The Leopard
Page 3
With these discoveries the publishing history of The Leopard can be considered complete.
Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, 2006
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1 Psychoanalyst, daughter of Boris Wolff Stomersee and Alice Barbi, a renowned lieder singer and close friend of Johannes Brahms towards the close of the composer’s life.
2 Gioacchino Lanza di Assaro. One of the young men close to Lampedusa in his declining years. He was a distant cousin of Lampedusa, who adopted him in 1956. Professor of the History of Music and impresario, currently in charge of the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples.
3 Enrico Merlo, Baron Tagliavia. Consigliere della Corte di Conti for the region of Sicily, he belongs to the small list of Lampedusa’s cultured friends; they were the only ones who recognised his talent. Merlo and Lampedusa would meet almost daily at the Caffè Caflish.
4 Mirella Radice, fiancée, later wife of Lampedusa’s adopted son Gioacchino Lanza di Assaro.
5 Giovanna, Casimiro and Lucio Piccolo di Calanovella, first cousins of Lampedusa on his mother’s side. Casimiro enjoyed painting and photography, Lucio composed music and wrote poetry. Lucio was discovered by Eugenio Montale. His poetry is published by Mondadori and by Scheiwiller and has been translated into English: Collected Poems of Lucio Piccolo, Translated and Edited by Brian Swann and Ruth Feldman, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1972.
6 Guido Lajolo, engineer and fellow-prisoner with Lampedusa in Szombathely Camp during the First World War. He had emigrated to Brazil. In 1953 the two had met in Palermo and remained in touch.
7 Lyudmila Iliaschenko, childhood friend of Princess Lampedusa. She lived in Palermo and gave language lessons.
8 Olga Wolff Stomersee Bianchieri, the Princess’s sister.
9 Pietro Tomasi della Torretta, Lampedusa’s uncle. Italian Ambassador to London 1922–7. The writer often stayed at the embassy and here he met his future wife, daughter of Alice Barbi by her first marriage, and subsequently the wife of Pietro Tomasi della Torretta.
10 Corrado Fatta della Fratta, historian and great friend of Lampedusa. His chief work is a biography of Henry VIII.
11 Francesco Agnello was one of the circle of young people close to Lampedusa in his declining years. Agnello was to become an important impresario.
12 Francesco Orlando. Lampedusa’s favourite pupil, for whom he wrote Letteratura inglese and Letteratura francese, a series of lessons they would read together twice weekly from 1954. Francesco Orlando is Professor of the Theory and Practice of Fiction at the Scuola Normale at Pisa.
13 Antonio Pasqualino, one of the circle of young people close to Lampedusa. He grew up to be a surgeon and a distinguished anthropologist.
14 A lawyer practising at Misilmeri. Two of Licy Lampedusa’s patients were children of his.
15 Ubaldo Mirabelli, art historian and journalist. He was for many years General Manager of the Teatro Massimo at Palermo.
16 Giuseppe Aridon, who administered the Lampedusa estate for the writer and his cousin Carolina Tomasi.
17 The Lampedusas’ small dog.
18 Francesco Orlando, Ricordo di Lampedusa, Scheiwiller, Milan 1962.
Also referred to in Ricordo di Lampedusa (1962), seguito da: Da distanze diverse (1996), Bollati Boringhieri, Turin 1996
19 Francesco Corrao, physician and psychoanalyst, pupil of the Princess.
20 Palazzo Mazzarino in Via Maqueda, where I was living, then belonged to my father, Fabrizio Lanza, Count Assaro.
21 Antonio Daneu, leading antiquarian from Palermo.
22 Pietro Emanuele Sgadari (Bebbuzzo), Baron Lo Monaco, musicologist and art critic. He kept open house and was a catalyst between Lampedusa and his group of young disciples.
23 Conchita Ramirez de Villaurrutia. Daughter of a Spanish diplomat and historian, Venceslao Ramirez de Villaurrutia, Foreign Minister in Alfonso XIII’s last government.
24 The nickname given to Lampedusa by his wife was Muri.
25 The analytical index is a breakdown of individual scenes in each Part of The Leopard which was included in the Italian edition published by Feltrinelli.
26 Francesco Brancaccio di Carpino, Tre Mesi nella Vicaria di Palermo,1860, Palermo 1900.
27 Novel by Silvio Pellico in the form of a diary about his hard incarceration in the castle of Spielberg. It was claimed in scholarly texts on the Risorgimento that Le mie prigioni resulted in Austria losing many a battle.
28 A salacious Lombard ditty taken up during the Risorgimento as a patriotic song.
29 Notable English vintners. They had opened their wine-vaults in Sicily at the time of Napoleon’s blockade of England.
30 In his recent I Misteri del Gattopardo/Ricordi di Vite Parallele/Lucio Piccolo e Beatrice Cutò (Patti, 2000), Franco Valenti has published a slightly different version of the second sonnet discovered at Capo d’Orlando. The final tercet sees the “I” altered to “You” (“You suffer, weep and curse, he only thinks to mock;/ He tortures you with rack and rope, binds you in fetters,/Ruthlessly will he hound you to the nether shores.”) Valente interprets this sonnet as a dig at Lucio Piccolo, distraught at being deserted by one of his sylvan nymphs.
31 The Mastrogiovanni Tasca Filangeri di Cutò sisters were Beatrice, Lampedusa’s mother, Teresa mother of the Piccolo brothers, Giulia, married into the Trigona di Sant’Elia clan, Lina married into the Cianciafara clan, and Maria who remained single. Their mother, Giovanna Filangeri di Cutò, had been educated in Paris and the sisters had received a more liberal and cosmopolitan education than was then common among the aristocracy of Palermo.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
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I am most grateful for the chance of making a thorough revision of this translation. The Italian is so full of subtle word-play and irony both delicate and grandiose that at times I felt myself coping with some of the most allusive prose written since Manzoni.
Now Mr. John D. Christie has helpfully suggested a large number of corrections; many have come from Mr. Raymond Mortimer and Mr. and Mrs. Milton Waldman among others; and there has also been patient research by the librarians of the Italian Institute. Earlier portions were read aloud to the doyenne of English translators from Italian, Miss Beryl de Zoete. And I have had the advantage throughout of advice and encouragement from the author’s widow, Principessa Alessandra di Lampedusa.
A word should be said about the Italian text. This was established for publication by Signor Giorgio Bassani, who first recognised the merit of the incomplete and anonymous manuscript from Palermo. The author himself died before his book was even set up in print, so had no chance of revising it. Another manuscript copy, with some variations, belongs to his co-heir and adopted son, now Duca di Palma, in Palermo.
To him and to many of the author’s relatives, friends, and connections throughout Sicily I owe insights into island life that have greatly helped towards an understanding of this book. The present revised text might in fact almost be called a co-operative effort by admirers to present something closer to a worthy version.
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When this book opens the Bourbon state of Naples and Sicily, called the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, was about to end. King Ferdinand II (“Bomba”) had just died; and the whole Italian peninsula would soon be one state for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire.
The Risorgimento, as this movement for unification came to be known, had been gathering strength since the occupation of the north by the Austrians after the Napoleonic Wars, and had already come to a head once, in 1848. Leadership had now fallen mainly to Piedmont, the so-called Kingdom of Sardinia, ruled from Turin by Victor Emmanuel of Savoy, with Cavour as his prime minister.
Early in May 1860 the popular hero Garibaldi, acting against Cavour’s wishes, sailed from near Genoa with a thousand volunteers for Sicily, to win the island from the Bourbons. The Redshirts, or “Garibaldini”, landed at Marsala, defeated the Bourbon troops at Calatafimi, and within three weeks had occupied the capital, Palermo. Garibaldi, hailed as “D
ictator” of Sicily, gathered more volunteers, crossed to the mainland, swept up the coast and entered Naples in triumph. That autumn the Bourbon armies were defeated on the Volturno, the Piedmontese besieged the last Bourbon king, Francis II, in Gaeta, and Garibaldi handed over southern Italy to King Victor Emmanuel; he then withdrew to private life.
Plebiscites were held; every state in the peninsula agreed to join the new united kingdom, except the Papal States, which were occupied, for reasons of internal French politics, by troops of Napoleon III. In 1862 Garibaldi tried to force this issue and march on Rome. But on the slopes of Aspromonte in Calabria his men were routed and he himself wounded by Piedmontese troops.
This action by Italian government forces ended the revolutionary phase of the Risorgimento, which culminated officially in the declaration of Rome as capital of Italy in 1870.
A.C., 1962
I
INTRODUCTION TO THE PRINCE
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MAY, 1860
“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.