Vita Nuova Read Free

you there.’
    ‘Come on, now, Salva! Don’t put that tragic voice on. You survived when I was down here looking after your mother.’
    ‘I was younger then.’
    ‘Really, the best thing for her is having the boys here. Totò said to her yesterday that she’s his absolutely favourite auntie. And he really meant it, too. You should have seen her face.’
    ‘She’s his only auntie.’
    ‘He said that, too! Right away, when he realized. You know Totò. He always makes her laugh. Oh—and the good news is that they’re going to operate on Monday. She doesn’t have to wait until September like we thought. Of course, these things have to be caught right away.’
    ‘You’ll be back sooner, then?’
    ‘I don’t know. It depends on whether she needs therapy afterwards.’
    ‘Couldn’t she come up here for that? What about school starting?’
    ‘We’ll see.’
    ‘Don’t say “we’ll see”! That’s what you say to the boys!’
    ‘It’s also what the doctors are saying to Nunziata. Have you eaten?’
    ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
    ‘You know you get bad-tempered when you’re hungry.’
    ‘I’m not bad-tempered! And I would have eaten by now if I could have found the salt!’
    ‘Oh, I knew there was something else I wanted to tell you. Listen. . . .’
    He listened, holding the receiver clamped to his ear so hard that it hurt, trying to get closer to her warming voice, not following a word of it.
    ‘Concetto, the postman—you remember him—the flat above the grocer’s at the corner of the piazza. His sister worked at the same place as Nunziata, but she left when she got pregnant with her second and then her husband was killed right away in that accident—now what was her second husband’s name? It’ll come to me in a minute—what was I telling you? Concetto, that’s right. So, anyway, his mother was always trying to get him married off, never thinking . . . well, now she knows and she’s more pleased than anything—I think she thinks she can keep him for herself, so she doesn’t know the full story yet. . . .
    ‘So, I’ve said they can go, but they go together—I don’t want Totò going out on his own and I’ve said so. . . .
    ‘Oh, and there’s an Alberto Sordi film on at nine o’clock—that’ll cheer you up. . . .’
    Nine o’clock. Well, he’d missed the beginning, but he knew it by heart anyway. Spaghetti or penne? Spaghetti, definitely spaghetti. He laid his solitary place at the kitchen table but without that anxious loneliness in the pit of his stomach that he feared and hated. He could still feel his ear where the receiver had been pressed against it, still feel the warmth of her voice flowing through him. A big bowl of pasta and a glass of red would be good, and Alberto Sordi would take over after that. The evening had a shape now. He closed the window in spite of the boiling pan. He wanted to shut out the sawing of the cicadas out in the darkness of the Boboli Gardens. The sound made him lonely.
    He wasn’t one of those men who couldn’t cope. He could cope all too well, that was the trouble. Years of it, when Teresa was still down in Syracuse looking after his sick mother and he had been posted to Florence. They’d had such plans and then, the stroke that had left her bedridden . . . long, lonely years. The rich man in the hospital had been luckier. Very slight, they said, a tiny haemorrhage. Have to watch his blood pressure, then. His own was all right, so far. Just his weight that— had to concentrate on the case. Hunger is a distraction. Just don’t overdo it, Teresa always said.
    Mm . . . that was so good, though he said it himself. Of course, she had made the tomato sauce . . . he was going to have just a bit of butter on it, too. He shouldn’t, but he had to keep his energy and his spirits up if he wanted to work efficiently. This might be a delicate case and, anyway, it was a difficult time for him, being alone. It was Teresa who looked after his