The Leopard

by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Timid and congenitally bureaucratic, he found himself much out of his element. His head had been stuffed with the tales of brigands by which Sicilians love to test the nervous resistance of new arrivals, and for a month he had seen every usher in his office as a murderer, and every wooden paper cutter on his desk as a dagger; for a month, too, the oily cooking had upset his inside.

Flattery always slipped off the Prince like water off leaves in fountains: it is one of the advantages enjoyed by men who are at once both proud and used to being so.

we Sicilians have become accustomed, by a long, a very long hegemony of rulers who were not of our religion and did not speak our language, to split hairs. If we had not done so we’d never have coped with Byzantine tax gatherers, with Berber Emirs, with Spanish Viceroys. Now the bent is endemic, we’re made like that. I said ‘support’, I did not say ‘participate’.

“In Sicily it doesn’t matter about doing things well or badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of ‘doing’ at all. We are old, Chevalley, very old. For over twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of superb and heterogeneous civilisations, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own.

“The intention is good, Chevalley, but it comes too late; and I’ve already said that it is mainly our fault. You talked to me a short while ago about a young Sicily sighting the marvels of the modern world; for my part I see instead a centenarian being dragged in a bath-chair round the Great Exhibition in London, understanding nothing and caring about nothing, whether it’s the steel factories of Sheffield or the cotton spinneries of Manchester, and thinking of nothing but drowsing off again on beslobbered pillows with a pot under the bed.”

“Sleep, my dear Chevalley, sleep, that is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them, even in order to bring them the most wonderful of gifts: I must say, between ourselves, that I have strong doubts whether the new kingdom will have many gifts for us in its luggage. All Sicilian self-expression, even the most violent, is really wish-fulfilment; our sensuality is a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death; our languor, our exotic ices, a hankering for voluptuous immobility, that is for death again; our meditative air is that of a void wanting to scrutinise the enigmas of Nirvana. From that comes the power among us of certain people, of those who are half awake: that is the cause of the well-known time lag of a century in our artistic and intellectual life; novelties attract us only when they are dead, incapable of arousing vital currents; from that comes the extraordinary phenomenon of the constant formation of myths which would be venerable if they were really ancient, but which are really nothing but sinister attempts to plunge us back into a past that attracts us only because it is dead.”

Those are the forces which have formed our minds together with and perhaps more than alien pressure and varied invasions: this landscape which knows no mean between sensuous sag and hellish drought; which is never petty, never ordinary, never relaxed, as should be a country made for rational beings to live in; this country of ours in which the inferno round Randazzo is a few miles from the beauty of Taormina Bay; this climate which inflicts us with six feverish months at a temperature of 104. Count them, Chevalley, count them; May, June, July, August, September, October; six times thirty days of sun sheer down on our heads; this summer of ours which is as long and glum as a Russian winter and against which we struggle with less success. You don’t know it yet, but fire could be said to snow down on us as on the accursed cities of the Bible. If a Sicilian worked hard in any of those months he would expend energy enough for three. Then water is either lacking altogether or has to be carried from so far that every drop is paid for by a drop of sweat; and when the rains come, they are always tempestuous and set dry torrents to frenzy, drown beasts and men on the very spot where two weeks before both had been dying of thirst.

I belong to an unlucky generation, swung between the old world and the new, and I find myself ill at ease in both. And what is more, as you must have realised by now, I am without illusions; what would the Senate do with me, an inexperienced legislator who lacks the faculty of self-deception, essential requisite for anyone wanting to guide others? We of our generation must draw aside and watch the capers and somersaults of the young around this ornate catafalque. Now you need young men, bright young men, with minds asking ‘how’ rather than ‘why’, and who are good at masking, at blending I should say, their obvious personal interests with vague public ideals.” He was silent, left St. Peter’s alone. Then he went on: “May I give you some advice to hand on to your superiors?”

He decided to make a last effort. As he got up his voice was charged with emotion. “Prince, do you seriously refuse to do all in your power to alleviate, to attempt to remedy the state of physical squalor, of blind moral misery in which this people of yours lies? Climate can be overcome, the memory of evil regimes cancelled, for the Sicilians must want to improve; if honest men withdraw the way will be open for those with no scruples and no vision, for Sedàra and his like; and then everything will be as before for yet more centuries. Listen to your conscience, Prince, and not to the proud truths that you have spoken. Collaborate.”

‘They are coming to teach us good manners!’ I replied in English. ‘But they won’t succeed, because we are gods.’

the Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery; every invasion by outsiders, whether so by origin or, if Sicilian, by independence of spirit, upsets their illusion of achieved perfection, risks disturbing their satisfied waiting for nothing; having been trampled on by a dozen different peoples, they think they have an imperial past which gives them a right to a grand funeral.

An occasional door was already open and the cumulative stench of sleep spread out into the street; by glimmering wicks mothers scrutinised the lids of their children for trachoma; almost all were in mourning and many had been the wives of those carcasses one stumbles over on the turns of mountain tracks.

Chevalley thought: “This state of things won’t last; our lively new modern administration will change it all.” The Prince was depressed. “All this shouldn’t last; but it will, always; the human ‘always’ of course, a century, two centuries . . . and after that it will be different, but worse. We were the Leopards and Lions; those who’ll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals and sheep, we’ll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.”

Nobles were reserved and incomprehensible, peasants explicit and clear; but the Devil twisted them both round his little finger all the same.

be. It was still only half-past ten, rather early to appear at a ball if one is Prince of Salina, whose arrival should be timed for when a fête is at its height. But this time they had to be early if they wanted to be there for the entry of the Sedàras, who were the sort of people (“they don’t know yet, poor things”) to take literally the times on the gleaming invitation card.

The girls, incomprehensible beings for whom a ball is fun and not a tedious worldly duty, were chatting away gaily in low voices;

There was something to be said for his strictures; what with the frequent marriages between cousins in recent years due to sexual lethargy and territorial calculations, with the dearth of proteins and overabundance of starch in the food, with the total lack of fresh air and movement, the drawing-rooms were now filled with a mob of girls incredibly short, improbably dark, unbearably giggly.

Even so they did not say much to him, for his cold blue eyes, glimpsed under the heavy lids, put would-be talkers off, and he often found himself isolated, not, as he thought, from respect, but from fear. He got up; his melancholy had now changed to black gloom.

They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other’s defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor, unknowing actors set to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director who had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script.

Don Fabrizio felt his heart thaw; his disgust gave way to compassion for all these ephemeral beings out to enjoy the tiny ray of light granted them between two shades, before the cradle, after the last spasms. How could one inveigh against those sure to die? It would be as vile as those fish-vendors insulting the condemned in the Piazza del Mercato sixty years before.

The thought occurred to Don Fabrizio that it was inner ignorance of this supreme consolation which makes the young feel sorrows much more sharply than the old; the latter are nearer the safety exit.

Wouldn’t it be better, after all, to listen to Angelica’s refreshing if forced cordiality, to Tancredi’s dry wit? No: better bore oneself than bore others.

For a dozen years or so he had been feeling as if the vital fluid, the faculty of existing, life itself in fact and perhaps even the will to go on living, were ebbing out of him slowly but steadily, as grains of sand cluster and then line up one by one, unhurried, unceasing, before the narrow neck of an hour-glass. In some moments of intense activity or concentration this sense of continual loss would vanish, to reappear impassively in brief instants of silence or introspection; just as a constant buzzing in the ears or ticking of a pendulum superimpose themselves when all else is silent, assuring us of always being there, watchful, even when we do not hear them.

The result was that he had been forced to spend thirty-six hours cooped up in a scorching hot box, suffocated by the smoke of tunnels repetitive as feverish dreams, blinded by the sun in open patches stark as sad realities, humiliated by the innumerable squalid services he had to ask of his alarmed grandson. They crossed evil-looking landscapes, accursed mountain ranges, torpid malarial plains, those landscapes of Calabria and Basilicata which seemed barbarous to him while they were actually just like those of Sicily.

this was a poor devil, doctor to the slum quarter around, impotent witness of a thousand wretched death agonies. Above a torn frock-coat stretched his long, haggard face stubbled with white hair, the disillusioned face of a famished intellectual; when he took a chainless watch from his pocket, the false gilt showed marks of verdigris.

“I’m seventy-three years old, and all in all I may have lived, really lived, a total of two . . . three at the most.”

It was she, the creature for ever yearned for, coming to fetch him; strange that one so young should yield to him; the time for the train’s departure must be very close.

she found herself even without the solace of being able to blame her own unhappiness on others, a solace which is the last protective device of the desperate.

“this dog has really become too moth-eaten and dusty. Take it out, throw it away.” As the carcass was dragged off, the glass eyes stared at her with the humble reproach of things discarded in the hope of final riddance. A few minutes later what remained of Bendicò was flung into a corner of the yard visited every day by the dustman. During the flight down from the window its form recomposed itself for an instant; in the air there seemed to be dancing a quadruped with long whiskers, its right foreleg raised in imprecation. Then all found peace in a little heap of livid dust.

The dog was hoping to induct the man into a taste for superfluous activity, to inculcate in him some part of his own energy; the man could have wished that the animal, by virtue of being loved, might appreciate if not abstract speculation, at least the pleasure of tasteful, gentlemanly idleness; neither of them, of course, achieved anything, but they were content nonetheless because happiness consists in seeking for an end in view rather than in attaining it; or so we are told.

The girls, however, pretty as they were, and with the bloom of youth, started to acquire that impalpable bluish patina, redolent of warm ash, that points to spinsterhood.

He campaigned in that highly profitable grey area of “The extreme left of the extreme right”, a magnificent springboard that was later to allow him to perform some admirable and much-admired acrobatics.