The Leopard (29 page)

Then the prelate came down the steps again and turned around. "A beautiful painting," he said, "very expressive."

"A miraculous image, Monsignor, most miraculous! " explained Caterina, poor ill creature, leaning from her ambulating instrument of torture.

"It has worked so many miracles!" Carolina pressed on. "It represents the Madonna of the Letter. The Virgin is on the point of consigning the holy missive invoking her Divine Son's protection on the people of Messina: a protection which has been gloriously conceded, as is shown by the many miracles during the earthquake of two years ago."

"A fine picture, Signorina; whatever it represents, it's a pretty thing and should be treated carefully." Then he turned to the relics: seventy-four of them, they completely covered the two walls on each side of the altar. Each was enclosed in a frame which also contained a card with in formation about it and a number referring to the documents of authentication. These documents themselves, often voluminous and hung with seals, were locked in a damask covered chest in a corner of the chapel. There were frames of worked and smooth silver, frames of bronze and coral, frames of tortoise shell; in filigree, in rare woods, in boxwood, in red and blue velvet; large, tiny, square, octagonal, round, oval frames worth a fortune and frames bought at the Bocconi stores: all collected by those devoted souls in their religious exaltation as custodians of supernatural treasures. The real creator of this collection had been Carolina; she had found somewhere a certain Donna Rosa, a great fat old woman, with connections in all the churches, convents, and charitable foundations of Palermo and its surroundings. It had been this Donna Rosa who every few months had brought up to Villa Salina a relic of a saint wrapped up in tissue paper. She had managed, she would say, to get some dilapidated parish church or decayed family to part with it. The name of the seller was not given, merely because of understandable, in fact praiseworthy, discretion; and anyway there were the proofs of authenticity which she brought and always handed over, clear as daylight, written out in Latin or mysterious characters she called Greek or Syriac. Concetta, administrator and bursar, would pay. Then would come a search and adaptation of frames. And once again the impassive Concetta would pay. There was a period, a couple of years ago, when the collecting mania even disturbed Carolina's and Caterina's sleep; in the morning they would recount to each other dreams of miraculous discoveries, with the hope that they would be realized, as indeed sometimes did happen after the dreams had been confided to Donna Rosa. What Concetta dreamed no one knew. Then Donna Rosa died and the influx of relics stopped almost completely; anyway, by then there was a certain satiation. Monsignor glanced rather hurriedly at one or two of the nearest frames. "Treasures)" he said, "treasures! What lovely frames!" Then, congratulating them on the fine decor, and promising to return next day with His Eminence ("Yes, at nine exactly"), he genuflected, crossed himself toward a modest Madonna of Pompeii hung on a side wall, and left the oratory. Soon the seats were bereft of hats, and the ecclesiastics climbed into the three carriages from the Archbishopric with their near-black horses which had awaited them in the courtyard. Monsignor made a point of asking the chaplain, Father Titta, to share his own carriage, much to the latter's solace. The carriages moved off, and Monsignor was silent; they drove by the sumptuous Villa Falconeri, with its flowering bougainvillaeas hanging over the walls of the splendidly kept garden; when they reached the slope down to Palermo amid the orange groves, Monsignor spoke. "And so you, Father Titta, have actually said Mass for years in front of the picture of that girl? Of that girl with a rendezvous waiting for her lover? Now don't tell me you too believed it was a holy image."

"Monsignor, I am to blame, I know. But it's not easy to gainsay the Signorina Carolina. That you can't know." Monsignor shivered at the memory. "My son, you've put your finger on it; and that will be taken into consideration." Carolina had gone off to pour out her rage in a letter to Chiara, her married sister in Naples. Caterina, tired by the long and painful conversation, had been put to bed. Concetta went back to her oWn solitary room. This was one of those rooms (so numerous that one might be tempted to say it of all rooms) which have two faces, one with a mask that they show to ignorant visitors, the other which is revealed only to those in the know, the owner in particular, to whom they are made manifest in all their squalid essence. This particular room was airy and looked over the broad garden; in a corner was a high bed with four pillows (Concetta suffered from heart trouble and had to sleep almost sitting up); no carpets, but a fine white floor divided into squares with intricate yellow lines, a valuable money chest with dozens of little drawers covered with marble inlay and semiprecious stones; the desk, central table, and all the furniture in a breezy local craftsmanship, with figures of huntsmen, dogs, and game in amber color on a dark background: furniture considered by Concetta herself as antiquated and in very bad taste, which, sold at auction after her death, is today the pride of a rich shipping agent when his wife gives cocktails to envious friends. On the walls were portraits, water colors, sacred images. All clean, all ordered. Two things only might have appeared unusual: in the corner opposite the bed towered four enormous wooden cases painted in green, each with a big padlock; and in front of these, on the floor, was a heap of mangy fur. To the lips of an ingenuous visitor the little room might have brought a smile, so suggestive was it of the good nature, the care of an old maid.

To one who knew the facts, to Concetta herself, it was an inferno of mummified memories. The four green cases contained dozens of day and night shirts, dressing gowns, pillowcases, sheets carefully divided into "best" and "second best": the trouseau collected by Concetta herself fifty years before. Now those padlocks were never opened for fear incongruous demons might leap out, and under the ubiquitous Palermo damp the contents grew yellow and decayed, useless for ever and for anyone. The portraits were of dead people no longer loved, the photographs of friends who had hurt her in their lifetime, the only reason they were not forgotten in death; the water colors showed houses and places most of which had been sold, or rather stupidly bartered by spendthrift nephews. Anyone who looked carefully into the heap of moth-eaten fur would have noticed two erect ears, a snout of black wood, and two astonished eyes of yellow glass; it was Bendico, dead for forty-five years, embalmed for forty-five years, nest now of spiderwebs and of moth, detested by the servants who had been imploring Concetta for dozens of years to have it thrown onto the rubbish heap; but she always refused, reluctant to detach herself from the only memory of her past which aroused no distressing sensations.

But the distressing sensations of today (at a certain age every day punctually produces its own) all referred to the present. Much less devout than Carolina, much more sensitive than Caterina, Concetta had understood the meaning of the Vicar-General's visit and foreseen the consequences: orders to take away all or nearly all the relics, the changing of the picture above the altar, an eventual reconsecration of the chapel. She had never really believed in the authenticity of those relics, and had paid up with the indifference of a father settling a bill for toys which are of no interest to himself but which help to keep children quiet. To her the removal of those objects was a matter of indifference; what did touch her, the day's real thorn, was the appalling figure the Salina family would now cut with the ecclesiastical authorities, and soon with the entire city. The Church kept its secrets much better than anyone else in Sicily, but that did not mean much yet; all would be spread around in a month or two, as everything is spread in this island which should have as its symbol not the Trinacria but the Ear of Dionysus at Syracuse which makes the lightest sigh resound for fifty yards around. And the Church's esteem meant much to her. The prestige of her name had slowly disappeared; the family fortune, divided and subdivided, was at best equivalent to that of any number of other lesser families and very much smaller than that of some rich industrialists. But in the Church, in their relations with it, the Salinas had maintained their preeminence. What a reception His Eminence had given the three sisters when they went to make their Christmas visit! Would that happen now?

A-maid entered: "Excellency, the Princess is just arriving. Her motorcar is in the courtyard." Concetta got up, tidied her hair, threw a black lace shawl over her shoulders, resumed her imperial air, and reached the entrance hall just as Angelica was climbing the last steps of the outer staircase. She suffered from varicose veins; her legs, which had always been a little short, scarcely upheld her, and she was climbing up leaning on the arm of her own footman, whose black topcoat swept the stairs. "Concetta darling!" "Angelica dear! It's so long since we've met! " In fact only five days had gone by since her last visit, but the intimacy between the two cousins, an intimacy similar in closeness and feeling to that which was to bind Italians and Austrians in their opposing trenches a few years later, was such that five days really could seem a long time. Angelica, now nearly seventy, still showed many traces of beauty; the illness which was to transform her into a wretched specter three years later was already active, but as yet secreted deep in her blood; her green eyes were what they had been before, only slightly dulled by the years, and the wrinkles on her neck were hidden by the soft black folds of the hood and veil which she, a widow for the last three years, wore not without a certain nostalgic coquetry. "You see," she said to Concetta as they moved entwined toward a drawing room, "you see, with these imminent celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the March of the Thousand there's never a minute's peace. just imagine, a few days ago they told me I'd been put on the Committee of Honor; a homage to dear Tancredi's memory, of course, but such a lot for me to do! Finding lodgings for veterans coming from all over Italy, arranging invitations for the grandstand without offending anyone; taking care to invite the mayor of every commune in the island. Oh, by the way, dear: the Mayor of Salina is a clerical and has refused to take part in the parade; so Lthought at once of your nephew, of Fabrizio; he came to visit me, and I pinned him down there and then. He couldn't refuse; and so at the end of the month we'll see him dressed to the nines parading down Via Liberta in front of a big placard with 'Salina' on it in letters a foot high. Don't you think it's a good idea? A Salina rendering homage to Garibaldi! A fusion of old and new Sicily! I've thought of you too, darling; here's your invitation for the grandstand of honor, right next to the Royal box." And she pulled out of her Paris bag a piece of cardboard in Garibaldi red, the very same color as the strip of silk worn for a time by Tancredi over his collar.

"Carolina and Caterina won't be too pleased," she went on in her arbitrary way, "but I only had one place; anyway you have more right to it than they have; you were Tancredi's favorite cousin."

She talked a lot and she talked well: forty years of living with Tancredi, however tempestuous and interrupted, had been more than long enough to rub off the last traces of Donnafugata accent and manners; she had camouflaged herself even to the point of copying that graceful twining of the fingers which had been one of Tancredi's characteristics. She read a great deal, and on her table the latest books by Anatole France and Bourget alternated with D'Annunzio's and Serao's; and she had the reputation in the drawing rooms of Palermo of being an expert on the architecture of the chateaux of the Loire, about which she would often discourse with somewhat hazy enthusiasm, contrasting, perhaps u4consciously, their Renaissance serenity with the restless baroque of the palace at Donnafugata, against which she nurtured an aversion inexplicable to anyone who knew nothing of her humble and ill-caredfor youth.

"But what a head I have, my dear! I was forgetting to tell you that Senator Tassoni will soon be coming here; he's staying with me at Villa Falconeri and wants to meet you; he was a great friend of poor Tancredi's, a comradein-arms too, and he's heard Tancredi talk of you, it seems. Our dear Tancredi! " The handkerchief with its narrow black border came out of her bag, and she dried a tear in eyes that were still beautiful.

Concetta had been inserting, as always, an occasional phrase of her own into Angelica's continual flow; but at the name of Tassoni she was silent. She saw once again a scene, very distant but quite clear, as if through the other end of a telescope: the big white table surrounded by all those people now dead; Tancredi near her, dead too-as anyway, really, she was herself; his brutal anecdote, Angelica's hysterical laughter, her own no less hysterical tears. It bad been the turning point of her life, that; the road she'd taken then had led her here, to this desert not even inhabited by extinct love or spent rancor.

"Oh, I've heard of the bother you're having with the Curia. What a nuisance they are! But why didn't you tell me before? I could have done something; the Cardinal is always very kind to me. I'm afraid that it's too late now. But I'll pull some strings. Anyway it'll all blow over."

Senator Tassoni, who arrived soon after, was a brisk and spruce old man. His wealth, which was great and growing, had been acquired by competition and hard struggle; instead of making him flabby, it had kept him in a state of continual energy which now seemed to conquer the years and make him almost fiery. From the few months spent with Garibaldi's southern army he had acquired a military bearing destined never to be discarded. Blended with courtesy, it formed a philter which had gained him many successes in the past, and now, joined to the number of his securities, was of great use for getting his own way with the boards of banks and cotton factories; half of Italy and a great part of the Balkan countries sewed on their own buttons with thread made by Tassoni & Co.

"Signorina," he was saying to Concetta as he sat beside her on a low stool suitable for a page, which was just why he had chosen it, "Signorina, a dream of my distant youth is now being realized. How often in those icy nights camping out on the Volturno or around the ramparts of besieged Gaeta, how often our unforgettable Tancredi used to talk of you! I seemed to know you already, to have frequented this house amid whose walls his untamed youth was passed; and I am happy to be able, though with such delay, to lay my homage at the feet of her who was the consolation of one of the purest heroes of our Risorgimento." Concetta was unused to conversations with people she had not known since infancy; she was also no lover of literature; so she had had no immunity against rhetoric and was in fact open to it's fascination. The Senator's words moved her; she forgot that old anecdote of half a century ago, she no longer saw in Tassoni a violator of convents, a jeerer at poor terrified nuns, but an old man, Tancredi's sincere friend, who talked of him with true affection, one who brought to her a shadow, a message from the dead man across the morass of time which the dead can so seldom cross. "And what did my dear cousin tell you about me?" she asked in a low voice, with a shyness that brought to life once more the eighteen-year-old girl from that bundle of black silk and white hair.