The Silent Duchess (8 page)

true nobleman can allow himself, in imitation of the Heavenly Father.

Even though she has never heard his voice Marianna knows exactly what is fermenting inside that sullen throat: a proud, attentive passion for the infinite possibilities of day-dreaming, of aimless aspirations and unattainable desires. A persistent voice, piercing the tedium and yet fully controlled, belonging to someone who never lets himself go. There's no doubt that is what he's thinking; she can tell from the breath that reaches her, hot and sour, whenever she is close to him.

Among other things Duke Pietro considers this mania of his wife for staying at Bagheria even in the cold winter months quite idiotic when they have a large comfortable house in Palermo. And it also annoys him to have to give up his evenings at the Casino dei Nobile, where he can play whist for hours, drinking glasses of aniseed-flavoured water and listening in a bored way to the desultory conversations of his contemporaries.

For her, on the other hand, the house in the Via Alloro is too dark, too cluttered with ancestral portraits and too frequented by unwelcome visitors. As for the journey from Bagheria to Palermo, she just cannot bear all the dust and the roads so full of potholes. And too often as she passes through the village of Acqua dei Corsari she has found herself face to face with the heads of bandits impaled on pikestaffs as a warning to the populace. Heads dried by the sun, infested by flies, often with chunks of arms and legs with blackened blood sticking to the skin.

Useless to turn her head away or shut her eyes. A small whirlwind sweeps through her mind. She knows that shortly she will be passing through the two colonnades of the Porta Felice, that they will go down the Cassaro Morto and immediately come into the wide rectangle of the Piazza Marina between the Piazza della Zecca and the church of Santa Maria Caterina. Then on the right will appear the Vicaria, and the wind in her head will become a hurricane, her fingers will contract as they clutch her father's hooded habit and end up tearing the little velvet cloak she is wearing round her shoulders.

Consequently she hates going to Palermo and prefers to stay on her own at Bagheria. So she has come to the decision that apart from exceptional occasions such as funerals or births or

christenings, which unfortunately occur with great frequency among her prolific relatives, she will set up her winter quarters at the Villa Ucr@ia even if the cold confines her to only a few rooms surrounded by braziers of lighted charcoal.

By now this is common knowledge and people come to seek her out when the roads are not rendered impassable by the flooding of the river Eleuterio, which often inundates the countryside between Ficarazzi and Bagheria.

Recently her father the Duke came and stayed with her for a whole week. They were alone together as she had always wanted, without the presence of sons, brothers, cousins and other relations. Since her mother's death, which occurred suddenly without any warning, he often comes to look her up on her own. He sits in the yellow room beneath the portrait of Grandmother Giuseppa and he smokes or sleeps. He has always slept a great deal, but it has got worse as he has grown older: if he does not sleep for ten hours every night he feels ill. And as he finds it difficult to get so many hours of unbroken sleep he ends up by dozing off in the daytime, lolling on the armchairs or on the couches.

When he wakes he invites his daughter to play a game of piquet. Happy and smiling in spite of the rheumatism that deforms his hands and makes his back bent, he never gets worked up over trifles and is always ready to amuse himself and to entertain others. He does not have the quick tongue of Aunt Manina, he is more ponderous than her, but he has the same sense of comedy and if he were to take the trouble he too could be an excellent mimic.

Every so often he grabs the notebook that Marianna keeps tied to her waist and writes on it impulsively.

"You are a little fool, my daughter, but now I am growing older, I realise that I prefer little fools to anyone else."

"Your husband, my brother-in-law, is a simpleton, but he loves you."

"Dying displeases me because I shall be leaving you, but it does not worry me having to go to see if knowing Our Lord is worth the penance."

What never ceases to surprise her is the difference between uncle husband Pietro and his sister Duchess Maria and cousin Duke

Signoretto. Just as her mother the

Duchess was plump and lazy, he is wizened and athletic, always needing to be active even if it is only to pace up and down through his vineyards. Not to mention her father, Duke Pietro's cousin, who is so calm and well-disposed towards others, while Pietro is hostile and suspicious towards everyone. In short, uncle husband seems to have been born of a rogue seed that fell askew into the family soil and grew up twisted, bristly and resentful.

The last time they were together, Marianna and her father the Duke played piquet, eating candied fruit and drinking perfumed wine from M`alaga, while Duke Pietro went to Torre Scannatura to see to the grape harvest. In between the game and having a drink, her father the Duke wrote down all the latest gossip from Palermo, about the Viceroy's mistress, who they say sleeps between black sheets to show off the whiteness of her skin; about the last galleon arriving from Barcelona with a cargo of transparent chamber-pots which everyone gave as presents to their friends; about the fashion of the "Adrienne" skirt, first launched at the French court in Paris, which flowed through Palermo like an unstoppable avalanche and had set the dressmakers all of a twitter. He had even confessed to her his love for a lace-maker called Esther, who worked in a house on his estate at Papireto. "I gave her a room that overlooked the street--you should see how delighted she is."

Yet this man, who is her father and who loves her tenderly, caused her to experience the greatest horror of her life. But he does not know that. He did it for her benefit: a renowned doctor of the school of Salerno had advised that his daughter's deafness had arisen from some experience of great fear and that to cure it an even greater fear was needed. Timor fecit vitium timor recuperabit salutam. It was not his fault that the experiment failed.

The last time he came to stay with her, he had brought her a present: a child of twelve, the daughter of a man sentenced to death, whom he had accompanied to the gallows. "Her mother died of the smallpox, her father was hanged, and he entrusted her to me when he was on the point of death. The White Brothers wanted to shut her away in a convent for orphans but I thought it would be better for

her to be with you, so I give her to you as a present. But love her well, she's all alone in the world. They say she has a brother but no one knows where he has hidden himself. For all I know he's dead. Her father told me he had not seen the baby since he had given him to a country woman. Promise me that you'll look after her."

So Filomena, usually known as Fila, has come to live in the villa. She has been clothed, provided for, and cherished, but she is still very distru/l. She talks very little or not at all; most of the time she hides behind doors, and she's unable to hold a plate in her hands without letting it drop. Whenever she can she escapes to the stables and sits down on the straw beside the cows so that when she comes back she brings with her a stench of manure that can be smelled at least ten feet away.

It is a waste of time to scold her. In her terrified gaze, always on the alert, Marianna recognises something of her own childhood moods, so she lets her alone, much to the anger of Innocenza and Raffaele Cuffa, and even of her uncle husband, who endures the newcomer with great difficulty and only out of respect for his cousin and brother-in-law and his dumb wife.

XI

Marianna wakes with a start and a sensation of freezing cold. She peers into the darkness to see if her husband's back is in its customary place beneath the sheets, but however much she tries she cannot make out the usual bulge. The pillows seem untouched and the sheets flat. She is on the point of lighting a candle when she notices that the room is flooded with a pale-blue light: the moon hangs low on the horizon and scatters drops of milky white on to the black waters of the sea.

Evidently, uncle husband has stayed in Palermo for the night, which he has been doing lately more and more often. This does not worry her-- indeed she looks on it with relief. Tomorrow she will at last pluck up courage to ask him to have his bed made up in another room, perhaps in the study beneath the picture of the Blessed Signoretto, between the books on heraldry and history. Recently he has taken to thrashing about in bed like a tarantula and these unexpected earthquakes keep waking her

up.

When this happens she would like to get up and go out but she does not do it for fear of waking him. If she were to sleep alone she would not have to keep asking herself whether she dare light a candle; she would be able to read a book or go downstairs into the kitchen to get a glass of water.

Since her mother's death, followed a few weeks later by the sudden deaths of Lina and Lena, both of them victims of quartan fever,

Marianna often wakes up with sad, disturbing thoughts, and is troubled by nightmares. Half-sleeping and half-awake, she is haunted by memories of her mother, to which she has never before paid much attention, as if she were seeing her for the first time: how she used to dangle her white swollen feet from the side of the bed, her big toes like two puff-balls, twitching as if she were playing an imaginary spinet with her feet. Her mouth with its full red lips that parted listlessly to imbibe a spoonful of broth; the finger she would dip into the little basin of hot water and then bring to her mouth to test the temperature with her tongue, as if she were about to drink it rather than wash her face; and how she would all of a sudden struggle to her feet, her face flushed with the effort of trying to lace up a silk sash behind her back. At table, after eating an orange, she used to take a pip, split it in two with her front teeth and then spit it out on to her plate; then she would take another and spit it out in the same way, until her plate was a small cemetery of pips, once white but now, gutted of their husks, green.

She departed this life unobtrusively, without bothering anyone, as she had done everything in her brief existence, fearful of attracting notice or putting herself into the limelight. Too idle to make decisions herself, she willingly left everything to others without bad feeling. What she really liked was to sit by the window with a bowl of candied fruit beside her, an occasional cup of hot chocolate, a glass of laudanum to lull her into a state of peace and a pinch of snuff to tickle the end of her nose. She was quite happy watching the world go by like a beautiful pageant so long as she was not asked to participate in it. She was generous and would clap her hands at other people's achievements, but it was as if everything had already taken place a long time ago and was now merely the inevitable repetition

of a familiar tale.

Marianna could not imagine her as the slim and lively girl described by Grandmother Giuseppa. She had always thought of her mother as she saw her: her broad face with its delicate skin, her eyes ever so slightly bulging, her heavy dark eyebrows, her fair curly hair, her round shoulders, her wide hips, her legs short in relation to her body, her arms weighed down with rolls of fat. She had a delightful way of laughing, between nervousness and familiarity, almost as if she was unsure whether to let herself go and enjoy the fun, or to draw back in order to conserve her energy. Whenever she shook her head her fair curls danced on her forehead and over her ears.

It is strange how often the memory of her returns now she is dead. In fact they are not memories, they are sudden visions almost as if she were there in the flesh, sagging from so many births and miscarriages: all prepared to carry out those small daily exertions that when she was still alive were performed by a woman who seemed on the point of death, and now that she is no more, display the raw, bitter flavour of real life.

Now Marianna is fully awake. Not a hope of getting back to sleep. She sits up in bed and starts to poke her feet into her slippers, but stops midway and waves her toes as if she were playing an imaginary spinet just like her mother--oh, to the devil with her, why doesn't she leave her in peace?

Tonight her feet guide her to the back stairs that lead up to the roof. She enjoys the chill of the cold steps beneath her straw slippers. Then up ten stairs, pause, ten stairs, another pause. She continues to climb with light footsteps. The hem of her wide satin dressing-gown rubs against her heels.

On one side are the doors to the attics, on the other the servants' quarters. She has not brought a candle with her; she will rely upon her nose to lead her along corridors, through narrow passages, tunnels, store rooms, hiding-places, cubby-holes, unexpected slopes and treacherous stairs. She is guided by the various smells: dust, mouse droppings, old wax, grapes hung up to dry, rotting wood, chamber-pots, rose-water and cinders.

The low door that opens on to the roof is shut.

Marianna tries to turn the doorknob but it seems to be stuck; she can't move it an inch. She leans her shoulder against it in an attempt to push it open, holding the doorknob between her fingers, and at this it suddenly yields. She loses her balance and stumbles forward into the opening, scared at having made such a clatter.

After a few minutes she decides to pick her way along the tiles. A gentle wind rumples her hair, and the moonlight hits her in the face like a great silver bucket. The surrounding country is flooded with light. The plain with its olive trees is mantled with thousands of metallic scales and beyond it Capo Zafferano sparkles in the distance like another world. The jasmine and the orange blossom send their perfume upwards like diaphanous wisps of smoke that evaporate between the roof tiles.

Far away in the distance, on the horizon, the black, motionless sea is traversed by a wide ribbon of tremulous light. Nearer, at the bottom of the sloping valley, the outlines of the olive trees, the carobs, the almonds and the lemons give the impression they are all asleep.