The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  ‘Very well, all is fine. Yes, darling, go ahead and have a beautiful bathing suit made for yourself.’

  She clapped her hands and jumped for joy, then tenderly kissed all of the sweat off my face in gratitude.

  Over the next few days she was very busy. As for her research, studies, attempts, doubts and resolutions regarding the construction of her bathing suit, I wasn’t privy to her secrets. She went out a few times during the day and stayed in her room for long hours with a seamstress. She wouldn’t allow me to know a thing. She wanted to surprise me with an unexpected masterpiece. Her face was full of happiness, day and night.

  Preoccupied with my virile thoughts, after a few days I had almost forgotten about her feminine pastime. But on Wednesday morning, when I took off my jacket before heading out, Aminta said goodbye, then added:

  ‘When you return in an hour it will be ready.’

  ‘What will be ready?’

  ‘Oh, the bathing suit.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, hurry back and you’ll see. It’s absolutely marvellous.’

  When I returned home less than an hour later, a sliver of suspicion was still trying to insidiously act upon me. Was it possible that this little story concerning the bathing suit marked the start of a campaign to get me to take her to the seaside?

  I went into my study where I heard her voice coming from the other side of the door to her room.

  ‘Don’t come in. I’m ready. Sit down on the couch.’

  ‘OK, I won’t come in. OK, I’m sitting on the couch.’

  I stared at the door to her room.

  When it opened a great light entered the study, and at the centre of that light Aminta stood wearing her bathing suit. My heart skipped a beat.

  Aminta came towards me. She seemed to be lit up, propelled by all the light in the sky. Trembling in ecstasy, I didn’t move from where I was. Aminta stopped in the middle of the room.

  It was truly marvellous. Pale-rose silk draped down from her throat accentuating her breasts, then gathered around her hips in a band of tiny pleats flaring into a short skirt that didn’t dare graze her flesh, the undulating hem quivering suggestively. Layered on top of the minuscule skirt’s pink material was a flounce of acute triangles, their colour emerald green. Aminta stood in the middle of the room; in the light cascading from her eyes, the pale rose of the silk bathing suit changed from minute to minute into a thousand mother-of-pearl reflections. The green of the flounce suggested a swarm of shiny scarab beetles flying across a sunset.

  Amidst that effusion of tender colours, the white of her arms and legs became even paler. On her feet she wore two small green satin slippers. Aminta was laughing with all of her soft flesh, with her entire green-and-pale-rose bathing suit; she laughed and shook like a plant in a garden; and the room was filled with the scent of paradise.

  I didn’t have the courage to move. Aminta was happy to be alive. Her laugh sounding like silver bells flying out the window and rushing up to heaven, Aminta sat herself down on the carpet in the middle of the room, her arms behind her and her white legs crossed, her torso reclining backwards and stretched out as if she were offering herself up to God.

  Her gaze landed on me. I still hadn’t moved and I held my heart in my hands. At the sight of my emotion, she was touched with affection and gratitude.

  Still trembling, I approached her. I sat beside her on the carpet and gently took her hand. I caressed her whole body with my eyes, then I timidly touched the pale-rose silk of her bathing suit with my forehead. Aminta’s eyes, full of smiles, were swelling with tears of affection. They contained a message for me. In a trembling voice, she said:

  ‘You see how beautiful it is, with no need to go to the seaside?’

  I felt the entirety of her innocent soul pressing against me. I was overcome by love. And I, too, now searched for something simple to say to her. With my cheek resting on her cool arm, I whispered:

  ‘Your modest desires deserve a prize.’

  She softened and once again laughed joyfully. But when I didn’t join in she stopped laughing and looked at me expectantly. Something fluttered in the air and touched me. I saw that she also had felt something. Her shoulders instantly trembled and she said:

  ‘What is it? How beautiful!’

  The whole room filled with a kind of light breath which then immediately disappeared. All around me I saw a flickering light; this too passed before my and Aminta’s eyes, then fled away.

  ‘Oh, how fabulous this is!’ Aminta murmured.

  She was sitting at the edge of the carpet and I was further back, almost behind her. A sweet, strange murmuring sound reached us, fading at her feet. I saw that she was listening intently.

  The ground murmured again, while before our eyes everything in the room vanished into a light mist infiltrated by blue shadows and silver flashes.

  By now the murmuring coming from the ground had become regular and frequent. It originated far away, swished nearby and died down at her feet. The murmuring then became prolonged: one, coming close, seemed to expand. Suddenly, she let out a cry and drew back her feet.

  ‘Look, look,’ she cried.

  I looked. Her green slipper was wet, as was her foot up to her ankle.

  And again, again …

  The gushing increased. The sound of tiny waves arriving at the edge of the carpet continued, pushing at her feet and alongside her legs. Fearlessly, she leaned forward, plunged her hands into those waves, then lifted them out dripping with water.

  ‘The sea, the sea.’

  The silver and blue mist around us filled with light and the carpet burned like sand. Aminta dived in, outstretched, her breasts extending over the edge, then she came back up, the wet silk clinging to her chest, her nipples erect. I stared at her, ecstatic, and listened to the sea, which had come to visit us.

  Suddenly, a bigger wave reached me and I felt the water rising as far as my calves.

  I jumped to my feet, alarmed: ‘Aminta, I’d better go and put on my bathing suit too.’

  ‘Yes,’ she cried. ‘There’s one in the bottom drawer of your bureau, but hurry.’

  And both of us were very happy.

  ‘La spiaggia miracolosa ovvero Premio della modestia (Aminta)’

  Written between 1925 and 1927 and published in a national newspaper, then included in Donna nel sole e altri idilli (Mondadori, 1928) and in Miracoli (Mondadori, 1938).

  Romano Bilenchi

  1909–89

  Bilenchi, from Florence, is an elusive figure, and an interesting study in extremes. He was known for obsessive revising and rewriting, admired for his unconventional and abstract coming-of-age tales. And yet he has slipped, somehow, through the literary cracks, still without a volume in Mondadori’s Meridiani series to his name. Fascist as a youth, he broke with the regime, disillusioned, and became a Communist, but given that he did not fully support Soviet policy, eventually left the party. He started publishing in his early twenties and wrote several collections of short stories and novels, including the celebrated long story ‘La siccità’ (‘The Drought’) set in a deliberately unidentified place. Composed in 1940, it became part of a volume of three limpid, chiselled stories called Gli anni impossibili (The Impossible Years). He funnelled his energy into journalism after the Second World War, helping to found the magazine Il contemporaneo and serving as editor of the Nuovo Corriere of Florence, an influential left-wing newspaper of the 1940s and 1950s. In 1958, about midway through his so-called ‘silent’ phase, Bilenchi decided to publish a rigorously revised volume of his short stories. His objective was to prune his language to its essentials; his labours were rewarded by the Premio Bagutta ‘vent’anni dopo’ (a prize to recognize work in retrospect; in this case, twenty years later), proof that his silence had been in fact an exceptionally productive one. In 1972 after the release of a novel called Il bottone di Stalingrado (The Button of Stalingrad), he won the Viareggio Prize. This story, from the collection Anna e Bruno, concerns a you
ng boy’s growing frustration with being misnamed, misconstrued and misunderstood. But its central theme – the inexorable specificity of place, and its correlation with identity – illuminates the intensely regional nature of Italy, even today.

  A Geographical Error

  Translated by Lawrence Venuti

  The inhabitants of the city of F. don’t know the geography of their country, of their own home. When I left G. to study at F., I immediately noticed that these people had a mistaken idea of the location of my native town. As soon as I mentioned G., they told me, ‘Oh, you’re from the Maremma.’

  One day, then, while the professor of Italian was explaining the work of some ancient Italian writer I no longer recall, he began to speak of certain shepherds who in the windows of their huts hung sheepskin tanned very finely instead of glass. For some reason I stood up from the last desk, where I was sitting, and said, ‘Yes, it’s true: among us as well farm workers attach the skins of rabbits or sheep to their cabin windows in place of glass, so great is their poverty.’ For some reason I stood up and said this. Perhaps I wanted to make myself seem clever to the professor; perhaps I was driven by a humanitarian impulse on behalf of poor people and I wanted to testify to my classmates, all of them city dwellers, that the professor had said something right, that such poverty really existed in the world. Apart from the poverty, however, the affirmation was a product of my imagination. In my life – God knows whether I had ever wandered around the countryside – only once did I happen to see a windowpane patched with a piece of paper; and the farmer’s wife, moreover, had practically apologized, saying that as soon as someone from the family could go to the city, they would buy a brand-new windowpane. No sooner was I standing before the class than I felt every impulse checked, and I realized that I had said something very stupid. I hoped that the professor might not be familiar with the customs of my region, but at my outburst, he raised his head from his book and said, ‘Don’t talk nonsense.’ After a moment, he laughed and everybody followed suit, if only to please him. ‘But wait a minute,’ he then said. ‘Perhaps you’re right. Your town, G., isn’t it in the Maremma? In the Maremma they probably still dress in sheepskin.’

  Everybody burst into laughter again. Someone, perhaps to point out that the professor and I were on the same level of stupidity, guffawed ambiguously. I turned to grasp that uncertain yet unique solidarity with my position, but the first classmate I encountered, to avoid compromising himself, called me ‘Bagpiper’ and imitated playing the bagpipes characteristic of rural areas. Another said, ‘Did you ever see sheep dung?’ and in a chorus the others chanted, ‘Baa, baa!’

  I began – this was my error – to respond to each of them as they opened their mouths. I was one of the smallest and most ingenuous students in the class, and very soon the whole gang preyed upon me. Although they belonged to distinguished families, the class included the son of a nouveau riche shopkeeper, as I gathered from the mammas and daddies who would come to the school every month: they spoke their minds to me. Finally, with tears in my eyes, taking advantage of a moment of silence, I shouted, ‘Professor, G. is not in the Maremma.’

  ‘It is in the Maremma.’

  ‘No, it is not in the Maremma.’

  ‘It is in the Maremma,’ said the professor resolutely. ‘I have friends all across your region and often I go to hunt larks with them. I know the town well. It is in the Maremma.’

  ‘We natives of G. also go to hunt larks in the Maremma. But the Maremma is at least eighty kilometres from my town. We see it as a very different place. Besides, G. is a city,’ I said.

  ‘But I’ve seen herdsmen precisely at the market in G.,’ he responded.

  ‘That’s impossible. I’ve always lived there and I’ve never seen any herdsmen.’

  ‘Don’t insist. You wouldn’t be trying to suggest that I’m an idiot, would you?’

  ‘I’m not trying to do anything,’ I said. ‘But G. is not in the Maremma. Travelling peddlers come to the market dressed as redskins. Because of this you could assert that G. is in America.’

  ‘You’re also witty,’ he said. ‘But before calling you stupid and throwing you out of the class, I shall demonstrate to your classmates that G. is located in the Maremma.’ He sent a boy to fetch the map of the region from the science classroom, so that there too they knew about my dispute and were amusing themselves at my expense. On the map, despite the fact that I didn’t allow a single one of his assertions to go unchallenged, the professor abolished the actual boundaries of the province, created new imaginary ones, and managed to convince my classmates, relying on the scale of 1:1,000,000, along with various other fabrications, that G. is really in the Maremma.

  ‘It isn’t true that G. is in the Maremma,’ I finally struck back, ‘since we take ‘Maremmano’ to be synonymous with an uncouth, ignorant man.’

  ‘In you, then,’ he concluded, ‘we have the proof that the people of G. are authentic Maremmani. I have known few boys as uncouth and ignorant as you. You’re still wearing those shaggy knee socks.’ At that point, he looked me up and down. The others did the same. I felt I wasn’t as elegant as my classmates. I fell silent, humiliated. From that day onward I was the ‘Maremmano’. But what irritated me most, in the end, was the geographical ignorance of the professor and my classmates.

  I could not bear the Maremma. I had been seized by an intense aversion at the first document that happened to come before my eyes concerning the territory and its inhabitants. I had previously read many books about the horsemen of the American prairies, and I had seen innumerable films about their astounding adventures – books and films that had excited me. A couple of years of my life had been dedicated to the horses, lassoes, huge hats and pistols of those extraordinary men. In my heart there was no room for anybody else. When they arrived to free sidekicks captured by the Indians, I felt that their fluttering little flag represented freedom; and I would have hurled myself at the throat of whoever declared himself on the side of White Deer and Son of Eagle. When the wagon train, forced to form a circle to brave the attack of the murderous Indians, would return joyful and ready to set forth over the immense deserted prairies and the deep mountain gorges, I felt as if men had again won the right to traverse the world. The names of those horsemen – I used to know the names of every hero of every serialized novel and every film – were always on my lips. I judged every person by comparing him to them, and very few withstood the comparison. When I read that a stone’s throw from my house – one might say – there lived men who lassoed wild animals, tamed bulls, dressed in Far West gear (more or less) and camped at night beneath the starry sky wrapped in blankets around blazing fires with their rifles and faithful dogs close by, I burst into a fit of laughter. I couldn’t even take seriously the stories about the faithful dogs, which are common and accepted throughout the world. I pored over many maps and increasingly convinced myself that in an area so close to me there couldn’t possibly be wild animals, brave men or any likelihood of adventures. Nor could there be the sweetest dark-haired women who sang on canvas-covered wagons and, if need be, loaded their partners’ weapons. No, the horsemen of the Maremma were poor copies of the heroes of my acquaintance. Those in the books and films constantly fought against Indians and robbers; but there, a stone’s throw away, what robbers could there be? The era of the famous old bandits seemed to be distant, if they had ever existed; I had my doubts about them as well.

  When I went to study at F., this is precisely the way I thought. I could not therefore stand the nickname ‘Maremmano’.

  I used to play football with skill, but also with a certain roughness, notwithstanding that I was small and thin. I immediately distinguished myself the first time I went on the field with my classmates, and they put me at inside left forward on the squad that represented the high school in the student championship. I played several games, earning much applause.

  ‘The Maremmano is good,’ they would say. ‘He must’ve been trained with the wild colts. The h
erdsmen taught him a bunch of sly tricks.’

  The gibes and taunts, since I was certain that they contained some sincere praise, did not in fact irritate me. I would smile and the others quickly fell silent. We were now close to the end of the championship with a good chance of coming in first, and I promised myself that, because of services rendered in the school’s honour – imagine a game won by a single point that I had scored – I would not be called ‘Maremmano’ in future. In the last match, however, an ugly incident occurred. On the way downfield I happened to turn my back to the opposing goal. They passed me the ball from the right. I turned to shoot on the volley. The goalie had guessed the move and dived forward to block both leg and ball, but my kick caught him squarely in the mouth. He passed out. I had broken three of his teeth. His mates heaped threats on me. I said that I hadn’t done it on purpose, it was an accident, I was a close friend of the goalie, who was staying in the very same pensione as me, but the students supporting the other squad, who were very numerous in the audience, began to shout, ‘Maremmano, Maremmano, Maremmano.’

  I saw red, and turning towards the spectators who were shouting more loudly, I made an obscene gesture. The referee sent me off the field. As I was leaving, the shouts and insults intensified. I saw that even the girls were shouting.

  ‘Maremmano, Maremmano, Maremmano – he comes from G.’

  My team-mates must have been among those who were shouting. How else could everyone know that I was born in G.? I felt deprived of any solidarity and, head lowered, I walked towards the dressing room.

  ‘Maremmano, Maremmano, Maremmano, you’re still wearing those shaggy knee socks.’

  The fact that the others didn’t like my knee socks was unimportant to me. It was a question of taste. I have always liked woollen things, hand-made and rather heavy. To me the socks were very handsome, and I didn’t blame them for my troubles, even though they were constantly the object of critical remarks and satire. On that occasion too, I was angered above all by the injustice my tormentors were committing against G. by continuing to believe that it was located in the Maremma. I went back to the spectators and sought to explain the error that those ignorant people were making, but by dint of the laughter, shouts, pushes and even kicks in the trousers, I was chased to the dressing room.