. He hand-wrote a flyer advertising his first book, a collection of very brief stories that describe an unnamed protagonist’s wanderings in an unidentified city. An avant-garde writer to the core, Delfini’s recurring theme was a ceaseless re-elaboration of the past. His prose is synthetic, rhapsodic, idiosyncratic. Natalia Ginzburg helped edit his diaries, which Einaudi published posthumously in 1982. In them, he confesses to having begun and abandoned hundreds of books. He received the Viareggio Prize, a few months after he died. His most famous collection of stories, Il ricordo della Basca (Memories of the Basque Country), had various incarnations: it was first published in 1938, then republished in 1956 with an elaborate introduction: a tour de force that straddles artistic statement, memoir and metafiction. It was renamed Racconti (Stories) in the year of his death, published along with an unfinished fragment of a new story. This selection below, moving and despairing, is both static and catapults by leaps and bounds, distilling the mechanism of memory. Much of Delfini’s work was openly autobiographical, but here he presents an incisively drawn female protagonist (his father died when he was young, and he was raised in a household of women). The public library in Modena which bears Delfini’s name, created a prize in his honour to recognize young poets.

  The Milliner

  Translated by Ann Goldstein

  Signora Elvira was past sixty. Sitting in a soft, flower-patterned chair, with comfortable armrests, she leaned her head back. She seemed to be lost in a place that was easy to get to but painful to return from. How many nights, in the years of her youth, had she sat, exhausted, in that chair? She looked at the wide bed with the big white lace-trimmed counterpane. The counterpane was a little shabby. But it didn’t matter then. Provided Arturo returned every night! The work wasn’t so important. The millinery shop she owned on the main street could easily cut back its business. All she needed was enough to live on. Arturo earned well, and she did
n’t have to put anything aside for him. If only she managed to keep the apartment clean, buy a new counterpane every year, with more elaborate lace, make fragrant coffee of the highest quality every evening (there was the Brasile, the big bar that stayed open all night during Carnival), life would go on in the happiest way.

  Arturo was certainly a handsome man, strong, tireless. How Goldena the dressmaker envied her! She wouldn’t have thought twice about leaving her husband, who was an office worker, to be Arturo’s. Goldena the dressmaker, although she was a pretty woman, had never succeeded with Arturo. She, Elvira, an orphan, a self-made woman, had grabbed him and wouldn’t let him go. Who rode a bicycle the way he did? Who smoked a cigar like him, inserting playful, hoarse-voiced compliments between one drag and the next? That big, raspy voice, which muddled her mind, made her spoil the shape of a hat when she thought about it. What a delight the vest (she had sewed it) that clung so nicely to his broad chest!

  ‘If the Signora knew …’ one of her workers said to her in the shop.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked, disturbed.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, just to say something.

  ‘But tell me, maybe you met him somewhere last night?’

  The shop-girl burst out laughing and disappeared into the back room, humming. Elvira looked at her hands, which she had ruined by washing so many sheets and towels the day before. She was worried. She had heard from a friend of hers that Arturo was considered a man with a future and, one of these days, would be able to give up the modest position he now occupied. My God, how would she manage? She, too, would make a reputation, would build a great fashion house in Milan. There was no other way: she had to keep up with him. Not stay behind. What a surprise Marchesa Y had that night when she saw the hat with feathers arrive (the young cavalry captain would spur his horse to a little jump of pleasure, a nice hop! hop! in honour of the marchesa), which she had ordered just the day before! And how refined it was! And how it suited her! And how majestic she was! The next day, the large marchese, sitting in the café with the silver knob of his cane in his hands, saw his wife’s fluttering feathers through the smoke rings from his very aromatic cigar. The gentlemen complimented him with a wink. Later, the ladies flooded into the shop: ‘What a beautiful hat you made for the marchesa! We want one that’s just the same but doesn’t cost so much, we don’t have a lot to spend.’ The city was invaded by so many feathers in luscious colours, and an unusual softness flowed through it; the men, touching the gold watches in the pockets of their waistcoats, eyed the women happily. They passed by, swinging their hips slightly, just revealing an aching foot, feathers in the wind and bunches of violets pinned to their chests.

  Picking violets one day in early spring, in the meadows outside the city, she had slipped, and a man with a handsome bearing had said to her: ‘What nice legs, Signora!’ He helped her up and between one compliment and the next squeezed her arm hard. She had let him take her home. Her old aunt, preparing dinner, observed: ‘You have a big rip in your sleeve. At your age, thirty, do you have to be followed about on the street?’ She blushed, thinking that someone had torn her sleeve. At thirty she wasn’t yet married, and though she was an attractive woman that didn’t keep others from laughing at her behind her back.

  Once, at seventeen, she went for a walk alone with a young medical student. He stank of tobacco, had a nice tie and bad teeth. For seven days he had waited for her to emerge from the workshop of her first teacher: an old dressmaker, a friend from her mother’s youth. The teacher was still going to the Carnival parties, in the company of a seventy-year-old senator who liked to enjoy himself or to be seen enjoying himself. On those occasions he had a little dinner prepared at home, including meat pie, aspic, fruit tart, red wine from his farm in the hills, Sassolino liqueur. The porter, who dressed as a servant for the occasion, brought the dinner basket to the theatre, and served the senator and the dressmaker in the rear of the box. Although she was old, the wine emboldened her, and she climbed over the balustrade and descended into the orchestra half undressed. For two days she didn’t come to the workshop, and the girls knew that she was sobering up from the dinner.

  It was on one of those days that Elvira left the workshop at an unusual time, seizing some freedom that otherwise wouldn’t have been granted. The student asked permission to accompany her, and she accepted, walking with him along deserted back streets where in the evenings a gas lamp shone, very faintly (when the fellow passed to light it, they hid behind a column of the portico). It was the first time she’d gone out with a man, and the first time she’d been kissed. Maybe someone knew about her adventure, since everyone looked at her differently the next day. That evening a strong taste of someone else’s saliva and a Tuscan cigar lingered in her mouth, so that when her aunt asked what was wrong, she answered: ‘This food is disgusting,’ and burst into tears, running to her room to lie on the bed. She didn’t see the student any more. She could do without that wan youth, who spit with every word (even though he had the money to buy her a new shawl).

  After that, what a long time passed before she went out with a man again! She had proposals, even suitable ones. And rich shopkeepers who would have made sacrifices just to have her as their lover. No, she couldn’t, who knows why, tolerate a man. And there was an occasion when she sank quite low. One winter, a few years after the affair with the student, a cousin of hers, a dancer in the opera theatre in the city of M—, invited her to visit for a few days during Carnival. One evening in the studio of a man who pretended to paint, she, her cousin and another dancer; another evening in an apartment full of photographs of women, belonging to a young man who always paid for everyone, wherever he was. Elvira attended the orgies impassively, affecting to have fun when it was appropriate or being outraged and getting scared when her own safety was at risk. She said to the men, ‘I’m not like my friends,’ and they, laughing, after a few attempts gave up, and in their good humour turned to the other two, who were cheerful and amenable. After all, they just wanted to have some fun, and end the evening. The other girls got what they wanted: to have dinner paid for and receive some gifts, something that, without Elvira, wouldn’t have happened, she being younger and more attractive. Her friends envied Elvira her indifference: ‘Lucky you, you’re so cold, you’re spared a lot of suffering.’

  While she waited for her friends in the dressing room of the theatre, she got the idea of making a hat, something she’d never done. Her work at the dressmaker’s consisted of a little basic stitching, buttonholes, sewing on buttons, and so on … It turned out well: a big hat, which was the style then, with an enormous pink ribbon in a bow. When her cousin saw it she wanted it for herself, and her friend ordered one like it. Elvira made this one different: with loops of beads. She went home, in third class, and during the journey she thought of becoming a nun. She lowered her eyes and enjoyed thinking that others were looking at her: ‘Sister Elvira, with well-shod ankles, if you were a lady I would have kissed you’; ‘Hail Mary, forgive us our sins, Lord, Hail Mary’. And meanwhile the spiteful aunt, exasperated, waited for her niece: she hadn’t succeeded in getting her into the life and being rid of her once and for all. Elvira returned: with the rosary in hand and a mad wish to run. The years passed, the aunt grew old, and the hats and the orders and the earnings made Elvira independent, free to go and pick violets one spring day in the meadows, to slip and fall, to raise her skirt. ‘What nice legs, Signora!’ She tore a sleeve of her dress. Tomorrow will be so much better with a new dress!

  Arturo was one of the early employees of the gas company. He earned a lot. It was he who gave Elvira the initial sum necessary to set up in business. He came to the shop, content, a large man, shaking his head and his bamboo stick. She was sewing, sitting with her legs apart, and exchanged slow words in dialect with her workers, savouring each one. Every so often, lost in ecstasy, she sang a bit from La Traviata: ‘Tonight I’ll come to you, kisses’: he showed up at the shop casually, opening the door slightly, and letting in a ve
ry faint smell of the elegant officers who had passed at that moment. They were returning from eating sweets at Celestina’s pastry shop. Arturo disappeared, swallowed up by the seven-o’clock crowd, the hour when it’s whispered how Signora Altani is having an affair with the captain of the cavalry. Finish work early and then close up, and what a delightful evening! ‘Tonight I’ll come to you, kisses, with lots of nice cream puffs, all for you.’ She had to go to Celestina to buy the pastries, to the Brasile for coffee, to the Toscana for a bottle of sparkling white wine, and to the cigar store for the minghetti. Then run home to change, put on her perfume. And every pleasure passed under the domed lampshade, with its encircling fringe of multi-coloured beads. Around two, he got up from the bed. Either he had to get the train for some little matter he had to attend to, or he wanted to return to his house, because, he said, when one stays with one’s lover too much, people find something to criticize; he left her alone to enjoy the warmth of the sheets and her sated pleasure. It was another hour before she’d go to sleep, letting herself be rocked by the fantasy that always ended by transporting her back to his arms. Then she fell asleep, and she slept until a beautiful feathered hat called her back to reality. ‘Oh! Elvira, oh! Pretty Elvira,’ the neighbourhood boys sang. She went to the shop in the morning, and her strong, resolute step echoed on the pavement. That young master who was still sleeping up there, had he wanted to listen, would have understood with anguish and delight whose legs they were. But she offered the young masters nothing, she didn’t even give them a look. They could linger for hours in front of the shop window, because she would never get upset over them. What a pleasure, however, to let the sound of her own steps be heard! What strength, what line, what torment (as Arturo said), those legs! And she pounded the pavement even harder, going along proudly and saying something obscene to herself in dialect.