Beautiful Antonio (35 page)

F
OUR YEARS HAVE PASSED
. One August day in 1943, in a little square in La Punta, the village you reach first on the road out of Catania up the slopes of Mount Etna, the good bandit Compagnoni, astride a donkey which, beneath his bulk, looked like a small unruly dog, began bellowing across at the windows of a certain smoke-ridden little house.

“Signora Rosaria,” he cried, “Signora Sara, how did your husband get the lowdown? You saw those thousands and thousands of trucks go by? Well, there's no more of 'em to come. The wild men on horseback are right on my tail now, the cannibals… yes, with rings in their noses and feathers in their hair… Just as your husband prophesied! Just as he prophesied, word for word. Savages, cannibals!”

He waved his massive arms about in a frenzy of rage, exhilaration, horror, indignation.

“To think I should ever live to see it! Cannibals in Catania, right there in the main street. And now they're on their way here. Signor Alfio must have had it from the devil himself!”

But where is Signor Alfio? Where is the poor old fellow now?

One night in 1942 he was picking his way slowly home-wards, cursing the darkness which every now and then made him start back as if a door had slammed in his face and inveighing against the war and his own old age, when every blessed thing, the cobbles in the street, the carriages drawn up along the kerb, the walls of the houses, the star-flecked sky and the bell-towers all broke out into one long, continuous
wail like a flock of sheep sensing the approaching wolf. The air-raid siren.

“Something tells me,” muttered Signor Alfio, “that tonight they're not going to leave a stone standing.”

And rather than taking the road home he turned into a neigh-bourhood of smelly alleyways where the noctambulist would as a rule hear on all sides the voices of women cooing, “Come in dearie, make yourself at home…”

But that night, none of the usual solicitings: nothing but the slamming of doors, and these no sooner shut than the loud, hasty clatter of bolts and bars.

Signor Alfio put on a burst of speed, scything about him with his stick and striking indiscriminately on dogs and cats and heaps of refuse. “By God, I'm going to die like a sewer-rat,” he thought. Then, “Hey,” he cried, “hey, Mariuccia, open up there!”

Mariuccia, who lived down the end of the alley, was a dried-up little morsel whose scrawny chest sported a pair of pale, plump breasts, just as in springtime a chinaberry tree still carries on its bare twigs fruits rotund and pallid.

“In God's name, Mariuccia, open up can't you!”

Signor Alfio, under the impression that he had already reached Mariuccia's door, had halted; but her door opened several paces off, and a face poked out, chalk white in the light from within.

“Oh, sir, you here, on a wicked night like this?”

He hurried breathlessly towards the voice, and stepped into a hovel where the most glittering and precious object was an alarm-clock ticking away the minutes with a cheap tin rattle.

“
You
here, sir!” she cried. “And what'll they be saying tomorrow, if we're found dead together? That Signor Alfio used to go visiting a woman of ill-repute?”

“Just what I want,” replied the old man. “I
want
to be found dead here. I want the whole of Catania to know that Alfio Magnano, despite all his seventy years, still goes with prost–I
beg your pardon, I mean no offence. Indeed, so little do I intend offence that I've come here to die.”

“Mercy on us! And who says we're to die for sure?” cried the girl a trifle huffily.

“Don't ask me. Ask those rogues up there. They're just naughty boys, you know, like the ones you find throwing their weight about at night in Via Etnea, except these do it in the streets of London.
And
they hang about the billiard saloons and have poor sods of fathers who can't get 'em to come home at a decent hour… But tonight they've decided to play billiards with our homes, here a pot, there a pot, and all come tumbling down. Yes, from this minute on every soul in Catania, you, me, the Prefect, the cuckolds and otherwise, Fascists and anti-Fascists, the Duca Di Bronte and that bitch of a wife of his, my son, and my Sara, all of us, and I say
all
of us, are at the mercy of a bunch of madcaps who can snuff us out with a puff, like candles when the party's over.”

“Let 'em try,” said the girl. “I'm going to call the cat in from the yard.”

She opened a small door giving onto a black pit in the centre of which presided a terracotta chamber-pot.

“Hey, don't leave me!” cried Signor Alfio. “I wouldn't care to be found here all alone tomorrow, as if I'd come to say my prayers. I want to die with a woman by my side! I'm jolly well going to take off my jacket, too!”

“Get along with you, we're not going to die,” answered the girl without turning round, and shut the yard door again.
“I
know the kind of hiding
that
cat needs!”

Yet die they did. Signor Alfio Magnano, esteemed and respected by the whole town, was found, after a five-day search, under the rubble in an ill-famed part of town. A green shoe with a pink bow, wafted there from a brothel in the next street, lay beside him with its toe resting against his temple. All that remained of Mariuccia was her right hand clutching her broom-handle. As for Signor Alfio, it was not clear what had actually killed him, for he appeared uninjured, his clothes
in one piece and relatively clean. In his trousers pocket, tucked into a celluloid cover, he had carefully conserved the note left two years before by his brother-in-law Ermenegildo on the bedside table in the gas-filled room: “This nightmare of life has been endlessly plausible and, even in the midst of its absurdities, has preserved an air of consistency and even of inevitability.”

The citizens of Catania, sitting of an evening at café tables in a totally blacked-out Via Etnea, and prattling away as in the good old days despite an impression of masticating gritty murk, found Signor Alfio's death an inexhaustible subject of conversation.

“What an insatiable old fellow! Seventy years old, and on a night like that he has enough pep to go hunting for somewhere to put his pecker!”

“Bit of an exaggeration, eh?”

“Exaggeration? Why?”

“Surely he could have tied a knot in it? D'you mean to tell me that if he spent twenty-four hours without… at his age… it'd have been the death of him?”

“Every man to his own…”

“Ah yes, it takes all sorts… All the same, he wasn't twenty any more.”

“No, he wasn't twenty, but he could still take
that
one at a run.”

“Lord save us, these Magnanos…”

“The old generation, you mean, because the young…”

“Ah yes, if his son had inherited a single hair of his head, a single hair, I say! Do I overstate it?”

Who knows how much else would have been said and surmised if, one week later, local Secretary Pietro Capàno, filling up his car from a can of petrol in the garage and finding himself unexpectedly plunged into darkness by an air-raid warning that doused the lights, had not seen fit to light a match. A
sudden roar in the air, a fierce flame leaping from nowhere, and he was a human torch. Twice he bounded back in an attempt to escape the inferno, but the flame, hugely attracted to his person, followed him hungrily.

Crazed with fear, this thirty-year-old son of doting parents started screaming for mum and dad, for help of any kind, but as no help came he hurtled out of the garage. Not a soul in the forecourt. Ominously flickering, Pietro Capàno made a mad dash into the nearest doorway and up to wherever the stairs might lead – to the door of an enemy, as it turned out. Impellizzeri his driver, whom he had sentenced to internal banishment, and who more than once had mumbled behind his hand “What you need is to be burnt alive, mate!”, nearly passed out with terror on opening the door a crack, then flinging it wide and seeing that poor devil trapped in a furnace rapidly lapping up the petrol splashed on clothes and skin and impatient to bite into the living flesh.

“Wait, Mr Secretary, wait there for God's sake. Don't put a foot inside or we'll all go up in flames!”

Rushing to the kitchen he armed himself with a bucket of water.

“Don't panic now, we'll have this lot out in a jiffy!”

So saying, with eager but trembling fingers he started spraying water on Capàno's face and clothing.

“Not water!” shrieked the hapless man. “Water makes it worse!”

Indeed, as if fuelled by the stuff, the flame sprang up with blood-red fervour, puffing black smoke ceilingwards. Seeing the agonized face in the thick of that blind, pitiless conflagration – was it human flesh and blood or a firebrand? – the driver burst into tears.

“Not water! Not water!” howled Pietro Capàno. “You're out to murder me because I'm a Fascist!”

“Fascist or not, we're human! How the devil do I get these flames out?” blubbered the other.

“Your coat!” screamed Capàno, throwing himself headlong
on the landing and dragging with him the flames, which leapt on top of him, gaining in breadth what they lost in height – but losing nothing of their fury.

“Coat! Coat! You're right!” babbled the other. “And carpet!”

He flew to the living-room, blocking his ears to muffle Capàno's screams as he writhed this way and that beneath the flames hungry to attack his back.

Panting and frantic, the driver returned with carpet, rug, overcoat, and threw these over the flames, muffling them. Then flinging himself on top of the pile he pressed down with his whole weight. With a belch the flames died and darkness ensued on the landing. The bundle poured forth smoke more dense and black than the dark itself; and ever more faint came the groans of Capàno.

A girl appeared with a candle. The driver scrambled to his feet a shivering wreck, teeth chattering. With bloodless hand he drew away the covers, exposing a body one mass of burns, blind, mute, blood clotted in the deep lesions scoring it this way and that.

For a moment the driver clasped the girl desperately to him, then knelt beside the man, even more horrifying now than when a prey to those horrific flames, and with no other sign of life than the sound of wounds still sizzling.

Pietro Capàno died next day, leaving vague stirrings of remorse amongst those who had hated him. Only a few – you could count them on your fingers – had the gall to mutter, “He had it coming to him” but there was always someone to come back at once with a “Hold your horses! Sweet Jesus, are we human beings or aren't we?
He
never burnt anyone alive, did he?”

“What's more,” added another. “He was even kind.”

“Kind perhaps, but…”

“No, really
kind
!”

“I don't know what you mean by kind.”

“When I say kind I mean
kind
. Don't you know the meaning of the word kind?”

“I merely wished…”

“You merely wished nothing, keep your trap shut!”

“I merely wished to suggest…”

“Drop it.”

“… to explain…”

And what of Antonio? His father's death prostrated him for no little time. That tender father, who had loved him more than his own eyes, had made his exit delivering him the most God-awful backhander that ever father welted his son with. The shame was not laid at the old man's door, for having met his end under the rubble of the red-light district and having lain a whole day out on the asphalt with two bulbous-nosed drunkards and half-a-dozen women whom death had scarcely known what to deprive of, so clean had life already picked their bones… No, the shame was his: for when he paid a visit to the cemetery of Aquicella three days later, he found on his father's gravestone, scrawled in charcoal by an unknown hand, these blood-curdling words: “… died March 6th 1942 to cleanse the family honour sullied by his son.” The letters were large, their message unbelievable. He tried to rub it out with his coat-sleeve, shooting nervous glances around him like a despoiler of tombs and encountering the steady gaze of funerary busts and memorial photographs. Never again did he visit the cemetery, and never a night but he was scared to go to sleep; for in his dreams he saw that charcoal scrawl.

Very different was the attitude of Signora Rosaria.

“My Alfio, my Alfio,” over and over again she repeated, dressed and draped in black from head to foot, her rosary beads never out of her hand, a black locket on her breast containing a likeness of Signor Alfio (in mourning for his father), her face buried in a black handkerchief: “
Alfietto mio
, Alfio my treasure, breath of my body, dead, among
those women
, under the rubble…”

She refused a morsel to eat or a moment's repose.

“How do you expect me to eat or sleep,” she wailed to the relatives who patted her hands, some one and some the other, “when my life and soul lies dead under the rubble, and God knows how much he suffered?”

Floods of tears on all sides. The women stole glances at Antonio: his beauty, in his suit of mourning and with the deathly pallor of grief and shame upon him, truly resembled that of an archangel.

Two months later Signora Rosaria, overcome with chagrin at not being able to die, consented to take nourishment and to lie on her bed for a few hours at a time. Antonio no longer dreamt about his father's gravestone. And every so often came a more congenial dream, in which Barbara, touched by the distressing event, wrote him a letter, a note perhaps, or a request to visit her.

But the devil a note did Barbara write, and Antonio took to prowling around Palazzo Di Bronte after sunset, lowering himself, in his agony of spirit, to such a level of oafishness that one night, seeing a glimmer of light through the slats of the shutters, and having hoped in vain that they would be flung wide and She would appear in the window, let out a lunatic cry of “Hey there! Ho you! The gallows is too good for the likes of you lot!”