The Leopard

by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

  Cavriaghi 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 rhythms of poets such as Prati and Aleardi, and in dreaming of moonlight elopements whose logical sequence he did not dare contemplate and which anyway Concetta’s “deafness” obviated from the start. Who can tell whether in the seclusion of that green room of his he did not abandon himself to more definite hopes? 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 on heat in the stables, and the tenacious burrowing of nuptial nests by wood-worms 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, as psychiatrists become infected and succumb to the frenzies of their patients. When after a day of hide and seek and moralising ambushes she lay down on her lonely bed, she would stroke her own withered breasts and mutter indiscriminate invocations to Tancredi, to Carlo, to Fabrizio . . .

  Centre 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 in the Sedàras’ rank of life 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 at once proceed to the business quarters for the finding or weaving of hidden plots, or by a maid who vanished into the servants’ hall to drink coffee and bore the unlucky palace domestics.

  Tancredi wanted to show Angelica the whole palace with its inextricable complex of guest rooms, state rooms, kitchens, chapels, theatres, picture galleries, odorous saddling rooms, stables, stuffy conservatories, passages, stairs, terraces and porticos, and particularly of 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 realise, or he realised perfectly well, that he was drawing the girl into the hidden centre of the sensual cyclone; and Angelica at that time wanted whatever Tancredi did. Their wanderings through the seemingly 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 house 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, sometimes by both (Father Pirrone with the wisdom of his Order had always refused to go); 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 one of the very long, narrow and tortuous passages, with grilled windows which could not be passed without a sense of anguish, turning through a gallery, up some handy stair, 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 created blind by the painter’s inexperience, or a shepherdess glancing down consentingly from an obliterated fresco.

  Cavriaghi, in any case, soon tired, and when he found his route leading through a room he knew or some staircase down into the garden 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, “Tancrède, Angelicà, où êtes-vous?” Then silence would fall again, except for the scuffle of rats in the ceilings above, or the rustle of some centuries-old forgotten letter sent wandering by the wind over the floor; excuses for pleasant frights, for the reassuring contact of flesh to flesh. And with them always, cunning and tenacious, was Eros, drawing the young couple further and further into a game full of charm and risk. 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 reached each other their sharpened senses would overwhelm them, and his five fingers entwining in hers with that gesture dear to indecisive sensualists, the gentle rub of fingertips on the pale veins of the back of the hand, would shake up their whole being, prelude more insinuating caresses.

  Once she had hidden behind an enormous picture propped on the floor; and for a short time Arturo Corbera at the Siege of Antioch formed a protection for the girl’s hopeful anxiety; but when she was found, with her smile veined in cobwebs and her hands veiled in dust, she was clasped tight, and though she kept on saying again and again, “No, Tancredi, no,” her denial was in fact an invitation, for all he was doing was to stare with his blue eyes into her green ones. One luminous cold morning she was trembling in a dress that was still summery; he squeezed her to him, to warm her, on a sofa covered in tattered silk: her scented breath moved the hair on his forehead; they were moments ecstatic and painful, during which desire became a torment, restraint upon it a delight.

  The rooms in the abandoned apartments had neither a definite layout nor a name; and like the explorers of the New World they would baptise the rooms they crossed with the names of their joint discoveries. A vast bedroom in whose alcove stood the ghost of a bed adorned with a baldacchino hung with skeleton ostrich feathers was remembered afterwards as “the feather room”; a staircase with steps of smooth crumbling slate was called by Tancredi “the staircase of the lucky slip”. A number of times they really did not know where they were; all this twisting and turning, backing and following, pauses full of murmuring contact, made them lose their way so that they had to lean out of some paneless window to gather from an angle of the courtyard or a view of the garden which wing of the palace they were in. But sometimes they could not find their way even so, as the window did not give on to one of the great courts but on to some inner yard, anonymous itself and never entered, marked only by the corpse of some cat or the usual little heap of spaghetti and tomato sauce vomited or flung there; and from another window they would find themselves looking into the eyes of some pensioned-off old maidservant. One afternoon inside a cupboard they found four carillons, those music-boxes which delighted the affected simplicity of the eighteenth century. Three of these, buried in dust and cobwebs, remained mute; but the last, which was more recent and shut tighter into its dark wooden box, started up its cylinder of bristling copper, and the little tongues of raised steel suddenly produced a delicate tune, all in clear silvery tones—the famous Carnival of Venice; they kissed in rhythm with those notes of disillusioned gaiety, and when their embrace loosened were surprised to notice that the notes had ceased for some time and their action had left no other trace than a memory of that ghostly music.

  Once the surprise was of a different kind. In one of the rooms in the old guest wing they noticed a door hidden by a wardrobe; the centuries-old lock soon gave way to fingers pleasantly entw
ined in forcing it: behind it a long narrow staircase wound up in gentle curves of pink marble steps. At the top was another door, open, and covered with thick but tattered padding; then came a charming but odd little apartment, of six small rooms gathered round a medium-sized drawing-room, all, including the drawing-room, with floors of whitest marble sloping away slightly towards a small lateral gutter. On the low ceilings were some very unusual reliefs in coloured stucco, luckily made almost indecipherable by damp; on the walls hung big surprised-looking mirrors, hung too low, one shattered by a blow almost in the middle, and each fitted with contorted rococo candle-brackets. The windows gave on to a segregated courtyard, a kind of blind and deaf well, which let in a grey light and had no other outlet. In every room and even in the drawing-room were wide, too wide, sofas, showing nails from which traces of silk had been torn away; spotty arm-rests; on the fireplaces were delicate intricate little marble intaglios, naked figures in paroxysm, but martyred, by some furious hammer. The damp had marked the walls high up and also perhaps low down at a man’s height, where it had assumed strange shapes, odd thickness; dark tints. Tancredi, disturbed, would not let Angelica touch a cupboard in the drawing-room wall, and opened it himself. It was very deep and it contained the oddest things: little rolls of fine silken cord; little silver boxes immodestly adorned; stuck to the outside, on their underside, were tiny labels with obscure indications neatly handwritten, a little like the labels on an apothecary’s jars: “Estr. catch.”, “Tirch. stram.”, “Part-opp.”; phials whose contents had evaporated; a roll of dirty stuff standing upright in a corner; inside was a bundle of small whips, switches of bull’s muscle, some with silver handles, others wrapped half-way up in a charming old silk, white with little blue stripes, on which could be seen three rows of blackish marks; and metal instruments for inexplicable purposes. Tancredi was afraid, also of himself. He realised he had arrived at the secret nucleus, the centre from which all the carnal agitation within the palace radiated outward. “Let’s go, my dear, there’s nothing interesting here.” They shut the door carefully, went down the stairs again in silence, and put the wardrobe back where it was before; and all the rest of that day Tancredi’s kisses were very light as if given in a dream and in expiation.1

  After the Leopard, in fact, the whip seemed the most frequent object at Donnafugata. The day after their discovery of the enigmatic little apartment the two lovers found another little whip. This was not actually in the secret apartment but in the venerated one called the Rooms of the Saint-Duke, where in the middle of the seventeenth century a Salina had withdrawn as if into a private monastery, there to do penance and prepare his own journey towards Heaven. They were small low rooms, with floors of humble brick, and white-washed walls, like those of the poorest peasants. The last of these opened on to a balcony which overlooked the yellow expanse of estate after estate, all immersed in sad light. On one wall was a huge crucifix, over life size; the head of the martyred God touched the ceiling, the bleeding feet grazed the floor; the wound in the ribs seemed like a mouth prevented by brutality from pronouncing the words of ultimate salvation. Next to the Divine Body there hung from a nail a lash with a short handle, from which dangled six strips of now hardened leather ending in six lumps of lead as big as walnuts. This was the “discipline” of the Saint-Duke. In that room Giuseppe Corbera Duke of Salina had scourged himself alone, in sight of his God and his estates, and it must have seemed to him that the drops of his own blood were about to rain down on the land and redeem it; in his holy exaltation it must have seemed that only through this expiatory baptism could that earth really become his, blood of his blood, flesh of his flesh, as the saying is. But now many pieces of it had gone for ever and a large number of those to be seen from up there belonged to others, to Calogero even; to Don Calogero, thus to Angelica, thus to his future son-in-law. This proof of ransom through beauty, parallel to that other ransom through blood, made Tancredi’s head swim. Angelica was kneeling and kissing the pierced feet of Christ. “There,” said Tancredi, “you’re like that whip there, used for the same ends.” He showed her the whip; and since Angelica did not understand and raised her smiling head, lovely but vacuous, he bent down and as she knelt gave her a rough kiss which made her moan, for it bruised her lip and rasped her palate.

  So the pair of them spent those days in dreamy wanderings, in the discovery of hells redeemed by love, of forgotten paradises profaned by love itself. The dangers of stopping the game and drawing the prize became more and more pressing for both; in the end they searched no longer, but went off absorbed into the remotest rooms, those from which no cry could reach anyone from the outside world. But there never would be a cry; only invocations and low whimpers. There they would both lie, close but innocent, pitying each other. The most dangerous places for them were the rooms of the old guest wing; private, in good order, each with its neat rolled-up mattress which would spread out again at a mere touch of the hand. One day, not Tancredi’s mind which had no say in the matter, but all his blood had decided to put an end to it; that morning Angelica, like the beautiful bitch that she was, had said, “I’m your novice,” recalling to him with the clarity of an invitation their first mutual onrush of desire; and already the woman had surrendered and offered, already the male was about to overwhelm the man, when the church bell clanged almost straight down on their prone bodies, adding its own throb to the others; their interlaced mouths disentangled for a smile. They came to themselves; and next day Tancredi had to leave.

  Those were the best days in the lives of Tancredi and Angelica, lives later to be so variegated, so erring, against the inevitable background of sorrow. But of that they were still unaware, in their pursuit of a future which they deemed more concrete than it turned out to be, made of nothing but smoke and wind. When they were old and uselessly wise their thoughts would go back to those days with insistent regret; they had been days when desire was always present because always overcome, when many beds had been offered and refused, when the sensual urge, because restrained, had for one second been sublimated in renunciation, that is into real love. Those days were the preparation for a marriage which, even erotically, was no success; a preparation, however, in a way sufficient to itself, exquisite and brief; like those overtures which outlive the forgotten operas they belong to and hint in delicate veiled gaiety at all the arias which later in the opera are to be developed undeftly, and fail.

  When Angelica and Tancredi returned to the world of the living from their exile in the universe of extinct vices, forgotten virtues and, above all, perennial desire, they were greeted with amiable irony. “How silly of you, children, to get so dusty. What a state you’re in, Tancredi!” would smile Don Fabrizio; and his nephew would go off to get himself dusted down. Cavriaghi sat astride a chair, conscientiously smoking a cheroot, looked at his friend washing his face and neck, and snorted at seeing the water turn black as coal. “I don’t deny it, Falconeri; the Signorina Angelica is the loveliest girl I’ve ever seen; but that’s not a justification: heavens, do restrain yourself a bit; to-day you’ve been alone together three whole hours; if you’re so much in love then get married at once and don’t let people laugh at you. You should have seen the face the father made to-day when he came out of his office and found you were still sailing about in that ocean of rooms! Brakes, my dear fellow, brakes, that’s what you need! You Sicilians have so few of ’em!”

  He pontificated away, enjoying inflicting his wisdom on his older comrade, on “deaf” Concetta’s cousin. But Tancredi, as he dried his hair, was furious; to be accused of having no brakes, he who had enough to stop a train! On the other hand the good Bersagliere was not entirely in the wrong; appearances had to be thought of too; though now he had gone moralist like this from envy it was obvious that his courtship of Concetta was getting nowhere. And then Angelica! That delicious taste of blood today when he’d bitten the inside of her lip! That soft bending of hers under his embrace! But it was true, there was no sense in it all really. “To-morrow
we’ll go and visit the church with a full escort of Father Pirrone and Mademoiselle Dombreuil!”

  Angelica meanwhile was changing her dress in the girls’ room. “Mais Angélica, est-il Dieu possible de se mettre dans un tel état?” Mademoiselle Dombreuil was wailing indignantly, as the lovely creature, in undervest and petticoats, was washing her arms and neck. The cold water subdued her excitement and she had to admit to herself that the governess was right; was it worth getting so tired and so dusty and making people smile? For what? Just to be gazed in the eyes, to be stroked by those slender fingers, little more . . . and her lip was still smarting. “That’s enough now. To-morrow we’ll stay in the drawing-room with the others.” But next day those same eyes, those same fingers would cast their spell again, and the two would go back once more to their wild games of hide and seek.