For this Translation Tuesday, we bring you a poignant and introspective short story by Olga Campofreda, translated from the Italian by Federica Silvi. A woman returns to her hometown for a simple mission: attending her cousin’s wedding. But her journey provokes uneasy reflections, as she tracks the trajectory of her cousin’s life, which has adhered to the conventional “good girl” narrative ingrained in their community, and measures its distance from her own. As much as she cherishes her life of openness and freedom, her homecoming resurrects the ghosts of other possibilities—and worse, the fear of not being able to maintain her new identity under the suffocating pressure of the past. Campofreda’s prose brims with quiet tension, exploring the friction between the selves we create for ourselves and the ones we can’t escape.
In the end, no one cheered. The plane glimmered in the sunset-red windows of the business district’s skyscrapers, then landed smoothly in Naples, but none of the usual hand-clapping followed. A single, half-hearted burst had all but died down by the time the wheels touched the ground. Some might blame it on the low season: at this time of year, all the passengers are foreigners, taking advantage of lower prices to visit the islands and hike on the Amalfi Coast. It’s the outfits that give them away, the summer clothes they start wearing before it’s even hot, the shorts and linen vests they bring out as good omens for the weather in the days to come. In the holiday dream world they purchased, there’s nothing but sunshine. They’ll find it even when it eludes them: a power they can only wield in the places they’re seeing for the first time.
“Are you from here?” the delicate woman sitting next to me asked, in English.
Her husband had woken her when Vesuvius appeared out of the window. She kept pressing her finger on the glass in its direction, ecstatic, a white-haired child.
“Are you from Naples?”
I nodded; she replied with a contented sigh, then turned away to gape at the scenery some more.
*
When people ask where I’m from, I never give a complete answer. I mostly keep it to “near Naples”, or simply “Naples”—though I always feel guilty afterwards. It’s like being in a relationship I’m somewhat ashamed of, and reluctant to disclose. The rare times I can bring myself to say the name of my hometown, it comes back multiplied, echoed, as people study their maps to pinpoint the exact location. “Caserta, Caserta?”, they ask. For a fleeting instant, it sounds a little like New York, New York.
From up in the sky, Caserta appears flattened: a city that looks like a rug that looks like a city. A scale model of clustered buildings, laid out at the foot of the dismal Medieval village of Casertavecchia. The Royal Palace dominates the landscape from the centre of the urban expanse; its park is a vast, rectangular green strip, flanked by the mansion on one side.
When I tell people I’m from Caserta, I rush to add that the Royal Palace was the set of many famous films. Tom Cruise was there once, pretending to climb the Vatican’s walls. Even a Star Wars episode was shot in the area. I remember it well, because my mother auditioned for a walk-on part in the Clone Army. She didn’t make the cut, but over time, we started leaving that part out; these days, we just say she was one of the extras. You couldn’t verify our story if you tried: most of the troopers were added in with special effects, anyway.
The Ercole bridge—possibly the lowest bridge known to mankind—crosses the Palace grounds, connecting the two halves of the city. On any given day, at least one lorry will get stuck under its arch, or crash into the walls. Very few make it through, knocking entire chunks off its 18th-century marble blocks. The scuffs on the sides of the tunnel are signs of obstinacy, though not on the vehicles’ part: it’s the stubbornness of a bridge that always seems close to crumbling down, and always stays put in spite of everything. The residents of nearby buildings only ever hear the birds sing when the road is cordoned off. I should know, because I used to live right on that street before I left. That part of Caserta that hasn’t yet given way to the smaller district of Casagiove, and isn’t quite the city centre either. The liminal space.
The elderly lady on the plane next to me doesn’t know, can’t know, that reality is muddled in Caserta: there’s the true nature of things, and, more crucially, the way they aspire to be. It also applies to people. All the locals say they’re from Naples; the Royal Palace dresses up as the Vatican; our bridge wants to live up to its name, but it’s only a tunnel underneath a large park. Even my mother, a primary school teacher, tells everyone she once was a clone trooper, and that’s just fine, because nothing really needs to change. Talk is all we care about; spreading the word is all that matters.
*
I’m not visiting on a religious holiday, for once: I’m coming back for my cousin’s wedding. Like every self-respecting good girl, she said yes to her high school sweetheart. The matrons at the reception will say she married her first love, and everyone will be satisfied, because that’s how marriage is done.
Rossella is the version of me that stayed behind, that never left. My own, personal Sliding Doors: the film about a woman whose life splits into two alternate realities, sparked by an event as ordinary as catching or missing a train. When I picture what my life would be like, had I decided to stay, it plays out like Rossella’s. Here I am, on a Sunday, helping in the kitchen before the usual family lunch. Here I am, sitting next to my grandmother at the top of the table: I wear an ironed shirt that smells like fresh laundry, and jewellery that looks just the right amount of refined for a young woman. I see myself sorting the flowers I received, yet again, on Valentine’s Day: I arrange them in a crystal vase on my desk, next to a paperback copy of Little Women, and a stack of Jane Austen novels with worn-out spines. In this version of my life, the words sleep aid are at the top of my Google search history, and the next day—a sun-drenched morning—I find the boyfriend waiting outside my door on his electric blue Vespa, ready to take me to the train station so I can go and sit an exam. His kiss tastes of morning coffee, and his fingers caress my face as he helps me take off my helmet.
How many doors keep us from the version of ourselves we’d most identify with? How far removed are we from the person we say we are? More and more often, I find myself circling around the edges of the choices I didn’t make. I contemplate outcomes and trajectories, and get lost among endless possibilities, like a weary wanderer. I wonder whether Rossella does this, too. Whether she ever finds herself wavering at a fork in the road, seeking a few more seconds of stillness, before it’s time to give in again: time to keep walking the sanctioned path, the compromise everyone agrees to call love.
But I digress. I go off on too many tangents, all the time, every time I end up in the very places I don’t want to be. I jump on the last carriage of a speeding train of thought and let it carry me through every stop, never attempting to get off. Queuing at passport control, I spot the woman I sat next to on my flight. She’s taller than I thought and doesn’t look quite as frail. I avoid her gaze, so she won’t see through the lies I told her.
*
After our brief conversation on the plane, I buried my head in the in-flight magazine, hoping she wouldn’t attempt more questions. I found myself reading an article about wildlife in the Apennines. It had a photo of an old snake skin shed on a rock, translucent, ghostly, barely visible between the cracks. It lay discarded in the heat, like an unworn dress on the back of an armchair. That, it seems, is how snakes leave their old skins behind: they crawl out of their nest and keep rubbing against the ground, until they’re finally free.
I feel a sort of empathy towards them when I travel home: I too have an old skin, waiting, intact, for my return. I kept that to myself, rather than sharing it with my seatmate. I wasn’t lying, though—I can’t quite call it a lie. It was an omission, and nothing more.
My passport omits a few things, too. On this document, my name is Clara, as in “the radiant one”. Yet, around here, I’m known to dwell in the shadows: I’m the child who never shone with beauty or perfection; I hide away so no one will notice me. My name tells a story of unmet expectations and missed opportunities. I was born nearly hairless, with big green eyes: that’s not on my passport, either. My grandmother was sure I’d become a resplendent blonde, but within the first month, my hair started growing dark, while my eyes turned an inscrutable black. Where I grew up, first impressions cling to you like a skin you can’t shed, so all you can do is keep wearing it, again and again, long after you’ve outgrown it. In a few moments, I’ll revert to being the awkward child, the liar, the rebel without a cause. I take a deep breath and brace myself for my backward metamorphosis, the ancient spell I still haven’t learned to break.
*
As I wait at baggage reclaim (small suitcase, meant for a brief stay), I try to picture my father in the arrivals hall (looking older than the last time? Thinner, perhaps?), then take my phone out of my pocket, and search the image gallery for the invite my mother messaged me. It looks classy: handwritten names on thick handcrafted paper, carefully chosen to announce that the couple can afford expensive whims. All family friends, colleagues and former classmates will have received one. It will be on show on doctors’ desks, and in the offices of young lawyers in the city centre. The date is a late May morning; people will turn up in droves to show they care; the struggle for parking around the church will be the measure of the day’s success.
Rossella Di Michele and Luca Migliori: what a match, you couldn’t make it up. My cousin’s patronymic last name bequeathed her the notion of belonging to a man. Her husband’s surname—the very word for “superior”—will associate her with prestige, and authority in the spheres our community still ascribes to married women: cooking, budgeting, supplying quality products for the home. Like the women before her, Rossella is about to change hands. From father to husband, as it should be.
*
Most of our former classmates—such good girls they are—had at least one child by the time they turned thirty. They all have a husband or a partner, and the ones who work have job titles people find easy to understand: teacher, solicitor, part-time doctor at a private practice. Others are stay-at-home mothers, though they’ll tell anyone willing to listen that it’s only temporary; only until the kids are old enough.
I’m thirty years old too, but don’t fit their demographic. I’m one of the many who describe themselves as expats: I was raised in a good home, my family paid for my studies, my mother says the word immigrant is a bad look. Deep down, though, immigrants is all we ever think of ourselves as. I don’t even have a fixed address at the moment; not that my relatives will ever find that out.
*
The flat I spend most of my time in belongs to Tomás, whom they’ve never heard about either. We met on a dating app, and that’s reason enough to avoid mentioning him. They would ask what on earth I’m doing on there; the thought of my profile pictures would horrify them (sexy pictures? Was she looking for sex? Did they have sex on their first date?); they would chide me that an app is no place to find a serious man. A serious man—what does that even mean? Looking at them, you’d be forgiven for taking it literally; for thinking that being adults together goes hand in hand with losing the will to smile.
*
Tomás’s flat is in a council estate in East London, around Mile End. I rent a room in a shared house on the opposite side of Victoria Park, barely furnished with a wardrobe and a single bed. These days I only stop by to pick up clean clothes, dump dirty laundry in the washing machine, and have brief chats with Anya, my Polish flatmate, who has three cats and rarely surfaces from behind her folding door. I can’t work out what she does for a living. Tomás reckons she must be making live streams on OnlyFans, dressed in nothing but lingerie, playing with her pets on her bed. She never goes out and only wears nightgowns, but her rent is always on time.
Tomás shares his flat with three people. I only know them as dark silhouettes: we rarely cross paths, and it’s always late at night, in the corridor, when I get out of bed to go to the toilet. There are no common spaces other than a dated, grubby kitchen I can only describe as featureless but functional. Functional, like our relationship: both keep us breathing in this airtight city. The walls of Tomás’s bedroom—our bedroom—are bare, painted the dark green of forests I’ve never been to. He has a desk, though it’s buried under piles of paperwork and acoustics textbooks, and there’s never any room for my stuff. The only decoration on the walls is a picture hung above his chest of drawers: an image of Rio Negro, in Argentina, where he used to spend his childhood summers with his family. Aside from this image, its frame thickened by the accumulation of dust, there are no other objects that tell his story. It’s as if he was always on the verge of moving away, though it’s an intention he never acts on. Transience is another of our qualities. It’ll work until it works, we agreed at the beginning; we left it at that, and now here we are.
When I slipped out of bed to go to the airport in the afternoon, I left Tomás to sleep on his side. It reassures him that I’m going away: that I can be here on my own, without introducing him to my family, without mentioning him when they ask if there’s a man in my life. It goes to show that we’re still free; we don’t belong to each other; our relationship is not exclusive.
*
I spot my father through the airport’s sliding doors: he’s scanning the space around him, looking out for familiar faces, hoping for chances to schmooze. He’s lost weight, though not so much that he looks haggard. He’s wearing a formal suit, and the salmon tie he’s been sporting since the day he became the centre-right’s new mayoral candidate. Lately, my mother warned me, he seems to have morphed into the avatar on his campaign poster; now I’m seeing him in the flesh, I realise she couldn’t have been more right. Here he is, looking me up and down as I approach with my luggage in tow. Unruffled, he kisses me on the cheek, takes the suitcase from my hand, and points at my tights, warning me there’s a ladder poking out of my combat boots.
“Get changed when you get home, you can’t be walking around like this.”
We walk through the parking lot in silence. There’s nothing honest I could say that wouldn’t trigger an argument. I can’t stand his face: the twitchy muscles he never seems to rest, the thick dapper moustache that looks too black to be real, and the smile underneath it, stuck on his skin like Super Glue. As we’re getting in the car, someone spots him and greets him from afar, shouting out his first name. He raises an arm to say hi back, and pulls me closer with the other, squeezing my shoulder so hard it hurts. It’s the sort of empty gesture he needs to show voters his integrity: family is the bedrock of good citizenship, as his propaganda video says. He barely ever speaks with his siblings, and when I was little, he cut all ties with his family after a dispute over an inheritance. But who cares, right?
On the way home, I listen to him talk about the upcoming election, asking no questions of my own. My mind’s already on the next topic on the family agenda. I picture the conversations we’ll have over the next ten days—my cousin is getting married, my cousin is getting married – and curse my decision to come back. For some reason, as my father drones on, I wonder whether he, too, has a profile on a dating app. Bio: lawyer (kinky), seeking mistress. Maximum distance: 40km, a trip between Caserta and Naples. Interested in: women (25-35). Theme song: I giardini di marzo—Lucio Battisti.
“Have you heard from Rossella?” he asks, so he can finally get my attention. As if time never passed, and Rossella and I were still the closest of friends.
“No”, I answer curtly. “Not since Christmas.” I unlock my phone screen out of reflex, and navigate straight to the wedding invite picture. I look at the two names next to each other. The hen weekend starts tomorrow; I’m surprised I was invited at all.
*
There’s a ritual to my returns; it begins the moment the lift opens on to the third floor landing. Alerted by the jangling of keys drawn out of pockets, and by the echoes of voices in the marble stairwell, our neighbour comes out to water the large weeping fig outside her door. She does it every evening, though it’s common knowledge in the building that the tree is a plastic replica in a mound of soil. It all began a few years ago, when her predecessor – an architect – moved out of the flat. Tending to the fake plant gave her a chance to introduce herself and start conversations in the early days; then, the habit stuck.
“Welcome back,” she says. “Missing home?” Her voice is laced with expectation: there’s only one acceptable answer, and she won’t settle for anything less.
Come to think of it, though, I don’t miss Caserta at all. What I often long for is a sense of promise: the certainty of a hometown that stands by waiting while you’re away, and always welcomes you back unchanged, frozen in time, as long as you don’t mind the sudden appearing and disappearing of trendy restaurants downtown. There are loads, especially on via Bosco: they all draw big crowds within the first few months of launching, then empty out and open again with new names. The town’s well-groomed teenage boys, flush with prize money from poker games, take their first serious girlfriends there on dinner dates. The girls snap photos of their food, and post them on Instagram with the obligatory Pure Baby Face filter and #oneyearofus hashtag. Look for the streets with the biggest concentration of parked mopeds, and you’ll be sure to find a bar, hidden as it may be beneath the throngs of people. Brawls erupt now and then: young men from the outskirts of town beating up rich city kids, crowds zoning in on the centre of the action and dispersing at the edges. On those nights of violence, the boys take their girlfriends home on their 50cc scooters, drop them off at the gate, then head back to join in the commotion.
For many of us, the late ’80s-born daughters of Caserta’s well-off families, girlhood unfolded along one prearranged path: a straight route that started at the bottom of via Mazzini—the private primary school ran by St. Augustine nuns—and merged into corso Giannone, touching the local middle school, the classical high school, and St. Anthony’s church, where families gather every Sunday before the customary weekend lunch at the grandparents’ house.
All the small-town good girls have neatly styled hair and ironed shirts; Leonardo DiCaprio or Nick Carter posters on the inside of wardrobe doors; school diaries decorated with song lyrics in colourful ink, and candid photos of that guy they met in Gaeta last summer. On midweek afternoons, while the good girls toil over Latin and Maths assignments, their mothers gather in their lounges and serve coffee in their best china sets. It’s time for the ceremony of the trousseau, the ritual they take part in to see and be seen. A salesman ensnares them with tales about the quality of fabrics, and dreams up sparkling futures for the women their daughters will be in twenty years’ time. Oh, how good they’ll look, stepping into their husbands’ homes with their precious marriage linens. Pure silk, Egyptian cotton in pink tones, subtle legacy of the dowry of old. Young mothers spend lavishly in front of their friends, argue over the finest pieces, sign cheques pretending the amounts are making them dizzy (my husband will say I’m crazy!), but it’s all part of a plan. Their daughters’ endowment starts right at this moment, when their family name’s reputation is made.
The lives of small-town good girls unfold like the Way of the Cross: social engagements as the equivalent of the fourteen stations, every diversion a minor scandal. Rumours about what happened and shouldn’t have spread among the residential buildings in the city centre, seep underneath balcony windows, and reach lounges bathed in early afternoon light, sending a sensual thrill down the spines of those who say shame, we’re a cut above those people, surely we’re not like that.
Clinàmen. The Latin word for deviation, as my high school teacher explained in a lesson on Lucretius. Atoms fall through the void in a straight line, then swerve unpredictably, unexpectedly; they collide, they connect, and behold!—the world’s formed. The desks, the classroom, the bored teenagers, the ringing bell at the end of class. My life was a straight line, too; every day, I longed for a clinàmen to merge me with new matter, and turn me into something wholly other than the good girl I was primed to be.
Translated from the Italian by Federica Silvi
Olga Campofreda was born in Caserta. She lives in London, and works as a researcher in Italian and Cultural Studies. Her debut novel, La Confraternita di Elvis, was published by ARPANet in 2009. Ragazze Perbene is her second novel, and she has had several short stories published in literary magazines and blogs. Her nonfiction works include A San Francisco con Lawrence Ferlinghetti (2019), and Dalla generazione all’individuo (2020), about Italian postmodern writer Pier Vittorio Tondelli. She is a co-author of podcast The Italian Files, and a co-curator of Elettra, a series of short story collections focusing on father-daughter relationships. In 2023, Ragazze Perbene was nominated for the Premio Strega: Italy’s most important literary award, celebrating the best work of fiction in the Italian language every year.
Federica Silvi is an Italian writer and translator based in London. She has published flash fiction and creative nonfiction pieces in English on Dear Damsels, Funny Pearls, Memoir Mixtapes, Visual Verse, and more. Ragazze Perbene (currently unpublished in English) is her first book-length translation project.
*****
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