“Excellency, no one has laid eyes on Don Calogero’s wife for years, except me. She only leaves the house to go to early Mass, the five o’clock one, when it’s empty. There’s no organ-playing at that hour; but once I got up early just to see her. Donna Bastiana came in with her maid, and as I was hiding behind a confessional I could not see very much; but at the end of Mass the heat was too great for the poor woman and she took off her black veil. Word of honour, Excellency, she was lovely as the sun, one can’t blame Don Calogero, who’s a beetle of a man, for wanting to keep her away from others. But even in the best kept houses secrets come out; servants talk; and it seems Donna Bastiana is a kind of animal: she can’t read or write or tell the time by a clock, can scarcely talk; just a beautiful mare, voluptuous and uncouth; she’s incapable even of affection for her own daughter! Good for bed and that’s all.”
Don Ciccio, who, as protégé of queens and follower of princes, considered his own simple manners to be perfect, smiled with pleasure. He had found a way of getting some of his own back on the suppressor of his personality. “Anyway,” he went on, “one couldn’t expect much else. You know whose daughter Donna Bastiana is, Excellency?” He turned, rose on tiptoe, pointed to a distant group of huts which looked as if they were slithering off the edge of the hill, nailed there just by a wretched-looking bell-tower: a crucified hamlet. “She’s the daughter of one of your peasants from Runci, Peppe Giunta he was called, so filthy and so crude that everyone called him Peppe “Mmerda” . . . excuse the word, Excellency.” Satisfied, he twisted one of Teresina’s ears round a finger. “Two years after Don Calogero had eloped with Bastiana they found him dead on the path to Rampinzeri, with twelve bullets in his back. Always lucky, is Don Calogero, for the old man was getting above himself and demanding, they say.”
Much of this was known to Don Fabrizio and had already been balanced up in his mind; but the nickname of Angelica’s grandfather was new to him; it opened a profound historical perspective, and made him glimpse other abysses compared to which Don Calogero himself seemed a garden flowerbed. The Prince began to feel the ground giving way under his feet; how ever could Tancredi swallow this? And what about himself? He found himself trying to work out the relationship between the Prince of Salina, uncle of the bridegroom, and the grandfather of the bride; he found none, there wasn’t any. Angelica was just Angelica, a flower of a girl, a rose merely fertilised by her grandfather’s nickname. Non olet, he repeated, non olet; in fact optime foeminam ac contuberninum olet.
“You’ve mentioned everything, Don Ciccio, crude mothers and faecal grandfathers, but not what interests me: the Signorina Angelica.”
The secret of Tancredi’s matrimonial intentions, although embryonic until a few hours before, would certainly have been told then had it not luckily been camouflaged. No doubt the young man’s frequent visits to Don Calogero’s home had been noticed, as also his ecstatic smiles and little attentions, normal and insignificant in a city but symptoms of violent passion in the eyes of virtuous folk at Donnafugata. The main scandal had been the first; the old men cooking in the sun and the children duelling in the dust had seen all, understood all, and repeated all; and on the aphrodisiac and seductive properties of those dozen peaches had been consulted the most expert witches and abstruse treatises on potions, chiefly that by Rutilio Benincasa, the Aristotle of the rustic proletariat. Luckily there had come about a phenomenon relatively frequent amongst Sicilians; malice had masked truth; everyone had built up a puppet of a libertine Tancredi fixing his lascivious desires on Angelica; he was manoeuvring to seduce her, that was all. The thought of any possible marriage between a Prince of Falconeri and a granddaughter of Peppe “Mmerda” did not even cross the minds of these country folk, who thus rendered to feudal families a homage equivalent to that rendered by a blasphemer to God. Tancredi’s departure had cut short these fantasies and they were not mentioned again. In this respect Tumeo had been like the others, so he greeted the Prince’s question with the amused air assumed by older men when discoursing on the follies of the young.
“As to the Signorina, Excellency, there’s nothing to say about her; she speaks for herself; her eyes, her skin, her figure are all there to be seen and appreciated by anyone. Don Tancredi has understood the language they speak, I think; or shouldn’t I suggest such a thing? She has all the beauty of the mother with none of the grandfather’s stink of manure; and she’s intelligent, too. You’ve seen how those few years in Florence have transformed her completely? A real lady she’s become,” went on Don Ciccio, insensitive to subtleties in such matters. “A complete lady. When she returned from school and invited me home she played my old mazurka; badly, but it was a delight to watch her, those black locks, those eyes, those legs, that breast . . . Uuh! No stink of manure there! Her sheets must smell like paradise!”
The Prince was vexed; so touchy is the pride of class, even in a moment of decline, that these orgiastic praises of his future niece’s allurements offended him; how dared Don Ciccio express himself with such lascivious lyricism about a future Princess of Falconeri? It is true, of course, that the poor man knew nothing as yet; he would have to be told all: but anyway the news would be public in three hours. He decided at once and turned to Tumeo a smile feline but friendly. “Calm yourself, my dear Don Ciccio, calm yourself; at home I have a letter from my nephew charging me to ask for Signorina Angelica’s hand in matrimony on his behalf; so from now on you will talk of her with your usual respect. You are the first to know the news, but for that privilege you must pay; when we get back to the palace you’ll be locked up with Teresina in the gun-room; you’ll have time to clean and oil all the guns, and you will be set at liberty only after Don Calogero’s visit; I want nothing to leak out before.”
Taken by surprise like this, all Don Ciccio’s snobberies and precautions collapsed together like a group of skittles hit in the middle. All that survived was age-old feeling.
“How foul, Excellency! A nephew of yours ought not to marry the daughter of those who’re your enemies, who have stabbed you in the back! To try to seduce her, as I thought, was an act of conquest; this is unconditional surrender. It’s the end of the Falconeri and of the Salina too.”
Having said this he bent his head and longed in anguish for the earth to open under his feet. The Prince had gone purple, even his ears, even the whites of his eyes seemed flushed with blood. He clenched his fists and took a step towards Don Ciccio. But he was a man of science, used, after all, to seeing at times the pros and cons; and anyway under that leonine aspect he was a sceptic. He had put up with so much that day already; the result of the Plebiscite, the nickname of Angelica’s grandfather, those bullets in the back. And Tumeo was right; in him spoke clear tradition. But the man was a fool: this marriage was not the end of everything, but the beginning of everything. It was in the very best of traditions.
His fists unclenched; the marks of his nails were impressed on his palms. “Let’s go home, Don Ciccio, there are some things you can’t understand. Now, you’ll remember what we agreed, won’t you?”
And as they climbed down towards the road, it would have been difficult to tell which of the two was Don Quixote and which Sancho Panza.
When Don Calogero’s arrival was announced at exactly half-past four the Prince had not yet finished his toilet; he sent a message asking the Mayor to wait a minute in his study and went on placidly embellishing himself. He plastered his hair with Lemo-liscio, Atkinson’s ‘Lime Juice and Glycerine’, a dense whitish lotion which arrived in cases from London and whose name suffered the same ethnic changes as songs; he rejected the black frock-coat and chose instead a very pale lilac one which seemed more in keeping with the presumably festive occasion; he dallied a little longer to tweak out with pincers an impudent fair hair which had succeeded in escaping that morning in his hurried shave; he had Father Pirrone called; before leaving the room he took off a table an extract from the Blätter für Himmelsforschung and with the rolled-up pamphlet made the sign of
the Cross, a gesture of devotion which in Sicily has a non-religious meaning more often than is realised.
As he crossed the two rooms preceding the study he tried to imagine himself as an imposing leopard with smooth scented skin preparing to tear a timid jackal to pieces; but by one of those involuntary associations of ideas which are the scourge of natures like his, he found flicking into his memory one of those French historical pictures in which Austrian marshals and generals, covered with plumes and decorations, are filing in surrender past an ironical Napoleon; they are more elegant, undoubtedly, but it is the squat little man in the grey topcoat who is the victor; and so, put out by these inopportune memories of Mantua and Ulm, it was an irritated Leopard that entered the study.
Don Calogero was standing there, very small, very badly shaved; he would have looked like a jackal had it not been for eyes glinting intelligence; but as this intelligence of his had a material aim opposed to the abstract one to which the Prince’s was supposed to tend, this was taken as a sign of slyness. Devoid of the instinct for choosing the right clothes for the occasion which was innate in the Prince, the Mayor had thought it proper to dress up almost in mourning; he was nearly as black as Father Pirrone, but while the latter was sitting in a corner with the marmoreally abstract air of priests who wish to avoid influencing the decisions of others, the Mayor’s face expressed a sense of avid expectancy almost painful to behold. They plunged at once into the skirmish of insignificant words which precede great verbal battles. But it was Don Calogero who launched the main attack.
“Excellency,” he asked, “have you had good news from Don Tancredi?” In little towns in those days the Mayor was always able to examine the post unofficially and maybe he had been warned by the unusually elegant writing paper. The Prince, when this occurred to him, began to feel annoyed.
“No, Don Calogero, no. My nephew’s gone mad . . .”
But there exists a deity who is protector of princes. He is called Courtesy. And he often intervenes to prevent Leopards from unfortunate slips. But he has to be paid heavy tribute. As Pallas intervened to curb the intemperances of Odysseus, so Courtesy appeared to Don Fabrizio and stopped him on the brink of the abyss; but the Prince had to pay for his salvation by becoming explicit for just once in his life. With perfect naturalness, without a second’s hesitation, he ended the phrase; “. . . mad with love for your daughter, Don Calogero. So he wrote to me yesterday.”
The Mayor preserved a surprising equanimity. He gave a slight smile and began examining the ribbon on his hat; Father Pirrone’s eyes were turned to the ceiling as if he were a master mason charged with judging its solidity. The Prince was put out: that silence on both their parts even deprived him of the petty satisfaction of arousing surprise. So it was with relief that he realised Don Calogero was about to speak.
“I knew it, Excellency, I knew it. They were seen to kiss on Tuesday, 25th of September, the day before Don Tancredi’s departure. In your garden, near the fountain. Laurel hedges aren’t always as thick as people think. For a month I’ve been waiting for your nephew to make some move, and I’d just been thinking now of coming to ask Your Excellency about his intentions.”
Don Fabrizio felt assailed by numbers of stinging hornets. First, as is proper to every man not yet decrepit, that of carnal jealousy. So Tancredi had tasted that flavour of strawberries and cream which would always be unknown to him! Then came a sense of social humiliation at finding himself an accused instead of a bearer of good news. Third, personal vexation, that of one who thought he had everything in his control and then finds much has been happening without his knowledge. “Don Calogero, let’s not change the cards we have on the table. Remember, it was I who called you. I wished to tell you of a letter from my nephew which arrived yesterday. In it he declares his passion for your daughter, a passion of whose intensity I . . .” (Here the Prince hesitated a moment, because lies are sometimes difficult to tell before gimlet eyes like the Mayor’s) “. . . I was completely ignorant till now; and at the end of it he charges me to ask you for Signorina Angelica’s hand.”
Don Calogero went on smiling impassively; Father Pirrone had transformed himself from architectural expert into Moslem sage, and with four fingers of his right hand crossed in four fingers of his left was rotating his thumbs around each other, turning and changing their direction with a great display of choreographic fantasy. The silence lasted a long time; the Prince lost patience. “Now, Don Calogero, it is I who am waiting for you to declare your intentions.”
The Mayor’s eyes had been fixed on the orange fringe of the Prince’s arm-chair; for an instant he covered them with his right hand, then raised them; now they looked candid, brimming with amazed surprise, as if that action had really changed them.
“Excuse me, Prince” (by the sudden omission of “Excellency” Don Fabrizio knew that all was happily consummated) “but joy and surprise had taken my words away. I’m a modern parent, though, and can give no definite answer until I have questioned the angel who is the consolation of our home. But I also know how to exercise a father’s sacred rights. All that happens in Angelica’s heart and mind is known to me, and I think I can say that Don Tancredi’s affection, which honours us all, is sincerely returned.”
Don Fabrizio was overcome with sincere emotion; the toad had been swallowed; the chewed head and gizzards were going down his throat; he still had to crunch up the claws, but that was nothing compared to the rest; the worst was over. With this sense of liberation he began to feel his affection for Tancredi coming to the fore again, and thought of those narrow blue eyes of his glittering as they read the happy reply; he imagined, or recalled rather, the first months of a love match with the frenzies and acrobatics of the senses braced and sustained by all the hierarchies of angels, benevolent though surely surprised. And he foresaw Tancredi’s security of life later on, his chances for developing talents whose wings would have been clipped by lack of money.
The nobleman rose to his feet, took a step towards the surprised Don Calogero, raised him from his arm-chair, clasped him to his breast; the Mayor’s short legs were suspended in the air. For a moment that room in a remote Sicilian province looked like a Japanese print of a huge violet iris with a hairy fly hanging from a petal. When Don Calogero touched the floor again, Don Fabrizio thought, “This won’t do, I really must give him a pair of English razors.”
Father Pirrone switched off the turbine of his thumbs; he got up and squeezed the Prince’s hand. “Excellency, I evoke the protection of God on this marriage; your joy has become mine.” To Don Calogero he extended the tips of his fingers without a word. Then with a knuckle he tapped the barometer hanging on the wall: it was falling; bad weather ahead. He sat down and opened his Breviary.
“Don Calogero,” said the Prince, “the love of these two young people is the basis, the sole foundation of their future happiness. That we all know. But we men of a certain age, men of experience, have to think of other things, too. There is no point in my telling you how illustrious is the family of Falconeri; it came to Sicily with Charles of Anjou, flourished under the Aragonese, the Spanish, the Bourbon kings (if I may name them in your presence) and I am sure that it will also prosper under the new dynasty from the mainland (which God preserve).” (It was impossible to tell how much the Prince was being ironic or how much just mistaken.) “They were Peers of the Realm, Grandees of Spain, Knights of Santiago, and when they have a fancy to be Knights of Malta they need only raise a finger and Via Condotti turns them out a diploma all fresh from the oven, without a word of complaint. So far at least.” (This perfidious insinuation was entirely lost on Don Calogero, who was quite ignorant of the statutes of the Sovereign Hierosalamitan Order of St. John.) “I am sure that your daughter will ornament still more by her rare beauty the ancient trunk of the Falconeri and emulate by her virtue that of the saintly princesses of the line, the last of whom, my sister, God rest her soul, will certainly bless the bride and groom from Heaven.” Again Don Fabrizio felt moved, rem
embering his dear Giulia whose wasted life had been a perpetual sacrifice to the frenzied extravagances of Tancredi’s father. “As for the boy, you know him; and if you did not, I am here to guarantee him in every possible way. There is endless good in him, and it is not only I who say so. Isn’t that true, Father Pirrone?”
The excellent Jesuit, dragged from his reading, found himself suddenly facing an unpleasant dilemma. He had been Tancredi’s confessor and he knew quite a number of his little failings: none very serious, of course, but such as to detract quite a good deal from the endless goodness of which the Prince had spoken; and all such (he almost felt like saying) as to guarantee an unwavering marital infidelity. This, of course, could not actually be said both for sacramental reasons and from worldly expediency. On the other hand he liked Tancredi, and though he disapproved of the wedding with all his heart he would never say a word which could either impede it or in any way cloud its course. He took refuge in Prudence, most tractable of the cardinal virtues. “The fund of goodness in our dear Tancredi is great indeed, Don Calogero, and, sustained by Divine Grace and by the earthly virtues of Signorina Angelica, he may one day become a good Christian husband.” The prophecy, risky but prudently conditional, passed muster.
“But, Don Calogero,” went on the Prince, chewing on the last gristly bits of toad, “if it is pointless to tell you of the antiquity of the Falconeri, it is unfortunately also pointless, since you already know it, to tell you that my nephew’s economic circumstances are not equal to the greatness of his name. Don Tancredi’s father, my brother-in-law Ferdinando, was not what is called a provident parent; his magnificent scale of life, and the irresponsibility of his administrators, have gravely shaken the patrimony of my dear nephew and former ward; the great estates around Mazzara, the pistachio woods of Ravanusa, the mulberry plantations of Oliveri, the palace in Palermo, all, all have gone; that you know, Don Calogero.”
The Leopard Page 13
