This Translation Tuesday, we are excited to present the English debut of Carmen Verde, a finalist for the Premio Strega in 2023 for her very first novel, A Minimal Unhappiness, which we excerpt here in Katie Shireen Assef’s impeccable translation. Verde’s narrator is a habitué of sadness and madness, an accustomed yet discerning sufferer. If unhappiness is a room, as she claims with some authority, then hers is lush-black, Gothically plangent, and filled with lugubrious relatives.
God is the Highest. God is the Most High.
Isn’t that terrifying?
***
In photographs we’re always sitting close together, my mother and I: she, pale, uneasy, with a look that seems to apologize for itself.
In those days, she still prayed to God that my bones would lengthen. God had nothing to do with it, though. If it took stubbornness for a girl not to grow, I had more than enough.
I never thought I was ugly. And I never doubted that I resembled my mother, even if I didn’t have her thin ankles, her elegant proportions. Ours was an elusive, an indecipherable resemblance: the sort of resemblance that pierces the heart of those who manage to recognize it.
***
In my five years of primary school, she came to pick me up every afternoon. The window of my classroom looked out onto the street, so that between my desk and the bench where she sat waiting, there couldn’t have been more than a hundred fifty feet as the crow flies. I was happy when I saw her on the other side of the glass, even if I was soon overcome by the fear—the terrible certainty, even—that she would decide to go and leave me there, alone. I never believed I had a right to my mother’s presence.
In winter, on windy days, the dust from the street would cling to her silk stockings, to her camel-colored coat, to her hair that was so straight and smooth it seemed like velvet. On the first warm days in June, she would stand beneath the shade of the linden tree at the center of the piazza. If she stayed, I told myself, it meant she loved me. I couldn’t see her from where I sat at my desk (the shutters were closed to block out the sun), and so the fear would slowly build up inside me until, five minutes before the lesson ended, I had lost all hope of finding her. And yet there she would be, still in the same spot. Yes, Sofia Vivier was a good mother.
The route we took walking home was always different. It might happen that to cover the same distance would take ten minutes one day and the next, over an hour. At every street corner I let myself be duped by the confidence with which she invariably led us in the wrong direction. Sometimes we walked to the edge of the city, only to stop and turn around again; others, without any logic whatsoever, we’d find ourselves wandering down country lanes, between fields of tobacco and tomato plants that gave off a strong smell of manure. I trailed behind her, my short legs racing to keep up. She would often stop and look all around us, anxious. When a car appeared at the end of the street, she’d walk faster as if trying to catch up with it. At the time, I didn’t know why she did this. I only recognized the disappointment on her face when we finally found the way back to our house.
Papà didn’t come home for lunch on weekdays, and so we could take our time walking. We always went in through the back entrance, an old wooden door that Mamma struggled with for long minutes.
“Why don’t we go in through the gate?” I asked her once.
“No, no, I’ve got it,” she answered, jamming the key into the large keyhole until the door opened with a complaint of rusty hinges.
“You see, Annetta? It’s just a matter of patience.” And I would suddenly blush, as if she had confided something indecent to me.
The table was already set; what little food there was, now cold, already on the plates. Mamma prepared everything before going out—an odd decision, given how long it took for us to arrive home, but she was doing her best to be a good mother. It was a role she played with determination, but without ever really feeling equal to it. (In those days, she was still the one who kept the house in order, too.)
Of those secret lunches that seemed to take place outside of time, I remember every detail. The bright walls of the room, the embroidered flaps of the tablecloth, the extravagant table setting, always the same: the porcelain plates, the crystal glasses, the nickel cutlery, the silver tray, the white doily with two very thin slices of bread placed upon it.
We would sit across from each other, at opposite ends of the long cherry wood table—me, on three cushions in order to reach my plate more easily. There was cognac in her glass (always a faint lipstick stain on its rim), and in mine, soda pop. Sometimes, I would see her quickly wipe what must have been a tear from her cheek, averting her gaze. Other times, her eyes grew moist without her noticing; then the warm tears fell onto her plate and she unknowingly swallowed them along with an olive or a canapé.
When we’d finished eating she would quickly clear the table, for fear that Papà would come home early and discover this, our innocent theatre.
For years, my mother was a smuggler in her own house. She insisted on buying useless, expensive things—Daum crystal, Torre del Greco corals, Meissen porcelain—which, once home, she would hurry to hide in the big chest in the study.
When, some time later, she decided to bring a few of them into the light, she’d show them to Papà: “See how lovely it is. Do you like it? I bought it for a song…”
He’d just nod, turning and weighing the “song” in his hands to evaluate the actual size of the expense.
“Almost nothing, Antonio, honestly,” she’d repeat, clenching her fists nervously as if struggling to hold on to the thin vein of pride she still had left.
The way I saw her, in the following days, polishing her trinkets and moving them from one piece of furniture to another, I sensed that they no longer brought her any pleasure. It was as though the darkness of the chest had cloaked them in a veil of melancholy, dulling their colors. She continued to take care of them, yes, but the way a nurse would look after a sick patient. She had loved these objects for the same reason she loved alcohol. They put her in a daze; they numbed her. But when the effect wore off, she would stand there and wring her hands in despair.
Unhappiness is not only a state of the spirit. If this were the case, if it were an exclusively interior matter, enclosed in the secret depths of our being, no one would be able to see it.
No. Unhappiness is a place, a real, physical place, a dark room that we decide to stay in. And even when we do turn on a light, we quickly cover it with a cloth so that no one can peer inside.
It was nonna Adelina who taught my mother unhappiness. It couldn’t have been too difficult: Sofia was a willing pupil. As a girl she had already prepared her own beautiful room, carefully selecting the furniture, the curtains, the rugs. When she married my father, she brought it with her like a dowry.
All the walls in that house were painted white, and so that room was, too; inside it, though, the whitewash gave off a sense of coldness. On the little table beside the window, a porcelain jewelry box full of coins, a notebook with a black cover and pages lined in red, a photograph of me and Mamma together (already, it occurs to me now, Papà wasn’t there). On the small shelf to the right of the velvet upholstered armchair, two rows of books.
The few times when Mamma absentmindedly left the door ajar, I tricked myself into thinking I could just walk in. But no sooner had I dared to approach than she would immediately close it again.
I was an obedient child, but once, only once, I don’t even remember why, I opened the door and stepped right inside. I found her sitting in the armchair, her blank eyes staring at nothing, shrouded in a shadow that dissolved into a weak patch of light on the rug, around her slippers. Her lips trembled slightly when she saw me, her hands groping for the throw blanket on her lap, and not finding it.
“Forgive me,” she murmured, kissing my hair.
Forgive her… And for what?
In this photo my mother looks up, as if she’d just seen a bird flying into the room. And everything—the old armchair, our clothes, the flaps of the tablecloth—is still in its proper place.
***
Papà’s family’s fabric store had been thriving for over a century, and yet the Baldinis never managed to accustom themselves to affluence. An inexplicable inferiority complex prevented them from enjoying their money, almost as if they felt they didn’t deserve it.
My mother’s side of the family was decidedly more interesting. I resembled my grandmother Adelina—everyone said so. I thought that was why, as she grew older, she seemed to shrink down to my size, her bones contracting. We would spend hours together, dancing to the music of a few old records chosen at random, and I was always the one who got tired first. When I collapsed on the sofa, she would pull off my shoes and massage my calves with increasingly quick, frenetic strokes.
“That’s enough,” I would beg her. But she’d pretend not to hear me and keep rubbing her palms hard against my skin.
At times she was overtaken by a violent, irrepressible agitation. She would shriek, cursing God and all the saints (one night, the neighbors had even called the police), and I felt then that my misery was quietly attuning itself to hers.
There are things within us that could manifest, but don’t—or else only in rare moments.
***
Nonna Adelina never talked about herself or the village in the South where she was from, and almost never about her parents. I knew only that her father had owned a number of oil mills (and this, I’d learned through the story of how someone had stolen a few jars of oil one night, jars that, each time she told it, grew in number: in the end there were hundreds, so many jars that the whole country wouldn’t be able to contain them).
Neither did she speak of her husband, Giulio Vivier, of whom she’d kept only a single photograph, placed at an angle on her nightstand so he couldn’t watch her while she slept. What had he whispered to convince her to run away with him, in that summer of her seventeenth year? Where is it now, that photograph in which my grandfather has the same sad eyes as his daughter?
Before being admitted to the asylum of **, and then to **, Adelina Gentile had squandered two fortunes: her father’s enormous one, and then the more modest one belonging to her husband, a high school teacher. I discovered this many years later, rummaging through cabinets and drawers, those small coffins in which parts of us remain ensconced long after we’re gone.
Adelina was mad. And so I, too had some madness in my blood, without having done anything to deserve it.
My father had always referred to his mother-in-law as the crazy old woman, so I must have already known something about my grandmother’s madness (if it’s even plausible to speak of knowing, here). For the girl I was, though, these words didn’t hold much weight, and the hint of contempt I detected in his voice made me think he was saying them out of spite—just one more way to avenge himself against his mother-in-law’s superiority.
Next to her, Antonio Baldini seemed a miserable man. The body always reveals the outcome of an existence. His hands, for instance, were stubby and pale, made to count money. Adelina’s, meanwhile, were crossed with swollen veins the color of dusk, where her blood ran in rivulets, and her cherry red nails were always bitten to the quick. (She painted them every day. “I have the right to,” she would say. “It’s my business.”)
Adelina’s madness dominated our family. It was in my mother’s infidelity; it was in my father’s gloominess; and it was in my puny, stunted body that even I had begun to look at with disgust.
***
Papà never appeared in our photographs. And yet he was there, always, behind the lens: it was he who decided which of our banal moments to consign to the future. We posed, Sofia Vivier and I, obeying his implacable eye.
***
Antonio Baldini was well aware of his wife’s fragility, of her insecurity.
As a girl, Sofia would buy cuts of silk fabric from his shop, always returning with her purchase the following day, unsatisfied. From the moment he handed her the package tied with a red ribbon, he knew that she’d have second thoughts and that she’d be back. Curious how, without knowing her at all, he already knew her so well.
Mamma and Papà rarely spoke of this period in their lives, and when they did it was only vaguely, with a certain modesty.
“We were engaged in the gardens,” my mother let slip once.
“What does it mean, engaged, Mamma?” I asked her.
“You’re too small to know about these things, Annetta.”
Blessed were the days when I still had permission to be small. I understood little of the world back then, but I knew that in the gardens there was a terrible, humid smell of rot, no matter the season. Why get engaged there, I wondered, once I’d learned what the word meant. But I never had the courage to call into question the happiness of their union. I kept all my doubts to myself, buried so deeply that I finally forgot about them.
***
Who is small? No one can say, exactly, apart from the doctors with their official charts. But others sense instinctively that something is missing from you, that you are not whole, and they start to spread the word.
At school, we were seated at our desks in strict order of height: the shortest in front and the tallest in back,as in a landscape with hills layered in the foreground, each one a little higher than the last, and mountains looming in the distance. It was an order established by the nuns, and blessed by God from one century to the next. It wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to violate it. For the rest of our lives, each of us would remain the obedient pupil, seated in the spot predestined for her.
Mine was obviously one of the desks in the first row, the flat plain that stretched out in front. Elisabetta Scuderi and Carlotta Masi—tall, superb—sat atop the inaccessible peak at the very back of the room, so far from the rest of us that they seemed like foreigners. I looked up to them the way you look at statues on their pedestals. They, however, never deigned to give me a glance; they wanted nothing to do with me, I was below them. For years, they tormented me with every sort of viciousness. I pretended not to be bothered by it, not to pay any mind to the faces they made, to their snickering. And so even while I suffered from the most recent blow, I would begin pleading again for their attention, inviting another, crueler joke, like a toddler who, cheek still burning from her mother’s slap, cries even more desperately to be held. The other girls in our class avoided me, too. But when once, on Epiphany, my mother decided to invite them over to play, I watched from my bedroom window as they gathered in front of our house with merciless punctuality. It wasn’t just the usual group; there were more of them now, drawn to our doorstep by boastful talk. (“Tomorrow that dum-dum will give away all her presents—do you want to come, too?”)
I sensed their nervousness the moment they set foot inside (first Elisabetta and Carlotta, then all the others). They were entering my territory: here, I was in charge. Just before leaving, each of them pointed to a package and asked me, almost shyly: “Can I have it?”
And so, with feigned generosity, I let them take away the presents that Mamma had chosen and wrapped for me. I handed the nicest ones to Elisabetta and Carlotta, who stuffed them in their backpacks without even a nod of thanks. Elisabetta was the quickest; she held her hands out greedily and withdrew them in an instant, as if the very thought of touching my skin made her recoil.
“You should keep your toys for yourself, Annetta,” Mamma softly scolded me, looking down at the floor of the now-empty chest.
“Why?” I asked. And the question stayed there, hanging above us in the room.
I felt that she secretly approved of me. She shook her head, yes, but with an air of satisfaction, as if this behavior of mine were in perfect accord with her spirit.
***
The first time I didn’t find her at the end of the school day, I thought she was late. I waited for over an hour, until I was certain she wouldn’t come. Only when it started to rain and I decided to walk home by myself did it occur to me that something might have happened to her. She’s dead, I repeated to myself, and I felt the fear growing inside me.
I took the wrong way twice, at the same corners where she always got us lost. When the rain finally stopped, I heard a clock strike three. From behind the fogged-up lenses of my glasses, I made out the figure of Sister Agnese leaving the school with a garbage bag. I was back where I’d started. Come on, Annetta, let’s go home, I told myself. I readjusted my backpack on my shoulders and set out again, and this time, I had no trouble finding my way.
She wasn’t dead. From the road in front of our building, I could see her in the pane of the bedroom window. The sun—a cold light, just emerging from behind the clouds—illuminated her back.
There was a man with her. In spite of the distance, I could see him clearly: tall, blond, close-cropped hair. His shoulders immersed her in a shadow that she sank into as if she wanted nothing else. I stood there watching for a moment that seemed interminable. In the rhythmic rocking of their embrace, Sofia’s back moved from shadow into light, from light into shadow, until the shadow won out and, after a long pause, their bodies drew apart.
When the church bell rang five, the sky had grown heavy with rain again.
He reached out to embrace her; my mother pulled away. I couldn’t see the look on her face, half-hidden by the plane trees’ yellow leaves that quivered in front of the windowpane, but she must have sensed my gaze because she lowered hers to the street. I hoped she hadn’t seen me.
I turned and ran.
I was just around the corner from the back door, the forbidden entrance to which only my mother had the key, when I heard the lock click into place—and on the first try, a sign that the man must have known her secrets.
I watched him turn and walk briskly away, looking back over his shoulder every so often with a nervous air that made him seem ridiculous. As the grey sky darkened and a thin, freezing rain began to fall, his skittish figure grew small in the distance, moving rapidly down the street.
Mamma hadn’t seen me; she wasn’t waiting for me. When I came inside, she greeted me distractedly, without asking where I’d been.
It seemed to me she had been crying.
“We need to buy you some new shoes,” was all she said, her eyes fixed on my mud-stained boots.
I noticed the half-empty bottle of cognac on the low table. She offered me a sip, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I shook my head no, though I was curious to try it.
“How serious you are, Annetta… Children shouldn’t be so serious,” she said.
My cheeks started to burn.
She was right; I took everything too seriously.
“When I was your age, my Nonna always let me drink a little from her glass, you know? Here, just a sip.”
“If you say so, Mamma.”
And so, at ten years old, I drank my first cognac. I found it disgusting, but for a moment it was as if I could feel my mother’s soul slipping into my body.
“Tomorrow I’ll come to get you from school, promise.”
We were together now, in the same windowpane where I’d been spying on her only moments before. I hugged her. Her shoulders—and her long hair, worn loose like a girl’s—immersed me in shadow.
Translated from the Italian by Katie Shireen Assef
This is a translated extract from “Una minima infelicità” by Carmen Verde © 2022 Neri Pozza Editore, Vicenza. This edition was published in agreement with the Proprietor through MalaTesta Literary Agency, Milan.
Carmen Verde was born in 1968 and lives in Rome. Una minima infelicità, her first novel, was a finalist for the Premio Strega in 2023.
Katie Shireen Assef is a writer and translator of French and Italian based in Marseille. Her translation of Valérie Mréjen’s novel Black Forest was a Publishers Weekly Book of the Year in 2019. Short translations and writing have appeared in publications such as Two Lines Journal, Berlin Quarterly, Los Angeles Review of Books, Fence, The Dial, and elsewhere.