Two Women

THE DARK AND THE LIGHT (182 pp.]--Elio Vittorini--New Directions ($3.75).

One of these two short novels, La Garibaldina, chronicles a picaresque encounter on a Sicilian train after World War I between a simple, hearty young soldier, joyous at the prospect of a three-day leave home, and a lusty, waspish old baroness who is full of guile and as phony as her title. She is nicknamed La Garibaldina, because she used to be a camp follower in Italy's redshirt army of liberation in the 1860s, a career she has elaborated into her own self-nourishing legend that she was the schoolgirl who inspired Garibaldi's march on Rome. Phony or not. she sends the soldier whistling away into the morning sunshine surprised anew by the richness of life.

Erica, by contrast, is the lyric tragedy of a shy, dreaming eight-year-old girl who. during the bitter days after World War II. realizes that her family is poor. From that moment on. she is haunted by the fear that her parents will abandon her, her younger brother and sister in the forest--as poor parents often do in stories she had heard. When her father and mother finally do abandon the children to seek work elsewhere. Erica is relieved. Now 14, she feels responsible, mature, freed at last from the terror of waiting. Stubbornly refusing the neighbors' charity, she hits upon the inevitable solution. She goes to stand in the window with a ribbon in her hair, waiting for the soldiers to pass by. Never confusing sympathy with sentimentality. Author Vittorini somehow manages to preserve Erica's lambent innocence even as she turns prostitute.

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