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He campaigned in that highly profitable grey area of ‘The extreme left of the extreme right’,
Between the pride and intellectuality of his mother and the sensuality and irresponsibility of his father, poor Prince Fabrizio lived in perpetual discontent under his Jove-like frown, watching the ruin of his own class and his own inheritance without ever making, still less wanting to make, any move towards saving it.
The Prince put one under his nose and seemed to be sniffing the thigh of a dancer from the Opera.
“one particular sovereign may not be up to it, yet the idea of monarchy is still the same; it is not connected with personalities.” That was true, too; but kings who personify an idea should not, cannot, fall below a certain level for generations; if they do, my dear brother-in-law, the idea suffers too.
Lucky those who could interpret such familiarity as friendship, such threats as royal might. He could not. And as he exchanged gossip with the impeccable chamberlain he was asking himself what was destined to succeed this monarchy which bore the marks of death upon its face.
a pleasant chore, symbol of his proud duties as paterfamilias.
who perceived in him a riotous zest for life and a frivolous temperament contradicted by sudden serious moods.
“But I’ve still got my vigour; and how can I find satisfaction with a woman who makes the sign of the Cross in bed before every embrace and then at the critical moment just cries, ‘Gesummaria!’ When we married and she was sixteen I found that rather exalting; but now . . . seven children I’ve had with her, seven; and never once have I seen her navel. Is that right?”
A kind of Bendicò in a silk petticoat.
Morphia was the name given to this crude substitute for the stoicism of the ancients and for Christian fortitude. With the late King, poor man, phantom administration had taken the place of morphia; he, Salina,
The sun, still far from its blazing zenith on that morning of the 13th of May, was showing itself the true ruler of Sicily; the crude brash sun, the drugging sun, which annulled every will, kept all things in servile immobility, cradled in violence and arbitrary dreams.
“We’re not blind, my dear Father, we’re just human beings. We live in a changing reality to which we try to adapt ourselves like seaweed bending under the pressure of water. Holy Church has been granted an explicit promise of immortality; we, as a social class, have not. Any palliative which may give us another hundred years of life is like eternity to us. We may worry about our children and perhaps our grandchildren; but beyond what we can hope to stroke with these hands of ours we have no obligations. I cannot worry myself about what will happen to any possible descendants in the year 1960.
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They were not messengers of catastrophe as Stella thought; on the contrary, their appearance at the time foreseen was a triumph of the human mind’s capacity to project itself and to participate in the sublime routine of the skies.
“The girl must have her eye on the young scamp. They’d make a fine couple. But I fear Tancredi will have to aim higher, by which of course I mean lower.”
the barrels of those enormous pieces had no rifling, he said, so bullets coming from them would have very little penetration; technical comments thought up on the spur of the moment, understood by few and convincing none but consoling all, including Concetta, as they managed to transform war into a neat little diagram of fire-trajectories from the very squalid chaos that it really was.
Personal jealousy, a bigot’s resentment of his agnostic cousin, a dullard’s at the other’s zest, had taken political guise.
The trees were only three, in truth, and eucalyptus at that, scruffiest of Mother Nature’s children.
All were white with dust to the eyebrows, lips or pigtails; whitish puffs arose around those who had reached the stopping-place and were dusting each other down.
The “Piedmontese” (as the Prince continued to call them for reassurance, just as others called them “Garibaldini” in exaltation or “Garibaldeschi” in vilification) had paid a call at the house, if not precisely cap in hand as he had been told, at least with a hand at the visors of those red caps of theirs, as floppy and faded as those of any Bourbon officer.
These early morning fantasies were the very worst that could happen to a man of middle age; and although the Prince knew that they would vanish with the day’s activities he suffered acutely all the same, as he was used enough to them by now to realise that deep inside him they left a sediment of sorrow which, accumulating day by day, would in the end be the real cause of his death.
And the Prince, who had found Donnafugata unchanged, was found very much changed himself; for never before would he have issued so cordial an invitation: and from that moment, invisibly, began the decline of his prestige.
nephew. Conquered for ever by the youth’s affectionate chaff he had begun during the last few months to admire his intelligence too; that quick adaptability, that worldly penetration, that innate artistic subtlety with which he could use the demagogic terms then in fashion while hinting to initiates that for him, the Prince of Falconeri, it was only a momentary pastime; all this amused Don Fabrizio, and in people of his character and standing the fact of being amused makes up four-fifths of affection.
Love. Of course, love. Flames for a year, ashes for thirty.
Someone had died at Donnafugata, some tired body unable to withstand the deep gloom of Sicilian summer had lacked stamina to await the rains. “Lucky person,” thought the Prince, as he rubbed lotion on his whiskers. “Lucky person, with no worries now about daughters, dowries and political careers.” This ephemeral identification with an unknown corpse was enough to calm him. “While there’s death there’s hope,” he thought; then he saw the absurd side of letting himself get into such a state of depression because one of his daughters wanted to marry.
No laugh, though, came from the Prince on whom, one might almost say, this news had more effect than the bulletin about Garibaldi’s landing at Marsala.
The Word from London had been most inadequately made flesh in a tailor from Girgenti to whom Don Calogero had gone with his tenacious avarice. The wings of his cravat pointed straight to heaven in mute supplication, his huge collar was shapeless, and, what is more, it is our painful but necessary duty to add that the mayor’s feet were shod in buttoned boots.
Yes, Don Fabrizio had certainly had his worries those last two months; they had come from all directions, like ants making for a dead lizard.
It was always he who answered this question; he would give a carefully considered account of what he knew, taking care, however, to present a well-arranged little bouquet of news from which his cautious tweezers had extracted both thorns (descriptions of many a jaunt to Naples, allusions to the lovely legs of Aurora Schwarzwald, dancer at the San Carlo) and premature buds (“send news of the Signorina Angelica” —“In Ferdinand II’s study I found a Madonna by Andrea del Sarto which reminded me of the Signorina Sedàra”). So he would put together an insipid picture of Tancredi which bore very
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In reality the Princess too had been subject to Tancredi’s charm, and she still loved him; but the pleasure of shouting “It’s your fault” being the strongest any human being can enjoy, all truths and all feelings were swept along in its wake.
The hater of shouting was himself bawling with all the breath in his great chest. Thinking he had a table in front of him, he banged a great fist on his own knee, hurt himself and calmed down too.
Don Fabrizio found himself stared at by big black eyes soon overlaid by a glaucous veil; they were looking at him with no reproval, but full of tortured amazement at the whole ordering of things; the velvety ears were already cold, the vigorous paws contracting in rhythm, still-living symbol of useless flight; the animal had died tortured by anxious hopes of salvation, imagining it could still escape when it was already caught, just like so many human beings.
But though a shot had killed the rabbit, though the bored rifles of General Cialdini were now dismaying the Bourbon troops at Gaeta, though the midday heat was making men doze off, nothing could stop the ants. Attracted by a few chewed grape skins spat out by Don Ciccio, along they rushed in close order, morale high at the chance of annexing this bit of garbage soaked with an organist’s saliva. Up they came full of confidence, disordered but resolute; groups of three or four would stop now and again for a chat, exalting, perhaps, the ancient glories and future prosperity of ant hill Number Two
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The cool air had dispersed Don Ciccio’s somnolence, the massive grandeur of the Prince dispelled his fears; all that remained afloat now on the surface of his conscience was resentment, useless of course but not ignoble. He stood up, spoke in dialect and gesticulated, a pathetic puppet who in some absurd way was right.
At this point calm descended on Don Fabrizio, who had finally solved the enigma; now he knew who had been killed at Donnafugata, at a hundred other places, in the course of that night of dirty wind: a new-born babe: good faith; just the very child who should have been cared for most, whose strengthening would have justified all the silly vandalisms.
Don Fabrizio had always liked Don Ciccio, partly because of the compassion inspired in him by all who from youth had thought of themselves as dedicated to the Arts, and in old age, realising they had no talent, still carried on the same activity at lower levels, pocketing withered dreams; and he was also touched by the dignity of his poverty. But now he also felt a kind of admiration for him, and deep down at the very bottom of his proud conscience a voice was asking if Don Ciccio had not perhaps behaved more nobly than the Prince of Salina.
Don Fabrizio could not know it then, but a great deal of the slackness and acquiescence for which the people of the South were to be criticised during the next decade, was due to the stupid annulment of the first expression of liberty ever offered them.
The Prince was vexed; so touchy is the pride of class, even in a moment of decline, that these orgiastic praises of his future niece’s allurements offended him; how dared Don Ciccio express himself with such lascivious lyricism about a future Princess of Falconeri?
“How foul, Excellency! A nephew of yours ought not to marry the daughter of those who’re your enemies, who have stabbed you in the back! To try to seduce her, as I thought, was an act of conquest; this is unconditional surrender. It’s the end of the Falconeri and of the Salina too.”
Don Fabrizio was overcome with sincere emotion; the toad had been swallowed; the chewed head and gizzards were going down his throat; he still had to crunch up the claws, but that was nothing compared to the rest; the worst was over.
He had been Tancredi’s confessor and he knew quite a number of his little failings: none very serious, of course, but such as to detract quite a good deal from the endless goodness of which the Prince had spoken; and all such (he almost felt like saying) as to guarantee an unwavering marital infidelity.
There are certain things known to people like us; and maybe it is impossible to obtain the distinction, the delicacy, the fascination of a boy like him without his ancestors having romped through half a dozen fortunes. At least so it is in Sicily; it’s a kind of law of nature, like those regulating earthquakes and drought.”
Father Pirrone did let his tongue cluck on his palate; then, annoyed at having shown his own amazement, he tried to rhyme the improvident sound by making his chair and shoes squeak and by crackling the leaves of his breviary but failed completely; the impression remained.
A hundred years ago this business of a missing link, of getting such papers “through” was an important element in the lives of many Sicilians, causing alternating exaltation and depression to thousands of respectable or not so respectable folk; but the subject is too important to be treated fleetingly, and we will content ourselves with saying here that Don Calogero’s heraldic impromptu gave the Prince the incomparable artistic satisfaction of seeing a type realised in all its details; and that he gave a depressed laugh ending in a sweetish taste of nausea.
Don Calogero’s advice, after listening to the Prince’s report and mentally setting it in order, was both opportune and immediately effective; but the eventual result of such advice, cruelly efficient in conception, and feeble in application by the kindly Don Fabrizio, was that as years went by the Salina were to acquire a reputation as extortioners of their own dependants, a reputation quite unjustified in reality but which helped to destroy their prestige at Donnafugata and Querceta, without in any way halting the collapse of the family fortunes.
It would be rash to affirm that Don Calogero drew an immediate profit from what he had learnt; he did manage from then on to shave a little better and feel a little less aghast at the amount of soap used for laundering, no more; but from that moment there began, for him and his family, that process of continual refining which in the course of three generations transforms innocent boors into defenceless gentry.
Only Bendicò, in contrast to his usual sociability, crouched behind a console table and growled away in the back of his throat until energetically called to task by an indignant Francesco Paolo with still quivering lips.
Anyone deducing from this attitude of Angelica that she loved Tancredi would have been mistaken; she had too much pride and too much ambition to be capable of that annihilation, however temporary, of one’s own personality without which there is no love; apart from that she was too young and inexperienced to be able as yet to appreciate his genuine qualities, all subtle nuances: but although she did not love him, she was in love with him, a very different thing;
so few strings had her own bow, forced as she always was to echo the joy of others.
cause of great satisfaction to him, for he used to say that a house of which one knew every room wasn’t worth living in.
“She’s too beautiful, too pure for me; she doesn’t love me; it was rash of me to hope; but I’ll leave here with a regret like a dagger in my heart. I’ve not even dared to make a definite proposal. I feel that to her I’m just a worm, and she’s right. I must find myself a she-worm to put up with me.”
