Beautiful Antonio (18 page)

“The day after tomorrow,” replied the notary in tones of ice, “the matter will be out of our hands and in those of our lawyers.”

“No!” bawled Signor Alfio, his eyes bulging fit to burst. “First you must see for yourself!… at the whatsit… at the brothel! I'll haul you there by the snout!…”

“Dad, dad!” came a cry at this point. “Dad, what ever are you up to?”

Antonio, who had overheard the end of the sentence, wrenched the receiver from his father's hand and banged it back on the apparatus where, sizzling like a red-hot ember in water, the notary's reply was quenched.

“Dad, do you want to be the death of me?”

“No, no, it's me, it's me I want dead!” burst out the old man, collapsing into a chair and fanning himself with one hand. “Bring me a drop of whatsit… yes… water!”

The following day Signora Rosaria went off to pray in the little church of the Madonna in Via Sant'Euplio.

While she was kneeling before the altar of Santa Rita, a voice said, “I know all too well what is going on in this poor head.”

And the hand of a young priest was laid lightly on the grey plaits knotted at the nape and held in place by countless almost invisible hairpins.

It was Father Raffaele, Signora Rosaria's new confessor, who had stepped into Father Giovanni's shoes since the latter's heart had abruptly stopped while he was contorting himself with rage during a sermon on the misdeeds of certain “damned souls” – whom some Fascist spies kneeling in the congregation, heads bowed, assumed to be the Nazis.

“Father Raffaele,” quavered Signora Rosaria, turning on him the eyes of a frightened child, “then you
know
?…”

The priest took her by the elbows and assisted her to her feet. “I know, alas, I know…”

“But whoever could have imagined such a terrible misfortune?”

The priest smiled ruefully.

“Can it be true,” she went on, casting terrified glances one after another at the saints looking down at her from niche and chapel; “can it be true that the Church is really against us?”

“What are you saying!” murmured the youthful priest paternally. “The Church stands for truth and justice.”

She looked searchingly into his face, in an effort to understand why the young man's eyes were so mild and reassuring, while his words were so abstruse.

“What about Barbara?” she asked. “You know your Barbara. What's your own judgement of that blessed girl?”

“I cannot judge her. A pastor's duty is to guide his flock, not to judge them. But I have to confess that…”

“That?…” Signora Rosaria egged him on.

“That I have found in her a hardened heart.”

“Father,” begged the poor lady, tortured by her incapacity to grasp the meaning of a man in whom she must repose so much trust. “What do you mean by ‘hardened'?”

“I mean,” replied the priest, tortured in turn by the impossibility of using the words which sprang most readily to his lips, “I mean a heart created by God to perplex us poor priests, a heart impossible to make head or tail of! All her mental attitudes are in order, and we can only approve and admire them. But all the same,” he continued, turning suddenly scarlet with a rush of true peasant blood, “all the same, if you want to know my feelings, and not my judgement, that girl…” – and here his voice rose almost to a screech – “I wouldn't allow her into church even in her coffin!”

The young priest's face had lost its habitual tint, the wan hue of a tired man living in twilight. His endless meditations and studies fled from his cheeks, which lost their hollow look as true Sicilian anger blazed darkly in his wide-spaced, slightly squinting eyes.

“That girl's heart is like the octopus,” he went on. “The longer you cook it the tougher it gets. The more you talk to her the less you convince her, and in matters of religion she knows more than the devil himself! Shall I tell you what she told me? – not in confession, of course, because in that case my lips would be sealed… She told me that ever since they explained to her that the Church considers her marriage null
and void, she has no longer permitted herself to love a man who is not her husband! Can you beat it! She no longer permits herself… It's a convenient heart to have, hers is (God forgive me, tomorrow I'll make confession myself). It's so constructed as to make suffering impossible for her, except with full advantage to herself and satisfaction to her parents. And never, never will she run the risk of losing either her head or a brass farthing!”

The priest's rage threw Signora Rosaria into ecstasies. Though she did not understand every word, she had no doubt about the general drift.

“Father,” she asked. “D'you think it would be possible for me to have a word with that dratted girl?”

“Do so, if you want. But you'll be wasting your breath. Her nostrils are already quivering with the scent of money.”

“Scent of money? What ever do you mean?” muttered Signora Rosaria, the happiness that had put new heart into her swiftly slipping away.

“I mean the scent of money! The Duca Di Bronte, who is to be Barbara's husband when her marriage to your son has been annulled, possesses three hundred million!… Now watch this coincidence: the moment this gentleman expresses his regret at not having married a down-to-earth girl like Barbara, her father happens to meet the Archbishop and, after considerably beating about the bush, asks his advice on how he should conduct himself regarding his son-in-law
vis-à-vis
his daughter…”

“But for seven months!…”

“Indeed, for seven months he had known how things stood between Antonio and Barbara but, as it happened, during those seven months he never came across the Archbishop! ‘But,' you may say, ‘did he not have
you
, the humble parish priests? And in his own house did he not have a Dominican with a whopping great cordon round his waist?' Ah, my dear lady, you are really ingenuous! It needed an Archbishop, if not the Supreme
Pontiff in person, to unseal the lips of a Notary Puglisi on a matter of such delicacy!”

“But Father, do you think this marriage will definitely be annulled?”

“I'm afraid so, dear lady. Cherish no false hopes on that score. If matters stand as they're said to stand, the marriage will be annulled.”

Signora Rosaria began to weep quietly: ‘Just think, Father! My Antonio… Father Giovanni used to see him come into church of a Sunday and give him a nasty look, because all the women's heads swivelled over their shoulders and stayed that way… My Antonio, Father, who when he was in Rome committed so many of those sins which young men are bound to commit!… Sometimes I beat myself about the head when I think that the Lord took me literally when I prayed to him to calm my son down and make him less of a lady-killer. ‘Calm him down, you ask?' replied the Lord. ‘Right then, I'll cool him off good and proper!' Father, do you think the Lord wished to punish me by sending us this shame?”

“But it is far from being shame, Signora Rosaria!”

“Oh, it
is
shame, it
is
shame!… Believe me, it
is
shame! Why, even the Church puts us in the wrong, and the Archbishop – forgetting all the favours my husband has done him – is all for Barbara and against my Antonio!”

“Oh, dear God, how can I make you understand!” exclaimed the priest, giving a vigorous wipe to his forehead with the back of his hand. “The Church puts no one in the wrong. It simply annuls the marriage.”

“
Simply
, Father? The Church simply annuls the marriage, does it? It does the bidding of Barbara, of the notary, of the Duca Di Bronte. If it didn't mean to put us in the wrong it would do what
we
want, it wouldn't annul the marriage. No, Father, no… God has seen fit to chastise me because I (better my tongue had fallen out!) have prayed to Him all too often to cool my son's passions. I see now that a mother should never pray such a prayer even in her sleep, that she should
leave her sons to go their own way, to sow their wild oats… But it was Father Giovanni (God rest his soul!), Father Giovanni himself, who struck terror into my heart by saying, ‘If your son goes on this way he will create havoc in Mother Church, and the Church will take stern measures with him.' Next thing that happens, my son becomes a perfect angel, behaves like a little angel descended from heaven, the living image of St Joseph with the Blessed Virgin. And the Church takes stern measures with him all the same – worse than stern, in fact! – and is prepared to do something that will at any moment take our whole family and rub our noses in the dirt! What has the Church got against my son? What harm has he done it? What harm have any of us done?”

“What a muddle in this poor head!” murmured the priest, patting her greying hairs and thoroughly discouraged. “How can I ever explain?”

“But Father, aren't I right? Aren't I making sense? I admit I made too much fuss when I realized that other women fancied my son. But who should we expect to take a fancy to a boy, eh?, if not the women… Silly fool that I was, instead of moaning and groaning why didn't I thank the Lord with all my heart for having granted me a son so beautiful that the girls tore him to shreds with their eyes?… And look at me now, no one to help me – not even you, Padre Raffaele!”

“No, Signora, you are unjust,” said the priest. “I am prepared to kiss your son's feet, if you wish, sinner that I am.” And he thought of how, many an afternoon, after attempting to keep his passions cool as the dew with a diet of milk and chicory, he had been thrown into a state of fever by the image of this same Barbara… whom perhaps, for this reason amongst others, he condemned too severely…

“It's Barbara who ought to kiss my son's feet,” declared Signora Rosaria. “Not you, Father Raffaele! That Barbara has cut us to the quick with poisoned steel… Father,” she added after a pause, “this favour you must do me and don't say no!”

“What favour, Signora? Tell me.”

“Arrange for me to have a talk with my daughter-in-law. But not at the house of that sly lot! Here in church in the sight of the Lord Jesus!”

“It shall be done, dear friend. Come at five o'clock on Saturday afternoon, and I will see to it that you meet your daughter-in-law.”

Two days later, at five o'clock precisely, Signora Rosaria returned to the church of the Madonna in Via Sant'Euplio.

As she entered, who should rise from the grille of the confessional but Don Luigino Compagnoni, a man who in his youth had terrorized the surrounding countryside with acts of brigandage. (Five girls had, through his agency, lost their innocence beneath a tree in no more time than it takes to say knife). But what sweet mildness now, in those eyes of his! What respect for modest middle-class customs in his mode of dress! Not for many a day had Signora Rosaria received so comforting and sympathetic a greeting as she was accorded in the middle of the church by this gallant bandit, who bowed to her deferentially while his right hand made the gesture of sweeping off the hat he was actually holding in his left.

Passing abruptly from the gentle eyes of the repentant bandit to the glacial ones of Barbara, whom she found kneeling before the chapel of Santa Rita, Signora Rosaria felt her hands trembling. Was it anger or fright?

“Good afternoon,” she said faintly.

“Give me your blessing,” replied Barbara.

The two women knelt side by side in silence, each making a show of reading in her missal.

“Shall we go into the sacristy?” said Barbara after a while, deftly crossing herself.

“As you wish,” replied Signora Rosaria.

In a cubby hole in the sacristy, from which Father Raffaele made a soundless exit, Barbara and Signora Rosaria stood for a moment face to face with lowered eyes.

All of a sudden Barbara threw herself at the elder woman's feet, clasped her round the knees, and wept.

Signora Rosaria made an attempt to stroke her hair, but her hands kept jerking away, they were shaking so much.

Barbara's sobs started quietly, then grew in strength and frequency; they were swelled by a kind of inchoate cry, which turned into a tumble of words and sobs, sobs that sent the words spinning, overwhelmed them, crushed them.

What Signora Rosaria thought she heard was, “Forgive me! I beg your son to forgive me for the harm I have done him! I must make amends at once!”

Signora Rosaria felt a softening of the heart and pressing Barbara's head more firmly to her knees, began to comfort her.

“There, there,” she said. “Enough of that. Pull yourself together, my dear…”

But imagine that lady's consternation when Barbara, having indeed pulled herself somewhat together, and one by one disentangled her words from her snuffles, repeated her tear-strangled statement after this manner: “Forgiveness, forgiveness is what Antonio must beg of me, for the harm he has done me, and he must make amends at once!”

Woe and alas, were all those tears, then, nothing but the tears of self-pity?

Signora Rosaria simply gaped, unable to fetch out a single word from a bosom dumbstruck with horror, but at last a burst of anger thrust half-a-dozen words into her mouth:

“Say that again, if you please!”

Barbara did not think it necessary to repeat the sentence which she had just pronounced all too clearly.

“But how has Antonio harmed you?” pursued the poor old lady. “What wrong has he done you?”

“Signora Rosaria,” said Barbara, hiding her face in the lady's black skirts, “when I married Antonio, and I swear it here in the sight of God, the head I had on my shoulders was the head of a three-year-old. If I had died that day – the Lord should have taken me! Oh, would he had taken me then! – I'd have gone straightway to Paradise! Every word from Antonio's lips
was for me the truth and the law. In heaven, God! On earth, Antonio! That was my religion… I loved him as I love my own soul! And I thought he too loved…”