by Norman Lewis
‘Show me the paper,’ he said in Italian, and Ernestina took the marriage certificate from her handbag and gave it to him. He read it very slowly, his eyes moving from side to side as he followed the lines of print, halted by so many unfamiliar words before plodding on. He examined the stamp and the signatures, nodding in the end his stunned conviction. At his back Madame Corvaja, a bloodless smile carved in her face, had been turned to a pillar of salt.
‘Non è uno scherzo, Papa,’ Ernestina assured him, eyes sparkling with a kind of triumph. I began to understand how firmly she was in command of the situation, and how in some way this was for her a moment of victory in her relationship with her father.
Suddenly Ernesto shook his head — as if to free himself from a web clinging to his face. He straightened and smiled at me, a little wolfishly, I thought. What I was witnessing was a classic example of the stoic Sicilian reaction to irretrievable calamity, known in their enigmatic island as ‘swallowing the claws of the toad’. As if he had remembered an essential part of a religious ceremony, he next stepped forward a little stiffly, and took me into his embrace, stretching to his full height to squeeze his cheeks against mine and kiss the lobe of each ear. For a moment he rummaged through his stock of English for the proper words. ‘I will give you my blood,’ he then said.
Madame Corvaja, released from her spell, had rushed from the room and was now back with a maid, carrying a tray with champagne.
I moved on a temporary basis into the Corvajas’ house, being instantly and wholly accepted as a member of the family. The situation is a familiar Mediterranean one where, by the survival of an ancient custom, it is normal for a husband to live — often for some years — with his in-laws before setting up a separate household, although the reverse is less frequently encountered. The tensions inherent in such an arrangement in the Anglo-Saxon world are rarely present in such cases, and the English stereotype of the overbearing mother-in-law is absent. Almost overnight I was absorbed into the traditional Latin family. Being a Sicilian household this ‘Latin-ness’, whatever its advantages and disadvantages, was exaggerated, seeming to call upon the individual member to surrender a little of his separate identity in exchange for the solidarity and protection of the tightly-knit family group. Despite this highly traditional background, the senior Corvajas faced each new situation as it arose in an alien land with an extraordinary openness of mind, and whatever astonishment they may have felt when Ernestina announced to them that we should be occupying separate rooms, nothing of this showed in the quasi-oriental composure of their faces.
Neither of the senior Corvajas ever permitted themselves a criticism of me, except on the single occasion when, as we were about to visit a restaurant together, Ernesto suggested that I should smarten up my appearance. To this, as if inspired by an afterthought, he added, ‘ — and always strive to develop character.’
Rootlessness and isolation were prime factors in our being married. I was isolated and Ernestina was even more so, isolation in her case being largely a product of the excessive cosmopolitanism of her upbringing. The Corvajas were a family of Spanish origin who had settled in Sicily in the seventeenth century while it still remained attached to the Spanish Kingdom, and it was perhaps to retain some link with the ancestral country that Ernestina had been sent to complete her education in Spain. It had been first Sicily, then the United States, followed by Spain, France and England. Thus she had never lived long enough in any country to soak up the prejudices and adopt the standpoints by which a personality is to some extent defined. She, like her parents, was devoid of class-consciousness, religious belief, and patriotism. There was not even an anchorage for her in a true native tongue which, even for a polyglot, is the vehicle for thought, because she spoke English, Spanish, Italian and French with equal fluency, and I am sure that there were times when she was not sure which language she was speaking. She was in urgent need of a tradition, a sense of history, allegiances, attitudes and a firm point of view, and I was the last person to be of any assistance to her in the attainment of any of these things.
Imprisoned within the intensely parochial life of the outer suburbs, the working day surrendered to sales patter for yeast tablets and the fraudulent elixir, the glum pick-ups in Church Street, Enfield and Hilly Fields Park, the teeth-baring bonhomie of the saloon bar of the George and Dragon, and the Saturday night hop at the Oddfellows’ Hall, I had lifted up my eyes to the expansive horizons of the cosmopolitan world. But the situation in which I found myself was not quite that. In their way — and with good reason, as I was to find — the Corvajas joined me in the search for escape, although we pursued always fugitive ends in markedly different ways.
There were four in the Corvaja family, including a teenage son, Eugene, who went to a London school, and was becoming rapidly and fairly painlessly Anglicized. How far this process had gone can be gauged from his reaction to a family ceremony which had taken place a few years before. A number of Ernesto’s friends had called at the house, and Eugene had been instructed to remove his trousers and climb on a table to permit his penis to be examined, to ritual cries of astonishment and delight. This would have been of no importance to a Sicilian boy steeped in the local tradition, but, infected as he was by this time with Anglo-Saxon prudery and reserve, it was an incident Eugene remembered with some embarrassment.
My mother-in-law, Maria, conducted the usual household tasks aided by a pair of young Welsh girls imported from some wretched mining village in Wales, who suffered the normal degree of exploitation that was the lot of so many of the daughters of that martyred country. What time that was left over from her severe and exacting surveillance of their work she would devote to the making of unsuitable shepherdesses’ dresses, or the reading of literary classics in several languages. The possession of a near-photographic memory — this she had passed on to her daughter — enabled her to read at great speed and to devour books at a rate of never less than one a day.
Ernesto might have been regarded by an outsider as the most interesting member of the family. His ancestor, Prince Corvaja, had bought his princedom (one of 147) from the Spanish crown for 2,000 scudi, and built the small but exquisite Corvaja Palace in Taormina, now a national monument. Some of the new princes and dukes who had had to scrape together the money to pay for their titles remained poor for the rest of their lives, others became some of the richest men in Europe. The Corvajas did well out of sulphur, scooped up by child slaves in the most fiendish of all mines, crawling through tunnels that were too narrow to admit an adult. These were the facts of history and his family’s past which Ernesto declined to discuss. Withdrawn in manner as he was, and dressed always as if attending at an important funeral, he was obsessed by an appearance of gaiety, with brilliance and light. The decorated gilt panels on the doors of his drawing room were his own work, and their Arabian motifs and geometric abstraction were repeated throughout the house. Having finished with the doors he began work on the ceilings, painting them with cheerful and indulgent scenes of fat-limbed putti bouncing on haloed clouds, his personal inspiration reinforced by Michelangelo’s oeuvre in the Sistine Chapel, of which he possessed an excellent set of hand-painted illustrations.
Strong light shone everywhere in the Corvajas’ house. They eschewed shadows and the dark. There was no unlit corner, no spookiness under the stairs, no heavily-draped curtains behind which an intruder could lurk. Every cupboard, when opened, was flooded with refulgence from high-powered lamps. Occasionally, when it seemed to Ernesto that a total of several thousand candlepower offered insufficient illumination, a spotlight of the kind used on a film set would be switched on as soon as a visitor appeared in the doorway. Sometimes Ernesto, described in his passport as a diamond dealer, would take a fine lawn handkerchief from his pocket in which, in professional style, he sometimes carried his diamonds. Placing a square of black cloth on the table immediately beneath the chandelier he would pour the diamonds from the handkerchief which, as they fell, made a faintly watery sou
nd, the hiss and crackle of a high, thin waterfall tumbling off a distant cliff. I had no evidence of his ever buying or selling a single diamond, but this was an operation from which he clearly derived much aesthetic satisfaction.
The central feature of life in the Corvaja household was the evening meal. By day the house was a quiet one. Ernesto was normally engaged in a struggle with problems of perspective in ceiling-painting in one of the upper rooms. Maria would be gulping down snatches of Stendhal in brief interludes from the vigilance maintained over the work of her Welsh drudges. Eugene was at school and Ernestina had just taken employment with the firm of Lever Brothers where she worked on the translation of confidential documents into a number of languages under security conditions resembling those of a military establishment.
In the evening the family came together for the dinner ritual, conducted in a scene of the greatest animation. In their contacts with outsiders the Corvajas were quiet and undemonstrative, and although I have no way of knowing that this was the case, it was my theory that they sought release from the restraints they imposed upon themselves each day in what may have been a traditional Sicilian way. Breakfast and lunch were regarded as unimportant, and consumed rapidly and in near silence, but the evening meal was elaborate and lengthy, eaten in the usual glare of lights, and to music — always excerpts from the operas of Verdi or Puccini, to which the elder Corvajas were passionately devoted — played on a first-rate gramophone turned up to an almost unendurable pitch.
Ernesto imported his own wine from Sicily, a lusty, full-bodied vintage with an alcoholic content causing it to be bracketed with sherry for the purpose of the payment of duty. The wine was imported in casks and siphoned with a rubber tube into innumerable bottles — a task which occupied many hours. By the time it was over, Ernesto’s normally cadaverous complexion was suffused by the vinous flush caused by unavoidable swallowing over a long period of tiny amounts of wine. Under this unsuspected intoxication his normal reserve dropped on one occasion, and I was astonished to hear him talking of Palermo of the far past, shaking his head at the folly of which the young of his day had been capable. One day he had been driving with a friend in the Parco della Favorita, and the coachman, boasting of his skill with the whip, had pointed to a cat by the roadside and said to them, ‘If I can kill it with a single blow, will you eat it?’ The bet was taken, and the coachman killed the cat, and Ernesto and his friend descended from the carriage and set about preparing the meal. Branches for firewood were taken from convenient bushes, someone was sent for a pot, for olive oil and tomato sauce, and the stew was prepared and eaten on the spot. ‘It was impossible to welsh on the bet,’ Ernesto said. ‘A man of honour cannot go back on his word.’
The park was a place where up-and-coming young males went to prove themselves, sometimes in a desperate fashion. Another acquaintance of Ernesto’s, seeking to ‘make his bones’, as the Sicilians put it, provoked an encounter with a prestigious rival, and received a knife thrust delivered with such practised skill that he was virtually disembowelled, without however the actual severance of an intestine (Ernesto, who may have been joking, said that such thrusts were practised on pigs or sheep). It was a moment, as the victor wiped his knife on his immaculate handkerchief, bowed smilingly and withdrew, which called for cool-headed action, and this the wounded piciotto took. Gathering his entrails with no signs of dismay, let alone panic, into his hat, he stopped a passing fiacre, got in, and had himself driven to hospital. In a couple of months he was out again and back in the park, settling to wait for weeks, months, if necessary years, for the opportunity to settle accounts. ‘He showed great presence of mind,’ Ernesto said.
After two or three glasses of Ernesto’s powerful wine an extraordinary change came over the members of the family. As if by agreement they began to argue with each other, arguments leading to quarrels of a violence I had never experienced before, with members of the family screaming to make themselves heard over the powerful operatic bellowing of Caruso or Tito Gobbi. Whenever this happened the terror-stricken cats shot under the table, and the fairly tame kestrel, equally startled, took off from the reproduction Donatello’s David on which it normally perched, to flap in a distraught fashion round the room before coming to rest again on David’s head upon which it would invariably release a copious dropping.
These nightly disputes arose over the most trivial causes, differences of opinion as to the highest building in New York, or the number of children given birth to by Queen Victoria. They were accompanied by terrible oaths in various languages, Eugene having recently been able to increase the repertoire of family invective by listing all the swear-words in English he had picked up in school.
Suddenly, at a moment when I felt sure that real violence, even tragedy was not to be averted, the storm was past, and reason and urbanity reigned again. Ernesto would settle himself, benign and contemplative, with a small brandy, Maria might pat her temples with eau de Cologne, while Eugene would avail himself of the moment of reconciliation to take off ‘Your Tiny Hand is Frozen’, and replace it inconspicuously with the new Duke Ellington.
The two most vociferous disputants were always Ernestina and her father, and despite the almost purely ritual character of these daily rows I began to suspect beneath the familiar histrionics the reality of a latent antagonism. It was some months before Ernestina admitted that so far as she was concerned this was the case.
The story was that shortly before being packed off to school in Spain, a nanny had been brought into the house to look after her brother and herself, a pretty girl about whom her mother had instantly had her doubts. Ostensibly the girl was the daughter of an old friend Ernesto wanted to help out, but, employing a private detective, Maria soon discovered that she had been Ernesto’s mistress for some time before he had conceived the daring but ill-starred plan for making her person more readily available by smuggling her into the family home. With extraordinary professional competence the detective had been able to discover Ernesto’s password by which he obtained access to his safe deposit in Chancery Lane, from which a number of letters were recovered full of amatory material of the most explicit character. What I was not told, but learned from a gossiping in-law much later, was that Maria waited for Ernesto just inside the front door when he returned home that evening and shot him at close range with the ridiculous little .22 pearl-handled revolver she still carried in her handbag when I first knew her. The occasion was dramatic but the damage slight, for the bullet, aimed at the heart, stuck in the gristle under the collar bone. Ernesto took a taxi round to the doctor who readily extracted the slug, and was back within the hour, by which time Maria had doused the nanny with the contents of a slop-pail kept ready for the moment and thrown her into the street. A fulsome reconciliation followed, and life at Gordon Street went on as if nothing had happened.
It remained a mystery to me that, while the relationship between husband and wife had settled to an obviously affectionate one, Ernestina should have decided to take up a cause her mother no longer had the slightest desire to defend. I could only suspect the existence of obscure psychological factors of which Ernestina herself may have been unconscious. Up to this time the relationship between father and daughter seemed to have been an exceptionally close one. Ernesto had made sure that his eldest child should have — as he saw it — the best of everything, while up to and through her adolescence she made it quite clear that he had occupied the centre of the stage of her life. Each saw the other as a paragon. Everyone complimented Ernesto on the possession of a beautiful and talented daughter, on her great store of precocious knowledge, her charm and her wit. She in turn constantly witnessed the deference shown her father by visitors to the house from Europe and the United States, how they bowed themselves into his presence and, if from Sicily, frequently pressed his hand to their lips. Now, suddenly, womanhood had taken her unawares, demoting an immortal father to common humanity, exposing his innumerable fallibilities, and she was guilt-ridden and resentful that her
love for him should have failed. So this sordid little passage salvaged from the past had come to her aid. It was impossible to say to him, ‘I no longer love you.’ Far easier, ‘You betrayed my mother.’
The watershed, as it seemed to me, in the relationship between my father-in-law and my wife, was reached as a result of the episode of the emerald ring, although this too, I suspected, was no more than an excuse to open up a campaign on a new front, when the quarrel over the fake nanny had begun to flag.
Ernesto had bought his daughter several valuable necklaces, a diamond-encrusted wristwatch, a spectacular diamond and sapphire ring, and for her seventeenth birthday he had made the journey to Santander to present her with a plain gold ring in which was set a large emerald.
She was proud of the journey, undertaken with some effort at that time, as well as the ring itself. ‘He was three days on the train,’ she said. ‘All that way to be with me on my birthday. I was the envy of the whole school. The diamond ring is more valuable, but I don’t like it so much.’ She would slip off the emerald ring, twist it under a lamp and laugh with pleasure, or hold it against a background of a silk scarf, or her dress, so that the emerald tempered the colour of the silk with its secret viridescent flash. Spanish was the language reserved for the praise of the emerald: ‘Ay qué bonito! Mira los colores. Es exquisita. No te parece?’
But one day Ernestina’s suspicions about the ring seem to have been aroused. She took it to a Bond Street jeweller, under the pretence of offering it for sale, and he put a glass in his eye, examined the back of the stone, shook his head and handed it back. Briefly he told her that the emerald was a ‘chip’ cut from a larger gem and that, possessing a flat base, was of far less value than a perfect stone shaped as a rhombohedron.