Free Voices In The Evening by Natalia Ginzburg Page A

the morning, while he was shaving in the bathroom,
    â€˜How can one be in love with Purillo?’
    Tommasino did not know either.
    Gradually he ceased to think about it. Why vex oneself over other people? Everyone did as he thought best.
    He gave Raffaella a refrigerator for a wedding present They were beginning to come into fashion. But no one in the village so far had had one.
    Raffaella went to live at the Villa Rondine. She wanted to take the horse with her; but Purillo fore-bade it. Where were they to put it at the Villa Rondine? There was no stall there.
    So the horse stayed on at Casa Tonda; that is what Raffaella called the house on the brow of the hill.
    It remained there for a while, and was groomed by the peasant woman’s sons. To begin with Raffaella came almost every day to see it. Then she forgot about it.
    Finally they sold it.
    Raffaella and Purillo had a baby which was called Pepè.
    Raffaella as a mother proved a great coward. She carried Pepè bundled up in wool and she did nothing but put on and take off his pullovers and shorts. She never dreamed of plunging him in the icy waters of the stream as she had done with Catè and Vincenzino’s children, all that long time ago.
    Vincenzino and Tommasino talked occasionally when alone. Vincenzino had taken a fancy to his younger brother. He told him things that he had never mentioned to anyone. He would begin usually in the evening after supper. He gazed into space and began to speak with that long slow murmur.
    Sometimes he spoke of Catè. He had a strange notion of their relations.
    He spoke of the day when as a little child still he had seen Purillo kill a dog by stoning it.
    Purillo did not like animals, one had always known that. That was why he had not wanted the horse.
    According to Vincenzino the strong impression which had been made on him as a child when the dog was stoned had bred in his soul a great horror of cruelty.
    Through this horror of cruelty he had given Catè the freedom to detach herself from him by not exerrising any force on her, in order that she should not be wounded and suffer.
    And so he had lost her.
    Tommasino was not much convinced by such a complicated chain of thought. But he agreed, because Vincenzino did not at all like being contradicted once he had got an idea in his head.
    Vincenzino said that he had many times regretted what he had done to Catè. He realized well enough that without intending it he had wounded her and made her suffer.
    And so often her voice echoed in his memory when she said,
    â€˜Oh, why, why have we ruined everything?’
    Many a time at night he could not sleep and could hear her lamenting in that way.
    They talked until a late hour, and drank whisky. Then they went to bed. In his room on the top floor Vincenzmo lay in a bed with a support so that he could read sitting up before going to sleep. He had copied it from Purillo.
    Vincenzino now knew a good many people in the town. But in his heart he liked to be with Tommasino —that was enough; or at most with some others of his family, with Raffaella and Gemmina, or even with Magna Maria.
    This was perhaps because these had known Catè; all the other people in the town had never known her.
    He set about writing another book, and had a number of plans and ideas
    He had an accident with his motor-car, while he was on his way to Rome to see his children. He was done. It was beginning to get dark and it was raining. The car skidded on the asphalt.
    Some peasants found him soon afterwards, flung across the steering wheel, and they summoned a motor-ambulance.
    He died in hospital. Purillo was telephoned for and got there in time to be with him at the last. But Tommasino—no, he did not make it in time.

6
Elsa and Tommasino
    T OMMASINO eats by himself with a book propped against his glass. Betta, the peasant woman, comes to summon him to meals.
    Betta comes and goes to and from the kitchen; she is squat broad and fat, wearing