The Silent Duchess (11 page)

A shadow comes between her imaginary painting and the sun which spreads its radiance over the floor. Marianna raises her eyes to the window and sees uncle husband watching them from outside the glass. His small penetrating eyes seem filled with gratification at the spectacle in front of him: there, assembled on the carpet of the most luminous room in the villa, is his whole family, his progeny. Now that there are two boys, his expression has become proud and protective.

The steady gaze of uncle husband meets that of his young spouse, his niece. There is gratitude in his barely discernible smile and in response she is touched by a feeling of primeval pleasure. Will uncle husband open the door of the french windows and join them beside the crib, or won't he? Knowing him, she expects that, having reassured himself, he will not be tempted by the warmth of the heated room but will go off on his own. And in fact she sees him turn his back, dig his hands into his

pockets and walk with long strides towards the coffee house. There, in the shelter of the windows, with the plants climbing up the wall, he has brought to him a cup of well-sweetened coffee, and contemplates the landscape that he knows by heart: on the right the spreading peak of the Pizzo della Tigna; opposite, thickets of acacia trees on Monte Solunto; the dark bare ridge of Monte Catalfano; and, close by, the ruffled sea that today is as green as a field in spring.

XIV

The room is in shadow. There is a brazier on the floor with a pan of boiling water on top of it. Marianna is sunk in a low chair, her legs stretched out on the floor, her head lolling on the cushion. She is asleep.

Beside her is the big wooden cot with blue ribbons that has already cradled Manina and Mariano. The ribbons are stirred by a breath of air that blows through the half-open window.

Innocenza comes in, pushing the door open with her foot. In her hands she carries a jug of boiling punch and a couple of biscuits spread with honey. She places the jug on a chair close to the Duchess and seems on the point of leaving, but thinks better of it and goes over to take a blanket from the bed to protect the sleeping mother from the cold. She has never seen her in such a bad way, so thin and pale, with dark rings under her eyes. There is something dishevelled about her appearance that is quite unlike her. She whom everyone normally thinks of as a young woman of twenty now looks years older. If only she wouldn't tire herself out reading so much! An open book lies upside down on the floor.

Innocenza lays the blanket over her legs, then goes to the big cradle to look at Signoretto, the last-born child, who sucks in his breath with a wheezing sound. This poor child won't last the night, she says to herself, and this desperate thought wakes Marianna, who comes to with a start.

She has been dreaming of flying, her eyes and nose streaming in the wind. A horse's hoofs are galloping through the clouds and she realises she is astride the bay Miguelito, sitting in front of her father, who is holding the reins and urging the animal to gallop through huge boulders of cotton

wool. Beneath, there in the centre of the valley, the Villa Ucr@ia can be seen in all its beauty, its elegant fa@cade the colour of amber, the arches of its two wings fretted with windows, the statues poised like ballerinas on the cornice of the roof.

She opens her eyes to find Innocenza's plump kindly face only a finger's breadth away from her. She pulls back abruptly.

Her first instinct is to push Innocenza back-- what does she think she's doing, spying on her like this? But Innocenza smiles at her with such affectionate anxiety that Marianna does not have the courage to drive her away. She sits up, fastens the collar of her dress and smooths her hair with her fingers.

Once again the cook moves over to the child, restless in his cradle; she unties the ribbons and scrutinises the small shrunken face with its open mouth desperately struggling for air.

Marianna asks herself by what ominous alchemy Innocenza's thoughts should reach her so clear and lucid, as if she could hear them. She finds this unnerving, a burden that is hard to bear. At the same time she enjoys breathing in the odour of the grey skirt that smells of fried onion, tincture of rosemary, vinegar, lard, basil. It is the smell of life that incongruously intermingles with the smells of vomit, perspiration and oil of camphor that exude from the beribboned cradle.

She signs to her to sit beside her. Innocenza responds quietly and, pulling down her wide pleated skirt, settles on the floor and stretches her legs out in front of her. Marianna extends her hand towards the little glass of punch. She would really have preferred a long drink of cold water, but Innocenza had thought the hot liquid would help her withstand the icy cold of the night, and she does not want to disappoint her by asking for something different. So she gulps down the hot sickly liquid in one breath, scalding her palate in the process. But instead of feeling warmer she starts to shiver with cold.

Innocenza grasps her hand with a sympathetic gesture and rubs it in hers to warm it. Marianna stiffens: she cannot avoid thinking of the bag of money and the sensual gesture as Innocenza put the coins to rest two at a time. So as not to wound her feelings with a rejection, Marianna gets up and

goes over to the bed. There, behind the screen embroidered with swans, she crouches down over the clean chamber-pot and passes a few drops of urine into it. Then she takes the chamber-pot over to the cook and hands it to her as if she were giving her a present. Innocenza takes it by the handle, covers it with a corner of her apron, and goes to the stairs to pour it down into the black cesspit. She walks cautiously, holding herself upright as if she were carrying something precious.

Now the child seems to be no longer breathing at all. Marianna watches the violet lips and, bending over him, anxiously places a finger under his nostrils. Little puffs of air are exhaled at rapid irregular intervals. The mother puts her head on her son's chest to feel the beating of his heart, which is so faint as to be barely perceptible. A powerful smell of regurgitated milk and camphorated oil rises to her nostrils. The physician has forbidden washing him and the poor little body lies wrapped in layers of cloth that are increasingly impregnated with the odours of death.

Perhaps he will make it; the others have been ill too. Manina has had two attacks of mumps and had a high fever for days. Mariano nearly died of erysipelas. But none of them has ever exuded the odour of decaying flesh that comes from Signoretto's body.

He is only just four but she sees him as he was when he was only a few months old, clinging to her breast with hands that were like small spiders. Both he and Manina were born prematurely, but while she came into the world a month before she was due, he tried to jump out two months early.

He grew slowly but according to the physician Cannamela he appeared to be healthy and in a few months would catch up with his brothers and sisters. At the breast he did not seem to know how to suck; he would tug violently, gulp down the milk and then sick it up. And yet he was the first to recognise her, the first to turn to her with happy lively smiles.

No one in the world could hold him in their arms except for her. And none of the wet-nurses, nannies and French maids were able to quieten him: until he was back in his mother's arms he would not stop screaming. He was a happy and intelligent child, who seemed to have intuited his mother's deafness and there and then invented a language which she alone could

understand. He communicated with her by kicking, mimicking, laughing and battering her with sticky kisses. He would press his big toothless mouth against her cheek, he would shut his eyes and lick her with his tongue, he would squeeze the lobes of her ears between his gums very gently, like a puppy that knows its strength but curbs it in play.

He grew more rapidly than the others. He became longer and longer, with two enormous feet that Innocenza would take in her hands with admiration. "With these we'll make him into a paladin," she said one day, and Duke Pietro hastened to write it down on a piece of paper because he knew it would make Marianna laugh.

He was not at all fat, by any stretch of the imagination. Hugging him she could feel his slender ribs like crescent moons beneath her fingers. When will this child decide to put on a little more flesh? she asked herself, and she kissed his protruding navel, which was always a little red and inflamed as if it had only just been cut off half an hour ago.

A smell of curdled milk hung around him. Even baths in the washtub brimful with soap and water could not entirely get rid of it. Even with her eyes tight shut she was able to recognise this last son of her thirtieth year. She openly preferred him; in response to his unlimited love for her, her love for him was boundless. Sometimes in the early morning she would wake up with a sensation of warmth on her naked shoulder and discover that he had crept furtively into her bed, attaching his toothless mouth to her flesh and pulling at it as if it were a nipple. She would clasp him round his neck and hug him against her in the dark beneath the warmth of the blankets, and he would burst out laughing and cling to her, sniffing her night smells and kissing and clasping her as he snuggled towards her breast.

At mealtimes she would have him sitting beside her in spite of peremptory notes from uncle husband: "Children should stay with the other children in the nursery. That's why it's there."

"Without me he wouldn't eat, my uncle." "And do not call me uncle."

"The child is too thin."

"I shall make him thinner if you don't send him to his room."

"If you send him away I shall go too."

An exchange of angry notes, which made

Fila and the scullery maids laugh behind her back.

In the end Marianna had permission for the child to sit next to her only at lunch, so that she could feed him little pizzas filled with minced chicken, pasta made with egg-yolk and cheese, and egg-flip with orange juice: everything that, as Innocenza said, "makes good red blood".

Signoretto got no fatter, but he grew taller and taller, acquiring the neck of a stork and two small thin arms like a monkey's, which were openly ridiculed by his brother. At two he was taller than Agata's three-year-old. Although he did not gain any weight he shot up like a plant in search of the sun. Neither his hair nor his teeth came through. His head was like a wooden ball and she covered it with embroidered bonnets turned up and puffed out at the edges.

At the age when other children had begun to talk he only laughed. He sang, he screamed, he spat, but he did not speak. And uncle husband had begun to write threatening notes: "I don't want my son to be dumb like you", and again, "It is essential he separates from you, that's what the apothecary says and so does the physician Cannamela."

Marianna was seized by such fear that he would be taken away that she had an attack of fever and while she was delirious Duke Pietro went round and round the house in a state of vacillation, overwhelmed by a frantic dilemma: should he take advantage of his wife's delirium to remove the child and put him in Aunt Teresa's convent, where he would be taught to speak, or should he be compassionate and leave him with his mother, to whom he was so uncontrollably bound? While he was fraught with indecision her fever subsided and she made him promise to leave the child with her for at least another year. In exchange he brought a tutor into the house and forced the boy to learn the alphabet. By now he was four and his refusal to speak worried her too.

So that was the situation. Uncle husband put his worries to rest--the child was healthy, he was happy, he ate well, he grew. How could he tear him from his mother's arms? But of talking he gave not a sign.

Then, one day, as the end of the year agreed on by his father drew near, he fell ill. He vomited until his body became ashen.

Doctor Cannamela diagnosed a delirium caused by inflammation of the brain. He has had a small basin of blood drawn out by the surgeon Pozzolungo, who, in addition, has put him on a fast in an isolated room which only his mother and Innocenza are allowed to enter. Moreover the surgeon has declared that it is not inflammation of the brain at all, but an abnormal type of smallpox.

Innocenza has had smallpox, from which she emerged half-dead, but she survived. Marianna has not had it but she is not afraid of it. Did she not stay all on her own in the villa when the whole of Bagheria was seized by fever and vomiting, without getting infected? On that occasion she had washed her hands continuously in vinegar, had eaten lemons with salt, and kept her mouth covered with a handkerchief tied behind her neck like a brigand.

But since Signoretto has been ill she has not taken any of her usual precautions. She sleeps in the upholstered chair next to the wooden cradle in which her son lies panting, watching for every breath. During the night she wakes with a start and puts her hand on to his mouth to make sure he is still breathing.

When she sees him drawing in air in this tormented way, his lips livid, his little hands clinging to the edge of the cradle, she can't help wondering if the best way of helping him would be to let him die. The surgeon says he should have passed away already. But with her help, with the warmth of her closeness to him, kissing him, giving him every now and then a draught of her own breath, he holds on to life.

XV

Her father the Duke has his own special way of mounting the bay horse, catching hold of its raven black mane and talking to it persuasively. What he says Marianna has never known but it is very similar to the affectionate chatter he poured into the ear of the prisoner condemned to death on the scaffold in the Piazza Marina.

Once he is in the saddle he makes a sign to her to come close, bends down over the horse's neck and pulls her up to sit in front of him astride the horse's mane. There is no need to use a whip or spurs on the bay horse Miguelito because he starts off as soon

as her father has taken up his proper position with his legs pressed tightly against the horse's flanks and his chest well forward. So they descend the slope from the entrance of the villa to the open space at the spring of San Nicola, there where the shepherds lay out the sheepskins to dry and there is always a strong smell of rotting flesh and flayed skin.