The Leopard (21 page)

'But they won't succeed, because we think we are gods.'

"I don't think they understood, but they laughed and went off. That is my answer to you too, my dear Chevalley: the Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery; every invasion by outsiders, whether so by origin or, if Sicilian, by independence of spirit, upsets their illusion of achieved perfection, risks disturbing their satisfied waiting for nothing; having been trampled on by a dozen different peoples, they consider they have an imperial past which gives them a right to a grand funeral. Do you really think, Chevalley, that you are the first who has hoped to canalize Sicily into the flow of universal history? I wonder how many Moslem imams, how many of King Roger's knights, how many Swabian scribes, how many Angevin barons, how many jurists of the Most Catholic King have conceived the same fine folly; and how many Spanish viceroys too, how many of Charles III's reforming functionaries! And who knows now what happened to them all! Sicily wanted to sleep in spite of their invocations; for why should she listen to them if she herself is rich, if she's wise, if she's civilized, if she's honest) if she's admired and envied by all, if, in a word, she is perfect?

"Now even people here are repeating what was written by Proudhon and some German Jew whose name I can't remember, that the bad state of things, here and elsewhere, is all due to feudalism; that is, my fault, as it were. Maybe. But there's been feudalism everywhere, and foreign invasions too. I don't believe that your ancestors, Chevalley, or the English squires or the French seigneurs governed Sicily any better than did the Salinas. The results were different. The reason for the difference must lie in this sense of superiority that dazzles every Sicilian eye, and which we ourselves call pride while in reality it is blindness. For the moment', for a long time yet, there's nothing to be done. I am sorry; but I cannot lift a finger in politics. It would only get bitten. These are things one can't say to a Sicilian; and if you'd said them yourself, I too would have objected.

"It's late, Chevalley; we must go and dress for dinner. For a few hours I have to act the part of a civilized man." Chevalley left early next morning, and Don Fabrizio, who had arranged to go out shooting, was able to accompany him to the post station. With them was Don Ciccio Tumeo, carrying on his shoulders the double weight of two shotguns, his and Don Fabrizio's, and within himself the bile of his own trampled virtue.

In the livid light of five-thirty in the morning Donna fugata was deserted and apparently despairing. In front of every house the refuse of squalid meals accumulated along leprous walls; trembling dogs were routing about with a greed that was always disappointed. An occasional door was already open and the smell of sleep spread out into the street; by glimmering wicks mothers scrutinized the eyelids of their children for trachoma; almost all were in mourning, and many h2~d been the wives of those carcasses one stumbles over on the turns of mountain tracks. The men were coming out gripping their hoes to look for someone who might give them work, God willing; subdued silence alternated with exasperated screams of hysterical voices; away over toward the Convent of the Holy Spirit a tin-colored dawn was beginning to tinge leaden clouds. Chevalley thought, "This state of things won't last; our lively new modern administration will change it all." The Prince was depressed: "All this shouldn't last; but it will, always; the human 'always,' of course, a century, two centuries . . . and after that it will be different, but worse. We were the Leopards, the Lions; those who'll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth." They thanked each other and said goodbye. Chevalley hoisted himself up onto the post carriage, propped on four wheels the color of vomit. The horse, all hunger and sores, began its long journey.

Day had just dawned; the little light that managed to pass through the quilt of clouds was held up once more by the immemorial filth on the windows. Chevalley was alone; amid bumps and shakes he moistened the tip of his index finger with saliva and cleaned a pane for the width of an eye. He looked out: in front of him, under the ashen light, the landscape lurched to and fro, irredeemable.

5

Father Pirrone Pays A Visit

Father Pirrone's arrival at San Cono - Conversation with his friends and the herbalist - Family troubles of a Jesuit - The troubles
solved - Interview with the "man of honor" - Return to Palermo

FEBRUARY, 1861

Father Pirrone's origins were rustic; he had been born at San Cono, a tiny hamlet which is now, thanks to the bus, almost a satellite star in the solar system of Palermo, but a century ago belonged as it were to a planetary system of its own, being four or five cart-hours from the Palermo sun.

The father of our Jesuit had been overseer of two properties belonging to the Abbey of Sant'Eleuterio in the region of San Cono. An overseer's job was then most perilous for the health both of soul and of body, as it necessitated odd acquaintanceships and the accumulated knowledge of many a tale which might bring on ills that could suddenly stretch the patient dead at the foot of some rustic wall, with all those stories locked inside him, lost irrevocably to idle curiosity. But Don Gaetano, Father Pirrone's father, had managed to avoid this occupational disease by rigorous hygiene based on discretion and a careful use of preventive remedies; and he had died peacefully of pneumonia, one sunny Sunday in February when a soughing wind was felling the almond blossom. He left his widow and three children (two girls and the priest) relatively well off ; wise man that he was, he had managed to save up some of the incredibly meager salary paid by the abbey, and at the moment of his demise owned a little almond grove at the back of the valley, a row or two of vines on the slopes, and some stony pasturage farther up: all poor man's stuff, of course, but enough to confer a certain weight amid the depressed economy of San Cono. He was also owner of a small, rigidly square house, blue outside and white in, four rooms down and four up, at the very entrance to the village on the Palermo road. Father Pirrone had left that house at the age of sixteen, when his successes at the parish school and the benevolence of the Mitered Abbot of Sant'Eleuterio had set him on the road toward the Archiepiscopal seminary; but every few years he had returned there, to bless the marriage of one of his sisters or to give a (in the worldly sense) superfluous absolution to the dying Don Gaetano, and he had come back now, at the end of February, 1861, for the fifteenth anniversary of his father's death; a day gusty and clear, just like that other one.

Getting there had meant a five-hour shaking in a cart with his feet dangling behind a horse's tail; but once he had overcome his nausea at the patriotic pictures newly painted on the cart panels, culminating in a rhetorical presentation of a flame-colored Garibaldi arm in arm with an aquamarine Santa Rosalia, they had been a pleasant five hours. The valley rising from Palermo to San Cono mingles the lushness of the coast with the harshness of the interior, and is swept by sudden gusts of cleansing wind, famous for being able to deviate the best-aimed bullets, so that marksmen faced with ballistic problems preferred to exercise elsewhere. Then the carter, who had known the dead man well, launched out into lengthy reminiscences of his merits, reminiscences which, although not always adapted to a son's and a priest's ear, had flattered his practiced listener. His arrival was greeted with happy tears. He embraced and blessed his mother, whose deep widow's weeds set off nicely her white hair and rosy hue, and greeted his sisters and nephews, looking askance among the latter at Carmelo, who had had the bad taste to put a tricolor cockade in his cap in token of rejoicing. As soon as he got into the house he was assailed as always by sweet youthful memories; nothing was changed, from the red-brick floor to the sparse furniture; the same light entered the small narrow windows; Romeo, the dog, barking briefly in a corner, was exactly like another hound, its great-great-grandfather, his companion in violent play; and from the kitchen arose the centuries-old aroma of simmering meat sauce made of extract of tomatoes, onions, and goat's meat, for macaroni on festive occasions. Everything expressed the serenity achieved by the dead man's labors. Soon they moved off to church for the commemorative Mass. That day San Cono looked its best, basking almost proudly in its exhibition of different manures. Sly goats with dangling black udders, and numbers of little Sicilian piglets, dark and slim as minute colts, were running among the people and up the steep tracks; and as Father Pirrone had become a kind of local glory, many women, children, and even youths crowded around him to ask for his benediction or remind him of old days. After local gossip in the sacristy with the parish priest, and attendance at Mass, he moved to the tombstone in a side chapel; the women kissed the marble amid sobs, the son prayed out loud in his archaic Latin; and when they got home the macaroni was ready and much enjoyed by Father Pirrone, whose palate had not been spoiled by the culinary delicacies of Villa Salina. Then toward evening his friends came to greet him and met in his room. A three-branched copper lantern hung from the ceiling and spread a dim light from its oil burners; in a comer was the bed with its varicolored mattress and stifling pink-and-yellow quilt; another corner of the room was bounded by high stiff matting, hiding honeycolored wheat taken weekly to the mill for the family's needs; on the walls hung pockmarked engravings, St. Anthony showing the Divine Infant, St. Lucia her gougedout eyes, and St. Francis Xavier haranguing crowds of plumed and naked Indians; outside in the starry dusk, the wind blew and in its way was the only one to commemorate the dead. In the center of the room, under the lamp, was a big squat brazier surrounded by a strip of polished wood on which people put their feet; all around, on hemp chairs, sat the guests. There were the parish priest, the two Schiro brothers, local landowners, and Don Pietrino, the old herbalist; they came looking glum and remained looking glum, because, while the women were busy below, they sat talking of politics, hoping to hear consoling news from Father Pirrone, who came from Palermo and must know a lot as he lived with the "nobles." The desire for news had been appeased and that for consolation disappointed, for their Jesuit friend, partly from sincerity and partly also from tactics, painted them a very black future. The Bourbon tricolor still hung over Gaeta but the blockade was tight and the powder magazines in the fortress were being blown up one by one, and nothing could be saved there now except honor: not much, that is; Russia was friendly but distant, Napoleon III shifty and close, and of the risings in Basilicata and Terre di Lavoro the Jesuit spoke little because deep down he was rather ashamed of them. They must, he told them, face up to the reality of this atheist and rapacious Italian State now in formation, to these laws of expropriation, to conscription which would spread from Piedmont all the way down here, like cholera.

"You'll see," was his not very original conclusion, "you'll see they won't even leave us eyes to weep with." These words were followed by the traditional chorus of rustic complaints. The Schiro brothers and the herbalist already felt the new fiscal grip; the former had had extra contributions and additions here and there, the latter an overwhelming shock: he had been called to the Town Hall and told that if he didn't pay twenty lire every year he wouldn't be allowed to sell his potions. "But I go and gather the grasses, these holy herbs God made, with my own hands in the mountains, rain or shine, on certain days and nights of the year. I dry them in the sun, which belongs to everybody, and I grind them up myself, with my own grandfather's mortar. What have you people at the Town Hall to do with it? Why should I pay you twenty Ere? just for nothing like that?" The words came muffled from a toothless mouth, but his eyes were dark with genuine rage. "Am I right or not, Father? You tell me!))

The Jesuit was fond of him; he remembered him as a man already grown, in fact already bent from continual wandering and stooping, when he himself had been a boy throwing stones at the birds; and he was also grateful because he knew that when the old man sold one of his potions to women he always said they would be useless without many a Hail Mary and a Gloria. But he prudently preferred to ignore what was in the potions, or the hopes with which the clients asked for them.

"You're right, Don Pietrino, a hundred times right. Why, of course! But if those people didn't take money off you and other poor souls like you, how could they afford to make war on the Pope and steal what's his?" The conversation meandered on in the mild lamplight, quivering as the wind penetrated the heavy shutters. Father Pirrone expatiated on the future and the inevitable confiscation of ecclesiastical property: goodbye then to the mild rule of the abbey in these parts ; goodbye to the plates of soup distributed in bad winters; and when the younger Schiro had the impudence to say that a few poor peasants might perhaps get some land of their own, his voice froze into sharp contempt. "You'll see, Don Antonino, you'll see. The Mayor will buy everything up, pay the first installments, and then do just what he likes. It's already happened in Piedmont! "