Il bell'Antonio

This is a difficult story to understand with its immense dramatizations of a very small and simple matter, causing havc for something very human and trivial. It is Sicilian, and in Sicily any absurdity is possible and taken for real, often turning reality itself into a mess of absurdities, but here, as a non-Sicilian, you must wonder: what's all the fuss about? Why make such a tremendous fuss about nothing? There are any number of marriages where the married couple have decided not to have children and not to have sex, and in Italy, if you don't care about any sexual life at all, it is very simple for you to become a priest or a monk - they live naturally without sex and are obliged to do so. Jesus himself said explicitly, that some people are made not to have sex. But here the fact that a single son married to the richest girl in town doesn't get it going causes a scandal of preporsterous dimensions. If a married couple don't have sex, that's their business and no one else's, isn't it? Why should everyone meddle with it, as if they were royalties, which they definitely aren't?

On the other hand, there are some very subtle ambiguities here. Antonio's cousin Eduardo is very normal and understanding and is the one Antonio can fully confide in, and Eduardo understands Antonio's problems. In the family there is a young delicate maid, and she eventually gets into an awkward situation. The suspicion cannot be whisked away that somehow Eduardo got in between and (accidentally, of course) managed to save Antonio's face. When everyone is cheering and celebrating in the end, Antonio is the only one who appears thoroughly unhappy and downright gloomy, more melancholy than ever. There must be some reason for it.

So it's actually a story of subtleties and very strange and intriguing as such. The obvious doesn't always have to be true, while the whole truth never is completely evident.