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- Herausgeber: Daunt Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
'It was incredible how fear and danger never produced ignoble words but always true ones, words that were torn from your very heart.'Anna, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl in a small town in northern Italy, finds herself pregnant after a brief romance. To save her reputation, she marries aneccentric older family friend, Cenzo Rena, and they move to his village in the south. Their relationship is touched by tragedy and grace as the events of their life in the countryside run parallel to the war and the encroaching threat of fascism – and in their wake, a society dealing with anxiety and grief.At the heart of the novel is a concern with experiences that both deepen and deaden existence: adultery and air raids, neighbourhood quarrels and bombings. With her signature clear-eyed wit, Natalia Ginzburg asks how we can act with integrity when faced with catastrophe, and how we can love well.
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‘Ginzburg’s books snare so much of what is odd and lovely and fleeting in the world.’ New York Times
‘It was as if her writing was a very important secret that I had been waiting all my life to discover … her words seemed to express something completely true about my experience of living, and about life.’ Sally Rooney
‘She is one of those writers whose voice is immediately recognisable.’ New York Times Review Of Books
‘Ginzburg’s beautiful words have such solidity and simplicity. I read her with joy and amazement.’ Tessa Hadley
‘Natalia Ginzburg is a fierce writer. She trusts in things – in the few objects that can capture the emptiness of the universe.’ Italo Calvino
‘Ginzburg is a unique voice and there’s a direct simplicity to her prose that makes her dry observations all the more riveting.’ Guardian
All Our Yesterdays
NATALIA GINZBURG
Translated by Angus Davidson
With an introductionby Sally Rooney
DAUNT BOOKS
Contents
Introduction
When I first read Natalia Ginzburg’s work several years ago, I felt as if I was reading something that had been written for me, something that had been written almost inside my own head or heart. I was astonished that I had never encountered Ginzburg’s work before: that no one, knowing me, had ever told me about her books. It was as if her writing was a very important secret that I had been waiting all my life to discover. Far more than anything I myself had ever written or even tried to write, her words seemed to express something completely true about my experience of living, and about life itself. This kind of transformative encounter with a book is, for me, very rare, a moment of contact with what seems to be the essence of human existence. For this reason, I wanted to write a little about Natalia Ginzburg and her novel All Our Yesterdays. I would like to address myself in particular to other readers who are right now awaiting, whether they know it or not, their first and special meeting with her work.
Ginzburg was born Natalia Levi, the daughter of a Jewish father and Catholic mother, in Sicily in 1916. She and her four siblings grew up in Turin in northern Italy, in a secular and intellectually lively home. In 1938, at the age of twenty-two, Natalia married the Jewish anti-fascist organiser Leone Ginzburg, and they went on to have three children together. In 1942, she published her first novel, La strada che va in città (The Road to the City). Due to the legal barriers imposed by the fascist government on publications by Jewish writers, this novel was printed under the pseudonym ‘Alessandra Tornimparte’. The Ginzburgs were sent into internal exile during the war, in the south of Italy, because of Leone’s political activities, but they travelled to Rome in secret to work on an anti-fascist newspaper. In 1944, Leone was imprisoned and tortured to death by the fascist regime. The war ended a year later, when Ginzburg was still in her twenties, a widowed mother of three small children. These experiences – her upbringing, her marriage, her motherhood, her husband’s death and the political and moral catastrophe of the Second World War – would shape Ginzburg’s writing for the rest of her life.
All Our Yesterdays, Ginzburg’s third novel, was originally published in Italian under the title Tutti i nostri ieri in 1952. It begins in a small town in northern Italy, in the years before the war, with a family: an ageing widower, his four children and the family’s companion, Signora Maria. Across the street, in the ‘house opposite’, lives the owner of the town’s soap factory, with his wife, his children and ‘a person that you couldn’t be quite sure who he was’ named Franz. Gradually, from the hectic and comical jostling of family life in the opening chapters, a protagonist begins to emerge: the widower’s youngest daughter Anna. The novel goes on to follow Anna’s relationships with her family, with the inhabitants of the ‘house opposite’ and with an older family friend named Cenzo Rena, before and during the war. But Anna’s status as the protagonist remains a partial and contingent one. The narrator often leads us away from her without warning, relating events to which she is not a witness, describing with sudden compassion the thoughts and feelings of other, seemingly minor figures, their desires, disappointments and dreams. The great emotional power of this novel springs from the depth and truth of each one of its characters. As readers we grow to know and love Anna deeply, but we cannot help loving at the same time her cantankerous father, her sombre and beautiful brother Ippolito, the fretting Signora Maria and all the other complex and interesting people that populate the world of the book.
After the death of Anna’s father, near the beginning of the novel, Ippolito befriends Emanuele, one of the boys from the house opposite. The two of them have ‘great discussions’ together, ‘but no one knew quite what they were about, because if anyone else was present they started talking in German’. They are soon joined by Danilo, a suitor of Anna’s sister Concettina, and the three young men take to shutting themselves up in the sitting room together, talking. The adolescent Anna is mystified by these developments: are Emanuele and Danilo both in love with her sister? Why do they spend so much time with Ippolito, speaking German? Then her brother Giustino whispers one word to her, a word that will change the course of the novel and Anna’s life: ‘Politics’.
‘Politics,’ thought Anna. She walked about the garden, amongst Signora Maria’s rose-trees, and repeated the word to herself. She was a plump girl, pale and indolent, dressed in a pleated skirt and a faded blue pullover, and not very tall for her fourteen years. ‘Politics,’ she repeated slowly, and now all at once she seemed to understand …
Ippolito, Emanuele and Danilo, we learn, are anti-fascist dissidents, gathering in secret to share and discuss prohibited political literature. Soon, Danilo is taken to prison, and Ippolito and Emanuele enlist Anna’s help to burn the newspapers and books they have been hiding behind the piano. As war breaks out in Europe, the moral world of the novel becomes increasingly haunted by the brutality of fascism, and by the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust. Ippolito sinks into a morbid depression at the German occupation of Poland, ‘with the Germans taking people away to die in the concentration camps … his will to live left him at the thought of those camps, where the Germans put their cigarettes out against the prisoners’ foreheads’.
In the second part of the novel, Italy too is at war. Anna is by this time married, a young mother, helping to conceal fugitives from the fascist regime in the cellar of her home. In one long tumbling sentence, from the point of view of the man who has become Anna’s husband, Ginzburg evokes the catastrophic unravelling of ordinary life:
He looked out of the window at the refugees from Naples who were now going hither and thither about the lanes of the village, carrying mattresses and babies, he looked and said how sad it was to see all these mattresses carried about here and there all over Italy, Italy was now pouring mattresses out of her ravaged houses.
Politics for Anna is no longer a daydream among the rose trees, but a question of supreme moral urgency. In times of crisis, she learns – and we learn along with her – that there can be no ethics without politics.
Ginzburg’s work is concerned, it seems to me more than anything, with the distinction between what is right and what is wrong. All Our Yesterdays approaches this question intellectually and ideologically, with an interest in the development of moral theories and belief systems; and it also and equally approaches this question from a practical and human point of view. In other words, it poses two questions of equal significance. Firstly, how do we know what is right? And secondly, how can we live by that knowledge? Reading this novel, we get to know its characters as if they were our own friends, or even ourselves. Many of them are trying hard in various ways to figure out what is right and resist what is wrong. As the war penetrates further into their lives, some must make terrible compromises in order to survive, while some cannot survive at all. But as readers, we have the chance to see a few of these people, under unimaginable pressure, with chaos and violence everywhere around them, responding with transcendent and unforgettable moral beauty. These are not people born with special moral qualities, people who find it easy to be brave and honourable. We know them: we know quite well that they are just as irritable and selfish and lazy as we are. As Anna’s husband tells her: ‘no one found himself with courage ready-made, you had to acquire courage little by little, it was a long story and it went on almost all your life’. Ginzburg shows us the possibility of this courage, she bears witness to the possibility, and reading her work we know and believe also.
This is not a novel that turns its face away from evil. Like any story of the Second World War, it tells of almost unendurable grief, loss, violence and injustice. But it is also a story about the possibility of knowing what is right, and living by that knowledge, whatever the consequences. As readers, we understand and love the novel’s characters in all their humanity – and for a moment or two, their courage seems to illuminate, in a flash of radiance, the meaning of human life on earth. And yet, at the novel’s close, after the war has ended, Ginzburg is careful to show the difficult task that awaits those who survive. A character who has spent the war editing an anti-fascist publication struggles to adjust to his new working conditions:
He could produce secret newspapers but not newspapers that were not secret, producing secret newspapers was easy, oh, how easy and how splendid it was. But newspapers that had to come out every day with the rising of the sun, without any danger or fear, that was another story. You had to sit and grind away at a desk, without either danger or fear, and out came a lot of ignoble words and you knew perfectly well that they were ignoble and you hated yourself like hell for having written them but you didn’t cross them out because there was a hurry to get out the newspaper for which people were waiting. But it was incredible how fear and danger never produced ignoble words but always true ones, words that were torn from your very heart.
These are characters from whom the war has taken a great deal, almost everything. But the challenge that faces them in the end is to make sense of a world that is no longer at war, a world in which heroic acts of courage are no longer necessary or even possible, a world in which newspapers have to ‘come out every day with the rising of the sun’. All Our Yesterdays was published seven years after the end of the war, and it is difficult not to hear Ginzburg’s own voice in this passage, sitting and grinding away at her desk, ‘without either danger or fear’, trying to make sense of what remains.
To me, All Our Yesterdays is a perfect novel, which is to say, it is completely what it is attempting to be, and nothing else. It is a book that shows in simple and intelligent prose both how large and how small a novel ought to be. Its stakes are as high as the most cataclysmic crisis of the twentieth century, and as low as the marriage of one young woman, the fate of one family dog. As readers of this novel, we come to see and feel the inextricable relations between the inner and outer worlds of human beings. Ginzburg’s novels manage not only to accommodate, but to place into a meaningful relationship, the intimate lives of fictional characters and the radical social and political changes unfolding around them. This accomplishment is made possible by Ginzburg’s extraordinary understanding of the human soul, by her brilliance as a prose stylist and above all by her incomparable moral clarity. All Our Yesterdays is among the great novels of its century, and Ginzburg among the great novelists. Speaking for myself, as a reader, as a writer and as a human being, her work has touched and transformed my life. I hope that you might give it the opportunity to do the same to yours.
Sally Rooney, 2022
All Our Yesterdays
Part One
Their mother’s portrait hung in the dining room: a woman seated on a chair, wearing a hat with feathers in it, and with a long, tired, frightened face. She had always been weak in health, suffering from fits of giddiness and palpitations, and four children had been too much for her. She died not long after Anna’s birth.
They used to go to the cemetery sometimes on Sundays, Anna, Giustino and Signora Maria. Concettina did not go, she never set foot outside the house on a Sunday; it was a day she detested and she stayed shut up in her room mending her stockings, wearing her ugliest clothes. And Ippolito had to keep his father company. At the cemetery Signora Maria would pray, but the two children did not, because their father always said it was silly to pray, and perhaps God 6might exist but it was no use praying to him, he was God and knew of his own accord how matters stood.
Before the time of their mother’s death Signora Maria did not live with them but with their grandmother, their father’s mother, and they used to travel together. On Signora Maria’s suitcases were hotel labels, and in a cupboard there was a dress of hers with buttons in the shape of little fir trees, bought in the Tyrol. Their grandmother had had a mania for travelling and never wanted to stop, and so she had run through all her money, for she liked going to smart hotels. Latterly she had turned very nasty, so Signora Maria said, because she could not bear having no money and could not make out how in the world this had happened, and every now and then she forgot and wanted to buy herself a hat, and Signora Maria had to drag her away from the shop window, thumping the ground with her umbrella and chewing her veil with rage. Now she lay buried at Nice, the place where she had died, the place in which she had enjoyed herself so much as a young woman, when she was fresh and pretty and had all her money.
Signora Maria was always pleased when she was able to talk about the money the old lady had had, and when she could tell stories and boast about the journeys they had taken. Signora Maria was very small, and when she was sitting down her feet did not touch the floor. For this reason, when she was sitting down she used to wrap herself 7round with a rug, because she did not like it to be seen that her feet did not reach the floor. The rug was a carriage rug, the one that she and the old lady used to spread over their knees twenty years before, when they drove about the town in a carriage. Signora Maria used to put a little touch of rouge on her cheeks, and she did not like to be seen early in the morning before she had put on her rouge, and so she would slip into the bathroom very quietly, holding her head down low; and she started and was very angry if someone stopped her in the passage to ask her something. She always stayed quite a long time in the bathroom, and everyone would come and knock at the door and she would begin to shout that she was tired of living in that house, where no one had any respect for her, and she intended to pack her bags at once and go to her sister’s in Genoa. Two or three times she had pulled out her suitcases from underneath the wardrobe and had begun putting away her shoes in little cloth bags. The only thing to be done was to pretend nothing had happened, and then after a little she would start taking the shoes out again. In any case everyone knew that the sister in Genoa did not want her in her house.
Signora Maria would come out of the bathroom fully dressed and with her hat on, and would then run out into the street with a shovel to collect dung to manure her rose trees, moving very swiftly and taking good care that nobody was going past. Then she would go off with her string bag 8to do the shopping; and her quick little feet in their little shoes with bows on them were capable of carrying her all over the town in half an hour. Every morning she ransacked the entire town to find where things were cheapest, and she came home dead tired, and was always in a bad humour after doing the shopping, and would get angry with Concettina who was still in her dressing gown, and say that never would she have believed, when she was sitting in the carriage beside the old lady, her knees nice and warm under the rug and people greeting them as they went by, that one day she would have to go toiling round the town with a string bag. Concettina would be very slowly brushing her hair in front of the looking glass, and then she would put her face close to the glass and look at her freckles one by one, and look at her teeth and her gums and put out her tongue and look at that too. She combed her hair and knotted it in a tight roll at the back of her neck, with a ruffled fringe on her forehead, and this fringe made her look exactly like a cocotte, Signora Maria said. Then she would throw open the door of the wardrobe and consider which dress to put on. In the meantime Signora Maria would be throwing off bedclothes and beating carpets, a handkerchief tied round her head and her sleeves rolled up over her dry, withered arms, but she would run away from the window if she saw the lady of the house opposite appear on her balcony, for she did not like to be seen with a handkerchief round her head, beating 9carpets, remembering that she had come to the house as a lady companion – and look at the things she had to do now!
The lady of the house opposite had a fringe too, but it was a fringe that had been curled by the hairdresser and then put into a graceful disorder, and Signora Maria said she looked younger than Concettina, when she came out in the morning in one of her fresh, bright-coloured wraps, although it was known for certain that she was forty-five.
There were days when Concettina could not manage to find any dress to put on. She tried skirts and blouses, belts, flowers at her bosom, and nothing pleased her. Then she would begin to cry and complain what an unlucky creature she was, without a single pretty dress to wear, and with such a bad figure into the bargain. Signora Maria would shut the windows so that no one in the house opposite should hear. ‘You haven’t a bad figure,’ she would say, ‘it’s just that you’re a bit heavy in the hips and a bit flat in the chest. Like your grandmother; she was flat-chested too.’ Concettina bawled and sobbed, throwing herself half-undressed on the unmade bed, and then all her troubles would come out, the exams she had to pass and the difficulties with her fiancés.
Concettina had so many fiancés. She was always changing them. One of them was always standing in front of the gate, one who had a broad, square face and wore, in place of a shirt, a scarf, fastened together with a safety pin. He was called Danilo. Concettina said she had given him up some 10time ago, but he had not yet resigned himself to this and walked up and down in front of the gate, his hands behind his back and his cap pulled down over his forehead. Signora Maria was afraid he might come in all of a sudden and make a scene with Concettina, and she went to Concettina’s father to complain about all the troubles the girl had with her fiancés, and drew him over to the window to look at Danilo with his cap and his hands behind his back, and wanted him to go down and send him away. However Concettina’s father said that the street belongs to everybody and one has no right to drive away a man from a street; and he pulled out his old revolver and put it on his desk, in case Danilo suddenly climbed over the gate. And he pushed Signora Maria out of the room, because he wanted to be left in peace to his writing.
He was writing a big book of memoirs. He had been writing it for many years, he had in fact given up his work as a lawyer in order to be able to write it. It was entitled Nothing but the Truth and it contained fiery attacks upon the fascists and the King. The old man used to laugh and rub his hands together at the thought that the King and Mussolini knew nothing about it, while in a small town in Italy there was a man writing fiery remarks about them. He was telling the whole story of his life, the Caporetto retreat in which he had been involved and all the things he had seen, and the gatherings of socialists and the March 11on Rome and all the fellows who had changed their shirts in his own little town, people who had appeared honest and decent and the shady, dirty things they had afterwards done – ‘nothing but the truth’. For months and months he wrote, ringing the bell every minute to ask for coffee, and the room was full of smoke, and even at night he sat up writing, or called Ippolito to write while he dictated. Ippolito would tap hard on the typewriter, and his father would walk up and down the room in his pyjamas as he dictated, and nobody could get to sleep, because the house had thin walls, and Signora Maria would turn over and over in her bed, trembling with fear lest someone in the street should hear the old man’s raised voice and the fiery things he was saying against Mussolini. But then all at once the old man lost heart, and his book no longer seemed so fine to him, and then he said that the Italians were all wrong but that you certainly could not change them by means of a book. He said he would like to go out along the street shooting off his revolver, or else that he did not want to do anything at all, just to lie on his back and sleep and wait for death to come. He no longer left his room; he spent his days in bed and made Ippolito read Faust to him. And then he would call Giustino and Anna and tell them how sorry he was that he had never done the things a father usually does, he had never taken them to the cinema or even out for a walk. And he called Concettina and wanted to know 12about her exams and about her fiancés. He became very kind when he was sad. He woke up one morning and no longer felt so sad; he made Ippolito massage his back with a horsehair glove, and he wanted his white flannel trousers. He went and sat in the garden and asked them to bring him his coffee there, but he always found it too weak and gulped it down with disgust. He would sit in the garden all the morning, his pipe between his long, white teeth, his thin, wrinkled face screwed up into a grimace, and it was impossible to make out whether this was because of the sun or because of his disgust at the coffee, or because of the effort of holding the pipe in his teeth alone. He made no excuses for anything to anybody after he had stopped feeling sad, and he used to flog the rose trees with his cane while he was thinking afresh about his book of memoirs, and then Signora Maria would be distressed about the rose trees which were so dear to her heart, and every morning she made the sacrifice of going out into the street to collect dung in her shovel, notwithstanding the risk that someone might see and laugh at her.
The old man had not a single friend. Occasionally he went out and walked all over the town, with a contemptuous, hostile air, and he would sit in a café in the centre of the town looking at the people passing, in order to be seen by those whom he had once known very well, to show he was still alive and meant them to be angry with him. He 13would come home well satisfied when he had seen one of the ones who had once been socialists like himself and were now fascists, and who did not know the things that were written about them in his book of memoirs, about the time when they were honest and decent people and about the shady, dirty things they had afterwards done. At the table the old man would rub his hands together and say that if God existed, he would let him live till the end of fascism, so that he could publish his book and see people’s faces. He said that in that way one would know at last whether this God existed or not, but he himself thought, on the whole, that he did not exist, or again, possibly He did exist but was on Mussolini’s side. After the meal the old man would say, ‘Giustino, go and buy me a paper. Make yourself useful, seeing that you’re not ornamental.’ For there was nothing kindly about him when he was not sad.
From time to time big boxes of chocolates used to arrive, sent by Cenzo Rena, who had been a great friend of the old man’s at one time. Picture postcards also used to arrive from him, from all parts of the world, for Cenzo Rena was always travelling, and Signora Maria would recognise the places where she had been with the old lady, and she stuck the postcards into her dressing-table mirror. But the old man did not like to hear Cenzo Rena’s name mentioned, because they had been friends but had then had a terrible quarrel, and when he saw the chocolates arrive he would 14shrug his shoulders and snort with rage, and Ippolito had to write secretly to Cenzo Rena to thank him and to give news of the old man.
Concettina and Anna had piano lessons twice a week. A timid little ring would be heard, Anna would open the gate, and the music teacher would walk across the garden, stopping to look at the rose trees, for he knew the story of the dung and the shovel, and also he hoped that the old man would pop out from some corner of the garden. At first the old man had paid him a great deal of attention and had imagined that this music teacher was a great man; he had sat him down in his own room and given him his own tobacco to smoke, and had tapped him hard on the knee and told him over and over again that he was an exceptional person. The music teacher was engaged in writing a Latin grammar in verse; he copied it out into a little exercise book and every time he came he was anxious that the old man should hear a few new stanzas. And all of a sudden the old man had become terribly tired of him; he did not wish to hear any more new stanzas of the grammar, and when the music teacher’s timid little ring at the gate was heard the old man could be seen escaping up the stairs to hide where best he could. The music teacher could not resign himself to being no longer welcomed in the old man’s room, and he would talk in a loud voice in the passage and read out his stanzas, looking this way and that all the time. Then he grew 15sad, and used to ask Concettina and Anna whether he had perhaps offended their father without knowing it. Neither Anna nor Concettina played well. They were both sick of these lessons and wanted to stop them, but Signora Maria was unwilling because the music teacher’s was the only face from the outside world that was ever seen inside the house. And a house is really too gloomy, she said, without a few visitors now and then. She herself was always present at the piano lessons, with her rug over her knees and her crochet work. And afterwards she used to carry on a conversation with the music teacher and listen to his new stanzas, and he would stay on till it was quite late, still in the hope of seeing the old man.
The music teacher was in very truth the only stranger who came to the house. There was indeed a nephew of Signora Maria’s who put in an occasional appearance – the son of that sister of hers at Genoa; he was studying to be a veterinary surgeon and at Genoa he always failed in his exams, and so he had come to study in this little town where the exams were much easier, but even so he failed from time to time. In any case he was not a real stranger because everyone had seen him constantly ever since he had been a child, and Signora Maria was always on tenterhooks when he arrived, for fear the old man should treat him unkindly. The old man did not want anyone about the house, and even Concettina’s fiancés were not allowed to enter the gate. 16
In the summer they all had to go to Le Visciole, every year. Each time Concettina wept because she wanted to go to the seaside, or else to stay in the town with her fiancés. And Signora Maria, too, was in despair, because of the contadino’s wife there, for they had quarrelled one day when the pig had eaten some handkerchiefs. And Giustino and Anna, too, who as children had enjoyed themselves at Le Visciole, now wore cross expressions when they had to go there. They hoped their father would let them go one summer to stay with Cenzo Rena in a kind of castle he possessed, for Cenzo Rena wrote every year to invite them. But their father did not wish them to go and said that in any case it was an ugly castle, a wretched thing with poor little towers; Cenzo Rena only thought it beautiful because he had spent money on it. Money is the devil’s excrement, said their father.
They went to Le Visciole by a little local train. It was near, but departure was a complicated business, for the old man gave no one any peace during the days when the packing had to be done; he flew into rages with Ippolito and with Signora Maria and the trunks had to be packed and unpacked a hundred times over. And Concettina’s fiancés, who had come to bid her goodbye, hung about the gate, and she cried because she was filled with a tremendous rage at having to stay for so many months at Le Visciole, where she grew fat from boredom and there wasn’t even a tennis court.17
They left early in the morning, and the old man was in a very bad temper throughout the journey, because the little train was crowded and people were eating and drinking, and he was afraid they would soil his trousers with wine. Never once did he fail to start a quarrel in the train. Then he would get angry with Signora Maria, who always had numbers of little bundles and baskets and her shoes in cloth bags stuck about all over the place, and in her string bag a wine flask of coffee and milk; the old man was particularly disgusted at this flask, to him it seemed revolting to see coffee and milk in a wine flask; and he said to Signora Maria that he quite failed to understand how the old lady could have wanted to take her about with her on so many journeys. But when they arrived at Le Visciole he was content. He sat himself down under the pergola and took in deep, strong breaths, breath after breath, and said how good the air tasted, it had such a strong, fresh taste that he felt he was taking a drink each time he breathed. And he called the contadino and greeted him warmly, and called Ippolito to see whether he didn’t think the contadino looked like a Van Gogh picture; he made the contadino sit with his face supported on his hand and put his hat on his head, and asked if he didn’t look like a real Van Gogh. After the contadino had gone, Ippolito said he might indeed be a Van Gogh, but he was also a thief because he stole grain and wine. The old man flew into a great rage. He had played with this contadino as a boy, and 18he could not allow Ippolito to start pouring contempt in this way upon the things of his childhood, and it was much worse to pour contempt upon the childhood of one’s father than to keep back a few pounds of grain when you needed it. Ippolito made no answer, he held his dog between his legs and stroked its ears. As soon as he arrived at Le Visciole he used to put on an old fustian jacket and high boots, and he went about dressed like that the whole summer, and he was shockingly dirty, and besides, he must be bursting with heat, said Signora Maria. But Ippolito never looked hot, he did not sweat and his face was always dry and smooth, and he used to go about the countryside with the dog in the hot midday sun. The dog ate the armchairs and had fleas, and Signora Maria wanted to give it away, but Ippolito was mad about this dog, and once when the dog was ill he had kept it in his room at night, getting up to make bread and milk for it. He would have liked to take it with him to the town, instead of which he had to leave it at Le Visciole with the contadino who did not look after it and who gave it bad food, and Ippolito was always much distressed in the autumn when he had to say goodbye to the dog, but his father agreed with Signora Maria about the dog and would not hear of having it in the town. So Ippolito would have to wait patiently for him to die, his father said, and really, perhaps Ippolito did hope very much that he would die soon, perhaps this was his pet dream, to be able to go for a walk in the town with his dog. 19
Ippolito listened in silence when his father spoke unkindly to him, he never answered back and his face remained quiet and pale, and at night he stayed up to type out the book of memoirs, or to read Goethe aloud when his father could not sleep. For he had the soul of a slave, Concettina used to say, and camomile in his veins instead of blood, and was like an old man of ninety, with no girls whom he liked and no desire for anything, all he could do was to wander about the countryside alone all day with the dog.
Le Visciole was a tall, large house, with guns and horns hung up on the walls, with high beds and mattresses that rustled because they were stuffed with maize leaves. The garden stretched down to the high road, a big, uncultivated garden full of trees; it was no use trying to plant rose bushes or other flowers because in winter the contadino would certainly not look after them and they would die. Behind the house was the courtyard, with the farm cart and the contadino’s cottage, and the contadino’s wife who came to her door from time to time and flung out a bucket of water, and then Signora Maria would shout out that this dirty water made the courtyard stink, and the contadino’s wife shouted back that it was clean water, quite good enough to wash Signora Maria’s face in, and so the two of them would go on quarrelling for a bit. All round, as far as the eye could see, stretched fields of corn and maize, and in the middle of them stood scarecrows, waving their empty 20sleeves; vineyards and oak trees started at the foot of the hill, and every now and then a shot would be heard from that direction, and a cloud of birds would rise and Ippolito’s dog would be heard barking, but Concettina said it barked from fright, not from a desire to catch anything. The river was some distance away, beyond the road, a bright, far off streak amongst bushes and rocks: and the village was a little beyond it, about ten houses or so.
In the village were the people whom the old man called ‘the humbugs’ – the local fascist secretary, the superintendent of police, the secretary of the commune; and the old man went every day to the village so that the humbugs might see him, that they might see he was still alive and that he cut them dead. The humbugs would be playing bowls in their shirtsleeves, ignorant that they too were in the book of memoirs; and their wives would be sitting round the monument in the little square, knitting and suckling their babies, with handkerchiefs over their breasts. The monument was big and made of stone, a big, stone young man with a badge and a fez: the old man would stop in front of it and stick his eyeglass in his eye, and look and smile sarcastically, he would stay there for a little, looking and smiling sarcastically: and Signora Maria was afraid that some day or other the humbugs would arrest him, and she would try to pull him away, as she had once done with the old lady in front of the hat shop windows. Signora Maria would have liked 21to talk to the wives of the humbugs, to have learnt new stitches and taught them some as well: and also to have told them that it would have been a good thing if they had washed their breasts with water that had been boiled before suckling their babies. But she never dared go near them because of the old man.
In the summer, freckles and places where the skin had peeled were to be seen on the old man’s bald, shiny head, because he went out in the sun bareheaded; and Concettina’s legs went golden brown, seeing that there was nothing else to do at Le Visciole except sunbathe, and Concettina sat all day long in a deck chair in front of the house, with dark glasses and a book that she did not read; she would look at her legs and take care that they got nicely sunburnt, and then she had the idea that if she kept them sweating in the sun they might grow a little thinner; for Concettina, besides being heavy in the hips, was heavy in the legs as well, and she used to say she would give ten years of her life to be slimmer from the hips down. Signora Maria would arrange her clothes about her as she sat under the pergola, her extraordinary clothes cut out of old curtains or bedspreads, with a hat made out of a newspaper on her head and her feet crossed on a footstool. Far away, on the brow of the hill, Ippolito could be seen going backwards and forwards with his gun and his dog: and the old man would curse the stupid dog and Ippolito’s mania for wandering about the 22countryside, when all the time he needed him to give him his injection and do some typewriting, and he would send off Giustino to chase him.
2
It was at Le Visciole that the old man felt ill for the first time. He was taking his coffee, and all of a sudden the hand that held the cup started trembling, and the coffee was spilt on his trousers, and his body was bowed down, and he was trembling and breathing heavily. Ippolito went on a bicycle to fetch the doctor. But the old man did not want the doctor and said that he felt a little better; he said the doctor was a humbug and he wanted to leave for the town at once. The doctor came, a humbug of the most insignificant kind, hardly taller than Signora Maria, with fair hair that looked like chickens’ feathers, and big baggy trousers like a Zouave and check stockings. And all at once he and the old man made friends. For the old man discovered that he was not a humbug at all, and that he hated the local fascist secretary and the superintendent of police and the stone young man in the village square. The old man said he was very pleased he had been ill, because in that way he had discovered this 23little doctor, a person whom he had believed to be a humbug whereas he was really a fine fellow; and every day they used to have a chat and tell each other all sorts of things, and the old man was almost inclined to read him some bits out of the book of memoirs, but Ippolito said better not. Ippolito could not now go roaming over the countryside, but had to sit all day long in his father’s room and give him injections and drops and read aloud to him: but the old man no longer wanted Goethe, he now wanted detective stories. Luckily there was the little doctor coming all the time, and the old man was perfectly contented: only he had told him to stop wearing those check stockings, because they did not suit him and were rather ridiculous.
They left, as usual, at the end of September: however Giustino and Signora Maria left earlier, because Giustino had to sit again for his examination in Greek. In the town the old man began to be ill again, growing thin and coughing, and a doctor came to see him, a doctor who was entirely different from the little doctor with hair like chickens’ feathers, a doctor who did not sit and chat with him, who did not listen to him and who treated him badly. He had forbidden him to smoke: and the old man gave Ippolito his tobacco pouch and told him to lock it up in a drawer and keep the key; but after a short time he wanted the tobacco, he wanted just a little of it, and Ippolito paid no attention to him and stood there with his hands in his pockets, and 24so then the old man said how ridiculous Ippolito was, who took everything literally and was lacking in commonsense, lacking a touch of commonsense and imagination, and the world was ruined by people like that, by people who took everything literally, and he couldn’t get over having produced such a ridiculous, stupid son, who stood there with a stony face and kept tight hold of the key: and it was a great grief to him to have a stupid son, a grief which did him more harm than a little tobacco. Until finally Ippolito gave a sigh and threw down the key on the desk: and the old man opened the drawer and took the tobacco, and started to smoke and to cough.
Then one day, while they were all at table, they saw the old man come into the room, in pyjamas and slippers, with a bundle of papers in his arms. It was the book of memoirs: and he asked whether the stove had been lit, and it had been lit because it was already cold: then all at once he started stuffing the sheets of paper into it, and they all looked at him open-mouthed, only Ippolito did not appear surprised. Big flames came up from the open stove, and the book of memoirs was blazing, and no one understood anything: but Ippolito did not appear surprised, he had got up and was looking at the flames, smoothing back his hair very slowly, and with the poker he pushed into the stove a few sheets that were not yet burned: and then the old man rubbed his hands together and said, ‘I feel happier now. 25It will have to be written all over again. It wasn’t going right.’ But all that day he was very jumpy, and would not hear of going back to bed nor of dressing himself either, and he walked up and down the room and bullied Ippolito with the usual story about his tobacco: he was very angry with Ippolito and finished by sending him out of the room, and insisted upon Concettina reading aloud to him: while she was reading he held her hand and stroked it and told her that she had beautiful hands and a beautiful profile, a really beautiful profile: but then he began saying that she read badly and in a singsong kind of voice, and made her stop.
He went to bed and was now unable to get up again. He grew slowly, steadily worse, and was dying, and everyone knew it, and certainly he himself knew it too but he pretended there was nothing wrong – he who used always to talk of death before he fell really ill; he spoke less and less as the days went by, gradually he came only to ask for what he needed; Giustino and Anna were forbidden to enter his room and saw him from the door as he lay flat in the bed with his thin, hairy arms lying on top of the coverlet, his nose getting whiter and whiter and sharper and sharper; sometimes he would make a sign to the boy and girl to come in, but then he would say nothing that was intelligible, only confused words, and would rumple up his pyjamas on his chest with his arms, and tremble and sweat. There was a smell of ether in the room, and a red rag 26tied round the lamp, and the old man’s long, pointed shoes stuck out from under the wardrobe, and you knew he would never walk again, because soon he would be dead. Anna and Concettina had not started their piano lessons again since the summer, but the music teacher still came in order to ask for news, only he did not dare to ring the bell and would stand in front of the gate and wait for Signora Maria to come out into the garden and tell him if the old man had been able to get a little rest. And Danilo, too, would almost always be at the gate, leaning against the wall with a book, and Signora Maria said it was really shameless of him not to leave Concettina in peace now that her father was so very ill; and when Concettina went out for a moment to do some shopping, he would put his book under his arm and walk behind her, and Concettina would throw fierce glances at him every now and then, and would come home very red in the face, with her fringe all untidy.
The old man died in the morning. Anna and Giustino were at school and Signora Maria came to fetch them, a tiny little black handkerchief tied round her neck; she kissed them gravely on the forehead and led them away. To kiss them she had had to rise on tiptoe, because they were both much taller than herself; it had been in the corridor at the school and the headmaster was there watching; usually he was rude but he was very kind that morning. They went up to their father’s room: Concettina was kneeling there 27sobbing, Ippolito on the other hand was standing still and silent, his face thin and white as usual. Their father was lying fully dressed on the bed, with his tie on, and shoes on his feet, and his face now was very beautiful, no longer trembling and sweaty, but composed and gentle.
Then Signora Maria took Anna to the house opposite, for the lady there had sent over to suggest that she might be left with them for the whole day. Anna was frightened because there was a dog there. Not a dog like Ippolito’s, curly-haired and stupid, but an Alsatian tied up with a chain; and hung on a tree in the garden was a notice: ‘Cave canem’. And she was also frightened because there was a ping-pong table. Through the hedge she had seen a boy playing ping-pong with an old gentleman. And so she was frightened that the boy might ask her to play and she didn’t know how to. She thought of saying that she knew how to play but didn’t want to because at their house at Le Visciole there was a ping-pong table and they did nothing but play at it all the summer. But if later all of a sudden she and the boy made great friends, it might perhaps be necessary to invite him to come one summer to Le Visciole and then he would realise that there wasn’t a ping-pong table there at all.
She had never been in the house opposite. Through the hedge she had looked at the boy and the old gentleman and the dog. The lady with the fringe who appeared on the balcony in her dressing gown, and who looked so young, 28was the old gentleman’s wife. Then there was a red-haired girl, who was the daughter of the old gentleman and of another wife whom he had had before. On the other hand the boy, and also another bigger boy who must be about Ippolito’s age, were the sons of this present wife, the one with the fringe. Signora Maria said they were very rich people, for the old gentleman was the owner of the soap factory, the long red-brick building on the river, with chimneys that were always smoking. They were very, very rich people. They never boiled up their coffee grounds a second time, but gave them to certain monks who came to ask for them. The red-haired girl, daughter of the old gentleman’s other wife, came out in the evenings with a broom and swept the whole garden, muttering all the time and working herself up into a rage. Signora Maria, too, had very often looked through the hedge, for she was inquisitive and much interested in rich people.
Signora Maria left Anna with the maid who came to open the door, recommending that they should make her put a scarf round her neck if she went out in the garden, and then she went home again. The maid led Anna to a room on the floor above and told her to wait there, and in a moment Signor Giuma would come and keep her company. Anna did not know who Signor Giuma was. From the windows she saw her own home – quite different when seen thus from this side, low, small and old, with 29the dried-up wistaria on the balcony and, on one corner of the roof, Giustino’s ball, torn and rain-soaked. The shutters were closed in her father’s room: and she remembered suddenly how he used to throw open the shutters with a clatter and lean out to look at the morning, soaping his chin with the shaving brush and stretching out his thin neck, and would say to her, ‘Go and buy me some tobacco. Make yourself useful, seeing that you’re not ornamental.’ And she seemed to see him going out into the garden, with his eyeglass, in his white flannel trousers, with his long legs that were slightly crooked because he had done so much riding as a young man. And she wondered where her father was now. She believed in hell, in purgatory and in paradise, and thought that her father must now be in purgatory, repenting of the unkind things he had so often said to them, particularly when he bullied Ippolito about the tobacco and about the dog; and how surprised he must have been to find that purgatory existed, when he had so often said that almost certainly there is nothing for the dead, and it is better so because at least you can sleep at last – he himself being such a bad sleeper.
The maid came to tell her that Signor Giuma had now arrived. It was the boy, the one who played ping-pong. He came running in, whistling, his hair over his eyes; he threw down his books, which were tied together by a leather strap, on the desk. He seemed surprised to see her; he gave a little 30cold, shy bow, stooping his shoulders slightly. He started looking round the room for something, whistling as he looked. From a drawer he took an exercise book and a pot of glue, and stuck some things into the book: they were big faces of film actors, cut out of a magazine. It appeared to be very important to stick them in, and very tiresome too, for the boy panted and snorted, throwing back his hair from over his eyes. Beside the desk was a big revolving globe and from time to time he looked on it for some country or other and then wrote hastily in the exercise book underneath the film-actors’ faces. The red-haired girl came in. Her hair was short and clipped in a fashion which was popular that year and which was called à la fièvre typhoïde. But only her hair was fashionable; her dress, on the contrary, was wide and ungraceful, with a round neck to it, and was of an ugly sort of lemon yellow. The girl held her usual broom in her hand and she swept the carpet violently and then said, ‘Giuma, it’s not very amusing for this little girl. Leave the film actors and show her The Child’s Treasure House, or take her into the garden and play ping-pong with her.’
They looked at The Child’s Treasure House. There were several volumes of it and all sorts of things were to be seen in it – flowers and birds and machines and cities. In front of each picture, Giuma stopped for a moment and they both looked: then he said, ‘Finished?’ and she said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Finished’ and ‘yes’ were the only words they spoke. Giuma’s 31thin, brown hand turned the pages. Anna was ashamed of having thought they would become great friends. Then all of a sudden a great clamour was heard all through the house, and she jumped and Giuma laughed: he had white, sharp teeth like a wolf’s. He said, ‘It’s the gong. We must go to lunch.’
The old gentleman sat at the head of the table. He was deaf, and had a little black box on his chest, with an electric wire which he kept hooked on to his ear. He had a white beard which he placed on top of his table napkin when he started to eat; he had a gastric ulcer and could eat only cooked vegetables and pieces of soaked bread with oil. Beside him sat the red-haired girl, who was called Amalia, and it was she who helped him to food and seasoned it with oil and poured mineral water into his glass. At the other end of the table sat his wife, wearing a very hairy blue woollen jumper and a little pearl necklace; then there was a person that you couldn’t be quite sure who he was, he wasn’t a guest because he was wearing slippers; he had Giuma beside him and Giuma poured water into his wine out of spite and then laughed with his fist over his mouth; the man took no notice of him and talked stocks and shares with the old gentleman, but he had to yell because the little box was slightly broken. Then they all started talking about Amalia’s new way of doing her hair, à la fièvre typhoïde, and the Signora said she wanted to do hers like that too, 32because she was a bit tired of her fringe. Amalia shouted the conversation into the old gentleman’s ear. The little box was called ‘Papa’s apparatus’; and even the old gentleman alluded to himself as ‘Papa’. He said, ‘Papa wants to take a long nap after lunch today. Papa is very old.’ Then the Signora began to get angry and to look out of the window because of Emanuele failing to arrive. Emanuele was the one who was about the same age as Ippolito, and he arrived almost at the end of lunch. He was lame, and he arrived all red and sweating from the fatigue of limping. He looked like Giuma, except that he hadn’t teeth like a wolf; he had broad, square teeth that stuck out over his lips. After lunch they wrapped the old gentleman up in a rug on the sofa and put a scarf over his eyes because otherwise he could not sleep, and then left him there.
