Thus I could see paintings, portraits, a few sticks of queer furniture, a few old magazines and an infinity of tasteful objects: the whole of it looking like someone who suddenly, of her own free will, without dying, has stopped. Last, because it was partly hidden in the shadow of a curtain, I saw the embalmed figure of a little Scottie dog. This, too, I remember as partaking of myth, but also of the present – somewhat more than a memory, almost a pale memory.

Then she came back, apologized and began to talk again. From time to time I picked up noises from the road, and I kept my eyes fixed on her; strange as it may sound, she seemed nearly happy.

This is a true story.

‘Elegia alla signora Nodier’

Published under the pseudonym Sandro Nardi in the journal Cronache (18 January 1947), and later included in Casa d’altri e altri racconti (Einaudi, 1980).

Fausta Cialente

1898–1994

Cialente is a writer who is hard to track down. Practically out of print in Italy, her work seldom appears in anthologies. And yet she won the Strega Prize, at the age of seventy-eight, for a novel called Le quattro ragazze Wiesleberger (The Four Wiesleberger Girls). Both celebrated and ignored by critics, Cialente herself declared that she was ‘everywhere a foreigner’. But this condition, combined with her nomadic, cosmopolitan perspective, fuelled her artistry. She was born in Cagliari, but, given that during her childhood her family moved around Italy, is not regarded a Sardinian writer. After marrying Enrico Terni, a Jewish composer, she moved to Alexandria, in Egypt, where she lived until 1947, and started writing. Her first novel, Natalia, published in 1930, was banned by Fascist censors because it portrayed a lesbian relationship. An outspoken anti-Fascist, Cialente wrote no fiction after the war, turning to journalism. In describing her stories, set both in Egypt and in Italy, she noted that her characters were almost always either ordinary people or children. The premise of ‘Malpasso’, set in an obscure mountain town, is about a stranger who interacts with an established community. An evocative portrait of place, it is at heart a story about storytelling itself and, ever pertinently for our times, about the truth as stated from a woman’s point of view as opposed to a man’s. Cialente’s stories were gathered together and published only after she became a finalist for the Strega Prize in 1961. A translator of Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, she remained rootless throughout her life, and died in a small English village at the age of ninety-five.

Malpasso

Translated by Jenny McPhee

Malpasso is the name of the road that winds up the side of the mountain. It’s carved into the same rock to which the houses cling and cast their reflections in the river far below. Built, it seems, one on top of the other, the houses resemble a tower, and beneath them is a low portico that shields the Malpasso from the rain and sun in both winter and summer. Gusts of blazing heat burst off the rock in summer, and in winter, the snow and the north wind dance upon it in a whistling swirl.