When the conversation fell on marriage in her daughter’s presence, Donna Teresa would warn, ‘Be careful what you say in front of girls!’ and when they were alone she would tell her that thinking of marriage was a mortal sin, to be confessed. Her confessor Father Camillo confirmed Lucrezia in these ideas. Then the princess would repeat again and again, ‘Anyway you’ve got nothing, so you’ll be forced to stay at home; who’ll want to marry you without any money?’ Chiara had been another matter; she had found someone willing to take her in nothing but her shift, as he knew she was wise, God fearing, and obedient to her mother. Sweetening the pill, the princess let fall now and again, ‘If you behave like your sister, I’ll make it up to you in some other way!’
So Lucrezia had grown up; constantly mortified and humiliated, more segregated from the world than in a convent, invisible to her elder brothers and even to her uncles, tyrannised a little even by Chiara who, being five years older, acted as a grown-up; loved and protected only by Ferdinando, with whose character hers was so much in accord. The Booby had to think of himself, not disposing of much goodwill in the family, but he showed Lucrezia as well as he could the love he had for her.
Older only by a year or so, he played with her and gave her toys he had made himself. Later on, when he got some notion of letters and taught himself to draw and do various little crafts, he passed on his knowledge to his sister, for whom the expense of a tutor had been spared. Besides Ferdinando’s company and protection was not all Lucrezia had; she had also Donna Vanna’s, one of the women-servants. And the princess, always wary and alert, did not see the danger from that direction.
The Francalanza servants were paid little and accustomed to trembling before their mistress. In spite of this it was rare for any of them to leave unless dismissed, as all found a means of recouping morally and materially for bad treatment. The means consisted in secretly taking sides with one of the children or in-laws against their mistress, in fomenting rebellions and acting as spies. For this reason there were as many factions down in the courtyard as there were heads up in the palace wanting to get their own way. Now Donna Vanna was one of the ‘young ladies’ faction: as before she had encouraged Chiara’s desperate resistance to the marriage imposed on her, so later she would tell Lucrezia her sister’s story in order to show her the harshness and quirkiness of her mother; and she put the idea into the girl’s head of getting married too, and gave her a consciousness of her own rights and qualities. It was not true that she was poor; the princess could only dispose of half of her own fortune, the other half had to be equally divided among all her children. ‘She must do that, as it’s written in the law; that’s why a part is called “legitimate” …’ And Lucrezia listened to her open-mouthed, trying to understand. She understood more easily the praises of the maid, who found recondite beauties in the person of her little mistress as she dressed and combed her. ‘How straight Your Excellency is!… Like a palm-tree … And these tresses! Like boat ropes!’ Then she would conclude, ‘We must find a man to enjoy them.’
So it happened that, when the Giulente family came to live opposite the Francalanza palace, Donna Vanna said to her young mistress, ‘Has Your Excellency seen the Signorino Benedetto? What a handsome lad!’ Lucrezia began watching him from her window, and agreed with the maid. ‘Hasn’t Your Excellency noticed how he looks at you?’ Lucrezia went redder than a poppy and from that day her eyes often strayed to the young man’s balcony. But as long as the princess was in good health things went no further than that and nobody suspected her. Then one day Donna Teresa, already poorly, woke with a pain in her side which at first she took no notice of, but which a year later was to take her to the tomb. When the mistress’s illness grew worse, and particularly when she went off alone to the Belvedere for a change of air, as Raimondo, her favourite, was in Florence and her other children were all more or less abhorred by her, then Donna Vanna, freer to favour her young mistress’s love more and more, talked to the young man, bore, first, greetings from one side to another, then messages, and finally letters. This was noticed in the family, and all turned on Lucrezia.
The Giulente, who had come to Catania almost a century before from Syracuse, belonged to a dubious class that was no longer ‘middle’ or bourgeois but had not yet acquired true and proper nobility. Nobles they thought and vaunted themselves to be, but they could not succeed in spreading this conviction to others. For a number of generations they had intermarried with families of the true ‘old stock’, but only among those short of money, for a girl who was both noble and rich would never have married a Giulente. In order to play at being the equals of authentic barons they had adopted all the baronial habits; only one son among them, the eldest, could marry; the others had to remain bachelors. The abolition of entails had pleased them, as there was none in their family; when the majority law was instituted, they had tried to get it applied to them, but without success. In spite of that everything was left to the eldest son. Don Paolo, Benedetto’s father, was very rich while his brother Don Lorenzo did not have a cent; that was the reason, maybe, why he intrigued with revolutionaries. Benedetto, partly from his uncle’s example, partly from the air of the times, was also a Liberal. He was very proud of his birth, but much against the arrogance of the nobility—‘When the fox can’t reach the grapes!’ cried Donna Ferdinanda—and because of these sentiments, though all his father’s fortune would one day come to him, he was studying for a lawyer’s degree. Hence Don Blasco’s anger against his niece for falling in love without asking his permission; and who with? A Giulente, a Liberal, a lawyer!
Now, after the reading of the Will, after the opposition put up to his suggestions by Chiara, the marchese, and Ferdinando, the monk turned to Lucrezia. He had greater hope of succeeding with her as her love of Giulente gave her a reason for rebelling against the family. It was true that for the moment he would have either to help or at least pretend to ignore his niece’s love affair, but as long as he could plot and put his finger in things, and get himself noticed, Don Blasco was willing to pass over greater difficulties than that. So he began to show Lucrezia how wrongly she had been treated, and what was to be deduced from it, and how Giacomo had robbed them all as soon as his mother was dead; and he went over the accounts with her again and encouraged her to come to an agreement with Ferdinando, on whom she alone could have an influence, in order to put up a united front against their elder brother.
At her family’s opposition Lucrezia had gone stubborn, like every Uzeda when contradicted, and sworn to Donna Vanna that she would marry Giulente at all costs; now, on hearing the monk talk of her rights, show her that she was richer than she thought, and instigate her to make her own will felt, she listened, though diffidently and suspecting a trick. At night she took counsel with the maid and, Donna Vanna encouraging her to follow the monk’s reasoning, she came to recognise that her mother had indeed sacrificed her like all the others for the sake of two sons, and she bowed her head to the arguments repeated to her by Don Blasco. But when she was just about to promise that she would speak out to Giacomo, fear held her back. She had grown up with the idea that he was of a different mould, a finer nature; while all her brothers and sisters used the familiar tu among themselves, the eldest son was always addressed by the formal voi. And the prince, who had always kept her at a distance and looked down on her from a height, now, after the reading of the Will, seemed even more withdrawn to all, particularly to her. Prepared to put up a fight for Giulente’s love, she wanted to reserve her strength for the right moment and not waste it on an aim which to her seemed secondary. Benedetto had let her know that as soon as he had his degree, which would be in a couple of years, he would ask for her hand, and that the Duke of Oragua, being such a close friend of his uncle Lorenzo’s, would be sure to support them; but meanwhile they must be patient and prudent, try not to arouse the Uzedas’ animosity. When consulted on the question of the Will he repeated his advice about doing nothing against the prince, partly for the old reasons, pa
rtly lest he should seem avid for her to have a bigger dowry. ‘You see, Your Exellency?’ commented the maid, hearing these letters read out by her mistress. ‘You see, Your Excellency, how good he is? He loves Your Excellency, not your money! Anyone out for the dowry would have replied differently and said “let’s fight it out!” …’ He was in fact a good, studious young man, with a head rather in the clouds, inflamed by his uncle’s Liberal doctrines and burning with love for Italy; to Lucrezia he wrote that he had three passions: her, his mother and their country to be redeemed.
So Lucrezia, after listening to Don Blasco’s instigations, did nothing of what her uncle wanted either. In fact once when he was being particularly insistent, she replied:
‘Why doesn’t Your Excellency talk to Giacomo yourself?’
At this remark the monk went purple and seemed on the point of suffocating.
‘So I’m to talk to him, am I? You little idiot! You’d like me to pull the chestnuts out of the fire with cat’s paws, wouldn’t you? Ah, so you want me to talk to him!… What the devil d’you think I care if he takes everything from you, if he eats you all up, you mob of madmen, Jesuits and imbeciles, eh?…’
To talk to Giacomo, to take the side of those other nephews and nieces against him, really was impossible for Don Blasco. It would have meant his involving himself definitely, coming down on one side, never being able to disagree with those he had agreed with before and vice versa; and that was something he just had to be free to do. Thus, for example, the prince had been the only one of the whole ‘bad lot’ (as the Benedictine called his family in moments of exasperation, that is almost always) to behave obediently and submissively to him and support the monk in his struggle against the princess; now Don Blasco was turning his brothers and sisters against him in exchange. But the monk did not think he was doing wrong in this. Sceptical and suspicious as he was, he knew that Giacomo had supported him not from any affection or respect but from simple self-interest.
Prince Giacomo did, in fact, have his own reasons. His mother, as if unable to forgive him for his not being born just when she expected or wanted him, had never shown affection for her eldest son, who had also endangered her life by his birth. Instead of loving him the more for his having cost her so much, Donna Teresa had loved him less. At Lodovico’s birth she had been even more vexed and indifferent; it was Raimondo who suddenly touched her maternal instincts. And so, while all the other relations who were not ‘mad’ like her, or mad in a different way, had given Giacomo the idea that he was above them as eldest son, as heir to the title, the princess had given all her love, a blind, exclusive, unreasonable love, to Raimondo. And the mother’s protection was a good deal more useful than the father’s or uncles’, for while these gave only vain words to Giacomo, who was avid for money and yearning for authority, Raimondo was showered with gifts, bossed everyone and made his whims law.
So began the split between the two brothers; Raimondo, who was younger, took some knocks, but when the princess saw her favourite appear in tears she let Giacomo feel the strength of those terrible hands of hers, which left bruises wherever they fell. The boy went obstinately on, until the mother’s coldness changed to definite hatred. Then he realised he was taking a wrong turning and changed tactics, played the hypocrite, became a spy for Don Blasco, and enjoyed his revenge by seeing the monk hit Raimondo out of hatred for the princess. But those were mediocre and short-lived satisfactions; as the years passed the princess shut her second son up in San Nicola, and gave Raimondo the title of Count. Mean, almost miserly with others, she was generous only with her favourite; Giacomo never had a coin on him, and went about in rags while the other was dressed up like a tailor’s dummy. If Raimondo expressed an opinion, it was at once supported, or at least not derided; Giacomo could get nothing done. For years he had nursed a longing to act as master and change the palace about in his own way; his mother did not allow him to move a chair. She herself had done a lot to change the architecture of the place, which seemed composed of four or five different buildings put together; for each ancestor had amused himself blocking windows in here and piercing balconies through there, or raising floors on one side and dismantling them on another, or changing the colour of a wash or design of a cornice.
Inside, the disorder was greater; sealed up doors, stairs going nowhere, rooms partitioned into two down the middle, walls torn down to make one room out of two. The ‘mad lot’, as Don Blasco called even his forebears, had built and dismembered in their own way one after the other. The biggest changes had been made by his father, Prince Giacomo XIII, when flinging money about in all directions; then that ‘pumpkinhead’ of a Donna Teresa, instead of thinking of economy, had gone and amused herself by wasting more money in other ill-considered novelties!… Giacomo wanted to change about the plan of the house too, but his mother would not even let him put in a nail. And the Benedictine was particularly furious to find that the son who had always been overruled was in fact just like his mother, hectoring, greedy, hard, scheming; while that goose of a woman preferred Raimondo, who did not know the value of money, wasted all he had, despised business, and liked and sought only amusement and pleasure …
The two brothers, though having the same family air, did not even resemble each other physically; Raimondo was very handsome, Giacomo very ugly. The two types could be seen in the Portrait Gallery. More distant forebears had that mixture of strength and grace which gave the young count his charm. Gradually, as the centuries passed, features began to alter, faces lengthened, noses grew, skin darkened; extreme fatness like Don Blasco’s, or extreme thinness like Don Eugenio’s, disfigured the portraits. Changes were most obvious among the women. Chiara and Lucrezia, though both of them fresh and young, were so hideous they scarcely looked like women at all. Aunt Ferdinanda, in male attire, would have been taken for a moneylender or a sacristan. And there were other harsh, mannish faces to be seen among feminine portraits of recent date, while in older ones the strange head-dresses and extravagant costumes, the huge Flemish collars, which made heads look as if they were on a basin, the ample robes enfolding the body like tortoiseshells could not quite hide slimness of form or alter pure lineaments of features. Now and again among the degenerate faces in more recent generations could be seen one or two reminiscent of the earliest; thus, as if by a kind of recrudescence of the old cells of noble blood, Raimondo was like the purest ancient type. The princess’s eyes would laugh with pleasure when she saw his graceful and elegant figure riding or driving or fencing. Her eldest son on the other hand she called by as many nicknames as she found defects in his person: ‘dancing bear’ because of his awkwardness; ‘Pulcinella’ because of the long nose; and ‘dwarf’ because of his short stature.
Thus Giacomo’s grudge against his mother and brother was always alive; it grew out of all proportion when Donna Teresa filled the cup to the brim and found Raimondo a wife. Family tradition, maintained until 1812 by the law of entail, forbade any son except the eldest to take a wife; in fact in the generation before neither the duke nor Don Eugenio had married. But the princess, as always, waived rules and found Raimondo a wife even before she had found one for Giacomo. At her death, because she would leave her fortune to both, the financial condition of the two brothers would become equal; but in her lifetime she was unwilling to deprive herself of anything; Giacomo would of course have to marry in order to hand on the title and could be set up on his wife’s dowry, while Raimondo, if he remained a bachelor, would have nothing.
Having decided that her favourite also must be given a wife she hesitated a long time even so before putting her resolve into practice, not because she felt any scruple at breaking tradition and creating in the Uzeda family a twisted branch which might compete with the straight one, but because of her very love for the youth; the idea of another woman with him night and day threw her into blind jealousy. So when she did finally decide, she could not bear to give him any girl from Catania or its province, but began looking about for a match in Messina, Pa
lermo, even farther, on the mainland, with certain criteria of her own, one of which was that the bride’s mother should be dead. She looked for a number of years and no one suited her. Finally through one of the Benedictine monks, a colleague of Don Blasco’s, Father Dilenna from Milazzo, she fixed her choice on the daughter of Baron Palmi, the Benedictine’s cousin. Then, as even she thought it too much for Raimondo to marry before Giacomo (still a bachelor at twenty-five, a unique case in the family history), she arranged to get both brothers married at the same time, and chose for her eldest son the daughter of the Marchese Grazzeri.
Quarrels on that occasion were violent. Strong as was Giacomo’s rancour at his brother getting married and founding another Uzeda family which would bear off part of his own inheritance, it was no less strong about his own marriage. Violent, grasping and arid though he was, he had for long been in love with his cousin Graziella, daughter of his mother’s sister, and determined to marry her, though her dowry was far less than that of the Grazzeri; but the princess, partly because of the latter’s greater riches, partly because she had never got on well with her sister, whom she had in fact always kept at a distance, and above all from a desire to go against her son’s inclination, made him marry the Grazzeri girl.
The Viceroys Page 11
