Beatrice and Benedick (22 page)

I expected her, then, to turn the cursed finger on Leonato, the third of the tribunal, but she swung around like a weathervane and pointed into the crowd, in my direction. I thought for one heart-freezing moment that she pointed at me, but her eyes and finger fixed upon Don Pedro.
‘Ti manciu ‘u
cori.'

All now looked at the three men for their reaction to this dreadful curse. I saw the colour drain from Don Pedro's ruddy face, while the viceroy blustered and gobbled into his many chins like a turkey-cock. The archbishop's reaction might have been more expected, for tears fell anew from his eyes; but this time with a difference. They were real.

I knew, in that moment, that he was afraid of her. The great archbishop in the golden chasuble was afraid of the bound Moor in the torn gown. He whispered into the silence, ‘Take her away.'

As the woman was bundled from the room, the crowd jostled, yammering and chattering, to the doorways, as if the sentence was to be carried out directly, as if they did not want to miss the flames. I made for the Lady Beatrice again; my anger gone, I wanted to explain that I had just been a fool, not a traitor.

But Don Pedro stayed me with a hand on my shoulder. He leaned forward and his whispering breath was warm in my ear. I thought he would seek reassurance in the face of such an evil curse, or at least censure me for my defence of the Moor; but he said something entirely different. ‘The fellow that gave you the pamphlet at the Vara,' he said. ‘Do you see him here today?'

I looked at the crowd – I could see the Moor's husband clearly – he was embracing the poet, who looked as if his heart was as broken as mine. The fellow's back was to me, but I still
knew him, could have pointed him out to Don Pedro. But I thought of the woman Guglielma, and her bravery in the face of the horror to come, her refusal to implicate Beatrice or her own husband. I looked not into Don Pedro's eyes but steadfastly at the medal of St James where it hung over his heart. But I was thinking of St Peter as I made my three denials. ‘No,' I said. ‘I have not seen him. He is not here.' And I shrugged off the prince's hand and followed the rest into the cathedral square.

Beatrice:
I could not stay away from the cathedral square that dawn.

I had crept from my bed, donned my hooded cloak, and stepped over the sleeping Margherita, who was propped at the chamber door.

As I walked the silver shore my heart beat fast and painfully. I prayed that there was something I could do to save Guglielma Crollalanza. I wished I could have appealed to Benedick – after his clumsy impassioned defence of Guglielma at the trial I was sorrier than ever that I had repudiated him. I wanted the chance to explain, to beg forgiveness. I knew him now for the best of men, knew that he would help me this dawn if he could, but I could not risk going to fetch him from his quarters, lest I be caught and stopped.

I did not know why he had been at the Tarantella, nor how he had led the Spanish there; but his actions at the trial told me that his betrayal of us had been none of his choosing, and God knows he was no more culpable than I. It was true that the Tarantella would have taken place with or without me, but it was my folly that had brought Guglielma to book.

The morning was grey and leaden, the sky heavy with foreboding. The moon was still in the sky, though it was morning, a silver disc lurking behind scudding silver clouds; but the sun had not shown her face. The days were out of joint.

In the cathedral square the bells tolled dolefully and I felt
their song in my chest. A press of people surrounded a dreadful new structure; a pyre of well-stacked faggots with a stake thrust into the centre. From the open door of the great cathedral drifted the last notes of the mass of the auto-da-fé.

The dignitaries filed out – the viceroy first, then the archbishop with Claudio in his wake. Such sights as the day promised were not meet for maids – Hero was at home with my aunt – but poor Claudio must witness the darkness. Lastly, my uncle appeared from the shadow of the doorway, but the shadow seemed to stay with him and dog him as closely as his own. He looked bowed down and defeated.

I pitied him, for I knew my own involvement in the Tarantella had forced his hand in the verdict. He was not a bad man, but a weak one, and to defy the Spanish would be to lose his governorship, his house, his fortune and Hero's too. I hoped Signor Crollalanza would not blame my uncle overmuch; but I did not see Michelangelo anywhere, nor his father. Good sense should have driven them from these shores already, but I knew that neither man would leave a beloved mother or wife to her fate without a fight, and I scanned the crowd, fearful that by the day's end they would be taken too.

I saw Guglielma then, surrounded by an impenetrable phalanx of soldiers. I could glimpse her through their brave scarlets. She was a small figure, barefoot, and dressed in a
sanbenito
of yellow sackcloth the colour of sunrays. Odd that the colour she had favoured in life was to be her shroud. On the sackcloth were painted crude black devils augmenting the red daubed flames that rose up towards her heart. Her face was serene, and upon her forehead was painted a red ‘H' for heretic. She wore a rope noose around her neck and carried a yellow candle in her hand. My view was then obscured and for a time I could see only the candle, and it did not shake in her grasp even a little. I watched the taper as she walked to the pyre, and as far as I could see, it never trembled at all.

As she rose to the pyre she turned to face the assembly. Despite the crude garb she somehow looked more noble than her judges; her sackcloth more glorious than their cloth of gold, her noose more costly than their chains of office, her candle more weighty than their sceptres of power. The archbishop spoke the anathema over her, and her lips moved too in response. I knew what she said, her eyes fixed upon the archbishop. I could read her full lips. She repeated the curse that she'd spoken in the courtroom, a scourge as old as the island:
Ti manciu ‘u cori.
I will eat your heart.

When the prayers were done the Spanish soldiers, those noble cavaliers of St James, jeered and shouted Moorish slurs. I heard the word ‘
Matamoros
' on their lips many times over.

It was then that two figures detached themselves from the crowd and rushed the ring of Spanish pikes. It was an impassioned, ill-advised rescue bid, and it did no good at all. I, perhaps alone of the crowd, knew the identities of the desperate father and son beneath the cowls.

‘Arrest them,' said the archbishop, and before anyone could move a tall, armoured figure wearing the helm of St James took the two men in hand. Outnumbering their captor, they could have shaken him off; but he spoke rapidly to them, and besides, there was nowhere for them to go. The knight led them past the cordon, but through the numb horror I knew that they, at least, were safe. For I would know the bearing and carriage of Signor Benedick anywhere; even beneath a suit of armour.

But now there was no escape for Guglielma. I watched, dumb, as she was lashed to the stake. It seemed so cruel, so out of all proportion with common decency and sense. Was the archbishop so desperate to remove the last vestige of Moorish blood from the island? Her arms were tied tight from shoulder to elbow, and I saw, with sudden clarity, that with both her hands she had made the sign of the horns, the salute she had made to me at the tournament. She had never told me what it
meant, but I thought I knew; it was not a sign of the Devil but a sign of defiance, a rejection of submission, a sign of women that confound men.

I waited for the people to rise up, for an angel to split the clouds, for a saint to ride over the volcano and slice her ropes with a fiery sword. Was there a celestial counterweight to St James Matamoros? Would St Zeno, the black saint of Verona, descend from the skies like an ebony-faced avenger and defend one of his own? But there was no intervention, earthly or heavenly. It seemed impossible, unbelievable, what was about to happen.

I don't know what I expected – that such a dreadful end would necessarily be slow; but as soon as the faggots were lit her gown caught almost at once and she was, instantly, a pall of flame. As the flames cleared I could see that her hands were still twisted into the gesture of the horns. She burned soundlessly, and the crowd were horribly silent too. I do not know when she died, but her body itself began to make strange corporeal sounds – crackling and whistlings as the air left her charred form. Worse, the burning flesh began to smell, and I heard, about me, many a stomach rumble, as the famished civilians smelled cooking meat. I remembered what Michelangelo had said to me on the dunes – that the people were starving.

I looked accusingly at the archbishop, with his trademark tears running down his face, then back at the faces around me. They were not looking at Guglielma any more. They were looking at him. I could not help but feel that his plan, whatever it was, had somehow misfired; that despite the jeers of the Spanish the citizens of Messina were not enjoying the spectacle that had been orchestrated for their benefit.

Perhaps it was the sight of one of their own burning, an Archirafi, a Crollalanza – a Sicilian. Perhaps the hunger in their bellies awakened their rebellion too late. But the air prickled with dissent; it floated about with Guglielma's ash, into every
eye and every mouth, inescapable. I felt pressure at my back and realised that the crowd was surging forward to the cathedral. It was eerie, that wordless movement forward, the hundreds of hollow eyes, the relentless shuffling feet, moving forth in silent protest. The Knights of St James raised their pikes, shouted threats and warnings, but the crowd did not abate. It was a protest, an uprising.

The archbishop, the viceroy and my uncle rose hurriedly from their thrones and retreated back inside the cathedral, and the doors closed behind them with a hollow boom. I half expected the people to hammer the doors in, but if they did not respect the prelate himself they respected the sanctity of the church, and went no further.

The fire lost its fierceness as the sun rose, as if that burning orb had appropriated the heat of the fire. Now there was nothing but ash, the crowd began to disperse; drifting away across the square with the cinders of martyred flesh.

This, then, was the end of Guglielma's story. And Guglielma's play had been a tragedy, as had the entire history of the Moors in Sicily. I had thought, and Michelangelo had thought that day on the dunes, that the Vara would be the climax of the story; the iconoclasm of the Moor's image, the chaos of the crowd. We had both been wrong. The archbishop had given the drama a climax as surely as any great impresario, a climax which plumbed the very depths of horror.

But the story had an epilogue; for in that dreadful, ashy aftermath the women came, the women who had danced with Guglielma, the women whom her courage had saved from calumny. They crept silently from every corner of the square, black clad in mourning, stealthy; spiders themselves. They knelt in the cinders and began to gather the cooled ash in their hands. Wordlessly, I joined them, sifting the ash until my hands were as black as they had been the day I first saw the Moor, when Signor Benedick had kissed my inky fingers. At length the
women found their grisly trophy – a hot and blackened skull, nothingness staring from empty orbs. Impossible that those burning eyes had now been extinguished, that another light had been put out.

The women handed the skull to a tall, hooded lady who held open a velvet-lined casket. Her cowl fell back a little to reveal alabaster skin and blue-grey eyes. It was my aunt.

I went to her and rested my head for an instant on her shoulder. I said nothing. There was nothing to say. I gathered the other bones with the rest to place in the casket, and then, powdered with ash like penitents, we followed my aunt as she led us from the square.

I bowed my head as we climbed, and my guilt mounted with the altitude. It was meet that I should wear ash upon my forehead, and if I could have changed my gown for sackcloth I would have done that too. Of all these penitents, these women who had not spoken up in time, I was the worst. I had drawn Benedick to the Tarantella, and so too the Spanish. My presence there had drawn my uncle's teeth at the trial, so he could do nothing else but convict Guglielma or expose me. That I, whose tongue would run away like a buckshee horse upon any other subject, could have stayed silent in that courtroom, restrained by my aunt's firm hand!

I looked ahead to the tall figure who led us up the slope. Did my aunt feel the burden of guilt as heavily as I? It was little comfort to tell myself that the courtroom appeals of both Guglielma's son and Signor Benedick had been to no avail. It was no use to assure myself that the archbishop, bent on destruction and the eradication of her race, would have convicted Guglielma even if God himself had intervened. I was as guilty as he.

We climbed the little hill from the Via Catania to a place I had heard of but never seen, the hilltop necropolis of the
Cimiterio Monumentale,
the family tomb of the Leonati. A small stone mausoleum crowned the hill, and a scar of dark flesh lay in the
hillside. The watchman, standing beside a hillock of fresh earth with a spade in his hand, had dug a grave ready. My aunt placed the casket in the ground, and the old man dug it over as if he were burying a cur, without a thought for what he did.

We all gathered about the grave, and in the fierce heat of the sun my aunt took a scroll from her sleeve and read from it; a verse about the killing power of slanderous tongues. She placed the paper on the mound, and anchored it with a handful of earth.

The Sicilian ladies each threw a handful of earth on the paper eulogy in turn, until it was quite, quite gone, the words interred with the bones. It was fitting that words should share her grave; for words had killed her. Witch. Devil-worshipper. Heretic. The falsehoods had gone through and through her like a blade.