The Silent Duchess (15 page)

about tolerated him, though he regarded him with considerable suspicion. Duke Pietro had learned English as a boy but had always refused to speak it, so by now he had forgotten it.

Grass communicated with her on rare occasions in well-formed handwriting on clean sheets of paper. Only during the last few days of his visit had they discovered that they liked the same books, and their correspondence became unexpectedly close and concentrated.

Marianna turns over the pages of the notebook and stops in amazement; at the bottom of the first page is a dedication written in ink in very small handwriting: "To her who does not speak-- may she accept with her generous mind a few thoughts that are close to me."

But why had he hidden it among the books in the library? Grass knew she was the only person who ever actually handled the books, yet he must also have known that her husband checked them from time to time. Then it was a secret present, hidden in such a way that she would find it when she was alone after his departure.

To have the sense of virtue, is nothing but to feel a satisfaction of a particular kind from the contemplation of a character. The very feeling constitutes our praise or admiration. We go no farther; nor do we enquire into the cause of the satisfaction. We do not infer a character to be virtuous, because it pleases: But in feeling that it pleases after such a particular manner, we in effect feel that it is virtuous. The case is the same as in our judgements concerning all kinds of beauty, and tastes, and sensations. Our approbation is imply'd in the immediate pleasure they convey to us.

Underneath it the name David Hume, written in green ink in minute handwriting. This reasoning cuts through the muddled pathways in Marianna's mind, unused as she is to thinking in an ordered, precise and radical way. She has to read the paragraph twice to grasp the rhythms of this explosive intelligence, so different from the other minds that have influenced her.

We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the

passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

The exact opposite to what she has been taught. Is passion not an awkward burden from whose edges spring slivers of greed that are best kept hidden? And is reason not the sword that everyone keeps at his side to cut the heads off the spectres of desire, so as to enforce the determination to be virtuous? Uncle husband would be horrified to read any one of the sentences in this little book. Already at the time of the War of Secession he had declared, "The world is ending up on a garbage heap." And it is all the fault of people like Galileo, Newton and Descartes, who "wanted to distort nature in the name of science, but in reality wanted to put her in their pockets to use in their own way. Presumptuous lunatics! Traitors!"

Marianna closes the notebook suddenly. Instinctively she hides it in the folds of her dress. Then she remembers that Duke Pietro went to Palermo yesterday, and she brings the book out again. She holds it up to her nose; it has a wholesome smell of fresh paper and good-quality ink. She opens it and among the pages discovers a coloured picture: a man of about thirty with a striped velvet turban that comes down over his forehead. A broad complacent face, his eyes looking downwards as if to assert that all knowledge comes from the earth on which we rest our feet. His lips are slightly open, his eyebrows thick and dark, suggesting a capacity for concentration that is almost painful. His double chin gives the impression of a gentleman who never goes short of a good meal. His neck, delicately encircled by a soft collar of white silk, emerges from a flowered waistcoat beneath a long jacket strewn with big bone buttons.

Here Grass's very small handwriting has attributed a name: "David Hume, a friend and a philosopher, too disturbing to inspire love except from his friends, among whom I take the liberty of including the friend who cannot speak."

Really strange, this young man Grass. Why had he not given it to her personally, instead of leaving her to find it hidden between travel books a month after his departure?

Such is our disappointment when we learn that the

connections between our ideas, the links, the efficacy are merely in ourselves and none other than a disposition of the mind.

Devil take that Mr Hume! How can he say that God is a "disposition of the mind"? Marianna is overcome by apprehension and again hides the notebook in her skirt. Even thinking such a thought, let alone saying it out loud, she could end up being burned at the stake on a word of command from the Holy Fathers of the Inquisition, who occupy the great Steri Palace in the Piazza Marina. "A disposition of the mind acquired through habit. ..." She has read something similar in her father's handwriting; he was for the most part a man bound by tradition, but he sometimes allowed himself to play havoc with those traditions, merely for amusement, curling his lips in a charming and incredulous smile.

""Every ant loves its own hole" and one puts one's worldly goods and one's morality in that same hole and they suddenly become one, morality and daily bread, fatherland and sons. ..."

Her mother the Duchess had glanced over the words written by her husband in her daughter's exercise book, had taken a pinch of snuff, cleared her throat, and poured half a bottle of orange-flower water over herself to take away the cloying smell of the snuff. Who knew what went on in her sweet mother's head, always languidly bent down over her shoulder. Is it possible that she slipped in by one door and slipped out by another, without a pause? Was she also prey to "a disposition of the mind acquired by habit", with that tendency to slump lazily into an unmade bed, into an easy chair, or into a dress, her soft flesh pressing against the whalebones, the hooks, even against the button-holes? A laziness deeper than a well in the tufa stone, a torpor that enfolded her as a carob pod enfolds its seed, hard and yet so soft, the colour of night. Below the dark surface her lady mother was soft just like a carob seed, forever surrendering to the small world of her family. She loved her husband to the point of forgetting herself. She stood poised on the edge of the void and so as to avoid feeling she would sit and gaze fascinated at the desert in front of her.

Her mother's voice, what was it like? In her

imagination it comes over as having a deep, dark, husky resonance. It is difficult to love someone whose voice one does not know. Yet she loved her father without ever having heard him speak. A slightly bitter taste tinges her tongue and spreads over her palate; could it be the pangs of regret?

Now as we call everything custom, which proceeds from a past repetition, without any new reasoning or conclusion, we may establish it as a certain truth, that all the belief, which follows upon any present impression, is deriv'd solely from that origin.

As if to say that certainty, every certainty gets flung to the winds, and that habit holds us in submission while pretending to educate us. The pleasures of habit, the bliss of repetition-- are these the glories we are talking about?

She would like to get to know this Mr Hume, with his light-green turban, his thick black eyebrows, his smiling expression, his double chin and his flowered waistcoat.

Thus it appears, that the belief or assent, which always attends the memory and senses is nothing but the vivacity of those perceptions they present; and that this alone distinguishes them from the imagination. To believe is in this case to feel an immediate impression of the senses, or a repetition of that impression in the memory.

What logic! What an obstinate and petulant rascal he is! She can't help smiling in admiration. To be lashed by a thought like this that has floated carelessly among stories of adventures, books on love, history books, poetry, almanacs, fables! A thought abandoned to the emptiness of ancient beliefs; yes, beliefs that have the flavour of egg-plants in a sour-sweet sauce. Or has it been the continuous self-questioning of her wounded destiny which has diverted her from other deeper and more fruitful ideas?

But as 'tis certain there is a great difference betwixt the simple conception of the existence of an object, and the belief of it, and as this difference lies not in the parts or composition of the idea, which

we conceive; it follows, that it must lie in the manner, in which we conceive it.

To think thoughts--here is something daring that tempts her as an exercise she can secretly indulge in. Mr Grass, with an impertinence worthy of a young student, has started to trample on the meadows inside her head. If that were not enough he has brought a friend with him: Mr David Hume with his ridiculous turban. And now they want to leave her in confusion. But they will not succeed.

But--what is this skirt brushing against the door? Someone has come into the library without her being aware of it. She thinks she had better hide the notebook with the marbled cover, but she realises it is too late.

Fila comes forward with a glass and a jug balanced on a tray. She makes a small curtsy, puts the tray on top of a table covered with papers, andwitha teasing gesture lifts the heavy folds of her dress to show she is wearing shoes. Then she leans against the doorpost waiting for an order.

Marianna contemplates her full round face, her slender body. Fila is nearly thirty yet she always seems like a child. "I give her to you as a gift. She is yours", her father the Duke had written. But where does it say that people can be given, taken, thrown away like dogs or little birds? "What nonsense!" uncle husband would have written. "Are you suggesting that God has not created noblemen and peasants, horses and sheep?" Does this not pinpoint for her the question of equality? Is it one of those indigestible seeds wafted from the pages of Grass's little notebook to confuse the opaque brain of a dumb woman? Can she then retain something of her own that does not originate in other minds, other constellations of thoughts, other wills, other interests? A repetition in her memory of images that appear real because they dart like lizards, squirming beneath the sun of everyday experience?

Marianna returns to her notebook, or rather to the hand that holds it, so prematurely withered, with broken nails, roughened knuckles, protruding veins. Yet it is a hand unused to scrubbing with soapy water, a hand used to giving orders. But also to obedience, with a chain of obligations and duties which she has always seen as necessary. What would Mr Hume in his seraphic oriental turban say

about a hand so eager to be daring and so resigned to playing safe?

XIX

Rummaging through ancient trunks and demijohns of olive oil Marianna came upon an old canvas, dark and covered with dust, that appeared from nowhere. She pulled it out, dusted it with the sleeve of her dress, and found it was none other than the portrait of her brothers and sisters that she had painted when she was thirteen. She had been painting it the morning she was interrupted by being called to see Tutui the puppet master, in the courtyard of the lodge, the same day her mother the Duchess told her she would have to marry her uncle Pietro.

The black shadow that covers the canvas dissolves, revealing the bright faces, now a little faded: Signoretto, Geraldo, Carlo, Fiammetta, Agata, the beautiful Agata, who seemed then to be destined for a future as a queen.

Twenty-five years have passed since then. Geraldo died in an accident: a carriage crashed into a wall, his body was flung through the air on to the ground, and a wheel ran over his chest --and all to do with a question of precedence. "Let me pass, I have right of way." "What right? I am a grandee of Spain, remember that!" They brought him back to the house without a drop of blood on his clothes, but with a broken neck.

Signoretto has become a senator, just as he had planned. After years of being a bachelor he has married a marchioness, already widowed, who is ten years older than him. The scandal threw the family into turmoil. But he is heir to the Ucr@ias of Fontanasalsa and he can do as he pleases.

Marianna likes this open-minded sister-in-law, who could not care less about scandal, and who quotes Voltaire and Madame de S@evign`e, gets her dresses from

Paris, and keeps a music master in her household who is also, so everyone whispers, her gallant. He is a young man who speaks Greek fluently as well as French and English, and has a quick wit. She has sometimes seen the two of them together at balls in Palermo on those rare occasions when she has been dragged

there by uncle husband: the Marchioness in a hooped skirt of damask edged with frills, he tightly buttoned up in a blue redingote with silver buckles, which he has cunningly tarnished.

Signoretto is not at all upset by this relationship. He even boasts that his wife has a private escort, and lets it be understood that he is no more than a protector installed by him at her side, so much does he resemble a "singer in the style of the seventeenth century", that is to say a castrato. This may be so, but many have their doubts.

Fiammetta has become Canoness of the Carmelite Convent of Santa Teresa. She wears her thick chestnut hair imprisoned inside a wimple that she sometimes tears off, especially when she is doing the cooking. Her hands have become big and strong, used as they are to transforming liquids into solids, raw into cooked, cold into hot. Her buck teeth give an air of cheerful disorder to a mouth that is always on the brink of laughter.

Agata has continued to wither. She does not even know how many children she has had, what with the ones that are alive and those that have died, having given birth to her first when she was twelve, and still going strong. Each year she becomes pregnant and if it were not for the fact that many of them die before they see the light of day, she would have had an army by now.