The Viceroys

by Federico De Roberto

  His cousin, delighted at having a finger in the pie, began on the same subject with the princess.

  ‘Can it really be true?…’ exclaimed Donna Margherita, who had noticed nothing. ‘Poor Matilde!… She doesn’t deserve such treatment!’

  ‘That’s what I say! With such a charming wife I can’t understand why Raimondo looks for distractions elsewhere … But who can understand men? I’m really sorry, I am indeed! Two families disturbed while they could have been together in peace and harmony! Anyway, my cousin should be persuaded to leave Donna Isabella in peace. As for me, I’d have no difficulty in saying so to his face; I’m not afraid of his eating me up! But you know how these things are. We’re cousins, it’s true. But I’d not like it said that I was trying to put my nose into other people’s business and stirring up strife! While God alone knows how sorry I am!’

  The princess nodded, sincerely sorry, all the more as she could do nothing. Had her husband not warned her to mind her own business, under pain of his displeasure?… And now Cousin Graziella began to manœuvre around Matilde herself, having decided to say everything to her. Was she not the wife? Who more than she had a right to talk to Raimondo and an interest in detaching him from that intrigue?… One evening she happened to meet her alone in the Red Drawing-room and began to ask news of the baron, of her sister’s marriage, and of the children’s health.

  ‘Will they be coming here, or will you go and join them?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ replied Matilde in embarrassment. ‘I don’t know what Raimondo will decide.’

  ‘I understand!’ replied Graziella with a sigh. ‘Men want to do whatever they get into their heads … One thing today, another tomorrow … You, of course, would like to go to your family home with your father. It’s all very well, a husband’s family, yes, yes, but one never forgets one’s own! Cousin Raimondo should also decide to leave here … it would be much better … for him too …’

  Matilde bowed her head and avoided looking at her, pressing her hands together. Graziella went on:

  ‘For him too … He’d get away from temptations … and have only his family to think of!… You’re right to be restless, you poor thing, I do understand … You don’t deserve to be treated like this … But you ought to tell him so!… You’re his wife after all, and mother of his children … You can talk out … Make him stop it once and for all.’

  The blood had rushed to Matilde’s forehead, and her eyes were shut. Then she felt herself go icy. Suddenly she brought both hands up to her face and burst into sobs.

  ‘Oh, Lord God!… Cousin!… What’s wrong with you?… Holy God!… Cousin, don’t do that!’

  ‘I!… I!…’ stuttered Matilde, her lips twisted with emotion, ‘I have been crying over it for two years … I who no longer have daughters … I who have prayed as well as I could …’

  ‘Divine goodness!… You’re right! But quiet now, do not sob like that … My dear cousin … take courage. It’s only death there’s no remedy for! Anyway I don’t think anything actually wrong has been done. Just gossip by the evil-minded. Raimondo is a little out of hand, but not that! No, I can’t believe that! The fault, I swear, is the other’s … She may like being courted, particularly by the Count of Lumera! Pure vanity, you can be quite sure! But don’t weep! How these things hurt one, Holy God!… With such a lovely family where there should be the peace of angels, with two little cherubs who might have come straight from heaven! But your husband ought to know it; you see he’ll understand … Why not call your father? It’s for him to help you.’

  The baron, on the other hand, was writing her reproving letters for abandoning her daughters, accusing her of loving her husband more than her children, and calling her home for her sister’s wedding. She tried for a little longer to hide from him the tempest broken over her head, the torture to which she was put by those accusations. But suddenly in the autumn he came to see her alone.

  ‘What’s up? Are you ill? What’s wrong with your husband? Why haven’t you written to me? Why haven’t you come?’

  She protested that nothing was happening, that she did not feel very well, and that was why she had been unable to come to him. The imminent explanation between her father and Raimondo terrified her. Knowing the overbearing character and contemptuous manners of her husband, and the outbursts of rage her father was capable of, she lived in suspense, forgetting her sorrows in order to avoid an outburst, the more so as the baron did not seem to believe in her protestations and showed a frowning brow in that house where before he had always been so proud to set foot. Now he was out most of the time and came back more frowning than ever, without saying a word to Raimondo. One evening he shut himself in her room and said:

  ‘Will you talk to me finally now? Don’t deny, it’s useless; I know the whole story.’

  She trembled all over and stuttered out:

  ‘What d’you know? I don’t understand … I don’t know …’

  ‘I know that your husband is leading a gay life and showing you his great love,’ exclaimed the baron in a voice heavy with menace. ‘I got an anonymous letter; that’s why I came. There’s never a lack of good folk of that kind! But as you don’t talk … as you don’t confide in your father!… Now you must put cards on the table, d’you understand?’ He banged one hand hard against the other.

  ‘Yes, yes, don’t worry yourself …’

  She did not now know from whence came that superhuman calm, that strength to deny the reason for her long agony.

  ‘Don’t worry yourself, darling daddy. Can’t you see how calm I am … I swear to you, I know nothing. They must be calumnies … There are so many bad people about. An anonymous letter! D’you take seriously what is in an anonymous letter?’

  The baron walked up and down the room, clicking his thumb and forefinger, and looking round with a frown.

  ‘All the better! All the better! But this continual coming and going must end! You must decide to stay at some place permanently, in your own home, with your children, like all other human beings.’

  ‘That’s what we are saying too. D’you think that we’re not sure of that? Raimondo wants to return to Florence. We’d be there now if it weren’t for this business of division and payment to my sisters-in-law …’ And she added with a smile, ‘Are the children a burden, perhaps?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. You can’t take me in, you know!’

  From every word of her father’s, from that impetuosity of his, reined in with difficulty, she felt that he knew with certainty of Raimondo’s betrayal and of something more serious still; and her heart shut up as in a vice, and strength abandoned her, and a quiver began to run over her whole body. Suddenly she started. Raimondo was knocking at the door, calling her.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked as he came in, glancing at them with curiosity.

  ‘Oh, nothing …’

  ‘Nothing,’ repeated the baron. ‘We were talking about the decision you must take … D’you want to continue homeless, and pay for that place in Florence just to keep it shut?’

  ‘Me?’ replied Raimondo in a tone of amazement, as if falling from the clouds. ‘If I could,’ he burst out, ‘I’d already have got out of this filthy place even on foot. Do you think I enjoy it here among these dolts, presumptuous, ignorant, stinking, envious, ill-mannered?’ Nothing could hold him back, never had he launched out so violently against his fellow-citizens. Gesticulating wildly, as if he were being contradicted, he went through a whole litany of recriminations, including in his disgust the whole of Sicily, the Neapolitan kingdom, the entire south.

  ‘Then when have you decided to leave?’ interrupted the baron sharply.

  ‘When?’ replied Raimondo, looking at him a moment. ‘You know I’m chained here by business, don’t you?’

  ‘Business can be hurried through in a week if one wants to.’

  Raimondo was silent a little, then exclaimed with a shrug of the shoulders:

  ‘All right then, you hurry it through if you can.’
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  The baron was just about to reply, but the words stayed in his throat. Raimondo, slim, graceful, elegant, with his contemptuous looks and the subtly ironical expression of his delicate white face dominated his father-in-law’s strong vigorous figure with its square shoulders, knotty wrists, bronzed visage. They looked at each other an instant, while Matilde stood there pale, her teeth chattering as if from fever. Then the baron glanced at his daughter, saw her dazed eyes turned to him, and bowing his head murmured:

  ‘All right … all right … Just try to be quick. My daughter’s getting married in a few days; I shall expect you then.’

  He left next day. When just about to start he told Matilde to get ready, so determined was he to take her with him, even alone, so as to make his son-in-law join them later. She bowed her head and agreed, throwing her arms round his neck in gratitude, for she realised that he had let himself be dominated for love of her and to spare her the pain of a scene. But the baron had scarcely left when Raimondo said to her:

  ‘He’s very odd, your father. Does he think we must all do what he likes? Or that I’m married to him?… I want to see to my own family business myself, d’you understand? And go where I like whenever I like!’

  She agreed, subdued as ever by his will, merely murmuring as excuse for her absent father his love for them both.

  They went to Milazzo for Carlotta’s wedding; then, when bride and groom and the baron left for Palermo, they returned to Catania, or rather to the Belvedere, where all the Uzeda were. There she had some months of truce; with the Fersa couple not there the Uzeda family seemed to have become amiable again. Her father wrote sometimes from Palermo, sometimes from Milazzo, sometimes from Messina; then he went to Naples too. Finally he returned in April, together with the Duke of Oragua. The latter said he had come on business and had put forward his departure so as to travel with the baron, but he talked a lot about public events, the war in Lombardy, the illness of Ferdinand II. In the duke’s company the baron seemed a different man; the intimacy between them, which had grown closer during the journey, soothed him. Even so he repeated to his daughter the offer to take her away with him; but as Raimondo had declared to her that he could not move yet, her reply was:

  ‘No, papa … we’ll all come … soon, in a few days.’

  STANDING with arms raised, red as a tomato, Don Blasco looked as if he’d like to cat his opponents alive.

  ‘Is that what you call winning? With the help of the strongest, eh? Why did they call for help in that case? Why didn’t they fight alone if they had the guts? Is this what you call a victory? Two against one?’

  ‘No, sir,’ protested Father Rocca, ‘they were twenty thousand less …’

  ‘A hundred and sixty thousand Austrians against a hundred and forty thousand Allies,’ added Father Dilenna.

  ‘And the Piedmontese fought alone!…’ affirmed Father Grazzeri.

  ‘What? Where? When?’ yelled Don Blasco. ‘What are you trying to put across me?’

  ‘Read the papers if you don’t know!’ exclaimed the others in chorus.

  He went pale then, as if mortally insulted.

  ‘Read the papers?… Read your newspapers?’ He stuttered as if looking for words. ‘D’you know what I’d use your newspapers for?… Ah, no? You prefer not to understand, eh?… This is how I’d use them, this …’ and he made the gesture of cleaning his backside.

  The lay-brother porter put his head over the staircase wall; from the terrace appeared the face of Father Pedantoni peering down into the cloister where the quarrel was growing fiercer.

  ‘That’s no sort of answer! Who gives you news, then? Have you a private information service of your own, then, if you don’t read newspapers?’

  ‘This …’ Don Blasco was still gesticulating away, beside himself with rage. ‘You dare talk to me about your dirty paper? To me, who’d have the lot of you roped up, you and whoever brings ’em here?’

  ‘Go and denounce us, then. You’re capable of it …’

  ‘I’d be doing my duty!’

  ‘You’d be doing the spy!’

  ‘Me?’

  Father Massei, who was enjoying all this from a seat, suddenly exclaimed, seeing Don Blasco make a gesture to loosen his leather belt:

  ‘Ssh … Ssh … The Abbot’s coming …’

  But Don Blasco boomed, ‘To hell with the Abbot, the Prior and the whole Chapter! Come on then, whoever thinks he’s a better man than me! Call me a spy, will you, ye carrion!’

  Seeing that he was serious, Father Dilenna moved towards him with a frown. Then Father Pedantoni was forced to get between to separate them.

  ‘Oh, come along, do stop it. What a way …’

  For some time discussions had ended like that, with yells, insults and threats. Don Blasco had become a fanatic since the Liberals raised their crests after events in Lombardy, the chasing of the Grand Duke from Florence and the growing agitation all over Italy. ‘This time it’s really true! It’s zero hour at last …’ they would say, and he would launch out first against Napoleon III, that ‘son of a who-knows-who’, not content with his own manger he comes to scratch about in that of others; then he boomed that Francis II would make them keep a straight plough. ‘Just because he’s a boy? Just because his father’s dead?… He’ll have you all tied up, the lot of you! You’ll see!…’

  He burst into his greatest fury when the Liberals, after prophesying imminent changes in Sicily and talking of the revolutionary movements that were all ready to break out, produced as proof the return of his brother, the Duke of Oragua, from Palmero. ‘That fellow ought to be in prison, tied hand and foot; the imbecile, madman, brigand and traitor!…’ Then he laughed at himself and vilified his brother in different terms, ‘He dangerous? That rabbit? He plot? He’s come to hide from the storm!… Palermo’s all very well for fun, but in time of trouble one’s own place is best, where one can shut oneself up and get well under cover … If all the mob are like him, Francis will reign another hundred years.’

  These remarks he would repeat outside the monastery, before strangers, particularly at the Cigar-woman’s where he went every day on leaving the refectory. At the canonical hour Donna Lucia would shut up shop and settle down at her window to watch him leave the monastery gates and enter those of the house where she lived; then she would go to meet him, half-way downstairs, with her daughters and husband. The girls, who were now ten and twelve years of age, looked exactly like Don Blasco, fat and gross as barrels, and they would kiss his hand and call him ‘Your Excellency’. Garino, too, did all he could to serve him, pushing out the most comfortable armchair and offering him the biscuits and Rosalìo wine given them by the monk at San Nicola’s expense. That was Don Blasco’s public visit to his mistress, for later there was a second one when Garino took the girls out for a walk and the two of them remained alone.

  Sometimes there was a third meeting at the tobacconist’s shop. Apart from tobacco, Garino also kept a café and had two tables with six coffee-cups each for the use of passers-by, most of them police spies and constables and police agents, for he exercised a third profession, that of informer. And so amid this public of faithfuls Don Blasco would have his say about revolutionaries in general and his brother in particular, and learn news at first hand about the traitor’s movements. Actually Garino professed great respect for the Duke of Oragua, uncle of the Prince of Francalanza, member of one of the leading families in the kingdom, and when listening to Don Blasco’s curses he shook his head a little. But, if one thought it over, was His Paternity so entirely mistaken? The duke did wrong to frequent Don Lorenzo Giulente so much, who was an out-and-out Liberal—of course not being a real noble—and who by means of the British Consul—the police knew everything!—got newspapers, proclamations and other prohibited matter. Don Lorenzo in fact had been visited by police inspectors at home, but they did not go to the duke from respect for the Uzeda family … That was just what Don Blasco found intolerable; that he should enjoy immunity, be spoken of as a re
volutionary leader without running any kind of risk. The monk would have liked to see him treated like others, shackled even more tightly.

  ‘They’re all mad dogs! What’s needed is a stick! What’s needed is a muzzle!’ Garino shook his head; the Royal Intendant Fitalia would never allow the Duke of Oragua to be molested unless of course he went too far. But this much was certain, that a grandee like him had everything to lose and nothing to gain by getting on the side of the ‘disestablishment’ and the agitators; the Intendant had told him so face to face!… Then, on hearing that his brother was received by the representative of the Government, Don Blasco abused him in different terms:

  ‘The fox! The chameleon! The turn-coat!… How can they trust him? He just goes with the winning party! He tricks the lot! He’d betray the father who created him!’

  And on leaving the Cigar-woman’s he would repeat all these remarks in public at Timpa’s pharmacy, which was the headquarters of the loyalists, while the revolutionaries met at Cardarella’s. If any one of them, scandalised by the monk’s violence, suggested that he ought not to talk in such a way to strangers about his own brother, ‘Brother?’ he would protest. ‘I’ve no brothers! I’ve no relations! I’ve no-one; how could I praise ’em?’

  He was particularly enraged because nothing at the palace went as he wanted. The year before, at the moment when the dates arranged by the princess for payment to her daughters fell due, Chiara and Lucrezia had not been in agreement. The marchese, critical of the girl’s love for Giulente, had again made friends with the prince, who had also gone out of his way to be friendly in return in order to propitiate him. Ferdinando, intent on putting together a museum of natural history, did not even know what was happening. And so, not only had the legatees never asked for accounts, but the prince, adducing lack of money, had got powers from the marchese to put off payment until the following year.