The Silent Duchess (4 page)

How can she get on with the painting now? She will have to dip into her memory, since she well knows that they will never come back to pose for her as a group; even today they have only done so after much cajoling and patience.

The gap left by their bodies is now filled by jasmine, dwarf palm trees and olive trees that slope down towards the sea. Why not paint this calm, immutable landscape instead of the brothers who never stay still for a moment? It has more depth and mystery and it has obligingly posed for centuries and is always there ready to be played with.

Marianna's youthful hand reaches out towards another canvas and puts it on the easel in place of the first. She dips her brush into a soft oily green. Where should she begin? With the fresh brilliant emerald green of the dwarf palm trees or the shimmering turquoise of the grove of olive trees or the green streaked with yellow of the slopes of Monte Catalfano?

Or she could paint the lodge, which was built by her grandfather Mariano Ucr@ia, with its square squat shape, its windows more suited to a tower than a hunting lodge in the country. She feels certain that one day it will be transformed into a villa and she will live there even through the winter because her roots are sunk into that soil, which she loves more than the cobblestones of Palermo.

While she remains poised irresolutely with the brush dripping paint on to her canvas, she feels herself pulled by the sleeve. She turns. It is Agata, who presents her with a piece of paper.

"Come--the puppeteer has arrived." From the handwriting she recognises that the invitation comes from Signoretto, though as a matter of fact it sounds more like a command than an invitation.

She gets up, wipes her paintbrush, still

dripping with green paint, on a small damp rag, cleans her hands by rubbing them against her striped apron and walks with her sister towards the entrance to the courtyard.

Carlo, Geraldo, Fiammetta and

Signoretto are already crowding round Tutui, the puppet master. He has left his donkey by the fig tree and is about to put up his theatre. Four vertical poles intersect with three horizontal planks and between them they support about four yards of black cloth. Meanwhile, leaning from the windows are the servants, Innocenza the cook, Don Raffaele Cuffa and even her ladyship the Duchess, towards whom the puppet master directs a low bow. The Duchess throws him a ten tar@i coin which he picks up quickly. He pockets it under his shirt, makes another theatrical bow and goes off to get his puppets from a saddle bag hanging down over the haunches of his donkey.

Marianna has already witnessed those blows, those heads that slump beneath the platform only to reappear soon after, bold and unredeemed; for every year at this time Tutui appears at the lodge in Bagheria to amuse the children. Every year the Duchess throws him a ten tar@i piece and the puppet master wears himself out with bows and greetings so exaggerated that it seems almost as if he is pulling her leg. Meanwhile, no one knows how, the word has spread and dozens of children are crowding in from the surrounding countryside. The servants come down into the courtyard, drying their hands and tidying their hair. Among them is the cowman Don Ciccio Cal@o with his twin daughters Lina and Lena, the gardener Peppi Geraci with his wife Maria and their four sons, and of course the footman Don Peppino Cannarota.

Soon on comes Nardo, who starts to beat Tiberio boom boom boom. The show has begun, while the children are still playing around. But a moment later they are all seated on the ground, heads in the air, eyes fixed on the stage.

Marianna remains standing a little apart. The children unnerve her: she has too often been a target for their teasing. They jump on to her without letting her see them and make fun of her reaction, they bet with each other who can let off a fire cracker without her catching them.

Meanwhile from the background of black cloth a new object is unexpectedly appearing. It

is a gibbet, something that has never before been seen in Tutui's theatre. At its appearance the children hold their breath expectantly, for this is an exciting novelty.

A guard with his sword on his hip pursues the irrepressible Nardo up and down the black curtain, seizes him by the scruff of the neck and slips his head through the noose. A drummer appears on the left and Nardo is made to jump on a stool. That's it! The guard kicks the stool away and Nardo falls under his own weight while the rope starts to rotate.

Marianna is shaken. She shudders. Something stirs in her memory like a fish caught on a hook, something that refuses to surface and disturb the calm still waters of her consciousness. She raises her hand to take hold of her father's rough habit but only finds the bristly hair of the donkey's tail.

Nardo hangs in space with all the suppleness of his boyish body, watery-eyed and toothless, his gaze fixed in a state of inescapable trance, still attempting spasmodically to raise his shoulder to free a hand with which to wipe his running nose.

Marianna falls backwards like a dead weight, hitting her head on the hard bare ground of the courtyard. Everyone turns. Agata runs towards her followed by Carlo, who leans over his sister and bursts into tears. Cannarota's wife fans her with her apron while a servant rushes off to call the Duchess. The puppet master emerges from beneath the black curtain, with the puppet in his hand, head downwards, while Nardo remains hanging aloft on the gallows.

VI

An hour later, Marianna wakes up in her parents' bed with a wet handkerchief pressing heavily on her forehead. Vinegar runs down through her eyelashes and stings her eyes. Her mother the Duchess bends over her. Even before she opens her eyes she recognises her from the strong smell of honey-scented snuff.

The daughter gazes up at her mother: the outline of her full lips slightly veiled by blonde down, her nostrils shadowed by the constant taking of snuff, her large dark eyes. Marianna finds it impossible to make up her mind whether she is beautiful or not, because there is something about her that is

off-putting. But what is it? Perhaps it is her unshakable calm, the way she always gives in to the slightest push, the way she abandons herself to the cloying fumes of snuff, indifferent to everything else.

Marianna has always suspected that her lady mother, in the far-off past, when she was very young and full of imagination, deliberately chose to become lifeless so that she would never have to die. From there must come her remarkable ability to accept every irritation with complete resignation and a minimum of effort.

Before her death, Marianna's grandmother Giuseppa wrote to her several times about her mother in an exercise book with a fleur-de-lys on the cover.

"Your mother was a beauty. Everybody loved her. But she didn't love anyone. She was obstinate as a goat, like her mother Giulia, who came from around Granada. She did not want to marry her cousin, your father Signoretto. Everyone said, "But he's a lovely young man, he really is." Not just because he was my son, the very sight of him would dazzle your eyes. Your mother married him grudgingly, she looked as if she were going to a funeral. Then after a month of marriage she fell in love with him and she loved him so much she started taking snuff, then at night she could no longer sleep so she took laudanum as well."

When the Duchess sees that her daughter is coming round, she goes to the writing-desk, takes a sheet of paper and writes on it. She dries the ink with ashes and hands the sheet to the young girl.

"How are you, my little one?"

As she sits up, Marianna spits out the vinegar that is still sticking to her teeth. Her lady mother laughs and removes the soaking rag from her face. Then she goes to the writing-desk again, scribbles something more and comes back to the bedside with the piece of paper.

"Now you are thurteen it's time I told you you have to get married. We have found a bridgroom for you. So there's no need for you to be a nun like Fiammetta."

The girl reads and rereads her mother's hurried note, written regardless of spelling, mixing Sicilian dialect with Italian, her handwriting hesitant and shaky. A husband? Why on earth? She had imagined that because of her disability, marriage would be unthinkable. And, anyway, she is barely thirteen.

Her mother is waiting for a reply. She gives her an affectionate smile--but there is something a little forced about it. For her, having a deaf and dumb daughter weighs her down with unbearable pain and embarrassment that make her freeze. She's at a loss how to behave towards her or how to make herself understood. She has never much liked writing, and to have to read other people's handwriting is a real torture. But with motherly self-sacrifice she goes to the writing-desk, snatches another sheet of paper, picks up the goose quill and the little bottle of ink and takes it all to her daughter as she lies stretched out on the bed.

"A husband for a dumb girl?" Marianna writes, leaning on her elbow and, in her confusion, dripping blobs of ink on the sheet.

"Your father did everything to make you talk. He even took you with him to the Vicaria where the frite might have helped you. You never uttered a word because your head is a sieve, you don't have the will. Your sister Fiammetta is betrothed to Christ, Agata is promised to the son of Prince Torre Mosca, and you--your duty is to axcept the bridgroom we have found for you because we love you. We don't want you wedded outside the family so we are giving you to your unkle Pietro Ucr@ia di Campo Spagnolo, Lord of Scannatura, of Bosco Grande and of Fiume Mendola, Count of Sala di Paruta,

Marquis of Sollazzi and of Taya. On top of all that he is my brother and your father's cousin. And he loves you. Only with him will your soul find sanktury."

Marianna reads the note with a frown, disregarding her mother's spelling mistakes and the words in dialect thrown in by the handful. Most of all she rereads the last lines; then her betrothed is to be her uncle Pietro? That sad, grumpy man, always dressed in red and known in the family as "the prawn".

"I will not get married", she writes angrily on the back of the sheet of paper still wet from her mother's words.

The Duchess Maria returns patiently to the writing-desk, her forehead mottled with little globules of sweat. What a lot of effort she has to make for this dumb girl who refuses to accept that she is nothing but an encumbrance, and there's no more to be said.

"No one will even look at you, my own little Marianna. And the convent will want a dowry, you know that. We already have to pay for Fiammetta. That costs a lot. Unkle Pietro will take you for nothing because he loves you. Then all his property will be yours. Now do you understand?"

She puts the pen down and starts talking to Marianna ever so softly, just as if she could hear her, absent-mindedly caressing her hair, which is still soaked with vinegar.

Eventually she snatches the pen from her daughter's hand, just as she is on the point of writing something, and traces rapidly and proudly these words: "In ready money that is a saving of fifteen thousand escudos."

VII

A loose pile of tufa stones in the courtyard, buckets full of plaster, great mountains of sand. Marianna walks up and down in the sunshine with her skirt tucked up round her waist so as not to get the hem dirty.

Bootees with their buttons left undone, hair gathered on her neck with little silver pins, a gift from her husband. All round her a disorderly confusion of bits of wood, boxes, stakes, posts, wheelbarrows, mallets and axes. Her back-ache has become almost unbearable and she looks round for somewhere she can rest for a few moments in the shade. A big stone beside the pig-sty, that will do, even if to get to it she has to slither through the mud. Holding her back with her hand she slides over to the stone. She looks down at her belly: the swelling hardly shows in spite of her being already five months pregnant. It is her third pregnancy.

In front of her stands the most elegant villa. There is no longer any trace of the former lodge. In its place is a building on three floors, with a staircase winding its way gracefully upwards in a snake-like spiral. From the central bay of the building extend two colonnaded wings that widen out and then narrow until they create an almost complete circle. The windows alternate in a regular rhythm, one, two, three, one; one, two, three, one: almost a dance, a tarascone. Some of the windows are real, others are painted so as to maintain the regular rhythm of a fugue. In one of these

windows a curtain will be painted with perhaps a woman's head looking out, maybe she herself watching from behind the window pane.

Uncle husband wanted to leave the lodge as it was, since it had been built by her grandfather Mariano, and the cousins had shared it amicably for so long. But she would not take no for an answer and was so obstinate that in the end she persuaded him to build her a villa where she could spend the winter as well as the summer, with rooms for the children and the servants, and for friends and guests. Meanwhile her father the Duke has got himself another hunting lodge near Santa Flavia.

Uncle husband was seldom to be seen on the building site. He could not bear bricks, dust, lime. He preferred to stay in the house in the Via Alloro in Palermo while she busied herself at Bagheria with the builders and the painters. Even the architect did not often appear there but left everything in the hands of the foreman builder and the young Duchess.

Already the villa has swallowed up vast sums of money. The architect alone cost sixteen hundred onze. The sandstone bricks were continually breaking and every week new ones had to be brought in; the foreman had fallen from the scaffolding and broken his arm, and the work was held up for two months. Then, when it was all finished except for the tiled floors, an epidemic of smallpox broke out in Bagheria: three masons were laid up and again the work had to be interrupted for months.

Uncle husband took refuge at Torre Scannatura with their daughters Giuseppa and Felice. She remained, in spite of notes from the Duke ordering her to "come quick or you will get it. Your first duty is to the child you are carrying."