The Leopard (22 page)

They ended by going off scowling even more than when they'd come, and with enough complaints to last two months. The only one to stay was the herbalist, who would not be going to bed that night as there was a new moon and he had to gather rosemary on the Pietrazzi rocks; he had brought a lantern with him and would be setting off straight from there.

"But tell me, Father, you who live with the nobles, what do they say about all these great doings? What does the Prince of Salina say, so tall and quick-tempered and proud? "

Father Pirrone had more than once asked himself this question, and it was not an easy one to answer, particularly as he had taken little notice or interpreted as exaggeration what Don Fabrizio had told him one morning in the observatory nearly a year ago. He knew now, but he could find no way of translating it into comprehensible terms for Don Pietrino, who, though far from a fool, had more understanding of the anticatarrhal, laxative, and even aphrodisiac properties of his herbs than of such abstractions. "You see, Don Pietrino, the 'nobles,' as you call them, aren't so easy to understand. They live in a world of their own, of joys and troubles of their own; they have a very strong collective memory, and so they're put out by things which wouldn't matter at all to you and me, but which to them seem vitally connected with their fortunes, memories, and hopes. Divine Providence has willed that I should become a humble member of the most glorious Order in an Eternal Church whose eventual victory has been assured; you are at the other end of the scale, by which I don't mean the lowest but the most different. When you find a thick bush of marjoram or a well-filled nest of Spanish flies (you look for those too, Don Pietrino, I know) you are in direct communication with the natural world which the Lord created with undifferentiated possibilities of good and evil until man could exercise his own free will on it; and when you're consulted by old women and by pretty young girls, you are plunging back into the dark abyss of centuries that preceded the light from Golgotha."

The old man looked at him in amazement; he had wanted to know if the Prince of Salina was satisfied or not with the latest changes, and the other was talking to him about aphrodisiacs and light from Golgotha. "All that reading's driven him off his head, poor man."

"But the 'nobles' aren't like that; all they live by has been handled by others. They find us ecclesiastics useful to reassure them about eternal life, just as you herbalists are here to procure them soothing or stimulating drinks. And by that I don't mean they're bad people; quite the contrary. They're just different; perhaps they appear so strange to us because they have reached a stage toward which-all those who are not saints are moving, that of indifference to earthly goods through surfeit. Perhaps it's because of that they take so little notice of things that are of great importance to us; people on the mountains don't worry about mosquitoes in the plains, nor do the inhabitants of Egypt about umbrellai. Yet the former fear landslides, the latter crocodiles, which are no worry to us. For them new fears have appeared of which we're ignorant; I've seen Don Fabrizio get quite testy, wise and serious though he is, because of a badly ironed collar to his shirt i and I know for certain that the Prince of Uscari didn't sleep for a whole night from rage because he was wrongly placed at one of the Viceroy's dinners. Now don't you think that a human being who is put out only by bad washing or protocol must be happy, and thus superior?"

Don Pietrino could understand nothing at all now: all this was getting more and more nonsensical, what with shirt collars and crocodiles. He was still upheld, though, by a basis of good rustic common sense. "But if that's what they're like, Father, they'll all go to hell."

"Why? 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. If you, Don Pietrino, sold hemlock instead of mint, knowingly, you'd be in for it; but if you thought you'd picked the right one, Gna Zana would die the noble death of Socrates and you'd go straight to heaven with a cassock and wings of purest white."

The death of Socrates was too much for the herbalist; he had given up and was fast asleep. Father Pirrone noticed this and was pleased, for now he would be able to talk freely without fear of being misunderstood; and he felt a need of talking, so as to fix into a pattern of phrases some ideas obscurely milling in his head.

"And they do a lot of good, too. If you knew, for instance, the families otherwise homeless that find shelter in those palaces! And the owners ask for no return, not even immunity from petty theft! They do it not from ostentation but from a sort of obscure atavistic instinct which prevents them from doing anything else. Although it may not seem so, they are in fact less selfish than many others; the splendor of their homes, the pomp of their receptions, have something impersonal about them, something not unlike the grandeur of churches and of liturgy, something which is in fact
ad maiorem gentis gloriam;
and that redeems a great deal: for every glass of champagne drunk by themselves they offer fifty to others; when they treat someone badly, as they do sometimes, it is not so much their personality sinning as their class affirming itself.
Fala crescunt.
For instance, Don Fabrizio has protected and educated his nephew Tancredi and so saved a poor orphan who would have otherwise been lost. You say that he did it because the young man is a noble too, and that he wouldn't have lifted a finger for anyone else. That's true, but why should he lift a finger if sincerely, in the deep roots of his heart, all 'others' seem to him botched attempts, china figurines come misshapen from the potter's hands and not worth putting to the test of fire?

"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.

"Have you ever thought, Don Pietrino, how many names of jobs have become insults? From carter and fishwife to reitre or pompier in French? People don't think of the merits of carters and fishwives; they just look at their marginal defects and call them all rough and vulgar; and as you can't hear me, I may tell you that I'm perfectly aware of the exact current meaning of the word

'Jesuit.'

"Then these nobles put a good face on their own disasters: I've seen one who'd decided to kill himself next day, poor man, looking beaming and happy as a boy on the eve of his first Communion; while if you, Don Pietrino, had to drink one of your own herb drinks you'd make the village ring with your laments. Rage is gentlemanly; complaints are not. I could give you a recipe, in fact: if you meet a 'gentleman' who's querulous, look up his family tree; you'll soon find a dead branch.

"It's a class difficult to suppress because it's in continual renewal-and because if needs be it can die well, that is it can throw out a seed at the moment of death. Look at France; they let themselves be massacred with elegance there and now they're back as before. I say as before, because it's differences of attitude, not estates and feudal rights, which make a noble.

"They tell me that in Paris nowadays there are Polish counts who've been forced into exile and poverty by revolts and despotism; they drive cabs, but frown so at their middle-class customers that the poor things get into the cab, without knowing why, as humbly as dogs in church.

"And I can tell you too, Don Pietrino, that if, as has often happened before, this class were to vanish, an equivalent one would be formed straight away with the same qualities and the same defects j it might not be based on blood any more, but possibly on . . . on, say, the length of time lived in a place, or on greater knowledge of some text considered sacred." At this point his mother's steps were heard on the wooden stairs; she laughed as she came in. "Whom d'you think you're talking to, son? Can't you see your friend's fast asleep? "

Father Pirrone looked a little abashed; he did not reply but just said, "I'll go outside with him now. Poor man, he's got to spend all night out in the cold." He took the wick from the lantern and lit it from one of the ceiling lamps, getting up on tiptoe and splashing his cassock with oil ; then he put it back and shut its little door. Don Pietrino was sailing in dreams; saliva was dribbling from a lip and spreading over his collar. It took some time to wake him up. "Excuse me, Father,, but you were saying such confusing things." They smiled, went downstairs, and out. Night submerged the little house, the village, the valley i the near-by mountains could just be seen, surly as always; the wind had calmed but it was very cold; the stars were glittering away, producing thousands of degrees of heat which were not enough to warm one poor old man. "Poor Don Pietrino! Would you like me to go and get you another cloak?"

"Thank you, I'm used to it. We'll meet tomorrow, then you'll tell me what the Prince of Salina feels about the Revolution." "I can tell you that at once and in a few words: he says there's been no revolution and that all will go on as it did before."

"More fool he! Doesn't it seem a revolution to you when the Mayor wants me to pay for the grass God created and which I gather myself? Or have you gone off your head too?"

The light of the lantern went jerking off and eventually vanished into shadows thick as felt. Father Pirrone thought what a mess the world must seem to one who knew neither mathematics nor theology. "0 Lord, only Thy Omniscience could have devised so many complications."

Another sample of these complications faced him next morning. When he went down, ready to say Mass in the parish church, he found his sister Sarina chopping onions in the kitchen. The tears in her eyes seemed bigger than her activity warranted.

"What is it, Sarina? Any trouble? Don't let it depress you; the Lord afflicts and consoles." His affectionate tone dissipated the remains of the poor woman's reserve; she began sobbing loudly, with her face on the greasy tabletop. Among the sobs could always be heard the same words, "Angelina, Angelina. . . . If Vicenzino knew he'd kill them both.

. . . Angelina. . . . He'd kill them both!"

His hands thrust into his wide black sash, with only his thumbs showing, Father Pirrone stood looking at her. It wasn't difficult to understand: Angelina was Sarina's adolescent daughter; Vicenzino, whose fury was so feared, was her father and his brother-inlaw; the only unknown part of the equation was the name of the other person involved, Angelina's presumed lover. The Jesuit had seen her for the first time the day before as a full-grown girl, after having left her a snivelling child seven years before. She seemed about eighteen and was very plain indeed, with the jutting mouth of so many peasant girls around these parts, and frightened dog's eyes. He had noticed her on his arrival and in his heart in fact made rather uncharitable comparisons between her, plebeian as the diminutive of her own name, and Angelica, sumptuous as that name of hers from Ariosto, who had recently disturbed the peace of the Salina household.

The trouble must be serious, and here he was right in the middle of it; he remembered what Don Fabrizio had once said: every time one sees a relative one finds a thorn; then he was sorry for having remembered that. He extracted his right thumb from his sash, took off his hat, and clapped his sister's quivering shoulder. "Come on now, Sarina, don't do that! Luckily, I'm here. Crying's no use. Where is Vicenzino?" Vicenzino had gone off to Rimato to see the Schiros' keeper. All the better; they could talk things over without fear of surprise. Between sobs, sucked tears, and nose snuffling, out the whole squalid story came: Angelina (or rather 'Ncilina) had let herself be seduced; the disaster had happened during St. Martin's summer; she used to go to meet her lover in Donna Nunziata's hayloft; now she'd been with child three months; in a panic she had confessed all to her mother; soon her belly would begin showing and Vicenzino would raise hell. "He'll kill me too, he will, because I didn't tell him; he's what they call

'a man of honor'! "

In fact with his low forehead, ornamental tufts of hair on the temples, lurching walk, and perpetual swelling of the right trouser pocket where he kept a knife, it was obvious at once that Vicenzino was "a man of honor," one of those violent cretins capable of any havoc.

Now Sarina was overcome by a new fit of sobbing, stronger than the first because she'd been seized by renewed remorse for having been unworthy of her husband, that mirror of chivalry.

"Sarina, Sarina, stop it now! Don't do that! The young man must marry her, he will marry her. I'll go to his home, talk to him and his family, everything will be all right. Then Vicenzino will know only about the engagement and his precious honor will remain intact. But I must know who the man is. If you know, tell me."