Free Beautiful Antonio by Vitaliano Brancati

true that Lorenzo Calderara has never been with a prostitute? Some people even claim that he’s never been with a woman at all. What do
you
think? After all…”
    â€œAfter all,” took up Edoardo, “not everyone can be like you!” And he gave a wink, that left his fine brow as unfurrowed and inexpressive as the sole of a foot.
    The thought that women existed, their tiny hands, their pink feet, their white throats, their enticing skirts, dispelled all melancholy. Edoardo let out a yell that caused that glimmer of female face behind the window-grating to vanish, blown out like a candle in the wind.
    â€œThree cheers!” he cried, taking advantage of the empty street. “Others may have freedom, but Italy has women!”
    A day or two after this promenade Antonio, having learnt that the Deputy Secretary-General had returned to Rome, paid a visit to the headquarters of the Fascist League to have a word with Lorenzo Calderara. As the telephone had summoned the usher into the interior of a phone-booth, and since he had already been sitting in the waiting-room for an hour, he walked up to the Party boss’s door and pushed it open. He caught a glimpse of Calderara’s head nose downwards on a divan, the brow aflame, the veins taut as whipcords… The penny dropped, he wished to see no more, but tiptoed away with the air of one who has asked a question and received a brutally downright answer, when a few casual words would have more than sufficed.
    â€œKindly tell him I’m positively glad not to have set eyes on him these last ten years!”
    This was the message Antonio received via the pharmacistSalinitro from his old schoolmate Angelo Bartolini, who lived like a hermit in the environs of Catania, close to a tiny railway station where every other day passed the little chugger-train on its tour of Mount Etna. This was the only noise likely to disturb the meditations of an amiable fellow whose kind-heartedness now found its sole outlet in cherishing his loathing of the times he lived in.
    â€œWhy’ he glad not to have set eyes on me for ten years?” asked Antonio, pausing with the pharmacist on the pavement of Via Etnea. “Personally, I’ve always been particularly fond of him.”
    â€œBecause he’s heard you’re going to be made Party Secretary of some place or other.”
    â€œIt’s a lie!” cried Antonio. “Tell him it’s four years since I paid up for my Party Card, and that one of these days I’m going to shut myself away in the country and…”
    At that moment who should emerge from a side-street but Barbara Puglisi with her mother. The girl was bearing a missal and walking with a slight stoop, hugging to her bosom, and concealing in the sweetest manner possible, the exuberance and surge of her youth. A gentle nudge from her mother notified her that she might allow her gaze, albeit attenuated by modesty, to recover both perception and alertness. Barbara permitted her oval face, lapped in violet lace, an imperceptible movement to the left; a more noticeable movement she imparted to her eyes, revealing their dazzling whites; and she espied Antonio gazing at her. A slight stumble detached her from her mother and led her very close to the young man. He inhaled the sweet scent of her veil, of her skin warmed by a swift rush of blood, of tortoise-shell hairpins, of clothes which had long kept company with a pot-pourri which no woman in Rome had ever possessed: it stung his flesh, it pricked him to the quick. He stood stock-still, tracing the course of that species of serpent which had penetrated his nervous system and was biting at its very roots.
    â€œMy God!” he muttered. “Could this be…”
    â€œYou’re leaving me in the dark,” said the pharmacist.
    Antonio’s answer was to throw his arms around the man’s neck and hug him.
    â€œI’m still more in the dark,” exclaimed the