Ippolito listened in silence when his father spoke unkindly to him, he never answered back and his face remained quiet and pale, and at night he stayed up to type out the book of memoirs, or to read Goethe aloud when his father could not sleep. For he had the soul of a slave, Concettina used to say, and camomile in his veins instead of blood, and was like an old man of ninety, with no girls whom he liked and no desire for anything, all he could do was to wander about the countryside alone all day with the dog.
Le Visciole was a tall, large house, with guns and horns hung up on the walls, with high beds and mattresses that rustled because they were stuffed with maize-leaves. The garden stretched down to the high road, a big, uncultivated garden full of trees ; it was no use trying to plant rosebushes or other flowers because in winter the contadino would certainly not look after them and they would die. Behind the house was the courtyard, with the farm-cart and the contadino’s cottage, and the contadino’s wife who came to her door from time to time and flung out a bucket of water, and then Signora Maria would shout out that this dirty water made the courtyard stink, and the contadino’s wife shouted back that it was clean water, quite good enough to wash Signora Maria’s face in, and so the two of them would go on quarrelling for a bit. All round, as far as the eye could see, stretched fields of corn and maize, and in the middle of them stood scarecrows, waving their empty sleeves ; vineyards and oak-trees started at the foot of the hill, and every now and then a shot would be heard from that direction, and a cloud of birds would rise and Ippolito’s dog would be heard barking, but Concettina said it barked from fright, not from a desire to catch anything. The river was some distance away, beyond the road, a bright, far-off streak amongst bushes and rocks : and the village was a little beyond it, about ten houses or so.
In the village were the people whom the old man called “the humbugs”—the local Fascist Secretary, the Superintendent of Police, the Secretary of the Commune ; and the old man went every day to the village so that the Humbugs might see him, that they might see he was still alive and that he cut them dead. The Humbugs would be playing bowls in their shirtsleeves, ignorant that they too were in the book of memoirs ; and their wives would be sitting round the monument in the little square, knitting and suckling their babies, with handkerchiefs over their breasts. The monument was big and made of stone, a big, stone young man with a badge and a fez : the old man would stop in front of it and stick his eyeglass in his eye, and look and smile sarcastically, he would stay there for a little, looking and smiling sarcastically : and Signora Maria was afraid that some day or other the Humbugs would arrest him, and she would try to pull him away, as she had once done with the old lady in front of the hat-shop windows. Signora Maria would have liked to talk to the wives of the Humbugs, to have learnt new stitches and taught them some as well: and also to have told them that it would have been a good thing if they had washed their breasts with water that had been boiled before suckling their babies. But she never dared go near them because of the old man.
In the summer, freckles and places where the skin had peeled were to be seen on the old man’s bald, shiny head, because he went out in the sun bareheaded ; and Concettina’s legs went golden brown, seeing that there was nothing else to do at Le Visciole except sunbathe, and Concettina sat all day long in a deck-chair in front of the house, with dark glasses and a book that she did not read ; she would look at her legs and take care that they got nicely sunburnt, and then she had the idea that if she kept them sweating in the sun they might grow a little thinner ; for Concettina, besides being heavy in the hips, was heavy in the legs as well, and she used to say she would give ten years of her life to be slimmer from the hips down. Signora Maria would arrange her clothes about her as she sat under the pergola, her extraordinary clothes cut out of old curtains or bedspreads, with a hat made out of a newspaper on her head and her feet crossed on a footstool. Far away, on the brow of the hill, Ippolito could be seen going backwards and forwards with his gun and his dog : and the old man would curse the stupid dog and Ippolito’s mania for wandering about the countryside, when all the time he needed him to give him his injection and do some typewriting, and he would send off Giustino to chase him.
2
It was at Le Visciole that the old man felt ill for the first time. He was taking his coffee, and all of a sudden the hand that held the cup started trembling, and the coffee was spilt on his trousers, and his body was bowed down, and he was trembling and breathing heavily. Ippolito went on a bicycle to fetch the doctor. But the old man did not want the doctor and said that he felt a little better ; he said the doctor was a humbug and he wanted to leave for the town at once. The doctor came, a humbug of the most insignificant kind, hardly taller than Signora Maria, with fair hair that looked like chickens’ feathers, and big baggy trousers like a Zouave and check stockings. And all at once he and the old man made friends. For the old man discovered that he was not a humbug at all, and that he hated the local Fascist Secretary and the Superintendent of Police and the stone young man in the village square. The old man said he was very pleased he had been ill, because in that way he had discovered this little doctor, a person whom he had believed to be a humbug whereas he was really a fine fellow ; and every day they used to have a chat and tell each other all sorts of things, and the old man was almost inclined to read him some bits out of the book of memoirs, but Ippolito said better not. Ippolito could not now go roaming over the countryside, but had to sit all day long in his father’s room and give him injections and drops and read aloud to him : but the old man no longer wanted Goethe, he now wanted detective stories. Luckily there was the little doctor coming all the time, and the old man was perfectly contented : only he had told him to stop wearing those check stockings, because they did not suit him and were rather ridiculous.
They left, as usual, at the end of September : however Giustino and Signora Maria left earlier, because Giustino had to sit again for his examination in Greek. In the town the old man began to be ill again, growing thin and coughing, and a. doctor came to see him, a doctor who was entirely different from the little doctor with hair like chickens’ feathers, a doctor who did not sit and chat with him, who did not listen to him and who treated him badly. He had forbidden him to smoke : and the old man gave Ippolito his tobacco-pouch and told him to lock it up in a drawer and keep the key ; but after a short time he wanted the tobacco, he wanted just a little of it, and Ippolito paid no attention to him and stood there with his hands in his pockets, and so then the old man said how ridiculous Ippolito was, who took everything literally and was lacking in commonsense, lacking a touch of commonsense and imagination, and the world was ruined by people like that, by people who took everything literally, and he couldn’t get over having produced such a ridiculous, stupid son, who stood there with a stony face and kept tight hold of the key : and it was a great grief to him to have a stupid son, a grief which did him more harm than a little tobacco. Until finally Ippolito gave a sigh and threw down the key on the desk : and the old man opened the drawer and took the tobacco, and started to smoke and to cough.
Then one day, while they were all at table, they saw the old man come into the room, in pyjamas and slippers, with a bundle of papers in his arms. It was the book of memoirs : and he asked whether the stove had been lit, and it had been lit because it was already cold : then all at once he started stuffing the sheets of paper into it, and they all looked at him open-mouthed, only Ippolito did not appear surprised. Big flames came up from the open stove, and the book of memoirs was blazing, and no one understood anything : but Ippolito did not appear surprised, he had got up and was looking at the flames, smoothing back his hair very slowly, and with the poker he pushed into the stove a few sheets that were not yet burned : and then the old man rubbed his hands together and said, “I feel happier now. It will have to be written all over again. It wasn’t going right.” But all that day he was very jumpy, and would not hear of going back to bed nor of dressing himself either, and he walked
up and down the room and bullied Ippolito with the usual story about his tobacco : he was very angry with Ippolito and finished by sending him out of the room, and insisted upon Concettina reading aloud to him : while she was reading he held her hand and stroked it and told her that she had beautiful hands and a beautiful profile, a really beautiful profile : but then he began saying that she read badly and in a singsong kind of voice, and made her stop.
He went to bed and was now unable to get up again. He grew slowly, steadily worse, and was dying, and everyone knew it, and certainly he himself knew it too but he pretended there was nothing wrong—he who used always to talk of death before he fell really ill; he spoke less and less as the days went by, gradually he came only to ask for what he needed ; Giustino and Anna were forbidden to enter his room and saw him from the door as he lay flat in the bed with his thin, hairy arms lying on top of the coverlet, his nose getting whiter and whiter and sharper and sharper; sometimes he would make a sign to the boy and girl to come in, but then he would say nothing that was intelligible, only confused words, and would rumple up his pyjamas on his chest with his arms, and tremble and sweat. There was a smell of ether in the room, and a red rag tied round the lamp, and the old man’s long, pointed shoes stuck out from under the wardrobe, and you knew he would never walk again, because soon he would be dead. Anna and Concettina had not started their piano-lessons again since the summer, but the music-master still came in order to ask for news, only he did not dare to ring the bell and would stand in front of the gate and wait for Signora Maria to come out into the garden and tell him if the old man had been able to get a little rest. And Danilo, too, would almost always be at the gate, leaning against the wall with a book, and Signora Maria said it was really shameless of him not to leave Concettina in peace now that her father was so very ill; and when Concettina went out for a moment to do some shopping, he would put his book under his arm and walk behind her, and Concettina would throw fierce glances at him every now and then, and would come home very red in the face, with her fringe all untidy.
The old man died in the morning. Anna and Giustino were at school and Signora Maria came to fetch them, a tiny little black handkerchief tied round her neck ; she kissed them gravely on the forehead and led them away. To kiss them she had had to rise on tiptoe, because they were both much taller than herself; it had been in the corridor at the school and the headmaster was there watching ; usually he was rude but he was very kind that morning. They went up to their father’s room : Concettina was kneeling there sobbing, Ippolito on the other hand was standing still and silent, his face thin and white as usual. Their father was lying fully dressed on the bed, with his tie on, and shoes on his feet, and his face now was very beautiful, no longer trembling and sweaty, but composed and gentle.
Then Signora Maria took Anna to the house opposite, for the lady there had sent over to suggest that she might be left with them for the whole day. Anna was frightened because there was a dog there. Not a dog like Ippolito’s, curly-haired and stupid, but an Alsatian tied up with a chain ; and hung on a tree in the garden was a notice : Cave canem. And she was also frightened because there was a ping-pong table. Through the hedge she had seen a boy playing ping-pong with an old gentleman. And so she was frightened that the boy might ask her to play and she didn’t know how to. She thought of saying that she knew how to play but didn’t want to because at their house at Le Visciole there was a ping-pong table and they did nothing but play at it all the summer. But if later all of a sudden she and the boy made great friends, it might perhaps be necessary to invite him to come one summer to Le Visciole and then he would realize that there wasn’t a ping-pong table there at all.
She had never been in the house opposite. Through the hedge she had looked at the boy and the old gentleman and the dog. The lady with the fringe who appeared on the balcony in her dressing-gown, and who looked so young, was the old gentleman’s wife. Then there was a red-haired girl, who was the daughter of the old gentleman and of another wife whom he had had before. On the other hand the boy, and also another bigger boy who must be about Ippolito’s age, were the sons of this present wife, the one with the fringe. Signora Maria said they were very rich people, for the old gentleman was the owner of the soap factory, the long red-brick building on the river, with chimneys that were always smoking. They were very, very rich people. They never boiled up their coffee-grounds a second time, but gave them to certain monks who came to ask for them. The red-haired girl, daughter of the old gentleman’s other wife, came out in the evenings with a broom and swept the whole garden, muttering all the time and working herself up into a rage. Signora Maria, too, had very often looked through the hedge, for she was inquisitive and much interested in rich people.
Signora Maria left Anna with the maid who came to open the door, recommending that they should make her put a scarf round her neck if she went out in the garden, and then she went home again. The maid led Anna to a room on the floor above and told her to wait there, and in a moment Signor Giuma would come and keep her company. Anna did not know who Signor Giuma was. From the windows she saw her own home—quite different when seen thus from this side, low, small and old, with the dried-up wistaria on the balcony and, on one corner of the roof, Giustino’s ball, torn and rain-soaked. The shutters were closed in her father’s room : and she remembered suddenly how he used to throw open the shutters with a clatter and lean out to look at the morning, soaping his chin with the shaving-brush and stretching out his thin neck, and would say to her, “Go and buy me some tobacco. Make yourself useful, seeing that you’re not ornamental.” And she seemed to see him going out into the garden, with his eyeglass, in his white flannel trousers, with his long legs that were slightly crooked because he had done so much riding as a young man. And she wondered where her father was now. She believed in hell, in purgatory and in paradise, and thought that her father must now be in purgatory, repenting of the unkind things he had so often said to them, particularly when he bullied Ippolito about the tobacco and about the dog ; and how surprised he must have been to find that purgatory existed, when he had so often said that almost certainly there is nothing for the dead, and it is better so because at least you can sleep at last—he himself being such a bad sleeper.
The maid came to tell her that Signor Giuma had now arrived. It was the boy, the one who played ping-pong. He came running in, whistling, his hair over his eyes ; he threw down his books, which were tied together by a leather strap, on the desk. He seemed surprised to see her ; he gave a little cold, shy bow, stooping his shoulders slightly. He started looking round the room for something, whistling as he looked. From a drawer he took an exercise-book and a pot of glue, and stuck some things into the book : they were big faces of film actors, cut out of a magazine. It appeared to be very important to stick them in, and very tiresome too, for the boy panted and snorted, throwing back his hair from over his eyes. Beside the desk was a big revolving globe and from time to time he looked on it for some country or other and then wrote hastily in the exercise-book underneath the film-actors’ faces. The red-haired girl came in. Her hair was short and clipped in a fashion which was popular that year and which was called á la fièvre typhoïde. But only her hair was fashionable ; her dress, on the contrary, was wide and ungraceful, with a round neck to it, and was of an ugly sort of lemon yellow. The girl held her usual broom in her hand and she swept the carpet violently and then said, “Giuma, it’s not very amusing for this little girl. Leave the film-actors and show her The Child’s Treasure-House, or take her into the garden and play ping-pong with her.”
All Our Yesterdays Page 2
