Beautiful Antonio

BEAUTIFUL ANTONIO

VITALIANO BRANCATI
was born at Pachino, near Syracuse in Sicily in 1907 and was educated at Catania where he took a degree in literature. In 1924 he joined the Fascist party, but after being ‘Fascist to the roots of his hair' as he said, he repudiated it completely, and
The Lost Years,
published in 1938, was the first fruit of his conversion. From 1937 he was a schoolteacher, but turned to full-time writing after the war.
Don Giovanni in Sicilia
was published in 1941 and in 1949
Il Bell' Antonio
won the Bagutta Prize. He also wrote short stories, plays and a considerable number of articles for the press. Brancati died in 1954 in Turin.

Born in Manchester in 1954, Tim Parks grew up in London and studied at Cambridge and Harvard. In 1981 he moved to Italy where he has lived ever since. He has written twelve novels, including
Europa, Destiny,
and, most recently,
Rapids,
as well as two non-fiction accounts of life in northern Italy, and two collections of essays, literary and historical. His many translations from the Italian include works by Moravia, Tabucchi, Calvino and Calasso.

VITALIANO BRANCATI

Translated from the Italian by

PATRICK CREAGH

with an Introduction by

TIM PARKS

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First published in Italy as
Il Bell' Antonio
by Valentino Bompiani 1949
First published in Great Britain as
Antonio: The Great Lover
1952
This translation first published by Harvill an Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1993
Published in Penguin Books 2007
1

Copyright © Gruppo Editoriale Fabbri, Bompiani, Sonzogno, Etas S.p.A, 1949
English translation © HarperCollins Publishers, 1993
Introduction copyright © Tim Parks, 2007
All rights reserved

The moral right of the author and introducer has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

EISBN: 978–0–141–91134–2

To my wife

Let's start with a very Italian joke. A man goes into a tobacconist's to ask for cigarettes and the shopkeeper gives him a pack with the health warning: “SMOKING CAUSES IMPOTENCE!” Disturbed, the man hands the cigarettes back. “Sorry”, he says, “I didn't want these. Could you give me the ones that cause death, please?”

Impotence is worse than death. “May the Lord strike me down dead before sending me such a curse,” says one of the characters in
The Beautiful Antonio
. And he means it. An impotent man is “worth less than a foot rag.” And yet, paradoxically, chastity remains a virtue, or so the church has always maintained, and in particular the Catholic church in Italy. When the gorgeous and still adolescent Antonio turns even the most devout and spinsterish heads at mass, the priest invites his worried mother to pray that God may “call the boy back to Himself as soon as possible.” An uncontrolled sexual potency, then, is also worse than death.

The Beautiful Antonio
was written soon after the Second World War and published in 1949 when its author was forty-two. Born and brought up in Catania, on the east coast of Sicily below the volcano of Mount Etna, Vitaliano Brancati had been an enthusiastic Fascist until his late twenties, moving to Rome to begin a successful career in journalism. However, in 1934 when a novel he had written was banned for its erotic content, Brancati woke up to the repressive character of the regime and by 1937 he had retreated to Sicily to work as a schoolteacher and continue his writing from the safe backwaters of the provinces. The core of his creative work is made
up of four novels written between 1934 and his early death in 1954. Each sets out with great energy to paint a grotesque and comic picture not just of Italy under Fascism but of human behaviour in general. Each could be characterized as involving a collision between vitality and despair.
The Beautiful Antonio
is indisputably the best.

The genius of the book is to construct a profound conundrum: What is the relation between the sexual dysfunction that plagues Antonio and the world he lives in? Or is there no relation at all? Almost every reader will have a different response, yet the question, as Brancati poses it, is so dense with implication that it is impossible not to go on mulling over it long after the book has been closed. Our understanding of what character is, of the interaction between mind and body, of the contradictions at the heart of Western culture, all depend on our finding a credible solution – which, of course, we never will.

Exact contemporary of his creator, Antonio is the son of moderately wealthy landowners in Catania. His father is a professed philanderer and choleric loudmouth; but loveable. His mother is quiet, anxious, devout, affectionate. Brancati likes to put his characters in evidently complementary relations to each other. Antonio's parents are a double act; their conversations follow well-worn rails. But their only child is more mysterious. His handsome face and fine physique would seem to offer him his father's role as a womaniser; when he is just sixteen the family maid writhes with desire for him, she has fits of hysteria. But Antonio shares his mother's quietness, her passivity. He is taciturn, sweet, ineffably innocuous. For almost a hundred pages Brancati doesn't let us know what lies behind this oddly quiet disposition. For a further seventy we are not allowed even a glimpse of what the young man himself is thinking.

Antonio is beautiful.
Il bell' Antonio
is the Italian title and the novel could be seen as a long meditation on beauty and its position in society. The story opens with a group of young Sicilians, who, like Brancati, come to Rome in the early 1930s
to seek their fortune in the Fascist regime. Most of them are ugly and so busy chasing women they do not even notice the great works of art that surround them in the eternal city. Beauty is alien and unnecessary to them, almost invisible. The only beauty they recognize is Antonio's, and that only because it is a quality which attracts women. In truth, Antonio doesn't really chase the girls, they simply fall at his feet. They are desperate for him. His friends are in awe. Yet like the Michelangelos and Borrominis that they do not see, Antonio seems curiously excluded from the world of everyday action. It's not clear what he actually does with the women who flock to him and aside from the most tenuous acquaintance with a certain powerful minister the young man proves quite unable to penetrate Fascism's halls of power. Eventually his parents call him back to Sicily: it is time for their son to marry.

Stylistically, Brancati loves to oscillate between an almost journalistic realism and a more colourful, narrative voice that takes us right back to Boccaccio's
Decameron
, a voice that launches into story-telling with great dispatch and is never afraid of caricature. So these opening pages of the novel are full of comedy and extremity. The two styles overlap in the spoken words of its considerable gallery of characters, Brancati's dialogue being at once absolutely credible yet full of the extravagance, blasphemy and bizarre earthiness that one does find in Italian speech. So and so “would pick up coins from the floor with his buttocks!” declares Antonio's father. Or again, so and so “has a dick that could punch holes in stone.”

Antonio, however, is always moderate in his speech, as if he were holding back, and this self-effacing manner is somehow at one with his enigmatic beauty. Again Brancati loves to work with stark contrasts. When Antonio is with his father, he lets him chatter on and simply agrees with him, humours him, even when the older man changes his mind more or less every time he opens his mouth. The two could not be more different, the one furiously, even grotesquely engaged in the world, the other graceful, but inert, limp. Crucially, Antonio allows
his parents to choose his bride for him: the beautiful and pious Barbara Puglisi, daughter of a local notary.

Fascism too, of course, enjoyed the extravagant gesture, the swagger of an exaggerated vitality, the cult of bold, determined action, in bed as well as on the battlefield. Mussolini as we know was notorious for his womanising. He claimed to have had thousands of women, although “he never wasted time taking his pants off,” regretted his long-term mistress Clara Petacci. Antonio's father refers to the Duce as the Proco: the pig, epitome of sexual indulgence, and physical and moral ugliness. Antonio, it seems, comes from another planet. His visit to a Sicilian brothel with a group of Fascist dignitaries is one of the great set pieces of the book. The whores all want Antonio, but he politely declines, allowing the successful politicians to behave like goats. Everybody is in awe of the minister who manages three women in a single evening.

But if Fascism sees life crudely in terms of success and failure, win or lose, the broader and older institution of the church offers the more subtle yardstick of right and wrong, sin and virtue. The position of sex in these two different schemes is problematic. In the masculine, Fascist vision it is always right for a man to have any woman he can. “I don't let anything slip by,” says one of Antonio's friends. Women are objects. “But your
uncle's wife
?” protests another. “The ass makes no exceptions… start having scruples, and the others'll be mounting her with both shoes on!”

Sex, then, is a competition, a free for all. Getting laid is success and not getting laid is failure or, worse still, somebody else's success. Again and again the book deploys an imagery that links sexual and military prowess, even sex and killing. But in the Christian scheme of things, of course, repeated sexual conquest is sin, betrayal is sin. The unchaste man, like the killer, is going to hell.

Both schemes, however, have their internal contradictions. When the philanderer is asked what happens if someone mounts his sister or mother, he shouts: “Don't talk about my
mother and my sister! My mother and my sister have got nothing to do with it!” “But aren't they women too?” replies his friend. For the church, and the upright community in general, despite all St. Paul's teaching about the superiority of celibacy, chastity ceases to be a virtue in marriage. However piously her parents may have brought her up, however rigorously they have protected her innocence, Antonio's rich in-laws want their daughter Barbara to have a child, to give the family a future, to provide an heir to their accumulated fortune.

Marriage, of course, is
par excellence
an image of fusion, reconciliation of opposites, resolution of contradictions. Sexual potency finds a kind of chastity in what the church considers a sacrament; female modesty may be relaxed in the monogamous marriage bed. And, of course, sex and property are fused together in marriage. The wife brings her dowry as well as her body. The man offers protection, income.

For Fascism too, despite the Duce's notorious promiscuity, the institution of the family was to be supported at all costs. The nation's vitality would express itself in its high birth rate, its production of young men and women prepared to live and die for Italy. In what he called “The battle for births,” Mussolini introduced cash prizes for the women who had most children and a “bachelor tax” on men over twenty-five who did not marry. In typically aggressive and ambiguous rhetoric, the Duce spoke of his determination to give the nation “a demographic whipping.”

But after three years of marriage, Antonio's beautiful wife is still not pregnant. In fact, as her scandalised parents discover, she is exactly as she was the day they gave her away in marriage, a virgin. To put it bluntly, the beautiful Antonio can't get it up. When the news finally breaks it causes a greater scandal, greater confusion, than even the bombs that will soon be falling in wartime. It is as if every tacit compromise and hypocrisy that allows society to go on functioning had been exposed.