Beautiful Antonio (2 page)

Antonio's impotence must become public because Barbara,
or her family, will not accept the idea of divorce on the grounds of incompatibility, they want the marriage annulled, declared never to have taken place, so that Barbara can marry again in church to a rich and corpulent nobleman. What is marriage then? Does it really cease to exist “for the mere fact that man and wife do not indulge in carnal acts,” those same carnal acts that the church is “constantly bothering us” by preaching against. Certainly Antonio loves Barbara, and she used to love him, till her maid told her what sex really was. In any event, if the marriage is to be annulled, if Barbara is to make a more lucrative marriage elsewhere, Antonio's failure as a man will have to be declared before a church tribunal. “Antonio didn't have the stuff of the real Fascist,” the local deputy party secretary subsequently writes to Antonio's one important political contact in Rome.

Any notion that a man might be an individual, whole unto himself, is now swept away in a storm of ridicule, speculation and scandal. Antonio's “failure” is experienced as the failure of his whole tribe. Both father and friends feel obliged to embark on orgies of fornication and adultery to demonstrate that they remain untainted. The world at large marvels and revels in the handsome Antonio's weakness. Trapped in a mesh of conflicting voices, one or two supportive, most full of contempt, Antonio falls into a defeatist mutism. He is now, as it were, aggressively passive; he spends all day in bed, he will not communicate.

To get a sense of how far Brancati goes beyond a mere condemnation of Fascism or Catholicism here, it's worth remembering another writer from the Catania area, Giovanni Verga. Born in 1840, Verga started his career as a writer of elegant society novels, but made his breakthrough in the late 1870s when, living in Milan, he turned to writing about the peasants in the backward part of Sicily where he had grown up. This was a time when the middle-class readers of the major European cities had begun to feel that acute nostalgia for the tight-knit communities of the rural past which is still with us
today. Verga recreated those communities for his sophisticated public, but in a wonderful stroke of therapeutic irony he showed how, far from being havens of mutual support, there was actually nothing crueller than the traditional peasant community, particularly when, for some reason, an individual broke society's rules or failed in some way to fit in. And although to the reader the chorus of pious rhetoric deployed by the community to destroy the unmarried mother, or the girl who cannot afford to stay at home and nurse a dying parent, is evidently hypocritical, the victim inevitably succumbs to that rhetoric and considers him or herself a guilty failure. There is no question in Verga of anyone reaching an independent position outside the chorus of hypocrisy. Everyone is at the whim of the cruel collective ethos.

Likewise Antonio. Even when his reason can calmly dismiss an idea as absurd, his mind nevertheless remains prey to every stray voice and even begins to invent those voices when they are not actually heard. Invited to take part in an anti-fascist meeting he finds himself equating political protest with failure and failure with sexual impotence. “They are always talking about philosophy and liberty because they can't get a hard on,” he thinks. Even though the private lives of one or two of the men present remind him that this is not actually the case, he nevertheless feels the men are, as he puts it, “stained with purity.”

This use of oxymoron alerts us to a general tendency in Brancati's work to stand traditional wisdom on its head. Antonio's mother protests to her confessor that the church is punishing her son for having behaved with Barbara in the very same way that Joseph behaved with Mary. Was the Virgin's marriage null? In perhaps the key passage in the book, Antonio and his uncle go together into an empty church. Despite the fact that nobody is there, Antonio feels the pressure of the institution's judgement of him, as if every painting and statue stared at him with disapproval. His sympathetic uncle, the only man who takes time to understand Antonio, is dying and so
disillusioned with Fascism, with life, that he is indeed eager to die. In an extraordinary passage, he struggles to pray, but reaches the frightening conclusion that the idea of Christ is as empty of content as it is beautiful, and salvation merely a dream. If Christ is the church's spouse, he hasn't delivered, and we erstwhile believers are “disappointed lovers.” In short, Christ too is impotent.

So what exactly is wrong with Antonio? Brancati's cleverness is to give us just one long statement from the sufferer himself. Hard pressed by his uncle, Antonio at last tells his story. But if, after all the book's hints of possible links between the moral ugliness of the time and Antonio's problems, we expected some cerebral, lucid assessment of his malaise, we will be surprised. Antonio tells a long, detailed, moving story of his dealings with women. It serves to dismiss any question that Brancati is using his predicament merely as a metaphor for a certain kind of personality disorder under Fascism. In particular, the extent to which, as a handsome man, Antonio has always felt himself to be a prey to female passion, to a disturbing voraciousness behind the rhetoric of romance and modesty, again suggests a layer of interpretation that goes beyond a comment on the contemporary situation.

Where does this leave the political and social readings of the story? It's curious that three other great Italian novels on the Fascist era make the same link between the difficulty in engaging in sexual relationships and the difficulty of becoming involved in action in general. In Cesare Pavese's
The House on the Hill
(1949), the hero is fascinated by a group of anti-fascist partisans, but is somehow unable to believe in their mission and cannot join them. As a result, an ex-girlfriend among the partisans, mother of a child that may be his, refuses to renew their relationship, sees him as irrelevant, outside reality.

In Giorgio Bassani's masterpiece
The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
(1962), the Jewish family's withdrawal from the realities of Fascist Italy into the haven of their garden is accompanied
by a failure of the young people in the book to achieve any sexual initiation. In Dino Buzzati's
The Tartar Steppe
(1940), the hero's long and fruitless wait for military engagement and glory is paralleled by a failure to marry or be involved with women in any way.

All these books are wonderfully different. Yet beneath them all lies a deep apprehension, in reaction perhaps to the very sensual and conflictual nature of Italian life, that any engagement with the world, sexual or political, is of its very nature ugly, demeaning. Hence the heroes of these books become strangely Peter Pan figures, yearning for virility and aggression, but excluded from events by their very sensibility.

Brancati himself was in Sicily when the Allies invaded the island in July 1943 and it is in the aftermath of that invasion and the devastation it brought that
The Beautiful Antonio
ends. Antonio has finally discovered the capacity to express his anger physically. He is ready to go and find Barbara, he announces, and give her a damn good thrashing. The idea at last gets his blood moving. His pecker is up. Written so soon after the collapse of Fascism, the novel itself might be seen as an analogous act of revenge on the writer's part, a virile if belated attack on a society that had treated the author badly. Readers will decide for themselves whether such vindictiveness is a positive development.

O
F THE BACHELOR
S
ICILIANS
who Settled in Rome around the year 1930, eight at the very least, if memory serves aright, rented furnished flats in quiet, out-of-the-way parts of town, and almost all of them by chance in the neighbourhood of famous monuments; of which, however, they never learnt the history or lit upon the beauty, and often they never so much as noticed them. But then, what ever
did
fail to escape the notice of eyes straining to catch a glimpse of the woman they lusted after among the scrum of passengers alighting from a tram? Domes, portals, monumental fountains… Works which, before they were achieved and accomplished, had for years furrowed the brows of Michelangelo and Borromini, could not for a moment catch the attention of the black, roving eyes of these guests from the South. Age-old bells with their mellow, solemn voices, celebrated in the lines of Goethe and of Shelley, earned themselves a
“Chi camurria, 'sta campana
! Damn those bells!” for vibrating with their dawn chorus through the wall against which the young man was resting a brow but recently surrendered to sleep and still red with the imprint of a pair of lips.

The respect which as a chronicler I owe to truth impels me to own that these Sicilian bachelors were not much of an eyeful; except for one, Antonio Magnano, who was an Adonis. In saying this I should not like you to imagine the ugly ones were unattractive to women. On the contrary many of them, despite being of bantam size, with Semitic noses and little-finger nails left long to pick their lugholes clean, appeared to be linked by some deep complicity to the whole of the female race. You
might think that between them and all the women under the sun a disgraceful act had somewhere and at some time taken place. There was not a woman but on first setting eyes on these men seemed to pale and to acknowledge herself bound to them by long-standing and unspeakable moral lapses. Hence their conquests always had a shabby air of blackmail, although (and this I can swear to) these fellows of twenty-five to thirty were of a peerless tenderness and courtesy towards the opposite sex. But upon this earth, for all its mysteries, there is perhaps no more mysterious being than your truly ugly man.

Of quite different stamp were the triumphs of Antonio Magnano. Back in 1932 he was twenty-six years of age, and photographs of him on show in Piazza di Spagna would halt even middle-aged women in their tracks, though laden with shopping and dragging along toddlers in floods of tears with the very hand just used to box their ears. Instant bewitchment streamed from his olive-skinned visage, powerfully blue-tinted on the chin but of extreme sensitivity; the eyes seemed to glint with tears that sat on the uppermost curve of the cheeks, where the shadow of his long lashes would oftentimes abide. In his reticent presence the most jittery, hysterical woman could be seized by one of those yawning fits that discharge nervous tension, prompting her to rise from her chair and stretch out on the sofa, to rise from the sofa and stretch out on the bed. A jaundiced and superficial observer might have consoled himself by saying that women were bored in Antonio's company. What a gross error! Women felt dominated and at the same time perfectly and completely at their ease. When in his presence they sweetly burned, and suffered agonies, and went mad with a pleasure so intense as to make them think themselves possessed by some severe aberration which jumbled up pleasure and pain in that utter lack of discrimination which is the sole state of mind wherein anyone dares to be overheard pronouncing the words “I am happy!”

Antonio's ugly friends looked up to him, and would have envied him too, or perhaps even hated him, had they not
(inspired and influenced by the women they knew) unwittingly fallen in love with him themselves. The secret of those conquests so different from their own, and in fact the exact opposite – since their successes with women seemed wrung from the latter as a result of dirty doings, whereas Antonio's appeared to emanate from some mysterious balm which he conferred on his victims – the secret of those conquests, I say, so greatly intrigued them that they would set the alarm for five to be up and out early, and catch Antonio in the shower. Here they were in for a bitter harvest. Faced with those athlete's limbs tempered by a touch of mild and melancholy pallor, as if, whatever the circumstances, that body were invested by some mystic light, his friends – and first and foremost Luigi d'Agata and Carlo Fischetti – would be assailed by a malaise that cloaked self-loathing. “You know what you look like?” they would ask, to come straight out with a catch-phrase that might otherwise have festered in their bosoms and turned to spite: “Like a fresh-baked biscuit!”

And they would start to thump his bare shoulders, tweak the hairs on his chest, grab him by an ankle and hoist up a foot… but only to find themselves possessed and disconcerted by the vibrations of a body so infinitely strange and undeniably superior in quality.

It has to be admitted that Antonio had provoked similar perturbations from his youth up. It was on April 5th 1922 that his mother and father, Signora Rosaria and Signor Alfio, were compelled to take note of the fact. That was the morning on which the maidservant, a country girl, entered their bedroom with her face all scratched and tear-stained.

“In pity's name, what have you done?” cried the good lady, removing the tray from the girl's trembling hands. “What's been going on? Speak up!”

The poor girl sank her chin on her chest and looked asquint like a goat. Eventually she said, “It wasn't me.”

“Then who was it?” demanded the mistress of the house, more flustered than ever.

“It's your son!” whimpered the girl.

“Antonio?” bawled his father, extracting from the bed two legs which by dint of wriggling under the bedclothes he had managed to sheathe in longjohns. “Right! I'll soon settle
his
hash!”

There ensued a moment's silence. The girl then flung herself on the floor and began writhing and foaming at the mouth, seizing Signor Alfio by the legs as if to deter him from some crime. Just then in came Antonio with an air so sweet and innocent that you could scarcely credit it. The girl at once released her hold on Signor Alfio's legs, rolled across the floor and grabbed the ankles of Antonio, who appeared genuinely astonished, looking questions at his parents: what on earth was all the fuss about? The girl in the meantime pressed her face to Antonio's feet; subsequent, however (and this detail particularly struck his parents, offending them and practically sending them into fits), to tearing off and hurling away his slippers so as to weep and rub her cheeks and nose upon the naked skin.