Voices In The Evening Read Online Free PDF

and leather, the melted snow under thek boots, her shoulders chafed by the straps of the rucksack, the chocolate half finished in the metal container, the oranges, and the wine.
    She has never gone back to the mountains. She still keeps in a box a battered tin cup. It is the one out of which they had both drunk, she and Nebbia, the night of the storm.
    After Gemmina came Vincenzino. Then Mario, Raffaella, and last Tommasino. Such, you see, were Balotta’s children.
    Vincenzino was a plump little fair boy, curly as a lamb. He was always dirty and untidy, always had long ringlets over his neck, the pockets of his raincoat were full of small books and newspapers, his shoes undone, because he was no good at tying knots, and the bottoms of his trousers were caked with mud as the result of his rambles in the country.
    Old Balotta used to say,
    â€˜He looks to me like a little rabbi.’
    He would roam the country on his own. At times he would come to a standstill in front of a wall or a gate where one could only see clumps of nettles or tufts of maidenhair; he would stare and stare, and one could not understand what he was staring at.
    He used to walk slowly, occasionally pulling a book or a paper out of his pocket which he set about reading as he walked, rather bent, and frowning. Whenever he opened a book it seemed as if he plunged into it nose first.
    He was fond of music and had countless wind instruments in his room. At nightfall he would begin to play an oboe, clarinet or flute.
    There issued from this a most lamentable wailing, weak and plaintive, like the bleating of sheep. Old Balotta would say,
    â€˜Have I always got to hear him bleating like this?’
    Vincenzino did not get on very well at school. He had extra coaching all the year round, yet they always ploughed him. Purillo and Mario, younger than he, went ahead, and he was always left behind.
    One could never really understand how that could be, seeing that he read so many books, and knew a world of things.
    He always spoke in a low voice, with an indistinct burr. He would answer the simplest questions with confused and rambling explanations which faded away slowly on the sad wave of that burr.
    His father would say,
    â€˜I cannot put up with him.’
    And when he listened at dusk to the wailing of the flute he would add,
    â€˜If he goes on bleating like that, I send him to Le Pietre.’
    And he did send him to Le Pietre for a while. Later he had him back again because he wanted to see for himself what he was made of.
    â€˜He can’t be absolutely stupid,’ he said to his wife.
    He took him to the factory and confronted him with the machinery. Vincenzino stared gloomily, his eyes starting out of his head, bending a little and knitting his brows.
    He stared hard and his nostrils curled, exactly as sometimes when out of doors he stared at a wall, a tree or a clump of nettles.
    He went to school at Salice, to the college. When he had finally obtained his leaving-certificate he went to the university in the town.
    His father wanted him to enroll in the Faculty of Economics as Mario had done, who was already in his second year. Instead he enrolled himself like Purillo in Engineering.
    He had been determined on this point. Balotta shrugged his shoulders and said to his wife,
    â€˜He will never manage to finish the Polytechnic course. Too difficult. But it is his look-out. I really cannot argue with him. He is mad, and you cannot argue with madmen.’
    He, Purillo and Mario lived in furnished rooms with a woman to look after them.
    Purillo slept with this woman.
    She was a fat heavy creature, no longer young. Shut up in his own room, Vincenzino could hear through the wall Purillo’s clear laughter and the woman scolding him in a lazy motherly manner,
    Vincenzino hated Purillo.
    He came to know Nebbia at the Polytechnic. They always saw each other at lectures. They got talking one evening on the train which was taking them home for the