The leopard, p.8
The Leopard, page 8
Entry into an enclosed community is never a quick matter, even for one possessing the most sacred of rights. Nuns like to show a certain reluctance, formal maybe but prolonged, which gives a greater flavor to however certain an admission and, although the visit had been announced beforehand, there was a considerable wait in the parlor. Toward the end of this Tancredi unexpectedly asked the Prince, "Uncle, can't you get me in too? After all, I'm half a Salina, and I've never been here before." Though pleased at heart by the request, the Prince shook his head decisively. "But, my boy, you know only I can enter here, and no other man." It was not easy, however, to put Tancredi off. "Excuse me, Uncle; the rule says, The Prince of Salina may enter together with two gentlemen of his suite if the Abbess so permits. I read it again yesterday. I'll be the gentleman in your suite, I'll be your squire, I'll be whatever you like. Do ask the Abbess, please." He was speaking with unusual warmth; perhaps he wanted a certain person there to forget his ill-considered chatter of the night before. The Prince was flattered. "If you're so keen on it, dear boy, I'll see . . ." But Concetta turned to her cousin with her sweetest smile: "Tancredi, as we passed we saw a wooden beam on the ground in front of Ginestra's house. Go and fetch it, it'll get you in all the quicker." Tancredi's blue eyes clouded over and his face went red as a poppy, either from shame or from anger. He tried to say something to the surprised Prince, but Concetta interrupted again, acidly now, and without a smile: "Let him be, Father, he's only joking; he's been in one convent already, that ought to be enough for him; it's not right for him to enter one of ours." With a grinding of drawn bolts, the door opened. Into the stuffy parlor entered the freshness of the cloister together with the murmur of assembled nuns. It was too late to ask questions, and Tancredi was left behind to walk up and down in front of the convent, under the blazing sky. The visit to the Holy Spirit was a great success. Don Fabrizio, from love of quiet, had refrained from asking Concetta the meaning of her words; doubtless just one of the usual tiffs between cousins; anyway the coolness between the two young people kept off bother, confabulations, and decisions, so it had been welcome. On these premises the tomb of Blessed Corbera was venerated with due respect by all, the nuns' watery coffee drunk with tolerance, the pink and greenish almond cakes crunched with satisfaction; the Princess inspected the wardrobe, Concetta talked to the nuns with her usual withdrawn kindliness, and he, the Prince, left on the refectory table the ten ounces of gold that he offered every time he came. It was true that on leaving Father Pirrone was found alone; but as he said that Tancredi had suddenly remembered an urgent letter and gone off on foot, no one took much notice.
On returning to the palace the Prince went up to the library, right in the middle of the facade under the clock and lightning conductor. From the great balcony, closed against the heat, could be seen the square of Donnafugata, vast, shaded by dusty plane trees. Opposite were some house fronts of exuberant design by a local architect, rustic monstrosities in soapstone, weathered by the years, upholding amid twists and curves balconies that were too small; other houses, among which was that of Don Calogero Sedira, hid behind prim Empire fronts.
Don Fabrizio walked up and down the immense room; every now and again he paused and glanced out at the square: on one of the benches donated by himself to the commune three old men were roasting themselves in the sun; four mules stood tethered to a tree; a dozen or so urchins were chasing each other, shouting and brandishing wooden swords. Under the blazing midsummer sun the view could not have been more typical. On one of his crossings by the window, however, his eye was drawn to a figure that was obviously from the city-slim, well dressed. He screwed up his eyes: it was Tancredi; he recognized him, although already some way off, by the sloping shoulders and slim-fitting waist of his frock coat. He had changed his clothes; he was no longer in brown, as at the convent, but in Prussian blue-"my seduction color," as he himself called it. In one hand he held a cane with an enamel handle (doubtless the one bearing the Unicorn of the Falconeri and their motto, Semper purus), and he was walking with catlike tread, as if taking care not to get his shoes dusty. Ten paces behind him followed a lackey carrying a tasselled box containing a dozen yellow peaches with pink cheeks. He sidestepped a sword-waving urchin, carefully avoided a urinating mule, and reached the Sedaras' door.
3
The Troubles of Don Fabrizio
Leaving for a shoot - Troubles of Don Fabrizio - A letter from Tancredi - Game and the Plebiscite - Don Ciccio Tumeo lets himself go - On eating a toad - Small epilogue
OCTOBER, 1860
The rains had come, the rains had gone, and the sun was back on its throne like an absolute monarch kept off it for a week by his subjects' barricades, and now reigning once again, choleric but under constitutional restraint. The heat braced without burning, the light domineered but let colors live; from the soil cautiously sprouted clover and mint, and on faces appeared diffident hopes. Don Fabrizio, with the dogs Teresina and Arguto and his retainer Don Ciccio Tumeo, would spend long hours out shooting, from dawn till afternoon. The effort was out of all proportion to the results, for the most expert shot finds difficulty in hitting a target which is scarcely ever there, and it was rarely that the Prince was able to take even a brace of pheasants home to the larder, or Don Ciccio to slap onto the kitchen table a wild rabbit, promoted-as is done in Sicily-- ipso facto to the rank of hare. A big bag would, anyway, have been a secondary pleasure for the Prince; the joy of those days out shooting lay elsewhere, subdivided in many tiny episodes. It began with shaving in a room still dark, by candlelight that projected every gesture emphatically over the painted architecture on the ceiling; it was whetted by crossing dormant drawing rooms, by glimpses in the flickering light of tables with playing cards lying in disorder amid chips and empty glasses, and catching sight among them of a Jack of Spades waving a manly greeting; by passing through the motionless garden under a gray light in which the earliest birds were twisting and turning to shake the dew off their feathers; by slipping through the ivy-hung wicket gate; by escaping, in fact. And then in the street, blamelessly innocent still in the early light, he would find Don Ciccio smiling into his yellowed mustache and swearing affectionately at the dogs; these, as they waited, were flexing their muscles under velvety fur. Venus still glimmered, a peeled grape, damp and transparent, but one could already bear the rumble of the solar chariot climbing the last slope below the horizon; soon they would meet the first flocks moving toward them, torpid as tides, guided by stones from shepherds in leather breeches; the wool looked soft and rosy in the early rays of the sun; then there would be obscure quarrels of precedence to be settled between sheep dogs and punctilious pointers, after which deafening interval they turned up a slope and found themselves in the immemorial silence of pastoral Sicily. All at once they were far from everything in space and still more so in time. Donnafugata with its palace and its newly rich was only a mile or two away, but it seemed a dim memory like those landscapes sometimes glimpsed at the distant end of a railway tunnel; its troubles and splendors appeared even more insignificant than if they belonged to the past, for compared to this remote unchangeable landscape they seemed part of the future, made not of stone and flesh but of the substance of some dream of things to come, extracts from a utopia thought up by a rustic Plato and apt to change at a whim into quite different forms or even found not to exist at all; deprived thus of that charge of energy which everything in the past continues to possess, they were a bother no longer.
Yes, Don Fabrizio had certainly had his worries those last two months; they had come from all directions, like ants making for a dead lizard. Some had crawled from crevices of the political situation; some had been flung on him by other people's passionsi and some (these had the sharpest bite) had sprung up within himself, from his irrational reactions, that is, to politics and the whims of others (((whims" was his name when irritated for what in calm he called "Passions"). He would review these worries every day, maneuver them, set them in column or extend them in open order on the parade ground of his own conscience, hoping to find in their evolutions a sense of finality that could reassure him; and not succeeding. In former years there had been far fewer bothers, and anyway his stay at Donnafugata had always been a period of rest; his worries used to drop their rifles, disperse into crags of the valleys and settle down there quietly, so intent on munching bread and cheese that their warlike uniforms were forgotten and they could be mistaken for inoffensive peasants. This year, though, they had all stayed on parade in a body, like mutinous troops shouting and brandishing weapons, arousing, in his home, the dismay of a Colonel who has given the order "Fall out" only to find his battalion standing there in closer and more threatening order than ever. The arrival had been all right, with bands, fireworks, ,,bells, gypsy songs, and Te Deum; but afterward! The bourgeois revolution climbing his stairs in Don Calogero's tail coat; Angelica's beauty, which had put the shy graceof his Concetta in the shade; Tancredi rushing at the inevitable changes, and even able to deck out his realistic motives with sensual infatuation; the scruples and deceptions of the Plebiscite; the endless little subterfuges he had submit to, he, the Leopard, who for years had swept away difficulties with a wave of his paw.
Tancredi had been gone for more than a month and was now at Caserta bivouacking in the apartments of his King; from there every now and again he sent Don Fabrizio letters which the latter read with alternate frowns and smiles, and then put away in the remotest drawer of his desk. He had never written to Concetta, though he did not forget to send her a greeting with the usual sly affection; once he even wrote, "I kiss the hands of all the little Leopardesses and particularly Concettes," phrases censored by paternal prudence when the letter was read out to the assembled family. Angelica was now visiting them almost daily, more seductive than ever, accompanied by her father or some old witch of a maid: officially these visits were made to her friends the girls, but in fact their climax obviously came at the moment when she asked with apparent indifference, "And what news of the Prince?" "Prince" in Angelica's mouth did not, alas, mean him, Don Fabrizio, but the little Garibaldino Captain; and this provoked a strange sensation in Salina, woven from the warp of the crude cotton of sensual jealousy and the woof of silken pleasure at his dear Tancredi's success; a sensation, when all was said and done, that was somewhat disagreeable. It was always he who answered this question; he would give a carefully considered account of what he knew, taking care, however, to present a wellarranged little bouquet of news, from which his cautious tweezers had extracted both thorns (descriptions of many a jaunt to Naples, obvious allusions to the legs of Aurora Schwarzwald, dancer at the San Carlo) and premature buds ("send news of the Signorina Angelica"-"In Ferdinand 11's study I found a Madonna by Andrea del Sarto which reminded me of the Signorina Sedera"). So he would put together an insipid picture of Tancredi which bore very little resemblance to the original, but did at least prevent anyone from saying that he himself was acting either as spoilsport or pimp. These verbal precautions corresponded to his own feelings about Tancredi's considered passion, but he found them tiresome too; anyway, they were only one sample of all the guile in language and behavior he had been forced to use for some time; he thought with regret of the year before, when he could say whatever went through his head, in the certainty that any silly remark would be treated as words from the Gospel, and any unconsidered comment as princely carelessness. And now that he had begun regretting the past, he would find himself, in moments of worst humor , slithering quite a way down that perilous slope; once, as he was putting sugar in a cup of tea which Angelica was holding out to him, he realized that he was envying the chances open to a Fabrizio, Salina and Tancredi Falconeri of three centuries before, who would have rid themselves of urges to bed down with the Angelicas of their day without ever going before a priest, or giving a thought to the dowries of such local girls (which were anyway then nonexistent) and never needing to keep uncles on tenterhooks about saying or suppressing appropriate remarks. The impulse of atavistic lust (which was not really all lust, but partly a sensuality stemming from laziness) stung the civilized gentleman nearing fifty so sharply that it made him blush; somewhere, at infinite removes, he had been touched by scruples which he chose to call Rousseauesque, and felt deeply ashamed; which could also go to show how deep was his revulsion from the social circumstances in which he was so inextricably involved.
The sensation of finding himself a prisoner in a situation evolving more rapidly than foreseen was particularly acute that morning. The night before, in fact, the stagecoach bearing the irregular and scanty mail to Donnafugata in its canary-yellow box had brought a letter from Tancredi.
This proclaimed its importance even before reading, written as it was on sumptuous sheets of gleaming paper and in a harmonious script scrupulously tracing full strokes down and thin strokes up. It was obviously the "clean copy" of any number of disordered drafts. In it the Prince was not addressed by the name of "Uncle mine," which had become dear to him; the wily youth had thought of a formula, "dear Uncle Fabrizio, ') which had a number of merits: of putting off any suspicion of connivance, proclaiming from the very first line the importance of what was to follow, allowing the letter to be shown to anyone, and also of providing a link with the ancient pre-Christian beliefs which attributed a binding power to the exact invocation of a name.
"Dear Uncle Fabrizio," therefore, was informed that his '(most affectionate and devoted nephew" had for the last three months been a prey to the most violent love, and that neither "the risks of war" (read: walks in the park of Caserta) nor "the many attractions of a great city" (read: the charms of the dancer Schwarzwald) had been able even for an instant to drive from his mind and heart the image of the Sionorina Angelica Sedera (here a long procession of adjectives to exalt the beauty, grace, virtue, and intellect of his beloved) i then, in neat hieroglyphics of ink and sentiment, the letter went on to say that Tancredi had felt so conscious of his own unworthiness that he had tried to suffocate his ardor ("long but vain have been the hours during which, amid the clamor of Naples or the austere company of my comrades-in-arms, I have tried to repress my feelings"). But now love had overcome his reserve, and he was begging his dearly beloved uncle to deign to request Signorina Angelica's "most esteemed father" for her hand, in his name and on his behalf. "You know, Uncle, that all I can offer to the object of my affection is my love, my name, and my sword." After this phrase, in connection with which it should not be forgotten that romanticism was then at high noon, Tancredi went on to long considerations of the expediency, nay the necessity, of unions between families such as the Falconeris and the Sediras (once he even dared write "The House of Sedara") being encouraged in order to bring new blood into old families, and also to level out classes, aims of the current political movement in Italy. This was the only part of the letter that Don Fabrizio read with any pleasure; and not just because it confirmed his own previsions and crowned him with the laurels of a prophet, but also (it would be harsh to say "above all") because the style, with its hints of subdued irony, magically evoked his nephew's image: the jesting nasal tone, the sparkling malice in his blue eyes, the mockingly polite smile. And when he realized that this little Jacobin sally was written out on exactly one single sheet of paper so that if he wanted he could let others read the letter while subtracting this revolutionary chapter, his admiration for Tancredi's tact knew no bounds. After a brief resume of recent operations and an expression of the conviction that within a year they would be in Rome, "predestined capital of the new Italy," he thanked his uncle for the care and affection given him in the past, and ended by excusing himself for daring to confide him with this charge, "on which my future happiness depends." Then came greetings (for Don Fabrizio only). A first reading of this extraordinary composition made Don Fabrizio's head spin: once again he noted how astoundingly fast all this had gone; put in modern terms, he could be said to be in the state of mind of someone today who thinks he has boarded one of the old planes which potter between Palermo and Naples, and suddenly finds himself shut inside a super jet and realizes he will be at his destination almost before there will be time to make the sign of the Cross. Then the second affectionate layer of his nature came to the top, and he rejoiced at this decision of Tancredi's which would assure him an ephemeral carnal satisfaction and a perennial financial peace. He paused, then, for a moment to note the youth's extraordinary selfconfidence in presuming his own wish already accepted by Angelica; but all these thoughts were swept away eventually by a sense of humiliation at being forced to deal with Don Calogero about subjects so intimate, and also of vexation at having to conduct delicate negotiations next day, with the use, what was more, of precaution and cunning alien to his presumably leonine nature. Don Fabrizio revealed the contents of this letter to his wife only when they were lying in bed under the pale blue glow from the glass-hooded oil lamp. Maria Stella did not say a word at first, just made a series of signs of the Cross then she remarked that she should have crossed herself with her left hand and not with her right; after this supreme expression of amazement she loosed the thunderbolts of her eloquence. Sitting up in bed, her fingers rumpling the sheet while her words furrowed the lunar atmosphere of the enclosed room like angry scarlet torches: "I'd so hoped he would marry Concetta! He's a traitor, like all liberals of his kind; first he betrayed his King, now he betrays us! He, with that double face of his, those honeyed words and poisoned actions! That's what happens when one lets people into one's home who aren't of our own blood!" Here she let loose her cavalry charge in family scenes: "I always said so, but no one would listen to me. I never could endure that fop! You just lost your head about him!" In reality the Princess too had been subject to Tancredi's charm, and she loved him still; but the pleasure of shouting "I told you so" being the strongest any human being can enjoy, all truths and all feelings were swept along in its wake. "And now he has even had the impertinence to ask you, his uncle and Prince of Salina, father of the very girl he has deceived, to carry his squalid message to that slut's rascally father! You mustn't do it, Fabrizio, you mustn't do it, you shan't do it, you mustn’t do it! " Her voice went up in tone, her body began to stiffen.
