The Leopard

by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Restless and domineering, the Princess dropped her rosary brusquely into her jet-fringed bag, while her fine crazy eyes glanced around at her slaves of children and her tyrant of a husband, over whom her diminutive body vainly yearned for loving dominion.

What's with all these "dominination/dominions"?

Dying for somebody or for something, that was perfectly normal, of course; but the person dying should know, or at least feel sure, that someone knows for whom or for what he is dying; the disfigured face was asking just that; and that was where the haze began.

“He died for the King, of course, my dear Fabrizio, obviously,” would have been the answer of his brother-in-law Màlvica, had the Prince asked him,

“For the King, who stands for order, continuity, decency, honor, right; for the King, who is sole defender of the Church, sole bulwark against the dispersa...

The King, all right. He knew the King well, or rather the one who had just died; the present one was only a seminarian dressed up as a General. And the old King had really not been worth much. “But you’re not reasoning, my dear Fabrizio,” Màlvica would reply; “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.

Even apart from permits, preparations for the Salinas’ journey had been lengthy and complicated. Cryptic negotiations had to be conducted in the agent’s office with “persons of influence” from Girgenti, negotiations ending in smiles, handclasps, and the tinkle of coin.

No comment.

waking at very early dawn amid all that sweat and stink, he had found himself comparing this ghastly journey with his own life, which had first moved over smiling level ground, then clambered up rocky mountains, slid over threatening passes, to emerge eventually into a landscape of interminable undulations, all of the same color, all bare as despair.

And he added, turning to the others, “And after dinner, at nine o’clock, we shall be happy to see all our friends.” For a long time Donnafugata commented on these last words. 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.

“Papa, Don Calogero is just coming up the stairs. In tails!”

Tancredi, intent on fascinating the wife of Don Onofrio, had realized the importance of the news a second before the others. But when he heard that last fatal word he could not contain himself and burst into convulsive laughter. No laugh, though, came from the Prince, on whom, one might almost say, this news had more effect than the bulletin about the landing at Marsala.

he saw revolution in that white tie and two black tails moving at this moment up the stairs of his own home. Not only was he, the Prince, no longer the major landowner in Donnafugata, but he now found himself forced to receive, when in afternoon dress himself, a guest appearing in evening clothes.

When he saw him, however, his agonies were somewhat eased. Though perfectly adequate as a political demonstration, it was obvious that, as tailoring, Don Calogero’s tailcoat was a disastrous failure. The material was excellent, the style modern, but the cut quite appalling. The Word from London had been most inadequately made flesh by a tailor from Girgenti to whom Don Calogero had gone in his tenacious avarice. The tails of his coat pointed straight to heaven in mute supplication, his huge collar was shapeless, and, what is more, the Mayor’s feet were shod in buttoned boots.

Gauche nouveau rich!

Angelica, excited by lights, food, Chablis, and the obvious admiration she was arousing in every man around the table, asked Tancredi to describe some episodes of the “glorious battle” for Palermo.

“It was the greatest fun, Signorina. Our biggest laugh was on the night of the twenty-eighth of May. The General needed a lookout post at the top of the convent at Origlione; we knocked, banged, cursed, knocked again: no one opened; it was an enclosed community.

We ran to fetch a beam from a shelled house nearby and finally, with a hellish din, the door gave way.

We went in; not a soul in sight; but from a corner of the passage we heard desperate screams; a group of nuns had taken refuge in the chapel and were all crouching around the altar;

They looked absurd, old and ugly in their black habits, with starting eyes, ready and...

They were whining like bitches. Tassoni, who’s a card, shouted, ‘Nothing doing, sisters, we’ve other things to think of; but we’ll be back when you’ve got some novices.’

Repulsive. But typical.

Angelica laughed, still leaning on her elbow, and showed all her pointed teeth. The joke seemed most piquant to her; that hint of rape perturbed her; her lovely throat quivered. “What fine lads you have been! How I wish I’d been with you!”

How could she say that? I guess she did it to "get along".

Tancredi seemed transformed; the excitement of the story, the thrill of memory, mingling with the agitation produced by the girl’s air of sensuality, changed him for an instant from the gentle youth he was in reality into a brutal and licentious soldier. “Had you been there, Signorina, we’d have had no need to wait for novices.”

Huh?? Was she supposed to pull the train? Disgusting!

Angelica had heard a lot of coarse talk at home; but this was the first time (and not the last) when she found herself the object of a sexual innuendo; the novelty of it pleased her, her laughter went up a tone, became strident.

Desperate for attention?

Tancredi bent to gather up the feather fan dropped by Angelica; as he rose to his feet he saw Concetta with face aflame and two little tears in the corners of her lids. “Tancredi, one tells nasty tales like that to a confessor, not to young ladies at table; or at least not when I’m there.” And she turned her back on him.

Centuries-old tradition required that the day following their arrival the Salina family should visit the Convent of the Holy Spirit to pray at the tomb of Blessed Corbèra, forebear of the Prince and foundress of the convent, who had endowed it, there lived a holy life, and there died a holy death.

The Convent of the Holy Spirit had a rigid rule of enclosure, and entry was severely forbidden to men. That was why the Prince particularly enjoyed visiting it, for he, as direct descendant of the foundress, was not excluded; and of this privilege, shared only with the King of Naples, he was both jealous and childishly proud.

Entry into an enclosed community is never a quick matter, even for one possessing the most sacred of rights. Nuns like to show a certain reluctance, formal maybe but prolonged, which gives a greater flavor to however certain an admission; and, although the visit had been announced beforehand, there was a considerable wait in the parlor. Toward the end of this Tancredi unexpectedly asked the Prince, “Uncle, can’t you get me in too? After all, I’m half a Salina, and I’ve never been here before.”

Though pleased at heart by the request, the Prince shook his head decisively. “But, my boy, you know only I can enter here, and no other man.”

was not easy, however, to put Tancredi off. “Excuse me, Uncle; the rule says, The Prince of Salina may enter together with two gentlemen of his suite if the Abbess so permits. I read it again yesterday. I’ll be the gentleman in your suite, I’ll be y...

But Concetta turned to her cousin with her sweetest smile: “Tancredi, as we passed we saw a wooden beam on the ground in front of Ginestra’s house. Go and fetch it, it’ll get you in all the quicker.” Tancredi’s blue eyes clouded over and his face went red as a poppy, either from shame or from anger. He tried to say something to the surprised Prince, but Concetta interrupted again, acidly now, and without a smile: “Let him be, Father, he’s only joking; he’s been in one convent already, that ought to be enough for him; it’s not right for him to enter one of ours.”

Touché!

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.

Tancredi had been gone for more than a month and was now at Caserta bivouacking in the apartments of his King; from there every now and again he sent Don Fabrizio letters which the latter read with alternate frowns and smiles, and then put away in the remotest drawer of his desk.

He had never written to Concetta, though he did not forget to send her a greeting with the usual sly affection; once he even wrote, “I kiss the hands of all the little Leopardesses and particularly Concetta’s,” phrases censored by paternal prudence when the letter was read out to the assembled family.

Angelica was now visiting them a...

officially these visits were made to her friends the girls, but in fact their climax obviously came at the moment when she asked with apparent ind...

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, obvious allusions to the 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”).

Great writing!

So he would put together an insipid picture of Tancredi which bore very little resemblance to the original, but did at least prevent anyone from saying that he himself was acting either as spoilsport or pimp.

These verbal precautions corresponded to his own feelings about Tancredi’s considered passion, but he found them tiresome too; anyway, they were only one sample of all the guile in language and behavior he had been forced to use for some time; he thought with regret of the year before, when he could say whatever went through his head, in the certainty that any silly remark...

The Prince and the organist rested under the circumscribed shadow of cork trees: they drank tepid wine from wooden bottles with a roast chicken from Don Fabrizio’s haversack, ate little cakes called muffoletti dusted with raw flour which Don Ciccio had brought with him and the local grapes so ugly to look at and so good to eat;

with great hunks of bread they satisfied the hungry dogs standing there in front of them, impassive as bailiffs bent on getting debts paid.

Great turn of phrase.

“And you, Don Ciccio, how did you vote on the twenty-first?”

The plebiscite to join Sicily to Italy. Part of what Garibaldi was doing.

“Excuse me, Excellency, but there’s no point in your question. You know that everyone in Donnafugata voted ‘yes.’ ”

Before the voting many had come to him for advice; all of them had been exhorted, sincerely, to vote “yes.” Don Fabrizio, in fact, could not see what else there was to do: whether treating it as a fait accompli or as an act merely theatrical and banal, whether taking it as historical necessity or considering the trouble these humble folk might get into if their negative attitude were known.

The day of the Plebiscite was windy and gray, and tired groups of youths had been seen going through the streets of the town with placards carrying “Yes” and the same on pieces of paper stuck in the ribbons of their hats.

Among the papers and refuse swirled about by the wind were a few verses of La Bella Gigugin transformed into a kind of Arab wail, a fate to which any gay tune sung in Sicily is bound to succumb.

A patriotic song. Good way to describe how it sounded at that time.

Before dusk the three or four whores of Donnafugata (there were some there, too, not organized but each hard at work on her own) appeared in the square with tricolor ribbons in their manes in protest against the exclusion of women from the vote; the poor creatures were jeered at even by the most advanced liberals and forced back to their lairs. This did not prevent the newspaper Giornale di Trinacria from telling the people of Palermo four days later that at Donnafugata “some gentle representatives of the fair sex wished to show their faith in the new and brilliant destinies of their beloved Country, and demonstrated in the main square amid general acclamation from the patriotic population.”

Voters listed, 515; Voted, 512; Yes, 512; No, zero.

A lot of No's didn't get counted!

The cool air had dispersed Don Ciccio’s somnolence; the massive grandeur of the Prince dispelled his fears; now all that remained afloat on the surface of Don Ciccio’s conscience was resentment, useless of course but not ignoble. He stood there, spoke in dialect, and gesticulated, a pathetic puppet who in some absurd way was right. “I, Excellency, voted ‘no.’ ‘No,’ a hundred times ‘no.’ I know what you told me: necessity, unity, expediency. You may be right; I know nothing of politics. Such things I leave to others. But Ciccio Tumeo is honest, poor though he may be, with his trousers in holes” (and he slapped the carefully mended patches in his shooting breeches), “and I don’t forget favors done me! Those swine in the Town Hall just swallowed up my opinion, chewed it, and then spat it out transformed as they wanted. I said black and they made me say white! The one time when I could say what I thought, that bloodsucker Sedàra went and annulled it, behaved as if I never existed, as if I never meant a thing, I, Francesco Tumeo La Manna, son of Leonardo, organist of the Mother Church at Donnafugata, a better man than he is! To think I’d even dedicated to him a mazurka I composed at the birth of that …” (he bit his thumb to rein himself in), “that mincing daughter of his!”

As was said earlier.

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 newborn babe: good faith; just the very child who should have been cared for most, whose strengthening would have justified all the silly vandalisms.

Don Ciccio’s negative vote, fifty similar votes at Donnafugata, a hundred thousand “noes” in the whole Kingdom, would have had no effect on the result, would in fact have made it, if anything, more signifi...

“Don Calogero,” said the Prince, “the love of these two young people is the basis, the only foundation, of their future happiness. We all know that. But we men of a certain age, men of experience, we have to think of other things, too. There is no point in my telling you how illustrious is the family of Falconeri; it came to Sicily with Charles of Anjou, flourished under Aragonese, Spanish, Bourbon kings (if I may name them in your presence), and I am sure that they will also prosper under the new dynasty from the mainland (may God preserve it).” (It was impossible to tell how much the Prince was being ironic or how much he was being mistaken.) “They were Peers of the Realm, Grandees of Spain, Knights of Santiago, and, when they have a fancy to be Knights of Malta, they need only raise a finger and the Via Condotti pours diplomas out on them without a moment’s hesitation, so far at least.” (This perfidious insinuation was entirely lost on Don Calogero, who was quite ignorant of the statutes of the Sovereign Order of the Knights of Malta.)