Difficult Loves

  “Down, Frisette! Down!” the hunter cried. And, into the bar: “Coffee!”

  “Handsome!” Stefania said, petting the dog. “Is he a setter?”

  “Épagneul breton,” the hunter said. “Female.” He was young, somewhat blunt, but more out of shyness than anything else.

  “How old is she?”

  “About ten months. Down, Frisette. Behave yourself.”

  “Well? Where are the partridges?” the barman said.

  “Oh, I just go out to exercise the dog,” the hunter said.

  “You go far?” Stefania asked.

  The hunter mentioned the name of a locality not very distant “It’s nothing with the car. So I’m back by ten. The job . . .”

  “It’s nice up there,” Stefania said. She didn’t feel like letting the conversation die, even if they weren’t talking about anything much.

  “There’s a deserted valley, clean, all bushes, heath, and in the morning there’s no mist, you can see clearly . . . If the dog flushes something . . .”

  “I wish I could go to work at ten. I’d sleep till nine-forty-five,” the barman said.

  “Well, I like to sleep, too,” the hunter said, “all the same, being up there, while everybody else is still sleeping . . . I don’t know, I like it . . . it’s a passion with me . . .”

  Stefania felt that behind his apparent self-justification this young man concealed a sharp pride, a contempt for the sleeping city all around, a determination to feel different.

  “Don’t take offense, but in my opinion you hunters are all crazy,” the barman said. “I mean, this business of getting up in the middle of the night.”

  “No,” Stefania said, “I understand them.”

  “Hm, who knows?” the hunter said. “It’s a passion like any other.” Now he had taken to looking at Stefania and that bit of conviction he had instilled earlier in his talk about hunting now seemed gone, and Stefania’s presence seemed to make him suspect that his whole attitude was mistaken, that perhaps happiness was something different from what he was seeking.

  “Really, I do understand you, a morning like this . . .” Stefania said.

  The hunter remained for a moment like someone who wants to talk but doesn’t know what to say. “In weather like this, dry, and cool, the dog can walk well,” he said. He had finished his coffee, paid for it, the dog was pulling him to go outside, and he remained there still, hesitant. He said, awkwardly: “Why don’t you come along too, Signora?”

  Stefania smiled. “Oh, if we run into each other again, we’ll fix something, eh?”

  The hunter said, “Mmm”, moved around a bit, to see if he could find another conversational ploy. “Well, I’ll be going. Good morning.” They waved and he let the dog pull him outside.

  A worker had come in. He ordered a shot of grappa. “To the health of everybody who wakes up early,” he said, raising his glass. “Beautiful ladies, specially.” He was a man not young but jolly-looking.

  “Your health,” Stefania said, politely.

  “First thing in the morning, you feel like you own the world,” the worker said.

  “And not in the evening?” Stefania asked.

  “In the evening you’re too sleepy,” he said, “and you don’t think of anything. If you do, it means trouble . . .”

  “Me, in the morning I think of every kind of problem, one after the other,” the barman said.

  “Because before you start working you need a nice ride. You should do like me: I go to the factory on my motor-bike, with the cold air on my face . . .”

  “The air drives out thoughts,” Stefania said.

  “There, the lady understands me,” the worker said. “And if she understands me, she should drink a little grappa with me.”

  “No, thanks, really, I don’t drink.”

  “In the morning it’s just what you need. Two grappas, chief.”

  “I really never drink; you drink to my health and you’ll make me happy.”

  “You never drink?”

  “Well, occasionally, in the evening.”

  “You see? There’s your mistake . . .”

  “Oh, a person makes plenty of mistakes . . .”

  “Your health,” and the worker drained one glass, then the other. “One and one makes two. You see, I’ll explain . . .”

  Stefania was alone, there in the midst of those men, those different men, and she was talking with them. She was calm, sure of herself, there was nothing that upset her. This was the new event of that morning.

  She came out of the bar to see if they had opened the door. The worker also came out, straddled his motor-bike, slipped on his driving gloves. “Aren’t you cold?” Stefania asked. The worker slapped himself on the chest; there was a rustle of newspapers. “I’m armored.” And then, in dialect, he said: “Good-Bye, Signora.” Stefania also said good-bye to him in dialect, and he rode off.

  Stefania realized that something had happened from which she could not now turn back. This new way of hers of being among men, the night-owl, the hunter, the worker, made her different. This had been her adultery, this being alone among them, like this, their equals. She didn’t even remember Fornero any more.

  The front door was open. Stefania R. hurried home. The concierge didn’t see her.

  (1958)

  The adventure of the married couple

  THE FACTORY-WORKER Arturo Massolari was on the night shift, the one that ends at six. To reach home he had to go a long way, which he covered on his bicycle in fine weather, and on the tram during the rainy, winter months. He got home between six-forty-five and seven; in other words, sometimes before and sometimes after the alarm clock rang to wake Elide, his wife.

  Often the two noises – the sound of the clock and his tread as he came in – merged in Elide’s mind, reaching her in the depths of her sleep, the compact early-morning sleep that she tried to squeeze out for a few more seconds, her face buried in the pillow. Then she pulled herself from the bed with a yank and was already blindly slipping her arms into her robe, her hair over her eyes. She appeared to him like that, in the kitchen, where Arturo was taking the empty receptacles from the bag that he carried with him to work: the lunch box, the thermos. He set them in the sink. He had already lighted the stove and started the coffee. As soon as he looked at her, Elide instinctively ran one hand through her hair, forced her eyes wide open, as if every time she were ashamed of that first sight her husband had of her on coming home, always such a mess, her face half-asleep. When two people have slept together it’s different, in the morning both are surfacing from the same sleep, and they’re on a par.

  Sometimes, on the other hand, it was he who came into the bedroom to wake her, with the little cup of coffee, a moment before the alarm rang; then everything was more natural, the grimace on emerging from sleep took on a kind of lazy sweetness, the arms that were lifted to stretch, naked, ended by clasping his neck. They embraced. Arturo was wearing his rainproof wind-cheater; feeling him close, she could understand what the weather was like: whether it was raining or foggy or if it had snowed, according to how damp and cold he was. But she would ask him anyway: “What’s the weather like?”, and he would start his usual grumbling, half-ironic, reviewing all the troubles he had encountered, beginning at the end: the trip on his bike, the weather he had found on coming out of the factory, different from when he had entered it the previous evening, and the problems on the job, the rumors going around his section, and so on.

  At that hour, the house was always scantily heated, but Elide had completely undressed, and was washing in the little bathroom. Afterwards he came in, more calmly, and also undressed and washed, slowly, removing the dust and grease of the shop. And so, as both of them stood at the same basin, half-naked, a bit numbed, shoving each other now and then, taking the soap from each other, the toothpaste, and continuing to tell each other the things they had to tell, the moment of intimacy came, and at times, maybe when they were helpfully taking turns scrubbing each other’s back,
a caress slipped in, and they found themselves embracing.

  But all of a sudden Elide would cry: “My God! Look at the time!” and she would run to pull on her garter-belt, skirt, all in haste, on her feet, still brushing her hair, and stretching her face to the mirror over the dresser, hairpins held between her lips. Arturo would come in after her; he had a cigarette going, and would look at her, standing, smoking, and every time he seemed a bit embarrassed, having to stay there unable to do anything. Elide was ready, she slipped her coat on in the corridor, they exchanged a kiss, she opened the door, and could already be heard running down the stairs.

  Arturo remained alone. He followed the sound of Elide’s heels down the steps, and when he couldn’t hear her any more he still followed her in his thoughts, that quick little trot through the courtyard, out of the door of the building, the sidewalk, as far as the tram stop. The tram, on the contrary, could be heard clearly: shrieking, stopping, the slam of the step as each passenger boarded. There, she’s caught it, he thought, and could see his wife clinging in the midst of the crowd of workers, men and women, on the number eleven that took her to the factory as it did every day. He stubbed out the butt, closed the shutters at the window, darkening the room, and got into bed.

  The bed was as Elide had left it on getting up, but on his side, Arturo’s, it was almost intact, as if it had just been made. He lay on his own half, properly, but later he stretched a leg over there, where his wife’s warmth had remained, then he also stretched out the other leg, and so little by little he moved entirely over to Elide’s side, into that niche of warmth that still retained the form of her body, and he dug his face into her pillow, into her perfume, and he fell asleep.

  When Elide came back, in the evening, Arturo had been stirring around the rooms for a while already: he had lighted the stove, put something on to cook. There were certain jobs he did in those hours before supper, like making the bed, sweeping a little, even soaking the dirty laundry. Elide criticized everything, but to tell the truth he didn’t then go to greater pains: what he did was only a kind of ritual in order to wait for her, like meeting her halfway while still remaining within the walls of the house, as outside the lights were coming on and she was going past the shops in the midst of the belated bustle of those neighborhoods where many of the women have to do their shopping in the evening.

  Finally he heard her footstep on the stairs, quite different from the morning, heavier now, because Elide was climbing up, tired from the day of work and loaded down with the shopping. Arturo went out on the landing, took the shopping bag from her hands, and they went inside, talking. She sank down on a chair in the kitchen, without taking off her coat, while he removed the things from the bag. Then she would say: “Well, let’s pull ourselves together”, and would stand up, take off her coat, put on her house-coat. They would begin to prepare the food: supper for both of them, plus the lunch he would take to the factory for his one a.m. break, and the snack to be left ready for when he would wake up the next day.

  She would potter a bit, then sit for a bit on the straw chair and tell him what he should do. For him, on the contrary, this was the time when he was rested, he worked with a will, indeed he wanted to do everything, but always a bit absently, his mind already on other things. At those moments, there were occasions when they got on each other’s nerves, said nasty things, because she would like him to pay more attention to what he was doing, take it more seriously, or else to be more attached to her, to be closer, comfort her more. But after the first enthusiasm when she came home, his mind was already out of the house, obsessed with the idea that he should hurry because he would soon have to be going.

  When the table was set, when everything that had been prepared was placed within reach so they wouldn’t have to get up afterwards, then came the moment of yearning that overwhelmed them both, the thought that they had so little time to be together, and they could hardly raise the spoon to their mouth, in their longing just to sit there and hold hands.

  But even before the coffee had finished rising in the pot, he was already at his bike, to make sure everything was in order. They hugged. Arturo seemed only then to realize how soft and warm his wife was. But he hoisted the bike to his shoulder and carefully went down the stairs.

  Elide washed the dishes, went over the house thoroughly, redoing the things her husband had done, shaking her head. Now he was speeding through the dark streets, among the sparse lamps, perhaps he had already passed the gasometer. Elide went to bed, turned off the light. From her own half, lying there, she would slide one foot towards her husband’s place, looking for his warmth, but each time she realized it was warmer where she slept, a sign that Arturo had slept there too, and she would feel a great tenderness.

  (1958)

  The adventure of a poet

  THE LITTLE island had a high rocky shoreline. On it grew the thick, low scrub, the vegetation that survives by the sea. Gulls flew in the sky. It was a small island near the coast, deserted, uncultivated: in half an hour you could circle it in a rowboat, or in a rubber canoe, like the one those two had who were coming forward, the man calmly paddling, the woman stretched out, taking the sun. Approaching, the man listened intently.

  “What do you hear?” she asked.

  “Silence,” he said. “Islands have a silence you can hear.”

  In fact, every silence consists of the network of minuscule sounds that enfolds it: the silence of the island was distinct from that of the calm sea surrounding it because it was pervaded by a vegetable rustling, the calls of birds or a sudden whirr of wings.

  Down below the rock, the water, without a ripple these days, was a sharp, limpid blue, penetrated to its depths by the sun’s rays. In the cliff-faces the mouths of grottos opened, and the couple in the rubber boat were going lazily to explore them.

  It was a coast in the South, still hardly affected by tourism, and those two were bathers who came from elsewhere. He was one Usnelli, a fairly well-known poet; she, Delia H., a very beautiful woman.

  Delia was an admirer of the South, passionate, even fanatical, and lying in the boat she talked with constant ecstasy about everything she was seeing, and perhaps also with a hint of hostility towards Usnelli, who was new to those places and, it seemed to her, did not share her enthusiasm as much as he should have.

  “Wait,” Usnelli said, “wait.”

  “Wait for what?” she said. “What could be more beautiful than this?”

  He, distrustful (by nature and through his literary education) of emotions and words already the property of others, accustomed more to discovering hidden and spurious beauties than those that were evident and indisputable, was still nervous and tense. Happiness, for Usnelli, was a suspended condition, to be lived, holding your breath. Ever since he began loving Delia, he had seen his cautious, sparing relationship with the world endangered; but he wished to renounce nothing, neither of himself nor of the happiness that opened before him. Now he was on guard, as if every degree of perfection that nature, around him, achieved – a decanting of the blue of the water, a languishing of the coast’s green into gray, the flash of a fish’s fin at the very spot where the sea’s expanse was most smooth – were only heralding another, higher degree, and so on, to the point where the invisible line of the horizon would part like an oyster revealing all of a sudden a different planet or a new word.

  They entered a grotto. It began spaciously, like an interior lake of pale green, under a broad vault of rock. Farther on it narrowed to a dark passage. The man with the paddle turned the canoe around to enjoy the various effects of the light. The light from outside, through the jagged aperture, dazzled with colors made more vivid by the contrast. The water, there, sparkled, and the shafts of light ricocheted upwards, in conflict with the soft shadows that spread from the rear. Reflections and glints communicated also to the rock walls and the vault the instability of the water.

  “Here you understand the gods,” the woman said.

  “Hum,” Usnelli said. He was n
ervous. His mind, used to translating sensations into words, was now helpless, unable to formulate a single one.

  They went further in. The canoe passed a shoal: a hump of rock at the level of the water; now the canoe floated among rare glints that appeared and disappeared at every stroke of the paddle: the rest was dense shadow; the paddle now and then struck a wall. Delia, looking back, saw the blue orb of the open sky constantly change outline.

  “A crab! Huge! Over there!” she cried, sitting up.

  “. . . ab! . . . ere!” the echo sounded.

  “The echo!” she said, pleased, and started shouting words under those grim vaults: invocations, lines of verse.

  “You too! You shout too! Make a wish!” she said to Usnelli.

  “Hoooo . . .” Usnelli shouted. “Heeey . . . Echoooo . . .”

  Now and then the boat scraped. The darkness was deeper.

  “I’m afraid. God knows what animals . . .”

  “We can still get past.”

  Usnelli realized that he was heading for the darkness like a fish of the depths, who flees sunlit water.

  “I’m afraid, let’s go back,” she insisted.

  To him, too, basically, any taste for the horrid was alien. He paddled backwards. As they returned to where the cavern broadened, the sea became cobalt.

  “Are there any octopuses?” Delia asked.

  “You’d see them. The water’s so clear.”

  “I’ll have a swim then.”

  She slipped over the side of the canoe, let go, swam in that underground lake, and her body at times seemed white (as if that light stripped it of any color of its own) and sometimes as blue as that screen of water.

  Usnelli had stopped rowing; he was still holding his breath. For him, being in love with Delia had always been like this, as in the mirror of this cavern: in a world beyond words. For that matter, in all his poems, he had never written a verse of love: not one.