“I will have him baptized!” he shouted suddenly. “And I will have him called Gian-Luca!”
Teresa, her throat modestly concealed by the collar of her cotton nightgown, her hair brushed severely from her brow and plaited, her hands clasped before her on the red coverlet, looked at her husband coldly.
“Why baptized?” she inquired as though surprised. “And if baptized, why Gian-Luca?”
Fabio turned to her: “Is it you who speak so—you who have always been so pious?”
“I have done with piety,” said Teresa quietly, flicking some dust from the bedspread.
“And you would deny him the rites of the Church?”
“I have done with the Church,” said Teresa.
“Ah! Then perhaps you have done with God, too?”
“Yes, I have done with God, too.”
Fabio stared at his wife aghast. He had not been a practicing Catholic for years; still, he had had his ideas about things, and God had been one of his ideas. Something angry and pitiful was stirring in his heart on behalf of the small Gian-Luca; a feeling that he was not receiving fair play, that for all he, Fabio, knew he was being deprived of some mystical, incomprehensible advantage, of something that he had a right to, and the more his heart smote him the angrier he grew.
“He shall be baptized!” he repeated furiously.
“Forms—” murmured Teresa, “just meaningless forms—” and she shrugged her angular shoulders. The child began to cry, and stooping down she rocked the wicker bassinette. “Just meaningless forms,” she murmured again, and then: “Why Gian-Luca, Fabio?”
“It came to me so—it came to me, ‘Gian-Luca,’ I cannot say more than that.”
“It came to you so?”
“Yes, I thought ‘Gian-Luca,’ as I took him from you that night.”
“I see—a sign from heaven, I suppose?”
“Corpo di Bacco!” bellowed Fabio. “Corpo di Bacco! I will baptize him now, I myself will baptize him!”
He lunged out of bed and over to the washstand, dipping his fingers in the jug. Bending down to the now quiet infant, he made the sign of the cross on its forehead. “Gian-Luca, I baptize thee,” he muttered fiercely, “in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” Then his anger suddenly deserted him. He looked up at Teresa; she was watching the proceedings with a little smile on her lips.
Feeling cold and rather frightened, he crawled back to bed and tried to take her in his arms. “My Teresa,” he whispered, “be gentle, my Teresa, don’t hate our little grandson so much—be gentle to him for Olga’s sake—perhaps, she can see us, who knows?”
“Fool!” said Teresa. “Olga is dead; it would have been better if the child had died too. I feel nothing any more, neither love nor hate, my heart is broken. Can a broken heart feel?”
“I will try to mend it for you,” he pleaded.
“You!” she said, turning her face away.
The candle guttered and went out. Fabio stared miserably into the darkness; he prayed a little but without much hope, he had always been rather hopeless in his prayers, always a little too fearful of God. And meanwhile the newly baptized Gian-Luca had mercifully gone off to sleep, his crumpled face was pressed into the pillow, his round, shiny head, ridiculously bald, was slightly bedewed with sweat. From time to time Teresa’s hand dropped softly and set the cradle in motion; this she did automatically, from a sense of duty and custom. The rocking of the cradle fell into line with a hundred other everyday duties that must and would be accomplished, and presently Gian-Luca would fall into line too. He would never be neglected; like the shop and the house he would always be kept clean and sweet, and like the shop and the house he would come to long at times for the hand that disheveled, that rendered untidy, in a foolish access of affection.
II
Gian-Luca having no one to talk to, and having no language wherewith to talk in any case, found himself, as all infants must be, at a great disadvantage in relation to life. Had his mind been a blank, as people seemed to think, it would have been easier not to howl; but his mind was a turbulent seething muddle, in which colic and darkness and the sudden flare of gas-jets and ticklings and prickings and stupid grasping hands and uncomfortable confinement in preposterous positions, were all jumbled together in nebulous chaos, impossible at first to disentangle. From this chaos one day there suddenly emerged a creature who was beautifully concrete, a kindly young woman who had always been there and had always borne a relation to hunger and to hunger’s ultimate appeasement. But whereas before she, like everything else, had been part of the haze called life, she now emerged a well-defined being that was capable of arousing anger or approval, capable of being smiled at or howled at, capable even, of being thumped. She could open her bodice and give you what you wanted, or she could refuse to do so. In the latter contingency you felt blind with rage, in the former you felt much less than was supposed, much less indeed than you appeared to be feeling; in the former you quickly became atavistic, doing what you must, automatically, because something, somewhere, ordered you to live.
The concrete creature was Rosa Varese, the daughter of Nerone who sold tobacco a little way down the street; she was married and had lost her own baby of croup in the very nick of time to provide you with dinners, but all this of course you did not know, nor would you have cared if you had. Your emotions were entirely concerned with yourself, not through any wish of yours, but by order of that something that commanded you, Gian-Luca, to live.
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