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Back Behind Closed Doors Save as PDF
Chapters (17)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Preface
  4. Introduction
  5. Grace
  6. America 1911
  7. Dainty Shoes
  8. Grandmother Lidda
  9. America 1918
  10. I Take You Out
  11. Her Father’s House
  12. Ciancianedda
  13. Red Roses
  14. Caterina’s Loom
  15. Glossary
  16. Afterword
  17. Translator’s Acknowledgments

Needy relatives were the only thing that worried her. Petrù had brothers and nephews who were dying of hunger, and in a moment of weakness he could write who knows what kind of nonsense into his will.

But had Petrù made a will? No one could understand that man. What was he thinking? What did he want to do?

“He’s making me crazy,” said Venera. “It’s like he lives in another world.”

Was he tormented by some regret? Was he hoping to get better or had he resigned himself? Uncommunicative, taciturn, and consumed by suffering, he was plagued by one fixed and painful thought. And he spoke simple words, sometimes even nonsense, with a sigh that made his broad chest heave. Often he would repeat: “I came back to start up a grocery.”

But he wasn’t saying it to his wife, or to his friends, but to an invisible someone that only he could see, terrified, there at the closed door.

I Take You Out

I Take You Out

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Ti-nesciu

In his day, the lawyer Scialabba had been the best in town, so much so that they referred to him simply as “the lawyer.” But since his wife had died and Nina Bellocchio had dumped him like a dog after having taken him for everything, even his vineyard, his luck started running out, too. Every now and then he still accepted a small case or two, and when he did he felt reassured and would prepare pompous speeches. But when he arrived in court, between his younger colleagues who poked fun at him and the judges who knit their brow to keep from laughing at him, well, he lost his train of thought, a train of thought too feeble for ideas that were too weighty, and he would start in on subjects that had no conclusions, mixing in outdated expressions that had been heard a hundred times before, while the lawyer Millone sketched his caricature on the cover of the law code. And yet he showed up like clockwork in court, all spruced up with his frayed but sparkling white collar and clean-shaven, sunken cheeks: it was a habit he couldn’t break, like that other one he had of always speaking Italian with his daughter and the peasants.