Beautiful Antonio Read Online Free PDF

virgin!”
    Antonio forced an ironic smile, something that came with difficulty and caused him displeasure, because he was asimple-hearted young man and could distinguish a truth from a falsehood.
    â€œEven if I married the most bigoted and ridiculous of you Sicilians,” continued Luisa in a more muted, a more measured voice, “he would have nothing to reproach me for. I know that when your women go to hotels in Taormina for the first night of their honeymoon they squawk like hens having their necks wrung. I wouldn’t squawk even if you killed me, but anyway… I’d have a right to… But why have you gone all pale? What’s the matter? Are you expecting someone? Is there someone at that door?”
    A spot of colour crept back into Antonio’s cheeks. A faint noise had come from the bedroom door, as of a bodily weight falling against it.
    â€œIs there a woman in there?” demanded Luisa in a hushed voice.
    â€œYes,” answered he, casting down his eyes.
    Luisa regained her poise, rose from the sofa, retrieved her handbag from a table, extracted a compact, peered at a pair of eyes that had turned to steel, dried them, then erased all traces of tears with two dabs of a powder-puff.
    â€œGoodbye then,” she said. “Forgive me.”
    And she made her exit.
    Antonio sped to the bedroom door, flung it open, and was kissed almost smack on the mouth by his poodle which, impatient of release, leapt up at him with a strangled yelp.
    He fondled its ears, tried to calm it, rocked its head to and fro as from among its riotous curlicues it shot him adoring glances. He then stretched out on the sofa, plopping the dog down on top of him, muzzle between front paws, while now and again it darted out its tongue to lick his chin and he, throwing back his head, skilfully evaded it.
    In this way passed some hours. The sky over Villa Borghese darkened… A crow flapped in and out of the clouds, emitting at each wheel of its flight a muffled caw.
    Tenderly Antonio lifted the dozing dog and deposited it onthe carpet. He then stretched himself lavishly and got up. A glance at the window, and beyond the Pincio the mist had thickened, as if the Tiber were filling the air with the vapour of its breath. The buildings glimpsed through the trees of the park had taken on a yellower tint. Down below in the street, at the corner of Via Pinciana and Via Sgambati, in the guise of a young man waiting for his girl, stood the inevitable plain-clothes policeman, motionless, bare-headed, hat in hand: and hidden in the hat the inevitable love-story he was reading to allay the endless tedium of protecting the life of a man whose car flashed by only once every couple of months.
    â€œLord, how dreary Rome is!” thought Antonio. And donning his overcoat and giving a rub to the tummy of his dog, which in expectation had already rolled onto its back with its legs in the air, he left the house.
    Thus ended the first part of a day which Antonio was destined to remember for many a long year.
    Either that same day or (as is more likely) the next, Antonio paid a call on his uncle, Ermenegildo Fasanaro, his mother’s brother, who lived in one of the new suburbs.
    This said uncle strode up and down the sitting-room, his silk shirt hanging out and his unknotted necktie beforked onto a paunch plumped out by his fifty years.
    â€œBest thing for you to do is get back to Catania,” stated this uncle, pausing every so often by the window, his bulk blocking out now the bend in the Tiber around Villa Glori, now the slopes of the hill.
    â€œWhat d’you think you’re doing here in Rome? Trying to find out if there’s any end to ‘that business’? Well let me tell you, there isn’t. You’re on the job night and day, you’re burning the candle at both ends, your cheeks get hollower and hollower and you’re always dropping off like a cat that’s been out all night on the