Lalla Romano

1906–2001

Romano’s first book of prose shares the title of the Roman poet Ovid’s magnum opus, which celebrates the act of transformation: Le metamorfosi (The Metamorphoses). She began her creative life as a painter before becoming a writer (soon after her Turin home and studio were bombed in the Second World War). Her canvases are moody, murky, full of greys. Towards the end of her life, this intensely visual writer had gone nearly blind. She continued writing, on enormous sheets of paper, sometimes just a word. These tenacious efforts are collected in the Diario ultimo (Last Diary), posthumously published. In it she writes, ‘La mia cecità = un punto di vista’ (‘My blindness = a point of view’), an aphoristic equation as paradoxical as it is profound. All of Romano’s prose is startling for its spareness, its incisiveness. She was contradictory in that she maintained a boundary between her public and private selves – she was not called Lalla but Graziella, her given name, by friends and family – and yet she wrote in a deeply autobiographical, even confessional vein. Nei mari estremi (In Extreme Seas), written after her husband’s death, is a plangent work about the physical loss and decline of a companion, while in Le parole tra noi leggere (The Light Words between Us), for which she won the Strega in 1969, she wrote frankly about her troubled relationship with her son. Though Romano settled in Milan after the war, this story is set in the mountains of Cuneo, her place of origin. Its carefully gauged point of view reveals the attitude of an artist alert to gestures and nuance. Discreetly erotic, it is a celebration, albeit ironic, of the female gaze, and also a study of political and class distinctions. In addition to being a writer and painter, Romano worked as a librarian and translated Flaubert’s Three Tales, an experience, according to Romano, which inspired her to turn to writing prose.

The Lady

Translated by Jhumpa Lahiri

In the hotel dining room, the lady started to observe the gentleman seated at the table across from her, and upon preliminary inspection, surmised that he was interesting.

The essential thing – that is to say, the hands – were perfect. The lady never gave a second thought to men who had rough, neglected hands. The man at the opposite table took excellent care of his hands. They were slender, anxious hands, and the noble curve of the nails was free of impurities. His hair was smooth, grey at the temples, and moulded to his round, rather small head. As the lady factored each new element into her analysis, approval mounted in her heart, and her whole being was poised for happiness.

The gentleman had finished lunch without raising his head, so the lady hadn’t been able to catch his eye. He got up and left the room, not only without glancing at the lady, but without even a nod. For a moment the morsel of food that the lady had just swallowed stuck in her throat, but she hastened to think that maybe she’d been mistaken, and then she abandoned herself to pleasant daydreams, looking out the window at the slope of the mountain where small fields of rye seemed to be fleeing below steady gusts of wind.