His simplicity was an act, his stupidity hid a really active cunning.
This is how it went:
He would choose a cabbage or a cauliflower with a truly exasperating patience. He would be ready to pay the price that was asked him, but suddenly would discover another one that looked larger or tastier, and this was enough for an argument to brew between Don Gaetano and the stallholder, each of them trying to rob the other, to cheat their fellow man, even if it was only of as much as a single centavo.
His bad faith was astonishing. He never paid what was asked, only what he offered. Once I had put the produce into the basket, Don Gaetano would step away from the stall, sink his thumbs into the pockets of his jacket, take out the money, count it, count it and recount it, and then throw it down onto the counter as if he were doing the stallholder a favour, and then move quickly away.
If the owner shouted after him, he would reply:
‘Estate buono.’18
He had the urge to keep moving, he was a glutton for looking at things, he went into ecstasies when he saw all the produce because of the money it represented.
He would go up to the pork sellers and ask them the price of their sausages, he would look carefully at the rosy pig-heads, turn them over in his hands slowly under the bland gaze of the bulky owners in their white aprons, scratch his ear, look with lust at the ribs hanging from their hooks, the pillars of sliced fatty bacon, and then, as if he were resolving a problem that had been tormenting his mind, would head off to another stall to snaffle a slice of cheese or count how many asparagus there were in a bunch, to get his hands dirty with artichokes and turnips, to eat pumpkin seeds or hold eggs up to the light and rejoice in the heaps of wet butter, solid, yellow, still smelling of whey.
We ate at around two in the afternoon. Don Miguel with his plate balanced on top of a kerosene flask, I standing at one corner of a table covered in books, the fat woman in the kitchen and Don Gaetano at the counter.
We left the cave at eleven p.m.
Don Miguel and the fat woman walked in the middle of the well-lit street, carrying the basket in which the coffee-making equipment banged around; Don Gaetano, his hands buried in his pockets, his hat on the crown of his head and a curl of hair hanging over his forehead, and I went after them, thinking how long my first day had been.
We went up to the house and when we got to the corridor Don Gaetano asked me:
‘Brought a mattress, did you?’
‘No. Why?’
‘There’s a bed, but no mattress.’
‘And there’s nothing to cover myself with?’
Don Gaetano looked around, then opened the door to the dining room; there was a heavy furry green cloth on the table.
Doña María had already gone into the bedroom when Don Gaetano grabbed the cloth at one end and threw it in a bad-tempered way over my shoulder, and said:
‘Estate buono.’ Without replying to my goodnight, he shut the door in my face.
I was disconcerted, standing in front of the old man, who showed his indignation with a dirty blasphemy (‘Ah! Stinking God!’) and then walked off with me following.
The garret where lived the scrawny old man, whom from that moment onwards I called Stinking God, was an absurd triangle under the roof, with a little round window that gave onto Esmerelda Street and its electric lighting. The glass in the bulls-eye was broken, and gusts of wind entered through the gap, causing the yellow tongue of a candle to dance in the saint’s alcove in the wall.
There was a scissor-bed against the walclass="underline" two crossed sticks with a canvas nailed to it.
Stinking God left to urinate on the terrace, then sat down on a box, took his hat and his boots off, wrapped his scarf round his neck and, prepared to face the cold of the night, got carefully into the scissor-bed, covering himself up to the chin with the covers, which were in fact sacks filled with worn-out rags.
The fading light of the candle illuminated his profile, his large red nose, his flat brow with its wrinkles, and his shaved head with a few remnants of grey hair over the ears. Because the draught annoyed him, Stinking God stuck a hand out, took his hat and pulled it down over his ears, then he took the butt-end of a cigar out of his pocket, lit it, threw out large mouthfuls of smoke and, with his hands behind his head, looked at me sombrely.
I started to examine my bed. Many people must have suffered in it, so bad was its state. The points of the springs had pierced the mattress, and they stayed sticking up in the air like fantastic corkscrews, and the staples that were supposed to hold the sides together had been replaced by pieces of wire.
But it was obvious that I wasn’t going to spend the night in ecstasy, and after testing its stability, I took off my boots in imitation of Stinking God, then wrapped them in a newspaper to serve as my pillow, then wrapped myself in the green cloth, lay down on the treacherous bed and resolved to sleep.
It was indisputably a bed for the extremely poor, a bad joke, the grumpiest bed I have ever known.
The springs sank into my back: it was as if the points wanted to drill through the flesh between my ribs; the steel mesh that was rigid in one spot sunk down inconsiderately in another, just as, by the miracle of elasticity, it lifted up in a third point; with every movement you made the bed would yelp, screech with amazing noises, like an unoiled gearbox. Furthermore, I couldn’t find a comfortable position, the stiff knap of the cloth scratched against my throat, the edges of the boots were making my neck lose all sensation, the spirals of the bent springs were pinching my flesh. So:
‘Hey, Stinking God!’
Like a tortoise, the old man stuck his little head out into the air from its sackcloth shell.
‘What is it, Don Silvio?’
‘How come they haven’t thrown this horrible bed out?’
The venerable old man, rolling his eyes, replied with a deep sigh, calling on God to witness all the iniquities of which mankind was capable.
‘Tell me, Stinking God, isn’t there any other bed…? It’s impossible to sleep on this one…’
‘This house is hell, Don Silvio… a pit of hell.’ Lowering his voice, afraid of being overheard: ‘It’s… the wife… the food… Oh Stinking God, what a terrible house this is!’
The old man put out the light and I thought:
‘I am indeed going from bad to worse.’
Now I heard the noise of rain on the zinc roof of the attic.
Suddenly I heard a muffled sobbing. It was the old man who was crying, crying out of misery and hunger. And this was my first day.
Sometimes, at night, there are faces that appear, faces of women who wound you with the sword of sweetness. We move apart, and our soul remains shadowy and alone, as happens after a party.
Unusual apparitions… they disappear and we never hear of them again, but even so they accompany us at night, their eyes fixed on our own fixed eyes… and we are wounded with the sword of sweetness, and imagine how the love of these women will be, these faces that enter into your own flesh. An anguished desert of the spirit, a transient luxury that is both harsh and demanding.
We think how each one would bend her head towards us, to have her half-open lips pointing towards the sky, how she would allow herself to faint from desire without spoiling for a moment her face throughout this ideal moment; we think how her own hands would tear at the laces of her corset…
Faces… faces of young women ready for joyous torments, faces which cause a sudden faintness to burn in one’s entrails, faces in which desire does not spoil the ideal nature of the moment. How do they come to occupy our nights?
I have spent hours on end chasing after, in my mind, a woman who during the day left the desire for love in my bones.