This Translation Tuesday, we continue to showcase the theme of childhood, this time through a story from 1940’s Italy about the ways that children form their own narratives about their peers. The quiet intensity of Elsa Morante’s “The Classmate” gives us a compelling glimpse of the disruption of such narratives. Be sure to also check out the Spring 2018 Fiction section, which also explores childhood. Robert Walser, Joanna Bator, and Jacques Fux, for example, all consider the formative nature of childhood memory (or lack thereof) on identity.
I was a boy of thirteen, a student in junior high school: among my many classmates, most of whom were neither particularly beautiful nor ugly, there was one who was extremely handsome.
He was too rebellious and lazy to be the first in the class, but everyone knew that even the slightest of effort on his part would have been enough to make him so. None us demonstrated an intellect like his, so limpid and fortunate. I was the first in the class; I had a poetic disposition and, at the thought of my classmate, I had the idea of calling him Arcangelo.
Evoking him again with this name, I can again see his longish, golden hair, the curve of his cheeks that harmonized so graciously with that of his lips, the proud light of his eyes. I can even hear again his laughter full of infantile abandon: like a body of water that has remained limpid through all these years.
Our classmate was so indulged by nature that none of us doubted that he was so treated by fortune. His arrogance was warranted; surely he was the richest of us all. He had neatly combed hair, pretty bowties, and his schoolbooks were covered with nice glossy red cardstock. None of us considered ourselves worthy of being granted entry into his house, which we considered—without having seen it—to be majestic.
Every day a woman came to pick him up who—he himself told us—was his servant. She was tall and reserved, prideful, one might have said, with pale cheeks, the heavy eyelids of someone who doesn’t sleep much at night, and a braid so splendid and thick that it seemed to be made from solid gold, gathered in a bun at the nape of her neck, as was customary among commoners.
The two would exchange a smile, in which today I recognize complicity; and then the woman, with humble solicitude befitting of a servant, would take the schoolbag from the hands of my classmate. And they would go off together, toward that never seen residence we all dreamed up.
Even though I was the first in the class, not him, it filled me with pride when he called me by my first name, Augusto, instead of my last name, as all the other students did.
One day (the classmate had been called to the teacher’s desk to be questioned), some of us immediately noticed that his face was different. In his eyes was a sort of furtive fright. He seemed, I thought with pity, like someone who had left a savage guest at his home who might, in his absence, fly into a rage against the things he loves. At the first question by the teacher, he fixed his eyes upon the desk, dumbfounded, and then burst into strange tears. Strange, because they were not liberating and spontaneous, like the tears of the other children his age; but arduous, bitter, like the tears of adults whose pain is hardened and hopeless. Seeing him cry like that, with his head folded between his arms, and shaken by sobs, we were overcome by the same anguished unease that one feels at seeing a man cry.
The next morning, we learned the cause of all this: our classmate, in fact, did not come to school because his mother, who had been sick for a few days, had died in the night. We also learned that his mother was that very commoner who used to wait for him at the exit; surely he was ashamed of his poverty and for this reason had pretended that she was his servant. That despicable pretense roused our contempt for our classmate; but since he stopped coming to school, the other students could not get revenge. Their vengeance was reserved for me.
The classmate, who had already lost his father, didn’t have any other close relatives, and was taken in out of charity by an uncle shopkeeper who put him to work in the shop as an errand boy. Not many months had passed since he left school when I found him there, having entered into the shop by chance. I had just gotten out of class and I had my books under my arm. He was wearing a suit that was too short and too tight; on his rather spindly shoulders his childlike face was so handsome that I couldn’t help but call him to myself, as before, Arcangelo. Looking at me, he had the strained smirk of a child who has been struck, but in order not to give you any satisfaction, pretends it’s nothing. But seeing me cool and silent on this side of the counter, he may have suspected the disdain that I, along with all the other kids, felt toward him. His pupils lit up with pride, his smile became triumphant and disdainful, and in a low voice he said to me, “Nerd.”
I don’t know who formulated the expression I used in response; who brought it to my lips as a child. Echoing back to me, it seems foreign, though I pronounced it: “Son of a servant,” I said to him. I just had time, after this, to see his fiery blush, and then, immediately, his pallor. He seemed so abandoned, so defenseless in his cowardice, that I suddenly felt again all my boyish love for my classmate. I rushed out of the shop.
Since that day I have not seen him or heard anything about him, but even today, in spite of that disdain, my feelings toward that classmate are such that if I learned that he was in prison (I don’t know why my mind has settled upon this hypothesis as the most probable), I would be ready to take his place so that he could be free.
First published in Oggi in 1940
Translated from the Italian by Rebecca Falkoff
Elsa Morante (1912-1985), author of four novels and numerous short stories, is known for her devastating stories of childhood reverie and disenchantment, and for the quiet intensity of her prose. She was awarded the Strega Prize in 1957 for Arturo’s Island.
Rebecca Falkoff is an Assistant Professor of Italian Studies at New York University. She has published essays on Carlo Emilio Gadda, Giorgio Manganelli, and Elena Ferrante. She is currently completing a book on hoarding and modernity.
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