Strega Prize 2020

STREGA PRIZE 2020
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STREGA PRIZE 2020
A selection of extracts from the 12 longlisted novels of the most prestigious Italian literary award.
A selection of extracts from the 12 long-listed novels of the most prestigious Italian literary award.
Silvia Ballestra, La nuova stagione
Translated by Virginia Jewiss
Giuseppe Lupo, Breve storia del mio silenzio
Translated by Malcolm Angelucci
Marta Barone, Città sommersa
Translated by Antony Shugaar
Daniele Mencarelli, Tutto chiede salvezza
Translated by Virginia Jewiss
Jonathan Bazzi, Febbre
Translated by Alex Valente
Valeria Parrella, Almarina
Translated by Alex Valente
Gianrico Carofiglio, La misura del tempo
Translated by Antony Shugaar
Remo Rapino, Vita, morte e miracoli di Bonfiglio Liborio
Translated by Anne Milano Appel
Gian Arturo Ferrari, Ragazzo italiano
Translated by Virginia Jewiss
Sandro Veronesi, Il Colibrì
Translated by Elena Pala
Alessio Forgione, Giovanissimi
Translated by Malcolm Angelucci
Gian Mario Villalta, L’apprendista
Translated by Anne Milano Appel
A project by the Italian Cultural Institutes in London, Los Angeles, Melbourne, San Francisco and Washington DC
In collaboration with Premio Strega and Fondazione Maria e Goffredo Bellonci
For the English translations: © 2020 by each translator
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Table of Contents
Silvia Ballestra, The New Season, pp. 199-202 7
Marta Barone, A City Submerged, pp. 136-138 9
Jonathan Bazzi, Fever, pp. 308-310 11
Gianrico Carofiglio, The Measure of Time, pp. 162-165 13
Gian Auturo Ferrari, Italian Boy, pp. 145-149 15
Alessio Forgione, Junior League, pp. 9-15 19
Giuseppe Lupo, A Brief History of My Silence, pp. 119-122 25
Daniele Mencarelli, Everything Asks For Salvation, pp. 187-189 27
Valeria Parrella, Almarina, pp. 13-16 29
Remo Rapino, The Life, Death and Miracles of Bonfiglio Liborio 31
Sandro Veronesi, The Hummingbird, pp. 93-95 33
Gian Mario Villalta, The Apprentice, pp. 221-223 35
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Silvia Ballestra, The New Season, pp. 199-202
Translated by Virginia Jewiss
So this was what it was to finally grow up, if not old, exactly, my cousin said one evening when we’d
gone to watch the sunset from the lookout point up in Montedinove. To despair over an
expropriation letter rather than a breakup letter. To feel your heart race over a payment that finally
came through instead of that cute guy’s voice. To cry because of some unknown surveyor in
Collesailcavolo instead of because your boyfriend dumped you. To lie awake at night dreading you
made a mistake signing some piece of paper rather than waiting hours for your lover’s phone call,
which never comes.
She finally understood, my cousin said, that all that childish fuss about love and love affairs was
merely a pretense, a smokescreen, a way to try and soften or ignore the anxieties and oppressions of
money and material concerns.
A distraction of sorts. A diversion, be it amusing or painful.
She also said she didn’t know which of the two she preferred. Which was even more absurd.
“As long as it has to do with this sort of stuff,” she said. “The heart, land, air, cashed checks,
bank guarantees… What’s the big deal? Compared to all this?”
Spreading out below us, masses of gilded green and dark orange mounds were rushing their way
toward the mountains, punctuated with trees and little valleys. A sight of unimaginable beauty and
grandeur. It ravished your eyes and your mind, all right, even if it revealed itself only briefly.
This was our place, still beautiful even after all the wounds inflicted not far off.
Beyond Monte Ascensione - you knew that’s where the damage started. The area hit was so vast,
it was almost impossible to delineate even if you knew more or less where it was. It traversed three
regions and I don’t know how many provinces. It redesigned the topography of the whole area,
disregarding administrative boundaries in order to form a new denomination: “crater.” An almost
extraterrestrial term, as if to suggest that what had happened was not of this world.
And yet it was a completely natural phenomenon. The loudest wake-up call on earth. Which
might be why many preferred to ignore it, and why lots of people from outside had begun to say:
“Just leave.” And: “It’s not worth it.”
But that made no sense. We’re talking about hundreds of towns, and fields that fed them all: it’s
not like you could just clump us all together in the cities, to survive on polluted air and synthetics.
You can’t treat the earth like an Excel sheet and place people in columns, like in those five-year plans
in the 1900s.
There were gradations ranging from congested cities to emptied-out villages.
The whole area was suddenly extremely fragile, the earthquake had shaken its very foundations,
leaving it alone and scared.
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We knew what it meant to head inland.
Buildings barricaded, churches closed, areas fenced off. In Force, an ancient village of
coppersmiths, the main piazza and historic center were blocked off with white and red tape. Idem in
Monsampietro Morico. In Santa Vittoria in Matenano, some of the turrets and battlements above the
city gates were held in place by steel cables and wooden beams. In San Ginesio, a village dedicated to
the patron saint of mimes and artists, the Collegiata church’s Flamboyant Gothic was trapped in a
web of metal scaffolding that looked like a gigantic corset or a cage.
As you approached the mountains, the damage got worse, the rocks stuck in the ground became
more numerous, and the cracks in the houses were deeper, meaner. Some places, guarded by soldiers
with sub-machine guns, you couldn’t even think of getting near. Streets, towns, important cities like
Camerino – the seat of a university since 1336 – were sealed off, closed, caught in a wicked spell cast
during the night or early morning of the day the clocks were turned back.
As if the switch from summer to winter time meant a stop in the flow of life. Now you could
no longer know the colors of certain houses, piazzas, or churches as the light on them changed: the
ochres and the yellows, the pink sandstone, the clays and column capitals and the pale travertine all
continued to warm themselves in the sun or grow grey in the rain far from human eyes, removed
from the cares and commotion of living, loving communities.
The municipal buildings, the priories, the palaces, the statues of popes in the squares, the
basilicas’ blue and gold frescos, the coffered ceilings, the museums, the tall, narrow houses squeezed
close together in the central piazzas, the convents of Farfa, the stone walls, the porticos and crypts,
the market squares and fountains, the sculpted bells, the annunciations, altar pieces and transepts, the
libraries, their halls lined with coats of arms, even the treasures and jewels, the tiny gems in stone or
wood or canvas, and the houses with their welcoming, mysterious open-air kitchens in the middle of
a clearing – like the houses in Goldilocks – the hamlets tucked in the woods, beautiful Spelonga, a
hamlet of the crumbled Arquata, Pretare, another hamlet of the crumbled Arquata, a village made of
stones from Monte Sibilla - all this and more, climbing toward Macerata and then further inland, to
Rieti and beyond, all the way to the plateaus, some well-known, others less so, following the giant
ring of the Sibillini Mountains all the way to the Campotosto dams and the view of the Gran Sasso,
knowing all the while that L’Aquila is near, and the mountains, the mountains there in the
background, beautiful and majestic, blue and pleated, their shapes unmistakable – the jagged peaks
of Monte Ascensione, above Ascoli, the giant hat of Monte San Vicino in Camerino, the small, eyeshaped
lake on top of Monte Vettore - in short, all the treasures and beauty and daily life - all of it -
was wounded, interrupted, immersed in silence.
Closed. All, or almost all of it. Paths closed, roads closed, entire areas off limits.
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Marta Barone, A City Submerged, pp. 136-138
Translated by Antony Shugaar
But I couldn’t be sure of that. The truth is that even now, I can’t begin to guess what he thought
or felt. All I have is this fistful of someone else’s stories, drained of richness by the passage of time,
distorted by memory. I can’t know anything about what he thought or felt, and that’s a condition that
cannot be remedied. Not only because I can no longer ask him about it, but because it’s not possible,
less possible even than it is with ourselves, to have so much as an idea in the first place (much less
reconstruct such an idea) of the entirety of another person’s life. We barely know anything about
ourselves, and often what little we do know is wrong.
There was an unbridgeable gap between us, a distance that I felt with increasing clarity as he
stopped merely being my father and became, most of all, my character, the boy out of the past who
still had only this grainy face, like a poorly printed photograph from a newspaper. The young man.
What did he feel like inside his own body? How did he feel the world on his body? Every now and
then, under some chance circumstance, I might have a conscious awareness of my hands and legs as
they move, of warm sunlight on a shoulder or other skin-deep sensations in a way that you might
describe as purely animal. It’s hard to explain; as if for a few fleeting instants I had gained full
awareness of (full contact with) my living body, and its acts. Those are moments when I find it
hardest to believe that one day I’m going to die. I’m not talking about terror. The fear, the refusal,
the negation, the rejection of death—my own death and the deaths of others—belong to other
moments in time. No, really it’s absolute disbelief. How can it be that someday I’ll simply cease to
exist? I live, I’m alive! These are the eyes through which I see this vase of flowers standing on the
side table out on the balcony, these are the ears with which I can hear the rush of the wind, this is
the very touch of the wind on the nape of my neck. The living flesh on the back of my neck. I am
alive, it’s irrefutable. My body can’t come to an end, my mind can’t come to an end.
And yet, whenever that would happen once I’d discovered the existence of the boy, my thoughts
would stray to how he must have seen, how he could have felt, how he might have experienced the
passage of time as it swept over him, upon his body in space.
During the three days that I spent in Rome for a wedding—I hadn’t been back there since the
only other time, ten years earlier, at the end of my high school years—I found myself thinking about
him frequently. Late at night, when we would walk through the neighborhoods of Monti and
Trastevere, me and N. and his friends, I’d look around me and experience a sense of secret
separateness, as if they and I were occupying different planes. This was what the night had been like
that he moved through, fifty years ago. Fifty years. It seemed so unreal, so vastly remote. And yet I
felt his presence with a singular intensity, like a pale-blue mist rising from the sidewalks and
enveloping me almost incessantly, even as I continued to find it unbelievable that these things, so
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alien to me—the yellow and reddish late-nineteenth-century palazzos, the overgrown buildings of
the millennia-old city, the dark-crowned stone pines, spreading like poppies at the height of their
bloom, the stairs in front of the department of architecture where I lingered for a few minutes
sometimes, luxuriating in the roar of time as it rushed over me, the tree-lined boulevard down which
we would stroll after visiting La Sapienza university, the source of knowledge, or Campo de’ Fiori on
a June evening, with the bizarre contrast between the unremarkable leisurely sprawl of the piazza and
the grim statue of Giordano Bruno—all these unfamiliar things had once belonged to him, to that
young man himself so unfamiliar, that young animal, free and pure, toward whom I felt an impulse
of something like brotherhood—I who was now older than he’d been when his life had ended (and
this, this too was unbelievable). And I wondered how those things filtered through his eyes, and what
they felt like to him, what heft and substance they had; and what Valle Giulia had been like, and the
long months that had followed; and what it was like to be L.B. at that age, and in that moment, and
in those places.
But I understood that it was impossible to know, just as it was impossible to know about any
other living creature outside of me.
Certainly, reconstructing him was even more complicated than were other people, others who
had at least left behind documents, letters, diaries in which they expressed something of themselves,
others who had succeeded in preserving memories, of whom something more remained than just
fleeting impressions made upon others. Paradoxically: I knew only a little more about my father’s
mind than I did about my long-lost forefathers—and in any case, only at second hand. I couldn’t
stand to think how much had been lost. I wanted the whole life, in its concrete entirety, I wanted to
rescue all of it even as I realized that this would be impossible. The uniqueness, the unrepeatable
complexity of one wave in the sea among all the others. Of one forgotten day in the life of a human
being, of one single blink of that human being’s eyelash. And yet, at the same time, how many hours,
days, conversations, pointless or marginal meetings make up a single life? This contradiction made
my head spin. Even so, there remained a desire, foolish and yet, I think, natural, to grasp the totality,
to summon up the entirety; but instead I found myself piecing together a story full of holes, an
insignificant speck of dust in the immense bloody boulder of History, which always lacked the voices
of those who’d been at the center of it.
And to think that until just a short time before I’d spent fruitful years thinking as little about
him as possible, successfully putting out of my mind all the most unpleasant memories of the
summers when I’d loathed him and his illness, and necessarily, therefore, nearly all the rest. It’s
certainly true that at a given moment the dead come back to find you, and you’re forced to sit down
around the table with them.
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Jonathan Bazzi, Fever, pp. 308-310
Translated by Alex Valente
Something I cannot change
Something I cannot change.
I have HIV, I am HIV-positive.
I’m one of them.
I don’t know who I want to be anymore, I’d say, every time. On a loop, it must be twenty years
now. I don’t know who I am, I’ve never known. All of my life up to this point, I’ve frantically tried to
be something, anything, take on any shape, any incarnation: singer, painter, journalist, aspiring
university lecturer, philosophy, kung fu, yoga, literature, Judaism, Buddhism, animal rights, playing the
guitar, music lessons, feminism, meditation, ballet, the occult. Uncountable ambitions, of which none
stuck. Always wonderful, then always incredibly tedious. All the identities I’ve tried on have always,
inevitably, cracked. I have denied them, outgrown them, dismissed them, shifting very quickly to
something else. Nothing here, not this one – I have to be something new.
Wish granted.
I too, now, have a stable attribute to show to the world. Something I can’t get rid of.
My graduation certificate is a medical report, the results of a blood test. My training courses are
held in a hospital. I am the biological sample for research. The infectious disease specialist is the
supervisor who hands me precise tasks, thrilling objectives. We work together to keep me alive, and
in the best conditions possible. We work together to prevent the therapy from failing, to limit its side
effects, to ensure that my liver isn’t poisoned, that my bones don’t crumble under osteoporosis, that
my kidneys don’t collapse from the medication’s toxins.
I’m always a little excited to see him.
Men can also take care of others, we can trust men too.
A person with HIV: an identity decided by my body, one I can acknowledge and accept, deny or
forget, but it’ll still be there, unchanging. It’s also being patient, waiting for me. I’m HIV-positive:
what does it mean? Are you afraid of me? Do I disgust you? It doesn’t matter, I don’t care. I have
been enlisted against my knowledge among the ranks of the impure, of the corrupt, of the carriers
of a special kind of evil.
Mark, stigma, shame?
Autumn 2016, I feel nothing.
Every time I think back to it I get a feeling of unreality: there is no anger, no embarrassment. I
have HIV: all it means is that I see doctors and go to medical check-ups. Just as millions of other
people in the world do, for a million different reasons.
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The blanks? You, we are the ones filling them in.
September, October, November: I can’t bring myself to feel like I truly belong in this supposed
category, like I have really been taken by this virtual presence – be it squid, octopus, jellyfish –
looming since teenagedom, which has now descended upon me with its tendrils of meanings and
reactions that have nothing to do with me.
The HIV virus has everything to do with the world.
It has more to do with you than with me.
It’s the result of overlapping looks, layer after layer.
I only know of its history and tradition in bits and pieces, they’re all behind me. Fates, numbers,
medical and media events, associations that precede me, cases about which, as much as I read and
look into, I never seem to know enough.
And yet, of course, it lives inside of me. It courses through me, exploiting my body – while I
only watch from the outside. I observe it from the outside. Emptiness, unfamiliarity: maybe the best
way to claim this new title, to feel more like who I am now, is to meet people who have already gone
through all this, who are still going through this. Attend mutual support groups, residencies – there’s
an annual one organised by a group in Bologna, three days of sharing, not dissimilar to a yoga
retreat. Come to terms with my own condition through someone else’s experience.
Being in a circle, seeing each other like peers.
To claim the title, maybe the best thing would be to talk about it.
To anyone?
To everyone?
I want to do something with the virus, act on it, change it, not be its passive subject – I only care
about learning experiences. I could write about it, maybe, using my privileged platform of an
infected person with no shame. Rename what has happened to me, reappropriate it through words,
in order to learn, to see more: using the diagnosis to explore what is usually kept quiet. Giving it a
reason, not letting it fester in the cupboard of wrongness.
I want to be in the same place as the pain, parsing it with words and making it hurt a little less.
And I can’t stand the idea of being forced to do something, anything.
The invisibility cloak reduces your standing among the degrees of existence. Secrets reduce your
mobility.
I have done nothing wrong, we haven’t done anything wrong. Those who disagree just want to
defend themselves at our expense: it’s a form of exorcism, an ancient apotropaic technique.
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Gianrico Carofiglio, The Measure of Time, pp. 162-165
Translated by Antony Shugaar
Lorenza
In my memories of those months, there are sudden rips in the fabric, dazzling flashes, where I can
see it all, where everything becomes real and utterly present. There are also lengthy interludes that I
can barely glimpse, as if in some indistinct dream or through pebbled glass.
There is no chronological order, no real connective tissue, in those memories.
I know only a few things.
I know that I always carried with me handfuls of coins and phone tokens; that what (little)
paper money I carried with me I folded together with a large paper clip; that I owned a cigarette case
a girlfriend had given me, and a Walkman; that I used a cologne called Drakkar. My hair was rather
long.
Lorenza and I saw each other again a few days later. She came to meet me downstairs from my
office, of course without a word of advance warning. From then on our relations took on a neurotic
pace that was, in its way, quite predictable. She didn’t have a phone and it was she who decided when
we would see each other, always at the last minute. There hung a dense fog of mystery about where
she went, her work at school, and what she did the evenings we weren’t together.
Now and then she’d call me at home, more frequently at the office. She’d ask to speak to
Counselor Guerrieri, and it annoyed me when she did (she knew perfectly well I wasn’t a lawyer, but
basically a trained paralegal, and the law firm’s secretary knew it too: whenever she put through one
of those phone calls, she couldn’t keep a hint of sarcasm out of her voice), but it also flattered me,
the way it would flatter a boy who was playing at being an adult.
There were times when I was tempted to ask the secretary to tell her that Counselor Guerrieri
was out of the office, just as a way of establishing the principle that she couldn’t be the only one to
decide when, where, and how. But I never did.
She always found some way of getting my goat. I’d try to react logically and she’d retort, for
instance, that my too-rational response was clearly a symptom of a lack of conviction, a limited
mastery of the subject. She had a daunting ability to manipulate a conversation, to sidestep any
attempt to force her to meet facts with facts. A natural gift for fallacies. She loved to get under my
skin, bring me to a boil, and, when she could, make me lose control. Whenever I did, soon after we’d
be having sex.
One time, while we were in her bed on Via Eritrea, she asked me: “Is it a problem for you if I
have another boyfriend?”
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I don’t remember what I answered, but I know I acted nonchalant, even as a pang of jealousy
tore deep through me. A short while later, I asked her if this other guy really existed, and who he was
if so. She changed the subject with her customary, intolerable evasiveness, a vagueness that she
wielded like a sharp weapon.
One evening she came by to pick me up with a girlfriend of hers. We went to the Taverna del
Maltese, ate panini, drank a succession of beers and some rum to top it off, and as the evening went
on, the conversation grew heavy with allusions and double-entendres. I started to think that they
were planning to have a three-way, and that this had been their plan from the start of the evening.
But as soon as we left the bar, the two women dropped me off at my house. They had another
engagement, Lorenza told me, practically chirping like a delighted bird as she told me goodnight, and
I just stood there, feeling like a fool.
Then, one afternoon, I spotted her in a dark blue Audi with a man who looked about forty; they
were stopped at a traffic light on Corso Vittorio Emanuele. The man exuded wealth, power, and
virility. I felt stupid, inferior, and humiliated, but when I saw her again, I think a couple of days later,
I didn’t have the nerve to ask her about him.
Only infrequently did she seem to break character. For instance, whenever we talked about
books. Then there emerged an angry, authentic passion, something that verged on the stirring. It was
she who introduced me to Yasunari Kawabata, Sylvia Plath, Fernando Pessoa, Luciano Bianciardi,
Anna Akhmatova, and others.
She’d mention an author and I’d go right out and buy one of their books because, even if I’d
never admit it, I wanted to make a good impression on her. But then, I would actually read those
books, and my eyes would be opened to worlds and stories and ideas of whose existence I’d been
blithely unaware.
Of all our conversations about books, there’s one I’ve never forgotten. The topic was fairytales.
“If you want to understand the dark side that lurks in any of us,” she told me, “reread the
classic fairytales. Just under the surface, you’ll find things that will appall you. The ambiguity of love,
for instance, something that’s never pure but always intertwined with anger, rancor, and even hatred.
Think of all the stories where the mother is dead and her place has been taken by a wicked
stepmother, upon whom the little child can unleash all their anger without having to worry about
destroying the true object of their love. Think of all the fairytales that tell of abandoned children.
Charles Perrault’s Hop o’ My Thumb, for instance, or The Little Match Girl, which I consider the most
horrible of them all. They’re about poverty, disease, and death. These aren’t stories for children. Read
the fairytales and you’ll find the most powerful key to an understanding of the nature of the evil and
fear bound up in the human heart.
The Measure of Time by Gianrico Carofiglio will be published
by Bitter Lemon Press in March 2021, translated by Howard Curtis
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Gian Auturo Ferrari, Italian Boy, pp. 145-149
Translated by Virginia Jewiss
It has to be said that he certainly didn’t expect a sea like this. He’d imagined green expanses, gently
sloping lawns, or fields even, then the beach would begin, and then the water. Dunes, bushes, hedges,
rocks, cliffs, small pools of limpid water, fish, starfish, shells. And palms. But here there was a wall
with a door, the wall surrounding the villa grounds, with a row of glass shards on top, broken bottles.
You’d walk through the door and right there on the other side was the water, with a narrow strip -
just a few yards wide - of pebbles in the middle. That was the beach. There you were supposed to
remove your uniform shirt and shorts, both ash-colored, stripping down to your black wool bathing
suit, which you’d put on underneath. The wool itched. Once you’d folded your clothes, you’d lie
down on the pebbles, fifteen minutes on your back, fifteen on your stomach, no more because
otherwise you’d burn. The bathing was next, ten minutes with the water, which was quite cold, up to
your waist, no higher because the nurse assistants, who also wore wool bathing suits and long faces,
didn’t want any trouble or bother, God forbid someone would end up with his head under water,
couldn’t breathe, and drowned, good heavens, no! Already, spending the summer of one’s twentieth
year in the company of those little boys was far from ideal. In the water, you couldn’t do anything
other than splash around a bit, you had to stand there, without moving, no fish, no shade even. Then
another fifteen minutes on back and belly, drying off in the sun. Lying face down in his wet suit,
Ninni could see in one direction the wall, in the other the sea with its tiny waves and gentle backwash
and, at the far end of the so-called beach, the cranes of a shipyard with something red and black
sticking out in the middle. Ninni liked to imagine it was the prow of a ship, but he suspected it was
actually a warehouse.
After half an hour of that pale sun, it was assumed that you were dry. But not so. The black
wool had the quality of remaining perpetually damp and the capacity to collect all the sand nestled
between one pebble and the next. Which proved that, after all, they too, albeit not the dazzling
version you’d see in the pictures, could be said to have a beach, or at least the respective sand. Better
yet, they wore their beach on their skin. And considering that there were no showers, not even for
the nurse assistants, sea and sand were always present, always with them, so to speak, in the sense
that even after removing your bathing suit, you stayed salty all day, slightly sandy and damp. But since
it was a general condition, no one paid any notice.
They ate, poorly, in the villa cellar. Huge, dented aluminum pots were passed along the benches,
with colossal women plunging their big, pork-sausage arms in and extracting giant spoonful
(forkfuls? shovelfuls?) of some shapeless mass, the so-called pastasciutta —pasta without sauce —
(pasta? more like paste) that was then plopped onto their plates. With a second round of pots,
shovelfuls of chopped, undressed tomatoes landed onto those same plates. Since there wasn’t
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anything else, Ninni stuffed himself to the point that one night he was ill, vomited it all up, and never
touched another tomato for ten years.
In the afternoon, after a siesta that the nurse assistants stretched to the limit so as to go about
their own business, it was time for their walk, never more than a couple of miles from the villa, and
then games in the park. Group games, in theory, and coordinated by the teachers, but when those
same teachers started chatting among themselves, smoking on the sly, dreaming of better vacations
with real bathing suits, dances, and young men on motor scooters - they didn’t even dare think about
the ones with cars, who were beyond their grasp - when, in short, supervision grew lax - “They’re
fenced in here, what could possibly happen?” - the boys would start playing normally, as if in a giant
courtyard.
After dinner, Ninni would make his way to the former guard house that now served as the
infirmary. To treat his chronic constipation, which surely would be irritated - she said - by the sun
and the warm sea, his mamma had gotten a malleable doctor from the South - not the brusque
Doctor Ambrosetti, who would have told her to get lost - to prescribe a particularly effective laxative.
Ninni had to swallow a large spoonful every evening, which he did without the least difficulty
because, even though the medicine was very bitter, in the end it was a pleasing, tasty bitterness.
Spoon and laxative were wielded by one of those kitchen ogresses in her capacity as nurse, wrapped
for the occasion in an ample white coat which, it must be said, transformed her, conferring on her an
air of benevolent authority.
As he made his way, alone, back to the villa, in the falling darkness, Ninni felt he was adapting to
the gentle, indolent rhythm of the colony. He seemed to understand confusedly that there were ways
of life different from those he’d been used to till then. He was discovering a daily life that was
peculiarly empty, devoid of duties and obligations other than those elementary ones connected to
one’s survival. No school, no homework as there’d been in Milan, but also no visits, no rituals, as in
Querciano.
A life also utterly devoid of emotional bonds, from those with one’s closest relations to those
with classmates and acquaintances. For the first time in his life, he was alone. No one knew him and
he knew no one. He’d been afraid of this before he left, he’d even asked himself if he would be able
to manage. Now that he was here, he seemed to oscillate. True, he wasn’t looked after, taken care of,
helped, or guided in the way he was used to. He wasn’t surrounded by warmth, that cushion which
softened every blow. He missed that, fiercely at times, and suffered from its absence. But on the
other hand, no one expected anything of him, no one required anything of him, he didn’t have to
undertake anything. He didn’t even have to wear himself out with the constant triangulation of papa,
mamma, and grandma.
Lying on the beach, taking his walks, in the few words exchanged at the dinner table or before
going to bed, he could utter unimportant things while continuing to think about what was inside his
16

own head, his own world. Like living on two different floors, without the second, laden with
emotions, ever interfering with the first, as happened, instead, in normal life.
He felt as if he were suspended midair, in a vast, grey limbo rippling with tiny waves, like the sea
he’d watch as he lay on his belly on the pebble beach. Strange, slightly disturbing, but not unpleasant.
He had the impression that more or less the same thing was happening to the other boys, who were
as isolated as he was. There was no opportunity to show off. Everyone was on good or at least
neutral terms with everyone else, everyone seemed at ease. Everyone bore some moderate interest in
his neighbor, and everyone knew that, a few weeks hence, he would never see those nieghbors again.
Compared to life at home, individual choices were reduced to a minimum. Everything -
schedule, clothing, ways to spend the day - came down from on high. There was nothing to decide,
nothing to choose. Yet at the same time, arbitrary acts, impositions, or caprices of authority of any
sort were excluded.
With ties to home severed, duties and obligations practically eliminated, and everything
uniform-able made uniform, Ninni, to his secret astonishment, discovered that other things existed
and endured. That he existed. That he could not be reduced to the tightly woven web that connected
him to the world, for he was something else, something that perhaps had always existed, but that he
could see only now, in the suspended, empty reality that the colony had created.
In the very place where he should have felt most alone, most at the mercy of external forces,
Ninni discovered that something new was growing inside himself. He was creating a space all his
own, an observatory to which he could withdraw and watch what was going on around him without
being instantly overwhelmed. His mother wrote him every week, and he would write back. She
wanted to know practical things above all. If the laxative was working, if he was eating, how well and
how much. He would reflect, imagining his mother reading his letter, and would reply that the
laxative was working wonders and that he was eating very well. He even listed the dishes that she
knew he liked. Having discovered his own autonomy, he had also discovered how to lie. White lies,
naturally.
17

18

Alessio Forgione, Junior League, pp. 9-15
Translated by Malcolm Angelucci
Refusal
There had been a time when Petrone had made a difference.
As a left back, he was winning the ball back and taking off like a rocket, head down, from our
penalty area to that of the opponents. From the center circle, where I was playing, the only things
that I could see clearly were the white soles of his shoes turning into light trails, and hypnotizing me.
I tried to follow them, but it was a matter of instants, seconds, and then there was nothing more: the
brown, thick dust was flying up, and he had disappeared.
Many times, while looking at him, I had speculated that there must have been some kind of
engine hidden in his body, or that he must have come from a different galaxy. I observed him, and
felt like a spectator, and so did the others, so much so that if Petrone scored nobody ran to cheer
him, and in those moments I believed he must have been very lonely: when with the ball under his
arm and his back bent, he was returning towards our half.
From a certain point onwards, I started to think that his mother accompanied him to training to
fight the solitude that, also because his father was a greengrocer and worked day and night, and she
had her hair dyed bright red, owned so many pairs of shoes and was the only one in that family that
lived the good life.
On top of that, she smoked long, slim cigarettes.
On Sundays, while we were warming up before the game, I used to turn toward the stands and
she was talking with my father and I asked myself what would he be thinking. Above all, if he
thought the same things as me, because we were coming home and I was locking myself in the
bathroom and wanking thinking about Petrone’s mother.
I used to pull my jocks down and sit on the toilet with my eyes closed to avoid seeing my
reflection. My legs were still as smooth as worms, while on the ones of Petrone there were thick
black hairs and the ones of the mother were really beautiful, I desired them and I desired that hairs
also sprang out of me, because it was for that reason that Petrone made the difference. Becase he
had developed and he had become a man before all of us. Then we got hair, and he already had a
beard. He let it grow but he was kidding himself, because now the time when he was making a
difference had ended, and with it also our respect.
He started to come to training alone, because he heard us joking. He took the c12 bus and also
walked and I had turned fourteen two months earlier. The season had started three matches ago and
Petrone was late and we were standing in the center circle talking about the last Sunday’s match. We
19

had won all of them but the coach was not satisfied, because we had conceded a goal like morons, so
he said. ‘If you really want to win you shouldn’t sit down, but keep fighting’.
This is what he was saying when Petrone appeared. The coach looked at him and he noticed it
immediately. ‘Bloody faggot!’ he told him.
‘Good evening’ answered Petrone, and then he laughed.
‘What did you do?’ he asked him bringing his hands to his cheeks, and all the others understood
as well that he wasn’t referring to the lateness, but to the beard, which had disappeared to leave space
for two long and thin sideburns, in the shape of lightning, that reached the edges of his mouth.
‘You don’t like them?’
The coach eyeballed him and we laughed, because Petrone had already stopped smiling.
‘Gioiello’ he said, and Gioiello played midfield, inside right. ‘Twenty minutes running and if I haven’t
come back yet: stretching’.
He asked Gioiello because he was like one of those dogs that are behind the gates and bark,
with their mouths open, showing you all their teeth and if you put a foot between the bars they
devour your shoe, the foot, and perhaps also the rest of the leg.
The coach walked towards the changing rooms and we started running. He went in and we
stopped. Not even Gioiello kept going.
We sat on the bench, some of us on the ground, and from there the field was enormous, it was
cold, the floodlight was on and it felt like the surface of the moon. Small clouds of air were coming
out of our mouths. On the moon there was no air. I thought that I was feeling cold, I thought that
while standing still one feels it even more, and I rubbed my legs with my hands.
After ten minutes someone said that the coach could come back at any moment, and so we
started to run again. Then he really came back. He came out of the changing room with a quick step,
his arms straight along his sides. On the ground his shadow was divided into four, and at every step
he lifted a handful of dirt. He came closer and I saw that in one hand he clutched a red can of
shaving foam. When he reached us, he ordered us to hold Petrone, and I also saw the razor, white,
the same as the one that my father used.
We held him and the coach covered his face with foam. Petrone moved and kicked, and
someone took advantage of it and gave him a couple of slaps behind the head.
‘For you I even spent three thousand lire’, the coach said and the moment of the razor arrived:
Petrone subsided entirely and it was as if his batteries had run out. ‘The sir is served’ said the coach
later, once he was finished, before ordering us to let him go.
We obeyed and Petrone squatted to clean his face with the edge of his hoody. Gioiello gave him
a kick in the ass. Fusco, the second striker, brought his hands to his belly and laughed.
‘Go wash yourself off, go’ he yelled and Petrone started to go towards the changing rooms.
‘And may it serve as an example to you’ the coach told us as we started running again, but he didn’t
explain of what, what he meant, what we could and couldn’t do and I felt a little confused.
20

Training continued without a hitch. During the shooting exercise, Imparato, never in the starting
eleven, shanked the ball and it almost reached the corner flag. The coach told him that if he kicked
with his back bent like a butcher slicing salami he would never hit the goal and Imparato’s father was
a butcher.
In the final training match I passed the ball to Fusco and he scored. He gave me a five and the
coach said that these were the things that he wanted to see more often and not all the bullshit. ‘Well
done’ he added and I believed as well that I had made a good pass, but Fusco was very strong as well
and so it was not all my doing. The training ended and we went to have a shower and in the changing
room it was impossible to talk to anyone, because everyone was yelling by himself.
I washed and quickly got dressed. I took my bag, put on the jacket and left: the streets were dark
and the streetlights were yellow. The buildings, made of bricks, seemed black to me. I walked for a
while and I heard someone calling me from above. It was an old lady who, from a window on the
second floor was trying to get my attention. ‘Wait there’ she said, and I didn’t move.
She reappeared and lowered a breadbasket. The rope was tense and fixed on the edge was a peg
that held five thousand lire. She asked me to buy her a packet of MS but I was almost at the alley and
thought that I would have had to walk at least five hundred meters to arrive at the tobacconist and
come back, give her the cigarettes and walk the same road to go home. And all of that with my bag
on my shoulder.
‘I am tired’ I answered.
She lifted the breadbasket and leaned forward a bit more.
‘Son of a bitch’ she said.
While I resumed my walk I asked myself if that was a sentence she would have said to anyone
or if she had said that because she had recognized me. My mother, for some, was a good for
nothing; I knew that. And they thought that and I pretended not to think the same. I pretended not
to hear, or not to understand. My mother, for me, was a slap in the face, an open wound. Or a
whistle in the ear, that got louder and softer and disturbed and covered everything and when I passed
by the tobacconists the sign was off and the shutters down.
I got home, put the dirty jersey and jocks in the washing machine and turned the dial. The
washing started, my father was cooking. We sat at the table and he, every evening, as he came back
from work used to stop and buy bread fresh from the oven. He asked me how training went and I
told him about Petrone and how the coach said that it was an example and we had to remember it. I
told him that I didn’t understand what it was an example of.
He replied that he had done well and it was called common sense.
‘Let’s imagine that everybody in your class is poor and the parents don’t work and your
classmates go to school with broken shoes, with holes that show the socks and you, instead, are rich
and buy a pair of shoes worth a hundred thousand lire. Do you think it is right to go to school with
those shoes?’
21

I didn’t understand if he was telling me that compared to Petrone I was poor, and therefore I
did not reply.
‘No, it is not’ he said. ‘It is not right to act strong with the weak and weak with the strong’.
I began to ask myself if, on top of being poor, he also thought I was weak. I kept silent. I took the
dishes and put them in the sink. My father opened the door to the kitchen balcony and, standing on
the threshold, he lit a cigarette. The packet was on the table, I was doing the dishes and was
concentrated on what I was doing. It was a way not to talk to him, but I could perceive that he was
looking at me and his eyes were heavy on my back.
‘What’s up?’ he asked.
‘Nothing’ I replied.
I heard him inhaling.
‘I wanted to explain to you that respect is the only thing that matters’.
‘Ok’.
‘Not so much the one you get, but the one you give. That’s the important one’.
‘Ok, dad’ I said and he left the cigarette and while I was starting to degrease the pan he put a
hand on my head, through my hair, and lowered it until my neck. He stroked me and I don’t know
why, but I felt very sad and very happy and I almost started to cry.
I kept degreasing and he stopped and I heard him locking himself in the bathroom, I dried my
hands on my jeans and went to the table. My father smoked Philip Morris. I pinched three and I put
them in my pocket. I went back to the sink and kept on washing.
‘Have you got much homework?’ he asked me, when he returned.
‘Not much’ I replied.
In my room I sat at the desk. I opened an issue of this magazine I was reading that talked about
aliens, ghosts and various paranormal phenomena and put it between the pages of the history book,
in case he opened the door.
I read again the issue that contained the article on spontaneous combustion and they practically
said that a body, suddenly, without any reason, could catch fire. They said that it could happen
because of the methane that some people have in their intestine, but they weren’t sure. I had even
talked about it with Lunno and he said that it wasn’t possible, that it was all nonsense, that he had
never seen anyone burn that way.
I observed the photo of this body of which only a leg remained and all the rest was a black
stain, of ember and ashes. I looked at it moving my head as close as possible to the page and I was
not convinced that it was real, because one could do many things to a photo and it was not that clear.
I moved to the article on the fake moon landing. It argued that man never reached the moon, or in
any case he didn’t make it there on that occasion, the famous one.
There was a photo of the helmet of the astronaut and they had circled some reflections in red,
which were some strange glows. They said they were lights, lights of a photographic studio and that
22

they could not have been there on the moon. They suggested that the director of the television
broadcast could have been Stanley Kubrick and it was then that I heard his name for the first time. I
liked the suits of the astronauts and I liked the patch with the American flag they had on the
shoulder. Then I thought about how sad the first astronaut who made it to the moon for real must
have been, because he couldn’t tell anyone and nobody knew and nobody ever thought of him when
looking at the sky, at night.
23

24

Giuseppe Lupo, A Brief History of My Silence, pp. 119-122
Translated by Malcolm Angelucci
The Milan that I saw for the second time was pierced by the first draughts of bitter cold; nothing
more than a feeling with which winter announced itself, even if the sun knew the sweetness of
autumn and the trees were laden with leaves about to yellow. My father was not answering to my
mother’s reproaches – we were slow, we moved to late – but the information we had gathered led us
straight to a boarding house in the vicinity of Naviglio Grande, just before the Alzaia, in that border
zone where the city regains a memory of water: wrought-iron bridges, rusty railings, cobbled streets,
shiny tram rails in the morning and a distrustful air that induces sadness.
The boarding house my father had contacted was an enormous building named after Saint
Giuseppe Calasanzio, the Spanish saint, founder of the Piarists. I didn’t know him and my mother
didn’t know him either, so she mangled the surname she read at the entrance: ‘Colasanzio will take
you, Colasanzio will listen to our prayers.’
They sat us in a large room full of worn out furniture and told us to wait. The rising damp on
the walls stuck to the wood of the windows and my mother didn’t know how to fill the hours of the
morning if not by directing her gaze towards the edges, the furnishing, the floors. They weren’t of
her liking, but she repeated regardless: ‘Colasanzio had to grant us this favour’.
‘Calasanzio’ corrected my father, ‘not Colasanzio.’
‘It is the same’ she said. But she didn’t add anything because they called us for the interview to
show us the refectory, the stairs, the study room. She became teary when we met a student in one of
the rooms and she recognized my physiognomy in the chilled silhouette of that boy, she saw me in
the humid clothes of the Naviglio and felt pity for what I could have been, in a hour of solitude, if I
had found myself living there. She left with tears in her eyes, descended the stairs and only when we
found ourselves far from the Alzaia did she say: ‘who knows if Colasanzio will grant us this favour’.
We were unsure of which direction to take and we were looking for answers moving away as
soon as possible from the smell of stagnant water. Saint Giuseppe Calasanzio, the saint invoked that
autumn morning, didn’t listen to my mothers’ prayers and I didn’t spend my university years in the
room of the boarding house that carried his name. A crepuscular city I could have known, had I
lived in those surroundings. Instead, the autumn wind pushed me to the opposite end of the city, in
that Lambrate where there were no channels for the saints to walk on. Milan had reserved me a
different destiny, leading me to the suburb of Città Studi. And between the windows of the
Polytechnic, under a sky made of axioms and theorems, I would feel the solitude of someone who is
in front of the unknown God and doesn’t know the name with which to call him.
25

There was a handful of days to go before the definitive departure, maybe a week, maybe two,
and my mother ironed and put aside shirts, socks, jumpers, scarves, gloves, handkerchiefs. But she
couldn’t decide to close the suitcase, as if she wished that the air of home would stick to the clothes
to remain imprisoned in the fabrics until my return for Christmas.
‘Will four shirts be enough?’ she asked my father. Four shirts were for her a unit of measure, a
sort of regulation of time. ‘Let’s remember the handkerchiefs, let’s remember the socks, let’s
remember the sheets of paper.’
I pretended not to listen in order not to interrupt that dialogue between the two, which was
composed of clothing and that for an inexplicable reason reminded me of the words uttered by my
mother during the move to the new house: ‘Let’s not forget anything, let’s not forget anything.’
According to her, my going to Milan resembled a relocation and I started feeling in danger once
again, like the boy of whom Canetti wrote. His tongue was freed from the scissors which threatened
to cut it, his words weren’t lost: this is what counted to me. And this restored my hope that I too, like
him, would have a tongue to set free, perhaps at the price of fleeing the place where I was born, and
never returning.
The shirts, the socks, the jumpers that my mother piled up beside the not yet closed suitcase
ended up infecting me as well, while I was patrolling the new house with the unforgiving gaze of
another farewell. I looked at my sister’s dolls, sitting one beside the other on the wardrobe of her
little room, I looked at my father’s study, which wasn’t a cubby hole anymore, but a space so wide as
to contain even my old sofa bed.
I was getting ready to travel along the Adriatic ridge as if the one-night trip resembled the
voyage of a refugee, having lost his house and the promise of a new land, and yet a strange euphoria
accompanied me in the afternoon hours, those of the wait. Then the moment of getting on the train
arrived and in the confusion of the farewell my father had the time to tell me: ‘ If the Twentieth
century to which we belong will have the destiny of being remembered, if your mother and I will
have the destiny of being remembered, depends on you.’
The doors closed and I couldn’t hear anything else. It was a moment, but in the words that my
father was uttering, in the silent smiling towards me as I was going away – and that gesture was
nothing else than dignified love in separation – precisely in that moment it was as if the century to
which we all belonged, me, my family, the Appennino were I was born, was extinguished. The next
day, in Milan, the Twentieth century didn’t exist anymore, and I was already missing it.
26

Daniele Mencarelli, Everything Asks For Salvation, pp. 187-189
Translated by Virginia Jewiss
It wouldn’t have taken much.
Listen, look the person in the eyes, acquiesce.
Once. Just once.
But no. They didn’t.
Because for them, we’re not worthy of being heard.
Because the insane, the ill, are in need of treatment. While words, dialogue, those are goods
reserved for the sane.
Is this degradation science?
Never open yourself up to pity. Empty the other person out to the point that you turn him into
a cog of flesh. Feel yourself in charge, the one with all the answers.
Is this normality? Is this mental health?
The real madness is to never give in. To never bend.
A week ago, I wanted to murder life for being so totally illogical, for the certainty that nothing is
predictable, that I’ve been granted the curse of living without ever getting used to life, the good as
well as the bad.
So I will live an unhappy life, sooner or later the pain will get the best of me, but it’s not you I
want to become.
Out of nowhere, Mario’s sparrow, with his black shining eyes, in its house of twigs and leaves. I
say goodbye to him for Mario as well.
I stop alongside Alessandro. I’m no good with prayers, but I’m not short on imagination. May this
cocoon of silence shatter sooner or later, may you return to this earth. Free.
There’s Madonnina, next to his bed, immobile, staring into space, absorbed in something only
he can see. I go up to him, stroke his hand.
“So long, Madonni’.”
I grab my bag, a final glance at the room.
I stick my head in the nurses’ station, trying to track down a nurse, someone I can have pass
along my goodbyes for Pino, Rossana and Lorenzo, but I can’t find anyone.
“Maria I’ve lost my soul!
Help me, Madonna!”
Madonnina again, in the hallway now.
I’ll never know for sure, but something in his eyes, maybe it’s only wishful thinking on my part,
but there in the unending darkness, comes a flicker of light in my direction.
27

“Maria I’ve lost my soul!
Help me, Madonna!”
Embrace everything.
The stench of urine mixed with the sweat, the wasted bones, the prickly beard.
I embrace everything of Madonnina, down to his hidden glory, his promised joy.
Down to the tears, which make a man out of me.
I didn’t tell anyone to come get me. I want to walk, to breathe, to be in the open air all by myself. My
legs struggle, unused to doing their job. The enormity of it all, from the space to the colors, dazes
and enchants me, the beauty conquers my eyes.
I stop to catch my breath, to turn and look behind me, for just a second.
From up above, from the farthest point in the universe, passing through my skull at the speed
of light, down to the soles of my feet and beyond, passing through every atom of matter. Everything
asks me for salvation.
For the living and the dead, salvation.
Salvation for Mario, Gianluca, Giorgio, Alessandro, and Madonnina.
For all the crazies, of all time, swallowed up by the madhouses of history.
28

Valeria Parrella, Almarina, pp. 13-16
Translated by Alex Valente
My name is Elisabetta Maiorano, not that anyone asked: I’m the one reminding myself every
time I reach the Nisida threshold (just like I tell myself my card PIN as I walk up to the ATM). I feel
guilty every time I step inside. At the barrier, when I stop for identification, I need to lower my gaze,
I show my face without ever really facing the officer, as if my car were stuffed with cocaine. And I
see it rise with incredible effort, that barrier, as if I am the one to lift it, as if it is my fault that Nisida
is a youth detention centre, as if I had dug out these tuff streets with my own hands, forcing my car
to struggle. As if they were doing me a favour.
Any time I reach that barrier, I lose all civil rights, any substance I have accrued with time, I am
no one, no longer a graduate, nor a qualified teacher, someone who passed exams and spent time
subbing up north and knows how to tell off those who try cutting in. The person who reports the
broken side-view mirror, the keyed car door. (‘Do you know who did it, madam?’ ‘Yes, I do: an illegal
parking valet under San Pasquale, he wanted money and I told him I’d rather give it to a busker.’ ‘I’m
afraid the busker may also have been illegal.’)
At the corner of the Nisida guarding lodge, I let them dissect me, but it’s just my imagination, I
tell myself: there are so many people heading up in the morning, educators, teachers, lab facilitators,
and my number plate is registered, and they never ask me anything, really. Maybe even they don’t
know, as they’re posted here one day and who knows where next month, that we’re all climbing the
mountain of Purgatory, and that when we descend we will never be the same.
Elisabetta Maiorano. For the past three years I’ve been carrying my passport instead of my
national ID card, as my passport doesn’t have my marital status, and my card still says married and I
have no desire to pay a visit to the General Register Office to get it changed.
(There was a lot of dust making the whole atmosphere a little ironic, as I was applying for my
national ID: not entirely believable. The clerks were indistinguishable from the ordinary citizens, or
maybe not: they looked more worn out, wearing jumpers that would never come back in style.
‘Can’t we just put non applicable under marital status and employment status?’ ‘Signò, if you don’t
want to let people know you’re married, just use your passport.’
I hadn’t been quick enough to respond, or laugh. It takes me a while to fully understand what is
happening to me, I’m quicker to act than think: I just left in frustration. As I became a widow, the
suggestion turned out to be useful.)
As the barrier closes behind me, I feel freer. I’ve received my eye-laden pass, I’ve crossed the
otherwise uncrossable threshold, and for the first stretch I listen to the relief. Relief from everything.
If only you knew what it means being able to turn around for a moment, the stretch of road just
before the turn. Stopping as the body continues, changes gears, plays with the clutch, prepares the
29

wheel for the turn, as the body rises: finding yourself after the barrier and before the prison, leaving
the whole city below, with its anxieties that are also my own. If only you knew, as you walk down the
decuman roads, as you pray in the church of site E of the Centro Direzionale next to the Courts of
Law. As you’re spending your holidays, as you’ve just finished giving your talk at the convention: I
want to call your attention to the west, make you turn around and tell you that the anguish-filled
woman ascending to Nisida is not an inmate. She’s a fifty year old woman and she married late. For a
number of reasons, but mostly because she had travelled a lot to sub in for other teachers. She has
been to Treviso, has learned to drink white wine in the morning, to drive in the snow. She has learned
to kill time, to dance the tango in Frosinone, she has helped the custodial staff hang up a sheet, at
the weekend, to use as a screen for a film projector. And when she got back, it was very late indeed.
But that’s not the point either. The point is that before the prison and already after the barrier, if
you look closely, you can see it: she’s feeling a strange kind of relief. Maybe people used to travelling
feel the same thing when the plane takes off. The only things taking off here are a few seagulls, and a
rock that rises like a pinnacle just as the road swerves. All else is silence. The silence you can never
hear elsewhere: away from the routes, far from any road, inaccessible sea all around, diving into
Vesuvius on the right, into the Italsider plant on the left. But today everything is idle: including the
volcano and the steelworks.
Almarina by Valeria Parrella will be published by John Murray in 2021, translated by Alex Valente
30

Remo Rapino, The Life, Death and Miracles of Bonfiglio Liborio
Translated by Anne Milano Appel
1926
The year that Liborio B. makes his entrance on earth, but in summer
Now those people, those others, everybody in this shitty town, go around saying I’m crazy. And it
didn’t just start now, those people, those others, all the people in this shitty town, having to tell me
I’m crazy. I know it too, and I think about it all the time, night and day, winter and summer, I think
about it every day that God Almighty delivers births and deaths, in sunshine and in darkness, I have
always thought about it to try to understand how come this noggin of mine went from being more
or less normal to having bats in its belfry, an unraveled muddle nutty as a fruitcake. Which is as if
you were walking along a straight road, and then all of a sudden, at a junction, it’s crooked like a
snake, you get twisted up and take the wrong road without even noticing it, and so out of nowhere
you find yourself in a place you’ve never seen before, where not one thing is familiar, you don’t
recognize the houses, the trees, people’s faces, voices, even your mother’s lovely voice jolts you, and
you can’t even find the fountain in the main piazza, though it’s a really big one, and after the pigeons
shit on your head for spite, you can’t even find the house where you were born with its old ugly
dilapidated wooden door, because public housing breeds woodworms and they feed on the wood
piece by piece, those woodworms even eat rust and mold. It can happen. I think that’s what
happened to me too. It may well be that it all began right when I came into the world, at least
according to what my mother told me, as for my father I don’t even know who he is or where he is
now, whether he’s still alive, or whether he died like the poor devil he was, because he was a poor
unfortunate devil. Those who remember him say he went to L’America, to Argentina or Brazil,
somewhere across the sea, but an enormous sea, they tell me, but what can you expect me to know
about him after such a long time. How big must that fucking sea be? Well anyway, when I was born
all these and many other things happened, and many more would happen. So much water came
down even when I was born, it was an evening in August so my grandfather, Peppe Bonfiglio, was
always telling me, and my mother, God rest her soul, between shrieking and shuddering, gripping two
candles in her hand to give a bit of light at least, swore at wave after wave of pain, screaming: Holy
Mother of God, where the hell is that jackass Don Nicola? Where the hell is that slut comare Elisa? And so in a
round of swearing and madonne, I was born. Then a whole life of chicory and greens. That was how
it was then. And even though hunger was never absent in my house, I didn’t die after all. My
grandfather, on the other hand, died unexpectedly, no one thought you could die just like that, in the
space of a day. Because it was in the afternoon that a scaffolding plank had broken, a wooden board
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otted by water and wind, a cracking under his feet, there at the site where they were building the
new school, and he fell right on a stack of newly unloaded bricks; his back, which was already rotting
on its own, shattered into a hundred pieces, maybe more, and he died too, renouncing Christ on the
cross. That’s the only way my grandfather could die, repudiating. After that my mother started getting
sick, little by little, a coughing fit every now and then, but it went on for a long time, until she started
spitting up dark blood on the pillow, anyway she spit blood, she spit and didn’t talk anymore, even
though in the evening she told me stories and tales that I don’t remember too well now and maybe
it’s best I forgot, apart from the story about my having the same eyes as my father’s. How can a
person not get angry at the world, heaven and earth, the priests who wanted to console you with an
Our Father and a Gloria, and also with the idea of paradise, and the angels, already I could smell a
rat, the stink of deception, though I only later became aware of this hoax. So I got the idea of
recounting everything that’s happened to me from the time I was born until now when I am over
eighty years old, sitting here at the marble table in the kitchen. Which is cold and I don’t know why
this marble and this cold, the table with the marble surface makes me think about death. Now and
then I think about death even if I’m not at the table, you take a look around and you see that every
day people die, and even if you don’t know them there are notices about the dead, obituaries written
especially for the dead, you see them, you read them and you always feel a little sorry, even if the
name printed there is a stranger to you. I also think about my own death, but not often, small
potatoes. That’s why I write, write and rewrite, that way death will wait, even though sometimes I
seem to see it, with its ashen white face and black-rimmed eyes, like those who suffer from heart
disease, and I tell it to wait a few more months, if possible until Christmas so that at least I’ll
remember the creche they put up at the big church one last time, when the book is finished then I’ll
call it myself, in short I let it hear that I’m ready, because death understands these things right away, it
doesn’t take a whole lot of explaining. Death is also a tiny bit kind, it puts on a show of patience and
believes me and goes away; once, but only once, it even smiled at me, though just barely, something
that just sort of slipped out. It bid farewell to me with a shriveled hand that was all creaky when the
fingers moved to wave ciao, like someone with osteoarthritis who when the weather changes feels the
stabbing aches as if pricked by thistle spines. Meanwhile now that death went away I breathe a big
soothing sigh, close my eyes to remember the things I have to remember, and I start writing but
slowly, because if I proceed slowly like this, life will last me a little longer, and that’s good too.
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Sandro Veronesi, The Hummingbird, pp. 93-95
Translated by Elena Pala
A thread, a Wizard, three cracks (1992 – 95)
It should be common knowledge – and yet it isn’t – that the course of every new relationship is set
from the start, once and for all, every time; and that in order to know in advance how things will end,
you only have to look at how they began. At the start of any human connection, in fact, there is
always a moment of clarity where you can see it grow, stretch through time, evolve as it will evolve
and end as it will end – all at once. It’s easy to see because in fact the whole relationship is already
captured in its beginning, just as the shape of all things is already contained within their first
manifestation. But it is only a moment, and then that prophetic vision disappears, or is erased from
memory – and it is only because of this lost knowledge that relationships then go on to generate
surprise, cause harm, bring us unforeseen pleasure or pain. We see it – at the beginning we really do
see it, for a fleeting, unclouded moment– but then for the rest of our life it’s gone. Just as when we
get up to go to the bathroom at night, fumbling around in the dark in our bedroom, and we feel lost,
and we switch on the light for a split second then switch it off straight away, and in that flash we see
the way, but only for the time it takes to relieve ourselves and get back to bed. The following night
we’ll feel lost all over again.
When his daughter’s disorder first manifested itself, around the time she was three, Marco
Carrera experienced that flash of clarity. He saw everything, but that vision was so unbearable (it had
to do with his sister Irene) that he immediately erased it from his memory and went on living as
though it had never happened. Perhaps psychoanalysis might have helped him recover it, but
besieged as he was by its disciples, Marco had developed an unconquerable aversion to
psychoanalysis. Or so he said. A therapist, of course, would counter that his aversion was nothing
more than a defence mechanism, a strategy he had adopted to justify erasing that vision.
Nevertheless, the vision was immediately and permanently erased, never to resurface again, not even
after things went the way they were meant to go – the way Marco Carrera knew they would, for a
moment, at the beginning, and then never again.
The onset of the child’s disorder coincided with the beginning of her relationship with her
father, which up until that day had remained rather vague. This was prompted by the child herself,
following what was probably the first autonomous decision of her life. It was on a bright August
Sunday – as father and daughter were having breakfast in the kitchen in Bolgheri and Marina was still
dozing in bed – that Adele Carrera decided to announce there was a thread attached to her back.
Despite her age, she was very clear in her description: there was a thread anchoring her to the nearest
wall, at all times. For some reason, no one but her could see it, which in turn meant she always had to
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e with her back against the wall so people wouldn’t trip over it or get tangled up. And what happens,
asked Marco, when you can’t be with your back against the wall? How do you manage then? Adele
answered that in those situations she had to be very careful, and if anyone walked behind her back
and got tangled in her thread, she had to walk around them to free them – and then she showed him
how. Marco kept asking questions. This thread at the back – did everyone have it, or was it just her?
Just her. And didn’t she think that was odd? Yes, it was odd. Odd that she had it or that other people
didn’t? Odd that other people didn’t. So how do you manage at home? – he asked – how do you
manage with mummy, with me? But daddy, explained the child, you never walk behind my back. And
so it was in that precise moment – faced with the astonishing revelation that he never walked behind
his daughter’s back – that Marco Carrera felt a shiver down his spine and his relationship with his
daughter started in earnest. And it was also in that precise moment that he saw, that he knew, that he
got scared – and therefore he immediately forgot that he saw, that he knew, and that he got scared.
The Hummingbird by Sandro Veronesi will be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson
in May 2021, translated by Elena Pala
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Gian Mario Villalta, The Apprentice, pp. 221-223
Translated by Anne Milano Appel
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Tilio comes in and says good morning to the sexton. The sacristy is sunk in shadow, autumn is
coming, it begins like this, with the day still dark and he and Fredi imagining one another’s faces as
they talk without turning on the lights. He sets down the thermos, lifts the cover. “It got chilly, didn’t
it?” he says quietly to Fredi.
I bet he’s sleeping, Tilio thinks, undecided whether to leave him alone or nudge him. He tries a soft
whistle. No reaction. He doesn’t want to irritate him, so he comes up with the idea of carefully,
slowly, removing the blanket, the way he used to do with Paolo when he was little; it was nice to
watch him trying to stay warm for a little while longer, in his sleep, until he opened his eyes startled
to see his father standing by the bed. He always said “One more minute,” and one minute later he
would get up.
It’s easy to slide the blanket down from the ears and uncover the shoulders. Fredi’s eyes remain
closed. Tilio now realizes that his neck is in an unnatural position; putting one knee on the ground,
he puts his arms around Fredi and drags him down, lays him on the floor. He shakes him gently.
Tries to hear his heartbeat. Nothing. His face shows no pain, the eyes are closed, did he feel death
coming and let himself be carried off? Tilio is unable to do anything but look at him, touch his
hands, his face.
Fredi’s body is soft, the skin of his hands smooth and warm, you haven’t gone anywhere, Tilio
thinks, you’re here, still all here. Fredi passed away. He can’t help thinking that Fredi, his entire life, all
the things he’d done and seen, all the words he spoke are in the darkness of this body lying
motionless. It’s Fredi. And it’s no longer him. Complete darkness. The body full of organs, blood,
fluids in a darkness that is no longer even dark, is no longer Fredi. But he can look at Fredi, touch
him, he hasn’t gone anywhere else. Tilio imagines the darkness that came quickly, overrunning Fredi’s
entire life, obliterating it like a huge city sinking into the night until it disappears. Rows of lights,
coronas, colorful processions of lamps, first the airport, then the narrow streets on the hillsides, after
which the throbbing ribbon of the connecting road goes dark. The light recedes, as if sucked into a
void, the boulevards, the hotels on the outskirts, the array of homes on the lake go out. Days and
days entering the darkness, faces and faces one by one, by the dozens, bodies in the crowd erased by
the dark. Buildings seen while traveling, seen in dreams, works of art, contours of mountains, entire
afternoons, months, years sink into obscurity. The light recedes like a wave from the gated gardens in
the suburban districts, leaving the silhouettes of the buildings near the train station still visible for a
moment, then nothing more, even the rust on the railway tracks is swallowed up by shadow. Love,
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desires, hopes, the wave of night advances and submerges everything. Churches, restaurants, streets
that trail off, the oldest ones, disappear. All of youth sinks into darkness. The piazza with its
fountain, the street lamps, everything vanishes, returning to the cells, swimming in the blood, up to
the brain, to the most tenuous tissues. Where there was already darkness, buried power lines, pipes,
underground tunnels, basements, even darker, darker, darker.
There is a child at the end of the corridor, when only one last white glimmer remains behind
him. And it goes out.
The city is still warm with life, Fredi’s body is still intact. The terrestrial night, the night of the
sky and of the entire universe has engulfed them, it is as if they are at the bottom of a sea of silence
and obscurity, not knowing what silence is any more, not seeing that it is night everywhere.
Tilio’s hands rest on Fredi’s face. He has to do something now. Calling an ambulance is
pointless. He goes to wake up Don Livio. He waits for him to finish dressing, accompanies him
down, does a stupid thing like hold out his palm to show him Fredi; when they enter the sacristy,
there he is, this is all he is now, this thing on the floor.
Tilio takes on the job of notifying Fredi’s sister, he knows where she lives. Don Livio said that
he would see to the certificates, and call the agency for everything else.
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STREGA PRIZE 2020
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