The Viceroys (71 page)

Every Sunday there was another quarrel about Mass. It bored Consalvo to attend it, and he would smile an ambiguous smile at his father's religious zeal. When forced to go to confession he recited to the old Dominican a rigmarole of clownish sins. He would also jeer at his sister for her fervour in devotion, and turn his back on the black cassocks always rustling around the house.
In the Milo cemetery the prince had had a monument of bronze and marble erected over the tomb of his first wife. On anniversaries of her death he would go up there with the princess and Teresa, have many Masses said for the repose of her soul and place huge wreaths on the tomb. Consalvo always refused to go with the family; he went either a day before or a day after. At every excuse his son put forward the prince looked at him fixedly, then he let himself be led off by his wife, who was doing all she could to keep the peace and avoid quarrels. By now there was more ill-feeling between son and father than between stepson and stepmother; Consalvo bowed more to a word from the princess than to the prince's injunctions.

One day he announced that he had taken on a tutor of German and English. The father, after looking him straight in the face, asked:

‘Will you explain once and for all what the devil you think you're doing?'

Consalvo stared back.

‘What I feel like doing,' he replied.

Suddenly the prince went scarlet as a lobster, leapt from his chair as if thrust by a spring and rushed at his son, shouting:

‘Is that the way to reply, you carter?'

Had the princess and Teresa not flung themselves between them and Consalvo not left the room at once, it would have ended badly. From that moment the break was final. By the prince's order the young man no longer came to eat with the family, which pained the princess somewhat and his sister more, but pleased Consalvo a lot. He saw his father for a minute every day to say good morning or good night, and the latter no longer complained of his son's silence and solitude and even avoided a meeting himself. Before the young man had gone on his travels, at the time when his bad habits and debts had given the prince bilious attacks, nervous tics and real illness, an awful thought had occurred to the father: perhaps his son had the Evil Eye? This thought was now growing, although he did not dare show it. Why, for instance, every time he started a discussion with his son did he either get a headache or a bilious attack? Why during Consalvo's long absence had he felt so well? Or, following another train of thought, had that political
conversion which so enraged Donna Ferdinanda and seemed almost to justify this impugning of the Will, not been another proof of his evil influence? Delving into his memory the prince found other reasons for believing in that dreaded power; a sale gone badly when his son had said, ‘It'll be hard to get a good price'; an earthquake shock just after the young man had remarked ‘Etna's smoking'. So he was pleased now to see little of him. If he met him on the stairs or on his way through the rooms, he answered his greeting with a nod and hurried on; if he had to be close to him in the drawing-room during visits, he talked to him as little as possible and got away as soon as he could.

The only way to bring peace back to the family was for the young man to marry and set up house on his own. Anyway he was now twenty-three, and heirs to the Uzeda princedom married young. Hangers-on, gossips, the curious, all those who took as much interest in Francalanza affairs as if they were their own, were impatiently awaiting his and Teresa's marriages and discussing possible matches. For Consalvo there was almost too wide a choice; the Baron Currera, the Baron Requense, the Marchese Corvitini, the Curcuma and numbers of other families had richly dowered daughters of marriageable age. For Teresa things were more difficult. The only young men both rich and noble enough to marry her were the two sons of the Duchess Radalì. The duchess, who had sacrificed her best years for love of her elder son, was very possessive and had not yet got him married as she could not find a good enough match for him. She kept him sewn to her skirts as if someone might steal him; but Giovannino she let free lest the young man should feel like marrying. His uncle's inheritance had made him as rich as his elder brother; but there were differences between the two to be considered. Michele was not of very winning appearance, at twenty-six he had little hair and was too fat; but he was the elder and bore all the family titles. The second son, who only had the untransmissible title of baron, was one of the most graceful and elegant young men in town. Though they had been to the Uzeda palace very little ever since there was a girl of marriageable age living there—in fact because of that—rumours of a possible marriage found credit. But if the prince was asked
what truth there was in this he would declare that Consalvo had to marry first, and the princess would be quite annoyed. ‘I do dislike all this gossip, as it might so easily come to Teresina's ear, and I'm so careful of her. My system is that girls shouldn't hear these or any other remarks …'

Teresa never seemed to hear either this or anything much else that was said, and dreamt open-eyed through the days. She devoured the few novels and books of verse which the princess allowed her to read, and painted pictures of battlemented castles rising from bright blue lakes, of troubadours with guitars slung from their shoulders, or more often of chatelaines kneeling and praying, or of a Madonna with the Divine Child in her arms. The princess preferred the austere and particularly the sacred compositions, so the girl stopped drawing more frivolous subjects. She never relaxed this constant submission to the will of others, this sense of dutiful obedience. The more trouble Consalvo gave the family, the more she thought it her duty to avoid causing her parents the slightest distress. The poetic tales in the books would arouse her fancy and quicken her heart, but if the princess judged she was spending too long on frivolous reading she stopped at once. Often when she heard a novel or play or book of verse praised she longed to read it, imagining how lovely it must be and the pleasure it would give her, but she put it out of her mind if her stepmother said, ‘No, Teresina, it's not for you.' Sometimes such books were in the possession of Consalvo, who, though he only pursued positive studies, also bought lighter reading to show himself
au fait
with everything. So all Teresa would have had to do was borrow the book from her brother and read it in secret, but this idea never even entered her head, for the same reason that in college she had refused to read certain books which her companions contrived to get hold of, and had not listened to the talk of her frustrated friends on forbidden subjects. Both confessor and headmistress had told her there were certain things she should never mention, and she had rigorously abstained. Just as in her childhood the thought of praises and prizes to be obtained won over the temptations of curiosity, so now aspiration to be an example to others made her forget what she was depriving herself of.

Now she was often taken to the theatre; in summer to
comedies, in winter to melodramas; and she did not know which of the two she liked most. Now and again she herself would compose a waltz or a mazurka, or nocturnes, symphonies, wordless fantasies with titles like ‘Yearning!' ‘Enchantment!' ‘A tale of melancholy!' ‘For ever!…' and her acquaintances, relatives and friends would all buzz with admiration at hearing them. Even her music-master, an old man chosen on purpose by the princess so as not to put ‘tinder next to fire', was full of praises. Don Cono, the old family hanger-on, called her ‘Bellini in skirts' and once even exclaimed, ‘I consider that the orchestra of warriors might fittingly rehearse her music and then execute it in public!' ‘The orchestra of warriors' meant the local military band, which had the reputation of being one of the best in Italy. Teresa parried this, while the princess could not make up her mind between pleasure at showing everybody ‘my daughter's talent', and loathing for publicity. The prince, as no money was involved, showed complete indifference. But Don Cono held fast his idea, and one day came and said that he had already spoken to the band-master.

Then Dono Cono brought the latter to the palace. Dark hair, light moustaches, pink cheeks, he was young and handsome as the Archangel Michael. As soon as the princess set eyes on him she began sniffing and making signs to Don Cono to say that she'd never expected such a thing from him, to bring a man with those looks to the house?… Meanwhile the band-master was playing the young princess's compositions on the piano with a touch and expression which made them unrecognisable to the composer herself. At every piece he expressed growing admiration and when there were no more said he would prefer not to choose as each was lovelier than the other; being unable to take them all he left it to the ‘princess' herself to choose. Teresa gave him ‘A tale of melancholy', but when, after scoring it, the band-master appeared a week later at the palace gates to show her his work, the porter told him that his master and mistress were no longer receiving.

‘To bring a man like that to the house? Never did I think you'd do such a thing … It's obvious you've no daughters!' Donna Graziella had said to the old hanger-on in her worry. But she was exaggerating as she did in everything else; would
the young Princess of Francalanza ever glance at a bandleader?

‘A tale of melancholy' was played one Sunday on the marine parade by the regimental band. The concert was one of their best, and Teresa's composition seemed like part of a real opera with some of the singing parts rendered by a French horn as soft as a human voice, and organ effects which made people think they were in San Nicola listening to Donato del Piano's instrument. Teresa listened in a closed carriage under the plane trees, her heart beating fit to break, with a sob in her throat and a face pale as a white rose, then suddenly flushed scarlet when at the end of the piece there was a burst of applause.

Her own music, the music of others, plays, poetry, swept her into ecstasy, high away into a blue ether where she could no longer feel her body and breathed and drank in the purest of happiness even amid tears. But none of the emotions, sweet, ardent or sad, tender or desperate, always ineffable, swelling her heart with joy or gripping it with anguish, were known to the world. She never betrayed herself; even when her mind was most perturbed, thinking of love, waiting for love, or when she was in the company of men, of handsome youths like her cousin Giovannino Radalì; while her imagination was painting in bright outline her own future, her joys and sorrows, fortunes and disasters, she remained calm, composed, and serene. It needed no great effort to disperse those fantasies by turning her mind to the petty or thankless calls of reality.

The meeting with the regimental band-master, his praises, his playing of her music, had loosed a tempest within her. But when the young man did not return to the palace because of the princess's veto, she never gave him another thought. Don Cono, still taken by his idea, and encouraged by success, spoke one day to the controller of public entertainment so that the conductor of the municipal orchestra should also arrange for one of the princess's compositions to be played. This controller of entertainment was Giuliano Biancavilla, son of Don Antonio and one of the Bivona. He was about thirty, with a dark skin and hair black as an Arab's, but slim and elegant and with the gentlest of eyes. As soon as he heard Don Cono's suggestion he at once gave the appropriate orders, and the princess agreed to
her daughter having all the necessary interviews with the conductor, who was about sixty. But how many ways the devil has of getting his tail in! Donna Graziella, with all her precautions, could not prevent the young controller from setting eyes from afar on Teresa! In the theatre he would stare at her without stopping for an instant; at the parade, his carriage would always follow the Uzedas'; even in church he arranged to be on their way. As soon as the princess realised what was going on, she referred the matter to the prince, who let fall only three words:

‘Mad, poor man.'

Then his wife's tongue began working. A Biancavilla pretending to the hand of a Princess of Francalanza? Maybe because an Uzeda had married a Giulente? Poor man, he thought he had another Lucrezia to deal with! Noble? Oh yes, the Biancavilla were noble and rich too, but their riches and nobility did not make them equal to the Viceroys. ‘What daring and impertinence! To set people gossiping about my daughter!…' And she never seemed to realise that by all her talk she was spreading the news quicker.

In a short time it was the sole subject of conversation in town. ‘Will they give her to him?… Won't they give her to him?…' But all recognised that Biancavilla had set eyes too high. Baldassarre, particularly, was beside himself. Of course he wanted the young princess to marry someone suitable for her, at the very least a baron rich enough to keep her regally, and while waiting for the prince to make his choice in his heart he had destined his young mistress to her cousin Don Giovannino. One thing, anyway, he was sure of: that the Signorina Teresa would never even notice Biancavilla's existence.

Instead of this, as time went on the young man's looks had drawn hers as by some magnetic force, and now made her quicken and suddenly catch her breath. She would look at him too every now and then, and find her view blurred by her own emotion. After a glimpse of him however distant she would return home happy and smiling and begin improvising on the piano, atremble from head to foot, as if he could hear all the secret thoughts of love she was confiding to the instrument, the divine hopes of eternal happiness. At college she had sometimes composed a few verses on feast days of mistresses or birthdays of
friends; now she wanted to write one for him, set it to music only for him: