The Leopard (14 page)

Her sheets must smell like Paradise!"

The Prince gave a start of annoyance i so touchy is the pride of class, even in a moment of decline, that these orgiastic praises of the beauties of his future niece offended him i how dared Don Ciccio express himself with this lascivious lyricism about a future Princess of Falconeri? It is true, of course, that the poor man knew nothing yet; he would have to be told all i but anyway the news would be public in three hours. He decided at once and turned to Tumeo a smile feline but friendly. "Calm yourself, my dear Don Ciccio, calm yourself i at home I have a letter from my nephew charging me to ask on his behalf for Signorina Angelicals hand in matrimony; so from now on you will talk of her with your usual respect. You are the first to know the news, but for that privilege you must pay: when we get back to the palace you'll be locked up with Teresina in the gun room; you'll have time to clean and oil all the guns, and you will be set at liberty only after Don Calogero's visit; I want nothing to leak out before." Taken by surprise like this, all Don Ciccio's snobberies and precautions collapsed together like a group of ninepins hit in the middle. All that survived was an age-old feeling.

"How foul, Excellency! A nephew of yours ought not to marry the daughter of those who're your enemies who have stabbed you in the back! To try to seduce her, as I thought, was an act of conquest; this is unconditional surrender. It's the end of the Falconeris, and of the Salinas too."

Having said this, he bent his head and longed in anguish for the earth to open under his feet. The Prince had gone purple; even his ears, even the whites of his eyes seemed flushed with blood. He clenched his fists and took a step toward Don Ciccio. But he was a man of science, used, after all, to seeing pros and cons; and anyway under that leonine aspect he was a skeptic. He had put up with so much that day already: the result of the Plebiscite, the nickname of Angelica's grandfather, those bullets in the back. And Tumeo was right; in him spoke clear tradition. But the man was a fool: this marriage was not the end of everything, but the beginning of everything. It was in the very best of traditions.

His fists unclenched; the marks of his nails were impressed on his palms. "Let's go home, Don Ciccio, there are some things you can't understand. Now you'll remember what we agreed, won't you?"

And as they climbed down toward the road, it would have been difficult to tell which of the two was Don Quixote and which was Sancho Panza.

When Don Calogero's arrival was announced at exactly half past four the Prince had not yet finished his toilet; he sent a message asking the Mayor to wait a minute in his study and went on placidly beautifying himself. He plastered his hair with lemo-liscio, Atkinson's lime and glycerine, a dense whitish lotion which arrived in cases from London and whose name suffered the same ethnic changes as songs; he rejected the black frock coat and chose instead a very pale lilac one which seemed more suited to the presumably festive occasion; he dallied a little longer to tweak out with pincers an impudent fair hair which had succeeded in getting through free that morning in his hurried shave; he had Father Pirrone called; before leaving the room he took from a table an extract from the Bldtter f2Wr Himmelsf orschung and with the rolled paper made the sign of the Cross, a gesture of devotion which in Sicily has a nonreligious meaning more frequently than is realized.

As he crossed the two rooms preceding the study he tried to imagine himself as an imposing Leopard with smooth, scented skin preparing to tear a timid jackal to pieces; but by one of those involuntary associations of ideas which are the scourge of natures like his, he found flicking into his memory one of those French historical pictures in which Austrian marshals and generals, covered with plumes and decorations, are filing in surrender past an ironical Napoleoni they are more elegant, undoubtedly, but it is the squat little man in the gray topcoat who is the victor; and so, put out by these inopportune memories of Mantua and Ulm, it was an irritated Leopard that entered the study.

Don Calogero was standing there, very small, very badly shaved; he would have looked like a jackal had it not been for eyes glinting intelligence; but as this intelligence of his had a material aim opposed to the abstract one to which the Prince's was supposed to tend, this was taken as a sign of slyness. Devoid of the instinct for choosing the right clothes for the occasion which was innate in the Prince, the Mayor had thought it proper to dress up almost in mourning; he was nearly as black as Father Pirrone, but while the latter was sitting in a corner with the marmoreally abstract air of priests who wish to avoid influencing the decisions of others, the Mayor's face expressed a sense of avid expectancy almost painful to behold. They plunged at once into the skirmish of insignificant words which precede great verbal battles. But it was Don Calogero who launched the main attack.

"Excellency," he asked, "have you had good news from )Don Tancredi?" In little towns in those days the Mayor was always able to examine the post unofficially, and perhaps he had been warned by the unusually elegant writing paper. The Prince, when this occurred to him, began to feel annoyed.

"No, Don Calogero, no. My nephew's gone mad

But there exists a deity who is protector of princes. He is called Courtesy. And he often intervenes to prevent leopards from unfortunate slips. But he has to be paid heavy tribute. As Pallas intervened to curb the intemperances of Odysseus, so Courtesy appeared to Don Fabrizio to stop him on the brink of the abyss; but the Prince had to pay for his salvation by becoming explicit for once in his life. With perfect naturalness, without a second's hesitation, he ended the phrase, 11. . . mad with love for your daughter, Don Calogero. So he wrote to me yesterday."

The Mayor preserved a surprising equanimity. He gave a slight smile and began examining the ribbon on his hat; Father Pirrone's eyes were turned to the ceiling, as if he were a master mason charged with judging its solidity. The Prince was put out: that silence on both their parts even deprived him of the petty satisfaction of arousing surprise. So it was with relief that he realized Don Calogero was about to speak.

"I knew it, Excellency, I knew it. They were seen to kiss on Tuesday, the twenty-fifth of September, the day before Don Tancredi's departure. In your garden, near the fountain. Laurel hedges aren't always as thick as people think. For a month I have been waiting for your nephew to make some move, and I was thinking just now of coming to ask Your Excellency what his intentions were."

Don Fabrizio felt as if he were assailed by numbers of stinging hornets. First, as is proper to every man not yet decrepit, that of carnal jealousy. So Tancredii had tasted that flavor of strawberries and cream which to him would always be unknown! Then came a sense of social humiliation at finding himself an accused instead of a bearer of good news. Third, personal vexation, that of one who thought he had everything in his control and then finds that a good deal has been happening without his knowledge.

"Don Calogero, let's not change the cards we have on the table. Remember, it was I who called you. I wished to tell you of a letter from my nephew which arrived yesterday. In it he declares his passion for your daughter, a passion of whose intensity I . . ." (here the Prince hesitated a moment because lies are sometimes difficult to tell before gimlet eyes like the Mayor's) ". . . I was completely ignorant till now; and at the end of it he charges me to ask you for Signorina Angelica's hand." Don Calogero went on smiling impassively; Father Pirrone had transformed himself from architectural expert into Moslem sage and, with four fingers of his right hand crossed in four fingers of his left, was rotating his thumbs around each other, turning and changing their direction with a great display of choreographic fantasy. The silence lasted a long time, the Prince lost patience.

"Now, Don Calogero, it is I who am waiting for you to declare your Intentions." The Mayor's eyes had been fixed on the orange fringe of the Prince's armchair; he covered them for an instant with his right hand, then raised them; now they looked candid, brimming with amazed surprise as if that action had really changed them.

"Excuse me, Prince" (by the sudden omission of "Excellency" Don Fabrizio knew that all was happily consummated), "but joy and surprise had taken my words away. I'm a modern parent, though, and can give no definite answer until I have questioned the angel who is the consolation of our home. But I also know how to exercise a father's sacred rights. All that happens in Angelica's heart and mind is known to me, and I think I can say that Don Tancredi's affection, which honors us all, is sincerely returned." Don Fabrizio was overcome with sincere emotion; the toad had been swallowed; the chewed head and gizzards were going down his throat; he still had to crunch up the claws, but that was nothing compared to the rest; the worst was over. With this sense of liberation, he began to feel his affection for Tancredi coming to the fore again, and imagined those narrow blue eyes of his glittering as they read the happy reply; he imagined, or recalled rather, the first months of a love-match with the frenzies and acrobatics of the senses approved and encouraged by all the hierarchies of angels, benevolent though surely surprised. And he foresaw Tancredi's security of life later on, his chances for developing talents whose wings would have been clipped by lack of money.

The nobleman rose to his feet, took a step toward the surprised Don Calogero, raised him from his armchair, clasped him to his breast i the Mayor's short legs were suspended in the air. For a moment that room in a remote Sicilian province looked like a Japanese print of a huge violet iris with a hairy fly hanging from a petal. When Don Calogero touched the floor again, Don Fabrizio thought, "I really must give him a pair of English razors; this won't do." Father Pirrone switched off the turbine of his thumbs; he got up and squeezed the Prince's hand. "Excellency, I invoke the protection of God on this marriage; your joy has become mine." To Don Calogero he extended the tips of his fingers without a word. Then with a knuckle he tapped a barometer hanging on the wall: it was falling; bad weather ahead. He sat down and opened his breviary.

"Don Calogero," said the Prince, "the love of these two young people is the basis, the only foundation, of their future happiness. We all know that. But we men of a certain age, men of experience, we have to think of other things too. There is no point in my telling you how illustrious is the family of Falconeri ; it came to Sicily with Charles of Anjou, flourished under Aragonese, Spanish, Bourbon kings (if I may name them in your presence), and I am sure that they will also prosper under the new dynasty from the mainland (may God preserve it)." (It was impossible to tell how much the Prince was being ironic or how much he was being mistaken.) "They were Peers of the Realm, Grandees of Spain, Knights of Santiago, and, when they have a fancy to be Knights of Malta, they need only raise a finger and the Via Condotti pours diplomas out on them without a moment's hesitation, so far at least." (This perfidious insinuation was entirely lost on Don Calogero, who was quite ignorant of the statutes of the Sovereign Order of the Knights of Malta.) "I am sure that your daughter will decorate the ancient trunk of the Falconeri by her rare beauty, and emulate in her virtues those of the saintly Princesses of the line, the last of whom, my sister, God rest her soul, will certainly bless the bride and bridegroom from heaven." Don Fabrizio felt moved again, remembering his dear Giulia whose wasted life had been a perpetual sacrifice to the frenzied extravagance of Tancredi's father. "As for the boy, you know him; and if you did not, I am here to guarantee him in every possible way. There is endless good in him, and it is not only I who say so. Isn't that true, Father Pirrone?"

The excellent Jesuit, dragged from his reading, found himself suddenly facing an unpleasant dilemma. He had been Tancredi's confessor, and he knew quite a number of his little failings: none of them very serious, of course, but such as to detract quite a good deal from the endless goodness of which the Prince had spoken; and all of them such (he almost felt like saying) as to guarantee the firmest marital infidelity. This, of course, could not actually be said both for sacramental reasons and from worldly convention. On the other hand he liked Tancredi, and though he disapproved of the wedding with all his heart, he would never say a word which could either impede it or in any way cloud its course. He took refuge in Prudence, most tractable of the cardinal virtues. "The fund of goodness in our dear Tancredi is great indeed, Don Calogero, and sustained by Divine Grace and by the earthly virtues of Signorina Angelica he may become, one day, an excellent Christian husband." The prophecy, risky but prudently conditional, passed muster.

"But, Don Calogero," went on the Prince, chewing on the last gristly bits of toad, "if it is pointless to tell you of the antiquity of the Falconeris, it is unfortunately also pointless, since you already know it, to tell you that my nephew's economic circumstances are not equal to the greatness of his name. Don Tancredi's father, my brother-inlaw Ferdinando, was not what is called a provident parent; his magnificent scale of life, and the irresponsibility of his administrators, have gravely shaken the patrimony of my dear nephew and former wardi the great estates around Mazzara, the pistachio woods of Ravanusa, the mulberry plantations of Oliveri, the palace in Palermo, all, all have gone; you know that, Don Calogero."

Don Calogero did indeed know that: it had been the greatest migration of swallows in living memory-a mernory which still brought terror, though not prudence, to the whole of the Sicilian nobility, while it was a font of delight for all the Sedaras.

"During the period of my guardianship all I succeeded in saving was the villa, the one near my own, by juridical quibbles and also thanks to a sacrifice or two on my own part which I made joyfully, both in memory of my sainted sister Giulia and because of my own affection for the dear lad. It's a fine villa: the staircase was designed by Marvuglia, the drawing rooms frescoed by Serenario; but at the moment the room in best repair can scarcely be used as a stall for goats." The last shreds of toad had been nastier than he had expected: but they had gone down too, in the end. Now he had only to wash out his mouth with some phrase which was pleasant as well as sincere. "But, Don Calogero, the result of all these disasters, of all this heartbreak, has been Tancredi. There are certain things known to people like usi and maybe it is impossible to obtain the distinction, the delicacy, the fascination of a boy like him without his ancestors' having romped through a half-dozen fortunes. At least so it is in Sicily; it's a kind of law of nature, like those which regulate earthquakes and drought." He paused a moment as a lackey came in bearing two lighted lamps on a tray. As they were being set in place the Prince made a silence vibrant with heartfelt pleasure reign in the study. "Tancredi is no ordinary boy, Don Calogero," he went on. "He is far more than merely gentlemanly and elegant; though he has not studied much, he knows about the important things: men, women, the feel and sense of the times. He is ambitious, and rightly so i he will go far; and your Angelica, Don Calogero, will be lucky to mount the ladder with him. Also, in Tancredi's company one may have moments of irritation, but never of boredomi and that means a great deal."