The Manzoni Family (45 page)

Vittoria to her father on 22 December:

‘It was a slight consolation to us to hear at least that poor Enrico
is quite calm!
God grant this calm is not feigned or illusory, and that it is really founded on the certainty that his affairs must shortly improve! What does worry me and what I should very much like to know is if he is in danger of losing Renate! . . . God forbid! I haven't the courage to write to him, but if you see him, embrace him for me, and please tell him I feel for his distresses and would remedy them if I could! . . . As I'm writing about such intimate subjects, I beg you to tell me, dear Papa, if you ever see Filippo and if he has caused you any further distress! If you see him and feel you can sincerely embrace him, do so from me too, for whatever has happened in the past, it is too painful to have to live estranged from part of my blood; and especially at this time, at Christmas when one needs one's family, and
memories of the past come back so vividly.
. . the only consolation we can find for the pain of absence is to be remembered by all the members of the family, and to unite in heart and mind to celebrate Christmas! .'

From Filippo, their father had received at about the same time a letter which he thought insolent. The letter has not been found, and perhaps Manzoni destroyed it. He wrote back to say he wished neither to write to him nor to hear from him.

Letter followed letter during the winter with news of Matilde's worsening health. At the beginning of March Manzoni wrote suggesting that Vittoria ask the doctor if he saw fit to ‘try magnetism'. It was Stefano's idea. A girl, the niece of a chamber maid, who was seriously ill, had shown some benefit from certain experiments with magnetism. But a few days later Pietro had a letter from Bista saying that the doctor's prognosis was decidedly gloomy. Manzoni wrote to Bista telling him to decide if they should come: Tor the love of Heaven, don't let the word “decide” alarm your delicate sensibilities; I would cross it out, if I did not consider it to mean no more than expressing an opinion. . .'

On 15 March, Manzoni received a letter from Matilde:

‘Caro Papà mio,

‘I'm writing to you at night as a rather high temperature prevents me sleeping and gives me strength I entirely lack in the day; this is the 95th night! Now, thank God, the illness seems past its peak, but the excessive exhaustion and the really terrible aching in my poor bones never give me a moment's peace and I suffer day and night so that I sometimes see my bed surrounded with weeping. Dear Papa, I thought I knew all about illness and suffering! . . . I've been in this bed for four months. God, what I have suffered and what I am suffering! . . . Sometimes I weep in desperation but God has given me such comfort by the general confession I have made and the holy communion which has brought peace to my heart [a blank line follows].

‘Dear Papa, the expenses grow distressingly and my purse is sometimes empty! I need such a lot of nursing, two women stay in my room at night and more or less all day because I can't make the slightest movement on my own however small, and the cost of an illness like this is unimaginable. Dear Papa and you are having problems this year! Believe me, I have cried many times! The idea of such an imperious need of money and such worrying straits! . . . What a misfortune Papa mio to have a wretched afflicted daughter like me! . . . In charity send me what you can to meet the first costs, when I'm better, God grant it will not be long, I will tell you what is needed, and how will you manage? . . . Oh, for pity's sake, have patience! . .

‘My head's
absolutely
dazed, I can't stop coughing and I must stop. . . I don't know what Vittoria and Bista will say about my wanting to write when they know. . . but the fever has kept me going. My dear revered Father! I beg you to send your blessing upon me every night to comfort me and help me to suffer and to get better, goodbye!

‘I've said nothing of Vittoria, Bista, “Babbo”, Giannina, may the Lord reward them! . . .'

Her father to Matilde, 19 March:

‘My dear, ever dearer Matilde,

‘My joy at seeing the address in your hand, my poor Matilde, gave way to grief to see how you are suffering! and to be able to do nothing but suffer with you, and pray and pray, albeit knowing how unworthy I am to be heard! But the One I implore is so good, and loves you, and I have commended so many loving souls to pray too.

‘Father Piantoni Barnabita, rector of the College of Porta nova, has just left me, and said that his 141 pupils will pray for you, as they celebrate Easter tomorrow. .

Matilde died on 30 March, in the arms of Vittoria and her “Babbo” Gaetano. She was buried in Siena, in the Chiostro dei Servi.

Manzoni sent an epitaph for her tomb:

‘Here lies Matilde daughter of Alessandro Manzoni consumed by a slow wasting illness on XXX March 1856 in the last year of her fifth lustrum [at the age of 25]; for a life beautiful in all the virtues that make her sex sublime she is greatly missed by her father, her brothers and her sister Vittoria wife of Gio. Battista Giorgini, who commend her to the prayers of the pious Sienese.'

That summer – at last and too late – Manzoni got to Tuscany. He went with Pietro and all his family. They joined the Giorginis at Viareggio where they were spending the summer. Manzoni went with Bista to Gino Capponi for a few days. They talked about questions of language, and planned to compile a trial vocabulary.

Then the travellers said goodbye to the Giorginis and set out on the return journey. They hired a private stage-coach because there were so many of them: the three adults, Pietro's four children, and a servant. They reached Genoa in twenty-four hours.

That year Lodovico Trotti died at Cassolnovo. He had been ill for some time; his sister Costanza was nursing him; he entrusted his four children to her.

In December Vittoria's little girl, the ‘prodigious Luisina', caught scarlet fever, was ill for two months, then seemed cured, but became feverish again, her legs swelled, her breathing became laboured, and she died in May 1857. She was buried beside Matilde, in the Chiostro dei Servi.

In July 1857 Manzoni was alone in Milan. Stefano had developed a pernicious fever at Lesa, and Teresa had gone to him; it was nothing serious, and soon over. Manzoni could not get a passport in time and had to wait; he also wanted to be near Pietro, who was enquiring into Enrico's affairs and trying to alleviate the consequences. Manzoni had the company either of Rossari or Pietro, who came from Brusuglio every day; but Rossari suffered from the heat, and was also involved in the school; Manzoni went for walks with Pietro: he still found it impossible, as he had done all his life, to go walking alone. Indoors, he felt sad at the sight of the little flight of stairs leading to Teresa's room, ‘and still more the little door at the top'. In his letters to Teresa he often mentioned those stairs. He wrote to her every day: he was tired by her presence, but saddened by her absence. He received letters from creditors, and news of Enrico's affairs, which seemed ever more complicated and alarming; he poured out his worries in the letters to Teresa:

‘When I have the good fortune to be with you, and something painful occurs, you know what a relief it is to tell you: I am suffering. . . Although this is denied me at the moment, I still find it some relief to mention to you what is grieving me. So forgive me if I tell you I have been and am still disturbed by a letter from that person. . . he proposes I should become involved, and as you know, I cannot and must not do so; but the problem does not go away, and seems to instil a drop of poison into the holiday period, from which I thought all gloomy thoughts should be, if not extinguished, at least partly eclipsed. But these are laments, whereas I ought only to beg you to help me accept everything from the hand of God, especially as you show me the way. In any case (and this too comes from His hand, but His all-merciful hand) seeing you again will afford quite different comfort from this poor writing. . . I want you to burn this letter, as I do not wish to leave any lasting trace of my feelings about this grievous business. . .

Teresa did not burn the letter, but she cut out some sentences where he spoke of ‘that person': a creditor, or perhaps Enrico himself.

In 1857 Enrico was thirty-eight. He and his wife and children still lived in the splendid villa of Renate, with its park, orchard, kitchen-garden, and winter garden. He had seven children. The oldest, Enrichetta, was thirteen; then came Sandrino, Matilde, Sofia, Lucia, Eugenio; and that year Bianca was born. Enrico, according to Vittoria in her memoirs, had an inflated idea of himself; he thought whatever he undertook would succeed. He had flung himself into business without knowing a thing about it. His wife approved and abetted him. By now he was completely ruined. He had entirely devoured even his wife's rich inheritance. He and his wife had remained
calm
for a long time; that is, they had continued to spend immoderately. The creditors who were writing to his father were not just business creditors, but furniture and carpet sellers, shoe-makers and tailors. Enrico and his wife knew the splendid villa they lived in was quite lost, and that they would soon have to leave it. Swiftly, in the space of a few months, Enrico's complicated, intricate situation became extremely simple: he had nothing left.

As he left for Lesa in August, Manzoni knew that one of the creditors had started legal proceedings, and there was the risk he might draw the whole troop behind him; but at Lesa he received a reassuring letter from Pietro: the legal proceedings had been suspended. Manzoni to Pietro:

‘You can imagine what a relief it was to read of the suspension. . . And as I assume from what you say that this was your doing, I thank you on my own behalf, since, as for the person directly involved, and his innocent children, your heart must have inspired you to it.'

Enrico to his father:

‘My brother Pietro has made a sacrifice that only a heart like his could make. I do not speak of the delicate means he adopted to help me. These are things I can't possibly describe in this letter. Yes, dear Papa, I have asked God's pardon. . . Dear Papa, accept my assurance that if, sadly, circumstances may condemn us, when these circumstances are known I am sure we will obtain forbearance. . . Our whole lives will henceforth be dedicated to righting the wrong that has been done, and by the grace of God which I continually implore, I feel we will succeed. . . Forgive me, dear Papa, for writing so badly. I realize I have failed to tell you all my poor heart feels.'

That spring Teresa had made another will. Terrified by Enrico's doings, she had apparently sought to defend her own son against these financial landslips. In this will she cancelled the arrangements regarding her dowry; this time Manzoni was absolutely obliged to restore the dowry to Stefano on her death, immediately and in its entirety. ‘To my most beloved husband Alessandro Manzoni,' she still left her ‘gold repeater', that is, a watch, as she had already declared in the previous will. Stefano was the sole heir, and was absolved from any obligations ‘that may have been indicated by me elsewhere'.

As she was once again preoccupied with death at that time, she grieved that Stefano, who was now thirty-eight – the same age as Enrico – was still unmarried. Years before he seemed to have been attracted by a beautiful girl from a wealthy family at Lesa: but in no time it had all come to nothing. ‘Your most aff. Mama would dearly love to become a grandmother to a little Stefanello,' she wrote at the bottom of every letter, or ‘The Lord Himself said:
it is not good that a man should be alone.
‘ Stefano, however, remained completely deaf to these exhortations. From time to time he started up some half-hearted matrimonial negotiations, to satisfy her: but it would all fade away quite quickly.

Teresa had not written to Vittoria after the death of Luisina. She wrote:

‘Dear, dear Vittoria – I can hardly pluck up the courage to say anything but poor dear Vittoria! – Oh, how I wish I were near you, to hold your hand in mine, and squeeze it and kiss it, trying but not daring to say a word about the angel you have given back to God. . . Please forgive my silence, dear Vittoria! it is not the silence of the heart. . . I embrace you with a love that you can imagine, and I beg you not to write a word in reply so that you can rest your eyes. Have courage, dear good Vittoria! your Luisina is in an ocean of joy, in the arms of your saintly mother, praying to the Lord for you and all your dear people.'

Vittoria stayed in Florence for a long time with Babbo Gaetano. She returned to Siena early in 1858.

Since her adolescence she had never been very strong: she was always having headaches, backache, and she had trouble with her weak eyes. Grief made her still weaker. She could not see at all well. She was not to tire her eyes. Babbo Gaetano used to read aloud to her.

Matilde had told her, if she died, to burn the notebooks and albums in which she used to note down her impressions and thoughts. Vittoria obeyed.

However, a few pages survived, between January and March, in a diary Matilde had kept in 1851. Obviously Vittoria did not want to burn them. They were found many years later among Bista's papers.

When she was writing that diary in 1851, Matilde was not very ill. She had friends, amusements, pastimes. Yet she never stopped thinking of death.

Her mother's face which she could not remember; her sister's little girl who was growing up beside her, and who was as dear to her as if she were her own child; a few fleeting moments of happiness which she immediately thought of as a chance, fleeting light that her eyes would never see again. This was Matilde's youth, as she wrote.

‘My dear saintly mother had to leave me when I was only two. . . Oh mamma mia! why could you not live to know my heart?

‘This morning my Luisina woke me with her kisses: I put on my dressing-gown as fast as I could and ran into the sitting-room, to see the presents the
Befana
(white witch) had brought. The little darling squealed with delight to see her stockings bulging, but wouldn't touch anything until Bista got up too, to take part in her happiness. Later I was so happy too, seeing the portrait of Papa that Stefano has sent Vittoria [it was the Hayez painting, in a copy by Stefano]. Oh! if only Papa could come to Pisa too! What joy it would be to be near him, without having to leave Vittorina, Bista, and their little pet! – By now I am too attached to them, and I can't contemplate the remotest possibility of separation, without shivering all over!