The Italian Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

lay upon the work bench, where I had already noted with approval the neat clean array of tools. Otto might be a mess in every other way, but he was still a meticulous craftsman. Our father had given us, in this respect, a training which could not be undone.
    Otto was seated on top of his folded overcoat upon a long low marble tomb with his plate balanced on his knee. His lunch consisted of water biscuits, butter and cheese in great quantity, and, in a cardboard box beside him, a mound of herbs which he had plucked in handfuls from the overgrown herb garden. I remembered these tastes of his. Feeding Otto was like feeding an elephant or a gorilla. His great size required an immense bulk of green stuff per day. At this moment, with a pocket-knife clasped in red bulging fingers, he was plastering on to a biscuit a piece of butter the size of a ping pong ball; upon this buttery sphere a cone of cheese of equivalent mass was then balanced, and to the cone were made to adhere bushy sprigs of mint and marjoram which Otto seized from the pile of green fodder beside him, skilfully eschewing the pieces of grass, groundsel, ground elder and other foreign greenery which the hastily gathered herbage was sure to contain. His gaping mouth remained open, revealing a green biscuity mess within, while he conveyed the greasy structure to it. Most of it got inside.
    ‘Odd, isn’t it,’ he mumbled, spewing out biscuit crumbs as he chewed, ‘that we are both practically vegetarians. I’m a vegetable man and you’re a fruit man. I expect it’s something to do with Lydia. Most things about us are!’
    I was in fact a vegetarian, though by preference and on instinct rather than on any clear principle. I seated myself now upon the work bench, checking my usual tendency to pace about as I did not want to stir up the multi-coloured stone dust upon the floor. I have a very sensitive nose. ‘Otto –’
    ‘Gosh, I believe I’ve just swallowed a furry caterpillar! Poor little blighter. Will he poison me do you think? I wonder what it’s like to be eaten? Well we should know. Oh, my God!’
    ‘Otto –’
    ‘All right, all right. Things to be decided. Such as Lydia’s tombstone, problem of. Christ.’
    ‘I leave that to you,’ I said. ‘Put on anything you like. I don’t mind. And she won’t mind now.’ We had had a discussion a little earlier about whether there should be any special inscription, and whether it should contain the words ‘wife’ and ‘mother’. They were words Lydia had detested. ‘Why not just her name, anyway.’
    ‘Lydia. It sounds like a little dog.’
    ‘I mean her full name, you ass. Anyway, you decide.’
    ‘Funny, isn’t it,’ said Otto, now cramming a leafy handful in, grass and all, ‘that I’m always so constipated in spite of all the green stuff. Green seems the natural colour of food, doesn’t it? Has it ever struck you that we don’t eat anything blue?’
    ‘Otto –’
    ‘Have some whisky, Ed, or are you still on the waggon?’
    ‘I’m not on the waggon. I just don’t like the stuff. Haven’t you had. enough for today?’
    Otto shook his head sadly, and when he could speak, ‘You just don’t understand about addictions. One always wants more. The more one has the more one wants and the more frantically one wants it. Ah, if only I could give up the drink now. And just live blankly. Then one would really feel the hell one was in. It would enter the body.’ He paused, his mouth, full of green mash, wide open, and gazed immobile at the cobwebby wall.
    I have said that Otto was taller than me. He was also wider and bulkier, his once bull-like frame turning to masses of fat. He still retained, however, an exceptional physical strength, and he was, when he wished to be, tireless. His face was enormous and had now become red and flabby. He had an absurdly short straight nose, a high wrinkled sweaty brow, tracts of soft pendulous cheek, and a wet shapeless gash of a mouth which usually hung