Beautiful Antonio (23 page)

“How he does drag on!” thought Ermenegildo to himself.

“… I kissed her fervidly, and, although I'd spent the previous afternoon with a girl, I again felt all the honey in my veins rush to concentrate at that point where I most loved to feel it… I didn't say a thing, but in my heart of hearts I cried a cry that surely must have reached the heavens, a cry to all those saints who had at last taken pity on me! A week later we had a tryst at the opera. On reaching our meeting-place I realized at once from the way she offered me her hand that Ing had decided to give herself to me that very night. On the stage, the tenors and prima donnas carried through their roles in
Don Giovanni…
and all the while I was thinking, ‘But what about the fiancé? How
can
she betray him? What goes on in these women's minds? They're twisted, they're really twisted!' After we'd left the theatre and reached her door, she was so well aware that I was aware as to be frankly amazed at my moment of hesitation before crossing the threshold and going upstairs with her. A little
later…”

“No, don't jump! Tell me everything in order! What room did she take you to?”

“Her bedroom.”

“Like that, right off?”

“Yes. And I, weary but happy, stretched myself on my back on the bed. She disappeared into the bathroom and returned a minute later in her night things, her face streaming with tears.”

“Don't believe those tears!” cried Uncle Ermenegildo as if actually present at the scene, an excited public cheering on its champion. “Wham it in
there. Don't believe those tears!”

“She sat down on the bed and began telling me the story of her life… She came from an influential German family and had been sent to study in Paris. There she fell in love with a Spanish architect from whom – surprised by joy – she learnt what until then she had not entertained even the remotest curiosity about. This Spaniard was squat and ugly, but he enflamed her with the fire of his passion…”

“Of course!” exclaimed Ermenegildo. “He was a Spaniard, which is like saying a Sicilian!”

“But her family opposed the match. The architect was a foreigner, and they considered him to be of inferior race. Ing returned to Berlin to try and talk her parents over, but they were deaf to all entreaties…”

“Germans!”

“Enraged by all this shilly-shallying and opposition, and wounded in his pride, the Spaniard wrote Ing a farewell letter which he signed with all his family's titles of nobility. She returned to Paris determined to throw herself in the Seine. During the journey she met a childhood friend, the beautiful Viennese officer of whom I told you, who was also contemplating suicide on account of a misfortune which he dared not speak of; not even when, having crossed the frontier into France, and having both rid themselves of the strange feeling of oppression which arose from knowing themselves to be on German soil, they confided their sorrows to one another
and fell into each other's arms. A month later they were engaged…”

“Women!”

“They telephoned to her family in Berlin and were greeted by a chorus of compliments and congratulations. They agreed to get married, and then… Well, you know how it is with these northern women…”

“Well, a bit, yes…”

“Once they were going to become man and wife, they shared a bed.”

Antonio stopped.

“All right, all right, they shared a bed. So what?”

“And there…”

“And there?”

“He…”

“He?”

“Nothing!”

“What d'you mean, nothing?”

“Just that – nothing.”

“By God, that strapping great chap?”

“Yes, that strapping great chap.”

“Well! And they always say… but did they try again?”

“Yes.”

“So?”

“Nothing.”

“Still nothing?”

“Still nothing.”

“Good Lord alive.”

“Ing confided in her mother, who told her there was no need to worry, they should get married anyway, and then, with time… But Ing had already succumbed to a fear that the fault was hers, that she wasn't fit for anything, that she ought to have known how to… When I heard all this – conceited and full of myself as I was at the time – I burst out laughing. ‘You?' I said. ‘No need for you to move a muscle. Why should you? A girl as beautiful as you, she doesn't have to do a thing.

She's already done enough with the mere rustle of her skirts!' Ing threw her arms around me in a rapture of joy and gratitude. Evidently her ears had been burning for ages to hear such heart-warming, undreamt-of words. When next she spoke she confided in me that this was the reason for certain tearful outbursts which I couldn't understand, this was the misfortune for which the Viennese officer was contemplating suicide on the journey to Paris, and this the lack of harmony she had besought Pius XI to set to rights… We spoke no more, but switched off the lamp and hugged each other tight. Soon she was near fainting with pleasure, opening little by little like a rose to the sun. As for me, I was beside myself with a joy even greater than hers, and already warning myself to smother the cry which I felt in my throat and which soon would escape me, when…”

He broke off. His uncle, on his part, held his tongue, but felt his right eye twitching like a fly in the clutches of a spider.

“When…” continued Antonio, and broke off a second time. “When a sudden panic and chill came over me, and precisely in that part of my body which, if I'd had to die that instant of frostbite and paralysis, I would have wished to be affected last!”

He fell silent.

Uncle Ermenegildo drew a long, deep breath, accompanied by a mournful wheezing of the lungs, but when it came to letting it go he opened his mouth and breathed out noiselessly.

“She was still lying on her back, lips parted, eyes closed, and I, frozen with shame, slid down at her side, pressing my trembling mouth into the pillow. It was the end of everything. Everything died a sudden death for me! The blood which so lustily and zestfully had converged in one point of my body was fled not only from there, but seemed to have vanished entirely from my veins, dried out by an icy wind that circulated in its stead; and I
knew without a doubt that, even if blood should return to my veins, from that particular part of my body it was for ever deviated, as if
there
began the territory of
some alien being into which my thoughts, my yearnings, my impulses, could never again in any way penetrate. With this certitude in my heart, confirmed by two hours of silence beside that perfectly motionless woman, who lay as if crushed by the sum of my shame and her own, two hours of silence during which all my efforts to regain the condition of happy manhood were doomed to failure, doomed to render me ever more incapable of that kind of happiness, and the few moments I had known of it in the past to seem almost incredible and unreal; after
two hours which seemed to me brief but static, like the split second the bullet takes from a rifle-muzzle to the condemned man's heart, I got up from that bed, that bed which I no longer saw, even the shape and size of which I had forgotten, and I left the room, and within it a woman I also could not remember the look of, so greatly did the warmth of the joy she had formerly given me, and the glacial iciness she transmitted to me that night, combine to render her image split, divided, unfocused, and, in the last analysis, terrifying.”

U
NCLE
E
RMENEGILDO'S HEAD
drooped and he shook it almost inperceptibly, causing his dewlap to quiver.

“And then what?” he asked.

Antonio was silent.

“And then what?” reiterated his uncle.

“Shut the shutters,” said Antonio.

Ermenegildo crossed to the window and closed the shutters; the room on the instant became a sudden blaze of electric light.

Antonio, sitting on the bed, his back against the wooden bedhead, still had in his hand the switch of the bedside lamp. He looked as if worn to a shred by long illness; but his face, chiselled by its very gauntness, could scarcely have been more beautiful.

“After that,” he resumed, resting the nape of his neck on the bedrail, thereby increasing the tension and fine-drawing of his nose and cheeks. “After that… I never again saw light!”

“Meaning?”

“I stayed for a fortnight holed up in my room. Then I found the boarding-house intolerable, and rented a small flat overlooking the park of the Villa Borghese. My father shipped me some furniture from home. When I saw it there, arranged around the room, it made me weep wrathful tears, because it reminded me of the times when I suffered that nausea, though desperately in love with every woman I set eyes on. A month later I made another sortie to Via Mario dei Fiori, to the brothel where I'd been restored to life the evening I first arrived in Rome. As I followed the woman up the spiral wooden stair
the frost in my loins froze anew; and as she – ushering me into a room heated by an Aladdin stove and closing the door – unbuttoned her bodice and slipped off her clothes, I thought I'd play the smart alick. Still fully dressed, leaning against a chest of drawers laden with photographs, I produced a smile: ‘Look, I've got a suggestion to make.' The woman had already relaxed naked on the bed, hands clasped behind her head, and was looking me over. ‘What is it?' she asked, adding in honeyed tones: ‘You know, darling, you're really really easy on the eye.' ‘Fancy me?' said I. ‘Yes,' said she, extracting a hand from behind her head and excitedly massaging her throat while giving me a meaning look. ‘When I've done my stint in this house I'd like to spend a fortnight with you in Venice! You just see what a good time we'll have! A single caress from your Caterina here can make a man wake from the dead!' ‘I bet you're exaggerating!' ‘Not a bit of it, my winsome laddie.' ‘All right, I accept, but on one condition.' ‘What's that?' ‘That if I manage to keep cool beneath your famous caresses, you'll pay for the trip to Venice. If not, OK, the jaunt's on me.' Her shining eyes looked at me squarely. ‘Done!' said she. ‘The wooden effigy of a saint couldn't resist
me
.' ‘Right then,' said I, stripping off quickly in the hope – you never know! – of losing my bet.”

“And did you?”

“Five minutes later the hapless Caterina was pouring sweat into the sheets, hair plastered to her cheeks, breath hissing through her teeth… But I remained unmoved, a malignant smirk on my face. Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, half an hour…

“‘Listen here,' said that hard-working lady, ‘you've won and I don't deny it. This means I'll pay for your trip to Venice. But now, for goodness' sake relax and let nature take its course.'

“On this I rose from the bed with a sarcastic laugh, dressed slowly and with deliberation, twice re-tying the knot of my tie, chucked some money onto the woman's bosom as she lay
mortified on the bed, and took myself off into the street. I made a rush for the Café Aragno, had them unlock the gents' for me, and once I'd slammed the door gave vent to a long and agonized flood of tears.”

“But you should never have pitted yourself against such a challenge,” declared his uncle. “Better to have bided your time.”

“I'd already waited six weeks!”

“You should have waited longer. It's a mistake to hurry matters of that sort.”

“Well, after that visit to Via Mario dei Fiori I spent three months steering clear of so much as speaking to a woman. One afternoon – the best of hours in times gone by – who should turn up but an old tootsy of mine who'd been searching for me like a needle in a haystack and had finally run me to earth. I allowed her to lie down beside me, kiss me, and practically take the skin off my face, rubbing her palms over my cheeks, slow, rough, loving, furious by turns. ‘You've got a heart of stone!' she burst out… But oh I was not stonyhearted, Ermenegildo. I was simply praying that death, the old body-snatcher, would snatch me out of there!”

“And then what?” prompted his uncle.

“Uncle! And then, and then… Is that all you've got to say?”

“Now hold your horses. Don't drive me up the wall. I may be on the verge of second childhood but, believe me, I'm not there yet!”

“What are you on about, uncle?”

“What d'you mean, what am I on about? Is it or is it not the case that your place in Rome was always chock-a-block with women? Is it or is it not the case that they were all beside themselves about you? Is it or is it not the case that the Countess K… what was her name?… you know who I mean… would come rubbing up against your door like a cat on heat? Is this the case or did I dream it?”

Antonio grasped his uncle's hand and drew it to his lips.

“What's this! Kissing my hand, eh?” said Ermenegildo, putting on a bluff manner to fight tears down. “Kissing my hand? Where do I come in?”

Antonio gently deposited his uncle's hand on the bed.

“What a fag,” he murmured, “all the lies and cheats and shams and excuses and pretences and deceptions!”

“On whose part?”

“Mine.”

“Why's that?”

“Not to give myself away… to women, to my parents, to my friends, to you… I even went so far as to go to church and confess all the sins I wanted to commit but couldn't, praying from the bottom of my heart for the Lord to make me capable of them. How pleased I was when the confessor shook his head over some of the yarns I spun him, and grumbled, ‘My son, you've gone too far. Don't you realize I can't give you absolution?'”

“You ask me to believe this?”

Antonio expressed a wry smile by snorting delicately down his nose. “Countess K”, he proceeded, “is the only one who must have suspected the truth, because one evening she said, ‘Antonio, tell me frankly, wouldn't it be convenient to be able to possess a woman with your eyes?' I don't know if she meant that I had the eyes of certain Sicilian shop-window rapists whom she'd been going on about the previous evening…”