Alba de Céspedes (1911 – 1997) was a Cuban-Italian best-selling novelist and political activist. This story is from her collection Invito a Pranzo (Invitation to Dinner), first published in 1955. The story is translated from the Italian by Jennifer Panek.
I didn’t recognize her when I opened the door: she was thinner; her hair was grey. And then I exclaimed “Serafina!” I invited her in and hugged her; she stood stock still. I would have regretted my impulsiveness if I hadn’t remembered what she was like: capable of the most faithful devotion, but closed-off, inscrutable even when she was moved by something—and, indeed, her lips were trembling. Her hair was done the same as it ever was, up in a tight bun; she was dressed all in black—even her stockings were black—and she still had the country habit of clutching a folded handkerchief in one hand.
She noticed me looking at her dress. “I’m a widow,” she said.
“Oh. . .” I murmured, adding some words of condolence; at the same time, I was wondering where we should go. The living room seemed wrong—she might not even want to sit down. The kitchen, on the other hand, would mean that I saw her as no more than the housekeeper who’d worked in my home for all those years. I settled on the bedroom. “Come and talk to me while I finish doing my make-up,” I said. She’d caught me with no powder or lipstick on, a look that didn’t suit me, and I was afraid of reading in her eyes how much I’d aged. It had been about fifteen years since I’d seen Serafina: after she’d married, she’d gone to live out in Capannelle, as her husband had been a jockey and worked with someone who bred horses. Occasionally, she’d come and visit me, but it always happened to be at an inconvenient time, and so she’d wait at length in the kitchen, perched on the edge of a chair, her hands resting on her purse. The housekeepers who came after her always heard me go on about how Serafina was ideal, Serafina was perfect; they hated her before they even met her, and disliked her glancing about the apartment, which seemed, beneath her gaze, untidy and not especially clean. I’d ask her a few questions, and then—even though she knew everything about me, she’d looked after me, she’d seen me in tears, she’d helped me get dressed so I could rush off to a party or on a date—I wouldn’t be able to think of anything else to say to her. She’d ask me about some relatives of mine and I’d say they were fine. Feeling uncomfortable, I’d soon come up with an excuse for having to leave; she’d stay until it got dark, as she dedicated her whole afternoon to these visits. When I’d say goodbye, I’d always say, “You’ll come back, won’t you?” and press her cold, perspiring hands. And then my mother died, I went to stay with my brother in Switzerland, the war broke out, and I lived abroad for many years, hearing nothing further about Serafina. When I came back, many things had changed, both inside me and around me: I was working, and I lived in a modest apartment with no housekeeper. She said she’d asked my relatives where to find me.
The phone rang and she discreetly walked away. Hearing her footsteps in the empty apartment gave me a sense of wellbeing. When I went to find her, she wasn’t sitting in the kitchen waiting for me, the way she used to: she’d put her purse down and started folding up some linens that were piled on the ironing board. She’d even put a dress away in the wardrobe. I sat down and watched her with affection, feeling her take me back to the days when I was a well-off, sheltered young girl, still full of illusions. I remembered her getting out the dishes with the gold borders for Christmas dinner.
“Serafina,” I said, “why don’t you come back and stay with me?”
She shook her head without looking at me. “I’m old,” she replied.
“There’s not much to do,” I assured her. “We’d help each other.”
“It’s not that,” she said. “I’m used to hard work.”
“Well, of course,” I added, “if you’ve got something better . . .”
She shook her head again. “What do you even know about me anymore? I could have done who knows what in all these years . . . and besides, I’m out of practice as a cook.”
I laughed and pointed out that there were no more big Christmas dinners. “So you’ll come?” I urged her.
She said nothing, and I recalled that that was her way of saying yes. I was afraid she might have second thoughts: “Why not just stay on right now?” Silently, she kept folding the linens.
And so began a busy, cheerful time, full of lively hopes that expressed themselves in an obsession with putting the apartment in order. We washed the curtains; we tied up the folded sheets with ribbons, pink and pale blue; I lost track of how many products I bought for polishing the silver. If Serafina hadn’t stopped me, saying that they did nothing but waste electricity, I’d have gone so far as to buy a vacuum cleaner on monthly installments. It was April, and the evenings were soft and lingering, laden with perfume and promise. But little by little, that perfect, orderly apartment brought on a new kind of melancholy. Serafina, by contrast, was growing more talkative, asking me about certain men who used to be in love with me, who used to court me assiduously; I didn’t even know where they were any more. Her presence, I felt, made a cruel comparison between how much I’d once had and how alone I was now. More than a return to the past, it was a measure of how much time had gone by, and I felt old at thirty-nine. I would shut myself in my bedroom; sometimes I’d cry. And then I’d bathe my eyes so that Serafina wouldn’t notice. I was ashamed of my weakness in front of her, a woman who embodied all the effort and pain of a hard life lived with silent dignity. I was afraid of her strength becoming an example for me to live up to whether I wanted to or not, without even the comfort of asking her sympathy. She never asked for any. If I made mention of her widowhood, she’d turn red, and I could see she didn’t want to talk about it. She’d never wanted to show emotion; even when she’d left us to get married, it was as if she were play-acting. “That little short guy, that runt,” she used to say when she talked about her fiancé; and she’d laugh, shaking her head, as if it were madness to be in love. She’d never wanted to admit she was succumbing to passion. And besides, her one and only passion had been her bankbook.
Sure enough, it was the only thing from her past that she brought up. We were sitting across from each other one evening; I’d bought some cotton percale for a bedspread and we were basting the edges, one of us on each side. “Do you remember the bankbook, signorina?” she asked suddenly.
“How could I not?” I said with a smile. “Of course I remember it.”
“When I got married,” she said, “I was up to more than fifteen thousand lire.”
My mother used to say that Serafina loved money—that, like all misers, she loved it physically, carnally. I would say no, it was something different, and sometimes we’d warm to the subject so much that we’d wind up in an argument. Serafina never went anywhere and never bought anything; she wore our cast-offs and thought of nothing but saving money. Sometimes I’d go into her room and she’d be reading that little grey bankbook as if it were a novel, slowly turning the pages. It contained her entire life: every deposit reminded her of a month, a day, a season, the midsummer heat of Ferragosto, the Easter sky, the Christmas tree. For her birthday, too, she liked cash gifts the best. She’d lock her wardrobe with a key, saying apologetically, “The bankbook’s in there.” She wrote down its number everywhere, afraid the book might get lost or stolen, and if we sent her to run an errand, she’d give it to my mother for safekeeping, observing that you never knew when a place might catch on fire. I insisted that she wasn’t a miser because when I asked her what she planned to spend her money on, she’d always say “a trip” or “a holiday in Venice.” One day she announced that she now had enough to buy a car; and I laughed, imagining her behind the wheel, or on a deck of a cruise ship. If ever I bought a hat or an evening gown, she’d immediately say that she could afford one too; she even said the same when we bought an encyclopedia. When she got engaged, my mother asked her if she’d be putting the money towards sheets, or a sewing machine, or some furniture. She’d flushed red. “What does all that have to do with my bankbook? It’s mine!” Her mother was supposed to send her sheets, she said, and her husband was responsible for the furniture. She even added that once she was married, she’d go out to sew or do laundry for wages if she needed to, but she wasn’t going to touch her bankbook.
Fifteen thousand lire: barely more than the salary I was paying her, I thought, and I shuddered to think what a catastrophe inflation must have been for her.
“You made so many sacrifices, you poor thing,” I murmured, “and now . . .”
“No,” she said. “It was back during the war. Things that happen when you’re young, when men make you lose your head—what sort of curse that is, I don’t know. We’d already done the paperwork and Vezio still had his doubts that I loved him. ‘You’re marrying me so you can get out of being in service,’ he used to say. He said it because I didn’t want to do certain things before marriage, since I was religious. He’d get all mean and say, ‘You’re making excuses—the truth is, you don’t trust me.’ And so he decided he wouldn’t marry me after all, and for an entire week he wasn’t there by the main doors when I’d go down to get the milk. At first I soldiered on, but then something came over me, like a sickness. Who can make sense of such things anymore, of that kind of madness? The fact is that I went to see him out in Capannelle where he was working, and I said, ‘To show you I trust you, I’ll make my bankbook over to you.’ We went to the bank, and while I was signing my name, that fancy hall with all its marble and stained glass felt like a church on the day of a funeral. And then we walked out and the sidewalk was full of people but I couldn’t see a thing. Even though my conscience was at peace, I felt as if I’d gone and done those things he’d wanted me to do, and that Vezio had taken my whole self and was carrying it away. We got married. He wasn’t a good husband; he was never home, even in the evenings, but he didn’t touch the bankbook. He kept it in the dresser and he used to say, ‘See, you should have trusted me,’ and I’d look at it every morning and think that he was right. Two years in, I went to look one morning, and the bankbook wasn’t there anymore. It wasn’t possible, I thought. I thought he was playing a joke. I went through everything, I emptied the wardrobe; I looked inside the mattress, under the dresser. I didn’t know where to find Vezio; his work took him from one place to another. The more hours that went by, the more I convinced myself that that was all it was: he wanted to make fun of me. But when he came home, I was afraid I might cut myself while I was slicing the bread—that’s how bad my hands were shaking. ‘Don’t play any more jokes like that,’ I said. ‘I just about had a stroke. Go get the bankbook.’ First he laughed, and then he got mad. He said being married meant that what’s yours is mine, and he’d gambled it on the horse races. Gambled it, I thought, and I felt all those horses just coming straight at me. Nothing made sense anymore.”
She’d kept her head down as she spoke, still sewing. A dark stain was widening, little by little, on the percale in front of her. I wanted to tell her that all of us women had in some way, at some point, handed over the thing that was most important to us, like her bankbook; and that all of us, when we knew it to be gone, had felt ourselves trampled by those horses. But I didn’t dare talk about these things to Serafina: I was intimidated by her strength. She had resigned herself; I had wept and thought about getting revenge. I suspected her husband might not be dead—that she’d abandoned him. But I looked at her black dress, and said that the dead ought to be forgiven.
“Not forgiven,” she said, looking up for the first time: her gaze was proud, determined, pitiless. “Never forgiven.” Then she bent her head again and said softly, “I served thirteen years. They took two off for good behavior.”
About the Author
Alba de Céspedes was born in Rome in 1911, the daughter of the Cuban ambassador to Italy. Imprisoned twice by the fascist regime for her political activism, she began her career as a journalist and went on to be a best-selling author of numerous novels, short stories, and screenplays. Despite her status as an important twentieth-century Italian feminist literary figure, alongside such writers as Natalia Ginzburg and Elsa Morante, de Céspedes’s work is only now being rediscovered by English-speaking readers, thanks in part to the 2023 publication of Ann Goldstein’s translation of her brilliant 1952 novel, Forbidden Notebook (Quaderno Proibito).
About the Translator
Jennifer Panek is a professor of early modern drama in the English department at the University of Ottawa, and translates from Italian for the sheer joy of it. Her translation of Danilo Balestra’s novel Tirati a Sorte (The Luck of the Draw) was published by Atene Edizioni in 2019. More recently, her translations have appeared in American Chordata, MAYDAY Magazine, and Copper Nickel.
