The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories Page 3

  Name and Tears

  Translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell

  I was writing in the gravel in the garden and it was dark already; lit for a while now by the lights from all the windows.

  The guard passed by.

  ‘What are you writing?’ he asked.

  ‘A word,’ I replied.

  He bent down to have a look, but couldn’t make it out.

  ‘What word is it?’ he asked again.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘It’s a name.’

  He jangled his keys.

  ‘With no ‘Long live …’? No ‘Down with …’?’

  ‘Oh no!’ I exclaimed.

  And I laughed as well.

  ‘It’s the name of a person,’ I said.

  ‘A person you’re waiting for?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I’m waiting for her.’

  Then the guard walked away, and I resumed my writing. I wrote and reached the earth beneath the gravel: I dug and wrote, and the night turned blacker still.

  The guard returned.

  ‘Still writing?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve written a bit more.’

  ‘What else have you written?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing else,’ I replied. ‘Nothing except that word.’

  ‘What?’ the guard shouted. ‘Nothing except that name?’

  And he rattled his keys again, and lit his lantern to have a look.

  ‘So I see,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing there but that name.’

  He raised the lantern and looked into my face.

  ‘I’ve written it deeper,’ I explained.

  ‘Is that right?’ he replied. ‘If you want to continue, I’ll give you a hoe.’

  ‘Give it to me,’ I said.

  The guard gave me the hoe, then went off again, and with the hoe I dug and wrote the name deep into the ground. In truth I would have inscribed it as far down as seams of coal or iron are found, down to the most secret metals, which bear ancient names. But the guard came back again and said: ‘You have to leave now. It’s closing time.’

  I climbed out of the name ditch.

  ‘All right,’ I replied.

  I put down the hoe, wiped my brow and looked at the city around me, through the dark trees.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘All right.’

  The guard grinned.

  ‘She hasn’t come, right?’

  ‘She hasn’t come,’ I said.

  But immediately afterwards I asked: ‘Who hasn’t come?’

  The guard lifted his lantern and looked into my face like before.

  ‘The person you were waiting for.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘she hasn’t come.’

  But then once again, straight away I asked: ‘What person?’

  ‘Damn it!’ the guard said. ‘The person with the name.’

  He shook his lantern, rattled his keys and added: ‘If you’d like to wait a little longer, don’t mind me.’

  ‘That isn’t what matters,’ I said. ‘But thanks.’

  But I didn’t leave, I stayed and the guard stayed with me, as if to keep me company.

  ‘Lovely night!’ he said.

  ‘Lovely,’ I said.

  Then, carrying his lantern, he took a few steps towards the trees.

  ‘I wonder,’ he said. ‘Are you sure she’s not there?’

  I knew that she could not have come, yet I was startled.

  ‘Where?’ I whispered.

  ‘Over there,’ said the guard. ‘Sitting on the bench.’

  The leaves rustled as he said these words; a woman stood up in the dark and started to walk on the gravel. On hearing her footsteps, I closed my eyes.

  ‘So she had come after all, had she?’ said the guard.

  Without answering, I followed after the woman.

  ‘We’re closing!’ the guard shouted. ‘We’re closing!’

  Shouting ‘We’re closing’, he disappeared amongst the trees.

  I followed the woman out of the garden and through the streets of the city.

  I followed after what had been the sound of her steps on gravel. Or you might say, rather, that I was guided by the memory of her footsteps. And it turned out to be a long walk, a long pursuit, now amidst the crowd, now along deserted pavements until, raising my eyes, I saw her for the first time, a passer-by, by the light of the last shop.

  What I saw, actually, was her hair. Nothing else. And fearing that I would lose her, I started to run.

  The city in these parts alternated between meadows and tall houses, dimly lit parks and lit-up funfairs, with the red eye of the gasworks in the background. Many times I asked: ‘Did she come this way?’

  Everyone told me that they didn’t know.

  But a mocking child came up, quickly, on roller-skates, and laughed.

  ‘Haah!’ she laughed. ‘I bet you’re looking for my sister.’

  ‘Your sister?’ I exclaimed. ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘I’m not telling you,’ the girl replied.

  And again she laughed, doing a dance of death around me on her roller-skates.

  ‘Haah!’ she laughed.

  ‘Then tell me where she is,’ I said.

  ‘Haah!’ laughed the girl. ‘She’s in a doorway.’

  She skated her dance of death around me again for a moment, then sped off up the endless avenue, laughing.

  ‘She’s in a doorway,’ she called back from afar, still laughing.

  The doorways were all occupied by abject couples, but I arrived at one that was abandoned and empty. The door opened when I pushed it. I went up the stairs and began to hear someone crying.

  ‘Is it her crying?’ I asked the concierge.

  This old woman was sitting asleep, halfway up the stairs with her rags in her hand – and she woke up and looked at me.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied. ‘Do you want the lift?’

  I did not want it, I wanted to go to where the crying was, and I continued to climb the stairs between the black, wide-open windows. I finally came to where the crying was, behind a white door. I went in, felt her close to me and turned on the light.

  But I saw no one in the room, and heard nothing more. And yet there, on the sofa, was the handkerchief, damp with her tears.

  ‘Nome e lagrime’

  First published in the magazine Corrente (31 October 1939). It then became the title of Vittorini’s first novel, published by Parenti in 1941, and then, the same year, by Bompiani as Conversazione in Sicilia.

  Giovanni Verga

  1840–1922

  Catania, on the eastern coast of Sicily, was destroyed more than once by earthquakes and eruptions of Mount Aetna. The effect of its late baroque reconstruction begun in 1693, from lava stone, is at once grim and spectacular. Still charged with the weight of disaster, the city personifies drama, destruction and rebirth. Verga, astride the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the eldest author of this collection, was raised there, but to produce his art he had to get away, first to Florence, immersing himself in its literary culture, and then to Milan, where he lived for twenty years (although he made frequent journeys back to Sicily). He was born three months after Thomas Hardy, an author with whom he bears comparison. Both wrote about hardship, family and fatal passions with lyricism and pessimism. Both had complex relationships with their places of origin, which both inspired and alienated them. Verga’s realistic approach – called the school of Verismo in Italian – was a reaction to a movement in the same period called Scapigliatura (devoted, broadly speaking, to interiority, individualism and ideals). Realism, in Verga’s time, was considered an anti-conformist approach to literature: alert to social tensions, refusing to elevate or evade. In reproducing elements of dialect, he allowed characters to sound as they actually would have in real life, and described the poor without sentimentality. In doing so, he broke definitively with the literary aesthetic in Italy that had come before him. Verga wrote seven collections of short stories in
his lifetime. ‘Fantasticheria’ (‘Picturesque Lives’), a description of a fishing village, is considered an antecedent to his later masterpiece, a novel called I Malavoglia (The Malavoglia, translated as The House by the Medlar Tree). It was adapted, in 1948, into the neoRealist cinematic classic La terra trema (The Earth Trembles) by Luchino Visconti. But it is more than preparatory work, striking for its epistolary structure, its imagery, its precise yet panoramic vision.

  Picturesque Lives

  Translated by G. H. McWilliam

  Once, when the train was passing by Aci Trezza, you looked out of the carriage window and exclaimed, ‘I’d like to spend a month down there!’

  We went back there and spent, not a month, but forty-eight hours. The villagers who stared in disbelief at your enormous trunks must have thought you would be staying for a couple of years. On the morning of the third day, tired of seeing nothing but green fields and blue sea, and of counting the carts as they trundled up and down the street, you were at the station, fiddling impatiently with the chain of your scent bottle, and craning your neck to catch sight of a train that couldn’t arrive too soon. In those forty-eight hours we did all it was possible to do in Aci Trezza. We walked down the dusty street and we scrambled over the rocks. Under the pretext of learning to row you got blisters beneath your gloves that had to be kissed better. We spent a marvellously romantic night at sea, casting nets so as to do something to convince the boatmen it was worth their while to be catching rheumatism. Dawn came upon us at the top of the beacon rock. I can still see that dawn – pale and unassuming, with broad, mauve-coloured shafts of light playing across a dark-green sea, caressing the tiny group of cottages that lay huddled up asleep on the shore, while above the rock, silhouetted against the dark and cloudless sky, your tiny figure stood out clearly in the expert lines designed for it by your dressmaker, and the fine, elegant profile of your own making. You were wearing a grey dress that seemed to have been specially made to blend with the colours of the dawn. A truly pretty picture! And you certainly knew it, to judge from the way you modelled yourself in your shawl and smiled with those enormous, tired, wide-open eyes at that strange spectacle, and at the strangeness, too, of being there yourself to witness it. What was going on at that moment in your little head, as you faced the rising sun? Were you asking it to tell you where in the world you would be, a month into the future? All you said, in that ingenuous way of yours, was, ‘I don’t understand how people can spend the whole of their lives in a place like this.’

  But you see, the answer is easier than it looks. For a start, all you need is not to have an income of a hundred thousand lire, and to take comfort in suffering a few of the many hardships that go with those giant rocks, set in the deep blue sea, that caused you to clap your hands in wonder. Those poor devils, who were nodding off in the boat as they waited for us, need no more than that to find, in among their ramshackle, picturesque cottages, that seemed to you from a distance to be trembling as if they too were seasick, everything you search for, high and low, in Paris, Nice and Naples.

  It’s a curious business, but perhaps it’s better that way for you, and for all the others like you. That cluster of cottages is inhabited by fishermen, who call themselves ‘men of the sea’ as opposed to your ‘men about town’, people whose skins are harder than the bread that they eat, when they eat any bread at all, for the sea is not always as calm as it was when it was planting kisses on your gloves. On its black days, when it roars and it thunders, you have to rest content with standing and gazing out at it from the shore, or lying in your bed, which is the best place to be on an empty stomach. On days like that, a crowd gathers outside the tavern, but you don’t hear many coins rattling on the tin counter, and the kids, who throng the village as if poverty was a good way to multiply their numbers, go shrieking and tearing around as though possessed by the devil.

  Every so often typhus, or cholera, or a bad harvest, or a storm at sea come along and make a good clean sweep through that swarm of people. You would imagine they could wish for nothing better than to be swept away and disappear altogether, but they always come swarming back again to the very same place. I can’t tell you how or why they do it.

  Did you ever, after an autumn shower, find yourself scattering an army of ants as you carelessly traced the name of your latest boyfriend in the sand along the boulevard? Some of those poor little creatures would have remained stuck on the ferrule of your umbrella, writhing in agony, but all the others, after five minutes of rushing about in panic, would have returned to cling on desperately to their dark little ant-heap. You wouldn’t go back there, certainly, and neither would I. But in order to understand that kind of stubbornness, which in some respects is heroic, we have to reduce ourselves to the same level, restrict our whole horizon to what lies between a couple of mounds of earth, and place their tiny hearts under a microscope to discover what makes them beat. Would you, too, like to take a look through this lens here, you who contemplate life through the other end of a telescope? You’ll think it a curious spectacle, and it might amuse you, perhaps.

  We were very close friends (do you remember?), and you asked me to dedicate a few pages to you. Why? à quoi bon, as you would put it. What value does anything I write possess for anyone who knows you? And to those who don’t, what are you anyway? But never mind all that, I remembered your little whim, on the day I set eyes once again on that beggarwoman you gave alms to, with the pretext of buying the oranges she’d laid out in a row on the bench outside the front door. The bench is no longer there, they’ve cut down the medlar tree in the yard and the house has a new window. It was only the woman that hadn’t changed. She was a little further on, holding out her hand to the cart-drivers, crouching there on the pile of stones blocking the entrance to the old outpost of the National Guard. As I was doing the rounds, puffing away at a cigar, it struck me that she too, poor as she is, had seen you passing by, fair of skin and proud of bearing.

  Don’t be angry if I’ve remembered you in such a way, and in such a context. Apart from the happy memories you left me, I have a hundred others, indistinct, confused, all different, gathered here, there and everywhere – some of them mere daydreams, perhaps – and in my confused state of mind, as I walked along that street that has witnessed so many happy and painful events, the frail-looking woman crouching there in her mantilla made me somehow feel very sad, and made me think of you, glutted with everything, even with the adulation heaped at your feet by the fashion magazines, that often splash your name in the headlines of their elegant feature articles – glutted to such a degree as to think up the notion of seeing your name in the pages of a book.

  Perhaps, when I have written the book, you won’t give it a second thought. But meanwhile, the memories I send you now, so far away from you in every sense, inebriated as you are with feasting and flowers, will bring a refreshing breeze to play upon the feverish round of your endless revelry. On the day you go back there, if you ever do go back, and we sit together again, kicking up stones with our feet and visions in our thoughts, perhaps we shall talk about those other breezes that life elsewhere has to offer. Imagine, if you like, that my mind is fixed on that unknown little corner of the world because you once stepped into it, or in order to avert my gaze from the dazzling glare of precious stones and fevered expectation that accompanies your every movement, or because I have sought you out in vain in all the places smiled upon by fashion. So you see, you always take the lead in my thoughts, as you do in the theatre!

  Do you also recall that old man at the tiller of our boat? You owe it to him to remember, because he saved you a dozen times from soaking your fine blue stockings. He died down there, poor devil, in the town hospital, in a huge white ward, between white sheets, chewing white bread, assisted by the white hands of the Sisters of Charity, whose only weakness was their failure to comprehend the string of woes that the wretched fellow mumbled forth in his semi-barbaric dialect.

  But if there was one thing he would have wanted above a
ll else, it was to die in that shaded little corner beside his own hearth, where he had slept for so many years ‘below his own roof’, which is why, when they carried him away, he was in tears, whining as only the old are able to.

  He had spent his whole life between those four walls, looking out on that lovely but treacherous sea with which he had had to wrestle every day of his life to extract what he needed to survive without coming to a watery end. And yet for that brief moment in time when he was silently relishing his place in the sun, huddled on the thwart of the boat with his arms round his knees, he wouldn’t have turned his head to admire you, and you would have looked in vain into those spellbound eyes for the proud reflection of your beauty, as when so many of the high and mighty bow their heads as they make way for you in the fashionable salons, and you see your reflection in the envious eyes of your best women friends.

  Life is rich, as you see, in its inexhaustible variety, and you can enjoy that part of its richness that has come your way just as you please.

  Take that young woman, for instance, who peeped out from behind the pots of basilico when the rustling of your dress set off a clamour in the street. When she espied your famous face in the window opposite she beamed as though she too were dressed in silk. Who knows what simple joys filled her thoughts as she stood at that window behind the fragrant basilico, her eyes fixed intently on the house opposite, bedecked with branches of vine. And the laughter in her eyes would not have turned later into bitter tears in the big city, far away from the four walls that had witnessed her birth and watched her grow up, if her grandfather hadn’t died in the hospital, and her father hadn’t drowned, and her family hadn’t been scattered by a puff of wind that had blown right through it – a puff of ruinous wind, which had carried one of her brothers off to prison on the island of Pantelleria, or ‘into trouble’, as they say in those parts.