Beautiful Antonio (21 page)

“The present princess is as barren as a mule,” proceeded
Ermenegildo. “No one had any luck with her: not the first barrel nor the second. It's as if she'd been salted and dried. That's why the relatives have given the second son permission to marry and have offspring into the bargain.”

“Offspring! What, him? That suet-belly!” cried Signor Alfio. “Why, I've heard that whenever he visits a… certain house… they bolt the doors and don't allow anyone else in, because he comes over all wheezy and you can hear him puffing and blowing in all the rest of the rooms and on the staircase too.”

“And you, Alfio,” put in Signora Rosaria bitterly, “for the sharpness of your tongue, and having a bad word to say for everyone, have been punished by the Almighty! And now the blight has been visited upon our son.”

“Blight? What blight?” shrieked Signor Alfio, quite beside himself. “So now
you're
taking their side, are you?
My
son has a cock that could drill a hole through stone!… Gildo,” he continued, in tones of supplication, “after lunch tomorrow I'll take this one out and leave you alone with him. Gildo, you'll be Christ returned to earth in my eyes if you manage to get him to open up that clam of a mouth of his and tell you the truth, the whole truth, whatever it may be.”

“I'll have a shot at it,” returned that gentleman. “Though I'd do better to go straight to hospital, rather than try such treatment!”

So after lunch the following day the two old people left the flat, accompanied by the maid, who went ahead of them down the dark staircase perpetually muttering, “Take care, madam, there's another step to come.”

Uncle and nephew were in the house alone.

“Now look what I've let myself in for,” snorted Ermenegildo, left to himself. “Don't I have troubles enough of my own, what with this rat gnawing at my guts, and the way I can't breathe, and the spots before my eyes, and the rest of the devilish crew that's getting at me?… Oh well, chin up!”

He approached Antonio's door, and finding it ajar he gave it a gentle prod and poked his head in.

Antonio lay propped on the bed, visibly relieved at having heard his parents go out and the house divesting itself of people suffering on his account.

When Ermenegildo entered, Antonio's face clouded somewhat.

“I stayed in,” his uncle hastened to say, rather apologetically, “because that pain in the neck Marraro has taken a month's leave from the Town Hall and at this time of day doesn't know what to do with himself, so he stands there on the pavement like a rooster on a dungheap, all poised to bore the pants off any acquaintance who happens to pass by. There's a strong chance the Party Sec. will descend on Via Etnea too, along with all those skunks who lick his boots, and if I so much as set eyes on them it poisons my bloodstream. I'll go out later on… Can you bear my company for a while?”

“Of course, dear uncle,” replied Antonio. “You're welcome to stay as long as you like.”

“In that case, with your permission, I'll take a seat in this comfy chair.”

Antonio gave a slight nod of assent and smiled weakly.

Uncle Ermenegildo reached over to the table, picked up a hefty volume and started leafing through it. Then, laying it down again, he asked, “Would you object to my smoking my pipe?”

Antonio raised his head, gave his assent, and smiled weakly. Then he closed his eyes and, abandoning himself exclusively to the care of that prematurely aged gentleman, received the comfort which an afflicted person feels in the company of another whom he judges to be in an even worse state than himself.

“The world's an ugly place,” began Ermenegildo, sensing that the more he made of his own demoralization the more likely he would be to gain Antonio's confidence. “Yes, it's an
ugly place…” He broke off, as the latter still kept his eyes closed.

“I'm not asleep,” said Antonio, without opening them. “In fact it's a pleasure to have someone to listen to. Tell me where you've been.”

“Where've I been, eh? I've been where I never ought to have been. To Spain, for my sins. And I've taken stock of my contemporaries and mankind in general. They're an ugly lot, Antonio my lad, and believe me, by the love you bear your mother, they put the fear of God into me!”

He waited for his nephew to open his eyes, but as this did not occur he relit his spent pipe and continued.

“Don't ask me who's right and who's wrong, or which of these two principles will win out in the end. People hide their opinions in their heads, so I didn't see them. What I did see was that both sides were quite ready and willing to butcher, burn and make mincemeat of Jesus Christ in person, and that if you get on the wrong side of them, then prepare yourself to scream a scream of pain such as you never thought the bowels of a human being could bring forth!”

He crossed to the window, opened it, spat outside, closed it again and returned to his seat.

“You simply can't conceive the sort of suffering they are capable of inflicting on a man's flesh. A square centimetre of your skin suffices them to let all hell loose in you. There's no courage on earth could withstand it, my lad. I'm no coward, but I assure you no courage could withstand it. Christian Culture, Social Justice: fine words! Both the one and the other of inestimable good to mankind. But take a look at the contorted faces of the carcasses they leave to rot for days on end in pot-holes, or drive lorries over to obliterate all traces of their features, and tell me if that's the way to provide for the good of mankind! Even these carcasses were once men, for God's sake, and that's all they got for their pains. Now, you'll tell me it's all being done for posterity… But even the men of tomorrow will think of the future, and want to do something
for
their
posterity, so they'll butcher each other like our own contemporaries. To this type of do-gooding there is no end. No, Antonio, believe you me, mankind gives me the jitters and nightly nightmares too.”

“You've got a nervous breakdown for
your
pains,” said Antonio affectionately. “You ought to take sleeping pills so as not to dream at night.”

“Call it what you will. You can even call it a nervous breakdown. But as for dreamless slumbers, I can't manage them any more, not even with doses of veronal verging on suicide. My brain doesn't close off well any more – like an old shutter hanging loose on its hinges that lets through hundreds of threads of light. And would it were only light! But there's the din as well, and the talk – pandemonium in fact… Why did I have a mind to see them for myself, those abominable creatures? Did anyone force me to go, for God's sake? No, I simply wanted to know who was in the right and who in the wrong, and all I found out was that they're an abomination, every striking one of them! What a handsome profit I made from my travels! Handsome's scarcely the word for it! Three cheers! I congratulate myself!… By good luck my heart is enlarged, my lungs are shrunk, and everything leads me to believe that next Sant' Agata's day you'll watch the fireworks without me.”

“Come off it, uncle, don't go on like that. I'm convinced it'll be you to walk us all to the graveyard,” murmured Antonio, though without opening his eyes.

“No, no, don't rob me of my only comfort. If I'm going to get off to sleep at night I need to think that death is sitting at my bedside. It's the only thought that brings me a little peace of mind. Without it all is anxiety, terror, insomnia and cold sweats. No Antonio, I'm telling you: in a few months' time I shall be the lucky one. Revolution will touch me no longer, any more than Reaction will. Fascism, Communism… they already leave me cold. Whichever wins, neither of those bully-bullies will be able to get at me again, to rob me either of bread
or breath. No one will ever again wrench my guts into that scream which many a time, when at home and alone, I have sought to imitate in front of the mirror, hoping perhaps to solace myself with the thought that it
is
within human capacity: sought to, yes, but always in vain. From which I have deduced how bestial the suffering must be, which instructs a man in it all at one fell swoop!”

Antonio opened his eyes, feeling a tender affection for this man so mellowed by the yearning for death.

“But let's hear about you now,” said his uncle. “What's up with you? Although, to be perfectly honest, I know what's up with you. Easy enough to see… I know perfectly well what's up with you… But everyone here's wondering why? how? what happened?… Well it's not hard to guess, and I don't need you to tell me. I really don't. Anyway, you're not letting on – so I'll do the talking.”

Ermenegildo broke off, to see if his nephew would decide to spill the beans; but as Antonio remained silent he continued:

“I'll do all the talking… I'll give you the whole picture with all the trimmings. All you have to do is listen. You've been going it too hot and strong, my lad. I remember you in Rome – that air of burning the candle at both ends. The way they used to come and go in your flat there might have been a corpse laid out in the parlour! But every single visitor to the catafalque was a woman, and there on the catafalque were you, stretched out like a dead man, I'll grant you that, but as lively as sin and always ready to start again. Those girls, passing at the hall door, regal as queens, every one of them – and you could scarcely fob them off with an ‘I like your pretty face', could you now?

“I remember that coming down the stairs one day I passed one of them going up, and the mere fact that I stopped to give her the once-over made her turn away as if she'd seen a heap of sicked-up spaghetti. But she wasn't snooty for long, I'll warrant! Aha! She was at your feet ready and willing to have you trample all over her sweet innocent features… But then,
you saw more than your fair share of that… Always so abstracted, always gazing towards the window as if you were meditating on the souls in purgatory… You'd yawn, and sometimes turn them down and their pants got hotter than ever, and who knows what endearments and caresses and sacrifices you had from them. They led you into bad habits. They spoilt you… And one fine day, when you found yourself with a wife who was a bit stand-offish, a bit stiff, a bit on her high horse, well you got it up your nose, and turned your back on her, and slept for three years with your face to the wall, thinking of the girls in Rome.”

Antonio cast a lightning glance at his uncle's face, then once more lowered his lashes.

“So now, tell me: have I put my finger on the spot?” continued his uncle. “I envied you, of course, very bitterly, at a time when I still fancied women. And Lord, how I fancied them! How I fancied them! But the day came when I got sick even of that. ‘Is it possible,' I thought to myself, ‘is it possible that I have to go on, after so many years that I barely recollect the first time, is it possible that I have to go on and on, mindlessly filling holes in flesh with other flesh?' And, for crying out loud, it's always the same thing! Even if you go to bed with the queen herself, it's the same thing. It starts the same way and it ends the same way. And if you go with an unwashed hunchback, no difference whatsoever: it starts the same way and it ends the same way. Apart from the fact that now I haven't even strength enough in me to die… But anyway, leaving aside my troubles, which are as they may be, tell me honestly, haven't I just given a picture of you stripped and flayed?”

“No,” said Antonio.

“No, eh?…”

“No!”

“Well then, let's hear it. What
is
the truth?”

Antonio sat bolt upright on the bed and wrung his hands.

“The truth?” he said. “The truth?… You really want to know the truth?”

“Certainly I do!”

“Then what?”

“Then nothing in particular. Stop wringing your hands like that, will you! Well… then we'll see.”

“Uncle… uncle…” stammered out Antonio, rising from the bed and pacing to and fro, pale as a ghost, “you're not going to believe it, but I…”

“But you?…”

“I… I… I wish I'd never been born!”

“You
say such a thing, Antonio? You, of all people? Leave that sort of thing to me, it's right up my street.”

“Why's it up your street? Because you've seen what fiends men are, seen them cut each other up and kill each other. I couldn't care less if they do go on like that. There's something else they do that I… that I…” Again his voice rose in a shrill crescendo on the word he couldn't tear himself away from: “That I, that I…” then falling to a barely audible whisper… “something I have never done!”

The old gentleman shook like an aspen.

“Never done?” he quavered. And getting to his feet he went over to Antonio, whose back was turned, and tried every which-way to turn the young man round and get a glimpse of the splendid visage which he had so often envied for the effect it had on women.

“Never done?” he repeated. “Did I hear aright? Did you say
never done?”

Antonio made no answer. His whole body was rigid with agony and his uncle failed to force him into turning.

“Antonio, I beg of you, look me in the face! I'm your uncle, for God's sake, and a reasonable person. You can't be afraid of an old man like me!”

Antonio wheeled slowly, and slowly, as the sunken cheek, the sweaty, pinched nose, the hollow eye-sockets were sketched in the glimmer of light from the window, the old
gentleman felt all hope of having got the wrong end of the stick, or having been misled by an overstatement, freeze in his breast.

“But Antonio,” he declared, “I feel as if I'd been pole-axed! Can you be telling me the truth?”

A deathly pallor, spreading over the young man's face, made answer for him.

“Never?” Ermenegildo pressed him. “You really mean
never?
”