Voices In The Evening

by Natalia Ginzburg

  However, Purillo spent very little time with these two old people. He took his meals with them and after dinner brought out a snakeskin case with his initials in gold on it

  ‘Cigarette, Barba Tommaso?’

  ‘Cigarette, Magna Maria?’

  He never troubled himself to say anything else.

  He pulled his beret over his head and went off to the works.

  Barba Tommaso and Magna Maria feared and respected him. They did not dare say a word when he hung up a large photograph of himself in the dining-room wearing a black shirt and raising his arm to the salute among some Party officers who had come to visit the works.

  Barba Tommaso and Magna Maria had never had any definite political opinions. Still they would whisper to one another,

  ‘If Balotta comes here one day what will happen then?’

  That was in any case an improbable eventuality. Old Balotta never came to Le Pietre.

  Then the war came. Balotta’s sons went on service, but Purillo was not called up because he had some constriction of the throat or chest—and he had had pleurisy as a child and a murmur could still be heard on one side.

  After the Eighth of September Purillo came one night to wake up Balotta and Signora Cecilia. He told them to dress at once and come away, because the Fascists were intending to come and get them Balotta protested and said he would not move. He said that everyone in the neighbourhood liked him and no one would venture to do anything to him. But Purillo with a face like marble had seized a suitcase and stood there with his hands on his belt saying,

  ‘We mustn’t lose time. Put some things in this and let us go.’

  Thereupon old Balotta got up and began to dress. He fumbled over his braces and buttons with his freckled hands that were covered with white wrinkled skin.

  ‘Where are we going?' he said.

  ‘To Cignano.’

  ‘To Cignano, to Cignano! And to whose house?

  ‘I am thinking.’

  Signora Cecilia, in her alarm, wandered round the roohis picking up at random what she found there, some flower vases which she put in a bag, silver spoons and old camisoles.

  Purillo got them into a motor-car. He drove without saying a word, with his long beaky nose curving over his black bristling moustache his little mouth tight shut, his cap drawn over his ears.

  ‘You, Purillo,’said old Balotta, ‘are probably saving my life. All the same, you are distasteful to me, and I cannot bear you.’

  And Purillo this time said

  ‘I am not bound to be to your taste.’

  ‘That is true,’ said old Balotta.

  Purillo always spoke formally to old Balotta, because Balotta had never told him to say thou.

  At Cignano, Purillo had rented a small apartment for them. They passed the days in the kitchen, where the stove was. Purillo came to see them almost every evening.

  The Fascists did actually come to La Casetta and they broke the windows and ripped up the chairs with bayonets.

  Signora Cecilia died at Cignano. She had struck up a friendship with the landlady, and passed away holding her hand. Old Balotta had gone to find a doctor. When he returned with one his wife was dead.

  He just could not believe it, and went on speaking to her and shaking her. He thought she had merely fainted.

  Only he and Purillo were at the funeral, and the lady who owned the house. Barba Tommaso and Magna Maria were ill, with fever.

  ‘Funk fever,’ said old Balotta.

  Purillo did not appear there any more. So Balotta was alone, though he seemed to want Purillo. Every minute he was asking the landlady,

  ‘But where has Purillo run off to?’

  It became known that Purillo had escaped to Switzerland, having been threatened with death either by the Fascists or by the Partisans. The factory remained entirely on the shoulders of an old surveyor one Borzaghi. But the factory meant nothing any more to old Balotta.

  His memory began to fail somewhat. He often fell asleep on a chair in the kitchen with his head bowed. He would wake up with a start and ask the landlady,

  ‘Where are my children?’

  He asked her this with a threatening air as though she had got them hidden from him in the store-room cupboard.

  ‘The boys, the grown-up ones, are at the war,’ said the landlady. ‘Don’t you remember that they are at the war? Little Tommasino is at school; and the girls, Gemmina is in Switzerland and Raffaella is in the mountains with the Partisans.’

  ‘What a life!' said old Balotta.

  And then he went to sleep again, bending forward, and starting up from time to time and looking round with his lack-lustre eyes like one who did not know where he was.

  After the Liberation, Magna Maria came to take him away in a car, with the chauffeur. He recognized him, as he was the son of one of his workmen, and embraced him. He held out two flabby fingers to Magna Maria, looking askance at her.

  He said,

  ‘You didn’t come to Cecilia’s funeral.’

  ‘I was in quarantine,’ said Magna Maria.

  They took him to La Casetta. Magna Maria had cleared away the broken glass and tidied up the rooms a little with the peasant woman’s help. But there were no mattresses or sheets, no plate or china. Complete devastation existed in the garden, just where once upon a time one saw Signora Cecilia moving about in the midst of her roses, with her blue apron, her scissors attached to her belt, and her watering pot in her hand.

  Old Balotta went away with Magna Maria to Le Pietre. Barba Tommaso was there just the same as ever, rosy faced in his clean shirt and white flannel trousers.

  Old Balotta came and sat down and suddenly began sobbing into his handkerchief, like a little child.

  Magna Maria stroked his head and kept on repeating,

  ‘Splendid, splendid. You are splendid. How splendid you are!'

  Barba Tommaso said,

  ‘I was the first to see the Partisans come. I was at the window with my telescope; General Sartorio was there, too. I saw them approaching up the road. I went to meet them with two bottles of wine, because I guessed they were thirsty.’

  And he said,

  ‘At the factory, the Germans have carried off all the machinery. But it does not matter, because now the Americans will give us new machinery.’

  Old Balotta said,

  ‘You just keep quiet. What a ninny you always are!'

  ‘Borghazi was very brave,’ said Magna Maria ‘The Germans arrested him, but he threw hihiself out of the train as it was going, and fractured his shoulder.’

  And she said,

  ‘You know that they killed Nebbia?'

  ‘Nebbia?’

  ‘Why yes. The Fascists took him and killed him, just there at the back, on those rocks there. It was at night and we heard him cry out And in the morning our woman found his scarf, and his spectacles all broken, and his cap, that fur one which he always wore.’

  Old Balotta was looking at the setting sun above the sloping rocks behind the house which is for that reason called Le Pietre, and at the clumps of pine trees which cover that side of the hill, and beyond the hills at the mountains with their sharp snowy peaks, and the long blue shadows of the glaciers and a white sugar-loaf suhimit, known as Lo Scivolo, ‘the Slide’, where his children used to go on Sundays with their friends.

  The following day the mayor came to invite him to make a speech in honour of the Liberation. They brought him out on the balcony of the town hall and below was a large crowd, the whole piazza was full. There were people also right down the street, they had climbed up the trees and telegraph poles. He recognized faces, some of his workmen, but he felt shy about speaking. He leaned with his hands on the balustrade and said,

  ‘Viva il Socialismo!’

  Then he remembered Nebbia He took off his beret and said,

  ‘Viva il Nebbia!’

  Loud applause broke out like the roll of thunder; and he was rather frightened and then suddenly felt very happy.

 
Then he wanted to speak again, but he did not know what else to say. He gasped and fumbled with his coat collar. They led him from the balcony, because now the mayor was to speak.

  While they were on their way home Barba Tommaso said to him,

  ‘Nebbia was never a Socialist, he was a Communist.'

  ‘No matter,’ said old Balotta, ‘and you shut up, what a ninny you always are!'

  At home again, Magna Maria put him to bed. He was flushed and fevered and had difficulty with his breathing.

  He died in the night.

  In the neighbourhood they said what a tragedy— that old Balotta is dead. Who knows what has become of his children, and the factory is left in Purillo's hands.

  They said,

  ‘All those children and not one of them here at the moment of his death.’

  The day after he died his younger daughter Raffaella appeared, the one who had been in the mountains with the Partisans. She was wearing trousers, a red handkerchief round her neck, and a pistol in a holster.

  She was eager for her father to see her with that pistol. She came to Le Pietre and found Magna Maria at the garden gate with black crepe on her head. Maria began to cry and said,

  ‘What a tragedy—what a tragedy!'

  Then she embraced Raffaella and said,

  ‘How splendid you are! Yes, splendid, splendid!' and added,

  ‘But don’t you ever fire that pistol here.’

  3

  Elsa and her Family

  DURING the war we went away first to Castello and first to Castel Piccolo for fear that the village would be bombed because of the factory.

  My mother kept chickens at Castello and turkeys and rabbits, and had also started a colony of bees. But there must have been somethingwrong with the hives, because the bees thed, the whole lot of them, when the snow came.

  At Castel Piccolo she would not have any more animals. She said that when she had to look after animals she became fond of them and she could not bear cooking them any more.

  Now we have various animals at our dairy farm. This is called La Vigna and lies in the direction of the woods of Castello about a kilometre from us. My mother goes to La Vigna two or three times every week. But she does not make friends with the animals. The woman on the farm looks after them and Antonia kills, plucks or skins them, and my mother puts them all in the pot widiout troubling herself, because she does not stop to think that they once had feathers or skins.

  After the Liberation my sister was called on to be an interpreter, because she had a good knowledge of English. An American colonel fell in love with her and they got married and went off to Johannesburg. In civil life he had a business down there.

  I went to the university in the town. I lived together with the younger of the little Bottiglia girls at the Protestant Centre. Giulana Bottiglia completed her teachers’ training and I took a degree in literature and then we both returned home.

  About twice every week I go to town on one pretext or another—to change the books at the ‘Selecta' library for Aunt Ottavia, to buy threads for my mother’s embroidery or a special brand of English tobacco for my father.

  I usually go on the motor-bus which leaves at midday from the piazza and get off in the Corso Piacenza in the town two steps away from the Yk dello Statute, where the ‘Selecta’ library is.

  The last bus is at ten o’clock in the evening.

  I was in the little arm-chair. I pressed my hands against the sides of the stove and took them away when I felt them burning and put them to my face, and then put them on the stove again. And so I whiled away half an hour.

  Giuliana Bottiglia appeared.

  She was wearing black stockings, as was the fashion at that time, and black leather gloves, a very short white raincoat and a black silk scarf on her head.

  ‘Am I disturbing you?’ she said.

  She sat down and took off her gloves and scarf and began to comb her wavy hair. Then she shook it out; it is black and fluffed out, with little curls, like commas, on the temples.

  ‘l went to the cinema today,’ she said, ‘at Cignano.’

  ‘What were they doing?”

  ‘Fiery Darkness.’

  ‘But why was the darkness fiery?’

  ‘Because He was an engineer—gone blind,’ she said, ‘and She was a woman off the streets, but He did not know that and believed She was pure and they get married. They take a very fine apartment. But He begins to have his suspicions.’

  ‘Why suspicions?’

  ‘Because She had told him that previously She had been poor, and instead He discovers that She was by no means so poor, since She has a good deal of jewellery. He discovers that because the maid tells him she had seen her with the jewellery.’

  ‘Previously?’

  ‘Yes, previously. And one evening He hears her talking to someone on the terrace. This is a banker very much enamoured of her who knows about her past, and is blackmailing her. He tells her that either She makes love with him or if not he goes to the blind man and tells him everything. The banker is Yul Brynner.’

  ‘The one with the shaven head?’

  ‘Yes, Then the engineer decides to have an operation which either kills him or restores his sight. Well, they do it and He gets his sight; at first all is confused, and then clear, and She is there looking lovely with an ermine cape. And He takes the cape in his arms and cries.’

  ‘Cries?’

  ‘Yes Then they go to a villa for a holiday, but Yul Brynner comes, too. And in the night Brynner looks for her and at last finds her in a little room, with some books, a sort of library And he wants to kill her, and the engineer comes in and finds them together.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Then the end is that Yul Brynner runs away with the engineer after him and they are on a window ledge. She, too, has got on to the ledge to save the engineer and then She falls off it.’

  'Killed?'

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the engineer?’

  ‘The engineer fires at the banker and he dies. But before he dies in the hospital he tells the engineer that She was as innocent as a saint. And the engineer goes blind again.’

  ‘Goes blind again?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why does he go blind again?’

  ‘Because his eyes were still weak and, you see, the retina becomes detached through shock.’

  ‘It was an idiotic film.’

  ‘Not at all. They did it well.’

  ‘And you went to Cignano to see it?’

  ‘To Cignano, yes.’

  ‘By bus?”

  ‘No, on my bicycle with my sister Maria and Maria Mosso.’

  Was the Chinese man nice?’

  ‘Was the Chinese man nice?’

  ‘The one at the dance at the Terenzis’.’

  ‘He wasn’t Chinese he was an Indian and he was at least seventy. Gigi Sartorio brought him.’

  She was smoothing her gloves on her lap, gently, gently, with her eyes lowered and her head a bit on one side, and she said,

  ‘Tommasino was there.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At the Tetenzis dance.’

  ‘He was?”

  ‘Yes, he was.’

  And—well?’

  ‘Nothing. He was there, that’s all.’

  She continued to smooth her gloves without looking at me, and said,

  ‘You do not tell me anything any more. I used to be your friend.’

  I stirred the ash in the stove and said,

  ‘I don’t tell you anything, about what?’

  ‘I come here, we talk about silly little things. I bore you, I know it.’

  ‘You don’t bore me at all I was amused by the story of the engineer.’

  I bore you, I know it.’

  She pulled on her gloves, and fastened the belt of her raincoat.

  ‘I must be going now.’

  At the door, without turning round, she said,

  ‘They saw you!'

  ‘Wha
t?’

  ‘They saw you, with Tommasino.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘My sister Maria and Maria Mosso. They saw you both in a bar.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Oh, nothing.’

  ‘Giuliana! What is the party at the Terenzis’?’ cried my mother at the foot of the stairs.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Because we met Gigi Sartorio with a salad bowl.’

  ‘But he was not going to the Terenzis' he was going to the Mossos' to take them some zabaione because they had made so much—what was left over. They gave us some as well.’

  ‘But how much had they made? A barrel?’ said my mother

  She said ‘What an idea to put the zabaione in a salad bowl.’

  ‘And where should they put it?’ said Aunt Ottavia.

  ‘In a glass dish, good gracious!'

  ‘We made some beignets,' said Giuhana, ‘as we do not care for zabaione by itself.’

  ‘We, on the contrary, ’said my mother, 'like eating very lightly in the evening.’

  One could read in her expression her annoyance because we had been excluded from the little zabaione party.

  4

  Balotta's Children

  BALOTTA had five children. The eldest is Gemmina. She is now over forty; she has not married and lives at La Casetta. When she came back from Switzerland she said,

  ‘No one is going to take La Casetta away from me.’

  Her brothers and sister wanted to come and live there after they had all returned to the district; but she repeatedly said,

  ‘La Casetta was Mama’s and Papa’s and no one is going to take it from me.’

  It was useless to point out to her that Mama and Papa were Mama and Papa to the others and not merely to her.

  Gemmina remained at La Casetta on her own, with one servant, an old nurse who had brought up all the brothers and sisters one after the other.

  Vincenzo and Mario wanted to have her, too, as nurse when they had children.

  But Gemmina said,

  ‘No one takes nurse away from me. Nurse stays with me and anyone who interferes with her can look out for himself.’

  Gemmina is tall and thin. Her peroxide hair is cut short. Her face is long and narrow, all chin. Her complexion is mottled. An old rash she had once has left livid marks.