The Silent Duchess (31 page)

He gave her permission to send every day to the Leprosi a footman with fresh bread, cheese and fruit, without however warning her that there was no guarantee the provisions would reach her prot@eg@ee. In the mornings Marianna would from time to time see the Praetor arrive in a little carriage drawn by a dappled horse. She would rush to tidy her hair which had fallen on to her shoulders, and receive him severely dressed with all her writing paraphernalia to hand.

He awaited her in the yellow room, standing in front of one of Intermassimi's chimeras, which seemed to be always pining for the love of whoever was looking at them. But it was sufficient for the observer to turn his back for the same look to transform itself into a mocking grimace. When she entered, the Praetor bowed down almost to the ground, diffusing a subtle scent of gardenias. He fixed her with metallic eyes made soft by honey of a flavour that pleased him above all else. He came to talk to her about the "poor madwoman", as he called Fila, shut away in the Leprosi under his "gracious" protection. Always kind and polite, always preceded by armfuls of flowers and sweets, he was perfectly happy to come all the way to Bagheria to visit her. He would seat himself on the edge of the chair and hold the pen with great elegance as he wrote.

Marianna served him with hot chocolate flavoured with cinnamon, or raisin wine from M`alaga with its sweet scent of dried figs. The first notes were of courteous formality: "How is Her Grace the Duchess this morning?"

"Has her sleep been propitious?" Having swallowed two cups of hot, well-sugared chocolate and stuffed his mouth with little cakes filled with fresh ricotta, Camal@eo began to send his pen darting over the sheet of white paper like a small lizard. His eyes lit up, his mouth took on a firm fold of satisfaction and he would go on for hours, talking or rather writing about Thucydides and Seneca, but also about Voltaire, Machiavelli, Locke and

Boileau. Marianna began to think that at bottom she was merely an innocent pretext for a firework display of learning, and he fell in with this, always bringing new pens, little bottles of Indian ink just arrived from Venice, paper edged with a blue border, ashes to dry the words as soon as they were written.

By this time she no longer experienced fear but only curiosity about this kaleidoscopic intelligence and also--why not?--a certain liking, especially when he wrote with his head down, holding the paper in his open hand. His hands were the most beautiful things in a disproportionate body, its long elegant torso in striking contrast to its two short stumpy legs.

It is strange how the awkward body of the Praetor should insinuate itself into her anxieties about Saro's wounds. Now I am here next to him, Marianna says to herself, and I do not want to, must not, think of anything except that his life is in danger. Saro spends his time sleeping, but it seems that it is something more deep-seated and more dangerous than sleep that numbs him and keeps him a prisoner. His wounds have not healed. Fila struck him with such violence that even though the surgeon Ciullo came at once from Palermo and sewed him up with great skill, his blood is no longer circulating with the joy it used to have, and his wounds are tending to suppurate.

Peppinedda, after the knife attack, has gone back to her father. So it falls to Marianna to take care of his wounds, alternating with Innocenza, who, however, does it with great reluctance, especially at night. For the first few days the unfortunate Saro tossed about as if he were battling against enemies trying to tie him up or gag him or imprison him inside a sack.

Now, exhausted, he seems to have given up the attempt to escape from his sack and passes his time sleeping, though now and again he is overcome by a painful restlessness and convulsed by tearless sobbing. Marianna keeps him company, sitting in an armchair by his bedside. She cleans his wounds, renews the bandages and moistens his lips with a little lemon and water.

Several physicians have been to see him. Not Cannamela, who is now old and half-blind, but other younger ones: among them one by the name of Pace, who has a great reputation for his skill. He arrived one morning on horseback, wrapped in the kind of large hooded cloak that in Palermo is called a giucche. He felt the invalid's pulse, smelled his urine and made a face. It was hard to be sure whether he was expressing uncertainty or simply wished to put on an air of enquiry and speculation befitting a scientist faced with a sick body that is anyway

destined to decay. Finally he decreed that it was necessary to apply leeches.

"He has already lost a lot of blood,

Doctor Pace", Marianna had written in haste, resting her sheet of paper on the bedside table. But the physician was not prepared to discuss the matter. He regarded her note as an insult and was deeply offended. He pulled down the collar of his cloak and went off, not however without having first collected his fee, including the additional expense of the journey, with hay and new horseshoes for his horse.

In the end Marianna sent for help from her daughter Felice, who arrived with her herbs, her decoctions, her poultices of nettles and mallow. She cured his wounds with cabbage leaves and herbal vinegar dei sette ladre.

In less than a week Saro has begun to improve very slightly, although he is still enveloped in the sweetish smell of his dressings. He remains motionless between the sheets, white on white, his chest bandaged, his ear packed round with cotton, his leg bound up like a mummy. Every so often he opens his grey eyes, unable to decide whether to withdraw to the re/l shadows of the beyond or to return to a life consisting of knives and bowls of soup that have somehow to be swallowed.

Marianna presses his hand: as she pressed Manina's hand when she was nearly dying of a blood infection after childbirth; as she pressed the hand of her father the Duke, except that when she took it he was already dead and there was an icy smell of mortal flesh about him. A litany of illnesses and deaths which have taken the splendour from the scaffolding of her thoughts; each death a rubbing in of grains of salt; her head marred by bruises and scars from which there is no recovery.

Now here she is, like a patient dove brooding over its egg, hoping to see the emergence of a beautiful young dove with a will to live. She could send for Peppinedda. Indeed, she knows that this is what she ought to do, but she has no wish to do it: she puts it off from day to day. Peppinedda will come back when she feels the need to stuff herself with food, to steal buttons and to roll around on the carpets.

XXXVII

Will it be compromising for her to go to San Giovanni de' Leprosi with Senator

Giacomo Camal@eo, Praetor of

Palermo? Could it be seen as an act of folly that will put her brothers and her children against her?

These questions course through Marianna's head at the very moment she puts her foot on the footboard of the two-horse carriage that awaits her in the courtyard of the Villa Ucr@ia. A gloved hand helps her to pull herself up. As she enters the carriage she is met by a strong scent of gardenia. Don Camal@eo is dressed in dark clothes, with breeches and redingote in chestnut brown threaded with gold, a black and chestnut tricorn slipping over his powdered curls, his pointed shoes illumined by silver rosettes studded with diamonds.

Marianna sits down facing him and immediately takes out of her bag of silver mesh the wooden holder with pen and ink and the little table very like the one given her by her father the Duke and later stolen from her at Torre Scannatura.

The senator smiles in tribute to the Duchess's skill: he will be obliged to lead off with a stream of letters stuffed with quotations from Hobbes and Plato, and thus intimacy will be avoided. But he hazards a guess that one of the letters he intends to write will be preserved in the box with Chinese designs: the letter in which he reveals himself most, telling her about his studies at T@ubingen when he was thirty years younger.

"I used to live in a tower with three floors that looked out over the river Neckar. I would spend the afternoons there with my books beside one of those big blue and white majolica stoves. If I looked up I could see the poplars along the river, the swans always waiting for someone to throw them bread out of a window. They made deep throaty sounds and they used to have terrible fights with each other during the mating season. I hated that river, I hated those houses with their steep roofs, I hated those swans with the voices of pigs, I hated the snow that threw a blanket of silence over the entire city, I even hated the beautiful girls with fringed shawls as they went to and fro along the island. The garden in front of the tower was actually part of a long gloomy island where the students used to walk between one class and the next. But now I would

give ten years of my life to return to that yellow tower on the banks of the Neckar and hear the guttural cries of the swans. I would even be happy to eat their greasy sausages, I would even admire those fair girls whose shoulders were draped with coloured shawls. Is it not an aberration of the memory to love only what it has lost? Just why do we lose these things, only to languish with nostalgia for the same places and the same people that earlier bored us to extinction? Is not all this predictable, vulgar folly?"

Only once during the journey from Bagheria to Palermo does Don Giacomo Camal@eo grasp Marianna's hand and press it for a moment in his, as if to reaffirm his thoughts, letting go of it immediately with a regretful and respectful expression.

Marianna, who is not very used to being courted, does not know how to react. She holds herself a little stiffly and looks out of the window at the countryside she knows so well. Bending slightly over the little writing-table she slowly writes out sentences, careful not to spill the ink, and drying the words with ashes while they are still damp.

Fortunately, Don Camal@eo's courtship consists principally of writing sophisticated sentences and learned discourses that aim to excite admiration more than attraction, in spite of the fact that he is certainly not a man to despise the pleasures of the flesh. But so far, his eyes seem to be saying, the bonds between them have yielded unripe fruit, extracting a juice that sets the teeth on edge as they force out the pulp. Haste is for the young, who do not know the delights of waiting, the desire to protract a surrender so as to enhance it with more intense and delicate flavours.

Thoughtfully Marianna watches the prudent gestures of his fine hands, so used to seizing the world by the scruff of the neck, but careful not to cause it any harm so that he can enjoy it in a state of quiet contemplation. So different from the men, possessed by haste and greed, she has known up to now: compared with Camal@eo, uncle husband was a rhinoceros. On the other hand he was as transparent as the waters of Fondachello. Her father too was of another mould: erudite and witty but without ambition. It had never occurred to him to plan a strategy for his life; he had never seen the future as an opportunity to sum up and preserve his victories and defeats; it would never

have entered his mind to defer a pleasure so as to make it in the end more enjoyable.

When they arrive at San Giovanni de' Leprosi Don Camal@eo jumps down from the carriage, displaying the agility of his fifty-five years without an ounce of excess fat, and delicately offers her his hand. But Marianna does not take it. She too jumps down andwitha merry silent laugh meets him boldly in the eye. He is left a little off balance; he knows that women, when they are being courted, like to make themselves appear weaker and more fragile than they are. But then he laughs with her and takes her by the arm as if she were a fellow student.

A minute later they are both facing a massive iron door. Keys turn in the lock; a heavy hand stretches out and makes incomprehensible signs with its fingers. There are bows, a running of guards, a glitter of swords. ...

Now a warder with broad shoulders precedes the Duchess down a bare passage while the Praetor shuts himself inside a room with two tall gentlemen, who from the style of their hats are Spaniards. Along the passage there are alternate doors, one of iron, one of wood, one of wood, one of iron, one polished, one unpolished, one unpolished, one polished. On each door a rectangular grill, and behind the grill curious faces, suspicious eyes, tousled heads, mouths that open over broken and blackened teeth.

A bolt slides, a door is pushed. Marianna finds herself inside a cold room with a floor of broken and dusty bricks. The windows are too high to be reached. The light drifts down from the ceiling like rain, the walls are bare and dirty, stained with black marks and sinister red blotches. On the ground are heaps of straw and iron buckets. A fearsome stench of caged humanity catches her by the throat. The warder makes a sign to her to sit down on a straw-bottomed chair that is so worn, with the ends of the straw curling up in the air, that it seems to have been eaten by rats.

Behind a grating the courtyard can be seen, with its bare stone paving softened by a single fig tree. Against the end wall a half-naked woman is asleep, curled up on the ground. Nearer, tied

to a bench, another woman, with white hair that slips out beneath a patched bonnet, endlessly repeats the same gesture of spitting into the distance. Her bare arms show weals from a cane. Beneath the fig tree a little girl of about eleven years old knits with a slow precise action.

Meanwhile a finger brushes against Marianna's cheek; she draws back with a start. It is Fila, her head wrapped in a turban of dirty bandages that makes her features seem smaller and her eyes larger. She smiles happily. Her hands hardly tremble. She has got so much thinner that from behind Marianna would never have recognised her. A long dress of sackcloth comes down in tatters to her ankles. It has no belt round the waist and no collar, and her arms are bare and covered with bruises.

Marianna gets up and embraces her. The animal smell that fills the room penetrates right inside her nostrils: it is horrifying. In a few months Fila has become an old woman, her face wizened; she has lost a front tooth, her hands shake, her legs are so withered that they can hardly support her weight, her eyes are glazed even when they are stretched into a smile of recognition.

When Marianna caresses her cheek, Fila dissolves into a timid weeping that creases up her mouth. Marianna, to overcome her embarrassment, brings a little purse of money from her pocket and encloses it between the girl's fingers. She tries to hide it and, feeling in vain for pockets in the asylum uniform, ends up clutching the little purse in her hand, looking round her in terror. Marianna then takes the scarf of green silk from her neck and puts it round Fila's shoulders. Fila strokes it with fingers trembling like those of a drunkard. She has stopped crying and is smiling seraphically. Then she suddenly lowers her head as if to avoid a blow, and her face darkens.

A guard with powerful arms catches her round the waist and lifts her up as if she were a child. Marianna is about to intervene but recognises the tenderness in the man's action. While he holds up the girl he talks to her gently, cradling her in his arms. Marianna tries to catch the sense of what he is saying by reading his lips, but she does not succeed. It is a language only they understand, that they have refined over months of enforced

cohabitation. And she watches Fila, who contentedly stretches up her shaking hands and encircles the neck of the giant as if she were drunk, resting her head affectionately against his chest.

The two vanish behind the door before Marianna can say goodbye to Fila. It is better like this; the guard has achieved, if not affection, at least an intimacy with the poor girl, Marianna tells herself. Even though the way the man looked at the little purse of money makes her wonder whether this intimacy is entirely disinterested.

XXXVIII

It is two days now since Saro started to eat again. His eyes seem to have grown larger inside the hollow sockets. His white cheeks become flushed with red whenever Marianna approaches his bed. He is still bandaged like a mummy, but the bandages tend to slip and unwind. His body tosses about, his muscles are returning to life and he cannot rest his head quietly on the pillow. His black quiff of hair has been washed and slides like the wing of a crow over his thin boy's face.

This morning Marianna has paid another visit to Fila and is bathing herself in bergamot water to take away the nauseous smells of the asylum. Inside the copper bath-tub that comes from France and that, seen from outside, looks like an ankle boot, she is as comfortable as if she were in bed, with the water coming right up to her shoulders and staying hot for longer than it would in an open bath-tub. It is quite the fashion for well-to-do ladies to hold conversations, receive their women friends or give orders to the servants, seated in the new French baths that are sometimes shielded by a transparent screen out of modesty. Even though Marianna enjoys wallowing in the heat while Innocenza pours saucepans of steaming water over her, she does not stay long in it because she cannot write or read there without getting the pages wet.

Winter has arrived suddenly, almost without being preceded by autumn. Yesterday she was going round with bare arms, now the stove has to be lit, and she has to wrap herself in shawls and cloaks. There is an icy wind whipping up the waves on the sea and tearing the leaves off the trees.

Manina has just given birth to another baby,

and has called her Marianna.

Giuseppa came to see her only yesterday. She is the only one who confides in her. Talking about her husband she says that sometimes he loves her and at others hates her, and that her cousin Olivo is continually pressing her to run away with him to France.

On Sundays Felice comes to lunch. She is struck by the down-to-earth account her mother gives her of Fila and the asylum at the Leprosi. She too has sought permission to go and see her and has returned determined to found a network of "helpers" for derelict women. The fact is, she has changed a great deal lately, having discovered that she has a gift for healing, and has dedicated herself to exploring ways of combining herbs, roots and minerals. After some early cures people have begun to ask for her in difficult cases of illness, especially for skin diseases. And she, faced with responsibility towards the wounded bodies that are entrusted to her, has taken to studying and experimenting. On her forehead has grown a furrow as straight and deep as a sabre cut. She is no longer so preoccupied with the immaculate state of her habit, and she leaves gossip to the younger nuns. She has acquired the busy and preoccupied look of a professional healer.

Her son Mariano, however, never comes. Lost as he is in day-dreams, he never finds time to go visiting his mother. But he has sent his uncle Signoretto to find out discreetly about the frequent visitor to the Villa Ucr@ia, whom the relatives are talking about with such shocked outrage.

"It is not right that at your age you should put yourself in a position where everyone is talking about you", Signoretto has written with a wary hand on a page pulled out from a book of prayers. "You are a widow and I hope you are not planning to make yourself look ridiculous by getting married at the age of forty-five to a libertine bachelor of fifty-five."

"Don't worry, I have no intention of getting married."

"Then you should not allow the senator Camal@eo to come and visit you. It is not right to make people talk."

"There is no physical relationship between us. It is purely a friendship."

"At your age, my lady sister, you should think of preparing your soul for the beyond rather than looking for new friendships."

"You are older than I, my lord brother, but it doesn't seem to me you are thinking of the beyond."

"You are a woman, Marianna. Nature has destined you for a serene cha/y. You have four children to think of. Mariano, who will inherit from you, is worried that you could convey your property elsewhere by a rash act that would be truly regrettable."

"Even if I did remarry, I would not take away a crumb."

"Perhaps you are ignorant of the fact that Camal@eo, before becoming Praetor of Palermo, was for a long time paid by the French to spy on the Spaniards, and they say that he then went over to the Spaniards, having had a more advantageous offer from them. In short, you are dealing with an adventurer whose trustworthiness no one would dare to guarantee. An unknown traveller who has enriched himself through secret dealings, he is not a man an Ucr@ia should associate with. It is the family's decision that you should not see him any more."