Beautiful Antonio (33 page)

Their expressions drove Signor Alfio to the point of paroxysm.

“Once again,” he bawled, his stick still hoisted above his head, “I'm telling that fucking cuckold to repeat what he said, and I'll take this stick and snap off his horns for him!”

“Go home, go home!” was all the reply he got from this side and that.

“Toddle off to bed!”

“To bed with you!”

“Go take a nap!”

The voices reached him from afar, from round the corner, and drove him clean off the handle.

“Come out of there!” he bellowed. “Come here if you dare! You lousy yellow-bellies, I'll squash you like cockroaches!”

“Toddle on home!”

“To bed with you!”

“Come out of there you sons of stinking whores, you limp cephalopods you, and I'll plant the toe of this boot in the cracks of your bums!”

“'
O cúrchiti
, to bed with you!”

“Shit, I'll catch you one!”

“'
O cúrchiti
!”

“With this boot, you hear me? Shit!”

“'
O cúrchiti
!”

“Shit on you – and your mothers –
and
your fathers!”

“'
O cúrchiti
!'

“Shit, I'll catch you one – shit and dammit!”

“Signor Alfio,” came a kindly voice. “This isn't like you!
What, taking notice of a couple of gutter-snipes who wouldn't show respect to their own fathers on their deathbeds?”

“Shit and dammit, let me kick their arses for them, friend!”

“Forget it. Calm yourself. Don't lower yourself to the level of that riff-raff. You'd be the loser, believe me: they've got nothing to lose. That sort wash their faces in the muck every morning. Take my advice and come away. I'll walk you home.”

The old man was hard put to it to drag himself away from the scene of such insults, and all the way home never spoke a word to the kind friend beside him. He halted now and then to thump his right hand down on the pommel of the stick which his left had planted stubbornly on the ground.

Once home, he uttered not a word for the rest of the day.

His wife, not hearing him hawk, or so much as clear his throat, went frequently to peek at him in the study, as heart-in-mouth as one nursing an invalid who seems to have stopped breathing.

But the old fellow was invariably there behind the desk, staring fixedly at the green baize top, and whenever he became conscious that his wife had tiptoed to the door, without moving his head one whit he pointed a finger back the way she had come.

“What's up with your dad?” she demanded of Antonio. “In all the forty years we've been together I've never known him so silent.”

Antonio reddened and clasped a hand over his heart, feeling it unroll and unravel from his breast as when a spindle drops. These days, anything that happened made him expect his humiliation to take on some further and even more repugnant aspect.

“I don't know,” he replied faintly, “What
could
possibly have happened to him?”

The next morning the old man woke up yelling his head off. And what do you imagine those desperate cries were all
in aid of? Simply that he wanted his coffee brought to him instanter, not a moment's delay!

“It's coming, it's coming,” cried Signora Rosaria. “What d'you have to go shouting like that for?”

“Because I feel like shouting. Because in my own house I shout when I want to, and if anyone doesn't like it they know where to find the whatsit… the door! And they're welcome to use it!”

Signora Rosaria's tears began to flow.

The fractious old man swung his legs out of bed, thrust his feet into his slippers and went out into the corridor.

“Antonio!” he bawled. “Antonio!”

His son came running in his pyjamas, his eyes wrenched from sleep by fright.

“Antonio, if you go out today you must do me a favour.”

“Of course, dad. What?”

“Carry a pistol.”

“Why on earth, dad?”

“No reason. I have my little whims, that's all. But you must do me this favour – carry a pistol.”

“But you might at least tell me why.”

“Oh, Santa Genoveffa, not again! There's nothing to explain, but will you or will you not do me this favour and carry a pistol?”

“All right, if you say so.”

“Good Lord, what a fuss about nothing! I'll do the same: if I go out I'll take my father's old shooting-iron.”

Alarmed at this, Antonio left the house earlier than usual and sought out Edoardo. The two friends had very little trouble in piecing together the incident which had befallen Signor Alfio, and this in the most minute detail possible.

Antonio was so upset he felt fit to faint, but as chance had at that moment led them quite near Avvocato Bonaccorsi's, Edoardo managed to persuade his cousin to step upstairs into the study, not least in order to get out of a street full of inquisitive, spiteful eyes.

So up Antonio went, and found the company of friends complete. With the addition of Ermenegildo Fasanaro, lending an ear, head bowed, mouth sagging, like a poor old cow at a standstill beneath a beating sun.

Antonio too prepared himself to listen in silence to those men who never once, in all they had to say, even incidentally or in passing, made any mention of women.

This was a relief to him at first, but after a while it infected him with a fidgety irritation always aroused in him by the words
liberty, progress, dignity, truth, conscience
and so on. Because they were the opposites of other words, words of such intolerable consequence in his life, such as
marry, annulment, wedding night, her, undress, bed, make it, try, flop
, he immediately fell into a state of discomfort which he could only shake off either by once and for all forgetting what tortured him most – for him an impossible feat – or else by fancying the makers of such speeches to be slightly hypocritical. It must be mentioned, however, that the sally which had caused Signor Alfio to brandish his stick in the street had been quoted to Antonio as follows: “They're forever prating about philosophy and freedom because they can't get their cocks up. If they were capable of satisfying their wives, they wouldn't have to fabricate so much rubbish.”

Antonio was too shrewd to attribute any measure of truth to such a coarse statement, but it none the less plagued him throughout that gathering. He was utterly and completely oblivious of the tone of vibrant sincerity in their voices, nor did he for one moment notice the warmth which actuated them. In the anguish that gripped him, depriving him of any hope of clear and calm perception, he saw all those present as exemplifying that chastity and abstinence to which he himself was constrained, saw them all without distinction as being useless with women. It slipped his mind that the ex-bandit Compagnoni (to name only one) had, one August afternoon, pursued by peasants brandishing machetes, left beneath a carob tree a sixteen-year-old girl – the same who was to this day his
wife – rent by the fury of his effusions as by the claws of a wolf. But as things stood, in Antonio's eyes even this man was tainted with purity.

Consequently, after listening in silence for an hour he shot from his chair, though he quickly restrained himself and checked his impulsive movements.

“I do apologize,” he said, “but I must be making a move.”

“Wait a jiffy,” said his uncle Ermenegildo. “I'll come along too.”

On reaching the street, Ermenegildo gave a finishing touch to the look of bitterness and disheartenment which in Bonaccorsi's room had caused him to resemble a poor old cow pestered by flies, and in the course of a terribly laboured sigh he infinitely ponderously pronounced the word, “Bah!…”

The tone of voice in which his uncle expelled this monsyllable was very pleasing to Antonio. The first voice for ages which chimed in with the disconsolate sound he clothed his own words in while fantasticating by day, or dreaming by night, of talking to Barbara, or to his father-in-law, or else to other women in his past.

“Bah!” repeated his uncle, and Antonio shivered from top to toe, and half-closed his eyes, and compressed his lips, so as to imbibe that sorrowing yet welcome exclamation to his very marrow.

“Bah! Bah! And bah again!”

They had now wended their way into Piazza Dante, and were passing close to the church of San Nicola with its truncated columns and walls all a whirl of swallows streaking from beneath the tiles of the beautiful monastery next door, launching brief, tenuous cries of the kind which, when accorded to lonely and ancient places, render them more lonely and more ancient still.

“How I love this land, this soil!” exclaimed Ermenegildo. “I could kiss every stone in it; I could kiss even the flies, the bird-shit. What a fool I was to live so remote from it for twenty years! In Paris, in Barcelona, I thought about nothing but these
sulky, half-naked urchins with one hand behind their backs to hide the stones they're just about to fling at your head… And look, here's the palm-tree!” He stabbed his stick at a dusty specimen. “This is the palm-tree which I'd have swopped all the gardens of Versailles for… It's the very one, by God! Still here!” He took a couple of turns around the old palm, tapping it gently with his stick, then stood back and eyed it with amorous dejection, shaking his head the while as if reproaching it, though in fact reproaching himself for some mysterious wrong committed against that tree.

“Here she is, the very one!… When I was in Spain,” he continued, unwillingly interrupting his contemplation of the tree and resuming his walk with Antonio, “I had bouts of dizziness that lasted a year. A whole year, and I'm not exaggerating. In Barcelona I couldn't take a step without feeling the ground missing from under my feet. But what scared me was not the act of collapsing in itself, so much as the idea of my face colliding with an insipid, odourless soil, a soil that in every respect lacked the tang of my homeland… of
this
soil!” And he stamped his foot hard, not without swaying on his feet, then blanching, and finally smiling at his moment of panic. “Of
this
,” he repeated, “which some day soon I desire to kiss so profoundly as to bequeath my carcass to it!”

“Uncle!”

“I know, I'm becoming maudlin. Talk about creaking gates!… However…”

He hadn't the heart to continue. He quickened his pace a little.

“However what?” enquired Antonio.

“However… What I wanted to say… But let's drop it. I'm becoming maudlin.”

They left the piazza and turned into Via Di San Giuliano, which plunges straight down towards the heart of the city. From this vantage point, beyond a series of drab
palazzi
bursting with caryatids, pediments, flower-pots, terra-cotta
water-butts, portals, jalousies, balconies, dark-hued roofs, all growing smaller and smaller in the illusion of the perspective, they caught a glimpse of a segment of sea, gently shrouded in a siroccan haze.

“However,” took up Ermenegildo, of a sudden, “I've never believed in the fact that the human spirit creates the world. That is… I'll explain myself better. When I read our Greatest Living Philosopher
^*
, I bow my head and confess myself beaten. There's no denying it, he's right: outside of human thought there is no reality whatever, we cannot get outside our thought, and even the very phrase
outside our thought
is in itself a human thought… By heaven, I find no arguments to contravert Croce: I gnaw my knuckles and bite the crook of my arm, but I have to admit that I find no way out. And yet… and yet I feel something deep inside me, a protest, an aspiration… how shall I say?… a madness, something that demands justice against this way of thinking that allows no gainsaying; justice against… how shall I say?… against the arrogance of our Greatest Living Philosopher. Justice, Justice! Oh may another philosopher come, greater and more gifted even than he, and may he demonstrate, in words refulgent as the sun, that on one hand there is the world, and on the other the thought that believes (note this word!), that
believes
it creates that world but in reality reflects it; on the one hand the body, on the other the soul. Our Greatest Living Philosopher maintains that such a demonstration will never be given by human kind, but (and here I take the liberty of raising an objection against him) how can he count his chickens before they're hatched? How can he decree what mankind will never think and never be able to demonstrate? Has he by any chance become a determinist – a determinist in his own particular manner, needless to say –, perhaps without knowing it? What's afoot? Has he scoffed at prophets one and all, only to come
out now with a thumping great prophecy himself? Eh? What do you think?”

“Watch where you put your feet,” said Antonio. “There's a step.”

“That truth and fact are one and the same thing,” said Ermenegildo, “I've always been convinced… but I've never believed it.”

“Come again?”

“What I mean is that it's one thing to be convinced by an argument and quite another to believe it's true. But you can't understand that. When your liver has turned to a stone like mine has, and peeing produces more tears of pain than drops of urine, then perhaps you'll see my point… And what's more, I may be an infant, an ignoramus, an old man who can't see past the end of his nose because he suffers the agonies of the damned, but, in short, what's the sense of saying that life is all very fine as it is, that it's senseless to complain about it and ask for something better? As far as I'm concerned it's a far cry from being all very fine! Once upon a time our men of genius roundly asserted that they wished to know the absolute truth, demanded to know why we are born, and what is the purpose, and whose the pleasure in the sufferings of mankind, seeing that these are cultivated so assiduously the world over: they enquired why we have to know that we will die, but remain completely ignorant of what death is; why, before we die ourselves, we are forced to witness the pitiful spectacle of so many corpses: why our thought is given just enough rope to enable it at one jump to get a sniff of truth, but without the ability to benefit from it; and finally, why we are granted the faculty of asking ‘why?' and denied a definitive answer. But today, it's another story! I take my hat off to the idealist philosophers (the others, alas, the ones who in a certain sense might agree with me, are nothing but chicken-shit), and I take my hat off and make a sweeping bow to our Greatest Living Philosopher: but, my dear Antonio, don't you think that this so-called concilatory philosophy, this philosophy which says,
'You are in search of the truth? Very well, the truth is your search in itself. You ask the question, why? Then the essential thing is not the answer, but the fact that you ask why…' Don't you think this philosophy very craftily covers up both resignation and cowardice? And do we thereby enlarge our mental scope, or are we submitting in the face of a mystery which turns out to be impenetrable? Is the serenity with which we say we understand, and accept with good grace, all the contradictions and absurdities of life, is it not by any chance worth far, far less than the desperation with which the great minds of the past cried out that they did not understand and still less accept them, preferring suicide to a life of mediocrity and ignorance which to those souls, truly magnanimous and great, appeared in any case to be ignoble?”