The Piedmontese, representative of the only liberal State in Italy, rose to the bait. “But, Prince, the Senate is the High Chamber of the Kingdom! In it the flower of Italy’s politicians, picked by the wisdom of the Sovereign, will examine, discuss, approve or disapprove the laws proposed by the Government for the progress of the country; it functions at the same time as spur and as brake; it incites good actions and prevents bad ones. When you have accepted a seat in it, you will represent Sicily on an equality with the other elected deputies, you will make us hear the voice of this lovely country which is only now sighting the modern world, with so many wounds to heal, so many just desires to be granted.”
Chevalley would perhaps have continued for some time in this tone if Bendicò from behind the door had not asked “the wisdom of his Sovereign” to admit him. Don Fabrizio made as if to get to his feet and open the door, but slowly enough to allow the Piedmontese time to open it himself; Bendicò meticulously sniffed around Chevalley’s trousers, after which, having decided this was a good man, the dog lay down under the window and slept.
“Just listen to me, Chevalley, will you? If it were merely a question of some honorific, of a simple title to put on a visiting card, no more, I should be pleased to accept; I feel that at this decisive moment for the future of the Italian State it is the duty of us all to support it, and to avoid any impression of disunity in the eyes of these foreign States which are watching us with alarm or hope, both of them unjustified, but that do at the moment exist.”
“Well, then, Prince, why not accept?”
“Be patient now, Chevalley, I’ll explain in a moment; we Sicilians have become accustomed, by a long, a very long hegemony of rulers who were not of our religion and did not speak our language, to split hairs. If we had not done so we’d never have coped with Byzantine tax gatherers, with Berber Emirs, with Spanish Viceroys. Now the bent is endemic, we’re made like that. I said ‘support’, I did not say ‘participate’. In these last six months, since your Garibaldi set foot at Marsala, too many things have been started without our being consulted for you now to ask a member of the old governing class to help develop them and carry them through. I do not wish to discuss now if what was done was good or bad; for my part I believe much of it to have been bad; but I’d like to tell you at once what you’ll only understand after spending a year among us.
“In Sicily it doesn’t matter about doing things well or badly; the sin which we Sicilians never forgive is simply that of ‘doing’ at all. We are old, Chevalley, very old. For over twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of superb and heterogeneous civilisations, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own. We’re as white as you are, Chevalley, and as the Queen of England; and yet for two thousand five hundred years we’ve been a colony. I don’t say that in complaint; it’s our fault. But even so we’re worn out and exhausted.”
Chevalley was disturbed now. “But that is all over, isn’t it? Now Sicily is no longer a conquered land, but a free part of a free State.”
“The intention is good, Chevalley, but it comes too late; and I’ve already said that it is mainly our fault. You talked to me a short while ago about a young Sicily sighting the marvels of the modern world; for my part I see instead a centenarian being dragged in a bath-chair round the Great Exhibition in London, understanding nothing and caring about nothing, whether it’s the steel factories of Sheffield or the cotton spinneries of Manchester, and thinking of nothing but drowsing off again on beslobbered pillows with a pot under the bed.”
He was still talking quietly, but the hand around St. Peter’s had tightened; later the tiny cross surmounting the dome was found snapped. “Sleep, my dear Chevalley, sleep, that is what Sicilians want, and they will always hate anyone who tries to wake them, even in order to bring them the most wonderful of gifts: I must say, between ourselves, that I have strong doubts whether the new kingdom will have many gifts for us in its luggage. All Sicilian self-expression, even the most violent, is really wish-fulfilment; our sensuality is a hankering for oblivion, our shooting and knifing a hankering for death; our languor, our exotic ices, a hankering for voluptuous immobility, that is for death again; our meditative air is that of a void wanting to scrutinise the enigmas of Nirvana. From that comes the power among us of certain people, of those who are half awake: that is the cause of the well-known time lag of a century in our artistic and intellectual life; novelties attract us only when they are dead, incapable of arousing vital currents; from that comes the extraordinary phenomenon of the constant formation of myths which would be venerable if they were really ancient, but which are really nothing but sinister attempts to plunge us back into a past that attracts us only because it is dead.”
Not all of this was understood by the good Chevalley; and the last phrase he found particularly obscure; he had seen the variously painted carts being drawn along by horses covered with feathers, he had heard tell of the heroic puppet theatres, but he too had thought they were genuine old traditions. He said, “Aren’t you exaggerating a little, Prince? I myself have met emigrant Sicilians in Turin, Crispi, for example, who seemed anything but asleep.”
The Prince said irritably, “When there are so many of us there are bound to be exceptions: in any event, I’ve already mentioned some of us as half awake. As for this young man Crispi, not I, certainly, but you perhaps may be able to see if as an old man he doesn’t fall back into our voluptuous torpor; they all do. Anyway, I’ve explained myself badly; I said Sicilians, I should have added Sicily, the atmosphere, the climate, the landscape of Sicily. Those are the forces which have formed our minds together with and perhaps more than alien pressure and varied invasions: this landscape which knows no mean between sensuous sag and hellish drought; which is never petty, never ordinary, never relaxed, as should be a country made for rational beings to live in; this country of ours in which the inferno round Randazzo is a few miles from the beauty of Taormina Bay; this climate which inflicts us with six feverish months at a temperature of 104. Count them, Chevalley, count them; May, June, July, August, September, October; six times thirty days of sun sheer down on our heads; this summer of ours which is as long and glum as a Russian winter and against which we struggle with less success. You don’t know it yet, but fire could be said to snow down on us as on the accursed cities of the Bible. If a Sicilian worked hard in any of those months he would expend energy enough for three. Then water is either lacking altogether or has to be carried from so far that every drop is paid for by a drop of sweat; and when the rains come, they are always tempestuous and set dry torrents to frenzy, drown beasts and men on the very spot where two weeks before both had been dying of thirst.
“This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and even these monuments of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing round us like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from all directions, who were at once obeyed, soon detested and always misunderstood; their sole means of expression works of art we found enigmatic and taxes we found only too intelligible, and which they spent elsewhere. All these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind.”
The ideological inferno evoked in this little study disturbed Chevalley even more than the bloodthirsty tales of that morning. He tried to say something, but Don Fabrizio was now too worked up to listen.
“I don’t deny that a few Sicilians may succeed in breaking the spell once off the island; but they would have to leave it very young; by twenty it’s too late; the crust is formed; they will remain convinced that their country is basely calumniated like all other countries, that the civilised norm is here, the oddities elsewhere. But do please excuse me, Chevalley, I’ve let myself be led on and I’ve probably bored you. You haven’t come all this way to hear Ezekiel deplore the misfortunes of Israel. Let us return to the subject o
f our conversation: I am most grateful to the Government for having thought of me for the Senate and I ask you to express my most sincere gratitude to them. But I cannot accept. I am a member of the old ruling class, inevitably compromised with the Bourbon régime, and bound to it by chains of decency if not of affection. I belong to an unlucky generation, swung between the old world and the new, and I find myself ill at ease in both. And what is more, as you must have realised by now, I am without illusions; what would the Senate do with me, an inexperienced legislator who lacks the faculty of self-deception, essential requisite for anyone wanting to guide others? We of our generation must draw aside and watch the capers and somersaults of the young around this ornate catafalque. Now you need young men, bright young men, with minds asking ‘how’ rather than ‘why’, and who are good at masking, at blending I should say, their obvious personal interests with vague public ideals.” He was silent, left St. Peter’s alone. Then he went on: “May I give you some advice to hand on to your superiors?”
“That goes without saying, Prince; it will certainly be heard with every consideration; but I still venture to hope that instead of advice you may give your consent.”
“There is a name I should like to suggest for the Senate: that of Calogero Sedàra. He has more the qualities to sit there than I have; his family, I am told, is an old one or soon will be: he has more than what you call prestige, he has power; he has outstanding practical merits instead of scientific ones; his attitude during the May crisis was not so much irreproachable as actively useful; as to illusions, I don’t think he has any more than I have, but he’s clever enough to know how to create them when needed. He’s the man for you. But you must be quick, as I’ve heard that he intends to put up as candidate for the Chamber of Deputies.”
There had been much talk about Sedàra at the Prefecture. His activities both as mayor and private citizen were well known. Chevalley gave a start; he was an honest man and his esteem for the legislative chambers was paralleled by the purity of his intentions; so he thought it best not to say a word in reply; and he did well not to compromise himself as, ten years later, Don Calogero did in fact gain the Senate. But though honest, Chevalley was no fool; he certainly lacked those quick wits which in Sicily usurp the name of intelligence, but he could assess slowly and firmly and also he had not the southern insensibility to the distress of others. He understood Don Fabrizio’s bitterness and discomfort, he reviewed for an instant the misery, the abjection, the black indifference of which he had been witness for the last month. During the past few hours he had envied the Salina opulence and grandeur, but now his mind went back tenderly to his own little vineyard, his Monterzuolo near Casale, ugly, mediocre, but serene and alive. And he found himself pitying this prince without hopes as much as the children without shoes, the malaria-ridden women, the guilty victims whose names reached his office every morning; all were equal fundamentally, all were comrades in misfortune segregated in the same well.
He decided to make a last effort. As he got up his voice was charged with emotion. “Prince, do you seriously refuse to do all in your power to alleviate, to attempt to remedy the state of physical squalor, of blind moral misery in which this people of yours lies? Climate can be overcome, the memory of evil regimes cancelled, for the Sicilians must want to improve; if honest men withdraw the way will be open for those with no scruples and no vision, for Sedàra and his like; and then everything will be as before for yet more centuries. Listen to your conscience, Prince, and not to the proud truths that you have spoken. Collaborate.”
Don Fabrizio smiled at him, took him by the hand, made him sit beside him on the sofa. “You’re a gentleman, Chevalley, and I consider it a privilege to have met you; you are right in all you say; your only mistake was saying ‘the Sicilians must want to improve.’ I’ll tell you a personal anecdote. Two or three days before Garibaldi entered Palermo I was introduced to some British naval officers from one of the warships then in harbour to keep an eye on things. They had heard, I don’t know how, that I own a house down on the shore facing the sea, with a terrace on its roof from which can be seen the whole circle of hills around the city; they asked to visit this house of mine and look at the landscape where Garibaldini were said to be operating, as they could get no clear idea from their ships. In fact Garibaldi was already at Gibilrossa. They came to my house, I accompanied them up on to the roof; they were simple youths in spite of their reddish whiskers. They were ecstatic about the view, the vehemence of the light; they confessed, though, that they had been horrified at the squalor, decay, filth of the streets around. I didn’t explain to them that one thing was derived from the other, as I have tried to with you. Then one of them asked me what those Italian volunteers were really coming to do in Sicily. ‘They are coming to teach us good manners!’ I replied in English. ‘But they won’t succeed, because we are gods.’
“I don’t think they understood, but they laughed and went off. That is my answer to you too, my dear Chevalley; the Sicilians never want to improve for the simple reason that they think themselves perfect; their vanity is stronger than their misery; every invasion by outsiders, whether so by origin or, if Sicilian, by independence of spirit, upsets their illusion of achieved perfection, risks disturbing their satisfied waiting for nothing; having been trampled on by a dozen different peoples, they think they have an imperial past which gives them a right to a grand funeral.
“Do you really think, Chevalley, that you are the first who has hoped to canalise Sicily into the flow of universal history? I wonder how many Moslem imams, how many of King Roger’s knights, how many Swabian scribes, how many Angevin barons, how many jurists of the Most Catholic King have conceived the same fine folly; and how many Spanish viceroys too, how many of Charles III’s reforming functionaries! And who knows now what happened to them all! Sicily wanted to sleep in spite of their invocations; for why should she listen to them if she herself is rich, if she’s wise, if she’s civilised, if she’s honest, if she’s admired and envied by all, if, in a word, she is perfect?
“Now even people here are repeating what was written by Proudhon and some German Jew whose name I can’t remember, that the bad state of things, here and elsewhere, is all due to feudalism; that it’s my fault, as it were. Maybe. But there’s been feudalism everywhere, and foreign invasions too. I don’t believe that your ancestors, Chevalley, or the English squires or the French seigneurs governed Sicily any better than did the Salina. The results were different. The reason for the difference must lie in this sense of superiority that dazzles every Sicilian eye, and which we ourselves call pride while in reality it’s blindness. For the moment, for a long time to come, there’s nothing to be done. I’m sorry; but I cannot lift a finger in politics. It would only get bitten. These are things one can’t say to a Sicilian; and if you’d said them yourself, I too would have objected.
“It’s late, Chevalley; we must go and dress for dinner. For a few hours I have to act the part of a civilised man.”
Chevalley left early next morning and Don Fabrizio, who had arranged to go out shooting, was able to accompany him to the post station. With them was Don Ciccio Tumeo, carrying on his shoulders the double weight of two shot-guns, his and Don Fabrizio’s, and within himself the bile of his own trampled virtue.
In the livid light of five-thirty in the morning Donnafugata was deserted and seemed despairing. In front of every house the refuse of squalid meals accumulated along leprous walls; trembling dogs were routing about with a greed that was always disappointed. An occasional door was already open and the cumulative stench of sleep spread out into the street; by glimmering wicks mothers scrutinised the lids of their children for trachoma; almost all were in mourning and many had been the wives of those carcasses one stumbles over on the turns of mountain tracks. The men were coming out gripping their hoes to look for someone who might give them work, God willing; subdued silence alternated with exasperated screams of hysterical voices; away over towards the Convent of the Holy Ghost
a tinny dawn was beginning to tinge leaden clouds.
Chevalley thought: “This state of things won’t last; our lively new modern administration will change it all.” The Prince was depressed. “All this shouldn’t last; but it will, always; the human ‘always’ of course, a century, two centuries . . . and after that it will be different, but worse. We were the Leopards and Lions; those who’ll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals and sheep, we’ll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.” They thanked each other and said good-bye. Chevalley hoisted himself up on the post-carriage, propped on four wheels the colour of vomit. The horse, all hunger and sores, began its long journey.
Day had just dawned: the little light that managed to pass through quilted clouds was held up once more by the immemorial filth on the windows. Chevalley was alone; amid bumps and shakes he moistened the tip of his index finger with saliva and cleaned a pane for the width of an eye. He looked out; in front of him, under the ashen light, the landscape lurched to and fro, irredeemable.
The Leopard Page 18