The Viceroys

by Federico De Roberto

  Giacomo was no longer a boy to obey his mother for fear of punishment or blows, but she held a more powerful weapon: that of controlling the money and threatening to disinherit him. ‘Not a cent …’ she would say to him coldly, flicking her thumbnail against her teeth, ‘not a cent will you get!’ And the scant sympathy she had shown him, her passion for Raimondo, and the latter’s imminent marriage confirmed the threat and made him suspect that she would carry it out. The prince, who till that point had never wholly succeeded in adopting the policy of pretence, after this last and violent quarrel, bowed to her in resignation and gave her his blind obedience even in things useless and ridiculous, with much talk of fraternal love, unity, and respect for elders. Inside he chafed, and while waiting to gather the fruits of his conduct, showed his vexation and exercised his own tyrannical sway only with his wife. From the first day of marriage she was treated worse than a servant, forbidden to express not only wishes, but even opinions, and trained to obey a simple movement of the prince’s eyes. When she needed a roll of cotton or a bit of ribbon, she had to ask him for the necessary coins—after bringing him a dowry of a hundred thousand onze. Her job was to give her husband an heir, to perpetuate the Viceroys; having done that, she was considered a useless mouth to feed, worse than a hanger-on; for the hangers-on did at least pay court to the family, and if need be give the major-domo a helping hand, while Donna Margherita could do nothing and, with her mania for cleanliness and obsession about contagion, thought of nothing but avoiding contact with others. Anyway she was a mild creature without will-power, soft wax which the prince moulded as he wished. Her mother-in-law, the princess, more than once took up her defence from dislike of her own son, not from any love for her; then she suffered all the more, as Giacomo, yielding outwardly, afterwards made her pay harshly for that protection.

  If the prince’s marriage went so badly, Raimondo’s went much worse. Giacomo did not want the Grazzeri girl since he loved his cousin; but Raimondo wanted no-one and had decided not to marry at all. His mother’s caresses and favouritism had roused in him an insatiable appetite for pleasure and freedom; but the princess’s protection weighed almost as much as her aversion, so despotic was she in all things. Her favourite had to do what she wanted, repay her by meeker obedience for the privileges she granted him. Yet these privileges, extraordinary in comparison to the subjection in which the other children were held, were not enough for Raimondo; they merely aroused his desires without satisfying them. He alone, for instance, was given money to fling about as he liked, but the princess gave it in fits and starts, and the young man, who was not only spending constantly on clothes and women but also had a passion for gambling, would throw away in a night what his mother gave him in a year. He was the only one allowed to go as far away as Florence, but that quick trip gave the young man a taste for travel and long sojourns in countries finer and richer than his own, which he could not follow up.

  So, though treated so differently, both brothers were awaiting their mother’s death with equal impatience; Giacomo to exercise his own authority as head of the house, revenge himself for the ill-treatment he had suffered, lay hands on the property; Raimondo to pay the debts he had secretly contracted, fling money about in the satisfaction of his own whims, appease his great yearning to leave Sicily, see Milan and Turin, live in Florence or Paris.

  So at the first announcement of his marriage he rebelled openly against his mother, being the only one among them all able to say ‘I won’t!’ to her face. Marriage was a chain round his neck, slavery, rejection of the life he had dreamt of; and he refused to accept it at any cost. The princess, who treated her other children with sharp sarcasm, harsh punishments and extreme threats, appealed to him by persuasion. Did he want to have his fun, lots of money to spend, do as he liked? A dowry would allow him all that at once! The jealous mother, prepared to see him married as a necessity, not wanting a local daughter-in-law and seeking a bride for him from a distance, refused to admit the possibility of her son loving that other woman, being faithful or considering himself seriously bound to her. ‘You silly boy!’ she would say then. ‘Marry her now; then when you get tired of her just drop her!’ And only by such language and arguments was the young man induced to say yes, convinced that in this way he would at once be rich and at the same time get away from his mother’s oppressive protection.

  Don Blasco, on hearing of Giacomo’s marriage, really let himself go and belched out curses against this nephew who had wanted to marry his cousin Graziella, daughter of another Risà! And against the sister-in-law who ‘forced him’ to take a Grazzeri instead! But Raimondo’s marriage was the real limit!… Let another son marry? Create a second family? Break family tradition? Was there ever such a raving mad woman?… Don Blasco did not bother about any contradiction between the respect he claimed they should have for traditions and his own insatiable rancour at having been sacrificed to the same traditions himself; to be in opposition, give vent to his feelings in some way, he ignored much bigger obstacles. What particularly affronted him, in Raimondo’s marriage, was the choice of the bride. Among so many matches offered, which had been that preferred by his sister-in-law? The one suggested by Father Dilenna, Don Blasco’s personal enemy!

  Among the many factions dividing the monks at the Benedictine monastery, the fiercest were political; Don Blasco, of course, was an out-and-out pro-Bourbon and Father Dilenna had thrown his hand in with the other Liberals in 1848 to get rid of Ferdinand II. Don Blasco had his revenge next year; but Dilenna had made him eat garlic later when, foreseeing the office of Prior being vacant, he supported Lodovico Uzeda, though Don Blasco was aspiring to that office himself! So to choose for Raimondo a wife proposed by Dilenna, the man’s own cousin in fact, was the last straw.

  It would take too long to describe what Don Blasco did and said at the palace, the chairs he overturned, the fists he banged on furniture, the curses and swear words that poured from his mouth; things got to such a point that the princess, who had let him shout on before and put up only passive resistance, now declared to his face that she had always done what she liked in her own house and that even her husband had never dared to say a word to her about it; ‘So just let me tell you! Be good enough not to come here again!’ Back Don Blasco flashed with, ‘You tell me not to come here, do you? Don’t you know the honour I’ve done you every time I set foot in this place? Don’t you know I don’t care a rap about you and all yours? Oh, go and .… yourselves, the lot of you, and cursed be my own silly feet for bringing me here!’ Off he went and said things against his sister-in-law among his colleagues that should have brought the roof down.

  For more than a year he did not set foot in the palace, though his yearning for a good rant nearly made him ill; so that when the young prince Consalvo VIII was born, and Giacomo, breathing peace and love, suggested to his mother that their uncle should be invited to the baptism and she agreed, the Benedictine reappeared in his sister-in-law’s house, and after a short period of apparent calm, started shouting around worse than before.

  So the princess, to marry off Raimondo, had a struggle, grim and violent at times, not only with her eldest son and Don Blasco, but with the very son whose future she wanted to ensure and even with herself. On that occasion she also had another and no less terrible opponent: Donna Ferdinanda.

  The spinster was then aged thirty-eight but looked fifty; nor had she when younger ever possessed the graces of her sex. Destined to remain unmarried in order not to diminish the patrimony reserved to her brother the prince, she might have been shut up for precaution in a convent had her ugliness and her natural and sincere aversion to the married state not reassured her parents against the dangers of temptation more than the cloister. She had never seemed female, either in body or mind. When as a child her companions talked of clothes and amusements she would list the Francalanza estates; she understood nothing about the cost of stuffs, ribbons and fashionable objects, but knew as well as any dealer the price of crops, wines and veget
ables; she had at her fingers’ ends all the complicated system of measuring solids, liquids and money; she knew how many tarì, how many carlini, how many grani went to an onza, into how many tumoli was divided a heap of grain or soil, how many rotoli and how many coppi formed a barrel of oil …

  Just as, physically, the Uzeda were divided into two great categories, the handsome and the ugly, so morally they were either unbridled pleasure-lovers and wasters like Prince Giacomo XIII and Count Raimondo, or self-interested, miserly, capable of selling their souls for a coin, like Prince Giacomo XIV and Donna Ferdinanda.

  Donna Ferdinanda’s father had left her a pittance, a so-called piatto, enough to ensure daily fare, which was the meagre provision made for younger children by the entail-system. With this pittance she had sworn to achieve wealth. All her thoughts day and night were directed to translating her dream into action. As soon as she got her miserable sixty onze a year she began to negotiate it, to lend it out against mortgages or security according to the debtor’s solvency, dealing in I.O.U.’s, making loans on valuables and goods, doing every sort of ghetto banking operation, since the meagreness of her income obliged her to deal with the poor, with petty merchants, shopkeepers, foremen builders, old-clothes dealers, small vintners and even the family servants. She never touched any of the capital and risked only its income; this she redoubled and tripled, such was her natural talent for business and so sharp and inexorable was she at getting back her money and its interest, which she would demand till the very last cent, deaf to any prayers and sobs of women or children. And she was more expert, more quibbling than any lawyer if she had to go to law. She was also miserly, not spending on herself more than two tarì a day, which she handed over to the princess in exchange for the food and service assured her by the latter. As lodging she still had the little room on the third floor under the roof which she had occupied as a child, and as clothes she bought her sister-in-law’s cast-off dresses. Gradually she had extended the circle of her business and put together a little hoard which she then began circulating among people of higher standing, wholesale merchants, speculators, embarrassed landowners.

  As her money grew, in the minds of the princess and of Don Blasco there also grew a blind jealousy against sister-in-law and sister. By different methods, Donna Ferdinanda was working towards an aim similar to Donna Teresa’s. The latter’s was to salvage and increase the Uzeda fortune, the former’s to create a fortune on her own. Now, as Donna Ferdinanda had started from nothing, her glory would be all the greater and would obscure Donna Teresa’s; hence came the princess’s blind antipathy, the sarcasms she would aim at her sister-in-law’s avarice, while her own was of course legitimate and admirable. As for Don Blasco, his resentment at having had to renounce the world grew more bitter every time any of his relatives acquired fame, power and money; so when he saw his sister doing what he would have done himself had he stayed in the world, and doing it so unexpectedly and speedily, his blood boiled, his temper worsened, envy poisoned him.

  Donna Ferdinanda seemed insensible to the sarcasms and sharp comments of her sister-in-law and brother. It suited her at that moment to be silent, as she was and wished to continue to be the princess’s guest until she had enough money for a home of her own. Every day her relations and friends advised her to take her little fortune out of such dangerous circulation, and acquire solid property. She shook her head, affirmed that her money ran no risk at all, for only ‘he who lends without security loses money, friend or wit’. Really she was waiting until she had enough to make a good purchase.

  In ’42, ten years after entering into possession of her meagre pittance, she astounded all her relations by acquiring, at public auction for five thousand onze, the Carrubo property, a fine piece of land worth ten thousand. She was fortunate, or rather shrewd, there too, in taking advantage of a superb opportunity. All had known that she possessed a tiny capital, but no one imagined that in ten years she had put together a small fortune. Her sister-in-law and brother were more biting than ever, particularly on seeing that she did not spend a cent more on herself. She let them have their say and went on speculating with the four hundred onze of income that she now had. She made it yield as much as possible, never lost a cent, and when the I.O.U.’s fell in, her notary, agent or lawyer, brought her due in fine gleaming and clinking coin. Lawyer, notary and agent were her friends. Among the frequenters of the Francalanza palace she had chosen and made friends with the sharpest and cleverest, those who, like her, had a bent and passion for business, to whom she could look for information and suggestions. Her preferred adviser was the Prince of Roccasciano, as noble as any Uzeda but with little money, which he was multiplying patiently, prudently and with none of her meanness and harshness.

  In ’49, when she least expected it, a chance came to buy herself a house. She had given a thousand onze or so to the Cavaliere Calasaro, whose son was involved in the revolution, and forced to go into exile. The father, who had stripped himself and exhausted his credit so that his son should lack for nothing, could not satisfy Donna Ferdinanda when the I.O.U.’s fell due. Sniffing the wind, she demanded to be paid at once, threatened him with expropriation and sent him a first writ. The debtor came to fling himself at her feet, his head in his hands, to prevent final ruin, and offered whatever she liked of all his property. Donna Ferdinanda spurned the lot as heavily encumbered and capable of bringing down only a deluge of stamped paper, and when the other insisted and offered her a house clear of mortgage, the spinster wrinkled her nose and said, ‘We’ll see.’ But she wanted it for her thousand one hundred onze, plus interest and expenses, without adding another cent, while the owner valued it at two thousand onze at least and claimed the balance. The matter was not settled; Donna Ferdinanda pushed on with her case. The other, with the water at his neck and his son still demanding money from Turin and the Government at him because of the young exile, finally yielded. ‘Pay at least for the expenses of the Deed’, he sent to say, but Donna Ferdinanda’s answer was ‘A thousand one hundred onze, that’s my last word!’ So she got the house. It was small, of course, for that price; two shops flanked the entrance and there was only one floor above, with a large balcony and two small ones on the front; but it had an inestimable value in Donna Ferdinanda’s eyes; it was situated in the Crociferi, the old quarter of the city nobles, and was itself a noble house, having belonged for a long time to the Calasaro, nobles of ‘the old stock’.

  In fact as well as a passion for money the spinster had one for nobility. All the Uzeda were vainglorious of their family’s origins; Donna Ferdinanda was positively sick with the pride of it. When she talked of ‘Don Ramon de Uzeda y de Zuellos, who was Señor of Esterel’ and came from Spain with King Pedro of Aragon to ‘settle’ in Sicily; when she enumerated all her ancestors and their descendants ‘promoted to the highest offices in the Kingdom’: Don Jaime I, ‘who served the King don Ferdinando, son of the Emperor don Alfonso, against the Moors of Cordova, on the battlefield of Calatrava’; Gagliardetto, ‘caballero de mucha qualitad’; Attardo, ‘a spirited knight, and armigerous’; the great Consalvo, ‘Vicar of the White Queen’; the even greater Lopez Ximenes, ‘Viceroy of the unvanquished Charles V’; then her eyes would glitter more brightly than newly-minted coin, and her pale, hollow cheeks flush. Indifferent to all but her money, incapable of emotion about any event, sad or gay, she found one passionate excitement, the memory of her ancestors’ splendours.

  At the time of her grandfather there had been a fine library in the palace, but when Prince Giacomo XIII began getting into deep water, it was the first thing to be sold. She saved a copy of the famous Mugnòs’ ‘Teatro genologico di Sicilia’ where the longest chapter was on the Uzeda family, occupying not less than thirty big pages. And those dry and yellow pages, exhaling the must of old paper, printed in clumsy, dim characters and fantastic orthography, that emphatic spavined seventeenth-century Sicilian-Spanish, was her favourite reading, the only pasture of her imagination; for her it was romance, it was t
he gospel which she used in order to recognise wheat from chaff, and select the true nobles from among the mob of ignobles and the ‘weeds’ of false nobles. ‘Outftanding amid the genealogies from Spain fhines one of the moft ancient and fublime families of the Kingdom of Valencia and Aragon, the family of Vzeda, acknowledged by all to be thus benamed from an eftate known as the Barony of Vzeda, granted by the aforefaid kings in recompenfe for their fervices in contributing to the royal and perennial military glories forever refounding in the Supreme Heavens.’

  For Donna Ferdinanda, this style was of supreme elegance and magnificence, and she read such words as ‘perennial’ quite literally. As it was considered ‘low’ for women of her class at the beginning of the century to be lettered, she had learnt to read on her own as a necessity for her speculations.

  And now to flout the spinster’s infatuation for her own origins and for the institution of nobility in general, here was the princess thinking of giving Raimondo as wife—whom if you please—a Palmi from Milazzo, daughter of a worthless baron of whom Mugnòs did not and could not make the very least mention! He gloried, did this so-called Baron Palmi, in certain privileges granted 150 years before; but what were 150 years compared with the centuries of Uzeda nobility? Without taking into account that these privileges were not even mentioned by the Marchese of Villabianca, an author flourishing only a century after Mugnòs!…

  The princess, who felt almost if not quite as strongly about nobility as did Donna Ferdinanda, had judged those 150 years of the Palmi family as sufficient, and more simply because, wanting her Raimondo’s wife to be as lowly to her husband as a slave-girl to her master, one whom he could treat loftily and do what he liked with, she had even for a moment thought of choosing him the humble daughter of a rich farmer … The disagreement was bitter.