A Very Italian Christmas Read online

  Pasqualina, thinking that the child hadn’t eaten all day and that it was a festive occasion, took a piece of black bread and put a little bit of fried blood on it, before saying to Canituccia:

  “Eat this.”

  But the little girl said no by simply shaking her head, even though she was dying of hunger.

  1902

  FAMILY INTERIOR

  Anna Maria Ortese

  Anastasia Finizio, the older daughter of Angelina Finizio and the late Ernesto, one of Chiaia’s leading hairdress ers, who only a few years earlier had retired to a sunny and tranquil enclosure in the cemetery of Poggioreale, had just returned from High Mass (it was Christmas Day) at Santa Maria degli Angeli, in Monte di Dio, and still hadn’t made up her mind to take off her hat. Tall and thin, like all the Finizios, with the same meticulous, glittering elegance, which contrasted sharply with the dullness and indefinable decrepitude of their horsey figures, Anastasia paced up and down the bedroom she shared with her sister, Anna, unable to contain a visible agitation. Only a few minutes earlier, everything had been indifference and peace, coldness and resignation in her heart of a woman on the verge of forty, who, almost without realizing it, had lost every hope of personal happiness and adapted fairly easily to a man’s life—all responsibility, accounts, work. In the same place where her father had styled the most demanding heads of Naples, she had a knitwear shop, and with that she supported the household: mother, aunt, sister, two brothers, one of whom was about to get married. Apart from the pleasure of dressing like a sophisticated woman of the big city, she didn’t know or wish for anything else. And now in an instant, she was no longer herself. Not that she was ill, not at all, but she felt a happiness that wasn’t really happiness so much as a revival of the imagination she had believed dead, a disorientation. The fact that she had reached an excellent position in life, that she dressed well, and the many moral satisfactions she gained from maintaining all those people— these had disappeared, or almost, like a whirlwind, confronted by the hope of being young and a woman again. In her brain, at that moment, there was true confusion, as if an entire crowd were shouting and lamenting, pleading for mercy, before someone who had come to announce, in an equivocal way, something extraordinary. She was still stunned by the bellowing of the organ, by the furor of the hymns, dazzled by the sparkle of gold and silver on the reds and whites of the sacred vestments, by the twinkling lights; her head was still heavy with the penetrating scent of lilies and roses, mixed with the funereal odor of incense, when, upon reaching the entrance, and stretching out her arms toward the plain, everyday air, she had run into Lina Stassano, the sister of her future sister-in-law, and thus learned that, after years of absence, a certain Antonio Laurano, a youth she had once considered, was back in Naples. “His health isn’t bad, but he says he’s tired of being at sea, and wants to find a job in Naples. He said to me: If you see Anastasia Finizio give her a special greeting.” That was all; it could be much, or nothing, but this time—as if something had broken in her rigid mental mechanism, the old control, all the defenses of a race forced to greater and greater sacrifices because there would be hell to pay if they weren’t made—Anastasia, who had always been so cold and cautious, let herself go, as if bewitched, into the digressions of a feeling as obscure as it was extraordinary.

  “Ah, Madonna!” she was saying in her mind, without being aware herself of this mysterious conversation she was having. “If it were true! If Lina Stassano isn’t wrong … if that really is Antonio’s feeling for me! But why couldn’t it be? What’s odd about it? I’m not bad-looking … and I can’t even say I’m old, although twenty years have gone by. I have no illusions; I look at reality, I do look. I’m independent … I have a position … money … He’s tired of sailing … maybe disappointed … he wants to settle in Naples … I could help him … Perhaps he needs security, affection … he’s not looking for a girl but a woman. And I, on the other hand, what sort of life do I lead? House and shop, shop and house. I’m not like my sister, Anna, who still wears her hair down and plays the piano. The young men, now, no longer notice me, and if I didn’t dress well and use an expensive perfume, they wouldn’t even bother to say hello. I’m not old yet, but I’m about to get old. I didn’t realize it, but it’s so. Either Antonio really does have feelings for me, loves me, and needs me, or I’m lost. I’ll always have my clothes, of course, but even the statues in church have clothes, and the people in photographs have clothes.”

  She’d never spoken this way before; her language tended toward comments about income and outflow, or, at most, interesting observations about this year’s fashions. Therefore she was astonished and discouraged, like someone who for the first time sees a wretched and silent town, and is told that she has been living there, thinking that she has been seeing palaces and gardens where there was only gravel and nettles; and Anastasia, considering in a flash that her life had been nothing but servitude and sleep, and was now about to decline, stopped walking and looked around her with an air of bewilderment.

  The window of the room, which was large and clean, but sparsely furnished, with two iron bedsteads, a wardrobe, and some chairs set here and there on the redbrick floor, and above the beds and the wardrobe an olive branch from the previous Easter—that window was open, and from outside a deep blue light entered, intense and at the same time cold, as if the sky from which it came were completely new to this earth, without the old intimate warmth of long ago. Not a cloud could be seen, not the smallest spot, or even the sun, and that fragment of walls and cornices that appeared at the level of the windowsill—faded, ethereal, like a drawing—seemed the world’s dribbles rather than its reality. Not a voice or a cry could be heard from the inhabitants of Naples, and in that moment Anastasia, standing near the window, her brow slightly furrowed, her heart heavy—whether with hope or anguish she no longer knew—looked down, almost not recognizing the places or the people. It seemed to her that the upward-sloping street, three stories below her, had a mysterious depth and sadness. The pavement, still dark from the night’s rain, was strewn with all the wood shavings and refuse from Christmas Eve. Many people were going to Mass or returning, and, meeting, stopped for a moment to exchange good wishes, a greeting, but one had to pay attention to distinguish the voices (“Merry Christmas!” “Good wishes to you and all your family!” “Same to you!”). Thanks to the beauty of the day, windows were open as far as the eye could see, and here and there one could glimpse a narrow black iron headboard, the white coverlet of a bed, the gilded oval frame of a dark painting, a chandelier’s glittering branch, the brown wallpaper with a design of gilded columns in a living room. There was plenty of activity going on in the kitchens, but the men were all free, some shaving, some collapsed, inert, against a windowsill, some staring out across the red flowerpots on a balcony. One, cigarette in hand, his face pockmarked by the passions and boredom of Neapolitan youth, gazed with indifference or melancholy at the exaggerated depth of the sky. Listening carefully, one could hear snatches of song—“cchiù bello ’e te” or “’o sole mio,” “more beautiful than you,” “my own sun”—but a silence persisted in the houses, as in the streets, that was not cheerful, as if the Christian celebration spreading temporarily over the anthill of streets were not so much a celebration as the flag of an unknown army raised at the center of a burned and devastated village. Dressed in his best, a boy of about thirteen, hands in his pockets, looked out from a balcony next to the Finizios’ window, with the grave, yellowish face of the seriously ill, spitting while he daydreamed. From time to time, a dog passed by in a hurry.

  “That life would have been a dream,” Anastasia continued to think, trying to harden herself, to overcome that vague fear, that weakness and confusion of her thoughts, pierced by such an unusual and cruel light, “like a lane that seems to be trailing off out in a dirt field, and instead, unexpectedly, opens into a square full of people, with music playing. Suddenly, you see, I would go and live in a house of my own. I wouldn’t go to t
he shop anymore. Yes, I never liked that life. I felt that someday it would have to end. Certainly I would get a satisfactory price for the shop. I can ask two million, even more, for that hole-in-the-wall in Chiaia. With two million, I could afford a place near here, so every day I’d come see Mamma. Three rooms and a terrace, with a view of San Martino.” She saw herself busy in those rooms, on a summer morning, hanging out clothes, and singing. But although she remained glued to this image, she did not extract any joy from it. It was as if she were witnessing someone else’s happiness. She thought also of summer evenings, when they would eat on the terrace, in the glow of an electric light hidden in the pergola; it would illuminate her hardened worker’s hands on the table, and make Antonio’s beautiful teeth sparkle in the darkness. And now thinking of those teeth, she saw, amazed, that all her intoxication originated there, in that mouth, younger than her own, indeed, young, with that health and youth that she had never possessed. And how had so many years passed—twenty, thirty—without her knowing this, without her wanting or even suspecting it? And why—now—did she desire it?

  She calculated rapidly how old he was, thirty-two, and, comparing it to her own age, said aloud: “Impossible.”

  She was still looking down, but her face was different: her brow wrinkled in the effort to get control of herself, her pink eyelids lowering, with the mechanical movement of a doll, over eyes distressed by humiliation. In the face of that certainty, everything that was disagreeable about her came to the surface, like the foam on the sea. Impossible, impossible! And her lips tightened, her cheeks, of an orange-pink color, caved in, making her forehead appear larger and bleaker, and the arch of her eyebrows more pretentious. Terribly unhappy, the Finizios’ older daughter had no expression, and her saddest moments were also the most perfectly banal. There was some obtuseness in her mind, that was all, a torpor, although sometimes she was aware of it, like the effect of an effort sustained over many centuries. She couldn’t think, live. Something was alive in her, and yet she couldn’t express it. This was her goodness, her strength, this incapacity to understand and want a life of her own. Only in remembering could she, from time to time, see, and then immediately that light, that landscape was extinguished. She remembered Antonio as if it were yesterday: not tall, but solid as a column, with brown hair and dark skin, and those sad eyes, of a man, and the mouth with the crowded teeth, white when he smiled; and the affectionate ways, as if marked by compassion, that he had with everyone, as if he were always returning from far away: “How are you, Anastasia?” “What do you want, life is the same … ” “True, but it could be better.” (And who knows what he was alluding to with that “better.”) “Come and see us sometime, it would be a pleasure.” That was all she knew to say to him, when they met, and with an idiotic, haughty expression. As if she were happy, as if her work were enough for her, and the satisfaction of supporting the whole family since her father died, and all those clothes that she made could console her. Instead, it wasn’t true. Countless times she would willingly have thrown away all those satisfactions, and gone to be a servant in his house, and serve him, serve him forever, the way a true woman serves a man.

  Bells tolled in two or three churches at once, and, at that terrible and familiar sound, which spoke of heaven and not of life, Anastasia roused herself. Her eyes filled with tears, and leaving the window she resumed walking up and down the room, her attention rapt, while she repeated mechanically: “The way a true woman serves a man … Yes, nothing else.”

  “Anastasia! Anastasia!”

  “Where is Anastasia?”

  It was Anna and Petrillo. Her only sister, pale-faced at the age of eighteen, with the beauty of ordinary roses, her large, gentle, protruding eyes at that moment filled by a lively smile, and Petrillo, with his air of a studious cockroach, eyeglasses planted in the middle of his small green face, rushed into the room where Anastasia Finizio was pacing restlessly, absorbed in those new thoughts. In fact, the one who rushed in was Anna, in a white dress that spread around her narrow hips as she ran, one hand, almost out of habit, at her blond hair, tied by a blue ribbon. Petrillo, in a man’s suit even though he was only sixteen, was a few steps behind, holding on to his eyeglasses, because one lens was broken and the least movement might cause it to fall out.

  “Did you see who’s arrived?”

  “No,” answered Anastasia, returning to the window and pretending to look out. She took off her gloves and put them back on, with her heart jumping out of her chest, and all of her aging blood rushing to her face, imagining she would hear, in a moment, that name. Never had she been so embarrassed. But she was wrong.

  “Don Liberato, Donn’Amelia’s brother, from Salerno. He sent someone to say that he’s coming to see us after lunch.”

  “Yes?” said Anastasia, relieved to feel that her heart was beating more regularly, her head cooling. At the same time it was as if that shadow, that sadness which in all its extraordinary imaginings had continually emerged to obscure the colors, had solidified, and she sat down, like a beggar, on the chair in the corner of the room. Her agitation vanished suddenly, and she was able to look at her siblings.

  “Why? Donn’Amelia isn’t coming?” she asked calmly.

  “She was sick all night,” Anna answered, going to look at herself in the windowpane, with an indolence that was due not merely to southern frivolity but also to the languor of lifeless blood, “and the doctor came this morning, too. Didn’t you hear?”

  “Anastasia doesn’t hear anything except money,” said Petrillo maliciously, and he waited for an irritated response, but his sister said nothing.

  “Mamma asks,” Anna continued idly, “if you would take the green glasses with the gold trim out of the chest. Dora Stassano and Giovannino are coming for lunch.”

  This Giovannino was Anna’s fiancé, a bookstore clerk, a short man with a red mustache, and although Anastasia didn’t think much of him, her heart constricted as she thought how her sister, twenty years younger, could speak easily about things that instead caused her confusion and torment. Even the thought of having to bend over the chest in her mother’s room, in her good clothes, to take out of its dusty interior the glasses so dear to Signora Finizio that she used them only on special occasions increased that inner chill. All Anna did was play the piano and take walks, for Anna duties … annoying things … didn’t exist. A nice life, Anna’s.

  “Petrillo, go out a moment,” she said in a flat voice.

  “I’ve just done my nails,” Anna said timidly. “I’m sorry.”

  Anastasia didn’t respond this time, either. While the boy left, whistling, with the superior attitude he’d acquired some months earlier, ever since he’d started to exchange a few serious words with a girl, Anastasia took off her blue wool coat, which had seen all that great joy, and then those bewilderments, that suffering, and laid it on the bed. With the same care, she took the blue hat off her head, removing the pins first. She opened her purse, also blue, took out a very white, scented handkerchief, and held it for a moment under her nose. Finally she sat down on the bed and, without using her hands, took off her shoes, which she pushed aside. In doing all these things, she was wasting time; there was a kind of silence in her, and also an obscure apprehension. That moment of emotion minutes earlier had disappeared completely, vanished, and she felt her younger sister looking at her, in fact observing her, with the large, beautiful, slightly surprised eyes of youths destined to die prematurely (Anna had a weak lung), and she had a very faint sensation of shame, of guilt, as if she were already old, and all those fabrics, powders, and scents that she put on her person constituted a theft, a sin, something that was taken away from the natural need of her brothers, of Anna. A thousand years seemed to pass before her sister left the room, before she stopped looking at her.

  “Mamma asks if you will also go to the kitchen for a moment and give them a hand. I have to look over the songs.”

  “Yes, I’m coming,” Anastasia answered calmly. “I’m just going to
rest a moment, then I’ll come.”

  But her sister wasn’t paying attention to her anymore. Near the open window, she was looking at her reflection in the glass, through which other balconies could be seen, and turning her pretty blond head slightly, she adjusted the blue ribbon and sang softly, Tutto è passato! It’s all over! in her dull, gentle voice.

  To get to the kitchen, Anastasia had to go out into a wide, bare hallway, onto which all four rooms of the house opened, and illuminated at the far end by a window looking onto a garden. Now that window was wide open, and the crudely whitewashed frame enclosed a dark blue sky so smooth and shining that it seemed fake. That morning an enormous beauty was in the air, and by comparison the houses and lives of men appeared strangely poor, shabby. And so Aunt Nana, who was hunched over, washing the floor, seemed to Anastasia’s disturbed gaze a real monstrosity. This woman, her mother’s older sister, after an idle youth, full of frivolous endeavors, and in continual expectation of a husband, had gradually had to resign herself, as happened among the women of the petty bourgeoisie, to a servile and silent life in the house of the married sister. Bring up this child, bring up this other one—there had no longer been time for personal occupations and thoughts. Over the years she had become almost completely deaf, so that she no longer grasped the scoldings or the laughter that from time to time came at her expense. Her obsession was newspapers, which she read avidly at night, lingering in particular on stories of passion, on the more prominent love stories: suicides and homicides for love, injuries, rapes, when there were not, as she preferred, notices of famous people’s engagements, weddings of princes and rulers, and, in short, the luxury and beauty of the world, mixed in with the happiness of the flesh. Then everything in her puffy, false, putrid-yellow face lit up, making her terrible eyes even blacker and shinier: the eyes of a woman who hasn’t been able to live, but still could, and there alone she could be heard chuckling: “Youth, ah, youth, what joy!” She had always been short in stature, but now she seemed more than short, shrunken and twisted, like ancient trees at the heart of some forest. She always wore black, and on Sundays and holidays she dabbed her cheeks with rouge. Seeing her, Anastasia felt that sadness, too confused to be defined, increase, that disgust and at the same time pity for herself and the life she lived, that mute longing for a sweeter day which had been whispering in her ear, and she said: