The Silent Duchess (3 page)

These murderous thoughts are dispelled by a sudden rush of air. The door opens wide and a man with a belly shaped like a melon appears in the entrance. He is dressed like a clown, half in red, half in yellow. He is young and corpulent, with short legs, square shoulders, the arms of a wrestler and small shifty eyes. He is chewing pumpkin seeds and spitting out the husks with a cheerful leer.

When the boy sees him he blanches. The smiles that her father the Duke has wrung from him die on his face, his lips begin to tremble, his mouth starts to quiver and his eyes to run. The clown, spitting out husks of pumpkin seeds, draws closer to him. The boy slides downwards like a wet rag and the clown gestures to two servants, who raise him up beneath the armpits and drag him towards the door.

The atmosphere resonates with sombre reverberations like the beating of the gigantic wings of an unseen bird. Marianna looks around her.

The White Brothers proceed towards the entrance with ceremonious footsteps. The great door opens wide at a single blow and the beating of the wings becomes close enough and loud enough to deafen her. It is the viceregal drums, together with the shouts from the crowd, everyone rejoicing and waving their arms.

The Piazza Marina, which earlier had been empty, is now seething with people: a sea of undulating heads, raised standards, stamping horses, a pandemonium of thronging bodies, struggling forward to invade the rectangular piazza.

IV

The windows are overflowing with heads. The balconies are tightly crammed with gesticulating bodies leaning out so that they can get a better view. The Ministers of Justice with their yellow robes, the Royal Guard with their gold and purple ensign, the Grenadiers armed with bayonets, are all there, restraining the impatience of the mob with some difficulty.

What is going to happen? The child guesses but does not dare to answer that question. All these bawling heads seem to be knocking at the door of her silence, asking to be allowed in.

Marianna shifts her gaze from the crowd and focuses it on the toothless boy. She sees him standing motionless, steady and upright. He is no longer trembling or keeling over. He has a glimmer of pride in his eyes: all this uproar for him! All these people dressed up in their Sunday best, these horses, these carriages, are only there for him. These banners, these uniforms with shining buttons, these plumed hats, all this gold and purple, all on his account. It is a miracle!

Two guards brutally interrupt this ecstatic contemplation of his own triumph. They fasten the rope with which they have tied his hands to another longer and stronger rope, which they secure to the tail of a mule. Bound thus, he is dragged towards the centre of the piazza.

At the far end, on the Steri Palace, a splendid blood-red flag flaunts itself; from there, from the Palazza Chiaramonte, the Noble Fathers of the Inquisition are emerging, two by two, preceded and followed by a swarm of altar boys.

In the centre of the piazza is a raised platform several feet high, similar to those on which are enacted the puppet stories of Nofriu and Travaglino, of Nardo and Tiberio. But instead of black canvas there is an ominous scaffolding of wood, shaped like an inverted L, to which a rope with a noose is attached.

Marianna gets pushed behind her father, who is following the prisoner, who in his turn follows the mule. Now the procession has got under way and no one can stop it, whatever the reason. The horses of the Royal Guard in front, followed by the Noble Brothers in their hooded habits, the Ministers of Justice, the archdeacons, the priests, the barefoot friars, the drummers, the trumpeters: a long cortege that laboriously makes it way along the street between the excited crowds. The gallows are only a few yards away, yet it takes the procession, winding its way in arbitrary circles round the piazza, a long time to get there.

At length Marianna's foot bumps into a small wooden step and the procession comes to a halt. Her father the Duke ascends the steps with the condemned prisoner, preceded by the executioner and followed by the other Brothers of the Good Death.

Once more the boy has that far-away smile on his white face. And it is her father the Duke who holds him spellbound and eases him towards paradise, bewitching him with descriptions of the delights of that place of repose, leisure, unlimited food and sleep. Like a baby made drowsy by words from his mother rather than his father, the boy seems to have no other wish than to rush from this world to the next, where there are no prisoners, no sickness, no lice, no suffering but only juleps and rest.

The little girl opens her aching eyes. Now a great desire leaps down upon her: to be him, if only for an hour, to be that toothless boy with the suppurating eyes, so as to hear her father's voice, to drink in the honey of that transient sound, even if only once, even at the cost of dying, hanging from that rope dangling in the sun.

The executioner continues to chew pumpkin seeds andwitha defiant look spits the husks high into the air. Everything is so like the puppet theatre: now Nardo will lift up his head and the hangman will deliver a hail of blows. Nardo will wave his arms and fall under the stage and then return more lively than ever to receive more blows and more insults.

Just as in the theatre, the crowd laughs, chatters and munches while waiting for the blows to begin. Street-vendors appear from under the scaffold to offer mugs of water and aniseed, pushing and jostling past sellers of bread and offal, of boiled squid and cactus fruit. Everyone is elbowing and shoving, trying to sell their wares. A toffee seller arrives beneath the child's nose and, almost as if he has an intuition that she is deaf, approaches her with exaggerated gestures to offer her the tray held round his neck with a greasy piece of string. She gives a sideways glance at the miniature toffee-tins. She could so easily stretch out her hand, select one, press down the catch with her finger to open the circular lid and let the little round sweets with their vanilla flavour slip out. But she doesn't want to be distracted, her attention is fixed elsewhere, above those steps of blackened wood, where her father the Duke is still talking to the condemned prisoner in a soft low voice as if he were flesh of his flesh.

The last steps are reached. The Duke bows towards the dignitaries seated in front of the scaffold, the senators, the princes, the magistrates. Then he kneels down reverently with the rosary between his fingers. For a moment the crowd falls quiet. Even the itinerant street-vendors cease bustling about and stand still with their mobile stalls, their straps, their samples of merchandise, their mouths wide open and their heads in the air.

When the prayer is ended, her father the Duke passes the crucifix to the prisoner for him to kiss. It is as if in place of Christ on the Cross, it could be he himself, naked, martyred, with his beautiful skin and a crown of thorns on his head, offering himself to the uncouth lips of a frightened boy to reassure him, to soothe him, to send him to the next world calm and tranquil. With her he has never been so tender, never so sensual, never so close. Never, never has he offered her his body to be kissed, never taken her under his wing, never cherished her with tender words of comfort.

The child's gaze shifts to the prisoner, and she watches him sink down on his knees. The seductive words of Duke Ucr@ia are swept away by the feel of the cold, slippery rope that the hangman places round his neck. But the boy still manages somehow to lift himself upright, while his nose starts to run. He tries to free his hand

to wipe the snot that dribbles over his lips. But his hands are firmly tied behind his back. Two or three times he lifts his shoulders and tries to twist his arm. At this moment it seems as if wiping his nose is the only thing that matters to him.

The air reverberates to the beat of a big drum. At a sign from the judge the hangman kicks away the box on which the boy has been forced to stand. The body jerks, stretches itself, falls downwards and starts to rotate.

But something has gone wrong. Instead of dangling inertly like a sack, the boy continues to writhe, suspended in the air, his neck swollen, his eyes starting out of their sockets.

The hangman, realising that his task has failed, heaves himself up with all the force of his arms against the gallows and jumps alongside the hanged boy; for a few seconds they are both dangling from the rope like two mating frogs, while the crowd holds its breath.

This time he is truly dead. The body has taken on all the attributes of a puppet. The hangman slides nonchalantly along the scaffold and jumps nimbly down on to the platform. People start to throw their caps in the air. A young brigand who has murdered a dozen people has met his fate. Justice has been done. But the little girl will not learn about this till later. For the moment she is asking herself what a boy not much older than herself and looking so scared and stupid could have done.

The father bends over his daughter, exhausted. He touches her mouth as if he were waiting for a miracle. He catches hold of her chin, looks into her eyes, imploring, threatening. "You must speak," say his lips. "You must open that accursed fish's mouth."

The child tries to unstick her lips but she cannot do it. Her body is seized with a violent trembling, her hands, still grasping the folds of her father's habit, are turned to stone.

The boy she wanted to kill is dead and she cannot help wondering whether it might have been her who killed him, for she had desired his death as one can desire a forbidden fruit.

Very

The brothers and sisters sit in a colourful group posing for her and shuffling their feet: Signoretto looking so like his father the Duke, with the same soft hair, shapely legs and bright trusting expression; Fiammetta in her little nun's dress, her hair gathered inside a lace-edged coif; Carlo with his black sparkling eyes and the short breeches that squeeze his plump thighs; Geraldo, who has recently lost his milk teeth, smiling like an old man; Agata with clear translucent skin speckled with mosquito bites.

The five watch their dumb sister bending over the palette, and it seems almost as if they are portraying her rather than she portraying them. They eye her as she looks down at her paints, mixes them with the tip of her brush, and then turns back to the canvas. All at once its whiteness becomes suffused with a soft yellow; then over the yellow she lays a cerulean blue with clear, delicate brush-strokes.

Carlo says something that makes the group burst into laughter. Marianna signs to them to stay quiet for a little longer. The charcoal drawing of their heads, necks, arms, faces, feet, is already there on the canvas, but she is finding it difficult to bring the colour to life: the paint becomes diluted and runs down towards the bottom of the canvas. Patiently they remain still for several minutes. But then it is Geraldo who creates a disturbance by giving Fiammetta a pinch. Fiammetta retaliates with a kick and suddenly they are both pushing, slapping and elbowing each other. Signoretto does not intervene to put Geraldo in his place, although as the eldest he has the right to do so.

Marianna again dips her brush first in the white paint and then in the pink, while her eyes shift from the canvas to the group. There is something disembodied about this picture she is painting, something too polished, not quite real. It seems almost like one of those official miniatures which her lady mother's friends have had painted of themselves, all stiff and formal, in which the original vision remains only a distant memory.

She says to herself she must concentrate on their personalities if she does not want them to slip through her fingers: Signoretto, who sees

himself as a rival to his father, with his commanding ways and resonant laughter, and as protector of his mother who, whenever she sees father and son in conflict, watches them slyly, even with amusement. But her indulgent glances linger on her son with such intensity that it must be obvious to everybody. His father the Duke, however, is irritated: this boy not only looks astonishingly like him, but acts out his movements with more grace and assurance than he does himself. It is as if he had a mirror in front of him, a mirror that flatters him and at the same time reminds him that soon he will be painlessly replaced. Amongst other things it is Signoretto who is the eldest, and it is he who will carry on the family name. Towards his dumb sister Signoretto is usually protective, somewhat jealous of the attention their father gives her, sometimes looking down on her disabilities, sometimes using her as a pretext for demonstrating to the others his generous spirit, never quite sure where truth ends and play-acting begins.

Next to him is Fiammetta in her nun's habit, her eyebrows like a pencilled line, her eyes too close together, her teeth irregular. She is not beautiful like Agata and for this reason she is destined for the convent. Even if she found a husband there could be no certainty of a marriage contract as there would be with a real beauty. In the highly coloured, twisted little face of the child there is already a look of rebellion against this fettered future, which she accepts defiantly while wearing the long narrow habit that smothers her womanhood.

Carlo and Geraldo, fifteen and eleven, look as alike as twins. But one will end up in a monastery and the other will go into the dragoons. They are often dressed up as monk and soldier, Carlo in a miniature habit and Geraldo in a boy's uniform. Whenever they are in the garden, they amuse themselves by exchanging clothes and then rolling on the ground clasped together, ruining both the cream-coloured habit and the handsome uniform with its gold toggles. Carlo is greedy for spicy foods and sweets and has begun to grow plump. But he is also the most affectionate of the brothers towards Marianna, and often comes to look for her and hold her hand.

Agata is the youngest and also the prettiest. A marriage contract has already been arranged for her

which, without costing the family anything except a dowry of thirty thousand escudos, will enable them to extend their influence, to make useful connections and establish a wealthy lineage.

When Marianna looks up to focus on her brothers and sisters she finds they have all vanished. They have taken advantage of her absorbed concentration on the canvas to slip away, counting on the fact that she will not be able to hear their giggling. She is just in time to catch a glimpse of Agata's skirt disappearing behind the lodge among the spikes of aloes.