CONTENTS
COVER
ABOUT THE BOOK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY GIUSEPPE TOMASI DI LAMPEDUSA
TITLE PAGE
FOREWORD
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
I. INTRODUCTION TO THE PRINCE
II. DONNAFUGATA
III. THE TROUBLES OF DON FABRIZIO
IV. LOVE AT DONNAFUGATA
V. FATHER PIRRONE PAYS A VISIT
VI. A BALL
VII. DEATH OF A PRINCE
VIII. RELICS
APPENDIX
AFTERWORD
FRAGMENT A
FRAGMENT B
THE HISTORY OF VINTAGE
COPYRIGHT
The Siren and Selected Writings
The Discovery of “The Salina Canzoniere”
In 1968, in an interview with La Fiera Letteraria (XLIII, no. 12, 21 March), I alluded to the presence of other matter in The Leopard. I mentioned that the author had written a number of poems, attributed to Don Fabrizio, and that in these he had revealed his love for Angelica. Among the items that have come to light there is a previously unpublished fragment of a piece of the novel, entitled “The Salina Canzoniere”. In the surviving text, Don Fabrizio’s love for Angelica is not apparent but “The Salina Canzoniere” was intended to end with a revelation embodied in the last sonnets, and the sonnets were to be dedicated to Angelica. The ode by Father Pirrone is an erudite parody based on a Canzonetta written by the actual Father Pirrone for the wedding of Lampedusa’s grandfather. The Canzonetta written by the real Father Pirrone will furnish a clue to the poem’s burlesque approach.
TO THE DUKE OF PALMA ON THE EIGHTH ANNIVERSARY OF HIS MARRIAGE
A supplicant I stood before the altar,
My urgent prayers to heaven I was addressing:
Among pure spirits here confined on earth
Allot me one, as an abundant blessing.
Select for me, nor let me be denied
The most enchanting bride.
And with the heartiest, eager appetite
I found myself revisiting in my mind
All homes where dwelt the most engaging ladies
Possessed of every trait that was refined,
Exciting passions lurking unconfessed
In each patrician breast.
When all at once, descending from on high,
By cherubs surrounded, in a glimmering haze,
I now beheld the Mother of the Elect
Apparelled in the purest ethereal rays:
My own sweet Mother of compassionate mien –
Mary, our Heavenly Queen.
“O happy scion of the Tomasi house,
Your eyes henceforth should be no more directed
To perishable things of earth,” she said;
“A far superior bride has been selected.
She is, by will of the Eternal Mind,
Into your hands consigned.
Behold now one who is an ethereal spirit
Which yet within a mortal frame’s bestowed.
Do but observe the generous profusion
Of graces wherewith her gracious heart’s endowed.”
Then she with gentle love and shyness blended
To me her arms extended.
And now the sun its annual round’s completed
Fully eight times since gladly first I heard
The message of the Blessed Virgin Mary
Whereby so great a blessing was conferred
Upon me; and, since hearing words like these,
I live in wedded ease.
20 April 1875
The Canzonetta is included in a blue exercise book containing “Father Pirrone Pays a Visit”, “A Society Evening” (Part VI which, in the 1957 version was to be called “A Ball”) and “The Salina Canzoniere”. “A Society Evening” and “The Salina Canzoniere” are numbered in sequence, the last two written on sheets which form part of those included in the original binding of the exercise book, even if they have been removed. In the 1957 draft, the first two texts were inserted and the third one dropped, which suggests a precise intention on the author’s part. At all events the chapter ends up incomplete. The two sonnets feature in two added pages, each one containing a first and second draft with variants. The ode, on the other hand, features as a fair copy and follows the author’s handwritten page numbering.
Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, 2006
“NUNC ET IN hora mortis nostrae. Amen.”
The daily recital of the Rosary was over. For half an hour the steady voice of the Prince had recalled the Sorrowful and the Glorious Mysteries; for half an hour other voices had interwoven a lilting hum from which, now and again, would chime some unlikely word; love, virginity, death; and during that hum the whole aspect of the rococo drawing-room seemed to change; even the parrots spreading iridescent wings over the silken walls appeared abashed; even the Magdalen between the two windows looked a penitent and not just a handsome blonde lost in some dubious daydream as she usually was.
Now, as the voices fell silent, everything dropped back into its usual order or disorder. Bendicò, the Great Dane, grieved at exclusion, came wagging its tail through the door by which the servants had left. The women rose slowly to their feet, their oscillating skirts as they withdrew baring bit by bit the naked figures from mythology painted all over the milky depths of the tiles. Only an Andromeda remained covered by the soutane of Father Pirrone, still deep in extra prayer, and it was some time before she could sight the silvery Perseus swooping down to her aid and her kiss.
The divinities frescoed on the ceiling awoke. The troops of Tritons and Dryads, hurtling across from hill and sea amid clouds of cyclamen pink towards a transfigured Conca d’Oro and bent on glorifying the House of Salina, seemed suddenly so overwhelmed with exaltation as to discard the most elementary rules of perspective; meanwhile the major Gods and Goddesses, the Princes among Gods, thunderous Jove and frowning Mars and languid Venus, had already preceded the mob of minor deities and were amiably supporting the blue armorial shield of the Leopard. They knew that for the next twenty-three and a half hours they would be lords of the villa once again. On the walls the monkeys went back to pulling faces at the cockatoos.
Beneath this Palermitan Olympus the mortals of the Salina family were also dropping speedily from mystic spheres. The girls resettled the folds in their dresses, exchanged blue-eyed glances and snatches of school-girl slang; for over a month, ever since the outbreaks of the Fourth of April, they had been home for safety’s sake from their convent, and regretting the canopied dormitories and collective cosiness of the Holy Redeemer. The boys were already scuffling with each other for possession of a medal of San Francesco di Paola; the eldest, the heir, the young Duke Paolo, longing to smoke and afraid of doing so in his parents’ presence, was squeezing through his pocket the braided straw of his cigar-case. His gaunt face was veiled in brooding melancholy; it had been a bad day; Guiscard, his Irish sorrel, had seemed off form, and Fanny had apparently been unable (or unwilling) to send him her usual lilac-tinted billet-doux. Of what avail then, to him, was the Incarnation of his Saviour?
Restless and domineering, the Princess dropped her rosary brusquely into her jet-fringed bag, while her fine crazy eyes glanced round at her slaves of children and her tyrant of a husband, over whom her diminutive body yearned vainly for loving dominion.
Meanwhile he himself, the Prince, had risen to his feet; the sudden movement of his huge frame made the floor tremble, and a glint of pride flashed in his light-blue eyes at this fleeting confirmation of his lordship over both humans and their works.
Now he was settling the huge scarlet missal on the chair which had been put in front of him during his recitation of the Rosary, putting back the handkerchief on which he had been kneeling, and a touch of irritation clouded his brow as his eye fell on a tiny coffee stain which had had the presumption, since that morning, to fleck the vast white expanse of his waistcoat.
Not that he was fat; just very large and very strong; in houses inhabited by common mortals his head would touch the lowest rosette on the chandeliers; his fingers could twist a ducat coin as if it were mere paper; and there was constant coming and going between Villa Salina and a silversmith’s for the straightening of forks and spoons which, in some fit of controlled rage at table, he had coiled into a hoop. But those fingers could also stroke and knead with the most exquisite delicacy, as his wife Maria Stella knew to her cost; while up in his private observatory at the top of the house the gleaming screws, caps and studs of telescopes, lenses and “comet-finders” seemed inviolate beneath his gentle manipulations.
The rays of the westering sun, still high on that May afternoon, lit up the Prince’s rosy hue and honey-coloured skin; these betrayed the German origin of his mother, the Princess Carolina whose haughtiness had frozen the easy-going court of the Two Sicilies thirty years before. But in his blood also fermented other German strains particularly disturbing to a Sicilian aristocrat in the year 186o, however attractive his fair skin and hair amid all that olive and black; an authoritarian temperament, a certain rigidity of morals, and a propensity for abstract ideas; these, in the relaxing atmosphere of Palermo society, had changed respectively into capricious arrogance, recurring moral scruples and contempt for his own relatives and friends, all of whom seemed to him mere driftwood in the languid meandering stream of Sicilian pragmatism.
In a family which for centuries had been incapable even of adding up their own expenditure and subtracting their own debts he was the first (and last) to have a genuine bent for mathematics; this he had applied to astronomy, and by his work gained a certain official recognition and a great deal of personal pleasure. In his mind, now, pride and mathematical analysis were so linked as to give him an illusion that the stars obeyed his calculations too (as, in fact, they seemed to be doing) and that the two small planets which he had discovered (Salina and Speedy he had called them, after his main estate and a shooting-dog he had been particularly fond of) would spread the fame of his family throughout the empty spaces between Mars and Jupiter, thus transforming the frescoes in the villa from the adulatory to the prophetic.
Between the pride and intellectuality of his mother and the sensuality and irresponsibility of his father, poor Prince Fabrizio lived in perpetual discontent under his Jove-like frown, watching the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without ever making, still less wanting to make, any move towards saving it.
That half hour between Rosary and dinner was one of the least irritating moments of his day, and for hours beforehand he would savour its rather uncertain calm.
With a wildly excited Bendicò bounding ahead of him he went down the short flight of steps into the garden. Enclosed between three walls and a side of the house its seclusion gave it the air of a cemetery, accentuated by the parallel little mounds bounding the irrigation canals and looking like the graves of very tall, very thin giants. Plants were growing in thick disorder on the reddish clay; flowers sprouted in all directions: and the myrtle hedges seemed put there to prevent movement rather than guide it. At the end a statue of Flora speckled with yellow-black lichen exhibited her centuries-old charms with an air of resignation; on each side were benches holding quilted cushions, also of grey marble; and in a corner the gold of an acacia tree introduced a sudden note of gaiety. Every sod seemed to exude a yearning for beauty soon muted by languor.
But the garden, hemmed and almost squashed between these barriers, was exhaling scents that were cloying, fleshy and slightly putrid, like the aromatic liquids distilled from the relics of certain saints; the carnations superimposed their pungence on the formal fragrance of roses and the oily emanations of magnolias drooping in corners; and somewhere beneath it all was a faint smell of mint mingling with a nursery whiff of acacia and a jammy one of myrtle; from a grove beyond the wall came an erotic waft of early orange-blossom.
It was a garden for the blind: a constant offence to the eyes, a pleasure strong if somewhat crude to the nose. The Paul Neyron roses, whose cuttings he had himself bought in Paris, had degenerated; first stimulated and then enfeebled by the strong if languid pull of Sicilian earth, burnt by apocalyptic Julys, they had changed into objects like flesh-coloured cabbages, obscene and distilling a dense almost indecent scent which no French horticulturist would have dared hope for. The Prince put one under his nose and seemed to be sniffing the thigh of a dancer from the Opera. Bendicò, to whom it was also proffered, drew back in disgust and hurried off in search of healthier sensations amid dead lizards and manure.
But the heavy scents of the garden brought on a gloomy train of thought for the Prince: “It smells all right here now; but a month ago . . .”
He remembered the nausea diffused throughout the entire villa by certain sweetish odours before their cause was traced: the corpse of a young soldier of the Fifth Regiment of Sharpshooters who had been wounded in the skirmish with the rebels at San Lorenzo and come up there to die, all alone, under a lemon tree. They had found him lying face downwards in the thick clover, his face covered in blood and vomit, crawling with ants, his nails dug into the soil; a pile of purplish intestines had formed a puddle under his bandoleer. Russo the agent had discovered this object, turned it over, covered its face with his red handkerchief, thrust the guts back into the gaping stomach with some twigs, and then covered the wound with the blue flaps of the cloak; spitting continuously with disgust, meanwhile, not right on, but very near the body. And all this with meticulous care. “Those swine stink even when they’re dead.” It had been the only epitaph to that derelict death.
After bemused fellow-soldiers had taken the body away (and yes, dragged it along by the shoulders to a cart so that the puppet’s stuffing fell out again), a De Profundis for the soul of the unknown youth was added to the evening Rosary; and now that the conscience of the ladies in the house seemed placated, the subject was never mentioned again.
The Prince went and scratched a little lichen off the feet of the Flora and then began to stroll up and down; the lowering sun threw an immense shadow of him over the grave-like flowerbeds.
No, the dead man had not been mentioned again; and anyway soldiers presumably become soldiers for exactly that, to die in defence of their king. But the image of that gutted corpse often recurred, as if asking to be given peace in the only possible way the Prince could give it; by justifying that last agony on grounds of general necessity. And then around would rise other even less attractive ghosts. Dying for somebody or for something, that was perfectly normal, of course: but the person dying should know, or at least feel sure, that someone knows for whom or for what he is dying; the disfigured face was asking just that; and that was where the haze began.
“He died for the King, of course, my dear Fabrizio, obviously,” would have been the answer of his brother-in-law Màlvica had the Prince asked him, and Màlvica was always the chosen spokesman of most of their friends. “For the King, who stands for order, continuity, decency, honour, right; for the King, who is sole defender of the Church, sole bulwark against the dispersal of property, the ‘Sect’s’ eventual aim.” Fine words, these, pointing to all that lay dearest and deepest in the Prince’s heart. But there was, even so, something that didn’t quite ring true. The King, all right. He knew the King well or rather the one who had just died; the present one was only a seminarist dressed up as a general. And the old King had really not been worth much. “But you’re not reasoning, my dear Fabrizio,” Màlvica would reply, “one particular sovereign may not be up to it, yet the idea of monarchy is still the same; it is not connected with personalities.”
That was true, too; but kings who personify an idea should not, cannot, fall below a certain level for generations; if they do, my dear brother-in-law, the idea suffers too.
He was sitting on a bench, inertly watching the devastation wrought by Bendicò in the flowerbeds; every now and again the dog would turn innocent eyes towards him as if asking for praise at labour done: fourteen carnations broken off, half a hedge torn apart, an irrigation channel blocked. How human!
“Good Bendicò, come here.” And the animal hurried up and put its earthy nostrils into his hand, anxious to show it had forgiven this silly interruption of a fine job of work.
Those audiences! All those audiences granted him by King Ferdinand at Caserta, at Capodimonte, at Portici, Naples, anywhere at all.
Beside the chamberlain on duty, chatting as he guided with a cocked hat under an arm and the latest Neapolitan slang on his lips, they would move through innumerable rooms of superb architecture and revolting décor (just like the Bourbon monarchy itself), plunge into dirty passages and up ill-kept stairs, and finally emerge into an ante-chamber filled with waiting people; closed faces of police spies, avid faces of petitioners. The chamberlain apologised, pushed through this mob, and led him towards another ante-chamber reserved for members of the Court; a little blue and silver room of the period of Charles III. After a short wait a lackey tapped at the door and they were admitted into the August Presence.
The private study was small and consciously simple; on the white-washed walls hung a portrait of King Francis I and one, with an acid ill-tempered expression, of the reigning Queen; above the mantelpiece was a Madonna by Andrea del Sarto looking astounded at finding herself in the company of coloured lithographs representing obscure Neapolitan saints and sanctuaries; on a side table stood a wax statuette of the Child Jesus with a votive light before it; and the modest desk was heaped with papers, white, yellow and blue; the whole administration of the kingdom here attained its final phase, that of signature by His Majesty (D.G.).
Behind this paper barricade was the King. He was already standing so as not to be seen getting up; the King with his pallid heavy face between fairish side-whiskers, with his rough cloth military jacket under which burst a purple cataract of trousers. He gave a step forward with his right hand out and bent for the hand-kiss which he would then refuse.
“Well, Salina, blessings on you!” His Neapolitan accent was far stronger than the chamberlain’s.
“I must beg Your Majesty to excuse me for not wearing court dress; I am only just passing through Naples; but I did not wish to forgo paying my respects to Your Revered Person.”
“Nonsense, Salina, nonsense: you know you’re always at home here at Caserta.
“At home, of course,” he repeated, sitting down behind the desk and waiting a second before indicating to his guest to sit down too.
“And how are the little girls?” The Prince realised that now was the moment to produce a play on words both salacious and edifying.
“Little girls, Your Majesty? At my age and under the sacred bonds of matrimony?”
The King’s mouth laughed as his hands primly settled the papers before him. “Those I’d never let myself refer to, Salina. I was asking about your little daughters, your little princesses. Concetta, now, that dear godchild of ours, she must be getting quite big, isn’t she, almost grown up?”
From family he passed to science. “Salina, you’re an honour not only to yourself but to the whole kingdom! A fine thing, science, unless it takes to attacking religion!” After this, however, the mask of the Friend was put aside, and in its place assumed that of the Severe Sovereign. “Tell me, Salina, what do they think of Castelcicala down in Sicily?”
Salina had never heard a good word for the Lieutenant-General of Sicily from either Royalists or Liberals, but not wanting to let a friend down he parried and kept to generalities. “A great gentleman, a true hero, maybe a little old for the fatigues of the Lieutenant-Generalcy . . .”
The King’s face darkened; Salina was refusing to act the spy. So Salina was no use to him. Leaning both hands on his desk he prepared the dismissal: “I’ve so much work! the whole Kingdom rests on these shoulders of mine.” Now for a bit of sweetening: out of the drawer came the friendly mask again. “When you pass through Naples next, Salina, come and show your Concetta to the Queen. She’s too young to be presented, I know, but there’s nothing against our arranging a little dinner for her, is there? Sweets to the sweet, as they say. Well, Salina, ’bye and be good!”
On one occasion, though, the dismissal had not been so amiable. The Prince had made his second bow while backing out when the King called after him, “Hey, Salina, listen. They tell me you’ve some odd friends in Palermo. That nephew of yours, Falconeri . . . Why don’t you knock some sense into him?”
“But, Your Majesty, Tancredi thinks of nothing but women and cards.”
The King lost patience; “Take care, Salina, take care. You’re responsible, remember, you’re his guardian. Tell him to look after that neck of his. You may withdraw.”
Repassing now through the sumptuously second-rate rooms on his way to sign the Queen’s book, he felt suddenly discouraged. That plebeian cordiality had depressed him as much as the police grins. Lucky those who could interpret such familiarity as friendship, such threats as royal might. He could not. And as he exchanged gossip with the impeccable chamberlain he was asking himself what was destined to succeed this monarchy which bore the marks of death upon its face. The Piedmontese, the so-called Galantuomo who was getting himself so talked of from that little out-of-the-way capital of his? Wouldn’t things be just the same? Just Torinese instead of Neapolitan dialect; that’s all.
He had reached the book. He signed: Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina.
Or maybe the Republic of Don Peppino Mazzini? “No thanks. I’d just be plain Signor Corbera.”
And the long jog back to Naples did not soothe him. Nor even the thought of an appointment with Cora Danolo.
This being the case, then, what should he do? Just cling to the status quo and avoid leaps in the dark? Then he would have to put up with more rattle of firing-squads like that which had resounded a short time before through a squalid square in Palermo; and what use were they, anyway? “One never achieves anything by going bang! bang! Does one, Bendicò?”
“Ding! Ding! Ding!” rang the bell for dinner. Bendicò rushed ahead with mouth watering in anticipation. “Just like a Piedmontese!” thought Salina as he moved back up the steps.
Dinner at Villa Salina was served with the slightly shabby grandeur then customary in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The number of those taking part (fourteen in all, with the master and mistress of the house, children, governesses and tutors) was itself enough to give the dining-table an imposing air. Covered with a fine but mended lace cloth, it glittered under a powerful carcel-lamp hung precariously under the Murano chandelier. Daylight was still streaming through the windows, but the white figures in painted bas-relief against the dark backgrounds of the door-mantels were already lost in shadow. The silver was massive and the glass splendid, bearing on smooth medallions amid cut Bohemian ware the initials F.D. (Ferdinandus dedit) in memory of royal munificence; but the plates, each signed by an illustrious artist, were mere survivors of many a scullion’s massacre and originated from different services. The biggest, vaguely Capodimonte, their wide almond-green borders engraved with little gilt anchors, were reserved for the Prince, who liked everything round him to be on his own scale except his wife.
When he entered the dining-room the whole party was already assembled, only the Princess sitting, the rest standing behind their chairs. Opposite his own chair, flanked by a pile of plates, swelled the silver flanks of the enormous soup tureen with its cover surmounted by a prancing Leopard. The Prince ladled out the minestra himself, a pleasant chore, symbol of his proud duties as paterfamilias. That evening, though, there came a sound that had not been heard for some time, a threatening tinkle of the ladle against a side of the tureen; sign of great though still controlled anger, one of the most terrifying sounds in the world, as one of his sons used to call it even forty years later. The Prince had noticed that the sixteen-year-old Francesco Paolo was not in his place. The lad entered at once (“Excuse me, Papa”) and sat down. He was not reproved, but Father Pirrone, whose duties were more or less those of sheepdog, bent his head and muttered a prayer. The bomb did not explode, but the gust from its passage had swept the table and ruined the dinner all the same. As they ate in silence the Prince’s blue eyes, narrowed behind half-closed lids, stared at his children one by one and numbed them with fear.
But, “A fine family,” he was thinking. The girls plump, glowing, with gay little dimples, and between the forehead and nose that frown which was the hereditary mark of the Salina; the males slim but wiry, wearing an expression of fashionable melancholy as they wielded knives and forks with subdued violence. One of them had been away for two years: Giovanni, the second son, the most loved, the most difficult. One fine day he had vanished from home and there had been no news of him for two months. Then a cold but respectful letter arrived from London with apologies for any anxiety he had caused, reassurances about his health, and the strange statement that he preferred a modest life as clerk in a coal depot to a pampered (read: “fettered”) existence in the ease of Palermo. Often a twinge of anxiety for the errant youth in that foggy and heretical city would prick the Prince’s heart and torture him. His face grew darker than ever.
It grew so dark that the Princess, sitting next to him, put out her childlike hand and stroked the powerful paw reposing on the tablecloth. A thoughtless gesture, which loosed a whole chain of reactions in him; irritation at being pitied, then a surge of sensuality, not however directed towards her who had aroused it. Into the Prince’s mind flashed a picture of Mariannina with her head deep in a pillow. He raised a dry voice: “Domenico,” he said to a lackey, “go and tell Don Antonio to harness the bays in the brougham; I’ll be going down to Palermo immediately after dinner.” A glance into his wife’s eyes, which had gone glassy, made him regret his order: but as it was quite out of the question to withdraw instructions already given, he persevered and even added a jeer to his cruelty; “Father Pirrone, you will come with me; we’ll be back by eleven; you can spend a couple of hours at your Mother-house with your friends.”
There could obviously be no valid reason for visiting Palermo at night in those disordered times, except some low love-adventure; and taking the family chaplain as companion was sheer offensive arrogance. So at least Father Pirrone felt, and was offended, though of course he acquiesced.
The last medlar had scarcely been eaten when the carriage wheels were heard crunching under the porch; in the hall, as a lackey handed the Prince his top hat and the Jesuit his tricorne, the Princess, now on the verge of tears, made a last attempt to hold him—vain as ever: “But Fabrizio, in times like these . . . with the streets full of soldiers, of hooligans . . . why, anything might happen.”
“Nonsense,” he snapped, “nonsense, Stella; what could happen? Everyone knows me; there aren’t many men as tall in Palermo. I’ll see you later.” And he placed a hurried kiss on her still unfurrowed brow which was level with his chin. But, whether the smell of the Princess’s skin had called up tender memories, or whether the penitential steps of Father Pirrone behind him evoked pious warnings, on reaching the carriage door he very nearly did countermand the trip. At that moment, just as he was opening his mouth to order the carriage back to the stables, a loud shriek of “Fabrizio, my Fabrizio!” followed by a scream, reached him from the window above. The Princess was having one of her fits of hysteria. “Drive on,” said he to the coachman on the box holding a whip diagonally across his paunch. “Drive on, down to Palermo and leave Father at his Mother-house,” and he banged the carriage door before the lackey could shut it.
It was not dark yet and the road meandered on, very white, deep between high walls. As they came out of the Salina property they passed on the left the half-ruined Falconeri villa, owned by Tancredi, his nephew and ward. A spendthrift father, married to the Prince’s sister, had squandered his whole fortune and then died. It was one of those total ruins which engulfed even the silver braid on liveries; and when the widow died the King had conferred the guardianship of her son, then aged fourteen, on his uncle Salina. The lad, scarcely known before, had become very dear to the irascible Prince, who perceived in him a riotous zest for life and a frivolous temperament contradicted by sudden serious moods. Though the Prince never admitted it to himself, he would have preferred the lad as his heir to that booby Paolo. Now, at twenty-one, Tancredi was enjoying life on the money which his uncle never grudged him, even from his own pocket. “I wonder what the silly boy is up to now?” thought the Prince as they drove past Villa Falconeri, whose huge bougainvillaea cascaded over the gates like swags of episcopal silk, lending a deceptive air of gaiety to the dark.
“What is he up to now?” For King Ferdinand, in speaking of the young man’s undesirable acquaintances, had been wrong to mention the matter but right in his facts. Swept up in a circle of gamblers and so-called “light” ladies, all dominated by his slim charm, Tancredi had actually got to the point of sympathising with the “Sect” and getting in touch with the secret National Committee; maybe he drew money from them as well as from the Royal coffers. It had taken the Prince a great deal of labour and trouble, visits to a sceptical Castelcicala and an over-polite Maniscalco, to prevent the youth getting into real trouble after the 4th of April “riots”. That hadn’t been too good; on the other hand Tancredi could never do wrong in his uncle’s eyes: so the real fault lay with the times, these confused times in which a young man of good family wasn’t even free to play a game of faro without involving himself with compromising acquaintanceships. Bad times.
“Bad times, Your Excellency.” The voice of Father Pirrone sounded like an echo of his thoughts. Squeezed into a corner of the brougham, hemmed in by the massive Prince, subject to that same Prince’s bullying, the Jesuit was suffering in body and conscience, and, being a man of parts himself, was now transposing his own ephemeral discomfort into the perennial realms of history. “Look, Excellency,” and he pointed to the mountain heights around the Conca d’Oro still visible in the last dusk. On their slopes and peaks glimmered dozens of flickering lights, bonfires lit every night by the rebel bands, silent threats to the city of palaces and convents. They looked like lights that burn in sick-rooms during the final nights.
“I can see, Father, I can see,” and it occurred to him that perhaps Tancredi was beside one of those ill-omened fires, his aristocratic hands stoking on twigs being burnt to damage just such hands as his. “A fine guardian I am, with my ward up to any nonsense that passes through his head.”
The road was now beginning to slope gently downhill and Palermo could be seen very close, plunged in total darkness, its low shuttered houses weighed down by the huge edifices of convents and monasteries. There were dozens of these, all vast, often grouped in twos or threes, for women and for men, for rich and poor, nobles and plebeians, for Jesuits, Benedictines, Franciscans, Capuchins, Carmelites, Liguorians, Augustinians . . . Here and there squat domes rose higher, in flaccid curves like breasts emptied of milk; but it was the religious houses which gave the city its grimness and its character, its sedateness and also the sense of death which not even the vibrant Sicilian light could ever manage to disperse. And at that hour, at night, they were despots of the scene. It was against them really that the bonfires were lit on the hills, stoked by men who were themselves very like those living in the monasteries below, as fanatical, as self-absorbed, as avid for power or rather for the idleness which was, for them, the purpose of power.
This was what the Prince was thinking as the bays trotted down the slope; thoughts in contrast to his real self, caused by anxiety about Tancredi and by the sensual urge which turned him against the restrictions embodied by religious houses.
Now the road was crossing orange groves in flower, and the nuptial scent of the blossoms absorbed the rest as a full moon does a landscape; the smell of sweating horses, the smell of leather from the carriage upholstery, the smell of Prince and the smell of Jesuit, were all cancelled out by that Islamic perfume evoking houris and fleshly joys beyond the grave.
It even touched Father Pirrone. “How lovely this would be, Excellency, if . . .”
“If there weren’t so many Jesuits,” thought the Prince, his delicious anticipations interrupted by the priest’s voice. At once he regretted this rudeness of thought, and his big hand tapped his old friend’s tricorne.
Where the suburbs began, at Villa Airoldi, the carriage was stopped by a patrol. Voices from Apulia, voices from Naples, called a halt, bayonets glittered under a wavering lantern; but a sergeant soon recognised the Prince sitting there with his top hat on his knees. “Excuse us, Excellency, pass on.” And a soldier was even told to get up on to the box so that the carriage would have no more trouble at other block posts. The loaded carriage moved on more slowly, round Villa Ranchibile, through Torrerosse and the orchards of Villafranca, and entered the city by Porta Maqueda. Outside the Caffè Romeres at the Quattro Canti di Campagna officers from units on guard were sitting laughing and eating huge ices. But that was the only sign of life in the entire city; the deserted streets echoed only to the rhythmic march of pickets on their rounds, passing with white bandoleers crossed over their chests. On each side were continuous monastery walls, the Monastery of the Mountain, of the Stigmata, of the Cross-Bearers, of the Theatines, massive, black as pitch, immersed in a sleep that seemed like the end of all things.
“I’ll fetch you in a couple of hours, Father. Pray well.”
And poor Pirrone knocked confusedly at the door of the Jesuit Mother-house, Casa Professa, as the brougham wheeled off down a side street.
Leaving the carriage at his palace, the Prince set off for his destination on foot. It was a short walk, but through a quarter of ill repute. Soldiers in full equipment, who had obviously just slipped away from the patrols bivouacked in the squares, were issuing with shining eyes from little houses on whose balconies pots of basil explained their ease of entry. Sinister-looking youths in wide trousers were quarrelling in the guttural grunts Sicilians use in anger. In the distance echoed shots from nervous sentries. Once past this district his route skirted the Cala; in the old fishing port decaying boats bobbed up and down, desolate as mangy dogs.
“I’m a sinner, I know, doubly a sinner, by Divine Law and by Stella’s human love. There’s no doubt of that, and to-morrow I’ll go and confess to Father Pirrone.” He smiled to himself at the thought that it might be superfluous, so certain must the Jesuit be of his sins of to-day. And then a spirit of quibble came over him again. “I’m sinning, it’s true, but I’m sinning so as not to sin worse, to stop this sensual nagging, to tear this thorn out of my flesh and avoid worse trouble. That the Lord knows.” Suddenly he was swept by a gust of tenderness towards himself. “I’m just a poor, weak creature,” he thought as his heavy steps crunched the dirty gravel. “I’m weak and without support. Stella! oh, well, the Lord knows how much I’ve loved her; but I was married at twenty. And now she’s too bossy, as well as too old.” His moment of weakness passed. “But I’ve still got my vigour; and how can I find satisfaction with a woman who makes the sign of the Cross in bed before every embrace and then at the critical moment just cries, ‘Gesummaria!’ When we married and she was sixteen I found that rather exalting; but now . . . seven children I’ve had with her, seven; and never once have I seen her navel. Is that right?” Now he was almost shouting, whipped by this odd anguish, “Is it right? I ask you all!” And he turned to the portico of the Catena. “Why, she’s the real sinner!”
Comforted by this reassuring discovery he gave a firm knock at Mariannina’s door.
Two hours later he was in his brougham on the way home with Father Pirrone beside him. The latter was worried; his colleagues had been telling him about the political situation which was, it seemed, much tenser than it looked from the detached calm of Villa Salina. There was fear of a landing by the Piedmontese in the south of the island, near Sciacca; the authorities had noticed a silent ferment among the people; at the first sign of weakening control the city rabble would take to looting and rape. The Jesuit Fathers were thoroughly alarmed and three of them, the oldest, had left for Naples by the afternoon packet-boat, taking their archives with them. “May the Lord protect us and spare this holy Kingdom!”
The Prince scarcely listened. He was immersed in sated ease tinged with disgust. Mariannina had looked at him with her big opaque peasant’s eyes, had refused him nothing, and been humble and compliant in every way. A kind of Bendicò in a silk petticoat. In a moment of particularly intense pleasure he had heard her exclaim “My Prince!” He smiled again with satisfaction at the thought. Much better than “mon chat” or “mon singe blond” produced in equivalent moments by Sarah, the Parisian slut he had frequented three years ago when the Astronomical Congress gave him a gold medal at the Sorbonne. Better than “mon chat”, no doubt of that; much better than “Gesummaria!”; no sacrilege at least. A good girl, Mariannina; next time he visited he’d bring her three lengths of crimson silk.
But how sad too: that manhandled, youthful flesh, that resigned lubricity; and what about him, what was he? A pig, just a pig! Suddenly there occurred to him a verse read by chance in a Paris bookshop while glancing at a volume by someone whose name he had forgotten, one of those poets the French incubate and forget next week. He could see once more the lemon-yellow pile of unsold copies, the page, an uneven page, and heard again the verses ending a jumble of a poem:
. . . donnez-moi la force et le courage
de contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans dégoût.
And as Father Pirrone went worrying on about a person called La Farina and another called Crispi, the Prince dozed off into a kind of tense euphoria, lulled by the trotting of the bays on whose plump flanks quivered the light from the carriage lamps. He woke up at the turning by Villa Falconeri. “Oh, he’s a fine one too, tending bonfires that’ll destroy him!”
In the matrimonial bedroom, glancing at poor Stella with her hair well tucked into her nightcap, sighing as she slept in the great brass bed, he felt touched. “Seven children she’s given me and she’s been mine alone.” A faint whiff of valerian drifted through the room, last vestige of her crisis of hysterics. “Poor little Stella,” he murmured pityingly as he climbed into bed. The hours passed and he could not sleep; a powerful hand was stoking three fires in his mind; Mariannina’s caresses, those French verses, the threatening pyres on the hills.
Towards dawn, however, the Princess had occasion to make the sign of the Cross.
Next morning the sun lit on a refreshed Prince. He had taken his coffee and was shaving in front of the mirror in a red and black flowered dressing-gown. Bendicò was leaning a heavy head on one of his slippers. As he shaved his right cheek he noticed in the mirror a face behind his own, the face of a young man, thin and elegant with a shy, quizzical look. He did not turn round and went on shaving. “Well, Tancredi, where were you last night?”
“Good morning, Nuncle. Where was I? Oh, just out with friends. An innocent night. Not like a certain person I know who went down to Palermo for some fun!”
The Prince concentrated on shaving the difficult bit between lips and chin. His nephew’s slightly nasal voice had such a youthful zest that it was impossible to be angry; but he might allow himself a touch of surprise. He turned and with his towel under his chin looked his nephew up and down. The young man was in shooting kit, a long tight jacket, high leggings. “And who was this person, may I ask?”
“Yourself, Nuncle, yourself. I saw you with my own eyes, at the Villa Airoldi block post, as you were talking to the sergeant. A fine thing at your age! With a priest too! Old rips!”
Really this was a little too insolent. Tancredi thought he could allow himself anything. Dark blue eyes, the eyes of his mother, his own eyes, gazed laughingly at him through half-closed lids. The Prince was offended; the boy didn’t know where to stop; but he could not bring himself to reprove him and anyway he was quite right. “Why are you dressed up like that, though? What’s on? A fancy-dress ball in the morning?”
The youth went serious; his triangular face took on an unexpectedly manly look. “I’m leaving, Uncle, leaving in an hour. I came to say goodbye.”
Poor Salina felt his heart tighten. “A duel?” “A big duel, uncle. A duel with Francis-by-the-Grace-of-God. . . . I’m off into the hills at Ficuzza; don’t tell a soul, specially Paolo. Great things are in the offing and I don’t want to stay at home. Anyway I’d be arrested at once if I did.”
The Prince had one of his visions: a savage guerrilla skirmish, shots in the woods, and Tancredi, his Tancredi, lying on the ground with his guts hanging out like that poor soldier. “You’re mad, my boy, to go with those people! They’re all mafia men, all crooks. A Falconeri should be with us, for the king.”
The eyes began smiling again. “For the King, yes, of course. But which King?” The lad had one of those sudden serious moods which made him so mysterious and so endearing. “Unless we ourselves take a hand now, they’ll foist a republic on us. If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change. D’you understand?” Rather moved, he embraced his uncle. “Well, good-bye, for now. I’ll be back with the tricolour.” The rhetoric of those friends of his had touched Tancredi a little too; and yet, no, there was a tone in that nasal voice which undercut the emphasis.
What a boy! Talking rubbish and contradicting it at the same time. And all that Paolo of his had on his mind probably at that moment was Guiscard’s digestion! This was his real son! The Prince jumped up, pulled the towel from his neck and rummaged in a drawer. “Tancredi, Tancredi, wait!” He ran after his nephew, slipped a roll of gold pieces into his pocket, and squeezed his shoulder.
The other laughed. “You’re subsidising the Revolution now! Thank you, Nuncle, see you soon; and my respects to my aunt.” And off he rushed down the stairs.
Bendicò was called from following his friend with joyous barks through the Villa, the Prince’s shave was over, his face washed. The valet came to help him into shoes and clothes. “The tricolour! Tricolour indeed! They fill their mouths with these words, the scamps. What’s it got, that geometric emblem, that aping of the French, compared to our white banner with its golden lily in the centre? What hope can those clashing colours bring ’em?” It was now the moment for the monumental black satin cravat to be wound round his neck: a difficult operation during which political worries were best suspended. One turn, two turns, three turns. The big delicate hands smoothed out the folds, settled the overlaps, pinned into the silk the little head of Medusa with ruby eyes. “A clean waistcoat. Can’t you see this one’s dirty?” The valet stood up on tiptoe to help him into a frock-coat of brown cloth; he proffered a handkerchief with three drops of bergamot. Keys, watch and chain, money, the Prince put in a pocket himself. Then he glanced in a mirror; no doubt about it, he was still a fine-looking man. “Old play-boy indeed! A bad joke, that one of Tancredi’s! I’d like to see him at my age, all skin and bone as he is!”
His vigorous steps made the windows tinkle in the rooms he crossed. The house was calm, luminous, ornate; above all it was his own. On his way downstairs he suddenly understood that remark of Tancredi “if we want things to stay as they are . . .” Tancredi would go a long way: he’d always thought so.
*
The estate office was still empty, lit silently by the sun through closed shutters. Although the scene of more frivolity than anywhere else in the villa, its appearance was of calm austerity. On white-washed walls, reflected in wax-polished tiles, hung enormous pictures representing the various Salina estates; there, in bright colours contrasting with the gold and black frame, was Salina, the island of the twin mountains, surrounded by a sea of white-flecked waves on which pranced beflagged galleons; Querceta, its low houses grouped round the rustic church on which were converging groups of bluish-coloured pilgrims; Ragattisi tucked under mountain gorges: Argivocale, tiny in contrast to the vast plains of corn dotted with hard-working peasants; Donnafugata with its baroque palace, goal of coaches in scarlet and green and gilt, loaded with women, wine and violins; and many others, all protected by a taut reassuring sky and by the Leopard grinning between long whiskers. Each picture was jocund—each illustrating the enlightened rule, direct or delegated, of the House of Salina. Ingenuous masterpieces of rustic art from the previous century; useless though at showing boundaries, or detailing tenures or tenancies; such matters remained obscure. The wealth of centuries had been transmuted into ornament, luxury, pleasure; no more; the abolition of feudal rights had swept away duties with privileges; wealth, like old wine, had let the dregs of greed, even of care and prudence, fall to the bottom of the barrel, preserving only verve and colour. And thus eventually it cancelled itself out; this wealth which had achieved its own object was now composed only of essential oils—and like essential oils soon evaporated. Already some of the estates which looked so gay in those pictures had taken wing, leaving behind only bright-coloured paintings and names. Others seemed like those September swallows which though still present are already grouped stridently on trees, ready for departure. But there were so many; endless, they seemed.
In spite of this the sensation felt by the Prince on entering his own office was, as always, an unpleasant one. In the centre of the room towered a huge desk, with dozens of drawers, niches, sockets, hollows and folding shelves; its mass of yellow wood and black inlay was carved and decorated like a stage set, full of unexpected, uneven surfaces, of secret drawers which no one knew now how to work except thieves. It was covered with papers and, although the Prince had taken care that most of these referred to the starry regions of astronomy, there were quite enough of others to fill his princely heart with dismay. Suddenly he was reminded of King Ferdinand’s desk at Caserta, also covered with papers needing decisions by which the King illuded himself to be influencing the course of fate, actually flowing on its own in another valley.
Journal des Savants. “Les dernières observations de l’Observatoire de Greenwich présentent un intérêt tout particulier . . .”