‘Viaggio di nozze’

This story was written between 24 November and 6 December 1936. It was first published shortly after Pavese’s death, in the magazine Comunità (IV, no. 9, September–October 1950) and then included in the collection Notte di festa (Einaudi, 1953).

Goffredo Parise

1929–86

‘Melancholy’ is part of Parise’s Sillabari, an ingenious work of literature consisting of fifty-four relatively brief, essential stories, grouped according to the letters of the alphabet and dedicated to a single emotion (a sillabario is the Italian word for a child’s spelling book, one of the first things that teaches us to read and write). The result is an artful glossary of the human heart. We begin with the letter A, for amore (love), and end with S, solitudine (solitude). Parise finished before getting to Z, explaining that he ended, in spite of his original intentions, where ‘the poetry abandoned him’.¹ The writer Giuseppe Montesano compared the Sillabari to the work of Robert Walser and Truman Capote, and the critic Cesare Garboli called them ‘virtual novels’. Indeed, each contains a universe, suggestive of much larger dimensions, yet each is a marvel of concision that, like Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations, constitutes a series of interlocking yet autonomous texts, orderly yet emotionally anarchic. Parise worked as a journalist and screenwriter and also wrote several novels, but the Sillabari (there were originally two volumes, Sillabario n. 1 and Sillabario n. 2, published in 1972 and 1982, and published, respectively, in English, as Abecedary and Solitudes) are considered his finest achievement. He received the Strega Prize for the second volume. In a letter from that period, he writes about striving to achieve ‘a sort of limbo, a light and suffused exaltation in which, all told, you like life and at the same time feel nostalgic about it’. The structure of Parise’s sentences – fluid, multi-faceted, associative – have a characteristic looseness that permits one thought to always make room for another, infusing this story with profound ambivalence. Parise, an illegitimate child, never knew his father, and was the long-time companion of the painter Giosetta Fioroni, celebrated for her pop-art portraits of women.

Melancholy

Translated by Jhumpa Lahiri

Every day that cool and distant summer, the children of the Bedin-Alighieri Colony, a camp for the poor managed by the equally poor Sisters of Saint Dorothy, were woken up bright and early and taken immediately on to the meadows or into the pine grove at the crest of the hill. Two young nuns watched over them, dressed all in white for summer instead of the black habit and bonnet; they too were quite young, and nearly as small as the children. There were boys and girls, and among the girls was a ‘guest’ named Silvia, referred to as a ‘guest’ because she was the granddaughter of one of the founders, a Socialist who was hardly poor.

This is why Silvia – unlike everyone else, who wore the grey, collarless smock the camp required, made from cheap cotton – was able to choose, from her little trunk, her normal clothes every day: the shoes she always wore (and not the red rubber sandals that were part of the uniform), and even her own dolls or toys that she’d brought from home. She slept, however, in the dormitory with all the other girls, and so the rest of Silvia’s day was just like the others’: the same small breakfast, same lunch, same snack in the afternoon, same dinner. Even the white enamelled bed and the coarse sheets with thick stitching down the middle were the same as everyone else’s.