The Silent Duchess (18 page)

Since her children have left home she has had more time, and there are never enough books for her. She orders them by the dozen but they often take months to arrive. For example, the parcel that contained Paradise Lost was held up for five months at the port of Palermo without anyone knowing where it had got to. Or like the Histoire Comique de Francion, which was lost at sea between Naples and Sicily when the boat sank off Capri. Other books she has loaned to someone but she cannot remember whom, like the Lays of Mary, Queen of Scots, which was never returned. Or The Romance of Brut, which must still be in the possession of her brother Carlo in the monastery of San Martino delle Scale.

This reading continues far into the night. It exhausts her but also fills her with delight. Marianna never seems to be able to bring herself to accept that it is time to go to bed and if it were not for the thirst that almost tears her away from her reading she would probably go on till daybreak. To leave a

book is like leaving the better part of oneself. To pass from the soft and airy arcades of the mind to the demands of a graceless body always grasping for one thing or another is in any case a surrender: a renunciation of characters one has studied and cared for in favour of a self one does not love, confined within a stupid succession of days, each day indistinguishable from the last.

A thirst has put its fist into this sensuous quietness, taking away the scent of flowers, darkening the shadows. The silence of the night is suffocating. Back in the library, with its guttering candles, Marianna asks herself why the nights are closing in on her, why everything is rushing into her head as if it were a well of dark water in which from time to time there is a heavy resounding splash; something has fallen--but what?

Her footsteps slip lightly and silently over the carpet in the corridor; they reach the dining-room, they cross the yellow room and the rose room and stop at the entrance to the kitchen. The black curtain that hides the big jar in which the drinking water is kept is drawn back--someone has already been down for a drink. For a moment she is seized by panic at the prospect of a nocturnal encounter with uncle husband. He has not come to find her since the night she refused him. She has an intuition that he is involved with Cuffa's wife. Not the elderly Severina, who died a while ago, but his new wife Rosalia, who has thick black plaits that swing down her back. She is about thirty, with a forceful temperament and a lot of energy. But with her master she knows how to be gentle and to satisfy his need for someone who welcomes his assaults without turning to ice. Marianna recalls their own hurried couplings in the dark, he armed and relentless, she distant, turned to stone. They must have looked comical, as foolish as those people who repeat without the least glimmer of understanding a duty which has no meaning for them and for which they are not cut out.

Yet they have had five children, and three who died before birth, making eight in all: eight times they have encountered each other beneath the sheets without a kiss or a caress. An assault, a bearing down of cold knees against her legs, and then a fast and furious explosion. Sometimes she would close her eyes while doing her duty and distance herself, thinking of the couplings of Zeus and Io, and Zeus and Leda, as described by Pausanias and

Plutarch. The divine body selects the terrestrial image, a fox, a swan, an eagle or a bull. And then, after prolonged ambushes among the cork trees and the oaks, a sudden apparition. No time to say a word. The creature curves its claws, nails the woman's neck with its bill and steals her for itself and its own pleasure. A beating of wings, a panting breath on her neck, teeth biting into her shoulder, and it is over. The lover departs, leaving her suffering and humiliated.

She would like to ask Rosalia whether uncle husband is transformed into a wolf who tears her to pieces and then runs off. But she knows she will never bring herself to do so, through timidity, but also perhaps because of a fear of those long black plaits. When Rosalia is in a bad mood they seem to rise up and spit like dancing serpents.

There are no lights in the downstairs rooms and Marianna knows for certain that her husband never walks around in the dark like she does; as a result of her deafness her sight has become particularly acute, as if she had the eyes of a cat.

The pitcher seeps moisture. It feels cold and porous to the touch, and exudes a good smell of earthenware. Marianna dips a small metal scoop attached to a stick into the pitcher and drinks avidly, letting the water run down her embroidered bodice.

Out of the corner of her eye she sees a faint light filtering through one of the doors to the servants' quarters. It is Fila's room and her door is half-open. Marianna has no idea what time it is, but it is certainly past midnight or even one o'clock, perhaps nearer to three. She seems to sense a slight rippling of the night air, set in motion by the bell of the chapel of the Casa Butera striking two.

Almost without realising it her feet take her in the direction of the light, and she peers through the gap in the door, trying to distinguish something by the flickering of a small smoky candle. She sees a naked arm dangling over the edge of the bed, a foot with a shoe on it going up and down. She draws back feeling ashamed. Spying is unworthy of her. But then she smiles at herself: shame can be left to noble souls, curiosity lies at the root of a thirst for knowledge, as Mr David Hume of London would say, and it is similar to that other curiosity

which drives her to burrow her way into books with great passion. So why be so hypocritical? With a daring that surprises her, she returns to spy through the open crack, holding her breath as if her future depends on what she is going to see, as if her glance was already being attacked before she had even looked.

Fila is not alone. Beside her is a good-looking youth who is crying pitifully. His dark, curly hair is tied behind his neck in a small tight plait. Marianna fancies that she has already seen this young lad, but where? His limbs are delicate and smooth, his skin is the colour of well-baked bread. She sees Fila take out a handkerchief and with it wipe the nose of the crying boy.

Now Fila seems to be pressing the boy with questions which he is unwilling to answer. Swinging backwards and forwards moodily, alternately laughing and weeping, he sits on the edge of the bed and looks down with amazement at the buckskin leather shoes lying on the floor, their laces all untied.

Fila goes on talking. She seems irritated but she has put the wet handkerchief back in her pocket and is bending over him, insistent and maternal. He stops crying, grabs one of her shoes and holds it up to his nose. Then Fila throws herself on top of him and hits him vigorously, slapping him with the palm of her hand, on the nape of his neck and then on his cheek, finally battering his head with a storm of blows. He lets himself be hit without moving. Then, with all the commotion, the candle goes out and the room is plunged into darkness. Marianna moves a few steps backwards, but Fila must have relit the candle because the light returns flickering in the doorway.

It is time to go back, Marianna tells herself, but a new uncontrollable curiosity, which her inner self judges to be almost indecent, pulls her once more towards the forbidden vision. Now Fila is sitting on the bed with the boy and he is nestling close to her and leaning his head on her breast. Gently she kisses his bruised forehead and brushes her tongue over the scratch she has made under his left eye.

This time Marianna forces herself to go back to the pitcher of fresh water. The idea of witnessing a scene of seduction between Fila and the boy sickens her; she is sufficiently surprised and upset

by what she has seen already. Once again she plunges the cane with its little metal scoop into the water, brings it up to her mouth and drinks in big gulps with her eyes closed.

She does not notice that the door has opened and Fila is standing on the threshold looking at her. She stands there, her bodice unlaced, her plaits undone, frozen with astonishment, unable to do anything except gaze open-mouthed. Meanwhile the boy too has come forward and stops beside her, his little pigtail hanging down beneath his reddened ear.

Marianna stares at them but without looking cross; perhaps there is even laughter in her eyes because eventually Fila frees herself from her paralysis and starts to lace up her bodice with hurried fingers. The boy does not seem afraid. He comes nearer, naked to the waist, focusing his bold eyes on the Duchess like one who has seen her only at a distance through half-closed doors, perhaps spying on her just as a few moments ago she was spying on him, standing by himself, hidden and motionless beyond half-drawn curtains, in ambush. As if he had heard much talk about her, and now wants to see what this great lady with the throat of stone is made of.

But Fila has something to say. She comes close to Marianna, takes her by the wrist and speaks into her deaf ears, making signs with her fingers immediately in front of her eyes. Marianna watches her getting all worked up while her hair slips out of the plaits and slides down on to her cheeks in black rivulets.

For once Marianna is protected by her deafness without feeling disabled. The thought of punishing them makes her cheeks flush. She knows very well that to do so would make no sense--and that, anyway, she is the guilty one for going round the house in the dead of night. But at that moment what she needs to do is to establish the proper distance between them, which has been dangerously undermined. She goes over to Fila with her arm raised, like a mistress who has discovered her servant with a stranger beneath her own roof. Uncle husband would approve of this; indeed he would provide her with a whip.

But Fila quickly takes her hand and drags her to the middle of the room, towards the mirror lit by the gleam of the lighted candle. With her other hand she takes the boy by his hair and pulls him beside her cheek to cheek. Marianna stares at these two

heads in the mirror, the glass darkened by smoke, and in a flash she understands what Fila is trying to tell her: two mouths shaped by the same hand, two prominent noses out of the same mould, narrow at the top and bottom, grey eyes slightly too far apart, wide cheekbones: they are brother and sister.

Fila realises that the force of her images has got her message across. She nods and sucks in her lips with joy. But how has she managed to hide the boy all this time so that even her father the Duke did not know of his existence? Now Fila, with all the authority of an elder sister, tells the boy to kneel down in front of the Duchess and to kiss the hem of her precious amber-coloured dress. And he dutifully looks up and down with a contrite yet theatrical expression and brushes the hem of her skirt with his lips. A flash of childlike cunning, a seductive guile which only someone who feels excluded from this glittering world is able to display.

Marianna gazes tenderly at the crescent moons that make a pair on his bent back. Quickly she gives a sign for him to rise. Fila laughs and claps her hands. The boy stands up straight in front of her. There is something shameless about him that displeases her but at the same time excites her. Their eyes meet in a brief moment of attraction.

XXII

Saro and Raffaele Cuffa are at the oars. The boat slips over the dark water with a regular rhythmic motion. Beneath a garland of paper lanterns there are gilded seats. Duchess Marianna, looking like a sphinx, is wrapped in a bottle-green cloak, her face turned towards the port.

On the seats, sitting across the boat, are Giuseppa with her husband Giulio Carbonelli and their two-year-old son, and Manina with her young daughter Giacinta. In the bows, on two coils of rope, sit Fila and Innocenza.

A boat comes close, a few lengths distant. Another festoon, another gilded seat, on which Duke Pietro is seated. Next to him is his daughter Felice the nun; here too is his son Mariano with his wife Caterina Mol`e di

Flores, and Cuffa's young wife

Rosalia, who has wrapped her black plaits on top of her head like a turban.

All over the water in the Bay of Palermo are hundreds of boats: gozzi, caiques, feluccas, each festooned with its array of lights, each with its seating for the nobility and places for the oarsmen. The sea is calm, the moon hidden behind small ragged clouds edged with violet, the boundaries between sky and water invisible in the dense blackness of a calm, still August night.

Soon the firework scaffold that rises imposingly on the shore will explode with Catherine wheels, rockets and fountains of light that will rain down over the sea. In the background Porta Felice seems like a Christmas crib all strewn with oil lights. To the right the Cassaro Morto, the dark outline of the Vicaria, the low houses of the Kalsa, the massive fa@cade of the Steri Palace, the grey domes of Santa Maria della Catena, the square wall of the Castello by the sea, the long stark building of San Giovanni de' Leprosi. Suddenly from a maze of dark crooked lanes thousands of people are pouring out towards the sea.

Marianna reads a small crumpled note which she holds in her lap. In a graceful copperplate is written, "Scaffold constructed by grace of the Master Weavers, the Master Grooms, and the Master Cheese Vendors. Amen."

Now the men have stopped rowing. The boat oscillates gently on the waves with its cargo of lights, bodies dressed up for a festival, slices of water-melon, bottles of aniseed water. Marianna turns her head towards this throng of boats which, in the stillness of the night, rock to and fro like feathers floating suspended in the void.

"Long live Ferdinand, the new-born son of Charles III, King of Sicily. Amen" says another note that has fallen on to her shoe. The first rocket streaks upwards. It explodes far up in the sky, almost hidden by the clouds. A rain of silver threads plummets down on to the roofs of Palermo, on to the fa@cades of the princely palaces, the streets with their grey cobblestones, the sea walls around the port, the boats laden with spectators, and is