Beautiful Antonio (30 page)

F
OR TWO MONTHS
Antonio never left the house, consoling himself each evening with the mute affection of his cousin Edoardo. Towards the end of November he yielded to the counsels of a friend of Bonaccorsi's, Engineer Marletti, who two years previously had been abandoned by his wife and, a year later, by his mistress: he therefore had an intimate knowledge of all the alleyways, the times, and the techniques that might enable a man whose honour had been wounded to begin, slowly and cautiously, on his task of making a re-entry amongst people long since accustomed to never setting eyes on him while discussing him all day long.

The engineer was clad in a mack, Edoardo walked with his stick tucked under his arm and a scowl on his face, directing his short-sighted eyes wrathfully at the street-lamps which he mistook for men pausing to gawp at them; between the two, one hand on his cousin's arm and his jacket collar turned up, proceeded Antonio with downcast eyes. The night was far advanced and the windows, from which so many glances had rained down upon our Sicilian Adonis, seemed firmly closed for the night. If, however, the glimmer of a lamp showed through the slats of the shutters, Antonio's heart began a subdued thunder, almost a churning, like a propeller under water. He immediately divined those sweet, enkindled things that are the eyes of women, even now at the slats; he imagined plaited hair falling onto naked bosoms, one shoulder of a nightgown slipped down to the elbow; he imagined bare feet arched in effort to stand on tiptoe; he imagined elegant shoes, smart umbrellas, slippers, petticoats, powder-puffs, mirrors,
ear-rings, buckles, trimmings, combs and ribbons; and all these things delivered a rebuke, and gave rise in his breast to an inkling of fear. Antonio quickened his pace and his two friends, as at the release of a spring, put on a spurt along with him.

Needless to say, during these walks Edoardo and Marletti were extremely careful to give a wide berth to Palazzo Puglisi, and at the same time Antonio himself appeared to have acquired a wooden neck from the care he took not to look in the direction of Piazza Stesicoro.

When, however, at two in the morning, he got home and went out onto the terrace, his eyes roved off at once to a certain roof, black and glistening like the scaly back of a fish: the roof beneath which Barbara was sleeping, chaste and alone, her mouth a little open against the pillow, a delicate scent of fresh dough emanating from her skin to her nightgown, her right hand palm-downwards with the fingers ever so slightly curled. Leather-bound, and encircled twice by the beads of a rosary, a missal lay blackly on the bedside table, resembling a revolver. A small lamp shaded with blue cloth gave a look of marble to the pillow where once his cheek had lain, and caused Barbara's black hair, sunk along with her head between one pillow and the other, to resemble an abyss of shadow.

Antonio knew that in that head everything worked like clock-work, that the hands regulating her thoughts revolved rigidly over images dictated by duty. Never, never over the image of himself! Cold sweat broke out all over his body as he realized that his own image could never have found an entry into those girlish thoughts, even when relaxed in sleep. He established, with the meticulous precision of a madman, the point in space where Barbara's brow was at that moment resting: that white, severe, secretive brow whose thoughts he no longer had a chance of fathoming, not even at night… Ah then a fretful restlessness seized hold of him; he would wander up and down the terrace, stopping every now and then, squeezing his temples and pressing his eyes: then shake his head,
again and again, and, between clenched teeth, make desolate moan.

He would go to bed and lie there open-eyed, minutely examining the darkness spread before him. Towards daybreak, when his father summoned the maid – no longer with the fine, irascible voice of yore, but in a flat, listless whine – Antonio closed his eyes and at long last drifted into sleep.

But need we say it? Need we say that this man, this thirty-five-year-old, godlike enough in his youthful and happy times, had now through insomnia, humiliation and anguish become more exquisitely godlike still?

Edoardo would look at him time and time again, with dolorous astonishment: never had all the marks of manliness been so patent, so disconcerting; never had desire for women been so strongly expressed by so desirable a male face.

“It beats me completely,” mused Edoardo. “Or maybe I'm not qualified to judge, being a man myself.”

But the women thought the same as he did.

Since that February of 1939, when he began to leave the house even in the daytime, Antonio was forced to concede that women darted him glances of such profound tenderness that he was obliged on each occasion to slacken his pace, as if something warm and debilitating had brushed against his flesh.

One day on the staircase he saw the Spinster Ardizzone standing stock-still at the bottom of the second flight, preparing to hurl herself down on the steps to prevent his passing. He attempted to slink by along the opposite wall, but, as he sidled down, the poor spinster had the opportunity to speak with her eyes the very uttermost in words of love and devotion; and when he came within reach she threw her arms around his neck and clasped him to her heaving, burning bosom, spurting a gush of hot tears onto his cheek.

Antonio detached himself roughly and fled away down the stairs.

When he got out into the street he was in a frenzy of rage and perturbation. The thought struck him that the news of his
plight had freed the opposite sex from all shyness and reserve towards him, and that they were treating him with the very masculinity they knew he lacked. He walked his habitual route as red in the face as a slapped child; so flushed was he that in one deserted piazza he stopped at a drinking-fountain to bathe his cheeks and forehead; and bumping into Edoardo two hours later he was still scarlet, as if the spinster's clinch had occurred just a moment before.

Edoardo endeavoured to coax him to Avvocato Bonaccorsi's study, but Antonio would have none of it. “So far I've done everything you've asked,” he said. “I went out at night, and now I even go out in the daytime. I go to church on Sunday, I venture into cafés… but don't ask any more of me. As soon as I set foot in anyone else's house I feel suffocated.”

His cousin did not insist.

“Well, I must be off there anyhow. Be seeing you.”

Antonio continued his walk alone, looking up at the roofs and the terraces of his own beautiful city.

Leisurely the eye seemed to penetrate that Sicilian air and absorb the sweetness of everything it lighted on. From inside a building with balconies piled with mattresses, carpets and potted palms, between the thwacks of a carpet-beater came the sound of a woman singing, while a little cloud of dust, emerging sluggishly from the dark of the window, halted in mid-air as if dazzled by the sun… Liberty, Beauty, Kindness: to which of these three deities might he have directed his deep sighs, if he could but have freed his breast of the boulder that was crushing it? What act would he not have performed willingly, if he had first been able to perform
that
one? Out in La Piana, while he was living in hope with Barbara, he had read books that had sent him into ecstasies. At dusk, his forehead pressed against a window-pane, he had mentally seen his Century, his Time, this personage whom some reckoned to be happy, others horrendous, some to be tyrannical, others free; he had seen it garbed in grey, with neither eyes nor mouth, and the outline of its face embraced half the sky. Then it was, aided by the philosophers
he was reading at the time, that he too was on the verge of making a judgement about his Times. And who knows if he wouldn't have fastened on it some epithet or even nickname that would have stamped it for ever and a day? The age of Liberty-Tyranny? Liberalism-Socialism? Idealism-Materialism? Immanence-Transcendence? Heavens, how many choices were open to people not shackled by his particular bondage!

He returned home with a bad headache. It was a fact that the very idea that he might begin to think again was exhausting to him.

The following day the postman delivered a scented envelope. He retired to his room and opened it. It was a letter from a woman, and the reading of it made him blush and sweat.

My very own Antonio,

No scorn is sufficient to repay that notary's daughter whom you chose to honour with your name! If I could have her to myself in a locked room I'd tear her to shreds with my nails!

Is this what she learnt on the red velvet and mahogany prie-dieux at home? Did she imagine she heard
this
in the words of the Mass? I too was a Daughter of Mary, and the Madonna taught me quite a different thing. She taught me to love you, to love you eternally, to love you as a faithful and devoted spouse, to love you with head held high, with all the power of my purity!

When your marriage is annulled, remember that at the second corner along Viale XX September lives a heart which has for years been brimming with love for you, a slave prepared to spend the rest of her life (which may be a long one – I am only eighteen) at your feet, like a dog which (if you so wish it) will not even raise its eyes to look you in the face, content to see you tread the same floor where it rests its muzzle…

*

This was the first warning of a storm, a veritable cloud-burst of letters of every shape and kind, signed and anonymous, lengthy as confessions and brief as dispatches, some so imperative as to appear to threaten, others imploring; the handwriting upright, sloping or falling over backwards, the script clear or horribly messy, uneven as the writing of a medium in a trance or uniform and proportioned to a nicety. One said, “As soon as we're behind closed doors your blood will seethe!” another, “One night on my breast and you will be all ablaze!” a third, “Pass a hand over my skin. Try it: I have worked miracles.”

But the majority were letters from mere girls: “To live solely on spiritual love, on glances, words, mutual understanding, has always been my dream” or else, “One afternoon at Taormina, in the garden of the Albergo San Domenico, my fiancé seemed to me to have been stricken with a malaise that, rather than pity, gave rise to terror and disgust. It was explained to me later that this was love of me, or rather the love of men for women in general. I was appalled! I broke off my engagement and vowed to take the veil. Any place, even the darkest, the dampest, the gloomiest, the one buried deepest behind the highest walls, would have seemed to me paradise simply because no person of the opposite sex could ever gain admittance there. But now I feel heart and soul that I am able to forswear my vow in order to marry you, you, Antonio my precious love. Last night St Catherine appeared to me in a dream and told me that the Sacred Heart of Jesus considers me free from every obligation. Let us be married, Antonio! Let's marry very soon…”

Or again: “Antonio, don't you remember the fifteen-year-old girl who held up Barbara's train on your wedding day? That girl is now a grown woman regretful that she didn't throw petrol and a lighted match on the train in her hands, to burn to ashes that infamous creature who dared in the sight of the Lord to pronounce a deceitful
Yes
. Oh how I envied her that day! How willingly I would have changed places with one of her eyes or one hair of her head, to marry you myself just
a little! How willingly I would have changed places with the hand you then clasped! Whereas I ought to have despised her, and demanded from her the respect which liars owe to honest folks!… I have torn up all the photographs in which I figure, standing there all meek and modest behind that monster – after I had cut out your likeness, of course, which now I carry next my heart. Antonio, might it not have been the will of God that placed me so near you at the moment you took to yourself a companion in life and in death? Did this not in truth make
us
just a little bit married? Did I not with all my heart cry out in answer to the priest's question, ‘Do you take this man to be your wedded husband?' did I not answer with a
Yes
that soared far higher than the one which Barbara let fall from her lips like a rotten apple? And did God not hearken to my
Yes
? And what other
Yes
could have reached heaven if not mine, springing from a heart hectic with adoration of you, anxiety and trepidation for you, desire for you?… etc., etc.”.

And yet again: “During your wanderings at night along Viale Regina Margherita, maybe you thought everyone slept in the buildings as you passed. But I was not asleep. My room is a semi-basement, and my window, when unshuttered, is a pandemonium of shoes, skirts, trousers, dogs, cats, carriage-wheels, horses' hoofs, a medley of things passing this way and that, or sometimes stopping and blocking out the light. From my bed against the wall under the window, at exactly one o'clock each night I used to hear a special sound emerge from all the other vague and distant sounds which fill the city at that hour – mostly from the main thoroughfare, which cuts across the end of our avenue only a few steps from my home. My heart recognized it immediately, and gave a bound: and I gave a bound with it, right out of bed! And then that sound left all the other sounds behind, entering on the quiet of the avenue, reverberating from one pavement to the other. At night I always have in my mind's eye a picture of the trees along my avenue, their shapes and their great height; and the sound of your footsteps gradually became more and more a part of these
pictures, and so gently and sweetly that my heart would drop into the pit of my stomach. Swaying as if just about to faint I would go to the window, lift the slats of the Venetian blind and peep out. One more minute and – there! your beloved feet were before my eyes… I could have reached out a hand and made you stay! Hundreds of visions crowded into my mind, hundreds of ways things might evolve: I saw you stumble, but not clumsily, I saw you cry out, I saw you shake your foot free and hasten on… I saw you bend down and smile at me, I saw you sit down by the window and talk to me, imagined you kissing me, I saw you drag me by the hair out into the street, I saw you jump down into my room… And these hundreds of imaginings came all at once, in a single flash of thought, so I was stricken to the quick with my face against the blinds, while the sound of your footsteps died away among visions of plane-trees far vaguer than my picture of the trees near my house, for these were still as crystal clear in my mind as your beloved footsteps as you passed them by… O my darling, O Antonio of my heart, why did you marry that woman? Why did you cease your bachelor walks by night? I have no desire to marry you, I have no wish to shut you up with me in my semi-basement. All I ask is to hear you go by at night, to hear you always, with that youthful step of yours, the step of a man not bound to any woman, your step so sweetly linked to the night of my twentieth birthday, when I deluded myself that as you passed my window you paused for a moment, as if you knew that behind that Venetian blind was a girl now celebrating her twentieth birthday for your sake, for your sake alone, Antonio my life, my soul… etc.”