The Silent Duchess (28 page)

Now she suddenly realises she has lost him in the crowd; where has Mariano, the dreamer, gone? She finds him a little later walking by himself in the direction of the bright lights of the coffee house. She watches him sip a coffee, burn his tongue and angrily stamp his foot just like he did when he was little. She watches him sit down on a straight-backed chair with the cup in his hand while his gaze rests greedily on the exposed bodies of the women guests. The pupils of his eyes grow dark, his lips tighten, his penetrating look reminds her of uncle husband. She recognises in it the sudden secret lust for rape.

Marianna shuts her eyes. She opens them again. Mariano is no longer in the coffee house,

and Caterina is looking for him. Now the gazebo is full of guests, everyone with a small cup of coffee in their hands. She has known them all her life, even if she does not see much of them. Usually she meets them at weddings, when someone enters a religious order, at visits following childbirth, and at confirmations.

They are always the same, these women whose minds have been left to grow lazy in the cloisters inside their heads, so delicately coiffured in the Parisian style. From mother to daughter, from daughter to niece they are forever circling round and round the problems of their sons, husbands, lovers, servants, friends, and inventing new wiles so as not to be crushed. Their men are busy with other problems, other enjoyments, different yet parallel: the administration of their distant estates, the future of their big houses, hunting, gaming, carriages, courtship and questions of prestige and precedence. There are a very few who once in a while are able to leap on to the roof-tops and look around them to see where the city is burning, or where the waters are flooding the land, where the earth still nurtures the ripening of the corn and the vines, and how their island will be ravished by fecklessness and plunder.

The weakness of these families is also hers. She knows the secret infamies which women talk about behind their fans, such as the initiation of young boys with servant girls who, when they become pregnant, are passed on to open-minded friends or sent into religious houses as being in "moral danger" or to hospices for "fallen women". Then there are the astronomical debts, the usury, the secret illnesses, the suspect births, the evenings spent at the club playing for castles and estates, the escapades in brothels, the singers competed for to the chink of money, the furious quarrels between brothers, the secret love affairs, the terrible vendettas.

But she knows the dreams too: the enchanting rhythms of the battles between Orlando, Art@u, Ricciardetto, Malagigi, Ruggero,

Angelica, Gano di Maganza and

Rodomonte that articulate everyone's fantasies; their willingness to live on bread and turnips so as to maintain a carriage emblazoned with gold. She knows their monstrous pride, their capricious intelligence that prides itself on remaining idle as a duty to their rank, the

secret biting wit that is often united with a sensual desire for decay and effacement.

Is she not like this too? Flesh of their flesh, idle, watchful, secretive and suffocated by foolish dreams of grandeur? The only difference is the disability that has given her more insight into herself and others, to the extent of sometimes being able to enter into the thoughts of someone beside her. But she has not known how to elevate this talent into an art as Mr David Hume has suggested; she has let it flower at random, suffering it rather than being guided by it, without drawing any profit from it.

In her silence, inhabited only by written words, she has elaborated theories and left them half-developed, she has pursued fragments of thought without methodically cultivating them, allowing herself to fall into the laziness typical of her kind, of those secure in their immunity, even before God, since "to him that hath shall be given and from him that hath not shall be taken even that he hath". And by "having" it is not estates, land, houses, gardens, that is meant, but refinement, reflection, intellectual complexity, all those things that need abundant leisure and that favour their lordships, who then amuse themselves throwing out crumbs to those who are poor both in money and in spirit.

The water ice has melted in the long-stemmed crystal glass. The spoon has slid to the floor. A puff of air, a breath of dried figs tickles her ear. Saro is bending over her, and his lips brush against her neck. Marianna gives a start, gets up, staggering comically with her shoes slipped off underneath her skirt, and stares angrily at the youth. How dare he come so stealthily to tempt her while she is lost in her own thoughts!

With a firm hand she takes hold of the notebook and pen, and without looking at him writes, "I have decided you must get married." Then she hands the sheet of paper to the boy, who holds it under the flares to read it better.

Marianna watches him with fascination. None of the other young men who have been invited have the grace of his body, over which flicker the undulating light and shade of the festivities. He is full of trepidation and uncertainty that lighten the way he moves, giving him a fragility as if he were suspended in air. How she would like to take him by the waist and pull him down to the floor!

But as soon as she sees his bewildered gaze settling on her, Marianna goes hastily to mingle with the throng of guests. Now it is time for the music, and she has to lead the guests along the garden paths between the hedges of elderflower and jasmine towards the newly varnished doors of the theatre.

Her brother Abbot Carlo offers her a cup of chocolate and smiles at her with a questioning look. Marianna fixes her gaze beyond the tall lilies and the trunks of pomegranate trees, to the city of Palermo stretched out like a pink and green Chinese rug, in a dust-cloud of dove-grey houses. The chocolate has a bitter-scented taste on her tongue. Now her brother taps his foot on the wooden floor of the veranda. Is he impatient to get rid of her? Yet she has only just arrived, after two hours in a litter along the rocky paths that lead up to San Martino delle Scale.

"I want to find a wife for a member of my household. I would like your advice about a good honest girl", writes Marianna, using her complicated writing implements, the little folding table that hangs from her belt, the goose-quill pen with a detachable nib just arrived from London, the ink bottle fixed to a little chain and a small exercise book with detachable pages.

The sister watches the brother's face as he reads her words. It is not haste that makes him wrinkle his forehead, she realises, it is embarrassment. This sister, locked as she is in her enforced silence, has always seemed remote, strange, except perhaps when Grandmother Giuseppa was still alive and both of them used to get into her bed. Then he would hug and kiss her so fervently that it took her breath away. Since then, he does not know why, they have drifted apart. Now, it seems, he is wondering what lies behind this request for advice from his deaf-mute sister: a pretext for an alliance against their elder brother, who has been plunging himself into debt? Or curiosity about his solitary abbot's life? Or a request for money?

Clusters of discordant thoughts slip unintentionally out of his eyes, out of his nostrils. Marianna watches him tormenting the pointed leaf of a lily between his plump fingers and knows she cannot escape from the wave of his reflections, which are reaching her from the depths of his indolent, caustic mind.

His sister the Duchess is anxious. Is she afraid of getting old? It's strange how

well she's worn ... not a shred of fat, no disfigurement, slim as when she was twenty, a fresh, clear complexion ... her hair still fair and curly ... only one white lock over her left temple ... does she rinse it in camomile? ... Though, come to think of it, our father the Duke stayed as fair as an angel until he was quite old. But all he himself has left are a few sparse threads. A waste of time looking at himself in the mirror, he's never managed to grow any hair, he remains covered with down like a baby, and that only grows because of the tincture of herb Gerard mixed with nettles that his niece Felice told him about. ... This dumb sister still has the face of a young girl ... while his has swollen up with lumps and bumps all over the place. ... What if it were her dumbness that has preserved her from the ruins of growing old? ... There is something virginal in her wide-open eyes ... when she looks at him like that she makes him feel uneasy. ... Heaven knows what sort of a beanpole his uncle was ... he used to see Duke Pietro walking like an old crock, all jerks and twists, as if he were made of wood ... and she has kept the purity of a young wife ... behind that lace, those cloaks, those bows the colour of night, there is a body that has never tasted what pleasure is. ... It must be like that ... pleasure devours, broadens, crumbles ... yes, pleasure ... he has been in it up to his neck, first of all women with thin backs and flat breasts, entwined body to body, leaving them both exhausted ... then changing over the years into a father's sensual taste for the deformed and emaciated bodies of sullen-faced little boys, whom he now loves only with his eyes and in his imagination. ... He would never give up the joy of having around him those small beings with legs crippled from undernourishment, those small black glittering eyes, those fingers that are unable to reach for anything in spite of wanting to reach for the world. ... He would never give up one of these prot@eg`es not even to regain that same body he had as a youth, with thick hair and a slender neck. ... It is she who by losing her voice has lost everything ... she is afraid ... you can read it in her eyes ... it's there underneath ... it is fear that stops her from living and throws her into the grave intact and still a virgin, but already suffocated, pulled to pieces, dead like a badly chiselled

block of wood. Why is she so obstinate? Where did it come from? Certainly not from her father, who was always generous and heedless, even less from her mother, who camouflaged herself under the blankets to the point where she couldn't recognise her own legs ... snuff and laudanum kept her in a limbo from which it became more and more nauseating for her to escape.

Marianna cannot take her eyes off his mind. Her brother's thoughts slip effortlessly from his head into hers, as if the expert hand of a gardener were trying out some dangerous grafting operation. She would like to stop him, to tear out this alien branch, from which flows such an icy bitter sap, but how to do it when one is at the receiving end of other people's thoughts and is unable to stifle them? She is taken over by a harsh desire to touch the bottom of this horror, giving substance to the most secret and fugitive words, the most despicable, the most nihilistic.

Her brother seems to be aware of her apprehension, and soothes it with a twinkle in his eyes and a kind smile. Then he gets hold of the pen and writes, filling the page with minute sloping letters, beautiful to look at.

"How old is the bridegroom?" "Twenty-four."

"What is his occupation?"

"Cellarman."

"Does he have any money?"

"None of his own. I will give him a thousand escudos. He has served me loyally. His sister is a servant in my house. Our father the Duke gave her to me as a present years ago."

"And how much do you pay him a month?" "Twenty-five tar@i."

Abbot Carlo Ucr@ia makes a face as if to say that it's not a bad wage, and that any peasant girl would be glad of him for a husband.

I could arrange something with the sister of Totuccio the stone-breaker. They are so poor in that family that if they could sell her in the market. ... They'd be free of the burden ... and there's the others too. Five sisters and a brother, a real misfortune for a fisherman without a boat who fishes from other people's old tubs and feeds off the remains which the bosses leave him in exchange for his work. He goes barefoot even on Sundays and all he's got for a house is a cave black with smoke. ... The first time he went there to please

that little snail Totuccio, the mother was squashing lice on the youngest of the daughters while the others stood round in a circle and laughed shamelessly, with those hungry mouths, their eyes popping out, their necks as stringy as a chicken's ... small, crooked. No one ever thinks of them as wives, they aren't even good for work, they've suffered too much hunger, who would take them on? The oldest has got a hump, the second goitre, the third is a mouse, the fourth a spider and the fifth a scorpion fish. ...

And yet the father is crazy about these deformed creatures, that big stupid man, you should see how he pets them. And their mother too, with her hands all scratched and filthy: she tickles them, cleans them, smooths their plaits with fish-oil ... and what laughs they all have together! Totuccio started to do odd jobs when he was nine to bring some money into the family ... but what could he earn? A tar@i once a fortnight, not even enough to get them a bread roll. You should have seen him the day he arrived at the monastery, half-naked, carrying a basket of stones on his head, all filthy with mortar dust and mud. And how seriously he lined up the stones next to the bed with the lilies. They were so heavy he could hardly manage to shove them into the ground. He had to thank Father Domenico, who has a mania for walls. Without him that boy would never have known how to start. Now all eight of them live off what he earns ... not much, only a few carlini, but it's just enough ... they make soup out of fish bones, bread out of chaff ... but they are a cheerful lot and they've got a bit fatter and cleaner. ... He didn't do it for their good, he hasn't got the soul of a Samaritan

... all the same, good has come out of it ... is this a vice?

This eternal carping of the moralists ... these Fathers make one laugh with the stink they create under their own noses ... my sister too with her pained frowns. Who does she think she is, Santa Genoveffa? Why doesn't she open her arms, put a foot wrong, take the bandages off her eyes? ... Everything we do is done out of our need for pleasure. Whether it is a refined pleasure like ministering to the poor, or a coarse pleasure like enjoying the sight of a little boy with a slender waist and a bottom like a little round loaf ... one doesn't become a saint through will-power but through pleasure. There are some who make love with the