Her Husband (3 page)

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, thank 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.

Litti (continuing to tug on each side of that mustache and then stretch his neck as if he could never get his head arranged well enough on his body) watched those people, listened to their fickle chatter, and soon felt his large fleshy ears burning. He was thinking that they all lived in Rome just as they would in any other modern city, and that Rome’s new population was composed of false, fatuous, vain people like them. What did they know about Rome? Three or four rhetorical commonplaces. What vision did they have of it? The Corso, the Pincio, cafes, salons, theaters, editorial offices . . . They were like the new streets and houses that had broadened the city only materially,
disfiguring it. When the circle of walls was smaller, Rome’s greatness roamed across the frontiers of the world. Now that the circle had widened . . . there it was, the new Rome. And Filiberto Litti stretched his neck.

In the meanwhile several others had arrived: nuisances who began to get in the way of the waiters carrying in the food to two or three couples, outsiders eating in the glassed-in dining room.

Among these young people (more or less with full heads of hair, aspirants to glory, unpaid collaborators of the innumerable literary periodicals of the peninsula) were three young women, evidently students of literature: two with glasses, sickly looking and taciturn; the third, on the other hand, was very vivacious, with red hair cut in a masculine style, a lively little freckled face, with variegated gray eyes that seemed to sparkle with malice. She laughed boisterously, bobbing around with laughter that provoked a grimace halfway between disdain and pity in a serious elderly man wandering amid such careless youth. He was Mario Puglia, who in former times had sung with a certain forced enthusiasm and vulgar passion. Now he felt he was already history. He sang no more. However, he had kept his long hair, which rained dandruff on the lapels of his military overcoat, and he sported a stately paunch.

Casimiro Luna, who had been watching him for a while, frowning, sighed at a certain point and said quietly: “Gentlemen, look at Puglia. Who knows where he left his guitar . . .”

“Cariolin! Cariolin!” several people shouted at that moment, making way for a perfumed, elegant little man who seemed to have been made and set on his feet as a joke, with twenty long hairs combed over his bald head, two violets in his buttonhole, and a monocle.

Smiling and bowing, Momo Cariolin saluted everyone with both bejeweled hands and ran to kiss the hand of Donna Francesca Lampugnani. He knew everyone. He could not resist bowing low, kissing the women’s hands, and telling jokes in Venetian dialect. He went everywhere, to all the important salons, to all the editorial offices, and was given a hearty welcome everywhere–no one knew why. He represented nothing, but his presence nevertheless managed to give a
certain class to gatherings, banquets, meetings–perhaps because of his impeccable, ingratiating manners, perhaps because of that certain diplomatic air of his.

The old poetess Donna Maria Rosa Bornè-Laturzi was accompanied by the Honorable Silvestro Carpi and the Lombard novelist Carlino Sanna, who was passing through Rome. As a poet, Bornè-Laturzi (according to Casimiro Luna) was an excellent mother. She adamantly believed that poetry, and art in general, was no excuse for loose morals. For this reason she did not speak to Signora Barmis or Signora Morlacchi–she spoke only to Marchesa Lampugnani because she was a marchesa and club president, Filiberto Litti because he was an archaeologist, and she let her hand be kissed by Cariolin, because Cariolin kissed only the hands of real nobility.

In the meantime several groups had formed, but the conversation languished because each person was concerned only about himself, and this concern impeded thought. Each one repeated what someone else, making a great effort, had managed to say about the weather or the landscape. Tito Lampini, for instance, hopped from one group to another, smilingly repeating, with one hand over his mouth, some turn of phrase that seemed pleasing to him, gleaned here and there, but that he passed off as his own.

Each one made silent, more or less bitter, criticisms of the other. Each one would have liked to talk about himself, about his latest publication, but no one dared give the other this satisfaction. Two even spoke in a low voice about what a third one there, close by, had written, and they spoke ill of it. When the latter came closer, they immediately changed the subject and smiled at him.

There were the miserably bored and the rowdy, like Luna. And the former envied the latter. Not out of respect, but because they knew that in the end such brashness triumphed. They would have happily imitated them, but being timid and in order not to admit this timidity to themselves, they preferred to believe that the seriousness of their intentions kept them from doing otherwise.

A blondish man with blue eyeglasses disconcerted everyone, so emaciated he seemed barely alive, with long hair, a long neck, scrawny,
stiff and tall as a processional statue. Over his frock coat he wore a gray mantelet. He bent his head this way and that and his fingers nervously worked his cuticles. He was obviously a foreigner: Swedish or Norwegian. No one knew him, no one knew who he was, and everyone looked at him with amazement and disgust.

Noticing the attention he was attracting, he smiled and seemed to say ceremoniously to all: “Brothers, we are all dying!”

That walking skeleton was a real indecency among so much vanity. Where in the world had Raceni dug him up? Whatever had given him the idea of inviting him to the banquet?

“I’m leaving!” Luna declared. “I can’t eat opposite that grasshopper.”