Beautiful Antonio (34 page)

With Ermenegildo gesticulating, vociferating, and clutching wildly at Antonio's arm each time his head began to spin, the pair of them had reached the Quattro Canti, the cross-roads at the very centre of the city. Here they were shoved to and fro by the crowd, and finally hemmed in against a shop window, in which Ermenegildo saw, bearing down on him, the face of a corpse. Hoping against hope that it was not his own, he tried winking one eye; the face winked back; he put out his tongue; the face inexorably retaliated.

“Let's get out of this crowd!” he burst out. “Let's get a move on…”

They stepped out more briskly and reached the gates of the collegiate church, spared by the crowds flooding up and down Via Etnea, ebbing and flowing but without ever quite invading the small recess above which soared the church.

“Of course…” began Ermenegildo; and, after a long pause, as if thinking better of it, “Well, be that as it may…”

“‘You're too much in love with your sins',” he resumed after another pause. “That's what that sprat of a Father Raffaele had the nerve to tell me. Me? Too much in love with my sins? What sins, I ask you? The sin of having to make a lot of money, the sin of having the gift of the gab, of envying someone else
if he's even quicker off the mark, the sin of packing my bags and being a gad-about, the sin of seducing the maidservants, the sin of bustling around a friend's wife?… I'm sick to death of them! I assure you, Antonio, that if I loved chastity, poverty and the cloistered life purely because they're Christian virtues, and not because they bring me pleasure and relief, I'd ascend into heaven boots and all. But even in this respect, alas, I'm the old sensualist I always was, as we Fasanaros always have been – at least the menfolk, because the women have all been saints. Chastity now appeals to me like a clean sheet, and even death I relish as a potent dose of morphine.
I like it
. Three words which are going to lock me out when I come to Peter's Gate! I like it, I like even death! I can't wait to relish it… Ouch!” he gasped at this juncture, tapping his chest. “This miserable carcass, this accursed cage! Why, the body of a hen is more spry and supple.” He now slapped his chest: “Dark prison full of the very same offal you see on kitchen tables when a kid or a chicken is gutted: the same repulsive lungs, liver, heart, intestines… You bloody guts that so often make me shriek with pain and lose the thread of my thoughts, it's about time you went to the devil!”

“Take it easy,” murmured Antonio, squeezing him by the arm. “People will think we're quarrelling.”

Ermenegildo shrugged.

“Tell me something, Antonio: that stony-hearted woman, have you seen her at all?”

Antonio tossed his head. No.

“She hasn't written? She hasn't asked for a word with you?”

Another toss, eyes shut this time.

“What a way to go on! After a love-match and a white wedding with pages, sung Mass and all the trimmings, after three years of life together, after the entire city has seen you happy in each other's company. How can this woman, without your having done the least thing to her… I mean, the least thing to harm her… just give you a nod and go off with a new husband without so much as a backward glance? And
still,” he continued in the voice of heartbreak, “still you try to tell me that this world isn't a mean ugly dump?…” A pause in the monologue. Then: “What about it, shall we take a peep inside?”

“Inside what?”

With a glance Ermenegildo indicated the church door.

“But… I was married there!” objected Antonio, blanching.

“What of it? Come on, let's take a dekko.”

With leaden feet Antonio trod the nine steps leading up to the forecourt. This he crossed on his uncle's arm, feeling himself under intense observation from the deserted balconies of Palazzo Biscari, from the shuttered windows of the adjoining alleyway, the stones, the statues, the railings like a rank of spearmen… Never as at that moment, and in that deserted spot, had he felt himself more the object of attention. They entered the church.

The ceiling here is painted by the same artist who frescoed the Teatro Bellini, and seems one vast though barely perceptible undulation such as a backstage draught imparts to a drop-curtain. A quantity of sunbeams, striking through the glass, hang like coloured vapours: in their radiance the dust-laden air is visibly in motion; beneath, a seething darkness specked with candle flames… There the high altar, there the prie-dieu, there the carved altar-rail! As if he had taken too large a gulp of the past, Antonio felt himself choking, his breath coming in quick, rasping pants, his chiselled nostrils, drained of blood, flaring wide in an effort to suck in sufficient air.

“Let's kneel,” said Ermenegildo. “We'll be comfier.”

Mechanically Antonio knelt down beside his uncle, who, clasping his hands on the pommel of his stick and resting his forehead on them, presented the statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus with a glistening, ivory scalp across which two remaining strands of an almost juvenile blondness were pathetically plastered down.

Antonio, meanwhile, cupped his hands and buried his whole face in them, to spare himself the sight of the high altar stripped
now of the purple hangings adorning it on his wedding-day, of the main aisle now bare of the sumptuous red carpet which had muffled the footsteps of relations, witnesses and friends.

He stayed this way for some time, waiting for the waves of blood to stop beating in his brain, the veins in his temples to cease their irksome throbbing.

“Is it possible,” began his uncle, raising his forehead from his hands and resting his chin there instead, “is it possible that the words heaven, paradise, divine justice, life everlasting, have no meaning in the sphere of reality? Do these words, the most beautiful words we know, correspond to nothing real? Is it possible that the name Jesus Christ – listen, I'll repeat it: JESUS CHRIST – is simply the name of a corpse, and the saying of it changes nothing in this world or the next? I'll repeat it again: Jesus Christ… JESUS CHRIST… Could this, then, be but the name of a madman living around two thousand years ago, who thought, in good faith, that he was shedding his blood and dying simply out of his own extraordinary, compassionate sympathy for human weakness; that only by struggling to rein in his Omnipotence did he spare the soldiers who scourged him and the towers of the city that witnessed his torment? Jesus Christ, a mere pitiful visionary then, with his face forever upturned towards the heavens, the form, composition and glory of which he was in fact ignorant of, but which he already believed to be his royal abode, visualizing in its midst his own gilded throne on the right hand of a somewhat eccentric Father… So then, that Thursday evening when he prayed in the Garden, repeating this word ‘Father' in the tenderest way imaginable, was there no one on the other side to hear him? And when, on the cross, he promised the repentant thief that he would take him with him to paradise – poor thief! how he must have cursed when he realized that after the dark of his death-agony a deeper darkness still had befallen him, and without a ray of hope… In that case for us men, whether our names be Ermenegildo Fasanaro or Jesus Christ of Nazareth, is there naught but darkness and
ignorance? Plus, if we have the benefit of a good education, a philosophy of resignation content to bestow the name of Truth on our poor unanswered questions? Well, I deny it! For the third time I repeat: JESUS CHRIST: No, by heaven, I say no! JESUS CHRIST – you have to admit it's not the same thing as saying Ermenegildo Fasanaro. It's a different thing altogether – JESUS CHRIST… And yet, who knows? In twenty thousand years he might be thought of as an irrelevant and practically barbaric moralist; a moralist far from charitable towards the less fortunate of our kind, the sinners incapable of self-redemption, whom he never ceased to threaten with the cruellest punishments… So Jesus Christ is a barbarian, is he? Did you hear what I said, Antonio? Jesus Christ a barbarian! Don't we blush for shame just to hear such words spoken? And what does this blush mean, if not that the truth is the contrary? Jesus Christ, Jesus: the very name of God! Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ! Jesus, Jesus, Jesus…”

Ermenegildo's brow sank back onto his stick, his eyes pressing onto the knuckles clasped around the silver pommel.

“Jesus Christ!” he began to murmur again, still slumped in the same attitude, “the more I repeat that name the more I lose touch with its meaning… But say what you will, how wonderful it would be if one of us men, perhaps this citizen of Nazareth,
had
been the son of God, and were waiting there for us on the other side, his body like our bodies, and he knowing from experience what it means to have had lungs, a liver, intestines, a heart that pumps…”

Antonio felt his mind drawn inexorably towards a certain word, a word that here, in this place, would have sounded obscene. He tried with all his might to exorcize it, but only got as far as regarding it as something dead. He saw all the letters of the word but they had no sense, nor echo in his memory.

“…glands, loins, cerebral matter, spinal cord…” continued his uncle.

And Antonio saw the selfsame letters for a second time.

“… if only he were waiting for us beside our dead bodies, one foot on our corpses perhaps, reassuring us in our fright after the leap we have taken, encouraging us, with the simple fact of his human form, and maybe with a smile… Ah, what bliss it would be, if these worthy priests had always been telling us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth! I
believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth
… Exactly so: God the Father created heaven and earth…
And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord
… Nothing could be truer, could it?… Jesus Christ
is
his only Son and our only Lord…
I believe in the Holy Ghost: the holy Catholic Church: The Communion of Saints; The Forgiveness of sins; The Resurrection of the Body, And the life everlasting. Amen
. As true as true, every word of it: the Communion of Saints, the Forgiveness of sins, the life everlasting… What bliss it would be if these pictures around us faithfully, literally and minutely mirrored the truth: all those angels with wings, the Madonna with her Madonna face, Jesus with his heart displayed on his breast! What bliss it would be if our Pope Pius XII (whose nephew incidentally I happen to know), really
were
the Vicar of Christ on earth; and if the visit the parish priest of Zafferana makes of an evening to our place in the country, lantern in one hand and oilcloth umbrella in the other, were not just a kindly custom, but a visit of genuine utility – more to the point by far than that of any fatuous doctor who looks at you in a proprietary way like an animal he owns, yet knows as much about you from having seen your X-ray as the average Sicilian knows about the China he's seen at the pictures… What büss it would be, by heaven! How happy I would be if that were the way of things!… But it's not,” he went on after a pause. “Christ himself knows, it's not. Son of God, why can't it be true that you exist? Why can't it be true that those who hunger and thirst after righteousness shall be filled, that the persecuted of the earth shall sit on the right hand of the Father in beatitude? And why can't you have
your
way when you threaten unbelievers with hell-fire? Why must the wicked have their's? What's more, if you threaten
unbelievers with hell, what must
we
threaten
you
with, we disillusioned lovers? And if you suffered when you sensed that some rejected your teaching, what must our suffering be when we come to realize that your teaching was a cheat, a dream, a blissful dream which the universe takes no account of, the dream of innumerable pathetic humans who hoped even unto death, and died together with their hope? But none the less, and I don't know why, as I utter these words I have a sense of failing in my duty and provoking some awesome response. Unless this is simply the impression of a man who…”

“Uncle,” broke in Antonio, giving a sudden squeeze to the old man's hand and getting to his feet, “there's a priest in the offing.”

“Show him to me!” said Ermenegildo, also scrambling to his feet. “I'll make my confession at once.”

They made a move towards a black cassock silhouetted on the steps of the Choir, lifeless as if it were hanging on a hook. At closer range Antonio made out a pallid face attached to the cassock by the black band of the collar.

He halted. “It's Father Raffaele!” he blurted out.

“Fine. I'll make my confession to him.”

“Please, not that!” cried Antonio, starting back.

“Why ever not?”

“He's
Barbara's
confessor.”

“What of it?”

“I do beg you not to!”

Antonio attempted to turn his uncle right-about-face and hustle him out. A wasted effort! Recognizing Antonio, Father Raffaele himself made to escape – so keenly was that good man's conscience pricked by his penitent's repudiation, an act she refused to accept as a sin, since her attitude had been endorsed by a sentence of the
Sacra Rota
.

Antonio blushed to the roots of his hair. His face burnt worse than ever; it even hurt. The black cassock, now sidling down the left-hand nave, seemed to him charged with the entire mystery of Barbara.

“Uncle,” he said, “I'm feeling a bit below par. I… I can't seem to focus… Please help me home.”

Ermenegildo stepped swiftly to his side and propped him up.

It was in a state of swoon that Antonio left the collegiate church leaning on his uncle who, despite the weight he was supporting, could not help muttering to himself as he laboured along:

“… or even
I'll
become a Communist!…”

“… or an out-and-out Catholic, all faith and devoutness, Family and Church!…”

“… or else I'll turn on the gas…”