The Viceroys (15 page)

At her family's opposition Lucrezia had gone stubborn, like every Uzeda when contradicted, and sworn to Donna Vanna that she would marry Giulente at all costs; now, on hearing the monk talk of her rights, show her that she was richer than she thought, and instigate her to make her own will felt, she listened, though diffidently and suspecting a trick. At night she took counsel with the maid and, Donna Vanna encouraging her to follow the monk's reasoning, she came to recognise that her mother had indeed sacrificed her like all the others for the sake of two sons, and she bowed her head to the arguments repeated to her by Don Blasco. But when she was just about to promise that she would speak out to Giacomo, fear held her back. She had grown up with the idea that he was of a different mould, a finer nature; while all her brothers and sisters used the familiar
tu
among themselves, the eldest son was always addressed by
the formal
voi
. And the prince, who had always kept her at a distance and looked down on her from a height, now, after the reading of the Will, seemed even more withdrawn to all, particularly to her. Prepared to put up a fight for Giulente's love, she wanted to reserve her strength for the right moment and not waste it on an aim which to her seemed secondary. Benedetto had let her know that as soon as he had his degree, which would be in a couple of years, he would ask for her hand, and that the Duke of Oragua, being such a close friend of his uncle Lorenzo's, would be sure to support them; but meanwhile they must be patient and prudent, try not to arouse the Uzedas' animosity. When consulted on the question of the Will he repeated his advice about doing nothing against the prince, partly for the old reasons, partly lest he should seem avid for her to have a bigger dowry. ‘You see, Your Exellency?' commented the maid, hearing these letters read out by her mistress. ‘You see, Your Excellency, how good he is? He loves Your Excellency, not your money! Anyone out for the dowry would have replied differently and said “let's fight it out!” …' He was in fact a good, studious young man, with a head rather in the clouds, inflamed by his uncle's Liberal doctrines and burning with love for Italy; to Lucrezia he wrote that he had three passions: her, his mother and their country to be redeemed.

So Lucrezia, after listening to Don Blasco's instigations, did nothing of what her uncle wanted either. In fact once when he was being particularly insistent, she replied:

‘Why doesn't Your Excellency talk to Giacomo yourself?'

At this remark the monk went purple and seemed on the point of suffocating.

‘So I'm to talk to him, am I? You little idiot! You'd like me to pull the chestnuts out of the fire with cat's paws, wouldn't you? Ah, so you want me to talk to him!… What the devil d'you think I care if he takes everything from you, if he eats you all up, you mob of madmen, Jesuits and imbeciles, eh?…'

To talk to Giacomo, to take the side of those other nephews and nieces against him, really was impossible for Don Blasco. It would have meant his involving himself definitely, coming down on one side, never being able to disagree with those he
had agreed with before and vice versa; and that was something he just had to be free to do. Thus, for example, the prince had been the only one of the whole ‘bad lot' (as the Benedictine called his family in moments of exasperation, that is almost always) to behave obediently and submissively to him and support the monk in his struggle against the princess; now Don Blasco was turning his brothers and sisters against him in exchange. But the monk did not think he was doing wrong in this. Sceptical and suspicious as he was, he knew that Giacomo had supported him not from any affection or respect but from simple self-interest.

Prince Giacomo did, in fact, have his own reasons. His mother, as if unable to forgive him for his not being born just when she expected or wanted him, had never shown affection for her eldest son, who had also endangered her life by his birth. Instead of loving him the more for his having cost her so much, Donna Teresa had loved him less. At Lodovico's birth she had been even more vexed and indifferent; it was Raimondo who suddenly touched her maternal instincts. And so, while all the other relations who were not ‘mad' like her, or mad in a different way, had given Giacomo the idea that he was above them as eldest son, as heir to the title, the princess had given all her love, a blind, exclusive, unreasonable love, to Raimondo. And the mother's protection was a good deal more useful than the father's or uncles', for while these gave only vain words to Giacomo, who was avid for money and yearning for authority, Raimondo was showered with gifts, bossed everyone and made his whims law.

So began the split between the two brothers; Raimondo, who was younger, took some knocks, but when the princess saw her favourite appear in tears she let Giacomo feel the strength of those terrible hands of hers, which left bruises wherever they fell. The boy went obstinately on, until the mother's coldness changed to definite hatred. Then he realised he was taking a wrong turning and changed tactics, played the hypocrite, became a spy for Don Blasco, and enjoyed his revenge by seeing the monk hit Raimondo out of hatred for the princess. But those were mediocre and short-lived satisfactions; as the years passed the princess shut her second son up in San Nicola, and gave
Raimondo the title of Count. Mean, almost miserly with others, she was generous only with her favourite; Giacomo never had a coin on him, and went about in rags while the other was dressed up like a tailor's dummy. If Raimondo expressed an opinion, it was at once supported, or at least not derided; Giacomo could get nothing done. For years he had nursed a longing to act as master and change the palace about in his own way; his mother did not allow him to move a chair. She herself had done a lot to change the architecture of the place, which seemed composed of four or five different buildings put together; for each ancestor had amused himself blocking windows in here and piercing balconies through there, or raising floors on one side and dismantling them on another, or changing the colour of a wash or design of a cornice.

Inside, the disorder was greater; sealed up doors, stairs going nowhere, rooms partitioned into two down the middle, walls torn down to make one room out of two. The ‘mad lot', as Don Blasco called even his forebears, had built and dismembered in their own way one after the other. The biggest changes had been made by his father, Prince Giacomo XIII, when flinging money about in all directions; then that ‘pumpkinhead' of a Donna Teresa, instead of thinking of economy, had gone and amused herself by wasting more money in other ill-considered novelties!… Giacomo wanted to change about the plan of the house too, but his mother would not even let him put in a nail. And the Benedictine was particularly furious to find that the son who had always been overruled was in fact just like his mother, hectoring, greedy, hard, scheming; while that goose of a woman preferred Raimondo, who did not know the value of money, wasted all he had, despised business, and liked and sought only amusement and pleasure …

The two brothers, though having the same family air, did not even resemble each other physically; Raimondo was very handsome, Giacomo very ugly. The two types could be seen in the Portrait Gallery. More distant forebears had that mixture of strength and grace which gave the young count his charm. Gradually, as the centuries passed, features began to alter, faces lengthened, noses grew, skin darkened; extreme fatness like Don Blasco's, or extreme thinness like Don Eugenio's, disfigured the
portraits. Changes were most obvious among the women. Chiara and Lucrezia, though both of them fresh and young, were so hideous they scarcely looked like women at all. Aunt Ferdinanda, in male attire, would have been taken for a moneylender or a sacristan. And there were other harsh, mannish faces to be seen among feminine portraits of recent date, while in older ones the strange head-dresses and extravagant costumes, the huge Flemish collars, which made heads look as if they were on a basin, the ample robes enfolding the body like tortoiseshells could not quite hide slimness of form or alter pure lineaments of features. Now and again among the degenerate faces in more recent generations could be seen one or two reminiscent of the earliest; thus, as if by a kind of recrudescence of the old cells of noble blood, Raimondo was like the purest ancient type. The princess's eyes would laugh with pleasure when she saw his graceful and elegant figure riding or driving or fencing. Her eldest son on the other hand she called by as many nicknames as she found defects in his person: ‘dancing bear' because of his awkwardness; ‘Pulcinella' because of the long nose; and ‘dwarf' because of his short stature.

Thus Giacomo's grudge against his mother and brother was always alive; it grew out of all proportion when Donna Teresa filled the cup to the brim and found Raimondo a wife. Family tradition, maintained until 1812 by the law of entail, forbade any son except the eldest to take a wife; in fact in the generation before neither the duke nor Don Eugenio had married. But the princess, as always, waived rules and found Raimondo a wife even before she had found one for Giacomo. At her death, because she would leave her fortune to both, the financial condition of the two brothers would become equal; but in her lifetime she was unwilling to deprive herself of anything; Giacomo would of course have to marry in order to hand on the title and could be set up on his wife's dowry, while Raimondo, if he remained a bachelor, would have nothing.

Having decided that her favourite also must be given a wife she hesitated a long time even so before putting her resolve into practice, not because she felt any scruple at breaking tradition and creating in the Uzeda family a twisted branch which might compete with the straight one, but because of her very love for
the youth; the idea of another woman with him night and day threw her into blind jealousy. So when she did finally decide, she could not bear to give him any girl from Catania or its province, but began looking about for a match in Messina, Palermo, even farther, on the mainland, with certain criteria of her own, one of which was that the bride's mother should be dead. She looked for a number of years and no one suited her. Finally through one of the Benedictine monks, a colleague of Don Blasco's, Father Dilenna from Milazzo, she fixed her choice on the daughter of Baron Palmi, the Benedictine's cousin. Then, as even she thought it too much for Raimondo to marry before Giacomo (still a bachelor at twenty-five, a unique case in the family history), she arranged to get both brothers married at the same time, and chose for her eldest son the daughter of the Marchese Grazzeri.

Quarrels on that occasion were violent. Strong as was Giacomo's rancour at his brother getting married and founding another Uzeda family which would bear off part of his own inheritance, it was no less strong about his own marriage. Violent, grasping and arid though he was, he had for long been in love with his cousin Graziella, daughter of his mother's sister, and determined to marry her, though her dowry was far less than that of the Grazzeri; but the princess, partly because of the latter's greater riches, partly because she had never got on well with her sister, whom she had in fact always kept at a distance, and above all from a desire to go against her son's inclination, made him marry the Grazzeri girl.

Giacomo was no longer a boy to obey his mother for fear of punishment or blows, but she held a more powerful weapon: that of controlling the money and threatening to disinherit him. ‘Not a cent …' she would say to him coldly, flicking her thumbnail against her teeth, ‘not a cent will you get!' And the scant sympathy she had shown him, her passion for Raimondo, and the latter's imminent marriage confirmed the threat and made him suspect that she would carry it out. The prince, who till that point had never wholly succeeded in adopting the policy of pretence, after this last and violent quarrel, bowed to her in resignation and gave her his blind obedience even in things useless and ridiculous, with much talk of fraternal love, unity,
and respect for elders. Inside he chafed, and while waiting to gather the fruits of his conduct, showed his vexation and exercised his own tyrannical sway only with his wife. From the first day of marriage she was treated worse than a servant, forbidden to express not only wishes, but even opinions, and trained to obey a simple movement of the prince's eyes. When she needed a roll of cotton or a bit of ribbon, she had to ask him for the necessary coins—after bringing him a dowry of a hundred thousand
onze.
Her job was to give her husband an heir, to perpetuate the Viceroys; having done that, she was considered a useless mouth to feed, worse than a hanger-on; for the hangers-on did at least pay court to the family, and if need be give the major-domo a helping hand, while Donna Margherita could do nothing and, with her mania for cleanliness and obsession about contagion, thought of nothing but avoiding contact with others. Anyway she was a mild creature without will-power, soft wax which the prince moulded as he wished. Her mother-in-law, the princess, more than once took up her defence from dislike of her own son, not from any love for her; then she suffered all the more, as Giacomo, yielding outwardly, afterwards made her pay harshly for that protection.

If the prince's marriage went so badly, Raimondo's went much worse. Giacomo did not want the Grazzeri girl since he loved his cousin; but Raimondo wanted no-one and had decided not to marry at all. His mother's caresses and favouritism had roused in him an insatiable appetite for pleasure and freedom; but the princess's protection weighed almost as much as her aversion, so despotic was she in all things. Her favourite had to do what she wanted, repay her by meeker obedience for the privileges she granted him. Yet these privileges, extraordinary in comparison to the subjection in which the other children were held, were not enough for Raimondo; they merely aroused his desires without satisfying them. He alone, for instance, was given money to fling about as he liked, but the princess gave it in fits and starts, and the young man, who was not only spending constantly on clothes and women but also had a passion for gambling, would throw away in a night what his mother gave him in a year. He was the only one allowed to go as far away as Florence, but that quick trip gave the young man a taste for
travel and long sojourns in countries finer and richer than his own, which he could not follow up.