The City and the House Read Free Page A

Adelmo wasn’t with him. Instead he had with him a plump, red-haired character dressed in grass-green overalls. I asked him where Adelmo was but he said he didn’t know anything about him. I asked him to come back home with me; he said he might come for lunch but at the moment he had things to do. He offered me his hand and I kissed his thin, black, bristly beard. Then I saw them disappear side by side - the green overalls and the leather coat - along the Lungotevere. He didn’t come to lunch that day and for a while I heard nothing about him. Then I heard that he had sold the flat in via Torricelli. Roberta told me. He had got a good price for it. He’s sly, Roberta said to me, he doesn’t look it but he’s sly; he loves money and always knows how and where to get hold of it. What makes you think he loves money I asked her, this love of money isn’t apparent in the way he lives. You don’t know him, Roberta said. It’s certainly true that I don’t know him. A few days ago he wrote to me from Berlin. He’s working on a film. For the moment he doesn’t intend to come back to Italy. Perhaps after the winter. The letter had the address of an hotel on it. I phoned him and told him that I was going to live in America. He said it seemed a good idea. I asked him to come and say goodbye to me before I left. He told me that he didn’t think he could travel, because of the film. We would see each other in America, in some American city where one day or other he might happen to turn up. The film is a film about Ulysses. He is the assistant director but they have also given him a little part, the part of a shepherd who sits on a rock and plays a pipe.
    I shall go to the cemetery before I leave. I haven’t been there for quite a while. My parents are there, and Aunt Bice, and in another part away from them, my wife. Aunt Bice is the one I think of most often. She was stupid and full of good will and above all full of an immense faith in herself. This faith filled the rooms, the sideboards and the balconies of her house. She was an optimist and was quite certain that everything she came across, every thing she could see and touch, would turn out well and happily. No one wanted Alberico; she didn’t have a moment’s hesitation, she immediately took him in. She had sky-blue eyes that were clear as water, a great head of white hair and a radiant smile. When we went wandering through the streets looking for Alberico and we couldn’t find him that smile faltered a little, but only a little. When she died Alberico was nineteen. He was doing his military service in Messina. I don’t know if Aunt Bice had ever realized that Alberico was a homosexual. I don’t think so. There were no homosexuals in her world. She died more or less unexpectedly, of a heart-attack, while visiting a neighbour. But she must have felt ill a few days before because she had contacted her solicitor. Then she had written a letter to Alberico but she hadn’t had time to post it, it was in her handbag. She had drawn up a list of every thing she had and left it to him - the flat in via Torricelli, her stocks and shares, three shops in Naples and some gold in a safe deposit. Lastly she asked him to look after her cat. Alberico came for the funeral and immediately went off again. The cat was entrusted to a neighbour. When he had finished his military service Alberico came to fetch it and took it to a flat where he was staying with some friends. He didn’t come and live in via Torricelli for the moment. He preferred his friends’ flat, a commune where six of them were living. He took the cat in a dome-shaped basket that he had bought specially. But as soon as the cat arrived in the commune it escaped over the roofs and was lost.
    Later Alberico went to live in via Torricelli with one of his friends, a Brazilian painter called Enrique. There were photographs everywhere, hanging from strings to