Donna Mara Fersa was of the old school, quite uneducated and even rather coarse mannered; but very shrewd and direct, and easy-going as any good housewife. She had hoped to marry her son off in her own way, but he had once gone to Palermo, seen Isabella Pinto, an orphan, fallen violently in love and immediately asked her hand of her maternal uncle who had brought her up. She was of very noble stock but without a dowry, though she had received an excellent education in her rich uncle’s house. The Fersa, on the other hand, though admitted among gentry, were of mediocre birth; Donna Ferdinanda, an admirer and friend of Donna Isabella, nicknamed them ‘Farce’—laughable farce—but they had a mass of money.
Donna Mara had at first tried to oppose that marriage; but as her son was head over heels in love with Isabella, who seemed even more so with him, the mother had finally agreed. And so the daughter-in-law from Palermo, elegant, educated, and noble, came to set the household upside-down; this Donna Mara took in very good part for love of her son, realising that one cannot oppose the tastes or whims of the young. Donna Isabella, though calling her ‘Mama’ and showing her the respect which was her due, seemed discontented with her, ashamed of her ignorance and simplicity. This attitude was so subtle that Matilde almost blamed herself for ill-will in noticing a kind of condescending pity for the mother-in-law’s opinions, as if they were those of a child or an inferior, an imperceptible exaggeration of obedience, a vague air of sacrifice which seemed intended to arouse pity in others but was particularly distasteful to Matilde.
Anyway it seemed certain that she would not have to endure her company for long. The only thing keeping Raimondo in Sicily could be the need to settle his interests; but he might hasten his departure to escape the cholera. Already at the first rumours of an epidemic, worried at being so far from her father and child, she had asked what he wanted to do; but her husband had not yet decided. The year before, in Tuscany, on hearing the news of the carnage in Sicily, of the terror reigning in the island, of the collapse of all civil organisation, he had expressed his satisfaction at being far away from his ‘savage’ native land, where, said he, he would take good care not to find himself in times of epidemic; so she was almost sure that they would cross over to the mainland, picking up the baby on the way.
Raimondo, on the other hand, seemed hesitant. He did complain of the evil star which had got him caught by the plague in an island trap, but said they could not travel because of her pregnancy now that the disease had broken out. Meanwhile Matilde’s father was writing for them to join him at Milazzo, as the cholera was coming from the south, and leave Catania soon, not wait till panic-stricken locals barricaded all roads. And so, as the news got worse, as her father’s letters became more pressing, as the danger of being cut off from her child grew graver, her heart was assailed with terror and anxiety as if she were about to lose her dear ones for ever; she exhorted Raimondo more warmly to come to some decision and leave at once.
‘Let’s get away!… let’s go to my home for a time! I don’t want to leave Teresina alone … We’ll also be farther from the plague’s hot-bed.’
‘Why should I shut myself up in a seaside village in time of cholera? And die like a dog? You must be mad! No, write to your father and sister to bring the child here.’
But the baron replied at once that he would on no account do anything so silly, as the cholera was at the gates of Catania, and he adjured his daughter not to lose time and even to leave Raimondo alone if he refused to come with her … Then she no longer knew what to do or whom to heed, frenzied at the idea of staying apart from her daughter and father, and unable to face the idea of leaving Raimondo, feeling she could live away from neither at such a time. The day that the duke packed his bags and left for Palermo she felt lost …
Till the last moment the prince had pressed his uncle to come with him to the Belvedere. The duke continued to refuse, adducing his affairs calling him to the capital and the greater safety there.
‘Don’t give me a thought,’ he said to his nieces and nephews, ‘I’ll run no risk; but get to safety yourselves.’
‘Your Excellency need not worry about me; I have all ready to leave at the first alarm,’ replied Giacomo. Turning to his brother, whom he had already invited once, he repeated in Matilde’s presence:
‘If you care to come too, I’d be pleased.’
Raimondo did not reply. Did he really want to stay apart from his daughter? Could he live so calmly far away from her in the terrible days coming? Matilde sobbed, begging him not to do such a thing. He replied testily:
‘I don’t know yet what I’ll do. One thing’s sure, I’m not going to Milazzo.’
‘Are we to leave that poor child alone then? Suppose they close the ferry, suppose we can’t see her any more?’
‘First of all your daughter is not abandoned in the middle of a road but is with her grandfather and aunt. Then if that stiffneck of a father of yours had listened to me by now he’d have brought her here and we’d be ready to go off all together to the Belvedere, where there isn’t a shadow of danger … Anyway, I’m not going to Milazzo; there’s already talk of suspected cases in Messina. Go alone, if you wish.’
And all the Uzeda, as if enjoying her anguish, as if not wanting to let her out of their clutches, approved and said that now everyone must stay where they were. Her father reproved her harshly for stubbornness and selfishness, while she thought she was going mad; dreaming every night ghastly dreams about slow death agonies, final separations, grisly tortures; weeping as if her child were dead and the new creature moving in her womb too; seeing her father and Raimondo hurl themselves at each other … And one terrible nightmarish day the prince came to say that the first case had appeared in the city, that the roads were being blocked, that they must leave for the Belvedere at once—where the two Fersa would be coming also …
Villa Francalanza at the Belvedere was still in the same state as three months before at the moment of the princess’s death. There, with their suites of servants, met the families of the prince and his guests, Chiara and the marchese, Donna Ferdinanda, the Cavaliere Don Eugenio, Raimondo and his wife. Ferdinando had refused to hear of leaving his own place; he had stayed there for the cholera of the year before; he would stay for this year’s too, declaring that no place offered better guarantees of immunity. Don Blasco and the Prior Don Lodovico had already made off, with all the San Nicola monks, for Nicolosi.
The Uzeda country mansion was big enough to house a regiment of soldiers as well as the prince’s guests but, like the palace in town, it had been through so many modifications and successive remodellings that it seemed made up of various layers of building stuck together haphazardly; there were not two windows of the same design or two façades of the same colour. The internal lay-out looked like the work of a lunatic, so often had it been altered. The same had happened with the surrounding land. Once upon a time, under Prince Giacomo XIII, this had been nearly all noble gardens. The prince, a lover of flowers, had spent on these some of the sums which had brought about his ruin; he had caused a well to be dug for water through the centuries-old lava of Mongibello, to a depth of 100 canne. The whole work was done by hand, with picks, and took about three years. When the water was finally found and drawn up by a chain-pump, he considered that viticulture could advantageously be exchanged for orchards, so he tore up all the vines in the land not yet transformed into a garden, to plant oranges and lemons. Thus the money laid out by his grandfather to build vats and cellar was lost.
But on Donna Teresa’s advent, all was thrown upside-down once more. Flowers being things ‘which one can’t eat’, roses and carnations were uprooted, pillars reduced to bricks, hothouses transformed into stalls for mules, and as wine fetched a higher price than fruit, the fine orange and lemon trees which had been tended so carefully were sacrificed for vines. There were now only a few acres of garden left between the gates and the house, and just enough fruit-trees for lemonade in summer-time. So all the money was truly flung down the well.
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Now as soon as he arrived the prince began renovating too, as he had at the palace. The land he did not touch, judging, like his mother, that the bedraggled roses clambering over the iron gates and walls of the villa were enough for the pleasure of sight and smell, and that cabbages, lettuces and onions were much better in the old flower-beds; but he called in workmen and told them to pull down walls and divide up rooms and block in doors and pierce new windows. He was in excellent mood and treated his guests well; he paid devoted court to his Aunt Ferdinanda, was all courtesy to his brother and sisters, his brother-in-law the marchese, and his sister-in-law Matilde. Of course, considering the time of year, no one spoke of business. Lucrezia was even more content than he, for the Giulente, who had no house of their own in town, owned one of the pleasantest villas at the Belvedere, and Benedetto, having come up there with his family at the first rumour of cholera, passed to and fro at any hour by the Francalanza gates.
The marchese was also very pleased, and Chiara quite beside herself with delight as her symptoms of pregnancy were confirmed; the husband and wife’s only worry was inability to prepare baby clothes. Even Donna Ferdinanda seemed more approachable, domesticated by the prince’s hospitality, pleased at saving the expense of taking a villa—though not of food, for each of the guests paid his own share.
But most pleased of all was the young prince. Morning and evening he was out in vineyards and garden, digging, carrying earth, building mud-houses. When tired of these occupations he would gallop to and fro astride a donkey or a mule, and if lackey or factor or other guide did not let him go where he wanted, he gave the man the whipping which he would have given his mount. Only the sight of his father could rein him in, for the prince had brought him up to tremble at a glance, though all his other relatives let him do what he liked. The princess agreed with him at a sign; his Aunt Ferdinanda also helped to spoil him, as heir to the princedom; only Don Eugenio vexed him now with lessons worse than in town. The boy would understand everything when attentive, but the difficulty was to make him keep quiet.
‘Study now or your father will send you to college!’ his uncle warned him; and in fact the prince had more than once expressed the intention of sending his son away from home and putting him either at the Cutelli College, founded to educate the nobility ‘in the Spanish mode’, or in the Benedictine novitiate, where youths who did not want to make vows received an education equally noble. Consalvo did not want to go to either place, and the threat was enough for him to decide to practise his handwriting and recite declensions. As a reward Don Eugenio took the boy with him around the countryside of Mompileri, where, a few days after his arrival at the Belvedere, he had begun to make certain mysterious trips.
About two centuries before, in 1669, the Etna lava had covered a little village near there called Massa Annunziata, and later on a few remains of its houses had been found. Now Don Eugenio, who had not earned much from trafficking in pots and was always brooding over some great coup which would enrich him, had conceived the plan of starting a series of excavations, like those he had seen at Herculaneum or Pompeii, to uncover the buried village and enrich himself with the money and objects which would certainly be found there. Secrecy was necessary so that others should not filch his idea. And that was why, alone or accompanied by the boy, who would go off on his own to hunt for lizards and butterflies, the cavaliere wandered amid the gorse and cactus lying below Mompileri with old books in his hand, getting his bearings from the spires of Nicolosi and Torre Del Grifo, studying the land, taking measurements, and risking arrest as an evil spirit by muleteers and shepherds who noticed him in those suspicious attitudes. But keeping the secrecy of the idea was not enough; to put it into action a great deal of money was also needed. So one day Don Eugenio called the prince aside, and with an air of great mystery informed him of the plan and asked him to lend enough money to pay for excavations.
‘Is Your Excellency joking or really serious? Excavate the mountain and find what? A few cooking-pots and bits of copper? You must be mad …’
Indirectly the prince was applying the word ‘mad’ to himself by that reply, which he would never have dreamt of making to the duke or Donna Ferdinanda. But Don Eugenio had little prestige in the family because of his follies in Naples, and in particular because of his utter lack of money … The cavaliere never mentioned the idea to him again. He changed his line and wondered whether to write to the government to do the excavations at public expense in the hope they would make him director. The young prince breathed freely as lessons were interrupted; after dinner Don Eugenio would shut himself up in his room to work on his memorandum and was not to be seen again for the whole evening, while the others gossiped or gambled.
Gradually quite a considerable society gathered at the villa; all the gentry in refuge at the Belvedere, all the local notabilities came to Villa Francalanza, where the prince held court and regaled them on anise and water. Half Catania was at the Belvedere, and the Uzeda, who were very exclusive in town, now made concessions because of the place and season, receiving people of small or even no nobility, all those whom Donna Ferdinanda derided or despised, whose names she would twist or to whom she would assign clownish coats-of-arms; the Maurigne for instance, who called themselves ‘cavalieri’, dubbed by the old aunt ‘foot cavaliers’; or the Mongiolino, who being descended from enriched brick-makers ought to have had tiles and bricks on their shields. Of that dubious class only the Giulente did not come to the villa because of Benedetto, but when the prince met Benedetto or his father or uncle at the public casino he was most affable, and the young man, who had not interrupted his correspondence with Lucrezia, would pass this on to her, delighted with such amiability. The girl’s joy increased her distraction of mind instead of decreasing it: she asked widowers for news of their dead wives, mistook one person for another, forgot everything. One evening she made everyone laugh by asking the Belvedere chemist, who had a sister in a convent:
‘And who is your sister the nun married to?…’
The thread running through all talk was of course news from town, where the cholera was spreading, though slowly and not raging with the terrifying force of the year before. Each exchanged news of relations and friends who had taken refuge in various parts of the Etna Woods; Cousin Graziella, who was at La Zafferana, sent notes and messages by carters almost every day to ask after her cousins, give news of herself and her husband, send warm greetings with presents of fruit and wine; the Duchess Radalì-Uzeda did not write from La Tardarìa because in the stress of unexpected departure, her husband had gone raving mad: madness was hereditary in the Radalì branch of the family; the Duke Radalì had suffered his first fits three years before at the birth of his second son Giovannino.
Since then the duchess, finding the responsibility for the whole household on her shoulders, had renounced the world to take the father’s place with her children. She loved them both, but preferred the young Duke Michele. Not content with instituting primogeniture she worked to improve the property, and led a life of economy and sacrifice so as to leave him even richer. She gave no umbrage to any of the Uzeda; even Donna Ferdinanda, who thought herself the only balanced mind, approved of her. At the Belvedere, in spite of the cholera, the old spinster took an interest in business, drawing apart the men who understood it, talking of loans, mortgages, credits to be granted, failures to be feared; and while the Prince of Roccasciano was explaining to the old speculator the laborious plans on which he was slowly and patiently building up his own fortune, his wife the princess, unbeknown to him, was gambling away with Raimondo and other passionate card-players all the money she had on her. Giacomo could sometimes be seen playing without ever producing a coin, but most of the time he spent chatting with people from the village.
There came to pay him court the doctor, the chemist, the landowners, when he found their aspect pleasant, for those among his mother’s familiars whom he thought to have the Evil Eye had been refused the door. The parish priest, the canon, and al
l the clerics in the village came. As in town, the Uzeda home was frequented here by all the regular and secular clergy, because of its reputation for devoutness and the good it had always done to the Church. The prince’s refusal to recognise the legacy to the Convent of San Placido did not prejudice him with these; it was human and natural for him to try to keep most of the property for himself; his mother had done so too. On dying he would be generous with the Church for the good of his soul.
As head of the family he also had the faculty of nominating priests celebrating Mass in all chapels and benefices founded by his ancestors; there at the Belvedere, particularly, was a very prosperous one, that of the Holy Light. One Silvio Uzeda, a dotty creature, who lived a century and a half before, had always been surrounded by priests and friars, and the monks of the monastery of Saint Mary of the Holy Light had persuaded him that the Madonna wanted to marry him. At this he was beside himself with joy. Tradition said that the ceremony had been carried out with all formalities. The bridegroom, after Confession and Communion, had been led, dressed in gala clothes, before the statue of the Blessed Virgin, where the priest asked him according to the formula if he wished to marry Her. ‘Yes!’ Uzeda had replied. Then the same question was asked of the Queen of Heaven, and, through the mouth of the Father Guardian of the Monastery, she too had replied ‘Yes’. Then rings had been exchanged; the statue still had on its finger that of the bridegroom who had of course left all his goods to his Consort. A long legal battle had followed, as the natural heirs refused to recognise the madman’s Will. Finally they had come to terms; as a result half the property had been used to found at the monastery a lay chaplaincy over which the Uzeda had patronage.
The Viceroys Page 17
