V. was one of those provincial towns where the tradition of an evening stroll along the main street still obtained, and in that nothing had changed from Amilcare’s day to the present. As always happens in these cases, one of the sidewalks was crammed by a steady flow of people; the other sidewalk, less so. In their day, Amilcare and his friends, out of a kind of anti-conformism, had always walked on the less popular sidewalk, from there had cast glances and greetings and quips at the girls going by on the other. Now he felt as he had then, indeed even more excited, and he set off along his old sidewalk, looking at all the people who passed. Encountering familiar people this time didn’t make him uneasy: it amused him; and he hastened to greet them. With some of them he would have liked also to stop and exchange a few words, but the main street of V. was so made, its sidewalks so narrow, with the crowd of people shoving you forward, and, what’s more, the traffic of vehicles now much increased, that you could no longer, as in the past, walk a bit in the middle of the street and cross it whenever you chose. In short, the stroll proceeded either too rushed or too slow, with no freedom of movement. Amilcare had to follow the current or struggle against it, and when he saw a familiar face he barely had time to wave a greeting before it vanished, and he could never be sure whether he had been seen or not.
Thus he ran into Corrado Strazza, his classmate and billiards-companion for many years. Amilcare smiled at him and waved broadly. Corrado Strazza came forward, his gaze on him, but it was as if that gaze went right through him, and Corrado continued on his way. Was it possible he hadn’t recognized him? Time had gone by, but Amilcare Carruga knew very well he hadn’t changed much; so far he had warded off a paunch as he had baldness, and his features had not been greatly altered. Here came Professor Cavanna. Amilcare gave him a deferential greeting, a little bow. At first the professor started to respond to it, instinctively, then he stopped and looked around, as if seeking someone else. Professor Cavanna! who was famous for his visual memory, because of all his numerous classes he remembered faces and first and last names and even semester grades! Finally Ciccio Corba, the coach of the football team, returned Amilcare’s greeting. But immediately afterwards he blinked and began to whistle, as if realizing he had intercepted by mistake the greeting of a stranger, addressed to God knows what other person.
Amilcare became aware that nobody would recognize him. The eyeglasses that made the rest of the world visible to him, those eyeglasses in their enormous black frames, made him invisible. Who would ever think that behind that sort of mask there was actually Amilcare Carruga, so long absent from V., whom no one was expecting to run into at any moment? He had barely managed to formulate mentally these conclusions when Isa Maria Bietti appeared. She was with a girl friend; they were sauntering and looking in shop windows, Amilcare blocked her way, and was about to cry “Isa Maria!” but his voice was paralyzed in his throat, Isa Maria Bietti pushed him aside with her elbow, said to her friend “The way people behave nowadays . . .”, and went on.
Not even Isa Maria Bietti had recognized him. He understood all of a sudden that it was only because of Isa Maria Bietti that he had come back, as it was only because of Isa Maria Bietti that he had decided to leave V. and had remained away so many years; everything, everything in his life and everything in the world was only because of Isa Maria Bietti, and now finally he saw her again, their eyes met, and Isa Maria Bietti didn’t recognize him. In his great emotion, he hadn’t noticed if she had changed, grown fat, aged, if she was attractive as ever, or less or more, he had seen nothing except that she was Isa Maria Bietti and that Isa Maria Bietti hadn’t seen him.
He had reached the end of that length of the street frequented in the evening stroll. Here, at the corner of the ice cream parlor, or a block further on, at the newsstand, the people turned around and came back along the sidewalk in the opposite direction. Amilcare Carruga also turned. He had taken off his glasses. Now the world had become once more that insipid cloud and he groped, groped with his eyes widened, and could bring nothing to the surface. Not that he didn’t succeed in recognizing anyone: in the better-lighted places he was always within a hair’s breadth of identifying a face or two, but a shadow of doubt that perhaps this wasn’t the person he thought always remained, and anyway, who it was or wasn’t mattered little to him after all. Someone nodded, waved; he may actually have been greeting him, but Amilcare couldn’t quite tell who it was. Another pair, too, as they went by, greeted him; he was about to reply, but had no idea who they were. One, from the opposite sidewalk, shouted a “Ciao, Carrù!” to him. To judge by the voice, it might have been a man named Stelvi. To his satisfaction, Amilcare realized they recognized him, they remembered him. The satisfaction was relative, because he couldn’t even see them, or else couldn’t manage to recognize them; they were persons who became confused in his memory, one with another, persons who basically were of little importance to him. “Good evening!” he said every so often, when he noticed a wave, a movement of the head. There, the one who had just greeted him must have been Bellintusi or Carretti, or Strazza. If it was Strazza Amilcare would have liked perhaps to stop a moment with him and talk. But by now he had returned that greeting rather hastily, and when he thought about it, it seemed natural that their relations should be like this; conventional and hurried greetings.
His looking around, however, clearly had one purpose: to track down Isa Maria Bietti. She was wearing a red coat, so she could be sighted at a distance. For a while Amilcare followed a red coat but when he managed to pass it he saw that it wasn’t she, and meanwhile two other red coats had gone past in the opposite direction. That year medium-weight red coats were all the fashion. Earlier, in the same coat, for example, he had seen Gigina, the one from the tobacco shop. Now he began to suspect that it hadn’t been Gigina from the tobacco shop but had really been Isa Maria Bietti! But how was it possible to mistake Isa Maria for Gigina? Amilcare retraced his steps, to make sure. He came upon Gigina, this was she, no doubt about it; but if she was now coming in this direction, she couldn’t have covered the whole distance; or had she made a shorter circuit? He was completely at sea. If Isa Maria had greeted him and he had responded quite coldly, his whole journey, all his waiting, all those years had been in vain. Amilcare went back and forth along those sidewalks, sometimes putting on his glasses, sometimes taking them off, sometimes greeting everyone and sometimes receiving the greetings of foggy, anonymous ghosts.
After the other extreme of the stroll, the street continued and was soon beyond the city limits. There was a row of trees, a ditch, beyond it a hedge, and the fields. In his day, in the evening, you came out here with your girl on your arm, if you had a girl; or else, if you were alone, you came here to be even more alone, to sit on a bench and listen to the crickets sing. Amilcare Carruga went on in that direction; now the city extended a bit farther, but not much. There was the bench, the ditch, the crickets, as before. Amilcare Carruga sat down. Of all the landscape the night maintained only some great swaths of shadow. Whether he put on or took off his eyeglasses here, it was really all the same. Amilcare Carruga realized that perhaps the thrill of his new glasses had been the last of his life, and now it was over.
(1958)
The adventure of a wife
SIGNORA STEFANIA R. was coming home at six in the morning. It was the first time.
The car hadn’t stopped at the door of her building but a bit before that, at the corner. She had been the one to ask Fornero to leave her there, because she didn’t want the concierge to see that while her husband was away she came home at dawn in the company of a young man. Fornero, as soon as he had cut off the engine, started to put his arm around her. Stefania R. drew back, as if the nearness of home made everything different. She darted out of the car in sudden haste, bent to signal Fornero to start it again and go away, then began walking, with her quick little steps, her face buried in the collar of her coat. Was she an adulteress?
The door of the building was still locked, however. Stefania R.
wasn’t expecting this. She didn’t have the key. It was because she didn’t have the key that she had spent the night out. That was the whole story: there would have been a hundred ways to have it opened, up till a certain hour; or rather: she should have remembered earlier that she didn’t have the key; but she hadn’t, it was as if she had acted deliberately. She had left the house in the afternoon without the key because she had thought she would be coming back for supper; instead she had let those girl-friends she hadn’t seen for ages, and those boys, those friends of theirs, a whole party, drag her first to supper then to drink and dance at one boy’s house, then at another’s. Obviously at two in the morning it was late to remember that she was without her key. It was all because she had fallen a bit in love with that boy, Fornero. Fallen in love? Fallen a bit. Things should be seen as they are: neither more nor less. She had spent the night with him, true: but that expression was too strong, it really wasn’t the right way to put it; she had waited in the company of that boy until it was time for the door of her building to be opened. That was all. She thought they opened up at six, and at six she had hastened to go home. Also because the cleaning woman came at seven and Stefania didn’t want her to notice she had spent the night out. And today, besides, her husband was coming home.
Now she found the door still locked, and she was alone there in the deserted street, in that early morning light, more transparent than at any other hour of the day, in which everything appeared to be seen through a magnifying glass. She felt a twinge of dismay, and the desire to be in her bed, sleeping there for hours, in the deep sleep of every morning, the desire, too, of her husband’s nearness, his protection. But it was the matter of a moment, perhaps less: perhaps she had only expected to feel that dismay but in reality hadn’t felt it. The fact that the concierge hadn’t opened up yet was a bore, a great bore, but there was something about that early morning air, about being alone here at this hour that made her blood race not at all unpleasantly. She didn’t even feel regret at having sent Fornero away: with him she would have been a bit nervous; alone, on the other hand, she felt a different agitation, a bit like when she was a girl, but quite different.
She really had to admit it: she felt no remorse at all for having spent the night out. Her conscience was easy. But was it easy because by now she had taken the plunge, because she had finally set aside her conjugal duties, or, on the contrary, because she had resisted, because, in spite of everything, she had kept herself faithful? Stefania asked herself this and it was this uncertainty, this unsureness as to how things really stood, along with the coolness of the morning, that made her shudder briefly. In a word: was she to consider herself an adulteress at this point, or not? She paced back and forth briefly, her hands thrust into the pockets of her long coat. Stefania R. had been married for a couple of years, and had never thought of being unfaithful to her husband. To be sure, in her life as a married woman there was a kind of expectation, the awareness that something was still lacking for her. It was like a continuation of her expectations as a girl, as if for her the complete emergence from her minority had not yet occurred, or rather, as if she had to emerge from a new minority, a minority with regard to her husband, and finally become his equal, before the world. Was it adultery she had been awaiting? And was Fornero adultery?
She saw that a couple of blocks farther on, on the opposite sidewalk, the bar had pulled up its shutters. She needed a hot coffee, at once. She started towards it. Fornero was a boy. You couldn’t think of using big words, for him. He had driven her around in his little car all night, they had covered the hills, backwards and forwards, the river road, until they had seen down breaking. They had run out of gas, at a certain point, they had had to push the car, wake up a sleeping filling-station attendant. It had been a kids’ night on the town. Three or four times Fornero’s tries had been more dangerous, and once he had even taken her to the door of the Pensione where he lived and had dug his feet in, stubbornly: “Now you’re going to stop making a fuss and come upstairs with me.” Stefania hadn’t gone upstairs. Was it right to behave like that? And afterwards? She didn’t want to think about it now, she had spent a sleepless night, she was tired. Or rather: she didn’t yet realize she was sleepy because she was in this extraordinary state, but once she got to bed she would go out like a light. She would write on the kitchen slate, telling the maid not to wake her. Maybe her husband would wake her, later, when he arrived. Did she still love her husband? Of course, she loved him. And then what? She would ask herself nothing. She was a little bit in love with that Fornero. A little bit. And when were they going to open that damn front door?
The chairs were piled up in the bar, sawdust scattered on the floor. There was only the barman, at the counter. Stefania came in; she didn’t feel the least ill-at-ease, being there at that unlikely hour. Who had to know anything? She could have just got up, she could be heading for the station, or arriving at that moment. Anyway, she didn’t owe explanations to anybody. She realized she enjoyed this feeling.
“Black, double, very hot,” she said to the man. She had acquired a confident, self-assured tone, as if there were a familiarity between her and the man in this bar, where actually she never came.
“Yes, Signora, just another minute for the machine to warm up and it’ll be ready,” the barman said. And he added: “It takes me longer to warm up than the machine, in the morning.”
Stefania smiled, huddled into her collar, and said: “Brrr . . .”
There was another man in the bar, a customer, off to one side, standing, looking out of the window. He turned at Stefania’s shiver and she noticed him only then, and as if the presence of two men suddenly recalled her to self-awareness, she looked carefully at her reflection in the glass behind the bar. No, it wasn’t obvious that she had spent the night out; she was only a bit pale. She took her compact from her bag and powdered her nose.
The man had come to the counter. He was wearing a dark overcoat, with a white silk scarf, and a blue suit underneath. “At this hour of the morning,” he said, addressing nobody in particular, “people who are awake fall into two categories: the still and the already.”
Stefania smiled briefly, without letting her eyes rest on him. She had already seen him clearly in any case: he had a somewhat pathetic, somewhat ordinary face, one of those men who, accepting themselves and the world, have arrived, without being old, at a condition between wisdom and imbecility.
“. . . and, when you see a pretty woman, after you’ve wished her a ‘good morning!’” And he bowed towards Stefania, taking the cigarette from his mouth.
“Good morning,” Stefania said, a bit ironic, but not sharp.
“. . . you ask yourself: Still? Already? Already? Still? There’s the mystery.”
“What?” Stefania said, with the air of someone who had caught on but doesn’t want to play the game. The man examined her, indiscreetly; but Stefania didn’t care at all even if he realized she was “still” awake.
“And you?” she asked, slyly; she had understood that this gentleman was the self-styled night-owl type and not recognizing him as such at first glance would distress him.
“Me? Still! Always still!” Then he thought about it a moment. “Why? Hadn’t you realized that?” And he smiled at her, but he wanted only to mock himself, at this point. He stayed there a moment, swallowing, as if his saliva had an unpleasant taste. “Daylight drives me off, makes me return to my lair like a bat . . .” he said absently, as if playing a part.
“Here’s your milk. The Signora’s coffee,” the barman said.
The man began blowing on the glass, then sipping slowly. “Is it good?” Stefania asked.
“Revolting,” he said. Then: “It drives out the poisons, they say. But how can it do anything for me at this point? If a poisonous snake bites me, it’ll drop dead.”
“As long as you’ve got your health . . .” Stefania said. Perhaps she was joking a bit too much.
And in fact, he said: “The only antidote, I know, i
f you want me to tell you . . .” God knows what he was getting at.
“What do I owe you?” Stefania asked the barman.
“. . . That woman I’ve been looking for always . . .” the night-owl continued.
Stefania went outside, to see if they had opened the door. She took a few steps on the sidewalk. No, the door was still closed. Meanwhile the man had also come out of the bar, as if he meant to follow her. Stefania retraced her steps, reentered the bar. The man, who hadn’t expected this, hesitated for a moment, started to go back too, then, overcome by an access of resignation, he continued, coughing a bit, on his way.
“Do you sell cigarettes?” Stefania asked the barman. She had run out, and wanted to smoke one the moment she was inside her house. The tobacconists were still closed.
The barman pulled out a pack. Stefania took it and paid him.
She went to the doorway of the bar again. A dog almost bumped into her, tugging violently on a leash and pulling after him a hunter, with gun, cartridge-belt, and game-bag.