The Leopard (27 page)

For this was different now, quite different. Sitting in an armchair, his long legs wrapped in a blanket, on the balcony of the Hotel Trinacria, he felt life flowing from him in great pressing waves, with a spiritual roar like that of the Falls of the Rhine. It was midday on a Monday at the end of July, and away in front of him spread the sea of Palermo, compact, oily, inert, improbably motionless, crouching like a dog trying to make itself invisible at its master's threats; but up there the static perpendicular sun was straddling it and lashing at it pitilessly. The silence was absolute. Under the high, high light Don Fabrizio heard no other sound than that inner one of life gushing from him.

He had arrived that morning, a few hours before, from Naples, where he had gone to consult a specialist, Professor Sommola. Accompanied by his forty-year-old daughter Concetta and his grandson Fabrizietto, he had had a dreary journey, slow as a funeral procession. The bustle of the port of departure and that of arrival at Naples, the acrid smell of the cabin, the incessant clamor of that paranoiac city, had exasperated him with the querulous exasperation which tires and prostrates the very weak while arousing an equivalent exasperation in good folk with years of life ahead. He had insisted on returning by land: a sudden decision which the doctor had tried to oppose; but he had been adamant, and so overwhelming was the shadow of his prestige still that he had had his way.

The result was that h~ had been forced to spend thirtysix hours cooped up in a scorching-hot box, suffocated by the smoke of tunnels repetitive as feverish dreams, blinded by sun in open patches stark as sad realities, humiliated by the innumerable low services he had to ask of his alarmed grandson. They crossed evil-looking landscapes, accursed mountain ranges, torpid malarial plains, landscapes of Calabria and Basilicata which seemed barbarous to him while they were actually just like those of Sicily. The railway line had not yet been completed; in its last stretches it made a wide detour through lunar deserts that were sarcastically called by the athletic and voluptuous names of Croton and Sybaris. Then, at Messina, after the deceitful smile of the Straits had been given a lie by the parched bald hills, there was another detour, long and cruel as the collection of legal arrears. They had gone down to Catania, clambered up again; the locomotive, as it panted up those fabulous slopes, seemed to be about to die like an overforced horse; then a noisy descent, and they reached Palermo. On the arrival platform were the usual masks of family faces with painted smiles of pleasure at the journey's happy outcome. It was in fact from the would-be consoling smiles of those awaiting him at the station, from their pretense-a bad pretense-at an air of gaiety, that there suddenly came home to him what had been the real diagnosis of Sommola, who to him had spoken only reassuring phrases; and it was then, after getting down from the train, as he was embracing his daughter-in-law buried in widow's weeds, his children showing their teeth in smiles, Tancredi with anxious eyes, Angelica with silken bodice tight over mature breasts, it was then that he heard the crash of the falls. Probably he fainted, for he did not remember how he had reached the carriage; he found himself lying in it with his legs drawn up, only Tancredi with him. The carriage had not moved yet, and from outside came voices of his family in confabulation. "It's nothing." "The journey was too long." "Any of us might faint in this heat." "It would be too tiring for him to go up to the villa." He was perfectly lucid again now: he noticed a serious conversation going on between Concetta and Francesco Paolo, then Tancredi's elegance, his brown and beige checked suit, his brown bowler; and he noticed how for once his nephew's smile was not mocking but touched with sad affection; from this he got the bittersweet sensation that his nephew loved him and also knew him to be done for, since that perpetual irony had been brushed away by tenderness. The carriage moved off and turned to the right.

"But where are we going, Tancredi?" His own voice surprised him. It seemed to echo that inner booming. "Uncle, we're going to the Trinacria; you're tired and the villa's a long way off; you can have a night's rest and get home tomorrow. Don't you think so?"

"Then let's go to our place by the sea, that's even nearer.))

But that wasn't possible; the house was not in order, as he well knew; it was used only for occasional luncheons by the sea; there wasn't even a bed in it.

"You'll be better at the hotel, Uncle; you'll have every comfort there." They were treating him like a new-born baby; and he had just about a new-born baby's strength.

The first comfort he found at the hotel was a doctor, called in a hurry, perhaps during his black-out. But it was not the one who always treated him, Doctor Cataliotti, with a big white cravat under a smiling face and rich gold spectacles; this was a poor devil, doctor to the slum quarter near by, impotent witness of a thousand wretched death agonies. Above a torn frock coat stretched his long, haggard face stubbled with white hair, the disillusioned face of a famished intellectual; when he took a chainless watch from his pocket, the false gilt showed marks of verdigris. He too was a poor goat-skin flask worn through by the jostle of the mule path and scattering without realizing it its last drops of oil. He felt the pulse, prescribed camphor drops, showed his decayed teeth in a smile meant to be reassuring and pitiable instead, and padded off.

The drops soon arrived from a druggist near by; they did him good; he felt a little less weak, but the impetus of escaping time did not lessen. Don Fabrizio looked at himself in the wardrobe mirror; he recognized his own suit more than himself: very tall and emaciated, with sunken cheeks and three days' growth of beard; he looked like one of those mad Englishmen who amble around in vignettes from books by Jules Verne which he used to give Fabrizietto as Christmas presents. A Leopard in very bad trim. Why, he wondered, did God not want anyone to die with his own face on? For the same happens to us all: we all die with a mask on our features i even the young; even the blood-daubed soldier, even Paolo when he'd been raised from the cobbles with taut crumpled features as people rushed in the dust after his runaway horse. And if in him, an old man, the crash of escaping life was so powerful, what a tumult there must have been as the still brimming reservoirs emptied out of those poor young bodies in a second.

An absurd rule of enforced camouflage-he would have liked to contravene it as much as he could; but he felt that he was unable, that to hold up a razor would have been like holding up his own desk. "Call a barber, will you?" he said to Francesco Paolo. But at once he thought, "No. It's a rule of the game; hateful but formal. They'll shave me afterward." And he said out loud, "It doesn't matter; we'll think about that later." The idea of the utter abandon of his corpse, with a barber crouched over it, did not disturb him.

A waiter came in with a basin of warm water and a sponge, took off his coat and shirt, and washed his face and hands, as one washes a child, as one washes the dead. Soot from the day-and-a-half train journey turned the water a funereal black. The low room was suffocating; the heat fomented smells, brought out the mustiness of ill-dusted plush; a medicinal odor came from the marks of dozens of crushed cockroaches; around the night table clung tenacious memories of old and varied urine. He had the shutters opened; the hotel was in shadow, but a blinding light was reflected from the metallic sea; better, though, than that prison stink. He asked for an armchair to be taken onto the balcony; leaning on someone's arm, he dragged himself out and sat down after those few steps with the sensation of relief he used to feel once on sitting down after four hours of shooting in the mountains.

"Tell everyone to leave me in peace; I feel better; I want to sleep." He did feel sleepy; but he found that to give way to drowsiness now would be as absurd as eating a slice of cake immediately before a longed-for banquet. He smiled. "I've always been a wise gourmet." And he sat there, immersed in that great outer silence, in the terrifying inner rumble. He could turn his head to the left; beside Monte Pellegrino could be seen a cleft in the circle of hills, and, beyond, two hillocks at whose feet lay his home. Unreachable to him as this was, it seemed very far away; he thought of his own observatory, of the telescopes now destined to years of dust; of poor Father Pirrone, who was dust too; of the paintings of his estates, of the monkeys on the hangings, of the big brass bedstead in which his dear Stella had died; of all those things which now seemed to him humble, however precious, of artfully twisted metalwork, of fabrics and silken tapestries dyed with colors derived from earth and plant juices, which had been kept alive by him, and which would shortly be plunged, through no fault of their own, into a limbo of abandon and oblivion. His heart tightened, he forgot his own agony thinking of the imminent end of those poor dear things. The inert row of houses behind him, the wall of hills, the sun-scourged distance, prevented him from thinking clearly even of Donnafugata; it seemed like a house in a dream, no longer his i all he had of his own now was this exhausted body, those slate tiles under his feet, that surging of dark water toward the abyss. He was alone, a shipwrecked man adrift on a raft, prey of untamable currents.

There were his sons, of course. The only one who resembled him, Giovanni, was no longer here. Every couple of years he sent greetings from London; he had ceased dealing with coal and moved on to diamonds; just after Stella's death a short letter had come addressed to her and soon after a little parcel with a bracelet. Ah, yes. He too had "courted death"; in fact, by leaving everything he had done his best to get as much of death as he could under control while actually going on living. But the others . .

. There were his, grandchildren too, of course: Fabrizietto, youngest of the Salinas, so handsome, so lively, so dear. . . . So odious. With his double dose of Milvica blood, with his good-time instincts, with his tendency to middle-class chic. It was useless to try to avoid the thought, but the last of the Salinas was really he himself, this gaunt giant now dying on a hotel balcony. For the significance of a noble family lies entirely in its traditions, that is in its vital memories; and he was the last to have any unusual memories, anything different from those of other families. Fabrizietto would only have banal ones like his schoolfellows, of snacks, of spiteful little jokes against teachers, horses bought with an eye more to price than to quality; and the meaning of his name would change more and more to empty pomp embittered by the gadfly thought that others could outdo him in outward show. He would go hunting for a rich marriage when that would have become a commonplace routine and no longer a bold predatory adventure like Tancredi's. The tapestries of Donnafugata, the almond groves of Ragattisi, even, who knows, the fountain of Amphitrite, might suffer the grotesque fate of being transmuted into pots of quickly swallowed foie gras, into noisy little women as transient as their rouge, from the ageold things of patina that they'd been. And he himself would be merely a memory of a choleric old grandfather who had collapsed one July afternoon just in time to prevent the boy's going off to Livorno for sea bathing. He had said that the Salinas would always remain the Salinas. He had been wrong. The last Salina was himself. That fellow Garibaldi, that bearded Vulcan, had won after all.

From the room next door, open on to the same balcony, Concetta's voice reached him: "We simply must; he's got to be called. I should never forgive myself if he weren't." He understood at once; they were talking of a priest. a moment he had an idea of refusing, of lying, of starting to shout that he was perfectly well, that he needed nothing. But Soon he realized how ridiculous all that would be: he was the Prince of Salina, and as a Prince of Salina he had to die with a priest by his side. Concetta was right. Why should he avoid what was longed for by thousands of other dying people? And he fell silent, waiting to hear the little bell with the Last Sacraments. It soon came; the parish church of the Pieta was almost opposite. The gay silvery tinkle came climbing up the stairs, flowed along the passage, became sharp as the door opened; preceded by the hotel manager, a Swiss, flustered at having a dying man on his hands, in came Father Balshmo, the parish priest, bearing under humeral veil the Blessed Sacrament in its leather pyx. Tancredi and Fabrizietto raised the armchair, bore it back into the room; the others were kneeling. He signed more than said, "Away, away." He wanted to confess. Things should be done properly or not at all. Everyone went out, but when he was about to speak he realized he had nothing to say; he could remember some definite sins, but they seemed so petty as not to warrant bothering a worthy priest about on a hot day. Not that he felt himself innocent; but his whole life was blameworthy, not this or that single act in it; and now he no longer had time to say so. His eyes must have expressed an uneasiness which the priest took for contrition; as in fact in a sense it was. He was absolved; his chin must have been propped on his chest, for the priest had to kneel down to place the Host between his lips. Then there was a murmur of the immemorial syllables which smooth the way, and the priest withdrew.

The armchair was not pulled back onto the balcony. Fabrizietto and Tancredi sat down next to him and held each of his hands; the boy was staring at him with the natural curiosity of one present at his first death agony and no more; this person dying was not a man, he was a grandfather, which is a very different thing. Tancredi squeezed his hand tightly and talked to him, talked a great deal, talked gaily; he explained projects with which he was associated, commented on political developments; he was a Deputy, had been promised the Legation in Lisbon, knew many a secret and savory story. His nasal voice, his subtle vocabulary, flew like a futile arrow over the ever noisier surging away of the waters of life. The Prince was grateful for the gossip i and he squeezed Tancredi's hand with a great effort though with almost no perceptible result. He was grateful, but he did not listen. He was making up a general balance sheet of his whole life, trying to sort out of the immense ash-heap of liabilities the golden flecks of happy moments. These were: two weeks before his marriage, six weeks after; half an hour when Paolo was born, when he felt proud at having prolonged by a twig the Salina tree (the pride had been misplaced, be knew that now, but there had been some genuine self-respect in it); a few talks with Giovanni before the latter vanished (a few monologues, if the truth were told, during which he had thought to find in the boy a kindred mind); and many hours in the observatory, absorbed in abstract calculations and the pursuit of the unreachable. Could those latter hours be really put down to the credit side of life? Were they not some sort of anticipatory gift of the beatitudes of death? It didn't matter, they had existed.