Angelica laughed, still leaning on her elbow, and showed all her pointed teeth. The joke seemed most piquant to her; that hint of rape perturbed her; her lovely throat quivered. “What fine lads you must have been! How I wish I’d been with you!” Tancredi seemed transformed; the excitement of the story, the thrill of memory, mingling with the agitation produced by the girl’s air of sensuality, changed him for an instant from the gentle youth he was in reality into a brutal and licentious soldier.
“Had you been there, signorina, we’d have had no need to wait for novices.”
Angelica had heard a lot of coarse talk at home; but this was the first time (and not the last) when she found herself the object of a sexual innuendo; the novelty of it pleased her, her laughter went up a tone, became strident.
At that moment everyone rose from the table; Tancredi bent to gather up the feather fan dropped by Angelica; as he rose to his feet he saw Concetta with face aflame and two little tears in the corners of her lids. “Tancredi, one tells nasty tales like that to a confessor, not to young ladies at table; anyway when I’m there.” And she turned her back on him.
Before going to bed Don Fabrizio paused a moment on the little balcony of his dressing-room. Beneath lay the shadowed garden, sunk in sleep; in the inert air the trees seemed like fused lead; from the overhanging bell-tower came an elfin hoot of owls. The sky was clear of clouds; those which had greeted the dusk had moved away, maybe towards less sinful places, condemned by divine wrath to lesser penalties. The stars looked turbid and their rays scarcely penetrated the pall of sultry air.
The soul of the Prince reached out towards them, towards the intangible, the unattainable, which gives joy without laying claim to anything in return; as on many other occasions, he tried to imagine himself in those icy tracts, a pure intellect armed with a note-book for calculations: difficult calculations, but ones which would always work out. “They’re the only truly disinterested, the only really trustworthy creatures,” thought he in his worldly idiom; “who worries about dowries for the Pleiads, a political career for Sirius, marital joys for Vega?” It had been a bad day; he realised it now, not only from a pressure in the pit of his stomach, but from the stars too; instead of seeing them disposed in their usual groupings he noticed a single pattern up there every time he raised his eyes: two stars above, the eyes; one beneath, the tip of a chin: mocking symbol of a triangular face which his mind projected into the constellations when it was disturbed. Don Calogero’s tail-coat, Concetta’s love, Tancredi’s blatant infatuation, his own cowardice; even the threatening beauty of that girl Angelica; bad things; rubble preceding an avalanche. And Tancredi! The lad was right, agreed, and he would help him too; but Don Fabrizio had to admit that it was all slightly ignoble. And he himself was like Tancredi. “Enough of that now, let’s sleep on it.”
Bendicò in the shadow rubbed a big head against his knee; “You see; you, Bendicò, are a bit like them, like the stars; happily incomprehensible, incapable of producing anxiety.” He raised the dog’s head, which was almost invisible in the darkness. “And then with those eyes of yours at the same level as your nose, with your lack of chin, such a head can’t possibly evoke malignant spectres in the sky.”
Centuries-old tradition required that the day following their arrival the Salina family should visit the Convent of the Holy Ghost to pray at the tomb of Blessed Corbèra, forebear of the Prince and foundress of the convent, who had endowed it, there lived a holy life and there died a holy death.
The Convent of the Holy Ghost had a rigid rule of enclosure and entry was severely forbidden to men. That was why the Prince particularly enjoyed visiting it, for he, as direct descendant of the foundress, was not excluded: and of this privilege, shared only with the King of Naples, he was both jealous and childishly proud.
This faculty of canonical intrusion was the chief, but not the only reason, for his liking the Convent of the Holy Ghost. Everything about the place pleased him, beginning with the humble simplicity of the parlour, with its barrel vaulted ceiling centred on the Leopard, its double gratings for interviews, a little wooden wheel for passing messages in and out, and a heavy door whose threshold he and the King were the only men in the whole world allowed to cross. He liked the look of the nuns with their wide wimples of purest white linen in tiny pleats gleaming against the rough black robes; he was edified at hearing for the hundredth time the Mother Abbess describe the Blessed One’s ingenuous miracles; at her showing the corner of the dank garden where the saintly nun had suspended in the air a huge stone which the Devil, irritated by her austerity, had flung at her; he was astounded at the sight of the two famous and indecipherable letters framed on the wall of a cell, one to the Devil from Blessed Corbèra, to convert him to virtue, and the other the Devil’s reply, expressing, it seems, his regret at not being able to comply with her request: the Prince liked the almond cakes which the nuns made up from an ancient recipe, he liked listening to the Office chanted in choir, and he was even quite happy to pay over to the community a not inconsiderable portion of his own income, in accordance with the act of foundation.
So that morning there were only happy people in the two carriages moving towards the convent just outside the town. In the first was the Prince, the Princess and their daughters Carolina and Concetta; in the second his daughter Caterina, Tancredi and Father Pirrone, both the latter of whom, of course, would stay extra muros and wait in the parlour during the visit, consoled by almond cakes from the wooden wheel. Concetta looked serene, though a little absent-minded, and the Prince did his best to hope that yesterday’s fancies had all blown over.
Entry into an enclosed convent is never a quick matter, even for one possessing the most sacred of rights. Nuns like to show a certain reluctance, formal maybe but prolonged, which gives more flavour to however certain an admission; and, although the visit had been announced beforehand, there was a considerable wait in the parlour. Towards the end of this Tancredi unexpectedly asked the Prince, “Uncle, can’t you get me in too? After all I’m half a Salina, and I’ve never been here before.”
Though pleased at heart by the request, the Prince shook his head decisively. “But, my boy, you know only I and no other man can enter here.” It was not easy, however, to put Tancredi off: “Excuse me, Nuncle; the rule says: The Prince of Salina may enter together with two gentlemen of his suite if the Abbess so permits. I read it again yesterday. I’ll be the gentleman in your suite, I’ll be your squire, I’ll be whatever you like. Do ask the Abbess, please.” He was speaking with unusual warmth; perhaps he wanted a certain person there to forget his ill-considered chatter of the night before. The Prince was flattered. “If you’re so keen on it, dear boy, I’ll see . . .” But Concetta turned to her cousin with her sweetest smile: “Tancredi, we passed a beam of wood lying in front of Ginestra’s house. Go and fetch it, it’ll get you in all the quicker.” Tancredi’s blue eyes clouded and his face went red as a poppy, either from shame or anger. He tried to say something to the surprised Prince, but Concetta interrupted again, acidly now, and without a smile: “Let him be, father, he’s only joking; he’s been in one convent already, that ought to be enough for him; it’s not right for him to enter this one of ours.” With a grinding of drawn bolts the door opened. Into the stuffy parlour entered the freshness of the cloister together with the murmur of assembled nuns. It was too late to ask questions, and Tancredi was left behind to walk up and down in front of the convent under the blazing sky.
The visit to the Holy Ghost was a great success. Don Fabrizio, from love of quiet, had refrained from asking Concetta the meaning of her words; doubtless just one of the usual tiffs between cousins; anyway the coolness between the two young people kept off bother, confabulations and decisions, so it had been welcome. On these premises the tomb of Blessed Corbèra was venerated with due respect by all, the nuns’ watery coffee drunk with tolerance and the pink and greenish almond cakes crunched with satisfaction; the Princess inspected the vestment-press, Concetta tal
ked to the nuns with her usual withdrawn kindliness and he, the Prince, left on the refectory table the ten ounces of gold that he offered every time he came. It was true that at the door Father Pirrone was found alone; but as he said that Tancredi had suddenly remembered an urgent letter and gone off on foot, no one took much notice.
On returning to the palace the Prince went up to the library, which was in the middle of the façade under the clock and lightning conductor. From the great balcony, closed against the heat, could be seen the square of Donnafugata, vast, shaded by dusty plane trees. Opposite were some house fronts of exuberant local design, rustic monstrosities in soap-stone, weathered by the years, upholding amid twists and curves balconies that were too small; other houses, among them that of Don Calogero Sedàra, hid behind prim Empire fronts.
Don Fabrizio walked up and down the immense room; every now and again glancing out at the square; on one of the benches donated by himself to the commune three old men were roasting in the sun; four mules stood tethered to a tree; a dozen or so urchins chased each other, shouting and brandishing wooden swords. Under the blazing mid-summer sun the view could not have been more typical. On one of his crossings past the window, however, his eye was drawn to a figure obviously urban—slim, erect, well-dressed. He screwed up his eyes. It was Tancredi; he recognised him, although already some way off, by the sloping shoulders and slim-fitting waist of his frock coat. He had changed his clothes; he was no longer in brown as at the convent, but in Prussian blue, “my seduction colour” as he himself called it. In one hand he held a cane with an enamel handle (doubtless the one bearing the Unicorn of the Falconeri and their motto Semper purus) and he was walking with cat-like tread, as if taking care not to get his shoes dusty. Ten paces behind him followed a lackey carrying a tasselled box containing a dozen yellow peaches with pink cheeks. He sidestepped a sword-waving urchin, carefully avoided a urinating mule, and reached the Sedàras’ door.
III
THE TROUBLES OF DON FABRIZIO
* * *
OCTOBER, 1860
THE RAINS HAD come, the rains had gone, and the sun was back on its throne like an absolute monarch kept off for a week by his subjects’ barricades, and now reigning once again, choleric but under constitutional restraint. The heat braced without burning, the light domineered but let colours live; from the soil sprouted cautious clover and mint, and on faces diffident hopes.
Don Fabrizio, with his dogs Teresina and Arguto and his retainer Don Ciccio Tumeo, would spend long hours out shooting, from dawn till afternoon. The effort was out of all proportion to the results, for the most expert shot finds difficulty in hitting a target which is scarcely ever there, and it was rarely that the Prince was able to take even a brace of partridges home to the larder, or Don Ciccio to slap on his kitchen table a wild rabbit—promoted, ipso facto as usual in Sicily, to the rank of hare.
A big bag would anyway have been a secondary pleasure for the Prince; the joy of those days out shooting lay elsewhere, subdivided in many tiny episodes. It began with shaving in a room still dark, by candlelight that projected every gesture emphatically over the painted architecture on the ceiling; it was whetted by crossing sleeping drawing-rooms, by glimpses in the flickering light of tables with playing cards lying in disorder amid chips and empty glasses, and catching sight among them of a Jack of Spades waving a manly greeting; by passing through the motionless garden under a grey light in which the earliest birds were twisting and turning to shake the dew off their feathers; by gliding through the ivy-hung wicket gate: by escaping, in fact. And then in the street, blamelessly innocent still in the early light, he would find Don Ciccio smiling into his yellowed moustaches and swearing affectionately at the dogs; these, as they waited, were flexing their muscles under velvety fur. Venus still glimmered, like the bloom on a grape, damp and transparent, but one could already hear the rumble of the solar chariot climbing the last slope below the horizon; soon they would meet the first flocks moving towards them torpidly as tides, guided by stones thrown by leather-breeched shepherds; the wool looked soft and rosy in the early sun: then there would be obscure quarrels of precedence to be settled between sheep dogs and punctilious pointers, after which deafening interval they turned up a slope and found themselves in the immemorial silence of pastoral Sicily. All at once they were far from everything in space and still more in time. Donnafugata with its palace and its new rich was only a mile or two away, but seemed a dim memory like those landscapes sometimes glimpsed at the distant end of a railway tunnel; its troubles and splendours appeared even more insignificant than if they belonged to the past, for compared to this remote unchangeable landscape they seemed part of the future, made not of stone and flesh but of the substance of some dream of things to come, extracts from a Utopia thought up by a rustic Plato and apt to change any second into quite different forms or even not to exist at all; deprived thus of that charge of energy which everything in the past continues to possess, they could no longer be a worry.
Yes, Don Fabrizio had certainly had his worries those last two months; they had come from all directions, like ants making for a dead lizard. Some had crawled from crevices of the political situation; some been flung on him by other people’s passions; and some (these had the sharpest bite) had sprung up within himself, from his irrational reactions, that is, to politics and the whims of others (“whims” was his name when irritated for what in calm he called “passions”). He would review these worries every day, manoeuvre them, set them in column or extend them in open order on the parade ground of his own conscience, hoping to find in their evolutions a sense of finality that could reassure him; and not succeeding. In former years there had been far fewer bothers, and anyway his stay at Donnafugata had always been a period of rest; his worries used to drop their rifles, disperse into the windings of the valleys and settle down there quietly, so intent on munching bread and cheese that their warlike uniforms were forgotten and they could be mistaken for inoffensive peasants. This year, though, they had all stayed on parade in a body, like mutinous troops shouting and brandishing weapons, arousing in his home the dismay of a colonel who has given the order “Fall out” only to find his battalion standing there in closer and more threatening order than ever.
The arrival had been all right, with bands, fireworks, bells, gipsy song and Te Deum; but afterwards! The bourgeois revolution climbing his stairs in Don Calogero’s tail-coat, Angelica’s beauty putting the shy grace of his Concetta in the shade, Tancredi rushing at the inevitable changes and even able to deck out his realistic motives with sensual infatuation; the scruples and deceptions of the Plebiscite; the endless little subterfuges he had to submit to, he, the Leopard, who for years had swept away difficulties with a wave of his paw.
Tancredi had been gone for more than a month and was now at Caserta bivouacking in the apartments of his King; from there every now and again he sent Don Fabrizio letters which the latter read with alternate frowns and smiles, then put away in the remotest drawer of his desk. He had never written to Concetta, though he did not forget to send her a greeting with his usual affectionate slyness; once he even wrote: “I kiss the hands of all the little Leopardesses and particularly Concetta’s,” phrases censored by paternal prudence when the letter was read out to the assembled family. Angelica was now visiting them almost daily, more seductive than ever, accompanied by her father or some old witch of a maid: officially these visits were made to her friends the girls, but in fact their climax obviously came at the moment when she asked with apparent indifference, “And what news of the Prince?” “Prince” in Angelica’s mouth did not, alas, mean him, Don Fabrizio, but the little Garibaldino captain; and this provoked a strange sensation in Salina, woven from the crude cotton of sensual jealousy to silken pleasure at his dear Tancredi’s success; a sensation, when all was said and done, that was somewhat disagreeable. It was always he who answered this question; he would give a carefully considered account of what he knew, taking care, however, to present a well-arran
ged little bouquet of news from which his cautious tweezers had extracted both thorns (descriptions of many a jaunt to Naples, allusions to the lovely legs of Aurora Schwarzwald, dancer at the San Carlo) and premature buds (“send news of the Signorina Angelica” —“In Ferdinand II’s study I found a Madonna by Andrea del Sarto which reminded me of the Signorina Sedàra”). So he would put together an insipid picture of Tancredi which bore very little resemblance to the original, but did at least prevent anyone saying that he himself was acting either as spoilsport or pimp. These verbal precautions corresponded closely to his own feelings about Tancredi’s considered passion, but they irritated him inasmuch as they wearied him; anyway they were only one sample of all the guile in language and behaviour he had been forced to adopt for some time; he thought with regret of the year before when he could say whatever went through his head, in the certainty that any silly remark would be treated as words from the Gospel and any unconsidered comment as princely carelessness. And now that he had begun regretting the past, he would find himself, in moments of worst humour, slithering quite a way down that perilous slope; once, as he was putting sugar in a cup of tea which Angelica was holding out to him, he realised that he was envying the chances open to a Fabrizio Salina and Tancredi Falconeri of three centuries before, who would have rid themselves of urges to bed down with the Angelicas of their day without ever going before a priest or giving a thought to such local girls’ dowries (which were anyway then non-existent), or ever needing to keep respectable uncles on tenterhooks about saying or suppressing appropriate remarks. The impulse of atavistic lust (which was not really all lust, but partly sensuality stemming from laziness) stung the civilised gentleman nearing fifty so sharply that it made him blush; somewhere, at infinite removes, he had been touched by scruples which he chose to call Rousseauesque, and felt deeply ashamed; from which might be deduced an even sharper revulsion against the social circumstances in which he was so inextricably involved.
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