The Silent Duchess (2 page)

Marianna turns to look out of the window and to her surprise they are right alongside the sea. The

smooth calm water splashes gently on to the big grey pebbles. On the horizon a large boat with limp sails goes from right to left.

The branch of a mulberry tree snaps against the window. Purple mulberries are squashed on the glass by the impact. Marianna turns aside, but too late, the jolt has made her bang her head against the window frame. Her lady mother is right: her ears are no use as sentinels. The dogs can catch hold of her by the waist from one minute to the next. That is why her nose has become so keen and her eyes so quick to warn her of any moving object.

Her father the Duke opens his eyes for a moment and then sinks back into sleep. Suppose she were to give him a kiss? How happily she would embrace him. How happy she would be to caress that cool cheek nicked by a careless razor. But she refrains because she knows he dislikes any mawkishness. And, anyway, why wake him up when he is happily asleep, why bring him back to another day of "turmoil", as he puts it, writing it for her on a small sheet of paper in his beautifully rounded and shapely handwriting.

From the regular jolting of the carriage the child guesses that they have arrived in Palermo. The wheels have begun to bounce over the cobblestones and it seems to her that she can almost hear their rhythmic clanking.

Soon they will be turning towards Porta Felice, then they will go into the Cassaro Morto, and then? Her father the Duke has not told her where he is taking her but from the basket Raffaele Cuffa has given him she can guess. To the Vicaria?

II

It is indeed the fa@cade of the Vicaria that greets her as she gets down from the carriage, helped by her father. The expression on his face makes her laugh: he has woken with a start, feeling the pressure of his powdered wig rammed down on to his ears, slapping on his tricorn hat and jumping from the footplate, a movement he intends to appear confident and carefree but which turns out to be clumsy. He almost has a heavy fall because of the pins and needles in his legs.

The windows of the Vicaria are all similar,

bristling with spiral gratings that end in menacing spikes; the great entrance gate is studded with rusty bolts; there is a door handle in the form of a wolf's head with an open mouth. With all its brutishness it looks so like a prison that people passing in front of it turn their heads away to avoid seeing it.

The Duke is about to knock on the door when it opens wide and he enters as if it were his own house. Marianna follows behind him and the guards and servants bow as they pass. One gives her a surprised smile, another frowns at her, another even tries to stop her by grabbing hold of her arm. But she breaks free and runs after her father. The child gets tired following him as he advances with giant strides towards the gangway. She skips along in her little satin shoes but she cannot manage to keep up. For a moment she thinks she has lost him, but there he is round a corner waiting for her.

Father and daughter find themselves together in a triangular room dimly lit by a single window immediately below the ceiling. A manservant helps her father the Duke remove his redingote and his tricorn hat. He relieves him of his wig and hangs it on a knob that juts out from the wall. He helps him to put on the long habit of white cloth lying in the basket together with a rosary, a cross and the purse of coins.

Now the titular head of the Chapel of the Noble Family of the White Brothers is ready. In the meantime, without the child noticing, other members of the Noble Family have arrived, also dressed in white habits. Four ghosts with cowls flopping round their necks.

Marianna stands on her own watching the attendants bustle round the White Brothers as if they were actors getting ready to come on stage: the folds of their spotless habits must be straight so that they fall modestly over their sandalled feet; the cowls must come down over the neck and the white points must be straightened so that they face upwards.

Now the five are indistinguishable: white on white, piety on piety. Only their hands peeping through the folds of their habits and that little area of blackness blinking in the two holes in the hood reveal the person underneath. The smallest of the ghosts leans towards the child, flutters his hands and turns to her father the Duke. She can see that he

is angry from the way he stamps his feet on the floor. Another brother takes a step forward as if to intervene. It looks as if they are going to seize each other by the scruff of their necks but her father the Duke orders them to be quiet with a gesture of authority.

Marianna feels the cold soft cloth of her father's habit against her bare wrist. The right hand of the father clutches the fingers of the daughter. Her nose tells her that something terrible is going to happen, but what can it be? Her father the Duke leads her towards another corridor and she walks without looking where to put her feet, seized by an excited and burning curiosity.

At the end of the passage they encounter steep slippery stone steps. The noble gentlemen grab their habits with their thumbs and fingers just like ladies picking up their full skirts and raising the hems so as not to stumble. The steps exude dampness and it is difficult to see, even though a guard goes ahead with a lighted flare. There are no windows, neither high nor low. Suddenly it is night, smelling of burnt oil, rat droppings, pork fat. The head of the prison guards gives the keys of the dungeon to Duke Ucr@ia, who advances till he reaches a small wooden door with reinforced bosses. There, with the help of a boy with bare feet, he unlocks the padlock and slides back a big iron bar.

The door opens. The smoky flare casts light on part of the floor, where cockroaches are running in all directions. The guard raises the flare to throw a shaft of light on several half-naked bodies lying against the wall, their ankles shackled in heavy chains.

An ironsmith appears from nowhere and bends down to release the chain from one of the prisoners, a boy with bleary eyes. He gets impatient because it takes so long and kicks out with his foot almost as if he was trying to tickle the ironsmith's nose. He laughs, showing a large toothless mouth.

The child hides behind her father. Every so often he bends down and gives her a quick caress, but more to make certain that she stays there watching than to comfort her.

When the boy is finally free he stands up. Marianna recognises that he is still almost a child, more or less the same age as Cannarota's son, who died of malarial fever a few months

ago at the age of thirteen. The other prisoners look on without speaking. As soon as the boy, his ankles freed, starts to walk about, they resume their unfinished game, glad to be able to make use of so much light. The game consists of louse-killing: whoever can squash between their two thumbs the greatest number in the shortest time wins. The dead lice are delicately placed on a small copper coin and the winner takes the money.

The child is absorbed in watching the three players, their mouths wide open and laughing as they shout words that she cannot hear. Fear has left her; now she thinks calmly of how her father the Duke will want to take her with him to hell; there must be a secret reason, some high-flown reason which she will only understand later on. He will take her to look at the damned wallowing in mud: some who walk burdened with heavy rocks on their shoulders, some who have been changed into trees, some who have swallowed burning coals and breathe out fiery smoke, some who crawl like snakes, some who are changed into dogs whose tails grow longer and longer until they become harpoons with which they hook passers-by and carry them to their mouths, just as her lady mother keeps telling her.

But her father the Duke is there to rescue her from these horrors. And, anyway, for living visitors like Dante hell can even be beautiful to look at. Those who are there, dead and suffering, and we who are here watching them: is this not what these white-hooded brethren, who pass the rosary from hand to hand, are offering us?

III

Rolling his eyes, the boy watches her, and Marianna returns his look, determined not to let herself be intimidated. But his eyelids are swollen and discharging pus; it is quite likely he cannot see properly, the little girl thinks to herself. Who can tell how he perceives her? Perhaps as gross and fleshy, like when she looks at her reflection in Aunt Manina's distorting mirror, or maybe undersized and all skin and bone? At that moment, in response to her grimace, the boy dissolves into a dark, crooked smile.

Her father the Duke, assisted by a hooded White Brother, takes the boy by the arm and leads him towards the door. The players return to the

half-darkness of their days. Two dry, slender hands lift up the child and place her gently on the bottom step of the staircase.

The procession starts up: the guard with the burning torch, Duke Ucr@ia leading the prisoner on his arm, the other White Brothers, the ironsmith and two attendants dressed in dark tunics behind. Again they find themselves in the triangular room, astir with the coming and going of guards and footmen, who carry torches, arrange chairs, and bring basins of tepid water, linen towels, a basket of fresh bread and a dish of candied fruit.

Her father the Duke leans over the boy with an affectionate gesture. Marianna tells herself that she has never seen him so tender and solicitous. He takes water from the earthenware basin in his cupped hand and splashes it on the pus on the boy's cheeks; then he cleans his face with the freshly laundered towel handed to him by a footman. Next he takes a piece of soft white bread between his fingers and offers it to the prisoner as if he were his favourite son.

The boy allows himself to be looked after, cleaned and fed, without uttering a word. Every so often he smiles, at other times he weeps. Somebody places a rosary of large mother-of-pearl beads in his hands. He fingers it and then lets it fall to the ground. Her father the Duke gestures impatiently. Marianna bends down, picks up the rosary and replaces it in the boy's hands. For a moment she experiences the contact of two cold, calloused fingers.

The prisoner stretches his lips over his toothless mouth. His bloodshot eyes are bathed with a small piece of cloth steeped in lettuce water. Under the indulgent gaze of the White Brothers the prisoner reaches out towards the dish, looks round him apprehensively and then thrusts into his mouth a honey-coloured plum encrusted with sugar. The five gentlemen have knelt down and are telling the rosary. The boy, his cheeks bulging with the candied fruit, is pushed gently on to his knees, for even he is required to pray.

Thus the oppressive heat of the afternoon passes in somnolent prayer. Every so often a footman approaches bearing glasses of water flavoured with aniseed. The White Brothers drink and return to their prayers. One of them mops his perspiring face, others doze off and then wake

up with a start and return to telling the rosary. After swallowing three crystallised apricots the boy falls asleep too, and no one has the heart to wake him up.

Marianna watches her father praying. Is that cowled figure Duke Signoretto or can it be someone else whose head is swaying from side to side? It seems as if she can hear his voice slowly reciting Hail Mary. In the shell of her ear, long since silent, she retains a faint memory of familiar voices: the hoarse gurgling of her mother, the shrill voice of the cook Innocenza, the sonorous kindly voice of her father the Duke, which every so often used to falter and become disagreeably sharp and splintered.

Perhaps she too had learned to talk. But how old was she then? Four or five? She was a backward child, quiet and absorbed, lurking in some corner where everyone tended to forget about her before suddenly remembering her and coming to scold her for having hidden herself. One day, for no reason, she fell silent: silence took possession of her like some illness, or perhaps like a vocation. Not to hear the merry voice of her father the Duke was the most distressing part of it. But in due course she became accustomed to it. Now she experienced a sense of happiness, almost a sly satisfaction, in watching him talk without being able to grasp the words.

"You were born like this, deaf and dumb", he had once written in an exercise book, and she had tried to convince herself that she had only dreamed up those distant voices, unable to admit that her sweet gentle father, who loved her so much, could lie to her. So she had to believe it was all a delusion. She lacked neither the imagination nor the desire for speech.

every p@i every p@i every p@i seven women for one tar@i every p@i every p@i every p@i one tar@i is not a lot seven women for an apricot. ...

But her thoughts are interrupted by the movement of a White Brother, who goes out and returns with a big book, on the cover of which is written: ATONEMENT OF CONSCIENCE. Her father the Duke wakes up the boy with a gentle tap and they withdraw together to a corner of the room, where the wall makes

a niche and a slab of stone fits into it like a seat. There the Duke Ucr@ia of Fontanasalsa bends down towards the prisoner's ear and invites him to make his confession. The boy mutters a few words through his young toothless mouth. Her father is affectionately insistent. At last the boy smiles. They seem almost like a father and son talking casually about family matters.

Marianna watches them filled with dismay. What does he think he is doing? This parrot roosting next to her father, as if he has always known him, as if he has always held his impatient hands between his fingers, as if since the day he was born he has known his smell in his nostrils, as if he has been clasped round the waist a thousand times by two strong arms that have helped him to jump down from a carriage or a sedan-chair, from a cradle, from steps, with the impetuosity that only a real father of flesh and blood can feel for his own daughter. What does he think he is doing?

A compelling urge to commit murder rises up from her throat, invades the top of her mouth and burns her tongue. She could throw a big dish at his head, plunge a knife into his chest, tear the hair off his scalp. Her father does not belong to that boy, he belongs to her, to the pitiable dumb girl who has only one love in the world-- her father.