Beautiful Antonio

BEAUTIFUL ANTONIO

VITALIANO BRANCATI was born at Pachino, near Syracuse in Sicily in 1907 and was educated at Catania where he took a degree in literature. In 1924 he joined the Fascist party, but after being ‘Fascist to the roots of his hair’ as he said, he repudiated it completely, and The Lost Years, published in 1938, was the first fruit of his conversion. From 1937 he was a schoolteacher, but turned to full-time writing after the war. Don Giovanni in Sicilia was published in 1941 and in 1949 Il Bell’ Antonio won the Bagutta Prize. He also wrote short stories, plays and a considerable number of articles for the press. Brancati died in 1954 in Turin.

Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since. He has written twelve novels, including Europa, Destiny, and, most recently, Rapids, as well as two non-fiction accounts of life in northern Italy, and two collections of essays, literary and historical. His many translations from the Italian include works by Moravia, Tabucchi, Calvino and Calasso.

VITALIANO BRANCATI

Beautiful Antonio

Translated from the Italian by

PATRICK CREAGH

with an Introduction by

TIM PARKS

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First published in Italy as Il Bell’ Antonio by Valentino Bompiani 1949
First published in Great Britain as Antonio: The Great Lover 1952
This translation first published by Harvill an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1993
Published in Penguin Books 2007
1

Copyright © Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri, Bompiani, Sonzogno, Etas S.p.A, 1949
English translation © HarperCollins Publishers, 1993
Introduction copyright © Tim Parks, 2007
All rights reserved

The moral right of the author and introducer has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
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EISBN: 978–0–141–91134–2

To my wife

Introduction

Let’s start with a very Italian joke. A man goes into a tobacconist’s to ask for cigarettes and the shopkeeper gives him a pack with the health warning: “SMOKING CAUSES IMPOTENCE!” Disturbed, the man hands the cigarettes back. “Sorry”, he says, “I didn’t want these. Could you give me the ones that cause death, please?”

Impotence is worse than death. “May the Lord strike me down dead before sending me such a curse,” says one of the characters in The Beautiful Antonio. And he means it. An impotent man is “worth less than a foot rag.” And yet, paradoxically, chastity remains a virtue, or so the church has always maintained, and in particular the Catholic church in Italy. When the gorgeous and still adolescent Antonio turns even the most devout and spinsterish heads at mass, the priest invites his worried mother to pray that God may “call the boy back to Himself as soon as possible.” An uncontrolled sexual potency, then, is also worse than death.

The Beautiful Antonio was written soon after the Second World War and published in 1949 when its author was forty-two. Born and brought up in Catania, on the east coast of Sicily below the volcano of Mount Etna, Vitaliano Brancati had been an enthusiastic Fascist until his late twenties, moving to Rome to begin a successful career in journalism. However, in 1934 when a novel he had written was banned for its erotic content, Brancati woke up to the repressive character of the regime and by 1937 he had retreated to Sicily to work as a schoolteacher and continue his writing from the safe backwaters of the provinces. The core of his creative work is made up of four novels written between 1934 and his early death in 1954. Each sets out with great energy to paint a grotesque and comic picture not just of Italy under Fascism but of human behaviour in general. Each could be characterized as involving a collision between vitality and despair. The Beautiful Antonio is indisputably the best.

The genius of the book is to construct a profound conundrum: What is the relation between the sexual dysfunction that plagues Antonio and the world he lives in? Or is there no relation at all? Almost every reader will have a different response, yet the question, as Brancati poses it, is so dense with implication that it is impossible not to go on mulling over it long after the book has been closed. Our understanding of what character is, of the interaction between mind and body, of the contradictions at the heart of Western culture, all depend on our finding a credible solution – which, of course, we never will.

Exact contemporary of his creator, Antonio is the son of moderately wealthy landowners in Catania. His father is a professed philanderer and choleric loudmouth; but loveable. His mother is quiet, anxious, devout, affectionate. Brancati likes to put his characters in evidently complementary relations to each other. Antonio’s parents are a double act; their conversations follow well-worn rails. But their only child is more mysterious. His handsome face and fine physique would seem to offer him his father’s role as a womaniser; when he is just sixteen the family maid writhes with desire for him, she has fits of hysteria. But Antonio shares his mother’s quietness, her passivity.