The Dry Heart Read online

  About Natalia Ginzburg and The Dry Heart

  “Ginzburg never raises her voice, never strains for effect, never judges her creations. Like Chekhov, she knows how to stand back and let her characters expose their own lives, their frailties and strengths, their illusions and private griefs. The result is nearly translucent writing — writing so clear, so direct, so seemingly simple that it gives the reader the magical sense of apprehending the world for the first time.”

  — Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

  “Her prose style is deceptively simple and very complex. Its effect on the reader is both calming and thrilling — that’s not so easy to do.”

  — Deborah Levy

  “Her sentences have great precision and clarity, and I learn a lot when I read her.”

  — Zadie Smith

  “I’m always drawn to short novels that pack a punch — Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline (101 pages), Willem Frederick Hermans’s An Untouched House (88 pages), and José Revueltas’s The Hole (79 pages) are all the more powerful for how brief they are. It’s less about finding the time to read Natalia Ginzburg’s The Dry Heart, an 83-page novel about an Italian woman who shoots and kills her husband on page one, than it is preparing yourself for it.”

  — Gabe Habash, Publishers Weekly Best Summer Reads 2019

  “If Ferrante is a friend, Ginzburg is a mentor.”

  — The Guardian

  “Ginzburg gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like. This voice emerges from her preoccupations and themes, whose specificity and universality she considers with a gravitas and authority that seem both familiar and entirely original.”

  — Rachel Cusk

  “Filled with shimmering, risky, darting observation.”

  — Colm Tóibín

  “The raw beauty of Ginzburg’s prose compels our gaze. First we look inward, with the shock of recognition inspired by all great writing, and then, inevitably, out at the shared world she evokes with such uncompromising clarity.”

  —Hilma Wolitzer

  “There is no one quite like Ginzburg for telling it like it is.”

  —Phillip Lopate

  “Ginzburg’s beautiful words have such solidity and simplicity. I read her with joy and amazement.”

  —Tessa Hadley

  “Her simplicity is an achievement, hard-won and remarkable, and the more welcome in a literary world where the cloak of omniscience is all too readily donned.”

  —William Weaver, The New York Times

  The Dry Heart

  By NATALIA GINZBURG

  from New Directions

  The Dry Heart

  Happiness, as Such

  Copyright © 1947, 1974, 2001, 2010 & 2018 by Giulio Einaudi Editore SpA, Torino

  Translation copyright © 1952 by the Hogarth Press Ltd.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, maga­zine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Originally published in Italian as È stato cosi. Published by arrangement with the Estate of Natalia Ginzburg and Giulio Einaudi Editore SpA

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  New Directions Books are printed on acid-free paper

  First published as a New Directions Paperbook (NDP1448) in 2019

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ginzburg, Natalia, author. | Frenaye, Frances, 1908–1996, translator.

  Title: The dry heart / Natalia Ginzburg ; translated by Frances Frenaye.

  Other titles: È stato cosi. English

  Description: New York : New Directions, 2019. | “A New Directions Book.” | English translation originally published by The Hogarth Press Ltd. in 1952.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019004340 | ISBN 9780811228787 (alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Marriage—Fiction. | Parricide—Fiction. | Murder—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PQ4817.I5 E213 2019 | DDC 853/.912—dc23

  eISBN: 9780811228794

  New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin

  by New Directions Publishing Corporation

  80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

  The Dry Heart

  “TELL me the truth,” I said.

  “What truth?” he echoed. He was making a rapid sketch in his notebook and now he showed me what it was: a long, long train with a big cloud of black smoke swirling over it and himself leaning out of a window to wave a handkerchief.

  I shot him between the eyes.

  He had asked me to give him something hot in a thermos bottle to take with him on his trip. I went into the kitchen, made some tea, put milk and sugar in it, screwed the top on tight, and went back into his study. It was then that he showed me the sketch, and I took the revolver out of his desk drawer and shot him between the eyes. But for a long time already I had known that sooner or later I should do something of the sort.

  I put on my raincoat and gloves and went out. I drank a cup of coffee at the counter of a café and walked haphazardly about the city. It was a chilly day and a damp wind was blowing. I sat down on a bench in the park, took off my gloves and looked at my hands. Then I slipped off my wedding ring and put it in my pocket.

  We had been husband and wife for four years. He had threatened often enough to leave me, but then our baby died and we stayed together. Another child, he said, would be my salvation. For this reason we made love frequently toward the end, but nothing came of it.

  I found him packing his bags and asked him where he was going. He said he was going to Rome to settle something with a lawyer and suggested I visit my parents so as not to be alone in the house while he was away. He didn’t know when he’d be back, in two weeks or a month, he couldn’t really say. It occurred to me that he might never come back at all. Meanwhile I packed my bags too. He told me to take some books with me to while away the time and I pulled Vanity Fair and two volumes of Galsworthy out of the bookcase and put them in one of my bags.

  “Tell me the truth, Alberto,” I said.

  “What truth?” he echoed.

  “You are going away together.”

  “Who are going away together? You let your imagination run riot. You eat your heart out thinking up terrible things. That way you’ve no peace of mind and neither has anyone else. . . . Take the bus that gets to Maona at two o’clock,” he said.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  He looked at the sky and remarked: “Better wear your raincoat and galoshes.”

  “I’d rather know the truth, whatever it may be,” I said, and he laughed and misquoted:

  She seeketh Truth, which is so dear

  As knoweth he who life for her refuses.*

  I sat on the bench for I don’t know how long. The park was deserted, the benches were drenched with dew, and the ground was strewn with wet leaves. I began to think about what I should do next. After a while I said to myself, “I should go to the police and try to tell them how it all came about.” But that would be no easy matter. I should have to go back to the day when we first met, at the house of Dr. Gaudenzi. He was playing a piano duet with the doctor’s wife and singing dialect songs. He looked at me hard and made a pencil sketch of me in his notebook. I said it was a good likeness, but he said it wasn’t and tore it up.

  “He can never draw the women that really attract him,” said Dr. Gau
denzi.

  They gave me a cigarette and laughed to see how it made my eyes water. Alberto took me back to my boardinghouse and asked if he could come the next day to bring me a French novel which he had mentioned in the course of the evening.

  The next day he came. We went out for a walk and ended up in a café. His eyes were gay and sparkling and I began to think he was in love with me. I was very happy, because no man had ever fallen in love with me before, and I could have sat with him in the café indefinitely. That evening we went to the theatre and I wore my best dress, a crimson velvet given me by my cousin Francesca.

  Francesca was at the theatre, too, a few rows behind us, and waved to me. The next day, when I went to lunch at the house of my aunt and uncle, she asked me:

  “Who was that old man?”

  “What old man?”

  “The old man at the theatre.”

  I told her he was someone who was interested in me but that I didn’t care for him one way or the other. When he came back to the boardinghouse to see me I looked him over and he didn’t seem so very old to me. Francesca called everyone old. I didn’t really like him, and the only reason I was pleased to have him come and call on me was that he looked at me with such gay and sparkling eyes. Every woman is pleased when a man looks at her like that. I thought he must be very much in love. “Poor fellow!” I thought to myself, and I imagined his asking me to marry him and the words he would say. I would answer no, and he would ask if we could still be friends. He would keep on taking me to the theatre and one evening he would introduce me to a friend, much younger than himself, who would fall in love with me, and this was the man I should marry. We should have a lot of children and Alberto would come to call. Every Christmas he would bring us a big fruitcake and there would be a touch of melancholy in his enjoyment of our happiness.

  Lying dreamily on the bed in my boardinghouse room, I imagined how wonderful it would be to be married and have a house of my own. In my imagination I saw exactly how I should arrange my house, with dozens of stylish gadgets and potted plants, and I visualized myself sitting in an armchair over a basket of embroidery. The face of the man I married was constantly changing, but he had always the same voice, which I could hear repeating over and over again the same ironical and tender phrases. The boardinghouse was gloomy, with dark hangings and upholstery, and in the room next to mine a colonel’s widow knocked on the wall with a hairbrush every time I opened the window or moved a chair. I had to get up early in order to arrive on time at the school where I was a teacher. I dressed in a hurry and ate a roll and an egg which I boiled over a tiny alcohol stove. The colonel’s widow knocked furiously on the wall while I moved about the room looking for my clothes, and in the bathroom the landlady’s hysterical daughter screeched like a peacock while they gave her a warm shower which was supposed to calm her down. I rushed out on to the street and while I waited in the cold and lonely dawn for the tram, I made up all sorts of stories to keep myself warm, so that sometimes I arrived at school with a wild and absent look on my face that must have been positively funny.

  A girl likes to think that a man may be in love with her, and even if she doesn’t love him in return it’s almost as if she did. She is prettier than usual and her eyes shine; she walks at a faster pace and the tone of her voice is softer and sweeter. Before I knew Alberto I used to feel so dull and unattractive that I was sure I should always be alone, but after I got the impression that he was in love with me I began to think that if I could please him then I might please someone else, too, perhaps the man who spoke to me in ironical and tender phrases in my imagination. This man had a constantly changing face, but he always had broad shoulders and red, slightly awkward hands and an utterly charming way of teasing me every evening when he came home and found me sitting over my embroidery.

  When a girl is very much alone and leads a tiresome and monotonous existence, with worn gloves and very little spending money, she may let her imagination run wild and find herself defenceless before all the errors and pitfalls which imagination has devised to deceive her. I was a weak and unarmed victim of imagination as I read Ovid to eighteen girls huddled in a cold classroom or ate my meals in the dingy boardinghouse dining room, peering out through the yellow windowpanes as I waited for Alberto to take me out walking or to a concert. Every Saturday afternoon I took the bus to Maona, returning on Sunday evening.

  My father has been a country doctor at Maona for over twenty years. He is a tall, stout, slightly lame old man who uses a cherrywood cane for walking. In summer he wears a straw hat with a black ribbon around it and in winter a beaver cap and an overcoat with a beaver collar. My mother is a tiny woman with a thick mass of white hair. My father has few calls because he is old and moves about with difficulty. When people are sick they call the doctor from Cavapietra, who has a motorcycle and studied medicine at Naples. My father and mother sit in the kitchen all day long playing chess with the local vet and the tax collector. On Saturdays when I came to Maona I sat down by the kitchen stove and there I sat all day Sunday until it was time to go. I roasted myself there by the stove, stuffed with thick soups and corn meal, and did not so much as open my mouth, while between one game of chess and the next my father told the vet that modern girls have no respect for their parents and do not tell them a word of what they are doing.

  I used to tell Alberto about my father and mother and the life I led at Maona before I came to teach in the city. I told him how my father used to rap me over the fingers with his cane and I used to run and cry in the coal cellar. How I used to hide From Slavegirl to Queen under my mattress to read at night and how, when my father and the tax collector and the maidservant and I used to walk down the road between the fields and vineyards to the cemetery, I had a violent longing to run away.

  Alberto never told me anything about himself, and I fell into the habit of asking him no questions. It had never happened before that anyone should take such an interest in me and attribute so much importance to what I had felt and said in the coal cellar or on the road to the cemetery. When I went for a walk with Alberto or when we sat in a café together I was happy and no longer felt so alone. Alberto told me that he lived with his mother, who was old and ailing. Dr. Gaudenzi’s wife informed me that she was a very rich but batty old woman who spent her time smoking cigarettes in an ivory holder and studying Sanskrit, and that she never saw anyone except a Dominican friar who came every evening to read her the Epistles of Saint Paul. On the pretext that she could not get her shoes on without hurting her feet she had not left the house for years, but sat all day long in an armchair, in the care of a young servant girl who cheated her on food bills and maltreated her into the bargain. At first I didn’t mind Alberto’s unwillingness to talk about himself, but later I was disappointed and asked him a few questions. His face took on an absent and faraway expression and his eyes were veiled with mist like those of a sick bird whenever I inquired about his mother, or his work, or any other part of his life.

  He never said that he was in love with me, but he came regularly to see me, bringing me books and chocolates, and wanting to take me out with him. I thought he might be shy and afraid to speak up, and I waited for him to say that he loved me so that I could tell Francesca. Francesca always had so much to tell and I never had anything. Finally, although he still hadn’t spoken, I told Francesca all the same. That day he had given me some tan kid gloves and I was sure that he must love me after all. I told her that he was too old for me to marry, although I didn’t really know how old he was — forty, perhaps — while I was only twenty-six. Francesca told me to get rid of him, that she didn’t like his looks, and that I should throw the gloves back in his face because the snaps at the wrist were long since out of style and made me look like a country bumpkin. She’d always suspected, she said, that this fellow would bring me trouble. Francesca was only twenty at the time, but I respected her common sense and always listened to what she had to say. But this time I didn’t
listen. I liked the gloves in spite of the snaps at the wrist and went on wearing them, and I liked Alberto, too, and continued to see him. After twenty-six years life had seemed empty and sad because no man had ever paid any attention to me, much less given me gifts. It was all very easy for Francesca to talk that way, when she had everything she wanted and was always travelling and amusing herself.

  Then summer came and I went to Maona. I expected Alberto to write, but he never sent me anything but his signature on a picture postcard of a village on the lakes. I was bored with Maona and the days seemed never to go by. I sat in the kitchen or stretched out on my bed to read. My mother, with her head wrapped in a napkin, peeled tomatoes on the porch and laid them out to dry on a board, for making preserves, while my father sat on the wall of the square in front of our house with the vet and the tax collector, tracing signs in the dust with his cane. The maidservant washed clothes at the fountain in the courtyard and wrung them out with her heavy red arms; flies buzzed over the tomatoes, and my mother wiped her knife on a newspaper and dried her sticky hands. I looked at Alberto’s postcard until I knew the contents of the picture by heart: a ray of sun striking a sailing boat on the lake. Why had he sent me nothing but this? Francesca wrote me two letters from Rome, where she had gone with a friend to study at a school of dramatics. First she said that she was engaged to be married and then that it was all off.

  I often thought that Alberto might come to Maona to see me. My father would be surprised until I explained that he was a friend of Dr. Gaudenzi. I used to go into the kitchen and carry the garbage pail down to the coal cellar because it had such a bad smell, but the maidservant said that it had no smell at all and carried it back to the kitchen. On the one hand I was afraid to see Alberto appear, because I was ashamed of the garbage pail and of the way my mother looked with a napkin wrapped around her head and her hands sticky with tomatoes; on the other, I waited eagerly for his arrival, and every time the bus came I looked out the window to see if he was on it. I breathed hard and shook all over every time I saw a slight figure in a light raincoat get off, but when I realized that it was not Alberto I went back into my room to read and daydream until dinner. Often I tried to dream again of the man with the broad shoulders and ironical manner, but he drifted farther and farther away until his anonymous and changing face lost all significance.