Beautiful Antonio, page 28
“No? You don’t believe it?”
Nose up another notch.
“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.
