Raceni did not reply. He crossed one leg over the other; he looked up at the ceiling; he closed his eyes.
“Oh, no, darling!” Signora Barmis exclaimed. “We’ll get nothing done like that. You came to me for help. First you have to satisfy my curiosity.”
“Well, I’m sorry!” Raceni snorted again, relaxing somewhat. “Those are some questions you’re asking!”
“I understand,” Signora Barmis said. “It’s either one thing or the other: either you truly are in love or she must be really ugly, as they say in Milan. Come on now, tell me: how does she dress? Badly, without a doubt!”
“Rather badly. Inexperienced, you understand.”
“I see, I see,” repeated Signora Barmis. “Shall we say a ruffled duckling?”
She opened her mouth, wrinkled her nose, and pretended to laugh, with her throat.
“Wait,” she went over to him. “You’re losing your pin. My goodness, how have you knotted this tie?”
“Oh,” Raceni began. “With all that …”
He stopped. Dora’s face was too close. Concentrating on his tie, she felt herself being watched. When she finished she gave him a little tap on his nose, and with an indefinable smile: “Well, then?” she asked him. “We were saying … ah, Signora Roncella! You don’t like duckling? Little monkey, then.”
“You’re wrong,” retorted Raceni. “She’s pretty enough, I assure you. Not striking, perhaps; but her eyes are exceptional!”
“Dark?”
“No, blue, intense, very gentle. And a sad smile, intelligent. She must be very very nice, that’s all.”
Dora Barmis attacked: “Nice you said? Nice? Go on! The person who wrote House of Dwarves can’t be nice, I assure you.”
“And yet …” Raceni said.
“I assure you!” Dora repeated. “That woman goes well armed, you can be certain!”
Raceni smiled.
“She must have a character sharp as a knife,” continued Signora Barmis. “And tell me, is it true she has a hairy wart here, on her lip?”
“A wart?”
“Hairy, here.”
“I never noticed one. But no, who told you that?”
“I imagined it. As far as I’m concerned, Roncella must have a hairy wart on her lip. I always seem to see it when I read her things. And tell me: her husband? What’s her husband like?”
“Just drop it!” Raceni replied impatiently. “He’s not for you.”
“Thank you very much!” Dora said. “I want to know what he’s like. I imagine him rotund… . Rotund, isn’t he? For heaven’s sake, tell me he’s rotund, blond, ruddy, and … not mean.”
“All right: that’s the way he’ll be, if it makes you happy. Now, please, can’t we be serious?”
“About the banquet?” Signora Barmis asked again. “Listen, darling: Silvia Roncella is no longer for us. Your little dove has flown too too high. She has crossed the Alps and the sea and will go to make herself a nest far far away, with many golden straws, in the great literary journals of France, Germany, and England…. How can you expect her to lay any more little blue eggs, even if very tiny ones, like this … on the altar of our poor Muses?”
“What eggs! What eggs!” Raceni said, shaking himself. “Not dove eggs, not an ostrich egg. Signora Roncella wont write for any magazine again. She’s devoting herself entirely to the theater.”
“To the theater? Really?” exclaimed Signora Barmis, her curiosity aroused.
“Not to act!” Raceni said. “That would be the last straw! To write.”
“For the theater?”
“Yes. Because her husband …”
“Right! Her husband … what’s his name?”
“Boggiolo.”
“Yes, yes. I remember. Boggiolo. And he writes, too.”
“Hardly! He’s at the Notary Public Office.”
“A notary? Oh, dear! A notary?”
“In a record office. A fine young man. Stop it, please. I want to finish with this business of the banquet as quickly as possible. I had a guest list, and those dogs … But let’s see if we can reconstruct it. You write. By the way, did you know that Gueli has accepted? It’s the clearest proof he really admires Signora Roncella, as they say.”
Dora Barmis was absorbed in thought; then she said: “I don’t understand… . Gueli… he seems so different… .”
“Let’s not argue,” Raceni cut her off. “Write: Maurizio Gueli.”
“I’ll add in parenthesis, if you don’t mind, Signora Frezzi permitting. Next?”
“Senator Borghi.”
“Has he accepted?”
“Good heavens. He’ll be presiding! He published House of Dwarves in his literary review. Write: Donna Francesca Lampugnani.”
“My lovely president, yes, yes,” Signora Barmis said as she wrote. “Dear, dear, dear . ..”
“Donna Maria Rosa Bornè-Laturzi,” Raceni continued to dictate.
“Oh, God!” snorted Dora Barmis. “That virtuous little guinea hen?”
“And decorative,” Raceni said. “Write: Filiberto Litti.”
“Very good! It gets better and better!” Signora Barmis approved. “Archaeology next to antiquity! Tell me, Raceni: we’re having this banquet in the ruins of the Forum?”
“By the way!” exclaimed Raceni. “We still have to decide where to have it. Where would you suggest?”
“But with these guests …”
“Oh, God, no, I say again, let’s be serious! I was thinking of the Caffe di Roma.”
“In the evening? No! It’s spring. We need to have it during the day, in a beautiful place, outside… Wait: at the Castello di Costantino. That’s it. Delightful. In the glassed-in hall, with the whole countryside in view … the Albani mountains … the Castelli romani … and then, opposite, the Palatine … Yes, yes, there … it’s enchanting! Without a doubt!”
“I’m for the Castello di Costantino,” Raceni said. “Let’s go there tomorrow to make the arrangements. I think we’ll be about thirty. Listen, Giustino has been particularly insistent… .”
“Who is Giustino?”
“Her husband, I told you, Giustino Boggiolo. He’s insisting on the press. He would like a lot of journalists. I invited Lampini… .”
“Ah, Ciceroncino, bravo!”
“And I think another four or five, I don’t know: Bardozzi, Centanni, Federici, and … what’s his name? the one who writes for the Capitate… .”
“Mola?”
“Mola. Write it down. We need some others who are a little more … a little more … With Gueli coming, you understand. For example, Casimiro Luna.”
“Wait a minute,” Signora Barmis said, “if Donna Francesca Lampugnani comes, it won’t be difficult to get Betti.”
“But Betti gave The House of Dwarves a bad review. Have you seen it?” Raceni asked.
“What does that matter? It’s even better. Invite him! I’ll speak to Donna Francesca. As for Miro Luna, I hope to bring him along with me.”
“You’ll make Boggiolo happy, really happy! Now write down the Honorable Carpi, and that little cripple … the poet …”
“Zago, yes! Poor little dear! What beautiful poems he writes. I love him, don’t you know? Look at his portrait there. I made him give it to me. Doesn’t he look like Leopardi with glasses?”
“Faustino Toronti,” Raceni continued dictating. “And Jacono …”
“No!” shouted Dora Barmis, throwing down her pen. “You’ve invited that dreadful Neapolitan Raimondo Jacono? Then I’m not coming!”
“Calm down. I had to,” Raceni replied regretfully. “He was with Zago…. If I invited one I had to invite the other.”
“Well, then, I insist on Flavia Morlacchi,” Signora Barmis said. “There: Fla-vi-a Morlacchi. Flavia’s not her real name. Her name’s Gaetana, Gaetana.”
“That’s what Jacono says!” smiled Raceni. “After the tiff.”
“Tiff?” Signora Barmis replied. “But they beat each other with sticks, darling! They spat in
each other’s faces, the watchmen came running… .”
Signora Barmis and Raceni reread the list, taking their time over this or that name, as if honing their list to a fine point on a grinder as they sharpened their tongues, which hardly needed it. Finally, a large fly quietly sleeping on a door woke up and zoomed in to make a third in the conversation. Dora reacted with terror–more than disgust, real terror. First she grabbed Raceni, holding him tight, her fragrant hair beneath his chin; then she ran to the alcove, shouting to Raceni behind the door that she wouldn’t come back in the room until he chased the fly out the window or killed the horrible beast.
“I’ll leave you there and be on my way,” Raceni said calmly, taking the new list from the desk.
“No, Raceni, for heaven’s sake!” Dora entreated from the other side.
“Well, open the door then!”
“There, I opened it, but you … Oh! what are you doing?”
“One kiss,” said Raceni, his foot holding the door open the crack allowed by Dora. “Just one …”
“What’s got into you?” she shouted, straining to close the door again.
“Just a little one,” he insisted. “I’ve practically come from a war…. A tiny reward, from there, come on … just one!”
“The fly might come in. Oh, dear, Raceni!”
“Well, do it quickly!”
Through the crack in the door their two mouths met and the opening gradually widened, when they heard the newsboy’s cry in the street outside: “Third edition! Four dead and twenty wounded! Clash with the military! Assault on Palazzo Braschiiii! Bloodshed on Piazza Navonaaaa!”
Attilio Raceni withdrew from the kiss, ashen: “Did you hear? Four dead. For God’s sake! Don’t they have anything to do? And I could have been there smack in the middle… .”
4
It had already struck twelve and only five of the thirty guests who should be coming to the banquet at Castello di Costantino had arrived. These five secretly regretted their punctuality, fearing it might make them seem overanxious or too accommodating.
First to come had been Flavia Morlacchi, poet, novelist, and playwright. After the other four arrived they left her alone, standing to one side. They were the old professor of archaeology and forgotten poet Filiberto Litti; the short-story writer from Piacenza, Faustino Toronti, affected and chaste; the overweight Neapolitan novelist Raimondo Jacono, and the Venetian poet Cosimo Zago, rickety and lame in one foot. All five stood on the terrace in front of the glassed-in hall.
Filiberto Litti was tall, thin, wooden, with a large white mustache and a smudge of hair between his lower lip and chin, and a pair of enormous fleshy, purple ears. He was speaking, stammering a little, about the ruins there on the Palatine (as if they belonged to him) with Faustino Toronti, also elderly, but less obviously so with his hair, combed over his ears and dyed mustache. Raimondo Jacono, his back to Signora Morlacchi, was compassionately watching Zago admire the cool green countryside there before them on that sweet April day.
The poor fellow had just arrived at the terrace railing, still wearing an old overcoat green with age that billowed around his neck. He placed a large-knuckled hand on the decorative top of the railing, his fingernails pink and deformed by the continual pressure on his crutch. Now, his sorrowful eyes closed behind his glasses, he repeated, as though he had never in his life enjoyed such a feast of light and color: “How enchanting! How intoxicating, this sun! What a view!”
“Yes, indeed,” ruminated Jacono. “Very beautiful. Marvelous. A pity that …”
“Those mountains over there, aerial… almost fragile … Are they still the Albani?’’
“Apennines or Albani, don’t faint! You can ask Professor Litti over there. He’s an archaeologist.”
“And … and, excuse me, what do the mountains have to do with … with archaeology?” Litti asked a little resentfully.
“Professor, what are you saying!” exclaimed the Neapolitan. “Monuments of nature, of the most venerable antiquity. It’s a shame that … I was saying … It’s twelve-thirty, my oh my! I’m hungry.”
Signora Morlacchi grimaced in disgust from where she stood. She seethed in silence as she pretended to be enchanted by the marvelous landscape. The Apennines or the Albani? She didn’t know either, but why was the name important? No one understood “azure” poetry better than she. And she asked herself if the word for the Roman burial niche, columbarium … the austere columbarium, wouldn’t successfully capture the image of those Palatine ruins: blind eyes, shadowy eyes of the fierce and glorious ghost of ancient Rome, still vainly gazing there from the hill on the spectacle of the green bewitching life of this April from a far distant time.
Of this April from a far distant time …
Nice line! Dreamlike . ..
And she lowered her large, heavy eyelids over her gloomy, pale eyes, like those of a dying goat. There. She had managed to pluck the flower of a beautiful image from nature and history. Because of this she no longer regretted having lowered herself to honor Silvia Roncella, so much younger than herself, almost a beginner still, uncultured, totally unpoetic.
While thinking such thoughts, with a gesture of disdain, she turned her pale, coarse, worn face, with violently contrasting thick painted lips, toward those four, who were paying no attention to her. She straightened her back and lifted a hand overloaded with rings to lightly pat the strawlike fringe on her forehead.
Perhaps Zago was also pondering a poem, pinching the bristly black hairs under his lip. But in order to create he first needed to know many things. However, he no longer wanted to ask anything of that Neapolitan who, before such a spectacle as that, said he was hungry.
Coming in with his customary hop and skip was the young journalist Tito Lampini–Ciceroncino, as they called him, also the author of a small volume of poems. Skinny, with a lean, almost bald head on a swanlike neck, protected by a button-on collar at least eight inches high.
Signora Morlacchi waylaid him in a shrill voice: “What kind of treatment is this, Lampini? They said it was at noon; in a moment it will be one; no one is here… .”
Lampini bowed, opened his arms, turned smiling to the other four, and said: “Excuse me, but what do I have to do with it, Signora?”
“I know you have nothing to do with it,” Signora Morlacchi continued. “But at least Raceni, as organizer of the banquet …”
“Yes, as the … archae … archaeo-logician.” Lampini concluded his word play shyly, hand over his mouth, looking at the archaeologist, Professor Litti.
“Yes, all right. But he should be here, it seems to me. It’s not very pleasant, that’s all.”
“You’re right, it’s unpleasant, yes! But I don’t know, I have nothing to do with it. I’m a guest like you, Signora. Will you excuse me?” And with a hasty bow, Lampini went to shake hands with Litti, Toronti, Jacono. He didn’t know Zago.
“I came in a carriage, afraid of being late,” he announced. “But others are coming. I saw Donna Francesca Lampugnani and Betti, and also Signora Barmis with Casimiro Luna coming up the hill.”
He looked in the glassed-in hall where the long table was already set, decorated with flowers and a spiral of ivy snaking round. Then he turned again to Signora Morlacchi, sorry that she was by herself, and said: “But Signora, excuse me, why …”
Raimondo Jacono interrupted him in time: “Tell us, Lampini, you always keep up with the latest: have you seen Signora Roncella?”
“No. It’s not true that I always keep up with the latest. I haven’t yet had the pleasure and honor.”
And Lampini, bowing a third time, sent a kind smile Morlacchi’s way.
“Very young?” asked Filiberto Litti, bending and looking surreptitiously at one of his very long, false-looking mustaches that seemed stuck to his wooden face.
“Twenty-four years old, they say,” Faustino Toronti replied.
“Does she also write poetry?” Litti asked, looking down at his other mustache.
“No, than
k your stars!” Jacono shouted. “Professor, do you want to kill us off? Another poetess in Italy? Tell us, tell us, Lampini, and the husband?”
“Yes, the husband. Yes,” said Lampini. “He came to the office last week to get a copy of the newspaper with Betti’s article about The House of Dwarves.”
“What’s his name?”
“The husband’s? I don’t know.”
“I think I understood Bóggiolo,” Toronti said. “Or Boggiòlo. Something like that.”
“A little plump, nice looking enough,” added Lampini. “Gold-rimmed glasses. Short, square, blond beard. And he must have beautiful penmanship. You can tell it from his mustache.”
The four men laughed. Signora Morlacchi also smiled from afar in spite of herself.
They came onto the terrace, heaving a great sigh of relief–Marchesa Donna Francesca Lampugnani, tall, stately, as though she carried on her magnificent bosom a card with the title President of the Ladies’ Culture Club, and her handsome knight-errant, Riccardo Betti. In his rather dreamy expression, in his half-smiles under his sparse very blond mustache and in his gestures and dress, just as in his prose and articles, he affected the dignity, the moderation, the correctness, the manners of the … no, du vrai monde.
Betti, just as Casimiro Luna, had come only to accommodate Donna Francesca, who, in her position as President of the Ladies’ Culture Club, could not miss that banquet. They belonged to another intellectual climate, the cream of journalism; they would never condescend to attend a gathering of literati. Betti made it very clear. On the other hand, Casimiro Luna, of a more jovial nature, erupted noisily onto the terrace with Dora Barmis. Passing through the entrance, he had made crude remarks about the large keyhole of the Castello di Costantino and of the enormous cardboard key put there for a joke. She laughed, pretending to be scandalized, and appealed to the Marchesa for help, and then, in her Italian that she wanted to seem French at all costs:
“You are abominable,” she protested, “absolutely abominable, Luna! What is this continual, odious persiflage?”
After this outburst she alone among the four new arrivals approached Signora Morlacchi and dragged her forcibly into the group, not wanting to miss any of “terrible” Luna’s other suggestive remarks.
Her Husband Page 2