“You had forgotten us,” repeated Antonello with a somewhat distorted smile. “You were right. We are buried.”
The tone of his voice struck me more than his words. His tones, gestures, looks, and all his actions had a singular intensity, like those of a man stricken by a mysterious disease or tormented by a continual hallucination, living in the midst of apparitions invisible to the eyes of others. It did not escape my notice that he was making an effort to break through some atmosphere that surrounded him, and to communicate more directly with me. This effort imparted a contracted and convulsed look to his whole person. My anxiety and distress grew greater.
“You will see our house,” he added with the same smile.
Involuntarily I asked—
“How is Donna Aldoina?”
Both the brothers hung their heads and did not answer.
They were like each other; in fact, they were twins. Both were tall and thin, and a little bent. They had the same light-coloured eyes, the same small silky beards, the same pale, restless, nervous hands, the hands of hysterical subjects. But in Antonello these marks of weakness and disorder were deeper and more irreparable. He was doomed.
During the pause that followed, I vainly sought for words to express myself. I was in bondage to a kind of melancholy stupor; it seemed as if the whole weight of my weary body had fallen on my soul. The road skirted a line of cliffs, and the horses’ trot as it resounded on the hard ground awoke echoes in the lonely hollows. At a turn of the road the river came in sight in the valley, its innumerable windings shining in the sun. A mass of white ruins was visible, enclosed like an island within one of these curves.
“Is not that Linturno over there?” I asked, as I recognised the dead city.
“Yes, that is Linturno,” replied Oddo. “Do you remember? We once went there together....”