Beautiful Antonio (19 page)

“What are you saying? Wasn't it true?”

“No. It was not true!”

Barbara began to snivel again, but very quietly, almost to herself.

“I am no longer the three-year-old girl who trusted in Antonio's every word as in those of the Gospel,” she continued. “I have now found out!”

“But… what have you found out?”

“What any married woman ought to know.”

“But child, explain yourself. Don't leave me in agony!”

“Antonio never loved me. He slighted me from the very start.”

“But… if his eyes lit up whenever he looked at you?”

“True. He was kind and affectionate. He couldn't sleep without holding me in his arms…”

“You see, you see? You were his treasure, his all-in-all!”

After a pause:

“He slighted me!” repeated Barbara sharply.

“Until you have explained to me why he slighted you, I shall conclude that you are just making excuses!”

“Excuses?” exclaimed Barbara, her eyes hardening. “Did you say
excuses
? Then why did he treat me like a log of wood? Do you think he ever treated
other
women that way?”

Signora Rosaria's mouth drooped. “Barbara,” she said, “you are still a babe in arms. You think you know it all, but you've a long way to travel before you understand life. What has happened to Antonio is sheer bad luck, simply a bit of bad luck, dear child. It could happen to anyone.”

“I know that too,” replied Barbara, still on her knees but straight-backed now. “I know that such a misfortune can happen to a man.”

“And you know when it happens?”

“Yes, I know.”

“It happens when he is head-over-heels in love with someone, when his emotions are too strong… when he thinks that person is an angel from heaven…”

“Yes, I know… But that could happen for a day or two… it could happen for a month! But with calm, and confidence, and seeing that his wife is a flesh-and-blood woman like every other, he gets over this… this bit of bad luck.”

“What if a young man never loses the feeling that his wife is an angel from heaven, and his heart never ceases to…”

“Leave his heart out of it! In the early days, I do admit, I heard his heart beat on my pillow and even shake the bedhead. But later on, not even on the side where his heart lies, when at night he was clasping my hand to his breast…”

“You see, you see!” interrupted Signora Rosaria, in tears. “Don't you see how much he loved you? He slept with your hand clasped to his breast, as he did mine when he was a little child! Because when you come down to it he's still a child…”

Barbara threw up her chin with an air of irritation and almost of exasperation.

“Possibly,” she said. “But when he used to sleep with your hand clasped to his heart, mother dear, that meant that he loved you. When he slept clasping
my
hand, it meant something quite different – that for him I might have been a log of wood!”

“Off you go again with this log-of-wood business!” exclaimed her mother-in-law with some asperity. “Really, Barbara… here we are, two married women, and you've got a few years behind you, you're no chicken. I had a son of twelve when I was your age.”

“If I am childless,” said Barbara in high dudgeon, “it is no fault of mine!”

“Now then, young lady! Kindly mind your p's and q's! I'm good-hearted and gentle, but that sort of talk, with the poison of the Puglisi in it, doesn't go down with me… Just a glance at you and I can count the money in your purse!”

Barbara rose to her feet.

“Now then, young lady,” said Signora Rosaria, “don't think
you'll make any impression on me! You may stand up, sit down, lie on your back or stand on your head for all I care. Such goings-on leave me absolutely cold. But here we stay until we've put a finger on the truth!”

“Well let me tell you…” began Barbara, in a rage.

“Pull yourself together,” interrupted the elder woman. “For your own sake you'd do better to control yourself… I mean to have first say, and I'll start by telling you that I refuse to listen to that rigmarole about Antonio slighting you. No, no, young madam! You Puglisi can't pull that one on me – I can read what's going on in your heads before you have time to turn round… I know your lot inside and out, so just you drop all this carry-on about slights. You know as well as I do that Antonio doesn't slight you, because he has no earthly reason to slight you. In fact he loves you like the very heart in his body. Ask me how I know it? I only have to hear his footsteps coming and I know what he's thinking. And ask me how long I've understood him for? For ever! Since he was a little child, and I only had to hear him turn over in his sleep to know what he was dreaming about. So this business of his slighting you – just you leave it be. What reason has he?… Tell me that!… You're as lovely as a rose, you've got health and to spare, green eyes, jet-black hair, skin as white as snow… in short, Antonio's dish with all the trimmings!”

“Possibly, but…”

“Possibly nothing! Our boy had a bit of bad luck, that's all. God has not willed…”

“And if God doesn't will…” interrupted the girl.

“Hold your horses, my fine lady! Let me finish… God has not so willed, up until today. But tomorrow, who knows? Don't leap before you look! Things weren't so awful that they couldn't wait a little longer.”

“What good would waiting do?”

“How do you mean, what good? Something that doesn't happen today might happen tomorrow. Antonio's a young fellow any woman alive would be glad to have after her…
This time the devil's put a halter round his neck, but so what? Ropes can break. You could have waited, my sainted girl! You had all the time in the world.”

“Signora Rosana,” said Barbara coldly, “I don't like the turn this conversation is taking. I had hoped that you, informed of how I have suffered these last three years, were here to offer me comfort.”

“Come now, Barbara, suffered?” cried her mother-in-law. “You come here telling
me
things like that? Exactly what
have
you suffered? One can very well get on without that side of things. It doesn't kill you. Three weeks after we were married my husband was called up, and I waited two years for him without a murmur. Who gave a thought to all that? God save us, who on earth gave it a thought?”

Barbara's face burned red, her pupils dilated.

“Well really!” she cried, “the Lord didn't send me into this world to be insulted by the Magnanos! Your son casts me aside like an old rag, then you outrage my feelings… I won't have it!”

“Take it or leave it, my girl. If I don't get everything off my chest I swear I'll have a heart attack!”

“Listen to me then. That side of things you tell me about, I've never even had a whiff of! Until seven months ago I didn't even know such things existed. I've never been the flighty, flirtatious type. As a woman I consider myself just about as cool…”

“Cool, cool, cool!” shrieked Signora Rosaria, also rising to her feet. “That explains everything, and you're saying it yourself! Then you've only yourself to blame if what's happened has happened! I've always thought you were as cold as they come and would put a damper on the lustiest chap alive. So take the blame yourself!”

“
Goodbye
, signora!” snorted Barbara, abruptly turning her back and, having halted a moment at the door to steady her still-quivering lip, turned the handle and disappeared down the passage, at the end of which, opening another door, she issued
forth into the nave and was on the instant illumined, from a stained-glass window, by a shaft of multicoloured light. Then she vanished, leaving Signora Rosaria smarting to the very marrow of her bones with the bitterness of one forced by a skilful adversary to act clumsily. Not only bereft of her just redress for the provocation received, but also racked with chagrin.

The poor thing gnawed her handkerchief and wept.

A little later Father Raffaele accompanied her to the church door and, “We shouldn't have been so rash,” he said. “No one can get the better of that girl. What she says has the fire of truth and the infernal slickness of cool calculation. She's only sincere when her sentiments are to her advantage. She is, in good faith, unaware of the fact that all her feelings have been well rehearsed.”

“Do you remember, Father Raffaele, seven years ago, when you brought me the holy oil because I was at death's door?”

“Dear friend, I remember as if it were yesterday…”

“Well then… while you were giving me Extreme Unction I prayed to Our Lady to grant me this grace: that I should live to see my son a married man. Oh, Father Raffaele, what a foolish prayer! How much better if I were not in this world today!”

“Oh dear lady, how wrong you are! Your son has committed neither theft nor murder. Think of how many poor women are the mothers of thieves and murderers.”

“Can't think of any other way to put it, Father Raffaele. I'm losing my faith… I think the Lord never cursed anyone else on earth with a disgrace such as ours!”

“What you say is blasphemous, dear friend. In time you will come to realize that your son is neither a disgrace nor a dishonour. It's all that Barbara's fault!” he added, assailed a second time by resentment against the image of the girl that troubled him all the more brazenly the more cold and spiteful he conceived her to be, until he himself no longer knew whether his was harsh criticism or a way of wooing her…
But he took a hold on himself. “Barbara is what she is,” he said softly. “Maybe she's no worse then many others, and she's certainly better than I am, standing here talking like a fool… The important thing is not to mention this to your husband. We men are apt to get up in arms. So goodbye, dear friend, and God be with you!”

But Signora Rosaria could not resist confiding in her husband.

“You did the wrong thing!” said he. “You shouldn't have behaved so openly with her. Now, I've studied how to behave towards the Puglisi. Watch me: like this – compressed lips, like theirs. I've thought up a few frigid little phrases too, and as God is my witness the first of them I happen across I'll freeze his blood for the rest of his born days! We'll see whether Alfio Magnano himself can't play the Jesuit!”

Two days later, in Via Etnea, he came across Barbara's uncle, Father Rosario.

The friar attempted at first to give a wide berth to old Magnano by stopping to gaze into a shop window devoted, as luck would have it, to fashionable lingerie; but he soon realized that it was scarcely seemly for a Dominican to be ogling the corsets and brassieres with which the window was chock-a-block, and, turning abruptly away, he found himself face to face with the very man he wished to avoid. But picture his surprise when, instead of the irascible old rogue he was expecting, he observed an unruffled gentleman who spoke to him through tight, half-smiling lips…

“I am anxious to enquire of you – you who know about such things,” said Signor Alfio straight off the bat, “why it is that the Church considers a marriage null and void simply because the husband and wife do not commit carnal acts.”

“Ah, dear Signor Alfio, I wash my hands of all that! I assure you I have no wish to get involved in the tangles of the young! They make their beds and they must lie on them. Nothing to do with me, nothing, nothing!”

“I am perfectly aware of that,” replied Signor Alfio,
sweating from head to foot with the effort of maintaining his calm. “But I would be grateful for information concerning the question, as you might say, in general, not simply as regards my son. I am very curious to learn how these things work…”

The friar cast a sidelong glance at his interlocutor, and seeing his face as white and tranquil as that of one who a moment since passed serenely away, he shuddered slightly. Such serenity was far from normal in Signor Alfio, and if one of the pair of them was to retain his calm, the friar much preferred to be the one.

“Listen to me, dear friend,” he said cordially, “let us speak as Christians and as relatives: I appreciate to the full your grief and indignation.”

Signor Alfio suppressed a growl that rose from deep down in his chest, and again succeeded in stamping a tight-lipped smile on his face.

“No no no!” cried the friar, having slunk a glance at him. “I quite understand. You are a father, and your son is the apple of your eye, and rightly so…”

“Get in through that doorway!” exploded Signor Alfio, overwhelmed by an access of wrath that gushed up past his shirt-collar, and set fire to his face. “We can talk there.”

They made their way into the damp, deserted courtyard of a well-to-do residence.

“Right, this is what I want to know,” demanded Signor Alfio in his usual voice, and permitting his face to contort at its own sweet will: “Just explain me this, will you! Why does the Church annul a marriage simply because the partners do not commit acts of carnality? What does the Church want? Wants them to stick at it day and night, does it?”

Seeing Signor Alfio with foam on his lips the Dominican heaved a sigh of relief and slipped easily into the pristine cool which the other had now abandoned for good and all.

“Matrimony, my dear Signor Alfio, is in all respects a
sacrament
. Indeed, I will go further: it is one of the most solemn of sacraments.”

“That's exactly what I'm saying, that it's a sacred thing.
Something that can't be broken from one moment to the next just because the husband (and he'll have had his reasons) decides not to mount his wife.”

“I'm sorry you feel it necessary to put it that way. Matrimony is a sacrament…”

“Like hell it is!”

“Kindly do not swear, because if you do so I shall feel obliged to take leave of you.”