A Very Italian Christmas Read online

  The lady fell a-smiling and answered, “It rejoiceth me mightily to see a wise man led by the nose by a woman, even as one leadeth a ram by the horns to the shambles, albeit thou art no longer wise nor hast been since the hour when, unknowing why, thou sufferedst the malignant spirit of jealousy to enter thy breast; and the sillier and more besotted thou art, so much the less is my glory thereof. Deemest thou, husband mine, I am as blind of the eyes of the body as thou of those of the mind? Certainly, no; I perceived at first sight who was the priest that confessed me and know that thou wast he; but I had it at heart to give thee that which thou wentest seeking, and in sooth I have done it. Wert thou as wise as thou thinkest to be, thou wouldst not have essayed by this means to learn the secrets of thy good wife, but wouldst, without taking vain suspicion, have recognized that which she confessed to thee to be the very truth, without her having sinned in aught. I told thee that I loved a priest, and wast not thou, whom I am much to blame to love as I do, become a priest? I told thee that no door of my house could abide locked, whenas he had a mind to lie with me; and what door in the house was ever kept against thee, whenas thou wouldst come whereas I might be? I told thee that the priest lay with me every night, and when was it that thou layest not with me? And whenassoever thou sentest thy clerk to me, which was thou knowest, as often as thou layest from me, I sent thee word that the priest had not been with me. What other than a crack-brain like thee, who has suffered thyself to be blinded by thy jealousy, had failed to understand these things? Thou hast abidden in the house, keeping watch anights, and thoughtest to have given me to believe that thou wast gone abroad to sup and sleep. Bethink thee henceforth and become a man again, as thou wast wont to be; and make not thyself a laughing stock to whoso knoweth thy fashions, as do I, and leave this unconscionable watching that thou keepest; for I swear to God that, if the fancy took me to make thee wear the horns, I would engage, haddest thou an hundred eyes, as thou hast but two, to do my pleasure on such wise that thou shouldst not be ware thereof.”

  The jealous wretch, who thought to have very adroitly surprised his wife’s secrets, hearing this, avouched himself befooled and without answering otherwhat, held the lady for virtuous and discreet; and whenas it behooved him to be jealous, he altogether divested himself of his jealousy, even as he had put it on, what time he had no need thereof. Wherefore the discreet lady, being in a manner licensed to do her pleasures, thenceforward no longer caused her lover to come to her by the roof, as go the cats, but e’en brought him in at the door, and dealing advisedly, many a day thereafter gave herself a good time and led a merry life with him.

  1351

  TO THE TENTH MUSE

  Matilde Serao

  “NOËL, NOËL! JOY, JOY!”

  Up above: a calm and quiet little room, with a sweetly warm ambience. A lamp pours its even, restful light over the pages of a good book; here and there a smile of friendship, or of love—the hours pass slowly and placidly, like lovely, languid people. Down below: the wet and muddy street, slippery with mire, is trampled by thousands of feet; a thick fog made of smoke, dampness, warm scirocco air, people’s breath; the darkness violently pierced by gaslights, smoking oil lamps, the reddish light of torches, the vivid colors of holiday fireworks; the comings, goings, encounters, and cries of a crowd that is dense, constant, ever-changing, and that talks, laughs, shouts, makes a din, sings, and yells; a clamor that courses the whole range of pitch from the highest to the lowest tones, with the wildest shifts from an extremely high-pitched racket to a deep thunderclap. Although the shutters are closed and the double walls are lined, echoes of that uproar make their way to the reader; distracted, he listens and smiles. The room’s temperature is pleasant, the carpet is soft, the light is soothing, the book displays the appeal of its pale yellow paper, its tapered lettering, its whimsical ornaments and verses; but all in vain; the great voice of the crowd is insistent, rising and resounding like a powerful summons. Then the reader is possessed by nostalgia for the street, the fog, the hustle and bustle; he feels a sharp desire to go down into that tumult, to enjoy that scene, to contribute his part to it, to feel small, insignificant, and lost in it; he no longer fights against this desire, but yields to it; and with an enormous sigh, the street triumphs over the little room.

  All the riches of the vegetable and animal kingdoms lie jumbled in profusion in the squares and streets. Here is the triumph of meat: there are rows of chickens hung by the legs, with their yellowish, firm skin lightly dotted with brown and veined with pale light blue; there are turkeys, fat and round, swinging somberly in the scirocco with the same seriousness as if they were still alive. The flickering torchlight puts into strange profile enormous heaps of veal, whose whitish flesh is bloody, with long, strong muscle fibers and smooth, polished, unblemished bones; and fully illuminates the white suckling pigs, with their almost elegant figures, which are the tender, juicy, and preferred meal of fine ladies and priests. You walk forever and see only meat—and then that smell of freshly slaughtered animals, that dripping reddish-brown blood, those sharp and decisive knife strokes, lead you to feel melancholy and disgust: the triumph of full, fat, heavy, insolent matter, smiling at its own death that is a new life, and at once provocative and sickening, ends up crushing you. With a sense of fear, you think of that luxury, that excess, that exuberance, that enormity—and anxiously you seek out milder sensations.

  Next there come into view herbs, greens, fruits: a veritable vegetable sweetness, the tribute of the countryside, the offering of the fields and forests. The little mounds of green broccoli, whose florets look like pointed lace work, gaze with disdain at the humble little chicory, harvested in small bunches, on which droplets of water are shining; the large, tightly closed white cabbages seem to want to burst from their wrapper of light green leaves, while the black cabbages blend with the darkness, almost as if seeking solitude. The rippling light when people or carriages pass by, a sudden burst of fireworks, a supervening shadow; all these contribute to the fantastic nature of this scene. Proportions seem to grow in size, you lose your sense of reality and seem to be walking in fields of marjoram and clover, between two hedges made of vegetables, while at the end, as a horizon, the yellow flame of a pyramid of oranges is lit, like a souvenir of Sicilian sunsets. The sharp, sometimes inebriating scent of apples reaches your brain; there is also the sweeter and seemingly older scent of pears brought out of winter storage, and the subtle, light, and exhilarating effluvium of mandarins. But a stronger and healthier smell drives away all the others, replacing them and becoming the sole ruler.

  You now enter the domain of the sea; in small, fringed, seaweed baskets, looking like the loose hair of a beautiful dead water-nymph, eels with brown backs and pale bellies quiver, writhe, and twist themselves in knots, while lobsters, usually so calm and resigned, agitate their long pointed legs. Pink mullets move their fins a little in order to breathe, oysters open their shells ever so slightly, and razor clams known as cannolicchi (in Naples, soleni) slip out of their long cases, almost as if seeking freedom. Codfish have died in a desperate position, their bodies half twisted with tails raised, almost as if they had suffered a slow and painful end; other more dignified fish, convinced of their fate, stayed still and proud. There is nonstop spraying of seawater, and loud, robust cries coming from the chests of men who have battled gales; these are sinewy, swarthy fishermen with bare legs and arms, who are happy to offer you their wares. The sea—the good old sea, that beneficent curmudgeon, that lavish eternal grumbler—very willingly gave up a little of its wealth, and left its grandiose calling card, in this colossal display. Let’s have a smile and recall playful summer swims, the coolness of the waves, and rocks crowned with seafoam!

  But the glow of gaslight—refracted in shiny faceted crystals, in gilded ornaments, in silver sequins, in brightly colored satins—draws your gaze to a store window, or two or three. Here are the sweets, with light, graceful, simple forms resembling flowers, fruit, hearts, and butterflies; with delicate, soft c
olors, such as translucent pink, opalescent green, grayish white, and pale violet, all of which melt together and blend into a palette of pastels pleasing to the eye. There are soft, fluffy foams looking as though they might vanish if a single puff of air were to touch them; wobbling creams, either white or yellow; candied fruit, covered with a silvery transparent film, in shiny cascades; the solemn weightiness of nougats, and dark brown chocolate in all its forms and aspects; light puff pastries that dissolve when you bite into them; dates stuffed with pistachios in a most noble union, like that of milk and honey. It is, in short, the gathering of all that is finest, most tender and elegant; these are caresses for the senses of sight, taste, and smell; in these sweets, refinement and deliciousness are given their most complete embodiment. We may find here the culmination of every desire, no matter how extraordinary; the highest and purest poetry of human sensations; fantasy that has been brought to life; the artistic ideal made real; the sum of art itself.

  With this sublime lyric flight concludes the splendid hymn that the people of Naples have dedicated to the tenth muse: Gasterea.1

  Christmas 1878

  1 Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste, or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy (New York: Courier Dover Publications, 2002 [1925]), 244: “Gasterea is the Tenth Muse: the delights of taste are her domain. The empire of the world were hers, would she but claim it; for the world is nothing without life, and all that lives takes nourishment.” Brillat-Savarin’s influential work was first published in Paris in 1825, and was well known in late nineteenth-century Italy.

  WINTER IN THE ABRUZZI

  Natalia Ginzburg

  GOD HAS GIVEN US THIS MOMENT OF PEACE.

  There are only two seasons in the Abruzzi: summer and winter. The spring is snowy and windy like the winter, and the autumn is hot and clear like the summer. Summer starts in June and ends in November. The long days of sunshine on the low, parched hills, the yellow dust in the streets and the babies’ dysentery come to an end, and winter begins. People stop living in the streets: the barefoot children disappear from the church steps. In the region I am talking about almost all the men disappeared after the last crops were brought in: they went for work to Terni, Sulmona or Rome. Many bricklayers came from that area, and some of the houses were elegantly built; they were like small villas with terraces and little columns, and when you entered them you would be astonished to find large dark kitchens with hams hanging from the ceilings, and vast, dirty, empty rooms. In the kitchen a fire would be burning, and there were various kinds of fire: there were great fires of oak logs, fires of branches and leaves, fires of twigs picked up one by one in the street. It was easier to tell the rich from the poor by looking at the fires they burned than by looking at the houses or at the people themselves, or at their clothes and shoes which were all more or less the same.

  When I first arrived in that countryside all the faces looked the same to me, all the women—rich and poor, young and old—resembled one another. Almost all of them had toothless mouths: exhaustion and a wretched diet, the unremitting overwork of childbirth and breast feeding, mean that women lose their teeth there when they are thirty. But then, gradually, I began to distinguish Vincenzina from Secondina, Annunziata from Addolerata, and I began to go into their houses and warm myself at their various fires.

  When the first snows began to fall a quiet sadness took hold of us. We were in exile: our city was a long way off, and so were books, friends, the various desultory events of a real existence. We lit our green stove with its long chimney that went through the ceiling: we gathered together in the room with the stove—there we cooked and ate, my husband wrote at the big oval table, the children covered the floor with toys. There was an eagle painted on the ceiling of the room, and I used to look at the eagle and think that was exile. Exile was the eagle, the murmur of the green stove, the vast, silent countryside and the motionless snow. At five o’clock the bell of the church of Santa Maria would ring and the women with their black shawls and red faces went to Benediction. Every evening my husband and I went for a walk: every evening we walked arm in arm, sinking our feet into the snow. The houses that ran alongside the street were lived in by people we knew and liked, and they all used to come to the door to greet us. Sometimes one would ask, “When will you go back to your own house?” My husband answered, “When the war is over.” “And when will this war be over? You know everything and you’re a professor, when will it be over?” They called my husband “the professor” because they could not pronounce his name, and they came from a long way off to ask his advice on the most diverse things—the best season for having teeth out, the subsidies which the town hall gave and the different taxes and duties.

  In winter when an old person died of pneumonia the bell of Santa Maria sounded the death knell and Domenico Orecchia, the joiner, made the coffin. A woman went mad and they took her to the lunatic asylum at Collemaggio, and this was the talk of the countryside for a while. She was a young, clean woman, the cleanest in the whole district; they said it was excessive cleanliness that had done it to her. Girl twins were born to Gigetto di Calcedonio who already had boy twins, and there was a row at the town hall because the authorities did not want to give the family any help as they had quite a bit of land and an immense kitchen-garden. A neighbor spat in the eye of Rosa, the school caretaker, and she went about with her eye bandaged because she intended to pay back the insult. “The eye is a delicate thing, and spit is salty,” she explained. And this was talked about for a while, until there was nothing else to say about it.

  Every day homesickness grew in us. Sometimes it was even pleasant, like being in gentle, slightly intoxicating company. Letters used to arrive from our city with news of marriages and deaths from which we were excluded. Sometimes our homesickness was sharp and bitter, and turned into hatred; then we hated Domenico Orecchia, Gigetto di Calcedonio, Annunziatina, the bells of Santa Maria. But it was a hatred which we kept hidden because we knew it was unjust; and our house was always full of people who came to ask for favors and to offer them. Sometimes the dressmaker made a special kind of dumpling for us. She would wrap a cloth around her waist and beat the eggs, and send Crocetta around the countryside to see if she could borrow a really big saucepan. Her red face was absorbed in her work and her eyes shone with a proud determination. She would have burned the house down to make her dumplings come out a success. Her clothes and hair became white with flour and then she would place the dumplings with great care on the oval table where my husband wrote.

  Crocetta was our serving woman. In fact she was not a woman because she was only fourteen years old. It was the dressmaker who had found her. The dressmaker divided the world into two groups—those who comb their hair and those who do not comb their hair. It was necessary to be on the lookout against those who do not comb their hair because, naturally, they have lice. Crocetta combed her hair; and so she came to work for us and tell our children long stories about death and cemeteries. Once upon a time there was a little boy whose mother died. His father chose another wife and this stepmother didn’t love the little boy. So she killed him when his father was out in the fields, and she boiled him in a stew. His father came home for supper, but, after he had finished eating, the bones that were left on the plate started to sing:

  Mummy with an angry frown

  Popped me in the cooking pot,

  When I was done and piping hot

  Greedy daddy gulped me down.

  Then the father killed his wife with a scythe and he hung her from a nail in front of the door. Sometimes I find myself murmuring the words of the song in the story, and then the whole country is in front of me again, together with the particular atmosphere of its seasons, its yellow gusting wind and the sound of its bells.

  Every morning I went out with my children and there was a general amazed disapproval that I should expose them to the cold and the snow. “What sin have the poor creatures committed?” people said. “This isn’t the time for walki
ng, dear. Go back home.” I went for long walks in the white deserted countryside, and the few people I met looked at the children with pity. “What sin have they committed?” they said to me. There, if a baby is born in winter they do not take it out of the room until the summer comes. At midday my husband used to catch me up with the post and we went back to the house together.

  I talked to the children about our city. They had been very small when we left, and had no memories of it at all. I told them that there the houses had many stories, that there were so many houses and so many streets, and so many big fine shops. “But here there is Giro’s,” the children said.

  Giro’s shop was exactly opposite our house. Giro used to stand in the doorway like an old owl, gazing at the street with his round, indifferent eyes. He sold a bit of everything; groceries and candles, postcards, shoes and oranges. When the stock arrived and Giro unloaded the crates, boys ran to eat the rotten oranges that he threw away. At Christmas nougat, liqueurs and sweets also arrived. But he never gave the slightest discount on his prices. “How mean you are, Giro,” the women said to him, and he answered “People who aren’t mean get eaten by dogs.” At Christmas the men returned from Terni, Sulmona and Rome, stayed for a few days, and set off again after they had slaughtered the pigs. For a few days people ate nothing but sfrizzoli, incredible sausages that made you drink the whole time; and then the squeal of the new piglets would fill the street.