The Leopard (3 page)

It grew so dark that the Princess, sitting next to him, put out her childlike hand and stroked the powerful paw reposing on the tablecloth. A thoughtless gesture, which loosed a whole chain of reactions in him: irritation at being pitied, then a surge of sensuality, not, however, directed toward her who had aroused it. Into the Prince's mind flashed a picture of Mariannina with her head deep in a pillow. He raised a dry voice: "Domenico," he said to a lackey, "go and tell Don Antonio to harness the bays to the brougham; I'll be going down to Palermo immediately after dinner." A glance into his wife's eyes, which had gone glassy, made him regret his order; but as it was quite out of the question to withdraw instructions already given, he persevered and even added a jeer to his cruelty: "Father Pirrone, you will come with me; we'll be back by eleven; you can spend a couple of hours with your Jesuit friends."

There could obviously be no valid reason for visiting Palermo at night in those disordered times except for some low loveadventure; and taking the family chaplain as companion was sheer offensive arrogance. So at least Father Pirrone felt, and he was offended, though of course he acquiesced.

The last medlar had scarcely been eaten when the carriage wheels were heard crunching under the porch; in the hall, as a lackey handed the Prince his top hat and the Jesuit his tricorne, the Princess, now on the verge of tears, made a last attempt to hold himvain as ever: "But, Fabrizio, in times like these . . . with the streets full of soldiers, of hooligans . . . why, anything might happen."

"Nonsense," he snapped, "nonsense, Stella; what could happen? Everyone knows me; there aren't many men as tall in Palermo. See you later." And he placed a hurried kiss on her still unfurrowed brow, which was level with his chin. But, whether the smell of the Princess's skin had called up tender memories, or whether the penitential steps of Father Pirrone behind him evoked pious warnings, on reaching the carriage door he very nearly did countermand the trip. At that moment, just as he was opening his mouth to order the carriage back to the stables, a loud shriek of "Fabrizio, my Fabrizio!" followed by a scream, reached him from the window above. The Princess was having one of her fits of hysteria. "Drive on," he said to the coachman on the box holding a whip diagonally across his paunch. "Drive on, down to Palermo, and leave Father at the Jesuit house," and he banged the carriage door before the lackey could shut it.

It was not dark yet and the road meandered on, very white, deep between high walls. As they came out of the Salina property they passed on the left the half-ruined Falconeri villa, owned by Tancredi, his nephew and ward. A spendthrift father, married to the Prince's sister, had squandered his whole fortune and then died. It had been one of those total ruins which included even the gold braid on the lackeys' liveries, and when the widow died the King had conferred the guardianship of her son, then aged four. teen, on his uncle Salina. The lad, scarcely known before, had become very dear to the irascible Prince, who perceived in him a riotous zest for life and a frivolous temperament contradicted by sudden serious moods. Though the Prince never admitted it to himself, he would have preferred the lad as his heir to that booby Paolo. Now, at twenty-one, Tancredii was enjoying life on the money which his uncle never grudged him, even from his own pocket. "I wonder what the silly boy is up to now," thought the Prince as they drove past Villa Falconeri, whose huge bougainvillaeas cascaded over the gates like swags of episcopal silk, lending a deceptive air of gaiety to the dark.

"What is he up to now?" For King Ferdinand, in speaking of the young man's undesirable acquaintances, had been wrong to mention the matter but right in his facts. Swept up in a circle of gamblers and ladies called "light," as the euphemism went, all dominated by his slim charm, Tancredi had actually got to the point of sympathizing with the Sect and getting in touch with the secret National Committee; maybe he drew money from them as well as from the Royal coffers. It had taken the Prince a great deal of labor and trouble, visits to a skeptical Castelcicala, and an overpolite Maniscalco, to prevent the youth from getting into real trouble after the Fourth of April "riots." That hadn't been too good; on the other hand, Tancredi could never do wrong in his uncle's eyes i so the real fault lay with the times, these confused times in which a young man of good family wasn't even free to play a game of faro without involving himself with compromising acquaintanceships. Bad times.

"Bad times, Your Excellency." The voice of Father Pirrone sounded like an echo of his thoughts. Squeezed into a corner of the brougham, hemmed in by the massive Prince, subject to that same Prince's bullying, the Jesuit was suffering in body and conscience and, being a man of parts himself, was now transposing his own ephemeral discomfort into the perennial realms of history. "Look, Excellency," and he pointed to the mountain heights of the Conca d'Oro still visible in the last dusk. On their slopes and peaks glimmered dozens of flickering lights, bonfires lit every night by the rebel bands, silent threats to the city of palaces and convents. They looked like the lights that burn in sickrooms during the last nights.

"l can see, Father, I can see," and it occurred to him that perhaps Tancredi was beside one of those ill-omened fires, his aristocratic hands throwing on sticks being burned to damage just such hands as his. "A fine guardian I am, with my ward up to any nonsense that passes through his head."

The road was now beginning to slope gently downhill, and Palermo could be seen very close, plunged in complete darkness, its low shuttered houses weighted down by the huge edifices of convents and monasteries. There were dozens of these, all vast, often grouped in twos or threes, for women and for men, for rich and poor, nobles and plebeians, for Jesuits, Benedictines, Franciscans, Capuchins, Carmelites, Redemptorists, Augustinians. . . . Above them rose squat domes in flabby curves like breasts emptied of milk; but it was the religious houses which gave the city its grimness and its character, its sedateness and also the sense of death which not even the vibrant Sicilian light could ever manage to disperse. And at that hour, at night, they were despots of the scene. It was against them really that the bonfires were lit on the hills, stoked by men who were themselves very like those living in the monasteries below, as fanatical, as self-absorbed, as avid for power or rather for the idleness which was, for them, the purpose of power.

This was what the Prince was thinking as the bays trotted down the slope; thoughts in contrast to his real self, caused by anxiety about Tancredi and by the sensual urge which made him turn against the restrictions embodied by the religious houses. Now the road was crossing orange groves in flower, and the nuptial scent of the blossoms absorbed all the rest as a full moon absorbs a landscape; the smell of sweating horses, the smell of leather from the carriage upholstery, the smell of Prince and the smell of Jesuit, were all cancelled out by that Islamic perfume evoking houris and fleshly joys beyond the grave. It even touched Father Pirrone. "How lovely this would be, Excellency, if . . . "

"If there weren't so many Jesuits," thought the Prince, his delicious anticipations interrupted by the priest's voice. At once he regretted this rudeness of thought, and his big hand tapped his old friend's tricorne. Where the suburbs began, at Villa Airoldi, the carriage was stopped by a patrol. Voices from Apulia, voices from Naples, called a halt, bayonets glittered under a wavering lantern; but a sergeant soon recognized the Prince sitting there with his top hat on his knees. "Excuse us, Excellency, pass on." And a soldier was even told to get up onto the box so that the carriage would have no more trouble at other block posts. The loaded carriage moved on more slowly, around Villa Ranchibile, through Torrerosse and the truck gardens of Villafranca, and into the city by Porta Maqueda. Outside the Caffe Romeres at the Quattro Canti di Campagna officers from units on guard were sitting laughing and eating huge ices. But that was the only sign of life in the entire city; the deserted streets echoed only to the rhythmic march of pickets on their rounds, passing with white bandoleers crossed over their chests. On each side monastery walls were continuous, the Monastery of the Mountain, of the Stigmata, of the Crusaders, of the Theatines, massive, black as pitch, immersed in a sleep that seemed like the end of all things.

"I'll fetch you in a couple of hours, Father. Pray well."

And poor Pirrone knocked confusedly at the door of the Jesuit house as the brougham wheeled off down a side street. Leaving the carriage at his palace, the Prince set off for his destination on foot. It was a short walk, but through a quarter of ill repute. Soldiers in full equipment, who had obviously just slipped away from the patrols bivouacked in the squares, were issuing with shining eyes from little houses on whose balconies pots of basil explained the ease of entry. Sinister-looking youths in wide trousers were quarrelling in the guttural grunts Sicilians use in anger. In the distance echoed shots from nervous sentries. Once past this district, his route skirted the Cala; in the old fishing port decaying boats bobbed up and down, desolate as mangy dogs.

"I'm a sinner, I know, doubly a sinner, by Divine Law and by Stella's human love. There's no doubt of that, and tomorrow I'll go and confess to Father Pirrone." He smiled to himself at the thought that it might be superfluous, so certain must the Jesuit be of his sins of today. And then a spirit of quibble came over him again. "I'm sinning, it's true, but I'm sinning so as not to sin worse, to stop this sensual nagging, to tear this thorn out of my flesh and avoid worse trouble. That the Lord knows." Suddenly he was swept by a gust of tenderness toward himself. "I'm just a poor, weak creature," he thought as his heavy steps crunched the dirty gravel. "I'm weak and without support. Stella! Oh well, the Lord knows how much I've loved her; but I was married at twenty. And now she's too bossy, as well as too old." His moment of weakness passed. "But I've still got my vigor i and how can I find satisfaction with a woman who makes the sign of the Cross in bed before every embrace and then at the crucial moment just cries,

'Gesummaria!' When we married and she was sixteen I found that rather exalting; but now . . . seven children I've had with her, seven; and never once have I seen her navel. Is that right?" Now, whipped by this odd anguish, he was almost shouting, "Is it right? I ask you all! " And he turned to the portico of the Catena. "Why, she's the real sinner! " Comforted by this reassuring discovery, he gave a firm knock at Mariannina's door.

Two hours later he was in his brougham on the way home with Father Pirrone beside him. The latter was worried: his colleagues had been telling him about the political situation, which was, it seemed, much tenser than it looked from the detached calm of Villa Salina. There was fear of a landing by the Piedmontese in the south of the island, near Sciacca; the authorities had noticed a silent ferment among the people; at the first sign of weakening control, the city rabble would take to looting and rape. The Jesuit Fathers were thoroughly alarmed and three of them, the oldest, had left for Naples by the afternoon packet boat, taking their archives with them. "May the Lord protect us, and spare this holy Kingdom!" The Prince scarcely listened. He was immersed in sated ease tinged with disgust. Mariannina had looked at him with her big opaque peasant's eyes, had refused him nothing, and had been humble and compliant in every way. A kind of Bendico in a silk petticoat. In a moment of particularly intense pleasure he had heard her exclaim, "My Prince!" He smiled again with satisfaction at the thought. Much better than "mon chat" or "mon singe blond" produced in equivalent moments by Sarah, the Parisian slut he had frequented three years ago, when the Astronomical Congress gave him a gold medal at the Sorbonne. Better than "mon chat)" no doubt of that; much better than
"Gesummaria!"
No sacrilege, at least. A good girl, Mariannina; next time he visited her he'd take her three lengths of crimson silk.

But how sad, too: that manhandled, youthful flesh, that resigned lubricity; and what about him, what was he? A pig, just a pig!

Suddenly there occurred to him a verse read by chance in a Paris bookshop, while glancing at a volume by someone whose name he had forgotten, one of those poets the French incubate and forget next week. He could see once more the lemon-yellow pile of unsold copies, the page, an uneven page, and hear again the verses ending a jumble of a poem:

. . . donnez-moi la force et le courage de contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans degout
And as Father Pirrone went worrying on about a person called La Farina and another called Crispi, the Prince dozed off into a kind of tense euphoria, lulled by the trotting of the bays, on whose plump flanks quivered the light from the carriage lamps. He woke up at the turning by Villa Falconeri. "Oh, he's a fine one too, tending bonfires that'll destroy him!" In the matrimonial bedroom, glancing at poor Stella with her hair well tucked into her nightcap, sighing as she slept in the huge, high brass bed, he felt touched. "Seven children she's given me, and she's been mine alone." A faint whiff of valerian drifted through the room, last vestige of her crisis of hysterics. "Poor little Stella," he murmured pityingly as he climbed into bed. The hours passed and he could not sleep; some powerful hand was stirring three fires smoldering in his mind: of Mariannina's caresses, of those French verses, of the autos-da-fe on the hills.

Toward dawn, however, the Princess had occasion to make the sign of the Cross.

Next morning the sun lit on a refreshed Prince. He had taken his coffee and was shaving in front of the mirror in a red and black flowered dressing gown. Bendico was leaning a heavy head on one of his slippers. As he shaved his right cheek he noticed in the mirror a face behind his own, the face of a young man, thin and elegant, with a shy, quizzical look. He did not turn around and went on shaving. "Well, Tancredi, where were you last night?"

"Good morning, Uncle. Where was I? Oh, just out with friends. An innocent night. Not like a certain person I know who went down to Palermo for some fun!"