Beautiful Antonio (4 page)

Luisa frowned, scattering attractive, kittenish wrinkles around her eyes and nose: “What do you mean? You don't know what you're saying!” Then, all in a rush, “What are you thinking of? I'm a virgin, I tell you, I'm a virgin!”

Antonio forced an ironic smile, something that came with difficulty and caused him displeasure, because he was a
simple-hearted young man and could distinguish a truth from a falsehood.

“Even if I married the most bigoted and ridiculous of you Sicilians,” continued Luisa in a more muted, a more measured voice, “he would have nothing to reproach me for. I know that when your women go to hotels in Taormina for the first night of their honeymoon they squawk like hens having their necks wrung. I wouldn't squawk even if you killed me, but anyway… I'd have a right to… But why have you gone all pale? What's the matter? Are you expecting someone? Is there someone at that door?”

A spot of colour crept back into Antonio's cheeks. A faint noise had come from the bedroom door, as of a bodily weight falling against it.

“Is there a woman in there?” demanded Luisa in a hushed voice.

“Yes,” answered he, casting down his eyes.

Luisa regained her poise, rose from the sofa, retrieved her handbag from a table, extracted a compact, peered at a pair of eyes that had turned to steel, dried them, then erased all traces of tears with two dabs of a powder-puff.

“Goodbye then,” she said. “Forgive me.”

And she made her exit.

Antonio sped to the bedroom door, flung it open, and was kissed almost smack on the mouth by his poodle which, impatient of release, leapt up at him with a strangled yelp.

He fondled its ears, tried to calm it, rocked its head to and fro as from among its riotous curlicues it shot him adoring glances. He then stretched out on the sofa, plopping the dog down on top of him, muzzle between front paws, while now and again it darted out its tongue to lick his chin and he, throwing back his head, skilfully evaded it.

In this way passed some hours. The sky over Villa Borghese darkened… A crow flapped in and out of the clouds, emitting at each wheel of its flight a muffled caw.

Tenderly Antonio lifted the dozing dog and deposited it on
the carpet. He then stretched himself lavishly and got up. A glance at the window, and beyond the Pincio the mist had thickened, as if the Tiber were filling the air with the vapour of its breath. The buildings glimpsed through the trees of the park had taken on a yellower tint. Down below in the street, at the corner of Via Pinciana and Via Sgambati, in the guise of a young man waiting for his girl, stood the inevitable plain-clothes policeman, motionless, bare-headed, hat in hand: and hidden in the hat the inevitable love-story he was reading to allay the endless tedium of protecting the life of a man whose car flashed by only once every couple of months.

“Lord, how dreary Rome is!” thought Antonio. And donning his overcoat and giving a rub to the tummy of his dog, which in expectation had already rolled onto its back with its legs in the air, he left the house.

Thus ended the first part of a day which Antonio was destined to remember for many a long year.

Either that same day or (as is more likely) the next, Antonio paid a call on his uncle, Ermenegildo Fasanaro, his mother's brother, who lived in one of the new suburbs.

This said uncle strode up and down the sitting-room, his silk shirt hanging out and his unknotted necktie beforked onto a paunch plumped out by his fifty years.

“Best thing for you to do is get back to Catania,” stated this uncle, pausing every so often by the window, his bulk blocking out now the bend in the Tiber around Villa Glori, now the slopes of the hill.

“What d'you think you're doing here in Rome? Trying to find out if there's any end to ‘that business'? Well let me tell you, there isn't. You're on the job night and day, you're burning the candle at both ends, your cheeks get hollower and hollower and you're always dropping off like a cat that's been out all night on the tiles… Hell and dammit! Where women are concerned you have to ration it out, lead 'em up the garden
path. It's easy enough to take them in if you use a bit of gumption. I'm pretty sure you're one of those fellows who'd give a fortune to make a good score every night, eh? Or am I wrong.”

“Well, to tell the truth I…”

“In one way, mind you, you're right. Women stroke you with one hand while they tot up the sums with the other. But what the deuce! it's so easy to spin 'em a yarn. All it takes is a spot of technique. Not that there aren't some pretty crafty ones who haggle over details, but that's the cunning of a fool, because your clever woman knows she has to keep on her toes in other ways. Your job is to know when you've had enough. That's all there is to it… It's the clean contrary of what we're told by the Pig who rules over us… Incidentally, is it true that he has a stomach ulcer?”

“Uncle, I have no idea!”

“Word has it that he has a stomach ulcer… In fact yesterday, sitting in a café, I heard a naval officer at the next table whispering behind his hand to a colleague of his, ‘We're home and dry: it's not an ulcer, it's cancer!' I'm pretty sure they were talking about him. No? Do you say not?”

“I didn't say a word.”

“For heaven's sake, you've no interest in politics at all! You don't give a fig for it. I bet you've never read Karl Marx…”

“No, I haven't.”

“Well don't. If you haven't read him by the age of thirty, don't start now. Just leave him be. In our day we used to read him. That is, we didn't
read
him either, but we talked about him as if we had… Socialism! Abolishing private property! What's your opinion, eh? Would it be possible to abolish private property? I don't think so. But on the other hand we've become slaves to everything produced by the masses: electricity, wirelesses, telephones, railways, trams… As we are slaves to such things, it follows that we are slaves to the masses. And these same masses, hell and dammit, only become as good as gold and work with a song in their hearts under either
Fascism or Communism. As soon as you give them freedom they start to sulk, grow churlish and rowdy, and throw their weight about so rudely that they rip this famous freedom to bits and trample it under foot. You agree?”

“Oh yes, uncle.”

“On the other hand, if the majority of the human race wants Socialism, the world will inevitably become Socialist.”

“You may be right.”

“Maybe yes, maybe no. It wouldn't be the first time the majority of the human race wanted one thing and history took another turn.”

“That may also be the case.”

“
What
may be the case?”

“That history will take another turn.”

“So what's this turn then?”

“Don't ask me.”

“On the other hand the rich, among whom I personally number myself, are disagreeable.”

“But uncle, you personally…”

“Believe me, we are disagreeable, we are block-headed, we are spoilt, we are bored stiff. Impossible to persist until the end of time with the rich on one side and the poor on the other! I am well aware, hell and dammit, that we can't go on like this!”

“Who am I to say…?”

“On the other hand, in whose hands do you wish to place Capital? In the hands of the State? The State, to put it mildly, is a bunch of civil servants and officials, from whom the good Lord deliver us! Apart from the fact that here in Italy all officials are bandits… No, it's no good shaking your head like that, they're bandits to a man!”

“But uncle, I didn't move a muscle!”

“… Officials, the world over, whenever they are invested with absolute authority, become such tyrants that in comparison the Roman emperors cut the figure of babes in arms… No, Socialism would be the Dark Ages!”

“Doubtless…”

“On the other hand, seeing that the Dark Ages occurred once, so they might occur twice…”

“Possibly, possibly…”

“On the other hand, why should there be a new Dark Ages? Who has set it up? Who has decreed it? It's us who've done it, by getting certain ideas into our own heads and taking them for gospel, like when people got the notion that New Year's Eve of the year One Thousand would be the end of the world – which obviously didn't happen… No, I don't believe there'll be a new Dark Ages.”

“Neither do I.”

“On the other hand, what we have today in Italy, isn't it a kind of Dark Ages?”

“I couldn't say…”

“Yes, it certainly is! Dear nephew, only that cancer can save us, if it gets a move on.”

“What they say is that he's got a syphilitic ulcer, not cancer.”

“Now he tells me! Hell and dammit, we're ruined. Two injections and your syphilitic ulcer goes kaput… On the other hand what happens if he dies? Who seizes power? His bunch of cut-purse henchmen? They'd slit each other's throats while they were carving up the spoils. So then, it's the Communist gaolbirds? Worse than the Fascists! At least the Fascists are incompetent scoundrels, and whatever crimes come into their minds they make a hash of, whereas the other lot are stern and upstanding, and make a clean job of 'em.”

“Yes, true enough, but…”

“On the other hand, I am speaking lightly of Communism. What if it were something reputable and practical?”

“What they say is…”

“What they say is a load of bollocks! Even if Communism were to be workable – and I assure you it isn't – I would rebel all the same, because it's immoral, insomuch as it suppresses freedom…”

“That's what I was sort of meaning.”

“On the other hand, who can take over the reins if
he
dies? The old fogies who now stay snug at home and flatter themselves that they're in no trouble just because they don't read books or newspapers and spend all day around the card table? They're too decrepit to know how to govern the masses.”

“Of course… no doubt about it…”

“On the other hand, to hell with the masses! If they care to put their heads in a noose, well I don't! And I can have something to say about it, can't I, at least on my own account? On the other hand what I've been saying may be quite wrong, because in 1922 (you won't remember it) the workers were already going quietly back to work and strikes were becoming rarer and rarer when along came the Pig and took away our freedom, took it from the working classes and from us. No, Antonio, the Italian workers are like the middle classes – they love freedom. It's him, the Pig, who's trying to bully us into thinking they don't. Tell your mother to pray for his death, instead of praying for you not to get chilblains! Pray for him to kick the bucket as soon as possible, before I kick it myself from sheer vexation and nausea. I was told something yesterday that, if it's true, makes life no longer worth living. They're going to make Lorenzo Calderara the local Party Secretary of Catania.
Can
this be true?”

“I believe it is.”

“Calderara, son of Poxface, nephew of Chaffbelly! Lord save us! A city that has had its De Felice, its Macchi, its Verga, its Bellini, its Angelo Musco, its Giovanni Grasso, its Capuana,
plus
my good friend De Roberto, bends the knee in this manner to Lorenzo Calderara, commonly known as Blockhead. A hypocrite to boot, and a worm so yellow-bellied you can't stand the whiff of him, such a brainless bloody idiot that his friends once managed to kid him he could buy himself iron gauntlets at the chemist's.”

“Iron…? Gauntlets…?”

“Come off it, Antonio! ‘The Iron Hand'… But on the other
hand, he'd scarcely have known what to do with them. A drip like that who…”

Antonio turned white as a sheet and his head flopped back against the sofa. He gawped at his uncle with pathetically lustreless eyes.

“Hey, what's up?” asked the uncle. “What's biting you?”

Antonio screwed his eyes up tight, leant forward and rested his eyelids on the thumb and first finger of one hand while flapping the other at his uncle to entreat him to keep quiet, not to worry… that he was getting over it…

“You, my lad,” that gentleman resumed as Antonio raised his head and laid it carefully, eyes closed, on the back of the sofa, “must pull up your socks and get back post-haste to Catania. If you hang on here the women will eat you alive, they'll pick you clean… I'm an old man now, but even so they don't give me a moment's peace; so imagine someone of your age and your… Yes, quite, your genial personality!… That face of yours, though it may be cadaverous, they lick at like a lollipop… But enough of that. Let's turn to serious topics. I know this Barbara Puglisi, the girl they want to marry you off to. I heard her play the violin the evening her uncle the monk was celebrating his silver wedding to the Church. I'm not saying she played superlatively, mind you… On the other hand, what's that to you? She's rich. She owns half Paternò! She went to boarding-school… Mind you I'm not saying she's a genius… But on the other hand a woman doesn't need to be a genius. Just as long as she's not brainless. And even if she
is
brainless, what's that to you? That's life, isn't it? So come on, buck up a bit!”

Three days later Antonio set off for Catania, shadowed by a lanky, skinny, droopy dog which, despite suitcases thumped against its nose, kicks from people struggling against the tide and whacks from the umbrellas of exasperated old ladies, unflinchingly persevered in tailing Antonio's white poodle,
with whom it had struck up a lightning friendship in the booking hall. The poodle, firmly on the leash and hauled swiftly along by Antonio, never ceased – he himself so handsome and sprucely groomed – from turning longing backward looks at his hideous though courteous friend.

At the carriage door was waiting Luigi d'Agata, who embraced Antonio with tears in his eyes, and uttered in tones of reproach, “In the name of God! Do you have to up sticks right now when things are looking a bit brighter? Just imagine, yesterday, round at the General's place, they'd invented a new game. If you tell them about it in Catania they won't believe you even if you fall dead at their feet. They call it ‘Nothing but the Truth'. You can ask any question you like and the others have to answer it truthfully. Just listen what they put to Signora Pollini: ‘If armed bandits broke in here and forced you to go to bed with one of those present, you've got to tell us in all truthfulness whom you would go with.'”