ANTONIO’S FAMILY HOME hovered on the third and top floor of an old building in the centre of Catania. A number of its windows overlooked the courtyard all a criss-cross of cords which, issuing from the caretaker’s cubby-hole, were used to wield the clappers of a dozen bells attached to the railings on the various storeys, in readiness to summon a maid, or the lady of the house.
There was a slip of a terrace jammed between their dining-room and the wall of the house opposite, a loftier building at one time totally blank and windowless at this level, but now pierced by French windows at which it was the custom of a certain Stately Elder to appear; to wit, Avvocato Ardizzone. Avvocato Ardizzone who, in spite of his flowery eloquence and the billowing folds of his peignoir, and his tendency to flaunt his gown in court, and his forefinger levelled point-blank at his adversary, and – the decisive stroke, thought he – his portrait in oils occupying half a wall in the Great Hall of the Bar Association, in which he was depicted with that celebrated forefinger (though here, from noblesse oblige, directed at the ceiling), his other hand resting on a highly-coloured Fascist symbol, the so-called Lictoral Fasces… despite these merits and high deserts, and the despatch of hundreds of boxes of oranges to influential people in Rome, and a plaintive, ranting, suppliant, peppery correspondence with ministers’ secretaries… had never secured a place in the Senate. And talking in his sleep at night, “Great God!” he would cry, “there’s so many coppers have hung up their handcuffs because thanks to my connections they got appointed Chiefs of Police, now toasting their arses in the Senate House, leaving me here behind them like a fart in the dark… Three cheers for Giolitti!” he added – risking arrest had his neighbour happened to be a dyed-in-the-wool Fascist. “At least this sort of thing didn’t happen in his day!”
This terrace, on the one side, looked onto the two-mile-long Via Etnea (“the Corso”), rackety with old trams, the lash of whips on the rumps of skinny horses; flurries of talk and of laughter, cries of newsboys; a place awhirl with hat-doffings, back-slappings, gesticulations, collisions, bowings and scrapings… On the other it gave onto a short side-street running straight as a die to the façade of a church in the topmost niche of which shone the Madonna, clad in her blue mantle, her fingers ten rays of light, her head haloed at night by electric bulbs which lost their dazzle in the haze of the sirocco.
On this terrace, on August nights at the dawn of the century, Antonio would fall asleep, face buried in his mother’s lap, hearing the comfort-sweet murmur of her fan above his head, while his father, seated nearby, smoked cigar-butts in his pipe and spat continuously; or else gulped noisily from the rim of a jug and then, smacking his lips with pleasure, was wont to exclaim, “Ah, there’s nothing on earth to beat cold water!”
This same terrace saw his mother and father greeting Antonio on his return from Rome: here he was hugged and kissed, and here brought coffee and biscuits, raw egg and milk; here, with tears in his eyes, he told them how his lovely white dog had dashed out at the open carriage door never to return… And here his mother gave him his first tidings of the city:
“… Dipaola’s son is dead of pneumonia; poor Aunt Santina’s pulse-rate is down to thirty beats a minute but the doctor maintains that she could live to a hundred just the same; and don’t even think of using the word ‘whore’ while you’re talking to Avvocato Palermo! – I know you swear too much, just like your father…”
“Why’s this?”
“His wife ran off last Sunday with a young man on his staff… Give the cold shoulder to young Baron Benedettini: he was gambling at the Coronets Club and they spotted a card up his sleeve… Zuccarello’s son died, just like that, in a couple of days. No time even to cross himself. Professor Callara hasn’t eaten for a week, because (heaven preserve us!) he finds that every morsel he puts into his mouth tastes like a turd. If he goes on like this he’ll be a goner…”
“Ye gods and little fishes!” exploded Antonio’s father. “Can’t you think of anything jollier to talk about? Come along inside, Antonio, and we’ll have a bit of man’s talk.”
Signor Alfio led Antonio to his study, plumped down on the sofa, the high, shelf-laden back of which was set a-jangle with dozens of knick-knacks in peril of falling.
Then, with a sigh, he said: “I think I’ve got angina pectoris.”
“God in heaven!” observed Antonio with some bitterness. “You call that jolly?”
“No, it’s not a jolly subject, but it’s one I can’t avoid bringing up.”
“But Dad, how many times have you been convinced you had angina and then the doctor declared you as sound as a bell?”
“Well, maybe it’s not angina, but it’s certainly something!… In any case, I have diabetes – there’s no two ways about it! That was discovered by your – what-d’ye-call-it? – your uncle, the evening I went to dinner with him and drank water endlessly. ‘Friend,’ said he to me, ‘d’you realize that’s your sixth glass of water? Get a blood-test done, at once, tomorrow, and no shilly-shallying!’ Next day I had the test and they found more sugar in me than in a candied orange. Come on, don’t pull that long face at me! I’m still full of beans, and if it weren’t for the fact that your mother takes it so much to heart… Good Lord, in a word, I’m still a man in the matters that count… I say this so you realize there’s no reason to feel ashamed of your father…”
Antonio blushed to the roots of his hair.
“Why’ve you gone all red?” continued Signor Alfio. “I’ve never minced my words with you. I’m perfectly certain you wouldn’t like your father to be a damp squib, just as I didn’t like it the day I was told your grandfather was in the habit of paying a pittance to gape at some woman in the nude, mop his face with a hanky, and go off again without so much as a lick or a promise… But then he was almost eighty…”
He paused a moment.
“Good Lord, I’m rambling… rambling… It’s the one affliction I simply can’t bear! Always escapes me, what I started to say… Ah, yes!” (picking up his thread). “I’ve been going on about all this because it’s time you got married.”
“But Dad…”
“None of this but-dad stuff! If you don’t marry this… what’s her name? Hell! Oh yes, this Barbara Puglisi, it’ll mean you’re your own worst enemy!”
“But I’ve never set eyes on her!”
“And why? I ask you that! Because when you like the look of a girl you turn your back on her, as if she’d called you a son-of-a-… well, let that go. You’re a nitwit. I can read your thoughts like the back of my hand. You’re ashamed of yourself because you fancy well-built girls with sturdy ankles. But why be ashamed of that, you nincompoop. If you want to know, your grandfather fancied them too, not to mention me, and they’re still favourites with… umm… umm… who was I thinking of?… Ah yes, me! Yes, I still fancy them. Come off it, this… what’s her name?… this Barbara Puglisi is a girl with every button where it ought to be. What’s more, she’s rich, she’s taken with you, she’s respectable… Lumme! what more d’you want?”
“It’s just that I’d like to put it off for a year or two.”
“Listen here my friend, you’re nearly thirty. You soon won’t be able to make it any more… I speak loosely, of course, because we come of good stock, and we unfailingly make it. But it’s one thing to marry at thirty and quite another to marry at forty. Add to all this that I can no longer afford to keep you in Rome…”
“But where’s all the money gone?”
“In ten years’ time we’ll have an orange-grove worth the best part of a million. But as things stand today we’re down to your mother having to cadge a spot of cash off the caretaker. I’ve sold all I had to buy this orange-grove, I’ve raised a loan from the bank, and – I’ve planted ten thousand young orange-trees… It’ll be worth a fortune, tomorrow! But as things stand today what it costs me is this” – and he stretched his arms wide – “and what I get out of it’s this” – and he narrowed the span to a slit. “But there! The darling could steal the very bread from my mouth…”
“What darling?” enquired Antonio, with a touch of rancour.
“My darling orange-grove… O Antonio, if only you could see her – she’s such a beauty! Even more beautiful than you are… eh, what? That’s to say… The fact is that it’s bleeding us white! What fiend was it that made me tie this millstone round my neck?… No, no… what on earth am I saying?… Blessed be the day I thought of buying it, and blessed be the notary who signed the Deed! But I’m rambling, I’m rambling again…” He clutched his temples with his right hand, raised his eyes, and all in one breath and like someone forced to walk a tightrope and taking a sprint at it rather than fall, cried, “In the five years you’ve been in Rome you haven’t managed to get your arse moving at all! You’ve already frittered away a hundred thousand lire, and my heart bleeds to think of it!”
“It’s not my fault,” mumbled Antonio. “Lots of young chaps have got into the Diplomatic without exams or anything. But me, I’ve been promised the sun, moon and stars, then whenever I check in to see how my application is going along they seem to wake up with a start, as if they’d never set eyes on me before!”
“But Whatsit… feller there… the minister, calls himself a Count (my foot!), didn’t he put himself out for you at all?”
“Let us not speak of the minister! He has behaved the worst of the lot.”
“You bet!” cried his father, knocking the pipe in his hand against his leg and smothering his trousers with an avalanche of ash and glowing embers. “If you go and poke his wife!”
“That’s simply not true,” said Antonio mildly.
“I don’t need you to tell me if it’s true or not!” retorted his father. “But what I do say is – Great God, what is his name? – that Count feller – he has more horns on his head than a trugful of snails. They all do it right under his nose and he’s never noticed a damn thing. It took my fool of a son to go all the way from Catania to make him jealous!”
“But it’s not true he’s jealous!” roared Antonio, puce in the face this time from sheer vexation. “It’s not true I’m his wife’s lover! What more do I have to say? It’s just not true!”
His father tilted his chin and looked down his nose.
“Be that as it may,” he said. “I have no wish to pry into your affairs. That notwithstanding, how do you explain the fact that a man like Blockhead, a damp squib if ever I saw one, who, if I were his father, would have me kneeling in the dirt for shame, has become Party Secretary of Catania, while you’ve been incapable of getting one of your little tarts to procure you a chair at the Foreign Ministry let alone the desk to go with it?”
At this point a masterful voice was heard intoning from the direction of the terrace.
“Signor Alfio, my dear Signor Alfio, I am informed that your son has arrived from the capital…”
Avvocato Ardizzone. And the Lord alone knows how grandiose were his gesticulations from the balcony, since a flock of birds fled in panic past the study window.
“Let’s get back to the terrace,” said Signor Alfio, and hastily added: “Bear in mind that the Avvocato thinks you’re the lover of the whatsit… ummm… ah yes, the Countess… If he asks you if it’s true, don’t say either yes or no. In any case don’t say no as definitely as you did to me: he’d end up believing you!”
Out on the terrace they found Antonio’s mother whipping up another egg for her son. The Avvocato was leaning over the balcony, draped in his peignoir. At his side, his daughter Elena, a thirty-six-year-old spinster who, following her trip to Switzerland (or so the story went in Catania), was eager at all costs to make it known that her “misadventure” had been “put to rights.”
“What account have you to render to us concerning the Eternal City?” apostrophized the Avvocato. “What is afoot in that fetid sewer which the Duce would be well advised to raze to the ground? We Sicilians ill thought-of as ever, I presume? It’s all because we have brains, brains and to spare. We could hand ’em out to that lot, and enough over for the other Party that acts so high-falutin!”
This harangue was interrupted by Elena, bursting through a thicket of simpers to cry, “Signora Rosaria, do take a look at the length of your son’s eyelashes! How can he have such beauties. They’re not lashes at all, they’re fans! Isn’t it true, Daddy, they look like ostrich-feather fans?”
“A pox on the woman!” muttered Signor Alfio under his breath, wheeling back indoors without a word to anyone.
But Antonio had to wait until the Avvocato’s complexion had ebbed from puce to pallid, betokening that the vein of his eloquence had, at least for the moment, run dry. Thereafter he had to allow himself to be kissed on the forehead and the eyelids by his mother, acting under the direction of the mature spinster who with nervous little giggles thus urged her on from the balcony:
“There’s where you must kiss him! Lower, lower… Let’s see if it tickles him there… Higher up, higher up! Heavens, what a bristly chin! Rasps like sandpaper, I’d say!”
But Antonio was left to himself at last, to gaze at leisure at the much-loved roofs of Catania: the black rooftops, the flowerpots, the skeletal fig-trees and the washing also, around which, at sunset, the March wind carried the kick of a mule; to gaze at the church domes glittering on feast-day evenings like golden mitres; at deserted tiers of open-air theatres and pepper-trees in the Public Gardens; this very sky, low and homely as a ceiling, in which the clouds arranged themselves in old familar patterns; and Mount Etna crouched between the sea and the heart of Sicily – upon its paws, its tail, its back, dozens of black townlets that had contrived to struggle up.
He went into his own room, where what was left of his odours of five years before bade him welcome like a dog faithfully waiting with its nose to the crack under the door… Here, in the two bookcases, were the sturdy volumes in which he had done his earliest reading, from which he had derived fabulous pleasure, until amorous daydreams abruptly put a stop to that. Here were the walls submerged in pictures, prints, hangings, crucifixes, holy-water stoops… and here, in the middle of the room, was the wash-stand with its swing mirror which (watch it!) you had to take care not to tip too far back in case the bottom came shooting forwards and knocked over all the pots and bottles: and here was the quilt, the hot-water bottle, the hand-warmer, the bed-warmer… Antonio stretched out on his back, fell asleep, and two hours later woke up with a tear on his cheek. What had he dreamt? It didn’t come back to him, but he felt an overpowering urge to give full vent to a flood of tears that someone seemed to have choked back in his throat.
“Come now!” he said to himself, ‘I swear to my crucifix there on the wall that I’ll never come over all moody and morose again.”
The same evening, in an effort to overcome his moodiness, he accepted a bizarre invitation from a cousin and good friend of his, Edoardo Lentini.
Just arrived from Rome to install Lorenzo Calderara in his post as local Party Secretary was the Deputy Secretary-General of the whole Fascist Party in person, a man with a chest entirely smothered with medals and a penchant for prostitutes. Having been apprised of this foible of his, a bunch of sycophants had strained every nerve to arrange a night out in the manner most agreeable to a personage so highly provided with power both for good and for ill. As a result of these efforts, at eleven o’clock precisely the “Pensione Eros” shut its doors in the face of its regular customers, who immediately began to howl insults, boot at the doors and hurl stones; with the result that a squad of policemen, disguised as raw recruits, turned up pretending to be so drunk as playfully to stroke the cheeks of the crowd with their revolver-barrels, and chivvied the customers from the alleyway. Half an hour later these same cops, fed up with playing drunk and getting curses and worse from every youth who came round the corner, rose up in the full strength of their officialdom, ordering all and sundry to “Move along now, move along!”
“Watch it! I’ve got your number!” was the retort of several of those addressed, their coat collars turned up high to conceal their faces.
Meanwhile, in the dining-salon of the “Pensione Eros” blazed many hundreds of candle-power, porcelain and crystal sparkled behind the glass doors of dressers, marble-topped tables groaned beneath heaps of officers’ coats and cloaks and caps and fezes.
Antonio was introduced to the Deputy Secretary of the Party as “a friend of Countess K”.
“So Comrade,” said the bigwig, “the stories we hear about you are true, eh?”
“Stories, what stories?” mumbled Antonio reddening, as Lorenzo Calderara whispered in his ear, “For heaven’s sake don’t be too familiar with him! Address him formally. And incidentally, why the hell aren’t you wearing your Party Badge?”
“The story goes,” continued the bigwig, “that you have prodigious success with women. What about you, now?” he added, turning to the four girls ringed around him, the two taller resting their elbows on the shoulders of the shorter, and each through gossamer veils displaying her particular pussy, “let’s hear your opinion. Could you fancy this sort of specimen?”
The four women allowed their gaze to rest for a moment upon Antonio, and despite the fact that they scarcely thought this the most propitious moment for frankness, two of them – the prettiest and the least endowed – in that one moment managed to fall in love.
“So, what d’you think? D’you fancy a specimen of this sort?” And with a swift, insolent movement he thrust back Antonio’s cuffs revealing the delicacy of the wrists. “Or d’you go for a man like me?” And he rolled up his own sleeves, displaying two hairy, bulging forearms.
The girls, unwilling to admit the truth, gawked wide-eyed at such wrists as his, crying out in a superfluity of wonderment. One of them plumped herself down on his lap, and fishing around among his medals, through his shirt and beneath his vest, drew forth a tuft of hair which with deft fingers she formed into a tiny plait. All the girls were keen to give it gentle tweaks, and all the men, with the sole exception of Antonio, vied with each other in cracking jokes about it that but thinly, yet brazenly, veiled their intended flattery.
“No one could take you for a woman!” declared a sycophantic Lorenzo Calderara.
At this point in came large trayfuls of brandy and gin. Eyes began to glisten bibulously amid the fog of cigarette smoke. The Deputy Secretary-General twice rose to his feet to go upstairs with the same girl, then once again to go with the madame of the Pensione; she however, politely but firmly, refused.
“My dear Nedda, are we going to have to banish you to some backwater?” said Lorenzo Calderara, his voice pitched midway between ribaldry and reprimand, leaving it uncertain which of the two was a fake.
“Right then, arrest me!” retorted Madame, trying to make a joke of it.
The Deputy Secretary-General for his third sortie, had to make do with another of the girls, whose pleasant face had previously, though briefly, been disfigured with pique on seeing the middle-aged madame given preference.
When the Deputy Secretary-General made his reappearance in the room, his bemedalled chest open to the winds and one arm round the bare flanks of the girl, he was hailed with applause.
“If it is not an indiscreet question,” said Antonio’s cousin, Edoardo Lentini, “may I enquire how old you are?”
“My dear chap,” replied the bigwig, “I’m pretty long in the tooth… Go on and guess!”
“Twenty-five! Twenty-four!” cried those who thought it opportune to butter him up by assuring him how young he looked.
“Forty! Forty-two!” wagered those wishing to bestow on him a contrasting pleasure – that of publicly denying any possibility that, in his case at least, it had required long years to rise to such heights in politics.
“Thirty-two!” was his curt reply.
“Heavens!” exclaimed the first lot. “You’re such a wow with the women we’d never have thought you a day over twenty-five!”
“By Jove!” ejaculated the others. “Only thirty-two and already Deputy Secretary-General of the Party?”
They went on to speak of Youth, which under the new regime had taken over the “helm of the State”. The ministers, the mayors, the Party Secretaries, were all without exception youthful, and the most youthful of all was… Whereupon they all lowered their voices, with a painful effort removed the sozzled smirks from their faces, stiffened in their chairs at the memory of how many times they had sprung to attention as they pronounced that title; and they named the name of Italy’s most potent and powerful personage.
Such conversation had become insufferable, not least because it demanded a sort of earnestness that was riotously banished from their faces by the flush of exhilaration and liquor.
To create a diversion a young police inspector snatched up one of the girls and dumped her on the lap of Lorenzo Calderara, who enjoyed what was (in Catania) the mortifying reputation of never having gone with a State prostitute.
They all set to a-clapping and a-shouting, while the girl poured a host of come-hitherings into the ear of Calderara, who contrived to give a sickly smile as he turned red as a turkey-cock.
“Get a move on!” bawled the Deputy Secretary-General (to whom a few hasty words had been addressed by a bony individual whose dismal species of diplomacy – known with a fantasy to match its aptness as hunchback-heartedness – had, from his constant whispering in people’s ears, resulted in a perpetual stoop). “Get a move on, Lorenzo, do your stuff! The Party Secretary of Catania has to be a man!… You take my meaning, I suppose?… And you, comrade Elena, will thereafter report to me in person!”
The company, with the exception of Antonio, leapt to their feet to heave Calderara out of his chair and spur him from the room along with the girl.
“Don’t push!” objected Calderara. “Hey there, that’s enough of that. I’ll go on my own two feet! Stop it!”
All present thereupon turned their eyes to the Deputy Secretary-General. Had they overstepped the mark with the man who from tomorrow onwards would have all their destinies in his hands?
“Let him alone,” said the Deputy Secretary. “He’ll go on his own two feet.”
“He’s not going anywhere!” This sudden shriek from the madame.
An outburst that caused all faces to swivel in her direction, and little by little to drain of their hilarity.
“He’s not going!… Mother of God, are you trying to force me to use foul language?… He’s not going!”
“What do you mean, not going?” enquired the Deputy Secretary. “On whose orders?”
“On mine!” retorted the woman, clapping a hand to the copious bosom a-quiver beneath her quivering bodice.
Laughter was general and hearty.
“No laughing matter this, you fools!” The Deputy Secretary-General rose from his chair, retracting his chin onto his chest, flaring bloodless nostrils; a pace away from the woman he raised his head, gave her a sidelong look, as a matador sidesteps before thrusting his sword into the heart of the bull; then, like lightning, he delivered a whacking backhand that sent her crashing against the wall.
Arms milling, the woman clutched at a tapestry that instantly ripped from its moorings and fell, entombing her in a number of the edifices of ancient Rome and a considerable stretch of the Tiber.
She slithered to the floor. The girls flocked to her aid, disentwining her from the hangings. One of them put a glass of water to her lips and tipped it gently into her mouth as into a lifeless vessel.
Having drunk, the woman gave a shake to her head, scrubbed her eyes energetically with the backs of her hands and scowled, one after the other, at the men, now resettled in their places.
“Cooled off a bit, eh?” enquired Lorenzo Calderara sarcastically.
“I did it for your sake, you oaf!” the woman said brokenly from where she sat slumped on the floor.
In imitation of the Deputy Secretary a few moments before, Calderara rose from his chair, though in a far more ludicrous manner and, hand raised, advanced in his turn on the woman.
“Oh, give over now, that’s quite enough of that!” broke in one of the girls, the tallest and most splendid of them all. “Lay off!” And she gave a shove that sent him tottering backwards. “What a bloody awful evening this has been! What a lot of dead-beats! Give us a break, do!…” And here she addressed Antonio in the accents of one relinquishing a tiresome role and giving voice to her true tastes. “Come on now, duckie. ’Cor, do I ever want to get a breath of fresh air!”
These words struck the company like the blow of a mace to the midriff. They could not have been more cogently informed that they were unlovable, and that without exception all their conquests of the evening had been but a snare and a delusion.
The girl had clasped Antonio to her side, and while the involuntary undulations of her bare hips, and the equally involuntary sportings of her right hand, manifested a warm and plentiful ardour, at the rest of the company she directed a cold and haughty stare.
“It’s been a bloody awful evening for us too, I’ll have you know!” declared the Deputy Secretary-General, hefting himself out of his chair. “Let’s get out of here!”
Edoardo Lentini, anxious lest such a conquest, by making the others look small, might get his friend into trouble, amiably remarked, “Antonio’ll be coming along with us. He’s not going to stay and waste his time here…”
“Here,” retorted the girl, “he would not be wasting his time. He’d be wasting it with you lot, with all that daft rubbish you get up to just so as to get on everybody’s nerves!”
“Antonio, we must go. We shouldn’t stay here a moment longer,” said Edoardo, now with a resolute ring to his voice.
“Leave him alone!” commanded the Deputy Secretary, carefully pressing his fez down onto his glistening hair. “We’re not such tyrants as to wish to chastise the taste of tarts…”
At this Antonio freed himself from the girl’s grasp and, with a motion as indolent as it was self-assured, removed the fez from the Deputy Secretary’s head and – O unheard-of thing! – began to toss it nonchalantly from hand to hand while eyeing the open window as if he had half a mind to bung it out into the street.
Every man-jack of them went green about the gills. Lorenzo Calderara puffed up like a drowning man gulping water, his breath coming ever more laboured and spasmodic. Edoardo Lentini mouthed the paternosters he was mentally rattling off to invoke the aid of God for his friend in peril. The women alone gazed upon Antonio with emotions which (since their very natures prompted them to play it strong) ended in their making some lewd remark.
The Deputy Secretary grabbed Antonio’s arm with his brawny hand and held it fast. He raked all present with a stately glare. He glared at Antonio… Then, seized by a sudden impulse of liking for the young man, he burst out laughing.
Sighs of relief all round, except from Lorenzo Calderara, ever slow on the uptake and incapable of lightning switches from wrath to mirth without risking a veritable seizure.
“Good luck to you, young man!” cried the bigwig, readjusting the fez on his hairdo and rapping his riding-crop on Antonio’s chest. “Would you care to go to Bologna as local Deputy Secretary? Only too glad to oblige. The women there will skin you alive… Anyway, give it a thought in the course of the night, if that girl of yours gives you a chance to think… She looks like giving you the works. A year from now you’ll be a local Party Secretary! Right, comrades, let’s make a move!”
And as in the meanwhile he had snapped shut the clasp of his cloak, impetuously he swept from the room.
Boisterously summing up the events of the evening, all the officials tumbled away at his heels.