“Would you care to go to Bologna as local Deputy Secretary? Only too glad to oblige. The women there will skin you alive… Anyway, give it a thought in the course of the night, if that girl of yours gives you a chance to think… She looks like giving you the works. A year from now you’ll be a local Party Secretary! Right, comrades, let’s make a move!”

And as in the meanwhile he had snapped shut the clasp of his cloak, impetuously he swept from the room.

Boisterously summing up the events of the evening, all the officials tumbled away at his heels.

III

THE EVENING SPENT at the “Pensione Eros” was not without consequences for Antonio. Signor Alfio learnt all the details in a dark corridor of the Law Courts, where the mice were producing deafening havoc in the great presses stuffed with old documents.

“Do I make myself clear?” he asked later, at table, addressing his wife and pretending not even to see Antonio. “Your son comes here to get engaged, and the very first evening he lands up in a whorehouse!”

“He’s a bachelor,” retorted the mother, with a bitter allusion to those who did likewise despite being bound by obligations of conjugal fidelity. “He doesn’t have anyone to answer to.”

“All you ever do is make nasty cracks about me! Don’t you realize that if such a thing comes to the ears of Father Rosario, the uncle of this… er… yes, this Barbara, the wedding will go up in smoke?”

The following day the aforesaid monk paid a visit on Signor Alfio, who at the mere mention of his name was seized with a fit of nerves and had to drink three glasses of water in quick succession.

“I have heard the good news,” began Father Rosario, as soon as he had taken his seat opposite Magnano Senior.

“What good news?” queried the other suspiciously.

“I have been informed that your son is in the good graces of the Deputy Secretary-General of the Party…”

“I couldn’t say,” replied Signor Alfio, all the more fearful that this priest was out to trap him. “Don’t even know if they ever met…”

“It appears they met the other evening…”

“Father, let’s not beat about the bush,” snorted Signor Alfio, already as testy as if he had received a reprimand, “let’s talk in plain terms.”

“Very well, plain terms it shall be: I would be highly grateful if Antonio were to beg the Deputy Secretary to put a damper, once and for all, on the Union boss in Viagrande, who, I assure you, subjects me to every sort of vexation, to the point – last October – of sending me all the thieves in the province to harvest my grapes! I can’t tell you what they didn’t steal from me… everything, including my night-cap!”

“Oh, if that’s all you’re on about…” exclaimed Signor Alfio with relief.

“Why, whatever were you expecting?”

“Nothing, nothing!” declared Magnano senior. “I thought, er… nothing, in short…”

This conversation with the monk was passed on to Antonio amid a series of grunts which rendered it incomprehensible.

Antonio listened, his thoughts wandering, until his father, hawking up the phlegm which had thitherto engulfed his words, clear and true came out with “My boy, for some time now you’ve had a bee in your bonnet I don’t much care for. What is it?”

“Nothing special,” answered Antonio, getting up from the table and edging towards the door.

“So I’m a Dutchman!” grumbled the old fellow, minutely observing his son’s receding back and the listless way in which he pushed open the door and left the room.

That evening Antonio and Edoardo Lentini went strolling up and down the short and infinitely beautiful Via Crociferi. The three churches and two convents between which the street sloped away were deserted and silent; the gates in the high wrought-iron railings which embraced the brief, steep flights of steps leading to the church doors were bolted and barred.

The two young men were gripped by a romantic nostalgia more troubling and unhappy to them even than to a real, genuine Romantic who might have trodden that same street a century earlier.

“It’s shaming to have to suck up to a man like that Deputy Secretary!” said Edoardo. “Times were when we’d have had to avert our gaze rather than return the least nod from such a man. Ugh! How I’d have liked to kick him…”

“He’s very virile,” observed Antonio. “He managed to go with three women in less than an hour!”

“I might have done the same myself if I hadn’t realized something that he, crude brute that he is, didn’t notice at all: the women despised us.”

“D’you really think so?”

“The way the madame said ‘You oaf!’ I could have kissed her feet!”

“Sorry to have to disappoint you, old boy, but the madame was beside herself because she hadn’t been able to receive a client of hers who brings her some narcotic or other every evening. After you all left she swore to me, tears in her eyes, that she’d give ten years of her life just to spend a single night with Mussolini.”

“What depravity! Makes you weep! To think that I, this very morning, learnt by heart a chapter in the Annals of Tacitus. I’ll quote it to you. ‘Nero bethought himself of Epicharis, and, not believing that a woman was capable of bearing pain, ordered her to be tortured. But nor rod nor fire nor all the fury of the executioners made her confess; and so she won the first day. Borne the following day to the same torments, and incapable of standing on her lacerated members, she drew from her bosom a sash, tied it to the chair, secured a noose around her neck and drew it tight with the weight of her own body, thus extracting what little breath remained in it. A memorable lesson this is to us, that a prostitute, inflicted with so much agony, was prepared to save the lives of strangers; while men – knights and senators – and this without torture, would denounce even the persons dearest to them.’ These days, in Italy, not even the women… When a society can no longer rely even on its prostitutes, it’s done for. There’s nothing more to be hoped for! personally, I have resigned myself. In fact, I’m going to ask you a favour.”

“What is it? Go ahead.”

“Since the Deputy Secretary-General has taken a liking to you, do ask him to have me appointed mayor of Catania!”

“What!… I don’t follow you…”

“Antonio, my friend, I’m thirty-two and in need of a job. I’m not going to salve my conscience by sitting at home earning nothing and getting dirty looks from my father-in-law. This regime is going to last at least a hundred years, so no need to feel guilty about what we do. But even if the regime falls, I’m not out to make excuses for myself. If I bothered about cutting a figure as an upstanding man with posterity I’d be a fool, and be giving undue importance to pomp. Because becoming a Party official, or not being enrolled in the Party at all, is all a lot of hogwash compared with the black misery we’ll be forced to live through, whether we’re Party officials or we stay at home and mind our own business. But I must say I have every intention of being an honest man, and my honesty will take the form of not stealing, of treating everyone courteously, while wishing all manner of ill to the regime I serve as punctiliously and conscientiously as is only made possible by being firmly inside and knowing its secrets!”

If Antonio had lent a more attentive ear, and if the channels of his intellect had not been more or less obstructed for some time now, he would certainly have considered his friend’s effusion very strange and incoherent. As it was, he confined himself to stating that he never again, for any reason whatever, wished to set eyes on the Deputy Secretary-General.

Edoardo’s determination flagged – he had no come-back to that one; and the two friends continued their walk in silence, unaware that the emaciated white face of a nun had stationed itself behind the grating of a high window, and had fixed on the person of Antonio a long, disapproving stare, which she had not the slightest wish to tear away.

“Heavens alive!” exclaimed Antonio out of the blue, “I simply must get back to doing some reading. Do you know that for ten years I haven’t read a single book right through to the end! I feel positively doped with ignorance. Books keep you on your toes!… Hey d’you think it’s really true that Lorenzo Calderara has never been with a prostitute? Some people even claim that he’s never been with a woman at all.