The Silent Duchess (26 page)

To extricate herself, Marianna pulls at the buckle, rips it off with a tug and, leaving everything for the cripples and the children, starts running. Her feet take wings and leap over drain holes, rush up steep steps, run through potholes filled with sludge, sink into the heaps of refuse and excrement with which the road is littered.

Suddenly, when she least expects it, she finds herself outside at last, alone in the middle of a little path through tall grass. Ahead of her, silhouetted against a sky of glazed china, is the figure of Saro playing at circus tricks. Malagigi rears up on his hind legs, thrashes his front legs in the air, then lowers them on to the ground only to rise up once again, bucking and kicking as if he had been bitten by a tarantula.

Marianna watches with amusement and alarm: that boy will fall off and break his collar-bone. She signals him from a distance but he does not come to her. Indeed he draws her on towards the hills like a snake-charmer. Hitching up her mud-stained skirt, her hair escaping from its pins, damp with sweat and short of breath, she follows, happier than she ever remembers. He'll lose his balance, he'll hurt himself, how on earth can she stop him? she asks herself.

Nevertheless, the thought is a happy one because she knows it is a game, and in games risk is part of the pleasure.

Horse and rider, still caracoling, have reached a coppice of hazel trees but they show no sign of stopping. They are dancing and cantering around in front of her but always keeping their distance. It is as if the entire life of Saro has been given over to horse-riding, like a gipsy. Now he is through the nut trees, and ahead there are only fields of clover, tall hedges of castor-oil plants and expanses of stony ground.

All at once Marianna sees the youth flying through the air like a rag doll and falling head down into the tall grass. She starts running again, jumping, tripping over the tangled brambles, holding her skirt up with both hands. When did she last run like this? Her heart is in her throat and feels as if it and her tongue want to jump out together.

Now at last she reaches him. He is lying on his back half-buried in the grass, his eyes shut, his face drained of blood. Gently she bends over him and tries to ease his neck and move first his arm and then his leg. But his body does not respond. It lies abandoned and deprived of all sensation. With shaking hands Marianna unbuttons his shirt at the neck.

He has only fainted, she tells herself, he will soon come to. Meanwhile she cannot take her eyes off him: he seems at that moment to have been born for her in all the beauty of his young body. If she gave him a kiss he would never know it. Why not once and once only give rein to her desires, held in check by her inimical will?

With a gentle movement she bends over the boy lying on his back, and her mouth lightly brushes against his cheek. For an instant she seems to feel his long eyelashes flutter. She draws back and looks at him again. He is a body stranded and lost in unconsciousness. Again she bends gingerly over him with the lightness of a butterfly, and places her lips against his. She seems to feel him tremble. Suppose it were a sign of delirium, the first intimation of death? She rises on to her knees and starts to stroke his cheek with her fingers until she sees him open his grey eyes, such beautiful grey eyes. They are laughing at her. They are telling her that it was all an act, a trap to steal a kiss from her. It has worked

perfectly. Only the tapping of her fingers on his cheek had not been foreseen, and perhaps forced him to give away the game sooner than he had intended.

What a fool I am, what a fool!

Marianna thinks while she tries to do up her hair. She knows that he will not move a finger without her consent, she knows that he is waiting, and for a moment she is tempted to disclose what was at first only a secret thought: to press him against her in an embrace that overflows with years of waiting and renunciation.

What an idiot, what an idiot! ... This trap will be her joy of joys. Why does she not let herself be caught in its noose? But there is a faint whiff of sugared almonds that does not please her, a suspicion that she is being taken for granted. Her knees press into the grass, her back straightens, her feet are already moving. Before Saro can guess her intention, she is off, running in the direction of the tower.

XXXII

The two lighted candlesticks are burning with green flames. Marianna watches those little tongues of fire with some apprehension: since when has a small candle of virgin wax burned with such a green light, rising in slender columns towards the ceiling and falling back as a frothy liquid? Even the bodies next to her are different from usual, swelling with menace: the belly of Don Pericle is contorting itself into sudden protuberances as if it were inhabited by a frightened child. On the table Manina's plump dimpled fingers are opening and closing quickly, shuffling the cards as if they were acting on their own, detached from her arms, grasping and turning the court cards while her wrists remain buried inside her sleeves.

Don Nunzio's white hair falls in ringlets on to the table. Snow in the middle of August? Immediately afterwards she sees him taking an enormous handkerchief out of his waistcoat pocket, rolling it into a ball and burying his nose in it. It is evident that as well as blowing his nose he is expelling his bad temper. If

he carries on like this Don Nunzio will blow his whole life into his handkerchief and expire on the card table. Marianna takes hold of his wrist and presses it.

The daughters burst out laughing at their mother's gesture of dismay. Don Pericle laughs too; Felice laughs and her sapphire cross dances on her breast. Sarino laughs, putting his hand in front of his mouth; even Fila laughs. She is standing next to Giuseppa holding a saucepan full of macaroni in tomato sauce.

Felice stretches out her hand to touch her mother's forehead. On the lips of her daughter Marianna reads the word "fever". All their faces look serious and she sees other hands stretching out to feel her forehead.

She'll never know how she managed to get upstairs: perhaps they carried her. She does not know how she got undressed, how she was able to hide beneath the sheets. The aching of her feverish head keeps her awake, but at last she is alone and thinking once more with disgust about her gullibility that morning, first her performance as a good Samaritan and then that childish rush over heaps of stones and through nut bushes, the submissiveness of a body possessed by ghosts, the ingenuousness of a kiss that she was going to steal and that has indeed been stolen. And now this malignant fever that brings echoes of an internal babble she cannot make sense of.

Can a woman of forty, a mother and a grandmother, wake up like a late-flowering rose from a torpor that has lasted for decades, and lay claim to a share of the honey? What is to stop her? Is it no more than her own will-power? Or perhaps the memory of a violation repeated so many times as to render deaf and mute the whole of her body?

At some time during the night somebody must have come in to see her. Was it Felice? Or Fila? Somebody who raised her head and forced her to swallow a sweet drink. Leave me in peace, she wanted to scream, but her mouth stayed shut with an expression of bitterness and pain.

He brought me to the banqueting house. ... and his fruit was sweet to my taste.

Comfort me with apples for I am sick of love. ...

What blasphemy: to mix in her confused memory

fragments of past happiness with the brilliant words of the Song of Songs. How can she be on the verge of forgetting her own disability?

My beloved is like a roe or a young hart.

These are words that should not be spoken, they sound ridiculous on tight-lipped mouths, they cannot belong to them. Yet they are there, these words of love, and they have become fused with the anguish of her fever.

Take us the foxes, the little foxes that spoil our vineyards.

Now the room is flooded with daylight. Someone must have opened the shutters while she slept. Her eyes are stinging as if she had grains of salt beneath her eyelids. She lifts a hand to her forehead and sees an owl on the arm of the chair. It seems to be looking at her tenderly. She tries to move her hand on the sheet but discovers that there is a large coiled-up serpent calmly sleeping on the embroidered border. Perhaps the owl will eat up the serpent. Perhaps not. If only Fila would come with some water. ... From the way her hands are crossed on her chest she concludes that she must already be dead. But her eyes are open and they see the door swinging back by itself, slowly, just as in life. Who is it?

Uncle husband, quite naked, with a great scar running down his chest and belly. The hair on his head is sparse like that of people infected with ringworm, and he exudes a strange smell of cinnamon and rancid butter. She sees him bend over her, armed as if to crucify her. A sort of dead egg-plant pulsates out of his belly, obscenely stiff with desire. I will make love out of pity for him, she tells herself. Love is above all merciful.

"I am dying," she says to him behind closed lips. And he smiles mysteriously like an accomplice. "I am going to die," she insists. He nods. He yawns and nods. Strange because the dead cannot feel the need for sleep. A sensation of freezing cold makes her raise her eyes towards the unshuttered window. A crescent moon hangs in the topmost window pane. Each gust of wind sets it swinging gently. It is like a piece of candied pumpkin with the sugar grains crystallised

and stuck to the rind. "I will make love out of pity," her dumb mouth repeats, but uncle husband does not want her consent, pity is not what he wants. Now his white body is on top of her, pressing down on her freezing belly. The dead flesh smells of dried flowers and saltpetre. The fleshy egg-plant insists on forcing its way into her womb.

At dawn the house resounds with a terrible drawn-out scream. Felice leaps from her bed. Surely it cannot be her dumb mother? Yet the scream comes from the direction of her room. She runs to wake her sister Giuseppa, who in turn pulls Manina out of bed. The three young sisters still in their night-dresses rush to their mother's bed, where she appears to be gasping for a few last desperate gulps of air.

Since there are no doctors at Torre Scannatura the local "leech" is hurriedly summoned. He is called Mino Pappalardo and he arrives attired in egg-yolk yellow. He takes the sick woman's pulse, examines her tongue, lifts her eyelids and buries his nose in the chamber-pot.

"Fever with congestion of the lungs," is his verdict. There is an urgent need to draw blood from the inflamed veins. For this he will require a high stool, a basin of luke-warm water, a big cup, a clean sheet and an assistant.

Felice offers to help while Giuseppa and Manina huddle in a corner of the room. The leech takes a pouch made of rolled-up canvas out of a small suitcase of light-coloured wood. Inside it, tied together by thin laces, are small sharp scalpels, small saws, pincers and a minute pair of scissors.

Moving confidently, Pappalardo bares the invalid's arm, feels the vein at the elbow, ties a tourniquet round the upper part of the arm, and then with a precise cut makes an incision, reaches the vein with the knife blade and starts to bleed her. Felice, kneeling beside the bed, collects the blood in a cup as it drops, without any sign of squeamishness.

Marianna opens her eyes. She sees the unshaven face of a man with two dark furrows on his cheeks. The man gives her a bruised distracted smile. But the snake which was curled up

on the sheet must have woken because she can feel it plunging its sharp fangs into her arm. She wants to warn Felice but she is unable to move even her eyes.

But who is this man on top of her who has a strange disagreeable smell? Somebody in disguise? Uncle husband? Her father the Duke? He would be quite capable of putting on a disguise, just for fun. At that moment a revelation transfixes her from head to foot, like an arrow: for the first time in her life she comprehends with a diamond clarity that it was him, her father, who was the one responsible for her disablement. From love or from carelessness she can't say. But it is he who cut her tongue and it is he who has filled up her ears with molten lead so that she can hear no sound and circles perpetually in the kingdoms of silence and fear.

XXXIII

A carriage with a drawn hood, the horse caparisoned with gold trappings. It must be that eccentric character Agonia, Prince of Palagonia. But no, there alights a lady attired in a veil thrown in the Spanish manner over her high tower of hair. Why, it is the Princess of Santa Riverdita, who has had two husbands both of whom died of poisoning. Behind her comes an elegant small gig drawn by a young spirited horse; this must be the Baron Pallavicine, who a short time ago won a lawsuit against his brother, a case concerning a disputed inheritance that lasted for over fifteen years. The brother has been left in sackcloth and ashes, and can now only become a monk or marry a rich woman. But in Palermo a rich woman doesn't marry a pauper, even if he does have a grand title, unless she is forced to, in which case the price is very high. Moreover, the "betrothed" has to be exceedingly beautiful and at the very least she must know how to play the spinet with grace.

A parade of carriages like this is something that has not been seen for years. The courtyard of the Villa Ucr@ia is completely obstructed: calashes, palanquins, fiacres, litters, sedan-chairs pass beneath the lights of the great archway of flowers that links the access road to the courtyard.

It is the first time since uncle husband's death that there has been a big party at the villa. Marianna has decided on it to celebrate her recovery from pleurisy. Her hair has begun to grow again and the colour has regained its natural fairness.