Quinto shut the door and went downstairs, black with rage. He could have killed the man. To start an affair of this sort, here in the house, with somebody in Caisotti’s pay – just when their business relations were in such a delicate phase . . . To go upstairs at the double with that sanctimonious little tramp . . . Ampelio didn’t give a hang for the project. He left him all the responsibilities and headaches, and when he did show up, he started criticizing. And there he was upstairs, having himself a good time, leaving his fool of a brother to ransack his drawers. They were probably laughing at him, sending him to look for papers that quite likely had no importance whatever! He didn’t put it past that slut. Always “Yes, sir,” “No, sir,” with him, demure as could be; but when Ampelio showed up, it was hoop-la! Or maybe Caisotti had sent her, to fool them. If so, it was clear why he hadn’t told her to try her tricks on him; she wouldn’t have had a hope in hell there! But even so, loosing her on Ampelio wasn’t really very clever. It was a filthy trick though, a filthy trick. And what was he supposed to do? Turn down the sheets for them?
Quinto was on his way out when the doorbell rang. It was Caisotti. He needed some details, he said; they wanted them at City Hall. . . . But was it really so urgent? There was something furtive in his manner that was unlike his usual wariness; he seemed anxious, unsure of himself. Quinto took him into the study and showed him the papers that his secretary had brought; he told him she had been looking for him. “Oh, she was here, was she? Where is she?” “Why? Didn’t you send her?” “Of course I sent her,” Caisotti said, “but she had some other things to do as well. There was something I wanted to tell her. Where is she?” Quinto shrugged. “How do I know? I suppose she’s gone back.” “In that case, I’d have met her.” Caisotti looked around toward the other rooms and the staircase, like a baffled animal.
“I suppose she went another way. Where do you imagine she is?”
It looked in fact as though Caisotti had followed her up to the villa, and not seeing her reappear, had come after her. He made one excuse after another to stay; his tone was conciliating, he made concessions, and even went so far as to propose some improvements in the building – at no extra cost. And all the time with that wary, uncertain look, searching Quinto’s face as though waiting for him to give himself away. At times it looked as though the uneasiness that kept him there was going to harden into some barely controllable violence. The slack muscles of his pale face grew taut, the blood showed through his clenched knuckles, the shark mouth twisted into a nervous, ingratiating grimace that seemed the prelude to some wild outburst. Quinto was annoyed at being stuck there with Caisotti and having to shield his brother and that tart upstairs. His resentment against Ampelio made him side with Caisotti; and at the same time he was aware that this was the right moment to force him to make important concessions. He was never going to have the man in his hands again like this, but on the spur of the moment he could remember nothing useful to ask him. Irritated at not being able to show that he was on his side, he could think of no way out except to persuade him to come and take a look at the site to see how the work was getting on.
Caisotti went with him reluctantly, taking care to keep the villa, and especially the garden gate, well in sight. They climbed up the gangplank, onto the second floor, where the cement was still wet. Quinto examined the angles of the walls and the doors. “This wall ought to be thicker, Caisotti,” he said, his voice booming through the empty space. “Here, do you see what I mean?”
Caisotti didn’t move. He was looking furtively through the bare brick frame of the window, across the dense green of the garden, which Quinto scarcely recognized from that unfamiliar vantage point. “Thicker? Yes, of course, but wait till it’s finished, with the mortar, you’ll see. . . .”
17
Caisotti’s stock was starting to go down, among his own following too. Even the red-haired giant – his name was Angerin – burst suddenly into revolt.
Angerin lived on the site in a wooden shack used as a tool shed and night watchman’s hut; he slept on the ground, like an animal, never taking off his clothes. First thing in the morning, his face blank and bewildered, he would set off down the hill with that ambling, apelike gait of his to buy a roll of bread, a blood sausage, and a tomato; he would come back chewing, his mouth full. He appeared to live on this, though every now and then he was seen cooking something in a dirty pot balanced on a couple of bricks. Caisotti, apparently, owed him a couple of months’ wages. The man was hunger itself and yet, being immensely strong and obedient, he was given all the heaviest work. The other men insisted on being paid regularly; otherwise they would go off and work elsewhere, for jobs were easy to find in the building trade. So Caisotti economized at the expense of Angerin – who was docile and incapable of taking any steps on his own – treating him like a slave. When he first arrived, he had been a frightening, bull-like figure, but he had lost weight, his shoulders curved in and his arms hung listlessly by his side. Lack of food, overwork, and sleeping on the ground were ruining him.
The only person who took any notice of him was Signora Anfossi, and Quinto learned about him from her. She would have him up to the villa and give him sugar and biscuits and old undershirts. She’d offer him advice and ask him about himself, a painful procedure for Angerin, this, since she couldn’t understand his inarticulate dialect and made him repeat everything ten times. He was from the mountain hinterland, like Caisotti, who had brought him down to work. “I don’t think he’s ever had any god except Caisotti,” Signora Anfossi said.
“He’s probably his illegitimate son,” Quinto suggested, laughing.
“Yes, I wondered about that. I asked him if they were related and he seemed confused.”
“Him too. . . . What a man!”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, gossip, gossip.”
On the job, the other men laughed at him and played tricks on him. He exploded quite suddenly. From the villa they heard the sound of blows, the crack of planks thrown down on planks, men shouting. Quinto ran out, down the site. The workmen were in the road, scattering in all directions; one had jumped from the second floor, right on top of the flowers. “Help! Angerin has gone crazy! Help!” The giant was up on the second floor, smashing everything. He sent buckets of mortar crashing against the walls, wrenched the scaffolding apart, toppled over ladders, blindly hurled bricks, cracking the walls and wrecking the fresh cement. The noise re-echoed in the empty building, grew enormous, and this obviously excited him still more. No one could get near him; he was making great flailing strokes with a shovel, which would have killed anyone on the spot. It was his way of working off his resentment against Caisotti – blindly, without caring whom he hit.
“Send for the police!” someone shouted. “No, no, send for Caisotti. He’s the only person who can handle him.” The foreman had in fact ridden off to look for him. Quinto stood and watched the skeleton of this house, which had risen so slowly and so painfully, being demolished before his eyes, watched the girders buckle under Angerin’s blows and the window sills crack. He was already reckoning the time that would be lost in repairing the damage, thinking of all the places that would merely be patched up, all the arguments they would have to go through. . . .
Caisotti arrived in his three-wheeler. As soon as the sound of his motor approached, then stopped, the sounds inside the new building stopped too. Caisotti got out, looking pale and drawn, but quite calm. He pushed his way through the men without looking at anyone and went up to the building, then propping a ladder against the wall, he climbed up to the second floor.
Angerin was there waiting for him, shovel raised, tensing himself to strike. Caisotti climbed another step. He spoke quickly, in dialect, not raising his voice. “Angerin, you’re sore at me?” The giant stared at him, wide-eyed, and started to tremble. At last he said, “Yes, with you.” “You want to kill me?” Angerin hesitated a moment, then: “No.” “Drop that shovel!” It didn’t sound like an order, more like a ques
tion or a statement; or maybe an order to a tame dog. Angerin dropped the shovel. As soon as Caisotti saw that his hands were empty, he came up quickly, and here he made a mistake. Angerin was beginning to be afraid of what he had done, but now his rage flooded back; seizing a trowel, he threw it violently at Caisotti. It hit him on the forehead; it was only a glancing blow but it opened up a long cut, which quickly brimmed with blood. It looked as though Caisotti must be stunned by the pain, but no, he reacted quickly. It was his only chance. The giant would have finished him otherwise. He raised one arm, more as though he wanted to hide the sight of his blood from Angerin than to stop the bleeding, then hurled himself on top of him. They rolled over and it was difficult to see what was happening, then Caisotti was on top and Angerin was no longer trying to hit him but merely to drag him off and then not even that. Caisotti, his knee pressed against the man’s chest, started to pommel him, one sledgehammer blow after another thudding dully on his back, his chest, his head, his bones.
“He’s killing him!” said one of the workmen standing beside Quinto. “No, he won’t kill him,” someone else said, “but Angerin won’t see a penny of his back pay. It’ll all go to repair the damage.” The thudding blows continued, then someone cried, “That’s enough! He’s not defending himself any more.” Quinto recognized his mother’s voice; she was standing by the hedge, very pale, a shawl wrapped around her.
Caisotti got to his feet and slowly came down the ladder. Angerin’s outstretched body began to stir and then he too got up, first on all fours, then onto his feet. But his body was slack and bent and he started to limp about, picking things up and putting them back in their place.
Caisotti walked forward, holding a bloody handkerchief to his face; he pulled his cap over it to keep it in place; his eyes were full of tears. “It was nothing,” he said in dialect to the men. “All right, you can go back to work now.” “Work with that lunatic? The hell you say! Damn near killed us, he did. We’re not going back, we’re going for the police.” “He won’t hurt you; he wasn’t after you anyway. He’s all right again now. You’re not calling anyone. Back to work!” And he got back into his three-wheeler, the bloody handkerchief slipping down over his eyes, and jammed his foot down onto the starter. He pushed for a moment, trembling with the putt-putt of the engine, blinded by the tears that were rolling down his cheeks. Then he was off.
18
Quinto spent most of the winter at Milan, working on the editorial board of the magazine that Bensi and Cerveteri had started. He would come home every now and then and stay a few days. He used to arrive in the evening and on his way to the villa pass by the site. The shadow of the building stood out in the darkness, still wrapped in its trellis of scaffolding, pierced with blank window spaces, roofless. The work was going ahead so slowly that it looked the same from one visit to the next. This, he felt, was as far as it was ever going to get; he couldn’t even imagine it finished. So this was where his passion for concrete reality had led him, to this shapeless heap of bricks and beams lying there unused; it had been a mere caprice, something started and then dropped halfway. Only with Bensi and Cerveteri did he feel himself a man of action, and this helped him to overcome his neurotic sense of being less educated and intelligent than they were. There too he was acting in continual opposition to his own instincts, but this was a more manageable kind of opposition. What in the world had ever made him dabble in real estate? He no longer felt the slightest interest in the project and stayed away for months on end, leaving all the headaches to his mother.
As for Ampelio, it was no use relying on him for anything. He was always preparing for some exam or other, the dirty grind, and there was no hope of shifting him an inch from his chosen path. Every three or four months, he came to see his mother for a couple of days, and that was that. During one of these brief visits, it happened that Quinto came home too. They met in the morning. Quinto, who had arrived the night before, was in the bathroom, washing, when Ampelio came in. Quinto went at him at once. “Well, what have you been doing? Have you settled anything? Have you seen to having the property confiscated since the work hasn’t been finished on time? And what about the foreclosure?” It was a relief to have someone on whom he could unload his own bad conscience and his resentment at the whole affair, which had seemed so straightforward at first and yet grew more and more involved as time went on.
Ampelio stood by the bathroom door; he was wearing an overcoat. His umbrella hung over one arm. No trace of expression was visible behind his glasses. “There’s nothing to be done,” he said calmly.
Quinto was in his pajamas. “What do you mean, there’s nothing to be done?” he shouted, drying himself hurriedly. “What do you mean? We’ve got the reversion clause, haven’t we?” He went back into his bedroom, shoving Ampelio out of the way. “Caisotti hasn’t handed over the apartments. Right. So we take back the site and everything on it. We’ve got to get moving.”
“Well, get moving then,” said Ampelio.
When Ampelio took this tone, Quinto always lost his temper completely. He knew what his brother was like, he knew that the angrier he became, the calmer Ampelio’s contemptuous irony would be; and yet he lost his temper every time. “So, you’ve been here five days. You should have been to see Canal and started legal proceedings. And what have you done? Nothing!”
Quinto was sitting on the edge of the bed, getting dressed. Ampelio stood in front of him in his overcoat, his hands on the handle of the umbrella, which was poking into the bedside rug. Ampelio’s standing there fully dressed while he was half naked made Quinto feel even more uncomfortable. “You’ve been here five days,” he went on, “and you haven’t settled a single thing! Caisotti is selling his apartments before he’s finished building them, and we sit here twiddling our thumbs. If we had some tenants who were due to take possession, he’d have to finish the work. Have you tried to find any tenants? Have you been to the agency?”
Ampelio always paused a moment or so before answering, staring at nothing. After a while he said, “You’ve got the whole thing back to front.”
“What do you mean?”
No answer.
“What do you mean?” Quinto shook him by the arm. “What are you talking about? Are you trying to say that I’ve been doing nothing myself and that I come here and take it out on you, is that what you mean? Is that it?” He continued to shake his arm, but Ampelio had nothing further to add. “All the months I spent here,” Quinto went on, “trying to pull the chestnuts out of the fire – your chestnuts too, don’t you understand? – sweating my guts out, you didn’t take the faintest notice, you didn’t even bother to thank me. Can you deny it? Just answer me: can you deny it?”
It was not Ampelio’s way to explain himself. He would only have had to say: “You spent three months here on the beach,” and Quinto would have been punctured; he wouldn’t have known how to go on. But Ampelio would never do what you wanted, not even in a quarrel. All he said was, “O.K., give me my share, we’ll divide the apartments between us, I’ll sell my part of it just as it is, to Caisotti or to anyone who’ll buy it; I’ll take what I can get. I don’t care so long as I don’t have to go on having these squabbles with you. The only thing I regret is leaving Mother in your hands.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Quinto seized him by the wrists. “Don’t you know that I’ve done everything so far, that I’ve done it for you too?”
Ampelio shook him off. “You’re sick, your nerves are shot to hell. You ought to go see a doctor.”
“Why do you treat me like this, why do you insult me?” Quinto yelled, and began pounding him with his fists. Ampelio fell on the bed and lay there without even trying to defend himself. He merely held his knees and elbows up so that Quinto’s blows, which were passionate rather than powerful, hit only his arms and legs. He was still holding his umbrella, but he made no attempt to use it. His glasses had fallen off and were lying on the bed. He simply waited, hunched up, his beard in the collar of his overco
at, staring at Quinto without resentment or anything else, only the lost look of the myopic and a complete withdrawal.
Quinto stopped suddenly. Ampelio got up and put on his glasses. “Go and see a doctor; you’re not normal.” And he left the room.
19
At the end of the winter Quinto found a job in Rome, working for a movie company. He left the editorial board of the review after quarreling with Bensi and Cerveteri. The Roman world was lavish and uninhibited; the producer was a man who managed to lay his hands on hundreds of thousands of lire from one day to the next. It was a convivial sort of existence, with ten-thousand-lire notes flying around as though they were small change. In the evenings they all went off to eat together at a restaurant, then on to someone’s house to drink. Drinking made Quinto ill; nonetheless, this, finally, was life. He had not yet laid his hands on much actual money, but he was on the way at last.
His mother’s letters, full of maddening little details, went into everything exhaustively, and nearly drove him crazy. They had lost a possible tenant because the apartments weren’t yet ready; Caisotti had now got the roof on, but the elevator shed on top exceeded the limits permitted by the regulations. Travaglia was supposed to come and note the violation, but he was nowhere to be found. Quinto was now living in another world, where everything was possible, everything could be fixed, everything was done quickly; even so, he was unable to wash his hands of the project, if only because he found that in the movies, the more he earned the more he spent, and it wasn’t enough. He was after a French girl who was part of a Franco-Italian co-production team, and he was always on the go. It was a rootless life.
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