Beautiful Antonio (8 page)

His father, beside himself with joy, rushed in his long johns out onto the terrace and summoned Avvocato Ardizzone to announce the gladsome tidings.

“
Rara avis!
” replied the old lawyer, actuated merely by the wish to pronounce, in open air and cavernous voice, the phrase he had learnt two hours previously; the which, there in the darkness, amongst the jumbled encumbrance of chimney-pots and the glint of star-lit balustrades, was perfectly meaningless. “
Rara avis!
” My most hearty congratulations and felicitations thereupon!”

But his daughter Elena, who had heard Signor Alfio's words from her place of concealment behind the shutters of the French windows, clutched at a heart that writhed like a fish in the net, and was by no means of her father's opinion.

“He's been and gone and done it!” she murmured, at first in a tone of voice that struggled to appear bantering, but that gradually gave place to rage. “He's gone and done it! That's the way they carry on here in Catania! Go off and marry a girl
they've never clapped eyes on and take not a mite of notice of their next-door neighbour!”

“Elena, my dear!” exclaimed her father, administering a great shove with his shoulder to get her back behind the shutter from which she was elbowing to emerge.

“Yes, it's true, it's true! When you have a young girl right under your nose, you might at least glance at her, before committing a bloomer in another neighbourhood!”

“But Elena!…”

“The fact is that I'm hapless, hapless, I was born hapless! The stars do not favour me, the saints do not sweat for me, it was not my lot – and my father, instead of hankering after the Senate, might have…”

“Elena, Elena, Elena!” shrieked the old man in three different keys, going wildly off pitch on the last
Elena!
, as if clappering a cracked bell. “You don't know what you're saying. Elena, come now, Elena, Elena!”

Another crack in his voice. Then he turned to Signor Alfio with, “Do forgive me, kind friend. Please have the condescension to pardon me and once again accept my… my… Good night, dear friend.”

And the old lawyer flung the French windows to with a tremendous clatter.

Quite early next morning Elena hurled down onto the Magnano terrace three bulky volumes of love-journals in which, along with sketches, pressed butterflies, violets, palm-leaves – all things which had lived and flourished fifteen years before – was pasted a photograph of Antonio astride a wooden rocking-horse: the only copy of that photo, the loss of which had saddened Signora Rosaria.

These journals plummeted onto the terrace while Antonio was engaged in watering the pots of cacti. He did not lose his composure but continuing to sprinkle water among prickles and petals, he turned the pages with his toe, his eye lighting here and there upon a sentence containing words in capital letters. For example: “I would let HIM walk on my FACE,”
or “From three o'clock until eight always thinking the same THING,” or else “What RINGS under his EYES today.” He then peeled off the photograph so long sought by his mother and threw the remains in the dustbin.

Two days later these fervent phrases were the playthings of the caretaker's kids in the entrance to the courtyard. Elena, who, we must suppose, felt the beating of those fragments of her heart wherever they chanced to be, rushed headlong down the many flights of the building and swooped like a vulture on those unwitting urchins who were passing around paper hats and boats adorned with words which, could they but have read them, might have put a sudden end to their innocence. Elena, in every case with one quick snatch, succeeded in yanking away the paper and tweaking the fingers holding it; then she flew back up the stairs, wails and caterwaulings in her wake.

That night she knocked back a glass of water in which she had dissolved a couple of dozen sulphur match-heads, and at dawn was convinced she was at death's door. However, it sufficed for her to vomit into a terracotta pot while her poor mother supported her head, and her father, in an agony of fright, delivered harangues to Death, Life, Honour and Madness – all of whom he most likely saw drawn up in front of him – for her to be as right as rain again.

Same day, at lunch at the Magnano's… Signor Alfio to Antonio, having of course recounted the occurrence in their neighbours' house: “What is it you
do
to these women, eh?”

His mother: “He doesn't need to do a thing. It's they who have the hot pants on 'em, not him!”

To forestall further troubles, the engagement to Barbara Puglisi was hastened on, and in the course of one week Antonio found himself up to the eyebrows in the traditions of an old-established Catanian family.

The residence of the foremost notary in Catania, Giorgio Puglisi, was situated in Piazza Stesicoro, opposite the old law-courts, above the roof of which Mount Etna, looking almost next door in the absence of anything to obstruct the view,
spreads her enormous wings, white as a swan's in the winter time, and mauve throughout other seasons of the year. This section of the piazza has been subjected to a deep excavation which brought to light the arches of a Roman theatre, rimed with mildew and pierced by passageways that vanish into the entrails of the city. These diggings, approached down a narrow flight of grass-grown steps, are fenced off by cast-iron railings along which any urchin who passes by at the trot will jaggle his stick with a clangour akin to that of shop-front shutters hauled down in a hurry.

This eastern part of the piazza keels over like the deck of a ship which has latterly received a broadside, conforming as it does to the shape of a crater which opened up here in ancient times. It is the starting-point of a road that scrambles, strident with the screech of tram-brakes (so fearful is the incline), towards the upper and more salubrious zones of the city. Tilted thus, it abuts, with its well frequented cafés, its pottery shops, on Via Etnea; beyond which, flat as a pancake, stretches the other half of the piazza, its pavements supporting the most precious of all the burdens with which the soil of Catania is weighted, to wit, the marble statue of our much venerated Vincenzo Bellini, in which he is depicted seated and smiling and surrounded by four of his celebrated protagonists, all with their mouths wide open in the process of scattering to the four winds the divine music of their creator. Here converge various alleyways, some lined with market stalls, some with brothels; and here also are the station approaches. And here more than anywhere the sirocco rubs his sweaty belly, and keeps the cobblestones covered with slithery mud.

But the Puglisi residence rose in the most lofty and luminous part of the piazza, so that in wintertime its window-panes admitted the dazzle of the snows of Mount Etna a-shimmer in the sunlight.

Barbara's mother, Signora Agatina, a vast, vociferous, dilapidated woman, had a dread of the cold, so often the cause of a nose blocked to suffocation-point, and when she discerned
a draught of cold air she turned upon it the look of a trapped game-bird facing a gun-barrel. For this reason she had cajoled her husband into installing central heating – the first ever in Catania.

This was the object of much criticism by the friends of the family, particularly because Notary Puglisi was considered the most respectable and level-headed man in town, related by ties of blood to other highly estimable notaries and to priests, all persons who for at least a century past had, along Via Etnea, been recipients of those obsequious salutations which the citizens of Catania bestow upon integrity, decorum, and absence of vices or debts.

And indeed, to take a closer look at the first and only eccentricity of a respected gentleman, and to glean personal knowledge of it, almost every day these family friends came flocking, with their nannies and their suckling infants, to spend a couple of hours in that insufferable heat; which they left with faces all splodged with red, as if one and all, from grand-dad to grandchild, had suffered a volley of slaps. But in the end they found it quite the normal thing, and one or two of them even installed this “central heating” themselves. “We ought to have know that a man like Puglisi could never have done anything irresponsible,” they said.

Barbara spent her girlhood in this summer-and-winter hothouse, singing and skipping along the corridors, but never out of earshot of a voice down the passage: “Don't you go getting too close to them radiators!” Or alternatively, when she dared to set foot on the wooden steps that led up to the attic, a second voice: “DON'T YOU DARE GO UP TO PAPÀ FRANCESCO!”

Papà Francesco, Signora Agatina's father, was of course the grandfather of Barbara, but was called “papà” on account of the respect owed to his wealth and blue blood. It was not known which king had created him Baron of PaternÒ, because he himself had a hatred of books, even those which, blazoning
forth all the fesses and hatchments of heraldic science, discoursed upon his family coat of arms.

Once Agatina was married off he was left with one decrepit old retainer, alone in his ancient palazzo with its marble pillars and statues supporting wrought-iron lanterns, fronting on an unfrequented piazza in the middle of which the old man could observe the rearing equestrian statue of one of the “continental usurpers”, King Umberto I.

His forehead pressed against the window-panes, this nobleman devoted a great deal of time to detesting that statue.

“Tell me, Paolino,” said he, addressing the old retainer, long since punch-drunk from having obeyed, though with the utmost respect, so many practically insane commands, “is it that I can't think straight, or does that chap there really have the mug of an ill-bred colt?”

“His visage is that of an ill-bred colt,” was the man's invariable reply.

But came the time when the municipal authorities had plane-trees planted all round the piazza, and right in the face of the palazzo sprouted burly trees which went into transports of joy at growing up into the most luminous sky in the world.

The baron succumbed to blacker and blacker rage, as the rooms of his palace were shrouded in ever densening shadows. He protested, he wrote screeds to the papers, he pestered the authorities, both lay and religious: the Hon. Carnazza MP and his rival the Hon. De Felice MP, although he blushed to the core at having to mount the stairs of these men who spoke from the standpoint of fishmongers, janitors and such… But the trees were stronger than he was, and continued to soar upwards without a care in the world.

There came a night, however, when the old retainer, furtive and muffled up to the eyes, slank forth from the palazzo, approached the trees and, one by one, subjected them to certain occult treatments known only to him. This ceremony was repeated for a month; and lo, those sturdy, waving fronds which only a thunderbolt could prevent from seeing the year
2000, started to yellow at the very tips through which they imbibed the light.

The glee of the baron at these signs of enfeeblement, which he was the first to notice, from his central balcony upon which the trees were wont to rest their lovely heads, knew no bounds. The ill-starred vegetable matter gradually languished and, beyond the window-panes which on windy days reflected the myriad frolics of their foliage, they espied a human face growing ever more joyous as they themselves crept nearer and nearer to death…

The scandal, on the brink of explosion, was quenched with infinite difficulty and expense. The tree-poisoner was obliged by his son-in-law to leave his palazzo and remove to Piazza Stesicoro to live with his daughter and himself. It would seem that something must have been gnawing at the old man's conscience if he, who had always slept in a bed dating from the reign of Ferdinand II of the Two Sicilies, developed a penchant for garrets, unmade beds, poky little windows, and a view of church towers over rooftops…

He also became devoted to intense noise, for which reason, every time he closed a window, he rammed it to with all his might and stood there wide-eyed, ecstatic, harkening to it as if he had elicited the sweetest of sweet echoes. One day he bought a drum and (his grand-daughter hopping and skipping in a frenzy of joy) within the narrow confines of the room he perpetrated a tattoo that would have done honour to any parade-ground. But the neighbours complained, and his own dear daughter, her eyes awash with tears, implored him to relinquish this type of performance.

A compromise was arrived at. The baron would, for six days a week, restrain the tormenting urge to beat upon his drumhead. Every Sunday, however, he would have the horses harnessed, step up into his carriage, with his old manservant cradling the drum ceremoniously swathed in a scarlet cloth, and take leave of that tiresome Catania, a city which didn't
turn a hair at the screeching of trams, but threw up its hands in horror at a perfectly pleasing paradiddle.

On reaching one of his country properties in La Piana, he would alight from the carriage and, amid bowings and scrapings from his peasants, stalk in amongst the trees, faithful servitor at heel bearing the drum still wrapped in its scarlet cloth. At length he would halt, disenrobe the instrument, sling it on his shoulder, and raise skywards the two ebony drumsticks quivering with all the fervours of a week-long-thwarted drummer. Then, slap-bang, with terrible fury, the old gentleman bombarded the thing time and time again, the drumhead quaked and hollered, the hens went squawking off in all directions pursued by dogs, and the bulls slouched away, furtively eyeing the red rag lying on the ground… and the servitor yawned.

For three hours would the old baron batter his ears with his tremendous onslaught. Then he would have the instrument swathed once more in its scarlet cloth and climb into the carriage to return to Catania. The door open, and one foot on the step, he would pause for an instant and enquire of his servant; “How did it go today?”

“Magnificent,” replied the other ancient; and, holding in his left hand the exhausted drum, he extended his right to aid the exhausted drummer.