Voices In The Evening Read Online Free PDF Page B

week-end. Nebbia’s family also lived outside the town.
    Vincenzino spoke firsts in his low voice. He mentioned that he had a cousin Purillo with whom he lived and whom he hated. He related what Purillo was like, how he washed and ate and made love with the servant, and how he did his exercises in the morning in shorts of black webbing.
    Nebbia strained his ear to listen to that long melancholy murmur. He laughed, really because he was amused by such hatred which had no real motive but ostensibly at Purillo’s way of eating and of scratching his armpits, and the physical jerks up and down in a rowing vest and shorts.
    He knew Purillo by sight When he came to know him personally he thought him quite harmless. Nebbia was in any case sociable and simple-minded. He was quiet and reserved and got on well with everybody.
    Vincenzino struck up a friendship with Nebbia; he was his first and last and only friend.
    Nebbia took him to his home, in Borgo Martino, and introduced him to his parents, his father a panel doctor, his mother a schoolmistress, and to his brothers and sisters.
    Vincenzino in turn brought him to La Casetta.
    Nebbia appealed to old Balotta—who even promised him a place in the factory when he should have finished at the Polytechnic.
    They went climbing on Sundays all together: Nebbia, Vincenzino, Nebbia’s sisters, Gemmina and Purillo. Vincenzino walked slowly and lagged behind; the others got impatient through having to wait for him. So he usually stopped at a rest hut by the fire, to bleat on his flute and stare at the flames.
    One summer at San Remo he got to know a girl from Brazil who was studying music. He was at the seaside there on his doctor’s advice after tonsilitis; but he did not swim, or sunbathe on the beach, because his skin was so white and delicate that the sun gave him a temperature, and in any case he hated the sun and the sand and the beach umbrellas and the crowd. Consequently he stayed reading under the trees in the hotel garden and so got into conversation with the girl from Brazil, who did not bathe either and wore dark glasses and a big sun hat. She had her mother with her,
La Mamita
a little old lady rather like a monkey with red-dyed hair.
    Vincenzino returned to La Casetta from the sea quite restored to health. He placed a portrait on the table in his room. It showed a girl standing up, in profile, wearing evening dress with a rope of pearls. She had a long neck, a huge black chignon and a feather boa.
    â€˜My fiancée,’ he said.
    Balotta said to his wife, ‘Is he engaged, that clown there?’
    He went to look at the portrait when Vincenzino was out.
    â€˜What a long neck,’ he said.
    And in the morning when he was hardly awake he said to his wife,
    â€˜That young woman will cover him with horns from his head to his feet and from his feet to his head.’
    Vincenzino wrote long letters to Sao Paolo in Brazil, and received correspondingly long ones, closely written in a big pointed hand. They were difficult to read being written on the back of the sheet as well.
    Towards Christmas the girl arrived in the town with
Mamita Papito
and
Fifito
her twelve-year-old brother. They meant to be taken up to La Casetta and to get to know Vincenzino’s family.
    They stayed at the hotel and Vincenzino took them round to see the town.
    One evening on coming home Purillo found Vincenzino on his bed, white as a sheet, and being sick into a basin. He was quivering all over and had had a nervous shock.
    He had realized that he was sick to death
of Mamita, Papito, Fifito
 and the girl, and could not see how to disentangle himself from them.
    Purillo went to get a doctor and Nebbia. They stayed there all night, he and Nebbia, to look after Vincenzino; made him drink some strong coffee and mopped his brow for him.
    Next morning they went to see
Papito
and
Matnita
and told them that Vincenzino was ill, very ill, and for the time being could not think of