Beautiful Antonio (15 page)

“Do so by all means,” said the notary. “Have a talk with your son. I, in the meantime, shall concern myself with the interests of my daughter. Good day to you! My regards to your wife.”

This said, he threw open the door, and there, head lolling against the wall and white as a corpse embalmed, was Signora Rosaria in person.

The notary performed a low bow before the swooning woman, and vanished into the penumbra of the passage.

“Sara!” cried Signor Alfio, dragging his wife into the study “Did you hear? Did you hear all that?”

“Yes,” gasped his wife, in a whisper as cold as the draught through a window in an icy February, “yes… Let me sit down, Alfio my dear.”

The old fellow helped his wife onto the settee, raised his half-finished glass of water to her lips, gave a few vigorous
pats to her cheeks to bring her round a bit, and started pacing up and down the room.

“The damned liar!” he bawled. “Damned liar, damned slanderer!… With that holier-than-thou look on his mug… damned liar! Just imagine,” he proceeded, planting himself in front of his wife and shaking a fist ceilingwards, “just imagine Antonio… my son… Antonio… not being able to!… No, no, Mr Notary, go tell that to the blockheads in your office, who hang upon your every word whatever rubbish you tell 'em, but don't try that one on me!”

Up and down the room again, stamping the floor at every step as if crushing venomous reptiles. Then, “If our Mr Notary ran a risk in bringing Antonio into his house, it was that my son would cuckold him from tip to toe, along with his brother and all his precious kith and kin!”

“Alfio, Alfio, don't say such things!”

“Just you let me say what I like, let me get it off my chest, for God's sake! He has the nerve to come here and tell me that my son… that Antonio… can't make it… Can't make what?… My son… What can't he?… Well, you've got to laugh, eh? In this family everybody makes it! Even I, an old man and with diabetes to boot, even I, if I get on top of a woman, I'm of a mind to have my cock coming out of her ears!”

“Alfietto, child! Don't talk that way!”

“Can you imagine? Eh? Eh!” went on the old man, bunching his fingertips and shaking them next his nose in a gesture of furious disbelief. “They're driving me mad!”

“Alfio, listen to me, will you,” said his wife, in the pleading tones of one whose strength is at a low ebb. “There's something fishy in this business, something devilish. Ever since that Cousin Giuseppina said what she said, I've been down in the dumps.”

“Cousin what? Who on earth? What did she say?”

“Alfio, don't you remember what Deaf-Adder Giuseppina said? She was right there where you are now, and she said: ‘Is
it true that Barbara Puglisi is going to marry the Duca Di Bronte?'”

Signor Alfio struck himself a mighty blow on the forehead. He struck himself another. He struck himself a third. “You're right!” he cried, “You're right! By God you're right! That snake in the grass knew… It's as plain as a pikestaff! D'you expect that old pest to leave home, stinking as she does, unless there's someone else's troubles for her to get her teeth into?” Then, suddenly horror-struck: “So this means that the whole town is prattling about us!”

The very thought sent the floor spinning beneath his feet. He had to sit down.

Now it was the wife's turn to get up, to clasp his head to her bosom, to stroke it gently.

“No, Alfio,” she said. “I don't imagine the deaf old pest knows all that much. The notary is a man of honour…”

“A bloody Jesuit!” croaked Signor Alfio, his mouth enbosomed in her blouse.

“All right, call him a Jesuit. All the more reason he should know how to serve his own interests – and he also knows as well as we do that when people's tongues start wagging the loser is the woman, not the man.”

“True,” said Signor Alfio, pushing away his wife and perking up a bit. “Yes, true enough, but only when the case is the opposite of what he's maintaining. In that case yes, it's the woman who takes the rap. But he's out to look after his own interests, and he's picked on the most poisonous, the most malicious, the most loathsome of slanders to the detriment of my son, and my son alone!”

“But Alfio, Alfio, here we are tearing our hearts out and not doing the one thing we ought to be doing.”

“What's that?”

“But Alfio, surely – to have a word with Antonio.”

“You're right, you're right! I'll give him a ring at once!… What's the number?”

“Alfietto mio, you know it perfectly well: 17420.”

“I don't know it! I wish I'd never heard it! One–Seven indeed!”

He got up, crossed to the desk, and began prodding at the telephone dial.

“I can't see the numbers, I can't see the numbers,” he shouted a moment later. “Get me my specs!”

“But Alfio, they're on your nose…”

He put a hand to his eyes and had to admit that the specs were already in position.

“All the same, I can't see!” he moaned. “Come here and dial this wretched number for me.”

Signora Rosaria trundled over to the desk, removed the specs from her husband's nose and put them on her own; then she had a bash at dialling the number. But her sobs broke her.

“I can't see the numbers myself,” she wept. “They've robbed us of ten years of our lives, curse them!”

The old people fell into each other's arms; and the cheeks of each were wet with the tears of the other.

“We'll have to call in the maid,” said Signor Alfio. “But let's dry our eyes first! No one must suspect a thing…”

“Lend me your hanky, Alfio.”

“Here… Give yourself a good mop… there, on your nose… And you've made your blouse all wet.”

“No harm done, Alfio, blouses wash. If only that was the worst trouble in life! Rosina!” she called when she had patched herself up as best she could. “Rosina! Come along here please.”

The maid appeared with wet, red hands and, half-illiterate as she was, had no little trouble in dialling the number. But at long last she did it.

As soon as the ringing tone started, Signor Alfio tore the receiver from her hand, while Signora Rosaria bustled her post-haste out of the room and firmly closed the door.

“It makes me sweat cold, having to telephone that house!” grumbled Signor Alfio, the receiver to his ear. “I wouldn't care for Mr Notary to answer, or that wet rag of a wife of his.
I swear to God, I'd tell 'em something they'd not forget in a hurry!”

But Antonio answered.

“Who's speaking? Oh, is that you, dad?”

On hearing his son's cheery voice, old Magnano put a hand over the mouthpiece and sobbed, as if he had woken that moment from a frightful nightmare. “Antonio!” he blabbered. “Antonio!”

“What on earth's the matter?” asked his son, somewhat perplexed.

“You can say that again! Antonio!…” And, beside himself with joy, he again covered the mouthpiece. “He's thoroughly mystified,” said Signor Alfio in a hurried whisper to his wife. “It's all a lot of tosh, you'll see! Imagine there being a word of truth in it!… Antonio,” he resumed, unsealing the mouthpiece, “any news, dear boy?”

“None at all, as far as I know.”

“Postively none at all?”

“Dad, I don't follow you. What sort of news?”

Old Alfio started windmilling his left arm around to give his wife some notion of his elation.

“In a word,” he went on, “you've nothing special to tell me?”

“I really don't follow you, dad. What could there be to tell you?”

“Well in that case,” declared Signor Alfio in a voice both resonant and solemn, “your father-in-law is the worst blackguard ever to besmirch the face of the earth!”

A pause ensued. Then: “What makes you say that?” asked Antonio, some sudden trouble creeping into his voice.

“He was here this morning. Didn't you know?”

“There with you?”

“Yes! Here with me, trying to break my heart by telling me things that… well, if you'd heard them!… Are you alone?”

“No,” said Antonio faintly. “But say on, anyway.”

“How can I, if the things I have to say just stick in my
gullet? He's as mad as a hatter, my boy! As soon as he gets home, put him in a strait-jacket! And gag him as well, because every word that comes out of his mouth covers us all in shit!… Do you know what he had the nerve to tell me, right here in this room, and the only reason I didn't stuff his silly little goatee down his throat was that I was his host?… What he said was, ‘Barbara…' Oh, it makes me sick just to say it!… He said, ‘Barbara, after three years of marriage is just exactly as she was when she left my house…'”

Antonio replaced the receiver.

T
HE COLOUR HAD DRAINED
from his cheeks and his teeth were chattering. Droplets of chill sweat trickled down his chest and flanks. From the waist down he felt a weight, a density, as if the full rush of his blood had flooded to his feet in its haste to sink into the earth and vanish. But from pit of stomach to crown of head he felt diaphanous, all but a vacuum, with thoughts flitting through his mind as swift as tremors of wind in a dead leaf. Filled with the insensate fear of one who stands aghast at seeing his crime revealed after years of deceit and duplicity, and is unspeakably woebegone, he was none the less appeased by the ineffable consolation of the truth.

His first impulse was to tiptoe away and conceal himself somewhere in the country, to hide between two stones like a lizard; but a number of women's voices, and the flap of the monkly uncle's sandals, and the chimes of the Lawcourts' clock (who knows how?) told him that the last word had not yet been spoken, and that he might still save some coals from the fire.

He hastened from the house – not even a word to his wife – and having done the length of the sun-dazed Via Etnea made a beeline for his father-in-law's office. He thrust aside the heavy curtain shielding the doorway and, seeing nothing and no one, blinded as he was from the dazzle of the street, stepped into the ground-floor room.

But the notary, in that flash of brilliance through the curtain, had seen Antonio clearly silhouetted. He rose from the desk at which he was seated with pen in hand and pencil tucked
behind the ear, surrounded by peasants clad in corduroy.

“One moment!” he told the said peasants, whose massive hands were firmly implanted round the rim of his desk. “I wish to have a word with this gentleman.”

He took Antonio swiftly by the elbow, as one does with someone plainly about to go off the deep end, conducted him down a narrow, low-ceilinged passage where old documents gave forth the odour of bergamot snuff-boxes, and drew him into a room at the back.

This room boasted a lofty vault. Dozens of chairs stacked one upon the other in a corner showed, between the curvy legs of the top row, a glimpse of the portraits of all the Mr Notary Puglisi's who had been lords and masters of that office over the last two centuries. The mid-May sun was ablaze in a small round window.

Antonio put a hand to his brow, aware that his face was bloodless, whereas into the visage of his father-in-law seemed to flow and concentrate those of all the other notarial visages enthroned among the chairlegs.

Incapable of opening the conversation, Antonio set himself to stare at his father-in-law, fixing on what was apparent through the hairs of his beard: the thin, red, straight-set lips that showed no signs of parting.

“My boy,” said the notary at length, having left his countenance for a considerable time at the mercy of those moist, ardent, desperately questioning eyes, “you must take into account that no other course of action was open to me.”

“But why?” cried Antonio. “Tell me why!”

And he cast a half-hearted glance over his shoulder, as if searching for something.

The notary extracted a stool from the pile of chairs and placed it behind Antonio's knees. He slowly sank down on it, once again stammering “Why?”

“Now Antonio, you are a man,” said the notary, and the blood at once came rushing to his cheeks as if he had unwittingly uttered a word that the other might consider sarcastic.

Hypersensitive as he was to catching peoples' reactions on this subject, to following its tortuous course in their innermost thoughts, Antonio caught that blush on the wing and turned more wan than ever.

“You are a man,” repeated the notary, since it seemed to him that the only way to avoid giving Antonio offence was to treat the phrase he had just pronounced as inoffensive, “and you must take it like a man! A tragedy has occurred, and that's all there is to it. There are thousands of tragedies, and this is just one of them.”

“Tragedy… what tragedy…? I don't understand…”

“Oh, tut, tut, Antonio! That's not the way to set about it! No indeed! You rely too much on the fact that your wife is a girl who's worth her weight in gold, and would rather die than unseal her lips. But this is scarcely fair on your part! Don't put too much faith in that. No indeed, no indeed!”

“But heavens alive,” pleaded Antonio, “
what
would Barbara rather die than talk about?”

“Antonio!” burst out the father-in-law, highly incensed, “it is I who am asking
you
what Barbara would have said, had she spoken! Do you follow me, Antonio?”

“No, I don't,” replied the young man weakly, “I'm waiting for you to put me in the picture.”

“Perhaps it will suffice,” said the notary, weighing his words, “that I should mention one name?”

“One name?”

“That of Giovanna.”

“Giovanna?” repeated Antonio cluelessly. “Who is this Giovanna?”

“In November of last year you gave notice to a maid. Her name was Giovanna…”

“So?”