CONTENTS

1) The Non- Camillo Books (Introduction)

2) Early Family Stories
- Introduction
.
- "He and She"
- "Age Forty"
- "Venice..."
- "Birthday Cake"
.
- "Travelling..."
- "...Revolution"
- "Prisoner..."
- "Purgatory Cake"

3) Later Family Stories

4) Drawing Room Farces

5) Notes from Prison Camp

Margherita said we must take full advantage of the last days before the children came back from their holidays in the country.

"I intend to have a good time tonight, all on my own," she declared. "I'm going out dancing."

I caught her up on the inexactitude of her expression. You can't very well go dancing without a partner, that is, unless you intend to give a solo performance, and that isn't quite the thing for a wife and mother to do. But Margherita explained that "all on her own," simply meant without me.

"The main thing is that you shouldn't go along, Giovannino," she said. "I'm quite fed up with your face. Night and day, day and night ... It's like the face of Damocles, hanging over me."

"Have a good time," I answered. "I think I'll go to the pictures."

"Whatever you say," said Margherita. "But first you must take me to my night club. I don't like to be out on the street alone at night. And you can call for me, later on. Of course I could find someone to bring me home easily enough, but I couldn't entirely trust a stranger. You never can tell; he might be a gangster in disguise."

I took Margherita to the night club and then pretended to go away. Instead, I sat down at a table hidden by a potted palm, as far as possible from the table where I had left Margherita. I had only to push aside a branch in order to enjoy a perfect view of the dance floor, her table included. After a while, a talkative young man came and sat down beside me.

"Pretty poor pickings," he observed. "All the girls have somebody with them, and a freelance like myself is out of luck."

"Don't take it so hard," I told him. "I see several women that look as if they were at loose ends to me."

"Oh, good Lord!" he exclaimed. "A few overgrown babes that are fair, fat and forty!"

I remarked that a forty-year-old woman may have more to offer than an insipid girl. He admitted the truth of this observation, but maintained it wasn't easy to pick a winner.

"That's perfectly simple," I told him. "Just keep your eyes peeled. Remember that it's an acid test for any woman to sit alone in a public place. If she has someone with her, she can always make out; she can giggle, hum, smoke a cigarette, wriggle around in her chair and pretend to be shocked if he tells her a funny story. Or else she can put on a tragic act. She can stare sadly into the distance until the man asks her why she is so unhappy, and that gives her a chance to tell him that she's not like other women because of a secret sorrow in her past. But when a woman's all alone, the way we are, it's a different story. If she can seem to be nonchalant and in perfect command of the situation, then she must have real class."

My companion looked around at the few lone women in the room.

"There's a dumb Dora, all right!" he whispered into my ear. "A regular old maid,, if ever I saw one! I doubt if she can lift one foot up after another. Straight from the sticks, don't you agree?"

"Do you mean that stout blonde in the green dress?" I asked, pushing aside a branch of the palm.

"No. The one on the left, in the flowered dress, with her handbag on her lap. Can you see her?"

I could see her perfectly. It was Margherita, of course, and she did look as if she had just arrived from the country.

"Look at those legs under the table," said the young man. "Mother's little darling must have corns, because she's slipped off one shoe."

"I don't think she's so bad," I told him. "Why not give her a try? Just ask her for one dance, and if that's all you can stand, take her back to her own table and leave her."

"I'm not in an experimental mood," he answered.

Finally, after we had discussed three or four other lone geese, he made up his mind.

"I'll try that old gal in yellow there in the corner," he said grimly. "If you see that I'm in trouble, call the police. Don't walk out on me."

My young friend never did come back. I saw him sitting at the table of the woman in the yellow dress, who was gesticulating at him, while he nodded silently in reply, managing every now and then to shoot me a look of utter anguish. It was a quarter to twelve, and my poor girl from the sticks was still sitting like a bump on a log, with one shoe off and one shoe on. All of a sudden I sank into one of my sporadic fits of depression.

~~~~~

I am in perpetual pursuit of my youth, and this is the source of all my sorrow, because the harder I pursue it, the farther it retreats. There are nights when I follow the street leading to my old school, and peer through the familiar gate, but the wind of time has swept all my words away like so many dead leaves and the darkness is silent as a tomb.

Sometimes I lose my sense of proportion and see the world on a reduced scale, as if through a microscope, with all the infinite fractions between the numbers one and two and the atoms of time between one second and another. Everything around me starts moving: I see my son growing, the apple tree in the garden sprouting, my fingernails lengthening and the paper before me turning yellow. Nothing stands still. All things flow, as the old Greek philosopher had it, and while they evade containment I am overcome by panic and struggle desperately to escape the cursed law of time. "Stop! Stay the way you are!" I call out to my sleeping daughter and to the chair upon which I am sitting, because I want to halt my youth and look at it again while I still have a chance. But time drags me farther and farther from my past, robbing me of the only wealth I once so fleetingly possessed.

It was a quarter to twelve, and my poor girl from the sticks was still sitting alone at her table. I was stricken with panic, because there, behind Margherita, was the elusive ghost of my youth.

~~~~~

While everyone else was dancing, I edged my way along the wall to the bar, from which I made a conspicuous entrance to the dance floor, directly back of Margherita.

"I've come just in time for the last dance," I said to her. "Or is it taken?"

Margherita stood up, without speaking, and casually slipped her foot into her shoe.

"A flat tire, I see," I said breezily. "As usual, I suppose you danced every dance."

"Of course," she nodded.

"Well, if your feet ache tomorrow, I'll have the last laugh," I said maliciously.

"We only live once," she said with a smile.

The last dance was a Strauss waltz, which gave satisfaction to everyone over forty. I whirled about like a Hollywood hussar, and Margherita was as light in my arms as the ghost of my youth.