Beautiful Antonio (27 page)

“What did her husband do with her all these years?”

“Brushed the flies off her.”

“Is it possible?”

“It's the fact of the matter.”

“What, Alfio's son doesn't find fresh bread toothsome?”

“He does not.”

“Come off it! You expect me to swallow that?”

“Strike me blind if it's not the truth! On the wedding night they went to bed together and… nothing happened!”

“How in the world…?”

“How? Just like that. I wasn't there, friend.”

“So, a flop?”

“An utter flop, friend.”

“Nothing but a flop for three years?”

“Nothing but a flop.”

“Every night a flop?”

“Every night a flop.”

“How on earth?”

“Go and ask Our Father which art in heaven, he's the one who cooks up these things.”

“I could understand it once or twice, or three times… I'll be generous – five times. Which of us hasn't done a flop?”

“I tell you no lie, friend.
I
never have.”

“Never?”

“Never!”

“In a certain sense, in the sense of a complete and hopeless flop, neither have I.”

“May the Lord send me death rather than such a misfortune! What's a man got in life if they take even that away from him? I tell you I'd go jump in the lake.”

“Why ever does he go on living?”

“Better dead!”

“A thousand times better dead!”

“What d'you mean, a thousand times? A million times better dead!”

“If ever I found myself reduced to such a condition, better a hundred yards underground, as you say, or at the bottom of the sea being eaten by the fish. I'll go further: better to be imprisoned for life with my hands and feet manacled like Christ's, but my honour as a man intact, by God, worthy of commiseration, maybe, for steeping my hands in the blood of my neighbour, but at least not a target for sniggers and nudges as I walk down the street, because if anyone dares to laugh or stick his elbow in his companion's ribs I can always yell ‘What're you laughing at, pieface? Why not send me along your sister or your wife and then we'll have a really good laugh!'

“And who can blame you? Jesus, Mary and Joseph! If I had such a useless thing just dangling there, God knows, I'd hack it off and toss it to the dogs! What's more Our Lord himself
said much the same thing: If one of your members offends you, cut it off and throw it away.”

“Fair enough, but not everyone has the guts to do it.”

“Ah, I would! In fact I can't understand how Alfio's boy hangs on to such a bit of bad news without doing something berserk.”

“How do we know he won't?”

“Not a chance, friend. He's let too much time slip by already. If he hasn't done it so far there's no reason for his doing it tomorrow. I don't know what stuff young people are made of these days, but they soon throw in the sponge.”

“Let's wait before jumping to conclusions.”

“As far as I'm concerned, you can wait as long as you please. But listen here now, has he always suffered from this raw deal, or did it come over him after he got married?”

“Honestly friend, I won't tell you a lie: I simply don't know.”

“Rumour has it that in Rome this lad gobbled up so many women he lost count of them, and that when he was in Catania he constantly needed a woman to tickle his elbow for him. One evening I was at the next-door table in a café, and I assure you that at least ten times I heard his friend – the one they've now foisted on us as mayor – ask him (and he was pretty persistent), ‘What's next on the agenda, Ninuzzu? Shall we nip down and get our ends away?'”

“That mayor gets his end away, and how! Seen all those pretty secretaries he's taken on at the Town Hall? But as for Alfio's son, he's a different kettle of fish. Can you swear to it, in all conscience, that he managed to get his end away that evening?”

“I can assure you in all conscience that later on – might have been elevenish – I heard him say these very words: ‘All right, let's nip off and get the old end away!'”

“But friend, it's one thing to talk and another thing to act. Were you there in the bed while he was trying to have it off?
What do you know about what went on there? It's dark in bed, mate, and you never know what goes on.”

“Christ alive, the women talk!”

“That depends. I once met someone who paid a whole heap of money for the woman to keep her mouth shut.”

“Are you suggesting that Alfio's boy paid a heap of money for women to keep their mouths shut?”

“I'm not suggesting anything. What's it matter to me, whether he makes it or not? That's his problem. Nothing I can do to help him… That is… If he'd called me in on his wedding night I'd have given him a helping hand very willingly.”

“Not much effort needed there, friend!
There's
a girl to bring the dead to life.”

The conversation grew moist with lustful slaverings and roguishly laughing mouths sprayed forth saliva. A minute later and it was time for back-handers on the belly and shoving each other about. Enough, in short, of solemn discourse; perfectly possible at this point that even a Justice of the Peace, barged into by a friend, might go thumping, as on a big bass drum, against some great resonant door already barred for the night.

The ones who were utterly crushed and annihilated were Antonio's friends.

These men, all in their thirties, were unable to master their emotions, and for several days the eyes of the envious were able to feast themselves upon their pale, drawn faces. It seemed as if the honour of the whole crew had suffered a blow, and some of them, in their eagerness to compensate, behaved atrociously even towards the wives of their relatives.

“I don't turn anything down. Opportunity never knocks twice,” was Luigi d'Agata's maxim.

“But really! Your uncle's wife…”

“Stop getting on my tits. Let me fend for myself.”

“But… your uncle's wife!”

“No go, old boy. I won't listen to reason. What I find, I
take. It's not my fault is it, if the beastly thing keeps rearing its head and won't stay quiet for a moment?”

“But really… a little consideration!”

“The beastly thing has no consideration for anyone. Is
this
a time to start standing on ceremony and let others walk all over us with their boots on! Let everyone take care of his own. As far as I'm concerned, when I come across a woman I don't give a hoot whose daughter she is or whose wife she is. She's a skirt? Right then! That's all I want to know.”

“But what's it all lead to?”

“One underneath and one on top.”

“And what would you say if I did that to
your
wife?”

“I'm not married.”

“But you've got a mother… a sister…”

“Kindly don't drag in my mother and sister. My mother and sister have nothing to do with it!”

“But aren't they women too?”

“Certainly they are, but I'm telling you they have nothing to do with the matter.”

“How can they have nothing to do with it? If they're women…”

“I said they have nothing to do with it. Do I make myself clear? Or do I have to tear a leg off the table?”

“Ah, so that's your kind of logic is it?”

“Yes, that's my kind of logic, and if anyone doesn't like my kind of logic he can piss off… Before I start in on him with a table leg!” he added from between his teeth.

“OK, OK, let's drop the subject.”

“Dead right! Let's drop it.”

The group fell silent, but here and there could be heard a foot tapping nervously on the floor, a rhythmic leg banging the rung of a chair, fingers drumming on the table-top.

All of a sudden one of those present, struck by who knows what unspoken thought, clapped his hands sharply together, making everybody jump.

“What the hell's up with you?” they demanded.

“Take it easy!”

“Steady now!”

“Scarcely good manners!”

“Ah, my poor little diddumses!” countered the aforesaid, abashed at having been caught red-handed thinking his most intimate thoughts, and annoyed at having to apologize for them. “Did I scare them, the little duckies? Mamma's pets, my sweetie-pies, did I give them a fright? Did I give them goose-pimples?”

A gloomy atmosphere of bickering closed in around Antonio's friends.

The gloomiest of all was Edoardo Lentini. Grief over his cousin's catastrophe and hatred for Hitler had made him the most despondent man to tramp the streets of Sicily in the midnight hours.

“My respects, Your Worship.” Some passer-by emerging from the shadows of a tree would recognize and greet him, raising a servile hand in the Fascist salute right under his nose.

“Goodnight,” Edoardo would reply, and then in an undertone, “Up yours!” in response to the “Son of a bitch!” or “A pox on you and your bloody bosses!” which the passer-by had undoubtedly added under his breath right after his respectful greeting.

Then Edoardo would turn and good-naturedly watch the other disappear into the darkness under the trees – he had a liking for anyone who insulted him as a representative of the regime.

But the
THING,
the
SHAPE,
that made him writhe with revulsion, and toss and turn at night between the sheets, and spit in drawing-rooms to the consternation of the ladies (who had admired his
savoir-faire
in former days), was the face of Hitler with its moustache like that of a hyaena its trainer has been trying in vain to teach to laugh. Ah, that face, that face! It was inconceivable! Intolerable!

When Hitler claimed the Sudetenland, and the war-scare started, and certain gas-lit alleyways in Catania filled with the
scuttling of thousands of men incited by fear and by the thought, “So, seeing we are about to die, we'd better ‘do it' as often as we possibly can,” on the 5th of August, in the hall of the Fascist Headquarters, while Party Secretary Pietro Capàno was hammering his fists on the table in an effort to instil a mite of martial quality into those black Supervisors' uniforms within which (out of prudence, vanity or self-interest) so many bourgeois nonentities had been hiding for years, Edoardo asked to be allowed to speak; and, all eyes upon him, he asserted that war would not break out.

Edoardo's bloodless face had the Party Secretary worried.

“On what do you base your claim that war won't break out?” he asked.

Edoardo paled still further, from the exquisite pleasure of the risk he was about to take, and from the fact that at long last he was giving vent to a hitherto hidden animosity.

“Hitler,” he said, “barks, but does not bite – like all men who have no balls.”

Pietro Capàno felt his head spinning with fright at the mere sound of such words.

“Eh?… What?… Whassat?” he babbled.

“It's not the Führer's fault he's in that condition,” continued Edoardo. “Indeed, it's to his credit as an ex-serviceman. You will yourself be aware, Mr Secretary, that in the last war Hitler was invested by a cloud of poison-gas which shrivelled his… whatever it was it shrivelled.”

“I know nothing about it!” gabbled Pietro Capàno, thumping the table with alternate fists. “I know absolutely nothing about it!”

“Come now, Mr Secretary. It's common knowledge.”

“To tell the truth,” interpolated a particularly ingenuous Supervisor,” I too was unaware that Hitler had been affected by gas in that quarter… To judge from the way he goes on, however, I would not say that he is a man without balls. On the contrary, I am of the opinion that his are of the sort that reach to the ground and churn up the dust!”

“Of course,” yelled Capàno, this time giving the table not a thump but a wallop and then drawing himself up to his full height. “He has a pair of balls that churn up the dust! All the men in his family have balls that churn up the dust! What's more no relative of his, so far as I know, has ever been repudiated by his wife!”

The allusion to Antonio was plain enough. Edoardo rose to his feet, half his face flaming red and the other still bloodless.

“I repeat,” said he, “that Hitler lost his balls in the war.”

The enraged Secretary grasped the corners of the table.

“If that's the way you think,” he hissed, “you have but one duty!”

“And what might that be?”

“To cease to serve a regime led by men without balls, you, who have balls yourself, as do
all
your relations!”

“Leave my relations out of it,” growled Edoardo morosely. “Just leave them out of it!… And as for your insinuation,” he added almost in a shriek, “my answer is that I do not serve the Nazi regime but the Fascist regime which is led by a man with all the balls you could wish for!”

“You know perfectly well,” said Pietro Capàno, biting his lip, “that the Duce and Hitler love each other like brothers, and anyone who insults the one insults the other.”

“Mr Secretary, come to the point: are you saying I ought to resign? Very well then, I resign, I resign, I resign!”

And with this Edoardo, already on his feet, plucked from a chair his beret with the gilded-eagle badge, adjusted it painstakingly on his head before the mirror – pretending to be absorbed with his appearance but in reality giving his face time to moderate its red and yellow blotchiness; then, saluting the Secretary and the other comrades with a highly stylish Fascist salute, he left the room.

Once outside Palazzo Vaccarini he took a deep breath.

“Phew!” he said to himself. “I'm free! I've got free at last!”

As soon as he reached home he recounted the whole occurrence to his wife.

“Very well,” said she. “Can I use the official car today, or shall I take a taxi?”