He drank the wine brought him, but that seemed to increase his bitterness even more. “Have you been on the mainland since the Kingdom was founded? You’re lucky. It’s not a pretty sight. Never have we been so disunited as since we’ve been reunited. Turin doesn’t want to cease being a capital. Milan finds our administration inferior to the Austrians’, Florence is afraid the works of art there will be carried off, Naples is moaning about the industries she’s lost and here, here in Sicily, some huge irrational disaster is growing up . . . For the moment, due partly to your humble servant, no one mentions red shirts any more; but they’ll be back again. When they’ve vanished, others of different colours will come; and then red ones once again. And how will it end? There’s Italy’s Lucky Star, they say. But you know better than me, Prince, that even fixed stars are so only in appearance.” Perhaps he was a little tipsy, making such prophecies. But at such disquieting prospects Don Fabrizio felt his heart contract.
The ball went on for a long time still, until six in the morning; all were exhausted and wishing they had been in bed for at least three hours; but to leave early was like proclaiming the party a failure and offending the host and hostess who had taken such a lot of trouble, poor dears.
The ladies’ faces were livid, their dresses crushed, their breaths heavy. “Maria! How tired I am! Maria! How sleepy!” Above their disordered cravats the faces of the men were yellow and lined, their mouths stained with bitter saliva. Their visits to a disordered little room near the band alcove became more frequent; in it were disposed a row of twenty vast vats; by that time nearly all were brimful, some spilling over. Sensing that the dance was nearing its end, the sleepy servants were no longer changing the candles in chandeliers, and the short stubs diffused a different, smoky, ill-omened light. In the empty supper room were only dirty plates, glasses with dregs of wine which the servants, glancing around, would hurriedly drain; through the cracks in the shutters filtered a plebeian light of dawn.
The party was crumbling away and around Donna Margherita there was already a group saying good-bye. “Heavenly! A dream! Like the old days!” Tancredi was hard put to wake Don Calogero who, with head flung back, had gone off to sleep on an arm-chair apart; his trousers were rucked up to his knees and above his silken socks showed the ends of his drawers, a most rustic sight. Even Colonel Pallavicino had circles under his eyes, declaring, though, to whoever wished to listen, that he was not going home and would move straight from Palazzo Ponteleone to his headquarters; such in fact was the iron tradition followed by officers invited to a ball.
When the family had settled into its carriage (the dew had made the cushions damp) Don Fabrizio said that he would walk home; a little fresh air would do him good, he had a slight headache. The truth is that he wanted to draw a little comfort from gazing at the stars. There were still one or two up there, at the zenith. As always, seeing them revived him; they were distant, they were omnipotent and at the same time they were docile to his calculations; just the contrary to humans, always too near, so weak and yet so quarrelsome.
There was already a little movement in the streets, a cart or two with rubbish heaped four times the height of the tiny grey donkey dragging it along. A long open wagon came by stacked with bulls killed shortly before at the slaughter-house, already quartered and exhibiting their intimate mechanism with the shamelessness of death. At intervals a big thick red drop fell on to the paving-stones.
At the cross-roads he glimpsed the sky to the east, above the sea. There was Venus, wrapped in her turban of autumn mist. She was always faithful, always awaiting a Don Fabrizio on his early morning outings, at Donnafugata before a shoot, now after a ball.
Don Fabrizio sighed. When would she decide to give him an appointment less ephemeral, far from stumps and blood, in her own region of perennial certitude?
VII
DEATH OF A PRINCE
* * *
JULY, 1883
DON FABRIZIO HAD always known that sensation. For a dozen years or so he had been feeling as if the vital fluid, the faculty of existing, life itself in fact and perhaps even the will to go on living, were ebbing out of him slowly but steadily, as grains of sand cluster and then line up one by one, unhurried, unceasing, before the narrow neck of an hour-glass. In some moments of intense activity or concentration this sense of continual loss would vanish, to reappear impassively in brief instants of silence or introspection; just as a constant buzzing in the ears or ticking of a pendulum superimpose themselves when all else is silent, assuring us of always being there, watchful, even when we do not hear them.
With the slightest effort of attention he used to notice at all other times too, the rustling of the grains of sand as they slid lightly away, the instants of time escaping from his mind and leaving him for ever. But this sensation was not, at first, linked to any physical discomfort. On the contrary this imperceptible loss of vitality was itself the proof, the condition so to say, of a sense of living; and for him, accustomed to scrutinising limitless outer space and to probing vast inner abysses, the sensation was in no way disagreeable; this continuous whittling away of his personality seemed linked to a vague presage of the rebuilding elsewhere of a personality (thanks be to God) less conscious and yet broader. Those tiny grains of sand were not lost; they were vanishing, but accumulating elsewhere to cement some more lasting pile. Though “pile”, he had reflected, was not the exact word, for it suggested weight; nor was “grain of sand” either for that matter. They were more like the tiny particles of watery vapour exhaled from a narrow pond, mounting then into the sky to great clouds, light and free.
Sometimes he was surprised that the vital reservoir could still contain anything at all after all those years of loss. “Not even were it big as a Pyramid . . .” On other occasions, more frequent, he had felt a kind of pride at being the only one to notice this continual escape, while no one around him seemed to sense it in the same way; and this had made him feel a certain contempt for others, as an old soldier despises a conscript who deludes himself that sizzling bullets are just harmless flies. Such things are never confessed, no one knows why, but left for others to sense; and no one around him had ever sensed them at all, none of his daughters with their dreams of a world beyond the tomb identical with this life, all complete with judges, cooks and convents; not even Stella who, though devoured by the canker of diabetes, had still clung pitiably to this vale of tears.
Perhaps only Tancredi had understood for an instant, when he had said with that subdued irony of his, “You, Nuncle, are courting death.” Now the courtship was ended; the lovely lady had said a definite “yes” to an elopement, to a reserved compartment on the train.
For this was different now, quite different. Sitting in an armchair, his long legs wrapped in a blanket, on the balcony of the Hotel Trinacria, he felt life flowing from him in great pressing waves with a spiritual roar like that of the Rhine Falls. It was noon on a Monday at the end of July, and away in front of him spread the sea of Palermo, compact, oily, inert, improbably motionless, crouching like a dog trying to make itself invisible at its master’s threats; but up there the static perpendicular sun was straddling it and lashing at it pitilessly. The silence was absolute. Under the high, high light Don Fabrizio heard no other sound but that inner one of the life gushing from him.
He had arrived that morning, a few hours before, from Naples, where he had gone to consult a specialist, Professor Sémmola. Accompanied by his forty-year-old daughter, Concetta, and his grandson Fabrizietto, he had had a dreary journey, slow as a funeral procession. The bustle of the port of departure and that of arrival at Naples, the acrid smell of the cabin, the incessant clamour of that paranoiac city, had exasperated him with the querulous exasperation which tires and prostrates the very weak while arousing an equivalent exasperation in good folk with years of life ahead. He had insisted on returning by land; a sudden decision which the doctor had tried to oppose: but he had been adamant, and so overwhelming was the shadow of his prestige still t
hat he had had his way.
The result was that he had been forced to spend thirty-six hours cooped up in a scorching hot box, suffocated by the smoke of tunnels repetitive as feverish dreams, blinded by the sun in open patches stark as sad realities, humiliated by the innumerable squalid services he had to ask of his alarmed grandson. They crossed evil-looking landscapes, accursed mountain ranges, torpid malarial plains, those landscapes of Calabria and Basilicata which seemed barbarous to him while they were actually just like those of Sicily. The railway line had not yet been completed; in its last tract near Reggio it made a wide detour through Metaponto across lunar deserts called sarcastically by the athletic and voluptuous names of Croton and Cybaris. Then, at Messina, after the deceitful smile of the Straits had been given a lie by the parched slopes of Cape Pelorus, there was another detour, long and cruel as legal arrears. They had gone down to Catania, clambered up again towards Castro Giovanni; the locomotive, as it panted up those fabulous slopes, seemed about to die like an over-forced horse; then after a noisy descent they reached Palermo. On the arrival platform were the usual masks of family faces with painted smiles of pleasure at the journey’s happy outcome. It was in fact from the would-be consoling smiles of those awaiting him at the station, from their pretence—a bad pretence—at an air of gaiety, that there suddenly came home to him what had been the real diagnosis of Sémmola, who to him had spoken only reassuring phrases; and it was then, after getting down from the train, as he was embracing his daughter-in-law buried in widow’s weeds, his children showing their teeth in smiles, Tancredi with anxious eyes, Angelica with her silken bodice over mature breasts, it was then that he heard the crash of the cascade.
Probably he fainted, for he did not remember how he had reached the carriage; he found himself lying in it with his legs contracted, only Tancredi with him. The carriage had not yet moved, and from outside came voices of his family in confabulation. “It’s nothing.” “The journey was too long.” “Any of us might faint in this heat.” “It would be too tiring for him to go up to the villa.” He was perfectly lucid again now: he noticed a serious conversation going on between Concetta and Francesco Paolo, Tancredi’s elegance, his brown and beige check suit, his brown bowler; and he noticed too how for once his nephew’s smile was not mocking but touched with sad affection; from this he got the bitter-sweet sensation that his nephew loved him and also knew him to be done for, since that perpetual irony had been driven off by tenderness. The carriage moved off and turned to the right. “But where are we going, Tancredi?” His own voice surprised him. It seemed to echo that inner booming.
“Nuncle, we’re going to the Hotel Trinacria; you’re tired and the villa’s a long way; you can have a night’s rest and get home to-morrow. Don’t you think so?”
“Then let’s go to our place by the sea, that’s even nearer.”
But it wasn’t possible; the house was not in order, as he knew well; it was only used for occasional luncheons by the sea; there wasn’t even a bed in it.
“You’ll be better at the hotel, Uncle; you’ll have every comfort there.” They were treating him like a new-born baby; and he had just about a new-born baby’s strength.
The first comfort he found at the hotel was a doctor, called in a hurry, perhaps during his black-out. But it was not the one who always treated him, Doctor Cataliotti, with big white cravat under smiling face and rich gold spectacles; this was a poor devil, doctor to the slum quarter around, impotent witness of a thousand wretched death agonies. Above a torn frock-coat stretched his long, haggard face stubbled with white hair, the disillusioned face of a famished intellectual; when he took a chainless watch from his pocket, the false gilt showed marks of verdigris. He too was a poor goat-skin flask worn through by the jostle of the mule path and scattering without realising its last drops of oil. He felt the pulse-beats, prescribed camphor drops, showed his decayed teeth in a smile meant to be reassuring and which was pitiable instead, and shuffled off.
The drops soon arrived from a chemist nearby; they did him good; he felt a little less weak, but the impetus of escaping time did not lessen.
Don Fabrizio looked at himself in the wardrobe mirror: recognised his own suit more than himself; very tall and emaciated, with sunken cheeks and three days’ growth of beard; he looked like one of those maniac Englishmen who amble round the vignettes in books by Jules Verne which he used to give Fabrizietto as Christmas presents. A Leopard in very bad trim. Why, he wondered, did God not want anyone to die with their own face on? For the same happens to us all: we all die with a mask on our features; even the young; even that blood-daubed soldier, even Paolo, when he’d been raised from the cobbles with taut crumpled features as passers-by rushed in the dust after his runaway horse. And if in him, an old man, the crash of escaping life was so powerful, what a tumult there must have been as the brimming reservoirs emptied in a second out of those poor young bodies.
An absurd rule of enforced camouflage—he would have liked to contravene it as much as he could; but he felt that he was unable, that to hold up a razor would have been like holding up his own desk, before. “Call a barber, will you?” he said to Francesco Paolo. But at once he thought, “No. It’s a rule of the game; hateful but formal. They’ll shave me afterwards.” And he said out loud, “It doesn’t matter; we’ll think about that later.” The idea of the utter abandon of his corpse, with a barber crouched over it, did not disturb him.
A waiter came in with a basin of warm water and a sponge, took off his coat and shirt and washed his face and hands, as one washes a child, as one washes the dead. Smuts from the day and a half’s train journey turned the water a funereal black. The low room was suffocating; the heat fomented smells, brought out the mustiness of ill-dusted plush; the ghosts of dozens of crushed cockroaches were manifested in a faint medicinal odour; by the night table tenacious memories of stale and varied urine overcast the room. He had the shutters opened; the hotel was in shadow, but a blinding light was reflected from the metallic sea; better, though, than that prison stink. He asked for an arm-chair to be taken on the balcony; leaning on someone’s arm he dragged himself out, and sat down after those few steps with the sensation of relief he used to feel once on sitting down after four hours of shooting in the mountains. “Tell everyone to leave me in peace; I feel better; I want to sleep.” He did feel sleepy; but he found that to give way to drowsiness now would be as absurd as eating a slice of cake immediately before a longed-for banquet. He smiled. “I’ve always been a wise gourmet.” And he sat there, immersed in that great outer silence, in that terrifying inner rumble.
He could turn his head to the left; beside Monte Pellegrino could be seen a cleft in the circle of hills and, beyond, two hillocks at whose feet lay his home. Unreachable to him as this was, it seemed very far away; he thought of his own observatory, of the telescopes now destined to years of dust; of poor Father Pirrone, who was dust too; of the paintings of his estates, of the monkeys on the hangings, of the big brass bed-stead in which his dear Stella had died; of all those things which now seemed to him humble however precious, just braided metal, woven threads and canvas corded with sap and earth, which he had kept alive and would shortly be plunged, through no fault of their own, into a limbo of abandon and oblivion. His heart tightened, he forgot his own agony thinking of the imminent end of those poor dear things. The inert row of houses behind him, the wall of hills, the sun-scourged distance, prevented him thinking clearly even of Donnafugata; it seemed like a house in a dream, no longer his; all he had of his own now was this exhausted body, those slate tiles under his feet, that surging of dark water towards the abyss. He was alone, a shipwrecked man adrift on a raft, prey of untameable currents.
There were his sons, of course. The only one who resembled him, Giovanni, was no longer here. Every couple of years he sent greetings from London; he had ceased dealing with coal and moved on to diamonds; just after Stella’s death a short letter had come addressed to her and soon after a little parcel with a bracelet.
Ah, yes. He too had “courted death”, in fact by leaving everything he had done his best to organise for himself as much of death as he could while actually going on living. But the others . . . There were his grandchildren, too, of course; Fabrizietto, youngest of the Salina, so handsome, so lively, so dear . . .
So odious. With his double dose of Màlvica blood, with his good-time instincts, with his tendency to middle-class smartness. It was useless to try and avoid the thought, but the last of the Salina was really he himself, this gaunt giant now dying on a hotel balcony. For the significance of a noble family lies entirely in its traditions, that is in its vital memories; and he was the last to have any unusual memories, anything different from those of other families. Fabrizietto would only have banal ones like his schoolfellows, of snacks, of spiteful little jokes against teachers, horses bought with an eye more to price than quality; and the meaning of his name would change more and more to empty pomp, embittered by the gad-fly thought that others could outdo him in outward show. He would go hunting for a rich marriage when that would have become a commonplace routine and no longer a predatory adventure like Tancredi’s. The tapestries of Donnafugata, the almond groves of Ragattisi, even, who knew, the fountain of Amphitrite, might suffer a grotesque metamorphosis from the age-old muted things they had been into pots of quickly-swallowed foie gras, or can-can girls transient as their own rouge. And he himself would be only a memory of a choleric old grandfather who had collapsed one July afternoon just in time to prevent the boy going off to Livorno for sea-bathing. He had said that the Salina would always remain the Salina. He had been wrong. The last Salina was himself. That fellow Garibaldi, that bearded Vulcan had won after all.
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