She lived for fifteen days in all. When they removed the blanket that had covered her legs, they found a card with childish handwriting resting on her knees. ‘I want to be locked inside the dark and good body of Bago too. The clothes mustn’t be removed: they are my friends.’ At the bottom of the card was a reminder. ‘Bago is the name of the armoire in my bedroom.’

Rutiliano hated absurdity in all its forms, but since custom demanded respect for the wishes of the deceased, no matter how absurd, Rutiliano ordered that the arrangements be followed as written on the card.

Ismene was placed inside the armoire and the armoire was lowered into the grave: a tomb with double doors that was too big for such a small body. Like a father folding a daughter against his chest.

‘Bago’

First published in the newspaper La Stampa (3 July 1943) and then in the magazine Il risveglio (6–13 February 1946). It was included in the collection Tutta la vita (Bompiani, 1945).

Umberto Saba

1883–1957

The heart of Trieste contains one of the most magnificent piazzas in Italy, with one side that looks out onto the sea. Around the corner is a beautiful secondhand bookshop that Saba purchased in 1919 and worked in for most of his life. Grouped with Eugenio Montale and Giuseppe Ungaretti as one of the three most influential Italian poets of his time, Saba was born with the surname ‘Poli’ (he adopted ‘Saba’, which means ‘Grandfather’ in Hebrew, in his late twenties). His best-known work in verse, Il canzoniere (Songbook), is a vast container of successive collections of poems that he structured as an ongoing autobiography. But he had an equally sophisticated control of prose. Scorciatoie e raccontini (Short-cuts and Very Short Stories) is a dense, aphoristic text of micro-narratives, at once intellectually rigorous and immensely readable. His posthumous autobiographical novel, Ernesto, about an adolescent boy’s sexual awakening with an older male worker and a female prostitute, is a distressing masterpiece. Bisexual, Jewish on his mother’s side, and raised without a father, he wrote moving poems both to his wife and in memory of his young male muse, Federico Almansi. In 1938, when the Racial Laws targeting Jews took effect, he and his wife changed various domiciles, including Ungaretti’s apartment in Rome. Saba’s mental health plagued him; he suffered his first crisis at twenty-one and underwent psychiatric treatment throughout his adulthood. He spent the last two years of his life institutionalized, and died in a clinic outside Trieste, of a heart attack, while writing Ernesto. This story below, about an adolescent boy’s love for an animal, is a powerful account of the loss of innocence. Saba is one of the few authors in this volume who was deeply sceptical of translation.