Read Online Beautiful Antonio by Vitaliano Brancati - Free Book Online

dead-beats! Give us a break, do!…” And here she addressedAntonio in the accents of one relinquishing a tiresome role and giving voice to her true tastes. “Come on now, duckie. ’Cor, do I ever want to get a breath of fresh air!”
    These words struck the company like the blow of a mace to the midriff. They could not have been more cogently informed that they were unlovable, and that without exception all their conquests of the evening had been but a snare and a delusion.
    The girl had clasped Antonio to her side, and while the involuntary undulations of her bare hips, and the equally involuntary sportings of her right hand, manifested a warm and plentiful ardour, at the rest of the company she directed a cold and haughty stare.
    â€œIt’s been a bloody awful evening for us too, I’ll have you know!” declared the Deputy Secretary-General, hefting himself out of his chair. “Let’s get out of here!”
    Edoardo Lentini, anxious lest such a conquest, by making the others look small, might get his friend into trouble, amiably remarked, “Antonio’ll be coming along with us. He’s not going to stay and waste his time here…”
    â€œ
Here
,” retorted the girl, “he would
not
be wasting his time. He’d be wasting it with you lot, with all that daft rubbish you get up to just so as to get on everybody’s nerves!”
    â€œAntonio, we must go. We shouldn’t stay here a moment longer,” said Edoardo, now with a resolute ring to his voice.
    â€œLeave him alone!” commanded the Deputy Secretary, carefully pressing his fez down onto his glistening hair. “We’re not such tyrants as to wish to chastise the taste of tarts…”
    At this Antonio freed himself from the girl’s grasp and, with a motion as indolent as it was self-assured, removed the fez from the Deputy Secretary’s head and – O unheard-of thing! – began to toss it nonchalantly from hand to hand while eyeing the open window as if he had half a mind to bung it out into the street.
    Every man-jack of them went green about the gills. Lorenzo Calderara puffed up like a drowning man gulping water, his breath coming ever more laboured and spasmodic. EdoardoLentini mouthed the paternosters he was mentally rattling off to invoke the aid of God for his friend in peril. The women alone gazed upon Antonio with emotions which (since their very natures prompted them to play it strong) ended in their making some lewd remark.
    The Deputy Secretary grabbed Antonio’s arm with his brawny hand and held it fast. He raked all present with a stately glare. He glared at Antonio… Then, seized by a sudden impulse of liking for the young man, he burst out laughing.
    Sighs of relief all round, except from Lorenzo Calderara, ever slow on the uptake and incapable of lightning switches from wrath to mirth without risking a veritable seizure.
    â€œGood luck to you, young man!” cried the bigwig, readjusting the fez on his hairdo and rapping his riding-crop on Antonio’s chest. “Would you care to go to Bologna as local Deputy Secretary? Only too glad to oblige. The women there will skin you alive… Anyway, give it a thought in the course of the night, if that girl of yours gives you a chance to think… She looks like giving you the works. A year from now you’ll be a local Party Secretary! Right, comrades, let’s make a move!”
    And as in the meanwhile he had snapped shut the clasp of his cloak, impetuously he swept from the room.
    Boisterously summing up the events of the evening, all the officials tumbled away at his heels.

III
    T HE EVENING SPENT at the “Pensione Eros” was not without consequences for Antonio. Signor Alfio learnt all the details in a dark corridor of the Law Courts, where the mice were producing deafening havoc in the great presses stuffed with old documents.
    â€œDo I make myself clear?” he asked