Beautiful Antonio (3 page)

“Forgive me!” she cried. “I'm a liar, a filthy liar!”

It was with great difficulty that Signor Alfio prized Antonio from the clutches of that twenty-year-old, her chin by now entrenched in the hollow of his shoulder.

Once alone with the girl, Antonio's mother at last learnt the truth. For five nights now this simple country lass had left her bed and gone to rend her bosom and her cheeks outside Antonio's door, caught betwixt her craving to open it and her reluctance to commit a base act.

“What's set me all on fire, what's making me burn?” whimpered the girl as she gnawed at her knuckles.

The good woman was much affected by this piteous tale, and repaired at once to her confessor at the church of Our Lady in Via Sant'Euplio. She told him the circumstances and, on the verge of tears, “Padre Giovanni,” she cried, “would it not be wiser to take on a serving-lad and send the girl home?”

The old priest tapped twice with his fingertips on the lid of his snuff-box and peeked out of the confessional.

“If your son's intentions are not honourable,” he said, “he will always find a way of making trouble for women.” Clearly Padre Giovanni had no intention of admitting that Antonio was completely blameless.

“But could these women not be urged to…?”

“To…?” snapped the priest.

“To behave more decorously towards him!”

“Can you even imagine all the women whose acquaintance your son will make? Will God every time be able to send an angel to warn you that your son is… is… Well I might as well say it: coming over all randy?”

“So what must I do?”

The priest was well aware that with regard to Antonio he harboured sentiments not immaculately Christian; but alas, once embarked upon the slippery slope of wrath he was unable to resist the delectable sensation that opens a yawning chasm beneath the feet, and that drags inexorably down.

“What you must do,” he informed the mother, “is pray to God that He may soon take your son to His bosom.”

The good lady nearly fainted away with horror, and the painted wooden angel on whose plinth she had leant her head began to wobble with her sobs.

“When I am preaching my sermons,” said the priest, “and your son is there at the back of the church, the women are always putting cricks in their necks to look at him. It's a scandal!”

It is perfectly true that Antonio, seated by the first column in the nave, had only to shift his chair or clear his throat for the pulpit to be robbed of the attentions of all the finest eyes in the place.

“Death,” continued the priest, “is for the true Christian no misfortune: rather, when it harvests us in the flower of youth, it is a gift of heaven. But it is not in our province to make suggestions to God as to the best way of placing a young man such as Antonio in the position of sinning no more and…” – he raised his voice and added – “of not inciting others to sin.
For to consign our own selves to perdition, dear madam, is
not
the worst thing we can do. No. It is to bring damnation upon
another
of God's creatures over whom we have no rights whatever! Pray to God, dear madam, and in his infinite wisdom he will find ways and means of mitigating your son's satanic beauty without reducing him to dust and ashes!”

The lady rose, not without having made the sign of the cross at the moment when the priest uttered the word “satanic”. If the church had not been aglow with gilded and golden light the extreme pallor of that poor woman's face might have softened even the heart of the priest.

“In what way,” she said heavily, “do you think my Antonio might be changed by God?”

The priest answered never a word, and she walked by his side and listened to his footsteps with the numbness of one utterly crushed. When they reached the church door he raised a hand still dripping with holy water and murmured:

“He might even lose his sight…”

The poor woman flung up an arm across her mouth to suppress a cry. “Come this way,” said the priest, with a return of his wrathful glower. And having led Signora Rosaria down to the forecourt and three times over yammered some incomprehensible word, drawing back his lips in such a way as even to distort the shape of his nose, he burst out as follows:

“Are you aware, madam, are you aware that out of twenty girls of good family who make their confessions to me, ten – yes ten! – have given offence to God by thinking too often about your son, and in a manner scarcely in keeping with their upbringing? Monsignor Cavallaro, three days after hearing the confession of my niece, said to me, “Brother in Christ,” he said, “try to keep Rita's eyes off young Magnano!” “My friend,” I enquired, naturally concerned, “do you
know
anything?” “Nothing whatever,” replied the monsignor. “How could I, a simple priest,
know
anything? But the Lord inspired me with these words, and I have reported them to you…” A most worthy person, Monsignor Cavallaro! Your husband
really should put in a word for him with the archbishop… But I ask you,” – and here his voice rose once more in a crescendo, “is it right that in church on Sundays the girls of good family find the High Altar to be wherever Antonio is sitting?”

Signora Rosaria reached home at her wits' end, wringing her hands in anguish as she waited for Antonio's return, as if her son had been jousting with the Archangel Gabriel. Her terror scaled the heights when in he came wearing a pair of spectacles.

“You're losing your sight!” shrieked the poor lady.

Antonio replied with the cheeriest smile in the world, and explained that his glasses had plain lenses and he was only wearing them to give himself an air of respectability.

His mother hugged him to her bosom, praying in her heart to the saints in heaven that all members of the sex she belonged to, and now went in fear of, should in future hug that boy only with sentiments such as she was feeling at that moment.

Woe and alas, her plea was not vouchsafed her. Towards Antonio women continued to nourish a sentiment so far at variance with those maternal feelings that they unanimously judged it to be a calamity, a horrendous and well-nigh intolerable tribulation, to be either mother or sister to Antonio, and obliged in consequence not to tremble to the roots of their being at the mere touch of his hand.

With so much in his favour in a field of activity that in Italy, and especially in the South, is thought of as heaven on earth, any other young man, not blessed with Antonio's good-heartedness and candour, would have become sceptical, indifferent, even cynical; but Antonio never lost his essentially provincial sweetness of nature, even when he had gone through university, come away with a Law degree, moved to a flatlet (furnished with old Sicilian furniture which his father had shipped from Catania on a slothful cargo boat) within view of the Villa Borghese gardens, and started to watch the autumns – the first, the second, the third, the fourth – fading
out upon the trees of this park dotted with converted shooting-boxes, in the expectation, totally unjustified by the facts, of being employed in the Foreign Ministry; though why by that particular ministry is not really clear.

In 1932 it was no rare thing for a young man to become a consul or a minister for a reason deemed all the more acceptible, indeed admirable, the less obvious it was. “That chap didn't sit the exam,” people would say. “He has no qualifications and can barely stammer a few words of French… Yet he's been posted to the Legation in Vienna as First Secretary. Evidently he's well thought of in High Places and will go far.”

But the “young hopefuls” blessed with this kind of luck had to knuckle down to it in no uncertain manner, and school their hearts so thoroughly that, try as they might, they were no longer able to fall in love with a woman who was not “influential”, or make friends with a fellow who wasn't “a power in the land”. The least thing smacking of weakness, self-abasement, misfortune or poverty stirred these lads to feelings of the utmost repugnance.

Antonio, on the other hand, had remained as candid and lackadaisical as any waiter in a Sicilian café who, of an August afternoon, bereft by the implacable sirocco of the least power of dissimulation, of conscious tact or any other species of consciousness, tells his customer he would be well advised not to select anything from the ice-cream list; and if the customer then, despite this warning, should proceed to order a lemon or an apricot sherbet, the waiter, jaded and job-ridden, neglects to bring it.

Thus Antonio had let the years roll by, emitting a “brrr” of pleasure at every first whiff of anthracite from the basements, announcing that the heating had been put on for the coming winter. “Gosh!” he'd say to himself, “this'll be the year, eh? This is going to be it!” Then, rubbing his hands vigorously, he'd cup them, blow into them, go and take a peek at himself in a shop window – and unfailingly discover that at his side was some woman gazing doe-eyed at him… Antonio, beautifically
half-closing his eyes, would mutter, “Ah yes, this year we'll make a go of it.”

But in the autumn of 1934 a melancholy, strange as it was sudden, had descended on him, and by late November had taken on all the signs of downright depression.

“You really get my goat,” said his friend d'Agata while they were having a bite to eat together. “What's wrong? What's the great grievance? Has your dad cut off your allowance?”

“The poor old boy would get it to me,” murmured Antonio, “even if he had to forge the stuff.”

“Bad news about the job prospect?”

“I don't give a damn about the job!”

D'Agata then, point-blank: “Have you picked up some disease?”

Antonio: “No, I'm perfectly healthy.” A pause, then “Perfectly…”

“Then for God's sake stop pulling that long face and making us all miserable!”

“Oh, give over, the lot of you! Just stay out of my hair!”

“Not another word do I say! Good Lord! So it's none of my business, eh?”

And his friends agreed among themselves to ask him no more questions.

On the 2nd of December a certain Miss Luisa Dreher, daughter of a diplomat and the most gorgeous foreign girl in the whole of Italy at that time, called on Antonio at ten in the morning. This visit had been neither solicited by the recipient nor announced by the caller. During the strolls he had taken with Luisa Dreyer, Antonio had not so much as dreamt of inviting her back to his place. Such an invitation, indeed, would have struck him as improper conduct towards those who were supposedly going to procure him a position he didn't deserve.

In the meanwhile there she was, this splendid girl, seated on a stool and twisting a cambric handkerchief with dainty fingers still bronzed by a summer of sunshine.

Antonio said nothing.

The girl, tilting her face sideways, stared at the toe of her shoe as it nervously tap-tapped the floor.

Antonio still remained silent.

The telephone shrilled in the other room, and Antonio dashed to answer it, closing the sitting-room door behind him.

“Hullo?”

“It's me, d'Agata. Is Luisa Dreyer at your place?”

“How did you know?”

“Ah then, it's true: she's there!”

“What of it?”

“Listen here. The day before yesterday there was a reception at the Embassy. The girls all got drunk and pissed in the flowerpots.”

“What of it?”

“Just don't make an ass of yourself.”

Antonio hung the receiver sharply back on the hook and returned to the sitting-room.

He found Luisa brushing the corner of her mouth with a fingertip to deviate a tear about to dribble into it.

“Why are you crying?” enquired Antonio.

Luisa shot to her feet, hurled her arms around his neck and nestled a cheek against his chest. “I love you,” she sobbed. “I love you!…”

Antonio patted her head, gazing vaguely the while out of the window at the intense green light which the trees of the Villa Borghese cast up against the sky.

“I ask nothing of you!” Luisa went on between sobs. “I don't want to get married! But… you happened to leave a letter from your father at my house, and I've read it.”

“What letter?” asked Antonio, horror-struck.

“A letter from your father telling you to get back at once to Catania to meet the young lady they mean to marry you off to.”

“I don't believe you managed to decipher my father's hand-writing!”
stammered Antonio. “I can't even make it out myself…”

“But that's not what I'm crying for… I've already told you I don't want to marry you. I'm all right on my own and… and don't want to marry anyone.”

“So what are you getting at?” said Antonio, panic-stricken.

“I love you I love you! In heaven's name can't you understand? I love you!”

Antonio's face took on the pallor of death and he slumped, he practically collapsed, onto a sofa.

The girl glided to his side, bringing with her the tender fragrance of her angora woollies and powdered neck. Shaken with sobs, she insinuated beneath his chin that fair brow on which, at Embassy receptions, there always glittered a small diamond crucifix. With her little frightened hand she sought for the heart beneath his dressing-gown, as if to see whether such a thing as a heart could ever beat there.

Far from just beating, Antonio's heart was at full gallop. Astride this runaway steed he sped towards the blackest anguish.

Luisa no longer knew what she was doing, she had lost all control of herself, she was aghast, ashamed, to discover her hand wandering frantically beneath Antonio's robe.

“I won't make any demands!” she sobbed. “Don't worry, I promise that! I won't make any trouble for you… I'm an honest woman, I'm not like the others!”

“On the contrary,” said he, clutching at the desperate expedient of playing it tough and nasty, grabbing her by the wrists to hold her off a little and looking her straight in the face. “You
are
like the others!”