The Leopard

by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

  “Fine, Prince, fine! They don’t do things like this nowadays, with gold leaf at its present price!” Sedàra was standing beside him; his quick eyes were moving over the room, insensible to its charm, intent on its monetary value.

  Quite suddenly Don Fabrizio felt a loathing for him; to the rise of this man and a hundred others like him, to their obscure intrigues and their tenacious greed and avarice, was due the sense of death looming darkly over these palaces; it was due to him and his colleagues, to their rancour and sense of inferiority, their incapacity for putting out blooms, that the black clothes of the men dancing reminded Don Fabrizio of crows veering to and fro above lost valleys in search of putrid prey. He felt like giving a sharp reply and telling him to get out of his way. But he couldn’t; the man was a guest, he was the father of that dear girl Angelica; and maybe, too, he was just as unhappy as others.

  “Fine, Don Calogero, fine. But our young couple’s the finest of all.” Tancredi and Angelica were passing in front of them at that moment, his gloved right hand on her waist, their outspread arms interlaced, their eyes gazing into each other’s. The black of his tail-coat, the pink of her interweaving dress, looked like some unusual jewel. They were the most moving sight there, two young people in love dancing together, blind to each other’s defects, deaf to the warnings of fate, deluding themselves that the whole course of their lives would be as smooth as the ballroom floor, unknowing actors set to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director who had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script. Neither was good, each self-interested, turgid with secret aims; yet there was something sweet and touching about them both; those murky but ingenuous ambitions of theirs were obliterated by the words of jesting tenderness he was murmuring in her ear, by the scent of her hair, by the mutual clasp of those bodies destined to die.

  The two young people drew away, other couples passed, less handsome, just as moving, each submerged in their passing blindness. Don Fabrizio felt his heart thaw; his disgust gave way to compassion for all these ephemeral beings out to enjoy the tiny ray of light granted them between two shades, before the cradle, after the last spasms. How could one inveigh against those sure to die? It would be as vile as those fish-vendors insulting the condemned in the Piazza del Mercato sixty years before. Even the female monkeys on the poufs, even those old boobies of friends were poor wretches, condemned and touching as the cattle lowing through city streets at night on their way to the slaughter-house; to the ears of each of them would one day come that tinkle he had heard three hours before behind San Domenico. Nothing could be decently hated except eternity.

  And then these people filling the rooms, all these faded women, all these stupid men, these two vainglorious sexes were part of his blood, part of himself; only they could really understand him, only with them could he be at ease. “I may be more intelligent, I’m certainly more cultivated than they are, but I come from the same stock, with them I must make common cause.”

  He noticed Don Calogero talking to Giovanni Finale about a possible rise in the price of cheese and how in the hope of this beatific event his eyes had gone liquid and gentle. Don Fabrizio could slip away without remorse.

  Till that moment accumulated irritation had given him energy; now with relaxed nerves weariness overcame him; it was already two o’clock. He looked round for a place where he could sit down quietly, far from men, beloved and brothers, all right in their way, but always tiresome. He soon found it; the library, small, silent, lit and empty. He sat down, then got up to drink some water which he found on a side table. “Only water is really good,” he thought like a true Sicilian; and did not dry the drops left on his lips. He sat down again; he liked the library and soon felt at his ease there; it did not oppose his taking possession for it was impersonal as are rooms little used; Ponteleone was not a type to waste his time in there. He began looking at a picture opposite him, a good copy of Greuze’s Death of the Just Man; the old man was expiring on his bed amid welters of clean linen, surrounded by afflicted grandsons, and by granddaughters raising arms towards the ceiling. The girls were pretty, and provoking: and the disorder of their clothes suggested sex more than sorrow; they, it was obvious at once, were the real subject of the picture. Even so Don Fabrizio was surprised for a second at Diego always having this melancholy scene before his eyes; then he reassured himself by thinking that the other probably entered that room only once or twice a year.

  Immediately afterwards he asked himself if his own death would be like that; probably it would, apart from the sheets being less impeccable (he knew that the sheets of those in their death agony are always dirty with spittle, ejections, medicine marks . . .) and it was to be hoped that Concetta, Carolina and his other women folk would be more decently clad. But the same, more or less. As always the thought of his own death calmed him as much as that of others disturbed him: was it perhaps because, when all was said and done, his own death would in the first place mean that of the whole world?

  From this he went on to think that he must see to repairing the tomb of his ancestors at the Capuchins. A pity corpses could no longer be hung up by the neck in the crypt and watched slowly mummifying; he’d look magnificent on that wall, tall and big as he was, terrifying girls by the set smile on his parchment face, by his long, long white nankeen trousers. But no, they’d dress him up in party clothes, perhaps in this very evening coat he was wearing now. . . .

  The door opened. “Nuncle, you’re looking wonderful this evening. Black suits you perfectly. But what are you looking at? Are you paying court to death?”

  Tancredi was arm in arm with Angelica; both of them were still under the sensual influence of the dance, and were tired. Angelica sat down and asked Tancredi for a handkerchief to mop her brow; Don Fabrizio gave her his. The two young people looked at the picture with complete lack of interest. For both of them death was purely an intellectual concept, a facet of knowledge as it were and no more, not an experience which pierced the marrow of their bones. Death, oh, yes, it existed of course, but was something that happened to others. The thought occurred to Don Fabrizio that it was inner ignorance of this supreme consolation which makes the young feel sorrows much more sharply than the old; the latter are nearer the safety exit.

  “Prince,” said Angelica, “we’d heard you were here; we came to have a little rest, but also to ask you something. I hope you won’t refuse it.” Her eyes were full of sly laughter, her hand was resting on Don Fabrizio’s sleeve. “I wanted to ask you to dance the next mazurka with me. Do say yes, now, don’t be naughty; we all know you used to be a great dancer.” The Prince was very pleased and felt suddenly quite spry. The Capuchins’ crypt indeed! His hairy cheeks quivered with pleasure. The idea of the mazurka rather alarmed him, though; that military dance, all heel-banging and turns, was not for his joints. To kneel before Angelica would be a pleasure, but what if he found it difficult to get up afterwards?

  “Thank you, my dear girl: you’re making me feel young again. I’ll be happy to obey you; but not the mazurka; grant me the first waltz.”

  “You see, Tancredi, how good Nuncle is? No nonsense about him, like you. You know, Prince, he didn’t want me to ask you; he’s jealous.”

  Tancredi laughed. “When one has such a smart good-looking uncle one’s quite right to be jealous. Anyway this time I won’t oppose it.” They all three smiled, and Don Fabrizio could not make out if they had thought up this suggestion to please him or to mock him. It didn’t matter; they were dear creatures all the same.

  As she was going out Angelica slid a finger over the cover of an arm-chair. “Pretty, these; a good colour, but those at your home, Prince . . .” The ship was taking its usual course.

  Tancredi intervened. “That’s enough, Angelica. We both love you quite apart from your knowledge of furniture. Leave the chairs alone and come and dance.”

  As he was going into the ballroom, Don Fabrizio saw that Sedàra was still talking to Giovanni Finale. He heard market terms; t
hey were comparing the prices of wheat. The Prince foresaw an invitation soon to Margarossa, the estate which was ruining Finale by his agricultural experiments.

  Angelica and Don Fabrizio made a magnificent couple. The Prince’s huge feet moved with surprising delicacy and never were his partner’s satin slippers in danger of being grazed. His great paw held her waist with vigorous firmness, his chin leant on the black waves of her hair; from Angelica’s bust rose a delicate scent of bouquet à la Maréchale, and above all an aroma of young smooth skin. A phrase of Tumeo came back to him: “Her sheets must smell like paradise.” A crude, vulgar phrase, but accurate. Lucky Tancredi . . .

  She talked. Her natural vanity was as appeased as her tenacious ambition. “I’m so happy, Nuncle. Everyone’s been so kind, so sweet. Tancredi’s an angel; and you’re an angel, too. I owe all this to you, Nuncle; even Tancredi. For if you hadn’t agreed, I don’t know what would have happened.”

  “I’ve nothing to do with it, my dear; all this is due to yourself alone.”

  It was true; no Tancredi could ever have resisted that beauty united to that income. He would have married her whatever happened. A twinge crossed his heart: the thought of Concetta’s haughty yet defeated eyes. But that was a brief little pain; at every twirl a year fell from his shoulders; soon he felt back at the age of twenty, when in that very same ballroom he had danced with Stella before he knew disappointment, boredom and the rest. For a second, that night, death seemed to him once more “something that happens to others”.

  So absorbed was he in memories which dovetailed so well with his present feelings that he did not notice how all of a sudden he and Angelica were dancing alone. Instigated, perhaps, by Tancredi, the other couples had stopped and were watching; the two Ponteleone were there too, looking touched; they were old and perhaps understood. Stella was old too, but she was gazing on dully from beneath a doorway. When the band stopped there was nearly a round of applause; but Fabrizio had too leonine an air for anyone to risk such an impropriety.

  When the waltz was over Angelica suggested that Don Fabrizio should come and take supper at her and Tancredi’s table. He would have much liked to, but at that moment the memories of his own youth were too vivid for him not to realise how tiresome supper with an old uncle would have been then, with Stella only a yard or so away. Lovers want to be alone, or at least with strangers; never with older people, worst of all with relations.

  “Thank you, Angelica, but I’m not hungry. I’ll take something standing up. Go with Tancredi, don’t worry about me.”

  He waited a moment for the two young people to draw away, then he too went into the supper room. A long, narrow table was set at the end, lit by the famous twelve silver-gilt candelabra given to Diego’s grandfather by the Court of Madrid at the end of his embassy in Spain; on tall pedestals of gleaming metal six alternating figures of athletes and women held above their heads silver-gilt shafts crowned by the flames of twelve candles. The sculptor had hinted skilfully at the serene ease of the men and the graceful effort of the girls in upholding the disproportionate weight. Twelve pieces of first-class quality . . . “I wonder how much land they’re worth,” that wretch Sedàra would have said. Don Fabrizio remembered Diego showing him one day the cases for each of those candles, vast green morocco affairs with the tripartite shield of Ponteleone and the entwined initials of the donors stamped on the sides in gold.

  Beneath the candelabra, beneath the five tiers bearing towards the distant ceiling pyramids of home-made cakes that were never touched, spread the monotonous opulence of buffets at big balls: coraline lobsters boiled alive, waxy chaud-froids of veal, steely-lined fish immersed in sauce, turkeys gilded by the ovens’ heat, rosy foie-gras under gelatine armour, boned woodcocks reclining on amber toast decorated with their own chopped guts, dawn-tinted galantine, and a dozen other cruel, coloured delights. At the end of the table two monumental silver tureens held limpid soup, the tint of burnt amber. To prepare this supper the cooks must have sweated away in the vast kitchens from the night before.

  “Dear me, what an amount! Donna Margherita knows how to do things well. But it’s not for me!”

  Scorning the table of drinks, glittering with crystal and silver on the right, he moved left towards that of the sweet-meats. Huge sorrel babas, Mont Blancs snowy with whipped cream, cakes speckled with white almonds and green pistachio nuts, hillocks of chocolate-covered pastry, brown and rich as the top soil of the Catanian plain from which, in fact, through many a twist and turn they had come, pink ices, champagne ices, coffee ices, all parfaits and falling apart with a squelch at a knife cleft; a melody in major of crystallised cherries, acid notes of yellow pineapple, and green pistachio paste of those cakes called “Triumphs of Gluttony”, shameless “Virgins’ cakes” shaped like breasts. Don Fabrizio asked for some of these, and as he held them on his plate looked like a profane caricature of Saint Agatha claiming her own sliced-off breasts. “Why ever didn’t the Holy Office forbid these puddings when it had the chance? ‘Triumphs of Gluttony’ indeed! (Gluttony, mortal sin!) Saint Agatha’s sliced-off teats sold by convents, devoured at dances! Well! Well!”

  Round the room smelling of vanilla, wine, chypre, wandered Don Fabrizio looking for a place. Tancredi saw him from his table and clapped a hand on a chair to show there was room there; next to him was Angelica, peering at the back of a silver dish to see if her hair was in place. Don Fabrizio shook his head in smiling refusal. He went on looking; from a table he heard the satisfied voice of Pallavicino, “The most moving moment of my life . . .” By him was an empty place. What a bore the man was! Wouldn’t it be better, after all, to listen to Angelica’s refreshing if forced cordiality, to Tancredi’s dry wit? No: better bore oneself than bore others.

  With a word of apology he sat down next to the Colonel, who got up as he arrived—a small sop to Salina pride. As he savoured the subtle mixture of blancmange, pistachio and cinnamon in the puddings he had chosen, Don Fabrizio began conversing with Pallavicino and realised that, beyond those sugary phrases meant perhaps only for ladies, the man was anything but a fool. He too was a “gentleman”, and the fundamental scepticism of his class, smothered usually by the impetuous Bersaglieri flames on his lapel, came peering out again now that he found himself in surroundings like those into which he was born, away from the inevitable rhetoric of barracks and admirers.

  “Now the Left wants to string me up because last August I ordered my men to open fire on the General. But can you tell me, Prince, what else I could have done in view of the written orders I was carrying? I must confess though, when at Aspromonte I found myself facing that mob of a few hundred ragamuffins, some looking like out-and-out fanatics, others scowling like professional agitators, I was pleased my instructions coincided so with my own feelings. If I hadn’t given orders to fire those people would have hacked us to pieces, my soldiers and me; that wouldn’t have mattered much, of course. But in the end it would have meant French and Austrian intervention, and that would have had endless repercussions, including the collapse of this Italian Kingdom of ours which has got itself put together in some miraculous way, quite how I can’t for the life of me understand. And I can tell you another thing in confidence: those musket shots of ours were a particular help to . . . Garibaldi himself! They freed him from the rabble hanging round him, all those creatures like Zambianchi who were making use of him for ends that may have been generous but were certainly inept, with the Tuileries or Palazzo Farnese behind them. Very different types those were to the ones who landed with him at Marsala, who did believe, the best of them, that Italy could be created by repeating 1848. And he knows that, the General does, for when I was making him the genuflection that has caused so much comment, he shook my hand with a warmth that must surely be unusual towards a man who’s just fired a bullet into one’s foot a few minutes before. And d’you know what he said to me in a low voice, he who was the one really decent person on the whole wretched mountainside? ‘Thank you, Colonel.’ Thank you f
or what, I ask you? For laming him for life? Obviously not; but for having brought home to him so clearly the bluster, the cowardice, worse maybe, of those followers of his.”

  “Forgive me saying so, Colonel, but don’t you think all the hand-kissing, cap-doffing and compliments went a little far?”

  “No, frankly. For they were all genuine acts of respect. You should have seen him, that poor great man, stretched out under a chestnut tree, suffering in body and still more in mind. A sad sight! He showed himself plainly as what he’s always been, a child, in spite of beard and wrinkles, a simple adventurous little boy; it was difficult for me not to feel moved at having had to shoot at him. Why shouldn’t I, anyway? Usually I kiss only ladies’ hands; on that occasion, Prince, I was kissing a hand for the salvation of the Kingdom, also a lady to whom we soldiers owe homage.”

  A footman passed; Don Fabrizio told him to bring a slice of Mont Blanc and a glass of champagne. “And you, Colonel, aren’t you taking anything?”

  “Nothing to eat, thank you. Perhaps I’ll drink a glass of champagne too.”

  Then he went on, obviously unable to take his mind off a memory which, consisting as it did of a little shooting and a lot of skill, was exactly the sort that attracts men of his type. “The General’s men, as my Bersaglieri disarmed them, were cursing away, and d’you know who at? At him, the only one of them who’d actually paid in his own person. Foul, but natural really; they saw that childlike yet large personality, the only one capable of covering up their obscure intrigues, slipping out of their grasp. And if my own courtesies were superfluous, I’d be pleased even so at having done them; we in Italy can never go too far with sentiment and hand-kissing; they’re the most effective political arguments we have.”