This story is in a battered parallel text edition which I get out every August. And what speaks more of summer than a child spending his days in the sea?
Zeffirino lives to fish. On this particular Sunday, while his father prises limpets off the rocks, he takes a secretly acquired harpoon (“he was a careful little boy”) and revels in the underwater hunt. As with the best stories about children, the telling is as effortless as the child’s movements, and the delight is fully the child’s.
“He had found the sea-bream again; in fact two! Just as he was aiming he saw a whole squadron of them navigating calmly to the left, and another shoal gleaming to his right. The place was swarming with fish, almost an enclosed lake, and wherever Zeffirino looked he met a frisking of narrow fins and a gleaming of scales.”
This is the story of an encounter between two very different humans, who for an afternoon find a new way to get along. The pivotal moment happens when Zeffirino emerges by a rock to see “a fat woman in a bathing-dress” crying into the sea. No longer carefree, he must assess this adult’s sadness. How to cheer her up. With the wonders of the sea of course: “if she did not stop at sight of a bass or a sea-perch, what on earth could ever console her?”
She accepts his offer to try on his mask but can’t see through her tears, and so she sits on the rocks putting his catch into a pool. The signorina becomes ever bolder in touching the fish, tracing their wounds, till the prize catch of an octopus attaches itself to her arm, then her throat. Things do not end well for the octopus, but Zeffirino is pleased to see there are no more tears.
First published as ‘Pesci Grossi, Pesci Piccoli’; published in English translation in Italian Short Stories, Penguin, 1965. Picked by Caroline Clark. Caroline’s books are: Saying Yes in Russian (Agenda Editions), Sovetica (CB editions) and Own Sweet Time (CB editions).
A Personal Anthology 