Pescara Tales Page 14
So, he had not realised!
Inside the room the tapers dripped wax. A breeze gusted more strongly now through the slats of the closed shutters and made the curtains bulge.
Rosa, slowly invaded by drowsiness, had begun to lower her eyelids, drop her head, quickly raise it again.
‘Are you tired?’ asked the priest gently.
‘I? No,’ the woman replied, recovering once more and straightening herself in her seat.
But in the returned silence somnolence invaded her again. She leant her head on the wall behind the chest, her hair totally surrounding her neck, and from the partly-open mouth her breath escaped regularly and slowly. And she was in that pose beautiful, and nothing was more voluptuous in her than the rhythm of her breast and the visible curve of her knees beneath the light skirt. Another sudden gust made the curtains flutter and extinguished the two tapers closest to the window.
‘What if I kissed her?’ thought Emidio, suddenly overtaken by a physical urge as he looked on the now dozing woman.
In the June night, the singing continued unfolding and floating, weighed with solemnity sinking at last in measures akin to liturgical falls; then, lifting again from some distant location, receiving responses from further and further, in disparate tones and with sure, unaccompanied voices. Outside, the full moon must have risen quite high, because in the room the reduced candle-light could not now compete with the dawn-like abundance that poured through the slats of the shutters.
Emidio turned towards the funeral bed. His eyes ran over the rigid, dark lines of the corpse, halting involuntarily at one hand, swollen and yellowish, its fingers somewhat hooked, its back crossed with livid webs. He quickly looked away. Very slowly, involuntarily, the sleeper’s head beside him traced something of an arc against the wall and came to rest on the disconcerted clergyman’s shoulder. The reclining of that beautiful head was a gentle act that but slightly affected the woman’s sleep, so that the eyelids barely lifted to show an edge of the irises that then disappeared in the whites, like the petal of a violet sinking in milk.
Emidio did not move and continued supporting that weight on his shoulder. He restrained his breathing for fear of disturbing the sleeper, and an incalculable anguish engulfed him, accompanied by the beating of his heart and the pulsing of blood in his wrists and temples, a tumult that appeared to him to fill the room. But since Rosa’s sleep went on, little by little he felt himself grow languid and strengthless as he looked down at that female throat and its Venus necklaces, those indicators of voluptuous delights, seemed to drift into an invincible lethargy as he inhaled that warm breath and the odour of her hair.
Another gust, laden with nocturnal scents, bent the third flamelet and blew it out.
Then, without thinking, without fear, abandoning himself to the need, the lone keeper of the vigil kissed the woman on the mouth.
At that contact she sprang into wakefulness, turning her astonished eyes on her brother-in-law, and she became very pale.
Slowly she gathered her hair over the nape of her neck and remained like that, her arm raised, holding herself erect on her seat, tensely vigilant, looking before her at the changing shadows.
‘Who put out the tapers?’
‘The wind.’
They said nothing more. They both remained sitting on the trousseau-chest as before, sat together, just touching elbows, in a torment of uncertainty, avoiding by a kind of mental artifice allowing their consciences to judge and repudiate the event. Then, spontaneously, they both directed their attention to extraneous things, what they could see and hear around them, lending to that diversion of the spirit a fictitious intensity, even expressed in the attitude of their bodies. And little by little a kind of intoxication was conquering them both.
The songs in the night pursued one another, lingering long in the air, softening caressingly, an earlier response enticing the next, the male and female voices weaving together in loving union. At times, a single high voice emerged above the others, providing a focus of sound to which harmonic inputs were drawn like eddies to a principal current; and now at intervals, as each new canto started, the metal tremor of a diapente-tuned guitar was audible, and audible between each new reprise became the measured beat of flails on threshing floors.
The two vigilants sat listening.
Perhaps from the wind’s vagary the odours were now no longer as before: perhaps originating from Orlando’s hill was borne the powerful scents of citruses; perhaps from Scalia’s gardens came the perfume of roses, so dense as to convey to the senses a recollected savour of nuptial confections; perhaps from Farnia’s swamp a humid fragrance rose of Florence irises, an inhaled delectation like a refreshment of cool water.
The two stayed silent, sitting immobile on the chest, overpowered by the opulence of the moonlit night. Before them, the last flamelet wavered rapidly, the wick in bending dropping tears of wax below the dying taper. At any moment now it must go out. They did not move. They sat on, looking with dismay, with eyes dilated and fixed, at the tremulous, moribund light. Suddenly, the night’s inebriating wind extinguished it at last. Then, unafraid of the new shadows round them, with mutual avidity and at the same moment, the man and the woman turned and clasped each other, locked together in an embrace in which each sought the other’s mouth; lost, blind and speechless, they smothered each other with caresses.
THE COUNTESS OF AMALFI
I.
When towards two o’clock in the afternoon Don Giovanni Ussorio was about to set foot on the threshold of Violetta Kutufà’s house, Rosa Catana appeared at the head of the stairs and said in a low voice, inclining her head respectfully:
‘Don Giovà, Madam has gone.’
Don Giovanni, stunned by the unexpected news, stood a moment with his eyes rounded and mouth open, looking up as if waiting further words of explanation; but since Rosa, moulding the edge of her apron with her fingers and swaying somewhat up there on the stairs, said nothing more, he asked:
‘But why… why?’
And he mounted a few steps, repeating with a slight stammer:
‘But why… why?’
‘Don Giovà, what can I say? She’s gone.’
‘But why?’
‘Don Giovà, I don’t know, really now.’
And Rosa walked from the landing towards the entry to the empty apartment. She was a rather meagre woman with reddish hair, and the skin of her face was scattered with freckles. Her ash-grey eyes, however, had a singular vitality. The excessive distance between her nose and mouth gave to the lower part of her face a rather simian look.
Don Giovanni pushed the door wide open and entered the first room, then he went into the second room, then the third; he made the round of all the apartment with animated steps, halting at last in its small bathroom. The silence dismayed him. He was in anguish.
‘It’s true. Yes, it’s true,’ he muttered, looking around him, lost.
The furnishings of the room were in their usual place, except that on the dressing table, under the round mirror, there were no crystal phials, turtle-shell combs, the cases, the brushes, all those minor adjuncts that serve attendance on feminine beauty, all were gone. In a corner there was a large zinc tub shaped like the body of a guitar, filled with translucent water rose-tinted by some bathing essence. The water exhaled a subtle perfume which mingling in the air with that of face powder made a combination having in it something inherently sensual.
‘Rosa! Rosa!’ Don Giovanni called in a suffocated voice, feeling himself invaded by an immense bitterness.
The woman appeared.
‘Tell me how it happened! Where has she gone? When did she go? Why?’ Don Giovanni demanded, making a childish, comic grimace with his lips to restrain a moan of sorrow. He had by this gripped Rosa’s wrists, inciting her to speak, to reveal all.
‘I dunno, sir… This morning she put things in suitcases, sent to Leone for a carriage, said nothin’ an’ left. What can you do? She’ll come back.’
‘She�
�ll come ba-ack?’ whimpered Don Giovanni, lifting his eyes in pain where the tears were already starting to overflow. ‘She told you that? Speak!’ And that last word came out as an almost menacing, angry shriek.
‘Well… she did say to me: “Good-bye, Rosa. We won’t see each other again…” But… when all’s said and done… who knows. Anythin’ can happen.’
At those words Don Giovanni slumped into a chair and sobbed with such a display of grief that the woman was almost touched by it.
‘Now, Don Giovà, what are you doing? Aren’t there other women in the world? Don’t you think, now...?’
But Don Giovanni was not listening, he went on sobbing like a child, burying his face in Rosa Catana’s apron, and all his frame shook with the heaves of his weeping.
‘No, no, no… I want Violetta! I want Violetta!’
At the sight of such a childish paroxysm, Rosa could not restrain a smile, and she put her hand out to stroke Don Giovanni’s bald cranium, murmuring calming words:
‘I’ll find Violetta for you, sir, I’ll find her… Be quiet now, be quiet, don’t cry no more. There, there, dear little man, dear little Don Giovà. People walkin’ past will hear. Now then, now then…’
And Don Giovanni under the motherly caresses of the servant slowly stemmed the flow of his tears, wiping his eyes with her apron.
‘O! O! What a thing to happen! O!’ he exclaimed after staring a moment at the zinc tub, where the water struck through by a sunray now glinted, ‘O! What a thing! O!’ and he covered his face with his hands and swayed two or three times in the manner of those caged monkeys sailors bring home from Africa.
‘Go now, Don Giovà dear, go!’ Rosa Catana was saying, taking him gently by the arm and pulling him up to his feet.
In the little room the perfume seemed to grow more intense; countless flies buzzed around a cup that held a residue of coffee; a spray of reflected light from the bath-water trembled on the wall like a fine gold web.
‘Leave everything as it is!’ Don Giovanni told the woman, his voice broken by barely suppressed sobs, and he went down the stairs, shaking his head in misery, his eyes red and swollen and bulging, giving his countenance a dissipated and hound-like expression.
His round body and prominent stomach burdened two short legs that were additionally somewhat knock-kneed. His bald head was encircled by a coronet of long curly hair that seemed not to grow down from the scalp but upwards from his shoulders, rising, as it were, to the nape of his neck and to his temples. He had a habit of lifting his bejewelled fingers to reorder some disarranged lock or tendril, at which moments those showy and expensive gems, even embellishing his thumbs, would glint. To fasten his shirt, he wore in the middle of his breast a cornelian stud as big as a strawberry.
When he came into the bright light of the square he was attacked anew by an invincible sense of loss. Some cobblers were there, busy at their trade and eating figs; somewhere a caged blackbird was whistling Garibaldi’s Hymn over and over with a heartrending persistence.
‘Your servant, Don Giovanni!’ Don Domenico Oliva greeted him as they passed each other, doffing his hat with that artful Neapolitan cordiality he was master of. His person was disproportionally long in the torso and short in the legs, and the characteristic twist to his mouth was that of someone instinctively sardonic. Among the citizens of Pescara he was known as ‘Shortarse’. Now, made curious by the troubled aspect of the other man, he curved his walk and soon greeted him again, with an even increased liberality of gesture and smile:
‘Your servant!’
Don Giovanni, irritated by the laughter of the fig eaters and by the bird song, and in whom a venomous ire was beginning to ferment, spitefully turned his back on the second salute, believing himself mocked.
Don Domenico, astonished, followed him.
‘But… Don Giovà!... I say… But…’
Don Giovanni did not listen. He went on with rapid steps in the direction of his own house. The fruit and vegetable sellers, the farriers along the road, gazed with incomprehension at the breathless race conducted by the two men, both beginning to sweat at the height of the torrid season.
Arrived at his door, Don Giovanni, on the point of exploding, turned like an asp, yellow and green with rage, and cried:
‘Don Domé, O Don Domé, I’ll give you one in the head!’
And having uttered his menace he went in and closed the door violently behind him.
Don Domenico was left standing speechless and dumbfounded; then he resumed his walk, wondering what the cause of this event could possibly be. Matteo Verdura, one of the fig-eaters called to him:
‘Come over here, sir! I say, come over! I’ve got somethin’ just grand to tell you.’
‘What thing?’ asked the man with the long spine, approaching.
‘So you don’t know at all?’
‘What?’
‘Ho-ho, you don’t know?’
‘But what?’
Verdura burst into laughter, and the other cobblers joined him. For a moment all those men bent and shook with the same raucous and unmannerly hilarity.
‘Buy three copper’s worth of figs if I tell you?’
Don Domenico was miserly and he hesitated, but his curiosity won.
‘All right, I’ll pay.’
Verdura called over a woman and made her pile a little hill of fruit on his counter. Then he said:
‘That lady who lived up there, Donna Viuletta, you know?... The one at the theatre, know ‘er?...’
‘Well?’
‘She ran off. This mornin’. Bang!’
‘Really?’
‘Really, Don Domé.’
‘Ah! Now I understand!’ exclaimed Don Domenico. He was a subtle man and his chuckle was exceptionally cruel. And since he wanted to revenge himself on Don Giovanni’s ill manners, and gain something out of his payment for the news, he turned immediately towards the Casino to divulge this intelligence and enlarge upon it.
The Casino, a kind of wine cellar that served coffee, was in deep shadow, and from its tiled floor that had been freshly sprinkled with water rose a singular odour of dust and mould. There, Doctor Panzoni snored abandoned in a chair, his two arms hanging down its sides; Baron Cappa, an ancient with a passion for lame dogs and girls of tender years, dozed discreetly over a paper; Don Ferdinando Giordano shifted little flags over a chart representing the theatre of conflict in the Franco-Prussian war; Don Settimio de Marinis discussed Pietro Metastasio with Doctor Fiocca, with no lack of vocal explosions and poetic citations delivered with flowery eloquence; the notary Gaiulli, lacking other players, toyed with the cards on his own, arranging them in rows on the deal table; Don Paolo Seccia went round the quadrilateral of the billiard table with measured steps calculated to assist his digestion.
Don Domenico Oliva entered with such vigour that everyone turned to look at him, except for Doctor Panzoni, who remained in the arms of Morpheus.
‘Have you heard? Have you heard?’
Don Domenico was so single-mindedly concerned with proclaiming the matter, and so breathless, that he at first rattled away without being understood; nevertheless, the company of gentlemen came to surround him and hung on his lips, hoping with gratitude to hear some strange occurrence that might bring nourishment at last to their afternoon gossip.
Don Paolo Seccia, who was a little deaf in one ear, interrupted him impatiently:
‘Come now, Don Domé, get your words in order!’
Don Domenico began the story again, more calmly and lucidly. He revealed all, amplifying Don Giovanni Ussorio’s frenzy, added fantastic details, grew intoxicated by his own volubility. You see? Do you follow? And then this happened, and then that…
In the middle of the clamour Doctor Panzoni’s eyelids lifted; he turned towards the other patrons his great globes still stupefied with sleep, himself still snoring through a nose dense with a monstrous growth of hairs, and asked, or rather snorted nasally:
‘Eh, what’s up? What’s up?’
Now in his turn Baron Cappa narrated, with slicks of saliva forming at the corners of his mouth, a grotesque little tale apropos Violetta Kutufà. Gleams flashed in the eyes of his intent audience, the greenish little irises of Don Paolo Seccia in particular glistening from the depths of some strangely exhilarated humour. At the conclusion, laughter in a variety of cachinnations rewarded the good Barron.
But Doctor Panzoni, vertical as he was, had succumbed to sleep again, for sleep, as compelling as a disease, sat in his nostrils; and so he remained alone and with his head propped on his chest, while the others dispersed over the town to divulge the information to one family after another.
And the broadcast news took Pescara by storm. Towards evening, and the arrival of the sea breeze and a new moon, the citizens came out into the streets and squares. The babble of voices was infinite and the name of Violetta Kutufà was on everybody’s lips. There was no sign of Don Giovanni Ussorio.
II.
Violetta Kutufà had come to Pescara with a company of singers in January, at the time of the carnival. She claimed to be a Greek of the Archipelago, to have sung before the King of the Hellenes in a theatre at Corfù, and to have afflicted to madness with love for her an English admiral. She was a woman of opulent curves, with the whitest of skins. Her arms were remarkably round and plump and liberally dimpled, the last most evidently whenever she gestured; and those small pink dimples and the rings on her fingers and all the vernal graces retained from a time when her form was more girlish, made her existing chubbiness singularly pleasant and fresh and an object of benevolent smiles. The contours of her face could not be called refined: the eyes were of a vaguely chestnut colour and languid, the lips large and as flat as if compressed by weights, and the nose revealed nothing Greek, being short, a little up-tilted and flanked by wide, serviceable nostrils. Her hair was black and abundant. She spoke softly, smiling often, hesitating at each word, although her voice could become unexpectedly raucous.