Beautiful Antonio (25 page)

There was a pause during which his uncle dared not utter his usual “Get on with it then!”

“The moment I arrived in Catania my father spoke to me of the girl they wished to make my wife. Just imagine! Some chance of my being in a position to think of marriage! But one day, as I was standing on the pavement in Via Etnea lending an ear to Salinitro the chemist relating a judgement of my friend Angelo's – and I remember it all as if it were yesterday – I saw Barbara Puglisi passing by with her mother. My dear uncle, the Almighty must have fancied a joke at my expense! For as Barbara drew close, and I saw her green eyes and the flush on her cheeks, I was so overcome I had a rush of blood to the head. I was rooted to the spot.”

“You don't say! After all this?”

“Yes, after all this. I don't tell lies, you know that. The same evening I went to my parents' room, sat on the edge of their bed, and announced my resolve to marry Barbara. I can't tell you how happy they were…”

“What a mess!” sighed Ermenegildo. “What a bloody awful mess! On the other hand, you're right… If merely setting eyes on her… The good Lord certainly pulls a fast one sometimes, there's no denying it… Forgive me for asking, though, but
while you were engaged, when you were together, and a kiss or something of the kind was bound to crop up – although in a house like theirs, stuffed with monks and crucifixes, I'm sure
I
wouldn't have the courage even to go to the lavatory… As I was saying, during your engagement, that is, while you were engaged, didn't you have a chance to, er… see how things were shaping up for you?”

“Uncle, in that house stuffed with monks and crucifixes, as you put it, in the presence of the notary and his wife, who never took their eyes off us, beneath the scrutiny of so many other dead notaries and monks glaring down from their frames, and several curious stains on the walls and ceilings that also gave an impression of being the eyes of the house, and the saints, gaze upturned to the heavens, but who none the less saw us as in a mirror; in that atmosphere pregnant with respect, devoutness and high principles, where every Sunday the maids kissed the hands of their employers, the children those of their parents, and the parents that of the monkish brother, and no one entertained a thought that was not irreproachably upright… and the clothes in which the women were encased looked at you with buttons like the eyes of rabid dogs, and you really thought that if you dared unbutton a single one of them your hand would be bitten, lacerated and torn to pieces; well, in that house…”

“In that house?… For goodness' sake get a move on!”

“In that house I was almost always in a state of feeling ashamed of myself. But it was not a crestfallen, gloomy kind of shame. On the contrary it was of the glad, proud sort. And the fear that this might be found out closely resembled a hope and a desire that it would be… and the shiverings, the queasy turns, the dizzy fits, the shooting pains that stabbed at my back and the nape of my neck around midnight with their stiletto sharpness forced something deeper and deeper into my flesh, something that glittered and shone like a diamond and stayed within me all night long, flooded my dreams and my blood with light… Uncle, I tell you, it was happiness!”

“Very good, very good, this is excellent news. Tell on.”

“Barbara is the most beautiful girl in the world.”

“You really mean that?”

“Barbara is the most beautiful girl in the world!”

“If you say so…”

“When we were married, and I saw those arms of hers, and a bit of a knee, and all the other beauties that stirred beneath the lace of her nightdress… and when I saw the ineffable light cast upon her face, and even her eyes, by the modesty of those first moments of intimacy with a man, and I harkened to that serious head of hers, and heard a little girl's thoughts going round inside it, all the more naïve the more we were left to our own devices, well you can't imagine, uncle, how exciting it can be to a chap…”

“All right, all right, it's exciting. Get a move on then. What happened next?”

“Dear uncle, what happened next is what had happened five years before with Ingeborg.”

“You stagger me!”

“That's the way it was, uncle.”

“You mean…
exactly
what happened five years before?”

“Well, not exactly. This time it wasn't a total freeze-up of my body… It was more as if at the moment of climax everything evaporated and went up in smoke: as if my flesh complete with blood and nerves and all had arrived at boiling point and then dissolved in sweat and steam.”

“Ah, what tricks the good Lord has up his sleeve, indeed he has! And so, poor boy, you're telling me that this time too…”

Antonio stared at the opposite wall without the flicker of an eyelid.

“But tell me, dear boy, why didn't you take immediate measures?”

“Measures? What sort of measures?”

“Leave your wife at once, before she got a whiff of the truth. Dear boy, you should have taken the initiative!”

“But how?”

“Well, for example, made off with a peasant girl, or a woman hoicked out of a brothel.”

“I can't think that would have been the proper way to behave.”

“Absolutely not. It would have been the conduct of an out-and-out blackguard.”

“So you see my point? But apart from that I was really happy with Barbara. I was full of all sorts of curious delights and hopes.”

“Even after…?”

“Yes, even after that.”

“I can't understand you.”

“Barbara was not Ingeborg. As far as Ingeborg was concerned, after what happened happened, I was left with a feeling of terror, and if I'd ever come across her again I would have fainted away as surely as if I'd seen my own corpse pass in front of me eyelids closed and all. But it wasn't that way with Barbara. No. I felt her moral sense to be positively majestic – she instilled in me respect for all the churches she had frequented before her marriage. But as far as relations with men were concerned she was spotless as a clean sheet of paper. She knew nothing, she asked nothing, she blushed continually, and whenever I put my arms around her she clung tightly round my neck so that I should be the one to defend her from what I might be about to reveal to her. Like a stubborn child, she went on turning her back on a fact that she had never even encountered. Well uncle, it was a fact
I
was not in a position to reveal to her, but I pretended to believe that I was behaving that way because Barbara was begging me to do so. At the same time, by her side I was neither frigid nor frightened, let alone disgusted. My blood boiled and my head seethed with intense excitement, but this, at a certain point, leaked out through the pores of my skin and was lost in the air, leaving me with the sort of dispersed, ineffectual pleasure that children have in dreams, shortly before they lose their innocence.”

“Pleasant and pleasurable, certainly, pleasant and pleasurable…
but for a day, or a week, or a month – not for three years!”

“But uncle, I was always hoping that things would buck up. I got more and more excited. I was like a car revving up faster and faster but never able to budge.”

“So what then? You threw in the sponge and cocked a snook at the lot of them?”

“Not a bit. As I got more and more worked up, so I grew happier and happier. I could already feel the first inklings, the first real seethings, dawning in Barbara's mind. This girl who, without committing the least misdeed, always in herself irreproachable and upright, was allowing the forebodings of sin to encroach upon the sacred images that filled her thoughts; this girl who, when she got into bed with me, blushed redder and redder every evening and remained for hours on end with a face of flame upon the pillow… uncle, what could I do? This girl made my head spin. Though it's a fact,” he added at once, “that her turmoil became particularly noticeable after the maid – a stupid woman whom we were forced to sack – had explained a good few things to her.”

“What?” burst out his uncle. “You mean to say you
knew
that Barbara was in the know?”

“After her conversation with the maid I took my courage in both hands and confessed everything in the minutest detail, as I have to you, uncle. I then asked her if she wanted to go on living with me or to separate.”

“And her answer?”

“She threw her arms around my neck and kissed me in a way I shall never forget. She said we ought to continue to live as close in each other's embrace as two angels. But when she came to bed that night she was scarlet in the face, and I could read her heartbeat in the ribbons knotted on her bosom. Thus started a new period. She found it hard to get to sleep at night, and lay there, as I told you, with her face aflame on the pillow, turned towards me but with eyes tight shut. Every so often she would open them and look me straight in the face, and they
were shining with love, curiosity and joyous premonitions: at which I really and truly began to think that the miracle of 1930 might be repeated, since it was this devout girl who asked it of me nightly in the purest and warmest manner possible. So life slid by very happily and lovingly until suddenly her father, her mother, and she herself, I don't quite know why…”

“No,” cried his uncle, leaping from the easy chair, “Don't say another word! You know why, and so does everyone else. I've been patient and let you talk, but at this point no, that's enough, I refuse to appear any dumber than I am. You know why Barbara decided to cut and run, you know it very well. I bided my time while you were painting that glowing portrait of your wife. ‘No doubt she is as he says,' I thought to myself, ‘beautiful, chaste, innocent etc., but what price the avarice, the coldness, the calculation she's inherited from her family? Let's see what he says about that! He won't dare deny that she's a self-seeking girl, a girl who well knows which side her bread is buttered, prepared to sacrifice everything except financial advantage. When she sees wealth it dazzles her, as a fish trapped by the light of a jack-lamp rises to the surface as good as gold and can be caught in the palm of the hand. He won't dare deny this, by God! If he does, it means that he takes me for a nincompoop, and I don't have any truck with people who take me for a nincompoop!'”

Antonio allowed his uncle's tantrum to subside with the indolent air of someone who has foreseen a tiresome event and then sees it happen.

“Uncle,” he murmured at length, “you speak the gospel truth: Barbara is a self-seeking girl, a girl with her head screwed on. So shall I tell you something? That I like even this side of her…”

“Well, in that case,” snorted Ermenegildo, “it's useless to go on discussing it. But how come,” he added, stabbing at him with a finger and raising his voice wrathfully, “how come this woman promises to live with you like a cherub with a seraph, tells you that you'll be as happy together and as close
as two peas in a pod, hugs you and kisses you and gives you loving looks all night long, and then kicks you out on the spot like a mangy dog?”

“Uncle, please! No one kicked me out, I left of my own accord. Barbara didn't take her decision on the spot, as you say she did: she's a true, honest, scrupulous Catholic, not one of those who claim to be Catholics and then go their own way. When she promised to go on living with me she didn't yet know that the Church considers a marriage like ours null and void: she hadn't yet spoken to the Archbishop of Catania…”

“Fool, fool, fool,” bellowed the old man. “Such a fool it needs me to tell you you're a fool! Don't you realize you're behaving like a babe in arms, the way they're exploiting you? All your fine perspicacity they're ready and willing to gobble up in two mouthfuls. The Archbishop, the Church… What you ought to say is the Duca Di Bronte, the Duca Di Bronte, the Duca Di Bronte with the buttocks of an abbess and broad acres in La Piana!”

Antonio heaved his legs off the bed. He seemed to shrink into himself. In the opening of his pyjama jacket his chest looked skinnier; the delicate whites of his eyes were shot with red.

“Well anyway,” he said, “I love Barbara, I always have loved her, and since I've not been seeing her I've been going mad with love for her.”

“In that case,” broke in his uncle disgustedly, “why not crawl under her door and implore her to do you the favour of allowing you to stay in the kitchen to keep the mice down, instead of the usual old grass-snake they use.”

Antonio shrank into himself still more. All his nobler qualities (not noticeable in what he said or, to be honest, in his manner of comportment), shone forth in his face.

“You don't understand me,” he said. And restoring his legs to the bed he lay down again.

“Not understand you? Why d'you think I'm calling you fool, fool and fool again, if not because I
do
understand you?”

“I would not go back to Barbara, not even if she came licking the ground right up to my door in front of the whole of Catania. I'm in love with her, yes, madly in love with her, and behind her back I'd kiss the ground she walks on, but from these lips speaking to you now Barbara will never hear her name again.”

In due order his uncle repeated to himself these last words of Antonio's: “From these lips speaking to you now Barbara will never hear her name again.”

“Fine!” he cried, “That's as fine as could be! That's the way for a man to talk! It's absolutely essential not to give those chisellers a chance to crow!… Instead,” he added after a pause, “let us think about what to do next. What shall I say to your father? The poor fellow believes that matters went quite differently. Who's to tell him that?…”

He broke off.

“What gets my goat,” he resumed, “is that tomorrow people will be making a meal of our private affairs. They won't credit it in one of our family, who have always been the cuckold-makers and never the cuckolds, and no one, thank God, not even the fellow who prides himself on being cock of the roost, can brag about having got a foot in
our
door. And even you, for heaven's sake, the women were scrimmaging to get at you, you had them on such tenterhooks… or so at least I thought, and so did everyone…”