‘Un paio di occhiali’

First published under the title ‘Ottomila lire per gli occhi di Eugenia’ in the magazine Omnibus (May 1949). Later included in Il mare non bagna Napoli in the Gettoni series (Einaudi, 1953).

Alberto Moravia

1907–90

A quintessentially Roman writer, Moravia, born Alberto Pincherle, wrote more works about that city’s people, streets and soul than any other. His 1952 collection, called simply I racconti (Stories), won the Strega Prize. His complete Racconti romani (published in English as Roman Tales and More Roman Tales) collected in 1954 and then in 1959, number well over one hundred. This story comes from a lesser-known collection, published in 1976, called Boh (an untranslatable expression one often hears in Rome, to express a general state of befuddlement). All are told in the first person from the female point of view. Together, these snapshots form a collective portrait of Roman women on the threshold of something new, like the protagonist of this selection, caught between traditional roles and a nascent feminist consciousness. The collection, coming as it did after Moravia had settled into his reputation as a celebrated man of letters and author of iconic novels like La noia (Boredom), represents another side to the author. But Moravia, at once a classical and subversive writer, embodied a spirit of contradiction from the very start. He had little formal schooling. A childhood illness confined him to bed and books, an experience fundamental to his becoming a writer. His early efforts included stories written in French for Bontempelli’s magazine, 900, and his first novel, Gli indifferenti (translated as The Time of Indifference), a scathing portrait of a bourgeois family that enraged Fascist critics, published when he was just twenty, is still considered by many to be his best. He wrote with equal facility about working-class and middle-class characters, about shopkeepers and bank clerks. Moravia was the founding editor of Nuovi Argomenti, one of Italy’s most prestigious literary journals and still a forum for short stories. Involved romantically with literary women, he was the husband of Elsa Morante, and the companion for many years of the writer Dacia Maraini.

The Other Side of the Moon

Translated by Michael F. Moore

I am two persons in one or, if you prefer, a double-faced person, with two sides, like the moon. And like the moon, I have one side that everyone knows, always the same, and a side unknown not only to others but also, in a sense, to myself. This second completely unknown side might not even exist: if you think about it, the things we ignore do not exist. But they do. Even if I don’t know it or allow it to be known, the other side of the moon is something I ‘sense’. And this obscure sense that the other side exists, invisible and different, behind my apparent face, at the back of my head, and is looking at the world behind me, means that in everyday life I am always scrupulously, dutifully occupied and, at the same time – how how can I put this? – ‘unglued’. Yes, unglued. That is to say, detached from the things I am doing at the very moment that I’m doing them. Have you ever seen an antique table from which a piece becomes suddenly unglued? A piece that until then had seemed to belong to the whole? When you look at it you see that on the surface of the old dry wood there is a kind of dull sheen of old glue. The table was damaged who knows how many centuries ago. Someone, who has likewise been dead for centuries, glued it back together. But one fine day, the glue no longer holds and the broken piece becomes unglued. Now it needs a new application of glue, as good as the former one, but who knows what kind? Well, in everyday life, I am that fragment that seems to stick but, in actuality, is detached.