The Leopard (30 page)

"Ali, so many things! He talked of you almost as much as of Donna Angelica! For him, she was love; you were the image of his sweet youth, that youth which for us soldiers passes so soon."

Again an icy hand froze her old heart i but now Tassoni had raised his voice, and turned to Angelica. "D'you remember, Princess, what he said at Vienna ten years ago?" He turned back toward Concetta to explain. "I was there with the Italian Delegation for the Trade Treaty; Tancredi put me up at the Embassy like the warmhearted friend and comrade he was, with that great gentleman's affability of his. Perhaps seeing a comrade-in-arms again in that hostile city had moved him, for he told us so much about-his past. In the back of a box at the Opera, between one act and another of Don Giovanni, he confessed, in his incomparably ironic way, a sin, an unpardonable sin, which he said he'd committed against you, yes, against you, Signorina." He interrupted himself a second to gain time to set his surprise. "He told us how one evening, during dinner at Donnafugata, he had allowed himself to invent a story and tell it to you i a tale of war connected with the fighting around Palermoi and how you believed it and were offended because the story was rather outspoken for the customs of fifty years ago. You had reproved him. 'She was so sweet,, said he, 'as she fixed me with those angry eyes of hers and as her lips swelled with anger so prettily, like a puppy's i she was so sweet that if I hadn't controlled myself I'd have kissed her there and then in front of twenty people and that terrible old uncle of mine!' You, Signorina, will have forgotten it, but Tancredi remembered it well, he had such delicacy of feeling; he also remembered it because it happened on the very day he met Donna Angelica for the first time." And he sketched toward the Princess one of those gestures of homage, with his right hand dropping away through the air, whose Goldoniesque tradition used to be preserved only among Senators of the Kingdom.

The conversation continued for some time, but it could not be said that Concetta took any great part in it. The sudden revelation penetrated into her mind slowly, and did not make her suffer much at first. But when the visitors had said goodbye and left and she was alone, she began seeing more clearly and so suffering more. The specters of the past had been exorcised for years, though they were, of course, to be found hidden in everything, and it was they that made food taste bitter and company seem boring i but it was a long time since they had shown their true faces 5 now they came leaping out, accompanied by the ghastly laughter of irreparable disaster. It would, of course, be absurd to say that Concetta still loved Tancredi; love's eternity lasts a year or two, not fifty. But as one who has recovered from smallpox fifty years before still bears its marks on his face although he may have forgotten the pain of the disease, so she bore in her own oppressed life now the wounds of a bitter disappointment that had become almost part of history, so much a part, in fact, that its fiftieth anniversary was being celebrated officially. Until today, on the rare occasions when she thought over what had happened at Donnafugata that distant summer, she had felt upheld by a sense of being martyred, being wronged, of resentment against a father who had neglected her, of torturing emotion for that other dead man. Now, however, these second-hand feelings which had formed the skeleton of her whole mode of thought were also collapsing. There had been no enemies, just one single adversary, herself; her future had been killed by her own imprudence, by the rash Salina pride; and now, just at the moment when her memories had come alive again after so many years, she found herself even without the solace of being able to blame her own unhappiness on others, a solace which is the last deceiving philter of the desperate.

If Tassoni had told the truth, then the long hours spent in savoring her hatred before her father's picture, her hiding of every photograph of Tancredi so as not to be forced to hate him too, had been stupidity-worse, cruel injustice; and she suffered now at the memory of Tancredi's warmth and imploring tone as he)had begged his uncle to allow him into that convent; they had been words of love toward her, words not understood, put to flight by her pride, which at her harshness had drawn back with their tails between their legs like whipped puppies. From the timeless depth of her being a black pain came welling to spatter her all over at that rev8ation of the truth.

But was it the truth? Nowhere has truth so short a life as in Sicily; a fact has scarcely happened five minutes before its genuine kernel has vanished, been camouflaged, embellished, disfigured, squashed, annihilated by imagination and self-interest; shame, fear, generosity, malice, opportunism, charity, all the passions, good as well as evil, fling themselves onto the fact and tear it to pieces; very soon it has vanished altogether. And poor Concetta was hoping to find the truth of feelings that had never been expressed but only glimpsed half a century before! The truth no longer existed. Precarious fact, though, had been replaced by irrefutable pain.

Meanwhile Angelica and the Senator were driving the short distance back to Villa Falconeri. Tassoni was worried. "Angelica," he said (they had had a very short affair thirty years before, and kept the intimacy-for which there is no substitute-conferred by a few hours spent between the same pair of sheets), "I'm afraid I disturbed your cousin in some way; did you notice how silent she was toward the end of the visit? I hope I didn't, she's such a dear."

"I should think you have hurt her, Vittorio," said Angelica, exasperated by a double though imaginary jealousy; "she was madly in love with Tancredi ; but he never took any notice of her." And so a new layer of soil fell on the tumulus of truth. The Cardinal of Palermo was a truly holy man; and even now that he has been dead for a long time his charity and his faith are still remembered. While he was alive, though, things were different: he was not a Sicilian, he was not even a Southerner or a Roman, and many years before he had tried to leaven with Northern activity the inert and heavy dough of the island's spiritual life in general and the clergy's in particular. Flanked by two or three secretaries from his own parts, he had deluded himself, those first years, that he could remove abuses and clear the soil of its more obvious stumbling blocks. But soon he had to realize that he was, as it were, firing into cotton wool; the little hole made at the moment was covered after a few seconds by thousands of tiny fibers, and all remained as before, the only additions being cost of powder, ridicule at useless effort, and deterioration of material. Like everyone who, in those days, wanted to change anything in the Sicil ian character, he had soon acquired the reputation of being a fool (which in the circumstances was exact) and had to content himself with works of charity, which, however, diminished his popularity still further if they involved those benefited in making the slightest effort, such as, for instance, having to come themselves to the Archiepiscopal palace.

So the aged prelate who set out on the morning of the fourteenth of May to visit Villa Salina was a good man but a disillusioned one, who had in the end assumed toward those in his own diocese an attitude of contemptuous pity (which was sometimes, after all, unjust). This made him adopt brusque and cutting ways that dragged him even further into the swamps of unpopularity. The three Salina sisters were as we know deeply offended by the inspection of their chapel; but, childish and above all feminine in mind, they also drew a certain undeniable satisfaction from the thought of receiving in their home a Prince of the Church, at being able to show him the grandeur of the Salinas which in good faith they thought still intact, and above all at seeing a kind of sumptuous red bird moving around their rooms for half an hour, and admiring the varied and harmonizing hues of its differing purples and its heavy shot silk. But the poor creatures were destined to be disappointed even of this last modest hope. When, having descended the external staircase, they saw His Eminence get out of his carriage, they realized that he was in informal dress. Only the tiny purple buttons on the severe black cassock indicated his high rank; in spite of his expression of injured goodness, the Cardinal was no more imposing than the Archpriest of Donnafugata. He was polite but cold, and mingled almost too ably a show of respect for the Salina name and the individual virtues of the ladies themselves with a contempt for their inept and formalist devotions. To the Vicar-General's exclamations about the beauty of the decorations in the rooms through which they passed he did not answer a word; he refused to accept any of the refreshments prepared for him ("Thank you, Signorina, only a little water; today is the eve of my Holy Patron's feast day"), he did not even sit down. He went to the chapel, genuflected a second before the Madonna of Pompeii, made a hurried inspection of the relics. Then he blessed with pastoral benignity the mistresses of the house and the servants kneeling in the entrance hall, and said to Concetta, who bore on her face the signs of a sleepless night, "Signorina, no Divine Service can be held in the chapel for three or four days, but I will see that it is reconsecrated as soon as possible. It seems to me that the picture of the Madonna of Pompeii might well take the place of the one now above the altar, which can join the fine works of art I have admired while passing through your rooms. As for the relics, I am leaving behind Don Pacchiotti, my secretary and a most competent priest; he will examine the documents and tell you the results of his researches; and what he decides will be as if I had decided it myself."

Benignly he let everyone kiss his ring, then got into the heavy carriage together with his small suite. The carriages had not yet reached the Falconeri turn before Carolina with cheeks taut and darting eyes ex claimed, "This Pope must be a Turk," while Caterina had to be given smelling salts. Meanwhile Concetta was chatting calmly with Don Pacchiotti, who had in the end accepted a cup of coffee and a baba.

Then the priest asked for the keys to the case of documents, requested permission, and withdrew into the chapel, after first taking from his bag a small hammer and saw, a screw driver, a magnifying glass, and a couple of pencils. He had been a pupil of the Vatican School of Paleography; also, he was Piedmontese. His labors were long and meticulous; the servants who passed by the chapel door heard the knocks of a hammer, squeaking screws, and sighs. Three hours later he emerged with his cassock full of dust and his hands black, but with a pleased look and a serene expression on his bespectacled face. He apologized for carrying a big wicker basket. "I took the liberty of appropriating this to put in what I'd discarded. May I set it down here?" And he placed his burden in a comer; it was overflowing with torn papers and cards, little boxes containing bits of bone and gristle. "I am happy to say that I have found five relics which are perfectly authentic and worthy of being objects of devotion. The rest are there," he said, pointing at the basket. "Would you tell me, Signorina, where I may brush myself and wash my hands?" Five minutes later he reappeared and dried his hands on a big towel on the border of which pranced a Leopard in red drawn-thread work. "I forgot to tell you that the frames are all set out on a table in the chapel; some of them are really lovely." He said goodbye.

"Ladies, my respects." But Caterina refused to kiss his hand.

"And what are we to do with the things in the basket?

"Just whatever you like, ladies; keep them or throw them on the rubbish heap; they have no value whatsoever." And when Concetta wanted to order a carriage to drive him back, he said, "Don't worry about that, Signorina; I'll have lunch with the Oratorians a few steps away; I don't need a thing." And putting his instruments back into his bag, he went off on light feet. Concetta withdrew into her room; she felt no emotion whatsoever; she seemed to be living in a world known to her yet strange, which had already ceded all the impulses it could give her and now consisted only of pure forms. The portrait of her father was just a few square inches of canvas, the green cases were just a few square yards of wood. A short while later she was brought a letter. The envelope had a black seal with a big coronet in relief.

"Darling Concetta, I've heard of His Eminence's visit and am so glad a few relics could be saved. I hope to get the Vicar-General
to come and say the first Mass in the reconsecrated chapel. Senator Tassoni is leaving tomorrow and recommends himself to your
bon souvenir. I'll be coming over to visit you soon. Meanwhile, a warm embrace to you and to Carolina and Caterina too.

"Yours ever, Angelica."

Still she could feel nothing; the inner emptiness was complete; but she did sense an unpleasant atmosphere emanating from the heap of fur. That was today's distress: even poor Bendico was hinting at bitter memories. She rang the bell. "Annetta," she said,

"this dog has really become too moth-eaten and dusty. Take it out and throw it away." As the carcass was dragged off, the glass eyes stared at her with the humble reproach of things that are thrown away, that are being annulled. A few minutes later what remained of Bendico was flung into a corner of the courtyard visited every day by the dustman. During the flight down from the window his form recomposed itself for an instant; in the air one could have seen dancing a quadruped with long whiskers, and its right foreleg seemed to be raised in imprecation. Then all found peace in a heap of livid dust.

The End