Agostino

So how would he manage to penetrate and gain admission to that house? How should he behave in choosing the woman and retiring with her? None of this mattered to Agostino. Even if it had, he couldn’t envision it. Because despite Tortima’s accounts, the house, its inhabitants, and the things that happened inside it were still enveloped in a dense, improbable air, as if they involved not so much concrete realities as a series of hazardous guesses that, at the last minute, might even prove to be wrong. The success of his endeavor was thus confided to a logical calculation: If there was a house, there were also women; and if there were women, there was also the possibility of getting close to one of them. But he wasn’t sure the house and the women really existed, and if they did, whether they resembled the image he had formed. It was not that he did not trust Tortima but rather that he had absolutely no terms of comparison. He had never done anything, never seen anything that had a thing in common, remotely or imperfectly, with what he was about to attempt. Like a poor savage who hears about the palaces of Europe and can only envision larger versions of his own hut, the only way he could imagine those women and their caresses was to think of his mother, so different and unimportant. The rest was daydreaming, fantasy, desire.

But as can happen, inexperience led him to dwell mainly on the practical aspects of the matter, as if, by settling them, he would also be able to solve the problem of how unrealistic the whole enterprise was. He was particularly worried by the question of money. Tortima had explained to him very carefully how much he would have to pay and to whom, but Agostino still could not wrap his mind around it. What was the relationship between money — which is generally needed to acquire clearly definable objects and verifiable quantities — and caresses, naked flesh, and the female body? How could a price be set on them, and how could such a price be calculated accurately and not vary each time? The idea of the money he would pay in exchange for that shameful, forbidden sweetness seemed strange and cruel, like an insult, which might be pleasurable to the person who delivers it but is painful to the one who receives it. Did he really have to pay the money directly to the woman or at least to someone in her presence? He felt it would be more appropriate for him to conceal the transaction from her, and leave her the illusion of a less interested relation. Finally, wasn’t the sum indicated by Tortima too small? No amount of money, he thought, could pay for an experience such as the one he expected to conclude one period of his life and inaugurate another.

In the face of these doubts, he decided in the end to stick closely to Tortima’s information. Even if untrue, it was nevertheless the only thing on which he could base a plan of action. He had persuaded a companion to tell him the price of a visit to the house, and the sum had seemed larger than the savings he had long been setting aside and keeping in a clay piggy bank. Between coins and small bills he must have scraped together the right amount and maybe even surpassed it. Maybe he could take the money from the piggy bank, wait until his mother had left to pick up her friend from the train station, go out himself, run to find Tortima, and then proceed to the house with him. Then the money would have to be enough for him and Tortima, whom he knew was poor as well as unwilling to do him any favors without receiving a personal benefit in return. This was the plan, and although he continued to see it as hopelessly remote and improbable, he decided to act on it with the same accuracy and certainty as a boat trip or a raid of the pine grove.

Excited, anxious, and for the first time free of the venom of guilt and impotence, he ran almost the whole way, crossing the town from the piazza to his house. When he arrived the door was locked, but the shutters of the living-room window on the ground floor were open. Through the window he could hear piano music. He went in. His mother was sitting in front of the keyboard. The two soft lamps on the piano illuminated her face, leaving most of the room in darkness. She was sitting upright on a stool, playing the piano. Next to her, on another stool, was the young boatman. It was the first time Agostino had seen him in their house, and a sudden premonition took his breath away. His mother seemed to have noticed Agostino’s presence, since she turned her head toward him with a calm and unconsciously flirtatious gesture. A flirtatiousness — to his mind, at least — directed more at the young man than at him, its supposed object. At the sight of him, she immediately stopped playing and asked him to draw nearer. “Agostino, is this any hour to return home? Come to me.”

He slowly approached her, filled with repulsion and awkwardness. The mother pulled him close, wrapping an arm around his body. In her eyes Agostino could see an extraordinary brightness, a sparkling youthful fire. Her mouth seemed to be restraining a nervous laughter that coated her teeth with saliva. And in the act of wrapping her arm around him and pulling him to her side, he felt an impetuous violence and a trembling joyousness that almost frightened him. They were effusions, he could not help but think, that had nothing to do with him. Strangely they made him think of his own excitement a little earlier when he was running through the streets of the city, thrilled at the idea of taking his savings, going to the house with Tortima, and possessing a woman.

“Where have you been?” the mother continued in a tender, cruel, but cheerful voice. “Where have you been all this time? You’re such a naughty boy.” Agostino said nothing, in part because he had the impression his mother was not awaiting an answer. The same way, he thought to himself, she sometimes spoke to the cat. The young man looked at him and smiled, leaning forward, his hands clasped between his knees, a cigarette between two fingers, and his eyes sparkling just like the mother’s. “Where have you been?” she repeated. “Naughty boy… you little rascal.” With her big, long, warm hand, she ruffled his hair with a caress of tender and irresistible violence, and then smoothed it back down on his forehead. “He’s such a handsome boy, isn’t he?” she added proudly, turning toward the young man.

“Handsome like his mother,” the young man replied. The mother laughed pathetically at this simple compliment. Agitated and filled with embarrassment, Agostino started to pull away. “Now go wash up,” the mother told him, “and don’t take all day. We’re having dinner soon.” Agostino said goodbye to the young man and left the room. From behind him, the musical notes resumed immediately, picking up where they had been interrupted by his entrance.

Once he was in the hall, he stopped and lingered to listen to the sounds the mother’s fingers were releasing from the keyboard. The hall was dark and stuffy. At one end you could see, through the open door, the illuminated kitchen and the cook dressed in white busying herself slowly between the table and the stove. In the meantime the mother was playing, and to Agostino the music sounded lively, tumultuous, sparkling, in every way similar to the expression in her eyes when she was holding him close to her side. Maybe it was the type of music, or maybe again it was the mother adding the tumult, the sparkle, and the liveliness. The whole house echoed with it, and Agostino found himself wondering whether outside in the street there might be clusters of people stopping to listen in amazement to the scandalous indiscretion resounding in each of those notes.

Then, all at once, midway through a chord, the sounds came to a stop. Agostino had a dark certainty that the force ringing through the music had suddenly found a more appropriate outlet. He took two steps back and set foot on the threshold of the living room.

What he saw did not greatly surprise him. The young man was standing up and kissing the woman on the mouth. Bent over backward on the low, narrow piano stool, which her body overflowed on every side, she still had one hand on the keyboard and the other wrapped around the young man’s neck. In the dim light you could see her body twisted back, her palpitating breast exposed, one leg bent and the other extended to touch the pedal. In contrast to her violent devotion, the young man seemed to maintain his customary distance and composure. From his upright position, he had one arm under the woman’s neck, more out of fear that she would fall, you might say, than out of violent passion. The other arm dangled to his side, the hand still holding a cigarette. His legs were clothed in white, sturdy and open, one on either side of her, expressing both self-possession and determination.