The Leopard (13 page)

The cool air had dispersed Don Ciccio's somnolence i 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. CCI , 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 Sedara 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! "

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 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 significant; and this maiming of souls would have been avoided. Six months before they used to hear a rough despotic voice saying, "Do what I say or you'll catch it! 11 Now there was an impression already of such a threat being replaced by the soapy tones of a moneylender: "But you signed it yourself, didn't you? Can't you see? It's quite clear. You must do as we say, for here are the I.O.U.s; your will is identical with mine." Don Ciccio was still thundering on: "For you nobles it's different. You can be ungrateful about an extra estate, but we must be grateful for a bit of bread. It's different again for profiteers like Se&ra, with whom cheating is a law of nature. Small folk like us have to take things as they come. You know, Excellency, that my father, God rest his soul, was gamekeeper at the Royal shoot of Sant'Onofrio back in Ferdinand IV's time, when the English were here? It was a hard life, but the green Royal livery and the silver plaque conferred authority. Queen Isabella, the Spaniard, was Duchess of Calabria then, and it was she who had me study, let me be what I am now, organist of the Mother Church, honored by Your Excellency's kindness; when my mother sent off a petition to Court, in our years of greatest need, back came five gold ounces, sure as death, for they were fond of us there in Naples, they knew we were decent folk and faithful subjects; when the King came he used to clap my father on the shoulder. 'Don Lioni,' he said, 11 wish we'd more like you, devoted to the Throne and to my Person.' Then the officer in attendance used to hand out the gold. Alms, they call it now, that really Royal generosity; and they call it that so as not to give any themselves; but it was a just reward for loyalty. And if those holy Kings and lovely Queens are looking down at us from heaven today, what would they say?

'The son of Don Leonardo Tumeo betrayed us! ' It's lucky the truth is known in Paradise! Yes, Excellency, I know, people like you have told me, such things from royalty mean nothing, they're just part of the job. That may be true, in fact it is true. But we'd get those five gold ounces, that's a fact, and they helped us through the winter. And now that I could repay the debt my 'no'

becomes a "yes'l I used to be a 'faithful subject'; I've become a 'filthy pro-Bourbon.' " 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, realizing 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. And the Sedaras, all the various Sedaras, from the petty one who violated figures at Donnafugata to the major ones at Palermo and Turin, had they not committed a crime by choking such consciences? 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 criticized during the next decades was due to the stupid annulment of the first expression of liberty ever offered them. Don Ciccio had said his say. And now his genuine but rarely shown side of "austere man of principle" was taken over by one much more frequent and no less genuine, that of snob. For Tumeo belonged to the zoological species of "passive snob," one unjustly reviled, particularly today. Of course the word "snob" was unknown in the Sicily of 18 6o ; but just as tuberculosis existed before Koch, so in that remote era there were people for whom to obey, imitate, and above all avoid distressing those whom they considered of higher social rank than themselves, was the supreme law of life. Snobbery, in fact, is the opposite of envy. At that time a man of this type went under various names: he was called "devoted," "attached," "faithful"; and life was happy for him since a nobleman's most fugitive smile was enough to flood an entire day with sun; and as he appeared under such affectionate names, the restorative graces were more frequent than they are today. Now Don Ciccio's frankly snobbish nature made him fear causing Don Fabrizio distress, and he searched diligently for ways to disperse any frowns he might be causing on the Prince's Olympian brow; the best means to hand was suggesting they should start shooting again; and so they did. Surprised in their afternoon naps, a few wretched woodcock and another rabbit fell under the marksmen's fire, particularly accurate and careful that day, as both Salina and Tumeo were identifying those innocent creatures with Don Calogero Sedara. But the shots, the flying feathers, the bits of skin glittering for an instant in the sun, were not enough to soothe the Prince that day; as the hours passed and return to Donnafugata drew near he felt more and more oppressed, worried, humiliated at the thought of the imminent conversation with the plebeian Mayor, and his having called in his heart those two woodcock and the rabbit "Don Calogero" had been no use after all; though he had already decided to swallow the horrid toad, he still felt a need for more ample information about his adversary, or rather, for a sounding out of public opinion about the step he was about to take. So for the second time that day Don Ciccio was surprised by a sudden point-blank question.

"Listen, Don Ciccio; you see so many people, what do they really think of Don Calogero at Donnafugata?" Tumeo, in truth, felt he had already shown his opinion of the Mayor quite clearly; and he was just about to say so when into his mind came rumors he had heard about Tancredi's making up to Angelica; and he was suddenly overwhelmed with regret at letting himself be drawn into expressing downright judgments which must certainly be anathema to the Prince if what he assumed was true; in another compartment of his mind meanwhile he was congratulating himself at not having said anything positive against Angelica; and the faint ache which he still felt in his right forefinger had the effect of a soothing balsam.

"After all, Excellency, Don Calogero Seffira is no worse than lots of others who have come up in the last few months." The homage was moderate but enough to allow Don Fabrizio to insist, "You see, Don Ciccio, I'm most interested to know the truth about Don Calogero and his family."

"The truth, Excellency, is that Don Calogero is very rich, and very influential too; that he's a miser (when his daughter was at school he and his wife used to eat a fried egg between them) but knows how to spend when he has to; and as every coin spent in the world must end in someone's pocket he now finds many people dependent on him; when he's a friend he really is a friend, one must say that for him: he lets his land on very harsh terms and the peasants kill themselves to pay, but a month ago he lent fifty gold ounces to Pasquale Tripi, who had helped him at the time of the landings: without interest, too, which is the greatest miracle ever known since Santa Rosalia stopped the plague at Palermo. He's clever as the Devil, too; Your Excellency should have seen him last April or May: up and down the whole district he went like a bat; by trap, horse, mule; foot, in rain or suni and whenever he passed secret groups were formed, to prepare the way for those that were to come. He's a scourge of God, Excellency, a scourge of God. And we haven't seen the beginning of Don Calogero's career. In a few months he'll be Deputy in the Turin Parliament; in a few years, when Church property is put up for sale, he'll pay next to nothing for the estates of Marca and Fondachello and become the biggest landowner in the province; that's Don Calogero, Excellency: the new man; a pity he has to be like that, though."

Don Fabrizio remembered a conversation with Father Pirrone some months before in the sunlit observatory. What the Jesuit had predicted had come to pass. But wasn't it perhaps good tactics to insert himself into the new movement, make at least part use of it for a few members of his own class? The bother of his imminent interview with Don Calogero lessened.

"But the rest of his family, Don Ciccio, what are they really like?"

"Excellency, no one has laid eyes on Don Calogero's wife for years, except me. She only leaves the house to go to early Mass, the five o'clock one, when it's empty. There's no organ-playing at that hour; but once I got up early just to see her. Donna Bastiana came in with her maid, and as I was hiding behind a confessional I could not see very much i but at the end of Mass the heat was too much for the poor woman and she took off her black veil.

Word of honor, Excellency, she was lovely as the sun; one can't blame Don Calogero, who's a beetle of a man, for wanting to keep her away from others. But even in the bestkept houses secrets come out i servants talk; and it seems Donna Bastiana is a kind of animal: she can't read or write, or tell the time by a clock; she can scarcely talk; just a beautiful mare, voluptuous and uncouth; she's incapable even of affection for her own daughter! Good for bed, and that's all." Don Ciccio, who, as pupil of queens and follower of princes, considered his own simple manners perfect, smiled with pleasure. He had found a way of getting some of his own back on this suppressor of his personality. "Anyway," he went on, "one couldn't expect much else. You know whose daughter Donna Bastiana is, Excellency?" He turned, rose on tiptoe, pointed to a distant group of huts which looked as if they were slithering off the edge of the hill, nailed there just by a wretched-looking bell tower: a crucified hamlet. "She's the daughter of one of your peasants from Runci, Peppe Giunta, he was called, so filthy and so savage that everyone called him Peppe Immerda; excuse the word, Excellency." Satisfied, he twisted one of Teresina's ears around a finger. "Two years after Don Calogero had eloped with Bastiana they found him dead on the path to Rampinzeri, with twelve bullets in his back. Always lucky, is Don Calogero, for the old man was getting uppish, they say." Much of this was known to Don Fabrizio and had already been totted up in his mind; but the nickname of Angelica's grandfather was new to him; it opened up profound historical perspectives and made him glimpse other abysses, compared to which Don Calogero himself seemed a flower bed in a garden. The Prince began to feel the ground giving way under his feet; how ever could Tancredi swallow this? And what about himself? He found himself trying to work out the relationship between the Piince of Salina, uncle of the bridegroom, and the grandfather of the bride; he found none, there wasn't any. Angelica was just Angelica, a flower of a girl, a rose merely fertilized by her grandfather's nickname. Non olet, he repeated, non olet; in fact, optime foeminam ac contubernium olet.

"You've mentioned everything, Don Ciccio, savage mothers and fecal grandfathers, but not what interests me: the Signorina Angelica."

The secret of Tancredi's matrimonial intentions, although still embryonic until a few hours before, would certainly have been told then had it not been luckily camouflaged. No doubt the young man's frequent visits to Don Calogero's home had been noticed, as also his ecstatic smiles and little attentions, normal and insignificant in a city but symptoms of violent passion in the eyes of the virtuous folk of Donnafugata. The main scandal had been the firsti the old man roasting in the sun and the children duelling in the dust had seen all, understood all, and repeated all; and on the aphrodisiac and seductive properties of those dozen peaches had been consulted the most expert witches and abstruse treatises on potions, chiefly that by Rutilio Benin casa, the Aristotle of the rustic proletariat. Luckily, there had come about a phenomenon relatively frequent among Sicilians: malice had masked truth; everyone had built up a puppet of a libertine Tancredi fixing his lascivious desires on Angelica; he was maneuvering to seduce her, that was all. The thought of any possible marriage between a Prince of Falconeri and a granddaughter of Peppe Immerda did not even cross the minds of these country folk, who thus rendered to feudal families a homage equivalent to that rendered by the blasphemer to God. Tancredi's departure had cut short these fantasies and they were not mentioned again. In this respect Tumeo had been like the others, so he greeted the Prince's question with the amused air assumed by old men discoursing on the follies of the young.

"As to the Signorina, Excellency, there's nothing to say about her; she speaks for herself: her eyes, her skin, her figure are all there to be seen and appreciated by anyone. Don Tancredi has understood the language they speak, I think; or shouldn't I suggest such a thing? She has all the beauty of the mother with none of the grandfather's stink of manure; and she's intelligent, too. You've seen how those few years in Florence have transformed her completely? A real lady she's become," went on Don Ciccio, insensible to subtleties in such matters, "a complete lady. When she returned from school and invited me home she played my old mazurka; badly, but it was a delight to watch her, those black locks, those eyes, those legs, that breast. . . . Uh! No stink of manure there!