The Silent Duchess (9 page)

Out of the wood the young knight comes,

A stalwart man and proud of mien,

His very garments white as snow,

His helmet graced by plover's plume.

These lines from Ariosto came sweetly into her memory. But why on earth did they come just now?

It seems as if she can make out the beloved figure of her father the Duke. The only "knight errant white as snow" who ever offered himself for her love. Since she was six years old the "knight" has fascinated her, with his white plume of plover's feathers; then as soon as she began to respond to him he went off to conquer other hearts, other restless eyes.

Perhaps he grew tired of waiting for his daughter to speak, perhaps unconsciously she had disappointed him with her stubborn dumbness. The fact is that by the time she was thirteen he was already bored with her and had given her, on a generous knightly impulse, to his unfortunate brother-in-law Pietro, who was in danger of dying without a wife or children. Perhaps her father's thinking had been, They'll reach an understanding through sharing each other's misfortunes.

And he had shrugged his shoulders with cheerful indifference, as only he can do.

But now--what can this smell of burning tallow be? Marianna looks around her but there are no lights to be seen. Who can be awake at this hour? Balancing on the leads, she takes a few steps forward and leans against the balustrade that encircles the roof and on which stand mythological statues: a Janus, a Neptune, a Venus and four enormous cupids armed with bows and arrows.

The light comes from a window beneath the eaves. She leans right forward so that she can see part of the room. It is Innocenza who has lighted the candle beside her bed. Strange that she should still be dressed as if she has only just come into the room.

Marianna watches her while she unlaces her high ankle boots. From her angry gestures Marianna can guess exactly what she is thinking: How I hate these laces that are always having to be threaded and unthreaded through the eyelets; but Duchess Marianna has them made for her and then passes them on to us, and how can I spit on a pair of Viennese chamois-leather boots that cost thirty tar@i?

Now Innocenza goes to the window and looks out. Marianna is suddenly afraid: what if she sees her here spying on her from the roof-top? But Innocenza looks downwards, also spellbound by the extraordinary brilliance of the moonlight that bathes the garden with phosphorescence and lights up the distant sea.

She watches her bending her head a little as if listening to some unexpected noise. It is probably the bay horse Miguelito stamping his hoofs on the stable floor. Yes, once again Innocenza's thoughts come through to Marianna and almost attack her: He's hungry, Miguelito is, that poor horse is starving. Don Cal@o has been stealing the hay again. Everyone knows about it but who is going to tell the Duke? I'm not one to tell tales, let them sort it out!

Her feet bare, wearing a pink bodice with channels of sweat beneath her armpits, the top of her dress unlaced and an ample brownish-red skirt billowing over her hips, Innocenza goes to the centre of the room and, kneeling down, gently raises one of the floorboards. Her hands rummage impatiently in the hole and she brings out a little leather bag tied with a thick black cord. She takes it to her bed and unties the

knot with agile fingers, plunges her hand into the bag and shuts her eyes while she explores something she obviously holds dear. Then very slowly she extracts from the purse a number of large silver coins and places them one by one on the sheet, like a gardener handling with great delicacy flowers that have only just come into bud.

Up at five tomorrow morning, up to her arms in coal as usual, whiffs of smoke billowing in her face while she struggles to light the cursed fire beneath the cooking pots, and then there are the fish to be gutted and those wretched rabbits, and when she feels their poor drooping heads with her fingers she thinks of all the trouble they've had to go through to feed themselves and to grow and then wham, one blow on the head and their eyes go dull and they never cease to look as if they were asking, "But why? Why?" Then tomorrow morning she will have to cope with the chickens--what a misfortune that Cal@o's two daughters are dead, they were so good at killing fowls. ... There's no doubt they were virgins even if Severina claimed she'd watched them one morning in the stable and while one was milking the cow the other was milking their father. Well, that's what she said, but Lord knows whether it's true. Since her son died Severina's been not quite right in the head, she sees odd things all over the place. Still, it's true that they both missed their periods for a few months, first one and then the other. They told Maria, and she's someone you can trust ... she's in charge of the towels hung out each month to dry and she keeps a tally. ... But suppose it was someone else who tumbled them? Why does it have to be their own father? Yet that's what people say, and come to that Don Peppino Geraci saw all three of them in bed together one morning when he came to fetch the milk very early. ... And then they miscarried ... poor idiots, they must for certain sure have gone to see La Pupara. They call her that because it is she who makes and unmakes the babies.

No one is quite sure how she does it, but she knows all the herbs and all the roots. ... For three days you're shitting and writhing and throwing up and on the third day you let go of the little mite ... dead. ... Yes, they all go to La Pupara, even the baronesses. They leave her up to three onze for a successful abortion ... but it always works. ... Oh, she's a clever one she is, that Pupara. ...

Marianna draws back, satiated with another

person's thoughts on that deserted roof, peopled by the ghosts that have settled there. But it is not so easy to free herself from Innocenza's voice, that silent voice that continues to pursue her, together with the sickly sweet smell of burning tallow.

And then she has to decipher the notes drawn by that crack-brained duchess, who changes her mind every five minutes about what she wants to eat, and expects her to understand those queer drawings of hers--a mouse on a spit for roast chicken, a frog in a frying-pan for saut@ed duck, a potato in water for baked egg-plant

... and then that impudent hussy Giuseppa comes down and she has to watch her putting her nose and fingers into the stews and sauces. She'll carry off to the library bits of tart that are still only half-cooked, and the way she looks like a barn-owl is enough to turn the milk sour. She'd like to give her a good slap but no one does that, not even her own mother ... just imagine! But what's got into her head? There's still so much to be done ... the Duke hasn't ordered anything for tomorrow and it's Manina's birthday. ... Baked sturgeon? ... It will have to stand the whole night marinading in wine. Then there's the tart with puff pastry, with every sheet of pastry having to be pounded like fury and left to rest, and when at last she gets to bed it's one o'clock in the morning and at five o'clock she has to be up and at work in the kitchen ... and all for four of those miserable bits and pieces of silver each month, and even then they make it difficult for her, having to keep on asking for it because they get out of step with what's due to her. ... These dukes have estates and palaces but they never have any money, to hell with whoever invented them!

Sometimes the Duchess palms off five crowns or even two carli but what use is small change to her? She needs something a bit more substantial to put into her purse that's always hungry and opens its mouth like a fish gasping for air. ... She can't even put them back under the floor, those silly little carli. ... What we need is a few of those golden escudos with the head of Charles III, brand new from the mint, or a good golden doubloon with an effigy of Philip Very, God rest his soul. ... Before he gives out that cursed money Don Raffaele keeps counting it again and again ... once he tried to palm off a coin that had been filed. What an ass!

As if she can't see with her eyes shut better

than a wife knows her husband's cock!

Marianna shakes her head in despair. She can't get Innocenza's thoughts off her back, thoughts which seem at that moment to come out of her own mind, drunk from the moonlight. She moves away from the balustrade, possessed by impatience and anger at the voice of the cook inside her head, still continuing to mutter ... and what can you do with all this money? You can get yourself a husband, you can even buy a husband ... but who wants a husband? Not me! ... That was what my sisters wanted and one got kicked out the first time she opened her mouth and the other was abandoned like a stupid donkey when he went off with some girl twenty years younger, leaving her without a house and without a copper coin to her name and six kids to support. The joys of the bedroom? They talk about that in songs and in those books like the Duchess reads ... but perhaps she, in spite of all those brocade and silk dresses, those carriages, those jewels

... has she ever known the joys of the bed? The poor dumb creature always stuck in books and papers ... it makes me feel sad for her.

It seems unbelievable, but that's how it is: the cook Innocenza Bordon, daughter of a mercenary soldier from the far-away Venetian countryside, unable to read or write, with her hands scarred with cuts, with no one but herself to care for in the whole world, feels pity for the great Duchess who is descended directly from Adam through the paternal line. ...

Again Marianna leans against the balustrade, incapable of withdrawing from Innocenza's chattering thoughts and having to accept the grievances of her cook as the only real thing in this unreal balmy night. She cannot help watching her as with fingers made supple from her work in the kitchen she lifts up the heavy silver coins one by one and arranges them in pairs in the bag as if she were pairing them off to sleep together. Her fingers can judge a coin's weight so precisely that even with her eyes shut she can tell whether there is the slightest shaving off it.

With a sigh Innocenza ties the cord round the neck of the bag. She puts it back in the hole in the centre of the room. She replaces the floorboard first with her hands and then by stamping it down with her feet. Then she goes towards the bed and rapidly gets out of her skirt, her blouse and her bodice, while her head shakes as if

she's just been bitten by a tarantula and her hairpins fly through the air together with the tortoiseshell comb that once upon a time belonged to her mistress.

Marianna closes her eyes and draws back. She does not want to have to gaze on the naked body of her cook. Now it is her turn to shake her head to free herself from intrusive thoughts, cloying like carob juice. Could it be getting worse? On previous occasions she has been aware of the ruminations of whoever was next to her, but never for so long: only small garnerings of sentences, scattered morsels of thoughts, which were always encountered casually, by chance. For instance, when she really wanted to understand what her father the Duke was thinking she did not succeed at all.

Lately she has taken to dropping inside people, attracted by a lively fluttering of their thoughts that promises all sorts of unknown surprises. But then she becomes lost in them, swallowed up, without knowing how to extricate herself. How she wishes she had never gone up on to that roof, never looked into Innocenza's room, never breathed in all that clear, poisonous air.

XII

"Papa's will is creating a real scandal." "Cutting out his eldest son in favour of his daughters."

"Such a thing has never happened."

"Poor Signoretto!"

"There'll be a rumpus with Geraldo." "That aunt who is a canoness disagrees."

"He's left you his half of the Villa Ucr@ia in Bagheria, so why cry, stupid?"

"Mangiapesce the lawyer says that the law prohibits a legacy like this."

"It'll all be annulled, that's the law of primogeniture."

Marianna shuffles the notes that her sisters and aunts have thrown on to her plate in quick succession. Her hands are wet with tears, and the words are blurred. How can they discuss estates and houses when the pale face of her dead father still haunts their eyes?

Watching them gesticulate she can see they are exchanging insults. And Innocenza's delicious dishes are not sufficient to keep their heads stuck into their plates. The realisation that while she was on

the roof gazing down at the landscape stretched out in the moonlight her father was dying in his bed at the house in the Via Alloro in

Palermo, makes the very thought of food abhorrent. How is it possible she did not hear the breathless breathing of his dying, she who can so easily hear other people's chattering thoughts? Yet she did have an inkling, it was as if she had seen his lovable body amongst the dwarf palm trees, and she had thought of her "knight errant white as snow". But she had not interpreted it as a presentiment of death. It was seduction that had been in her thoughts, without realising that she was close to the last, most profound seduction of all.

And now the birthday party for which Duke Pietro ordered Innocenza to serve baked sturgeon and a tart of puff pastry has become transformed into a funeral feast. But of mourning there is very little sign; more important is the scandal of her father the Duke's unusual will. And no one can understand how the will came to be already opened, even before his dead body had been interred.

They are all upset, but especially

Geraldo, who has taken his father's generosity towards his sisters as a personal affront, even if it is after all only a matter of small bequests. In any case the largest amount goes to Signoretto, and from the unexpected inheritance the younger sons also have a life interest. But this disregard of normal custom has taken them all by surprise and, though at the end of the day they are not displeased at getting something for themselves, they feel duty bound to make a protest.

Signoretto, like the gentleman he is, does not interfere even though he is the one most affected. It is Aunt Agata the nun, sister of Grandfather Mariano, who is most determined to defend his rights, and it is she who sticks her neck out in paroxysms of indignation.