I would consider her charms slowly, charms that were ashamed of being so adorable: her mouth made for nothing other than lengthy kisses; I imagined her willing body holding tight to the flesh of another person, flesh that called for her to abandon herself, and imagined her insisting that she would enjoy her abandonment; I saw the magnificent smallness of her vulnerable parts, my vision filled with her face, with her body that was so young for torment and for motherhood; I would stretch out an arm to my own poor flesh: in punishing it, I allowed it to attain pleasure.
At this moment Don Gaetano came in from the street and headed towards the kitchen. He looked at me with furrowed brows, but did not say anything, and I leant over the jar of paste I was using to repair a book, thinking: there’s going to be a storm here.
It was the case that, with brief bright periods, the couple fought.
The pale woman, immobile, her elbows on the counter, her hands buried in the folds of her green shawl, followed her husband’s movements with cruel eyes.
Don Miguel, in the little kitchen, was washing the plates in a greasy basin. The tips of his scarf touched the edges of the vessel and a red and blue checked apron tied to his belt with twine protected him from splashes.
‘What a house this is, Stinking God!’
I should explain that the kitchen, the site of our meetings, was in front of a stinking latrine, a corner of the cave behind the bookshelves.
On top of a dirty table, stacked next to leftover vegetables, were little pieces of meat and potatoes, which Don Miguel used to make the meagre pittance that was the midday meal. What was spared our voraciousness was served again at night-time as an outlandish stew. And Stinking God was the genius and the wizard of this repugnant alcove. We would go there to curse our luck; sometimes Don Gaetano would hide there to meditate on the discomforts of matrimony.
The hatred that brewed in the woman’s breast always ended up by exploding.
Some insignificant motive was enough, any little nothing.
Suddenly, swollen by a dull fury, the woman would leave the counter and, with her slippers dragging on the tiles, wringing her hands underneath the scarf, with her lips set and her eyes wide open, would look for her husband.
I remember the particular scene of that day:
As was his custom, that morning Don Gaetano had pretended not to see her, even though he was only a step away from her. I saw the man bend his head towards a book and pretend to read the title.
When she stopped, the pale woman stayed stock-still. Only her lips trembled, like leaves.
Then she said in a voice that was a terrible monotone:
‘I was beautiful. What have you done to my life?’
The hair that hung over her forehead trembled as if in a breeze.
Don Gaetano shuddered.
With a despair that caused her throat to close up, she threw the following words at her husband, heavy words, words like gunpowder:
‘I raised you up… Who was your mother…? Just a bagazza who went around with all the men? What have you done with my life…?’
‘María, shut up!’ Don Gaetano replied in a cavernous voice.
‘Yes, who was it who fed you and clothed you…? Me, strunzo… I fed you.’ The woman’s hand lifted as if she wished to strike her husband’s cheek.
Don Gaetano retreated, trembling.
She said, with a bitterness that trembled on the edge of sobbing, heavy gunpowder-like sobbing:
‘What have you done to my life… pig? I was happy in my house like a poppy in a pot, and I didn’t need to marry you, strunzo…’
The woman’s lips moved convulsively, as if she were chewing on some sticky, terrible hatred.
I went out to chase the curious bystanders away from the front of the shop.
‘Leave them, Silvio,’ she ordered me in a shout. ‘Let them hear who this scoundrel really is.’ Her green eyes were wide, making it seem as if her face were drawing ever nearer, like an image painted on the background of a screen, and she continued speaking, ever more pale:
‘If I were a different person, if I got around more, then I’d have a better life… I’d be a long way away from a hog like you.’
She stopped talking and rested.
Now Don Gaetano was looking after a gentleman in an overcoat, with big gold spectacles riding on a narrow cold-reddened nose.
Aroused by his indifference, because the husband must have been used to these scenes and must have preferred to be insulted to losing his benefits, the woman called out:
‘Don’t listen to him, señor, don’t you see that he’s just a thief from Napoli?’
The old gentleman turned round in astonishment to look at this fury, and she continued:
‘He’ll ask you twenty pesos for a book that cost four.’ As Don Gaetano did not turn round, she screamed until her face filled with blood: ‘Yes, you’re a thief, a thief!’ And she spat out her spite, her disgust.
The old gentleman said, fixing his glasses more firmly on his nose:
‘I’ll come back some other day.’ And he left indignantly.
Then Doña María took a book and threw it suddenly at Don Gaetano’s head, and then another one, and another one.
Don Gaetano seemed to be drowning in rage. Suddenly he grasped at his neck, took the black tie and threw it at his wife’s face; then he stopped still for a moment as if he had been given a blow to the temple, and then he started running, he ran out into the street, his eyes sticking out of their sockets, and, stopping in the middle of the pavement, shaking his bare shaved head, waving like a madman to the passers-by, his arms held out, he shouted in a voice that rage had made unnaturaclass="underline"
‘Beast… beast… animal!’
With satisfaction, she turned to me:
‘You see what he’s like? Worthless… scum! I’m telling you, sometimes I feel like leaving him.’ Turning to the counter she crossed her arms, still sunk in abstractions, her cruel gaze fixed on the street.
Suddenly:
‘Silvio.’
‘Señora.’
‘How many days does he owe you for?’
‘Three including today, señora.’
‘Here you go.’ Passing me the money, she added: ‘Don’t trust him, he’s a con-artist… He cheated an Insurance Company; if I wanted, I could get him sent to jail.’
I went to the kitchen.
‘What do you think, Miguel?’
‘Hell, Don Silvio. What a life! Stinking God!’
And the old man, threatening heaven with his fist, sighed and then bent his head over the basin and carried on peeling potatoes.
‘But where do these explosions come from?’
‘I don’t know… they don’t have kids… he can’t perform…’
‘Miguel.’
‘Yes, señora.’
The strident voice ordered:
‘Don’t make any food; we’re not going to eat today. Anyone who doesn’t like it can move out.’
This was the coup de grâce. A few tears flowed down the ruined face of the starving old man.
A few moments went by.
‘Silvio.’
‘Señora.’
‘Here you go, here’s fifty centavos. You go and find something to eat round here.’ Wrapping her arms in the folds of the green scarf, she took up her normal wild pose. On her livid cheeks two tears flowed slowly down to the corners of her mouth.
Feeling moved, I murmured:
‘Señora…’
She looked at me, and without moving her mouth, smiling with a strangely convulsive smile, she said:
‘Run along, and be back at five.’
Taking advantage of my free afternoon I decided to go to see Señor Vicente Timoteo Souza, a man who dedicated himself to occult sciences and other theosophic studies, and to whom I had been recommended by a third party.