The Smell of Death

Translated by John Shepley

If you rub the fingers of one hand on the back of the other long and hard, and then smell your skin, what you smell is the smell of death.

Carlo had learned this as a child, maybe from his mother’s conversations with other women in the courtyard, or more likely in those gatherings of children on summer nights, in that interval that falls between the last game and the first job, where from slightly older companions one learns so many things about life in general and about the relations between men and women in particular.

He smelled a definite odour one evening in another summer, when he was already a man, and that it was precisely the smell of death was demonstrated by the facts.

That evening Carlo was waiting at the end of the street where the San Lazzaro Hospital stands and opposite the grade crossing just outside the railroad station. The last train for T. left, puffing its black smoke into the evening sky and giving off a fine odour of coal and steel under friction; from its windows came a yellow light, as soft and soothing as the light from the windows of one’s home. Eight-fifteen, he said to himself, as he excitedly watched the dispatcher turning the crank to raise the barrier.

Inside the house against whose corner he was leaning, a woman, who from her voice seemed to be his mother’s age, started singing a song of her youth:

Mamma mia, dammi cento lire,

Che in America voglio andare …

Mamma mia, gimme a hundred lire,

’Cause I wanna go to America …

It would be nice to be in America, he thought – especially in Hollywood. But not tonight, tonight I want to make love in my own country. And he stuck his fists in the pockets of his trousers.

Carlo was waiting for his eighteen-year-old girlfriend, to take her out towards the fields, and there is no need to dwell on his desire, nor on the way time went by on the illuminated face of the station clock. And still she didn’t come. But it should be said that her body represented Carlo’s only riches at this harsh moment in his life, and if she didn’t show up this evening he would have to live another whole week of tension and constraint to have her again.

Thus, even when her usual hour had passed, he was reluctant to discard all hope and go away, and remained standing there superstitiously, almost as though she could not fail to come if he held out long enough. But now it was eight-forty, and looking around he saw the old people sitting on benches in the public park, half obscured by the darkness, but those who were smoking were all pointing the red tips of their cigars at him. And that woman who had been singing before – she was surely the one who had been singing before – was now out on her balcony and for some time had been gazing down at the top of his head.