The Ambitious Ones

Translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell

When I first met the Donato women, a few years ago now, the falling-out between the mother and her eldest daughter was already well advanced. Angela Donato, the widowed mother, had three daughters, and of these, Concetta, the eldest, was by far the most beautiful as well as the one who resembled her most. In those southern Italian villages women mature early; sweet and languorous humours run through their veins, and their bodies bloom with the fleshy elegance of a tuberose, while the primitive ardour in their eyes is concealed with a veil of tenderness. Concetta was still an adolescent, radiant in her litheness; Angela was already in decline, and above her majestic matronly corpulence her face with its clear-cut, determined features was languidly fading. But mother and daughter shared a similar smile, at once flirtatious and fervid; similar too was the shape of their eyes, in which an inclination to affection mingled with what one might venture to call ferocity; also similar was the shape of their lips, which when they weren’t laughing revealed a proud determination. And similar, finally, were their hands: white, plump and soft; so beautiful as to resemble the hands of aristocratic women. Both mother and daughter took loving care of their hands, delegating the roughest tasks to Concetta’s younger sisters. Mother and daughter, evidently, were both vain, especially with regard to these exquisitely beautiful hands of theirs. The mother would habitually kiss her daughter’s hands, I recall, giving a kiss to every dimple, and one to every finger – and in response the daughter would kiss the hands of her mother.

Both mother and daughter had clear, high singing voices, and among their ambitions was the ambition, precisely, to sing: but whereas the mother had dreamt of a career on the stage, her daughter yearned to sing sacred motets, in church, with choirs of nuns and organ accompaniment. Both Concetta and Angela loved festivities and the pomp of an occasion; but whereas Angela fantasized about crowded avenues, carriages, balls, carnivals in the piazzas, Concetta had a predilection for solemn ceremony in cathedrals; the lilies, the candle flames, the stories illuminated in stained glass. Angela liked elegant clothes, earrings and necklaces; Concetta would go into ecstasies over embroidered chasubles, golden tabernacles, splendid stoles. It was here that the source of the difference between mother and daughter was to be found. To which we must add that when Concetta turned fifteen her mother had begun to promise herself a grand marriage for her daughter: one that would bring to the family all the distinction and elegance that she’d always yearned for in vain. Instead Concetta, having talked with her nuns about their heavenly spouse, never wanted to hear about any other kind of husband again.

Even as a young girl, at times, when she’d found herself alone in a room, the sound of the gentle smack of her particularly resonant kisses could be heard in the next room; and if you hovered at the door to spy on what she was up to, you would catch sight of her blowing kisses into thin air and smiling, enraptured. Kisses that were directed, of course, to her intended: that is to say, the Lord. Her mother would shake her by the arm and say: ‘So this is what I have to put up with, you silly, stupid girl!’ – and Concetta, eyes blazing with fury, would free herself from the maternal grasp and run.