UMBERTO ECO : THE PRAGUE CEMETERY (21 page)

I find Nievo in a rage, waving a letter. "Your friend Dumas," he says, I find Nievo in a rage, waving a letter. "Your friend Dumas," he says, "plays at being Croesus, then imagines that I am Croesus! Look what he's written — and he has the gall to say he's doing it in the general's name! Swiss and Bavarian mercenaries around Naples, hired by the Bourbons, smell defeat and are offering to desert for four ducats a head. And there are five thousand of them, which means twenty thousand ducats, or ninety thousand francs. Dumas, who had seemed to be his own Count of Monte Cristo, doesn't have that much, and grandly offers the paltry sum of one thousand francs. He says they'll collect three thousand from patriots in Naples, and asks if by any chance I would put up the rest. Where does he think I would get such a sum?"

He offers me a drink. "You see, Simonini, everyone is getting excited about the landings on the mainland, and no one seems to know anything about a tragedy that will weigh shamefully on the history of our expedition. It took place at Bronte, near Catania, a town of ten thousand inhabitants, mostly sharecroppers and shepherds, still slaves to a system akin to medieval feudalism. The whole area had been presented as a gift to Lord Nelson, along with the title of Duke of Bronte, and in any event the land had always been in the hands of a few wealthy people, or
galantuomini
, as they are called down there. The people were exploited and treated like animals — they couldn't even go into the landowners' woods to gather wild plants for food and had to pay a toll when they went into the fields. When Garibaldi arrives, these people imagine that the time has come for justice and that the land will be returned to them. They form committees of so-called liberals, and the leading figure is a lawyer named Lombardo. But Bronte is owned by Nelson's English heirs, and the English had helped Garibaldi at Marsala. So whom should he support? At this point the people stop listening to Avvocato Lombardo and other liberals and lose all control, triggering a popular riot, a mass slaughter, and they massacre the landowning gentry. They've done wrong, that's perfectly obvious, and among the rebels were also ex-convicts — with the havoc reigning on the island, many rogues had been set free who ought to have been kept inside . . . But it all happened because of our arrival. Under pressure from the English, Garibaldi sends Bixio to Bronte, and he's not a man to beat around the bush. He orders a siege, begins harsh reprisals against the population, hears the allegations made by the gentry and identifies Avvocato Lombardo as the ringleader of the riot, which isn't true, but that doesn't matter. An example had to be made, and Lombardo is executed by a firing squad, along with four others, including a wretched lunatic who long before the massacres had been walking the streets shouting insults against the gentry without upsetting anyone. Apart from my sadness over this cruelty, the whole business affects me personally. You understand, Simonini? On the one hand, news of such actions is reaching Turin, from which we appear to be colluding with the old landowners; on the other hand, there are those rumors I told you about concerning money. You don't need much to put the two together: landowners pay us to shoot the poor wretches, and we enjoy ourselves here on their money. And see how people are dying around us all the time. It augurs ill."

(8th September) Garibaldi has entered Naples without meeting any resistance. He's obviously getting rather cocky, because Nievo says he has asked Vittorio Emanuele to dismiss Cavour. Turin will now be needing my report, and I realize it must be as unfavorable as possible to Garibaldi. I will have to exaggerate the Masonic gold, portray Garibaldi as irresponsible, play up the Bronte massacre, refer to other crimes, embezzlement, extortion, corruption and general extravagance. I will use Musumeci's account to describe the behavior of the volunteers, carousing in the convents, deflowering maidens (perhaps nuns as well — there's no harm in laying on the color).

I'll then produce a few orders requisitioning private property. A letter from an anonymous informer telling me about frequent dealings between Garibaldi and Mazzini via Crispi, and about their plans for establishing a republic, even in Piedmont. In other words, a good strong report to put Garibaldi into a tight corner. Not least because Musumeci gave me another good point to include: Garibaldi's men are for the most part a band of foreign mercenaries. These thousand men comprise adventurers from France, America, England, Hungary and Africa too, the dregs of every nation, and many were buccaneers with Garibaldi himself in the Americas. It's enough to hear the names of his lieutenants: Turr, Eber, Tukory, Teloky, Magyarody, Czudafy, Frigyesy (Musumeci spat out these names as best he could, and apart from Turr and Eber, I've never heard any mention of the others). Then there were Poles, Turks, Bavarians and a German called Wolff, commander of the German and Swiss deserters who had previously served the Bourbons. And the English government provided Garibaldi with Algerian and Indian battalions. Hardly Italian patriots! Out of a thousand, only half were Italians. Musumeci is no doubt exaggerating, because all around I hear Venetian, Lombard, Emilian and Tuscan accents, and I haven't seen a single Indian. But I don't think it will do any harm to play up this hodgepodge of races.

 

Garibaldi has entered Naples without meeting any resistance.

Of course I've also added a few references to the Jews working hand in glove with the Masons.

I think the report should reach Turin as soon as possible, and it mustn't fall into the wrong hands. I've found a Piedmontese naval vessel about to return to the Kingdom of Piedmont, and it won't take much to forge an official document ordering the captain to land me at Genoa. My stay in Sicily ends here, and I'm sorry I won't see what is going on in Naples and beyond, but I wasn't here to enjoy myself, nor to write an epic. At the end of these travels I remember with pleasure only the
pisci d'ovu,
the
babbaluci a picchipacchi
(a way of cooking snails), and the
cannoli
. . . Ah, the
cannoli
! Nievo also promised to let me taste a certain swordfish a'
sammurigghu
, but there wasn't enough time, so all I can savor is the aroma of its name.

8

THE ERCOLE

From the diary for 30th and 31st March and 1st April 1897 The Narrator is beginning to find this amoebean dialogue between Simonini and his intrusive abbé rather tiresome, but it would appear that on the 30th of March Simonini completed a partial reconstruction of the final events in Sicily, in which many lines have been blotted out and paragraphs crossed through with an X but still legible — and disturbing to read. On the 31st of March Abbé Dalla Piccola intervenes in the diary, as if to prise open tightly closed doors in Simonini's memory, revealing to him what he is desperately refusing to remember. And on the 1st of April, after a restless night in which he recalls having attacks of nausea, Simonini makes a further entry, apparently annoyed and seeking to correct what he considers to be the abbé's exaggerations and moralistic indignation. But the Narrator, being unsure, in short, who in the end is right, has allowed himself to describe these events as he feels they might best be reconstructed, and naturally accepts responsibility for his reconstruction.

Simonini sent his report to Cavalier Bianco upon his return to Turin. A message came the following day calling him to a meeting that evening at the same place where he'd been taken by carriage the first time, where Bianco, Riccardi and Negri di Saint Front awaited him.

"Avvocato Simonini," Bianco began, "I don't know whether the nature of our relationship now permits me to express my full feelings, but I have to say you're a fool."

"Cavalier, how dare you?"

"He's quite right," intervened Riccardi, "and he speaks for us all. And I might add, a dangerous fool. So much so that we have to consider whether it's wise to leave you wandering around Turin with such ideas in your head."

"Excuse me, I may have got something wrong, but —"

"You have, you have. You've got it all wrong. Don't you realize that in just a few days (even the fishwives know about it by now) General Cialdini and our troops will be entering the Papal States? And our army will probably be at the gates of Naples within a month. At that point we'll have prepared the ground for a popular plebiscite in which the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and its lands will be officially annexed to the Kingdom of Italy. If Garibaldi is the gentleman and realist we think he is, he will resist the demands of that hothead Mazzini. He'll accept the situation,
bon gré mal gré,
he'll hand over the conquered lands to the king, and he'll have done a splendid job as a patriot. Then we'll have to dismantle Garibaldi's army, which now numbers almost sixty thousand men — they're better not left roaming about as they please, so the volunteers will be accepted into the Savoy army and the others sent home with money in their pockets. All fine fellows, all heroes. And you want us, by releasing that damned report of yours to the newspapers and the general public, to say that these Garibaldini, who are about to become our own soldiers and officers, were a bunch of scoundrels, for the most part foreign, who pillaged their way through Sicily? You want us to say that Garibaldi is not the selfless hero to whom the whole of Italy should be grateful, but an adventurer who defeated a bogus enemy by buying them off? And that he plotted with Mazzini to the very end to make Italy a republic? And you want us to say that Nino Bixio went around Sicily executing liberals and massacring shepherds and peasants? You're mad!"

"But gentlemen, you employed me —"

"We did not employ you to slander Garibaldi and those fine Italians who fought with him, but to find documents that might show how the hero's republican entourage were misgoverning the occupied lands, so as to justify an intervention from Piedmont."

"But gentlemen, you are well aware that La Farina —"

"La Farina wrote private letters to Count Cavour, which he certainly hasn't been waving around. And then La Farina is La Farina — someone who bears a particular grudge against Crispi. And last of all, what's this nonsense about gold from the English Masons?"

"Everyone's talking about it."

"Everyone? We're not. And what are these Masons anyway? Are you a Mason?"

"No, I'm not, but —"

"So don't involve yourself in matters that are of no concern to you. Let the Masons stew in their own juice."

Simonini evidently hadn't realized that the whole Savoy government were Freemasons — and with all the Jesuits he'd had around him as a child, perhaps he should have done so. But Riccardi had already moved on to the question of the Jews, asking by what twisted notion he had included them in his report.

Simonini stammered, "The Jews are everywhere, and don't you think—"

"It doesn't matter what we think or don't think," interrupted Saint Front. "The fact is that in a united Italy we also need the support of the Jewish community. What is more, it's pointless telling good Italian Catholics that Garibaldi's selfless heroes also included Jews. In short, with all these blunders of yours, we'd have every reason to send you off for a good long time to enjoy the air at one of our comfortable Alpine fortresses. But regrettably we still need you. It would seem that this Captain Nievo (or Colonel or whatever) is still down there with all his account books. We have no idea,
in primis,
whether he's been keeping them correctly and,
in secundis,
whether it is politically wise for these accounts to be disclosed. You tell us Nievo intends to hand them over to us, and that would be good, but if he shows them to others before they reach us, then it would not. And so you will return to Sicily, once again as a correspondent for Professor Boggio reporting on the new and momentous events. You will attach yourself like a leech to Nievo and make sure the accounts disappear, vanish into thin air, go up in smoke, so there's no more talk of them. It is for you to decide how to do this, and you are authorized to use any means, provided of course they are lawful, nor should you expect further orders from us. Cavalier Bianco will give you a contact at the Bank of the Two Sicilies to assure the necessary funds."