To this picture the Martian has been added, who walked past the drivers and Faruk, happily ignoring them, but sticking his chest out a bit. At the Excelsior he stopped and retraced his steps. He did not feel like going to sleep, I understood this well. The boredom of the night, the fear of the bed, the horror of an unfriendly room that repulses you, were now keeping him glued to a display window full of toys, now in front of a flower-shop window. It seems that beautiful flowers like ours do not grow on Mars … he decided finally to cross the street, and, at this point, in the grey silence, someone yelled out ‘Hey, Martian! …’ The Martian turned around immediately, but once again the silence was broken, and this time by a long sound, lacerating, vulgar. The Martian remained still and scanned the darkness. But there was nobody there, or rather, no one to be seen. He resumed his walk; an even louder sound, multiple, roaring, nailed him to the pavement: the night seemed to be ripped open by a concert of devils.

‘Scoundrels!’ yelled the Martian.

An outburst of sounds, prolonged, crackling like an atrocious firework, which later extinguished itself in a flowery vibrato only when the Martian managed to blend in with the small crowd which loitered in front of the Caffé Strega. We were able to deduce that the youngsters were in a big group, hiding behind the news stand in Via Boncompagni.

Later on, returning home, I saw Koont, heading alone towards Villa Borghese with long, soft steps. Above the tips of the pine trees the red dot of Mars was shining, almost solitary in the sky. Koont stopped to look at it. There is, in fact, talk of an imminent departure, if only he will be able to get his spaceship back from the hotel owners who, they say, had it distrained.

‘Un marziano a Roma’

First published in the weekly magazine Il Mondo (2 November 1954) and then included in Diario notturno (Bompiani, 1956).

Beppe Fenoglio

1922–63

Fenoglio created two literary alter egos: ‘Johnny’ and ‘Milton’. Together, the names of these protagonists, Italian characters who are stand-ins for Fenoglio, add up to an Americanized version of John Milton. The seventeenth-century English poet (who also composed in Italian) was a touchstone for Fenoglio, who never graduated from university, served in the Partisan Army, and wrote about the Resistance in an unsparing key. But perhaps Fenoglio’s first act of literary resistance was to not write at all: when required, in school, to write an essay celebrating Mussolini’s March on Rome, he left the page blank. Apart from his years in the military, Fenoglio lived in the Piedmontese city of Alba, in the Langhe, where he was born. This isolated region and its peasant culture provided him with inspiration for his work. ‘The Smell of Death’ is one of twelve stories in his debut collection, I ventitré giorni della città di Alba (The Twenty-three Days of the City of Alba), published in 1952 in Vittorini’s Gettoni series. The collection, widely considered a quintessential work of literature about the Italian Resistance, describes the trauma of the partisan struggle without rhetoric, and with exceptional acuity. It was deemed a political betrayal by the Left, given that it was more truthful than ideological. Fenoglio’s knowledge of English, a language he fell passionately in love with as a teenager, was strong enough to translate Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Gerard Manley Hopkins. He also conceived and drafted his own work directly in English, saying that the last novel published in his lifetime, Primavera di bellezza (Beautiful Spring), was a ‘mere translation’ for the Italian reader. The novels Una questione privata (most recently published as A Private Affair) and Il partigiano Johnny (Johnny the Partisan) perhaps his most powerful, were published after his death from lung cancer at forty. The first draft of Il partigiano Johnny was composed in an anomalous blend of English and Italian dubbed ‘Fenglish’ by Italian literary critics.