The Revolution of the Moon
Page 21
At three o’clock the casket with the viceroy’s body was loaded onto a wheeled platform pulled by four horses, escorted by a platoon of lancers, and hoisted aboard the ship.
At five o’clock donna Eleonora arrived in a carriage, alone. The carriage with her four chambermaids followed behind.
The ship’s captain welcomed her aboard and led her to the cabin normally reserved for the Admiral.
Then the city Senate, the Holy Royal Council, and other high dignitaries arrived.
Among the latter was the court physician, who seemed merely touched, and not even so much.
Donna Eleonora came out on deck.
Such a cry rose up from the crowd that the Grand Captain’s words of official farewell became incomprehensible.
From where the populace stood, crammed together and piling on top of one another, came an unending stream of goodbyes, farewells, thanks, and blessings, accompanied by an endless waving of handkerchiefs, dishcloths, rags, and shirts.
Donna Eleonora waved her hand in reply.
Then the sailors began to raise the moorings.
All at once a great silence fell.
And amidst the silence, the voice of Peppi Gangitano, a poet of the streets and taverns, rose up strong, and sang the following:
To circle the earth in its entirety,
the moon takes twenty-eight days.
Women know this, as does the sea,
for with the moon they’re always in phase.
Your reign lasted one lunar circuit,
tho’ it turned the night bright as day;
your laws of goodness brought a surfeit,
and did some of our suffering allay.
And now that your effort is ended,
Lady Leonore, look into our heart,
and deep therein you’ll find a splendid
little moon, yourself, reigning apart.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
All but one of the chronicles of the Spanish Viceroys of Sicily, when they come to the year 1677, write without fail that the Viceroy don Angel de Guzmán died in Palermo that year and was succeeded by Cardinal Luis Ferdinando de Portocarrero.
In reality, however, they all make inexplicably—or all too explicably—a grave error of omission.
What they do not say is that between the death of don Angel and the arrival of Cardinal Portocarrero, Sicily was governed by a woman, even if only for twenty-seven days.
As he was dying, don Angel had left a written testament stipulating that he wanted his own widow, doña Eleonora di Mora, to succeed him. The will was ambiguous, in the sense that it didn’t specify whether his widow should be appointed Viceroy pro tempore—that is, pending the designation of a new viceroy—or should remain such for so long as it pleased His Majesty. Whatever the case, the final decision was inescapably up to the King.
It should be added that this wasn’t the first time that a viceroy, on his deathbed, named a relative as his successor. In 1627, Viceroy Antonio Pimentel, marquis of Tavora, appointed his son, eliciting a reaction from Archbishop Doria of Palermo, who had aspired to the same post.
And likewise in 1677, the bishop of Palermo aspired to become viceroy.
However, the Holy Royal Council, which included the bishop of Palermo, had no choice but to submit to the deceased’s last will and testament, and thus donna Eleonora became viceroy, the only woman in the world at the time to rise to so high a political and adminsitrative office.
* * *
I came across the subject when reading an important work by Francesco Paolo Castiglione, his Dizionario delle figure, delle istituzioni e dei constumi della Sicilia storica (Palermo, Sellerio, 2010).
The author, however, devotes only a few lines to the story of donna Eleonora, scattered in a few of the different entries that make up the volume.
A few rare references can also be found in the third volume of the Storia cronologica dei Viceré, by G. E. Di Blasi, published in 1975 by the Regione Siciliana. This work is the one exception I mentioned at the start of this note.
Di Blasi dwells briefly on the removal of donna Eleonora from office because of the simple fact of her being a woman and, as such, unable to assume the authority of the born Legate of the Pope, a title inseparable from that of Viceroy. The person who’d raised the question was the bishop of Palermo, who’d been excluded from the Holy Royal Council by Viceroy donna Eleonora and claimed that she persecuted him.
There wasn’t much to go on, in other words, but it was enough to glean the image of an extraordinary woman who was able to earn a great deal of respect for what she did in her very brief period governing Sicily.
Hers were definitely the lowering of the price of bread and the creation of a Magistrate of Commerce bringing together the seventy-two guilds of Palermo.
As for the measures she took to assist women, it should be stated that she put the Conservatorio for Endangered Virgins and the refuge for old prostitutes back in running order, as both had been abandoned for lack of funds, whereas the so-called Royal Dowry and the Conservatorio for Reformed Magdalens were entirely of her own creation.
Also hers was the reduction of offspring required to receive the benefits set aside for “burdened fathers” (patri onusti).
Since I was narrating a novel, I took a good number of liberties, but I won’t bother to enumerate them. But I will reveal two minor ones.
The first is that donna Eleonora could not have brandished the scarecrow of Royal Visitor don Francisco Peyró at the time, because Peyró was already dead by then. He remained a legend for having sent to prison one of the highest state functionaries, Harbormaster Federico Abbatellis, count of Cammarata, and with him the Grand Treasurer of the Realm, the Secretary, and two high prelates, for embezzlement . . . He was ultimately stabbed to death near Viterbo on his way back to Spain. On his deathbed, Federico Abbatellis confessed to having sent the assassin himself.
The second: after receiving the letter relieving her of her duties, donna Eleonora immediately handed the reins over to the Grand Captain of Justice but remained for a while in Palermo, to the point that Cardinal Portocarrero was unable to move into the viceregal palace right away because it was still occupied. So he took the trouble of sending a reverential message to donna Eleonora, in which he wrote that she could remain there for as long as she liked, because he had found temporary lodgings in the bishop’s palace, which fortunately, at the time, had no occupant.
My endless thanks also go to Valentina Alferj, for her invaluable collaboration in revising the text.
A.C.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andrea Camilleri is widely considered to be one of the greatest living Italian writers. His Montalbano crime series, each installment of which is a bestseller in Italy, is published in America by Penguin Random House. Several books in the series have been New York Times bestsellers. His literary honors include the Nino Martoglio International Book Award. Born in Sicily, Camilleri currently lives in Rome.