Lorenza Ronzano
TRANS. BY anne greeott
stupid girl
Between my mother and my maternal grandmother, there is an obvious lack of connection. They’re like a river and its tributary at the point of greatest resistance where the currents cross, and each one holds stubbornly to its own intention and spins off whirlpools and side currents in every direction. My grandmother has always favored her niece Franca—the daughter of her older brother—and due to a lack of tact and sensitivity, she has never succeeded in hiding this favoritism, at least not in the presence of my mother. For example, my grandmother often recklessly calls my mother “Franca” by mistake.
My mother has naturally always hated her cousin Franca, not just out of jealousy but also out of an ineradicable incompatibility of temperament. It’s as if Franca and my grandmother came from the same cloth, but my mother fits more with the tribe of my grandfather—her father—who she resembles through and through, from her olive complexion to her droopy eyes, from her full lips to her dignified nose that turns up at any hint of silliness.
My mother is a little girl who decided never to grow up in the hopes of one day finally earning all the love and approval of her own dear mamma. The child in my mother has never come to terms with the passage of time, and because of this unfulfilled wish, ever renewed and ever disappointed, all her impulses have matured into hatred, resentment, and envy. That’s why I’m not a fan of high hopes. My mother is seventy years old, but she hasn’t let go of her wish; even today she fidgets and squirms in front of my grandmother, waiting for her judgment, hoping to please her. When she goes shopping, my mother takes out one of her tiny, crumpled purses and pulls out little coins one by one in the hopes of being able to scrape together in single coins the entire cost of the purchase. Only when the cashier loses his patience and somebody grumbling in line snaps her back to reality does my mother surrender, and with deep sadness in her eyes, she pulls out a banknote. My mother is the handful of humble and fastidious little coins; Franca is the banknote that is always preferred to her.
My mother never had real friendships, and she never attended social activities with any regularity because her fear of confrontation and the possibility of ending up defeated upset her deeply. Women aroused an uncontrollable anxiety in her that made her completely boil over with envy and rancor. When she saw a woman just a little taller than her or with nicer clothes, her eyes would light up with a cold distance that could easily slip into deferential sweet talk or vindictive disapproval as soon as it was given a chance.
I observed her with microscopic attention, trying to detect the infinitesimal nervous framework that lay beneath the creases of her skin. When she realized I was watching her, she would run me over with the same aggression directed at the interlocutor of the moment, as if I were complicit or had in some obscure way contributed to producing the presence of another woman in order to inflict humiliation upon her. Her accusatory gaze alluded to my crime of having allowed a more beautiful, intelligent, or lovable woman to come near her, forcing the obvious comparison and shattering from one moment to the next the illusion of being the only woman in the world. A heart-breaking illusion, but one that guaranteed she would always come out ahead.
The only people whose proximity she tolerated were complete imbeciles. I remember a certain Piera, a woman a few years younger than my mother, her companion since youth. There was a time when Piera always came for visits at our house. I’d see her show up once a week and settle in on the sofa, where she would fling a shabby little faux leather purse with the same urge to be rid of it as someone throwing out a bag of trash. The fact that I was already there playing next to the radiator with my dolls didn’t bother Piera; every time she came in, she stepped over me as if I were a substantial interference, but one that she could dodge without too much effort.
Piera and my mother would talk about the old days when they were young and reveling in their joys. I heard the laughter exploding out of those old women, but I couldn’t empathize with them; the hysteria of their outdated yearnings and posthumous desire crackled like a kernel of popcorn that had popped too late, after it had already been swallowed. It was as if I didn’t exist in those moments, or more truthfully, I felt like I completely existed—never had I felt so lucid or tried to squeeze and save as many vital juices as possible from the present moment. I didn’t exist, however, for those poor women trying to dig up a past that had decisively ended, whose fruits they were ignoring for the moment—the proof of the next generation for my mother and the discomfort of individual extinction for Piera, who was not a mother. They wanted to patch together a raving mad present that would pick right up from where they had left it on those afternoons in the late sixties when they had hoped to be beautiful and to be loved.
For my part, it took all the self-control I possessed not to make fun of the two of them. Piera was uncontrollable—her face, I mean. I had to force my stare into a tête-à tête with the radiator element just to hold myself together. Piera had bleary eyes, and when her nervous conditions were aggravated one eye bulged out of its socket with more vehemence than the other like a prisoner trying to escape, testing every crevice as a way out. She had some kind of liquid in her eyes that consciousness drowned in before it had time to emerge. Piera’s entire body was a poorly calibrated liquid, a fluid assembly with temperamental pressures that couldn’t give enough reinforcement where it was needed and, conversely, put too much pressure on the spots in her body that should have allowed some kind of escape in the form of emotion.
One time I don’t know what got into her, but she started to dance the cha-cha. I hadn’t followed what had led up to it because I was completely absorbed in my sublime views of the inner workings of the radiator. At a certain point I heard the noise of the chairs being moved to make room for a little improvised dance floor, and I saw the two women moving their arms in the air like crank handles in perpetual motion. I was stunned. I felt a very strange emotion, hard to pin down. What was happening there in front of me, two meters away from my nose? What were those bodies in motion? My mother and another woman? No way, give me a break!
I carefully avoided looking at them, but could feel their bodies revolving around each other like two wells of stagnant water, creating a mutual sanguine ebb and flow. They moved their hands like they were holding rattles and bent one leg and then the other at right angles in their quest to achieve the greatest possible curvature of the hips, each one checking out her reflection in the other woman’s body. On top of all this, Piera had a speech impediment that made her “C” frothy and muffled like Donald Duck’s. When they sang cha-cha-cha together, coming toward each other like the Kessler Twins, I heard “shah-shah-shah”. That’s when I glimpsed a wink of understanding from the pristine stillness of the radiator, as if the radiator were smirking at the two women and asking for my secret agreement. I winked back right away, and fell to the floor in uncontrollable laughter.
A few years later Nicoletta appeared. Nicoletta was one of those women past her prime who saw the years pile up and tumble off a sheer cliff of decay after her thirties, then trudged along until the next pile up without any kind of cushioning, without any delicate transition from one flaw to the next that might have made the process less gaudy or more tolerable, like a star falling in slow motion. In my eyes Nicoletta was a perennial sixty-five-year-old because that was about when time had given up on her and quit, not knowing whether to move forward or backward in her absurd life.
She always had on some strange masculine retro uniform in a color combination from the seventies—black and orange, black and purple, or yellow and black—all very funereal and solar, like they had come right out of some death rite lasting for days and days under the scorching heavens, ringed all around by a deep red pool and the yellow glare of new life. She always wore men’s pants made out of heavy cotton in an undefinable shade of blue with a sharp crease ironed straight down the leg. Anyone who saw her felt a profound regret for the irreproducibility of colors.
Taken in all her dimensions, Nicoletta was like a little Lego man with just a few joints that plagued her with a rigid frugality of movement, ruling out any hint of grace in even her slightest intention. Her actions weren’t actions, they were more like maneuvers, and the stress on her joints transformed her wishes into heavy labor, entirely depriving them of that indistinct lofty cloud that might keep them ethereal and floating. In rough hands like hers, wishes came crashing to the ground with a huge racket like a hot-air balloon that gets a sudden hole. When she was sitting on the couch I would look at her, and it was as if the brown back of the sofa she was leaning against had swallowed up one of her dimensions, making Nicoletta an outline against a background, like a two-dimensional figure you might find in the funny pages to cut out and dress up in paper clothes.
Poor Nicoletta smoked three packs of unfiltered Nazionali every day because a woman like her couldn’t comprehend the concept of a filter. She drank one beer after another in a continuous assembly line of coming and going; it required all her skill to move the can from her mouth to the table, from the table to her mouth and back again to the table, and then to pick up a pack of cigarettes. Her fingers moved with the mechanical precision of automated pincers to calibrate the exact point at which to grasp the cigarette in an act derived from a sum total averaged with all of the preceding motions. You couldn’t exactly say that it was Nicoletta that acted; it was the hands of Nicoletta, the blood pressure of Nicoletta, the arms of Nicoletta, the body temperature of Nicoletta that acted. In the best case, what acted was a fixed collaboration of these components.
Nevertheless, Nicoletta wrote poetry. My mother said that once she won first prize in a literary contest that she had entered with one of her rhyming poems. I imagined schlocky rhymes, terrible poems. Then I thought again: where did this inflexible assumption come from? Maybe Nicoletta was really good; maybe she had no taste, no style, but you couldn’t rule out that she might be a genius at writing. It never entered my mind to ask her to read me one of her poems; I thought that her body, her nervous huffing and puffing, and her parchment-paper skin were much more interesting. The rhythm in a line of poetry was the last thing that mattered to me.
One day when she had already downed a few shots of bitters, Nicoletta started complaining to my mother that the beers were warm. “Put them in the fridge!” she barked.
My mother told her they had been in the fridge, that she had only just taken them out in order to serve them. So then Nicoletta said, “Well what kind of fucking fridge do you have?”
Fascinated by this conversation and wanting to insert myself into it, I went up to Nicoletta and said, “Grundig.”
The woman didn’t understand, because of course her question was a rhetorical one meant to insult the bad luck that had delivered her warm beer, and I had just cruelly pierced the discussion like a needle that couldn’t help taking literally the edges of the fabric I was joining. I looked her in the eye and repeated “Grundig” drily, enjoying that word that I had never before pronounced but that pursued me daily with its little logo stuck on right at eye level.
I said the brand name again with a vengeance: “Grundig,” still looking the poor woman in the eye. Nicoletta didn’t answer me, and instead her eyes took on a concave appearance, like right before a person falls asleep. I got scared and looked into her vast, empty, black pupils. No one was there inside her eyes, but they were wide open toward me! Oh God, I thought, what did I say to her? I looked to see her reaction, but her steady facial muscles were covering up a kind of trembling, and from her temples I felt an abnormal silence vibrating, like what intervenes when the power goes out. I was shot through with terror, but I still couldn’t pull my eyes away from hers.
After three seconds of interminable, constant frenzy Nicoletta started to foam at the mouth, and her eyes rolled back to resurface now and then like horrendous lottery numbers in rotating bins. It was a faceless face; the physiological residue holding Nicoletta together like a bundle barely tied to the back of a mule had fallen apart. I saw the foam glue her mouth shut in a pitiful, twisted grimace. My mother shouted, “Stupid girl!” and pulled me out of the kitchen so she could tend to the sick woman.
From the hallway, I heard some wheezing and then my mother shouting, “That stupid girl just stood there and stared!”
Lorenza Ronzano (1977–2021) taught literature in secondary schools and served as a philosophical counselor in a psychiatric ward and a district attorney’s office. “Stupid Girl” is an excerpt from her first novel, Zolfo (2013), which was a finalist for the Campiello First Novel Prize. Her later work includes the book-length essay La variabile umana (2019) and the novel Il buon auspicio (2021).
Anne Greeott translates poetry and prose from Italian and Spanish. Her work has appeared in Italian Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, World Literature Today, and elsewhere. She has received Fulbright grants to Italy and Peru, as well as a Travel Fellowship from the American Literary Translators Association.