The Viceroys (72 page)

She could get no further, but began composing a ballad on this theme, called ‘Were I …' weeping sweet tears when no one was watching as the passionate notes flew from the keys.

That winter some balls were given by Baron Curcuma. Till then Donna Graziella had not taken Teresa out in society, firstly because she did not want young men to approach too near her ‘daughter' and also because she considered no house worthy of being frequented by the young princess. The Curcumas', though, passed muster, and the prince also wanted the whole family to go. But Donna Graziella had a presentiment; and the very first evening who should be there but Giuliano Biancavilla … Had that presumptuous youth known a little of the world he would have kept quietly to his place; instead of which he actually introduced himself and asked Teresa for a dance!… She trembled in his arms; not a word did he say except ‘Are you tired?… Thank you …' But she felt in heaven, while the princess on tenterhooks was making her husband signs to alert him about the danger. But the prince was deep in conversation with his host. And suddenly the young thruster reappeared to ask the signorina for a mazurka. Then Donna Graziella intervened.

‘Excuse us, cavaliere, my daughter's tired.'

With a tightening of the heart Teresa noticed her stepmother's opposition. Inflamed at having held her a moment in his arms, Biancavilla now began following her through the streets like a shadow. The princess puffed and sniffed with rage. Once at the door of the Minorite Church, as he passed in front of them she exclaimed quietly, but loud enough for those around to hear, ‘What a bore!…'

Teresa mourned long, hiding her tears, foreseeing all her hopes dashed if her parents would not have him. The Biancavilla family also knew that the Uzeda would never consent to the match. But the young man, quite beside himself with love, kept on and on imploring his mother and father to make the request; so much so that one day Biancavilla's father took his courage in both hands and went to talk to the duke. The latter, with much use of ‘greatly honoured' and ‘what a pleasure it would be for me', told him he would speak to the prince. Giacomo repeated to his uncle the same three words he'd said to his wife, with one small variation, ‘Mad, poor things!' Then the duke with many a fine turn of phrase answered Don Antonio that there was nothing to be done, ‘as the prince wanted Consalvo married first'.

This was not an excuse. The prince had started negotiations with the Curcuma and gone to their house to arrange a match between the young baroness and his son. The match had been accepted blindly, and Consalvo's assiduous attendance at the baron's balls was taken as the start of his courtship to the daughter of the house. But he knew nothing of his father's arrangements, and went into society nowadays just to talk politics and philosophy. All the gold in the world would never have got him to dance a waltz; he would hold forth among, the men, and if any ladies or girls came up, talked to them about municipal accounts, school regulations and the yield from consumer taxes, with many quotations of statistics and Latin proverbs. Repeated from mouth to mouth, the news of his own marriage eventually reached him. Then he burst into a cordial laugh and said even more laconically than his father:

‘Mad!'

Take a wife, marry a gold-draped doll like that young baroness, tie himself still more closely to this town which he yearned to leave, create binding family duties, when what he needed was to be free as air, to dedicate all his energies to achieving his aim? Mad, yes, they really were! The matter seemed so absurd that he did not even stop his visits to the baron.

At this point Giuliano Biancavilla left, having lost all hope. Some said he had gone to Rome, some to Paris, some added
that he would never return home again, careless of his sorrowing family. The duke, charged by the prince who was afraid of speaking directly to his son, announced to Consalvo that it was time he took a wife and that the whole family was agreed on the young baroness.

‘Of course, Excellency,' replied the young man. ‘There's one difficulty though.'

‘What's that?'

‘I don't want her!'

‘And why don't you want her?'

‘Well, I just don't! Is it I or Your Excellency who's to marry? It's I, isn't it? So it's up to me to show my own wishes. And I don't want her.'

At the moment when the duke referred this reply to the prince Giacomo was already in a furious temper, having just heard that the expert charged by the Court to examine the late Don Blasco's Will had pronounced against the genuineness of the signature. On hearing of his son's decisive refusal he burst into a raucous shout.

‘It's his Evil Eye! He's doing it on purpose. To kill me. I'll see him die first! Tell him that he can choose who the devil he likes. Marry the first slut he wants, one of those tarts he went round with before he got it into his head to be literary. Marry whomever he likes and go to the devil, because I don't want to have any more to do with him and his Evil Eye!'

‘Excellency,' replied the young prince to his uncle, who had brought him this second message, ‘I wish neither to marry the Curcuma girl nor any other. I'm still young and there's lots of time for shackles later. Anyway it's quite certain there's no point in talking to me about marriage for the moment. I'm not a woman like Aunt Chiara, whom my grandmother forced into marriage …'

The new storm blew up with a rumble, lightning flashed from the prince's furious eyes, thunder boomed in his harsh voice.

‘Holy God of Love!' cried the princess to Teresa. ‘How dreadful this quarrel is, how shocking! However will it end?… But you … You haven't given anyone the slightest worry … Blessings on you!… May you always be such a saint …'

Teresa let herself be embraced and kissed by her stepmother,
relished the praise, deplored the quarrel between her father and brother, implored Our Lady to stop it. What could she offer the Virgin to obtain such a grace? Her love for Giuliano?… No, that was too much, it was what she had most at heart … She no longer saw the young man, knew nothing of the request and its refusal. Even so she realised that her parents did not look favourably on that match; but hope was still alive in her. Some day or other her father and stepmother might think it over and consent to her being happy …

One day, though, the storm brewing between her father and brother did break. The latter had ordered on his own initiative, without consulting anyone, four large bookcases to take his books. When the prince saw this furniture arriving he sent for Consalvo and asked him excitedly:

‘Who gave you permission to order things for my house?'

The young man replied, with the studied coldness which particularly infuriated his father: ‘I needed the furniture.'

‘Here it's I who give orders; I've told you that often enough,' replied the other, making violent efforts to control himself. ‘Not a nail is to be put in without my permission! If you want to act the master, you can leave. Nobody's keeping you here … Take a wife and be damned to you!'

‘Already,' replied Consalvo, more coldly than ever, ‘I have told uncle that I don't want to get married …'

‘Oh you don't want?… You don't want?… Then I'll kick you out of the house, you swine! Carter! Animal!'

‘All the better,' rejoined the young prince, cold as ice. ‘You'd be doing me a favour …'

Suddenly the prince went pale as if about to faint, then purple as if about to have an apoplectic fit, and finally broke into a bark like a dog.

‘Get out!… Out of my house … Now this instant, throw him out!…'

In rushed, pale and terrified, the princess, Teresa and Baldassarre. Frothing at the mouth, the prince was dragged off by his wife and the major-domo.

Teresa then went up to her brother, clasping her trembling hands and exclaimed in a voice of anguished reproof:

‘Consalvo!… Consalvo!… how
can
you do such a thing!'

‘D'you defend him?' replied the young man, still calm but in a voice that was slightly strident. ‘Go on then, defend him, defend them, our mother's murderers.'

‘Oh!'

She hid her face in her hands. When she looked round she was alone. Servants were rushing to and fro throughout the house. A doctor was called, ice-packs applied to the prince's forehead. She fell on her knees before the statue of the Blessed Virgin. After that horrible scene, after her brother's terrible words, remorse was seizing her for not having offered her love, her hopes of joy as sacrifices, so that the violent quarrel and terrible accusation could have been avoided. She asked the Virgin to forgive her for her selfishness, begged for comfort and help, trembling with fear, swaying as if the floor were shifting beneath her knees. She was still kneeling when she was surprised by the princess coming to call her to her father's bedside.

‘Daughter! Daughter!… what a daughterly heart!… Yes, beg Our Lady for peace to return. She alone can do that miracle now … Your father won't see him any more, won't have him in the house; and he doesn't budge … But you no! You no!…'

And between kisses and tears she talked of someone else, of him, and gave her the news that he had left.

‘It was the best thing for him to do. You may have found him attractive; I don't blame you for that; we've all been girls in our time and know how these things are. But you'd never have been happy with him, and your father, whose one thought is your happiness, did not want him … I'd never have talked to you of this but for all this trouble, and if I didn't know you were sensible enough to realise that your father only wishes what is for your own good. Isn't that true, my daughter?…'

The first time that the prince heard his son's name after that scene he yelled:

‘Don't mention that name again, he's got the Evil Eye! Don't ever mention him again. Or I'll send the lot of you away …!'

The break was definite. The duke, on being told of what had happened, came to fetch Consalvo and took him off for some
weeks to the country. On their return it was decided that the young prince should go and live in a house belonging to his father down by the sea. The young man asked for nothing better. He did up an apartment to his own taste and moved in, happy as a king. Now he could be his own master, no longer went to Mass, saw whom he liked, invited home big-wigs from the club to show them two large rooms full of printed paper. The advantages were legion. At the palace he had been unable to show his Liberal leanings by putting out lights and flags for patriotic celebrations. Now on the 14th March and on Constitution Day he put out a flag as big as a curtain and had the balconies arranged with rows of lamps which shone out sadly in the dark and deserted quarter. Now he could stay in his study as long as he liked and take his meals at any unusual hour. He was studying the
Popular Encyclopaedia
, memorising articles about questions of the day, and then astounding the Assembly with his erudition by saying ‘So-and-so and so-and-so have written on this subject, etc., etc.' As once he had thrust his four-horsed carriages into the mob so now he crushed it with the weight of his knowledge. And people who had drawn aside at one time to avoid his horses' hooves while still exclaiming ‘What a fine turnout!', now listened to him, bemused by his eloquence, muttering, ‘What a lot he knows!'

The native Spanish arrogance of his ignorant and overbearing stock, the need to adapt to democratic times, were thus linking up inside him all unknown to himself. Nothing would stop him from reaching his goal, the hardiest enterprises never deterred him. He read the heaviest books, even a treatise on advanced calculus, as if they were novels. From all this study he drew mediocre profit—the only one possible; he acquired a smattering of information about many things, all sorts of odds and ends, contradictory ideas, much heavy and indigested knowledge. But amid the ignorant mass of local nobles he gained the reputation of being ‘well-informed', and when working folk heard the young Prince of Mirabella named they would all say ‘You mean the one who's gone literary?'

One fine morning, amid the printed matter which the post brought him in cascades, he received from Palermo the first instalment of
The Sicilian Herald, an Historico-Noble Work by
the Cavaliere don Eugenio Uzeda of Francalanza and Mirabella.
Besides him, all relations, subscribers and clubs were sent copies. The ‘
Historico-Noble
' work began with
Short amplified notes
about the dynasties which had reigned in the island: the Royal Norman House, the Royal Swabian House, the Royal House of Anjou, and so on till the Royal House of Savoy—for the cavaliere had recognised the new monarchy in order to sell copies of his book to the State libraries. The
Short amplified notes
amused Consalvo, the Royal House of Savoy infuriated Donna Ferdinanda, although the old woman was already in a permanent state of rage because of the still undecided law case. But her fury against the prince's family was a natural growth, since the advances given by the prince to Don Eugenio had made the printing of that ‘filth' possible.

Having promised two thousand lire, however, the prince had only given five hundred, for which his uncle had had to give him an I.O.U. with a blank date. But after Don Blasco's death financial relations between uncle and nephew soon took a dangerous turn. Don Eugenio, first amiably, then threateningly, wrote to his nephew asking for more money, otherwise he would join Ferdinanda in impugning their brother's Will. The prince, on his side, tried to keep his uncle in hand by using the I.O.U. When the printing of the book was under way one day the cavaliere suddenly appeared from Palermo, looking more sordid and starving than ever. After long negotiations the prince handed out another two thousand lire, against which Don Eugenio renounced by signed deed all that would be due to him in a division of the monk's property and agreed to his nephew becoming owner of a thousand copies of the book.