The Silent Duchess (27 page)
The curtain in the blue room on the first floor has been drawn aside and she is standing behind it, watching the comings and goings of footmen, grooms, lackeys, porters and waiters in plush breeches. During the evening a new theatre will be inaugurated, built by her for the performance of music she cannot hear, for the enjoyment of plays she will be unable to enjoy. To compensate for her deafness she has made the stage large and high, with splendid decorations by Intermassimi. She has had the boxes lined with yellow damask with borders of blue velvet, she has planned a wide vaulted ceiling painted with designs showing birds of paradise, unicorns and chimeras with enigmatic expressions.
Intermassimi arrived from Naples all spruced up, accompanied by a young wife called Elena, with tiny ears, and fingers weighed down with rings. They stayed in the house for three months, eating dainty little titbits and fondling each other everywhere: in the garden, in the corridors, on the scaffolding, among the bowls of paint. He is forty-five and she is fifteen.
Whenever Marianna came across the two of them by chance in some part of the villa, clasped in each other's arms, short of breath, their clothes unfastened, he used to smile at her mischievously as if to say, Now you see what you've missed. Marianna would turn her back on him in annoyance. Latterly she avoided going through the villa when she suspected she might meet them. But in spite of her precautions she would often come across them, almost as if they had put themselves in her path on purpose.
So she went to Palermo to the palazzo in the Via Alloro, wandering ill-humouredly through the dark rooms crammed with pictures, tapestries and rugs. She took Fila with her, leaving Innocenza at Bagheria. She left Saro at the villa too. For some time he has been in charge of the cellars and the wine, swooshing it from one cheek to the other with his eyes shut, and then spitting it out a long way with a sharp smack of his tongue. By now he can also make a guess at the wine's
vintage.
By the time she returned in May the work was finished and she found the frescos so beautiful that she forgave the painter his exhibitionism and his boasting. He and his child wife had left on the very day that Ciccio Cal@o died; towards the end Cal@o had become quite senile, going round the courtyard half-naked, looking for his daughters, with his eyes starting out of his head.
Today is a day of celebration. In the drawing-room lit by chandeliers of Murano glass are all the great ladies of Palermo. Their enormous dresses have skirts stretched out on hoops of wood and whalebone, and tight-fitting, low-necked bodices in delicately coloured silks; beside them are the courtly gentlemen, dressed up for the occasion in long redingotes, red, violet and green, embroidered in silver and gold thread, with shirts puffed out with ruffles and lace, and wearing powdered and perfumed wigs.
Marianna looks around her with satisfaction. For days and days she has been preparing these festivities and she is confident she has arranged it all so that the evening will run on well-oiled wheels. The hors-do'"...oeuvres are to be served on the terrace decorated with geraniums and succulent African plants. Some of the glasses have had to be borrowed from the house at Torre Mosca because after the death of uncle husband she no longer replaced those that gradually got broken. Into these glasses, lent by Agata, is being poured a light spiced drink, lemonade, or a sparkling wine.
Supper, however, will be served in the gardens, between the dwarf palm trees and the jasmine bushes, on linen tablecloths, using the dinner service known as "the regal" in white and blue with the black eagle. The meal will consist of macaroni di zitu, red mullet, hare in a sour sauce, boar with chocolate, turkey stuffed with ricotta, fish cooked in wine, roast suckling pig, sweet rice, conserve of scorzonera, ice-cream, sweetmeats, almond biscuits, water ices and wines from Casa Ucr@ia with the strong pungent flavour of the grapes from Torre Scannatura.
After supper there will be a theatrical entertainment: Olivo, Sebastiano, Manina and Mariano will sing the Artaserse of Metastasio
with music by Vincenzo Ciampi, played by an orchestra of the nobility, consisting of the Duke of Carrera Lo Bianco, the Prince Crescimanno, Lord of Gabelle del
Biscotto, the Baroness Spitaleri, the Count della Cattolica, the Prince Des Puches di Caccamo and the Princess Mirabella.
Luckily the sky is clear, strewn with small luminous buds of light. The moon is not yet visible but, to compensate, the fountain of the Triton, lit from the inside by candles placed in niches hollowed out of the rock, creates a dazzling spectacle. Everything moves according to a predetermined rhythm, following a choreography orchestrated in advance, so that the guests, with their precious attire, their shoes studded with jewels, are unknowingly taking part in an intricate game of charades.
Marianna has decided not to wear a ceremonial dress so that she can move more easily among the guests, go quickly to the kitchen, run to the theatre, go and see the players in the orchestra, who are tuning up their instruments in the yellow room, attend to the lighted tapers, keep an eye on her daughters and her nieces, and signal with her head to the cook and to Saro to get him to fetch more wine from the cellars.
A few of the women are unable to sit down because their skirts are so elaborate and wide, supported by a rigid framework that resembles a dome with a little clock-tower at the summit. This year the hooped skirt is in fashion at the French court, forming a canopy so wide that it could shelter a crouching couple. It is made out of plaited osiers covered by a long full skirt and surmounted by a shiny pleated bodice ornamented with bows and frills, and stiffened up the back with two quills that stretch from the nape of the neck to the waist.
At eleven o'clock there will be a ball and at midnight there are to be fireworks. A frame has been specially constructed and placed in the lemon grove next to the theatre in such a way that the bangs will only occur above the heads of the guests and the flashes will be extinguished in the carp pond or among the roses and pansies in the flower beds.
A warm soft night, pungent with scents. A light salt breeze comes in gusts from the sea, cooling the air. Marianna, in all the confusion,
has not had time to eat even a vol-au-vent. The cooks have been hired for the evening; the head chef is French, or at least so he claims, and insists on being called Monsieur Trebbian@o, but she suspects that he has only been in France for a brief visit. He cooks well @a la fran@caise, but his best dishes are the Sicilian ones. Under the most recondite names it is possible to recognise the familiar flavours that everyone likes. For years the great families of Palermo have competed for him for supper and dinner parties with throngs of guests. And "Monsu" Trebbian@o is happy to earn his living going from one house to another, accompanied by his troop of helpers, assistants and faithful petites mains, to say nothing of an avalanche of saucepans, knives and moulds of his own.
For a moment Marianna sits down and under her long gown slips off her small pointed shoes. It is years since she has seen all the family together at the villa. There is Signoretto, whose affairs are not going well; he has had to mortgage the feudal estate of Fontanasalsa to pay his debts. However, he doesn't look any the worse for it. The slow descent of the family towards ruin he regards as part of the common destiny: a destiny which it is useless to oppose because, anyway, it will overtake them.
Carlo has become famous for his learning and now he is called in from all parts of Europe to decipher ancient manuscripts. He is just back from Salamanca, where he was invited by the Universidad Real, who, at the end of his stay, offered him a teaching post; but he preferred to return to his gardens at San Martino delle Scale, surrounded by his books, his students, his woods, his food. "I invent dreams and fables", he has written on a little sheet of paper which she thrust into her pocket as if it were wiser to keep it hidden. ""All is lies, in delirium I live", as the poet Metastasio puts it."
Marianna rereads the crumpled note, which has remained in her pocket. Her eyes search for her brother: he has sunk into a deep chair, his hair thinning, his eyes pig-like. It requires the most careful observation to perceive a vestige of spirituality in this body, which is now getting right out of
control and overflowing on all sides.
I must see him more often, Marianna tells herself, noting the unhealthy pallor of her brother's face, which seems to recall her mother's; even at a distance she thinks she catches the smell of laudanum and snuff.
Agata too is much changed. Signs of her beauty remain: her large limpid eyes in which the white and the blue are clearly separated. Everything else about her looks as if it has been immersed in the laundry water, soaked and washed for too long, and then spread with ashes and beaten on stones, like sheets in the river.
Beside her, Agata's daughter Maria looks like a portrait of Agata as a girl, with the sharp shoulders of a sixteen-year-old that slip like fresh almonds out of her lace-covered dress festooned with lilac bows. Fortunately Agata has succeeded in saving her from being forced to marry at twelve as her husband wanted. She keeps her close to her and dresses her like a little girl so that she will seem younger, which vexes her daughter, who would like to appear grown-up. Giuseppa and Giulio sit close together, continually looking at each other and laughing at every trifle. Her cousin Olivo watches them sullenly from another table. His wife, sitting next to him, looks less disagreeable than she has been described to Marianna: small, stiff, but capable of bursting out in sensuous rippling laughter. She does not seem upset by the expression on her young husband's face, possibly because she has no suspicion of the love affair between the two cousins. Or perhaps she does and that is why when she is serious she looks as if she had swallowed a broomstick. Her laughter could certainly be a way of enabling herself to face the situation with courage.
Mariano grows ever more handsome and majestic. Sometimes he looks arrogant and frowning, bringing to mind his father, but his colouring is that of his grandfather Signoretto, the colour of bread just taken out of the oven. His wife Caterina Mol`e di
Flores has had several miscarriages but no children; this has created feelings of resentment between the two of them which are obvious to the naked eye. He always talks to her crossly and reprovingly, and she answers him back in a dull tone of voice as if she was always having to expiate her guilt at being childless. She talks to him about the new
freedom, spellbound by the ideas of her aunt Domitilla, but never with quite her conviction. He does not even pretend to listen to her any more. His eyes are constantly on guard lest anyone invades the charmed circle in which he shuts himself to dream. From being passionately interested in having a good time, always going from one house to another for balls and card games, over the past few years he has grown lazy and self-absorbed. His wife drags him through the salons and he lets himself be led but does not join in the conversations, refuses to play cards, eats little, hardly drinks at all. He enjoys looking at other people without being looked at, sunk in his own misty clouds of thought.
What does Mariano dream about? It is hard to say. Sometimes when she has been standing close to him Marianna has been able to guess: dreams of great military adventures among foreign people, of swords held at the ready, of sweating horses, of the smells of battle and gunpowder. Like his father, he possesses a collection of arms, and every time he invites her for a family meal he shows it to her in the minutest detail: the sword of Philip II, an arquebus that belonged to the Duke of Anjou, a musket from the guards of Louis XIV, an enamelled box used by the Infanta of Spain for black gunpowder, and other marvels of a similar kind. Some he has inherited from his father, others he has bought himself. Yet he would not move from his palace in the Via Alloro even if he had the guarantee of a striking victory on the battlefield. He has abandoned himself to dreams of military strategy, which in some way have taken on a second life more real and tangible than reality.
Marianna watches her son as he gets up from the table where he dined with Francesco Gravina, son of that other Gravina of Palagonia nicknamed Agonia. The young man has been refurbishing the villa built by his grandfather, filling it with weird statues: men with the heads of goats, women who are half monkeys, elephants playing the violin, serpents that twist round flutes, dragons dressed as gnomes and gnomes with the tails of dragons, not to mention a collection of hunchbacks, Punchinellos, Moors, beggars, Spanish soldiers and travelling musicians. The people of Bagheria
regard him as crazy; his relations have tried to have him put under an interdict. But his friends love him for a certain open and bashful way he has of laughing at himself. It also seems that he has transformed the Villa Palagonia into a place of enchantment: rooms lined with mirrors that break up and multiply the reflected images so as to render them unrecognisable; busts of marble that project from the walls with arms held out towards the dancers; glass eyes rotating in their eye-sockets; the bedrooms populated with embalmed animals--donkeys, sparrow-hawks, foxes, together with snakes, scorpions, lizards, worms, creatures that no one has ever before thought of preserving.
Evil-minded gossips say that his grandfather Ignazio Sebastiano collected up to his death--that is to say, to the end of last year--a local tax on coitus in exchange for giving up his claims to the feudal jus primae noctis. The young Palagonia is as ugly as sin: a receding chin, eyes too close together and a nose like a beak, but those who know him well say he is kind, merry, incapable of hurting a fly, courteous to those beneath him, tolerant, thoughtful and dedicated to reading romances of adventure and travel. Strange how they are friends, he and Mariano; they are so different, but perhaps it is just this that brings them together. Mariano would not read a book even if he were forced to do so. His fantasies are nourished by the spoken rather than the written word and he certainly prefers a ballad singer from the streets to a book from his mother's library.
