The Silent Duchess (14 page)

Sister Palmira Malaga: she remembers reading about her somewhere, perhaps in a book on the history of heresy, or in some publication on quietism, or in one of those lists put out by the Holy Inquisition, giving the names of people suspected of heresy. Sister Palmira, yes, she remembers it now, she has read a short book about her; published in Rome, it turned up somehow in the library at the villa. There was even a caricature of her with two horns on her head and a long ass's tail coming out from under her habit and ending in a forked point, which reminded her of the dogs so feared by her mother the Duchess.

She sees her going up the wooden steps of the scaffold one at a time. Barefoot, hands tied behind her back, her face twisted in a bizarre grimace, almost as if this horror were the last seal to affirm her commitment to peace. Behind her Brother Reginaldo, whom Marianna imagines as bearded, with a stringy neck and hollow chest, and large dirty feet in tight Franciscan sandals.

Now the executioner ties them to the posts above a pile of chopped logs. Two assistants with lighted torches approach the pile of wood. The flame does not immediately ignite the branches of elder and the broken sugar canes that someone has cut and tied with willows so as to make it easier to light the fire. White smoke puffs out into the faces of the nearby spectators.

Sister Palmira smells the acrid smoke of the faggots; fear contracts the muscles of her belly and a stream of urine runs down her thighs. And yet her martyrdom has hardly begun--how will she endure it to the end?

The secret is breathed into her ear by a most gentle voice. The secret, Palmira, is your consent, not to stiffen and resist, but to gather up into your womb these tongues of flame as if they were flowers flying through the air, to gulp down the smoke as if it were incense, and turn towards Him whose eye is suffused with pity. It is they who suffer, not you.

Then violent hands stretch up to her head to plaster her hair with pitch, and Sister Palmira turns towards her torturers with a look of love. Now they are crowding round in solemn exultation, bringing a burning torch to her smeared hair. The woman's head lights up and bursts into flames like a resplendent crown, and everyone applauds. They want her death to be a spectacle; and since Our Lord permits it He must want it too, in the mysterious and profound way in which Our Lord wills the things of this world.

Brother Reginaldo opens his mouth as if to speak, but perhaps it is only a scream of pain. In front of him Sister Palmira's head is burning like the sun, while her mouth tries to smile as it twists and curls in the heat of the blaze.

Marianna sees uncle husband sitting on a handsome golden chair upholstered in purple velvet, next to the Holy Fathers of the Inquisition, elegant in their habits embroidered with designs of bunches of grapes. The crowd around them is packed together so tightly that it is almost impossible to distinguish one face from another; it is one single body with a single eye, held in suspense, looking upwards, throbbing with exultation.

At the moment when the flames set alight Sister Palmira's hair the crowd explodes into a great roar. Marianna feels it vibrating in her belly. Uncle husband is now leaning forward, his wrinkled neck stretched tight, his face rigid with a cramp that he does not understand-- is it of horror or of satisfaction?

Marianna raises her hand to the bell-rope. She pulls it several times, insistently. Soon she sees the door open and Fila's head peep

round. She makes a sign for her to come in. The girl does not dare, she is afraid of the Duchess's bad temper. Marianna looks at her feet. They are bare. She smiles so as to reassure her and bends her finger to beckon her, as if she were a child.

Fila comes closer on tiptoe. Marianna makes her understand that she needs help with unbuttoning her dress at the back. With their rich embroidery of pearls, the sleeves come off by themselves, like tubes of wood. The skirt rests rigidly on the floor. It is as if the Duchess were divided in two, one half the body of a woman, moving freely in her white cotton petticoat, the other Her Excellency the Duchess of Ucr@ia, confined in stiff brocade, who bows, smiles, nods, approves, with all the dignity proper to her station. It is the point at which these two bodies meet that is hard to discern: where one acknowledges the other, where one is shielded by the other, where one displays itself and the other hides itself so as to become completely lost.

Meanwhile Fila has knelt down to help her take off her shoes, but Marianna is in a hurry and to make her understand that she will take them off herself she pushes her away with a small affectionate kick. Fila lifts her head.

She is put out and in her look there broods an unforgivable hurt. Marianna will think what to do about it later, she decides, now she is in too much of a hurry. She takes off her shoes, picks up her bedjacket the colour of egg-yolk, and snuggles down inside the bed that has only been made a moment ago.

Just in time! The door opens before she has even had the chance to undo her hair. The trouble with being deaf is that no one ever bothers to knock before coming in, knowing they will not be heard. So she is always finding herself unprepared for the arrival of the unexpected visitor who throws open the door and appears before her with a triumphant smile, as if to say, Here I am. You didn't hear me, but now you can see me.

This time it is Felice, her daughter and now a nun, elegant in her milk-white habit, her chestnut curls popping provocatively out of her white coif. Felice goes straight to her mother's writing-desk, picks up pen and paper and takes ink from the small silver phial. Within a

few seconds she hands over the written sheet of paper: "Auto-da-f`e today. Great festival in Palermo. What's the matter--are you feeling ill?"

Marianna reads and rereads the note. Since Felice has been in the convent her writing has improved and she has taken on a carefree, confident look that neither of her other daughters has. Marianna watches her while she talks to Fila, moving her lips with sensual grace. There's no doubt her voice must be very melodious, Marianna tells herself. How she would like to hear it! Sometimes in the internal cavity deep inside her ear she has a sensation of rhythm, which seems to form a clot of blood that shifts, disentangles itself, dissolves, flows ... and she begins to tap her feet on the ground in time with this far-off subterranean harmony.

She has read of Corelli, Stradella and Handel as marvels of musical architecture. She has tried to imagine a taut arch of enchanting colours, but all that issues from the vaults of her childhood memory is a few sonorous gurgles, ruins of buried music. Only her eyes have the capacity to grasp pleasure, but is it possible for music to be transformed into something corporeal that can be embraced with a look?

"Do you know how to sing?" she writes to her daughter, handing her a beautiful clean sheet of paper. Felice turns round in surprise.

Why singing, for Heaven's sake? Everybody is getting ready for this trip to Palermo to attend the grand spectacle of the auto-da-f`e, and here is her mother asking silly questions that are quite irrelevant. Sometimes she thinks her mother is a bit weak in the head and simple-minded. But then, because she cannot talk, each thought has to be written down and, as everyone knows, as soon as you write anything down it acquires a stiffness, a gloss, a heaviness, it is like something that has been embalmed.

Marianna guesses her daughter's thoughts, she anticipates them and pursues each new revelation with painful relish.

Our grandmother died before she was fifty, maybe our lady mother will die soon too. ... She knows she is only thirty-seven but she could have a stroke at any time ... after all she is already disabled. ... If she were to die she might leave her a large life interest on her inheritance from her father--let's say three thousand onze or maybe even five thousand. ... The expenses at the convent are always getting heavier ... and then there is the new sedan-chair with golden cupids and damask hangings ... she can't be for ever waiting for her father to send her his ... and sugar has gone up by five grani a sack, lard by twenty, then wax has got impossible, seven grani a small candle, and where is she to get the money? ... Not that she wishes for her mother's death ... but sometimes she is so stupid, more like a child than any of her children ... she thinks she understands everything just because she reads so many books but she understands absolutely nothing. ... Come to that, why did Manina get a bigger dowry than she did?

Only to marry that parrot Francesco Chiarand@a of the estates of Magazzinasso. ... Isn't it more important to be married to Christ? That everything, but everything, should go to Mariano is ... it's an insult. ... They say that in the Netherlands it's no longer like that. There, if they want to cut their children off without a penny and leave them quite naked--why, they can do it. ... Wouldn't it be better to leave them in paradise among trees of manna and fountains of sweet wine? That idiot Aunt Fiammetta wants her to hoe the convent orchard like all the others. ... "Little one, aren't you the same as everyone else, my little girlie?" But surely an Ucr@ia of Campo

Spagnolo di Scannatura and di Bosco

Grande can never be put to hoeing the kitchen garden like some peasant or other? Some of these abbesses have turnips instead of brains, they're filled with jealousy and envy. "I do it, and I'm a noblewoman just as much as you," says Aunt Fiammetta, and you should see how she rolls up her sleeves and bends over the hoe, pushing down on the metal edge with her delicate little foot ... a madwoman! Heaven knows where she unearthed this passion for menial work ... the beauty of it is that she doesn't do it as a penance, no, she actually loves her hoe, she loves the earth, she loves bending down under the sun and getting as brown as a peasant. ... It's impossible to make head or tail of that silly woman.

"What pleasure is there in seeing two heretics burned?" writes Marianna to her daughter, in an attempt to shrug off all these trifling and oppressive thoughts. Even though she knows there is more ingenuousness than wickedness in Felice's broodings, she feels she is being attacked.

"The whole convent of Santa Chiara will be there, the Abbess, the Prioress, the Canonesses. Afterwards there'll be prayers and refreshments."

"So it's the cakes, confess."

"The Sisters give me all the cakes I want, anyway. I only have to ask", answers Felice huffily, scrawling the s's sideways as if she wanted to blow them away.

Marianna goes to kiss her, forcing herself to forget those petulant thoughts. But she finds her daughter sullen and ready to reject her: she is none too pleased at being treated like a thirteen-year-old when she is all of twenty-two; and she stands there rigid, staring frostily at her mother.

That long dress ... and socks up to her knees, she looks so old-fashioned she's positively dowdy. She's thirty-seven and she's got grown-up daughters, what does she think she's up to? Inside that deaf, cloistered head she's older than my father, and he's seventy! With his body as long and thin as a rake, he's got one foot in the grave, but still has a look of vitality, while she's all trussed up like a Spanish infanta, with collars that look like bibs. There's something faded about her that makes her seem dated ... those antiquated laced boots in the Hapsburg style, her stockings the colour of milk. ... The mothers of her friends wear coloured stockings woven with gold thread, with shiny ribbons round their waists, floppy skirts quilted with beads, low-heeled slippers with pointed toes and Eastern designs. ...

As so often happens, once she has grasped the thread of a thought, Marianna cannot let it go, she turns it over between her fingers, pulling it and knotting it to suit her own purposes.

An angry compulsion to wound her daughter on account of this internal chattering, so brutally confident, makes her hand shake. But at the same time the desire to ask her once more to sing impels her towards the writing-desk. She is sure that somehow she would be able to hear her, and already she is conscious of the mercurial fluidity of that voice on her walled-up ears.

The understanding, when it acts alone, and according to its most general principles, entirely subverts itself, and leaves not the lowest degree of evidence in any proposition, either in philosophy or common life. We save ourselves from this total scepticism only by means of that singular and seemingly trivial property of the fancy, by which we enter with difficulty into remote views of things. ...

Marianna reads with her chin resting on her hand. Her feet warm each other, sheltering beneath a blanket from the icy draughts that whistle through the closed windows. Goodness knows who left this notebook with its marbled cover in the library. Was it brought from London by her brother Signoretto? He returned a few months ago and has visited them twice at Bagheria with presents from England. But she has never before seen this notebook. It could have been left behind by Mariano's friend, that small dark-haired youth, born in Venice of English parents, who has footed it half-way round the world. He spent a few days at Bagheria, sleeping in Manina's room. An unusual person: he used to get up at midday, having spent the whole night reading. In the morning the bed sheets would be smeared with candle wax. He borrowed books from the library and then forgot to return them. He accumulated a pile as high as his arm. He ate like a horse and had a weakness for Sicilian food: pickled egg-plants, spaghetti with sardines, little pizzas with onion and oregano, ices flavoured with jasmine, and muscatel raisins.

Although his hair was very black he had a pale skin and it only needed a little sun for his nose to peel. But what was his name? Dick or Gilbert or Jerome? She cannot remember. However, Mariano addressed him by his surname, Grass, pronouncing it with three s's. Without doubt the little notebook belonged to this young Grass, who came from London and was on his way to Messina on a journey of "self-discovery". Innocenza could not stand him because of his habit of reading at night with a candle balanced on the sheets. Uncle husband just