Sure enough, that evening, madness, before entering his head, suddenly rushed to his hands and to one of his feet. It prompted him to place his foot on the step of the milkman’s cart which stood there by chance at the corner of his street, and to grab hold of the seat and the shaft with both hands.
What? Him, Mr. Bareggi, a serious, sedate, respectable man, on the milkman’s cart?
Yes. The impulse came to him on the spur of the moment when he spotted the milkman’s cart through the fog, as he turned off the avenue onto his street. His nostrils had picked up the fresh smell of hay fermenting in the feedbag, and the goaty odor of the milkman’s coat thrown upon the seat, both of which had suddenly reminded him of the countryside — far, far away, beyond the Nomentine gate, beyond Casal dei Pazzi—immense, self-forgetful, and liberating.
The horse, craning its neck and snatching the grass which grew freely at the roadside, must have wandered a step at a time away from the three small houses at the end of the street. The milkman was tarrying to chat with the women, as he habitually did at each of his stops, certain that his trusty horse would be waiting for him patiently in front of the door. But now, if he were to come out with the empty jugs and not find his horse, he would probably start running about, screaming and shouting. Therefore, Bareggi had to be quick. Excited by that sudden surge of madness which flashed from his eyes, he panted and quivered all over with pleasure and fear. At this point he did not stop to think what would happen to himself or to the milkman and the women on his route. In the confusion of thoughts already whirling through his troubled mind, he lifted the whip, gave the horse a mighty lash, and off they went!
Since the horse looked deceptively old, Bareggi had not counted on its quick plunging leap, nor on all those cans and jugs toppling and clanging behind him at the rebound. In trying to brace himself after the jolt, he let the reins fly out of his hand. His feet were juggled by the shafts and, while the whip sailed through the air, he almost fell backwards on top of all those cans and jugs. He scarcely had time to feel relieved of that initial danger, when suddenly the threat of other imminent perils kept him breathless and in suspense, because that blasted, uncontrollable animal had launched out on a maddening race through the fog, which progressively thickened as night approached.
Wasn’t anyone running up to stop it, or coming out to call for help? Yet in the dark, that cart in flight must have seemed like a storm with all those containers bouncing around and clashing into one another. But perhaps there were no longer any people on the road, or else he was not hearing their shouts above the din. Meanwhile, the fog kept him from even seeing the electric streetlights which must have already been turned on.
In his desperate attempt to take hold of the seat with both his hands, he had even thrown away the whip. Aha, not only he, but the horse too, must have gone mad, either because it had never received such a powerful lash, or because it was glad that the route had ended so early that evening, or because it no longer felt bound by the reins! It neighed and neighed. Meanwhile, Mr. Bareggi became terrified as he saw the furious thrust of its flanks in a race that, at every lunge, seemed to acquire increased vigor.
At a certain point, when the thought flashed through his mind that he might crash into something at the turn of the road, he tried to stretch out his arm to retrieve the reins, but in the process was thrown off balance and jostled about. He bumped his nose against something or other and ended up with a bloody nose and a great deal of blood on his mouth, chin, and hand. He was unable to care for the wound he realized he had received, having neither the time nor the means to do so. His only concern was to brace himself firmly with both hands. Blood before and milk behind! Oh, God, how the milk swished and sloshed about in those cans and jugs, and splattered all over his back! Although fear gripped his innermost being, Mr. Bareggi laughed at that fear. He instinctively dismissed the idea of an imminent catastrophe — howsoever clearly it appeared to him — replacing it with the thought that, after all, this was nothing more than a fine prank, a prank he had wanted to play, and one that he would tell everyone about tomorrow. He laughed and laughed, as he desperately tried to recall the peaceful image of the farmer who watered his garden beyond the hedge on his street, as he had seen him every evening from his little balcony. He also thought of funny things. He thought, for instance, of the peasants whose old clothes are covered with patches which seem expressly chosen to proclaim their poverty, a poverty, however, rendered as cheerful as a flag, displayed there on their buttocks, elbows, and knees. Meanwhile, beneath these peaceful and amusing thoughts, there loomed a terrifying thought, one which was no less vivid than any of the others, namely, that of crashing, overturning, and ending up in a pile of wreckage. They flew across the Nomentine Bridge. They flew past Casal dei Pazzi, and away, away they went into the open countryside, already somewhat visible through the fog.
When the horse finally came to a halt in front of a small farmhouse, its cart battered and without a single can or jug left inside, it was already night.
Hearing the cart arrive at that unusual hour, the milkman’s wife called out from the farmhouse. But no one answered. She then went out to her doorstep with an oil lamp, and saw the wreck. Again she called out, this time pronouncing her husband’s name. But where was he? What had happened?
Of course, these were questions which the horse, still panting and happy after its marvelous gallop, could not answer.
Snorting and stamping, its eyes bloodshot, it only shook its head briskly.
Puberty
The little sailor suit no longer looked right on her. That was something her grandmother should have realized.
Of course, it wasn’t easy to find decent clothes for her, clothes for someone no longer a child, nor yet a woman. Yesterday she had seen the Gianchi girl. What a horrible sight, poor thing! Encumbered by a long, hairy gray skirt that almost reached down to her ankles, the girl could hardly move her legs about under it.
But she, too, had a problem with all that bosom scarcely fitting in that little blouse meant for a child!
She puffed and angrily shook her head.
During certain hours of the day, her awareness of the exuberant fragrance of her body would almost overwhelm her. The smell of her thick, black, somewhat curly and dry hair as she loosened it to wash it, the smell that emanated from under her bare arms when she raised them to hold up that suffocating mass of hair, the smell of powder dampened with perspiration — all filled her with a frenzy more nauseous than exhilarating, since her unexpected and all-too-rapid physical development had suddenly revealed to her so many secret and troublesome things.
Certain evenings, as she was undressing for bed, if she but thought of those things, or if their image would suddenly pop up in her mind, the anger and disgust she felt would increase so greatly that she would have liked to hurl her small shoes against the white lacquer wardrobe with its three mirrors, where she could see all of herself, half-naked as she was and with one leg flung somewhat indecently over the other. She would feel like biting and scratching herself, or like weeping incessantly. Then she would feel the urge to laugh, and would laugh uncontrollably through her tears. And if she thought about drying those tears, she would start crying again. Perhaps she was just a fool. It puzzled her that such a natural thing should appear so strange to her.
Already possessing the promptness women have in realizing from a single glance that someone is interested in them, she would immediately lower her eyes whenever a man on the street would look at her.
She still could not understand what a man might be thinking when he looked at a woman. Disturbed, as she walked along with her eyes lowered, she experienced an irritating feeling of revulsion, imagining in her uncertainty, and in spite of herself, that her body contained some intimate secret, and only she knew precisely what it was.
Although she stopped looking, she felt looked at. And she was dying to figure out what men particularly looked for in a woman. But this, perhaps, she had already figured out.
As soon as she got home and was alone, she would deliberately let her schoolbooks or gloves fall from her hands so that she could bend over and pick them up. And in bending over, she would peer down the opening of her neckline at her breasts. But as soon as she would catch a glimpse of them and feel their weight, she would take hold of the large knot of the black silk handkerchief under the collar of her middy, and immediately tug it up, up, right up to her eyes, thoroughly disgusted with herself.
A moment later she would use both hands to gather the material of that little blouse on both sides, and would stretch it downwards so that it clung to her erect breasts. Then she would go and stand in front of the mirror, taking delight in the promising curve of her hips as well.
“Oh, what a fantastically seductive young lady you are!” And she would burst into laughter.
She heard the tiny, cantankerous voice of her grandmother, who was in the hall of the little villa, calling her down for her English lesson.
To make her angry, her grandmother usually called her Dreina and not Dreetta, as she herself wanted to be called. Fine, she would come down, but only when it would finally occur to her grandmother to call her Dreetta, and not Dreina.
“Dreetta! Dreetta!”
“Here I am , Grandmother.”
“Oh, goodness gracious! You’re keeping your teacher waiting.”
“I’m sorry, but I just now heard you calling.”
During the summer, in the afternoon, her grandmother would order that all the windows in the little villa be kept tightly shut. Dreetta, of course, would have wanted them all wide open. She liked it a lot, therefore, when the fierce, unrelenting sun still managed to find a way to penetrate into that almost pitch-black shade preferred by her grandmother.
Sunbeams darted and quivered through all the rooms like small outbursts of children’s laughter that shatter a strictly imposed silence.
Dreetta herself was very often like that, darting and quivering and, from time to time, seemingly surrounded, blinded, and ravished by real flashes of madness. Immediately afterwards her face would darken at the secret suspicion that those flashes of madness came from her mother, whom she had never known, and about whom no one had ever told her anything. As for her father, she only knew that he had died young; she knew nothing about the cause of his death. There was a mystery, perhaps a foul and grim one, in the circumstances of her birth and in the premature death of her parents. To understand that, one had only to look at her grandmother with that cartilaginous face and those troubled eyes, half-shielded by huge eyelids, one seemingly heavier than the other. Always dressed in black and stooped by age, she kept that mystery concealed in her breast, protecting it under tightly drawn arms. She held her hands under her chin, one clenched into a fist, the other deformed by arthritis, resting upon that fist. But Dreetta did not want to know about it. It seemed to her that she already knew what it was by the way so many people looked at her when they heard someone mention her name, and by the glances they then exchanged with one another as they exclaimed almost unconsciously: “Oh, she’s the daughter of…” And they would not finish the sentence. She would pretend not to hear. After all, she now had Uncle Zeno, her aunt, and her little cousins, who would come by almost every day to take her out and provide her with all sorts of entertainment. Her uncle would have liked to take her into his own home, seeing that Aunt Tilla, his wife, loved her almost as dearly as she did her own daughters, but as long as her grandmother was alive, she had to stay with her.
Dreetta was sure that her grandmother, with that fist always resting under her chin, would never die. And this was one of the things that most frequently triggered those flashes of madness. Her cousins would have a fine time showing her the room already reserved for her, telling how they would decorate it for her, and inventing stories about the life all four of them would someday live together and share forever. She liked all of that, would verbally agree with everything they said, would even join them in inventing stories, but in the bottom of her heart she didn’t have even the faintest hope that the dream would come true.
Were she ever in a position to free herself, she could only expect her freedom to come about as a result of a sudden and unpredictable chance happening; a chance encounter on the street, for example. Therefore, when she went strolling with her uncle and her cousins, or when she walked to or from school, she always became flushed with excitement and seemed elated. And she would tremble with anxiety to such a degree that she paid no attention to what they were saying to her. She would concentrate on looking here and there, her eyes beaming and a nervous smile on her lips, as if she really felt exposed to that chance happening which was suddenly to seize and ravish her. She was ready. Was there no elderly English or American gentleman who would take such a fancy to her that he would ask her uncle… for her hand? No! Of course not! … for permission to adopt her and take her away, far away from the living nightmare of life with that awful grandmother, and from her aunt’s benevolence, which was so pitifully ostentatious? And would he not take her to London or to America, where he’d marry her to his nephew or to the son of a friend?
This crazy notion of an elderly English or American gentleman had come into her head to save her from admitting that, at least as far as the near future was concerned, her freedom could only come through marriage. From those turbid sensations that impetuously cluttered her spirit with shame and contempt for the precocious exuberance of her body, and also from the way men looked at her on the street, the idea had already blossomed in her mind that the prospect was likely, though something to blush about. Come on, now, get married at her age! To keep from blushing at the thought, she would interpose, as a defense, the highly unlikely eventuality of a chance adoption by an elderly English or American gentleman. He had to be English or American because, if she were to marry — oh yes, no joke — she would marry only an Englishman or an American, one who was simon-pure, and had a bit of the sky, at least a bit of the blue sky in his eyes.
That’s why she was studying English.
How odd that, by keeping the idea of marriage so far from her mind so as not to blush at it, she had not till now viewed Mr. Walston, her teacher, as the Englishman who, being so close at hand, could marry her!
Her cheeks suddenly turned red-hot as if Mr. Walston stood there in front of her expressly for that purpose. And she felt herself shudder from head to foot when she noticed that he, in turn, was also blushing. Yet she knew quite well that it was Mr. Walston’s nature to blush at little or nothing. She had often laughed at that, considering it extremely funny in a man with such a powerful physique, despite his truly childish appearance.
He seemed more enormous as he stood there near the delicate gilt living room table in front of the window, where he usually gave her her lesson. He was dressed in a light-gray summer suit and wore a blue shirt and tan shoes. And he was smiling. It was an empty smile which revealed, at the opening of his large mouth, the few teeth left to him as a result of gum disease. He was smiling without even realizing that he had blushed while getting up as his little pupil entered the room. So far was he from the thought that had entered her mind about him. As soon as he was invited to sit down, he picked up the English grammer book from the little table, peered over his glasses at his pupil, his blue eyes softening as if to urge her not to interrupt his reading with her usual uncontrollable bursts of laughter at the pronunciation of certain words, and then began to read, crossing one leg over the other.
He was a huge man, and so it happened that, while crossing his legs, he exposed almost the whole of his calf above his white cotton sock, which was held up by the taut elastic band of his old pink garter. Dreetta caught a glimpse of it and suddenly felt a sense of revulsion, the sort that also invites looking. She observed that the flesh of the calf was lifelessly white and that on that flesh some reddish metallic hairs curled here and there. In the semidarkness the entire living room seemed to be still, in expectation of something. It seemed as if it was trying to make
Dreetta increasingly aware of the contrast between her strange anxiety, exasperated by the revulsion she felt—as from a scorching, shameful contact—and the detached, intellectual placidity of that huge Englishman who was busily reading, his calf exposed like any old husband already deaf to all the feelings of his wife.
“Present tense: I do not go, io non vado; thou dost not go, tu non vai; he does not go, egli non va.”
All of a sudden, Mr. Walston heard a deafening cry, and, raising his eyes from the book, he saw his pupil shudder as if something painful had unexpectedly passed through her flesh. She dashed out of the living room, shouting frenetically, her face hidden under both arms. Dazed, his face aflame, he was still looking about, when he saw the old grandmother almost dancing in front of him. Convulsed with contempt, she was shouting some incomprehensible words. The poor man could have imagined anything but that the smile of bewilderment on his large flushed face would be mistaken at that moment for a smile of impudence.
He found himself seized by the lapels of his jacket by a manservant who, beckoned by the cries, had rushed over. With a great deal of pushing and shoving, he was then thrown out through the doorway into the garden. He scarcely had enough time to raise his head upon hearing a shriek coming from overhead:
“Teacher, catch me!”
He caught sight of a body dangling from the eaves of the little villa. It was Dreetta, her hair disheveled and her eyes flashing with madness. She was clenching her teeth in terror, and, remorseful, was tossing about in an effort to climb back to safety. Then he heard a ragged, agonized laugh that lingered for a moment in the air, as a wake to the horrible thud made by the body that plummeted and lay crushed at his feet.
Victory of the Ants
Tales of Madness Page 16