Read Online Voices In The Evening by Natalia Ginzburg - Free Book Online Page B

there, sitting in that arm-chair of an evening,’ she said, ‘used to be Nebbia, and it was all so nice, and it seemed nothing to have him sitting there, asleep, and now we shall never see him any more!’
    â€˜Happiness,’ he said, ‘always seems nothing. It is like water; one only realizes it when it has run away.’
    That is true,’ she said. She thought for a moment and said,
    â€˜It is the same with the evil we do; it seems nothing, just seems foolishness, cold water, while we are doing it. Otherwise people would not do it; they would be more careful.’
    â€˜True,’ he said.
    She said, ‘Why have we ruined everything, everything?’ and she began to cry. She said,
    â€˜I can’t leave this house. I brought up my children here, I have been here so many years, so many years. I can’ t—I can’ t leave it.’
    â€˜Then you want to stay here?’ he asked.
    And she said, ‘No’—and went away the next day.
    Vincenzino remained alone.
    For a while he stayed at Casa Mercanti, then he moved to the house where Raffaella and Tommasino were, on the brow of the hill.
    He went to Rome, once or twice a month, to see his children. Catè was there in Rome, in her apartment in the Viale Parioli. They never saw one another.
    He used to take the children sweets and presents. He also took them on one occasion a flute. But they were not interested in music; they only liked mechanical things, motors.
    The Christian Left was disbanded and he did not belong to any party after that. He wrote a book about his time as a prisoner in India, and had a resounding success with it.
    He was surprised and pleased also; then he immediately put it out of his thoughts.
    He was now in sole command at the works. His hands were free, and he was able to do as he pleased. He had many plans in his head and he was able to realize them. There was a whole world of things in his head.
    He was always the same, with his fair curly hair thick and close like a carpet. He hadn’t a grey hair. He had developed a cool rather weary manner of authority that appealed to the women.
    He could probably have had all the women he wanted. But he did not want anyone.
    When he went to the town he ended up occasionally by spending the evening at Xenia’s. He played chess with the Swiss doctor whom Xenia had married, and drank whisky. The doctor gave him advice about his liver, which he had ruined with whisky, and prescribed some minute doses of that green powder of his in little papers.
    In the village he sometimes spent the evenings with Purillo. It surprised him that he liked passing the time in this way, with his old enemies, Xenia and Purillo.
    Purillo was still very much scared, when he returned from Switzerland after the war, so scared that before he did return he had waited some time and could not make up his mind. To begin with he remained shut up in the Villa Rondine without ever setting foot in the works. He was thin, wasted away by fear, and there he was in the house with his
purillo
cap on his head and wearing an overcoat because there at the Vila Rondine the water was frozen in the central-heating system and the boilers had burst: they had to burn wood in the stoves, which did not draw and heated badly.
    He was assailed with regrets for having been a Fascist. That seemed to him an enormous act of folly, quite unforgivable, wMch had put a stain on Ms whole life At times he spoke of making away with himself. Vincenzino had to comfort him and calm him down.
    He begged Vincenzino to tell everybody that he, Purillo, had saved Balotta, by taking him away from the village. The Fascists would have killed old Balotta if he had not taken him to Cignano.
    â€˜But they know that in the village,’ said Vincenzino, and looked at him sitting there with his
purillo
cap, his badly shaved cheeks, his Adam’s apple protruding from his unfastened collar, and his pale hands with folds of