The next day the headmaster summoned me and suspended me for a week because of the gesture I had made to the spectators, a gesture that dishonoured the school. I opened my heart to the headmaster, hoping that at least he might understand that G. was not in the Maremma. He listened to me at length, but his face wore the same derisive expression as my classmates’, and at the end of my speech, he confirmed the punishment. Perhaps he believed that I was something of an idiot.
My first impulse was to write home and beg my father and mother to send me to study in another city. But how could I explain my punishment? I would not have been understood; in fact, they would have scolded me. They were making sacrifices to support me at school. I decided to put up with everything. On my return to school after the suspension, the offences against G. and me multiplied. Summer was approaching, however, and with summer, vacation would come. At home I would think about what to do the following year; perhaps I would abandon my studies and find a job. But just then the worst trouble befell me.
One Sunday morning, having left my pensione early to enjoy the bright colours of late spring, I saw the walls plastered with vivid posters and groups of people lingering to admire them. The three figures that stood out in the posters immediately made me turn up my nose: a bull, his head lowered as if in the act of hurling himself into the street; a slender colt pawing the ground; and a herdsman who was looking at the two animals with contemptuous self-confidence. I drew closer. The posters announced that next Sunday, in a field near the hippodrome, for the first time in a city, the horsemen of the Maremma would perform in thrilling feats of derring-do.
I had never been in the Maremma, nor had I ever seen the herdsmen except in photographs. A better occasion to laugh at them could not have been offered to me. Besides, I liked immensely the place where the event would take place. As the river leaves the city, it withdraws into the countryside through bizarre bends, finally free of the houses and bridges. Between the right riverbank and a row of hills lie some very beautiful parks with wooden cafés and enormous trees; there are also pretty green meadows surrounded by well-kept boxwood hedges, which suddenly open up amid the trees. I liked the green meadows and hedges even more than the riverbank, and on the afternoons when I did not have class, I would never miss going to visit them. I would sit at the borders, next to the hedges, and from there observe the low, tender grass, which filled my soul with joy.
‘I shall go there Sunday,’ I decided, and at noon, on my return to the pensione, I invited my mess-mates, the goalie I had injured in the football match and two students in my high school to go to the performance with me.
‘We’ve already seen the posters,’ said the goalie. ‘We’ll come to admire your teachers.’ The others also accepted and on the appointed day we walked to the site of the performance. I was not expecting the huge crowd, drawn there, I thought, more by the splendid day than by the herdsmen and their animals. There were beautiful ladies and girls, just like at the races. I had already begun looking at the women who went strolling near the hippodrome on Sundays. Following the crowd we entered a field, where on one side several stands had been constructed. I suddenly realized that I was no longer with my mates; perhaps the throng had separated us. I found a place to sit.
A wild colt entered the arena, along with a few herdsmen dressed in the style of cowboys from overseas. I was immediately annoyed by their clothing. The colt started to wander confusedly through the field. A herdsman rushed up behind it. His task was to mount the horse from behind on the run and to remain mounted despite the animal’s fits of rage. But the colt, having noticed the man, stopped and allowed him to approach. Then the herdsman, perhaps unsettled by the presence of so many people, made a leap and wound up nearly astride the colt’s neck. It was the way to mount a wooden horse, and yet horse and rider fell to the earth. The other herdsmen ran to help. The colt didn’t want to stand up; it held the man prisoner, pressing its belly on his legs. The audience began to shout. The colt eventually decided to get on its feet again and, very calmly, allowed itself to be led out of the field.
‘He won’t be tamed,’ shouted a spectator. ‘He’s a lamb.’
The crowd erupted into noisy laughter. I too laughed with relish.
A bull entered the green clearing. A herdsman confronted it at once, trying to grasp it by the horns and bring it down. The audience was hushed. The bull seemed more alert than the colt. In fact, the roles were quickly reversed – it seemed as if the bull had been assigned the task of knocking down the man. The animal began to behave with a kind of strange craftiness: it enacted a long series of feints like a football player who wants to pass an opponent. It finally charged the man, driving him to take to his heels. Yet it was a charge full of caution, without hostility, as if the bull had wanted to mock the enemy’s gruff attitude, and the spectators immediately realized that the herdsman had not suffered any harm. Once again the other herdsmen ran to help their mate. Then the bull began running merrily after those poor devils. It headed for the hedges and, after completing two laps around the field, dashed in the direction of the river. The herdsmen, now in despair, also vanished beyond the hedge amid the uproar of the audience.
The crowd was yelling and cursing. In the end, aware that there would be no other attractions, they began to disperse.
‘Swindlers,’ they shouted.
‘It’s a scandal.’
‘What robbery!’
‘Down with the Maremmani!’
‘We want our money back.’
I shouted along with the others. Someone landed several blows on the booth where the tickets for the stands had been sold. I threw a stone at the wooden tables: I wanted to see everything destroyed. At the exit my mates surrounded me.
‘We were looking for you,’ said one.
‘You were hiding, weren’t you?’
‘Your paisans were just great. All of you should reimburse the spectators for the price of the ticket.’
‘He too is a Maremmano,’ said the goalie, pointing me out to people nearby.
‘He’s a Maremmano, just like these swindlers who jerked us around.’
A crowd of boys gathered and started to ridicule me as if they had always known me.
‘Don’t you think he’s a Maremmano?’ said the goalie again. ‘Look at his knee socks. That’s the kind of stuff they wear in Maremma.’
‘Tomorrow I’ll wear cotton socks,’ I said. ‘I wear them every year when it gets warm.’ Then I added, ‘G. is not in the Maremma.’
At the mention of G. several adults made common cause with the boys.
‘Tell your countrymen they’re thieves,’ said a young man. The others laughed. With tears in my eyes I then tried to explain the grave error they committed by thinking that G. was located in the Maremma.
‘Is he a bit touched?’ someone asked one of my mates.
‘More than a bit,’ he replied.
The boys were shouting more loudly than before. They started pushing me, the adults no less than the boys.
A young man ran up; he was laughing and said that he had been to the river. The bull had thrown himself into the water, and the herdsmen were weeping, cursing and begging the saints and the bull, but they were unable to drag him out. At this news the attacks on me intensified.
‘He must be the son of the herdsmen’s boss if he defends them so much,’ said a girl.
‘No,’ I hollered. ‘I’m not defending them. I hate them. I have nothing to do with them. My grandfather owned farms. My mother is a lady. It was she who made these socks.’
‘They’re made of goat hair,’ said an old gentleman. One boy emitted a ‘Baa’, another a ‘Moo’, and a third gave me a punch.
I turned around. I was standing in the middle of a street that leads to the city. People were gathering behind me in a semicircle. I was crying. It must have been a long time since I had cried. I broke away from the group and leaned against a tree. Far away, on the shore of the river, I glimpsed my mates running in the opposite directio
n. Perhaps they were going to see the bull who had thrown himself in the river.
‘Un errore geografico’
Written in 1937 and first published in the collection Mio cugino Andrea (Vallecchi, 1943). It was then included in the collection Racconti (Vallecchi, 1958) and in the 1989 edition of Anna e Bruno e altri racconti (Rizzoli).
Luciano Bianciardi
1922–71
In 1949, Bianciardi, a recent graduate from the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa who had written a thesis on John Dewey and was teaching in a high school, launched something called a ‘Bibliobus’: a library on wheels. It was an act of cultural reconstruction and unification that promoted literature as a vehicle for social change, at a time when illiteracy rates in Italy were still remarkably high. Bianciardi didn’t have a licence, so the bus was driven by his friend Cassola who, like Bianciardi, was raised in the Maremma. Among the circulating volumes were works by Shakespeare, Conrad, Steinbeck, Dostoevsky, Moravia and Hemingway (the latter two were the bestselling authors at that time). The Bible, the Koran and various agricultural manuals were also available. Bianciardi, a translator of Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac, remained an activist-intellectual throughout his life. He was wary of cities, opposed to industrialization and consumer culture. In 1954 he moved to Milan to work as an editor at Feltrinelli. The experience alienated him utterly but inspired his most successful work, a novel called La vita agra (published in English as It’s a Hard Life). It is a bilious portrait of that city’s bohemian intelligentsia. The original title of ‘The Streetwalker’, also set in Milan, is ‘Il Peripatetico’, the title story of a posthumous 1976 collection that gathered together, for the first time, various short stories previously published in newspapers, magazines and assorted anthologies. The title alludes to the Ancient Greek school of philosophy, but the title in Italian has a double meaning: a ‘peripatetica’ is also a term for a prostitute. One key to appreciating the story is knowing about the Merlin Law of 1958, which made brothels illegal in Italy. Bianciardi died of complications from alcohol. His final novel, Garibaldi – a fictional portrait intended to render Italy’s legendary general more ‘human’ – was published a year after his death.
The Streetwalker
Translated by Ann Goldstein
When I can, I make a small financial contribution to the friends of family planning. It’s unsung, deserving work, which should be encouraged. Dr Trabattoni and the others have nothing to gain, in a country like ours, and everything to lose. And yet there they are, and for a laughable fee one can always simply walk into their clinics, where they give advice and medical assistance. Of course, you’d need very different means, and very different advertising, to properly solve the problem of birth control.
In Italy today – or, rather, in that tiny fraction of Italy that knows about and practises birth control – there are basically three methods of contraception. The physiological method, also called the rhythm method, or, popularly, the Ogino-Knaus rule (from the names of the two scientists, a Japanese and a German, who discovered it). Once you’ve established that the woman has phases of fertility and phases of sterility every month, you try to distinguish the cyclical start of the former and abstain from sexual relations until it’s over.
It’s a method that even the ecclesiastical authorities tolerate (without, naturally, wanting excessive publicity about it), and it’s also, in theory, the healthiest. In theory: in practice, ovulation (as in fact the ‘fertile period’ is called) varies greatly from person to person and is influenced by both external and internal factors – for example, by the change of seasons, body temperature, even mood – and nothing prohibits it from occurring not once, but twice in the same month.
Certain clever gynaecologists, I no longer remember whether American or Swedish, would even like to name the maternity ward of their clinic after Ogino and Knaus, to indicate how many new births owe their good fortune (?) to those famous scientists. My son Augusto, born in 1948, is of that batch. We married young, Viola and I, and at the time knew very little about such things.
The chemical method seems to be more secure: as everyone knows, sperm prosper in an alkaline habitat and, on the contrary, react negatively when they find themselves in the presence of acids. So one has only to create an acidic internal environment (through special foam-generating suppositories) to kill or at least neutralize the sperm. The inconveniences are obvious: you feel the acidity, and not pleasantly, on the mucosa of the glans and especially in the balanopreputial sulcus.
Finally, there is the mechanical method: placing a pure and simple barrier between the sperm and the fertilizable egg. The barrier can be positioned either directly at the opening of the urethra (that is, using the common rubber condom) or in front of the cervix, using the diaphragm: it’s a disc, also made of rubber, with a diameter of eight centimetres and a reinforced edge, which, with an adroit manoeuvre, is suspended between the pelvic bone and the muscles of the anal sphincter, in such a way as to entirely block the mouth of the uterus. Best to dampen the diaphragm with a spermicidal substance when it’s inserted, as a guarantee against the possible porousness of the rubber. At first, to position it, the woman will likely resort to a special little plastic rod, jointed and serrated; then she’ll be able to do it using just her fingers.
In everyone’s opinion, the diaphragm (hardly noticeable after a short period of adjustment) is by far preferable to the condom, which is annoying and, let’s face it, humiliating. But a doctor has to measure the position and angle of the woman’s cervix, the contractibility of the striated muscles, the relative angle of the vaginal duct. Otherwise the diaphragm may not form a perfect seal, as, for example, in the case of my second-born, Cesare. My son was born in 1950, and my wife, Viola, accepted the new pregnancy with the tacit submissiveness that is her most admirable gift.
Her eyes turn soft and moist, her body is fuller, her skin clear: I have to say that she becomes beautiful. The trouble begins later, around the seventh month, when she loses her shape, along with her serenity: she’s no longer a woman but an animal, a plant that Mother Nature destined for procreation, and then she stays in bed, with the meek, vacant gaze of a sheep, and waits, waits to expel the infant, nurse it, clean it, cradle it in her arms.
Tiberius, the third-born, came into the world by mistake. It was in 1954, a Saturday evening when Cesare and Augusto were spending the night at their grandparents’, and we decided, on the spur of the moment, to spend the weekend out of town, stopping in the first motel we found on the road to the lakes. Viola had left her faithful diaphragm in the medicine chest, but the evening was beautiful, the wine light, pale and sparkling, and I didn’t manage to pull out. The pregnancy was smooth, as always: in the seventh month Viola fell into lethargy – lethargy, so to speak, of course: she ate, slept, took walks – and sent me to sleep in the guest room, so she wouldn’t bother me in the night, she said. Indeed, when she’s expecting a child, she’s always hot at night and wants the window open and scarcely a blanket on the bed.
Now, I love my wife, who is a wonderful, calm woman, who never asks where I’m going or why, even if I come home after ten at night. I know wives of others, meddling, capricious, tiresome, always ready to criticize, ask questions and so on. Not Viola: especially when she’s pregnant, she thinks about the children, about what’s to come, about the house and that’s it. That’s precisely the situation now she’s expecting the fourth, and I have a vague suspicion that this time she did it on purpose – she took out the diaphragm.
On the other hand, what am I to do? Honestly, I think I’m a worker. The antiquarian bookshop is my father’s and, no doubt about it, he’s the one who built it up. From his father, my grandfather, he inherited little more than a stall in Piazzale Nord. My grandfather – it’s not a figure of speech – arrived from Pontremoli with a basket of used books. For years he lived on chick-pea pancakes and drank water from the fountain, and he gradually put down roots in the metropolis, which was just then starting to expand. He and my f
ather deserve credit, agreed, but you have to acknowledge that without what I contributed to the business myself we wouldn’t be the best-known antiquarian bookshop in Lombardy today.
All the Milanese collectors seek us out, who are more numerous than you might think, and people write from all over Italy. Modesty aside, I was the one who taught my father that a nose for the business isn’t enough, that it takes a minimal cultural framework as well: ranging from the plain old Piedmontese editions of Bona, and the versatile little volumes of Le Monnier, with their pink covers, all the way up to truly rare pieces. I have about a dozen books from the sixteenth century, sixty Aldine books, a good thirty-seven of which have the original dolphin-and-anchor printer’s mark. I have Abramo Hortel’s Imago Mundi, a marvellous atlas from the late sixteenth century. My father wanted to take it apart and sell the maps individually. In fact, five or six years ago it was very fashionable to have, as decor, old maps put into frames. I was against it, and I was right. Today I’ve been offered upward of four hundred thousand lire for that Imago mundi, but even now I can’t make up my mind to sell it, because every now and then I like to sit and look through it.
In the morning I always get up at seven, and an hour later I’m in the shop, before my four salespeople, before the woman who does the accounts. My father sometimes comes by and sometimes he doesn’t, and I can’t blame him: he’s seventy, and deserves a break. But, for his part, he should also recognize that I keep the business going and, if nothing else, add an ‘& Son’ to the business name. He has me on a salary – a good one, moreover – but he doesn’t give me any share in the profits. I leave at six every night, except on Tuesdays and Fridays, when I know that the important customers come by, the ones you have to tend to personally. So it’s not at all an easy life, even though I don’t lack comforts that my grandfather certainly didn’t have: a car, a nice house, two weeks of vacation a year, a seasonal outing to the Frankfurt Book Fair, for business but also pleasure.
The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories Page 44