Beautiful Antonio (11 page)

Antonio waited for his father's friends to take their leave, then shot him a fiery glance.

“What's up with you then?” demanded Alfio. “Why are you glaring at me like that?”

“I overheard what you said just now.”

“So what? What did I say wrong? Anything to be ashamed of if you're a good stallion? Why, you'd be ashamed if you weren't!”

Antonio stamped his foot with vexation and burst out, “But don't you understand that…”

“Oh ho, my friend,” broke in his father, “I understand very well indeed. What matters is that
you
should understand that I am entitled to talk about my own son when and how I please!”

Antonio bit his lip and said nothing, though the following morning, perhaps in search of comfort, he rang up his cousin Edoardo.

“I'm very anxious to speak to you too,” replied his friend. “Wait for me there at home, and I'll be with you in a brace of shakes.”

He came, huffing and puffing. His eyes were red about the rims and he had every appearance of suffering from the pangs of unrequited love. They went out together onto the terrace.

“I'm disgusted with myself!” said Edoardo, leaning on the railing that overhung the sun-drenched Corso. “We've really hit rock-bottom!”

“Who's
we
?” asked Antonio.

“All of us… you, me… but specially me.”

“But why?”

“I tell you I haven't slept a wink for six nights or swallowed a morsel. Yesterday in the street I had to prop myself on a beggar's shoulder because the ground was reeling beneath my feet. And what's more, I've got an itch I can't get rid of…
I'm always shunting off to the “Pensione Eros”… Today I laid hands on the charwoman – who's all of fifty – and rammed her against the wall…”

“Why on earth?”

“Listen here, Antonio! I've got to be made mayor of Catania. Me, and no one else! It's a debt of honour I've taken on with myself and the entire bunch of my relatives, who regard me as pretty small beer. You've got to write to the minister! If necessary we'll go up to Rome together. I'll pay the fares and everything. But I've simply got to be made mayor of Catania! In any case,” he added, raising his face, with half-closed eyes, and filling his lungs with moist February air, “this dud show can't last, if it's true they're gearing up to invade Abyssinia. You need to be as dimwitted as a schoolmarm if you plan to do today what the English already did three centuries ago! Listen to what Croce has to say, for godsake.”

“Come again?” queried Antonio.

“Benedetto Croce. Never heard of him! He's the only reason we can claim that Italy's a country fit for human habitation, and not just a sheep-pen…”

And drawing forth Croce's
History of Europe
from where he held it, secreted under his arm, he read aloud a number of pages peppered with such comments as “No!… The man's mad!… No, No and No again!” in case the book should fall into the hands of a Fascist fanatic or a policeman in mufti.

Edoardo read aloud with great fervour. The little terrace, abud with leaves dappling the rosy sunlight with violet shadows, heard the word “freedom” pronounced in the most devout and desperate manner possible, by a man of thirty-two who knew only too well that he lacked the fortitude and courage not to let the whole thing slide.

Antonio was on the point of feeling genuinely moved when a venomous thought darted into his mind. “And how often have you been to the ‘Eros' lately?” he blurted out.

“Yesterday, three times!” replied Edoardo, breaking off his
reading. “The day before – you're not going to believe me – four!”

“And whatever happened with the old char?”

“Oh nothing… I squashed her against the wall as if I was about to strangle her, said
boo
in her face and passed the whole thing off as a joke. So I beg you, Antonio, dear boy, to write a letter to the minister here and now!”

Yet another letter Antonio wrote to the minister, but this time his missive met with no success. In his courteous reply, Count K declared himself regretful that he was unable to comply with the request of his friend Antonio, because the appointment of Edoardo Lentini as mayor of Catania did not meet with the approval of the local Party Secretary, Calderara. The Town Hall would be administered provisionally by a commissioner, in the person of the Deputy Prefect Solarino, fifty years old and a decent fellow, though for thirty years deprived of the joys of life; the author, what's more, of a number of sonnets inimical to France and to Russia.

The moment Edoardo learnt that the chief obstacle to the chief aim and purpose of his life was Lorenzo Calderara, he set to work to butter him up, and began to pay daily visits to the headquarters of the Fascist League (a charming palazzo designed by Vaccarini, at the portal of which two sentries stood at ease with a blend of apathy and insolence, clasping across their stomachs enormous rifles weighing more than they did themselves, while in gruff, drawling voices they would bark out a “Take yer 'at off comrade!” at the backs of all who crossed the threshold). And Edoardo put so much vim into sucking up to Calderara that eventually he came to regard his own actions as being intelligent only if they were of the sort that appeals to a positive cretin…

Antonio, for his part, wrapped himself up entirely in his private life, and spent five happy months in the company of a girl who only on Sundays, on returning from Mass, allowed him to run up the stairs with her, leaving her parents puffing
behind; and, near the frosted-glass window on one of the landings, to kiss her on the mouth.

He had also tried to snatch a kiss late one evening in the drawing-room, when the notary's hand fell from the arm of his chair along with the newspaper it was grasping; but Barbara put all her strength and craft into freeing herself from the embrace without making any noise about it, sprang from her chair, ran from the room, and instantly leant her back against the closed door… so weak did she feel at the knees.

When she re-entered the room those lovely green eyes of hers, which so overawed the Lenten homilists, had grown the more severe as the countenance surrounding them had darkened. Antonio's mind reeled: he found that heady mixture of sensual ferment and moral inflexibility so irresistible that he was compelled to take his leave half an hour earlier than usual. This due to a rapture that made him tingle from head to foot.

On leaving the Puglisi household he began wandering through endless streets, and avenues, and courtyards, aware all the time that in the most austere palazzo in Catania, in whose wardrobes hung the clerical attire of her monkish uncle, herself defended by crucifixes steely as swordblades, slept a girl pure as spring water, destined for him alone.

Accompanied by these thoughts he walked the length of Via Etnea, which loomed the larger in the stillness of the night, passed the ebony-dark Bellini Gardens, and turned into Viale Regina Margherita, a long straight incline flanked with suburban villas serried with terraces, palm-trees and godwottery, until it petered out, lofty and free, up there near the stars.

Reaching Piazza Santa Maria di Gesù, he took the road for Cibali, and after a loud tramp of boots, some bouncing back as echoes, others squelchy with mud, he gained the tiny piazza of that little town, swathed to its roof-tops with sea-breezes. From this vantage-point, on moonlit nights, the sea lay calm and still, except for that glittering quicksilver path on which the city printed the ink of its chimney-pots, or now and again the dome of a church.

Eventually he made his way back down a deserted road, all but a country lane, skirting a public wash-trough redolent of soap-suds, and sundry kitchen-gardens with their lettuces and cabbages, re-entered Catania through a maze of winding alleys still hot from the swarming bodies of urchins that jam-packed them the livelong day. And throughout this ramble he held his chin high and his eyes fixed upon the heavens – upon that warm, live, multitudinous sky of the south which, at the very point where rooftop, terrace, tree-tip end, there she bursts forth! No vague, ambiguous, half-hearted sky is this, as in the cities of the north, but immediate, utterly dense and teeming; majestic and silent as perhaps she is at one thousand light-years from this earth.

A shudder of chill brought him home again both weary and happy, and plunged him at once into a long sleep from which (or so it seemed to him) certain dreams that before his engagement to Barbara had distressed him night after night were now banished for ever.

One afternoon in March Barbara took it into her head to arrange a visit, along with Antonio and his parents, to the Magnano property in La Piana, the great alluvial plain to the south of the city. A decrepit carriage, swaying this way and that and crushing the life out of poppies and daisies, bore them at a snail's pace into the heart of this delectable plain, flanked, in the chrome-yellow light of the sirocco and the sandy soil, by the skittering wavelets of the Ionian Sea.

This fertile expanse is bounded to the east by the finest of golden sands; to the south by the heights above Syracuse and Lentini; to the north by the outskirts of Catania, the very last houses of which straggle up the lower slopes of Mount Etna, from here looming in all its vastitude: startling, solitary, unequivocal, as is the retaining rampart of an ancient temple when the rest of the masonry has all but crumbled away. A twelve-hour cloudburst suffices to submerge this plain
completely, mingling the waters of the River Simeto with those of the Lake of Lentini; but conversely a single day of sunshine will bring it to the surface again, dripping and verdant, its lanes muddily odorous and its birds all skin-and-bone from their long, strenuous flights over grasses viewed through a window-pane of water.

On March afternoons this landscape shimmers with the most limpid light imaginable. Depending on the wind, a wind which seems to hammer at the heavens themselves, and to draw swift veils of cloud, red, yellow, brown or blue, across the sun. This wind whirls furiously about all points of the compass: now we see it, passing in the puff of dust that veils the lush lower slopes of Etna, now to the east in the mantle which suddenly darkens the surface of the sea, now in the plain itself, all around us, close around us, in the wheat-fields that sway low their heads, to rise again dispensing from their bosoms glints of gold and silver.

As soon as the party came within sight of the gate of the Magnano property, and beyond, the long drive leading to a knoll topped with a cluster of buildings, Signor Alfio doused his pipe with a stab of his thumb, wiped his mouth and burst out, “That's him! There's the fellow who sucks my blood! Now we're in for a mammoth dose of his belly-achings!”

The person thus referred to was the share-cropper, a lean old figure in fustian trousers and a pleated shirt, white though grimy with dust, the rolled-up sleeves of which revealed two leathery arms as dark as a negro's. His face rough-hewn and wrinkled, with two little light-coloured eyes so weighed upon by the pouches above it seemed impossible that they should move. A red handkerchief was knotted about his neck in such a way as to leave two ass's-ear ends dangling onto his collarless shirtfront.

He straightened up from his work and rested his hands on the handle of his mattock; then, with his right, hampered in his movement by its very massiveness, he grasped the peak of his cap, made a clumsy effort to raise it, pushing it this way
and that across a forehead to which it appeared to be glued, until finally, with a furious twist that might have been sheer anger, he wrenched it off and held it in hoverance above his head; onto which, after a brief moment, he curtly returned it.

“Hey there, Nunzio!” shouted Signor Alfio, poking his own head out of the window of the carriage, come to a halt in the middle of the driveway. “You call
that
the way to work?”

The labourer lowered his eyes and shook his head, biting back a grumble.

“When did you start that piece of digging?”

“
Stamatina
” (first thing this morning) replied the other, lowing his eyes again.

“And how's it going?”

“
Malamenti
.”

“Badly? Why?”

“
Pirchí va malamenti
.” ('cos it does)

“And just you tell me, brother, what'd you do if you couldn't be forever bemoaning your lot?” Then, in a quite different voice and dropping the dialect, “I have come to show my daughter-in-law my orange-grove.”

“
E unni su', st'aranci?
” (where's these oranges, then?)

Signor Alfio thrust open the door and descended grumbling from the carriage, needing for his arms, which felt a furious desire to wave about, the requisite space to do so.

“Listen here, in God's name don't make me lose my temper! I've brought my daughter-in-law here today, and it's got to be a happy occasion for all present, so I don't want to get hot under the collar. Signora Agatina, Barbara, Antonio,” he proceeded, poking his head back into the carriage: “Get down, do!” The two women and Antonio climbed down from opposite sides of the carriage, blinking in the dazzle of light from the sea which, beyond the green fields and the sands, rose brave and bristling with wind in a half-moon of horizon.

“How lovely it all is!” exclaimed Signora Agatina. “Good for you, friend Alfio, really and truly! I never imagined it was so lovely here.”

The corn was high already, pastelled with an inkling of wheat-ears and gorgeously emblazoned with poppies great and small, their cups spilling scarlet light into the air, in among the cornstalks and into the very furrow. Olive trees, their windswept leaves a-sheen with silver, stood at regular intervals, like human figures halting their steps at a holler from someone left behind. The drive led up the knoll on which stood a small yellow house with green-painted shutters, flanked by farm buildings – dirty-white walls riddled with the black rectangles of doors and windows. Verdant and shining on the right of the drive, brightening the air with the breath of cool springs, the lemon groves swept to the top of the knoll; and beyond again, as far as a second knoll atop which, constructed dry-stone fashion out of blocks of lava, stood an imposing well-head.