Not more than sixteen or so, she had the look of a country girl, with her pink-and-white complexion, her eyes dark under the well-marked brows, and two soft, black braids of hair falling onto her ample breasts.
“You must be the Anfossi brothers,” she offered.
Cunning little bitch, Quinto said to himself, false as hell, with her nose in the air and that butter-wouldn’t-melt expression.
Ampelio’s joke might have seemed designed to pave the way for an improbable exchange of pleasantries with the girl, but he at once resumed his usual dry manner as though he had gone too far. He asked about the building sites where Caisotti might be found, said good-bye and went down the narrow stairs. But at the bottom he produced one more unlikely witticism. “Ciao, bella!” he cried.
On his way down, Quinto turned around and saw that the girl had not yet shut the door. She was looking down through her heavy lashes and smiling in a curious way. He had the impression that behind that country-girl face of hers, Caisotti was staring at them in his enigmatic fashion.
“Not bad, the girl, eh?” he said, wanting to talk about her.
“Mmm,” Ampelio said, as though avoiding an indelicate topic.
They went to one of the places she had suggested, where Caisotti’s firm was putting up a new house, or rather adding new floors to an existing two-story house. It was in one of the main streets and the addition would fill the gap between two large buildings.
They went in. There were mounds of cement all over the place, but no sign of men at work. The staircase was not in yet, so Quinto and Ampelio had to climb up on some sloping planks. “Hey! Anybody about? Caisotti! Is the boss here?” Their voices re-echoed between the bare walls.
On the third floor two workmen were crouching down, banging away at chisels. They had the air of people doing something they know to be useless. The two brothers at once stopped shouting and asked, almost in a whisper, “Isn’t Caisotti here?” “No.” “Hasn’t he come yet?” “We don’t know.” “Is the foreman here?” “Next floor up.” Quinto and Ampelio went up.
On this floor the walls were in place, but the roof and the floor were lacking. The doors opened onto empty space. A kind of wild gaiety came over the pair of them. Haie! they whooped at each other, haie! as they climbed along the planks of the scaffolding with arms extended, like tightrope walkers.
There was a noise of scraping shoes. A narrow plank spanned the open floor of a room, resting on the doorsteps at each side. And there, outlined against the doorway, as though in hiding, was Caisotti.
They calmed down, feeling rather silly. “Ah, Caisotti, hello there, we were just looking for you.” The man’s heavy bulk blocked the frame of the doorway on which the narrow plank lay. He stood there with his hands in his pockets, giving no sign of recognition. Quinto went forward a few steps along the plank, then paused as he felt it bend beneath him. He was waiting for Caisotti to do something, at least put a foot on his end of the plank to keep it steady, but no, he said nothing, did nothing. Suspended there in space, Quinto, simply to break the silence, said, “I want you to meet my brother, Ampelio.” Caisotti took one hand out of his pocket and bringing it up to the peak of his cap, struck it with the flat of his hand. Quinto turned around toward his brother, slowly, so as not to start the plank wobbling, and noticed that he was responding to Caisotti’s gesture with precisely the same gesture. They both looked serious.
“Don’t go there; you’ll fall,” Caisotti said slowly. Then: “If you’ll both go down, I’ll be with you.”
They went to the Caffè Melina and sat at a noisy table on the sidewalk. Caisotti wanted to buy the drinks. “A Punt e Mes?” Ampelio took Punt e Mes. Quinto, who suffered from stomach trouble, ordered a rabarbaro, though secretly convinced that rabarbaro was bad for him too. Ampelio offered Caisotti a cigarette. Quinto didn’t smoke. The two men were perfectly at ease with each other and Quinto felt rather jealous.
Caisotti was repeating to Ampelio everything he had said to Signora Anfossi and Quinto, interjecting remarks like “As I had the pleasure of saying to your mother,” or “You’re an engineer, sir; I don’t have to explain this to you.” Ampelio had his degree in chemistry, but he raised no objection. He listened in silence, the cigarette dangling from his black beard, eyes half shut behind the thick lenses. He asked a question now and then, but casually, as one professional to another, and not, or so it seemed, with anything of Quinto’s nagging compulsion to show himself well informed and on his guard.
Indeed, when Quinto raised an objection, Caisotti turned to Ampelio with that plaintive air of his, as though he were asking for protection. “Of course you understand that your brother’s point –”
“No, no, Caisotti!” Quinto broke in, to cover himself. Ampelio’s only response was a broad gesture, brushing the surface of the table as though to clear away side issues and get back to the heart of the matter.
Caisotti would obviously have liked to go on playing the victim, but his heart was no longer in it. Instead he remarked, still to Ampelio, “You’re the elder brother, sir, and you understand –”
“No, look here, I’m the elder brother,” Quinto interrupted, feeling slightly embarrassed. Caisotti nonetheless continued to treat Ampelio with markedly greater respect.
“And if you tell me that on your side you want a space between the floors, fine, I’ll see you have your space.”
“It’s you who need the space,” Ampelio said, “to avoid dampness in your ground floor.”
“I need the space, certainly I need it, but tell me this, please: won’t I sell the ground floor just as well without the space, whereas if you should decide one day to build on the site next to me, you’d find the space very handy.”
Quinto looked at Ampelio. Slowly he blew a cloud of smoke. He waited until the smoke had drifted away, then said, “And what if we were to build together?”
There was a tiny movement of Caisotti’s fingers as he knocked the ash off his cigarette; his eyes were moist, like someone looking into the distance to banish some remote excitement, but at the same time they came to a sharp point and the wrinkles thickened around his lids.
“I’d say we could get along very nicely.”
9
Ampelio considered that they ought not to let themselves be influenced by unfavorable reports on Caisotti. “You know how it is here. All you ever hear about people is gossip. Someone new makes his mark and gets ahead, and at once the whole pack is tearing him to bits.”
Canal came near to doing just that. “Go into partnership with Caisotti? You two, your mother? With that crooked, loose-living peasant! The way he drags that girl around with him. . . .”
“We saw the girl,” Quinto said, instantly distracted by a facile curiosity. “What about her? Who is she? She looks as though she came from the country.” He glanced at Ampelio as though asking his support. I told you what they’re like, Ampelio’s expression seemed to say.
“She does,” Canal said. “He brought her with him from the village where he used to live – he’s got a wife and children up there.”
“You mean . . . ?”
“I don’t mean anything, I don’t know anything about them and I don’t want to. There’s something dirty about the whole setup.”
Quinto described his impression, on first seeing the girl, that there was some resemblance between her and Caisotti, all the more disturbing because it wasn’t a physical or external resemblance.
“I wouldn’t doubt it,” Canal said.
“How do you mean? The idea of him and that girl . . . she’s barely sixteen . . . with a man who might be her father. . . .”
“Oh, he’s got lots of children. He left home because he’d filled the whole valley with his bastards.”
“You think she’s his illegitimate daughter?” Quinto said, but he felt that the moment had come to react against this gossipy curiosity and show himself in his true colors, a man of the world with no provincial prejudices. “And what if she is, what’s the harm? A
ll right, so he’s got an illegitimate daughter, and instead of abandoning her he finds her a job and keeps her with him. Is that any reason to stick your knife in him?”
“Oh, I know nothing about it, I assure you.”
“And if she were his mistress and not his daughter, what would be the harm in that? He likes girls, they get on well together. . . . Why do you people always have to split hairs?”
“It doesn’t matter to me what she is. She may be his daughter or his girl friend – or both at the same time, for all I care!”
“How about getting back to the contract?” Ampelio suggested.
It was a bright, cool afternoon, the kind of weather that makes you feel ready for anything. After their meeting with Caisotti, the two brothers had gone at once to see Canal, their lawyer. They had had to wait since Canal was busy with clients, but this in no way diminished their excitement and they had sat in the waiting room putting the finishing touches to their project. They spoke in broken snatches to prevent anyone understanding what they were talking about. From Canal’s office came the sounds of a noisy argument in dialect; he had taken over an old-fashioned clientele of country people, small proprietors doggedly pursuing trivial, interminable suits concerning wills or disputed boundaries. For the first time Quinto did not feel guilty at the distance between himself and this ancestral world; he belonged now to another world from which he could look back on the old one with a superior irony. He was one of the new men, who had thrown off the old-fashioned prejudices, who were used to handling money.
Canal, however, had no sooner heard their schemes than he sat up in his chair in alarm. “But you’re crazy! You and Caisotti? Why, he’ll spit you like a pair of thrushes!”
Quinto smiled. “Steady, now. Let’s wait and see who’s going to be the thrush, shall we? The deal is entirely in our favor.”
“And Caisotti agrees? You don’t say!”
Quinto kept on smiling. “Caisotti agrees. We’ve just seen him about it.”
“But you’re mad. Go into business with Caisotti! You and your mother!” And so it went on.
“Listen,” Quinto said. In explaining the affair to Canal he had adopted an air of indulgent patience, like a grown-up son explaining something to his father, who thinks he is still a child. Resentment at not being taken seriously is never, on such occasions, far below the surface.
Quinto explained that Caisotti was prepared to buy the two sites, paying partly in cash (which would allow them to settle their back taxes) and partly in apartments (which would mean turning an unproductive asset into a profitable source of income, at no cost to themselves). Quinto appeared to be more and more amused by Canal’s objections, and even to go out of his way to provoke him. Every new angle that came up made the game more difficult and exciting, and served to put their skill to the test. Quinto had great confidence in Canal and was delighted to give him so complicated a case and to see how skillfully he handled it. Ampelio, on the other hand, was irritated by the way the lawyer kept raising difficulties; it struck him as mere defeatism. It was not that he trusted Caisotti or that he thought their project foolproof, but rather that Canal’s scruples went against the brisk, almost aggressive spirit with which he had thrown himself into the affair. He was convinced that it was one of those things that you either handled resolutely, in the way people do who set a dozen such deals going every day and then let them take their own course; or else you got bogged down in ifs and buts, and then the whole thing became an interminable bore. And in that case, God, why start it in the first place?
He was on his feet, smoking, and from the dry, ironical way he spoke he seemed to have grown more pessimistic about the affair than Canal, and he started attacking Quinto. Deprived of his brother’s support, Quinto began to hesitate. Of course, if the outlook was really so uncertain, perhaps the best course was to back out and return to their original project – sell the flowerpottery and leave it at that.
But now it was Canal who wanted to go ahead. As he studied the clauses of the proposed contract, he began to enjoy the prospect of anticipating all the ways in which Caisotti might wriggle out of his obligations and to arm himself with more involved clauses, precautions, restraints, guarantees of every description. He was grimacing and rolling his eyes, running a hand through his disorderly hair, speckling the papers on the desk with marginal notes. “I’ll draw you up a contract designed especially for Caisotti, one that won’t give an inch. He won’t have a hope in hell of getting out of it.” He giggled as he sat there bent double, imagining a contract as spiky as a porcupine.
Then, with a sceptical shrug, he added, “Insofar as contracts ever really hold, of course.”
10
It began during the period of plans, blueprints, estimates. The key man now was Travaglia.
Travaglia was one of the busiest construction engineers in town and he couldn’t spare Quinto and Ampelio much time. They conducted their business through brief, harassed sessions while construction plans were unrolled and spread out on the table and Travaglia answered the telephone and cursed his surveyors.
Travaglia did everything by fits and starts, now issuing a spate of orders, now sitting at his desk tracing lines with a ruler, now scrapping everything and making a clean start. But then, every so often, he would raise his clear eyes, smile, stretch his arms down his heavy body, and be perfectly at peace, as though vistas of endless leisure stretched out ahead of him. He was a fat man, but he sat perched on the high swivel stool by the drawing table; he laughed, staring into the distance. “Do either of you two have the faintest idea what a construction contract is?” His manner was protective, contemptuous, artful. His weight and his early baldness gave him an air of maturity, an authoritative appearance which he put to full use. The Anfossi brothers, who lived from hand to mouth and pursued vague ambitions quite out of their reach, represented in Travaglia’s eyes a way of life which he had rejected at the start of his career: the life of art, of science, and to some extent of political ideas as well. And he’d been right to reject them, he assured himself as he looked at them: never getting ahead, making no sort of position for themselves. Quinto, a man still without arts or parts; Ampelio, a dishwasher in some university laboratory who might get a chair at the age of sixty. A pair of failures, there was no longer any doubt about it. As he looked at them, he felt more than ever satisfied with himself, and in dealing with them he paraded his own philosophy of life, that of the practical man who puts first things first. But there was something else in his attitude, a note of violence, a sort of aggressive irritation which the Anfossis always aroused in him. “Because, after all, damn it, I like the poor devils! And I’m the only person who understands them.”
They were looking at some accounts. Travaglia raised his head and studied the pair of them, then broke into one of his tired, silent laughs. “Tell me,” he said, “just tell me one thing: who put you up to this?”
“You don’t need to say any more – you’ve had enough of us for today. We’ll be back tomorrow. We’ll tackle the question on our own.” The Anfossis were on their way to the door.
“Hey!” cried Travaglia, running after them. “You don’t think I’d let you go it alone! That fellow Caisotti would swallow you in one mouthful, you poor innocents. You stay where you are. Let’s see now, where were we?”
They had to send the surveyor to ask Caisotti about something marked on the plan. His office was not far from Travaglia’s. The man returned with the news that he wasn’t there. “I asked the girl –”
“Ah, the girl. . . .” Travaglia sniggered.
“She said she didn’t know.”
“That girl doesn’t even know where her – But she was there when we saw it. Go back and tell her it’s on the table; it was there this morning and it must be there now.”
Ampelio had been sitting in his raincoat, his beard sunk on his chest, not saying anything. Suddenly he stood up and said, “I’ll go.”
Travaglia gave another of his silent laughs, another s
tare at nothing, as though he had something in mind that he couldn’t put into words.
Quinto was confused. After a while, he said, “I don’t understand; you wanted Ampelio to go there to . . .”
“What?” Travaglia was already thinking about something else. They started checking the figures.
Ampelio was back in twenty minutes. He stood there stiffly without saying anything.
“Well?”
“We’ll have to go to the site. There’s a mistake in the plan.”
In the end they all went. The flowerpottery and the part of the garden with the forget-me-not bed were in a state of confusion; Signora Anfossi had started to transplant her flowers. It was a fine day and under the warm sun flowers and leaves took on an air of luxuriant gaiety. Quinto had never realized that so intense and various a life flourished within that narrow space, and now, at the thought that it was all to die and be replaced by a structure of bricks and girders, he was overcome by a sense of sadness, a fondness even for the weeds and nettles, which was almost repentance. The other two, however, seemed merely to be enjoying the pleasant weather. Travaglia had been wearing a hat, but feeling the heat he had taken it off and was carrying it in his hand; it had marked his forehead with a red, sweaty line. Before long he began to feel the sun on his bald head and he put his hat on again, but on the back of his head, which gave him a gay, Sunday air. Ampelio had finally removed his unseasonable raincoat and was carrying it, neatly folded, over one shoulder. They were measuring a section of the site where the boundary line curved in. Quinto left them to it. Travaglia, although he was working, was in one of his periods of contemplative calm. “What are these called?” he asked Ampelio, pushing aside some plants with his fingers. Ampelio answered with an air of vigorous authority that surprised Quinto, who had not realized his brother took any interest in flowers.
Difficult Loves Page 21