FOUR 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!”
Out went the light at once and Antonio fled like a petty thief, with such self-loathing that no sooner had he reached the deserted Via Sant’Euplio, there below the wall of the Public Gardens, than he laid his hand on a moss-covered stone and for a long time shed upon that hand hot tears; and since he was in the habit of using the perfume which had been Barbara’s, for a little while he had the sweet illusion of weeping not on his own hand at all, but on Barbara’s cheek.
Ah, deceitful sweetness! He knew the cheat even in the throes of enjoyment, all the fiercer and more debilitating for the growing knowledge that it could not but collapse into a pit of sour despondency. And indeed the sweetness was already past, already lost! His hand fell from the mossy stone, be-queathing a trace of Barbara’s perfume to the green; no more than a trace, the mere ghost of a thing, such as remains of the light of an August day in the flight of a firefly.
“This Barbara,” declared Edoardo, “is nothing short of delinquent.”
Antonio replied with an ironic smile, almost a conceited smirk.
“I can’t help wondering if it’s true, what they’re saying,” pursued his cousin.
“What are they saying?” enquired Antonio, more to hear Barbara talked about than to credit some rumour he knew from the word go would be a lie.
“What they say is… Well, they’re saying all sorts of things.” Then, catching a glimpse of his cousin’s sardonic smile, Edoardo bristled and went on, “And the beauty of it is that I personally believe it! You, of course, don’t… Do you?”
“But I haven’t the foggiest what you’re going on about yet.”
“Simply this: that Barbara and her husband don’t get on. But when you come to think of it, how could a woman get on with that species of cow lacking nothing but a cowbell round his neck?”
Antonio’s whole being glowed with pleasure.
“And that’s not all. Barbara’s cheating on him!”
Antonio scowled for a moment, but then swiftly resumed his trace of a smile and put his nose in the air.
“You, of course, don’t believe it…”
Antonio sucked in his lips and raised the nose another fraction.
“Well I believe it, and I bet you anything it’s true.”
“And who’s she supposed to be cheating him with?”
“The coachman.”
Antonio smiled, a smile rising from deep down in his breast, almost his very entrails; and he lofted the nose again.
“No? You don’t believe it?”
“It’s true though. Barbara has a strong dose of mad blood in her veins. Amazing that after three years with her you didn’t cotton on. Personally I saw it at first glance. In that Puglisi family, as you well know, there are two or three crackpots no Mr Notary cares to hear mentioned. Know what you ought to do? Go to your father-in-law…”
Antonio paled.
“… Well, your ex-father-in-law if you want, and address him thus: ‘Mr Notary, I wish to know the manner of the death of your Uncle Tanino,’ and just watch what colour Mr Notary Puglisi turns.”
“Why? How did he die?”
“One woman squatting over his face and another straddling him amidships. Beside his bed – where the Puglisi keep their missals – they found a paper twist containing a certain powder… Another Puglisi – an uncle of this Tanino – used to smuggle the stuff after the Great War. He hid the little twists of paper in his hair. Various people I know used to knock at the door of his ground-floor flat of an evening, hand over a sizeable wad of lolly, and buy his permission to scratch his head for him. One fine evening in they stepped to find his wife alone, howling with grief: the poor chap was dead. My friends consoled the woman, calmed her down, then, “I suppose he hasn’t left a pinch of magnesia?” “How should I know?” whined the widow. “How should I know if he left any? I don’t even know where he kept it. And to cap it all I don’t know where to lay my hands on a brass farthing to have him said a Mass!…”
The chaps gently chivvied the woman aside and entered the other room hat in hand. The corpse was laid out on the catafalque, candles burning at all four corners; his head, pil-lowless, hung hidden by the mound of his chest. One of the chaps stepped up beside him, knelt down, crossed himself, said a prayer, crossed himself again, then ran his fingers through the dead man’s hair, extracting a packet. Back in the presence of the widow he took her right hand, clasped it to his breast, and pressed her fingers round the two thousand lire which next day enabled her brother the priest to perform a sung Mass…”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that if Barbara looks around for a drop of insanity in her blood, she’ll discover more than one. Also, I’ve heard that when she was a child… But let’s forget about when she was a child. Let’s talk about today, now, when she’s at it lock, stock and barrel with the coachman!”
Antonio rose indignantly to his feet and turned away.
“You’re going soft in the head!” yelled his cousin at his back.
Antonio shrugged his shoulders, succeeding with the nape of his neck alone in expressing the most incredulous scorn. Then he walked off.
“All right, all right,” murmured Edoardo glumly. “Have it your own way.”
Antonio resumed his evening prowls beneath the windows of Palazzo Di Bronte. He glided from the trunk of one plane-tree to another as swift and silent as a hunter, then poked his face between the garden railings, his cheeks savouring the hard chill of the iron like a humiliating caress which Barbara had detailed a piece of her property to bestow on him; the least she could bestow, but a lot to him all the same, filling him indeed with joy and well-being. His heart leapt and thudded at the thought that, unobserved, he was happy, against all the rules of dignity, propriety, decorum. No, Edoardo couldn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about. There stood the Palazzo Di Bronte, as dark and solemn as a church, and from its lofty tower there rose to heaven – taking its place therein with statuesque majesty – the high morality, the pride, the iciness of the woman who wore its keys at her belt.
One day the two cousins espied a carriage with the Di Bronte coat of arms emblazoned on its doors rolling slowly along Via Etnea.
Antonio stopped and nudged Edoardo.
Bowler-hatted on the box, a long whip in his right hand and the reins in his left, doddered the coachman.
“Look at him,” exclaimed Antonio. “There’s your coachman! Take a guess at his age.”
The coachman was old enough in all conscience, but Edoardo gallantly made him out to be a genuine antique, and gave him seventy-five.
“It has to be said,” he admitted, “that the chap who regaled me with the Barbara story is a certified liar – believe it or not he told me yesterday in all seriousness that he’s positively heard on the wireless that Hitler had put his own eyes out. But I do admit he wasn’t the only one to pass the Barbara story on. In any case,” – and here he gave a snort of impatience – “let her do as she pleases. Let her treat him as she will: he’s hers, after all. There’s lots of more important things in the world at the moment than Barbara and her precious Duca Di Bronte. Not long now, my dear Antonio…”
The lights are still out all over Europe – ships slipping out to sea by night as dark and lugubrious as hearses – people in many places down to a handful of raisins – but Edoardo none the less catches in the air “the whiff of happiness”.
“Not long now,” he resumed, “before these twenty years of despotism, brashness and bullying will seem to us like one night’s fevered dream. Nothing left of it but the nervous tic of glancing over our shoulders before daring to utter a syllable out loud… And we’ll be the laughing-stock of our grand-childen. ‘What’s the matter with grand-dad?’ they’ll ask. ‘Why’s he always looking over his shoulder?’ And our own dear offspring will smile and explain that poor grand-dad lived at a time when every citizen had a cop at his shoulder, and was sent to gaol just for saying that our Great Panjandrum had aged a bit… Just imagine, Antonio!” He grasped his cousin by the elbows and shook him with might and main. “Not long now and I won’t have to keep saying that Hitler is scarcely knee-high to Our Duce when what I want to say is that they’re a pair of unmitigated swine. Soon I’ll be able to speak the plain truth to anyone’s face. Is there such a thing, I sometimes ask myself, can there be such a thing as speaking one’s mind out loud, without a qualm?… Speaking one’s mind,” he added almost in a whisper, as if to savour those words to the full, to concentrate on them and grasp them the better: “without a qualm… out loud… But you know Antonio,” he resumed with emotion, “I can’t believe I’ll ever make it – ever see that day. I’ll die on the eve, for sure. And anyway, would I be up to it? I mean, will I be able to speak the language of a free man? Won’t I get tongue-tied, and blush, and commit all sorts of blunders? Won’t I make it only too obvious to everyone that I’ve been a flagrant flunky for twenty years now? Won’t I – from sheer habit mind you – won’t I break my neck to accommodate someone, to butter up a bigwig, to do the done thing, to be sure to say the politic thing whatever happens… Or will I, maybe, become a rebel for no reason, and end up not paying my bus ticket simply to show I’m my own man? It’s enough to drive you round the bend…”
The cousins walked on side by side in silence.
“The only thing that really gets me,” resumed Edoardo with a ring of real feeling, “is that the milk of human kindness, times of compassion, of poetry, will return to this earth when we’re no longer lads of twenty. That Man there has pocketed our youth, and the day they arrest and search him they’ll find our ‘twenties on him, yours and mine! Makes me sweat cold, that does – to see a free Europe, a peaceful Europe, a Europe that honours dreams and music, and us no longer of an age to dream as once we did, spending whole days together humming Tosti’s latest hit!… But so be it! The main thing is to see the happy times again, and above all – freedom!”
Nourishing such sentiments and rhetoric Edoardo spent the years 1940–42, years which for him, in the expectation of happiness, were in fact tenderly, apprehensively, happy ones. In what hues did hope not attire herself? What sustenance did she shun? What tiniest floweret’s radiance did she not borrow?
What jingle on the lips of a passer-by did her peerless voice not transfigure into song?
E Pippo, Pippo non lo sa
che quando passa ride tutta la citta,
si crede bello
come un Apollo
e saltella come un pollo.*
Ah, what a song and a half that was to Edoardo! For him it meant the happy times were just round the corner.
And a year or two later:
Underneath the lantern by the barrack gate
Darling I remember the way you used to wait,
T’was there that you whispered tenderly,
That you loved me, you’d always be
My Lili of the lamplight,
My own Lili Marlene
Time would come for roll-call, time for us to part,
Darling I’d caress you and press you to my heart…
Chin propped on the pillow, Edoardo followed the voice of this noctambulist. This ferocious Europe was weary. It wanted no more roll-calls. It preferred a kiss beneath the lamplight. Here was the return of romanticism, and here the first new-romantic sauntering down the street in the dead of night, right under Edoardo’s window: here came the first European with a head full of dreams.
Orders came for sailing somewhere over there,
All confined to barracks was more than I could bear…
Sweet European, more than he could bear, eh?
You wait where that lantern softly gleams,
Your sweet face seems to haunt my dreams…
Adorable European, needing only the image of a woman in his mind’s eye to blot out all the mud and the misery.
Edoardo tossed and turned in bed, snorting with contented expectation.
“Whatever’s up with you?” asked his wife.
“Not long now…” replied Edoardo, “not long now…”
“Not long what?”
“Nothing. Wait and see.”
And here at last is the day so long yearned for by Edoardo: it is dated the 5th of August 1943. Here it is!… But how black with high explosive and filled with the dull rumble of ruin! The despotism falls, but so do the roofs of the houses, the church-towers, the old bridges over the rivers; atop the public buildings the clocks are stopped, their hands fixed at the time when the bomb dropped in the piazza and killed a huddle of frightened people…
And here, too, is the good bandit Compagnoni, astride a donkey, arriving at La Punta and bellowing in the direction of the little smoke-ridden house where Signora Rosaria and her son Antonio have taken refuge. He yells about the Africans and Red Indians close on his heels.
Signora Rosaria timidly pokes out a beshawled head, crosses herself, pulls it in again.
“Antonio, did you hear that,” she asks in the wisp of a voice she has had since her husband died. “Your father must have spoken to the angels, poor soul. Cannibals in Catania, in the main street!”
Stretched out on the divan, the inevitable silk scarf knotted round his neck, Antonio turns his head away. “Here today and gone tomorrow,” he mumbles, his cheek against the moth-eaten old sofa-back.
“I pity the poor young girls,” sighed his mother. “May Our Lady have mercy on them! They say these savages take it out on the girls…”
Antonio jerked himself upright on the sofa.
“Stuff and nonsense!” he exclaimed. “No difference between negroes and white men.”
“Ah, you may think so,” returned his mother. “So many rumours… Who am I to judge?…” And she added with a sigh, “Our poor old home, I wonder if it’s still standing. Supposing the army have requisitioned it?… Leave me my bed they must, the bed I slept in so many years with your father. They can take anything else they like, but the bed they must leave me. If not, despite my years, I couldn’t answer for the consequences!”
“You wouldn’t have a chance in hell, mother,” said Antonio, trying to jolly her along a bit. “Those chaps have guns and they’d take pot shots at you.”
“And I’d rip their eyes out with these nails!”
“They wouldn’t let you near them, mother.”
“I’d get near them somehow all right.They wouldn’t know I wanted to rip their eyes out, would they? So I’d creep up, I’d creep up, and with this hand… I’d have their eyes out!”
Antonio’s spirits drooped. It always happened to him these days. After trying to play the fool he was very soon down in the dumps again. A twinkling of gaiety made him all the more bleakly aware of the gall and wormwood of his habitual state of mind.
“One of these days, my boy,” continued Signora Rosaria, “I want you to pluck up courage and get down to Catania and take a look at the house.”
“I’ll do it tomorrow,” replied Antonio, swinging his legs back onto the sofa and stretching out.
Tomorrow came. He didn’t budge.
For two whole weeks the sound of the bagpipes which the Scottish troops, billeted in the chemist’s house across the way, played day and night every hour on the hour, gave him a kind of ambiguous and paralysing pleasure… What was Barbara up to all this time? Was there any truth in the rumours circulating about her? The notary in La Punta would have it that she had been raped by a German; his clerk swore she had hopped it with a tommy; the local doctor, a friend of the Di Bronte and Puglisi families, who drove his dog-cart every other day to the village where Barbara and her husband had taken refuge – a reliable witness, therefore – reported that on the contrary the Di Bronte establishment had remained unviolated by both Germans and British, and that Barbara, simply by appearing at the window, had dissuaded a body of the soldiery from continuing to demand admittance with the butts of their rifles.
This image of Barbara appearing on high and causing a gang of obstreperous stevedores from Hamburg or London to come over all lax and listless was the one which most appealed to Antonio, and entirely convinced him. This was the true picture, no doubt about it! This was Barbara to a T. His heart confirmed it by thumping fit to burst whenever he contemplated her in that high-and-mighty attitude.
Towards the end of August he shook off his sloth, had a good stretch, put on his black suit and went down to Catania.
What a scene of desolation! In Via Etnea the rubble from the fine palazzi, not yet carted away, lay heaped against what walls still stood; most of the shops were closed, their steel shutters wrenched this way and that by the thieves who attempted to force them nightly; mountains of rubble in every corner, licked by half-hearted flames with only a few flakes of dry orange-peel or a scrap of newspaper to get their teeth into, sent a dense cloud of foul odours up to the top floors and the terraces; the swallows, scared by the gunfire, flew high high up as if over an earth submerged by flood-waters, printing on the depths of the sky hazy symbols of woe; conversely, mosquitoes, attracted by army trucks, refugees, and that mysterious vortex which draws insects into the midst of mankind whenever the latter is at a low ebb, pressed in from La Piana to the heart of the city, where they injected malaria even into the heaven-flung arms of the impromptu sopranos – a shabby crew – who sang of an evening in the Teatro Bellini for the benefit of the troops; half-naked boys, so thin their shoulder-blades stuck out like vestigial wings, roamed the rubbish dumps in search of scraps; here and there among the ruins, gleaming gold, lay the harp-like innards of pianos stripped of their carcasses, and mournfully in dead of night betrayed the presence of thieves who, tiptoeing off with an item of lumber, inadvertently strummed their strings. Matches, meanwhile, were unobtainable, and the lighting of a fire entailed cajoling a provident friend who might well live at the other end of town.
What desolation! Along Via Etnea placards of all sizes gave warning in English: “Look out for VD!”, “Wars end but VD marches on!”, “What’ll you take home to your girl? VD?” Half-way down the street a long-established café of honoured name had been done over with a coat of whitewash and fitted out with white screens. Over the doorway an illuminated sign exhorted the troops: “Come along in, but wash first – or at least afterwards!” The Public Gardens were one mass of trucks; at twilight the bombed-out among the townsfolk roamed like ghosts haunting the places where their homes lay buried, and the rooms which only a twelvemonth since had rung with New Year toasts and greetings and exchange of kisses. Others, evicted from their apartments and reduced to bumming off hard-up, nagging relatives, hovered in the streets and squinnied in through windows to see what was afoot in the familiar rooms, and saw – on the wall where once had hung the picture of the Holy Family – a nude woman lewdly scrawled, her eye a revolver-bullet loosed off by some drunken soldier.
The harbour area, where the patrician mansions of Catania stand cheek by jowl with working-class dwellings, was fenced off with barbed wire and out of bounds to all civilians – it had been requisitioned as quarters for the hefty but homesick negro troops, some one of whom might occasionally be seen standing at a window, his evicted landlady’s hat on his head and her boa round his neck. The old inhabitants of the neighbourhood, rich and poor alike, craned over the barbed wire, peering with all their might, launching the consolation of despair towards their old homes which had fallen, as they put it, into the hands of the Cannibals.
If bricks and mortar were in a state of devastation, no less so were feelings. Resentment was rife between this family and that: greetings unreturned, disdainful glances, political denunciations, had conferred an even more beleaguered air on the buildings still left standing, as if they had been rudely and spitefully slammed shut in each other’s faces. The erstwhile Bullies, now deprived of an outlet, were so jaundiced by the poison pent up in them that they couldn’t cast a kindly look even on their own children.
And of those who had suffered under them, woe alas, how many were broken by all this! Benevolent old Avvocato Bon-accorsi barricaded himself in his flat and refused to admit his friends, who had begun to get on his nerves. Dressed in black, armed with a handkerchief and seated in front of a mirror as if to console himself with the sight of a man of grief, he wept day in day out. Thus, while some who had beaten up their neighbours, imprisoned or even killed them, went about brazen and insolent, scheming vendettas or putting them into practice, this gentle soul, always on the side of reason and never harming anyone, racked with compassion for his fellow men, had not the courage to show his face in the street.
On the other side of the coin was Engineer Marletti. Appointed mayor of the city, he strutted up and down Via Etnea – dusty and deafening with military convoys – his aquiline nose stuck in the air, pretending not to recognize many an acquaintance and replying (a cheerful smile, a wave of the hand) only to the greetings of the new bullyboys. His authority, it turned out, was nothing to write home about. For one evening a party of drunken British officers caught him off guard on his own doorstep, solemnly declaiming a list of those citizens who were to be permanently deprived of civil rights.
They bundled him into a jeep and whisked him off to an ancient palazzo where, among the leftovers of a banquet, they made him wash up a monumental stack of dishes.
Avvocato Ardizzone was obsessed by a terror as grave and solemn as the airs he formerly put on. One afternoon he dragged some artist fellow along to the Bar Association and there, taking advantage of the fact not a soul was about at that hour of day, had him smother the Fascist symbol on which he was leaning in his portrait with some very thorough brush-work. His likeness, as a result, was left suspended in the void. Unfortunately, be it the fault of the inferior pigment or the work of some ill-wisher, two days later the fasces reappeared, surrounded by a blood-red smudge. An unknown voice came to him over the wire: “Avvocato, the fasces is back again!”
“I don’t understand. Kindly explain yourself.”
“The fasces in your portrait – it’s back again, large as life!”
“I am an honest man and have nothing to fear!”
“I know you’re an honest man, but some malicious tongue might…”
“What do you advise me to do?”
“Remove the picture.”
“No, no, that would worsen the situation. Who knows what they might not think?… For example… for example that I had once had my photograph taken with that Heinous Criminal, the author of all our misfortunes. Do you understand me, my dear, kind friend, whose name I regret not knowing, but whom I none the less thank from the bottom of my heart?”
“If that is the case, do as you think best.”
The avvocato thereupon became delirious, and on several occasions, hearing a knocking at the street door and imagining it to be the British military police with their red tops and white webbing, such was his state of mindless terror that he tried to climb to the terrace and hurl himself down into the street below.
*
Antonio got himself down to Catania during the morning, and having no wish to do the length of Via Etnea, where he was more than likely to bump into people altered not only in expression but even in the way they walked, he took a narrow side-turning leading from Via Umberto to his home street. Here his eye fell on a door he knew; which is to say that with a sinking of the heart he noticed, laid athwart a ditch that had yawned open all along the housefronts, a very familiar door now acting as a bridge between the street and a small entrance. A few steps further and he saw the leaf of another familiar door on the ground, serving the same purpose, this time still more recognizable – since it bore the name “Antonio” scratched with the point of a nail in the stiff, upright handwriting he had had as a ten-year-old; and before the alley opened into Via Pacini, lo, a third door similarly placed, the oldest old door in his building, covered with muddy footprints and smashed almost to smithereens under the strain.
“God, the house must be completely flattened!” thought Antonio in panic as he turned the corner.
But the building was still standing. The metal entrance-doors had been hoisted off their hinges, however, and sagged against the door-jamb, immovable. He turned sharply in under the archway. Rubble and wreckage of every sort, pulverized window-panes and mirrors, great mounds of rags and refuse. At the foot of the main staircase, on the step of the porter’s lodge, the old caretaker himself, dazed by the horror of events, sat staring blindly into space.
“Don Sebastiano,” cried Antonio, “How are things with you?”
The caretaker groped around for Antonio’s hand, and having grasped it drew it close to his eyes, then burst into tears.
“They even come pissing right in under here!” he sobbed. “And if I dare say a word it’s the worse for me! Come barking into my face like butchers’ curs, they do.”
“How about our flat? Is it damaged?”
“Not a bomb has fallen here, Master Ninuzzo, but it does seem as the thieves has grown wings these days!”
“Why couldn’t you have slept up there yourself?”
“I could never have made the stairs, Master Ninuzzo.”
“Give us the keys then, will you?”
“My niece’s up there, cleaning around a bit.”
Antonio took the stairs two at a time, passing a number of unfamiliar figures on their way down from somewhere he didn’t care to imagine, possibly his own home…
“Where d’you think you’re off to?” said one. “Don’t you know the maid’s up there?”
“Son of a bitch,” muttered Antonio, elbowing the man roughly aside and sprinting up still faster.
From the doorway of his old home issued a cloud of dust as dense as smoke from sodden logs, and in the thick of it swished a broomstick forcefully wielded.
“Leave off a moment, can’t you!” panted Antonio as he reached the landing.
The caretaker’s niece came to the open door, beating the dust from her broom, and stood in puzzlement. She was fifty or thereabouts, dwarf-like in stature but straight and strong and full of pep, with one rosy cheek and the other entirely covered by a birth-mark the colour of wine-lees.
“…I’m the owner here,” explained Antonio.
“Oh, Signor Don Alfio!” shrilled the woman, steadying herself with one hand on the broom-handle while she dropped a deep curtsey.
“Signor Alfio was my father. He’s dead. I’m Antonio.”
“Oh, oh, Signor Don Ninuzzo!” she cried, more than ever eager to be of assistance. “I’ll be off and tidy your bedroom what’s all of a mess. If you did but know the job it is to keep an eye on these pesky thieves! Why, they’re here every minute of the day claiming they’re cops, or Brits, or Yanks, or the devil knows what.”
This said, she leant her broom against the wall and bustled off down the passage. Antonio closed the apartment door, the only one in the place still on its hinges, and followed in her wake; but at the sight of his father’s study he was overcome by a weariness he hadn’t been aware of till that very moment. He flopped down on the sofa, which no longer jangled, the reason being that the back was now denuded of knick-knacks and white with dust. He propped his head on the wooden arm-rest and, letting his eye slowly roam, drank in the portraits, looking sadder now, the sagging curtains, the doorless apertures, the smashed window providing a fine view of the caved-in roof of a neighbouring building all bristling with beams. From the street came unremitting whiffs of stench and clouds of dust and the birdlike acrobatics of half-charred paper. Oh, the pity of it, the pity of it…
A voice from the far end of the passage, unexpected, a breathless voice: “Antonio! Hey Antonio! Where are you?”
The sound of footsteps in the passage, hesitant and slow at first, then picking up speed, and in came a man whom the years had once respected, laying scarcely a finger on him, and then only to caress him, but for whom now they seemed to have lain in ambush on a dark night and bastonaded with sudden wrath and rancour, leaving no part of him unscathed by the daily castigation meted out to him.
“Edoardo!” cried Antonio, struck aghast, flinging his arms wide (though without rising from his couch): “Edoardo!”
His cousin grasped Antonio’s hand and shook it: his own palm was dry and callused to the touch. He hooked a stool under him and sat down.
“Edoardo?” said Antonio, “Is that really you?”
“Yes, yes, it’s old Edoardo all right,” returned the other, pinching the palm of his left hand with the fingers of his right. He looked around him wearily and gave a wry grimace. “Yes, it’s old Edoardo. The same old Edoardo…”
The name fell sadly on the air, then silence. “You know where I’ve just come from, eh?” he added.
“No, no I don’t… or rather, yes I do…”
“From gaol.”
“They told me you’d been sent to a concentration camp!”
“First to gaol, then to a camp, then back to gaol again… Mind you, I don’t take back a single word of what I said! I haven’t changed my opinions one jot. But heavens above, it’s pretty bizarre to have waited so many years for freedom… and you know how I waited!… and when it finally arrives the first thing they do is shut me in a cell with a steel door, then it’s a barbed-wire compound, then a cell again. It’s bizarre Antonio, bizarre…”
The caretaker’s niece poked her head in through the curtains and asked Antonio if she should make up his bed.
“Yes please,” he said. “I’ll take forty winks, I think.”
The woman smiled, glad to have another job to set her hand to, and trotted off.
“The more I know of cells, barbed wire, and sentries with Sten-guns, the more I detest tyranny,” continued Edoardo. “I must admit my sentry wasn’t a bad chap, though; a stolid bank-clerk who’d mugged up a few words of Italian. One night we had this conversation through the wire about Shakespeare and Keats, as we looked up at the stars above our heads and wondered if the world had gone to the bad for ever. Such a late-night chat between a prisoner and his warder, such exchanged confidences, the way the same star caught our eye at the same time, seemed to me a good omen. But every time a car’s headlights swung by, the glitter on his Sten gave me a sick feeling: if I tried to escape there were bullets in there with my name on them… And after all… How can I put it, Antonio? One thing is reason, with its mental processes always on a tight rein, but quite another is the heart that despairs for reasons all of its own… No man,” he burst out, his eyes reddening in an effort to restrain his tears, “no man ought ever to be shut in by another man behind barbed wire or a steel cell-door. It’s a bloody miracle if he gets out of there with enough human pride left in him to be able to stand on his own two feet; and even so he’ll be left with the wild animal’s distrust of man, instinctively seeking cover whenever humans come near him. You know, each evening, when it gets to the time of day I was arrested, I go and hide in the attic… Every army truck that grinds to a halt, stops my heart. I’m honestly convinced that the entire Eighth Army is on my track, that it landed in Europe for the sole purpose of hunting me down. No, Antonio, we never ought to hunt men down – never! God knows I’ve always detested despotism, so just imagine, now that I’ve experienced it at first hand!… And the bizarre thing is that it’s this blessed ‘freedom’ that has opened my eyes…”
Gently lulled by the doleful drone of this discourse, Antonio nodded off, but a moment later was awakened by the caretaker’s niece popping back through the door-curtains, and asking him to step that way a moment as she had something particular to say to him.
Antonio signalled that he’d be with her in a moment, and the woman, all smiles, withdrew.
“Then there’s another thing,” resumed Edoardo. “Can tyranny really be demolished by gunfire? You know what a cell-mate of mine said to me? ‘If you go hating the rich and sticking up for freedom of opinion you’re going to be a man of sorrows. Hating the rich will get you in among the Communists, who’ll bung you into gaol because you fancy freedom of opinion!’ So what’s the answer? Do those other Hordes pouring in from the East rebel as much as I do against censorship, deportation and imprisonment? Don’t you think they might have come to accept these horrors as being in the nature of things? Antonio, we are duty-bound to ponder on these matters and come to a decision that enables us…”
“Excuse me one moment,” said Antonio. “I’ll be right back.”
He rose from the sofa with an agreeable sense of lassitude in his legs, left the study, sauntered the length of the corridor and entered his own bedroom.
The woman was just bending over, putting finishing touches to the sheets. On hearing a footstep she glanced round and gave Antonio a smiling look from beneath her lashes.
“You wanted me, er… what is your name?”
“Rosa,” she replied, her smile more radiant than ever.
“Then what is it, Rosa?”
The woman straightened up from the bed and turned, took a slight step backwards, staring mistrustfully at Antonio’s right hand, raised to his face, as if it might be about to dart in her direction.
“Nothing… I just wanted to ask…” She hesitated, smiling uncomfortably now, the colour in her cheeks, both the rosy and the vinous, growing more vivid still.
“Come on, tell me. What did you want?”
Another moment of hesitation. “Nothing… I only wanted to know would you be requiring anything more?”
A deafening roar in Antonio’s ears – a hot flush behind his eyeballs as his vision clouded – on the instant, its own impetuosity breaking the fetters of its steel-hard casing, a wave of passion exploded from the very ganglions of his nerves, shrapnelled his whole skin, pulsed like a heart in tumult in that distant part of his body so many years an orphan.
Reeling slightly he approached the woman, grabbed her under the armpits, hefted her clean off her feet and welded her to him.
“Whatever are you up to?” cried Rosa, emitting the heady odour of physical thrill. “What are you thinking of? I’m gone fifty, I am…”
“What of it?” Antonio murmured huskily. “Keep quiet.”
And still shackling her to him, her feet dangling, he bore her inch by inch towards the bed.
“Whatever are you up to, what are you doing? I want to know!”
“Doesn’t matter. Shut your trap!”
“I won’t, I won’t! Just you tell me what…?”
“Shut up!” he repeated.
“Oh my God!”
“My God, he’s shoving me down…”
She was flung on the bed, which squeaked and bounced accordingly. Antonio, terrified as of old that the ruttish heat possessing him might come to nothing, though his face was ablaze and every vein in his body pulsing fiercely, hurled himself on the woman, tore off her clothes like a cur clawing at the wrapping of a piece of meat, scratched her, bit her, dashed her to right and to left, rolled her this way and that, panting through clenched teeth, still biting her, fingers digging in… until seized by a voluptuousness, potent, double-edged, as of one giving vent to a long-suppressed loathing – and simultaneously receiving a slap in the face which, by paying him back for some sin of his, relieves him of an intolerable guilt… A pang in his chest, his bowels, his throat, forced out a sharp cry.
A weight was on top of him, pinning him to the sofa. He awoke – in the grip of Edoardo.
“What in heaven’s name’s the matter?” gasped Edoardo. “Yelling blue murder and trying to rip all the skin off your ribs! What the hell’s up with you?”
Antonio had another spasm, arching his body and pressing up from the sofa with his hands, then fell limply back with a deep sigh.
“So I was dreaming, was I?” he murmured, without opening his eyes.
“You certainly were,” retorted Edoardo pettishly. “There I was, talking to you, and instead of listening you coolly went off to sleep!”
“I had a most wonderful dream,” said Antonio, the shadow of a smile on his pale lips. “What a wonderful dream I had!”
He sat up and rubbed his eyes.
“Edoardo,” he recommenced, a tremor in his voice. “I dreamt that… You get my meaning?”
“I certainly don’t! What did you dream?”
“I dreamt I did it, I really did it… I felt such joy I could have died. Or maybe it wasn’t a dream, or only the woman in it was a dream, because for me… for me it wasn’t a dream at all!”
Edoardo shot to his feet.
“D’you really think this is the time and place to have wet dreams?” he demanded sourly.
“No need to get so hot under the collar about it,” said Antonio. “I seem to have rubbed you up the wrong way.”
“No you haven’t, but there are times, I’ll have you know, when a person simply can’t stand…”
“You amaze me,” returned Antonio. “You’ve always been so kind, so thoughtful, so… understanding.”
“My dear boy,” rejoined his cousin, “sometimes I need a bit of understanding too.”
“Don’t get on your high horse, Edoardo. That’s not worthy of your intelligence.”
“Think I’m offended, eh? Not in the least. But according to you,” added Edoardo with a rasp in his voice, “we must always be thinking about that same old thing. Is there nothing else in the world? Would to God there weren’t, Antonio! While I was in the camp I did a lot of thinking about things, and you were one of them.”
“What conclusions did you draw? Let’s hear the worst.”
“That you might have been more philosophical about your mishap.”
“You call it a mishap?”
“Yes I do. I call it a mishap, and a piddling one at that. For anyone in any other country it would have been a piddling little mishap. But for us? Oh, we have to make a Greek tragedy of it! And why? Because all we can think of is the one little thing, and that’s it! In the meanwhile along comes a despotic gangster. One kick in the pants from him and we go flying into this war, and then all the other countries come charging back at us with another kick in the pants, and the next thing is they’ve taken us over, lock, stock and barrel. But no matter! Women, women, women, four, five, six times a day… That’s all we worry about…
“But,” he continued, “has it never occurred to you that there’s no dishonour attached to living in chastity all one’s life long? You, Antonio, are tall, dark and handsome. You’re a fine figure of a man and you’ve been well brought up. You can master anything you put your hand to. You’re capable of understanding anything you care to name, goddam it! Just think of all the things you could have done if you hadn’t buried yourself night and day in your one, single obsession, and pined your bloody life away!”
“My dear Edoardo, all I want is one thing and one thing only: to make that dream come true.”
“Ah yes, you worship the god of lust, the great god Libido! To what lofty heights do you not aspire!”
“There is something else I want, and it’s this: to meet Barbara and slap her face for her. I give you my word that if I met her today I’d fetch her such a wallop I’d have the skin off her cheek. And in front of her father and her husband, what’s more!”
“Oh, terrific stuff! That’s the way to right all the wrongs of the world, be an honour to your country, resolve the social problem…”
“A fat lot I care about the social problem!” yelled Antonio in exasperation. Then, in crescendo, “And still less about my country!”
“Naturally! Concerned with matters as life-and-death as you are…”
“Edoardo, if you really want to know, you’re getting my goat today.”
“And if you really want to know, dearest coz, you’re being a pain in the neck yourself. I can’t imagine how I’ve stood your feeble-minded sob-stuff all these years.”
“Or I your interminable blathering on.”
“In that case we’ll call it a day. I’ll be off.” Edoardo got up, took his hat from the desk. “When your precious dream comes true, just hang a flag out over the balcony. I’ll get the message. Be seeing you… Oh, and speaking of flags, hang out another when you’ve caught Barbara a good hefty whack. ’Bye for now.”
In the doorway Edoardo glanced back to see whether he’d got any reaction, but Antonio returned his look with lofty disdain.
“Fathead!” muttered Edoardo. “Man of straw… maniac… layabout… doormat.”
In the meantime he had reached Via Etnea and was busy fending off numerous knots of military personnel, some of whom staggered drunkenly in his direction, drawn to him as matter to a vacuum and all set to collapse on top of him.
“Hapless youth… with that bee in his bonnet… always staring past his navel to see if down in the forest something stirs. He’s made it his god, his religion. What a fate!”
Thinking these thoughts, and giving muttered voice to them, he reached his own building and turned in at the main door – swung to on the instant behind him by the daughter of the concierge.
“And I so badly needed to let off a bit of steam with him… He’s left me with all the muck still bottled up inside… It’s left a bad taste in my mouth… Hey, Giovanna, what the devil are you doing barring the door? It’s not midnight!”
“I’m scared of the soldiers, sir, ’cos I’m alone here. They comes right inside all wild-eyed like, and what they wants I’m sure I don’t know.”
“You know perfectly well what they want.”
“I don’t know nothing, sir.”
“Get on with you, of course you do.”
“Think what you please, sir, I don’t know nothing.”
“If you don’t, you’d better get someone to teach you!”
“No one needs teach me nothing. I don’t want to learn nothing from no one.”
“Not even from me?”
“Not even you, sir.” “Come along now, from me…”
“Not even you, I said – and just you leave my face alone!”
“What a hoity-toity little thing you are!”
“I am what I am. And leave go my hands!”
“Heavens, can’t I even touch your hands?”
“No you can’t!”
“Not even this little nose of yours?”
“Hands off my nose! Gawd give me patience!”
“Then what can I touch?”
“Nothing! You can’t touch nothing!… Oh no sir, no!” The poor, dazed girl let out a sudden shriek. “Holy Mother of God, what are you doing? What’s got into you today?”
Edoardo acted swiftly, forcefully, never for an instant relaxing his appearance of being in a towering rage.
Having got himself to his feet and mopped his brow, he hastily lowered his eyes, for he had small wish to look the woman in the face: she was making no secret of her smouldering resentment and animosity, tugging her skirt down and dusting it off… He made for the stairs, started up them, but progress was slow up the first flight. The second was no better… but the third he took at a run. Entering the flat, with clumsy haste he flung open the shutters, crossed to the telephone and dialled Antonio’s number.
“Yes?” came his cousin’s listless query. “Hullo? Who’s calling?”
At Edoardo’s end, silence.
“Who’s on the line, please? Hullo, hullo?”
Silence.
“Oh, stop fooling! Who is it?”
Edoardo burst into blubbering sobs.
For a minute Antonio hesitated; then he said, “Is that you, Edoardo?”
At this end of the line the sobs slackened, grew less incoherent, paused, as if to leave space for a word that just wouldn’t come out, and for two or three deep sighs to relax the cramps in the chest. And finally they ceased.
“Yes,” said Edoardo, “it’s me… I… please, I beg you to forgive me.”
“Forgive you? What for?”
“Because I had the impudence to… to tell you off… I… I…” – he choked on another sob – “who am the lowest of the low. I who have…”
“You who have what?”
“Next time you see me, Antonio, you must spit in my face! You must stamp all over it and then give your shoes a good clean!”
“But what on earth have you been up to?”
Far in the distance a bomb went off, the window-panes rattled just a little, the sky seemed dimmer…
“Edoardo, what have you done?”
Unsparingly self-abrasive, Edoardo told what had happened at the foot of the stairs.
When he had finished there was a pause: Edoardo waited for his cousin to speak. He waited in vain. There was silence on the line.
“Aren’t you going to say something?” asked Edoardo, pained.
Dead silence.
“Have you nothing to say?”
Silence.
“Not even a word?”
Antonio still said nothing, though plainly he was listening intently. And another thing he made plain all in a flash was this: that far from condemning Edoardo, or commiserating with him for what had occurred at the foot of the stairs, he envied him. With every throb of blood in his veins, with every least thought in his head, he envied him. Ever more intense, and vehement, and scalding, the force of that envy reached Edoardo over the wire.
“No!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, “no, no, no, no! Believe me, Antonio – I swear by all that’s holy – you’ve got it all wrong – it’s not like you say at all –”
“I haven’t said anything,” replied Antonio; and, drawing in a mighty breath, he held it for as long as he could, filling the telephone wire with all that was utter silence. Until he too broke into weeping.
Between those tears and Edoardo’s there was a great gulf fixed. Far more strangled and desperate this weeping was, and ruptured by the rasp of lungs that for many long years had never for one moment breathed freely of the air of happiness.
Edoardo held on for another minute or two; then, realizing that there were no signs of a let-up, he lost heart, took the instrument from his ear and looked at it. For a long, long time he looked at it, depressed, dismayed, as it gurgled forth the sobs of an incurable adolescent.
“Very bizarre, all this,” he murmured, wiping away a tear now frozen on his cheek. “Very bizarre indeed…”
Then very slowly, very gently, he replaced the receiver.