The Viceroys (23 page)

The marchese was also very pleased, and Chiara quite beside herself with delight as her symptoms of pregnancy were confirmed; the husband and wife's only worry was inability to prepare baby clothes. Even Donna Ferdinanda seemed more approachable, domesticated by the prince's hospitality, pleased at saving the expense of taking a villa—though not of food, for each of the guests paid his own share.

But most pleased of all was the young prince. Morning and evening he was out in vineyards and garden, digging, carrying earth, building mud-houses. When tired of these occupations he would gallop to and fro astride a donkey or a mule, and if lackey or factor or other guide did not let him go where he wanted, he gave the man the whipping which he would have given his mount. Only the sight of his father could rein him in, for the prince had brought him up to tremble at a glance, though all his other relatives let him do what he liked. The princess agreed with him at a sign; his Aunt Ferdinanda also helped to spoil him, as heir to the princedom; only Don Eugenio vexed him now with lessons worse than in town. The boy would understand everything when attentive, but the difficulty was to make him keep quiet.

‘Study now or your father will send you to college!' his uncle warned him; and in fact the prince had more than once expressed the intention of sending his son away from home and putting him either at the Cutelli College, founded to educate the nobility ‘in the Spanish mode', or in the Benedictine novitiate, where youths who did not want to make vows received an education equally noble. Consalvo did not want to go to either place, and the threat was enough for him to decide to practise his handwriting and recite declensions. As a reward Don Eugenio took the boy with him around the countryside of Mompileri, where, a few days after his arrival at the Belvedere, he had begun to make certain mysterious trips.

About two centuries before, in 1669, the Etna lava had covered a little village near there called Massa Annunziata, and later on a few remains of its houses had been found. Now Don Eugenio, who had not earned much from trafficking in pots and was always brooding over some great coup which would enrich him, had conceived the plan of starting a series of excavations, like those he had seen at Herculaneum or Pompeii, to uncover the buried village and enrich himself with the money and objects which would certainly be found there. Secrecy was necessary so that others should not filch his idea. And that was why, alone or accompanied by the boy, who would go off on his own to hunt for lizards and butterflies, the cavaliere wandered amid the gorse and cactus lying below Mompileri with old books in his hand, getting his bearings from the spires of Nicolosi and Torre Del Grifo, studying the land, taking measurements, and risking arrest as an evil spirit by muleteers and shepherds who noticed him in those suspicious attitudes. But keeping the secrecy of the idea was not enough; to put it into action a great deal of money was also needed. So one day Don Eugenio called the prince aside, and with an air of great mystery informed him of the plan and asked him to lend enough money to pay for excavations.

‘Is Your Excellency joking or really serious? Excavate the mountain and find what? A few cooking-pots and bits of copper? You must be mad …'

Indirectly the prince was applying the word ‘mad' to himself by that reply, which he would never have dreamt of making to the duke or Donna Ferdinanda. But Don Eugenio had little prestige in the family because of his follies in Naples, and in particular because of his utter lack of money … The cavaliere never mentioned the idea to him again. He changed his line and wondered whether to write to the government to do the excavations at public expense in the hope they would make him director. The young prince breathed freely as lessons were interrupted; after dinner Don Eugenio would shut himself up in his room to work on his memorandum and was not to be seen again for the whole evening, while the others gossiped or gambled.

Gradually quite a considerable society gathered at the villa;
all the gentry in refuge at the Belvedere, all the local notabilities came to Villa Francalanza, where the prince held court and regaled them on anise and water. Half Catania was at the Belvedere, and the Uzeda, who were very exclusive in town, now made concessions because of the place and season, receiving people of small or even no nobility, all those whom Donna Ferdinanda derided or despised, whose names she would twist or to whom she would assign clownish coats-of-arms; the Maurigne for instance, who called themselves ‘cavalieri', dubbed by the old aunt ‘foot cavaliers'; or the Mongiolino, who being descended from enriched brick-makers ought to have had tiles and bricks on their shields. Of that dubious class only the Giulente did not come to the villa because of Benedetto, but when the prince met Benedetto or his father or uncle at the public casino he was most affable, and the young man, who had not interrupted his correspondence with Lucrezia, would pass this on to her, delighted with such amiability. The girl's joy increased her distraction of mind instead of decreasing it: she asked widowers for news of their dead wives, mistook one person for another, forgot everything. One evening she made everyone laugh by asking the Belvedere chemist, who had a sister in a convent:

‘And who is your sister the nun married to?…'

The thread running through all talk was of course news from town, where the cholera was spreading, though slowly and not raging with the terrifying force of the year before. Each exchanged news of relations and friends who had taken refuge in various parts of the Etna Woods; Cousin Graziella, who was at La Zafferana, sent notes and messages by carters almost every day to ask after her cousins, give news of herself and her husband, send warm greetings with presents of fruit and wine; the Duchess Radalì-Uzeda did not write from La Tardarìa because in the stress of unexpected departure, her husband had gone raving mad: madness was hereditary in the Radalì branch of the family; the Duke Radalì had suffered his first fits three years before at the birth of his second son Giovannino.

Since then the duchess, finding the responsibility for the whole household on her shoulders, had renounced the world to take the father's place with her children. She loved them both, but
preferred the young Duke Michele. Not content with instituting primogeniture she worked to improve the property, and led a life of economy and sacrifice so as to leave him even richer. She gave no umbrage to any of the Uzeda; even Donna Ferdinanda, who thought herself the only balanced mind, approved of her. At the Belvedere, in spite of the cholera, the old spinster took an interest in business, drawing apart the men who understood it, talking of loans, mortgages, credits to be granted, failures to be feared; and while the Prince of Roccasciano was explaining to the old speculator the laborious plans on which he was slowly and patiently building up his own fortune, his wife the princess, unbeknown to him, was gambling away with Raimondo and other passionate card-players all the money she had on her. Giacomo could sometimes be seen playing without ever producing a coin, but most of the time he spent chatting with people from the village.

There came to pay him court the doctor, the chemist, the landowners, when he found their aspect pleasant, for those among his mother's familiars whom he thought to have the Evil Eye had been refused the door. The parish priest, the canon, and all the clerics in the village came. As in town, the Uzeda home was frequented here by all the regular and secular clergy, because of its reputation for devoutness and the good it had always done to the Church. The prince's refusal to recognise the legacy to the Convent of San Placido did not prejudice him with these; it was human and natural for him to try to keep most of the property for himself; his mother had done so too. On dying he would be generous with the Church for the good of his soul.

As head of the family he also had the faculty of nominating priests celebrating Mass in all chapels and benefices founded by his ancestors; there at the Belvedere, particularly, was a very prosperous one, that of the Holy Light. One Silvio Uzeda, a dotty creature, who lived a century and a half before, had always been surrounded by priests and friars, and the monks of the monastery of Saint Mary of the Holy Light had persuaded him that the Madonna wanted to marry him. At this he was beside himself with joy. Tradition said that the ceremony had been carried out with all formalities. The bridegroom, after Confession
and Communion, had been led, dressed in gala clothes, before the statue of the Blessed Virgin, where the priest asked him according to the formula if he wished to marry Her. ‘Yes!' Uzeda had replied. Then the same question was asked of the Queen of Heaven, and, through the mouth of the Father Guardian of the Monastery, she too had replied ‘Yes'. Then rings had been exchanged; the statue still had on its finger that of the bridegroom who had of course left all his goods to his Consort. A long legal battle had followed, as the natural heirs refused to recognise the madman's Will. Finally they had come to terms; as a result half the property had been used to found at the monastery a lay chaplaincy over which the Uzeda had patronage.

So all the monks came in the evenings to pay court to the prince and discuss the affairs of the monastery with him. Among all these he acted the grandee, was treated like a pope and listened to like a god. He would forget the rest of the society, the ladies and gentlemen gambling at tombola or playing at charades or arranging excursions on the mountainside and spending their time so gaily that, had it not been for the news of the cholera and for the armed peasants keeping fugitives away later, no one could have thought those were times of pestilence.

The only one who failed to hide her own sorrow amid these general distractions was the Countess Matilde. She had come away from town almost in a frenzy, so strong had been the trials to which she had been put. Terror-struck, she had realised when just on the point of leaving for the country that the pain she could bear least was not separation from her child but Raimondo's betrayal. How could she doubt that any more? Had the truth of that not been suddenly made clear at his announcement that he was going to the Belvedere, where Donna Isabella Fersa was going? Why ever had he, who so hated living in Sicily, refused to leave for the mainland unless it was because he wanted to keep near that other woman? He had pretended that he couldn't decide, so as to wait and see what she decided! And he had thought up pretexts and accused his father-in-law and temporised so well that when the pestilence broke out he had done just what he wanted!

In those pretences and lies of his she no longer saw confirmation
of the bad sides of his character; the fact that he was capable of them did not hurt her. Her one torture was the thought that he had used them for love of that other woman. That he had no love for his daughter, that he was unjust to his father-in-law, and bullying, capricious and rude, did not bother her at all; she did not want him to belong to any other! In Florence her jealousy had had no definite object, or had continually changed its object, for he paid court to all the women he met. She herself had also felt reassured up to a point, as, though he was gallant in speech with ladies, his changeableness and impatience made him prefer those others—paid women … How shameful it had been to find herself reduced to the point of rejoicing at that! Yet now she envied her past sufferings, finding it intolerable that he should be so full of another woman as to keep away from his own daughter in such terrible days in order to be near her!

Her anguish grew as she realised how fast he was advancing along the road of betrayal. In Florence, Raimondo's intrigues had a certain shame about them; he even tried then to gain her forgiveness by being nice to her at times. Now he was doing it all so openly she was forced to be spectator of his infamy! This wounded her most; that they should be so shameless as to make such a rendezvous, under her very eyes, while hearts all round were trembling at the thought of death!

What a day was that of their flight to the Belvedere, through streets roasting in the sun, amidst clouds of hot, suffocating dust! She shared a carriage with Chiara, Lucrezia and the marchese, and the sight of the latter being so attentive to his wife made her suffering the more acute. Raimondo had refused to travel with her, left her alone in that rush through villages where armed men stopped every person and vehicle, barring the way: but she understood nothing of all that! She saw nothing on the road! All she saw, in her mind's eye, was Raimondo smiling and happy beside that woman, as she had seen him so often in reality without her innate trust suspecting anything! Now, however, all the things that she had been unable to explain acquired an obvious meaning; Raimondo's long absences, his impatient waiting, the pleasure which could be read in his eyes as soon as that woman entered, even the mysterious instinct
of revulsion which that woman had aroused in her from the first moment.

What a false and evil creature she must be, to call her by the tender name of friend and embrace her and kiss her while taking away her husband! Was he himself not just as false? How many lies! He had even used her pregnancy as a reason for not leaving Sicily, quite disregarding the fact that he was thereby risking the life of the creature she bore in her womb!

What a terrible day! In the furnace-hot carriage, its windows peered through by suspicious faces of brutish peasants, its air full of the nauseating smell of camphor which Chiara and Lucrezia were holding to their nostrils against infection, she felt her breath fail. She did not know where she was or where she was going; she yearned to shout out to coachman and travelling companions, ‘Turn back … I don't want to come!' She longed to confront her husband, fling his betrayal in his face, adjure him not to take her near that woman, not to kill her, to save the creature moving in her womb, restore peace to her heart, air to her breast … Long before arriving at the Belvedere she had quite lost her senses, and could not even remember how and when she entered the villa.