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 appointm
ent 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 th
e 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.
The Leopard Page 4
