Her Husband Read Free Page B

heard the newsboy’s cry in the street outside: “ Third edition! Four dead and twenty wounded! Clash with the military! Assault on Palazzo Braschiiii! Bloodshed on Piazza Navonaaaa! ”
    Attilio Raceni withdrew from the kiss, ashen: “Did you hear? Four dead. For God’s sake! Don’t they have anything to do? And I could have been there smack in the middle. . . .”

4

    It had already struck twelve and only five of the thirty guests who should be coming to the banquet at Castello di Costantino had arrived. These five secretly regretted their punctuality, fearing it might make them seem overanxious or too accommodating.
    First to come had been Flavia Morlacchi, poet, novelist, and playwright. After the other four arrived they left her alone, standing to one side. They were the old professor of archaeology and forgotten poet Filiberto Litti; the short-story writer from Piacenza, Faustino Toronti, affected and chaste; the overweight Neapolitan novelist Raimondo Jacono, and the Venetian poet Cosimo Zago, rickety and lame in one foot. All five stood on the terrace in front of the glassed-in hall.
    Filiberto Litti was tall, thin, wooden, with a large white mustache and a smudge of hair between his lower lip and chin, and a pair of enormous fleshy, purple ears. He was speaking, stammering a little, about the ruins there on the Palatine (as if they belonged to him) with Faustino Toronti, also elderly, but less obviously so with his hair, combed over his ears and dyed mustache. Raimondo Jacono, his backto Signora Morlacchi, was compassionately watching Zago admire the cool green countryside there before them on that sweet April day.
    The poor fellow had just arrived at the terrace railing, still wearing an old overcoat green with age that billowed around his neck. He placed a large-knuckled hand on the decorative top of the railing, his fingernails pink and deformed by the continual pressure on his crutch. Now, his sorrowful eyes closed behind his glasses, he repeated, as though he had never in his life enjoyed such a feast of light and color: “How enchanting! How intoxicating, this sun! What a view!”
    “Yes, indeed,” ruminated Jacono. “Very beautiful. Marvelous. A pity that …”
    “Those mountains over there, aerial. . . almost fragile . . . Are they still the Albani?’’
    “Apennines or Albani, don’t faint! You can ask Professor Litti over there. He’s an archaeologist.”
    “And … and, excuse me, what do the mountains have to do with … with archaeology?” Litti asked a little resentfully.
    “Professor, what are you saying!” exclaimed the Neapolitan. “Monuments of nature, of the most venerable antiquity. It’s a shame that . . . I was saying . . . It’s twelve-thirty, my oh my! I’m hungry.”
    Signora Morlacchi grimaced in disgust from where she stood. She seethed in silence as she pretended to be enchanted by the marvelous landscape. The Apennines or the Albani? She didn’t know either, but why was the name important? No one understood “azure” poetry better than she. And she asked herself if the word for the Roman burial niche, columbarium . . . the austere columbarium, wouldn’t successfully capture the image of those Palatine ruins: blind eyes, shadowy eyes of the fierce and glorious ghost of ancient Rome, still vainly gazing there from the hill on the spectacle of the green bewitching life of this April from a far distant time.
    Of this April from a far distant time . . .
    Nice line! Dreamlike . ..
    And she lowered her large, heavy eyelids over her gloomy, pale eyes, like those of a dying goat. There. She had managed to pluck the flowerof a beautiful image from nature and history. Because of this she no longer regretted having lowered herself to honor Silvia Roncella, so much younger than herself, almost a beginner still, uncultured, totally unpoetic.
    While thinking such thoughts, with a gesture of disdain, she turned her pale, coarse, worn face, with violently contrasting thick