Voices In The Evening by Natalia Ginzburg Page B

too? said my mother. ‘I thought that it was only we who called them that, at home here. They are not little girls any more, by any means.’
    â€˜Why ‘by any means”?,’ said my father.
    â€˜By any means,’ said my mother, ‘because they are not yet married. For a woman marriage is the finest destiny, a happy marriage. Not an unfortunate one, otherwise it is better with nothing, one knows that.
    You, Tommasino, have had the sad experience of an unfortunate marriage in your family. Poor Vincenzino.
    â€˜And perhaps it is for that reason,’ she said, ‘that you don’t get married. You will think long about it and you are right. For that matter, as a man, you are still very young.’ 
    â€˜I,’ said Aunt Ottavia, ‘have not married and I am quite happy so.’
    â€˜You were not cut out for marriage,’ said my mother; 'you are too fond of your own convenience.’
    â€˜My convenience? And when do I ever look after my own convenience?’ said Aunt Ottavia.
    â€˜Well, she has not got engaged, Giuliana Bottiglia,’ said my mother; ‘one has seen them about together for years, she and Gigi Sartorio. If they were engaged, I should be the first to know of it. Her mother, Netta Bottiglia, and I are together from morning till evening.’
    â€˜How is your work getting on, my dear Tommasino?’ asked my father.
    Twisting his hair round his fingers, Tommasino began to talk about linear programmation.
    We went into the sitting-room for coffee.
    â€˜Your views are socialistic, aren’t they, Tommasino?’ said my mother. Is this linear programmation, if I have understood it rightly, something socialistic?’
    I could not allow my mother to appropriate linear programmation.
    â€˜Socialism does not come into it at all,’ I said. ‘It is useless to wish to talk about what one doesn’t understand.’
    â€˜I have understood it perfectly well,’ said my mother. ‘My poor brother—I don’t know if you have heard him mentioned, Tommasino—was also taken up with these matters. He died some years ago; his name was Cesare Maderna.’
    â€˜Your brother,’ said my father, ‘was employed on the railways. How could he have had anything to do with what Tommasino was talking about?’
    â€˜But he was a politician,’ said my mother. ‘He was a candidate for Parliament. He was a Socialist. A great Socialist like your father, Tommasino.’
    â€˜Except, however, that he joined the Fascist Party,’ said my father.
    â€˜What does that matter? He had to do it or he lost his place. From every point of view he was first a politician and was interested in social problems exactly as Tommasino is now. Isn’t that true, Ottavia?
    â€˜Our poor brother,’ said Aunt Ottavia, ‘was only a humble railway employee. As a young man he took some part in politics, without much success, however. He was never a candidate for Parliament. You, Matilda, confuse him with Cousin Ernesto. Cousin Ernesto, yes, was a candidate for Parliament. But our poor brother, never. He was just an honourable man. He did join the Fascists, yes, but as for the black shirt he never put it on. He had one, but he never put it on.’
    â€˜And what did it matter to him even if he did lose his place?’ said my father. ‘His wife was rich; he would go on just the same. ‘His wife,’ said he turning to Tommasino, was a Terenzi of Cignano. Vineyards, woods, pastures, a fine inheritance. They had no children and left everything on their death to the priests.’
    â€˜That was she, his wife,’ said my mother. ‘He could not bear to look at the priests. But he was already dead when she died.’
    â€˜A Terenzi of Cignano,’ said Tommasino. ‘Relations of the Terenzis of this place?’
    â€˜Distant relations.’
    â€˜And on the other hand, as regards Cousin