The Leopard (26 page)

Beneath the candelabra, beneath the five tiers bearing toward the distant ceiling pyramids of homemade cakes that were never touched, spread the monotonous opulence of buffets at big balls: coralline lobsters boiled alive, waxy
chaud-froids
of veal, steelytinted fish immersed in sauce, turkeys gilded by the ovens' heat, rosy
foie gras
under gelatin armor, boned woodcock reclining on amber toast decorated with their own chopped insides, and a dozen other cruel, colored delights. At the end of the table two monumental silver tureens held clear soup the color of burnt amber. To prepare this supper the cooks must have sweated away in the vast kitchens from the night before.

"Dear me, what an amount! Donna Margherita knows how to do things well. But it's not for me!" Scorning the table of drinks, glittering with crystal and silver on the right, he moved left toward that of the sweetmeats. Huge blond
babas, Mont Blancs
snowy with whipped cream, cakes speckled with white almonds and green pistachio nuts, hillocks of chocolate-covered pastry, brown and rich as the topsoil of the Catanian plain from which, in fact, through many a twist and turn they had come, pink ices, champagne ices, coffee ices, all
parfaits
, which fell apart with a squelch as the knife cleft them, melody in major of crystallized cherries, acid notes of yellow pineapple, and those cakes called "triumphs of gluttony" filled with green pistachio paste, and shameless "virgins' cakes" shaped like breasts. Don Fabrizio asked for some of these and, as he held them in his plate, looked like a profane caricature of St. Agatha. "Why ever didn't the Holy Office forbid these cakes when it had the chance? St. Agatha's sliced-off breasts sold by convents, devoured at dances! Well, well!" Around the room smelling of vanilla, wine, chypre, wandered Don Fabrizio looking for a place. Tancredi saw him from his table and clapped a hand on a chair to show there was room there; next to him was Angelica, peering at the side of a silver dish to see if her hair was in place. Don Fabrizio shook his head in smiling refusal. He went on looking; from a table he heard the satisfied voice of Pallavicino: "The most moving moment of my life." There was an empty place by him. What a bore the man was!

Wouldn't it be better, after all, to listen to Angelica's refreshing if forced cordiality, to Tancredi's dry wit? No: better bore oneself than bore others.

With a word of apology he sat down next to the Colonel, who got up as he arrived-a small sop to Salina pride. As he savored the subtle mixture of blancmange, pistachio, and cinnamon in the dessert he had chosen, Don Fabrizio began conversing with Pallavicino and realized that, beyond those sugary phrases meant perhaps only for ladies, the man was anything but a fool. He too was a "gentleman," and the fundamental skepticism of his class, smothered usually by the impetuous Bersaglieri flames on his lapel, came peering out again now that he found himself in surroundings like those into which he was born, away from the inevitable rhetoric of barracks and admirers.

"Now the Left wants to string me up because last August I ordered my men to opd'n fire on Garibaldi. But can you tell me, Prince, what else I could have done in view of the written orders I was carrying? I must confess, though, when at Aspromonte I found myself facing that mob of a hundred men or so, some looking like out-and-out fanatics, others like professional agitators, I was pleased that my instructions coincided so with my own feelings. If I hadn't given orders to fire, those people would have hacked us to pieces, my soldiers and me; that wouldn't have mattered much, of course. But in the end it would have meant French and Austrian intervention, and that would have had endless repercussions, including the collapse of the Italian Kingdom of ours which has got itself put together in some miraculous way, quite how I can't for the life of me understand. And I tell you another thing in confidence: those musket-shots of ours were a particular help to . . . Garibaldi himself! They freed him from the rabble hanging around him, all those creatures like Zambianchi who were making use of him for ends that may have been generous but were certainly inept, with the Tuileries or Palazzo Farnese behind them. Very different types those were to the ones who landed with him at Marsala, people who did believe, the best of them, that Italy could be created by repeating 1848. And he knows that, the General does, for when I was making him the genuflection that has caused so much comment, he shook my hand with a warmth that must surely be unusual toward a man who's just fired a bullet into one's foot a few minutes before. And d'you know what he said to me in a low voice, he who was the one really decent person on the whole wretched mountainside? 'Thank you, Colonel.'

Thank you for what, I ask you? For blaming him for life? Obviously not; but for having brought home to him so clearly the bluster, the cowardice, worse maybe, of those followers of his."

"Forgive me for saying so, Colonel, but don't you think all that hand-kissing, cap-doffing, and complimenting went a little far?"

"No, frankly. For they were all genuine acts of respect. You should have seen him, that poor great man, stretched out under a chestnut tree, suffering in body and still more in mind. A sad sight! He showed himself plainly as what he's always been, a child, with beard and wrinkles, but a simple adventurous little boy all the same; it was difficult for me not to feel moved at having had to shoot at him. Why shouldn't 1, anyway? Usually I kiss only women's hands; then, Prince, I was kissing a hand for the salvation of the Kingdom, a lady to whom we soldiers owe homage too."

A footman passed; Don Fabrizio told him to bring a slice of Mont Blanc and a glass of champagne. "And you, Col onel, aren't you taking anything?" "Nothing to eat, thank you. Perhaps I'll drink a glass of champagne too." Then he went on, obviously not able to take his mind off a memory which, consisting as it did of a little shooting and a lot of skill, was exactly the sort that attracts men of his type. "The General's men, as my Bersaglieri disarmed them, were cursing away, and d'you know at whom? At him, the only one of them who'd actually paid in his own person. Foul, but natural, really; they saw that childlike yet great man slipping out of their grasp, the only one capable of covering up their obscure intrigues. And even if my own courtesies were superfluous, I'd be pleased even so at having done them; we in Italy can never go too far with sentiment and hand-kissing; they're the most effective political arguments we have."

He drank the wine brought him, but that seemed to increase his bitterness even more. "Have you been on the mainland since the Kingdom was founded? You're lucky. It's not a pretty sight. Never have we been so disunited as since we've been reunited. Turin doesn't want to cease being a capital, Milan finds our administration inferior to the Austrians', Florence is afraid the works of art there will be carried off, Naples is moaning about the industries she's lost, and here, here in Sicily, some huge irrational disaster is in the making. . . . For the moment, owing partly to your humble servant, no one mentions red shirts any more; but they'll be back again. When they've vanished, others of different colors will come; and then red ones once again. And how will it end? There's Italy's lucky star, they say. But you know better than I, Prince, that even fixed stars are so only in appearance." Perhaps he was a little tipsy, making such prophecies. But at these disquieting prospects Don Fabrizio felt his heart contract. The ball went on for a long time, until six in the morning; all were exhausted and wishing they had been in bed for at least three hours; but to leave early was like proclaiming the party a failure and offending the host and hostess who had taken such a lot of trouble, poor dears.

The ladies' faces were livid, their dresses crushed, their breaths heavy. "Maria! How tired I am! Maria! How sleepy!" Above their disordered cravats the faces of the men were yellow and lined, their mouths stained with bitter saliva. Their visits to a disordered little room near the band alcove became more frequent; in it was disposed a row of twenty vast vats, by that time nearly all brimful, some spilling over. Sensing that the dance was nearing its end, the sleepy servants were no longer changing the candles in chandeliers; the short stubs diffused a different, smoky, ill-omened light. In the empty supper room were only dirty plates, glasses with dregs of wine which the servants glancing around would hurriedly drain i through the cracks in the shutters filtered a plebeian light of dawn.

The party was crumbling away, and around Donna Margherita there was already a group saying goodbye. "Heavenly! A dream!

Like the old days! " Tancredi was hard put to wake Don Calogero, who, with head flung back, had gone off to sleep on an armchair apart; his trousers were rucked up to his knees and above his silken socks showed the ends of his drawers, most rustic sight. Colonel Pallavicino was yawning too, declaring, though, to whoever wished to listen, that he was not going home and would move straight from Palazzo Ponteleone to his headquarters; such in fact was theiron tradition followed by officers invited to a ball.

When the family had settled into its carriage (the dew had made the cushions damp) Don Fabrizio said that he would walk home; a little fresh air would do him good, he had a slight headache. The truth is that he wanted to draw a little comfort from gazing at the stars. There were still one or two up there, at the zenith. As always, seeing them revived him; they were distant, they were omnipotent, and at the same time they were docile to his calculationsi just the contrary to human beings, always too near, so weak and yet so quarrelsome.

There was already a little movement in the streets: a cart or two with rubbish heaped four times the height of the tiny gray donkey dragging it along. A long open wagon came by stacked with bulls killed shortly before at the slaughterhouse, already quartered and exhibiting their intimate mechanism with the shamelessness of death. At intervals a big thick red drop fell onto the pavement. At a crossroad he glimpsed the sky to the west, above the sea. There was Venus, wrapped in her turban of autumn mist. She was always faithful, always waiting for Don Fabrizio on his early morning outings, at Donnafugata before a shoot, now after a ball. Don Fabrizio sighed. When would she decide to give him an appointment less ephemeral, far from carcasses and blood, in her own region of perennial certitude?

7

Death of a Prince

Death of a Prince

JULY, 1888

Don Fabrizio had always known that sensation. For a dozen years or so he had been feeling as if the vital fluid, the faculty of existing, life itself in fact and perhaps even the will to go on living, were ebbing out of him slowly but steadily, as grains of sand cluster and then line up one by one, unhurried, unceasing, before the narrow neck of an hourglass. In some moments of intense activity or concentration this sense of continual loss would vanish, to reappear impassively in brief instants of silence or introspection; just as a constant buzzing in the ears or the ticking of a pendulum superimposes itself when all else is silent, assuring us of always being there, watchful, even when we do not hear it.

With the slightest effort of attention he would notice at all other times too the rustling of the grains of sand as they slid lightly away, the instants of time escaping from his mind and leaving him for ever. But this sensation was not, at first, linked to any physical discomfort. On the contrary, this imperceptible loss of vitality was itself the proof, the condition so to say, of a sense of living; and for him, accustomed to scrutinizing limitless outer space and to probing vast inner abysses, the sensation was in no way disagreeable; this continuous whittling away of his personality seemed linked to a vague presage of the rebuilding elsewhere of a personality (thanks be to God) less conscious and yet broader. Those tiny grains of sand were not lost; they were vanishing, but accumulating elsewhere to cement some more lasting pile. Though "pile," he had reflected, was not the exact word, for it suggested weight; nor was "grain of sand" either for that matter. They were more like the tiny particles of watery vapor exhaled from a narrow pond, then mounting into the sky to great clouds, light and free.

Sometimes he was surprised that the vital reservoir could still contain anything at all after all those years of loss. "Not even were it big as a pyramid . . . . " On other occasions, more frequent, he had felt a kind of pride at being the only one to notice this continual escape, while no one around him seemed to sense it in the same way; and this had made him feel a certain contempt for others, as an old soldier despises a conscript who deludes himself that whistling bullets are just harmless flies. Such things are never confessed, no one knows why; we leave them for others to sense, and no one around him had ever sensed them at all, none of his daughters with their dreams of a world beyond the tomb identical with this life, all complete with judges, cooks, and convents; not even Stella, who, though devoured by the canker of diabetes, still had clung pitiably to this vale of tears. Perhaps only Tancredi had understood for an instant, when he had said with that subdued irony of his, "Uncle, you are courting death." Now the courtship was ended; the lovely lady had said "Yes" i the elopement was decided on, the compartment on the train reserved.