My gangster hadn’t told me that he owned this magnificent shop. The only thing I knew about him was that he lived with his elderly mother and two children, and that his wife had left him and was living in Milan with another man. But then I realized he had been a cosmetics salesman for a while, maybe years, because his conversation with the customer was that of a professional; you can’t improvise it. For me the precision of his speech was like a flash of lightning in the night, illuminating the tiniest details of a landscape, even if just for a moment. I realized, in other words, that I had been wrong. I had mistaken him for a predatory falcon. He was instead a sly mole. So in that flash of awareness, I made a quick calculation and realized that he was no better than my husband. He, too, had two children that I would have to take care of. He, too, would expect me to slave away in the house. As for work, it was better to be a bank clerk than a cosmetics saleslady, if for no other reason than that I only had to work at the bank in the morning. There was love, it’s true. But I realized now, after discovering the shop, that I felt just as unglued around him as I did around my husband. So I didn’t wait for the customer to find the right lipstick. I did an about-face and walked out. At the door, however, I glanced back. Now he was looking at me from over his customer’s shoulders, and I shook my head no. He wasn’t stupid, and he must have understood, because he never came looking for me after that. Maybe, who knows, he didn’t trust me as a cosmetics saleslady. After all, there’s no difference between a shop and a bank. He must have feared that I, incorrigible, would repeat the robbery, but this time against him, and maybe in cahoots with a genuine gangster, the kind that holds up a bank to commit a real crime and not to buy a cosmetics shop.

‘L’altra faccia della luna’

Part of the collection Boh (Bompiani, 1976).

Elsa Morante

1912–85

A photo of Elsa Morante from the 1960s shows her seated at Caffè Rosati in Rome’s Piazza del Popolo, with her then husband, Alberto Moravia, and the writer Pier Paolo Pasolini, a close friend. Caught in profile, she seems to be saying something, and looks like she may be scratching a mosquito bite on her arm. Morante, too poor to finish her university degree, remains the literary queen of that city. Her mother was a Jewish school teacher, and her biological father – her mother would marry another man, who raised her – worked in a post office. One of five children, she grew up in the neighbourhood of Testaccio and left home at eighteen to support herself. Her first novel, Menzogna e sortilegio (Lies and Sorcery, which was published in English under the title House of Liars), is a sprawling masterpiece, demonic in its energy. It was typical of her complex, choral novels, including La storia (History), but she made her literary debut with a collection of short stories called Il gioco segreto (The Secret Game) in 1941. Among her most revered works is a novel called L’Isola di Arturo (Arturo’s Island). It won the Strega Prize in 1957. Active in cultural and literary delegations, she visited the Soviet Union, China, India, the United States and Brazil, often in Moravia’s company. But by 1960 she had set up a separate home for herself, while still married, and had befriended Bill Morrow, a young American painter whom she took under her wing. She was laid low following Morrow’s suicide in 1962 (he jumped from a skyscraper). In 1983, Morante herself attempted suicide. She remains a major writer who had tiny penmanship and a grand, tragic vision. She wrote with particular power about parent–child relationships, a theme central to the selection here. Posthumously published, it demonstrates her wit and her dense, virtuosic prose.