The Leopard (16 page)

The family was crowding around the door; the Princess had withdrawn her own reservations before the wrath of her husband, who had not so much rejected them as blasted them to nothingness; she kissed her lovely future niece again and again and squeezed her to her bosom with such energy that the girl found stamped on her skin the setting of the famous Salina ruby necklace which Maria Stella had insisted on wearing, though it was daylight, in sign of a major celebration. The sixteen-year-old Francesco Paolo was pleased at having this exceptional chance of kissing Angelica too, under the impotently jealous eyes of his father. Concetta was particularly affectionate; her joy was so intense that the tears even came to her eyes. The other sisters drew close around her with noisy gaiety just because they were not moved. Even Father Pirrone, who in his saintly way was not insensible to female fascination, in which he saw an undeniable proof of Divine Goodness, felt all his own opposition melt away before the warmth of her grace (with a small g), and he murmured to her, "Veni, sponsa de Libano." (He had to check himself then to avoid other warmer verses rising to his memory.) Mademoiselle Dombreuil, as befits a governess, wept with emotion, kneading the girl's plump shoulders in her disappointed fingers and crying, "Angelica, Angelica, pensons a la joie de Tancrede." Only Bendico, 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.

Lighted candles had been set in twenty-four of the fortyeight branches of the chandelier, and each of these candles, candid and at the same time ardent, seemed like a virgin in the throes of love; the two-colored Murano flowers on their stems of curved glass looked down, admired the girl who entered, and gave her a fragile and iridescent smile. The great fireplace was lit more in sign of joy than to warm the tepid room, and the light of the flames quivered on the floor, loosing intermittent gleams from the dull gold of the furniture; it really did represent the domestic hearth, symbol of home, and its brands were sparks of desire, its embers were ardors contained.

The Princess, who possessed to eminent degree the faculty of reducing emotions to the least common denominator, began narrating sublime episodes from Tancredi's childhood; so insistent was she about these that it really began to seem as if Angelica should consider herself lucky to be marrying a man who had been so reasonable at the age of six as to submit to necessary enemas without a fuss, and so bold at twelve as to have stolen a handful of cherries. As this episode of banditry was being recalled, Concetta burst out laughing. "That's a habit Tancredi hasn't yet been able to rid himself of," she said. "D'you. remember, Papa, how a couple of months ago he took those peaches we'd been so looking forward to?" Then she suddenly looked dour, as if she were chairwoman of an association for owners of damaged orchards.

Don Fabrizio's voice quickly put such trifling in its place; he talked of Tancredi as he was now, of the quick attentive youth, always ready with a remark which enraptured those who loved him and exasperated everyone else; he told of Tancredi's introduction to the Duchess of San-somethingor-other during a visit to Naples, and how she had been so taken with him that she wanted him to visit her morning, noon, and night, whether she happened to be in her drawing room or her bed; all because, said she, no one knew how to tell
les petits riens
like Tancredi; and although Don Fabrizio hurriedly added that Tancredi could have been no more than sixteen at the time and the Duchess over fifty, Angelica's eyes flashed, for she had definite information about the habits of Palermitan youths and strong intuitions about those of Neapolitan Duchesses. 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 to appreciate yet his genuine qualities, all subtle nuances; but although she did not love him, she was, then, in love with him, a very different thing; his blue eyes, his affectionate teasing, certain suddenly serious tones of his voice gave her, even in memory, quite a definite turn, and in those days her one longing was to be gripped by those hands of his; presently she would forget them and find a substitute as she did, in fact, later, but for the moment she yearned for him to seize her. So the revelation of this possible love-affair (which was, in fact, nonexistent) gave her a twinge of that most absurd of tortures, retrospective jealousy; a twinge soon dissipated, however, by a cool appraisal of the advantages, erotic and otherwise, of marriage to Tancredi.

Don Fabrizio went on praising Tancredi. In his affection he got to the point of talking about him as a kind of Mirabeau. "He's begun early and well," said he, "and will go far." Angelica's smooth forehead bowed in assent. Actually she did not care at all about Tancredi's political future; she was one of the many girls who consider public events as part of a separate universe, and she could not even imagine that a speech by Cavour might in time, through a thousand minute links, influence her own fife and change it. She was thinking, "We've got the stuff, and that's enough for us; as to going far . . ." Such youthful simplicities she was to discard completely when, years later, she became one of the most venomous string pullers for Parliament and Senate.

"And then, Angelica, you have no idea yet how amusing Tancredi is! He knows everything, sees an unexpected side everywhere. When one's with him and he's in form, the world seems even funnier than it usually does, sometimes more serious, too." That Tancredi was amusing, Angelica already knew; that he was capable of revealing new worlds, she not only hoped but had some reason to suspect ever since the twenty-fifth of last September, day of that famous kiss, the only one officially noticed, in the shelter of that treacherous laurel hedge, for it had been something much subtler and tastier, entirely different from the only other sample in her experience, one given her over a year before by a gardener's boy at Pogglo a Cajano. But Angelica cared very little about the wit or even the intelligence of her fiance, far less in any case than did sweet old Don Fabrizio -really so sweet, though so "intellectual" too. In Tancredi she saw her chance of gaining a fine position in the noble world of Sicily, a world which to her was full of marvels very different from those which it contained in reality; and she also wanted him as a lively partner in bed. If he was superior in spirit too, all the better; but she for her part didn't bother much about that. There was always amusement to be had. In any case those were ideas for the future; for the moment, whether witty or stupid, she would have liked to have him there, stroking at least her neck under the tresses, as he had once done.

"Oh God, oh God, how I wish he were with us now!

The exclamation moved them all, both by its evident sincerity and the ignorance that caused her to make it, and brought that very successful first visit to an end. For shortly afterward Angelica and her father made their farewells: preceded by a stable lad with a lighted lantern, the uncertain gold of whose gleams set alight the red of fallen plane leaves, father and daughter returned to their home whose entrance had been forbidden to Peppe 'Mmerda, Angelica's grandfather, by bullets in the kidneys. Now that Don Fabrizio felt serene again, he had gone back to his habit of evening reading. In autumn, after the Rosary, as it was now too dark to go out, the family would gather around the fire waiting for dinner, and the Prince, standing up, would read out to his family extracts from modern novels, exuding dignified benevolence from every pore. Those were years when novels were helping to form those literary myths which still dominate European minds today; but in Sicily, partly because of its traditional impermeability to anything new, partly because of the general ignorance of any language whatsoever, partly also, it must be said, because of a nagging and strict Bourbon censorship which worked through the Customs, no one had heard of Dickens, Eliot, Sand, Flaubert, or even Dumas. A couple of Balzac's volumes had, through various subterfuges, it is true, reached the hands of Don Fabrizio, who had appointed himself family censor; he had read them and then lent them, in disgust, to a friend he didn't like, saying that they were by a writer with a talent undoubtedly vigorous but also extravagant and "obsessed" (today he would have said "monomaniacal"): a hasty judgment, obviously, but not without a certain acuteness. The level of these readings was therefore somewhat low, conditioned as it was by respect for the virginal shyness of the girls, the religious scruples of the Princess, and the Prince's own sense of dignity, which would have energetically refused to let his united family hear any "filth."

It was about the tenth of November and getting toward the end of their stay at Donnafugata. The rain was pouring down and a gale slapping gusts of rain angrily on the windowpanes; in the distance was a roll of thunder; every now and again a few drops found their way down the primitive Sicilian chimney, sizzled a moment on the fire, and dotted with black the glowing brands of olive wood. He was reading Angiola Maria and that evening had just reached the last few pages; the description of the heroine's journey through the icy Lombard winter froze the Sicilian hearts of the young ladies, even in their warm armchairs. All of a sudden there was a great scuttle in the room next door, and in came Mimi the valet breathing hard. "Excellency," he cried, forgetting all his style, "Excellency, Signorino Tancredi's arrived! He's in the courtyard seeing his luggage unloaded. Think of it!

Madonna, in this weather! " And off he rushed.

Surprise swept Concetta into a time which no longer corresponded with reality, and "Darling! " she exclaimed. But the very sound of her own voice led her back to the comfortless present and, of course, such a brusque change from a secret warm climate to an open frozen one was most painful; fortunately, the exclamation was submerged in the general excitement and not heard. Preceded by Don Fabrizio's long steps, they all rushed toward the stairs; the dark drawing rooms were hurriedly crossed; down they went; the great gate was flung wide on to the outer stairs and the courtyard below; the wind rushed in, making the canvases of the portraits quiver and sweeping with it dampness and a smell of earth; against a sky lit by flashes of lightning the trees in the garden swayed and rustled like torn silk. Don Fabrizio was just about to pass through the front door when on the top step outside appeared a heavy shapeless mass; it was Tancredi wrapped up in the huge blue cloak of the Piedmontese Cavalry, so soaked that he must have weighed a ton and looked quite black. "Careful, Uncle; don't touch me, I'm a sponge! " The light of the lantern on the stairs showed a glimpse of his face. He came in, undid the chain which held the cloak at the collar, and let fall the garment, which flopped on the floor with a squelch. He smelled like a wet dog; he hadn't taken off his boots for the last three days; but to Don Fabrizio, embracing him, he was the lad more beloved than his own sons, for Maria Stella a dear nephew most basely calumniated, for Father Pirrone the sheep always lost and always found, for Concetta a dear ghost resembling her lost love. Even Mademoiselle Dombreuil kissed him with her mouth so unused to caresses and cried, poor girl,
"Tancredi, Tancredi, pensons a la
joie d'Angelica,"
so few strings had her own bow, forced as she always was to echo the joys of others. Bendico also found again his dear comrade in play, one who knew better than anyone else how to blow into a snout through a closed fist; but he showed his ecstasy in his own doggy way by leaping frenziedly around the room and taking no notice of his beloved. It was a moving moment, this grouping of the family around the returned youth, all the dearer as he was not really a member of it, all the happier as he was coming to gather both love and a sense of perennial security. A moving moment-but a long one, too. When the first transports were spent, Don Fabrizio noticed that on the threshold were standing two other figures, also dripping and also smiling. Tancredi noticed them too and began to laugh. "Excuse me, all of you, but the excitement quite made me forget. Aunt," he said, turning to the Princess, "I've allowed myself to bring a dear friend, Count Carlo Cavriaghi; anyway you know him, he used often to come up to the villa when he was with the General. And this other is Lancer Moroni, my servant." The soldier smiled 411 over his dull, honest face, and stood there at attention while from the thick cloth of his overcoat the water dripped down onto the floor. But the young Count did not stand at attention; taking off his soaking shapeless cap, he kissed the Princess's hand, smiled, and dazzled the girls with his little blond mustache and his unsuppressible rolling r. "And to think they told me that it never rained down here! Heavens, the last two days we might have been in the sea itself." Then he became serious: "But, Falconeri, where is the Signorina Angelica? You've dragged me all the way here from Naples to show me her. I see many a beauty, but not her." He turned to Don Fabrizio: "You know, Prince, according to him she's the Queen of Sheba! Let's go at once to worship this creature
formosissima et nigerrima.
Come on, you stubborn oaf! " By such talk he brought the language of the officers' mess into the proud hall with its armored and beribboned ancestors; and everyone was amused. But Don Fabrizio and Tancredi knew how things stood: they knew Don Calogero, they knew his Beautiful Beast of a wife, the incredible state of that rich man's home; things unknown in candid Lombardy. Don Fabrizio intervened. "Listen, Count: you thought ,it never rained in Sicily and now you can see it's pouring. We wouldn't like you to think there isn't pneumonia in Sicily too, and then find yourself in bed with a high temperature. Mimi," he said to the valet,

"light the fire in the Signorino Tancredi's room and in the green room of the guest wing. Prepare the little room next door for the soldier. And you, Count, go and get thoroughly dry and change your clothes. I'll send you up some punch and biscuits. And dinner is at eight, in two hours." Cavriaghi was too used to military service not to bow at once to the voice of authority; he saluted and followed meekly behind the valet. Behind him Moroni dragged along the military boxes and curved sabers in their green flannel wrappings.