Voices In The Evening Read Free Page B

head. Maria began to cry and said,
    â€˜What a tragedy—what a tragedy!'
    Then she embraced Raffaella and said,
    â€˜How splendid you are! Yes, splendid, splendid!' and added,
    â€˜But don’t you ever fire that pistol here.’

3
Elsa and her Family
    D URING the war we went away first to Castello and first to Castel Piccolo for fear that the village would be bombed because of the factory.
    My mother kept chickens at Castello and turkeys and rabbits, and had also started a colony of bees. But there must have been somethingwrong with the hives, because the bees thed, the whole lot of them, when the snow came.
    At Castel Piccolo she would not have any more animals. She said that when she had to look after animals she became fond of them and she could not bear cooking them any more.
    Now we have various animals at our dairy farm. This is called La Vigna and lies in the direction of the woods of Castello about a kilometre from us. My mother goes to La Vigna two or three times every week. But she does not make friends with the animals. The woman on the farm looks after them and Antonia kills, plucks or skins them, and my mother puts them all in the pot widiout troubling herself, because she does not stop to think that they once had feathers or skins.
    After the Liberation my sister was called on to be an interpreter, because she had a good knowledge of English. An American colonel fell in love with her and they got married and went off to Johannesburg. In civil life he had a business down there.
    I went to the university in the town. I lived together with the younger of the little Bottiglia girls at the Protestant Centre. Giulana Bottiglia completed her teachers’ training and I took a degree in literature and then we both returned home.
    About twice every week I go to town on one pretext or another—to change the books at the ‘Selecta' library for Aunt Ottavia, to buy threads for my mother’s embroidery or a special brand of English tobacco for my father.
    I usually go on the motor-bus which leaves at midday from the piazza and get off in the Corso Piacenza in the town two steps away from the Yk dello Statute, where the ‘Selecta’ library is.
    The last bus is at ten o’clock in the evening.
    I was in the little arm-chair. I pressed my hands against the sides of the stove and took them away when I felt them burning and put them to my face, and then put them on the stove again. And so I whiled away half an hour.
    Giuliana Bottiglia appeared.
    She was wearing black stockings, as was the fashion at that time, and black leather gloves, a very short white raincoat and a black silk scarf on her head.
    â€˜Am I disturbing you?’ she said.
    She sat down and took off her gloves and scarf and began to comb her wavy hair. Then she shook it out; it is black and fluffed out, with little curls, like commas, on the temples.
    â€˜l went to the cinema today,’ she said, ‘at Cignano.’
    â€˜What were they doing?”
    â€˜Fiery Darkness.’
    â€˜But why was the darkness fiery?’
    â€˜Because He was an engineer—gone blind,’ she said, ‘and She was a woman off the streets, but He did not know that and believed She was pure and they get married. They take a very fine apartment. But He begins to have his suspicions.’
    â€˜Why suspicions?’
    â€˜Because She had told him that previously She had been poor, and instead He discovers that She was by no means so poor, since She has a good deal of jewellery. He discovers that because the maid tells him she had seen her with the jewellery.’
    â€˜Previously?’
    â€˜Yes, previously. And one evening He hears her talking to someone on the terrace. This is a banker very much enamoured of her who knows about her past, and is blackmailing her. He tells her that either She makes love with him or if not he goes to the blind man and tells him everything. The banker is Yul Brynner.’
    â€˜The one