The Silent Duchess (23 page)

Her legs obey this wise tyrannical voice, her feet move heavily, dragging her bedroom slippers across the floor. Once she reaches the curtains her arm lifts mechanically andwitha brusque movement of her wrist she pulls them so as completely to obscure the window, which looks out on to the terrace of the tower. She has not dared to raise her eyes but she has felt with her skin, with her nails, with her hair, the anger of the boy she has repulsed.

Now like a somnambulist she returns to bed, puts out the candles one by one with a weak puff of breath that leaves her hollow, and slips between the sheets, making the sign of the cross with freezing fingers.

"May Christ have mercy on me." But instead of the blood-streaked face of Our Lord on the Cross, the compassionate and ironic face of Mr David Hume dances in front of her with his turban of light-coloured velvet, his serene eyes, his mouth half-open and mocking.

"Reason can never of itself be the motive of any action of the will," she repeats to herself thoughtfully, and her lips stretch in a sad smile. No doubt Mr David Hume is an inspired soul but what does he know of Sicily? "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." And that's that! What a clown Mr Hume is inside his Indian turban, with his insolent far-away eyes, with the double chin of somebody who knows how to eat and sleep well. What does he know of a crippled woman tortured by pride and doubt?

If only my soul could embrace thee for one blink of an eye, then could I die.

The words of Paolo Maura, the poet from Catania, copied into her little damask-covered

notebook, come gently into her memory and distract her momentarily from the pain that she is creating for herself.

Her head refuses to lie on the pillow, knowing that he is still there behind the window pane, waiting for her to change her mind. Even though she cannot see him she has no doubt that he is there; it would take so little to have him beside her, so little that she asks herself how long her cruel self-denial can hold out.

To stifle temptation she decides to get up and light a candle, put on her slippers and go out through the door. The corridor is dark and it has a smell of old carpets and worm-eaten furniture. Marianna leans against the walls, feeling her legs giving way beneath her. The smell reminds her of another long-past visit to Torre Scannatura. She was then about eight and the passage was covered in the same worn carpet. Only her mother was with her. It must have been August then, as it is now. In the tower it was hot and from the surrounding countryside rose the smell of carcasses left out to rot in the sun.

Her mother was unhappy. Her husband had disappeared with one of his mistresses and after waiting for him to return, drinking laudanum and taking snuff, she had suddenly decided to leave with her deaf-mute daughter for the estate of the Scebarr@as uncles. They had a dreary time, she playing alone beneath the portico, and her mother asleep, drugged, in the small bedroom in the tower which is now hers. The only consolations were the smell of new wine inside the wooden barrels and the smell of newly picked tomatoes, which was so strong that it made her nostrils smart.

Marianna puts her hand on her chest to calm the spinning of her heart in the void. At that moment she sees Fila coming towards her wearing a brown cloak over her long white night-dress. The girl stands there looking at her as if she wants to say something important. Her soft grey eyes are hardened with resentment. Marianna lifts her arm and her hand goes of its own volition to slap that distraught face. She does not know why she does it, but she knows that the girl is expecting it and that it is her duty at that moment to comply with the compulsive pressures of a stupid servant-mistress relationship.

Fila does not react: she lets herself slide slowly to the ground. Marianna helps her

to get up, tenderly wipes the tears from her cheeks, and hugs her with such vehemence that Fila is scared. Now it is clear why she came and why that slap has already expunged the crime of a sister who was furtively spying on her brother's movements. Now Fila can go back to bed.

Marianna climbs a staircase and stops in front of Giuseppa's room, from which emerges a streak of light. She knocks. She enters. Giuseppa, still dressed, is sitting at the writing-table, her pen in her hand, the little bottle of ink uncovered. As soon as she sees her mother she makes as if to hide the sheet of paper, but then thinks better of it, looks at her with an expression of defiance, seizes another piece of paper and writes: "I refuse to have him as my husband any more. I want him off my back. We must separate."

The mother recognises in the eyes of her daughter her own dangerously impulsive pride. "Father is dead, the seventeenth century is long since past, Mamma. People's attitudes have changed. In Paris, who bothers about marriage any more? Oh yes, they're married, but without being slaves to duty, it's everyone for themselves. Instead of which he insists that I have to do whatever he wants."

Marianna sits down beside her daughter. She takes the pen from her hands.

"And how did it end with the bonnet-maker?" "It ended with her going off on her own. She's much more sensible than Giulio, for sure. I got to sympathise with her. Sleeping together a friendship sprang up between us and I really felt sorry for her, Mamma."

"Then you no longer want to beat him up?" writes Marianna, recognising that her fingers are gripping the pen unsteadily, as if she'd intended to write something quite different. The bone nib creaks on the paper.

"For me he's a complete stranger. Dead." "Then who are you writing to now?"

"A friend, Mamma, Cousin Olivo, who understands me and talks to me affectionately, while Giulio just avoids me."

"You must break it off, Giuseppa. Cousin Olivo is married and you shouldn't be writing to him."

Marianna catches a glimpse of her head

reflected next to that of her daughter in the mirror behind the writing-bureau, and realises that they are so alike that it is almost as if they were sisters.

"But I love him."

Marianna is about to write another prohibition but she restrains herself. How arrogant her refusal sounds: to break off, chop off, cut off. ... With a shiver she thinks of the hands of the Capuchin friars cutting into uncle husband to rip out his guts, to clean, to strip off the flesh, to scrape, to preserve. Those who want to preserve always use sharp knives. How apprehensive a mother she is, all out to amputate the feelings of her daughter. Giuseppa is only twenty-seven. From her young body arise tender odours of hair damp with sweat, of skin reddened by the sun. Why not give in to her desires, even if they are forbidden?

"Write your letter by all means, I shall not be watching you." Her hands write the note by themselves, and she sees her daughter smile with relief.

Marianna pulls the young woman's head on to her breast and holds her in her arms, once again too impetuously, seized by an overwhelming impulse that throws her off balance and leaves her feeling empty and exhausted.

XXIX

A morning in August. Beneath the shadows of the portico four women are seated round a table of woven cane. Hands move daintily from the crystal sugar bowl to the earthenware cups filled to the brim with milk, from peach jam to buttered rolls, from foaming coffee to sweet fritters filled with ricotta and candied pumpkin.

Marianna chases a wasp from the edge of her cup and watches it alight a moment later, undeterred, on the slice of bread that Manina is lifting to her mouth. She is about to shoo it away from there too but her daughter stops her hand, looks at her with a gentle smile and continues to bite at her bread with the wasp still on it. At this point Giuseppa, her mouth full of fritters, waves a hand to chase off the intrusive wasp; she stops in mid-air when Manina all of a sudden starts to buzz like the insect, much to the sisters' amusement. Felice, dressed in her white habit, the sapphire crucifix on her

breast, laughs, upsetting her milk as she follows the flight of another wasp that seems undecided whether to alight on Manina's hair or on the open sugar bowl. Others are arriving, attracted by such an abundance of sweet things.

They have been at Torre Scannatura for three weeks. Marianna has learned to distinguish fields of wheat from fields of oats, fields of clover from those left to pasture. She knows the market price of a cheese and how much goes to the shepherd and how much to the Ucr@ia family. The structure of rents and share-cropping is clear to her. She has learned who are the peasant guards and what their function is: to act as intermediaries between negligent proprietors and quarrelsome peasants, stealing surreptitiously from both sides, armed custodians of a miraculously maintained peace. The gabelloti, who in their turn are lease-holders of the land, twist the neck of anyone who works it, and in two generations, if they are shrewd, put enough money on one side to buy it.

She has spent hours with the accountant Don Nunzio, who patiently explains what needs to be done. On the account books Don Nunzio traces spiky signs that are hard to decipher, but he takes care to make concessions to the dumb Duchess's intellect since he regards it as being somewhat childlike.

Don Pericle is busy in the parish, he only comes in the evening for supper, and afterwards he stops to play piquet or faro with the girls. Marianna does not like him and whenever she can leaves him with her daughters. But she likes Don Nunzio; his thoughts are well boxed-in; there is no risk of them gushing out from that calm head, always kept closed and padlocked. Don Nunzio's hands run over the Duchess's sheets of paper; as well as explaining in detail the system of prices and taxes he also quotes Dante and Ariosto. Even though it is hard deciphering the old man's handwriting, Marianna prefers it to the florid, backward-sloping script of Don Pericle, which seems to weave words with spittle like a greedy spider.

Her daughters have reverted to being children. When she watches them strolling in the garden with their white lace-trimmed sunshades, when she observes them sitting on the wicker seats, as they are now, stuffing their mouths with bread and butter, it seems as

if she has gone back twenty years to when, at the Villa Ucr@ia, from her bedroom window, she used to watch them running wild, and she almost seems to hear their voices and laughter in the days before they went off to get married.

Far away from husbands and children they pass their time sleeping, going for walks, playing. They gobble up stuffed macaroni and little tartlets filled with egg-plant; and they are very greedy for the sweet made from chopped citrons cooked with honey, called petrafennula, which Innocenza cooks to perfection. It hardly seems possible, looking at them now, that a few months ago Manina nearly died from puerperal fever; that Giuseppa was weeping desperately over her husband's infidelity; or that Felice was clinging to her father's corpse as if she wanted to be incarcerated with him in the cave of saltpetre.

Yesterday evening they danced. Felice played the spinet; looking blissful, Don Pericle turned the pages on the music stand. They had invited Cousin Olivo, the son of

Signoretto, and his friend Sebastiano, who were staying for a few weeks in the old Villa di Dogana Vecchia a mile or so away, and they had danced far into the night. At one point they had even invited Saro, who had been standing on one leg like a stork, watching. Fila, also asked, did not want to join in the dancing; perhaps because she had never learned to dance the minuet and also because she was wearing shoes and her feet moved awkwardly.

To persuade her they improvised a tarascone but she did not let herself be tempted.

Saro, however, has taken lessons from Manina's dancing master and now dances like an expert. Each day he leaves more and more of his past behind him: his dialect, his callouses, his tousled curls, his shrill voice, his clumsy, diffident way of walking; at the same time he is leaving behind him his sister Fila, who does not want to learn like he does, perhaps out of scorn or perhaps out of a deeper feeling for her own integrity.

One morning when Marianna mounted the mule to go and look at the grape harvest in the domain of the Mendola river, she found the handsome Saro standing in front of her, holding a sheet of paper. Stealthily he handed it to her, with an expression of pride that set his eyes alight.

I LOVE YOU he had written in ostentatious, laboured, but also decisive letters.

She pushed it angrily into her bodice.

She did not have a chance to throw the note away as she'd hoped to do while she was riding the mule in the direction of the wine press, so she hid it in the tin box with Chinese designs underneath a heap of notes from her father.

While Don Nunzio was showing her the vats of blood-red must, it seemed as if she could feel the tremor of horse's hoofs beneath her feet; she hoped it might be Saro even though she knew she should not be waiting for him.

Don Nunzio took hold of her sleeve shyly. A moment later they were enveloped in a cloud of acidic, intoxicating fumes, in front of a platform of earth raised almost two feet from the ground. In the vat, men dressed only in short breeches were treading and retreading the grapes, their bare feet sinking into the must, spurting the light-red liquid all round them. Through a hole in the sloping floor the unfermented wine ran down into wide tubs, foaming and gurgling, leaving behind it bits of grape stalks and blades of grass. Marianna peered into this bubbling liquid and was overtaken by a strong desire to throw herself in and be swallowed up in the sludge. She was continually testing her will-power and finding it strong, barricaded within itself like a soldier in armour.

To compensate for her severity in the face of her own desires, Marianna has begun to be more indulgent towards her daughters. Giuseppa dallies with Olivo, who has left his young wife in Palermo to pursue his cousin in the country. Manina is openly courted by Sebastiano, the shy elegant young man from Naples.