The Silent Duchess (25 page)
feathers, glasses of crystal with silvery reflections, tiny knives and forks that sparkle in the sun.
The ladies sit on the big stones beneath the elm tree that Ciccio Panella has arranged for them in the shape of a bench. But their pretty skirts of muslin and cambric are already covered with dust and are bristling with grape stalks and prickles caught up in the hems.
The men, seated on the far side under the shelter of the two olive trees that give very little shade, eat and drink in silence, not daring to take it as easy as usual, letting the flies crawl all over their faces as if they were the muzzles of the mules; and the fact that no one ventures to chase them off as the animals do, makes a lump come in Marianna's throat. To eat this choice food in front of their envious yet discreetly lowered eyes suddenly strikes her as intolerable arrogance. She gets up followed by the anxious gaze of Saro and goes over to U Zoppu, the oldest of her guards, to ask him for information about the grape harvest. She leaves her portion of gateau uneaten on her plate.
U Zoppu hastily swallows an enormous mouthful of bread and omelette that he has only just thrust into his mouth, wipes his lips on the back of a hand streaked with black earth, and bows bashfully over the sheet of paper that the Duchess hands him. But not knowing how to read, he gives her an absent look and then, pretending to have understood, starts to talk to her as if she were able to hear his words. Through embarrassment each has overlooked the defect of the other.
Saro, who has followed their gestures, comes to the help of the guard, pulls the sheet of paper out of his hands, reads it in a loud voice and is on the point of transcribing U Zoppu's reply on the complicated contraption that his mistress carries with her--the little folding table, the ink-pot with the screw top hanging by a silver chain, the goose-quill pen and the ashes.
But Ciccio Panella is infuriated by such presumption: how can a servant be allowed to come face to face with his mistress? How can he be allowed to show off his learning in front of a peasant who knows much more than he ever will, but who does not choose to reveal it by means of such a ridiculous and obscure activity as handwriting?
All at once Marianna sees Saro
change position; the muscles in his legs stiffen, his arms stretch out in front of him with his fists closed, his eyes narrow until they become two slits. Panella must have said something insulting to him and Saro has suddenly put his aristocratic pretensions to one side to get ready for a fight. Marianna looks towards Ciccio Panella just in time to see him draw a knife with a short sharp blade. Saro goes pale but does not flinch and, seizing a block of wood from the ground, is about to attack him.
Marianna runs forward but the two are already laying into each other. A blow from the wooden cudgel has sent the knife flying out of Ciccio's hand and now the two are going for each other with fists, kicks and bites. U Zoppu gives an order and five men rush to separate them, which they succeed in doing after a struggle. Saro has a wound in his hand, which is bleeding, and Ciccio has a black eye.
Marianna makes a sign to her daughters to get back into the litters. Then she pours some wine over Saro's bleeding hand while U
Zoppu makes a bandage out of vine leaves and grass stalks. Meanwhile Ciccio Panella, on the orders of the older men, has gone down on his knees to offer his apology to the Duchess and has kissed her hand.
In the litter Marianna finds herself seated facing Saro; the young man has taken advantage of the confusion to slip into the seat opposite her and now there he is, sitting with his eyes shut, his head smeared with earth, his shirt ripped open, all calculated to excite her admiration.
He seems like an angel, Marianna says, smiling to herself. It is as if while trying to reveal his angelic grace he has lost his balance and fallen from the sky and now lies battered and breathless, waiting to be taken care of. It is all a bit theatrical ... yet only a short time ago the "angel" was fighting a man armed with a knife with a courage and generous spirit she had not recognised in him.
Marianna turns her eyes away from that angelic face that offers itself to her with such docile effrontery. She looks out at the sunlit landscape, a land of ploughed-up furrows, a tangle of brash yellow broom, a pool of lead-coloured water that reflects the violet of the sky; but something brings her gaze back to the inside
of the litter. Saro is watching her with gentle searching eyes: eyes that speak shamelessly of an aching will to become a son, without sacrificing any of his pride and independence, with all the passion of an ambitious and intelligent youth.
What does she want, Marianna asks herself? Is she not just as impatient to become a mother and to clasp this boy to her and take him into her arms? A look can sometimes become flesh, uniting two people more closely than an embrace. Thus Marianna and Saro, inside this narrow carriage suspended between two mules, swaying over an empty void, let themselves be rocked by the motion, glued to their seats, while their gaze, tender and fervent, shifts from one to the other. Neither the flies nor the heat nor the swaying of the litter can divert them from the intense pleasure of this bitter-sweet exchange.
XXXI
Coming into that strange house she is nailed to the threshold by the clammy darkness, heavy with odours. The damp air brushes against her face like a wet cloth; she can only see black shadows submerged in the dark of the room.
Then little by little her eyes become accustomed to the blackness: at the far end of the room she makes out a kneading trough with broken legs, a dented iron bowl, a high bed surrounded by a closely woven mosquito net, and a stove from which burning wood emits an acrid smoke. The heels of the Duchess's shoes sink into the floor of beaten earth scored with the marks of a besom. Next to the door a donkey is eating a small pile of hay. Squatting hens are sleeping with their heads under their wings.
A tiny woman dressed in red and white pops out from nowhere with a baby in her arms, and gives the visitor a wry smile, wrinkling her pockmarked face. Marianna cannot avoid screwing up her mouth at the impact of these brazen smells: excrement, dried urine, curdled milk, charcoal ash, dried figs, chickpea soup. She has a fit of coughing as the smoke penetrates her eyes and mouth.
The woman with the child looks at her and her smile becomes more open, almost mocking. It is the first time that Marianna has entered the house of a peasant woman on her estates, the wife of one of her
tenants. For all that she has read about them in books, she has never imagined such poverty.
She is accompanied by Don Pericle, who fans his face with a calendar to keep himself from sweating. Marianna gives him a questioning look: does he know these houses, does he visit them? But fortunately today Don Pericle is impenetrable, he keeps his eyes fixed on the distance, leaning over his protuberant stomach like pregnant women who do not know whether they are there to support their bellies or if it is their bellies that support them.
Marianna gestures to Fila, who has remained outside in the road with a large basket full of provisions. The girl comes in, makes the sign of the cross and curls up her nose in disgust. Very probably she was born in a house just like this one but has done all she can to wipe it out of her memory. Now she has become accustomed to the sweet-scented fragrance of lavender in large sun-drenched rooms, and to be here fills her with resentment.
The woman with the baby gives a kick to drive away the hens that are starting to flutter and flap their wings inside the room, shifts the few poor bits of crockery on the table and waits for her share of the bounty.
Marianna takes some sausage from the basket, some bags of rice and some sugar, and puts them all down on the table with brusque gestures. With every gift she offers she feels more ridiculous, more indecent: the indecency of a benefactor who claims immediate gratitude from the other; the indecency of a conscience that is satisfied with its own generosity and can ask the Lord for a place in paradise.
Meanwhile the baby has started to cry. Marianna watches its mouth grow bigger and bigger, its eyes squeezing shut, its hands with raised clenched fists. And this crying seems to communicate itself little by little to everything in the vicinity, making them cry too: from the hens to the donkey, from the bed to the kneading trough, from the tattered skirt of the woman to the irretrievably burnt and dented cooking pans.
As she goes outside, Marianna puts her hands to her sweating neck and opens her mouth to breathe in great gulps of fresh air. But the smells stagnating in the narrow lane are not much better
than those inside the house: excrement, rotting vegetables, frying oil, dust. Now many more women are crowding in their doorways for their share of alms. Some sit in front of their houses delousing their children and chattering cheerfully to each other.
Is not this act of charity the root of corruption that seduces the receiver? The landowner encourages the avidity of his dependants, flattering and satiating them not only to make himself look good with the guardians of heaven but also because he well knows that the recipients will be lowered in their own eyes by accepting these gifts that enjoin gratitude and loyalty.
"I am suffocating here. I am going back to the tower", Marianna writes on her little table and passes the note to Don Pericle. "You carry on."
Fila gives an ill-tempered frown at the basket supported against her hips and still piled with food. Now she'll have to carry on by herself because she cannot count on Felice, who has stopped on the paved road so as not to get her shoes dirty. As for the other two girls, Heaven knows when they'll turn up. They were playing cards till late into the night and this morning they did not appear for breakfast under the portico.
Meanwhile Marianna strides off in the direction of Torre Scannatura, which she thinks she can catch a glimpse of beyond this desolation of roofs on which anything and everything grows, from chives to fennel, from capers to nettles. Turning down a narrow alleyway she stumbles over a chamber-pot that someone has left upside down in the middle of the road. Even in Bagheria the same sort of thing happens and, for that matter, in the poorer quarters of Palermo. In the morning the housewives empty the contents of their chamber-pots in the middle of the street, then come out with a bucket of water and sluice everything further down the road, at which point they lose all interest in what happens to it. But since there is always someone upstream in the process of carrying out exactly the same operation, the narrow street is permanently overrun by an evil-smelling open drain, humming with flies. The same flies settle in clouds on the faces of the small boys who sit playing along the sides of the alleys, and cling to their eyelids as if they were an exquisite dish for
them to suck. The children, with these clusters of flies hanging from their eyelids, end up looking as if they were wearing monstrous masks.
Marianna walks quickly, trying to avoid the filth, followed by a swarm of hopping creatures; she can only guess at how many by the fluttering of wings that surrounds her. She walks as fast as she can, swallowing mouthfuls of pungent air, and aims towards the end of the village with her head down. But each time she thinks she has reached the road to the tower she finds herself blocked by a low wall topped with fragments of broken crockery, or a sharp turning, or a chicken-run. The tower seems within reach but the village for all its smallness has a labyrinthine layout that is difficult to disentangle.
Walking this way and that, turning round to retrace her footsteps, Marianna suddenly finds herself in a small square piazza dominated by a gigantic statue of the Madonna. She stops for a moment to recover her breath, and leans against the base of grey stone. In whichever direction she looks it is the same: low houses jammed on top of each other, often with a single entrance that serves as both window and door. Inside she can glimpse dark rooms inhabited by both people and animals in easy promiscuity; outside are rivulets of dirty water, a few shops with grain exhibited in large baskets, a blacksmith who works in his doorway spitting out sparks, a tailor who cuts, sews and irons by the light of his open stable door, a fruit seller who displays his wares in wooden boxes with a label on each different product-- FIGS: 2 GRANI A BAG;
ONIONS: 4 GRANI A BAG; LAMP
OIL: 5 GRANI A C; EGGS:
HALF A GRANO EACH. Her eyes alight on the labels with their prices like buoys in a sea at high tide; the numbers reassure her and make sense of the mysterious layout of this dusty and hostile village.
But here now, under her feet, she becomes aware of the familiar thud of hoofs, a rhythmic beat that makes her look up: and there, appearing from nowhere, she sees Saro coming towards her, riding on the back of a young Arab horse that uncle husband gave him before his death and which he has ostentatiously called Malagigi.
At last she will be able to get out of this maze, and
she is about to go forward to meet him when both horse and rider disappear, swallowed up behind a low wall carpeted with caper plants. Marianna goes towards this wall but turning round finds herself confronted by a crowd of women and children who look at her in amazement as if she were a supernatural being. Two cripples drag themselves along the paving stones, leaning on their crutches, and start to limp behind her in the hope of getting some money out of her. They surmise that a smartly dressed woman like her must be carrying a purse full of real gold. So they come right up to her, touch her hair, pull at her sleeves, snatch at the ribbons knotted round her waist that hold her writing-board with the ink and pens.
Once more Marianna thinks she can see Malagigi caracoling at the end of a lane and Sarino raising his hat very high and saluting her from a distance. She gestures so that he can see her signalling him to come and rescue her. In the meantime someone has grabbed her bag with the pens, thinking it must have money inside it, and is pulling hard, unable to detach it from her belt.