From Capriccio Italiano

[Note: Edoardo Sanguineti, who passed away on May 18, 2010, was a founding member of the Italian neo-av ant-garde movement Gruppo 63, and the author of nearly forty books of poetry, translations from several languages, innumerable essays and critical studies on medieval and modern poetry, newspaper columns, libretti, plays, novels, and other texts (including a multimedia history of the twentieth century and a glossary of terms from Antonio Gramsci). This translation of an excerpt of Sanguineti's novel Capriccio Italiano (Feltrinelli, 1963) was first published in 1964, in Art and Literature, edited by John Ashbery. It appears here by permission of the translator.]LI am here with my wife, and we're sitting on the terrace of the hospital, on wicker chairs. In front of us is the lake. "Touch," my wife says, and she takes my hand and puts it on her belly. And I feel it moving around a lot, the baby. "He moves around like mad," I say to my wife. We laugh and laugh. When we stop laughing, the lake isn't there any more, and neither is the terrace of the hospital. "Your belly's all hard with baby," I say to her. And I move closer to her, cautiously, there in the bed, in the darkness. I put my head on her pillow and I feel that the pillow is all damp. Then my wife calls me softly by name. "What do you want?" I say to her. Then I say: "What are you thinking about?" She calls to me softly, again by name. "Why are you crying?" I say to her. And: "Why?" Then she says to me: "Put your hand here." Here is just below the stomach, after it comes the uterus at once. "You feel?" my wife says. "You don't feel anything there," she says, "nothing at all." She says: "There it's all empty." "Oh," she says to me, "I've been wanting to tell you for a long time; this baby isn't like the other ones we've made together, because this one- feel?- doesn't have any feet." Then she also says to me: "All you can feel is the trunk- feel!- that keeps moving around." Then I hastily take my hand away, and again there is plenty of light all around, and the whole lake is full of light, and again we're on the terrace of the hospital and we feel the evening sun, so soft, striking our faces. "Now let's go back inside," my wife says. "If you give me your hand," she says, "I'll stand up."LI"What's your name?" I say to her. And she tells me what her name is. "That's a pretty name," I say to her. And we stroll. You can hear our footsteps in the night, and now we're going along the river, and she tells me the whole story of her Ufe. "Where shall we go?" she says to me. Then she says that she has her car over there, in a street over there, and we can go get it. And we go and get it. Now we drive around in the car in the night, and I see a big church with spotlights illuminating the facade, and then the church is already behind the car. So we go for a drive, and every now and then she stops the car and tells me another bit of her Ufe, and then we start up again and drive on. I see the church a second time, and the spotUghts seem brighter, and then there's another bit of her Ufe, and then there's the church again. Because we keep driving around the same streets, almost, apparently, and it reaUy doesn't matter what streets we drive on, because there are always the bits of her Ufe, and the iUuminated church, and it reaUy doesn't matter how many times we see the church. There are few people in the streets, and we even go the wrong way down a one-way street, from time to time, and from time to time we find everything dark, and from time to time we're near the river. Then we stop, now, in a kind of garden, which is, however, the entrance to a still larger garden. I hear another bit of her Ufe, and now I think that it's been rather a while since we saw that iUuminated church. Then I say, to this girl: "What did you say your name was, by the way?"LIII was keeping score, sitting up there, in that high, high stool, looking to the right, looking to the left. …