The Leopard (9 page)

"Of course, but legal love, blessed by you as their master) and by Nino the gardener as notary. Considered, fruitful love. As for those," he went on, pointing at the fountain whose shimmer could just be discerned through a veil of plane trees, "d'you really think they've been before a priest? "

The conversation was taking a dangerous turn and Don Fabrizio hastily changed its direction. As they moved back up toward the house Tancredi began telling what he had heard of the love-life of Donnafugata: Menica, the daughter of Saverio the keeper, had let herself be put with child by her young man; the marriage would be rushed now. Calicchio had just avoided being shot by an angry husband.

"But how d'you know such things?"

"I know, Uncle, I know. They tell me everything i they know I'll sympathize." When they reached the top of the steps, which rose from the garden to the palace with gentle turns and long landings, they could see the dusky horizon beyond the trees; over toward the sea huge, inky clouds were climbing up the sky. Perhaps the anger of God was satiated and the annual curse on Sicily nearly over? At that moment those clouds loaded with relief were being stared at by thousands of other eyes, sensed in the womb of the earth by billions of seeds.

"Let's hope the summer is over, and that the rains are finally here," said Don Fabrizio; and with these words the haughty noble to whom the rain would only be a personal nuisance showed himself a brother to his roughest peasants. The Prince had always taken care that the first dinner at Donnafugata should bear the stamp of solemnity: children under fifteen were excluded from table, French wines were served, there was punch
alla Romana
before the roasti and the flunkeys were in powder and knee-breeches. There was only one unusual detail: he did not put on evening dress, so as not to embarrass his guests who would, obviously, not possess any. That evening, in the "Leopold" drawing room, as it was called, the Salina family were awaiting the last of their guests. From under lace-covered shades the oil lamps spread circles of yellow light; the vast equestrian portraits of past Salinas seemed but imposing symbols, vague as their memories. Don Onofrio, with his wife, had already arrived, and so had the Archpriest, who, with his light mantle folded back on his shoulders in sign of gala, was telling the Princess about tiffs at the College of Mary. Don Ciccio, the organist, had also arrived (Teresina had already been tied to the leg of a table in the scullery) and was recalling with the Prince their fantastic bags in the ravines of Dragonara. All was placid and normal when Francesco Paolo, the sixteen-year-old son, burst into the room and announced, "Papa, Don Calogero is just coming up the stairs. In
tails
!"

Tancredi, intent on fascinating the wife of Don Onofrio, had realized the importance of the news a second before the others. But when he heard that last fatal word he could not contain himself and burst into convulsive laughter. No laugh, though, came from the Prince, on whom, one might almost say, this news had more effect than the bulletin about the landing at Marsla. That had been an event not only foreseen but also distant and invisible. Now, with his sensibility to presages and symbols, he saw revolution in that white tie and two black tails moving at this moment up the stairs of his own home. Not only was he, the Prince, no longer the major landowner in Donnafugata, but he now found himself forced to receive, when in afternoon dress himself, a guest appearing in evening clothes.

His distress was great; it still lasted as he moved mechanically toward the door to receive his guest. When he saw him, however, his agonies were somewhat eased. Though perfectly adequate as a political demonstration, it was obvious that, as tailoring, Don Calogero's tail coat was a disastrous failure. The material was excellent, the style modern, but the cut quite appalling. The Word from London had been most inadequately made flesh by a tailor from Girgenti to whom Don Calogero had gone in his tenacious avarice. The tails of his coat pointed straight to heaven in mute supplication, his huge collar was shapeless, and, what is more, the Mayor's feet were shod in buttoned boots.

Don Calogero advanced toward the Princess with a hand outstretched and gloved. "My daughter begs you to excuse her; she was not quite ready. Your Excellency knows how females are on these occasions," he added, expressing in his near-dialect terms a touch of Parisian levity, "but she'll be here in a second ; it's only a step from our place, as you know." The second lasted five minutes; then the door opened and in came Angelica. The first impression was of dazed surprise. The Salina family all stood there with breath taken away; Tancredi could even feel the veins pulsing in his temples. Under the first shock from her beauty the men were incapable of noticing or analyzing its defects, which were numerous; there were to be many forever incapable of this critical appraisal. She was tall and well made, on an ample scale; her skin looked as if it had the flavor of fresh cream, which it resembled; her childlike mouth, that of strawberries. Under a mass of raven hair, curling in gentle waves, her green eyes gleamed motionless as those of statues, and like them a little cruel. She was moving slowly, making her wide white skirt rotate around her, and emanating from her whole person was the invincible calm of a woman sure of her beauty. Only many months later was it known that at the moment of that victorious entry she had been on the point of fainting from anxiety. She took no notice of the Prince hurrying toward her; she passed by Tancredi grinning at her in a daydream; before the Princess's armchair she bent her superb waist in a slight bow, and this form of homage, unusual in Sicily, gave her for an instant the fascination of the exotic as well as that of local beauty.

"Angelica my dear, it's so long since I've seen you. You've changed a lot; not for the worse!" The Princess could not believe her own eyes; she remembered the rather ugly and uncared-for thirteen-year-old girl of four years before and could not make her tally with this voluptuous maiden here before her. The Prince had no memories to reorganize; he only had forecasts to overturni the blow to his pride dealt by the father's tail coat was now repeated by the daughter's looks i but this time it was not a matter of black stuff, but of milky white skin, and well cut, yes, very well indeed! Old war horse that he was, the bugle call of feminine beauty found him ready, and he turned to the girl with the tone of gracious respect which he would have used with the Duchess of Bovino or the Princess of Lampedusa: "How fortunate we are, Signorina Angelica, to have gathered such a lovely flower in our home i and I hope that we shall have the pleasure of seeing you here often."

"Thank you, Prince; I see that you are as kind to me as you have always been to my dear father." The voice was pretty, lowpitched, a little too careful perhaps; Florentine schooling had cancelled the sagging Girgenti accent; the only Sicilian characteristic still in her speech was the harsh consonants, which anyway toned in well with her clear but emphatic type of beauty. In Florence she had also been taught to drop the "Excellency."

About Tancredi there seems little to be said; after being introduced by Don Calogero, after maneuvering the searchlight of his blue eyes, after just managing to resist implanting a kiss on Angelica's hand, he had resumed his chat with the Signora Rotolo without taking in a word that the good lady said. Father Pirrone, in a dark corner, was deep in meditation over Holy Scripture, which that night appeared only in the guise of Delilahs, Judiths, and Esthers.

The central doors of the drawing room were flung open and the butler declaimed mysterious sounds announcing that dinner was ready. "Prann' pronn." The heterogeneous group moved toward the dining room. The Prince was too experienced to offer Sicilian guests, in a town of the interior, a dinner beginning with soup, and he infringed the rules of haute cuisine all the more readily as he disliked it himself. But rumors of the barbaric foreign usage of serving insipid liquid as first course had reached the major citizens of Donnafugata too insistently for them not to quiver with a slight residue of alarm at the start of a solemn dinner like this. So when three lackeys in green, gold, and powder entered, each holding a great silver dish containing a towering mound of macaroni, only four of the twenty at table avoided showing their pleased surprise: the Prince and Princess from foreknowledge, Angelica, from affectation, and Concetta from lack of appetite. All the others, including Tancredi, showed their relief in varying ways, from the fluty and ecstatic grunts of the notary to the sharp squeak of Francesco Paolo. But a threatening circular stare from the host soon stifled these improper demonstrations. Good manners apart, though, the appearance of those monumental dishes of macaroni was worthy of the quivers of admiration they evoked. The burnished gold of the crusts, the fragrance of sugar and cinnamon they exuded, were but preludes to the delights released from the interior when the knife broke the crust; first came a mist laden with aromas, then chicken livers, hard-boiled eggs, sliced ham, chicken, and truffles in masses of piping-hot, glistening macaroni, to which the meat juice gave an exquisite hue of suede.

The beginning of the meal, as happens in the provinces, was quiet. The Archpriest made the sign of the Cross, and plunged in head-first without a word. The organist absorbed the succulent dish with closed eyesi he was grateful to the Creator that his ability to shoot hare and woodcock could bring him ecstatic pleasures like this, and the thought came to him that he and Teresina could exist for a month on the cost of one of these dishes. Angelica, the lovely Angelica, forgot her Tuscan affectations and part of her good manners and devoured her food with the appetite of her seventeen years and the vigor derived from grasping her fork halfway up the handle. Tancredi, in an attempt to link gallantry and greed, tried to imagine himself tasting, in the aromatic forkfuls, the kisses of his neighbor Angelica, but he realized at once that the experiment was disgusting and suspended it, with a mental reservation about reviving this fantasy with the pudding. The Prince, although rapt in the contemplation of Angelica sitting opposite him, was the only one able to note that the demi-glace was too rich, and made a mental note to tell the cook so next day; the others ate without thinking of anything, and without realizing that the food seemed so delicious because a whiff of sensuality had wafted into the house.

All were calm and contented. All except Concetta. She had of course embraced and kissed Angelica, told her not to use the formal third person and insisted on the familiar (
'tu
" of their infancy, but under her pale blue bodice her heart was being torn to shreds; the violent Salina blood came surging up in her, and under a smooth forehead she found herself brooding over daydreams of poisoning. Tancredi was sitting between her and Angelica and distributing, with the slightly forced air of one who feels in the wrong, his glances, compliments, and jokes equally between both neighbors; but Concetta had an intuition, an animal intuition, of the current of desire flowing from her cousin toward the intruder, and the little frown between her nose and forehead deepened; she wanted to kill as much as she wanted to die. But being a woman she snatched at details: Angelica's little finger in the air when her hand held her glass; a reddish mole on the skin of her neck; an attempt, half repressed, to remove with a finger a bit of food stuck in her very white teeth. She noticed even more sharply a certain coarseness of spirit; and to these details, which were really quite insignificant as they were cauterized by sensual fascination, she dung as trustingly and desperately as a falling carpenter's apprentice snatches at a leaden gutteri she hoped that Tancredi would notice too and be revolted by these obvious traces of ill breeding. But Tancredi had already noticed them and, alas! with no result. He was letting himself be drawn along by the physical stimulus that a beautiful woman was to his fiery youth, and also by the (as it were) measurable excitement aroused by a rich girl in the mind of a man both ambitious and poor.

At the end of dinner the conversation became general: Don Calogero told in bad Italian but with knowing insight some inside stories about the conquest of the province by Garibaldi; the notary told the Princess of a little house he was having built "out of town"; Angelica, excited by lights, food, Chablis, and the obvious admiration she was arousing in every man around the table, asked Tancredi to describe some episodes of the "glorious battle" for Palermo. She had put an elbow on the table and was leaning her cheek on her hand. Her face was flushed and she was perilously attractive to behold; the arabesque made by her forearm, elbow, finger, and hanging white glove seemed exquisite to Tancredi and repulsive to Concetta. The young man, while continuing to admire, was describing the campaign as if it had all been quite light and unimportant: the night march on Gibilrossa, the scene between Bixio and La Masa, the assault on Porta di Termini. "It was the greatest fun, Signorina. Our biggest laugh was on the night of the twenty-eighth of May. The General needed a lookout post at the top of the convent at Origlione; we knocked, banged, cursed, knocked again: no one opened i it was an enclosed community. Then Tassoni, Aldrighetti, I, and one or two others tried to break down the door with our rifle butts. Nothing doing. We ran to fetch a beam from a shelled house near by and finally, with a hellish din, the door gave way. We went in i not a soul in sight; but from a corner of the passage we heard desperate screams; a group of nuns had taken refuge in the chapel and were all crouching around the altar; I wonder what they feared at the hands of those dozen excited young men! They looked absurd, old and ugly in their black habits, with starting eyes, ready and prepared for

. . . martyrdom. They were whining like bitches. Tassoni, who's a card, shouted, 'Nothing doing, sisters, we've other things to think of; but we'll be back when you've got some novices.' And we all laughed fit to burst. Then we left them there, their tongues hanging out) to go and shoot at Royalists from the terraces above. Ten minutes later I was wounded." Angelica. laughed, still leaning on her elbow, and showed all her pointed teeth. The joke seemed most piquant to her; that hint of rape perturbed her; her lovely throat quivered. "What fine lads you have been! How I wish I'd been with you! " Tancredi seemed transformed; the excitement of the story, the thrill of memory, mingling with the agitation produced by the girl's air of sensuality, changed him for an instant from the gentle youth he was in reality into a brutal and licentious soldier.