The only way to bring peace back to the family was for the young man to marry and set up house on his own. Anyway he was now twenty-three, and heirs to the Uzeda princedom married young. Hangers-on, gossips, the curious, all those who took as much interest in Francalanza affairs as if they were their own, were impatiently awaiting his and Teresa’s marriages and discussing possible matches. For Consalvo there was almost too wide a choice; the Baron Currera, the Baron Requense, the Marchese Corvitini, the Curcuma and numbers of other families had richly dowered daughters of marriageable age. For Teresa things were more difficult. The only young men both rich and noble enough to marry her were the two sons of the Duchess Radalì. The duchess, who had sacrificed her best years for love of her elder son, was very possessive and had not yet got him married as she could not find a good enough match for him. She kept him sewn to her skirts as if someone might steal him; but Giovannino she let free lest the young man should feel like marrying. His uncle’s inheritance had made him as rich as his elder brother; but there were differences between the two to be considered. Michele was not of very winning appearance, at twenty-six he had little hair and was too fat; but he was the elder and bore all the family titles. The second son, who only had the untransmissible title of baron, was one of the most graceful and elegant young men in town. Though they had been to the Uzeda palace very little ever since there was a girl of marriageable age living there—in fact because of that—rumours of a possible marriage found credit. But if the prince was asked what truth there was in this he would declare that Consalvo had to marry first, and the princess would be quite annoyed. ‘I do dislike all this gossip, as it might so easily come to Teresina’s ear, and I’m so careful of her. My system is that girls shouldn’t hear these or any other remarks …’
Teresa never seemed to hear either this or anything much else that was said, and dreamt open-eyed through the days. She devoured the few novels and books of verse which the princess allowed her to read, and painted pictures of battlemented castles rising from bright blue lakes, of troubadours with guitars slung from their shoulders, or more often of chatelaines kneeling and praying, or of a Madonna with the Divine Child in her arms. The princess preferred the austere and particularly the sacred compositions, so the girl stopped drawing more frivolous subjects. She never relaxed this constant submission to the will of others, this sense of dutiful obedience. The more trouble Consalvo gave the family, the more she thought it her duty to avoid causing her parents the slightest distress. The poetic tales in the books would arouse her fancy and quicken her heart, but if the princess judged she was spending too long on frivolous reading she stopped at once. Often when she heard a novel or play or book of verse praised she longed to read it, imagining how lovely it must be and the pleasure it would give her, but she put it out of her mind if her stepmother said, ‘No, Teresina, it’s not for you.’ Sometimes such books were in the possession of Consalvo, who, though he only pursued positive studies, also bought lighter reading to show himself au fait with everything. So all Teresa would have had to do was borrow the book from her brother and read it in secret, but this idea never even entered her head, for the same reason that in college she had refused to read certain books which her companions contrived to get hold of, and had not listened to the talk of her frustrated friends on forbidden subjects. Both confessor and headmistress had told her there were certain things she should never mention, and she had rigorously abstained. Just as in her childhood the thought of praises and prizes to be obtained won over the temptations of curiosity, so now aspiration to be an example to others made her forget what she was depriving herself of.
Now she was often taken to the theatre; in summer to comedies, in winter to melodramas; and she did not know which of the two she liked most. Now and again she herself would compose a waltz or a mazurka, or nocturnes, symphonies, wordless fantasies with titles like ‘Yearning!’ ‘Enchantment!’ ‘A tale of melancholy!’ ‘For ever!…’ and her acquaintances, relatives and friends would all buzz with admiration at hearing them. Even her music-master, an old man chosen on purpose by the princess so as not to put ‘tinder next to fire’, was full of praises. Don Cono, the old family hanger-on, called her ‘Bellini in skirts’ and once even exclaimed, ‘I consider that the orchestra of warriors might fittingly rehearse her music and then execute it in public!’ ‘The orchestra of warriors’ meant the local military band, which had the reputation of being one of the best in Italy. Teresa parried this, while the princess could not make up her mind between pleasure at showing everybody ‘my daughter’s talent’, and loathing for publicity. The prince, as no money was involved, showed complete indifference. But Don Cono held fast his idea, and one day came and said that he had already spoken to the band-master.
Then Dono Cono brought the latter to the palace. Dark hair, light moustaches, pink cheeks, he was young and handsome as the Archangel Michael. As soon as the princess set eyes on him she began sniffing and making signs to Don Cono to say that she’d never expected such a thing from him, to bring a man with those looks to the house?… Meanwhile the band-master was playing the young princess’s compositions on the piano with a touch and expression which made them unrecognisable to the composer herself. At every piece he expressed growing admiration and when there were no more said he would prefer not to choose as each was lovelier than the other; being unable to take them all he left it to the ‘princess’ herself to choose. Teresa gave him ‘A tale of melancholy’, but when, after scoring it, the band-master appeared a week later at the palace gates to show her his work, the porter told him that his master and mistress were no longer receiving.
‘To bring a man like that to the house? Never did I think you’d do such a thing … It’s obvious you’ve no daughters!’ Donna Graziella had said to the old hanger-on in her worry. But she was exaggerating as she did in everything else; would the young Princess of Francalanza ever glance at a bandleader?
‘A tale of melancholy’ was played one Sunday on the marine parade by the regimental band. The concert was one of their best, and Teresa’s composition seemed like part of a real opera with some of the singing parts rendered by a French horn as soft as a human voice, and organ effects which made people think they were in San Nicola listening to Donato del Piano’s instrument. Teresa listened in a closed carriage under the plane trees, her heart beating fit to break, with a sob in her throat and a face pale as a white rose, then suddenly flushed scarlet when at the end of the piece there was a burst of applause.
Her own music, the music of others, plays, poetry, swept her into ecstasy, high away into a blue ether where she could no longer feel her body and breathed and drank in the purest of happiness even amid tears. But none of the emotions, sweet, ardent or sad, tender or desperate, always ineffable, swelling her heart with joy or gripping it with anguish, were known to the world. She never betrayed herself; even when her mind was most perturbed, thinking of love, waiting for love, or when she was in the company of men, of handsome youths like her cousin Giovannino Radalì; while her imagination was painting in bright outline her own future, her joys and sorrows, fortunes and disasters, she remained calm, composed, and serene. It needed no great effort to disperse those fantasies by turning her mind to the petty or thankless calls of reality.
The meeting with the regimental band-master, his praises, his playing of her music, had loosed a tempest within her. But when the young man did not return to the palace because of the princess’s veto, she never gave him another thought. Don Cono, still taken by his idea, and encouraged by success, spoke one day to the controller of public entertainment so that the conductor of the municipal orchestra should also arrange for one of the princess’s compositions to be played. This controller of entertainment was Giuliano Biancavilla, son of Don Antonio and one of the Bivona. He was about thirty, with a dark skin and hair black as an Arab’s, but slim and elegant and with the gentlest of eyes. As soon as he heard Don Cono’s suggestion he at once gave the appropriate orders, and the princess agr
eed to her daughter having all the necessary interviews with the conductor, who was about sixty. But how many ways the devil has of getting his tail in! Donna Graziella, with all her precautions, could not prevent the young controller from setting eyes from afar on Teresa! In the theatre he would stare at her without stopping for an instant; at the parade, his carriage would always follow the Uzedas’; even in church he arranged to be on their way. As soon as the princess realised what was going on, she referred the matter to the prince, who let fall only three words:
‘Mad, poor man.’
Then his wife’s tongue began working. A Biancavilla pretending to the hand of a Princess of Francalanza? Maybe because an Uzeda had married a Giulente? Poor man, he thought he had another Lucrezia to deal with! Noble? Oh yes, the Biancavilla were noble and rich too, but their riches and nobility did not make them equal to the Viceroys. ‘What daring and impertinence! To set people gossiping about my daughter!…’ And she never seemed to realise that by all her talk she was spreading the news quicker.
In a short time it was the sole subject of conversation in town. ‘Will they give her to him?… Won’t they give her to him?…’ But all recognised that Biancavilla had set eyes too high. Baldassarre, particularly, was beside himself. Of course he wanted the young princess to marry someone suitable for her, at the very least a baron rich enough to keep her regally, and while waiting for the prince to make his choice in his heart he had destined his young mistress to her cousin Don Giovannino. One thing, anyway, he was sure of: that the Signorina Teresa would never even notice Biancavilla’s existence.
Instead of this, as time went on the young man’s looks had drawn hers as by some magnetic force, and now made her quicken and suddenly catch her breath. She would look at him too every now and then, and find her view blurred by her own emotion. After a glimpse of him however distant she would return home happy and smiling and begin improvising on the piano, atremble from head to foot, as if he could hear all the secret thoughts of love she was confiding to the instrument, the divine hopes of eternal happiness. At college she had sometimes composed a few verses on feast days of mistresses or birthdays of friends; now she wanted to write one for him, set it to music only for him:
Were I but the pallid
little ray of light
that in the dusky night
the moon lays on thy brow;
Were I but the zephyr
gently breathing air
fondling thy hair …
She could get no further, but began composing a ballad on this theme, called ‘Were I …’ weeping sweet tears when no one was watching as the passionate notes flew from the keys.
That winter some balls were given by Baron Curcuma. Till then Donna Graziella had not taken Teresa out in society, firstly because she did not want young men to approach too near her ‘daughter’ and also because she considered no house worthy of being frequented by the young princess. The Curcumas’, though, passed muster, and the prince also wanted the whole family to go. But Donna Graziella had a presentiment; and the very first evening who should be there but Giuliano Biancavilla … Had that presumptuous youth known a little of the world he would have kept quietly to his place; instead of which he actually introduced himself and asked Teresa for a dance!… She trembled in his arms; not a word did he say except ‘Are you tired?… Thank you …’ But she felt in heaven, while the princess on tenterhooks was making her husband signs to alert him about the danger. But the prince was deep in conversation with his host. And suddenly the young thruster reappeared to ask the signorina for a mazurka. Then Donna Graziella intervened.
‘Excuse us, cavaliere, my daughter’s tired.’
With a tightening of the heart Teresa noticed her stepmother’s opposition. Inflamed at having held her a moment in his arms, Biancavilla now began following her through the streets like a shadow. The princess puffed and sniffed with rage. Once at the door of the Minorite Church, as he passed in front of them she exclaimed quietly, but loud enough for those around to hear, ‘What a bore!…’
Teresa mourned long, hiding her tears, foreseeing all her hopes dashed if her parents would not have him. The Biancavilla family also knew that the Uzeda would never consent to the match. But the young man, quite beside himself with love, kept on and on imploring his mother and father to make the request; so much so that one day Biancavilla’s father took his courage in both hands and went to talk to the duke. The latter, with much use of ‘greatly honoured’ and ‘what a pleasure it would be for me’, told him he would speak to the prince. Giacomo repeated to his uncle the same three words he’d said to his wife, with one small variation, ‘Mad, poor things!’ Then the duke with many a fine turn of phrase answered Don Antonio that there was nothing to be done, ‘as the prince wanted Consalvo married first’.
This was not an excuse. The prince had started negotiations with the Curcuma and gone to their house to arrange a match between the young baroness and his son. The match had been accepted blindly, and Consalvo’s assiduous attendance at the baron’s balls was taken as the start of his courtship to the daughter of the house. But he knew nothing of his father’s arrangements, and went into society nowadays just to talk politics and philosophy. All the gold in the world would never have got him to dance a waltz; he would hold forth among, the men, and if any ladies or girls came up, talked to them about municipal accounts, school regulations and the yield from consumer taxes, with many quotations of statistics and Latin proverbs. Repeated from mouth to mouth, the news of his own marriage eventually reached him. Then he burst into a cordial laugh and said even more laconically than his father:
‘Mad!’
Take a wife, marry a gold-draped doll like that young baroness, tie himself still more closely to this town which he yearned to leave, create binding family duties, when what he needed was to be free as air, to dedicate all his energies to achieving his aim? Mad, yes, they really were! The matter seemed so absurd that he did not even stop his visits to the baron.
At this point Giuliano Biancavilla left, having lost all hope. Some said he had gone to Rome, some to Paris, some added that he would never return home again, careless of his sorrowing family. The duke, charged by the prince who was afraid of speaking directly to his son, announced to Consalvo that it was time he took a wife and that the whole family was agreed on the young baroness.
‘Of course, Excellency,’ replied the young man. ‘There’s one difficulty though.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I don’t want her!’
‘And why don’t you want her?’
‘Well, I just don’t! Is it I or Your Excellency who’s to marry? It’s I, isn’t it? So it’s up to me to show my own wishes. And I don’t want her.’
At the moment when the duke referred this reply to the prince Giacomo was already in a furious temper, having just heard that the expert charged by the Court to examine the late Don Blasco’s Will had pronounced against the genuineness of the signature. On hearing of his son’s decisive refusal he burst into a raucous shout.
‘It’s his Evil Eye! He’s doing it on purpose. To kill me. I’ll see him die first! Tell him that he can choose who the devil he likes. Marry the first slut he wants, one of those tarts he went round with before he got it into his head to be literary. Marry whomever he likes and go to the devil, because I don’t want to have any more to do with him and his Evil Eye!’
‘Excellency,’ replied the young prince to his uncle, who had brought him this second message, ‘I wish neither to marry the Curcuma girl nor any other. I’m still young and there’s lots of time for shackles later. Anyway it’s quite certain there’s no point in talking to me about marriage for the moment. I’m not a woman like Aunt Chiara, whom my grandmother forced into marriage …’
The new storm blew up with a rumble, lightning flashed from the prince’s furious eyes, thunder boomed in his harsh voice.
‘Holy God of Love!’ cried the princess to Teresa. ‘How dreadful this quarrel is, how shocking! Howev
er will it end?… But you … You haven’t given anyone the slightest worry … Blessings on you!… May you always be such a saint …’
Teresa let herself be embraced and kissed by her stepmother, relished the praise, deplored the quarrel between her father and brother, implored Our Lady to stop it. What could she offer the Virgin to obtain such a grace? Her love for Giuliano?… No, that was too much, it was what she had most at heart … She no longer saw the young man, knew nothing of the request and its refusal. Even so she realised that her parents did not look favourably on that match; but hope was still alive in her. Some day or other her father and stepmother might think it over and consent to her being happy …
One day, though, the storm brewing between her father and brother did break. The latter had ordered on his own initiative, without consulting anyone, four large bookcases to take his books. When the prince saw this furniture arriving he sent for Consalvo and asked him excitedly:
‘Who gave you permission to order things for my house?’
The young man replied, with the studied coldness which particularly infuriated his father: ‘I needed the furniture.’
‘Here it’s I who give orders; I’ve told you that often enough,’ replied the other, making violent efforts to control himself. ‘Not a nail is to be put in without my permission! If you want to act the master, you can leave. Nobody’s keeping you here … Take a wife and be damned to you!’
‘Already,’ replied Consalvo, more coldly than ever, ‘I have told uncle that I don’t want to get married …’
‘Oh you don’t want?… You don’t want?… Then I’ll kick you out of the house, you swine! Carter! Animal!’
The Viceroys Page 54
