The Leopard (25 page)

The more of them he saw the more he felt put out; his mind, conditioned by long periods of solitude and abstract thought, eventually, as he was passing through a long gallery where a numerous colony of these creatures had gathered on the central pouf, produced a kind of hallucination; he felt like a keeper in a zoo set to looking after a hundred female monkeys; he expected at any moment to see them clamber up the chandeliers and hang there by their tails, swinging to and fro, showing off their behinds and loosing a stream of nuts, shrieks, and grins at pacific visitors below.

Curiously enough, it was religion that drew him from this zoologic vision, for from the group of crinolined monkeys there rose a monotonous, continuous sacred invocation. "Maria! Maria!" the poor girls were perpetually exclaiming. "Maria, what a lovely house! " "Maria, what a comets by their tails. "Anyway, I'm here now; it would be rude to leave. Let's have a look at the dancing." The ballroom was all golden: smooth on the cornices, uneven on the door frames, in a pale, almost silvery design against a darker background on the door panels and on the shutters annulling the windows, thus conferring on the room the look of some superb jewel case shut off from an unworthy world. It was not the flashy gilding which decorators slap on nowadays, but a faded gold, pale as the hair of Nordic children, determinedly hiding its value under a muted use of precious material intended to let beauty be seen and cost forgotten. Here and there on the panels were knots of rococo flowers in a color so faint as to seem just an ephemeral pink reflected from the chandeliers.

That solar hue, that variegation of gleam and shade, made Don Fabrizio's heart ache as he stood black and stiff in a doorway: this eminently patrician room reminded him of country things; the chromatic scale was the same as that of the vast wheat fields around Donnafugata, rapt, begging pity from the tyrannous sun; in this room too, as on his estates in mid-August, the harvest had been gathered long before, stacked elsewhere, leaving, as here, a sole reminder in the color of stubble burned and useless now. The notes of the waltz in the warm air seemed to him but a stylization of the incessant winds harping their own sorrows on the parched surfaces, today, yesterday, tomorrow, forever and forever. The crowd of dancers, among whom he could count so many near to him in blood if not in heart, began to seem unreal, made up of that material from which are woven lapsed memories, more elusive even than the stuff of disturbing dreams. From the ceiling the gods, reclining on gilded couches, gazed down smiling and inexorable as a summer sky. They thought themselves eternal i but a bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was to prove the contrary in 1943.

"Fine, Prince, fine! "They don't make things like this nowadays, with gold leaf at its present price!" Sedara was standing beside him; his quick eyes were moving over the room, insensible to its charm, intent on its monetary value. Quite suddenly Don Fabrizio felt a loathing for him; it was to the rise of this man and a hundred others like him, to their obscure intrigues and their tenacious greed and avarice, that was due the sense of death which was now, obviously, hanging darkly over these palaces; it was because of him and his colleagues, their rancor and sense of inferiority, that the black clothes of the men dancing reminded Don Fabrizio of crows veering to and fro above lost valleys in search of putrid prey. He felt like giving a sharp reply and telling him to get out of his way. But he couldn't: the man was a guest i he was the father of that dear girl Angelica; and maybe, too, he was as unhappy as others.

"Fine, Don Calogero, fine. But our young couple's the finest of all!" Tancredi and Angelica were passing in front of them at that moment, his gloved right hand on her waist, their outspread arms interlaced, their eyes gazing into each other's. The black of his tail coat, the pink of her dress, combining formed a kind of strange jewel. They were -the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other's defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor, unknowing actors made to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director whcl had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script. Neither of them was good, each full of selfinterest, swollen with secret aims; yet there was something sweet and touching about them both; those murky but ingenuous ambitions of theirs were obliterated by the words of jesting tenderness he was murmuring in her car, by the scent of her hair, by the mutual clasp of those bodies of theirs destined to die.

The two young people moved away, other couples passed, less handsome, just as moving, each submerged in their transitory blindness. Don Fabrizio felt his heart thaw; his disgust gave way to compassion for all these ephemeral beings out to enjoy the tiny ray of light granted them between two shades, before the cradle, after the last spasms. How could one inveigh against those sure to die? It would be as vile as those fish-vendors insulting the condemned in the Piazza del Mercato sixty years before. Even the female monkeys on the poufs, even those old baboons of friends were poor wretches, condemned and touching as the cattle lowing through the city streets at night on the way to the slaughterhouse; to the ears of each of them would one day come that tinkle he had heard three hours earlier behind San Domenico. Nothing could be decently hated except eternity And then these people filling the rooms, all these faded women, all these stupid men, these two vainglorious sexes were part of his blood, part of himself; only they could really understand him, only with them could he be at his ease. "I may be more intelligent, I'm certainly more cultivated, but I come from the same stock as they, with them I must make common cause." He noticed Don Calogero talking to Giovanni Finale about a possible rise in the price of cheese and how in the hope of this beatific event his eyes had gone liquid and gentle. Don Fabrizio could slip away without remorse. Till that moment accumulated irritation had given him energy; now with relaxed nerves he was overcome by tiredness; it was already two o'clock. He looked around for a place where he could sit down quietly, far from men, lovers and brothers, all right in their way, but always tiresome. He soon found it: the library, small, silent, lit, and empty. He sat down, then got up to drink some water which he found on a side table. "Only water is really good," he thought like a true Sicilian; and did not dry the drops left on his lips. He sat down again; he liked the library and soon felt at his ease there; it put up no opposition to him because it was impersonal, as are rooms which are little used; Ponteleone was not a type to waste time in there. He began looking at a picture opposite him, a good copy of Greuze's Death of the Just Man; the old man was expiring on his bed, amid welters of clean linen, surrounded by afflicted grandsons and granddaughters raising arms toward the ceiling. The girls were pretty, provoking, and the disorder of their clothes suggested sex more than sorrow; they, it was obvious at once, were the real subject of the picture, Even so, Don Fabrizio was surprised for a second at Diego always having this melancholy scene before his eyes; then he reassured himself by thinking that the other probably entered that room only once or twice a year. Immediately afterward he asked himself if his own death would be like that; probably it would, apart from the sheets being less impeccable (he knew that the sheets of those in their death agony are always dirty with spittle, discharges, marks of medicine), and it was to be hoped that Concetta, Carolina, and his other womenfolk would be more decently clad. But the same, more or less. As always, the thought of his own death calmed him as much as that of others disturbed him; was it perhaps because, when all was said and done, his own death would in the first place mean that of the whole world?

From this he went on to think that he must see to repairing the tomb of his ancestors at the Capuchins'. A pity corpses couldn't be hung up by the neck in the crypt and watched slowly mummifying; he'd look magnificent on that wall, tall and big as he was, terrifying girls by the set smile on his sandpaper face, by his long, long white pique trousers. But no, they'd dress him up in party clothes, perhaps in this very evening coat he was wearing now. . . . The door opened. "Uncle, you're looking wonderful this evening. Black suits you perfectly. But what are you looking at? Are you courting death?" Tancredi was arm in arm with Angelica; both of them were still under the sensual influence of the dance, and were tired. Angelica sat down and asked Tancredi for a handkerchief to mop her brow; Don Fabrizio gave her his. The two young people looked at the picture with complete lack of interest. For both of them death was purely an intellectual concept, a fact of knowledge as it were and no more, not an experience which pierced the marrow of their bones. Death, oh yes, it existed of course, but it was something that happened to others. The thought occurred to Don Fabrizio that it was ignorance of this supreme consolation that made the young feel sorrows much more sharply than the oldi the latter are nearer the safety exit.

"Prince," said Angelica, "we'd heard you were here; we came to have a little rest, but also to ask you something. I hope you won't refuse it." Her eyes were full of roguish laughter, her hand was resting on Don Fabrizio's sleeve. "I want to ask you to dance the next mazurka with me. Do say Yes, now, don't be naughty; we all know you used to be a great dancer." The Prince was very pleased and felt suddenly quite spry. The Capuchins' crypt indeed! His downy cheeks quivered with pleasure. The idea of the mazurka rather alarmed him, though; that military dance, all heel-banging and turns, was not for his joints. To kneel before Angelica would be a pleasure, but what if he found it difficult to get up afterward?

"Thank you, my dear girl; you're making me feel young again. I'll be happy to obey you; but not the mazurka; grant me the first waltz.)'

"You see, Tancredi, how good Uncle is? No nonsense about him, like you. You know, Prince, he didn't want me to ask you; he's jealous."

Tancredi laughed. "When one has such a smart, goodlooking uncle one's quite right to be jealous. Anyway, this time I won't oppose it." They all three smiled, and Don Fabrizio could not make out whether they had thought up this suggestion to please him or to mock him. It didn't matter; they were dear creatures all the same.

As she was going out Angelica slid a finger over the cover of an armchair. "Pretty, these; a good color, but those at your house, Prince The ship was taking its usual course.

Tancredi intervened. "That's enough, Angelica. We both love you quite apart from your knowledge of furniture. Leave the chairs alone and come and dance."

As he was going into the ballroom, Don Fabrizio saw that Sedira was still talking to Giovanni Finale. He heard the words russella, primintio, marzolino: they were comparing the prices of seed corn. The Prince foresaw an invitation soon to Margarossa, the estate which was ruining Finale by his agricultural experiments.

Angelica and Don Fabrizio made a magnificent couple. The Prince's huge feet moved with surprising delicacy, and never were his partner's satin slippers in danger of being grazed. His great paw held her waist with vigorous firmness, his chin leaned on the black waves of her hairi from Angelica's bust rose a delicate scent of bouquet
a la Marichale
, and above all an aroma of young smooth skin. A phrase of Tumeo's came back to him: "Her sheets must smell like Paradise." A crude, vulgar phrase, but accurate. Lucky Tancredi. . . .

She talked. Her natilral vanity was as appeased as her tenacious ambition. "I'm so happy, Uncle. Everyone's been so kind, so sweet. Tancredi's an angel; and you're an angel, too. I owe all this to you, Uncle; even Tancredi. For if you hadn't agreed, I don't know what would have happened."

"I've nothing to do with it, my dear; all this is due to yourself alone." It was true; no Tancredi could ever have resisted that beauty united to that income. He would have married her whatever happened. A twinge crossed his heart: the thought of Concetta's haughty yet defeated eyes. But that was a brief little pain; at every twirl a year fell from his shoulders; soon he felt back at the age of twenty, when in that very same ballroom he had danced with Stella before he knew disappointment, boredom, and the rest. For a second, that night, death seemed to him once more

"something that happens to others."

So absorbed was he in memories which dovetailed so well with his present feelings that he did not notice how all of a sudden he and Angelica were dancing alone. Instigated, perhaps, by Tancredi, the other couples had stopped and were looking on; the two Ponteleones were there too, looking touched; they were old and perhaps understood. Stella was old too, but she was gazing on dully from beneath a doorway. When the band stopped there was nearly a round of applause; but Fabrizio had too leonine an air for anyone to risk such an impropriety.

When the waltz was over Angelica suggested that Don Fabrizio should come and take supper at her and Tancredi's table. He would have much liked to, but at that moment the memories of his own youth were too vivid for him not to realize how tiresome supper with an old uncle would have been then, with Stella only a yard or so away. Lovers want to be alone, or at least with strangers; never with older people, or worst of all with relatives.

"Thank you, Angelica, but I'm not hungry. I'll take something standing up. Go with Tancredi, don't worry about me." He waited a moment for the two young people to draw away, then he too went into the supper room. A long, narrow table was set at the end, lit by the famous twelve silvergilt candelabra given to Diego's grandfather by the Court of Madrid at the end of his embassy in Spain; on tall pedestals of gleaming metal the alternating figures of six athletes and of six women held above their heads silver-gilt shafts crowned by the flames of twelve candles. The sculptor had hinted skillfully at the serene ease of the men and the graceful effort of the girls in upholding the disproportionate weight. Twelve pieces of first-rate quality. "I wonder how much land they're worth," that wretch Sedara would have said. Don Fabrizio remembered how one day Diego had shown him the case for each of the candelabra) vast green morocco affairs with the tripartite shield of Ponteleone and the entwined initials of the donors stamped on the sides in gold.