The Viceroys (17 page)

For Donna Ferdinanda, this style was of supreme elegance and magnificence, and she read such words as ‘perennial' quite literally. As it was considered ‘low' for women of her class at the beginning of the century to be lettered, she had learnt to read on her own as a necessity for her speculations.

And now to flout the spinster's infatuation for her own origins and for the institution of nobility in general, here was the princess thinking of giving Raimondo as wife—whom if you please—a Palmi from Milazzo, daughter of a worthless baron of whom Mugnòs did not and could not make the very least mention! He gloried, did this so-called Baron Palmi, in certain privileges granted 150 years before; but what were 150 years compared with the centuries of Uzeda nobility? Without taking into account that these privileges were not even mentioned by the Marchese of Villabianca, an author flourishing only a century after Mugnòs!…

The princess, who felt almost if not quite as strongly about nobility as did Donna Ferdinanda, had judged those 150 years of the Palmi family as sufficient, and more simply because, wanting her Raimondo's wife to be as lowly to her husband as a slave-girl to her master, one whom he could treat loftily and do what he liked with, she had even for a moment thought of choosing him the humble daughter of a rich farmer … The disagreement was bitter.

By then Donna Ferdinanda, having acquired the Calasaro house, had left the Francalanza palace and set up house on her own, continuing to pinch and scrape but paying for the luxury of a private carriage. These were a couple of rickety old vehicles bought for a few ducats but decorated with the Uzeda coat-of-arms; and the horses, two thin nags which she had fed with a little straw from the Carrubo land, a handful of bran and rotted vegetables. The coachman, as well as serving stable and coachhouse, acted as cook and butler. The princess's sarcasms had of course become sharper at all this, now the spinster was holding her head as high as her sister-in-law. Being rich in money, and as she thought in sense, Donna Ferdinanda expected to be paid court and held in account; while before, when living with her relations, she had been indifferent to their affairs, she now tried to put her nose into all family matters from a distance. But the princess would tolerate neither patronage nor imposition; hence daily quarrels.

On the other hand, Don Blasco, exasperated by his sister's rising fortunes, was now maddened at seeing her rival him in his position as niggling critic and infallible judge. The spinster in return frankly expressed her opinion of his scandalous life. Once, when a nurse had to be engaged for the young prince and Donna Ferdinanda thought the woman's milk suspect, Don Blasco declared it to be of first quality (evil tongues said he had reason to know); and brother and sister almost came to blows. Calmed with difficulty by their nephew Giacomo, they never spoke to each other again. The odd thing was that though never talking, and avoiding each other like the plague, they were the only ones in the family to see things in the same way and express the same opinions about everything. As Don Blasco spat flame and fire against Raimondo's marriage, so Donna Ferdinanda became viperish. Not only was that sister-in-law of hers protecting the third son just because she loathed the heir to the title, not only was she trampling on the ‘law' which looked only to the continuation of the direct line; but she was giving him who? Who, good God? A Palmi from Milazzo!… Palmi? Donna Ferdinanda never called her by that name; but at times Palma, at others Palmo, and gave her as coat-of-arms either the four palms' length of bamboo which haberdashers used for
measuring cotton, or a couple of small, shaggy palms, ‘like the peasants they were'. The two sisters-in-law became so sarcastic and quarrelsome that they nearly got to tearing out each other's hair. Like Don Blasco, the spinster announced she would never set foot in the Francalanza palace again but, like her brother, she could not bear to be away from it for long and returned at the first opportunity.

The other two brothers-in-law, the Duke Gaspare and the Cavaliere Don Eugenio, had not given much bother to Donna Teresa.

The Cavaliere Don Eugenio, at the time of those quarrels, was not in Sicily. At first destined also for the Benedictine Order like his brother Don Blasco, he had saved himself by adducing an inclination for a military career. It was his first lie, to avoid the monastery; he could not feel any calling to a profession almost unknown in Sicily, where there was no conscription and a popular motto went ‘better swine than soldier'. Thus not even the nobility went in for soldiering. But Don Eugenio wanted to be free and gain himself a place in the world. After remaining for education at the Novitiate of San Nicola till almost eighteen, on coming out of the monastery he went off to Naples and was enrolled in the noble corps of Royal Bodyguards, sure of rising to the highest ranks at once. But after ten years he was still a cornet.

Infatuated with his nobility like all the Uzeda, he looked down on his companions and even a little on his superiors, and boasted not only of sublime birth but of vast wealth. When it came to the point, however, the young Neapolitan lordlings would bring out their money while the boastful Sicilian younger son drew back, or worse, made debts which he did not pay.

Treated as a braggart, he was almost outlawed by his companions; anyway he himself realised that he had not reached his aim, though to his family he wrote that his lack of success was due to envy and injustice; and one fine day he decided to resign. He stayed on, however, in Naples, whence he wrote that the richest and noblest houses were open to him as if they were his own, and that the Duke This and the Prince of That wanted
him to marry their daughters. None of these matches, constantly bruited as certain, ever came off.

Meanwhile, in great need of money, he had applied for a post at Court, and in spite of his unpromising past, yet for political reasons, as the Bourbons were eager to keep on good terms with great Sicilian families, he was named Gentleman of the Bedchamber, with functions. In 1852, he returned home, an unexpected guest. He said that he had been passed from active to honorary service because the climate of Naples did not agree with him; there was an insistent rumour, however, of certain squalid little arrangements with one of the suppliers for the Royal Family …

The ex-Royal Bodyguard and Gentleman of the Bedchamber returned from Naples with a new vocation, archaeology, numismatics, and fine arts. With him he brought a quantity of rubbish coming, so he said, from Pompeii, Herculaneum and Paestum, and of enormous value; enough canvasses to rig out a sailing ship; ‘all from famous hands: Raphael, Titian, Tintoretto'. With all this material he filled a little apartment he had rented—for the princess would not hear of his living at home again—and began dealing in antiques. Giacomo had been married for two years and already had the expected heir; Raimondo was in Florence with his wife, where she had borne a little girl.

The Duke Gaspare had not been at home either at the time of the marriage but, though from afar, he was the only one to approve his sister-in-law's arrangements, drawing on himself of course by this approval, and even more by the motive which dictated it, the thunderbolts of Donna Ferdinanda and Don Blasco. This reason was entirely of a political nature. Baron Palmi, Matilde's father, a Liberal of long standing, had played such an active part in the revolution of '48 that after the Restoration he had taken refuge in Malta with a capital charge on his head; and without very special protection and solemn promises not to do it again his exile would have lasted a lifetime instead of a few months. Even so, when pardoned and admonished, he began directing the movement against the Bourbons in his own part of the country and throughout most of Sicily. Now it was these political opinions and this authority over the still very active Liberal Party that were the reasons why
the duke was so benevolently inclined towards the marriage of the baron's daughter with Raimondo.

Until 1848, the duke, like all the Uzeda, had been an out-and-out pro-Bourbon. But although, as second son and Duke of Oragua, he had drawn rather more than the meagre pittance of the others, and maternal uncles had helped to enlarge his substance, he was still envious of the eldest son, and longed to get rich and make himself a greater place in the world than his brothers; his portion had awakened but not appeased his appetite. While the entail-system lasted the younger sons had put up with their wretched condition in resignation, being unable to go against the law, but now that eldest sons were only preferred by what, in the light of new ideas, seemed mere prejudice, envy gnawed them. This reaction, which drove Don Blasco to behave like one possessed and fanned Don Eugenio's cupidity, made the duke lend an ear to the flattery of the revolutionaries, who were eager to draw on their side a person of importance like the Duke of Oragua, second son of a Prince of Francalanza. He did not cease at the same time to pay his usual court to the Royal Intendant, so as to prepare a safety-exit for himself in case of possible reverses; he joined the Reading-Circle which was a nest of Liberals, without leaving the Nobles' Club, which was the headquarters of the purists, and in fact trained himself to steer between the two currents.

At the first outbreak of the revolution fear overwhelmed him: to his new friends he declared that the movement was unprepared, inopportune, and certainly destined to fail. And while the people armed and fought he retreated into the country, letting the chiefs of the Royalist Party know that he was waiting for the end of that ‘carnival'. But the ‘carnival' looked like lasting; the Neapolitan troops evacuated Sicily and although their return was announced every day no news of them came whatsoever, and the provisional Government was settling in. The duke, seeing his skin in no danger, returned to town and lent an car to the flattery of the party in power, which promised him whatever he wanted in order to get him on their side. He waited and watched a bit longer, dallied, advised prudence, talked of the good of the country and of possible dangers and traps, thus playing with both sides.

Being short-sighted as well as presumptuous, just as things were taking a turn for the worse he judged that the moment had come for him to throw himself into the Liberals' arms. When he was about to burn his boats and already tasting the first fruits of popularity, one fine day the Prince of Satriano landed at Messina with twelve thousand men to put things back to where they were before. The duke thought himself lost; and panic made him commit a folly he was later to repent. While the city was making ready to resist, he signed with other faithful pro-Bourbons and Liberal traitors a document invoking the early restoration of legitimate government.

At the beginning of April the companies of Sicilian militia garrisoned at Taormina evacuated at the appearance of the royalist troops and returned to Catania. On the 7th, Satriano, after a bloody battle, entered the city. All the Uzeda had escaped to the country; the duke had barricaded himself in at Pietra dell'Ovo, because the general opinion was that the Neapolitans would appear on the opposite side, that is by the Messina road. Instead of which they came springing down from the Etna woods and captured, after short skirmishes, the block posts at Ravanuso and Barriera. On reaching Pietra dell'Ovo the Bourbon general and his staff entered the Uzeda estates, where he was greeted by the duke as master, saviour and god. Meanwhile guns swept the Via Etnea in Catania; the royalist troops were counter-attacked at the Aci Gate by a desperate battalion of Corsicans. Decimated by dagger thrusts from that handful of desperate men in the grim light of dusk, they went wild, slaughtered a thousand or so to the last man, then vented their wrath on the defenceless city …

Friend of Satriano, protected by the signature he had put to that act of submission which Liberals were now calling the
Black Book
, protected even more by his own name—since it was thought impossible for an Uzeda to have been serious about throwing in his lot with revolutionaries—the duke was never once troubled during the reaction and was even courted. But on the other hand there was a great ferment against him among the defeated. He was blamed for that odious signature, but even more for his welcome to Satriano at Pietra dell'Ovo. The matter of the signature was known to few, to the leaders only; the
tale of what happened at Pietra dell'Ovo was spread among the rank and file and went round everywhere; each added a bit more, and people got to the point of saying that when the city was in its death agony the duke was actually watching through Satriano's telescope; that at the conqueror's entry into the city he had ridden by the general's side.

Don Lorenzo Giulente, who had remained his friend, had a difficult time defending him, denying exaggerations, asserting that the duke, alone and helpless as he was, could not very well send packing a general and an entire army. Minds embittered by disappointment demanded a scapegoat, and as Mieroslawski, the Polish commander of police, had been accused of treason, popular rancour turned against the duke although thousands deserved it more and were more to blame than he. After all the duke had accepted no rank or money or decorations from the revolution; he had just looked on and awaited the outcome; while many others, after playing hell, had flung themselves at the Intendant's feet and swept the ground with their hats when naming His Majesty Ferdinand II, ‘whom may God always preserve!' That was what the duke wanted to say in his own defence; and that was what Giulente did say. But they were talking to the deaf; and the duke found himself pointed at, branded with the name of traitor, insulted, and even threatened by anonymous letters.

One day his friend Don Lorenzo advised him to leave; only distance and time could make that hatred simmer down. The duke did not wait to be told twice and made off to Palermo. There, the Party of Action, though also defeated, was less depressed even so; hopes were either not dead or beginning to rise again. Once he had got over the fear given him by recent events, his ambitions mortified and unappeased, the duke again lent an ear to the Liberals' wiles, partly to show his dear fellow-citizens that he did not deserve their contempt. And although he did not stray far from his usual prudence, and went to revolutionary meetings as well as to the Royal Lieutenant-General's receptions, and was playing, in fact, the same old game as before, the rumour even so reached Catania that he was in the action committees and corresponding with exiles, and giving money for the good cause and helping persecuted patriots. With
this rumour also came money sent by him to local committees; for he now realised finally that such was the right way to set about things, and that one like him, lacking faith or courage, could only get anywhere by paying cash down. Meanwhile, as minds calmed and events were seen more clearly people realised who were most to blame and turned against them their former hatred of the duke.