And so we retired, leaving to the nuns of the convent, according to established custom, the task of keeping vigil over their sister. She was dressed again in the clothes that identified her as belonging to God: the black skirt; the wooden crucifix; the wimple, black wings on her head. The next day, having stayed at Angela’s home so as not to leave the mother on her own, I saw, from the window, Concetta’s procession towards her longed-for mansion. Despite any efforts to the contrary, the funeral was a modest one. The coffin was carried to the cemetery, with just three small wreaths, followed by chanting priests, and then the nuns. Bringing up the rear were the Daughters of Mary, wearing their immaculate bridal veils, beneath which their everyday, brightly coloured felt dresses and their down-at-heel ankle boots could be glimpsed.

Angela was watching the cortège with a fixed look. At a certain point, shaking her fist, she said: ‘She didn’t even spare a last word for her poor mother!’ And she turned her face to one side, with a sob of bitter jealousy, then resumed her careful scrutiny of the wreaths, the procession, the Daughters of Mary bearing long candles in their hands. From behind the glassy veil of her tears a mundane curiosity peered, and her lips formed a childish pout that culminated in a lachrymose outburst: ‘Ah, my beautiful daughter,’ she cried, with desperate vanity, ‘look how they’re taking her! She deserved a send-off worthy of a queen! And she was a queen, that wretched girl!’ And with disdain she withdrew from the window, while the short procession disappeared behind Piazza Garibaldi.

‘Le ambiziose’

First published in the magazine Oggi (6 December 1941), and posthumously published in Racconti dimenticati (Einaudi, 2004).

Giorgio Manganelli

1922–90

Manganelli, who detested Realism and conventional narrative, was a member of the ‘Gruppo 63’, a neo-avant-garde literary movement founded in Palermo in 1963. In opposition to the intellectual mainstream and the post-war vision of writers such as Carlo Cassola, the group, which never wrote a manifesto, insisted on experimental writing with a strong linguistic focus. Born in Milan, Manganelli, a gifted student, joined the Partisan War in 1944. Captured and condemned to die a year later, he was set free by his executioner after being beaten with a rifle. He began his literary career by translating Henry James’ Confidence and also translated the works of T. S. Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe and W. B. Yeats. He worked as an editor for various publishing houses and taught English literature at La Sapienza University, in Rome, but grew bitterly disillusioned with academia. He was a passionate traveller and wrote perceptively about India. A Jungian analysand for many years, he had a tormented relationship with his possessive mother and incorporated mythic archetypes into his work. Notes from his psychoanalysis inspired his first book, a linguistically ornate, brazenly stylized monologue called Hilarotragoedia, published when he was over forty, after his mother’s death. Centuria (published in English as Centuria: One Hundred Ouroboric Novels), which received the Viareggio Prize in 1979, is a volume of one hundred extremely short, anguished, trenchant tales – the same number contained in Boccaccio’s Decameron. They are recondite and relentless, rigorously on the edge. Each segment is to be savoured slowly and, given their intricately wrought nature, not necessarily all at once. Here are a few examples of his refined register, his experimental sensibility, his aspect at once audacious and kempt.