Free Beautiful Antonio by Vitaliano Brancati Page B

“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