Ernesto

by Umberto Saba

  “You counted your chickens before they hatched,” Ernesto said, recalling a more or less appropriate saying he’d often heard his uncle use. Still laughing, he broke the branch into pieces, and threw them away, just as long before, he had discarded the pieces of cardboard attached to the sack of double-zero flour.

  “And now let’s get to work,” he said in the sober tones of a superior addressing a subordinate. Then seeing how miserable the man looked, he spoke more softly, “I’m sorry if I hurt you. I was just fooling around like I’m sure you were too.” (He wasn’t really sure of this, in fact, he was sure the opposite was true.) “If it keeps hurting,” he added, “try to remember that it was me, Ernesto, who caused you that bit of pain. Then it will hurt you less.”

  THIRD EPISODE

  “IT’S TIME you got your hair cut,” Ernesto’s mother said to him one morning. “I can’t stand looking at you anymore. Here’s the money. Stop at Bernardo’s before lunch.” Bernardo owned the barbershop across the street.

  Signora Celestina had been pleading with Ernesto for over a month to have this bit of surgery done. Much given to neatness, she couldn’t bear seeing her son going around looking like a savage or an orphan. However, Ernesto didn’t like relinquishing any part of his body, not even those parts that inevitably grow back. When, as a toddler, he was at his nursemaid’s home, one of the reasons for which the young woman would spank him was his resistance to having his nails cut. At the fearful moment that he’d see her approaching scissors in hand—though obedient to her other commands—he’d dash wildly about her small room and finally hide under the bed. It was difficult for her to pry him out from there and at times the woman, who loved him as if he were her own child (her son had died shortly after birth), and who had much more work to do, would lose her temper.

  “Stop at Bernardo’s, my father’s?” said Ernesto.

  “If I hear that disgraceful talk from you once more,” Signora Celestina responded (as she always did), “I’ll tell Uncle Giovanni. He’ll put you in your place. He’ll teach you to respect your mother.” And (as she always did) she burst into tears.

  It had to do with slanderous old gossip. When Ernesto’s mother had owned a furniture store, her shop and Bernardo’s were next to each other, and at times when neither had customers, they would chat from their doorways. That was all. But the street was full of busybodies, and what with Signora Celestina’s strange marriage followed so quickly by a legal separation (the reasons for which were never made clear), those chats about the weather did the rest. Two years earlier a cousin of Ernesto’s, a boy his own age, who had undertaken to tell him how babies are made and how they’re born (about which Ernesto had only the vaguest notion), added, as a sort of sequel to the first lesson, that in his home everyone said that Bernardo was Ernesto’s real father, and that had been the reason (though one wasn’t supposed to know or talk about it) for which his parents (at least, allegedly) had separated. Thrilled and exhilarated by the revelations of the mysteries of procreation and of his hidden relationship to Bernardo, Ernesto had raced home to recount both of these exciting bits of news to his mother. On hearing the first, the woman’s face darkened and she immediately began inveighing against the corrupting cousin. On hearing the second, she fainted and fell to the ground. Stricken with remorse (he imagined his mother dead, dead because of him), Ernesto couldn’t think what to do. He could have throttled his blackbird singing away obliviously at the window. It seemed, in fact, to be singing louder and better than ever before.

  A dose of bromide eventually set things right. Nevertheless, every time his mother pressed him go to the barber (two, perhaps three times a year), the boy would get back at her with the old tale, though by then he, too, knew that it was complete and utter rubbish. And every time she would get insulted and angry and threaten to punish him by telling his uncle Giovanni. As far as Ernesto was concerned, beyond the comforting certainty that his mother wouldn’t carry out her threat, he didn’t see anything so terrible about being Bernardo’s son.

  Bernardo was a heavy, fairly elderly man with completely white hair and a kind face. He always welcomed Ernesto warmly, had even lent him money once, which the boy spent at a new bakery that everyone in town was raving about, and which he repaid punctually from the weekly allowance he got from his uncle. Bernardo had waited on him since childhood. He had been the first person to cut his hair after he’d left his nursemaid’s care, and hoped it would be he to give him his first shave. He used to predict a brilliant future for the boy (destined, one way or another, by some legacy, a kind of birthright, at least in Bernardo’s mind, to become rich someday). And he suffered his first disappointment when Ernesto left school to take a job. It seems that Bernardo belonged to that very large group of people who cannot imagine a brilliant career not preceded by an academic degree. Although he never expressed his disappointment to Ernesto, the boy sensed it. He could have changed barbers, but that would have seemed to him a kind of betrayal of a person who had always been kind and affectionate to him. With these thoughts in mind, and so that he could escape his mother’s mealtime reproaches, once again he returned to Bernardo’s to have his hair cut. He walked resolutely into the shop.

  Bernardo wanted to take care of him personally. He took the towel his assistant was about to tuck around the boy’s neck, asked for the scissors, and set about his work. Once seated in the revolving chair and completely at the mercy of his unwitting torturer, Ernesto resigned himself to having his hair cut as a necessity, however unpleasant, of the good life. (Later, when life became hostile and difficult to him, he’d call it “heated.”) All he said to Bernardo was not to cut his hair too short, and answered all his questions cheerfully.

  The first thing the barber inquired about was his health (he knew that Ernesto had been ill and wanted him to know that he knew it). After that he asked after the health of Signora Celestina and of his very old aunt. Then he told him that just the previous day Signor Giovanni had been in to have his beard trimmed. (He seemed to take pride in this.) He added that his uncle had spoken about Ernesto, lamenting that he was still a Socialist. Socialists, his uncle had said, were hated by everyone and would never amount to anything in the world. “Is what your uncle said about you true?” the barber asked, using the familiar tu. (Sometimes he used it, sometimes the more formal lei. He’d begun to use the formal address the first time the boy came into the shop wearing long pants. Occasionally he’d lapse into the old way, which Ernesto, who knew Bernardo forever, preferred.)

  “Yes, I’m still a Socialist,” he answered. “But I’m not a party member. I’m not old enough yet. But the Socialists have it right,” he added. “Anyway, I’d side with them even if they didn’t, just to spite my uncle.”

  Bernardo laughed. He knew Ernesto well enough not to take him seriously. The boy (as Bernardo knew) didn’t hate his uncle (he didn’t hate anyone yet). He was just afraid of him. He felt that his uncle didn’t love him (at least not very much) and, moreover, that he didn’t approve of him (perhaps he suspected something strange and forbidden about his nephew). And one aspect of Ernesto’s nature was a need to be appreciated and loved.

  “He also told me that you’re a poet. Is that true?”

  The boy blushed. “My uncle’s crazy,” he said. “He probably saw me reading a book of poems, so now he goes around saying I’m a poet.”

  “But you still play the violin,” Bernardo said, touching another of Ernesto’s sore points. “I hear you over here, and right away I say to Giacomini” (his assistant) “ ‘That’s our Ernesto practicing the violin.’ ”

  Ernesto was hoping for a word of praise. He would have given anything for it, though he knew he didn’t deserve it. Playing the violin had begun as one of his whims, but one in which he subsequently persisted. Having heard talk about violins and violinists (a famous Bohemian virtuoso was performing in Trieste then), the boy (fifteen years old at the time) had sold his stamp album without telling anyone, added some crowns to the five he’
d received for it, and bought a violin. He paid a teacher from the weekly allowance that he received from his uncle, and from the small sums he extorted with wheedling and promises from his old aunt. Aside from the fact that he had no ear for music, it was already too late (at least that’s what everyone told him) to begin studying an instrument that should be begun in earliest childhood.

  When his mother saw him arriving home with the violin under his arm, she’d shrugged her shoulders and aired her disapproval in words that did not augur well to the boy. His uncle, it turned out, disliked violins in general and his nephew’s in particular. He said that there was only one great violinist in the world: Paganini. And when he wanted to discourage Ernesto, he would laughingly call him “a fledgling Paganini.” (The derision with which his uncle delivered these words stung the boy more deeply than a slap in the face.) The only person who was not completely disapproving of the experiment was his old aunt. She would say that there were no difficulties that couldn’t be overcome with patience and will—that one can even acquire an ear for music with practice. And that perhaps one day Ernesto would play in an orchestra and earn a little something to supplement his clerk’s salary. But his aunt, in addition to being old, was a little deaf. The only work that Signora Celestina let her do at home was to wash the radicchio, which they ate in large amounts. Despite his meager progress, the boy persisted in studying his loved-and-hated violin. Sometimes he even dreamed of becoming a concert artist, of eventually becoming as famous as the Bohemian violinist whose triumphs he still followed in newspapers, and who had kindled in him what his uncle called “that fool notion.” But Ernesto was resolute on the subject. It was a miracle that, chatterbox that he was, he had never said a word about it to the man.

  By now, he was wishing that Bernardo would hurry up and get done, but the old barber showed no signs of hurry. He seemed to enjoy dragging out the process, which was a torture to Ernesto. And who’s to say—who will ever know—whether all that old gossip he too might have heard hadn’t transformed the boy, whose hair he was now cutting with special care, into his son.

  “Your uncle can’t stand Socialists,” he said. “He’s got too much money. Anyway, when he was young, he was for Garibaldi.”

  “If Garibaldi were alive today he’d be a Socialist,” Ernesto retorted. The idea wasn’t his. He’d recently read it in The Worker, had liked it and appropriated it for himself. Bernardo didn’t feel like contradicting him. Besides, he was almost done. When he did finish, or was just about to, he handed his young customer a mirror so that he could assess the barber’s handiwork and express his satisfaction. Ernesto barely glanced at it, then shut his eyes so as not to see himself looking, as he expected, worse than before. His neck, which the barber had shaved, felt unpleasantly chilled.

  “It’s very good, thanks,” he said, and had already risen to rush out of the chair (among other things, he was very hungry) when Bernardo brushed the back of his hand lightly across his cheek.

  “Hold on,” he said, “I feel a little beard here. If you wait a minute, I’ll have it off in a jiffy.”

  Ernesto didn’t have the courage to refuse. The truth is, he didn’t really have a beard, just some light fuzz, which could very well have remained on his still-unshaven cheeks. His intuitive reaction would have been to get up and get out quickly. But aside from being timid, he would have had to have some excuse and he didn’t have one, couldn’t even think of one. Then suddenly he thought of the man; saw him, off in the distance, looking as if he were weeping. In the meantime, Bernardo, unaware of his customer’s inner turmoil, had already soaped his cheeks and had very, very lightly drawn the razor over them. It was, after all, his profession. If there were no such things as beards, he would have invented them.

  Ernesto was finally free and got up from the chair. No one noticed the tears in his eyes. “Thank you,” he said once again and left the shop, forgetting—as he never had before—to pay. Bernardo, smiling contentedly and folding his towel, watched Ernesto cross the street as he fled home. His assistant (hoping for a tip) mentioned Ernesto’s forgetfulness, but Bernardo was clearly not going to call him back.

  “He’ll pay another time,” he said. “And if he doesn’t, so what?”

  A light breeze that had come up from the sea made the sensation of cold at the back of Ernesto’s neck and on his cheeks even more unpleasant. He felt as if he’d been left naked and couldn’t wait to be back home. He was hoping, even as he knew it was in vain, that his mother would comfort him.

  “Mama,” he said, sounding as if a great tragedy had befallen him, the moment his mother opened the door, “Bernardo shaved me.” But the woman didn’t perceive his distress, and it never occurred to her to utter a word of greeting, much less to kiss her son’s newly razored cheek.

  “Young men your age begin to grow beards,” she said. “It’s good that Bernardo shaved it. Let me see.”

  The words “young men” irked and depressed Ernesto. When he had been about thirteen or fourteen years old, he would have liked to be taken for a grown man and had badgered his mother to buy him a vest (like one a boy in his class had). Now, however, reading newspapers, he was pleased if a youth of his age was still referred to as a boy. If instead of saying “young men” his mother had said “boys,” he would have forgiven her insensitivity.

  “He was sneaky,” he said. “He tricked me—didn’t ask me if I wanted him to do it or not.”

  “Well, change your jacket,” his mother said, “and come right back and eat. I’ve made you some fugazette. Auntie and I are hungry. We’ve been waiting for you for over half an hour.”

  Not counting sweets, his mother’s fugazette were Ernesto’s favorite food. They were rounds of minced beef that Signora Celestina larded with slivers of garlic, then soaked in oil for twenty-four hours. They left specks of blood in the oil, and she would then fry them in the same oil. They were, in fact, meatballs, though flattened, but they must have contained a secret ingredient. They never tasted the same to Ernesto after his mother’s death, although shortly before she passed away, during a period of truce, Signora Celestina had given her daughter- in-law the recipe.

  Until he was thirteen years old, Ernesto had been served only one; afterward he got a second as large as the first. He could eat three, perhaps even four, but that day he could barely taste any of his food. He ate in silence, then immediately withdrew to his room, the only one in the house with a sloping roof, where he threw himself down on the brass bed to brood on his unhappiness. The blackbird, accustomed to being released and to having its bath at that time of day, began hopping restlessly from perch to perch, and calling to Ernesto to open the cage.

  “If only I could lose my virginity today, right now, immediately!” was the conclusion of Ernesto’s melancholy brooding. Gone was the promise he’d made to himself not to have women before he was eighteen or nineteen. With a sense of regret he recalled all the friends who had already done so and had bragged about it to him. They had told him all they knew on the subject and were lavish with details. Even a cousin his own age (well, not exactly, he was three months older than Ernesto) had already done it—more than once, if you could believe him.

  “Why him and not me?” Ernesto thought. What he had done with the man didn’t count. Life, in that sense, began the day a boy had a woman for the first time. True, there were certain kinds of diseases (his friends had told him about them, too—one of the boys even boasted that he’d already contracted one). But Ernesto wasn’t afraid of diseases at that moment, at least those that you can get from women. There had been a time, however, when he was convinced that he would die of tuberculosis before he got to be twenty. It was the result of a campaign newspapers were running against “the merciless evil,” which had terrified readers, especially young ones, by suggesting precautions and treatments to which only the wealthy had recourse in that era. Everyone else (and Ernesto counted himself among those others) was going to die. His obsession lasted two or three months. Then he stopped thinki
ng about it. It was the violin—his preoccupation with the violin—that had cured him. And after that, his friendship with the man.

  He had another problem, too. He knew he was incapable of saying no, especially to a woman. Consequently, if he went to a brothel he would have to say yes to the first woman offered him. What if she didn’t appeal to him? If he’d rather have someone else? How would he have the nerve to afflict a poor, unfortunate woman (The Worker had taught him that prostitutes were poor unfortunate victims of bourgeois prejudice) with the shame of a refusal? Ernesto had not yet reached the age of aesthetic sensibility (he would reach it shortly—but by other ways and other means). His preferences were dictated solely by his sensuality at a given moment. And as we’ve seen, this sensuality was very changeable—even uncertain in terms of its objectives. For example, it never occurred to him to wonder whether the man was handsome or ugly. He had responded to him for reasons that had nothing to do with aesthetics. He wanted to be loved and the man loved him. (Of course, there were other reasons, too, deeper ones, but the boy wasn’t aware of them.) True, a prostitute wasn’t going to love him. He knew that. If she went with him, it was for the money. And she’d prefer an old man, someone like Signor Wilder from whom she could get, or at least hope for, a good tip. This matter of making a choice (or rather of not making one) was a major difficulty rooted in his character.

  But fate was once again to favor him. There was a woman in the old city who practiced the profession on her own (perhaps secretly, meaning without police authorization). Ernesto had seen her often at her window. One day he even thought she’d smiled at him. She lived on the second floor of an old building in a part of town where brothels were permitted. A friend had told him her price (a florin). But Ernesto didn’t know which door was hers. If he knocked at the wrong door, what would he say to whoever opened it? He imagined—who knows why—an old woman holding a broom, who, on hearing what he wanted, would chase him into the street shrieking insults and humiliating him in front of everybody. Worse, his uncle (who, fearing solitary vices in his nephew, was giving him weekly gifts for just this purpose though, alas, without actually stating his reason) owned shops on a street not far from the brothels. What if his uncle happened to pass by and witness the scene? He was capable of smacking Ernesto in public, grabbing his arm so that he couldn’t escape, then dragging him home, and telling his mother everything right off. Ernesto had no doubt she would immediately start crying, maybe faint, or even die right there with the shame of having such a son.