The Leopard

by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

  The real creator of this collection had been Carolina; she had found somewhere a certain Donna Rosa, a huge old woman, half-nun, with useful connections in all the churches, convents and charity foundations of Palermo and its surroundings. It had been this Donna Rosa who had brought up to Villa Salina every few months a relic of a saint wrapped in tissue paper. She had managed, she would say, to get some dilapidated parish or decayed family to part with it. The name of the seller was not given merely because of understandable, in fact praiseworthy, discretion; and anyway there were the proofs of authenticity which she brought and always handed over, clear as daylight, written out in Latin or mysterious characters she called Greek or Syriac. Concetta, administrator and bursar, would pay. Then came a search and adaptation of frames. And once again the impassive Concetta would pay. There was a period, a couple of years ago, when the collecting mania even disturbed Caterina and Carolina’s sleep; in the morning they would recount to each other dreams of miraculous discoveries, with the hope that they would be realised, as did indeed sometimes happen after the dreams had been confided to Donna Rosa. What Concetta dreamt no one knew. Then Donna Rosa died and the influx of relics stopped almost completely; anyway, by then, there was a certain superfluity.

  Monsignor glanced rather hurriedly at one or two of the nearest frames. “Treasures,” he said, “treasures! What lovely frames!” Then congratulating them on the fine “display” (such was his word), and promising to return next day with His Eminence (“yes, at nine exactly”), he genuflected, crossed himself towards a modest Madonna of Pompeii hung on a side wall, and left the oratory. Soon the seats were bereft of hats, and the ecclesiastics climbed into the three carriages from the Archbishopric, with their black horses, which had awaited them in the courtyard. Monsignor made a point of asking the chaplain, Father Titta, to share his own carriage, much to the latter’s solace. The carriages moved off, and Monsignor was silent; they drove by the sumptuous Villa Falconeri, with its flowering bougainvillaea drooping over the walls of the splendidly kept gardens; and when they reached the slope down to Palermo amid the orange groves, Monsignor spoke. “And so you, Father Titta, have actually said Mass for years in front of the picture of that girl? That girl with a rendezvous and waiting for her lover? Now don’t tell me you too believed it was a holy icon.”

  “Monsignor, I am to blame, I know. But it’s not easy to gainsay the Signorina Carolina. That you cannot know.”

  Monsignor shivered at the memory. My son, you’ve put your finger on it; and that will be taken into consideration.”

  Carolina had gone off to pour out her rage in a letter to Chiara, her married sister in Naples; Caterina, tired by the long and painful conversation, had been put to bed; Concetta went back to her own solitary room. This was one of those rooms (so numerous that one might be tempted to say it of all rooms) which have two faces, one with a mask that they show to ignorant visitors, the other which is only revealed to those in the know, the owner in particular to whom all its squalid essence is manifest. This particular room was airy and looked over the broad garden; in a corner was a high bed with four pillows (Concetta suffered from heart trouble and had to sleep almost sitting up): no carpets, but a fine white floor with intricate yellow tiles; a valuable money chest with dozens of little drawers covered with hardstone and worked stucco: the desk, central table and all the furniture in breezy local inlay work, with figures of huntsmen, dogs and game in amber-colour on a rose-wood background: furniture considered by Concetta herself as antiquated and even in bad taste and which, sold at auction after her death, is to-day the pride of a prosperous shipping agent when his wife serves cocktails to envious friends. On the walls were portraits, water colours, sacred images. All was clean, all ordered. Two things only, perhaps, might have appeared unusual: in the corner opposite the bed towered four enormous wooden cases painted in green, each with a big padlock; and in front of these, on the floor, was a heap of mangy fur. To the lips of an ingenuous visitor the little room might have brought a smile, so suggestive was it of an old maid’s affectionate care.

  To one who knew the facts—Concetta herself—it was an inferno of mummified memories. The four green cases contained dozens of day and night shirts, dressing-gowns, pillow-cases, sheets carefully divided into “best” and “second-best”: the trousseau collected by Concetta herself fifty years before. Now those padlocks were never opened for fear incongruous demons might leap out, and under the ubiquitous Palermo damp the contents grew yellow and decayed, useless for ever and for anyone. The portraits were of dead people no longer loved, the photographs of friends who had hurt her in their lifetime, the only reason they were not forgotten in death; the water-colours showed houses and places most of which had been sold, or rather stupidly bartered away by spendthrift nephews. Anyone looking carefully into the heap of moth-eaten fur would have noticed two erect ears, a snout of black wood, and two astonished eyes of yellow glass; it was Bendicò, dead for forty-five years, embalmed for forty-five years, nest now of spiders’ webs and moth, detested by the servants who had been imploring Concetta for dozens of years to have it thrown on the rubbish heap; but she always refused, reluctant to detach herself from the only memory of her past which aroused no distressing sensations.

  But the distressing sensations of to-day (at a certain age every day punctually produces its own) all referred to the present. Much less devout than Carolina, much more sensitive than Caterina, Concetta had understood the meaning of the Vicar-General’s visit and foreseen the consequences; orders to take away all or nearly all the relics, the changing of the picture above the altar, an eventual reconsecration of the chapel. She had never really believed in the authenticity of these relics, and had paid up with the indifference of a father settling a bill for toys which are of no interest to himself but help to keep the children quiet. To her the removal of these objects was a matter of indifference; what did touch her, the day’s real thorn, was the appalling figure the Salina family would now cut with ecclesiastical authorities, and soon with the entire city. The Church kept its secrets much better than anyone else in Sicily, but that did not mean much yet; all would be spread round in a month or two; as everything spreads on this island which should have as its symbol not the Trinacria but the Ear of Dionysius at Syracuse which makes the lightest sigh resound for fifty yards. And the Church’s esteem meant a lot to her. The prestige of her name had slowly disappeared, the family fortune, divided and subdivided, was at best equivalent to that of any number of other lesser families and very much smaller than that of some rich industrialists. But in the Church, in their relations with it, the Salina had maintained their pre-eminence. What a reception His Eminence had given the three sisters when they went to make their Christmas visit! Would that happen now?

  A maid entered: “Excellency, the Princess is just arriving. Her motor-car is in the courtyard.” Concetta got up, tidied her hair, threw a black lace shawl over her shoulders, resumed her imperial air, and reached the entrance hall just as Angelica was climbing the last steps of the outer staircase. She suffered from varicose veins; her legs, which had always been a little short, scarcely upheld her, and she was climbing up leaning on the arm of her own footman whose black topcoat swept the stairs. “Concetta, darling!” “Angelica, dear! It’s so long since we’ve met!” In fact only five days had gone by since her last visit, but the intimacy between the two cousins, an intimacy similar in closeness and feeling to that which was to bind Italians and Austrians in their opposing trenches a few years later, was such that five days really could seem a long time.

  Angelica, now nearly seventy, still showed many traces of beauty; the illness which was to transform her into a wretched spectre three years later was already active, but still secreted deep in her blood; her green eyes were what they had been before, only slightly dulled by the years, and the wrinkles on her neck were hidden by the soft black folds of the hood and veil which she, a widow for the last three years, wore not without a certain nostalgic coquetry. “You se
e,” she said to Concetta as they moved entwined towards a drawing-room, “you see, with these imminent celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of The Thousand there’s never a minute’s peace. Just imagine, a few days ago they told me I’d been put on the Committee of Honour; a homage to dear Tancredi’s memory, of course, but such a lot for me to do! Finding lodgings for veterans coming from all over Italy, arranging invitations for the grandstand without offending anyone; taking care to invite the mayor of every commune in the island. Oh, by the way, dear: the Mayor of Salina is a clerical and has refused to march past; so I thought at once of your nephew, of Fabrizio; he came to visit me, and I pinned him down there and then. He couldn’t refuse. So at the end of the month we’ll see him filing past dressed to the nines down Via Libertà in front of a big placard with ‘Salina’ on it in letters a foot high. Don’t you think it’s a good idea? A Salina rendering homage to Garibaldi! A fusion of old and new in Sicily! I’ve thought of you too, darling; here’s your invitation for the grandstand, right next to the royal box.” And she pulled out of her Parisian bag a piece of cardboard in Garibaldi red, the very same colour as the strip of silk worn for a time by Tancredi above his collar. “Carolina and Caterina won’t be too pleased,” she went on in her arbitrary way, “but I only had one place; anyway you have more right to it than they have; you were Tancredi’s favourite cousin.”

  She talked a lot and she talked well; forty years of living with Tancredi, however tempestuous and interrupted, had been more than long enough to rub off the last traces of Donnafugata accent and manners; she had camouflaged herself even to the point of copying that graceful twining of the fingers which had been one of Tancredi’s characteristics. She read a lot; on her table the latest books by Anatole France and Bourget alternated with D’Annunzio and Serao; and she had the reputation in the drawing-rooms of Palermo of being an expert on the architecture of the Châteaux of the Loire, about which she would often discourse with somewhat hazy enthusiasm, contrasting, perhaps unconsciously, their Renaissance serenity with the restless baroque of the palace at Donnafugata, against which she nurtured an aversion inexplicable to anyone who knew nothing of her meek and slighted youth.

  “But what a head I have, my dear! I was forgetting to tell you that Senator Tassoni will soon be coming here; he’s staying with me at Villa Falconeri and wants to meet you; he was a great friend of poor Tancredi’s, a comrade-in-arms too, and he’s heard Tancredi talk of you, it seems. Our dear Tancredi!” The handkerchief with its narrow black border came out of her bag, and she dried a tear in eyes that were still fine.

  Concetta had been inserting, as always, an occasional phrase of her own into Angelica’s continual flow; but at the name of Tassoni she was silent. Once again she saw a scene, very distant but quite clear, as if through the other end of a telescope: the big white table surrounded by all those people now dead; near her Tancredi, dead too—as anyway, really, she was herself; his brutal anecdote, Angelica’s hysterical laughter, her own no less hysterical tears. It had been the turning-point of her life, that; the road she had taken then had led her here, to this desert not even inhabited by extinct love or spent rancour.

  “Oh, I’ve heard of the bother you’re having with the Curia. What a nuisance they are! But why didn’t you tell me before? I could have done something; the Cardinal is always very good to me. I’m afraid that it’s too late now. But I’ll pull some strings. Anyway, it’ll all blow over.”

  Senator Tassoni, who arrived soon after, was a brisk and spruce old man. His wealth, which was great and growing, had been acquired by competition and hard struggle, and instead of making him flabby it had kept him in a state of continual energy which now seemed to conquer the years and made him almost fiery. From the few months spent with Garibaldi’s southern army he had acquired a military bearing destined never to be discarded. Blended with courtesy it formed a philtre which had gained him many successes in the past, and which now, joined to the number of his securities, was of great use for getting his own way with the boards of banks and cotton factories; half Italy and a great part of the Balkan countries sewed on their own buttons with thread made by Tassoni & Co.

  “Signorina,” he was saying to Concetta as he sat beside her on a low stool suitable for a page, which was just why he had chosen it, “Signorina, a dream of my distant youth is now being realised. How often in those icy nights camping out on the Volturno or around the ramparts of besieged Gaeta, how often our unforgettable Tancredi used to talk of you! I seemed to know you already, to have frequented this house amid whose walls his untamed youth was passed, and I am happy to be able, though with such delay, to lay my homage at the feet of her who was the consolation of one of the purest heroes of our Risorgimento.”

  Concetta was unused to conversations with people she had not known since infancy; she was also no lover of literature; so she had had no immunity against rhetoric and was in fact open to its fascination. The senator’s words moved her; she forgot that old anecdote of half a century ago, she no longer saw in Tassoni a violator of convents, a jeerer at poor terrified nuns, but an old man, Tancredi’s sincere friend who talked of him with true affection, one who brought to her a shadow, a message from the dead man across the morass of time which the dead can so seldom cross. “And what did my dear cousin tell you about me?” she asked in a low voice, with a shyness that brought to life once more the eighteen-year-old-girl from that bundle of black silk and white hair.

  “Ah, so many things! He talked of you almost as much as of Donna Angelica! She for him was love, you were the image of his sweet youth, that youth which for us soldiers passes so soon.”

  Again an icy hand froze her old heart; but now Tassoni had raised his voice, and turned to Angelica. “D’you remember, Princess, what he said at Vienna ten years ago?” He turned back towards Concetta to explain. “I was there with the Italian delegation for the Trade Treaty; Tancredi put me up at the embassy like the warm-hearted friend and comrade he was, with that great gentleman’s affability of his. Perhaps seeing a comrade-in-arms again in that hostile city had moved him, for he told us so much about his past. In the back of a box at the Opera, between one act and another of Don Giovanni, he confessed, in his incomparably ironic way, a sin, an unpardonable sin, which he said he’d committed against you, yes, against you, Signorina.” He interrupted himself a second to gain time to set his surprise. “He told us how one evening, during dinner at Donnafugata, he had allowed himself to invent a story and tell it to you; a tale of war connected with the fighting round Palermo; and how you believed it and were offended because the story was rather outspoken for the customs of fifty years ago. You had reproved him. ‘She was so sweet,’ said he, ‘as she fixed me with those angry eyes of hers and as her lips swelled with anger so prettily, like a puppy’s; she was so sweet that if I hadn’t controlled myself I’d have kissed her there and then in front of twenty people and that terrible old uncle of mine!’ You, Signorina, will have forgotten it; but Tancredi remembered it well, he had such delicacy of feeling; he also remembered it because it happened on the very day he met Donna Angelica for the first time.” And he sketched towards the Princess one of those gestures of homage, with his right hand dropping away through the air, whose Goldoniesque tradition was preserved then only among Senators of the Kingdom.

  The conversation continued for some time, but it could not be said that Concetta took any great part in it. The sudden revelation penetrated into her mind slowly and did not make her suffer much at first. But when the visitors had said good-bye and left and she was alone, she began seeing more clearly and so suffering more. The spectres of the past had been exorcised for years; though they were of course to be found hidden in everything, and it was they that made food taste bitter and company seem boring: but it was a long time since they had shown their faces; now they came leaping out, with the ghastly grins of irreparable wrongs. It would, of course, be absurd to say that Concetta still loved Tancredi; love’s eternity lasts but a year or two, not fifty. B
ut as one who has recovered from smallpox fifty years before still bears its marks on the face although he may have forgotten the pain of the disease, so she bore in her own oppressed life now the wounds of a bitter disappointment that had become almost part of history, so much part in fact that its fiftieth anniversary was being celebrated officially.

  Until to-day, on the rare occasions when she thought over what had happened at Donnafugata that distant summer, she had felt upheld by a sense of martyrdom, of wrong endured, of resentment against a father who had neglected her, and of torturing emotion on account of that other dead man. Now, however, these second-hand feelings which had formed the skeleton of her whole mode of thought were also collapsing. There had been no enemies, just one single adversary, herself; her future had been killed by her own imprudence, by the reckless Salina pride; and now, just at the moment when her memories had come alive again after so many years, she found herself even without the solace of being able to blame her own unhappiness on others, a solace which is the last protective device of the desperate.

  If Tassoni had told the truth, then the long hours spent in savouring her hatred before her father’s picture, her hiding of every photograph of Tancredi so as not to be forced to hate him too, had been stupidity—worse, cruel injustice; and she suffered now at the memory of Tancredi’s warm and imploring tone as he had begged his uncle to allow him into that convent; they had been words of love towards her, words not understood, routed by her pride which at her harshness had drawn back with their tails between their legs like whipped puppies. From the timeless depth of her being a black pain came welling to spatter her all over at that revelation of the truth.

  But was it the truth? Nowhere has truth so short a life as in Sicily; a fact has scarcely happened five minutes before its genuine kernel has vanished, been camouflaged, embellished, disfigured, annihilated by imagination and self-interest; shame, fear, generosity, malice, opportunism, charity, all the passions, good as well as evil, fling themselves on the fact and tear it to pieces; very soon it has vanished altogether. And poor Concetta was hoping to find the truth of feelings that had never been expressed but only glimpsed half a century before! The truth no longer existed. Precarious fact, though, had been replaced by irrefutable pain.