The Leopard

by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

  Soon afterwards appeared Russo, whom the Prince found the most significant of his dependants. Clever, dressed rather smartly in a striped velvet jacket, with greedy eyes below a remorseless forehead, the Prince found him a perfect specimen of a class on its way up. He was obsequious too, and even sincerely friendly in a way, for his cheating was done in the certainty of exercising a right. “I can imagine how Your Excellency must be worried by Signorino Tancredi’s departure; but he won’t be away long, I’m sure, and all will end well.” Again the Prince found himself facing one of the enigmas of Sicily; in this secret island, where houses are barred and peasants refuse to admit they even know the way to their own village in clear view on a hillock within a few minutes’ walk, here, in spite of the ostentatious show of mystery, reserve is a myth.

  He signed to Russo to sit down and stared him in the eyes. “Pietro, let’s talk to each other man to man. You’re involved in all this too, aren’t you?” No, came the answer, not actually; he had a family and such risks were for young men like Signorino Tancredi. “I’d never hide anything from Your Excellency, who’s like a father to me.” (Yet three months before he had hidden in his cellar three hundred baskets of lemons belonging to the Prince, and he knew that the Prince knew.) “But I must say that my heart is with them, those bold lads.” He got up to let in Bendicò, who was making the door shake under his friendly impetus. Then he sat down again. “Your Excellency knows we can stand no more; searches, questions, nagging about every little thing, a police-spy at every corner of the street; an honest man can’t even look after his own affairs. Afterwards, though, we’ll have liberty, security, lighter taxes, ease, trade. Everything will be better; the only ones to lose will be the priests. But the Lord protects poor folk like me, not them.”

  The Prince smiled. He knew that he, Russo, was at that moment trying through intermediaries to buy the estate of Argivocale. “There will be a day or two of shooting and trouble, but Villa Salina will be safe as a rock; Your Excellency is our father, I have many friends here. The Piedmontese will come cap in hand to pay Your Excellencies their respects. And then you are also the uncle, the guardian of Don Tancredi!”

  The Prince felt humiliated, reduced to the rank of one protected by Russo’s friends; his only merit, as far as he could see, was being uncle to that urchin Tancredi. “In a week’s time I’ll find my life’s only safe because I keep Bendicò. He squeezed one of the dog’s ears so hard that the poor creature whined, honoured doubtless but in pain.

  Shortly afterwards a remark of Russo’s relieved the Prince. “Everything will be better, believe me, Excellency. Honest and able men will have a chance to get ahead, that’s all. The rest will be as it was before.” All that these people, these petty local Liberals wanted, was to find ways of making more money themselves. No more. The swallows would take wing a little sooner, that was all. Anyway there were still plenty in the nest.

  “You may be right. Who knows?” Now he had penetrated all the hidden meanings; the enigmatic words of Tancredi, the rhetorical ones of Ferrara, the false but revealing ones of Russo, had yielded their reassuring secret. Much would happen, but all would be play-acting; a noisy, romantic play with a few spots of blood on the comic costumes. This was a country of arrangements, with none of that frenzy of the French; and anyway, had anything really serious happened in France, except for June of ’48? He felt like saying to Russo, but his innate courtesy held him back, “I understand now; you don’t want to destroy us, who are your ‘fathers’. You just want to take our places. Gently, nicely, maybe even putting a few thousand ducats in our pockets. And what then? Your nephew, my dear Russo, will sincerely believe himself a baron; maybe you, because of your name, will become descendant of a grand duke of Muscovy instead of some red-skinned peasant, which is what that name of yours means. And long before that your daughter will have married one of us, perhaps Tancredi himself, with his blue eyes and his willowy hands. She’s good-looking, anyway, and once she’s learned to wash . . . For all will be the same, just as it is now: except for an imperceptible change round of classes. My Court Chamberlain’s gilt keys, my cherry-coloured cordon of St. Januarius will stay in a drawer and end up in some glass case of Paolo’s son. But the Salina will remain the Salina; they may even get some sort of compensation; a seat in the Sardinian Senate, that pistachio ribbon of St. Maurice. Both have tassels, after all.”

  He got up. “Pietro, talk to your friends, will you? There are girls here. They mustn’t be alarmed.”

  “I felt that, Excellency, and have already spoken of it—Villa Salina will be quiet as a convent,” and he smiled with amiable irony.

  Don Fabrizio went out followed by Bendicò; he wanted to go up and see Father Pirrone, but the dog’s yearning look forced him out into the garden; for Bendicò had thrilling memories of the fine work he’d put in the night before, and wanted to finish it off like a good artist. The garden was even more odorous than the day before, and under the morning sun the gold of the acacia tree clashed less. “What about our King and Queen, though, what about them? And what about the principle of legitimacy?” The thought disturbed him a moment, he could not avoid it. For a second he felt like Màlvica. Those Ferdinands, those Francises that had been so despised, seemed for a moment like elder brothers, trusting, just, affectionate, true kings. But the defence forces of his inner calm always on the alert in the Prince were already hurrying to his aid, with the musketry of law, the artillery of history. “What about France? Isn’t Napoleon III illegitimate? And aren’t the French quite happy under that enlightened Emperor, who will surely lead them to the highest of destinies? Anyway, let’s face it. Was our Charles III so definitely within his right? Was his Battle of Bitonto so unlike that of Bisacquino or Corleone or any of these battles in which the Piedmontese are now sweeping our troops before them? One of those battles fought so that all should remain as it was? And anyway, even Jupiter was not legitimate King of Olympus.

  At this, of course, Jupiter’s coup d’état against Saturn was bound to bring his mind back to the stars.

  Leaving Bendicò panting from his own dynamism, he climbed the stairs again, crossed rooms in which his daughters sat chatting to friends from the Holy Redeemer (at his passage the silken skirts rustled as the girls rose), went up a long ladder and came into the bright blue light of the observatory. Father Pirrone, with the serene air of a priest who has said Mass and drunk black coffee with Monreale biscuits, was sitting immersed in algebraical formulae. The two telescopes and three lenses were lying there quietly, dazed by the sun, with black pads over the eyepieces, like well-trained animals who knew their meal was only given them at night.

  The sight of the Prince drew the priest from his calculations and reminded him of his humiliation of the night before. He got up, and then, as he bowed politely, found himself saying, “Is Your Excellency coming to confession?” The Prince, whose sleep that night and conversations that morning had driven the episode of the previous night from his mind, looked amazed. “Confession? It’s not Saturday.” Then he remembered and smiled, “Really, Father, there wouldn’t even be need, would there? You know it all already.”

  This insistence on his enforced complicity irritated the Jesuit. “Excellency, the efficacy of confession not only consists in telling our sins, but in being sorry for them. And until you do so and show me you do so, you will remain in mortal sin, whether I know what your sins are or not.” He blew a meticulous whiff at a bit of fluff on his sleeve and plunged back into his abstractions.

  Such was the calm produced in the Prince’s mind by the political discoveries of that morning that he smiled at what would at other times have seemed to him gross impertinence. He opened one of the windows of the little tower. The countryside spread below in all its beauty. Under the leaven of the strong sun everything seemed weightless; the sea in the background was a dash of pure colour, the mountains which had seemed so alarmingly full of hidden men during the night now looked like masses of vapour on the point of dissolving, and gr
im Palermo itself lay crouching quietly around its monasteries like a flock of sheep around their shepherds. Even the foreign warships anchored in the harbour in case of trouble spread no sense of fear in the majestic calm. The sun, still far from its blazing zenith on that morning of the 13th of May, was showing itself the true ruler of Sicily; the crude brash sun, the drugging sun, which annulled every will, kept all things in servile immobility, cradled in violence and arbitrary dreams.

  “It’ll take any number of Victor Emmanuels to change this magic potion for ever being poured for us.”

  Father Pirrone had got up, adjusted his sash and moved towards the Prince with a hand out. “Excellency, I was too brusque. Let me not trespass on your kindness, but do please listen and come to confession.”

  The ice was broken. And the Prince could tell Father Pirrone of his own political intuitions. But the Jesuit was far from sharing his relief and even became acid again. “Briefly, then, you nobles will come to an agreement with the Liberals, and yes, even with the Masons, at our expense, at the expense of the Church. Then, of course, our property, which is the patrimony of the poor, will be seized and carved up among the most brazen of their leaders; and who will then feed all the destitute sustained and guided by the Church to-day?” The Prince was silent. “How will those desperate masses be placated? I’ll tell you at once, Excellency. They will be flung first a portion, then another portion and eventually all the rest of your estates. And so God will have done His justice, even by means of the Masons. Our Lord healed the blind in body; but what will be the fate of the blind in spirit?”

  The unhappy priest was breathing hard; sincere horror at the foreseen dispersal of Church property was linked with regret at his having lost control of himself again, with fear of offending the Prince, whom he genuinely liked and whose blustering rages as well as disinterested kindness he knew well. So he sat down warily, glancing every now and again at Don Fabrizio, who had taken up a little brush and was cleaning the knobs of a telescope, apparently absorbed. A little later he got up and cleaned his hands thoroughly with a rag; his face was quite expressionless, his light eyes seemed intent only on finding any remaining stain of oil in the cuticles of his nails. Down below, around the villa, all was luminous and grandiose silence, emphasised rather than disturbed by the distant barking of Bendicò baiting the gardener’s dog at the far end of the lemon-grove, and by the dull rhythmic beat from the kitchen of a cook’s knife chopping meat for the approaching meal. The sun had absorbed the turbulence of men as well as the harshness of earth. The Prince moved towards the priest’s table, sat down and began drawing pointed little Bourbon lilies with a carefully sharpened pencil which the Jesuit had left behind in his anger. He looked serious but so serene that Father Pirrone no longer felt on tenterhooks.

  “We’re not blind, my dear Father, we’re just human beings. We live in a changing reality to which we try to adapt ourselves like seaweed bending under the pressure of water. Holy Church has been granted an explicit promise of immortality; we, as a social class, have not. Any palliative which may give us another hundred years of life is like eternity to us. We may worry about our children and perhaps our grandchildren; but beyond what we can hope to stroke with these hands of ours we have no obligations. I cannot worry myself about what will happen to any possible descendants in the year 1960. The Church, yes, She must worry for She is destined not to die. Solace is implicit in Her desperation. Don’t you think that if now or in the future She could save herself by sacrificing us She wouldn’t do so? Of course She would, and rightly.”

  Father Pirrone was so pleased at not having offended the Prince that he did not take offence either. Of course that word “desperation” applied to the Church was quite inadmissible, but long habit as confessor had made him capable of appreciating Don Fabrizio’s disillusioned mood. He must not let the other triumph, though. “Now, Excellency, you have a couple of sins to confess to me on Saturday; one of the flesh yesterday, one of the spirit to-day. Remember!”

  Both soothed, they began discussing a report which they would soon be sending to a foreign observatory, at Arcetri. Supported, guided, it seemed, by calculations which were invisible at that hour yet ever present, the stars cleft the ether in those exact trajectories of theirs. The comets would be appearing as usual, punctual to the fraction of a second, in sight of whoever was observing them. They were not messengers of catastrophe as Stella thought; on the contrary, their appearance at the time foreseen was a triumph of the human mind’s capacity to project itself and to participate in the sublime routine of the skies. “Let’s leave the Bendicòs down there running after rustic prey, and the cooks’ knives chopping the flesh of innocent beasts. From up in this observatory the bluster of the one and the blood on the other merge into tranquil harmony. The real problem is how to go on living this life of the spirit in its most sublimated moments, those moments that are most like death.”

  So reasoned the Prince, forgetting his own recurrent whims, his own cavortings of the night before. During those moments of abstraction he seemed more intimately absolved, in the sense of being linked anew with the universe, than by any blessing of Father Pirrone. For half an hour that morning the gods of the ceilings and the monkeys on the walls were again put to silence. But in the drawing-room no one noticed.

  When the bell for luncheon called them downstairs, both had regained their serenity, due to understanding the political scene and to setting that understanding aside. An atmosphere of unusual relaxation had spread over the house. The midday meal was the chief one of the day, and went, God be thanked, quite smoothly. This in spite of one of the ringlets framing the face of the twenty-year-old Carolina, the eldest daughter, dropping into her soup plate because apparently of an ill-secured pin. Another day the incident might have had dreadful consequences, but now it only heightened the gaiety; and when her brother, sitting next to her, took the lock of hair and pinned it on his neckerchief where it hung like a scapular, even the Prince allowed himself a smile. Tancredi’s departure, destination and reasons were now known to all, and everyone talked of them, except Paolo who went on eating in silence. No one was really worrying about him, in fact, but the Prince, who showed no signs of the anxiety he still felt deep down, and Concetta who was the only one with a shadow on her pretty forehead. “The girl must have her eye on the young scamp. They’d make a fine couple. But I fear Tancredi will have to aim higher, by which of course I mean lower.”

  To-day, as political calm had cleared the mists generally veiling it, the Prince’s fundamental good nature showed on the surface. To reassure his daughter he began explaining what useless muskets the royal army had; the barrels of those enormous pieces had no rifling, he said, so bullets coming from them would have very little penetration; technical comments thought up on the spur of the moment, understood by few and convincing none but consoling all, including Concetta, as they managed to transform war into a neat little diagram of fire-trajectories from the very squalid chaos that it really was.

  At the end of the meal appeared a rum jelly. This was the Prince’s favourite pudding, and the Princess had been careful to order it early that morning in gratitude for favours granted.

  It was rather threatening at first sight, shaped like a tower with bastions and battlements and smooth slippery walls impossible to scale, garrisoned by red and green cherries and pistachio nuts; but into its transparent and quivering flanks a spoon plunged with astounding ease. By the time the amber-coloured fortress reached Francesco Paolo, the sixteen-year-old son who was served last, it consisted only of shattered walls and hunks of wobbly rubble. Exhilarated by the aroma of rum and the delicate flavour of the multi-coloured garrison, the Prince enjoyed watching the rapid demolishing of the fortress beneath the assault of his family’s appetite. One of his glasses was still half-full of Marsala. He raised it, glanced round the family, gazed for a second into Concetta’s blue eyes, then said: “To the health of our Tancredi.” He drained his wine in a single gulp. The initials F.D., whi
ch before had stood out clearly on the golden colour of the full glass, were no longer visible.

  In the estate office, to which he returned after luncheon, the sunlight was oblique, and the pictures of his estates, now shadowed, sent no messages of reproof. “Blessings on Your Excellency,” muttered Pastorello and Lo Nigro, the two tenants of Ragattisi who had brought the portion of their rent they paid in kind. They were standing very straight with stunned-looking eyes in faces carefully shaven and burnt dark by sun. They gave out a smell of flocks and herds. The Prince talked to them cordially in his very stylised dialect, inquired about their families, the state of their livestock, the outlook for the crops. Then he asked, “Have you brought anything?” And when the two answered yes, that it was in the room next door, the Prince felt a twinge of shame as he realised that the interview was a repetition of his own audiences with King Ferdinand. “Wait five minutes and Ferrara will give you the receipts.” He put into their hands a couple of ducats each, worth more, probably, than what they had brought. “Drink my health, will you?” and then went and looked at their produce: on the ground were four caciocavallo cheeses, each weighing roughly ten kilos; he gave them a careless glance; he loathed that particular cheese; there were six baby lambs, the last of the year’s litter, with their heads lolling pathetically above the big gash through which their life-blood had flowed a few hours before. Their bellies had been slashed open too, and iridescent intestines hung out. “May God receive his soul,” he thought, remembering the gutted soldier of a month before. Four pairs of chickens tied by the claws were twisting in terror under Bendicò’s restless snout. “Another example of pointless alarm,” he thought, “the dog is no danger to them at all; he wouldn’t even touch one of their bones as it would give him a belly-ache.”