The Charterhouse of Parma (45 page)

“How disappointed I shall be,” Fabrizio said to himself, “if instead of that heavenly and thoughtful face I am expecting, and which may blush a little if she catches sight of me, I should see coming the vulgar countenance of some ordinary chambermaid, assigned the task of tending the birds! But if I do see Clélia, will she deign to see me? Upon my soul, I’ll have to do something out of the ordinary to be noticed; my situation ought to have some privileges; besides, we’re both alone here and so far away from the world! I’m a prisoner, apparently what General Conti and the other such wretches call one of their inferiors.… But she has so much sense, or I should say so much soul, as the Count imagines, that perhaps, according to what he says, she despises her father’s profession; hence her melancholy! A noble source of sadness! But after all, I am not quite a stranger to her. With what modest grace she greeted me last night! I remember well how during our meeting near Como I told her: Some day I’ll come and look at your fine paintings in Parma, will you remember this name: Fabrizio del Dongo? Will she have forgotten? She was so young back then!

“But that reminds me,” Fabrizio said to himself, suddenly astonished and interrupting the course of his thoughts, “I was forgetting to be angry! Could I be one of those courageous men of the kind antiquity has revealed to the world? Am I a hero without suspecting it? What! I who was so afraid of prison—here I am, and I don’t even recall being melancholy! How true it is that fear has been a hundred
times worse than its object. So! I need to reason with myself to be distressed by this prison which, as Blanès used to say, can last ten years as easily as ten months? Might it be the amazement of all these new circumstances which distracts me from the pain I should be feeling? Perhaps this good humor independent of my will and quite without reason will suddenly vanish, perhaps in an instant I shall fall into the black despair that I ought to be feeling.

“In any case, it is quite surprising to be in prison and to have to reason with myself in order to be sad. My word, it brings me back to my supposition—perhaps I have a great character.”

Fabrizio’s reveries were interrupted by the carpenter of the Citadel, who had come to take the measurements for a window-blind; this was the first time that this prison had been used, and the authorities had forgotten to complete it down to this essential detail.

“So,” Fabrizio said to himself, “I shall be deprived of this sublime view,” and he tried to feel sad about this privation. “But what are you doing?” he suddenly exclaimed to the carpenter. “Am I no longer to see those pretty birds?”

“Oh, the Signorina’s birds that she’s so fond of!” the man said good-naturedly. “Hidden, eclipsed, overshadowed like all the rest.”

The carpenter, like the jailers, was strictly forbidden to speak, but this man had taken pity on the prisoner’s youth: he told him that these enormous shutters, placed over the sills of the two windows and slanting away from the wall, would block out everything but the prisoners’ view of the sky.

“This is done to effect their morale,” he told him, “in order to increase a salutary sadness and the desire for self-correction in the prisoners’ souls; the General,” the carpenter added, “has also devised a way of removing the panes of glass and having the windows replaced by oiled paper.”

Fabrizio greatly appreciated the epigrammatic turn this conversation was taking, a rare phenomenon in Italy.

“I’d like to have a bird to distract me here, I love their songs; buy me one from Signorina Clélia Conti’s chambermaid.”

“You mean you know her?” exclaimed the carpenter. “You say her name so readily.”

“Who has not heard of this famous beauty? But I’ve had the honor of meeting her several times at Court.”

“The poor young lady leads a very dull life here,” the carpenter added; “she spends all her time down there with her birds. This morning she’s just bought some splendid orange-trees which she’s ordered planted at the gates of the tower under your window; if it weren’t for the cornice you could see them.”

These were precious words for Fabrizio in this observation, and he found a tactful way of giving the carpenter some money.

“I’m committing two sins at once,” this man said to him. “I’m speaking to Your Excellency and I’m taking money. The day after tomorrow, when I come back for the blinds, I’ll bring a bird in my pocket, and if I’m not alone, I’ll pretend to let it fly away; if I possibly can, I’ll bring you a missal; you must be suffering from not being able to say your prayers.”

“So,” Fabrizio said to himself once he was alone, “these birds are hers, but in two days’ time, I shall no longer be seeing them!” With this observation, his thoughts took on a sorrowful tinge. But at last, to his inexpressible delight, after such a long wait and so much gazing, toward noon Clélia came to tend her birds. Fabrizio stood motionless, hardly daring to breathe as he leaned against the huge bars of his window. He noticed that she did not look up toward him, but her gestures had the awkwardness of someone who feels watched. Had she wished to, the poor girl could not have forgotten the faint smile that she had seen flickering over the prisoner’s lips, the evening before, when the police were taking him out of the guard-room.

Although, from all appearances, she was paying close attention to her actions, at the moment she approached the aviary window she blushed very noticeably. Fabrizio’s first thought, leaning against the iron bars of his window, was to indulge in the child’s play of tapping against these bars, which would produce a faint noise; then the mere notion of this indelicacy horrified him. “I should deserve eight days of having her send her chambermaid to tend her birds.” This delicate notion would scarcely have occurred to him at Naples or at Novara.

He eagerly followed her with his eyes: “Certainly,” he said to himself,
“she’ll leave without deigning to glance up at this poor window, and yet she’s just opposite …” But in returning from the rear of the room which Fabrizio, thanks to his higher position, could see quite clearly, Clélia could not keep herself from glancing up, as she was walking, and this was enough for Fabrizio to consider himself authorized to greet her. “Are we not alone in the world here?” he said to himself to work up his courage. Upon this gesture, the girl stood stock-still and lowered her eyes; then Fabrizio saw them look up very slowly; and obviously making a great effort to control herself, Clélia greeted the prisoner with the most serious and
distant
movement, but she could not impose silence upon her eyes; probably without her being aware of it, they expressed for a moment the deepest compassion. Fabrizio noticed that she was blushing so deeply that the pink hue rapidly spread to the upper part of her shoulders, from which the warm air had just caused her to remove, upon entering the aviary, a black lace shawl. The involuntary glance by which Fabrizio responded to her greeting redoubled the girl’s confusion.

“How happy that poor woman would be,” she was saying to herself, thinking of the Duchess, “if only for a moment she could see him as I am seeing him now.”

Fabrizio had had some faint hope of greeting her again upon her departure; but in order to avoid this new salutation, Clélia made a cunning retreat by stages, from cage to cage, as if, ultimately, she had had to tend the birds placed closest to the door. Finally she left the room; Fabrizio stood motionless staring at the door through which she had just vanished; he was another man.

From this moment the sole object of his thoughts was to know how he might manage to continue seeing her, even when this horrible blind had been put in place over the windows which overlooked the Governor’s
palazzo
.

The previous evening, before going to sleep, he had given himself the tedious obligation of concealing the best part of what gold he had in the various rat-holes which embellished his wooden cell. “And tonight I must hide my watch. Haven’t I heard it said that with patience and a jagged watch-spring, you can cut through wood and even
iron? So I might be able to saw through that blind …” This labor of hiding his watch, which lasted two long hours, did not seem long at all to him; he brooded over the various ways of achieving his goal, especially over what he knew about carpentry. “If I could manage it,” he said to himself, “I might cut out a square of the oak board that will form the shutter, near the part that will rest on the window-sill; I could remove and replace this piece depending on the circumstances; I’ll give everything I have to Grillo so that he’ll be good enough not to notice this little stratagem.” Henceforth all of Fabrizio’s happiness was attached to the possibility of performing this task, and he could think of nothing else. “If I can just manage to see her, I’m a happy man.… No,” he said to himself, “she must also see that I see her.” All night long, his head was filled with carpentry stratagems, and he may not have thought even once of the Court of Parma, of the Prince’s anger, and so on. We confess that he also did not think of the sufferings that must be overwhelming the Duchess. He waited impatiently for the next day, but the carpenter did not reappear: apparently he was regarded in the prison as a Liberal; it was found necessary to send someone else, a mean-faced fellow who made no reply except to grumble ominously in response to all the agreeable things Fabrizio could think up to say. Some of the Duchess’s many attempts to correspond with Fabrizio had been discovered by the Marchesa Raversi’s numerous agents, and by her General Fabio Conti was daily informed, alarmed, and put on his mettle. Every eight hours, six soldiers of the guard relieved those in the great hall with the hundred columns; moreover, the Governor posted a special jailer at each of the three iron gates along the corridor, and poor Grillo, the only man who actually saw the prisoner, was condemned to leaving the Farnese Tower only every eight days, which distressed him a good deal. He revealed his ill humor to Fabrizio, who had the wit to reply by no more than these words: “Plenty of
nebiolo d’Asti
, my friend,” and gave him some money.

“Well! Even this, which consoles us for every ill,” exclaimed the outraged Grillo, his voice barely audible to the prisoner, “we’re forbidden to take, and I should refuse it, but I’m going to take it; besides, it’s a waste of money; there’s nothing I can tell you about anything. You
must be nice and guilty; the whole Citadel is in a frenzy on account of you; the Duchess’s goings-on have managed to get three of us dismissed already.”

“Will the shutter be ready before noon?” Such was the great question which made Fabrizio’s heart pound all that long morning; he counted every quarter of an hour which chimed from the Citadel’s clock-tower. Finally, when the last quarter before noon was striking, the blind had not yet arrived; Clélia reappeared to tend her birds. Cruel necessity had given wings to Fabrizio’s boldness, and the danger of no longer seeing her seemed so overpowering that he dared, as he stared at her, to make the gesture of sawing the shutter with his finger; it is true that immediately after having perceived this gesture, so seditious in a prison, she faintly bowed and withdrew.

“What is this?” exclaimed Fabrizio. “Can she be silly enough to see an absurd familiarity in a gesture dictated by the most imperious necessity? I wanted to ask her to deign, whenever she comes to tend her birds, to glance occasionally at the prison window, even when she finds it covered by an enormous wooden shutter; I wanted to show her that I would do whatever is humanly possible to manage to see her. Good God! Can it be that she won’t come tomorrow because of this one indiscreet gesture?”

This fear, which troubled Fabrizio’s sleep, was completely justified; the next day Clélia had not appeared by three o’clock in the afternoon, when the huge blinds were put in place over Fabrizio’s windows; the various planks had been raised, starting from the esplanade of the great tower, by means of ropes and pulleys attached outside to the iron bars of the windows. It is true that, hidden behind a shutter in her own apartment, Clélia had followed in anguish every action of the workmen; she had clearly seen Fabrizio’s mortal anxiety, but had nevertheless had the courage to keep the promise she had made to herself.

Clélia was a little devotee of Liberalism; in her childhood she had taken quite seriously all the Liberal notions she had heard in the company of her father, whose only thoughts were of establishing his position in society; she had then gone on to hold in scorn and virtually in horror the courtier’s supple character: hence her antipathy to marriage.
Since Fabrizio’s arrival, she was filled with remorse: “Now,” she said to herself, “my unworthy heart sides with people who seek to betray my father! And he dares make me a gesture of sawing through a door!… But,” she immediately said to herself, her soul overwhelmed, “the whole town is talking of his imminent death! Tomorrow may well be the fatal day! With the monsters who govern us now, anything in the world is possible! What sweetness, what heroic serenity in those eyes which may be about to close forever! Lord! What agonies the Duchess must be suffering! They say she’s in complete despair. If I were she, I’d go stab the Prince, like that heroine
Charlotte Corday
 …”

During this whole third day of his imprisonment, Fabrizio was crazed with anger, but solely for not having seen Clélia reappear.

“Anger for anger, I should have told her that I loved her,” he exclaimed to himself, for he had arrived at this discovery. “No, it’s not out of greatness of soul that I am ignoring my prison and belying Blanès’s prophecy; such honor does not fall to me. In spite of myself I am dreaming of that sweet glance of pity Clélia cast upon me when the police were taking me out of the guard-room; that glance has erased my entire past life. Who could have told me that I should find such gentle eyes in such a place! And just when I had my own eyes sullied by the physiognomy of a Barbone and by that of Signor Governor-General. Heaven appears amidst these vile creatures. And what am I to do if I am not to love beauty and seek to see it again? No, it is not by greatness of soul that I am indifferent to all the little vexations with which prison overwhelms me.” Fabrizio’s imagination, rapidly considering all the possibilities, arrived at that of being restored to liberty. “No doubt the Duchess’s friendship will work miracles for me. Well! I shall thank her for my freedom with no more than my lips; these places are not the sort to which one returns! Once out of prison, separates socially as we are, I shall probably never see Clélia again! And as a matter of fact, what harm has prison done me? If Clélia deigned not to overwhelm me with her anger, what else would I have to ask of Heaven?”