The Leopard

by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

secret drawers which no one now knew how to work except thieves.

he does believe in ‘glorious new days for this Sicily of ours,’ as he puts it; these have been promised us on every single one of the thousand invasions we’ve had from Nicias onward, and they’ve never come. And why should they come, anyway? What will happen then? Oh, well. Just negotiations punctuated by a little harmless shooting, then all will be the same though all will be changed.”

To reassure his daughter he began explaining what useless muskets the Royal Army had; 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 and very positive chaos that it really was.

Love. Of course, love. Flames for a year, ashes for thirty. He knew what love was.…

The Prince had always taken care that the first dinner at Donnafugata should bear the stamp of solemnity: children under fifteen were excluded from table, French wines were served, there was punch alla Romana before the roast; and the flunkeys were in powder and knee-breeches.

The Prince was too experienced to offer Sicilian guests, in a town of the interior, a dinner beginning with soup, and he infringed the rules of haute cuisine all the more readily as he disliked it himself. But rumors of the barbaric foreign usage of serving insipid liquid as first course had reached the major citizens of Donnafugata too insistently for them not to quiver with a slight residue of alarm at the start of a solemn dinner like this. So when three lackeys in green, gold, and powder entered, each holding a great silver dish containing a towering mound of macaroni, only four of the twenty at table avoided showing their pleased surprise: the Prince and Princess from foreknowledge, Angelica from affectation, and Concetta from lack of appetite. All the others, including Tancredi, showed their relief in varying ways, from the fluty and ecstatic grunts of the notary to the sharp squeak of Francesco Paolo. But a threatening circular stare from the host soon stifled these improper demonstrations. Good manners apart, though, the appearance of those monumental dishes of macaroni was worthy of the quivers of admiration they evoked.

Excellency,” he asked, “have you had good news from Don Tancredi?” In little towns in those days the Mayor was always able to examine the post unofficially, and perhaps he had been warned by the unusually elegant writing paper. The Prince, when this occurred to him, began to feel annoyed. “No, Don Calogero, no. My nephew’s gone mad …” But there exists a deity who is protector of princes. He is called Courtesy. And he often intervenes to prevent leopards from unfortunate slips. But he has to be paid heavy tribute. As Pallas intervened to curb the intemperances of Odysseus, so Courtesy appeared to Don Fabrizio to stop him on the brink of the abyss; but the Prince had to pay for his salvation by becoming explicit for once in his life. With perfect naturalness, without a second’s hesitation, he ended the phrase, “… mad with love for your daughter, Don Calogero. So he wrote to me yesterday.”

Bit by bit, almost without realizing it, Don Fabrizio told Don Calogero about his own affairs, which were numerous, complex, and little known to himself; this was not due to any defect of intelligence, but to a kind of contemptuous indifference about matters he considered low, though deep down this attitude was really due to laziness and the ease with which he had always got out of difficulties by selling off a few more hundred of his thousands of acres.

This abstract energy made a deep impression on Don Calogero, although with a direct impact not filtered through words as has been attempted here; much of this fascination he noticed simply came from good manners, and he realized how agreeable can be a well-bred man, who at heart is only someone who eliminates the unpleasant aspects of so much of the human condition and exercises a kind of profitable altruism (a formula in which the usefulness of the adjective made him tolerate the uselessness of the noun). Gradually Don Calogero came to understand that a meal in common need not necessarily be all munching and grease stains; that a conversation may well bear no resemblance to a dog fight; that to give precedence to a woman is a sign of strength and not, as he had believed, of weakness; that sometimes more can be obtained by saying “I haven’t explained myself well” than “I can’t understand a word”; and that the adoption of such tactics can result in a greatly increased yield from meals, arguments, women, and questions.

Their wanderings through the almost limitless building were interminable; they would set off as if for some unknown land, and unknown indeed it was because in many of those apartments and corners not even Don Fabrizio had ever set foot (a cause of great satisfaction to him, for he used to say that a palace of which one knew every room wasn’t worth living in).

we Sicilians have become accustomed, by a long, a very long hegemony of rulers who were not of our religion and who 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.

“In Sicily it doesn’t matter whether things are done well or done badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of ‘doing’ at all. We are old, Chevalley, very old. For more than twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of a superb and heterogeneous civilization, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own. We’re as white as you are, Chevalley, and as the Queen of England; and yet for two thousand and five hundred years we’ve been a colony. I don’t say that in complaint; it’s our fault. But even so we’re worn out and exhausted.”

Some will be lost, others saved, according to how they’ve lived in that conditioned world of theirs. Salina himself, for instance, might just scrape through; he plays his own game properly, follows the rules, doesn’t cheat. God punishes those who voluntarily contravene the Divine Laws which they know and voluntarily turn down a bad road; one who goes his own way, so long as he doesn’t misbehave along it, is always all right.

“You, Don Pietrino, if you weren’t asleep at this moment, would be jumping up to tell me that the ‘nobles’ are wrong to have this contempt for others, and that all of us, equally subject to the double slavery of love and death, are equal before the Creator; and I would have to agree with you. But I’d add that not only the ‘nobles’ are to be blamed for despising others, since that is quite a general vice. A university professor despises a parish schoolmaster even if he doesn’t show it, and since you’re asleep I can tell you without reticence that we clergy consider ourselves superior to the laity, we Jesuits superior to the other clergy, just as you herbalists despise tooth-pullers who in their turn deride you. Doctors, on the other hand, jeer at both tooth-pullers and herbalists, and are themselves treated as fools by their patients who expect to be kept alive with hearts or livers in a hopeless state; lawyers, to magistrates, are just bores who try to deflect the course of the law, and on the other hand literature is full of satires against the pomposity, ignorance, and often worse of those very judges. The only people who also despise themselves are laborers; when they’ve learned to jeer at others the circle will be closed and we’ll have to start all over again.

Palermo at the moment was passing through one of its intermittent periods of worldliness; there were balls everywhere. After the coming of the Piedmontese, after that incident at Aspromonte, now that the specters of violence and sequestration had fled, the few hundred people who made up “the world” never tired of meeting each other, always the same ones, to exchange mutual congratulations on still existing.

The more of them he saw the more he felt put out; his mind, conditioned by long periods of solitude and abstract thought, eventually, as he was passing through a long gallery where a populous colony of these creatures had gathered on the central pouf, produced a kind of hallucination; he felt like a keeper in a zoo set to looking after a hundred female monkeys; he expected at any moment to see them clamber up the chandeliers and hang there by their tails, swinging to and fro, showing off their behinds and loosing a stream of nuts, shrieks, and grins at pacific visitors below.

The ball went on for a long time, until six in the morning; all were exhausted and wishing they had been in bed for at least three hours; but to leave early was like proclaiming the party a failure and offending the host and hostess who had taken such a lot of trouble, poor dears.

love’s eternity lasts a year or two, not fifty.