Beautiful Antonio (6 page)

This harangue was interrupted by Elena, bursting through a thicket of simpers to cry, “Signora Rosaria,
do
take a look at the length of your son's eyelashes! How
can
he have such beauties. They're not lashes at all, they're
fans
! Isn't it true, Daddy, they look like ostrich-feather fans?”

“A pox on the woman!” muttered Signor Alfio under his breath, wheeling back indoors without a word to anyone.

But Antonio had to wait until the Avvocato's complexion had ebbed from puce to pallid, betokening that the vein of his eloquence had, at least for the moment, run dry. Thereafter he had to allow himself to be kissed on the forehead and the eyelids by his mother, acting under the direction of the mature spinster who with nervous little giggles thus urged her on from the balcony:

“
There
's where you must kiss him! Lower, lower… Let's see if it tickles him
there
… Higher up, higher up! Heavens, what a bristly chin! Rasps like sandpaper, I'd say!”

But Antonio was left to himself at last, to gaze at leisure at the much-loved roofs of Catania: the black rooftops, the flowerpots, the skeletal fig-trees and the washing also, around
which, at sunset, the March wind carried the kick of a mule; to gaze at the church domes glittering on feast-day evenings like golden mitres; at deserted tiers of open-air theatres and pepper-trees in the Public Gardens; this very sky, low and homely as a ceiling, in which the clouds arranged themselves in old familar patterns; and Mount Etna crouched between the sea and the heart of Sicily – upon its paws, its tail, its back, dozens of black townlets that had contrived to struggle up.

He went into his own room, where what was left of his odours of five years before bade him welcome like a dog faithfully waiting with its nose to the crack under the door… Here, in the two bookcases, were the sturdy volumes in which he had done his earliest reading, from which he had derived fabulous pleasure, until amorous daydreams abruptly put a stop to that. Here were the walls submerged in pictures, prints, hangings, crucifixes, holy-water stoops… and here, in the middle of the room, was the wash-stand with its swing mirror which (watch it!) you had to take care not to tip too far back in case the bottom came shooting forwards and knocked over all the pots and bottles: and here was the quilt, the hot-water bottle, the hand-warmer, the bed-warmer… Antonio stretched out on his back, fell asleep, and two hours later woke up with a tear on his cheek. What had he dreamt? It didn't come back to him, but he felt an overpowering urge to give full vent to a flood of tears that someone seemed to have choked back in his throat.

“Come now!” he said to himself, ‘I swear to my crucifix there on the wall that I'll never come over all moody and morose again.”

The same evening, in an effort to overcome his moodiness, he accepted a bizarre invitation from a cousin and good friend of his, Edoardo Lentini.

Just arrived from Rome to install Lorenzo Calderara in his post as local Party Secretary was the Deputy Secretary-General of the whole Fascist Party in person, a man with a chest entirely smothered with medals and a penchant for prostitutes. Having
been apprised of this foible of his, a bunch of sycophants had strained every nerve to arrange a night out in the manner most agreeable to a personage so highly provided with power both for good and for ill. As a result of these efforts, at eleven o'clock precisely the “Pensione Eros” shut its doors in the face of its regular customers, who immediately began to howl insults, boot at the doors and hurl stones; with the result that a squad of policemen, disguised as raw recruits, turned up pretending to be so drunk as playfully to stroke the cheeks of the crowd with their revolver-barrels, and chivvied the customers from the alleyway. Half an hour later these same cops, fed up with playing drunk and getting curses and worse from every youth who came round the corner, rose up in the full strength of their officialdom, ordering all and sundry to “Move along now, move along!”

“Watch it! I've got your number!” was the retort of several of those addressed, their coat collars turned up high to conceal their faces.

Meanwhile, in the dining-salon of the “Pensione Eros” blazed many hundreds of candle-power, porcelain and crystal sparkled behind the glass doors of dressers, marble-topped tables groaned beneath heaps of officers' coats and cloaks and caps and fezes.

Antonio was introduced to the Deputy Secretary of the Party as “a friend of Countess K”.

“So Comrade,” said the bigwig, “the stories we hear about you are true, eh?”

“Stories, what stories?” mumbled Antonio reddening, as Lorenzo Calderara whispered in his ear, “For heaven's sake don't be too familiar with him! Address him formally. And incidentally, why the hell aren't you wearing your Party Badge?”

“The story goes,” continued the bigwig, “that you have prodigious success with women. What about you, now?” he added, turning to the four girls ringed around him, the two taller resting their elbows on the shoulders of the shorter, and
each through gossamer veils displaying her particular pussy, “let's hear
your
opinion. Could you fancy this sort of specimen?”

The four women allowed their gaze to rest for a moment upon Antonio, and despite the fact that they scarcely thought this the most propitious moment for frankness, two of them – the prettiest and the least endowed – in that one moment managed to fall in love.

“So, what d'you think? D'you fancy a specimen of this sort?” And with a swift, insolent movement he thrust back Antonio's cuffs revealing the delicacy of the wrists. “Or d'you go for a man like me?” And he rolled up his own sleeves, displaying two hairy, bulging forearms.

The girls, unwilling to admit the truth, gawked wide-eyed at such wrists as his, crying out in a superfluity of wonderment. One of them plumped herself down on his lap, and fishing around among his medals, through his shirt and beneath his vest, drew forth a tuft of hair which with deft fingers she formed into a tiny plait. All the girls were keen to give it gentle tweaks, and all the men, with the sole exception of Antonio, vied with each other in cracking jokes about it that but thinly, yet brazenly, veiled their intended flattery.

“No one could take
you
for a woman!” declared a sycophantic Lorenzo Calderara.

At this point in came large trayfuls of brandy and gin. Eyes began to glisten bibulously amid the fog of cigarette smoke. The Deputy Secretary-General twice rose to his feet to go upstairs with the same girl, then once again to go with the madame of the Pensione; she however, politely but firmly, refused.

“My dear Nedda, are we going to have to banish you to some backwater?” said Lorenzo Calderara, his voice pitched midway between ribaldry and reprimand, leaving it uncertain which of the two was a fake.

“Right then, arrest me!” retorted Madame, trying to make a joke of it.

The Deputy Secretary-General for his third sortie, had to make do with another of the girls, whose pleasant face had previously, though briefly, been disfigured with pique on seeing the middle-aged madame given preference.

When the Deputy Secretary-General made his reappearance in the room, his bemedalled chest open to the winds and one arm round the bare flanks of the girl, he was hailed with applause.

“If it is not an indiscreet question,” said Antonio's cousin, Edoardo Lentini, “may I enquire how old you are?”

“My dear chap,” replied the bigwig, “I'm pretty long in the tooth… Go on and guess!”

“Twenty-five! Twenty-four!” cried those who thought it opportune to butter him up by assuring him how young he looked.

“Forty! Forty-two!” wagered those wishing to bestow on him a contrasting pleasure – that of publicly denying any possibility that, in his case at least, it had required long years to rise to such heights in politics.

“Thirty-two!” was his curt reply.

“Heavens!” exclaimed the first lot. “You're such a wow with the women we'd never have thought you a day over twenty-five!”

“By Jove!” ejaculated the others. “Only thirty-two and already Deputy Secretary-General of the Party?”

They went on to speak of Youth, which under the new regime had taken over the “helm of the State”. The ministers, the mayors, the Party Secretaries, were all without exception youthful, and the most youthful of all was… Whereupon they all lowered their voices, with a painful effort removed the sozzled smirks from their faces, stiffened in their chairs at the memory of how many times they had sprung to attention as they pronounced that title; and they named the name of Italy's most potent and powerful personage.

Such conversation had become insufferable, not least because it demanded a sort of earnestness that was riotously
banished from their faces by the flush of exhilaration and liquor.

To create a diversion a young police inspector snatched up one of the girls and dumped her on the lap of Lorenzo Calderara, who enjoyed what was (in Catania) the mortifying reputation of never having gone with a State prostitute.

They all set to a-clapping and a-shouting, while the girl poured a host of come-hitherings into the ear of Calderara, who contrived to give a sickly smile as he turned red as a turkey-cock.

“Get a move on!” bawled the Deputy Secretary-General (to whom a few hasty words had been addressed by a bony individual whose dismal species of diplomacy – known with a fantasy to match its aptness as hunchback-heartedness – had, from his constant whispering in people's ears, resulted in a perpetual stoop). “Get a move on, Lorenzo, do your stuff! The Party Secretary of Catania has to be a
man
!… You take my meaning, I suppose?… And you, comrade Elena, will thereafter report to me in person!”

The company, with the exception of Antonio, leapt to their feet to heave Calderara out of his chair and spur him from the room along with the girl.

“Don't push!” objected Calderara. “Hey there, that's enough of that. I'll go on my own two feet! Stop it!”

All present thereupon turned their eyes to the Deputy Secretary-General. Had they overstepped the mark with the man who from tomorrow onwards would have all their destinies in his hands?

“Let him alone,” said the Deputy Secretary. “He'll go on his own two feet.”

“He's not going anywhere!” This sudden shriek from the madame.

An outburst that caused all faces to swivel in her direction, and little by little to drain of their hilarity.

“He's not going!… Mother of God, are you trying to force me to use foul language?… He's not going!”

“What do you mean, not going?” enquired the Deputy Secretary. “On whose orders?”

“On mine!” retorted the woman, clapping a hand to the copious bosom a-quiver beneath her quivering bodice.

Laughter was general and hearty.

“No laughing matter this, you fools!” The Deputy Secretary-General rose from his chair, retracting his chin onto his chest, flaring bloodless nostrils; a pace away from the woman he raised his head, gave her a sidelong look, as a matador sidesteps before thrusting his sword into the heart of the bull; then, like lightning, he delivered a whacking backhand that sent her crashing against the wall.

Arms milling, the woman clutched at a tapestry that instantly ripped from its moorings and fell, entombing her in a number of the edifices of ancient Rome and a considerable stretch of the Tiber.

She slithered to the floor. The girls flocked to her aid, disentwining her from the hangings. One of them put a glass of water to her lips and tipped it gently into her mouth as into a lifeless vessel.

Having drunk, the woman gave a shake to her head, scrubbed her eyes energetically with the backs of her hands and scowled, one after the other, at the men, now resettled in their places.

“Cooled off a bit, eh?” enquired Lorenzo Calderara sarcastically.

“I did it for your sake, you oaf!” the woman said brokenly from where she sat slumped on the floor.

In imitation of the Deputy Secretary a few moments before, Calderara rose from his chair, though in a far more ludicrous manner and, hand raised, advanced in his turn on the woman.

“Oh, give over now, that's quite enough of that!” broke in one of the girls, the tallest and most splendid of them all. “Lay off!” And she gave a shove that sent him tottering backwards. “What a bloody awful evening this has been! What a lot of dead-beats! Give us a break, do!…” And here she addressed
Antonio in the accents of one relinquishing a tiresome role and giving voice to her true tastes. “Come on now, duckie. 'Cor, do I ever want to get a breath of fresh air!”

These words struck the company like the blow of a mace to the midriff. They could not have been more cogently informed that they were unlovable, and that without exception all their conquests of the evening had been but a snare and a delusion.

The girl had clasped Antonio to her side, and while the involuntary undulations of her bare hips, and the equally involuntary sportings of her right hand, manifested a warm and plentiful ardour, at the rest of the company she directed a cold and haughty stare.

“It's been a bloody awful evening for us too, I'll have you know!” declared the Deputy Secretary-General, hefting himself out of his chair. “Let's get out of here!”

Edoardo Lentini, anxious lest such a conquest, by making the others look small, might get his friend into trouble, amiably remarked, “Antonio'll be coming along with us. He's not going to stay and waste his time here…”

“
Here
,” retorted the girl, “he would
not
be wasting his time. He'd be wasting it with you lot, with all that daft rubbish you get up to just so as to get on everybody's nerves!”

“Antonio, we must go. We shouldn't stay here a moment longer,” said Edoardo, now with a resolute ring to his voice.

“Leave him alone!” commanded the Deputy Secretary, carefully pressing his fez down onto his glistening hair. “We're not such tyrants as to wish to chastise the taste of tarts…”