The Viceroys
Page 1
This edition published by Verso 2016
First published by MacGibbon & Kee Ltd 1962
Originally published as I vicerè
© Aldo Garzanti, editore, Milan 1959
Translation © Archibald Colquhoun 1962, 2016
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-256-6 (PB)
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v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword by Franco Moretti
Introduction by Archibald Colquhoun
Translator’s Note
THE VICEROYS
Principal Characters
Book I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Book II
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Book III
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
FOREWORD
Franco Moretti
In the late nineteenth century, the European novel discovered a new protagonist: the family. Unified yet proliferating, fictional families allowed writers to explore large social and geographical expanses (France in Zola’s Rougon-Maquart cycle, remote reaches of the Hapsburg empire in Roth’s Radetzky March), and to follow the course of history across several generations—from the bourgeois stability of Mann’s Lübeck, to the hundred tumultuous years of Garcia Marquéz’s Buendía saga.
Federico De Roberto’s Uzeda are part of this constellation: a microcosm of Sicily—its Viceroys’, no less—in the decades of the Risorgimento and the Italian unification. Seldom, however, has a crowded novelistic family so thoroughly coincided with a single social class—and one sliding irreparably towards its ruin. The result is a unique combination of naturalistic lucidity over the fate of impoverished aristocracies, and a Goya-like inventiveness in extracting from social disintegration a whole gallery of grotesques and monstrosities, culminating in the desperate scurrility of the sadistic and promiscuous monk Don Blasco.
Readers who have encountered nineteenth-century Sicily through Lampedusa’s Leopard (and, possibly, Visconti’s silky reworking for the big screen) will find The Viceroys familiar, yet strangely uncanny. Though the overall arc of the story is roughly the same, Tancredi’s seductive liveliness, or the Prince’s civilized intelligence, are nowhere in sight; all the Uzeda have to show is sickness onto death, impotent greed, and outright imbecility. The Viceroys is a superb lesson in how coarse and rancid the collapse of a ruling class actually is.
INTRODUCTION
CATANIA is one of those places that have a pervasive effect on all who live there. Cyclops were the first inhabitants of the area, and the province is scattered with place-names beginning with ‘Aci’, from a local shepherd whose rivalry with a Cyclop was sung by Theocritus; at Acireale, beneath Etna, craggy islets just off the coast are called I Ciclopi. These legends may refer to a time when a crater of the volcano looked like some glaring eye, linked by mariners with mysterious troglodytes who lived hereabouts, the ancient Siculians. Even now there is something improbable, obsessed, about this part under Etna; slopes twist into grim shapes, houses perch on jagged residues of lava-flows, and against a prevailing colour-tone of dark grey the vegetation is all strident pinks and greens.
In atmosphere it is far removed from the serenities of Syracuse, a few miles to the south. Yet all these shores face across to the Aegean; and some underlying harmony in contrast, a creative tension emanating from these Greek parts of Sicily has combined to produce hereabouts the island’s best minds, from Archimedes to Pirandello. The birthplaces of nearly every Sicilian writer, ancient and modern, are along the eastern coastline from Messina to Pachino, or at Agrigento and Caltanisetta; in comparison the Phoenician and Arab west has had speculative or scientific minds, an eighteenth-century dialect poet, and now the Prince of Lampedusa. The last great period of Palermo as a Mediterranean centre of culture dates back to Frederick II. For the last hundred years or so, the literary capital of Sicily has been halfway down the east coast, at Catania. There, towards the end of the last century, appeared a small group of writers who have gone down to Italian literary history as the Veristi or ‘Realists’. One, Giovanni Verga, has long been considered a genius. His life-long friend and pupil, Federico De Roberto, is only being generally appreciated in Italy now, thirty-four years after his death. All were closely linked to their environment.
Volcanoes, to those who live under them, are symbols of unpredictable or sinister power, and no city in Europe is closer to one than Catania. In certain lights or under rain, the place has a brooding quality; its huge buildings, lava-grey chequered with grimy white, ooze as if from bombing in the last war. Here the Volcano’s influence is everywhere. A few years before the great earthquake that destroyed the town in 1693, a lava-flow had submerged and reshaped whole districts, cutting off, for instance, Castell ‘Ursino from the sea which had been its outlet since medieval days. Thus the architect Vaccarini had a free hand to produce his town-planning scheme on a vast scale. The briefest tour shows how masterly was his grouping. The plan hinges brilliantly on one main artery, Via Etnea, running straight through the entire city towards the volcano. This street is an epitome of Catania’s character and history. It emerges first from under the Uzeda gate, down by the old seashore where even now can be found professional story-tellers, cantastorie, declaiming tales of Roland and Excalibur. Next it passes the great steps of the cathedral, with its image of the local patron-saint, St Agata, winged and hieratic as the goddess Isis whose cult once centred here. On a fountain opposite perches the city’s symbol, an elephant in lava with an obelisk on its back. From there Via Etnea sweeps on past huge churches in ‘exasperated’ baroque with tiled domes glittering in the sun, past endlessly parading throngs (the street is Catania’s open-air club), past gardens and monuments to another presiding genius, the composer Bellini; on up to where new districts spring up almost nightly in the present east-coast boom. Over it all, so near that the Cyclops should have found it easy to fling down either lava or snow, hangs the white cone, vast, aloof, of the volcano.
Etna is not mentioned much by local writers, perhaps because it is so much part of the texture of their minds. References to the volcano are oblique, as to a deity which needs propitiating. In I vicerè, for instance, the slopes of the volcano are merely referred to as useful boltholes from invasion or cholera. The name Uzeda is taken from a Duque de Uceda (a town, in the province of Madrid, the Spanish ‘c’ changing into Sicilian ‘z’), a Vice-roy of Sicily at the end of the seventeenth century, said to be partly responsible
for rebuilding Catania after the earthquake of 1693. Against their setting and period the chronicles of De Roberto’s Uzeda come into focus; with Etna an ever-present monster brooding over landscape, climate and architecture, this family of monsters looks less grotesque. To the inhabitants of Catania they are based on recognisable originals, accepted as part of the highly charged pattern of local life. To us they might seem provincial oddities were it not for that quality in Sicily which transforms island peculiarities into reflections of the universal, and which may be connected with its geographical position in the centre of the Mediterranean. What more universal and corroding than the pride which recurs in variations throughout I vicerè?
This sort of novel seldom has a hero, and the real protagonist is the Year of Unification, dies irae, 1860 itself. Stresses of local nature combine here with exasperations of a period tense from social and economic changes centuries overdue. Garibaldi’s sweep that year from Marsala across the island and up through southern Italy to beyond Naples, all in a few summer months, was one of those events with an exhilarating sense of recasting the map of history. It was the fuse-point (retarded as it turned out) of modern Sicily, politically, economically, socially, even in a way religiously. That summer Garibaldi was not only the bogey-man of the nobles, but a symbol to Sicilians who have never quite absorbed their pagan past and hailed the hero in a red shirt on a white horse as kinsman of the patroness of Palermo, Santa Rosalìa, blood-brother to the knights of the puppet-theatres, paladin in the struggle of Charlemagne and Roland against the Moors, of good against evil. There were even pictures of him wearing a crown of thorns. Surely after this apparition of the ‘Knight of Humanity’ nothing would ever be the same again (though a glimpse into the interior today might make anyone wonder what all the excitement was about). But the Campaign of the Thousand—the very name rings of some antique feat—left a mark all over the south. No disillusion has quite affected it, even when Garibaldi’s deputy stamped out a peasant’s revolt in the (British-owned) Bronte estates, and at Aspromonte two years later he himself was attacked by troops of the Italian state he had helped to create. Whether or not Garibaldi could ever have solved Sicilian dearth, there is no doubt about the ‘moment-of-truth’ quality of 1860 in the south; this explains why all major Sicilian writers, dramatists and composers have been obsessed with that year ever since, why Verga and Pirandello, De Roberto and now Lampedusa, wrote novels about the impact of change, the technique of accommodation, the effects of opportunism, in the Year of Unification. Of them all the vastest picture in size, detail and historical scope was De Roberto’s.
I vicerè is about the Risorgimento betrayed. Until recent years the aims and results of that movement have been blurred by official rhetoric and a process of falsification which began in the north of Italy and was at first due to the role of Piedmont and its dynasty. The piazzas of Italy are still cluttered with some of the less harmful results, those bewhiskered and gesticulating statues of the first King of United Italy, Victor Emmanuel of Savoy. Amid the confusion of motives, nationalism, dynastic aggrandisement, social aspiration, it was the south that came off worst. Seen from there the posturing and rhetoric looked suspiciously like cover for failed promises; in time this even became linked with Mussolini’s rodomontades about ‘eight million bayonets’. The age-old distrust of rulers throughout the south spread next to ‘those in Rome’. Subsequent waves of immigration from the depressed areas of Sicily and Calabria brought with them the Mafia and Camorra, to spread all over the Americas; and, less obvious but more damaging, the diffusion from Soho throughout the world of that most inadequate and adhesive of national images, the Italian organ-grinder with a monkey on a stick.
A preoccupation of Manzoni when writing the first Italian novel I Promessi Sposi (‘The Betrothed’) had been ‘the millions whom history ignores’. In the pages of Verga we glimpse for the first time the southern worker, sober, toiling, undemonstrative, bitter sometimes at hopes deferred. Manzoni’s Lombard peasants of fifty years before had been irradiated by Providence; the Furies dog Verga’s fisherfolk at Acitrezza and peasant proprietors in the hinterland. All the Catanian so-called Veristi (‘Verismo, verismo, verità, io dico!’, exclaimed Verga) were haunted by this bitter aftermath of a Risorgimento that in Sicily during the decades after 1860 looked almost a mockery. This spirit pervades I vicerè, though its protagonists were nobles and its plot the end of Sicilian feudalism (or, according to a modern historian, ‘the feudalising of the Sicilian Risorgimento’). Its pages almost vibrate at times with an indignation about cant that must have affected most sensitive inhabitants of the island then, and has left traces today. They show in that very different book with a similar plot, Il Gattopardo (‘The Leopard’); but De Roberto was nearer to the facts and less involved than the Prince of Lampedusa, not watching the ruin of his own class on its way later but noting in detail the moves used by the old order to preserve itself at the time. On a deeper level the oriental fatalism prevalent in western Sicily scarcely touched these writers of the east, who with all their disillusion (a modern critic has even accused Verga of ‘narcissism of defeat’), kept alive something of the dynamism of the Risorgimento.
One result of the sweeping away of ancient state barriers was a sudden awareness of local cultural roots. In Sicily, with its unimaginable riches of untapped image and legend, there was no danger of artificial ‘folklore’, and a dialect breakaway was avoided by Verga’s insistence on using an Italian modified by local speech rhythms; ‘By listening, listening, one learns to write’, he would say. Another major influence was literary theory from France, then prevalent in northern Europe. The French realists’ advocacy of close ‘objective’ study of physical and psychological detail, in effect usually turned into fixation on the drabber aspects of middle-class life around them. Since Attic days, Sicily has been a forcing-house for ideas from outside and the Catanian Veristi, working directly on the Sicilian themes they found around them, brought off a grafting process which made them more vital, and eventually more influential, than their French teachers.
Verga was born at Vizzini, one of those remote places in the interior whose roofs lie like leaves around a church, and whose male inhabitants appear to spend their days in the streets, cloaked and silent, staring into space. Capuana’s birth-place, Mineo, is a primeval hill-town behind Catania. But De Roberto was only half-Sicilian by blood, and born in Naples, in 1861, over twenty years after either of his masters. His father was a Neapolitan who, on service in Catania as a regular officer in the Bourbon army during the last years of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, married the daughter of a local family, the Asmundo. Colonel De Roberto, according to family tradition, was the officer who personally consigned Naples to Garibaldi on the latter’s historic entry in September, 1860. On the colonel’s death his only son, aged ten, was sent for education down to his mother’s family at Catania. There Federico De Roberto made his home, never to return to Naples except for an occasional visit to such family property as was there.
The Asmundo were a vast involuted tribe, of Spanish origin as the name implies (so was Verga), ruled by an aged and autocratic grandparent, chief charity commissioner for the city. Systems of life centuries behind the times have a way of being preserved in Sicily; the Asmundo were more patriarchal than feudal, and memories of the family set-up must have been at the back of De Roberto’s mind when he started I vicerè. Not that the Asmundo, though of ancient Spanish stock, were grandees on any such scale as the book’s Uzeda. One catches a glimpse, in De Roberto’s background, of something far rarer, particularly in the south; the old professional upper middle-cum-minor-landowning class whose standards have helped to give fibre to the south since the Renaissance; the class to which, in Naples, belonged many of the promoters of the Parthenopean Republic and later the opposition to King ‘Bomba’, and in more recent days De Sanctis, founder of Italian literary criticism, and the late Benedetto Croce. Rare on Sicily’s east coast, it is almost non-existent in the west; at Palermo, eve
n today, such standards as there are (outside the Church, the Communists, and the followers of Danilo Dolci) have devolved, for the arts at least, on to sprigs of the nobility, who take a serious part in the Regional Government’s various ‘Assessorates’ for the encouragement of opera, music, even tourism. Catanians have always prided themselves on energy and thrust, and life there, however provincial and enclosed, has less social rigidity. Verga, for instance, in spite of his radical views, spent most of the last twenty afternoons of his life dozing away beneath the springing arches of Palazzo Càrcaci, the Nobles’ Club in Via Etnea. For De Roberto this place was merely a waste of his maestro’s time. He himself had an early ‘salon period’ (there is an agreeable glimpse in an early story of a duchess on her venitiènne in a remote darkened boudoir toying with a tortoiseshell paper-cutter over the pages of Bourget); but he kept away from most Catania society, which was far more flourishing at the time than it is now. No volumes of his inscribed to local great ladies survive, as they do of Verga, Capuana, and even of the ‘anarchist’ poet Rapisardi. Detachment from his characters’ lives gives an oddly transposable air to I vicerè, as if it might be in another medium, music or even dance, heard or seen through a door. Perhaps it was this quality that made the Prince of Lampedusa consider I vicerè as a ‘picture of the Sicilian aristocracy seen from the servants’ hall’. The introspective poetry of Il Gattopardo which gives that book its effulgence was a sign of its author’s lingering involvement, while De Roberto changes key and presses on almost obsessively.
Whatever De Roberto’s preferences in the way of company, he was anything but a recluse most of his life, and must have taken an active part in literary life in Florence and then in Milan, where he was established by the late ‘eighties. For he followed a pattern common to Sicilians of all classes, who long to escape from their island, sometimes do and always yearn to return. In northern Italy De Roberto had no difficulty in finding his feet as critic and literary journalist; Milan had been an intellectual centre since the first Italian Encyclopedists and the ‘Società del Café’ at the end of the eighteenth century. In the ferment of those years after the Unification, it was the liveliest place in the peninsula, with writers and aspirants from all over Italy, Giacosa, the two Boitos, young D’Annunzio, young Fogazzaro, congregating in the cafés around the Scala. There De Roberto first met his fellow-townsman Verga, already an established writer and just plunging into the great creative period of his life. Capuana joined them, and it is pleasant to think that the meeting of these three Sicilians amid the Lombard mists helped to bring about a renovation of Italian letters.