Beautiful Antonio (7 page)

At this Antonio freed himself from the girl's grasp and, with a motion as indolent as it was self-assured, removed the fez from the Deputy Secretary's head and – O unheard-of thing! – began to toss it nonchalantly from hand to hand while eyeing the open window as if he had half a mind to bung it out into the street.

Every man-jack of them went green about the gills. Lorenzo Calderara puffed up like a drowning man gulping water, his breath coming ever more laboured and spasmodic. Edoardo
Lentini mouthed the paternosters he was mentally rattling off to invoke the aid of God for his friend in peril. The women alone gazed upon Antonio with emotions which (since their very natures prompted them to play it strong) ended in their making some lewd remark.

The Deputy Secretary grabbed Antonio's arm with his brawny hand and held it fast. He raked all present with a stately glare. He glared at Antonio… Then, seized by a sudden impulse of liking for the young man, he burst out laughing.

Sighs of relief all round, except from Lorenzo Calderara, ever slow on the uptake and incapable of lightning switches from wrath to mirth without risking a veritable seizure.

“Good luck to you, young man!” cried the bigwig, readjusting the fez on his hairdo and rapping his riding-crop on Antonio's chest. “Would you care to go to Bologna as local Deputy Secretary? Only too glad to oblige. The women there will skin you alive… Anyway, give it a thought in the course of the night, if that girl of yours gives you a chance to think… She looks like giving you the works. A year from now you'll be a local Party Secretary! Right, comrades, let's make a move!”

And as in the meanwhile he had snapped shut the clasp of his cloak, impetuously he swept from the room.

Boisterously summing up the events of the evening, all the officials tumbled away at his heels.

T
HE EVENING SPENT
at the “Pensione Eros” was not without consequences for Antonio. Signor Alfio learnt all the details in a dark corridor of the Law Courts, where the mice were producing deafening havoc in the great presses stuffed with old documents.

“Do I make myself clear?” he asked later, at table, addressing his wife and pretending not even to see Antonio. “Your son comes here to get engaged, and the very first evening he lands up in a whorehouse!”

“He's a bachelor,” retorted the mother, with a bitter allusion to those who did likewise despite being bound by obligations of conjugal fidelity. “He doesn't have anyone to answer to.”

“All you ever do is make nasty cracks about me! Don't you realize that if such a thing comes to the ears of Father Rosario, the uncle of this… er… yes, this Barbara, the wedding will go up in smoke?”

The following day the aforesaid monk paid a visit on Signor Alfio, who at the mere mention of his name was seized with a fit of nerves and had to drink three glasses of water in quick succession.

“I have heard the good news,” began Father Rosario, as soon as he had taken his seat opposite Magnano Senior.

“What good news?” queried the other suspiciously.

“I have been informed that your son is in the good graces of the Deputy Secretary-General of the Party…”

“I couldn't say,” replied Signor Alfio, all the more fearful that this priest was out to trap him. “Don't even know if they ever met…”

“It appears they met the other evening…”

“Father, let's not beat about the bush,” snorted Signor Alfio, already as testy as if he had received a reprimand, “let's talk in plain terms.”

“Very well, plain terms it shall be: I would be highly grateful if Antonio were to beg the Deputy Secretary to put a damper, once and for all, on the Union boss in Viagrande, who, I assure you, subjects me to every sort of vexation, to the point – last October – of sending me all the thieves in the province to harvest my grapes! I can't tell you what they didn't steal from me… everything, including my night-cap!”

“Oh, if that's all you're on about…” exclaimed Signor Alfio with relief.

“Why, whatever were you expecting?”

“Nothing, nothing!” declared Magnano senior. “I thought, er… nothing, in short…”

This conversation with the monk was passed on to Antonio amid a series of grunts which rendered it incomprehensible.

Antonio listened, his thoughts wandering, until his father, hawking up the phlegm which had thitherto engulfed his words, clear and true came out with “My boy, for some time now you've had a bee in your bonnet I don't much care for. What is it?”

“Nothing special,” answered Antonio, getting up from the table and edging towards the door.

“So I'm a Dutchman!” grumbled the old fellow, minutely observing his son's receding back and the listless way in which he pushed open the door and left the room.

That evening Antonio and Edoardo Lentini went strolling up and down the short and infinitely beautiful Via Crociferi. The three churches and two convents between which the street sloped away were deserted and silent; the gates in the high wrought-iron railings which embraced the brief, steep flights of steps leading to the church doors were bolted and barred.

The two young men were gripped by a romantic nostalgia more troubling and unhappy to them even than to a real,
genuine Romantic who might have trodden that same street a century earlier.

“It's shaming to have to suck up to a man like that Deputy Secretary!” said Edoardo. “Times were when we'd have had to avert our gaze rather than return the least nod from such a man. Ugh! How I'd have liked to kick him…”

“He's very virile,” observed Antonio. “He managed to go with three women in less than an hour!”

“I might have done the same myself if I hadn't realized something that he, crude brute that he is, didn't notice at all: the women despised us.”

“D'you really think so?”

“The way the madame said ‘You oaf!' I could have kissed her feet!”

“Sorry to have to disappoint you, old boy, but the madame was beside herself because she hadn't been able to receive a client of hers who brings her some narcotic or other every evening. After you all left she swore to me, tears in her eyes, that she'd give ten years of her life just to spend a single night with Mussolini.”

“What depravity! Makes you weep! To think that I, this very morning, learnt by heart a chapter in the
Annals
of Tacitus. I'll quote it to you. ‘Nero bethought himself of Epicharis, and, not believing that a woman was capable of bearing pain, ordered her to be tortured. But nor rod nor fire nor all the fury of the executioners made her confess; and so she won the first day. Borne the following day to the same torments, and incapable of standing on her lacerated members, she drew from her bosom a sash, tied it to the chair, secured a noose around her neck and drew it tight with the weight of her own body, thus extracting what little breath remained in it. A memorable lesson this is to us, that a prostitute, inflicted with so much agony, was prepared to save the lives of strangers; while men – knights and senators – and this without torture, would denounce even the persons dearest to them.' These days, in Italy, not even the women… When a society can no longer
rely even on its prostitutes, it's done for. There's nothing more to be hoped for! personally, I have resigned myself. In fact, I'm going to ask you a favour.”

“What is it? Go ahead.”

“Since the Deputy Secretary-General has taken a liking to you, do ask him to have me appointed mayor of Catania!”

“What!… I don't follow you…”

“Antonio, my friend, I'm thirty-two and in need of a job. I'm not going to salve my conscience by sitting at home earning nothing and getting dirty looks from my father-in-law. This regime is going to last at least a hundred years, so no need to feel guilty about what we do. But even if the regime falls, I'm not out to make excuses for myself. If I bothered about cutting a figure as an upstanding man with posterity I'd be a fool, and be giving undue importance to pomp. Because becoming a Party official, or not being enrolled in the Party at all, is all a lot of hogwash compared with the black misery we'll be forced to live through, whether we're Party officials or we stay at home and mind our own business. But I must say I have every intention of being an honest man, and my honesty will take the form of not stealing, of treating everyone courteously, while wishing all manner of ill to the regime I serve as punctiliously and conscientiously as is only made possible by being firmly inside and knowing its secrets!”

If Antonio had lent a more attentive ear, and if the channels of his intellect had not been more or less obstructed for some time now, he would certainly have considered his friend's effusion very strange and incoherent. As it was, he confined himself to stating that he never again, for any reason whatever, wished to set eyes on the Deputy Secretary-General.

Edoardo's determination flagged – he had no come-back to that one; and the two friends continued their walk in silence, unaware that the emaciated white face of a nun had stationed itself behind the grating of a high window, and had fixed on the person of Antonio a long, disapproving stare, which she had not the slightest wish to tear away.

“Heavens alive!” exclaimed Antonio out of the blue, “I simply must get back to doing some reading. Do you know that for ten years I haven't read a single book right through to the end! I feel positively doped with ignorance. Books keep you on your toes!… Hey d'you think it's really true that Lorenzo Calderara has never been with a prostitute? Some people even claim that he's never been with a woman at all. What do
you
think? After all…”

“After all,” took up Edoardo, “not everyone can be like you!” And he gave a wink, that left his fine brow as unfurrowed and inexpressive as the sole of a foot.

The thought that women existed, their tiny hands, their pink feet, their white throats, their enticing skirts, dispelled all melancholy. Edoardo let out a yell that caused that glimmer of female face behind the window-grating to vanish, blown out like a candle in the wind.

“Three cheers!” he cried, taking advantage of the empty street. “Others may have freedom, but Italy has women!”

A day or two after this promenade Antonio, having learnt that the Deputy Secretary-General had returned to Rome, paid a visit to the headquarters of the Fascist League to have a word with Lorenzo Calderara. As the telephone had summoned the usher into the interior of a phone-booth, and since he had already been sitting in the waiting-room for an hour, he walked up to the Party boss's door and pushed it open. He caught a glimpse of Calderara's head nose downwards on a divan, the brow aflame, the veins taut as whipcords… The penny dropped, he wished to see no more, but tiptoed away with the air of one who has asked a question and received a brutally downright answer, when a few casual words would have more than sufficed.

“Kindly tell him I'm positively glad not to have set eyes on him these last ten years!”

This was the message Antonio received via the pharmacist
Salinitro from his old schoolmate Angelo Bartolini, who lived like a hermit in the environs of Catania, close to a tiny railway station where every other day passed the little chugger-train on its tour of Mount Etna. This was the only noise likely to disturb the meditations of an amiable fellow whose kind-heartedness now found its sole outlet in cherishing his loathing of the times he lived in.

“Why' he glad not to have set eyes on me for ten years?” asked Antonio, pausing with the pharmacist on the pavement of Via Etnea. “Personally, I've always been particularly fond of him.”

“Because he's heard you're going to be made Party Secretary of some place or other.”

“It's a lie!” cried Antonio. “Tell him it's four years since I paid up for my Party Card, and that one of these days I'm going to shut myself away in the country and…”

At that moment who should emerge from a side-street but Barbara Puglisi with her mother. The girl was bearing a missal and walking with a slight stoop, hugging to her bosom, and concealing in the sweetest manner possible, the exuberance and surge of her youth. A gentle nudge from her mother notified her that she might allow her gaze, albeit attenuated by modesty, to recover both perception and alertness. Barbara permitted her oval face, lapped in violet lace, an imperceptible movement to the left; a more noticeable movement she imparted to her eyes, revealing their dazzling whites; and she espied Antonio gazing at her. A slight stumble detached her from her mother and led her very close to the young man. He inhaled the sweet scent of her veil, of her skin warmed by a swift rush of blood, of tortoise-shell hairpins, of clothes which had long kept company with a pot-pourri which no woman in Rome had ever possessed: it stung his flesh, it pricked him to the quick. He stood stock-still, tracing the course of that species of serpent which had penetrated his nervous system and was biting at its very roots.

“My God!” he muttered. “Could this be…”

“You're leaving me in the dark,” said the pharmacist.

Antonio's answer was to throw his arms around the man's neck and hug him.

“I'm still more in the dark,” exclaimed the other.

“Tell friend Angelo,” cried Antonio in tones of elation “that in no time at all I'm going to marry that girl you saw passing just now… and that I'm delighted at the prospect!”

So saying he rested his eyes upon the statue of the Madonna up there on the church of the Carmine, and retained them there devoutly, as one who, in an act of thanksgiving, presses his forehead to the ground before an altar.

“And what about your political opinions? What shall I tell friend Angelo about those?” enquired the other.

“Oh,
those
… What do they matter?” replied Antonio, grasping the pharmacist's hand in both of his.

That very same evening he entered his parents' bedroom and announced that he was all agog to marry Barbara.