The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories Read online

  ‘Do you want some of those drops the doctor prescribed for sleeping?’ she asked to hurry up and be done.

  I hesitated, even though the desire to feel better was nearly overpowering.

  ‘If you like,’ I said, trying to appear only resigned. Taking drops is hardly tantamount to a confession of feeling bad.

  Then there was an instant in which I enjoyed great peace. It lasted as long as my wife, in her pinkish nightgown, in the dim light of that candle, was by my side counting the drops. The bed was a real horizontal bed, and my eyelids, if I closed them, were enough to shut any light whatsoever out of my eyes. But I opened them now and then, and that light and the pink of that nightgown gave me as much relief as total darkness. But she didn’t want her help to last an instant longer, and I was dropped back into the night to struggle for peace on my own. I remembered that, as a youth, to bring on sleep more quickly, I would force myself to think of a dreadfully ugly old woman who would make me forget the beautiful visions that were obsessing me. Here it was then that now, by contrast, it was granted me to call without danger upon beauty, which would of course help me. It was the advantage – the only one – of old age. And I imagined, calling them by name, several beautiful women, desires of my youth, of a time in which beautiful women had abounded in an unbelievable way. But they didn’t come. They didn’t yield then, either. And I went on evoking, evoking, until a single beautiful figure emerged from the night: Anna, she of all people, as she was so many years earlier, but with her face, her lovely rosy face, wearing an expression of distress and reproach. Because she wanted to bring me not peace, but remorse. That was clear. And seeing as she was present, I spoke with her. I had left her, but she had immediately married another man, which was altogether fair. But then she had brought into the world a girl who was now fifteen years old and who looked like her mother in her soft colours, the gold of her head and the blue in her eyes, but her face was affected by the intervention of the father who had been chosen for her: the gentle waves of the hair turned into a mass of frizzy curls, big cheeks, a wide mouth and overly thick lips. But her mother’s colouring in her father’s features ended up being a shameless kiss, a kiss in public. What did she want from me now, after she had so often shown herself to me fascinated by her husband?

  And it was the first time that night I was able to believe that I had triumphed. Anna got meeker, as if changing her mind. And then her company no longer displeased me. She could stay. And I fell asleep admiring her, beautiful and kind, persuaded. I soon fell asleep.

  An awful dream. I found myself in a complicated structure, but which I understood right away as if I had been part of it. A huge, primitive cave, without those decorations nature has fun creating in caves, and thus certainly the work of man; I was sitting in the dark on a three-legged wooden stool next to a glass chest feebly lit by a light I took to be one of its qualities, the only light in the vast space, and which lit me, a wall made of large uncut stones, and, beneath it, a cement wall. How expressive dream structures are! You might say they are so the person who designed them can understand them easily, and that would be correct. But the surprising thing is that the architect doesn’t know he has built them, and he doesn’t remember it even when he is awake, and thinking about the world it emerged from and where structures pop up with such ease he might be surprised to find that everything there is understood with no need for a single word.

  I knew right away that that cave had been built by men who were using it for a cure they had come up with, a cure that would be lethal for one of those put away there (a lot of them must have been down there in the shadows), but beneficial to all of the others. Exactly! A kind of religion, which needed a sacrifice, and by that I was naturally not surprised.

  It was quite a bit easier to guess that, since I had been placed so close to the glass chest in which the victim was supposed to be asphyxiated, I had been chosen to die, to everyone else’s advantage. And I was already anticipating the pains of the horrible death that was awaiting me. I was having trouble breathing, and my head was hurting and feeling heavy, as a result of which I held it in my hands, my elbows propped on my knees.

  All at once everything that I already knew was spoken by a lot of people concealed in the darkness. My wife spoke first: ‘Hurry up, the doctor said you’re the one who has to go into that chest.’ It seemed distressing to me, but very logical. So I didn’t protest, but I pretended not to hear. And I thought: ‘My wife’s love has always struck me as stupid.’ A lot of other voices were shouting imperiously: ‘Have you decided to obey?’ Among them I made out, very clearly, Dr Paoli’s. I couldn’t protest, but thought: ‘He is doing it to be paid.’

  I lifted my gaze for another look at the glass chest that was awaiting me. I then saw, sitting on the lid, the bride. There, too, she maintained her constant air of easy assurance. Frankly, I despised that silly woman, but I was immediately informed that she was very important for me. I would have found this out in real life too, seeing her seated on that device that was supposed to kill me. And so, eagerly, I looked at her. I felt like one of those tiny little dogs that win favour by wagging their tails. What degradation!

  But the bride spoke. Without any ferocity, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she said: ‘Uncle, the chest is for you.’

  I had to fight for my life on my own. This, too, I divined. I had the feeling of being able to make a huge effort without anyone’s noticing it. Just as I had earlier sensed in myself an organ that enabled me to win over my judge without speaking, so I discovered within me another organ – what it was I don’t know – with which to fight without moving and thus to attack my unthreatened adversaries. And the effort paid off right away. Here was Giovanni, fat Giovanni, sitting in the bright glass chest on a wooden stool similar to mine and in the same position as me. He was hunched over, the chest being too low, and had his glasses in his hands so they wouldn’t fall off his nose. But that way he sort of looked as if he were working on a deal and had taken off his glasses to think better without seeing anything. And, in fact, although he was sweaty and out of breath, instead of thinking about his coming death, he was full of malice, as you could tell from his eyes, in which I caught sight of the same effort I had made shortly before. So, because I feared him, I was unable to take pity on him.

  Giovanni’s effort paid off as well. Shortly thereafter, Alberi, the tall, slender and healthy Alberi, was in his spot in the chest, in the same position as Giovanni had been in but made worse by the size of his body. He was altogether bent double and would really have aroused compassion in me had there not also been in him, in addition to agitation, great malice. He was looking me up and down, with an evil smile, knowing that not dying in that chest depended on him alone.

  From on top of the chest, the bride spoke again: ‘Now it’s your turn, of course, Uncle.’ She stressed each syllable with great pedantry. And her words were accompanied by another sound, very distant, very much from on high. From that long-lasting sound, let out by a person moving quickly away, I could tell that the cave ended in a steep corridor that led to the surface of the earth. It was a single hiss, but a hiss of approval, and it was coming from Anna, who was once again showing her hatred for me. She didn’t have the courage to put it in words, because I had in fact convinced her she had wronged me more than I had wronged her. But when it comes to hatred conviction counts for nothing.

  I was condemned by everybody. A long way from me, somewhere in the cave, waiting, my wife and the doctor were pacing back and forth, and I sensed that my wife had a resentful appearance. She was moving her hands energetically, reciting my wrongs. Wine, food and my brusque manners with her and with my daughter.

  I felt myself drawn to the chest by Alberi’s gaze, turned triumphantly on me. I went slowly over to it with the stool, less than an inch at a time, but I knew that when I got within a yard of it (such was the law) I would find myself, in a single bound, made captive and gasping for breath.

  But there was still h
ope for salvation. Giovanni, perfectly recovered from the fatigue of his tough struggle, had shown up by the chest, which he no longer had to fear, as he had already been in it (this, too, was law down there). He was standing up straight, right in the light, looking at times at Alberi, who was gasping and making threats, and at times at me, as I was slowly approaching the chest.

  ‘Giovanni!’ I shouted. ‘Help me keep him in there … I’ll pay you.’

  The entire cave resounded with my shout, and it seemed like a scornful laugh. I understood. It was no use begging. Neither the first person nor the second person who had gotten into the chest was meant to die in it, but the third person was. This, too, was a law of the cave, which, like all the other laws, was the ruin of me. And it was hard to have to acknowledge it hadn’t been made just then to harm me in particular. It, too, stemmed from that darkness and that light. Giovanni didn’t even answer, and he shrugged to convey to me his distress at being unable to save me or sell me salvation.

  And then I screamed again: ‘If there’s no other way, take my daughter. She’s sleeping right here. It will be easy.’ These shouts, too, were brought back by a tremendous echo. I was befuddled by them, but I shouted for my daughter again: ‘Emma! Emma! Emma!’

  And in fact Emma’s answer came to me from the depths of the cave, the sound of her still childish voice: ‘Here I am, Daddy, here I am.’

  It seemed to me I hadn’t answered right away. Just then there was a violent start caused, so I thought, by my leap into the chest. ‘This daughter,’ I thought, ‘always slow when it comes to obeying.’ This time her slowness was going to be the ruin of me, and I was full of rancour.

  I woke up. That was the start. The leap from one world to the other. My head and my trunk were off the bed, and I would have fallen had my wife not come to hold me up.

  ‘Were you dreaming?’ she asked me.

  And then, moved: ‘You were calling your daughter. You see how you love her?’

  At first, I was dazzled by that reality in which it seemed to me that everything was twisted and perverted. And I said to my wife, who certainly had to know everything as well:

  ‘How will we ever win our children’s forgiveness for having given them this life?’

  But she, in her simplicity, said: ‘Our children are delighted to be alive.’

  The life I then felt to be the real one, the dream life, was still enveloping me, and I wanted to declare it: ‘Because they don’t know anything yet.’

  But then I went quiet and withdrew into silence. The window by my bed was getting light, and by that light I immediately sensed I shouldn’t recount that dream, as the shame of it had to be concealed. But soon, as the sunlight, so light blue and soft, but pressing, went on flooding the room, I no longer even felt that shame. Dream life wasn’t my life, and I wasn’t the man who had grovelled and been ready to sacrifice his own daughter to save himself.

  But the return to that horrendous cave had to be avoided. And it is thus that I became submissive and conformed eagerly to the doctor’s diet. If, through no fault of mine – that is, as a result not of excessive libation but of the final fever – I should have to return to that cave, I would immediately jump into that glass chest, if it’s there, to keep from grovelling and to keep from being a traitor.

  ‘Vino generoso’

  First published in the journal La fiera letteraria (28 August 1927). It was then included in the collection La novella del buon vecchio e della bella fanciulla e altri scritti (Morreale, 1929).

  Leonardo Sciascia

  1921–89

  Sciascia assembled a volume of thirteen short stories in the final decades of his life and called it Il mare colore del vino (The Wine-dark Sea), invoking the Homeric epithet. One of Sicily’s most celebrated public intellectuals, he was born in the province of Agrigento, where magnificent Greek temples still stand, and the island was his subject from beginning to end. He wrote about its people, its politics, its beauty and its corruption, its Mafia violence, its rich cultural history, its incantatory effect. He explored the island’s relationship, always fraught, to the rest of Italy, and he tackled, with a combination of compassion and steely documentation, the great theme of justice. Sciascia confronted the major controversies and cataclysmic events of his day, including Italian terrorism, writing cogently about the abduction and assassination of Aldo Moro, a former prime minister of Italy, during the 1970s. In addition to writing essays and political and investigative journalism, he composed a series of tough, terse novels that elevated crime fiction to a high literary form. Il giorno della civetta (The Day of the Owl) and A ciascuno il suo (To Each His Own), among his most famous novels, are two exemplary works of concision. Before he became a full-time writer he taught in elementary school. He was elected to the Palermo city council in 1976 with Communist Party support, and was also a member of the European Parliament. The stories in Il mare colore del vino were published between 1959 and 1972 in various newspapers and magazines. In the author’s note to the collection, which he arranged in order of publication, he speaks of the satisfaction of assembling the book in spite of his ‘general and continuous dissatisfaction’. Sciascia’s sentences are rich and dark like the sea he invokes, his figurative language precise and unnerving. This story has a mythic grace to it, and takes us where we least expect.

  The Long Voyage

  Translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell

  It was a night that seemed made for it, shrouded in a darkness you could almost feel the weight of as you moved. And it was frightening, the breathing of that beast of a world, the sound of the sea: a breathing that came right up and expired at their feet.

  They stood, with their cardboard suitcases and their bundles, on a stony stretch of beach, protected by the hills, between Gela and Licata: they had reached there at nightfall, they had left their villages at daybreak; villages of the interior far removed from the sea, clustered in the arid plague of feudal lands. For some, it was the first time they had seen the sea: the thought of having to cross the whole of it from that deserted beach in Sicily, at night, to get to another deserted beach in America, also at night, was deeply disconcerting. Because the deal was this: ‘I take you on board at night,’ the man had said, a kind of travelling salesman, judging by the style of his patter, though with a serious and honest face, ‘and I land you at night: you’ll land on the beach in Nugiorsi. I’ll put you ashore a short walk from Nuovaiorche … Those who have relatives in America can write and tell them to go wait for you at Trenton Station, twelve days after we set sail … You do the calculation … Of course, I can’t guarantee the exact date you’ll get there: let’s suppose that the sea might be rough, let’s suppose that the coastguards might be on the lookout … One day here or there will make no difference to you. The important thing is to land in America.’

  To land in America really was the important thing: how or when hardly mattered, in the end. If their letters had succeeded in reaching their relatives, with those confused and scrawled addresses that they’d managed to inscribe on the envelopes, then they would make it too. Whoever has a tongue shall cross the sea, as the proverb rightly had it. And they would have crossed the sea, that great dark ocean; and they would have reached the stori and the farme – the stores and farms – of America, the welcoming circle of brothers uncles nephews cousins, the warm luxurious spacious houses, the automobiles that were as big as houses.

  Two hundred and fifty thousand lire: half on departure, half on arrival. They kept the money, in the style of scapularies, between their skin and shirts. They had sold everything they had in order to scrape it together: the house, the land the mule the donkey that year’s provisions the chest of drawers the blankets. The craftier ones had resorted to moneylenders, with the secret intention of cheating them at least this once, after years of harassment. They relished the thought of how the faces of those moneylenders would look when they received the news that they’d gone. ‘Come and find me in America, bloodsucker, and maybe you’ll get you
r money back. But without interest, even if you do manage to track me down.’ The dream of America was awash with dollars, with cash no longer clutched in a shabby wallet or hidden beneath their shirts, but stuffed casually into trouser pockets and pulled out by the handful the way they’d seen their relatives do it – relatives who had left half starved, thin as rakes and scorched by the sun, then returned after twenty or thirty years, though only for a short vacation, with their round rosy-cheeked faces handsomely contrasting with their white hair.

  It was eleven o’clock already. One of them lit the lantern: the signal that they were ready to be collected and taken aboard the steamer. When he extinguished it again, the darkness seemed even thicker and more menacing. But just a few minutes later, from the relentless breathing of the sea a more human, domestic sound emerged from the water, like that of buckets being rhythmically filled and emptied. And then came the sound of voices, a muffled chatter. They found themselves in the presence of Signor Melfa, which was the name they knew the organizer of their great adventure by, even before realizing that the boat had touched land.

  ‘Is everyone here?’ he asked. Signor Melfa turned on a torch and counted heads. Two people were missing. ‘Maybe they’ve had second thoughts, maybe they’ll turn up later … Either way, so much the worse for them. What’s the point of waiting for them, with the risks that we’re running already?’

  Everyone agreed that it was not worth waiting.

  ‘If any of you doesn’t have the cash ready,’ warned Signor Melfa, ‘they might as well start walking home again right now – because if anyone thinks that they’re going to spring that little surprise when we’re already on board they’re making a big mistake. If that happened I swear I’d drop the whole lot of you back off again. Then everyone would suffer, thanks to one person, which isn’t fair – and that person would be made to pay with a beating from me, and from his mates too, that he’ll remember for as long as he lives. If he’s lucky, that is …’