From the Tree to the Labyrinth (89 page)

Don Abbondio recognizes the bravoes for what they are because he is in possession of a behavioral, vestimentary, and kinesic code. Otherwise, it would be hard to understand why he is able to identify them at first sight as “individuals of the species known as bravoes” (p. 28). (It is curious how scholastically rigorous Manzoni is at this point, how, using Aristotelian terms, he is able to suggest the semiotic relationship between
type
and
token.
)

We may note in passing that Don Abbondio is fully aware that the habit and not the name make the monk. In the last chapter he will jestingly discuss with Renzo the inanity of the decree that grants to cardinals the title of “eminence” (p. 707). It has come about because at this point everybody was called “monsignor” or “your grace,” but before long everybody will want to be called “eminence,” and the linguistic innovation will have done nothing to bring order to the universe of ecclesiastical dignity and human vanity.

The meeting with the bravoes takes place under the sign of the opposition between word and visual evidence. The bravoes speak, but what Don Abbondio understands always anticipates their words. The priest realizes “by certain unmistakable signs” (p. 32) that he is the one they are waiting for; he puts on a casual attitude, in the vain hope of deceiving the threatening characters who are lying in wait for him, running the first two fingers of his left hand under his collar; he decides that to run for it would have lent itself to an inauspicious interpretation (“it would have been the same as saying, follow me, or worse”); once more he pretends to be relaxed, reciting a verse or two out loud; he composes his face into as calm and carefree an expression as he can muster (because he knows that, since gestures and facial expressions speak, they can be manipulated in order to lie); he prepares a smile; and, to indicate his submission, he comes to a halt.

As for the bravoes, when they speak (and so far they speak saying nonthreatening things), they speak with a menacing attitude, they speak in his ear “in a tone of impressive command” (p. 33), and they know full well that their attitude speaks louder than their words, because “if these things had to be settled by talk, [Don Abbondio with his book learning] would make rings round [them]” (p. 33).

There’s just one thing, at the end of the episode, that seems to challenge our hypothesis, and to this we must now turn our full attention.

The bravoes mention the name of Don Rodrigo and “The effect of that name on Don Abbondio’s mind was like a flash of lightning in the middle of the storm at night, which illuminates one’s surroundings confusedly for a moment, and makes them more terrifying than before” (p. 34). Confronted with this power of the name, it has to be said that, of all the
flatus vocis
that we cannot trust, proper names, because of their indexical nature, take on a particular status which makes them cognate with symptoms or visual signs.

The novelist must certainly have faith in proper names, to identify his characters without ambiguity. Now it appears that when he needs these indispensable labels, for Renzo, Lucia, Agnese, Tonio, or Donna Prassede, Manzoni makes the most neutral choices possible, dipping into the liturgical calendar or into the Scriptures,

For the historical characters in the background, he uses the names that history obliges him to use (Federigo, Ambrogio Spinola, Ferrer), but for the most part he could not be more careful about using as few surnames and place names as he can, resulting in the great abundance of asterisks that we are all familiar with, and the unrevealing antonomasias like “the Signora,” arriving finally at that masterpiece of reticence that is the name of the Unnamed, written with a lower case initial in the original no less.

In other words, Manzoni has the same reluctance to divulge names that Renzo demonstrates at the inn in the presence of the pseudo-Ambrogio Fusella. And he does not appear to do so merely in obedience to the rules of the genre. He seems to lack faith in names because he realizes that, even regarding names, the chronicles, which speak of facts, are ambiguous, so much so that we do not even know what the correct name is of the man who was the first bearer of the contagion, and we have to choose between two, both of which are probably false. And when havoc has been wreaked upon real names (as in the case of the name of Giangiacomo Mora), an image that does not correspond to reality has attached itself to the label, connoting in infamous fashion a name that ought by rights to evoke feelings of pity.

Proper names, then, embarrassing signs, are not reliable as words, and are in danger of being even less so as “rigid designators.” The fewer of them mentioned the better. But, as labels, they serve their purpose: little by little the reader
hangs
on the name Lucia everything that the actions of the young woman have done to define her, and the characters in the novel do likewise. Obviously, the name is all the more effective the more it provides a label for a series of characteristics already defined from the outset, as is the case with Don Rodrigo, and for characters already fully defined by a hagiography that is never called into question, as is the case with Cardinal Federigo Borromeo. Don Rodrigo and Federigo are both clichés—the first damned from the opening chapters (so much so that we will never learn whether or not he was touched by grace at the point of death), the second wearing a halo of holiness before he even comes onstage. This is why their names have an almost magical power, hearing them one either shudders or is reassured.

But, both in the case of already defined characters like Federigo, and those in the process of being defined like the Unnamed, Manzoni can name names—sidestepping his distrust of the verbal—because as a good storyteller he knows that proper names are merely hooks on which to hang precise descriptions, and the descriptions come from a playbook of behaviors and actions that manifest themselves in terms of natural semiotics.

In any case, we cannot say that Manzoni exploits names to suggest connotations of character. The case of the defamatory nicknames of the bravoes does not count, because the bravoes appear onstage already characterized for what they are and what they have no option but to be. Let us consider instead a borderline case, that of the aforementioned pettifogging lawyer Azzeccagarbugli (Dr Quibbler).

He seems to be defined from the start by his nickname, but this is not altogether true. The theater of visual appearances that he deploys around himself seduces Renzo in the beginning: the actions of the pettifogger are marked by humanity, his rooms are a guarantee of his learning and respect for the law (the portraits of the twelve Caesars, the bookshelf full of dusty old volumes, the table littered with statements, pleas, applications, and edicts). Nor should we forget that the dressing gown he is draped in is a legal robe, however threadbare. Renzo is taken in by a seductive mise-en-scène, and he concludes that a quibbler can quibble for a just cause as well as an evil one. The name has not yet condemned the character, indeed the mise-en-scène exalts him, at least in the eyes of someone without experience of the world. All the doctor’s gestures are reassuring to Renzo, showing him the edicts, letting him see with his own eyes that the laws exist, and so on. Azzeccagabugli only becomes odious when Renzo realizes that all this talk about the rule of law hides his desire to get around it, and the good doctor reveals his true self when he talks like Don Abbondio, using language, that is, to duck the request that is being made. At that point his gestures are unequivocal, shooing Renzo out and especially (the exercise of the symbolic has a material cost) giving him back his brace of capons.

The solemn scene of the pardon in
Chapter 4
is symbolic and liturgical in its staging. Given the solemn comportment of the actors, the time and place of the meeting, and the elaborately theatrical orchestration of the action, as well as the costumes and poses of the figures who are to decide upon the life or death of the penitent, words become irrelevant.

The duel itself had already occurred because there were rules of behavior and precedence to be observed, in which left and right, frowns and tones of voice counted. Ludovico/Cristoforo’s repentance and his conversion were a consequence of his revulsion from the offense he had committed. “Though murder was so common in those days that everyone was used to the news of violent death and the sight of blood, the impression made on him by the spectacle of the man who had died for him, and the man who had died at his hands, was something novel and indescribable—a revelation of feelings he had never known before. To see his enemy fall to the ground, to see the change in his face, as it passed in a moment from fury and menace to the vanquished, solemn peace of death, was an experience which transformed the soul of the killer” (p. 83). But let us come to the scene of the pardon.

Blood will have blood: the fact that Cristoforo has repented, that he is seeking forgiveness, that he has gone so far as to renounce the world and take the habit of a Franciscan friar, cannot wash away the offense. It is washed away by a magnificently mounted scenario that articulates, in terms of a strict code of etiquette, what words cannot say—a seventeenth-century idea if ever there was one, which Manzoni captures with a fine pictorial sense. Hence the gathering of all the deceased’s relatives in the great reception hall, with capes, plumes, ceremonial swords, starched and pleated ruffs, flowing simars—a secular aristocratic liturgy.

The two friars process ritually between the two wings of the crowd, and already at that point “Brother Cristoforo’s face and manner proclaimed unmistakably to the assembled company” (p. 88) that he had truly repented. Whether Cristoforo is sincere or not is unimportant: he behaves in a sincere way, with the tone of a sincere man, which he somehow instinctively theatricalizes, true son of his century that he is, and cannot help theatricalizing, since he must stay within the parameters that have been carefully preordained. After which Cristoforo sticks to his script. He kneels, crosses his hands over his chest, bows his shaved head. At that point he speaks and pronounces words of forgiveness, but it is clear from the narrative that it is not those words that convince the dead man’s brother and the crowd of nobles. Their conviction has already taken place. The dead man’s brother’s “stance was meant to suggest strained condescension and suppressed wrath” (he strikes a pose, like a character in an opera), but the gestures of the penitent (his ritual posturings) make it clear that the bearing of the offended party may now be modified. This is the context, liturgical and clearly ecclesiastical in nature, for the embrace and the kiss of peace, the petition for and the bestowing of the bread of forgiveness.

Cristoforo is fully aware that this bread is something more than part of the paraphernalia of the ceremony, that, rather than being mere evidence of his forgiveness, it has performatively created that forgiveness and will continue to keep it alive as long as the bread itself lasts. He will carry a morsel of that bread with him for the rest of his life. In the plague hospital, after reminding Renzo that in thirty years he has still not found peace for what he did, he entrusts the bread to the two betrothed as inheritance, warning, pledge, and viaticum. Cristoforo does not feel blasphemous using that bread as a relic, because he knows that it has been consecrated in the course of a ritual.

We could continue, and heaven help us if we couldn’t. In the meeting between Don Rodrigo and Father Cristoforo, the courteous words Don Rodrigo pronounces at the start of their conversation are belied by “his way of uttering them” (p. 108). Don Rodrigo asks in what way can he be of service, but his tone plainly says: remember whom you are speaking to. And Cristoforo indulges in a little stage business himself when, in order to strike terror into the heart of the villain, given the patent inadequacy of verbal threats of divine retribution, he has recourse (or Manzoni has recourse for him, which amounts to the same thing) to striking another theatrical pose, this time more nineteenth-century than baroque: “stepping back a couple of paces, poised boldly on his right foot, with his right hand on his hip, he raised the other hand with his forefinger outstretched towards Don Rodrigo and looked him straight in the eye with a furious glare” (pp. 110–111).

Before the reader has learned about her terrible life, the Signora of Monza is introduced, in a passage that owes much to the Gothic novel, behind the convent grille, condemned by her physiognomic ambiguities, by her gaze, by the not unworldly way her waist is laced and a curl of black hair allowed to emerge from the band on her forehead, against every rule of the cloister (p. 171). As yet we know nothing about Gertrude, and already we can guess a great deal. The only ones who cannot guess are Lucia, she too as yet a novice when it comes to the codes of natural semiosis, and the Father Superior, who has given up trying to read behavior for political reasons.

Moreover, Gertrude’s entire education consists of visual signs more than words, from the religious dolls given to her as a child down to her segregation as a consequence of her rebellion, a segregation that takes the form of a play of absences, evasive glances, silences, reticence: “The days went by, without her father or anyone else talking to her about her application, or her change of mind, and without any course of action whatever being urged upon her, either with caresses or with threats. Her parents’ behavior to her was unsmiling, gloomy and harsh, but they never told her why” (p. 182). The opportunity to speak, and at some length, is restored to her only after she has surrendered, because by now what she was expected to understand she has understood without words.

On the other hand Gertrude, in the end, sentences herself to burial in the cloister precisely because words are extorted from her that she would have preferred not to utter, that do not express what she feels, but, since they are ritual gestures with a performative value, no sooner have they been said than they can no longer be taken back.