The Leopard (15 page)

It would be an exaggeration to say that the Mayor appreciated the worldly subtleties of this part of the Prince's speech; on the whole it just confirmed him in his conviction of Tancredi's astuteness and opportunism; and what he needed at home was a man astute and able, no more. He thought himself, he felt himself, to be the equal of anyone; and he was even sorry to notice in his daughter a genuine affection for the handsome youth.

"Prince, all these things I knew, and others too. And they don't matter to me at all." He wrapped himself round once more in a cloak of sentimentality. "Love, Excellency, love is all, as I know myself." And he may have been sincere, poor man, if his definition of love were admitted. "But I'm a man of the world and I want to put my cards on the table too. There's no point in talking about my daughter's qualities: she's the blood in my heart, the liver in my guts; I've no one else to leave what I have, and what's mine is hers. But it's only right that the young people should know what they can count on at once. In the marriage contract I will assign to my daughter the estate of Settesoli, of six hundred and forty-four salmi, that is ten hundred and ten hectares, as they want us to call them nowadays, all wheat, first-class land, airy and cool; and a hundred and eighty salmi of olive groves and vineyards at Gibildolce; and on the wedding day I will hand over to the bridegroom twenty linen sacks each containing ten thousand ounces of gold. I'll only have a pittance left myself," he added, knowing well he would not, and not wanting to be believed, "but a daughter's a daughter. And with that they can do up all the staircases by Marruggia and all the ceilings by Sorcionario that exist. Angelica must be properly housed."

Ignorant vulgarity exuded from his every pore; even SO) the two listeners were astounded; Don Fabrizio needed all his selfcontrol not to show surprise; Tancredi's coup was far bigger than he had ever imagined. A sensation of revulsion came over him again, but Angelica's beauty, the bridegroom's grace, still managed to veil in poetry the crudeness of the contract. Father Pirrone did let his tongue cluck on his palate; then, annoyed at having shown his own amazement, he tried to rhyme the improvident sound by making his chair and shoes squeak and by crackling the leaves of his breviary, but he failed completely; the impression remained.

Luckily, an impromptu remark from Don Calogero, the only one in the conversation, got both of them out of their embarrassment.

"Prince)" he said, "I know that what I am about to say will have no effect on you who descend from the loves of the Emperor Titus and Queen Berenice; but the Sedaras are noble too i till I came along we'd been an unlucky lot, buried in the provinces and undistinguished, but I have the documents in order, and one day it will be known that your nephew has married the Baronessina Sedara del Biscotto; a title granted by his Majesty Ferdinand IV for work on the port of Mazzara. I have to put the papers through; there's only one link missing."

A hundred years ago this business of a missing entry, of getting such papers "through," was an important element in the lives of many Sicilians, causing alternating exaltation and depression to thousands of decent or not so decent people; this subject is too important to be treated fleetingly, but we will content ourselves with saying that Don Calogero's heraldic impromptu gave the Prince the incomparable artistic satisfaction of seeing a type realized in all its details, and that the depressed laugh he gave ended in a sweetish taste of nausea.

After this the conversation drifted off into a number of aimless ruts: Don Fabrizio remembered Tumeo shut up in the darkness of the gun room; for the nth time in his life he deplored the length of country calls and ended by wrapping himself in hostile silence. Don Calogero understood, promised to return next morning with Angelica?s undoubted consent, and said goodbye. He was accompanied through two of the drawing rooms, embraced again, and began descending the stairs as the Prince, towering above him, watched this little conglomeration of astuteness, illcut clothes, money, and ignorance who was now to become almost a part of the family getting smaller and smaller.

Holding a candle in his hand, he then went to free Tumeo, who was sitting resignedly in the dark smoking his pipe. "I'm sorry, Don Ciccio, but you'll understand, I had to do it."

"I do understand, Excellency, I do understand. Did everything go off all right?"

"Perfectly, couldn't be better." Tumeo mouthed some congratulations, put the leash back on the collar of Teresina, sleeping exhausted from the hunt, and picked up the day's bag.

"Take those woodcock of mine too, won't you? They're nol enough for us all, anyway. Goodbye, Don Ciccio, come and see us soon. And excuse everything." A powerful clap on the shoulder served as sign of reconciliation and a reminder of power; the last faithful retainer of the House of Salina went off to his own poor rooms.

When the Prince returned to his study he found that Father Pirrone had slipped away to avoid discussions. And he went toward his wife's room to tell her all that had happened. The sound of his vigorous rapid steps announced his arrival ten yards ahead. He crossed the girls' sitting room; Carolina and Caterina were winding a skein of wool, and as he passed got to their feet and smiled; Mademoiselle Dombreuil hurriedly took off her spectacles and replied demurely to his greeting; Concetta had her back to him; she was bent over her embroidery frame and, not hearing her father's steps, did not even turn.

4

Love At Donnafugata

Don Fabrizio and Don Calogero - Angelica's first visit as bride-to-be - Arrival of Tancredi and Cavriaghi Arrival of Angelica -
Cyclone of love - Slackening after the storm - A Piedmontese arrives at Donnafugata, - A turn around the town - Chevalley and
Don Fabrizio Departure at dawn

NOVEMBER, 1860

As meetings due to the marriage contract became more frequent, Don Fabrizio found an odd admiration growing in him for Sedara's qualities. He became used to the ill-shaven cheeks, the plebeian accent, the odd clothes, and the persistent odor of stale sweat, and he began to realize the man's rare intelligence. Many problems that had seemed insoluble to the Prince were resolved in a trice by Don Calogero; free as he was from the shackles imposed on many other men by honesty, decency, and plain good manners, he moved through the jungle of life with the confidence of an elephant which advances in a straight line, rooting up trees and trampling down lairs, without even noticing scratches of thorns and moans from the crushed. Reared and tended in tranquil vales across which blew the courtesies of "please," "I'd be so grateful," "How very kind," the Prince, when talking to Don Calogero, now found himself on an open heath swept by searing winds, and although continuing in his heart to prefer defiles in the hills he could not help admiring this surge and sweep which drew from the plane trees and cedars of Donnafugata notes never heard before.

Bit by bit, almost without realizing it, Don Fabrizio told Don Calogero about his own affairs, which were numerous, complex, and little known to himself; this was not due to any defect of intelligence, but to a kind of contemptuous indifference about matters he considered low, though deep down this attitude was really due to laziness and the ease with which he had always got out of difficulties by selling off a few more hundred of his thousands of acres.

Don Calogero's advice, after listening to the Prince's accounts and reorganizing them for himself, was both opportune and immediately effective; but the eventual result of such advice, cruelly efficient in conception and feeble in application by the easygoing Don Fabrizio, was that in years to come the Salina family were to acquire a reputation for treating dependents harshly, a reputation quite unjustified in reality but which helped to destroy its prestige at Donnafugata and Querceta, without in any way halting the collapse of the family fortunes.

It is only fair to mention that more frequent contact with the Prince had a certain effect on Sedara too. Until that moment he had met aristocrats only on business (of buying and selling) or through their very rare and longbrooded invitations to parties, circumstances in which this most singular of social classes does not show at its best. During such meetings he had formed the opinion that the aristocracy consisted entirely of sheeplike creatures, existing merely in order to give their wool to his clipping shears and their names and incomprehensible prestige to his daughter. But since getting to know Tancredi during the period after Garibaldi's landing, he had found himself dealing, unexpectedly, with a young noble as cynical as himself, capable of striking a sharp bargain between his own smiles and titles and the attractions and fortunes of others, while knowing how to dress up such

"Sedaraish" actions with a grace and fascination which he, Don Calogero, felt he did not himself possess, but which influenced him without his realizing it and without his being able in any way to discern its origins. When he got to know Don Fabrizio better, he found there again the pliability and incapacity for self-defense that were characteristic of his imaginary sheep-noble, but also a strength of attraction different in tinge, but similar in intensity, to young Falconerl'si he also found a certain energy with a tendency toward abstraction, a-disposition to seek a shape for life from within himself and not in what he could wrest from others. This abstract energy made a deep impression on Don Calogero, although with a direct impact not filtered through words as has been attempted here i much of this fascination he noticed simply came from good manners, and he realized how agreeable can be a well-bred man, who at heart is only someone who eliminates the unpleasant aspects of so much of the human condition and exercises a kind of profitable altruism (a formula in which the usefulness of the adjective made him tolerate the uselessness of the noun). Gradually Don Calogero came to understand that a meal in common need not necessarily be all munching and grease stains; that a conversation may well bear no resemblance to a dog fight; that to give precedence to a woman is a sign of strength and not, as he had believed, of weakness; that sometimes more can be obtained by saying "I haven't explained myself well" than

"I -can't understand a word"; and that the adoption of such tactics can result in a greatly increased yield from meals, arguments, women, and questions.

It would be rash to affirm that Don Calogero drew an immediate profit from what he had learned; he did try to shave a little better and complain a little less about the waste of laundry soap; but from that moment there began, for him and his family, that process of continual refining which in the course of three generations transforms innocent peasants into defenseless gentry. Angelica's first visit to the Salina family as a bride-to-be was impeccably stage-managed. Her bearing was so perfect that it might have been suggested word by word by Tancredi, but this was ruled out by the slow communications of the period; one possible explanation was that he had given her some suggestions even before their official engagement: a risky hypothesis for anyone able to measure the young Prince's foresight, but not entirely absurd. Angelica arrived at six in the evening, dressed in pink and white; her soft black tresses were shadowed by a big autumnal straw hat on which bunches of artificial grapes and golden ears of wheat discreetly evoked the vineyards of Gibildolce and the granaries of Settesoli. She sloughed off her father in the entrance hall, then with a swirl of wide skirts floated lightly up the many steps of the inner staircase and flung herself into the arms of Don Fabrizioi on his whiskers she implanted two big kisses which were returned with genuine affection; the Prince paused perhaps just a second longer than necessary to breathe in the scent of gardenia on adolescent cheeks. After this Angelica blushed, took half a step back:

"I'm so, so happy . . . " then came close again, stood on tiptoe, and murmured into his ear, "Uncle mine! " 5 a highly successful line, comparable in its perfect timing almost to Eisenstein's baby carriage, and which, explicit and secret as it was, set the Prince's simple heart aflutter and yoked him to the lovely girl for ever. Meanwhile Don Calogero was coming up the stairs, and said how very sorry his wife was she could not be present, but the night before she had slipped at home and twisted her left foot, which was most painful. "Her ankle's like an eggplant, Prince." Don Fabrizio, exhilarated by the verbal caress, and forewarned by Tumeo's revelations that his offer would never be put to the proof, said that he would give himself the pleasure of calling upon the Signora Sedira at once, a suggestion which dismayed Don Calogero and made him, in order to reject it, think up a second indisposition of his spouse's, this time a violent headache which forced the poor woman to remain in the dark. Meanwhile the Prince gave his arm to Angelica. They crossed a number of dark salons, just lit enough by the dim glimmer of oil lamps for them to see their way; but at the end of the splendid perspective of rooms glittered the "Leopold Drawing Room," where the rest of the family was gathered, and their procession through empty darkness toward a light center of intimacy had the rhythm of a Masonic initiation.