The Leopard (6 page)

When the Prince went upstairs again, he found Paolo, his heir, the Duke of Querceta, waiting for him in his study on the red sofa where he proposed to take his siesta. The youth had screwed up all his courage to talk to him. Short, slim, olive-skinned, he seemed older than the Prince himself. "l wanted to ask you, Papa, how we're to behave with Tancredi when we next meet him." The Prince understood at once and felt a twinge of annoyance. "What d'you mean? Has anything changed?" "But, Papa, you can't possibly approve; he's gone to join those swine who're making trouble all over Sicily; things like that just aren't done." Personal jealousy, a bigot's resentment at his agnostic cousin, a dullard's at the other's zest, had taken political guise. The Prince was so indignant that he did not even ask his son to sit down. "Better to make a fool of oneself than spend all day staring at horses'

dung! I'm even fonder of Tancredi than I was before. And anyway what he's doing isn't as silly as all that. If in the future you're able to go on putting 'Duke of Querceta' on your cards, and if you inherit any money when I'm gone, you will owe it to Tancredi and others like him. Out with you now, and don't mention the subject to me again! I'm the only one who gives orders here." Then he became kindlier and substituted irony for anger. "Be off now, son, as I want to have a snooze. Go and talk politics with Guiscard, you'll understand each other."

And as a shaken Paolo closed the door behind him, the Prince took off his frock coat and boots, made the sofa creak under his weight, and slid calmly off to sleep.

When he awoke, his valet came in with a newspaper and a letter on a tray. They had been sent up from Palermo by his brother-inlaw Malvica, brought by a mounted groom a short while before. Still a little dazed from his afternoon nap, the Prince opened the letter. "My dear Fabrizio, I am writing to you in a state of utter collapse. Such dreadful news in the paper. The Piedmontese have landed. We are all lost. Tonight I and my whole family will take refuge on a British man-o'-war. You will want to do the same, I am sure i if you wish I can reserve a berth or two for you. May God save our beloved King! As always, Ciccio." He folded up the letter, put it in his pocket, and began laughing out loud. That fool Malvica! He'd always been a rabbit. Not understanding a thing, and now panic-stricken. Abandoning his palace to the mercy of his servants; this time he'd certainly find it empty on his return. "That reminds me, Paolo must go and stay down at Palermo; a house empty at a moment like this means a house lost. I'll tell him at dinner."

He opened the newspaper. "On the i i th of May an act of flagrant piracy culminated in the landing of armed men at Marsala. The latest reports say that the band numbers about eight hundred, and is commanded by Garibaldi. When these brigands set foot on land they were very careful to avoid any encounter with the Royal troops and moved off, as far as can be ascertained, in the direction of Castelvetrano, threatening peaceful citizens and spreading rapine and devastation, etc., etc . . . ... The name of Garibaldi disturbed him a little. That adventurer, all hair and beard, was a pure Mazzinian. He had caused a lot of trouble already. "But if that Galantuomo King of his has let him come down here it means they're sure of him. They'll curb him!" Reassured, he combed his hair and had his shoes and frock coat put on again. He thrust the newspaper into a drawer. It was almost time for Rosary, but the drawing room was still empty. He sat down on a sofa, and as he waited noticed how the Vulcan on the ceiling was rather like the lithographs of Garibaldi he had seen in Turin. He smiled. "A cuckold!" The family was gathering. Silken skirts rustled. The youngest were still joking together. Behind the door could be heard the usual echo of controversy between servants and Benclic0, determined to take part.

A ray of sunshine full of dust specks lit up the malicious monkeys.

He knelt down.
"Salve Regina, Mater misericordiae."

2

Donnafugata

Journey to Donnafugata - The halt - Preludes and progress of the journey -Arrival at Donnafugata -In church - Don Onofrio
Rotolo - Conversation in a bathroom - Fountain of Amphitrite - A surprise before dinner - Dinner and various reactions - Don
Fabrizio and the stars - A visit to a convent - Seen from a window

"The trees! The trees! "

This shout from the leading carriage could just be heard along the row of four behind, almost invisible in clouds of white dust; and at every window perspiring faces expressed tired satisfaction.

The trees were only three, in truth, and eucalyptus at that, scruffiest of Mother Nature's children. But they were also the first seen by the Salina family since leaving Bisacquino at six that morning. It was now eleven, and for the last five hours all they had set eyes on were bare hillsides flaming yellow under the sun. Trots over level ground had alternated briefly with long, slow trudges uphill and then careful shuffles downi both trudge and trot merging, anyway, into the constant jingle of harness bells, imperceptible, now, to the dazed senses, except as sound equivalent of the blazing landscape. They had passed through crazedlooking villages washed in palest blue; crossed dry river beds over fantastic bridges; skirted sheer precipices which no sage and broom could temper. Never a tree, never a drop of water; just sun and dust. Inside the carriages, tightly shut against that sun and dust, the temperature must have been well over 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Those desiccated trees yearning away under bleached sky bore many a message: that they were now within a couple of hours of their journey's end; that they were coming into the family estates; that they could lunch, and perhaps even wash their faces in the verminous waters of the well. Ten minutes later they reached the farm buildings of Rampinzeri: a huge pile, used only one month in the year by laborers, mules, and cattle gathered there for the harvest. Over the great solid but sagging door, a stone Leopard pranced, in spite of legs broken off by flung stones; next to the main farm building a deep well, watched over by those eucalyptuses, mutely offered various services: as swimming pool, drinking trough, prison, or cemetery. It slaked thirst, spread typhus, guarded the kidnapped, and hid the corpses of both animals and men till they were reduced to the smoothest of anonymous skeletons. The whole Salina family alighted from their various carriages. The Prince, cheered by the thought of soon reaching his beloved Donnafugata; the Princess irritated and yet inert, in part restored, however, by her husband's serenity; tired girls; boys excited by novelty and untamed by the heat; Mademoiselle Dombreuil, the French governess, utterly exhausted, remembering years spent in Algeria with the family of Marshal Bugeaud, moaning, "Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, C"est pire qu'en Afrique!" and mopping at her turned-up nose. Father Pirrone, whose breviary reading had lulled him into a sleep which had shortened the whole trip and made him the spryest of the party; a maid and two lackeys, city folk worried by the unusual aspect of the countryside; and Bendico, who had rushed out of the last carriage and was baying at the funereal suggestions of rooks swirling low in the light. All were white with dust to the eyebrows, lips, or pigtails; whitish puffs arose around those who had reached the stopping place and were dusting each other off.

Amid all the dirt Tancredi's elegant spruceness stood out. He had travelled on horseback and, reaching the farm half an hour before the carriages, had had time to shake off dust, brush up, and change his white cravat. While drawing some water from that well of many uses he had glanced for a second into the mirror of the bucket and found himself in good order, with the black patch over his right eye now more reminiscent than protective of a wound received three months before in the fighting at Palermo; with that other dark blue eye which seemed to have assumed the task of expressing enough shy gaiety for its mate in temporary eclipse; and with, above his cravat, a scarlet thread alluding discreetly to the red shirt he had once worn. He helped the Princess to alight, dusted the Prince's top hat with his sleeve, distributed sweets to his girl cousins and quips to the boys, nearly genuflected to the Jesuit, returned the passionate caress of Bendic6, consoled Mademoiselle Dombreuil, laughed at all, enchanted all. The coachmen were walking the horses slowly around to freshen them up before watering, the lackeys laying tablecloths out on straw left over from the threshing in the oblong of shade from the building. Luncheon began near the accommodating well. All around quivered the funereal countryside, yellow with stubble, black with burned patches; the lament of cicadas filled the sky. It was like a death rattle of parched Sicily at the end of August vainly awaiting rain. An hour later they were all on the road again, refreshed. Although the horses were tired and going more slowly than ever, the last part of the journey seemed short; the landscape, no longer unknown, had lost its more sinister aspects. They began recognizing places they knew well, and goals of past excursions and picnics in other years -the Dragonara ravine, the Misilbesi crossroads; soon they would reach the Shrine of Our Ladv of All Graces, end of their longest walks from Donnafugata. The Princess had dozed off; the Prince, alone with her in the wide carriage, was beaming.

Never had he been so glad to be going to spend three months at Donnafugata as he was now, in that late August of 1860. Not only because he loved the house at Donnafugata, the people, the sense of feudal ownership surviving there, but also because, unlike other times, he felt no regret for his peaceful evenings in the observatory, his occasional visits to Mariannina. The truth was he had found the spectacle of Palermo in the last three months rather nauseating. He would have liked to have the fun of being the only one to understand the situation and accept that red-shirted "bogeyman" Garibaldii but he had to admit that second sight was not a Salina monopoly. Everyone in Palermo seemed pleased; everyone except a mere handful of grumblers: his brother-in-law MUvica, who had got himself arrested by Garibaldi's police and spent ten days in prison; his son Paolo, just as discontented but slightly more prudent, and now left behind at Palermo deep in some silly plot or other. Everyone else was making a great show of joy: wearing tricolor cockades on lapels, marching about in processions from morning till night, and above all talking, haranguing, declaiming; and if in the very first days of the occupation all this was given some sense of purpose by the acclamations greeting the few wounded passing through the main streets and by the shrieks of Bourbon police "rats" being tortured in the side alleys, now that the wounded had recovered and the surviving "rats" were enrolled in the new police, this hubbub, inevitable though he realized it to be, began to seem pointless and petty.

But he had to admit that all this was mere surface manifestation of ill breeding; the fundamentals of the situation, economic and social, were satisfactory, just as he had foreseen. Don Pietro Russo had kept his promises and not a shot had been heard near Villa Salina i and though a whole service of Chinese porcelain had been stolen from the palace in Palermo, that was merely due to the idiocy of Paolo, who had had it packed into a couple of cases which he had then left out in the palace courtyard during the shellinga positive invitation for the packers themselves to cart it away.

The "Piedmontesee" (as the Prince continued to call them for reassurance, just as others called them "Garibaldini" in exaltation or

"Garibaldeschi" in vilification) had paid a call at the house, if not precisely cap in hand as the Prince had been told, at least with a hand at the visors of those red caps of theirs, as floppy and faded as those of any Bourbon officer. About the twentieth of June, announced twenty-four hours beforehand by Tancredi, appeared a General in a red tunic with black froggings. He was followed by an aide-de-camp and asked most politely for admission in order to admire the frescoes on the ceilings. In he was ushered without ado, as there had been sufficient warning to clear from one of the drawing rooms a portrait of King Ferdinand II in full Court dress and substitute for it a neutral Pool of Bethesda, an operation combining advantages both political and aesthetic.

The General was a quick-witted Tuscan of about thirty, talkative and inclined to show off, though perfectly well behaved and agreeable; he had treated the Prince with all proper respect and even called him "Excellency," in complete contradiction to one of the Dictator's first decrees. The aide-de-camp, a new recruit of nineteen, was a Nlllanese Count, who fascinated the girls with his glittering boots and his slurred r's. With them came Tancredi, promoted, or rather created, Captain on the field of battle; a little drawn from the pain of his wound, he stood there red-shirted and irresistible, showing an easy intimacy with the victors, an intimacy demonstrated by a lavish use of the familiar tu and of "my dear fellow" with childish fervor by the two officers from the mainland and returned in kind by Tancredi, though with a faint nasal twang that to the Prince seemed full of muted irony. While greeting them from heights of imperturbable courtesy, the Prince had in fact been much amused and quite reassured. So much so that three days later the two "Piedmontese" had been invited to dinner; it was a fine sight then to see Carolina at the piano accompanying the singing of the General, who, in homage to Sicily, had risked "I see you again, oh lovely land," with Tancredi gravely turning the pages of the score as if false notes didn't exist. The young Milanese Count, meanwhile, was leaning over a sofa, chatting away about orange blossoms to Concetta and revealing to her the existence of a writer she had never heard of, Aleardo Aleardi; she was pretending to listen to him, though worrying about the gaunt looks of her cousin, whom the light of the candle on the piano made appear even more languid than he was in reality.