The Silent Duchess (12 page)

So here they are, father and daughter, riding beyond the gates of the Villa Trabia, crossing the narrow lane that passes along the edge of the garden of the Villa Palagonia, leaving the two pink stone one-eyed monsters to the left. They proceed along the dusty road bordered by a prodigious number of mulberry bushes and prickly pears, in the direction of Aspra and Mongerbino.

Father leans forward, the bay Miguelito starts to gallop and they speed on beyond the contorted carob trees, beyond a scattering of peasant huts, beyond the olive and mulberry trees, beyond the vines and the river. As soon as the damp mist from the sea rises fresh and salty into his nostrils the bay lifts his front legs, and a few seconds later, with a powerful push of his hindquarters, lifts himself off the ground. The air is thinner and clearer, the gulls sweep down in surprise. Father urges on the horse, the little girl clings to the mane, balancing herself on Miguelito's neck, which seems more like the neck of a giraffe. The wind blows through her hair and cuts the breath in her throat. A cloud advances sluggishly towards them and at one bound the bay leaps into it and begins to swim in the floating foam, kicking and whinnying. For a moment Marianna can see nothing, only a clinging white cloud that fills her eyes. Then they are out of it, in the clear blue of the welcoming sky.

There's no doubt that this time Father is taking her with him to paradise, Marianna tells herself, and she looks down with joy at the trees beneath them as they become ever smaller and darker. The fields in the distance separate into blue geometric patterns, squares and triangles that overlap each other confusedly.

But now the bay horse is no longer pointing towards the sky but to the summit of a mountain. Marianna recognises the flat bare point, a grey shape that resembles a castle: it is Monte Pellegrino. In a flash they are there. Now they descend on to those burnt rocks to rest

a little before setting out for unknown happy skies.

But below them a large crowd has assembled and in the middle of the crowd she can see a black object. It is a platform, a man, a rope hanging downwards. The bay Miguelito is going round and round in circles. The air becomes warmer, the birds are left behind. Now she can see everything clearly. Her father the Duke is about to find a place for himself with his horse and his daughter in front of the gallows where a boy with discharging eyes is about to be executed.

At the very instant that Miguelito's hoofs touch the ground Marianna wakes up, her night-dress soaked with sweat, her mouth burning. Since little Signoretto died, she has been unable to sleep at night. Every two hours she wakes up gasping for air in spite of the valerian and laudanum that she swallows along with tisanes of hawthorn, orange flower and camomile.

With a restless movement she throws back the bedclothes and pushes out her bare legs. The small goatskin rug lightly tickles the soles of her feet. She reaches out for the tapers. She lights a candle on the little chest of drawers, puts on a violet-coloured chenille cloak and goes out into the passage.

Under the door of uncle husband's room she can see a fillet of light. Is he too unable to sleep? Or has he gone to sleep with a book in his hand and the candle burning, as happens to him more and more often?

Further along the passage the door of Mariano's room is half-open. Marianna pushes it with her fingers and takes a few steps towards the bed. She finds her son asleep with his mouth agape. She wonders whether they should consult the physician Cannamela once more. The boy has always had a weak throat, every time he has a cold his nose swells and gets blocked and he is shaken with violent fits of coughing. He has already been to see two well-known physicians. One has prescribed the usual blood-letting, which only made him weaker still. The other recommended opening up his nose to remove a polyp that was in the way, and then closing it again. But uncle husband refused to think of it: "In this house the only things that are opened and closed are the doors, you son of a bitch."

Fortunately Mariano's behaviour is improving as he grows older: he is less naughty, he no longer throws himself on the floor when he can't have his own way. He is growing rather more like her mother the Duchess, his grandmother: lazy, good-natured, prone to over-excitement but just as often to depression. From time to time he comes to kiss Marianna's hand and tell her something that has happened, and he fills sheets of paper with large confused handwriting.

Sometimes Marianna is aware of her son looking with pity at her hands, which have become prematurely old. She knows that in some way he is pleased by this, as if it were a punishment she has deserved for the indecent and uncontrolled way in which she concentrated all her care on the repellent and ugly little body of his small brother, who died at the age of four.

Duke Pietro and Aunt Teresa do everything in their power to prevail upon him to behave like a duke. His father is so much older than his mother, and on his death Mariano will inherit all the titles, if not the wealth, of the dead branch of the Scebarr@as family bequeathed as a legacy to Duke Pietro. And he plays along with it: he's become big-headed and arrogant but he gets easily bored and reverts to playing hide-and-seek with his sisters under the scandalised eyes of his father. But then after all he is only thirteen.

Marianna stops in front of Giuseppa's room. She is the most worrying of her three daughters. She refuses to have music lessons, to learn embroidery or Spanish; she is greedy only for cakes and horse-riding. Before quartan fever carried off Lina and Lena, when they all used to call the bay horse with a whistle and run arm in arm through the olive groves, it was they who taught her to ride. Uncle husband did not approve. "There are sedan-chairs for ladies, there are litters, there are carriages. I don't want Amazons here."

But as soon as her father has gone off to Palermo, Giuseppa fetches Miguelito and rides him all the way to the sea. Marianna knows about it but has never betrayed her. She too would have liked to get on a horse and gallop along the dusty paths but it has never been allowed. Her lady mother had convinced her that because she was dumb she could do almost nothing she wanted to do

without being seized "by the dogs with long forked tails". Only her father the Duke, after much persuasion, had secretly taken her two or three times on Miguelito's back when he was still a young, happy horse.

Duke Pietro is particularly severe with Giuseppa. If she refuses to get up early in the morning, he shuts her in her room and keeps her there all day. Innocenza secretly brings specially cooked titbits for her without the Duke suspecting anything.

"Your daughter Giuseppa is eighteen and behaves like a child of seven", he writes on a sheet of paper, putting it down with a look of irritation. Marianna recognises that her daughter is unhappy but she is unable to say why. It seems as if her only pleasure is to roll herself up in her bedclothes soaked with tears, in a landslide of breadcrumbs, her hair all over the place, determined to say no to everyone and everything.

"Growing pains", Marianna's father the Duke had written. "Let her be." But uncle husband does not let her be at all. "Nonsense!" Every morning he stands in front of her at the head of her bed and addresses lengthy sermons to her that inevitably have an effect exactly opposite to that intended. Above all he scolds her for refusing to get married.

"Eighteen and still unmarried. It's a disgrace. At eighteen your mother had already given birth to three children. And you--you're like an old maid. What am I to do with an old maid, I ask you? What can I do?"

Marianna advances on tiptoe. It is a long passage and the children's rooms follow one another like the Stations of the Cross. Here Manina used to sleep before she got married when she was only twelve, as her father decreed. She was always her father's favourite, the most obedient, the most beautiful. And he had considered he was making a great sacrifice, giving her up "for her to make a good marriage to an upright and well-to-do man".

The fringed four-poster bed, the yellow velvet curtains, the set of combs and brushes in tortoiseshell and gold, a present from Grandfather Signoretto on her tenth birthday--everything in its place as if the girl were still living there. Marianna thinks again of the indignant letters she

wrote to uncle husband to dissuade him from such an early marriage. But she was defeated by relations, friends and custom. Today she asks herself whether she did enough for her youngest daughter. She did not have sufficient courage. There's no doubt she would have fought with more energy if it had been about Signoretto. With Manina, after the first battle, she had let it go, through exhaustion, boredom, through cowardice. ...

Hurriedly she leaves her daughter's room, partially illuminated by a little light that burns beneath a picture of the Madonna. Next door, in the room adjacent to the staircase, is where

Felice, the most cheerful of her daughters, used to sleep until a few years ago. She entered the convent when she was eleven, and she created a little kingdom for herself among the Franciscan nuns, which she rules over at her own sweet will. She comes and goes as she pleases, she gives lunches and dinners for all occasions. Her father often sends a sedan-chair for her; she comes over to Bagheria for a day or two, and no one says a word.

She too has left an empty void. She has lost her daughters too early, Marianna tells herself. Except for Giuseppa, who gulps down venom and curls up in bed without even knowing why. There is something idiotic about fussing over her children as if they were eggs, with the anxious brooding of a sitting hen. As her children's bodies changed and developed, so she identified her own body with theirs, giving it up as if she had lost it when she got married. She slips in and out of her clothes like a ghost, at the mercy of a sense of duty which she did not choose but which arose from a dark, ancient, female pride. She has put into motherhood both her flesh and her feelings, adapting them, restricting them, renouncing them. But with little Signoretto she let her feelings run away with her, she knows that now; theirs was a love that went beyond the relationship of mother and son to blossom into that of lovers. And so it could not last. He was the one to realise this before she did, with the miraculous understanding of a child, and he had chosen to leave her. But how can one live without a body, as she has done for the past thirty years, without ending up mummified?

Now her feet are taking her on, down the stone staircase covered by a flowered stair carpet, past the corner of the entrance hall, the plants that twine along the wall, the white passage, the

big window overlooking the sleeping courtyard, the yellow room with a glimpse of the spinet lacquered with clear varnish, the two Roman statues guarding the tall french windows, the sharp-eyed chimera peering from between the fronds on the ceiling, the rose room with its upholstered chaise-longue, the prie-dieu in reddish wood, the dining-table on which is the white basket full to the brim with porcelain pears and grapes. The air is freezing. For days an unusual and unexpected spell of cold weather has descended on Bagheria. No one remembers such cold as this in years.

The kitchen with its smell of frying oil and dried tomatoes has a welcoming feel, though it is only a shade warmer. Through the open door she can see a sliver of pale-blue light coming in. Marianna goes to the kitchen dresser and opens the doors without thinking. She breathes in the powerful smell of bread. She remembers something she has read about Democritus in Plutarch: so that his death should not cause suffering to his sister, who was just about to get married, the philosopher prolonged his death agony by smelling newly baked bread.

Out of the corner of her eye, Marianna glimpses something black wriggling on the floor. She bends down to have a look. For the past few years she has no longer seen well over a distance. Uncle husband had a pair of strong lenses sent all the way from Florence for her, but she cannot get used to them. And then she feels stupid with all this equipment on her face. It seems that in Madrid young people wear these glasses quite needlessly, simply to display the large tortoiseshell frames. And this in itself would be a good enough reason for her not to wear them.

Looking closely she sees that it consists of ants: a monstrous file composed of thousands of tiny creatures that scurry to and from the kitchen dresser, crossing the entire kitchen and climbing up the walls, to reach the lard that fills the majolica soup tureen shaped like a duck. But where is the sugar? Marianna looks around her, searching for the enamel jars in which the precious granules have been stored ever since she was a child. She finds them at last beside the shutters, standing on top of a wooden board. What ingenuity Innocenza has brought to bear to keep the ants away! The board is balanced between two chairs,

the legs of the chairs immersed in saucepans filled with water, and on top of each jar is a soup plate filled with vinegar.

Marianna takes a rough-skinned lemon from a basket on the floor and smells its fresh bitter smell. She cuts it in half with a small knife that has a handle of horn. From one of the halves she cuts a fleshy slice with a soft, spongy white rind. She sprinkles a pinch of salt on it and puts it on her tongue. It is a habit acquired from Grandmother Giuseppa, who every morning, even before washing her face, ate a lemon cut in pieces. It was her recipe for ensuring healthy teeth and a fresh mouth.

Marianna feels her teeth by putting a finger between her gums and her tongue. Certainly they are sound and healthy, even though two were extracted by the surgeon last year and as a result she now chews less well on one side. One of them was broken, the other was discoloured. Being pregnant has an effect on the teeth: when children are in the womb they are avid for bone, no one knows why. Perhaps the molar could have been saved, but it was hurting and it is an established fact that the surgeon's job is to cut, not to repair. It cost him so much effort to pull those two teeth out that he was sweating and shaking as if he had a fever. He pulled and pulled with his forceps but the tooth would not budge. Eventually he broke it with a little hammer, and then he only just succeeded in extracting the broken pieces, bracing his knee against her chest and puffing and blowing like a buffalo.