Beautiful Antonio (16 page)

“So… nothing!” replied the notary irritably. “In the name of suffering do you want to crucify me, by heaven! Giovanna talked! As soon as you'd dismissed her she went to my wife and let the cat out of the bag.” The notary gave him a frosty
stare, and added. “I request you not to ask me what she said.”

Antonio passed his hand hard across the corner of his mouth where a tic had developed, and managed to quell it.

“I, on the other hand,” he mumbled, “would like to know.”

The notary drew forth from his pocket a solid gold cigarette-case – he opened it – he extracted a cigarette – he closed it again – he put into each of these gestures sufficient force to crush that gadget to pulp, and equal energy into restraining himself – he lit a match – he raised it to his lips with the tremor of one at the nth degree of tension – he noisily puffed it out – and, staring at the floor, began to smoke. Then, with the same extraordinary effort, he raised his eyes and riveted them on Antonio's face; and, still weighing his words: “One day,” he began, “Barbara had a dizzy spell, and the maid asked her whether she might not be expecting a baby. Barbara replied ‘I think I am.' The maid had five children of her own, and, in order to calculate the date of the happy event which Barbara had just announced, she asked a few further questions. In this way she learnt that according to Barbara, who had learnt it from you, babies are born as the result of chaste and fraternal embraces which, after midnight…”

“Stop!” cried Antonio. “That's enough!”

“By God you're right!” exclaimed the notary, hurling down his cigarette and stamping on it. “Quite enough! More than enough! I should think so too! You hoped that…”

“I hoped nothing!” retorted the young man. “But this kind of thing… instead of going to my father with it, why didn't you come to me? We could have done…”

“Done what? What do you imagine we could have done? I am older than you, and know about such things. I know that when relations between husband and wife turn out this way, the only thing to do is split – split up at once!”

Antonio closed his eyes and rested his brow on the palm of one hand, forcing his faultless eyebrows upwards and revealing in full the delicate tissue of his eyelids.

Then he raised his head.

“At once?” he queried. “But November is six months ago! What made you wait so long, if you already knew?”

For the first time, the notary's face betrayed a flash of discomposure.

“True,” he replied. “Six months have passed. That is true. I cannot deny it. But I first had to make sure… to talk to Barbara…”

“Do you mean to say,” cried Antonio, “that for the last six months you've been talking to Barbara – about
this
– behind my back?”

“Wait a moment!” cut in the notary, re-injecting the stern quality into his voice. “‘Talking to Barbara' is not exactly a precise way of putting it. We attempted to speak to her, we attempted to persuade her, we…”

“Persuade her to what?”

The notary narrowed his eyes, as one taking good aim before delivering his broadside. “To persuade her,” he said, “to think of herself as what she actually is: a virgin who never married anyone!”

“In heaven's name!” cried Antonio. “Are you out to create a scandal? To set everyone gossiping about me, about her…?”

“We are in the hands of the Almighty,” replied the notary.

“No, no, I beg of you!” Antonio burst out. “Think, before you act! Consider the dreadful consequences!”

“Is there anything all that satisfactory in the present state of affairs?”

Antonio bowed his head, but after a moment's thought he looked up. “Neither you nor I should be judge in this matter,” he said. “Only Barbara.”

“Barbara is a young woman of good judgement.”

“What are you implying?”

“I simply say that Barbara is a young woman of good judgement. She will judge wisely!”

“But… does Barbara know you were going to discuss this with me today?”

“Antonio, it was you who called on me!”

“Then does she know that today you were going to discuss it with my father?”

“I am of the opinion she does not.”

“Does she know or doesn't she?”

“I am of the opinion she does not!”

Antonio realized that he was up against a brick wall. He hesitated a fraction of a second, then thrust aside his father-in-law, who was blocking the doorway, flung out into the corridor without giving the other so much as a nod, stalked through the office filled with hands raised in amazement, clumsily tore aside the heavy curtain, and gained the street.

He had to talk to Barbara! Now! Not a moment to be lost!

He re-did the length of Via Etnea, barging into the hundred sun-baked backs of persons stopping for a word every other second, whipped round into Piazza Stesicoro, bounded into the doorway of Palazzo Puglisi, and flew up the staircase with a din as of someone tumbling down it.

He found Barbara in the bedroom, ensconced in an armchair with a piece of crochet-work on her lap. The moment he saw her, a bitterly ironic notion occurred to him, one which he himself was bound to bear the brunt of: a young wife preparing little things for her firstborn.

Daunted by these freakish ambiguities and allusions coming at him from all sides, and in need of some miraculous support, Antonio raised his eyes to the wall where hung a picture of the Madonna… But there too a thought of similar stamp awaited him, though gilded, perhaps, with some measure of comfort – the Madonna had borne her Son without having recourse to that act…

He sat himself down on the floor at his wife's feet, and “Barbara,” he said, “my darling Barbara…”

He squeezed her shapely hand and felt, as ever, the most fervid emotion, compounded of desperate fantasies and longings for a pleasure that no one in real life has ever tasted.

His wife reddened, colour gushing into her cheeks like blood
from a severed artery, and spreading in waves over her forehead, into her hair, behind her ears.

“Barbara!” cried Antonio. “Why are you blushing so?”

“I'm sorry,” she said, as a more crimson tide than ever swept across her cheeks. “I'm sorry… I just can't help it!”

He looked up at her, carried away by the wondrous beauty of that lustre of blushes, and sorely wounded by the thoughts he imagined to be at work behind such tides of blood.

He pulled himself to his knees and grasped his wife by the arms.

“Barbara,” he said. “Something really serious happened this morning. Do you know about it?”

Her blushes ceased, she seemed on the point of fainting. Then looking her husband straight in the face she answered: “Yes.”

“Yes?” he said. “You're telling me you do? You know that your father called on mine this morning?”

“Yes. I know.”

“Since when?”

“They told me afterwards.”

“Heavens! Are you telling me your father took such a momentous step without consulting you?”

She set herself frantically to pick up the stitch she had dropped in her crochet, and said nothing.

“Barbara,” pursued Antonio, tilting up her chin with his fingertips, “Barbara, tell me the truth. Do you approve of what your father did? Come on, give me an answer! Do you?”

She remained silent for a full minute, letting her chin rest on Antonio's hand, her eyes cast down. Then, “Yes!” she said.

Antonio leapt up. “You approve?” he demanded, horror-struck. “You think he did right?”

Faced with the wordless silence of his wife, a silence he dared not think about, a silence that cut him a blow across the face and tore at his flesh, he covered his eyes with a hand and murmured, “Oh, God in heaven, the shame of it! The shame of it.”

Barbara, in silence, took up her crochet-work again, an almost imperceptible tremor on her set lips.

“But Barbara,” Antonio went on, “why is it that suddenly, after three years of marriage and for no apparent reason, you and your parents decide…”

“Antonio, you're being unfair,” broke in Barbara, pulling herself together. “You know perfectly well that it was only last November that I learnt from that woman…”

And she lowered her head in such a way as to cause several locks of hair to mask her face and her blushes.

Antonio gulped, then said, “Perfectly true. But even after that, didn't we vow to each other to live together and love each other all the same, even more so in fact?… How often have you told me you were happier that way than… and that God's blessing was on our house in which we didn't…”

“But now,” said Barbara, twisting thread around the fingers of her left hand, “I have learnt that the Church does not bless our house!”

“But why?” cried Antonio. “What harm do we do to a soul?”

“We do no harm to anyone, but our marriage does not exist in the sight of God!”

“And how long have you known that our marriage ‘does not exist in the sight of God'?”

“For some little while.”

“How long? I insist on knowing exactly!”

Barbara hesitated. Then she said: “Since it was explained to me by the Archbishop.”

“What!” blabbered Antonio, left almost speechless. “You mean you've been talking about these things even with the Archbishop? So you've all been discussing me. You've thrown me to the town dogs, eh?… And while I,” he added, a tremor in his voice, “was living with you in complete trust… and you seemed so happy and so tender towards me. But as soon as I turned my back you all rushed off, did you, to prattle to priests and archbishops?”

“It only happened a week ago!” broke in Barbara. “Only a week!”

“But how did it happen? And why? What was so special about a week ago?”

“I don't know what was special about a week ago, but my dear Antonio I have my duties as a daughter, as well as those of a wife, and I had to obey my father!”

“I see. So it was your father who took you a week ago to see the Archbishop?”

“Yes.”

“And why, such an upright man, does he begin to concern himself with our affairs only a week ago, when he had known since November?”

“Antonio,” said she irritably, “are you criticizing him for what he did, or for being so hesitant in doing it?”

“I'm not criticizing him at all, but no one can convince me that he hasn't got some secret scheme up his sleeve for you.”

“I have no idea what schemes my father may have for me, but in any case they could never be other than honest and affectionate. My father is a man of principle, who goes to confession and takes Holy Communion far more often than you do, Antonio. And my duty is to obey him.”

“Barbara,” he shouted “look me in the eyes!… You know the truth, Barbara!”

“I know nothing,” she replied – and her face ceased its spasms of blushing and paling, taking on that severe and lofty inscrutability which made the Puglisi clan, terrifying when they spoke, more terrifying still when they were silent.

“So Barbara,” continued Antonio, a pleading note in his voice as he sat down again at his wife's feet, “so what's become of all the love you once had for me?”

“I do still love you,” said Barbara gently, “but no longer as a wife loves her husband!”

“Why this ‘no longer'?…”

“Because we are
not
man and wife!”

“Since when aren't we man and wife?”

“Oh, Antonio, we never have been… And I didn't know… But now I do!”

“And this is the reason why you can't love me any more?”

“But I do, I do! I do love you – how can I explain? – I do love you, but no longer as your wife. It's… another kind of fondness,” she insisted, tearful-eyed.

“I don't know what kind of fondness you're on about,” said Antonio, “but I certainly know that no one could do me down more foully than you're out to!”

“An even fouler thing, Antonio, would be for a man and a woman to go on living together without being properly married!… Don't you realize,” she went on in a queer sort of voice, “that since they explained it all to me I haven't been able to be with you without blushing scarlet?”

“But we're not doing any harm by being together.”

“Indeed, we are doing nothing, and that's what makes me blush so!”

“We can sleep in separate beds… split up and live in two different rooms!”

She shook her head.

“In separate flats…”

She shook her head.

“If you want, I'll leave. I'll pretend to be going on a trip, then never come back… I'll go and work in Africa… I'll stay there for the rest of my life!”

“And wouldn't that make matters worse, Antonio?”

“No, it wouldn't. Nothing could be worse than what they're cooking up for me!… Listen!” he added, in the voice of one who has found some unhoped-for lifeline: “We'll go to America and get a divorce.”

“No!” she replied firmly. “I am a Catholic, and would never get divorced, not even if you'd murdered our child!…” She bit her lip and blushed again, realizing that she had stupidly stumbled upon one of the half-dozen words she had sworn to herself never to utter in her husband's hearing. “My dear,” she
went on, passing a hand across her eyes, “ask what you like of me, except things that go against my conscience.”

“But if our marriage is judged to be null and void by the Church,” said Antonio, “well then, why not think of it the same way ourselves? I'll go off and live in the back of beyond, we'll be living apart, we won't see each other – or else from time to time we'll meet like two strangers… And it'll all be all right!”

“No,” she said. “You know as well as I do that that's not enough!”

“Not enough?” gasped Antonio. “Is there more to come?”