When he climbed aboard the bus, he annoyed everyone.
The briefcase bulging with other people’s papers, the enormous package crammed beneath his left arm, his plush gray scarf, the umbrella threatening to open—all this made it difficult for him to show his return ticket. Obliged to rest the package on the driver’s change table, he sent scores of coins cascading to the floor; when he tried to kneel down to retrieve them, protests rose behind him from those afraid his delay would cause their coattails to catch in the automatically closing door. He managed to insert himself into the line of people clinging to the bars overhead; slight of build though he was, his bundles conferred upon him the volume of a nun swelled up with seven skirts. As they skidded on the slush through the miserable chaos of the traffic, his awkward bulk spread discontent from one end of the vehicle to the other: He stepped on toes, had his own stepped on, and prompted reproaches; when he even heard slyly muttered allusions to his alleged conjugal misfortunes, honor compelled him to turn his head; he flattered himself that he lodged a threat in the weary expression of his eyes.
Meanwhile they traveled through streets whose rustic baroque façades obscured a wretched hinterland that nonetheless contrived to peek out at every corner. They passed the faintly yellow lights of octogenarian shops.
Approaching his stop, he rang the bell, tripped over his umbrella as he got off, finally found himself alone on his own square yard of uneven sidewalk; he hastened to verify the presence of his plastic wallet. And was free to savor his happiness.
Contained in the wallet was 37,245 lire, the year-end bonus he’d received an hour earlier, amounting to the removal of several thorns from his family’s side: his landlord, to whom he owed two quarters’ rent, growing more insistent the longer he was thwarted; the exceedingly punctual collector of installment payments on his wife’s veste de lapin (“It suits you much better than a long coat, my dear, it’s slimming”); the black looks of the fishmonger and greengrocer. The five large banknotes likewise eliminated his dread of the next light bill, the dismayed stares at the children’s shoes, the anxious watch for flickers in the bottled-gas flame; the notes hardly represented opulence, to be sure, but they did promise a respite from anguish, which is the true joy of the poor; and perhaps a few thousand lire would survive long enough to be consumed in the splendor of Christmas dinner.
But too many such bonuses had come and gone for him to mistake the fleeting exhilaration produced by them for the euphoria now welling up inside him, rosy and bright. Rosy, yes, rosy like the wrapping of the delicious weight that was making his left arm sore. Indeed, it was precisely from the fifteen-pound panettone he had carried away from the office that the feeling emanated. Not that he was crazy about that reliably mediocre mixture of flour, sugar, egg powder, and raisins. On the contrary, to be honest he didn’t even like it. But fifteen pounds of a luxury good all at once! An immense if circumscribed instance of abundance in a house where food typically entered in quarter pounds and pints! An illustrious product in a pantry dedicated to third-rate generics! What joy for Maria! What a thrill for the children, who for two whole weeks would venture into that unknown land of the afternoon snack!
These, however, were the joys of others, material joys composed of vanillin and colored cardboard, of panettones, in other words. His personal happiness was something else entirely, a spiritual happiness mixed with pride and tenderness—yessir, spiritual.
Earlier that day when the commendatore in charge of his office had distributed pay envelopes and Christ-mas wishes with the haughty bonhomie of the old Fascist party official that he was, he’d also said that the fifteen-pound panettone presented to the office by Central Manufacturing would be conferred on the most deserving employee, and thus he entreated his dear staff to democratically (his word) select the lucky man straightaway.
The panettone, meanwhile, stood at the center of his desk, hermetically sealed, “laden with good omens,” as the commendatore himself would have said twenty years ago in his black uniform of Sardinian wool. Giggles and whispers had passed from colleague to colleague; then everyone, starting with the director, had shouted his name. A source of great satisfaction, an assurance of continued employment—in short, a triumph. And nothing could have dampened that invigorating sensation, not the three hundred lire he’d had to spend at the wretched “café” below, in the double bruising of a blustery sunset and low-pressure neon, when he’d treated his friends to coffee, nor the swearing he’d had directed at him on the bus—nothing, not even the abrupt realization deep in his consciousness that it had come down to a moment of scornful pity for the neediest among the employees. He truly was too poor to permit the weed of pride to sprout where it could not survive.
He set off home along a decrepit street to which the bombardments of fifteen years earlier had provided the finishing touches. He arrived in the ghostly little piazza at whose far edge squatted the phantasmal building.
He vigorously greeted the concierge, Cosimo, who despised him for earning less than he did. Nine steps, three steps, nine steps: the floor where the gentleman So-and-So lived. Phooey! He had a Fiat 1100, it’s true, but he also had an ugly and licentious old wife. Nine steps, three steps, a slip and near stumble, nine steps: the apartment of Dr. What’s-His-Name. Worse than ever! A layabout son who went crazy for Lambretta and Vespa scooters and a waiting room that was always empty. Nine steps, three steps, nine steps: his own apartment, the modest residence of a well-liked and honest man, an esteemed prizewinner, an outstanding accountant.
He opened the door and penetrated the tiny entrance hall already filled with the smell of frying onions and herbs. On a wooden chest as large as a hamper he set down the weighty package, the briefcase loaded with other people’s business, the unwieldy scarf. His voice blared out, “Maria! Come quick! Come and see what bounty I have brought!”
His wife emerged from the kitchen in a sky-blue housecoat stained with soot from the pots, her small, dishwater-reddened hands resting on a stomach deformed by multiple births. The children, snot trailing from noses, huddled around the rose-colored monument and squealed without daring to touch it.
“Nicely done! And your salary as well? I haven’t got a lira left myself.”
“Here it is, dear. I’m keeping just the coins for myself, two hundred forty-five lire. Now, by God, take a look at this!”
Maria had once been pretty, and until a few years ago she’d had a sweet, expressive face illuminated by capricious eyes. Since then, squabbles with shopkeepers had hoarsened her voice, poor food had ruined her complexion, the incessant scanning of a horizon filled with fog and reefs had extinguished the brilliance of her eyes. All that survived in her was a saintly soul, inflexible and without tenderness; a profound goodness reduced to expressing itself in reproaches and prohibitions; and a pride of caste, mortified but tenacious, because she was the granddaughter of a celebrated hatter on Via Indipendenza and despised the less distinguished origins of her Girolamo, whom she nonetheless adored as one does a dull but endearing child.
Her gaze slid dispassionately over the delightful package.
“Very good. Tomorrow we’ll send it to Risma. We owe him a favor.”
Two years ago the lawyer Risma had hired him for a complicated accounting job, and, in addition to paying him, had invited them both to lunch in his abstractionist, metallic apartment, where the accountant had suffered like a dog in the new shoes he’d bought especially for the occasion. And now, for the sake of this litigator who lacked for nothing, his dear Maria, his boys Andrea and Saverio, his baby daughter Giuseppina, he himself, all forced to surrender the only vein of abundance discovered in so many years!
He ran into the kitchen, grabbed a knife, and rushed to sever the golden twine some industrious Milanese worker had so handsomely knotted atop the wrapping, but a reddened hand fell wearily on his shoulder.
“Don’t be a child, Girolamo. You know that we have to return Risma’s favor.”
It was the Law that spoke, the Law decreed by irreproachable hatters.
“But darling, this is a prize, a token of appreciation, a badge of merit!”
“Let it go. Your colleagues are hardly ones for noble sentiments! It’s charity, Girì, nothing but charity.” She called him by his old pet name, smiled at him with eyes in which he alone could perceive the traces of her former charms.
“Tomorrow we’ll buy another panettone, a little one, which is plenty for us, and four of those red corkscrew candles they’ve got in the window at Standa; that’ll make it a special holiday.”
And so the next day he bought a tiny, nondescript panettone, not four but two of the astonishing candles, and engaged an agency to send the colossus to the lawyer Risma, costing him a further two hundred lire.
After Christmas, moreover, he was obliged to purchase a third cake, which, disguised in slices, he had to bring in for the colleagues who’d teased him about not offering them a single crumb of the sumptuous booty.
The fate of the original panettone was thereafter obscured by a curtain of fog.
He went to the agency, Lightning Couriers, to complain. He was grudgingly shown the delivery receipt whose reverse side the lawyer’s servant had signed. After Epiphany, however, a visiting card arrived: “With warmest thanks and holiday wishes.”
Honor had been preserved.