The sun, which had invaded the room at dusk, rendered the princely table even more resplendent, glittering in its violet light.

The master looked at Leonia, who was staring tenaciously at the table, and every so often he would become distracted and glance in the direction of the door instead.

Someone came in as lightly as mist, and so white as to be indistinguishable from the air. Only Benedetto Vai was able to make out the pale apparition that advanced from the door to the festively laid table which was being fixed for all eternity in those wide blue eyes.

‘Silenzio’

First published in the weekly magazine L’Europeo (IV, no. 51, 19 December 1948). Later included in Tutte le novelle (Mondadori, 1957).

Anna Maria Ortese

1914–98

Ortese, who had little more than an elementary school education, was born to a poor family in Rome, spent three years in Libya as a child, and based herself, at eighteen, in Naples. One of her brothers drowned when she was nineteen – a trauma that inspired her first writing – and both her parents died by the time she was forty. She lived the rest of her years with her sister, who followed her from place to place as Ortese cobbled together writing-related work. Massimo Bontempelli was an early fan, and her first collection was published in 1937. She would go on to publish ten others, and six novels. This story, about a child’s perception of poverty, is now considered a touchstone of Italian short fiction, and opens Il mare non bagna Napoli (recently published in English under the title Neapolitan Chronicles), a collection published in 1953 in Vittorini’s Gettoni series (see Chronology). A great fresco cycle that depicts Naples, shattered, after the Second World War, it garnered Ortese the Viareggio Prize. But the last chapter, an attack on the city’s literary establishment, alienated influential critics and forced her to leave the city. She became an increasingly solitary literary figure who compared herself to a castaway and a cat. Economic difficulties plagued her; though she won the Strega Prize in 1967 she was forced to ask for help from the Legge Bacchelli, an organization created by the Italian government to support illustrious artists in need. Ortese both rejected reality and documented it. Her writing, she observed, ‘has something of the exalted and the feverish; it tends towards the high-pitched, encroaches on the hallucinatory, and at almost every point on the page displays, even in its precision, something of the too much’.¹ She wrote a trilogy of novels in which animals were the main characters.

A Pair of Eyeglasses

Translated by Ann Goldstein and Jenny McPhee

‘As long as there’s the sun … the sun!’ the voice of Don Peppino Quaglia crooned softly near the doorway of the low, dark basement apartment. ‘Leave it to God,’ answered the humble and faintly cheerful voice of his wife, Rosa, from inside; she was in bed, moaning in pain from arthritis, complicated by heart disease, and, addressing her sister-in-law, who was in the bathroom, she added: ‘You know what I’ll do, Nunziata? Later I’ll get up and take the clothes out of the water.’