All Our Yesterdays (12 page)

They got into the habit of meeting in the avenue every day. Anna would rather have gone to see her girl friend or come straight home to do her homework. As it was she had to stay up after supper to do her lessons. But she was too proud of Giuma wanting to be with her. Giuma was a boy. Concettina had told her again and again that at her age she had had plenty of boys to go out with. Concettina had scolded her because she came straight home from school to do her homework. Now she was impatient for Concettina to come back from her honeymoon, so that she might be seen with Giuma on the road by the river. Signora Maria, however, was not altogether pleased at her going about with Giuma, she did not know Giuma, she did not know what type of boy he was. Emanuele told her he was an impossible type, presumptuous and fatuous, but in the matter of upbringing there was nothing to be said against him, he was well brought up from head to foot and you could safely give him five hundred girls to take out. But Signora Maria asked why he had not made friends with Giustino who was in the same class, why with Anna ? Then Giustino said that Giuma had tried to make friends with him too, but he had not paid any attention to him and so he had immediately stopped.

Of Giustino and of the other boys at school Giuma always spoke with great contempt. They did not read books, they did not wash properly, they did not go in for any kind of sport : they gave themselves grand sporting airs but when it came to the point they could do nothing seriously. Anna asked him if he was still friends with Cingalesi and Pucci Donadio : she had always remembered these names which at one time he had so constantly repeated to her. Giuma frowned. Pucci Donadio he remembered, he had never been really a friend of his, he was the son of a friend of Mammina's, he was much smaller than himself and they used to take him to play on the beach at Mentone and he had to make sand-castles for him. As for Cingalesi, he didn't know who he was. Then he thought hard and recalled Cingalesi, a boy who used to sell oranges on the beach. No, he had other friends now. He pulled a bundle of letters out of his pocket; he showed her the stamps on the envelopes, his friends wrote to him from every part of the world, from America, from Denmark, at the school in Switzerland he had got to know people from everywhere. Some of them were still at the school and were waiting for him to come back, they were putting aside bottles of brandy and gin to celebrate his return, he felt he really wanted some gin, perhaps Mammina would let him go back again soon.

He often took her to the cinema, for he always had money to spend. Or they would wander about the town, they would go into bookshops and look at the magazines and the art books, Giuma went into ecstasies over reproductions of pictures in which there was nothing but triangles and small circles. Sometimes they bought roast chestnuts and sat and ate them on a seat in the public gardens. Giuma would pull out the poems of Montale and start reading them aloud. He had explained to her who Montale was, he had explained who the other poets were who were of any importance. Anna sat silent without listening to him, she was quite unable to fix her attention upon his words. She looked at his wide, light-coloured overcoat, at his scarf, at the locks of hair falling over his forehead, at his small teeth like a wolf's. Gradually she had ceased to be bored in his company, she did not listen to what he said but she looked at him, and she was infinitely proud to sit with Giuma on a seat in the public gardens, and it seemed to her that Giuma's light-coloured overcoat and his scarf and his watch in its black shell all belonged partly to her, and it seemed to her that none of her school-friends had anything like this, a boy to go about with like this, her school-friends went out with giggling, tiresome boys who did not read Montale and knew nothing about the painters who made small circles. She sat silent with her hands in her lap, the shells of the chestnuts entangled in the wool of her coat. She could not have said one single word about Montale and she had not understood much of his poetry. Yet she had taken a fancy to certain lines, from having heard them spoken by Giuma : “Un'ora e mi riporta Cumerlotti—Lakmé nell'aria delle campanelle—o vero c'era il falòtico—mutarsi della mia vita—quando udii sugli scogli crepitare—la bomba ballerina.” She went home with the
bomba ballerina
and the 
falòtico
,
for some time the
bomba ballerina
went dancing in front of her. She did not ask Giuma who Cumerlotti was, she did not ask him about the
falòtico
,
she was afraid he might get angry, and she was afraid the
falòtico
might turn into something dull and valueless if one discovered what it was.

In the morning at school her friend always asked her whether Giuma had kissed her and she said no. Her friend was much surprised and not altogether pleased and said that never had such a thing happened to her, boys always kissed her. In the end she imagined that they had kissed each other and that Anna wouldn't tell her. Gradually they became a little less friendly. Anna did not tell her anything about the 
falòtico
,
this friend of hers now seemed to her silly, and also it seemed to her that her neck was a little dirty, she like Giuma had now begun to look whether people washed themselves properly. So that when Giuma really did kiss her she said nothing to her friend. No one knew about it.

Giuma kissed her one day when he was feeling sad. He had got only three marks in Greek, Mammina was angry with him, and then he had said he had got only three marks on purpose, because he wanted to go back to Switzerland, he did not like this nasty school and did not want to stay there any longer. All of a sudden Emanuele had begun shouting at him too. And then he had said it didn't really matter to him so much about the school, but he didn't like staying at home and he preferred to go to a boarding-school, he didn't like taking Mammina about when she went to see those awful women who played bridge. Emanuele had shouted that he must not be lacking in respect towards Mammina, he had gone for him and they had hit each other, Mammina, trying to separate them, had sprained her wrist, and then the whole day had been spent in putting vegeto-mineral water compresses on it. They were not letting him go back to Switzerland, there was no hope of that. And he was fed up with everything. Only with Anna was he happy, she was the only person who was kind to him. They sat in silence, Giuma looked down on the ground, frowning, and made marks in the dust with his foot. Suddenly he put his arm round her waist and pressed himself slightly against her. There was a terrible silence between them, they looked at each other in a fright, the fright and the silence lasted a long time. And then Giuma kissed her and they sighed and smiled at each other peacefully.

Anna knew from Giustino that at school they detested him, they turned their backs at once if he came up to speak to them. At first he had bored them to tears with his rugby matches and his letters from all parts of the world, he irritated everyone with his letters, he insisted on translating parts of them which seemed to him immensely funny, he explained how funny they were and told long tales about drinks and football matches, laughing on his own account. Now, on the other hand, he could talk of nothing but the poems of Montale, he was as vehement about Montale's poems as if he had written them himself, he dragged in Montale every time the teacher asked him a question. He suggested meeting once a week to read and discuss Montale. And probably he didn't understand anything at all about Montale. Emanuele asked Giustino why they did not punch his head, perhaps it would have done him a great deal of good. But Giustino said they hadn't even any desire to punch him, nor even to make fun of him, he was too tiresome, they preferred just to turn their backs when he came up to them. Nobody except Anna could manage to endure him, and they went about together because Anna was silly and ingenuous and took all the nonsense he told her seriously. Anna was listening, and she tried to curl her lips in scorn as Giuma did. But she felt mortified, she thought of how he went up to speak to them and of how they turned their backs, and she felt deeply mortified, just as though they had turned their backs on
her.
And at times she was seized by a suspicion that in reality Giuma knew no more about the
fal
ò
tico
or about Cumerlotti than she did, that he had to pretend he knew in order to feel powerful and proud, in order to curl his lips in scorn and walk proudly about the town, without looking too closely at his own intimate self, which was perhaps mortified and suffering and lonely. After a long time perhaps it would be discovered that he knew absolutely nothing about the
fal
ò
tico.
Once upon a time he had boasted perpetually about Cingalesi, bringing him into every conversation, and she had thought of Cingalesi as of some terrible, disdainful force. Then the old Cingalesi had gone up in smoke and all that was left in his place was a harmless orange-seller.

His face, when he kissed her, always lost all sign of scorn and of arrogance. His face became gentle, tender, brotherly, as he started removing, one by one, the chestnut-shells from her coat. Then they would laugh about these shells, and it seemed there were so many things they could laugh about together, it seemed they could laugh together even about the
fal
ò
tico,
that they could say to each other that they did not quite know what it was. But they did not say this, they never got as far as saying it, it was only for one moment that Giuma continued to be so tender and gentle, the next moment he curled his lips and looked round him in disgust, how squalid these public gardens were, how squalid the town was, you ought to see what the public gardens in Geneva and Lausanne were like. Then he pressed the spring of the black shell and buttoned up his overcoat, Mammina was expecting him as usual to make a fourth at bridge.

In the end Anna told him about the time when they burned the newspapers, herself and Concettina and Ippolito and Emanuele. Giuma did not show much surprise, he said he had suspected for some time that Emanuele was getting mixed up in politics, he was really an idiot. He didn't like Fascism himself, but it was better to put up with it and it wasn't worth the trouble of running risks, besides Emanuele ought to think of Mammina, if they put him in prison Mammina would go mad. He didn't hold with Fascism himself, above all it was a provincial thing, it made Italy provincial, it prevented people from arranging exhibitions with fine pictures from abroad. Fascism was certainly an ugly, provincial, ignorant thing. But it wasn't worth the trouble of getting oneself put in prison for such an ugly, clumsy thing, getting oneself put in prison was taking it too seriously. But there must be a revolution, Anna said. He started to laugh a great deal, he bent back and laughed, displaying all his wolf-like teeth. A revolution, he said, Anna wanted to start a revolution. No, he said, there was no need for that, because Fascism would gradually fizzle out by itself, like those rubber balloons that deflate themselves with a whistling noise. No, there was no revolution to be started and in any case even if a revolution did have to be started Emanuele and Anna would not be the people to do it. “And not Danilo either ? ” asked Anna. Not Danilo either, Giuma answered, not Danilo either, because he had married a wife who was too twisted and pinched.

10

Concettina came back from her honeymoon, and went to live with her parents-in-law in their villa outside the town. Concettina was going to have a baby and all she could do was vomit and spit. She did not come to the house. Anna and Giustino went to see her a few days after she had arrived, she was lying in a big double bed, wearing a yellow embroidered bed-jacket and spitting into a chamber-pot of flower-patterned china. Her mother-in-law was fussing round her, and also a number of grandmothers and old aunts and servant-maids, one of them bringing her soup and another lemons to suck and another putting a hot-water bottle at her feet. Concettina spoke very slowly, with her teeth clenched to prevent her from vomiting. She had been to Naples and to Capri, and had bathed in the sea before the time when she started vomiting. At Capri she had bought a box all made of shells and some shoes of plaited straw. There were old men there dressed as fishermen who were really marquises or princes, there were women who looked like men and men who looked like women. There was a lady sitting in a café with a parrot on her shoulder and three cats on a lead. Then when she had shown them the shoes and the box they found nothing more to say to each other, Anna and Giustino were standing waiting for the moment to go away, there was nothing more to say to this new Concettina who was going to have a baby, in this house full of grandmothers and servants. Old Signora Sbrancagna told them they must not tire Concettina. So they went away, they had a long way to go to get home, it took at least an hour to walk the distance between them and Concettina. The house in which Concettina lived was right out in the country, and it had round it a small damp garden, surrounded by a wall with pieces of glass stuck on top of it. “Che ha in cima cocci aguzzi di bottiglia ”, said Anna. But Giustino told her to stop quoting Montale at once, he knew that Giuma read her Montale's poems and goodness knows what they thought about them, he himself had read Montale too and had not understood much of it, he was a poet who wasn't very easy to understand. The poem about the pieces of broken bottle was the only one that could be understood a little. He told her to be careful with Giuma, perhaps he wanted to kiss her and she must take care not to let herself be kissed, she must not let herself become like Concettina, who before she got married had allowed herself to be kissed by almost everybody. Concettina had got married all the same because she was rather attractive,
she
wasn't in the least attractive and she would never get married if she went about too much with boys and let herself be kissed. They were both in a bad temper and they quarrelled all the way home, Giustino said she was treading on his toes, couldn't she keep a little to one side ? He didn't at all care about her being seen every day with Giuma, goodness knows how many times she had let him kiss her, and tills Giuma was an impossible kind of person, at school they turned their backs on him if he came up to speak to them. Anna told him that the girl she had seen him with was an Impossible kind of person, that very tall, thin girl who went out for walks with him in the evening. In any case he liked pinched-looking women, he liked Danilo's wife who was so terribly pinched-looking, he liked women who were all twisted and dried up. Giustino said that the girl whom he took out for walks in the evening meant nothing to him, she was not his girl, she was a girl who was useful to him because she was very good at doing Italian exercises, whenever he had a difficult exercise he went to this girl and got her to do it for him, and then as a reward he took her out for a walk. They got back home and Emanuele hurried to meet them in order to ask if there was a portrait of Mussolini in Concettina's bedroom, they answered that there wasn't and Emanuele was displeased, he said that perhaps Concettina had taken it down in a great hurry when she heard them arrive. Signora Maria began imploring them for goodness' sake to leave Concettina out of their politics, she was not feeling well because she was expecting a baby. Emanuele said that Concettina would have a dozen babies all for love of the Duce, so as to provide soldiers for Italy as the Duce wished. Anna and Giustino felt rather sad, it seemed strange but they felt lost without Concettina in the house, it seemed strange because she had never taken any notice of anyone and always stayed shut up in her room mending her stockings or filing her nails or nibbling her pencil while she thought about Racine. And now it seemed as if Concettina no longer existed in any part of the world ; this woman who was going to have a baby, this woman who spat into a flowered chamber-pot did not seem to be the real Concettina at all. Concettina had now got rid of Racine for ever, but, to make up for it, she suffered from nausea and would have to bring into the world a dozen babies, all of them tiresome to wash and to put to sleep.