Beautiful Antonio (28 page)

“Use the car, for goodness' sake. Until I'm replaced I'm still mayor of Catania!”

After lunching in silence with his wife and his five children he sat down at his desk and penned the following letter to Count K:

Your Excellency,

I wish to inform you promptly of an episode which occurred today at the headquarters of the Fascist Federation, an episode in which I behaved intemperately. In the course of a discussion on foreign policy, of which you are etc., etc., I perhaps yielded too much to the feeling of intense admiration which I have for our LEADER.

As you know, I cannot permit that the Führer be considered as of the same moral and intellectual standard as the DUCE. Whenever I think I perceive some such intention in the pronouncements of others, I, Your Excellency, lose control of myself and react with violence.

Today, at Headquarters, I seemed to discern that the officials of the Party ingenuously considered Hitler to be the main protagonist of present events. I say “ingenuously” because the comrades here in Catania are attached by profound devotion to the DUCE, to your own person, and to His Majesty the King and Emperor. But their ingenuousness wounded me deeply. Your Excellency, I could not restrain myself, and I reminded them in no uncertain terms of the mutilation of which the German leader was a victim during the late war, in which (let it be said) our own superb troops were resplendent for their valour – a mutilation in itself glorious, but which sets the Führer, even physically, on a level below that on which soars the figure of our DUCE.

I will not say that the Secretary denied the difference in stature between the two men, but he was too warm in
the defence of Hitler, so that at a certain point in the discussion he stooped to the use of strong words offensive to family honour.

Your Excellency, I am not accusing anyone! I will go further: I excuse them all and accuse only myself.

Thinking over what was said, and the whole course of that dispute, I am obliged to recognize that I am suffering from nervous strain, and that my love for the DUCE renders me so liable to irritation that I am unable to serve him with serenity at a time when HE has seen fit to take to his bosom another leader a fraction of himself in stature, but at whose side he has declared he will march
to the very end
.

For this reason I make so bold as to offer you my resignation as mayor of Catania, and offer it to you, Your Excellency, rather than to the Minister of Internal Affairs, begging you to consider me the most grateful and devoted servant of the DUCE and of your own person.

With Fascist respects etc.

This letter was reckoned by Edoardo's relations to be a model of diplomacy. The manner in which he expounded the facts was the only one which could save him from expulsion from the Party and maybe even banishment.

But no sooner had he posted it than he fell a prey to gloomy thoughts.

“Is it fair that I have to lie in order to tell the truth?” he grumbled to himself, slipping down a side-street in an attempt to hide his tracks from some fellow who had been tailing him for three days, who switched his eyes skywards, adopting the air of a lover or a contemplator of clouds each time his quarry turned to observe him. “Is it fair that to show how much Hitler disgusts me I should have to choke back everything his crony arouses in me? True, I've achieved my aim: I've resigned as mayor. The position I so set my heart on I've thrown to the dogs. But in order to reject this honour which would make
millions of Italians delirious with joy I've had to demean myself as if I were a toady. Evil times indeed, when even pride has the vile taste of its opposite!”

Once more he took to tramping the empty avenues in the midnight hours, and to the rare passers-by who flashed an open palm in salute before his eyes with a “Your Worship!” he replied, “I'm no longer the mayor. I've resigned.”

His step was impatient, and he turned over strange and terrible things in his mind… Tomorrow, at dawn, he would send a second letter to Count K: “Dear Sir, You will doubtless have realized that my previous letter was written in the style of convention and stupidity. But to prevent any misunderstandings arising between us, I will tell you the real reason which induced me to resign as mayor of Catania. It is that Fascism, the Duce, the Führer, and you yourself, Count K, provoke in me a profound sense of nausea which at long last I have the strength not to fight down. For years I lacked this strength, because the very air we breathe infects our lungs with fatalism and falsehood; for years I have gone about in my mayoral uniform, and the people, seeing me through the windows of the official car, with the gilded eagle on my brow, have been at liberty to salute me with the most servile of salutes and to preserve an image of me to carry home and scoff at at leisure and with impunity. But those times are over. The man now writing to you is no longer afraid, as you see, to call you
lei
*
and address you as plain Sir etc., etc…”

At this point the voices of his wife and children screamed in his ears… No, such a letter would be useless folly; no paper would publish it, no one would think it credible. He himself would be thrown into prison on a charge of having, say, demanded three hundred thousand lire from an engineering company to allot them the contract to build a road… His imagination changed tack, and he was a man three thousand metres high, exactly the height of Mount Etna. Each stride of
such a man would be two kilometres long. Two hundred and fifty strides and he is already in sight of Rome. The guns thunder against him, their shells barely prick his skin, he squashes the aircraft between his palms like bothersome mosquitoes. Sweeping a foot to right and to left he tramples and scatters the army attempting to bar his passage. Now he is bending over Rome, inserting one hand with difficulty into the narrow crevice of Via Nomentana in an attempt to catch a car dashing hither and thither like an ant, carrying within it an insect even smaller than itself. At last he manages to grasp it with thumb and two fingers and, straightening up again, lifts it to the height of Mount Etna itself, on a level with his eyes. He removes from it a tiny little kicking figure which he immediately places under a vast magnifying glass. He makes out the insignia of the Chief Marshal of the Empire, absolutely minute and totally invisible to the naked eye…

A voice broke into his reverie: “My respects, Your Worship!”

His heart jumped into his mouth.

“Goodnight,” he replied, “however I am no longer…”

Disgust and discouragement pulled him up short. What was the good of telling a night-owl that he had resigned? That poor fellow, stunned with lack of sleep and years of hard work, long since incapable of believing in the courage and altruism of his compatriots, would he fancy cudgelling his brains in order to understand that the administrator of his city had really and truly resigned, had not been kicked out, and that the futile reason which he had given for resigning hid another and far more profound one? Certainly not. So how
was
he to behave? Edoardo struggled and strove like a tunnyfish trapped in the nets. What ought he to do? What ought he to say? Was it possible that in this damned society even an act of the most magnanimous wrath ended up as bowings and scrapings?

Even before receiving Count K's answer to his letter he considered himself a private citizen and no longer went to
the Town Hall. When secretaries telephoned him at home he invariably replied, “I am no longer mayor.”

“But Your Worship…”

“No longer, I tell you!”

“For me you'll always be my mayor.”

“I order you not to think of me as mayor!”

“But Your Worship…”

To settle the matter once and for all, he began to frequent the apartment of the Socialist lawyer Raimondo Bonaccorsi, around whom gathered a group of anti-Fascist “non-cardholders” who had left their thumb-prints in the police files.

His host was a man who, except at meetings and in the lawcourts, had always spoken in a hushed voice, as if destined from birth to be the opponent of a regime with flapping ears. This thoughtful, hesitant man dominated his listeners with wisdom of the old school, rummaging at length in his beard before finding a yes or a no, and making it understood that beyond the obvious and facile arguments of his restless friends there were others; to be found not in the books and newspapers they were in the habit of reading, but in more venerable newspapers, and books exceeding rare, on the extremely distant fringes of culture which his mind alone was capable of embracing.

The first evening Edoardo went to Avvocato Bonaccorsi's apartment the company kept their eye on him as a suspicious character. But within three days he had won all hearts.

The old anti-Fascists had been reduced to a sorry plight by endless disappointments. The habit of failure had engendered in them a bitterness that was little by little benumbing them, to the point of slowing down their pulse rates. Their host appeared to be afflicted with this malady even more than the rest of them, and some said that he was so attached to his gloom that he would have relinquished the pleasure of victory rather than that of his despondency.

Lifeless voices filled the Avvocato's study when Edoardo
burst on them with his implacable hopefulness and his rugged assurance that the things he hated would soon be dead and buried.

Apart from erstwhile Socialist and democratic Deputies, the study was frequented by the ex-bandit Don Luigi Compag-noni, always fretting because his honesty and mild temper, which had by an unfortunate coincidence come over him in 1925 – the year in which the ruling tyranny had killed off all strength of character both in good and in evil – might seem to be attributable to funk. “Bless me!” said he. “Oh for the times when a man performed his devotions with his knife! Oh for those times!” He hoped to see such times again in order to flaunt his integrity in the midst of a multitude of daggers unsheathed anew.

But for some years now, in fact since the exploit in Ethiopia had ended successfully, disheartenment reigned stagnant in the Avvocato's study. It seemed as if their host piled the grate high with blocks of ice, rather than with the fires of hope. And the one to suffer most from this was the good ex-bandit Compag-noni, and along with him a young architect, Pasqualino Cannavò, a fanatical hummer of modern popular songs, and one who until 1936 had also been a fanatical supporter of Fascism. That was the year he fought as a volunteer in Africa, singing
Faccetta nera
, but as this song about little black faces was subsequently banned he marched into Addis Ababa with sealed lips and a heart heavy with the suspicion that he was not a free man. Three months later the suspicion had become a certainty, and robbed him of his sleep. In 1937 he was sentenced to two months internal banishment, and on his return to Catania he began to visit Avvocato Bonaccorsi's study – where he succeeded in doing so much damage to his liver that in the summer he had to take the waters at Chianciano.

It was only natural that the advent of Edoardo should be greeted by these two – by the others also – like the dawn of a new day. The Avvocato's premises rang with shouts, with the thump of fists on tables, with Neapolitan songs; the hopes of
the old campaigners shook off the hoar-frost, and stretched forth wings made stiff by the long night.

“They won't start a war! They won't do it!” cried Edoardo. “I'll bet anything you like they won't!”

“Excuse me, but why not?” asked Avvocato Bonaccorsi.

“Because their little fannies are all of a tremble, the pair of them.”

“I have my doubts.”

“And you,
maestro
,” stormed Don Luigi Compagnoni irascibly, “tell me, could you live without doubts?”

One evening their host waited until Don Luigi had finished printing kisses on Edoardo's forehead because he had announced that “Hitler would chicken out,” and then said very quietly, “Avvocato Lentini…”

Edoardo tucked his tie back inside his jacket, whence it had sprung in the tumult of the embrace, and said, “You want a word with me,
maestro
?”

“I think you should know that in Palazzo Vaccarini they are spreading a malicious rumour about you.”

“Why should an honest man take any notice of what they say at Party Headquarters?”

“Even the saints fear false report, you know.”

“What are those brigands saying?” demanded Don Luigi, his great hands grasping an invisible neck and wringing it. “What are they saying?”

“That you,” resumed the Avvocato, turning to Edoardo, “resigned as mayor because in the course of one session, or assembly, or meeting – I don't know what these gatherings are called – the Party Secretary made an allusion to the business of your cousin, Antonio Magnano.”

Edoardo thrust out his lips disdainfully: “My dear
maestro
, no one will believe what they say. One of the exhortations in the Party membership card is in fact
Believe!
, because each and every one of the things they say is, without distinction, unbelievable. In any case, I should like you to know that the incident which took place at Party Headquarters was provoked
by me. It was I who declared, in front of all the Supervisors, that Hitler's balls had been shrivelled by gas.”

“You said that right there at Party Headquarters?” cried Don Luigi, rising from his seat with wide-open arms. “I must kiss you again!”

“Yes, I said it and I repeated it,” continued Edoardo, once he had broken loose from the embrace.
“Maestro,
please forgive my curiosity, but who gave you this information?”

“Avvocato Targoni. An excellent young man.”

“The Party Supervisor?” exclaimed Pasqualino Cannavò. “Are you,
maestro,
on familiar terms with a Party Supervisor?”

“He is an extremely courteous person, from whom I have received nothing but kindness.”

“
Maestro
, you astound me! There is no such thing as an extremely courteous person on that side of the fence.”