The Leopard

by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

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  1 In the description of the Sadists’ apartment four passages have been inserted in the 1957 manuscript and are not to be found in the typescript version dictated to Francesco Orlando. In the typescript the text relating to the third passage reads: “It was very deep but empty, except for a roll of dirty stuff standing upright in a corner.” In the Harvill edition, however, the first two passages were already translated by A. Colquhoun and inserted. Therefore in the present new edition only the two passages not previously included have been translated, the one starting “and it contained . . .” and the one starting “He realised he had arrived . . .”

  V

  FATHER PIRRONE PAYS A VISIT

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  FEBRUARY, 1861

  FATHER PIRRONE’S ORIGINS were rustic; he had been born at San Cono, a tiny hamlet which is now, thanks to the autobus, almost a satellite-star in the solar system of Palermo, but a century ago belonged as it were to a planetary system of its own, being four or five cart-hours from the Palermo sun.

  The father of our Jesuit had been overseer of two properties which the Abbey of Sant’ Eleuterio thought it owned in the territory of San Cono. An overseer’s job was then most perilous for the health both of soul and body, as it necessitated odd acquaintanceships and the knowledge of many a tale which might bring 0n ills that could suddenly stretch the patient dead beneath some rustic wall, with all those stories inside him lost irrevocably to idle curiosity. But Don Gaetano, Father Pirrone’s father, had managed to avoid this occupational disease by rigorous hygiene based on discretion and a careful use of preventive remedies; and he had died peacefully of pneumonia one bright Sunday in February when a soughing wind was stripping the almond blossom. He left his widow and three children (two girls and the priest) relatively well off; like the wise man he was, he had managed to save up some of the incredibly meagre salary paid by the Abbey, and at the moment of his demise owned a few almond trees at the end of the valley, a row or two of vines on the slopes, and some stony pasturage farther up: all poor stuff, of course, but enough to confer a certain weight amid the depressed economy of San Cono. He was also owner of a small, rigidly square house, blue outside and white in, four rooms down and four up, at the very entrance of the village on the Palermo road.

  Father Pirrone had left this house at the age of sixteen, when his successes at the parish school and the benevolence of the mitred Abbot of Sant’ Eleuterio had set him on the road towards the archiepiscopal seminary; but every few years he had returned there, to bless the marriage of one of his sisters or to give a (in the worldly sense) superfluous absolution to the dying Don Gaetano, and he had come back now, at the end of February 1861, for the fifteenth anniversary of his father’s death; on a day gusty and clear, just like that other one.

  Getting there had meant a five hours’ shaking in a cart with his feet dangling behind a horse’s tail; but once he had overcome his nausea at the patriotic pictures newly painted on the cart panels, culminating in a rhetorical presentation of a flame-coloured Garibaldi arm in arm with an aquamarine Santa Rosalia, they had been a pleasant five hours. The valley rising from Palermo to San Cono mingles the lushness of the coast with the harshness of the interior, and is swept by sudden gusts of cleansing wind famous for being able to deviate the best-aimed bullets, so that marksmen faced with these ballistic problems preferred to go elsewhere. Then the carter, who had known the dead man well, launched out into lengthy reminiscences of his merits, reminiscences which, although not always adapted to a son’s and a priest’s ear, had flattered his practised listener.

  His arrival was greeted with happy tears. He embraced and blessed his mother, whose deep widow’s weeds set off nicely her white hair and rosy hue; and greeted his sisters and nephews, looking askance among the latter at Carmelo, who had had the bad taste to put a tricolour cockade on his cap in token of rejoicing. As soon as he got into the house he was assailed as always by sweet youthful memories. Nothing was changed, from the red brick floor to the sparse furniture; the same light entered the small narrow windows; Romeo, the dog, barking briefly in a corner, was exactly like another hound, its great-great-grandfather, his companion in violent play; and from the kitchen arose the centuries-old aroma of simmering stew of essence of tomatoes, onions and mutton, for macaroni on festive occasions. Everything expressed the serenity achieved by the dead man’s labours.

  Soon they moved off to church for the commemorative Mass. That day San Cono looked its best, basking almost proudly in its exhibition of different manures. Sly goats with dangling black udders and numbers of little Sicilian piglets, dark and slim as minute colts, were running among the people and up the steep tracks; and as Father Pirrone had become a kind of local glory, many women, children and even youths crowded round him to ask for his blessing or remind him of old days.

  After a re-orientating gossip in the sacristy by the parish priest and attendance at Mass he moved to the tombstone in a side chapel; the women kissed the marble amid sobs, the son prayed aloud in his archaic Latin; and when they got home the macaroni was ready and much enjoyed by Father Pirrone, whose palate had not been spoilt by the culinary delicacies of Villa Salina.

  Then towards evening his friends came to greet him and met in his room. A three-branched bronze lantern hung from the ceiling and spread a dim light from its oil burners; in a corner was the bed with its vari-coloured mattress and stifling pink and yellow quilt; another corner of the room, the “barn”, was divided off by high stiff matting hiding honey-coloured corn taken weekly to the mill for the family needs; on the walls hung pock-marked engravings, St. Antony exhibiting the Divine Infant, St. Lucia her gouged-out eyes, and St. Francis Xavier haranguing crowds of plumed and naked Indians; outside, in the starry dusk, the wind blew and in its way was the only one to commemorate the dead. In the centre of the room under the lamp was a big squat brazier surrounded by a strip of polished wood on which people put their feet; all around, on hemp chairs, sat the guests. There were the parish priest, the two Schirò brothers, local landowners, and Don Pietrino the old herbalist; they came looking glum and remained looking glum, because, while the women were busy below, they sat talking of politics, hoping to hear consoling news from Father Pirrone who came from Palermo and must know a lot as he lived with the “nobles”. The desire for news had been appeased and that for consolation disappointed, for their Jesuit friend, partly from sincerity and partly also from tactics, painted for them a very black future. The Bourbon tricolour still hung over Gaeta but the blockade was tight and the powder magazines in the fortress were being blown up one by one, and nothing could be saved there now, except honour: not much, that is; Russia was friendly but distant, Napoleon III shifty and close, and of the risings in Basilicata and Terra di Lavoro the Jesuit spoke little because deep down he was rather ashamed of them. They must, he told them, face up to the reality of this atheistic and rapacious Italian state now in formation, to these laws of expropriation, to conscription which would spread from Piedmont all the way down here, like cholera. “You’ll see,” was his not very original conclusion, “you’ll see they won’t even leave us eyes to weep with.”

  These words were followed by the traditional chorus of rustic complaints. The Schirò brothers and the herbalist already felt the new fiscal grip; the former had had extra contributions and additions here and there, the latter an overwhelming shock; he had been called to the Town Hall and told that if he didn’t pay twenty lire every year he wouldn’t be allowed to sell his potions. “But I go and gather the grasses, these holy herbs God made, with my own hands in the mountains, rain or shine, on certain days and nights of the year. I dry them in the sun which belongs to everybody and I grind them up myself, with my own grandfather’s mortar. What have you people at the Town Hall to do with it? Why should I pay you twenty lire? Just for nothing like that?”

  The words came muffled from a toothless mouth, but his eyes were dark with genuine rage. “Am I right or not, Father? You tell me!”

&
nbsp; The Jesuit was fond of him; he remembered him as a man already grown, in fact already bent from continual wandering and stooping, when he himself had been a boy throwing stones at the birds; and he was also grateful because he knew that when the old man sold one of his potions to women he always said they would be useless without many an Ave and Gloria. But he prudently preferred to ignore what was in the potions, or the hopes with which the clients asked for them.

  “You’re right, Don Pietrino, a hundred times right. Why, of course! But if those people didn’t take money off you and other poor souls like you, how could they afford to make war on the Pope and steal what’s his?”

  The conversation meandered on in the mild lamplight, quivering as the wind penetrated the heavy shutters. Father Pirrone expatiated on the future and the inevitable confiscation of ecclesiastical property; good-bye then to the mild rule of the Abbey in these parts: good-bye to the plates of soup distributed in bad winters; and when the younger Schirò had the imprudence to say that a few poor peasants might perhaps get some land of their own, his voice froze into sharp contempt. “You’ll see, Don Antonino, you’ll see. The Mayor will buy everything up, pay the first instalments, and then do just what he likes. It’s already happened in Piedmont!”

  They ended by going off scowling even more than when they’d come, and with enough complaints to last two months. The only one to stay was the herbalist, who would not be going to bed that night as there was a new moon and he had to gather rosemary on the Pietrazzi rocks; he had brought a lantern with him and would be setting off straight from there.

  “But tell me, Father, you who live with the nobles, what do they say about all these great doings? What does the Prince of Salina say, so tall and touchy and proud?”

  Father Pirrone had more than once asked himself this question, and it was not an easy one to answer, particularly as he had taken little notice or interpreted as exaggeration what Don Fabrizio had told him one morning in the Observatory nearly a year ago. He knew now, but could find no way of translating it into comprehensible terms for Don Pietrino who, though far from a fool, had more understanding of the anti-catarrhal, laxative, and even aphrodisiac properties of his herbs than of such abstractions.

  “You see, Don Pietrino, the ‘nobles’, as you call them, aren’t so easy to understand. They live in a world of their own, created not directly by God but by themselves during centuries of highly specialised experiences, of their own worries and joys; they have a very strong collective memory, and so they’re put out or pleased by things which wouldn’t matter at all to you and me, but which to them seem vitally connected with their heritage of memories, hopes, caste fears. Divine Providence has willed that I should become a humble member of the most glorious Order in an Eternal Church whose eventual victory has been assured; you are at the other end of the scale, by which I don’t mean the lowest but the most different. When you find a thick bush of marjoram or a well-filled nest of Spanish flies (you look for those too, Don Pietrino, I know) you are in direct communication with the natural world which the Lord created with undifferentiated possibilities of good and evil until man could exercise his own free will on it; and when you’re consulted by evil old women and eager young girls, you are plunging back into the dark abyss of centuries that preceded the light from Golgotha.”

  The old man looked at him in amazement; he had wanted to know if the Prince of Salina was satisfied or not with the latest changes, and the other was talking to him about aphrodisiacs and light from Golgotha. “All that reading’s driven him off his head, poor man.”

  “But the ‘nobles’ aren’t like that; all they live by has been handled by others. They find us ecclesiastics useful to reassure them about eternal life, just as you herbalists are here to procure them soothing or stimulating drinks. And by that I don’t mean they’re bad people; quite the contrary. They’re just different; perhaps they appear so strange to us because they have reached a stage towards which all those who are not saints are moving, that of indifference to earthly goods through surfeit. Perhaps it’s because of that they take so little notice of things that are of great importance to us; those on mountains don’t worry about mosquitoes in plains, nor do the people in Egypt about umbrellas. Yet the former fear landslides, the latter crocodiles, which are no worry to us. For them new fears have appeared of which we’re ignorant; I’ve seen Don Fabrizio get quite testy, wise and serious though he is, because of a badly ironed collar to his shirt; and I know for certain that the Prince of Làscari didn’t sleep for a whole night from rage because he was wrongly placed at one of the Viceroy’s dinners. Now don’t you think that a human being who is put out only by bad washing or protocol must be happy, and thus superior?”

  Don Pietrino could understand nothing at all now: all this was getting more and more nonsensical, what with shirt collars and crocodiles. He was still upheld, though, by a basis of good rustic commonsense. “But if that’s what they’re like, Father, they’ll all go to Hell.”

  “Why? Some will be lost, others saved, according to how they’ve lived in that conditioned world of theirs. Salina himself, for instance, might just scrape through; he plays his own game decently, follows the rules, doesn’t cheat. God punishes those who voluntarily contravene the Divine Laws which they know and turn voluntarily down a bad road; one who goes his own way, so long as he doesn’t misbehave along it, is always all right. If you, Don Pietrino, sold hemlock instead of mint, knowingly, you’d be for it; but if you thought you’d picked the right one, old Zana would die the noble death of Socrates and you’d go straight to Heaven with a cassock and wings of purest white.”

  The death of Socrates was too much for the herbalist; he had given up and was fast asleep. Father Pirrone noticed this and was pleased, for now he would be able to talk freely without fear of being misunderstood; and he felt a need of talking, so as to fix into a pattern of phrases some ideas obscurely milling in his head.

  “And they do a lot of good, too. If you knew, for instance, the families otherwise homeless that find shelter in those palaces! And the owners ask for no return, not even immunity from petty theft. They do it not from ostentation but from a sort of obscure atavistic instinct which prevents them doing anything else. Although it may not seem so, they are in fact less selfish than many others; the splendour of their homes, the pomp of their receptions, have something impersonal about them, something not unlike the grandeur of churches and of liturgy, something which is in fact ad maiorem gentis gloriam, and that redeems a great deal: for every glass of champagne drunk by themselves they offer fifty to others; when they treat someone badly, as they do sometimes, it is not so much their personality sinning as their class affirming itself. Fata crescunt. For instance, Don Fabrizio has protected and educated his nephew Tancredi and so saved a poor orphan who would have otherwise been lost. You say that he did it because the young man is a noble too, and that he wouldn’t have lifted a finger for anyone else. That’s true, but why should he lift a finger if sincerely, in the deep roots of his heart, he considers all ‘others’ to be botched attempts, china figurines come misshapen from the potter’s hands and not worth putting to the test of fire.

  “You, Don Pietrino, if you weren’t asleep at this moment, would be jumping up to tell me that the nobles are wrong to have this contempt of others, and that all of us, equally subject to the double slavery of love and death, are equal before the Creator; and I would have to agree with you. But I’d add that not only nobles are to be blamed for despising others, since that is quite a general vice. A university professor despises a parish schoolmaster even if he doesn’t show it, and since you’re asleep I can tell you without reticence that we clergy consider ourselves superior to the laity, we Jesuits superior to the other clergy, just as you herbalists despise tooth-pullers who in their turn deride you. Doctors on the other hand jeer at both tooth-pullers and herbalists, and are themselves treated as fools by their patients who expect to be kept alive with hearts or livers in a hopeless state; to magistrate
s lawyers are just bores who try to delay the course of law, and on the other hand literature is full of satires against the pomposity, indolence and often worse of those very judges. The only people who also despise themselves are labourers; when they’ve learnt to jeer at others the circle will be closed and we’ll start all over again.

  “Have you ever thought, Don Pietrino, how many names of jobs have become insults? From trooper and fishwife to reitre or pompier in French? People don’t think of the merits of troopers or fishwives; they just look at their marginal defects and call them all rough and profane; and as you can’t hear me, I may tell you that I’m perfectly aware of the exact current meaning of the word ‘Jesuit’.

  “Then these nobles put a good face on their own disasters: I’ve seen one who’d decided to kill himself next day, poor man, looking beaming and happy as a boy on the eve of his first Communion; while if you, Don Pietrino, had to drink one of your own herb drinks, you’d make the village ring with your laments. To rage and mock is gentlemanly; to grumble and whine is not. In fact I could give you a recipe: if you meet a ‘gentleman’ who’s querulous, look up his family tree; you’ll soon find a dead branch.

  “It’s a class difficult to suppress because it’s in continual renewal and because if needs be it can die well, that is it can throw out a seed at the moment of death. Look at France; they let themselves be massacred with elegance there and now they’re back as before. I say as before, because it is differences of attitude, not estates and feudal rights, which make a noble.

  “They tell me that in Paris nowadays there are Polish counts who’ve been forced into exile and poverty by revolts and despotism; they drive cabs, but frown so at their middle-class customers that the poor things get into the cab, without knowing why, as humbly as dogs in church.