In a Glass House by Nino Ricci Read Free Book Online Page A

Were you waiting up for me? What’s the matter, don’t you remember me? Mario,” turning now to my father, “didn’t you tell Vittorio I was coming? Look at him, you’d think he’d seen a ghost!”
    I had last seen Tsia Teresa at my grandfather’s funeral service in Castilucci, when she’d been the only one of my father’s siblings who’d come over to greet my mother and me. On the rare occasions when my mother and I had gone to visit my father’s family back then, Tsia Teresa would take me to the square and tease a few
lire
from the young men at the bar to buy me candy or walk with me in the pastures near town, taking my arm in hers and joking that she was my girlfriend. She’d seemed from a different family then, the coddled youngest daughter, the only one who’d been allowed to go on in school; and she’d beenpretty, an angular, sharp-boned prettiness, with her pale skin and her dark eyes, that she’d parade at once brash and awkward before the men in the square like a prize she wasn’t yet sure was hers to award.
    But now her energy had nothing tentative about it, seeming to spread out around her like heat from a fire. In a few minutes she had finished a tour of the house, coming out of my bedroom finally with the baby in her arms.
    “
Ma com’è bella!
She was lying there wide awake, quiet as a mouse. What’s her name?”
    But no one had thought to name her yet.
    “Mario, don’t tell me you haven’t given her a name! You can’t treat her like an animal.”
    I felt embarrassed for her, thought she had misunderstood how things were with the baby, expected some sign from my father that would put her right; but my father’s silence, this shutting down in him when the baby was around, seemed lost on her.
    “We’ll call her Margherita,” she decided finally. She held the baby close and pronounced the name slowly, offering it to her like a gift. “Mar-ghe-ri-ta. That’s the saint all the mothers pray to when they’re going to have a baby. You say it: Mar-ghe-ri-ta. Look, she’s smiling, see how she understands?”
    With my aunt’s arrival things began to change, the mood of the house, the careful eggshell order that had established itself. I thought the household couldn’t bear her blind energy, that it must shatter, and yet somehow it shifted to accommodate her. She referred to the baby as my sister, a strange thing, so intimate; what had been unthinkable before, these plain declarations of what we all were to each other, seemed in her to become merely commonplace. It was odd to have someone in the housewho didn’t simply capitulate to its gloom, who so openly carved a space for herself there. Within a few days she had moved me out from the bedroom to the couch, within a few more had asked for a crib for the baby.
    “I don’t think I can go another night in the same bed,” she said. “It makes me think of what we used to do when the pigs had babies, remember that, how we had to make a little house for them in the stall or the mother would roll over and crush them.”
    “One bed was fine for three people,” my father said. “Now it’s not enough for one.”
    “
Dai
, it won’t cost you a thing. Mauro’s wife has a crib they’re not using, I spoke to her on the telephone.”
    But my father flushed with anger.
    “I’m going to crack your skull with that phone, then you’ll learn to stop bothering other people with your stupidities.”
    “Let her sleep with you then,” my aunt said, undaunted. “What a sight you’d make, I’ll bet you’ve never held a baby in your life!”
    I thought my father would fling something at her, so furled did he seem with his anger; but then he faltered.
    “
Sì, va bene
, everything’s a joke to you. Like a chicken. We’ll see if everything’s a joke.”
    Already he seemed merely to be grumbling to himself, to have made some concession; and a few days later when we came in for lunch there was a van in the courtyard and a blond-haired man in