The Leopard (17 page)

Meanwhile Tancredi was writing, "Dearest Angelica, I've come, and for you. I'm head over heels in love, but also wet as a frog, filthy as a lost dog, and hungry as a wolf. The very minute I've cleaned myself up and consider myself worthy of appearing before the loveliest creature in the world, I will hurry over to you; in two hours. My respects to your dear parents. To you . . . nothing for the moment." The text was submitted for the approval of the Prince; the latter had always been an admirer of Tancredi's epistolary style; he laughed, and approved in full. Donna Bastiana would have plenty of time to catch some other imaginary disease; and the note was at once sent across the square.

Such was the general zest and jollity that a quarter of an hour was enough for the two young men to dry, clean up, change uniforms, and meet once again in the "Leopold Room" around the fire; there they drank tea and brandy and let themselves be admired. At that period nothing could have been less military than the families of the Sicilian aristocracy; no Bourbon officers had ever been seen in the drawing rooms of Palermo, and the few Garlbaldini who had penetrated them gave more the impression of picturesque scarecrows than real military men. So those two young officers were in fact the first the Salina girls had ever seen, close to ; in their double-breasted uniforms, Tancredi's with the silver buttons of the Lancers, Carlo's with the gilt ones of the Bersaglieri, the first with a high black velvet collar bordered with orange, the other with crimson, they sat stretching toward the embers legs encased in blue cloth and black cloth. On their sleeves were the silver and gold stars amid twirls and dashes and endless loops: a delight for girls used only to severe frock coats and funereal tail coats. The edifying novel lay upside down behind an armchair.

Don Fabrizio did not quite understand: he remembered both the young men in lobster red and very carelessly turned out.

"Shouldn't you Garibaldini be wearing a red shirt, though?" The two turned on him as if a snake had bitten them. "Garibaldini, Garibaldini indeed, Uncle! We were once, and now that's over! Cavriaghii and 1, thanks be to God, are officers in the regular army of His Majesty, King of Sardinia for another few months, and shortly to be of Italy. When Garibaldi's army broke up we had the choice: to go home or stay in the King's army. He and I and a lot of others went into the real army. We couldn't stand that rabble long, could we, Cavriaghi?

"Heavens, what dreadful people! Good for ambushes and looting, that's all! Now we're with decent fellows, and we're real officers!" And he plucked at his little mustache with a grimace of adolescent disgust.

"We had to drop rank, you know, Uncle. They didn't seem to think much of our military experience. From Captain I've become Lieutenant again, as you see! " And he showed the two stars on his shoulder straps. "He from being Lieutenant is now Second Lieutenant. But we're as happy as if we'd got a promotion. With our uniforms, we're now respected in quite another way."

"I should think so," interrupted Cavriaghi. "People aren't afraid we'll steal their chickens."

"You should have seen what it was like from Palermo to here, when we stopped at post stations to change horses! All we had to say was 'Urgent orders on His Majesty's service,' and horses appeared like magic; and we'd show them our orders, which were actually the bills of the Naples hotel wrapped up and sealed! "

Having had their say on military changes, they passed on to vaguer subjects of conversation. Concetta and Cavriaghii had sat down together a little apart, and the young Count showed her the present which he had brought her from Naples: the Poems of Aleardo Aleardi magnificently bound for the purpose. A princely crown was deeply incised into the dark blue leather with her initials, C. C. S., beneath. Below that again, in large vaguely Gothic letterJng, were the words
Sempre sorda
-forever deaf. Concetta was amused, and laughed. "Why deaf, Count? I can hear C. C. S. all right!" The face of the young Count flamed with boyish passion. "Blind and deaf, yes, deaf, Signorina, deaf to my sighs and deaf to my groans! And blind, too, blind to the begging in my eyes. If you only knew what I suffered when you left Palermo to come here; not a wave, not a sign as the carriage vanished down the drive. And you expect me not to call you deaf? 'Cruel' is what I really should have written."

His somewhat literary excitement was chilled by the girl's reserve. "Count, you must be very tired after your long journey, your nerves are not quite in order; calm yourself. Why not read me a nice poem?"

While the Bersagliere was reading out the gentle verse in a voice charged with emotion and amid pauses full of distress, Tancredi in front of the fireplace was taking from his pocket a small blue satin box. "Here's the ring, Uncle, the ring I'm giving to Angelica; or rather the one you must hand to her in my name." He pressed the clasp and there was a dark sapphire cut in a clear octagon, and clustering close around it a multitude of tiny flawless diamonds. A slightly gloomy jewel, but in close harmony with the funereal taste of the times, and one obviously worth the two hundred gold ounces sent by Don Fabrizio. In reality it had cost a good deal less; in those months of fleeing and sacking, there were superb jewels to be picked up cheap in Naples; from the difference in price had come a brooch, a memento for Schwarzwald. Concetta and Cavriaghi were also called to admire it, but they did not move, as the young Count had already seen it and Concetta was putting off that pleasure till later. The ring went from hand to hand, was admired, praised, and Tancredii was congratulated on his good taste. Don Fabrizio asked, "But what about the measurements? We'll have to send the ring to Girgenti to have it adjusted to the right size." Tancredi's eyes sparkled with fun.

"There's no need for that, Unclei the measurement is exact; I'd taken it before." And Don Fabrizio was silenced; here, he recognized, was a master.

The little box had made the whole round of the fireplace and come back to the hands of Tancredi when from behind the door was heard a subdued "May I" It was Angelica. In the rush and excitement she had snatched up, to protect her from the pouring rain, one of those huge peasants' capes of rough cloth called a scappolare. Wrapped in the stiff dark blue folds, her body looked very slim; under the wet hood her green eyes looked anxious and bewildered, eagerly sensual. The sight of her, and the contrast between the beauty of her face and the rusticity of her clothes, was like a whip lash to Tancredi; he got up, ran to her without a word, and kissed her on the mouth. The box which he held in his right hand tickled her bent neck. Then he pressed the spring, took the ring, put it on her engagement fingeri the box dropped to the floor. "There, darling, that's for you, from your Tancredi." Then irony broke in: "And thank Uncle for it, too." Then he embraced her again; sensual anticipation made them both tremble; the room, the bystanders, seemed very far away; and he really felt as if by those kisses he were taking possession of Sicily once more, of the lovely faithless land which the Falconeris had lorded over for centuries and which now, after a vain revolt, had surrendered to him again, as always to his people, its carnal delights and its golden crops. As a result of this welcome arrival the family's return to Palermo was put off, and there followed two weeks of enchantment. The gale which had accompanied the journey of the two officers had been the last of a series; after it came the resplendent St. Martin's summer, which is the real season of pleasure in Sicily: weather luminous and blue, oasis of mildness in the harsh progression of the seasons, inveigling and leading on the senses with its sweetness, luring to secret nudities by its warmth. Not that there was any erotic nudity at the palace of Donnafugata, just an air of excited sensuality all the sharper for being carefully restrained. Eighty years before, the Salina palace had been a meeting place for those obscure pleasures which appealed to the dying eighteenth century; but the severe regency of the Princess Carolina, the neoreligious fervor of the Restoration, the straightforward sensuality of Don Fabrizio, had eventually caused its bizarre extravagances to be forgotten; the little powdered demons had been put to flight; they -still eixsted, of course, but only as sleeping embryos, hibernating under piles of dust in some attic of the vast building. The lovely Angelica's entry into the palace had made them stir a little, as may be remembered; but it was the arrival of two young men in love which really awoke the instincts lying dormant in the house; and these now showed themselves everywhere, like ants wakened by the sun, no longer poisonous, but livelier than ever. Even the architecture, the rococo decoration itself, evoked thoughts of fleshly curves and taut erect breasts; and every opening door seemed like a curtain rustling in a bed-alcove.

Cavriaghl was in love with Concetta; but boy that he was, not only in appearance like Tancredi but deep within, his love found expression in the easy rhymes of poets such ,as Prati and Aleardi, and in dreaming of moonlight elopements whose logical sequence he did not dare contemplate -and which Concetta's "deafness" obviated from the start anyway. One cannot know if in the seclusion of that green room of his he did not abandon himself to more definite hopesi certain it is that to the love-scenery of that autumn in Donnafugata his only contribution was the sketching in of clouds and evanescent horizons and not the creation of architectural masses. The two girls Carolina and Caterina, however, played their parts excellently in the symphony of desires traversing the whole palace that November and mingling with the murmur of the fountains, the pawing of the horses in heat in the stables, and the tenacious burrowing of nuptial nests by woodworms in the old furniture. The two girls were young and attractive and, though with no particular loves of their own, found themselves immersed in the currents emanating from the others; often the kiss which Concetta denied to Cavriaghi, the embrace from Angelica which left Tancredi unsatisfied, would reverberate around the girls and graze their untouched bodies; and they too would find themselves dreaming about locks of hair damp with sweat, about whimpers of pleasure. Even poor Mademoiselle Dombreuil, by dint of functioning as lightning conductor,was drawn into the turbid and laughing vortex, just as psychiatrists become infected and succumb to the frenzies of their patients. When after a day of hide-and-seek and moralizing ambushes she lay down on her lonely bed, her own withered breasts would quiver as she muttered indiscriminate invocations to Tancredi, to Carlo, to Fabrizio. . . . Center and motor of this sensual agitation were, of course, one couple, Tancredi and Angelica. Their certain marriage, though not very close, extended its reassuring shadow in anticipation on the parched soil of their mutual desires. Difference of class made Don Calogero consider their long periods alone together as quite normal with the nobility, and made Princess Maria Stella think habitual to those of the Seffiras' rank the frequency of Angelica's visits and a freedom of bearing which she would certainly not have found proper in her own daughters. And so Angelica's visits to the palace became more and more frequent until they were almost constant, and she ended by being only accompanied there formally by her father, who would return at once to his office and to the finding or weaving of hidden plots, or by a maid who would vanish into the servants' quarters to drink coffee and bore the unfortunate palace domestics.

Tancredi wanted Angelica to know the whole palace with its inextricable complex of guest rooms, state rooms, kitchens, chapels, theaters, picture galleries, odorous tack rooms, stables, stuffy conservatories, passages, stairs, terraces and porticoes, and particularly a series of abandoned and uninhabited apartments which had not been used for many years and formed a mysterious and intricate labyrinth of their own. Tancredi did not realize (or he realized perfectly well) that he was drawing the girl into the hidden center of the sensual cyclone; and Angelica at that time wanted whatever Tancredi did. Their wanderings through the almost limitless building were interminable; they would set off as if for some unknown land, and unknown indeed it was because in many of those apartments and corners not even Don Fabrizio had ever set foot (a cause of great satisfaction to him, for he used to say that a palace of which one knew every room wasn't worth living in).

The two lovers embarked for Cythera on a ship made of dark and sunny rooms, of apartments sumptuous or squalid, empty or crammed with remains of heterogeneous furniture. They would set off accompanied by Cavriaghi or by Mademoiselle Dombreuil (Father Pirrone, with the wisdorn of his Order, had always refused his company), sometimes by both; outer decency was saved. But in the palace of Donnafugata it was not difficult to mislead anyone wanting to follow; this just meant slipping into a passage (these were very long, narrow, and tortuous, with grilled windows which could not be passed without a sense of anguish), turning through a gallery, going up some handy stairs, and the two young people were far away, invisible, alone as if on a desert island. All that remained to survey them was some faded pastoral portrait made unseeing by the painter's inexperience, or a shepherdess glancing down consenting from some obliterated fresco.

Cavriaghi anyway would soon tire, and when he found his route leading through a room he knew or some staircase down into the garden he would slip off, both to please his friend and to go and sigh over Concetta's ice-cold hands. The governess would hang on longer, but not indefinitely; for some time her unanswered calls could be heard fading farther and farther away:
"(Tancrede,
Angelica, ou etes-vous?" Then
silence would fall again, except for the scuffle of rats in the ceilings above, or the rustle of some centuries-old and forgotten letter sent wandering by the wind over the floor: excuses for pleasant frights, for the reassuring contact of flesh with flesh. And with them always was Eros, malicious and tenacious, drawing the young couple into a game full of risk and fun. Both of them were still very near childhood, and they enjoyed the game in itself, enjoyed being followed, being lost, being found again; but when they touched each other their sharp ened senses would overwhelm them, and his five fingers entwined in hers with that gesture dear to uncertain sensualists, the gentle rub of fingertips on the pale veins of the back of the hand, confusing their whole being, preluding more insinuating caresses.