The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  – It’s just that Mario’s so busy, Adriana said. He never gets home before seven-thirty, eight o’clock. And after dinner he goes out, he always has.

  – They’re all the same, all men, her mother said. They’re one big selfish lot. I remember when I was nursing …

  The bell began to ring. A collective ‘Ah’ of satisfaction was heard.

  – Finally, Adriana said.

  – But I hoped women today were better off, the mother said. I’ve lived like a slave.

  Adriana started laughing.

  – I’m not exaggerating, the mother went on. If you think it’s funny, good for you. But think about it, Adriana: what pleasures do we women get out of life? At times I think I’d have been better off not being born.

  They were silent, listening to the conversations around them. Then, suddenly, they had to move out of the way to avoid a collision with a railway man who rushed past shouting:

  – Step back, everyone! Step back!

  The two red eyes of the train sprang out of the dark countryside. For a moment it seemed immobile, then it seemed to race towards them at breakneck speed, and finally it passed by slowly, stopping at the last minute with a tremendous jerk, while people calmly gathered up their things.

  Mother and daughter embraced. The mother was one of the first to board and, looking out, she called to Adriana, who was standing in front of the window.

  – We’ve still got a little time, Adriana said. It always stops for a few minutes.

  – Get going if you need to, the mother said.

  – Dinner’s ready in any case, Adriana replied.

  – It’s seven-thirty, the mother said. Who knows what that man will make a fuss about? I can almost hear him. He’s always done what he’s wanted, unlike me …

  Their separation now looming, the conversation broke apart.

  – Give everyone my best, Adriana said.

  – I will, the mother replied.

  The station had emptied out. Three or four people had lingered to say goodbye to those leaving.

  – Ready to go, Adriana said.

  She’d seen the captain raise his paddle.

  – Thank goodness, the mother said.

  The train started to move.

  – Say hi to Mario. Tell him I’m sorry not to have said goodbye.

  – Lots of kisses to Dad! Ariana shouted out.

  She stood there waving her handkerchief for as long as she could see something, or thought she did.

  ‘Alla stazione’

  Written in 1945 and likely to have been published in a local newspaper. Later included in the collection La visita (Einaudi, 1962), updated by the author to include his early stories.

  Cristina Campo

  1923–77

  A writer’s writer who published very little in her lifetime, Campo, who came from an aristocratic family, was the daughter of an openly Fascist composer. She was born with a grave heart condition, inoperable at the time, which prevented her from playing vigorously with other children and from attending school. This sense of solitude characterizes her project as a writer, which mines a consistently interior, spiritual vein. Her creativity was a vocation in the truest sense; always at a remove, indifferent to attention or success. Her real name was Vittoria Guerrini; the name Cristina Campo was invented when she was around thirty years old. Educated by tutors but largely self-taught, she learned to read in French, German, Spanish and Latin. Katherine Mansfield was one of the first authors she translated. She also translated the work of Emily Dickinson, John Donne, William Carlos Williams and Simone Weil, introducing the latter’s writing to Italy. Campo lived for most of her life in Rome, on a secluded piazza dominated by an enormous abbey, and was openly involved for twenty years with Elémire Zolla, a married man who was a scholar and philosopher of esoteric doctrine and mysticism. She wrote criticism about fairy tales and turned emphatically to religion towards the end of her life. Perfection was her theme, aesthetic as well as moral. This autobiographical story, isolated in the appendix of a volume of her essays, introductions and translator’s notes, is a hallucinatory remembrance of an unconventional, encumbered childhood. It is about the enchantment of reading, the enigmas of adulthood and the slippery border between literature and life. The book’s title is Sotto falso nome (Under a False Name). She left behind several volumes of magnificent letters, all of them signed Cristina Campo.

  The Golden Nut

  Translated by Jenny McPhee

  Ave, viaticum meae peregrinationis.

  Cicero

  Children born on Sunday have the gift of being able to see the fairies who preside over their baptism.

  Karl Felix Wolff

  Over a string of long and glorious summers, every afternoon at half past four, the watered-down gravel on the driveway crackled furtively, almost ceremoniously, under the tyres of the blue Dilambda. The car had driven up along the ancient Via Cavaliera’s scalding, dusky portico, flashed beneath the light-splattered leaves of the linden trees lining the Via dei Cappuccini, passed by the inane patrician gates surrounding the Villa Revedin, in order to arrive at the top of our hill. Reacting to the cold roar of the tyres, combined with the midday heat and cicadas, I threw my tricycle on to the lawn, and Luigi, priest-like in his red jacket, flung open the small glass door wreathed in bronzed ivy, while my beautiful older cousins, Zarina and Maria Sofia, fluttered forth from the car like birds. The pure white of the last bridal-wreath spirea, the petals already strewn over the gravel, instantly mirrored the new whites – my cousins’ long gloves, their little sectional cloche hats, the freshly washed fur of their old Sealyham terrier, and above all, their bags, those deep sacks made of linen or canvas in which, afternoon upon afternoon, from the gloomy and oppressive rooms on Via Cavaliera, their old toys made their way up to me.

  The days of agitated cries of What-did-you-bring-me associated with those bags were over for me. Now, smiling silently, my heart in tumult, I walked hand in hand between my older cousins as we headed towards the small green iron table surrounded by tall wooden chairs, these also green and dotted with hard little bubbles of paint, ready to drink our tea under the Cedar of Lebanon. My mother came down, having recently awoken, wearing a violet kimono and carrying two or three pillows, a yellow-rose print on their thick cotton cases. Kisses and minor exclamations ensued: ‘But why have you come down so soon?’ ‘Goodness, I’ve been up for over an hour.’ ‘Didn’t you sleep?’ ‘And yet how beautiful you are, a rose.’ ‘Oh, but you needn’t say so, I hardly sleep any more.’ ‘But what a splendid afternoon.’ ‘Oh, yes, it seems like a dream to be here once again.’ Then my mother would see me, a smile slipping across her lips, and on the round table, amidst polite laughter, the beautiful bags opened up like corollas beneath glowing faces. Two of those faces, my mother’s and Maria Sofia’s, were velvet-smooth and peach-brown and they looked identical, even though Maria Sofia was younger. Zarina’s face, covered in golden freckles, had a Japanese look. Her real name was Maria Cesarina, but she had called herself Zarina in honour of the unfortunate Russian empress. And in the silence, thick with midday heat and cicadas, small objects emerged from the bags and were placed in a circle on the table.

  It is, perhaps, perverse, but maybe also useful, for a child to be brought up among people who are older than she is by at least twenty or thirty years. It is certain, in any case, that my childhood, in many ways already asymmetrical, was, in an indescribably peaceful manner, superimposed upon by another, already lived – that of my older cousins and their brothers, the last children to wear straw hats with wide blue ribbons, the last children whose childhoods hadn’t, in fact, been stolen from them. I do not want to dwell excessively on those austere and bewitching toys I was in the process of inheriting on those afternoons – the dark walnut dolls’ house, its rooms so warm and sweet and solemn; the bed with the ornate headboard; the stout little rocking chair; the goblet-flower basin with the tiny blue jug in the shape of a closed flower bud. And the minuscule green wool car
pets, the quilted bedspreads and that incongruous bench, sturdy on its corrugated legs, which belonged to the dolls’ house, but evoked those long periods outdoors when I had been inspired to create a string of miniature vegetable patches in the darkest corners of the garden, patiently girding them with twigs from the spirea shrubs. These toys had made it through a war, having crossed, with a heroic and immeasurable leap, the abyss that had split apart the century, in order to come to rest on the fragile edge of the last ridge where we still endured – but for how long? The last toys, the dying proof of an era when, in relationship to childhood, the wink did not yet exist, a time when play was both a prophecy of, and a preparation for, that singular and always insufficient répétition générale de la vie, which is, in fact, childhood: the carriage which is only a smaller carriage, the wooden horse a miniature of a real horse, the doll who is a little woman or girl – but never an ambiguous, symbolic puppet. Just like the three-year-old toddler in jewels and ribbons holding a rose, framed on a wall in my bedroom, looked more like a plump little grandmother, and was, in any case, the only creature I yearned for in that adult-filled childhood of mine. (‘It’s an old portrait of the Princess of Linguaglossa, the daughter of Prime Minister Crispi. Poor thing, she is no longer of this world,’ I heard it said, enigmatically, at home.)

  During one of those summers when they brought me back to the house on the hill, I learned to read. In the city where we spent our winters, while taking walks through the streets with my young father – who carried his walking stick straight up as if it were a sabre, the handle tucked into the pocket of his coat – I would follow the tip of that walking stick which brusquely directed itself towards signs indicating antique or pastry shops, and I quickly figured out the relationship, the gravitational law, that brought letters together. The news reached my godmother, the solitary Gladys Vucetich, and she, too, came up that summer from her house on Via dei Cappuccini. She appeared to be in the permanent shadow not only of those enormous cedar trees but of her entire family line of military heroes, for whom she remained in a state of mourning. She came up in her black veils, oppressed by an almost mythological illness (which hadn’t kept her from ‘spending the entire war with the Red Cross’), her heavy step lightened by the striking of her black cane, her head covered by a rubber rain bonnet. Her very light-blue eyes – so light that her eyelids seemed transparent – were fixed in a slightly maniacal stare, one that held a persistent presentiment of disaster. Gladys Vucetich had herself once discovered in that huge impenetrable house (where the silence was such that at the very far end of the gloomy dining room one could hear the taps dripping in the distant kitchen filled with cookware from Carnia), the books of her childhood. And she came now too, with her oracular gift, no less prophetic than the gold pendant she had placed around my neck the day I was baptized, inscribed with all four of my names: Vittoria, Maria Angelica, Marcella, Cristina.

  The books had very durable covers with lovely faded colours, and some looked quite gothic. On the cover of one, I recall a tall solemn female figure wearing a yellow headband ushering forward a young girl, her hands on her shoulders. Where to? The small space allocated to these two figures didn’t afford an answer. A kind of sweet horror transpired there, above all, in the face of the little child, who was a miniature replica of the woman – the same headband, hers greenish, her hair a little blonder, the same long peaked sleeves. Her eyes wide with astonishment, the child leaned back against the person standing over her, the anguished reluctance of her action revealing, like a mirror does, extreme fascination. Written underneath in eight large gothic letters was: FAIRY NIX. Nothing else about that feminine image of life’s journey hinted at its mysteries.

  As was true for toy designers in that prediluvian era, the book illustrators would never even have understood if someone had suggested that they ‘assist the child’ in accepting the mystical characters she encountered (thereby, inevitably, ensuring she wouldn’t believe in them). Later, incorporated into that same vile pretext was the irreversible, rigid and programmatic distortion of figures that came about with the advent of cartoons: the smirks on the faces of the fake-baby-animal-like gnomes; the ogres’ wide-open eyes (‘Come now, don’t you see he’s not real? Can’t you see that even he doesn’t believe he’s real?’); iridescent inconsistency, from beetles to princes and princesses (‘In place of these characters here, who don’t have faces, you can put whomever you want, yourselves, for example’).

  Gladys Vucetich’s books belonged to an era of her childhood at the turn of the century known as the ‘Liberty’ period and the artists had illustrated the fairy tales extremely seriously, using Liberty-style figures. Their hands had been guided by the same delicate excitement evident, for example, in the creation of the scenery for The Tempest, the same deliberate, meticulous black-and-white designs dedicated to the novel Demetrio Pianelli or to The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard. The result was an adorably gloomy jumble of girls who looked like Anna Pavlova. They wore gauze wings and star-studded crowns as if attending a Spanish-style tea party at a Hapsburg court in 1880. It was a mildly lugubrious atmosphere, in which wasp-waisted princesses, likely to be wearing corsets and wigs, dwelled in enormous sombre-grey palaces, filled with potted palms, balconies, curtains with heavy silk tassels and thick bannisters. Those fateful places and people, I discovered at the time, with a shiver, were really no different from the disturbing, yellowed cabinet card photographs of my young grandmother and other dead relatives. My mother always carried these around with her in green leather cases whenever she travelled. Those photographs of terribly distant smiles always made me so anxious, because behind the lady standing there, brittle under her mass of hair, beyond the open curtains, beyond the haze and foliage, there was the constant oppressive threat of a thunderstorm.

  Instead of a feathered toque, the princess in the book once owned by Gladys Vucetich wore a crown on her head, but that threat behind her fragile shoulders also culminated in stupendous and sorrowful secrets. From the ornate double-arched window, she could vertiginously whizz into the room with a large black-and-white swallow in her arms, a tiny King of the Elves riding on the bird’s back. And from under the raised curtains, slowly, tragically, in creeped nothing less than the Monster, that desolate and amorous nightmare, the nocturnal visitor who exposed the slim and pale Belinda (representing, for me, my grandmother’s childhood) to the horror. And the Monster, as those sombre and virtuous artists had depicted him, was nothing other than a Monster – a pathetic and unmentionable chimaera, half-griffin, half-serpent, drawn with maniacal precision, scale by scale, coil by coil. And because of this mad loyalty to his name, it tormented me to no end to see huge tears flowing from his eyes as he lay on the floor, poor Monster, wearing his crown – and Belinda sitting at the table at that ceremonial hour, the dinner and music hour, alone, unmoving, dauntless.

  This figure, together with another, and for an entirely different reason, illustrated in the fairy tale of the ‘Twelve Dancing Princesses’, occupied a special place for me. In this one, a soldier of fortune guarded the bedroom of twelve princesses who had caused the king, their father, to become suspicious, because the soles of his daughters’ shoes were always pristine. This soldier, shrewdly pouring into his beard the drugged wine the girls offered him each evening, managed to discover the lake-filled underground realms where the princesses descended at midnight, through a trapdoor and down a swirling spiral staircase, in order to go dancing on an island with their young lovers. And those twelve, revealing their naked shoulders to the soldier, their abundant hair pulled up, were no less fascinating and palpable than the most beautiful of my older cousins who in that moment – shoulders, hips, delicate chest, all transparent as the sunlight penetrated her white dress – was heading towards the spigot concealed beneath a small iron hatch, which magically liberated, as if from the centre of the earth, a fountain of water gushing on to the lawn. There with my cousins it was easy to believe in every word of the story, to comprehend almost a paralle
l version, hearing those delectable creatures with their silken skin, their almond eyes, whispering as they drank their tea under the Cedar of Lebanon, with their ladyfingers and their langues de chat biscuits, sitting in their green chairs covered in paint bubbles, (certain, in their naivety, that no one would understand what they were saying): ‘We had fun last night, didn’t we?’ ‘Oh, how amusing it is to sneak behind the back of that poor soldier!’ ‘Let’s hope Papa doesn’t suspect anything!’ ‘Don’t be silly, he has no idea …’ In the book, of course, they sounded completely different, breathed a different air; certainly the real life of my beautiful cousins was a life of fun until the midnight curfew, the hour at which, like the poor drugged sentinel, I had to go to sleep between the two high rails of my brass bed; the hour of provocation and delirium, which I didn’t get a real taste of until the following day, when I would spell out the words, my finger on the page, while seated at the edge of a bed of rust-coloured zinnias, so engrossed a stream of saliva fell from the corner of my mouth. I was following the twelve princesses as they made their way down the twists and turns of the spiral staircase towards the centre of the earth, like the twelve hours that head towards the dark and fluid midnight of life … But suddenly from the garden I heard my mother’s voice meekly questioning the cook who was standing at the kitchen window: ‘Cook, have you done the shopping? You know how important it is that the professor …’ I imagined her large, dazzling and anxious eyes, while I, without distinguishing one woe from another, listened to that other sweet, bewitched creature, Anatrella of ‘The Three Oranges’, floating in the castle moat beneath the windows of the royal kitchens:

  ‘Cook, my cook, in the castle do they sleep?’

  ‘Anatrella, my dear, I don’t hear a peep.’

  ‘Cook, my cook, you must not slack,