The Silent Duchess (32 page)

"So the family decides. By what right?" "Do not start talking nonsense to me like my wife Domitilla. I am sick to death of Voltaire."

"Once upon a time even you used to quote from Voltaire."

"The stupidity of youth."

"I am a widow and I believe that I am perfectly capable of looking after my own affairs according to my own beliefs."

"What nonsense, sister. Still the same old worthless rigmarole! You know very well that you are not alone but are part of a family, and that you cannot, not even with permission from Monsieur Voltaire and the support of all the saints in paradise, allow yourself to take any liberties. You must get rid of that man."

"Camal@eo is a kindly person. He has helped me to save a servant from the gallows."

"Do not allow questions that have to do with servants to dictate your life. Certainly Camal@eo is aiming to marry you. To become related to the Ucr@ias would be part of a secret strategy. Believe me, this individual has no real interest in you. Do not trust him, I beg you."

"I shall not trust him."

Somewhat, even if not entirely, reassured, Signoretto left her after graciously kissing her hand. Everyone knows that her brother has had more lovers since he got married than he ever had before. Lately he has spent ridiculous sums of money on a singer who performs at the Santa Lucia theatre, who they say has also been the Viceroy's mistress.

In spite of his authoritarian manner, she was pleased to see him, with that fair head of his, in which tenderness becomes clotted beneath the skin in the form of large inflamed wens. His way of looking slightly askance, questioning, reminds her of her father the Duke when he was young. But he lacks their father's ability to laugh at himself. He has developed a subtle insidious brutality that weighs on his swollen eyelids. And the more his habit of taking command grows, the more evident his own self-indulgence becomes, to such an extent that he can no longer distinguish a chair from a chamber-pot.

Heaven knows when he began to get these new bones that have hollowed out his eyes, broadened his pelvis and flattened the soles of his feet. Perhaps sitting in the Senate or going out to attend executions with the other White Brothers and accompanying the condemned prisoners to the gallows. Or perhaps night after night, lying in the big four-poster beside his wife, who, though she is still beautiful, has become so boring to him that he cannot bear to look at her.

In recent years the memory of uncle husband has suddenly jumped to the fore when she finds herself face to face with other men of the family. That anxious, lugubrious individual, always brooding resentfully on the shortcomings of others, was at bottom more truthful and direct, certainly more faithful to himself, than any of them. With their smiles and their politeness they have holed themselves up in their homes, scared of every novelty, of being reduced to accepting ideas and beliefs which they have laughed at for years. It could be a question of perspective: as Camal@eo says, time has mellowed the fading memories. Her husband Pietro's belongings that are still around the house retain something of his morose, lonely melancholy. And yet that man had violated her when she was not yet six, and she asks whether she will ever be able to forgive him for that.

Nowadays it is Abbot Carlo who is closest to her, immersed like her in books. He

alone is capable of making a judgement that is not vitiated by his own immediate interests. Carlo is true to his own self: a libertine in love with books. He does not pretend, he does not flatter, he does not pride himself on meddling in the intrigues of others.

As for her son Mariano, after the euphoria of growing up, the great hunt for love, the journeys round the world, now at thirty he has settled down and has become intolerant of any behaviour that he regards as a threat to his own peace of mind. Towards his sisters he adopts a dry, ill-natured tone; towards his mother he is respectful on the surface, but she realises that he is impatient of the liberties she takes in spite of her disablement. The fact that he has sent his uncle Signoretto to see her instead of coming himself highlights the character of his fears: suppose a freak of nature like his mother brought another son into the world while he has failed to have even one, and suppose this child attracted the interest of a widowed aunt of the Scebarr@as line, whose inheritance he hopes for? And suppose the nonsense of a marriage outside the accepted rules recoiled on him who more than anyone else carries the weighty name of the Ucr@ias of Campo Spagnolo and Scannatura?

Mariano is fond of luxuries: he buys his shirts from Paris, as if there were not perfectly good shirt-makers here in Palermo. He has his hair arranged by Monsieur Cr@eme, who presents himself at the palace accompanied by four assistants who carry le n@ecessaire pour le travail: large and small boxes of soap, scissors, razors, combs, cream scented with lily of the valley and powders perfumed with carnations. For the care of the feet and hands there is Signor Enrico Aragujo Calisto

Barr`es, who comes from Barcelona and has a shop in the Via Cala Vecchia. For ten carlini he also visits ladies in their homes and pares the corns of both young and old, who all have problems with the little Parisian shoes with points like a hen's neck and heels like the beak of a swan.

Marianna rouses herself from her thoughts when Saro grasps her hand with a new vigour. He seems to be getting better, he really seems to be getting better. He opens his eyes. A fresh look, naked, emerging from the embrace of a pod like

a bean, still soft from sleep. Marianna draws close to him and lays a finger on his cracked lips. His light breath, moist and regular, caresses her hollow palm. A feeling of happiness holds her immobile in that gesture of tenderness as she inhales his acid breath.

Now Saro's mouth presses on her fingers and he kisses her hand anxiously on the inside of her palm. For the first time Marianna does not repulse him. Instead she shuts her eyes as if better to savour his touch. They are kisses that come from a long way back, from that first evening when they saw each other by the wavering light of the candle in the stained mirror in Fila's room.

But the effort seems to have exhausted him. He continues to hold Marianna's fingers against his mouth but he does not kiss them any more. His breath has become irregular, hurried, spasmodic.

Gently Marianna takes her hand away. From sitting in the armchair, she kneels down on the floor beside the bed and leans forward on top of the blankets. She rests her forehead on his chest, something she has often imagined but has never brought herself to do. Beneath her ear she can feel the thickness of the bandages impregnated with camphor, and below them the half-moon of his ribs, and below that the tempestuous throbbing of his blood.

Saro lies quite still, anxious lest any movement on his part might interrupt Marianna's timid advances towards him, afraid that she might at any moment retreat, as she has always done before. So he waits for her to decide, holding his breath and keeping his eyes closed, hoping, desperately hoping that she will hold him close to her.

Marianna's fingers glide across his forehead, his ears, his neck as if she can no longer put her trust in her eyes. Passing over his hair, sticky with sweat, she pauses on the bulge of the bandage that conceals his left ear, then continues along the outline of his lips, moving down towards the chin, bristly with a convalescent's beard, returning to the nose as if the knowledge of this body could only pass through the tips of her fingers, as curious and exploratory as her gaze is faint-hearted and uncertain. Her forefinger pursues the long road that leads from one temple to the other, descends along the wings of the nostril, climbs up the hills of the cheeks, brushing the thickets of the eyebrows, finds itself almost by chance

at the point where the lips come close together, forces a way between the teeth and reaches the tip of the tongue.

Only now does Saro risk an imperceptible movement: he closes his teeth, but with the lightest of pressure, across the finger that remains imprisoned between palate and tongue, enveloped in the feverish warmth of his saliva. Marianna smiles. And with the thumb and first finger of her other hand she pinches his nostrils until he lets her go and opens his mouth to breathe. Then she withdraws her wet finger and begins to explore all over again. He looks at her blissfully, his eyes tell her that his blood is quickening.

Now the hands of the Duchess grasp the quilt and slide it off the bed. The same with the sheet: it is thrown to one side and falls to the floor in disordered folds. And here in front of her eyes, startled by their own daring, is the naked body of the young man, with only the bandages around his hips, on his chest and head. His ribs are there, protruding crescent moons like a map of the planets in their phases of progression, one following the other, one above the other.

Marianna's hands rest ever so gently on his barely healed wounds, still red and painful. The wound on the thigh reminds her of Ulysses attacked by the wild boar as he must have appeared to the stupefied nurse who was the first to recognise her lord and master returning after so many years of war, when everyone else still took him for a beggar. Marianna strokes him lightly with her fingers while Saro's breathing becomes quicker. From between his closed lips minute drops of saliva emerge that suggest pain but also an unimaginable savage joy, a blissful surrender.

How she came to find herself undressed beside Saro's naked body Marianna was unable to say. She knows it was very simple and that she felt no shame. She knows they were in each other's arms like two friendly bodies in harmony and that welcoming him inside her was like finding once more a part of her own body she had believed lost for ever. She knows she had never thought of enfolding in her own belly a man's flesh that was not either a child or an invading enemy.

Children find themselves in the body of a woman without her having summoned them, just as the flesh of uncle husband stayed warm inside her without her having ever invited or desired him. But she has desired and

willed this body as she desired and willed her own joy. It would not pain and lacerate her as her children did every time she gave birth, but would slip away with the joyful promise of return once the spasm of love had been shared. For so many years of marriage she had thought the body of a man existed only to torment her. And she had yielded to this torment as one yields to the curse of God, a duty that no woman of refinement could accept without having to swallow gall. Had not Our Lord also swallowed gall in the garden of Gethsemane? Did He not die on the Cross without one word of recrimination? What was her trifling pain suffered in her own bed, compared to the sufferings of Christ?

And instead here is a body that is not alien to her, that does not assault her, does not steal from her, does not ask for sacrifice and renunciation, but goes to her confidently and gently. Here is a body that knows how to wait, that takes and knows how to be taken without any kind of force. How will she ever again do without it?

XXXIX

Peppina Malaga has come back to the house, two small black pigtails tied behind her ears with a piece of string, her feet bare as usual, her legs heavy and swollen, her protruding belly raising her skirt over her shin-bones. Marianna watches her through the window while she gets down from the cart and runs towards Saro. He looks up at the window as if to ask, What am I to do?

"Use not your scythe in the grain of others", says the austere Gaspara Stampa. It is her duty to leave husband and wife together for their own happiness. She will let them have a larger room where they can bring up the new baby.

And then:

In my repose an inward doubt assails me That ever holds my heart 'twixt life and death.

Is it jealousy, that little fool, the "green-eyed monster", as Shakespeare called it, "that doth mock the meat it feeds on"? The Duchess Marianna Ucr@ia di Campo Spagnolo,

Countess of Paruta, Baroness of

Bosco Grande, of Fiame Mendola and of Sollazzi, how can she ever be jealous of a scullery maid, of a fledgling fallen from the nest?

But that's exactly how it is: this dark ugly little girl seems to gather up in herself all the joys of paradise. She has the innocence of a pumpkin flower, the freshness of a grape stalk. Marianna tells herself that she would willingly give away all her estates and all her houses just to enter into that young determined little body that jumps down from the cart with the tiny baby curled up in her womb, to go and meet Saro.

Her hand releases its hold on the curtain, which falls back to cover the window. The courtyard vanishes and with it the cart pulled by a donkey adorned with plumes, and Peppinedda, who propels her belly towards her husband as if it were a box of jewels. Saro too disappears while clasping his wife close to him and raising his eyes towards Marianna with a look of theatrical resignation. But one can see that he is gratified by this double love. From this moment will begin a life of subterfuges, deceptions, escapes, clandestine meetings. There will be a need to corrupt, to keep others quiet, to erase all traces of every embrace. A sudden resentment clouds

Marianna's eyes. She has no intention of falling into such traps, she tells herself. She has provided him with a wife so as to keep him at a distance and not to serve as a cover-up. So then? So then she has to break it off.

There is something arrogant about her thoughts, she knows that. She is not taking into account the pleasures of her body, which has woken for the first time to its own fulfilment, nor has she given a thought to Saro's wishes, she does not even consider consulting him. She will decide for or against him, but above all against herself. The long practice of renunciation has made her a vigilant custodian of herself. So many years spent keeping her own needs at arm's length have strengthened her will. Marianna looks at her wrinkled hands, which are wet from having been pressed against her cheeks. She raises them to her mouth. She tastes some of the salt that contains the bitterness of her renunciation.