Beautiful Antonio (22 page)

Antonio knitted his brows as if to concentrate all his scattered wits into a single look, and said, “Hardly ever.”

Ermenegildo was taken aback, but then on the instant leapt heart and soul at the morsel of hope contained in those two words.

“Hardly ever is a different matter from never!” he burst out. “It's a different thing altogether!”

Antonio said nothing.

“Hardly ever, eh?” resumed Ermenegildo with increasing vigour, perhaps trying to encourage himself, “hardly ever can mean a whole heap of things. ‘Never' is one thing and ‘hardly ever' is another. I must confess that even I, on occasion… I don't say always, or even often, but… well, in a word,
sometimes… You can't eat without dropping crumbs, as they say… If you're always in the saddle you must expect to take a tumble sometimes.”

“Uncle!Uncle! Uncle!” cried Antonio, first angry, then desperate, and finally beseeching. “
Please
don't say any more!”

There was a pause.

“All right, I'll shut my trap. But you do a bit of talking instead. Come on, my boy, speak up!”

There was a second pause.

Antonio couldn't get a word out; but from between clenched teeth he let out a soft, continuous hiss, as if he had inhaled enough air to pronounce a non-stop speech of a thousand words, and was giving it forth all skeletal without a single
syllable. In that hiss were exclamations, cries, questions, and even sobs; but all stifled and voiceless.

“No, dear boy, no,” said his uncle. “You've got to speak up clearly, frankly and straight-forwardly. And waste no more time about it, because around seven o'clock my head begins to spin so awfully I can't tell the floor from the ceiling.”

“I mean by ‘hardly ever'…” Antonio suddenly yelled at the top of his voice, “that in that business, I…”

“Softly now, softly,” broke in Ermenegildo in alarm. “We don't want the whole town to know!”

“Let 'em know! Let the whole town know!” shrieked Antonio, writhing and squirming as one trying to struggle free of his bonds. “I, I, I…”

And having gnawed his hands, a wrist and the crook of an arm, he threw himself full length on the bed, clenching his teeth and panting.

His uncle seated himself at the bedside and began to stroke the lad's
forehead, waiting in silence for him to calm down.

Twilight was falling, and the little light from the window no longer succeeded in prevailing over the darkness in the room, when the old gentleman became convinced that Antonio must either be asleep or have fainted away.

But just then a calm voice, a voice entirely bereft of feeling, inflexion, human warmth, a voice which truly seemed the voice of nobody, a dead, impartial voice, rose from the pillow where Antonio's head was laid, eyes closed.

“Hardly ever… yes,” said the voice, coldly repeating the words that had previously been sobbed and screamed. “Until I was eighteen I used to do it in my dreams; then, once, I half did it in a brothel in Via Maddem, and that evening I vomited. That was the 3rd of May, 1924. After that I didn't do it any more, even in dreams, or
even half way, because every time I set out on that path, or when my thoughts, routing around among memories, happened upon that 3rd of May, I had spasms of retching, like seasickness. I remember one day, on a marble table-top in a café, I found two scrawled figures
engaged in the act. I went as white as a sheet and had to rush to the lavatory and splash water on my face. All this time I was madly in love with all women, especially with their faces, their eyes, and their feet. Sometimes, when I spent the night at my grandfather's – it was on the first floor – I only had to hear the tapping of high-heels fading out of earshot to start writhing between the sheets like a deportee locked in the hold of a
ship and listening as the harbour-sounds of his home town, sweetest of serenades, die off into the distance…”

Uncle Ermenegildo closed his eyes. He was gaining from his nephew what his nephew had shortly before received from him: the powerful distraction of an anguish other than his own.

“As regards women,” continued Antonio in the same chill voice, “my situation was this: with all my heart I wanted to throw myself at their feet and roll on the floor begging for mercy.”

“But my dear boy… I don't get it,” said his uncle, venturing his words into the dark. “If I am not mistaken, the women themselves were mad
about you!”

“So you all say,” went on the voice, “but I saw things in a different light. For me, in the eyes of every girl there dwelt an almost sarcastic come-hither, a challenge to get together with her and to be a man. They'd step up flaunting their bosoms with the laughing, swaggering air of approaching an adversary who has them covered with an unloaded pistol. Maybe I got it wrong…”

“You certainly did!” declared his uncle, less to provide comfort than simply to interrupt that frigid, monotone voice.

“In Rome, in 1930 it was, a strange thing happened to me. The evening of the day I arrived, after having a larger dinner and drinking more than usual, I went to
a brothel, and before I'd had time to feel frightened or nauseated I succeeded in being a man…”

“You did? Ah, good, very good, by Jove!”

“It seemed too incredible to be true, and I left the place reeling around for joy, and kissing all the walls and the doors
between the scene of my victory and Piazza San Silvestro. That night I dreamt I was doing it over again, and let out such a cry that the landlady came running in her dressing-gown. Then it was I realized that the smiles bestowed on me by women, which I had thought to be a sardonic challenge, were, on
the contary, signs of the most genuine rapture. And now I understood the expression I had seen on the landlady's face twelve hours earlier (and interpreted as one of disagreeable, sneering curiosity) to be the very evident effect of a desire conceived the moment she saw me, to meet me on terms of greater intimacy. This I knew from the flush of pleasure that spread over her cheeks as she came into the room, and the promptness with which she'd scurried there, as if the desire to accomplish that act had put her in a condition to get down to it there and then… I'm not going to claim I was very enterprising that night. I was sated, and had to wait at least six days for this to wear off. A week later, in fact, I was able to
pleasure both my landlady and myself. The following day I had to feign illness, not being able to think of any other way to justify breaking off our relationship.

“That was the most glorious period of my life. I was twenty-four, the women were besotted over me, and I, once a week, was able to make one of them swoon with delight. The very next day began the lies and subterfuges because at all costs I had to avoid going back and sleeping with the lady… How many times I fled to Naples and a hotel on the sea-front, to be tormented by the mandolins outside the restaurants and the smack of kisses from behind closed doors, while I waited for my desire, spread so evenly throughout my body as to seep placidly from my hand whenever I shook that of a woman, to condense into the place which is made for it… I have never mentioned these things to anyone, but I've written them down and copied them out countless times on sheets of paper which I then burnt: by now I know them by heart. And I must say that when I did ever think of a person in whom I could confide, that person was you.”

His uncle silently squeezed Antonio's hand.

“I was happy that year,” continued the voice. “I was even arrogantly full of myself. Once a week? So what! I felt like a bull! What's more, that sensation, though rare, was so powerful that the day before experiencing it I got into a state of excitement unknown to most, be they even in the act of undressing the object of their desire for the first time; and for two days afterwards I still had the taste of honey in my blood, and if I saw, or touched, or heard anything truly throbbing with life, it held such sweetness for me that I nearly fainted. Ah, how lovely was life! how lovely it was!”

There followed a pause which Ermenegildo did not dare to intrude on.

“That May,” continued the voice, “I happened to set eyes on a German girl with her fiancé, a young Viennese officer, sitting at a café in the Villa Borghese. Both were of such beauty that the couples around them had an air of humiliation and mourning: not a man or woman among them dared hazard a caress, or even hold hands, for fear it might seem that by so doing they entered into some pretentious and ridiculous rivalry with those two sublime foreigners.”

“Well, in point of good looks,” put in his uncle, “you didn't leave much to be desired yourself!”

“Yes I… well anyway… But if you'd seen that Viennese officer you'd have gone weak at the knees.”

“To tell the truth, I'm not in the habit of giving men the once-over. But let that go. What was
she
like?”

“She was tall, with rose-coloured hair…”

“Rose-coloured? What the devil?…”

“It would have been reddish in anyone else. But hers was so ravishing it seemed rose-coloured. Her eyes were azure, but her gaze was as if dusted
over by the finest of fragrant powders, and I could scent the perfume of it…”

“What the blazes is he on about?” muttered Ermenegildo under his breath.

“… Fine, firm breasts, perfect legs, long, with knees that
made themselves apparent through any garment as if they were luminous. Luminous her belly too, it seemed to me… and that recess between the legs which in the past had made me vomit, but appeared to me now to gleam like a priceless treasure.”

Ermenegildo felt a tremor run down his spine.

“Here's a fine thing!” he thought to himself. “Even at my age, just the mention of it… while this unfortunate youngster…”

“Every afternoon without fail I went to the café, the Casina Valadier, and there I always found the German couple. I affected to be admiring the panorama of Rome spread at my feet, but my shoulder-blades saw her, the hairs on the nape of my neck saw her, and my heart felt as if it had done a right-about-turn, so that the view below me acquired a
positive feeling of pathos, as might a landscape before the eyes of a corpse.

“After a couple of weeks I found the German girl alone. Almost slouched in her wicker chair, her hands in her jacket pockets, sun glasses on her nose and half an inch more leg showing than usual. I plucked up courage to look at her, though very shamefacedly because her fiancé, now that he was absent, seemed to me a veritable god, and the deep blue shadow immersing the empty chair beside her to be projected by that gentleman from some seat in the heavens.”

“The way you do go on!” exclaimed Ermenegildo. Then he stubbornly repeated: “In point of good looks, you didn't leave much to be desired yourself, by Jove!”

“There you go again! I tell you that girl's fiancé would have made the carved image of a saint swivel on her litter and the whole procession behind her too!”

“Oh all right, have it your own way,” grumbled Ermenegildo, bitten by his long-standing resentment against any man who began to get on his nerves. “So you gave her a look…”

“I looked at her, yes.”

“And what about her? Did she look back?”

“She did more than that. She spoke to me!”

“Damn it!” muttered Ermenegildo, under his breath, feeling his heart miss a beat, as it was wont to do when he still had his health.

“She said, ‘Excuse me, signore. Are you coming here alvays?' I answered ‘Yes', hardly believing my ears. Christ alive, I thought, is it really possible this girl is interested enough in me to speak the first word? And with a fiancé before whom she ought to light votive candles night and day?”

“Skip all that. Get down to brass tracks.”

“Her name was Ingeborg, but at home they called her Ing; and as she'd been in Paris her French friends pronounced this Ange… The result was I called her Angel.”

“The way you do go on!” repeated
Ermenegildo, this time to himself.

“Her fiancé had gone back to Vienna, and she sat near me reading his long letters, reddening as if someone were kissing her before my very eyes. ‘Good news?' I asked, and she gave a ghost of a smile and thrust her hand into her pocket, letter and all. I was so dominated by that vision-of-a-man that I would have preferred to talk
to her of nothing else, but she changed the subject every time.”

“All well and good,” broke in his uncle, “but didn't you try to get somewhere with her?”

“No I didn't, in spite of the fact that, as I said, I felt full to the brim with lust, like a ram. Every three days I spent the afternoon with one of the
girls I had already formally abandoned – who'd be overcome by an out-and-out fit of hysterics at unexpectedly finding my head on her pillow again. I don't know if you noticed I said
every three days,
but indeed this miracle had happened: I no longer needed to wait a whole week for the tastiest of fruits to ripen on my bough. My happiness was so naïve that I attributed this miracle to the fact that I was in the papal city; and one day,
when I went with Ing to a public audience in the Vatican, while we were kneeling before
the Pontiff and Ing was praying aloud to heaven to grant harmony between herself and her fiancé, I silently thanked the Vicar of Christ for the boon which his city had bestowed on me.

“When we left the Vatican I remembered Ing's prayer. ‘What's this?' I asked, ‘don't you get on with your fiancé?' ‘Oh yes,' she replied. ‘Ve see the same vay about everything. Ve like the same books, the same miusic, the same peektures, the same strheets, the same bloomps, and he is ver' good and kayind. And he is zo beautifall…' At this point I read on her lips a
but
as sombre as the tomb itself.”

“Well then? Did you get your end away or not?” cried Uncle Ermenegildo, losing patience.

“One evening we'd gone for a ride in a horse-drawn cab,” continued the voice, as cold and unruffled as that of an automaton, “and I couldn't see her face, and not seeing her face, nor did I see her fiancé's, which until then, in my mind, I had always envisaged close to hers…'