BEAUTIFUL ANTONIO
VITALIANO BRANCATI was born at Pachino, near Syracuse in Sicily in 1907 and was educated at Catania where he took a degree in literature. In 1924 he joined the Fascist party, but after being ‘Fascist to the roots of his hair’ as he said, he repudiated it completely, and The Lost Years, published in 1938, was the first fruit of his conversion. From 1937 he was a schoolteacher, but turned to full-time writing after the war. Don Giovanni in Sicilia was published in 1941 and in 1949 Il Bell’ Antonio won the Bagutta Prize. He also wrote short stories, plays and a considerable number of articles for the press. Brancati died in 1954 in Turin.
Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since. He has written twelve novels, including Europa, Destiny, and, most recently, Rapids, as well as two non-fiction accounts of life in northern Italy, and two collections of essays, literary and historical. His many translations from the Italian include works by Moravia, Tabucchi, Calvino and Calasso.
Translated from the Italian by
PATRICK CREAGH
with an Introduction by
TIM PARKS
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First published in Italy as Il Bell’ Antonio by Valentino Bompiani 1949
First published in Great Britain as Antonio: The Great Lover 1952
This translation first published by Harvill an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1993
Published in Penguin Books 2007
1
Copyright © Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri, Bompiani, Sonzogno, Etas S.p.A, 1949
English translation © HarperCollins Publishers, 1993
Introduction copyright © Tim Parks, 2007
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EISBN: 978–0–141–91134–2
To my wife
Let’s start with a very Italian joke. A man goes into a tobacconist’s to ask for cigarettes and the shopkeeper gives him a pack with the health warning: “SMOKING CAUSES IMPOTENCE!” Disturbed, the man hands the cigarettes back. “Sorry”, he says, “I didn’t want these. Could you give me the ones that cause death, please?”
Impotence is worse than death. “May the Lord strike me down dead before sending me such a curse,” says one of the characters in The Beautiful Antonio. And he means it. An impotent man is “worth less than a foot rag.” And yet, paradoxically, chastity remains a virtue, or so the church has always maintained, and in particular the Catholic church in Italy. When the gorgeous and still adolescent Antonio turns even the most devout and spinsterish heads at mass, the priest invites his worried mother to pray that God may “call the boy back to Himself as soon as possible.” An uncontrolled sexual potency, then, is also worse than death.
The Beautiful Antonio was written soon after the Second World War and published in 1949 when its author was forty-two. Born and brought up in Catania, on the east coast of Sicily below the volcano of Mount Etna, Vitaliano Brancati had been an enthusiastic Fascist until his late twenties, moving to Rome to begin a successful career in journalism. However, in 1934 when a novel he had written was banned for its erotic content, Brancati woke up to the repressive character of the regime and by 1937 he had retreated to Sicily to work as a schoolteacher and continue his writing from the safe backwaters of the provinces. The core of his creative work is made up of four novels written between 1934 and his early death in 1954. Each sets out with great energy to paint a grotesque and comic picture not just of Italy under Fascism but of human behaviour in general. Each could be characterized as involving a collision between vitality and despair. The Beautiful Antonio is indisputably the best.
The genius of the book is to construct a profound conundrum: What is the relation between the sexual dysfunction that plagues Antonio and the world he lives in? Or is there no relation at all? Almost every reader will have a different response, yet the question, as Brancati poses it, is so dense with implication that it is impossible not to go on mulling over it long after the book has been closed. Our understanding of what character is, of the interaction between mind and body, of the contradictions at the heart of Western culture, all depend on our finding a credible solution – which, of course, we never will.
Exact contemporary of his creator, Antonio is the son of moderately wealthy landowners in Catania. His father is a professed philanderer and choleric loudmouth; but loveable. His mother is quiet, anxious, devout, affectionate. Brancati likes to put his characters in evidently complementary relations to each other. Antonio’s parents are a double act; their conversations follow well-worn rails. But their only child is more mysterious. His handsome face and fine physique would seem to offer him his father’s role as a womaniser; when he is just sixteen the family maid writhes with desire for him, she has fits of hysteria. But Antonio shares his mother’s quietness, her passivity. He is taciturn, sweet, ineffably innocuous. For almost a hundred pages Brancati doesn’t let us know what lies behind this oddly quiet disposition. For a further seventy we are not allowed even a glimpse of what the young man himself is thinking.
Antonio is beautiful. Il bell’ Antonio is the Italian title and the novel could be seen as a long meditation on beauty and its position in society. The story opens with a group of young Sicilians, who, like Brancati, come to Rome in the early 1930s to seek their fortune in the Fascist regime. Most of them are ugly and so busy chasing women they do not even notice the great works of art that surround them in the eternal city. Beauty is alien and unnecessary to them, almost invisible. The only beauty they recognize is Antonio’s, and that only because it is a quality which attracts women. In truth, Antonio doesn’t really chase the girls, they simply fall at his feet. They are desperate for him. His friends are in awe. Yet like the Michelangelos and Borrominis that they do not see, Antonio seems curiously excluded from the world of everyday action. It’s not clear what he actually does with the women who flock to him and aside from the most tenuous acquaintance with a certain powerful minister the young man proves quite unable to penetrate Fascism’s halls of power. Eventually his parents call him back to Sicily: it is time for their son to marry.
Stylistically, Brancati loves to oscillate between an almost journalistic realism and a more colourful, narrative voice that takes us right back to Boccaccio’s Decameron, a voice that launches into story-telling with great dispatch and is never afraid of caricature. So these opening pages of the novel are full of comedy and extremity. The two styles overlap in the spoken words of its considerable gallery of characters, Brancati’s dialogue being at once absolutely credible yet full of the extravagance, blasphemy and bizarre earthiness that one does find in Italian speech. So and so “would pick up coins from the floor with his buttocks!” declares Antonio’s father. Or again, so and so “has a dick that could punch holes in stone.”
Antonio, however, is always moderate in his speech, as if he were holding back, and this self-effacing manner is somehow at one with his enigmatic beauty. Again Brancati loves to work with stark contrasts. When Antonio is with his father, he lets him chatter on and simply agrees with him, humours him, even when the older man changes his mind more or less every time he opens his mouth. The two could not be more different, the one furiously, even grotesquely engaged in the world, the other graceful, but inert, limp. Crucially, Antonio allows his parents to choose his bride for him: the beautiful and pious Barbara Puglisi, daughter of a local notary.
Fascism too, of course, enjoyed the extravagant gesture, the swagger of an exaggerated vitality, the cult of bold, determined action, in bed as well as on the battlefield. Mussolini as we know was notorious for his womanising. He claimed to have had thousands of women, although “he never wasted time taking his pants off,” regretted his long-term mistress Clara Petacci. Antonio’s father refers to the Duce as the Proco: the pig, epitome of sexual indulgence, and physical and moral ugliness. Antonio, it seems, comes from another planet. His visit to a Sicilian brothel with a group of Fascist dignitaries is one of the great set pieces of the book. The whores all want Antonio, but he politely declines, allowing the successful politicians to behave like goats. Everybody is in awe of the minister who manages three women in a single evening.
But if Fascism sees life crudely in terms of success and failure, win or lose, the broader and older institution of the church offers the more subtle yardstick of right and wrong, sin and virtue. The position of sex in these two different schemes is problematic. In the masculine, Fascist vision it is always right for a man to have any woman he can. “I don’t let anything slip by,” says one of Antonio’s friends. Women are objects. “But your uncle’s wife?” protests another. “The ass makes no exceptions… start having scruples, and the others’ll be mounting her with both shoes on!”
Sex, then, is a competition, a free for all. Getting laid is success and not getting laid is failure or, worse still, somebody else’s success. Again and again the book deploys an imagery that links sexual and military prowess, even sex and killing. But in the Christian scheme of things, of course, repeated sexual conquest is sin, betrayal is sin. The unchaste man, like the killer, is going to hell.
Both schemes, however, have their internal contradictions. When the philanderer is asked what happens if someone mounts his sister or mother, he shouts: “Don’t talk about my mother and my sister! My mother and my sister have got nothing to do with it!” “But aren’t they women too?” replies his friend. For the church, and the upright community in general, despite all St. Paul’s teaching about the superiority of celibacy, chastity ceases to be a virtue in marriage. However piously her parents may have brought her up, however rigorously they have protected her innocence, Antonio’s rich in-laws want their daughter Barbara to have a child, to give the family a future, to provide an heir to their accumulated fortune.
Marriage, of course, is par excellence an image of fusion, reconciliation of opposites, resolution of contradictions. Sexual potency finds a kind of chastity in what the church considers a sacrament; female modesty may be relaxed in the monogamous marriage bed. And, of course, sex and property are fused together in marriage. The wife brings her dowry as well as her body. The man offers protection, income.
For Fascism too, despite the Duce’s notorious promiscuity, the institution of the family was to be supported at all costs. The nation’s vitality would express itself in its high birth rate, its production of young men and women prepared to live and die for Italy. In what he called “The battle for births,” Mussolini introduced cash prizes for the women who had most children and a “bachelor tax” on men over twenty-five who did not marry. In typically aggressive and ambiguous rhetoric, the Duce spoke of his determination to give the nation “a demographic whipping.”
But after three years of marriage, Antonio’s beautiful wife is still not pregnant. In fact, as her scandalised parents discover, she is exactly as she was the day they gave her away in marriage, a virgin. To put it bluntly, the beautiful Antonio can’t get it up. When the news finally breaks it causes a greater scandal, greater confusion, than even the bombs that will soon be falling in wartime. It is as if every tacit compromise and hypocrisy that allows society to go on functioning had been exposed.
Antonio’s impotence must become public because Barbara, or her family, will not accept the idea of divorce on the grounds of incompatibility, they want the marriage annulled, declared never to have taken place, so that Barbara can marry again in church to a rich and corpulent nobleman. What is marriage then? Does it really cease to exist “for the mere fact that man and wife do not indulge in carnal acts,” those same carnal acts that the church is “constantly bothering us” by preaching against. Certainly Antonio loves Barbara, and she used to love him, till her maid told her what sex really was. In any event, if the marriage is to be annulled, if Barbara is to make a more lucrative marriage elsewhere, Antonio’s failure as a man will have to be declared before a church tribunal. “Antonio didn’t have the stuff of the real Fascist,” the local deputy party secretary subsequently writes to Antonio’s one important political contact in Rome.
Any notion that a man might be an individual, whole unto himself, is now swept away in a storm of ridicule, speculation and scandal. Antonio’s “failure” is experienced as the failure of his whole tribe. Both father and friends feel obliged to embark on orgies of fornication and adultery to demonstrate that they remain untainted. The world at large marvels and revels in the handsome Antonio’s weakness. Trapped in a mesh of conflicting voices, one or two supportive, most full of contempt, Antonio falls into a defeatist mutism. He is now, as it were, aggressively passive; he spends all day in bed, he will not communicate.
To get a sense of how far Brancati goes beyond a mere condemnation of Fascism or Catholicism here, it’s worth remembering another writer from the Catania area, Giovanni Verga. Born in 1840, Verga started his career as a writer of elegant society novels, but made his breakthrough in the late 1870s when, living in Milan, he turned to writing about the peasants in the backward part of Sicily where he had grown up. This was a time when the middle-class readers of the major European cities had begun to feel that acute nostalgia for the tight-knit communities of the rural past which is still with us today. Verga recreated those communities for his sophisticated public, but in a wonderful stroke of therapeutic irony he showed how, far from being havens of mutual support, there was actually nothing crueller than the traditional peasant community, particularly when, for some reason, an individual broke society’s rules or failed in some way to fit in. And although to the reader the chorus of pious rhetoric deployed by the community to destroy the unmarried mother, or the girl who cannot afford to stay at home and nurse a dying parent, is evidently hypocritical, the victim inevitably succumbs to that rhetoric and considers him or herself a guilty failure. There is no question in Verga of anyone reaching an independent position outside the chorus of hypocrisy. Everyone is at the whim of the cruel collective ethos.
Likewise Antonio. Even when his reason can calmly dismiss an idea as absurd, his mind nevertheless remains prey to every stray voice and even begins to invent those voices when they are not actually heard. Invited to take part in an anti-fascist meeting he finds himself equating political protest with failure and failure with sexual impotence. “They are always talking about philosophy and liberty because they can’t get a hard on,” he thinks. Even though the private lives of one or two of the men present remind him that this is not actually the case, he nevertheless feels the men are, as he puts it, “stained with purity.”
This use of oxymoron alerts us to a general tendency in Brancati’s work to stand traditional wisdom on its head. Antonio’s mother protests to her confessor that the church is punishing her son for having behaved with Barbara in the very same way that Joseph behaved with Mary. Was the Virgin’s marriage null? In perhaps the key passage in the book, Antonio and his uncle go together into an empty church. Despite the fact that nobody is there, Antonio feels the pressure of the institution’s judgement of him, as if every painting and statue stared at him with disapproval. His sympathetic uncle, the only man who takes time to understand Antonio, is dying and so disillusioned with Fascism, with life, that he is indeed eager to die. In an extraordinary passage, he struggles to pray, but reaches the frightening conclusion that the idea of Christ is as empty of content as it is beautiful, and salvation merely a dream. If Christ is the church’s spouse, he hasn’t delivered, and we erstwhile believers are “disappointed lovers.” In short, Christ too is impotent.
So what exactly is wrong with Antonio? Brancati’s cleverness is to give us just one long statement from the sufferer himself. Hard pressed by his uncle, Antonio at last tells his story. But if, after all the book’s hints of possible links between the moral ugliness of the time and Antonio’s problems, we expected some cerebral, lucid assessment of his malaise, we will be surprised. Antonio tells a long, detailed, moving story of his dealings with women. It serves to dismiss any question that Brancati is using his predicament merely as a metaphor for a certain kind of personality disorder under Fascism. In particular, the extent to which, as a handsome man, Antonio has always felt himself to be a prey to female passion, to a disturbing voraciousness behind the rhetoric of romance and modesty, again suggests a layer of interpretation that goes beyond a comment on the contemporary situation.
Where does this leave the political and social readings of the story? It’s curious that three other great Italian novels on the Fascist era make the same link between the difficulty in engaging in sexual relationships and the difficulty of becoming involved in action in general. In Cesare Pavese’s The House on the Hill (1949), the hero is fascinated by a group of anti-fascist partisans, but is somehow unable to believe in their mission and cannot join them. As a result, an ex-girlfriend among the partisans, mother of a child that may be his, refuses to renew their relationship, sees him as irrelevant, outside reality.
In Giorgio Bassani’s masterpiece The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962), the Jewish family’s withdrawal from the realities of Fascist Italy into the haven of their garden is accompanied by a failure of the young people in the book to achieve any sexual initiation. In Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe (1940), the hero’s long and fruitless wait for military engagement and glory is paralleled by a failure to marry or be involved with women in any way.
All these books are wonderfully different. Yet beneath them all lies a deep apprehension, in reaction perhaps to the very sensual and conflictual nature of Italian life, that any engagement with the world, sexual or political, is of its very nature ugly, demeaning. Hence the heroes of these books become strangely Peter Pan figures, yearning for virility and aggression, but excluded from events by their very sensibility.
Brancati himself was in Sicily when the Allies invaded the island in July 1943 and it is in the aftermath of that invasion and the devastation it brought that The Beautiful Antonio ends. Antonio has finally discovered the capacity to express his anger physically. He is ready to go and find Barbara, he announces, and give her a damn good thrashing. The idea at last gets his blood moving. His pecker is up. Written so soon after the collapse of Fascism, the novel itself might be seen as an analogous act of revenge on the writer’s part, a virile if belated attack on a society that had treated the author badly. Readers will decide for themselves whether such vindictiveness is a positive development.
OF THE BACHELOR SICILIANS who Settled in Rome around the year 1930, eight at the very least, if memory serves aright, rented furnished flats in quiet, out-of-the-way parts of town, and almost all of them by chance in the neighbourhood of famous monuments; of which, however, they never learnt the history or lit upon the beauty, and often they never so much as noticed them. But then, what ever did fail to escape the notice of eyes straining to catch a glimpse of the woman they lusted after among the scrum of passengers alighting from a tram? Domes, portals, monumental fountains… Works which, before they were achieved and accomplished, had for years furrowed the brows of Michelangelo and Borromini, could not for a moment catch the attention of the black, roving eyes of these guests from the South. Age-old bells with their mellow, solemn voices, celebrated in the lines of Goethe and of Shelley, earned themselves a “Chi camurria, ’sta campana! Damn those bells!” for vibrating with their dawn chorus through the wall against which the young man was resting a brow but recently surrendered to sleep and still red with the imprint of a pair of lips.
The respect which as a chronicler I owe to truth impels me to own that these Sicilian bachelors were not much of an eyeful; except for one, Antonio Magnano, who was an Adonis. In saying this I should not like you to imagine the ugly ones were unattractive to women. On the contrary many of them, despite being of bantam size, with Semitic noses and little-finger nails left long to pick their lugholes clean, appeared to be linked by some deep complicity to the whole of the female race. You might think that between them and all the women under the sun a disgraceful act had somewhere and at some time taken place. There was not a woman but on first setting eyes on these men seemed to pale and to acknowledge herself bound to them by long-standing and unspeakable moral lapses. Hence their conquests always had a shabby air of blackmail, although (and this I can swear to) these fellows of twenty-five to thirty were of a peerless tenderness and courtesy towards the opposite sex. But upon this earth, for all its mysteries, there is perhaps no more mysterious being than your truly ugly man.
Of quite different stamp were the triumphs of Antonio Magnano. Back in 1932 he was twenty-six years of age, and photographs of him on show in Piazza di Spagna would halt even middle-aged women in their tracks, though laden with shopping and dragging along toddlers in floods of tears with the very hand just used to box their ears. Instant bewitchment streamed from his olive-skinned visage, powerfully blue-tinted on the chin but of extreme sensitivity; the eyes seemed to glint with tears that sat on the uppermost curve of the cheeks, where the shadow of his long lashes would oftentimes abide. In his reticent presence the most jittery, hysterical woman could be seized by one of those yawning fits that discharge nervous tension, prompting her to rise from her chair and stretch out on the sofa, to rise from the sofa and stretch out on the bed. A jaundiced and superficial observer might have consoled himself by saying that women were bored in Antonio’s company. What a gross error! Women felt dominated and at the same time perfectly and completely at their ease. When in his presence they sweetly burned, and suffered agonies, and went mad with a pleasure so intense as to make them think themselves possessed by some severe aberration which jumbled up pleasure and pain in that utter lack of discrimination which is the sole state of mind wherein anyone dares to be overheard pronouncing the words “I am happy!”
Antonio’s ugly friends looked up to him, and would have envied him too, or perhaps even hated him, had they not (inspired and influenced by the women they knew) unwittingly fallen in love with him themselves. The secret of those conquests so different from their own, and in fact the exact opposite – since their successes with women seemed wrung from the latter as a result of dirty doings, whereas Antonio’s appeared to emanate from some mysterious balm which he conferred on his victims – the secret of those conquests, I say, so greatly intrigued them that they would set the alarm for five to be up and out early, and catch Antonio in the shower. Here they were in for a bitter harvest. Faced with those athlete’s limbs tempered by a touch of mild and melancholy pallor, as if, whatever the circumstances, that body were invested by some mystic light, his friends – and first and foremost Luigi d’Agata and Carlo Fischetti – would be assailed by a malaise that cloaked self-loathing. “You know what you look like?” they would ask, to come straight out with a catch-phrase that might otherwise have festered in their bosoms and turned to spite: “Like a fresh-baked biscuit!”
And they would start to thump his bare shoulders, tweak the hairs on his chest, grab him by an ankle and hoist up a foot… but only to find themselves possessed and disconcerted by the vibrations of a body so infinitely strange and undeniably superior in quality.
It has to be admitted that Antonio had provoked similar perturbations from his youth up. It was on April 5th 1922 that his mother and father, Signora Rosaria and Signor Alfio, were compelled to take note of the fact. That was the morning on which the maidservant, a country girl, entered their bedroom with her face all scratched and tear-stained.
“In pity’s name, what have you done?” cried the good lady, removing the tray from the girl’s trembling hands. “What’s been going on? Speak up!”
The poor girl sank her chin on her chest and looked asquint like a goat. Eventually she said, “It wasn’t me.”
“Then who was it?” demanded the mistress of the house, more flustered than ever.
“It’s your son!” whimpered the girl.
“Antonio?” bawled his father, extracting from the bed two legs which by dint of wriggling under the bedclothes he had managed to sheathe in longjohns. “Right! I’ll soon settle his hash!”
There ensued a moment’s silence. The girl then flung herself on the floor and began writhing and foaming at the mouth, seizing Signor Alfio by the legs as if to deter him from some crime. Just then in came Antonio with an air so sweet and innocent that you could scarcely credit it. The girl at once released her hold on Signor Alfio’s legs, rolled across the floor and grabbed the ankles of Antonio, who appeared genuinely astonished, looking questions at his parents: what on earth was all the fuss about? The girl in the meantime pressed her face to Antonio’s feet; subsequent, however (and this detail particularly struck his parents, offending them and practically sending them into fits), to tearing off and hurling away his slippers so as to weep and rub her cheeks and nose upon the naked skin.
“Forgive me!” she cried. “I’m a liar, a filthy liar!”
It was with great difficulty that Signor Alfio prized Antonio from the clutches of that twenty-year-old, her chin by now entrenched in the hollow of his shoulder.
Once alone with the girl, Antonio’s mother at last learnt the truth. For five nights now this simple country lass had left her bed and gone to rend her bosom and her cheeks outside Antonio’s door, caught betwixt her craving to open it and her reluctance to commit a base act.
“What’s set me all on fire, what’s making me burn?” whimpered the girl as she gnawed at her knuckles.
The good woman was much affected by this piteous tale, and repaired at once to her confessor at the church of Our Lady in Via Sant’Euplio. She told him the circumstances and, on the verge of tears, “Padre Giovanni,” she cried, “would it not be wiser to take on a serving-lad and send the girl home?”
The old priest tapped twice with his fingertips on the lid of his snuff-box and peeked out of the confessional.
“If your son’s intentions are not honourable,” he said, “he will always find a way of making trouble for women.” Clearly Padre Giovanni had no intention of admitting that Antonio was completely blameless.
“But could these women not be urged to…?”
“To…?” snapped the priest.
“To behave more decorously towards him!”
“Can you even imagine all the women whose acquaintance your son will make? Will God every time be able to send an angel to warn you that your son is… is… Well I might as well say it: coming over all randy?”
“So what must I do?”
The priest was well aware that with regard to Antonio he harboured sentiments not immaculately Christian; but alas, once embarked upon the slippery slope of wrath he was unable to resist the delectable sensation that opens a yawning chasm beneath the feet, and that drags inexorably down.
“What you must do,” he informed the mother, “is pray to God that He may soon take your son to His bosom.”
The good lady nearly fainted away with horror, and the painted wooden angel on whose plinth she had leant her head began to wobble with her sobs.
“When I am preaching my sermons,” said the priest, “and your son is there at the back of the church, the women are always putting cricks in their necks to look at him. It’s a scandal!”
It is perfectly true that Antonio, seated by the first column in the nave, had only to shift his chair or clear his throat for the pulpit to be robbed of the attentions of all the finest eyes in the place.
“Death,” continued the priest, “is for the true Christian no misfortune: rather, when it harvests us in the flower of youth, it is a gift of heaven. But it is not in our province to make suggestions to God as to the best way of placing a young man such as Antonio in the position of sinning no more and…” – he raised his voice and added – “of not inciting others to sin. For to consign our own selves to perdition, dear madam, is not the worst thing we can do. No. It is to bring damnation upon another of God’s creatures over whom we have no rights whatever! Pray to God, dear madam, and in his infinite wisdom he will find ways and means of mitigating your son’s satanic beauty without reducing him to dust and ashes!”
The lady rose, not without having made the sign of the cross at the moment when the priest uttered the word “satanic”. If the church had not been aglow with gilded and golden light the extreme pallor of that poor woman’s face might have softened even the heart of the priest.
“In what way,” she said heavily, “do you think my Antonio might be changed by God?”
The priest answered never a word, and she walked by his side and listened to his footsteps with the numbness of one utterly crushed. When they reached the church door he raised a hand still dripping with holy water and murmured:
“He might even lose his sight…”
The poor woman flung up an arm across her mouth to suppress a cry. “Come this way,” said the priest, with a return of his wrathful glower. And having led Signora Rosaria down to the forecourt and three times over yammered some incomprehensible word, drawing back his lips in such a way as even to distort the shape of his nose, he burst out as follows:
“Are you aware, madam, are you aware that out of twenty girls of good family who make their confessions to me, ten – yes ten! – have given offence to God by thinking too often about your son, and in a manner scarcely in keeping with their upbringing? Monsignor Cavallaro, three days after hearing the confession of my niece, said to me, “Brother in Christ,” he said, “try to keep Rita’s eyes off young Magnano!” “My friend,” I enquired, naturally concerned, “do you know anything?” “Nothing whatever,” replied the monsignor. “How could I, a simple priest, know anything? But the Lord inspired me with these words, and I have reported them to you…” A most worthy person, Monsignor Cavallaro! Your husband really should put in a word for him with the archbishop… But I ask you,” – and here his voice rose once more in a crescendo, “is it right that in church on Sundays the girls of good family find the High Altar to be wherever Antonio is sitting?”
Signora Rosaria reached home at her wits’ end, wringing her hands in anguish as she waited for Antonio’s return, as if her son had been jousting with the Archangel Gabriel. Her terror scaled the heights when in he came wearing a pair of spectacles.
“You’re losing your sight!” shrieked the poor lady.
Antonio replied with the cheeriest smile in the world, and explained that his glasses had plain lenses and he was only wearing them to give himself an air of respectability.
His mother hugged him to her bosom, praying in her heart to the saints in heaven that all members of the sex she belonged to, and now went in fear of, should in future hug that boy only with sentiments such as she was feeling at that moment.
Woe and alas, her plea was not vouchsafed her. Towards Antonio women continued to nourish a sentiment so far at variance with those maternal feelings that they unanimously judged it to be a calamity, a horrendous and well-nigh intolerable tribulation, to be either mother or sister to Antonio, and obliged in consequence not to tremble to the roots of their being at the mere touch of his hand.
With so much in his favour in a field of activity that in Italy, and especially in the South, is thought of as heaven on earth, any other young man, not blessed with Antonio’s good-heartedness and candour, would have become sceptical, indifferent, even cynical; but Antonio never lost his essentially provincial sweetness of nature, even when he had gone through university, come away with a Law degree, moved to a flatlet (furnished with old Sicilian furniture which his father had shipped from Catania on a slothful cargo boat) within view of the Villa Borghese gardens, and started to watch the autumns – the first, the second, the third, the fourth – fading out upon the trees of this park dotted with converted shooting-boxes, in the expectation, totally unjustified by the facts, of being employed in the Foreign Ministry; though why by that particular ministry is not really clear.
In 1932 it was no rare thing for a young man to become a consul or a minister for a reason deemed all the more acceptible, indeed admirable, the less obvious it was. “That chap didn’t sit the exam,” people would say. “He has no qualifications and can barely stammer a few words of French… Yet he’s been posted to the Legation in Vienna as First Secretary. Evidently he’s well thought of in High Places and will go far.”
But the “young hopefuls” blessed with this kind of luck had to knuckle down to it in no uncertain manner, and school their hearts so thoroughly that, try as they might, they were no longer able to fall in love with a woman who was not “influential”, or make friends with a fellow who wasn’t “a power in the land”. The least thing smacking of weakness, self-abasement, misfortune or poverty stirred these lads to feelings of the utmost repugnance.
Antonio, on the other hand, had remained as candid and lackadaisical as any waiter in a Sicilian café who, of an August afternoon, bereft by the implacable sirocco of the least power of dissimulation, of conscious tact or any other species of consciousness, tells his customer he would be well advised not to select anything from the ice-cream list; and if the customer then, despite this warning, should proceed to order a lemon or an apricot sherbet, the waiter, jaded and job-ridden, neglects to bring it.
Thus Antonio had let the years roll by, emitting a “brrr” of pleasure at every first whiff of anthracite from the basements, announcing that the heating had been put on for the coming winter. “Gosh!” he’d say to himself, “this’ll be the year, eh? This is going to be it!” Then, rubbing his hands vigorously, he’d cup them, blow into them, go and take a peek at himself in a shop window – and unfailingly discover that at his side was some woman gazing doe-eyed at him… Antonio, beautifically half-closing his eyes, would mutter, “Ah yes, this year we’ll make a go of it.”
But in the autumn of 1934 a melancholy, strange as it was sudden, had descended on him, and by late November had taken on all the signs of downright depression.
“You really get my goat,” said his friend d’Agata while they were having a bite to eat together. “What’s wrong? What’s the great grievance? Has your dad cut off your allowance?”
“The poor old boy would get it to me,” murmured Antonio, “even if he had to forge the stuff.”
“Bad news about the job prospect?”
“I don’t give a damn about the job!”
D’Agata then, point-blank: “Have you picked up some disease?”
Antonio: “No, I’m perfectly healthy.” A pause, then “Perfectly…”
“Then for God’s sake stop pulling that long face and making us all miserable!”
“Oh, give over, the lot of you! Just stay out of my hair!”
“Not another word do I say! Good Lord! So it’s none of my business, eh?”
And his friends agreed among themselves to ask him no more questions.
On the 2nd of December a certain Miss Luisa Dreher, daughter of a diplomat and the most gorgeous foreign girl in the whole of Italy at that time, called on Antonio at ten in the morning. This visit had been neither solicited by the recipient nor announced by the caller. During the strolls he had taken with Luisa Dreyer, Antonio had not so much as dreamt of inviting her back to his place. Such an invitation, indeed, would have struck him as improper conduct towards those who were supposedly going to procure him a position he didn’t deserve.
In the meanwhile there she was, this splendid girl, seated on a stool and twisting a cambric handkerchief with dainty fingers still bronzed by a summer of sunshine.
Antonio said nothing.
The girl, tilting her face sideways, stared at the toe of her shoe as it nervously tap-tapped the floor.
Antonio still remained silent.
The telephone shrilled in the other room, and Antonio dashed to answer it, closing the sitting-room door behind him.
“Hullo?”
“It’s me, d’Agata. Is Luisa Dreyer at your place?”
“How did you know?”
“Ah then, it’s true: she’s there!”
“What of it?”
“Listen here. The day before yesterday there was a reception at the Embassy. The girls all got drunk and pissed in the flowerpots.”
“What of it?”
“Just don’t make an ass of yourself.”
Antonio hung the receiver sharply back on the hook and returned to the sitting-room.
He found Luisa brushing the corner of her mouth with a fingertip to deviate a tear about to dribble into it.
“Why are you crying?” enquired Antonio.
Luisa shot to her feet, hurled her arms around his neck and nestled a cheek against his chest. “I love you,” she sobbed. “I love you!…”
Antonio patted her head, gazing vaguely the while out of the window at the intense green light which the trees of the Villa Borghese cast up against the sky.
“I ask nothing of you!” Luisa went on between sobs. “I don’t want to get married! But… you happened to leave a letter from your father at my house, and I’ve read it.”
“What letter?” asked Antonio, horror-struck.
“A letter from your father telling you to get back at once to Catania to meet the young lady they mean to marry you off to.”
“I don’t believe you managed to decipher my father’s hand-writing!” stammered Antonio. “I can’t even make it out myself…”
“But that’s not what I’m crying for… I’ve already told you I don’t want to marry you. I’m all right on my own and… and don’t want to marry anyone.”
“So what are you getting at?” said Antonio, panic-stricken.
“I love you I love you! In heaven’s name can’t you understand? I love you!”
Antonio’s face took on the pallor of death and he slumped, he practically collapsed, onto a sofa.
The girl glided to his side, bringing with her the tender fragrance of her angora woollies and powdered neck. Shaken with sobs, she insinuated beneath his chin that fair brow on which, at Embassy receptions, there always glittered a small diamond crucifix. With her little frightened hand she sought for the heart beneath his dressing-gown, as if to see whether such a thing as a heart could ever beat there.
Far from just beating, Antonio’s heart was at full gallop. Astride this runaway steed he sped towards the blackest anguish.
Luisa no longer knew what she was doing, she had lost all control of herself, she was aghast, ashamed, to discover her hand wandering frantically beneath Antonio’s robe.
“I won’t make any demands!” she sobbed. “Don’t worry, I promise that! I won’t make any trouble for you… I’m an honest woman, I’m not like the others!”
“On the contrary,” said he, clutching at the desperate expedient of playing it tough and nasty, grabbing her by the wrists to hold her off a little and looking her straight in the face. “You are like the others!”
Luisa frowned, scattering attractive, kittenish wrinkles around her eyes and nose: “What do you mean? You don’t know what you’re saying!” Then, all in a rush, “What are you thinking of? I’m a virgin, I tell you, I’m a virgin!”
Antonio forced an ironic smile, something that came with difficulty and caused him displeasure, because he was a simple-hearted young man and could distinguish a truth from a falsehood.
“Even if I married the most bigoted and ridiculous of you Sicilians,” continued Luisa in a more muted, a more measured voice, “he would have nothing to reproach me for. I know that when your women go to hotels in Taormina for the first night of their honeymoon they squawk like hens having their necks wrung. I wouldn’t squawk even if you killed me, but anyway… I’d have a right to… But why have you gone all pale? What’s the matter? Are you expecting someone? Is there someone at that door?”
A spot of colour crept back into Antonio’s cheeks. A faint noise had come from the bedroom door, as of a bodily weight falling against it.
“Is there a woman in there?” demanded Luisa in a hushed voice.
“Yes,” answered he, casting down his eyes.
Luisa regained her poise, rose from the sofa, retrieved her handbag from a table, extracted a compact, peered at a pair of eyes that had turned to steel, dried them, then erased all traces of tears with two dabs of a powder-puff.
“Goodbye then,” she said. “Forgive me.”
And she made her exit.
Antonio sped to the bedroom door, flung it open, and was kissed almost smack on the mouth by his poodle which, impatient of release, leapt up at him with a strangled yelp.
He fondled its ears, tried to calm it, rocked its head to and fro as from among its riotous curlicues it shot him adoring glances. He then stretched out on the sofa, plopping the dog down on top of him, muzzle between front paws, while now and again it darted out its tongue to lick his chin and he, throwing back his head, skilfully evaded it.
In this way passed some hours. The sky over Villa Borghese darkened… A crow flapped in and out of the clouds, emitting at each wheel of its flight a muffled caw.
Tenderly Antonio lifted the dozing dog and deposited it on the carpet. He then stretched himself lavishly and got up. A glance at the window, and beyond the Pincio the mist had thickened, as if the Tiber were filling the air with the vapour of its breath. The buildings glimpsed through the trees of the park had taken on a yellower tint. Down below in the street, at the corner of Via Pinciana and Via Sgambati, in the guise of a young man waiting for his girl, stood the inevitable plain-clothes policeman, motionless, bare-headed, hat in hand: and hidden in the hat the inevitable love-story he was reading to allay the endless tedium of protecting the life of a man whose car flashed by only once every couple of months.
“Lord, how dreary Rome is!” thought Antonio. And donning his overcoat and giving a rub to the tummy of his dog, which in expectation had already rolled onto its back with its legs in the air, he left the house.
Thus ended the first part of a day which Antonio was destined to remember for many a long year.
Either that same day or (as is more likely) the next, Antonio paid a call on his uncle, Ermenegildo Fasanaro, his mother’s brother, who lived in one of the new suburbs.
This said uncle strode up and down the sitting-room, his silk shirt hanging out and his unknotted necktie beforked onto a paunch plumped out by his fifty years.
“Best thing for you to do is get back to Catania,” stated this uncle, pausing every so often by the window, his bulk blocking out now the bend in the Tiber around Villa Glori, now the slopes of the hill.
“What d’you think you’re doing here in Rome? Trying to find out if there’s any end to ‘that business’? Well let me tell you, there isn’t. You’re on the job night and day, you’re burning the candle at both ends, your cheeks get hollower and hollower and you’re always dropping off like a cat that’s been out all night on the tiles… Hell and dammit! Where women are concerned you have to ration it out, lead ’em up the garden path. It’s easy enough to take them in if you use a bit of gumption. I’m pretty sure you’re one of those fellows who’d give a fortune to make a good score every night, eh? Or am I wrong.”
“Well, to tell the truth I…”
“In one way, mind you, you’re right. Women stroke you with one hand while they tot up the sums with the other. But what the deuce! it’s so easy to spin ’em a yarn. All it takes is a spot of technique. Not that there aren’t some pretty crafty ones who haggle over details, but that’s the cunning of a fool, because your clever woman knows she has to keep on her toes in other ways. Your job is to know when you’ve had enough. That’s all there is to it… It’s the clean contrary of what we’re told by the Pig who rules over us… Incidentally, is it true that he has a stomach ulcer?”
“Uncle, I have no idea!”
“Word has it that he has a stomach ulcer… In fact yesterday, sitting in a café, I heard a naval officer at the next table whispering behind his hand to a colleague of his, ‘We’re home and dry: it’s not an ulcer, it’s cancer!’ I’m pretty sure they were talking about him. No? Do you say not?”
“I didn’t say a word.”
“For heaven’s sake, you’ve no interest in politics at all! You don’t give a fig for it. I bet you’ve never read Karl Marx…”
“No, I haven’t.”
“Well don’t. If you haven’t read him by the age of thirty, don’t start now. Just leave him be. In our day we used to read him. That is, we didn’t read him either, but we talked about him as if we had… Socialism! Abolishing private property! What’s your opinion, eh? Would it be possible to abolish private property? I don’t think so. But on the other hand we’ve become slaves to everything produced by the masses: electricity, wirelesses, telephones, railways, trams… As we are slaves to such things, it follows that we are slaves to the masses. And these same masses, hell and dammit, only become as good as gold and work with a song in their hearts under either Fascism or Communism. As soon as you give them freedom they start to sulk, grow churlish and rowdy, and throw their weight about so rudely that they rip this famous freedom to bits and trample it under foot. You agree?”
“Oh yes, uncle.”
“On the other hand, if the majority of the human race wants Socialism, the world will inevitably become Socialist.”
“You may be right.”
“Maybe yes, maybe no. It wouldn’t be the first time the majority of the human race wanted one thing and history took another turn.”
“That may also be the case.”
“What may be the case?”
“That history will take another turn.”
“So what’s this turn then?”
“Don’t ask me.”
“On the other hand the rich, among whom I personally number myself, are disagreeable.”
“But uncle, you personally…”
“Believe me, we are disagreeable, we are block-headed, we are spoilt, we are bored stiff. Impossible to persist until the end of time with the rich on one side and the poor on the other! I am well aware, hell and dammit, that we can’t go on like this!”
“Who am I to say…?”