Beautiful Antonio (24 page)

“Ah, the strumpet!” burst out Ermenegildo. “Just let her come here and they'll be in and out of her like the door of the lawcourts… And not just with their eyes, you may be sure!”

“Or maybe she meant that with nothing but my eyes I could…”

“Ah, strumpet, strumpet a hundred times over! Strumpet like her mother, her grandmother, her sister and her daughter before her!… However, listen here, Antonio: there are some things I simply can't swallow, even to save my life. Your being able for years and years to pull the wool over the eyes of all
those women around you… no sir! that I can't swallow, I can't get it down, it sticks in my gullet, here!”

And he vigorously thwacked his Adam's apple.

Antonio raised his eyes to the opposite wall, projecting the shadow of his brow onto the wallpaper beside him.

“No,” resumed his uncle. “No, never!”

And in a different tone of voice: “Why are you trying to deceive me, Antonio?”

“Until yesterday I was deceiving you, uncle. Today is the first time I've told you the truth.”

“But hell and dammit! Women, I tell you, they're not so easily duped… And about this matter, what's more – the thing they care most about in all the world! Not even Beelzebub himself could bring it off! Not even some soi-disant kingpin of tricksters!”

“I brought it off,” said Antonio, with a smirk of ironical pride.

“But let's be reasonable! The first time, with a woman, you can kid her that you've taken an oath, or got a tummy-ache, or have to be in a state of grace to go to Communion. But what d'you tell her the second time? Out with it! What d'you tell her?”

“Uncle, I always found an excuse.”

“
Always
?”

“Always.”

“But I ask you, did nobody, nobody ever, absolutely nobody ever smell a rat in all this?”

Antonio raised his head and shook it.

“No?”

“No.”

“You think I'm such a fool as to believe you?” shouted the old gentleman.

“Uncle Gildo, do you really want me, over a matter like this, to swear on the life of my mother and father, who at this very moment don't know which way to turn, as they're elbowed around by the crowd, half-blind as they are? What
d'you want me to say – that if I'm lying may they never come home alive?”

“No!” cried Ermenegildo, in a fright.

“Or ‘may I lose the sight of my eyes'?”

“God forbid!”

“Or ‘may I get shot down in a narrow alley'?”

“No, no! I believe you!”

A pause.

“Well then,” resumed Ermenegildo, “after that time with the German girl, nothing more, nix, not even some pit-a-pat, some loosening up, some something, half-something, how can I put it?…”

“In 1933, in August…”

“There you are, you see?” exclaimed Ermenegildo with a sigh of relief. “So – in August?…”

“I happened to be in Collalbo – place near a town called Soprabolzano. Ever heard of it?”

“Collalbo… Yes, of course, naturally! A town. Summer resort.”

“It's a town in a manner of speaking: a handful of wooden buildings, all of them boarding-houses, a hotel or two, a public garden with a tennis court…”

“Yes, yes, I know, I know. Collalbo.”

“And then there's a mass of woods all round…”

“Yes, woods, of course, of course,” put in Ermenegildo pressingly, as if to second Antonio's welcome inclination to talk about something less depressing.

“It's there on a mountain one thousand two hundred metres high. To the north you can see even higher mountains.”

“The Dolomites.”

“Yes, the Dolomites.”

“So, in Collalbo…?”

“I was there with Luigi d'Agata, Turi Grassi and the Pertoni brothers. They were all rolling around in the grass like a bunch of nincompoops in their lust for a woman, hunting every-whichway and at their wits' end because they couldn't find
one. At night they were so frantically randy they rushed off into the woods and howled loud enough to wake the whole neighbourhood, ‘What shall I do, cut it off? Holy Mother of God, if it goes on like this I'll cut it off and throw it to the dogs!' Hour after hour, baying and wailing like werewolves, ‘What shall I do, cut it off?'”

His uncle had to smile – a relief to the oppression which for quite a while had been weighing on his heart.

“One evening,” proceeded Antonio, “a hypnotist turned up at the poshest of the hotels. You know, one of those fellows who puts people to sleep.”

“Yes yes, a hypnotist.”

“He was a poor half-starved individual who did his act in evening dress along with a wife, most
décolletée
, whom he referred to as ‘the lady wife'. This wife, either because she had undergone less hardship, or managed to filch something from the larder, or else because the good Lord was rooting for her, was as fat as any butcher's bitch, slabs of beef under her belt, a bottom that would burst apart the most capacious of skirts, half of her two boobs bulging out of her bodice, and a pair of olive-black eyes that appeared to ooze from under lowered lids.

“Having produced doves, flags, confetti and silk handkerchiefs from his top-hat, the hypnotist put his wife into a trance, turning her as white as a sheet, and while she was in this state, with imperious gestures which her eyes could not see but her flesh felt like whiplashes, he had her walk stiff as a ramrod out of the lounge, along the corridor and into a little room where she remained standing motionless, eyes tight shut. Ten minutes later, in thunderous tones, her husband demanded to know what numbers had been written by three gentlemen in the audience on three little scrolls of paper which he had that instant unrolled. And the woman, still in a trance, rattled off the numbers to a nicety, as if they'd been right in front of her nose.”

“Queer goings-on those,” mumbled his uncle.

“Well, the second evening Turi Grassi and Luigi d'Agata, guess what they did! They hid in the little room, and when the poor woman got there, eyes shut and arms outstretched, one of them, I forget which, without so much as by your leave slipped her a length as calm as you please.”

“You amaze me! I am flabbergasted. And the woman didn't wake up?”

“I tell you no lies! She didn't wake up: either she pretended to remain in a trance so as not to create a scandal and not lose her livelihood, or else she lapped it up.”

“Very possibly… And what about you?”

“The whole thing threw me into fits of agitation. It was like a drop of liquid fire on my flesh. God, what a ferment I was in! That night I went off into the woods on my own. The moon lit up the Dolomites, the trees smelt sweetly, and from down there beyond the wood came the receding sound of a band on the march as it left Collalbo for a nearby village. Something seethed in my blood, and my very sight and hearing felt as if they'd recovered the happiness of times when the least note of music or ray of light brought me to the brink of ecstasy…”

“Go on!” pressed his uncle. “Don't stop!”

“But that's exactly where I have to stop, because everything stopped there. Nothing else happened. That's all that occurred. My hopes were not fulfilled. My blood froze again, and again I felt as if between me and that part of my body there was a great knife fixed.”

“Hell's teeth!” cried his uncle. “Hell's teeth I say!… But after that? Forgive me, dear boy, if I keep on repeating this question, but I'm too fond of you not to, and I'd give these last few months of my life to be told that, afterwards, things went well.”

“Dear uncle,” said Antonio, squeezing the old man's hand again,” things went as badly afterwards as before. Impossible for you to understand…”

“On the contrary, I do understand.”

“No, you can't understand what it's like, that agony. There's a dead man in the midst of your life, a corpse so placed that whatever move you make you're bound to brush up against it, against its cold, fetid skin.”

“I know what you mean. Indeed yes, I know very well! You're wrong to think I don't understand such things… But forgive me,” he burst out, as one suddenly plucking up courage to jettison a weighty burden, “forgive me for saying it, dear boy, but if you knew things were tending this way…” And here, joining the tips of the thumb and forefinger of his right hand he applied them to his forehead, “if you knew, I repeat, that – at least for a period – the beast which God gave us for our torment fell to its knees when it should have stood upright and, well… to cut a long story short, was inclined to flop a lot more than was proper, then why, I ask of you…” And here, having joined the thumb and forefinger of his
left
hand, he applied them too to his forehead “… why, in heaven's name why, you blessed son-of-a-gun, did you have to go stepping into that nest of priests and vipers – by which I mean get involved in marriage (and what a marriage!) with a self-seeking girl, offspring of a self-seeking breed, colder than marble, prickly as a porcupine, probably touchy too – one of the sort you couldn't say ‘What lovely eyes you've got' to –, with a crucifix on her breast which when the time suits she flashes like a dagger at you, armed with the counsels of a confessor who forbids her to do this and do that, until you feel the honest fellow is right there in bed with you managing your affairs, and you watch every word you say because tomorrow they'll be the property of the confessional; a woman quick to turn her back on you at the least friction and bundle herself up in her portion of blanket as in a sack, by day forever with a bad smell under her nose and the keys of all the drawers hanging from her belt; who keeps count of every mouthful you swallow, can't stand perfumes because she says they stink, refuses to shampoo her hair because she says it makes it fall out, has a bath only once a week because baths are debilitating;
who gets huffy if you read the paper at table, answers in monosyllables if you talk to her, and if you don't – never utters a word; who if you're warm towards her grumbles that you're taking her for ‘one of them', and if you're off-hand accuses you of neglecting her; all agog and willing like the dumb cluck she is to grow old and grey and swell up all slovenly fore and aft, to get swollen feet and hobble around as if a brick had dropped on her big toe – yet if you wear better than she does, she'll wish you all the ills in the world… not mortal ills, I need hardly say, but uncomfortable ones none the less, that make you once and for all drop the pretence of being still young.”

“No, no, no, no!” cried Antonio.

“What do'you mean no, no, no? Aren't I right?”

“You're miles from the truth, my dear uncle!”

“I'm as sure as eggs is eggs of what I just said.”

“You're miles off the mark.”

“D'you realize how well I know that type of woman? Like the back of my hand. It's quite right of you of course, to defend someone who has been, and in a certain sense still is, your wife, it shows your good breeding, but kindly let me speak as I please, let me vent my bad temper, otherwise I'll fret myself to pulp.”

“You're miles off target, Uncle Gildo.”

“Then you tell
me
. Explain to me who is this Barbara Puglisi, why the devil you married her, and what happened between you and her. For crying out loud, the truth must be somewhere. If I've got it wrong, it's up to you to tell me. I'm prepared to stand corrected.”

“In 1934 I returned here from Rome fed up to the back teeth with my own lies. I'd contrived to infer that I was the lover of Countess K, of the daughter of an ambassador, of the wife of a Party supervisor…”

“For the love of God I can't imagine how you managed to abide all those Fascists.”

“Uncle, that kind of thing crosses Party barriers. The rub
was not that the women I knew were married to Fascists: I didn't give a damn about that. No, the hell of it was that with those women I had to confine myself to acting a part, because in real life I couldn't do a thing. If I could have been any more enterprising with the wives of the anti-Fascists, I can tell you, uncle, the Fascist Youth, Workers and Militia put together wouldn't have prevented me from paying court to them.”

“What are you thinking of! Anti-Fascist wives are highly respectable, dear boy, and wouldn't have given you much rope.”

“I could tell you a thing or two… But let's leave politics aside, Uncle Gildo. It's always politics politics with you. Politics has nothing to do with this.”

“All right, all right! Go on with the story: in 1934 you came back from Rome.”

“And I came back like a poor brute bound for the slaughterhouse, and what a turmoil of emotion my head was as I tried to drop off in the sleeping-car. Rome, you see, was the city that had given me my greatest, my only delights in life. I was putting miles between myself and the Pope, to whose proximity in 1930 I had attributed the miracle of those ineffably halcyon days, when happiness besieged and beset me on every side. Memories of those endless hangings about in Naples, with the sound of mandolins boring into my flesh, and the lies of those times too, and the farewells, and the flights… all cancelled out! What remained with me was the taste of mulled wine that the world had then, a world I drank in at every pore, and the memory of the celestial moment – all the more celestial with the passing of these years bereft of it – that moment of fire, of honey, of paradise…”

“Take it easy, take it easy,” urged his uncle. “It's a moment like any other…”

“Could be I've been making too much of it,” admitted Antonio mildly, “since I ceased being able to repeat it. But don't say it's just a moment like any other!”

“It can be an awful let-down,” said his uncle, digging his
heels in. “But don't let's argue. Get on with your story.”

“Rome, the city of my few and far-between delights – and I was leaving it, perhaps for ever, and in store for me was Catania, the ghastly town were I had known only the one woman, and that only once, and then not all the way; the town where I'd lie on my bed at night trying to pick out the high heels among the footsteps of passing night-birds, and follow them furiously in my mind's eye until, little by little, as they grew further off and fainter, and finally eluded me, I tasted to the full my desperation as the useless husk of a man. In those endearing sounds fast fading away I heard the very echo of my own destiny; and so, having saturated my mind with bitterness as with a narcotic poison, I lost consciousness for an hour or two.”