The Murder on Via Belpoggio

By Italo Svevo

"Everyone felt his own beloved person threatened," notes the narrator of Svevo's sarcastic tale of a bungling murderer--an underemployed porter known derisively as "il signore" by his equally down-at-heel friends--on the loose in the city of Trieste.

"L'assassinio di via Belpoggio" was first published in installments in 1890 and was Svevo's first major story.

Genre: short story
Words: 9,014
Date of English translation: 2011

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fario
• Release date: Oct 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465864307

Italo Svevo

Italian writer, born in Trieste, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1861, and most well known for the novel _La coscienza di Zeno_.

Book preview

The Murder on Via Belpoggio

Italo Svevo

Translated by John Penuel

Original title: L’assassinio di via Belpoggio

English translation copyright 2011 by John Penuel

Published by John Penuel at Smashwords

Table of Contents

I

II

III

I

So killing was such an easy thing? He stopped for a single instant in his flight and looked back: he saw the body of that Antonio whose last name he didn’t even know lying in the long street lit by few lamps, and he saw it with a precision he immediately marveled at. As if, in that brief instant, he had been able to make out his face, that lean sufferer’s face, and the position of the body, a natural but not usual one. He caught a glimpse of it, the head bent over the shoulder because it had hit the wall in a bad way; of the entire figure, only the upright tips of the toes—and which projected a long way over the ground in the dim light of the distant lamps—were as if the body to which they belonged had lain down voluntarily; all of the other parts were really those of a dead man, of a murdered man, in fact.

He chose the most direct streets; he knew them all and avoided the lanes that didn’t lead directly away.

It was an immoderate flight, as if he had the cops on his heels. He nearly knocked a woman to the ground, and he kept going without paying any heed to the abuse she hurled at him.

He stopped on piazzale di San Giusto. He could feel his blood coursing dizzyingly in his veins, but he wasn’t winded, so it couldn’t be the flight that had tired him out. The wine shortly before perhaps? Not the murder, most assuredly not; it had neither tired nor frightened him.

Antonio had asked him to hold that bundle of banknotes a second for him. A little later, when Antonio asked for it back, it flashed into his mind that not much at all separated him from total ownership of that bundle: Antonio’s life. Not even had he conceived the idea clearly than he had acted on it, and he was amazed that that idea that was still not a resolution had given him the energy to land such a tremendous blow he felt the strain of it in the muscles of his arm.

Before leaving the piazzale, he tore off the wrapping around the bundle of banknotes, threw it away, and stuffed the contents of it in pockets; then he headed off at a gait meant to be calm