The Leopard

by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

  All this blood and panic revolted him, however. “Pastorello, take the chickens into the coop, will you, as there’s no need of them in the larder; and another time take the baby lambs straight into the kitchen, will you; they make a mess here. And you, Lo Nigro, go and tell Salvatore to come and clean up and take away the cheeses. And open the window to let out the smell.”

  Then Ferrara came and made out the receipts.

  When the Prince went upstairs again, he found Paolo, his heir, the Duke of Querceta, waiting for him in his study on the red sofa where he proposed to take his siesta. The youth had screwed up all his courage to talk to him. Short, slim, Olive-skinned, he seemed older than the Prince himself. “I wanted to ask you, papa, how we’re to behave with Tancredi when we next meet him.”

  The Prince understood at once and felt a twinge of annoyance. “What d’you mean? Has anything changed?”

  “But papa, you can’t possibly approve; he’s gone to join those swine who’re making trouble all over Sicily; things like that just aren’t done.”

  Personal jealousy, a bigot’s resentment of his agnostic cousin, a dullard’s at the other’s zest, had taken political guise. The Prince was so indignant that he did not even ask his son to sit down. “Better to make a fool of oneself than spend all day staring at horses’ dung! I’m even fonder of Tancredi than I was before. And anyway what he’s doing isn’t as silly as all that. If in the future you’re able to go on putting Duke of Querceta on your cards, and if you inherit any money when I’m gone, you will owe it to Tancredi and to others like him. Out with you now, and don’t mention the subject to me again! I’m the only one who gives orders here.” Then he became kindlier and substituted irony for anger. “Be off now, son, as I want to have a snooze. Go and talk politics with Guiscard, you’ll understand each other.”

  And as a shaken Paolo closed the door behind him, the Prince took off his frock-coat and boots, made the sofa creak under his weight and slid calmly off to sleep.

  When he awoke, his valet came in with a newspaper and a letter on a tray. They had been sent up from Palermo by his brother-in-law Màlvica, brought by a mounted groom a short while before. Still a little dazed from his afternoon nap, the Prince opened the letter. “My dear Fabrizio, I am writing to you in a state of utter collapse. Such dreadful news in the paper. The Piedmontese have landed. We are all lost. To-night I and my whole family will take refuge on a British man-o’-war. You will want to do the same, I am sure; if you wish I can reserve a berth or two for you. May God save our beloved King! As always, Ciccio.”

  He folded up the letter, put it in his pocket and began laughing out loud. That ass Màlvica! He’d always been a rabbit. Not understanding a thing, and now panic-struck. Abandoning his palace to the mercy of servants; this time he’d really find it empty on his return. “That reminds me, Paolo must go and stay down at Palermo; a house empty at a moment like this means a house lost. I’ll tell him at dinner.”

  He opened the newspaper. “On the 11th of May an act of flagrant piracy culminated in the landing of armed men at Marsala. The latest reports say that the band numbers about eight hundred, and is commanded by Garibaldi. When these brigands set foot on land they were very careful to avoid any encounter with the royal troops, and moved off, as far as can be ascertained, in the direction of Castelvetrano, threatening peaceful citizens and spreading rapine and devastation, etc., etc. . . .”

  The name of Garibaldi disturbed him a little. That adventurer all hair and beard was a pure Mazzinian. He had caused a lot of trouble already. “But if that Galantuomo King of his has let him come down here it means they’re sure of him. They’ll curb him!”

  Reassured, he combed his hair and had his shoes and frock-coat put on again. He thrust the newspaper into a drawer. It was almost time for Rosary, but the drawing-room was still empty. He sat down on a sofa, and as he waited noticed how the Vulcan on the ceiling was rather like the lithographs of Garibaldi he had seen in Turin. He smiled. “Cuckold!”

  The family was gathering. Silken skirts rustled. The youngest were still joking together. Behind the door could be heard the usual echo of controversy between servants and Bendicò determined to take part.

  A ray of sunshine full of dust specks lit up the malicious monkeys.

  He knelt down. “Salve Regina, Mater misericordiae.”

  II

  DONNAFUGATA

  * * *

  AUGUST, 1860

  “THE TREES! THE trees!”

  This shout from the leading carriage eddied back along the following four, almost invisible in clouds of white dust; and at every window perspiring faces expressed tired gratification.

  The trees were only three, in truth, and eucalyptus at that, scruffiest of Mother Nature’s children. But they were also the first seen by the Salina family since leaving Bisacquino at six that morning. It was now eleven, and for the last five hours all they had set eyes on were bare hillsides flaming yellow under the sun. Trots over level ground had alternated briefly with long slow trudges uphill and then careful shuffles down; both trudge and trot merging, anyway, into the constant jingle of harness bells, imperceptible now to the dazed senses except as sound equivalent of the blazing landscape. They had passed through crazed-looking villages washed in palest blue; crossed dry beds of torrents over fantastic bridges; skirted sheer precipices which no sage and broom could temper. Never a tree, never a drop of water; just sun and dust. Inside the carriages, tight shut against that sun and dust, the temperature must have been well over 120 degrees. Those desiccated trees yearning away under bleached sky bore many a message; that they were now within a couple of hours from their journey’s end; that they were entering the family estates; that they could lunch, and perhaps even wash their faces in the verminous waters of the well.

  Ten minutes later they reached the farm buildings of Rampinzeri; a huge pile, only used one month in the year by labourers, mules and cattle gathered there for the harvest. Over the great solid yet staved-in door a stone Leopard pranced in spite of legs broken off by flung stones; next to the main farm building a deep well, watched over by those eucalyptuses, mutely offered various services: as swimming pool, drinking trough, prison or cemetery. It slaked thirst, spread typhus, guarded the kidnapped and hid the corpses both of animals and men till they were reduced to the smoothest of anonymous skeletons.

  The whole Salina family alighted from their various carriages. The Prince, cheered by the thought of soon reaching his beloved Donnafugata, the Princess irritated and yet inert, part restored, however, by her husband’s serenity; tired girls; boys excited by novelty and untamed by the heat; Mademoiselle Dombreuil, the French governess, utterly exhausted, remembering years spent in Algeria with the family of Marshal Bugeaud, moaning “Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, c’est pire, qu’en Afrique!” and mopping at her turned-up nose; Father Pirrone, whose breviary-reading had lulled him into a sleep which had shortened the whole trip and made him the spryest of the party; a maid and two lackeys, city folk worried by the unusual aspect of the countryside; and Bendicò, who had rushed out of the last carriage and was baying at the funereal suggestions of rooks swirling low in the light.

  All were white with dust to the eyebrows, lips or pigtails; whitish puffs arose around those who had reached the stopping-place and were dusting each other down.

  Amid this dirt Tancredi’s elegant spruceness stood out all the more. He had travelled on horseback and, reaching the farm half an hour before the carriages, had time to shake off dust, brush up and change his white cravat. While drawing some water from that well of many uses he had glanced for a second into the mirror of the bucket and found himself in good order, with the black patch over his right eye now more reminiscent than protective of a wound received three months before in the fighting at Palermo; with that other dark blue eye which seemed to have assumed the task of expressing enough sly gaiety for its mate in temporary eclipse; and with, above his cravat, a scarlet thread alluding discreetly to the red shirt he had once worn. He
helped the Princess to alight, dusted the Prince’s top hat with his sleeve, distributed sweets to his girl cousins and quips to the boys, almost genuflected before the Jesuit, returned the passionate hugs of Bendicò, consoled Mademoiselle Dombreuil, laughed at all, enchanted all.

  The coachmen were walking the horses slowly round to freshen them up before watering, the lackeys laying table-cloths out on straw left over from the threshing, in the oblong of shade from the building. Luncheon began near the accommodating well. All round quivered the funereal countryside, yellow with stubble, black with burnt patches; the lament of cicadas filled the sky. It was like a death-rattle from parched Sicily at the end of August vainly awaiting rain.

  An hour later they were all on the road again, refreshed. Although the horses were tired and going slower than ever, the last part of the journey seemed short; the landscape, no longer unknown, had lost its more sinister aspects. They began recognising places they knew well, arid goals of past excursions and picnics in other years—the Dragonara ravine, the Misilbesi cross-roads; soon they would reach the shrine of Our Lady of Graces, turning-point of their longest walks from Donnafugata. The Princess had dozed off, the Prince, alone with her in the wide carriage, was beaming.

  Never had he been so glad to be going to spend three months at Donnafugata as he was now, in that late August of 1860. Not only because at Donnafugata he loved the house, the people, the sense of feudal ownership still surviving there, but also because, unlike other times, he felt no regret for his peaceful evenings in the observatory, his occasional visits to Mariannina. The truth was he had found the spectacle offered by Palermo in the last three months rather nauseating. He would have liked to have had the fun of being the only one to understand the situation and accept that red-shirted “bogey-man” Garibaldi; but he had to admit that second-sight was not a Salina monopoly. Everyone in Palermo seemed pleased; everyone except a mere handful of grumblers: his brother-in-law Màlvica, who had got himself arrested by Garibaldi’s police and spent ten days in prison; his son Paolo, just as discontented but slightly more prudent, and now left behind at Palermo deep in some silly plot or other. Everyone else was making a great show of joy; wearing tricolour cockades on lapels, marching about in processions from morning till night, and above all talking, haranguing, declaiming; and if in the very first days of the occupation all this was given some sense of purpose by the acclamations greeting the few wounded passing through the main streets and by the shrieks of Bourbon police “rats” being tortured in the side alleys, now that the wounded had recovered and the surviving “rats” enrolled in the new police this hubbub, inevitable though he realised it to be, began to seem pointless and petty.

  But he had to admit that all this was a mere surface manifestation of ill-breeding; the fundamentals of the situation, economic and social, were satisfactory, just as he had foreseen. Don Pietro Russo had kept his promises and not a shot had been heard near Villa Salina; and though a whole service of Chinese porcelain had been stolen from the palace in Palermo, that was merely due to the idiocy of Paolo, who had had it packed into a couple of cases which he had then left out in the palace courtyard during the shelling; a positive invitation for the packers themselves to cart it off.

  The “Piedmontese” (as the Prince continued to call them for reassurance, just as others called them “Garibaldini” in exaltation or “Garibaldeschi” in vilification) had paid a call at the house, if not precisely cap in hand as he had been told, at least with a hand at the visors of those red caps of theirs, as floppy and faded as those of any Bourbon officer.

  About the 20th of June, announced twenty-four hours beforehand by Tancredi, appeared a general in a red tunic with black froggings. He was followed by an aide-de-camp and asked most politely for admission in order to admire the frescoes on the ceilings. In he was ushered without ado, as there had been sufficient warning to clear from one of the drawing-rooms a portrait of King Ferdinand II in full regalia and substitute for it a neutral Pool of Bethsaida; an operation combining advantages political and aesthetic.

  The general was a quick-witted Tuscan of about thirty, talkative and inclined to show off; he had been well behaved and agreeable, had treated the Prince with all proper respect and even called him “Excellency”, in utter contradiction to one of the Dictator’s first decrees; the aide-de-camp, a new recruit of nineteen, was a Milanese count, who fascinated the girls with his glittering boots and his slurred “r”s. With them came Tancredi, promoted, or rather created, captain on the field of battle; a little drawn from the pain of his wound, he stood there red-shirted and irresistible, showing an easy intimacy with the victors, an intimacy demonstrated by a mutual use of the familiar tu, lavished with childish fervour by the two officers from the mainland and returned in kind by Tancredi, though with a faint nasal twang that to the Prince seemed full of muted irony. While greeting them from heights of imperturbable courtesy, the Prince had in fact been much amused and quite reassured. So much so that three days later the two “Piedmontese” had been invited to dinner; Carolina then had made a fine sight at the piano accompanying the singing of the general, who had risked, in homage to Sicily, Bellini’s “Viravviso, o luoghi ameni” with Tancredi demurely turning over the pages of the score as if false notes didn’t exist. The young Milanese count, meanwhile, was leaning over a sofa, chatting away about orange blossom to Concetta and revealing to her the existence of a writer she had never heard of, Aleardo Aleardi; she was pretending to listen though worrying really about the look of her cousin, whom the candlelight on the piano made even more languid than he was in reality.

  It had been an idyllic evening and was followed by others equally cordial; during one of these the general was asked to try and obtain an exemption from the order expelling Jesuits for Father Pirrone, described as very aged and very ill; the general, who had taken a liking to the good priest, pretended to believe in his wretched state and agreed; he talked to political friends, pulled a string or two, and Father Pirrone stayed. Which went to confirm the Prince more than ever in the accuracy of his predictions.

  The general was also most helpful about the complicated permits necessary in those troubled times for anyone wanting to move from place to place; and it was largely due to him that the Salina family was able to enjoy its annual sojourn in the country in that year of revolution. The young captain asked for a month’s leave and set off with his uncle and aunt. Even apart from permits, the preparations for the Salina family’s journey had been lengthy and complicated. Cryptic negotiations had to be conducted in the agent’s office with “persons of influence” from Girgenti, negotiations ending in smiles, handclasps and the tinkle of coin. Thus a second and more useful permit had been obtained; though this was no novelty. Piles of luggage and food had to be collected too, and cooks and servants sent on three days ahead; then there was one of the smaller telescopes to be packed and Paolo persuaded to stay behind in Palermo. After this they were able to move off; the general and the little lieutenant came to wish them all Godspeed and bring them flowers; and as the carriages moved off from Villa Salina two scarlet-covered arms continued to wave for a long time; at a carriage window appeared the Prince’s black top hat, but the little hand in black lace mittens which the young count had hoped to see remained in Concetta’s lap.

  The journey had lasted more than three days and been quite appalling. The roads, the famous Sicilian roads which had cost the Prince of Satriano the Lieutenant-Generalcy, were no more than tracks, all ruts and dust. The first night at Marineo, at the home of a notary and friend, had been more or less bearable, but the second at a little inn at Prizzi had been torture, with three of them to a bed, besieged by repellent local fauna. The third was at Bisacquino; no bugs there but to make up for that the Prince had found thirteen flies in his glass of granita, while a strong smell of excrement drifted in from the street and the privy next door, and all this had caused him most unpleasant dreams; waking at very early dawn amid all that sweat and stink he had found himself compa
ring this ghastly journey with his own life, which had first moved over smiling level ground, then clambered up rocky mountains, slid over threatening passes, to emerge eventually into a landscape of interminable undulations, all the same colour, all bare as despair. These early morning fantasies were the very worst that could happen to a man of middle age; and although the Prince knew that they would vanish with the day’s activities he suffered acutely all the same, as he was used enough to them by now to realise that deep inside him they left a sediment of sorrow which, accumulating day by day, would in the end be the real cause of his death.

  With the rising of the sun those monsters had gone back to their lairs in his unconscious; nearby now was Donnafugata and his palace, with its many-jetted fountains, its memories of saintly forebears, the sense it gave him of everlasting childhood. Even the people there were pleasant, simple and devoted. At this point a thought occurred: would they be just as devoted as before, after recent events? “We’ll soon see.”

  Now at last they were nearly there. Tancredi’s mischievous face appeared at the carriage window-sill. “Uncle, Aunt, get ready, in five minutes we’ll be there.” Tancredi was too tactful to precede the Prince into the town. He slowed his horse to a walk and proceeded in silence beside the leading carriage.

  Beyond the short bridge leading into the town were waiting the authorities, surrounded by a few dozen peasants. As the carriages moved on to the bridge the municipal band struck up with frenzied enthusiasm Noi siamo zingarelle from “Traviata”, the first odd and endearing greeting by Donnafugata to its Prince in recent years; after this at a warning by some urchin on the look-out the bells of the Mother Church and of the Convent of the Holy Ghost filled the air with festive sound.

  “Thanks be to God, everything seems as usual,” thought the Prince as he climbed out of his carriage. There was Don Calogero Sedàra, the mayor, with a tricolour sash bright and new as his job tight around his waist; Monsignor Trottolino, the arch-priest, with his big red face; Don Ciccio Ginestra, the notary, all braid and feathers, dressed up as captain of the National Guard; there was Don Totò Giambono, the doctor, and there was little Nunzia Giarritta, who offered the Princess a rather messy bunch of flowers, picked half an hour before in the palace gardens. There was Ciccio Tumeo, the Cathedral organist, who was not strictly speaking of sufficient standing to be there with the authorities but had come along all the same as friend and hunting companion of the Prince, and had had the excellent notion of bringing along with him, for the Prince’s pleasure, his red pointer bitch Teresina, with two little brown spots above its eyes; a daring rewarded with a special smile from Don Fabrizio.