Beautiful Antonio, page 18
She’s already done enough with the mere rustle of her skirts!’ Ing threw her arms around me in a rapture of joy and gratitude. Evidently her ears had been burning for ages to hear such heart-warming, undreamt-of words. When next she spoke she confided in me that this was the reason for certain tearful outbursts which I couldn’t understand, this was the misfortune for which the Viennese officer was contemplating suicide on the journey to Paris, and this the lack of harmony she had besought Pius XI to set to rights… We spoke no more, but switched off the lamp and hugged each other tight. Soon she was near fainting with pleasure, opening little by little like a rose to the sun. As for me, I was beside myself with a joy even greater than hers, and already warning myself to smother the cry which I felt in my throat and which soon would escape me, when…”
He broke off. His uncle, on his part, held his tongue, but felt his right eye twitching like a fly in the clutches of a spider.
“When…” continued Antonio, and broke off a second time. “When a sudden panic and chill came over me, and precisely in that part of my body which, if I’d had to die that instant of frostbite and paralysis, I would have wished to be affected last!”
He fell silent.
Uncle Ermenegildo drew a long, deep breath, accompanied by a mournful wheezing of the lungs, but when it came to letting it go he opened his mouth and breathed out noiselessly.
“She was still lying on her back, lips parted, eyes closed, and I, frozen with shame, slid down at her side, pressing my trembling mouth into the pillow. It was the end of everything. Everything died a sudden death for me! The blood which so lustily and zestfully had converged in one point of my body was fled not only from there, but seemed to have vanished entirely from my veins, dried out by an icy wind that circulated in its stead; and I knew without a doubt that, even if blood should return to my veins, from that particular part of my body it was for ever deviated, as if there began the territory of some alien being into which my thoughts, my yearnings, my impulses, could never again in any way penetrate. With this certitude in my heart, confirmed by two hours of silence beside that perfectly motionless woman, who lay as if crushed by the sum of my shame and her own, two hours of silence during which all my efforts to regain the condition of happy manhood were doomed to failure, doomed to render me ever more incapable of that kind of happiness, and the few moments I had known of it in the past to seem almost incredible and unreal; after two hours which seemed to me brief but static, like the split second the bullet takes from a rifle-muzzle to the condemned man’s heart, I got up from that bed, that bed which I no longer saw, even the shape and size of which I had forgotten, and I left the room, and within it a woman I also could not remember the look of, so greatly did the warmth of the joy she had formerly given me, and the glacial iciness she transmitted to me that night, combine to render her image split, divided, unfocused, and, in the last analysis, terrifying.”
IX
UNCLE ERMENEGILDO’S HEAD drooped and he shook it almost inperceptibly, causing his dewlap to quiver.
“And then what?” he asked.
Antonio was silent.
“And then what?” reiterated his uncle.
“Shut the shutters,” said Antonio.
Ermenegildo crossed to the window and closed the shutters; the room on the instant became a sudden blaze of electric light.
Antonio, sitting on the bed, his back against the wooden bedhead, still had in his hand the switch of the bedside lamp. He looked as if worn to a shred by long illness; but his face, chiselled by its very gauntness, could scarcely have been more beautiful.
“After that,” he resumed, resting the nape of his neck on the bedrail, thereby increasing the tension and fine-drawing of his nose and cheeks. “After that… I never again saw light!”
“Meaning?”
“I stayed for a fortnight holed up in my room. Then I found the boarding-house intolerable, and rented a small flat overlooking the park of the Villa Borghese. My father shipped me some furniture from home. When I saw it there, arranged around the room, it made me weep wrathful tears, because it reminded me of the times when I suffered that nausea, though desperately in love with every woman I set eyes on. A month later I made another sortie to Via Mario dei Fiori, to the brothel where I’d been restored to life the evening I first arrived in Rome. As I followed the woman up the spiral wooden stair the frost in my loins froze anew; and as she – ushering me into a room heated by an Aladdin stove and closing the door – unbuttoned her bodice and slipped off her clothes, I thought I’d play the smart alick. Still fully dressed, leaning against a chest of drawers laden with photographs, I produced a smile: ‘Look, I’ve got a suggestion to make.’ The woman had already relaxed naked on the bed, hands clasped behind her head, and was looking me over. ‘What is it?’ she asked, adding in honeyed tones: ‘You know, darling, you’re really really easy on the eye.’ ‘Fancy me?’ said I. ‘Yes,’ said she, extracting a hand from behind her head and excitedly massaging her throat while giving me a meaning look. ‘When I’ve done my stint in this house I’d like to spend a fortnight with you in Venice! You just see what a good time we’ll have! A single caress from your Caterina here can make a man wake from the dead!’ ‘I bet you’re exaggerating!’ ‘Not a bit of it, my winsome laddie.’ ‘All right, I accept, but on one condition.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘That if I manage to keep cool beneath your famous caresses, you’ll pay for the trip to Venice. If not, OK, the jaunt’s on me.’ Her shining eyes looked at me squarely. ‘Done!’ said she. ‘The wooden effigy of a saint couldn’t resist me.’ ‘Right then,’ said I, stripping off quickly in the hope – you never know! – of losing my bet.”
“And did you?”
“Five minutes later the hapless Caterina was pouring sweat into the sheets, hair plastered to her cheeks, breath hissing through her teeth… But I remained unmoved, a malignant smirk on my face. Ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, half an hour…
“‘Listen here,’ said that hard-working lady, ‘you’ve won and I don’t deny it. This means I’ll pay for your trip to Venice. But now, for goodness’ sake relax and let nature take its course.’
“On this I rose from the bed with a sarcastic laugh, dressed slowly and with deliberation, twice re-tying the knot of my tie, chucked some money onto the woman’s bosom as she lay mortified on the bed, and took myself off into the street. I made a rush for the Café Aragno, had them unlock the gents’ for me, and once I’d slammed the door gave vent to a long and agonized flood of tears.”
“But you should never have pitted yourself against such a challenge,” declared his uncle. “Better to have bided your time.”
“I’d already waited six weeks!”
“You should have waited longer. It’s a mistake to hurry matters of that sort.”
“Well, after that visit to Via Mario dei Fiori I spent three months steering clear of so much as speaking to a woman. One afternoon – the best of hours in times gone by – who should turn up but an old tootsy of mine who’d been searching for me like a needle in a haystack and had finally run me to earth. I allowed her to lie down beside me, kiss me, and practically take the skin off my face, rubbing her palms over my cheeks, slow, rough, loving, furious by turns. ‘You’ve got a heart of stone!’ she burst out… But oh I was not stonyhearted, Ermenegildo. I was simply praying that death, the old body-snatcher, would snatch me out of there!”
“And then what?” prompted his uncle.
“Uncle! And then, and then… Is that all you’ve got to say?”
“Now hold your horses. Don’t drive me up the wall. I may be on the verge of second childhood but, believe me, I’m not there yet!”
“What are you on about, uncle?”
“What d’you mean, what am I on about? Is it or is it not the case that your place in Rome was always chock-a-block with women? Is it or is it not the case that they were all beside themselves about you? Is it or is it not the case that the Countess K… what was her name?… you know who I mean… would come rubbing up against your door like a cat on heat? Is this the case or did I dream it?”
Antonio grasped his uncle’s hand and drew it to his lips.
“What’s this! Kissing my hand, eh?” said Ermenegildo, putting on a bluff manner to fight tears down. “Kissing my hand? Where do I come in?”
Antonio gently deposited his uncle’s hand on the bed.
“What a fag,” he murmured, “all the lies and cheats and shams and excuses and pretences and deceptions!”
“On whose part?”
“Mine.”
“Why’s that?”
“Not to give myself away… to women, to my parents, to my friends, to you… I even went so far as to go to church and confess all the sins I wanted to commit but couldn’t, praying from the bottom of my heart for the Lord to make me capable of them. How pleased I was when the confessor shook his head over some of the yarns I spun him, and grumbled, ‘My son, you’ve gone too far. Don’t you realize I can’t give you absolution?’”
“You ask me to believe this?”
Antonio expressed a wry smile by snorting delicately down his nose. “Countess K”, he proceeded, “is the only one who must have suspected the truth, because one evening she said, ‘Antonio, tell me frankly, wouldn’t it be convenient to be able to possess a woman with your eyes?’ I don’t know if she meant that I had the eyes of certain Sicilian shop-window rapists whom she’d been going on about the previous evening…”
“Ah, the strumpet!” burst out Ermenegildo. “Just let her come here and they’ll be in and out of her like the door of the lawcourts… And not just with their eyes, you may be sure!”
“Or maybe she meant that with nothing but my eyes I could…”
“Ah, strumpet, strumpet a hundred times over! Strumpet like her mother, her grandmother, her sister and her daughter before her!… However, listen here, Antonio: there are some things I simply can’t swallow, even to save my life. Your being able for years and years to pull the wool over the eyes of all those women around you… no sir! that I can’t swallow, I can’t get it down, it sticks in my gullet, here!”
And he vigorously thwacked his Adam’s apple.
Antonio raised his eyes to the opposite wall, projecting the shadow of his brow onto the wallpaper beside him.
“No,” resumed his uncle. “No, never!”
And in a different tone of voice: “Why are you trying to deceive me, Antonio?”
“Until yesterday I was deceiving you, uncle. Today is the first time I’ve told you the truth.”
“But hell and dammit! Women, I tell you, they’re not so easily duped… And about this matter, what’s more – the thing they care most about in all the world! Not even Beelzebub himself could bring it off! Not even some soi-disant kingpin of tricksters!”
“I brought it off,” said Antonio, with a smirk of ironical pride.
“But let’s be reasonable! The first time, with a woman, you can kid her that you’ve taken an oath, or got a tummy-ache, or have to be in a state of grace to go to Communion. But what d’you tell her the second time? Out with it! What d’you tell her?”
“Uncle, I always found an excuse.”
“Always?”
“Always.”
“But I ask you, did nobody, nobody ever, absolutely nobody ever smell a rat in all this?”
Antonio raised his head and shook it.
“No?”
“No.”
“You think I’m such a fool as to believe you?” shouted the old gentleman.
“Uncle Gildo, do you really want me, over a matter like this, to swear on the life of my mother and father, who at this very moment don’t know which way to turn, as they’re elbowed around by the crowd, half-blind as they are? What d’you want me to say – that if I’m lying may they never come home alive?”
“No!” cried Ermenegildo, in a fright.
“Or ‘may I lose the sight of my eyes’?”
“God forbid!”
“Or ‘may I get shot down in a narrow alley’?”
“No, no! I believe you!”
A pause.
“Well then,” resumed Ermenegildo, “after that time with the German girl, nothing more, nix, not even some pit-a-pat, some loosening up, some something, half-something, how can I put it?…”
“In 1933, in August…”
“There you are, you see?” exclaimed Ermenegildo with a sigh of relief. “So – in August?…”
“I happened to be in Collalbo – place near a town called Soprabolzano. Ever heard of it?”
“Collalbo… Yes, of course, naturally! A town. Summer resort.”
“It’s a town in a manner of speaking: a handful of wooden buildings, all of them boarding-houses, a hotel or two, a public garden with a tennis court…”
“Yes, yes, I know, I know. Collalbo.”
“And then there’s a mass of woods all round…”
“Yes, woods, of course, of course,” put in Ermenegildo pressingly, as if to second Antonio’s welcome inclination to talk about something less depressing.
“It’s there on a mountain one thousand two hundred metres high. To the north you can see even higher mountains.”
“The Dolomites.”
“Yes, the Dolomites.”
“So, in Collalbo…?”
“I was there with Luigi d’Agata, Turi Grassi and the Pertoni brothers. They were all rolling around in the grass like a bunch of nincompoops in their lust for a woman, hunting every-whichway and at their wits’ end because they couldn’t find one. At night they were so frantically randy they rushed off into the woods and howled loud enough to wake the whole neighbourhood, ‘What shall I do, cut it off? Holy Mother of God, if it goes on like this I’ll cut it off and throw it to the dogs!’ Hour after hour, baying and wailing like werewolves, ‘What shall I do, cut it off?’”
His uncle had to smile – a relief to the oppression which for quite a while had been weighing on his heart.
“One evening,” proceeded Antonio, “a hypnotist turned up at the poshest of the hotels. You know, one of those fellows who puts people to sleep.”
“Yes yes, a hypnotist.”
“He was a poor half-starved individual who did his act in evening dress along with a wife, most décolletée, whom he referred to as ‘the lady wife’. This wife, either because she had undergone less hardship, or managed to filch something from the larder, or else because the good Lord was rooting for her, was as fat as any butcher’s bitch, slabs of beef under her belt, a bottom that would burst apart the most capacious of skirts, half of her two boobs bulging out of her bodice, and a pair of olive-black eyes that appeared to ooze from under lowered lids.
“Having produced doves, flags, confetti and silk handkerchiefs from his top-hat, the hypnotist put his wife into a trance, turning her as white as a sheet, and while she was in this state, with imperious gestures which her eyes could not see but her flesh felt like whiplashes, he had her walk stiff as a ramrod out of the lounge, along the corridor and into a little room where she remained standing motionless, eyes tight shut. Ten minutes later, in thunderous tones, her husband demanded to know what numbers had been written by three gentlemen in the audience on three little scrolls of paper which he had that instant unrolled. And the woman, still in a trance, rattled off the numbers to a nicety, as if they’d been right in front of her nose.”
“Queer goings-on those,” mumbled his uncle.
“Well, the second evening Turi Grassi and Luigi d’Agata, guess what they did! They hid in the little room, and when the poor woman got there, eyes shut and arms outstretched, one of them, I forget which, without so much as by your leave slipped her a length as calm as you please.”
“You amaze me! I am flabbergasted. And the woman didn’t wake up?”
“I tell you no lies! She didn’t wake up: either she pretended to remain in a trance so as not to create a scandal and not lose her livelihood, or else she lapped it up.”
“Very possibly… And what about you?”
“The whole thing threw me into fits of agitation. It was like a drop of liquid fire on my flesh. God, what a ferment I was in! That night I went off into the woods on my own. The moon lit up the Dolomites, the trees smelt sweetly, and from down there beyond the wood came the receding sound of a band on the march as it left Collalbo for a nearby village. Something seethed in my blood, and my very sight and hearing felt as if they’d recovered the happiness of times when the least note of music or ray of light brought me to the brink of ecstasy…”
“Go on!” pressed his uncle. “Don’t stop!”
“But that’s exactly where I have to stop, because everything stopped there. Nothing else happened. That’s all that occurred. My hopes were not fulfilled. My blood froze again, and again I felt as if between me and that part of my body there was a great knife fixed.”
“Hell’s teeth!” cried his uncle. “Hell’s teeth I say!… But after that? Forgive me, dear boy, if I keep on repeating this question, but I’m too fond of you not to, and I’d give these last few months of my life to be told that, afterwards, things went well.”
“Dear uncle,” said Antonio, squeezing the old man’s hand again,” things went as badly afterwards as before. Impossible for you to understand…”
“On the contrary, I do understand.”
“No, you can’t understand what it’s like, that agony. There’s a dead man in the midst of your life, a corpse so placed that whatever move you make you’re bound to brush up against it, against its cold, fetid skin.”
“I know what you mean. Indeed yes, I know very well! You’re wrong to think I don’t understand such things… But forgive me,” he burst out, as one suddenly plucking up courage to jettison a weighty burden, “forgive me for saying it, dear boy, but if you knew things were tending this way…” And here, joining the tips of the thumb and forefinger of his right hand he applied them to his forehead, “if you knew, I repeat, that – at least for a period – the beast which God gave us for our torment fell to its knees when it should have stood upright and, well… to cut a long story short, was inclined to flop a lot more than was proper, then why, I ask of you…” And here, having joined the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, he applied them too to his forehead “… why, in heaven’s name why, you blessed son-of-a-gun, did you have to go stepping into that nest of priests and vipers – by which I mean get involved in marriage (and what a marriage!) with a self-seeking girl, offspring of a self-seeking breed, colder than marble, prickly as a porcupine, probably touchy too – one of the sort you couldn’t say ‘What lovely eyes you’ve got’ to –, with a crucifix on her breast which when the time suits she flashes like a dagger at you, armed with the counsels of a confessor who forbids her to do this and do that, until you feel the honest fellow is right there in bed with you managing your affairs, and you watch every word you say because tomorrow they’ll be the property of the confessional; a woman quick to turn her back on you at the least friction and bundle herself up in her portion of blanket as in a sack, by day forever with a bad smell under her nose and the keys of all the drawers hanging from her belt; who keeps count of every mouthful you swallow, can’t stand perfumes because she says they stink, refuses to shampoo her hair because she says it makes it fall out, has a bath only once a week because baths are debilitating; who gets huffy if you read the paper at table, answers in monosyllables if you talk to her, and if you don’t – never utters a word; who if you’re warm towards her grumbles that you’re taking her for ‘one of them’, and if you’re off-hand accuses you of neglecting her; all agog and willing like the dumb cluck she is to grow old and grey and swell up all slovenly fore and aft, to get swollen feet and hobble around as if a brick had dropped on her big toe – yet if you wear better than she does, she’ll wish you all the ills in the world… not mortal ills, I need hardly say, but uncomfortable ones none the less, that make you once and for all drop the pretence of being still young.”
