The Viceroys (3 page)

Identifying characters in such a local novel can be a stimulating entry into Catanian life, and so an effective if roundabout help to appreciation. Though the family of Uzeda have as much basis in reality as Proust's Guermantes, only the Paternò Castello clan in its various branches held an analogous position at the time. Don Blasco, for instance, an improbable figure to us outside the pages of some biased account of
monastic life before the French Revolution, turns out to be
una cosa naturalissima
in Catania, possibly based in part on a Father Paternò Castello who was famous in the town fifty years ago and is still remembered for his private life and public bluster. There, opposite the great monastery façade (for the Italian State Monopoly rarely changes sites) is still the tobacconist's where reigned his mistress, the ‘Cigar-woman'. To create these macabre grandees, near-brigands or near-saints De Roberto had to combine traits of feudal families all over Sicily, and his Uzeda stand out like Goyas, exceptional beings demanding exceptional treatment. For such a conception gentler sides have to be played down. The Princes of Bìscari, Paternò Castello, were Maecenases of the arts with a liberal tradition since their ancestor corresponded with Voltaire and befriended Goethe; the Dukes of Càrcaci, Paternò Castello, still have the most civilised manners in town (‘Wherever there is a Càrcaci one can
breathe
!' says a young American resident). A more obvious model was the late nineteenth-century Marchese di San Giuliano, Paternò Castello, who became Foreign Minister of Italy under Giolitti, and whose character and career are freely sketched into the young Prince Consalvo. Palazzo San Giuliano may well be the original of the Francalanza palace of the book, for it fills a whole side of its own square on Via Etnea and is so vast and imposing that, with its entrance covered in commemorative plaques of royal visits, it is often mistaken for the town-hall opposite. Although now housing a bank, numerous shops and businesses and a large hotel, high on its main façade can still be seen two shuttered windows on rooms which are never opened, due to some tragedy, rumour has it, or perhaps some monster … In Catania the monstrous and improbable are never very far away, particularly among the established classes. Even poor old Don Eugenio, the only Uzeda who was perhaps an artist manqué, had a prototype, an old beggar often seen within living memory around the smarter cafés, who would take alms only from nobles of rank equal to himself.

Later, Vitaliano Brancati extended this panorama to the middle classes, whose predicament between the two wars was brilliantly and terrifyingly caught by his novels,
Il Bell' Antonio
and
Don Giovanni in Sicilia
.

Since the late ‘nineties De Roberto had spent part of each year at Catania, and eventually ill-health decided him to settle definitely in his beloved city. This return to origins did not have the psychic effect on him that it did on Verga, whose displacement home from cosy Milan brought about one of those mysterious crises of Sicilian inertia, so that he never wrote more than an odd chapter or so of his great planned cycle about
I Vinti
(‘The Defeated'). De Roberto, as well as directing the city's museums and antiquities, kept up a flow of varied productions; studies, short stories, plays, essays, they appeared regularly, uneven, original, all stamped somewhere with a directness, at times an acrid immediacy, that was becoming increasingly rare in Italian letters as D'Annunzio's influence grew. Occasionally he produced something outstanding, such as his tales of military life during the first world war; one short story written at this time,
La Paura
, about a soldier's fear, treated battle so frankly that it was not published until after his death. Such writing has only been appreciated in Italy during the last few years, partly through the influence of Hemingway, who might have written these stories himself.

Sometimes De Roberto's choice of plots make an unconscious pattern; an old lady gambles away her last cent with her chaplain; a confessor is tempted by his penitent; an anarchist prince murders his mistress; love natural and supernatural is found and lost and twisted. Among his most impressive stories are
Il Rosario
, about an old woman reciting her rosary as she refuses to pardon a dying daughter;
Il Sogno
, a successful piece of experimental writing, on a man's thoughts to the rhythm of the train in which he is escaping from wife to mistress;
La Messa di Nozze
(1911), a short novel whose plot turns on a moving and elaborately treated crisis of conscience by a woman during her marriage service. Fascination with the Church, horror of unctuousness, terror of love ‘
soif de l'absolu
' perhaps unacknowledged … no wonder his fiction and his ‘scientific' and even his historical studies, emanate a tense, sometimes brusque disquiet; even at the Feast of the Assumption at Randazzo the decorated float reminded him of the chariot of Vishnu or Moloch.

Neither Verga nor De Roberto ever married, both having theories about a writer being wedded to his work. This did not
prevent Verga from keeping secret mistresses with whom he would vanish for long jaunts in northern Europe, unknown to all till after his death. De Roberto stayed at home with his mother, locked in one of those relationships which are inexplicably both closer and less neurotic in the south. Love betrayed recurs so often in his writing that he must have set up some embittering pattern of his own, driven perhaps too by that sexual rhetoric of Catania for which Brancati found a new word, based on the image of a strutting cock,
gallismo.
With all De Roberto's clarity and energy his writing is full of the strange Sicilian character, its subdued fervour and sadness, its solitude beyond the smiles. Is its only cause, as some historians insist, a social structure too ill-balanced to release local energies? Or is there some deeper anguish in Pirandello's comment ‘Intelligence is a terrible thing because it destroys the beauty of life', or in the title of his last ‘Notes on my involuntary sojourn on earth'? A remark which De Roberto put into the mouth of Mme de Maintenon, ‘Nothing is more able than irreproachable conduct', calls up one of those silently screaming cardinals by Francis Bacon. Sicily now is one of the few places where Stendhal would still find his ‘
sombre Italie
'.

De Roberto's last years were spent either tending at his mother's bedside or looking after Verga's literary interests, and at his death in 1927 he left behind a mass of unfinished manuscripts; a history of Malta, a biography of Verga, the complete first part of a novel,
L'Imperio
, which continued the story of the last Uzeda, Prince Consalvo, in Rome. Such fame as he had outside Sicily dated back to the ‘nineties, his writing was not the kind to appeal to Fascism, his books were allowed to fall out of print while in public demand, and within a few years he was almost forgotten except by specialists; though it is pleasant to record that Edith Wharton was an enthusiast about
I vicerè
, and, through her, Bernard Berenson. Now Italians are probably closer to his spirit than ever before. There is a growing realisation of the odd and important place that Sicily occupies in their modern literature, of, for instance, De Roberto's influence on the narrative style of Moravia, of the
Veristi's
direct perception as part of that chain in Italian art which links Giotto to realist films. De Roberto's work is likely to be reassessed against
a wider background. ‘God concedes to every artist one hour that is truly great', he once told an admirer, but never said which he thought to be his.

We catch a glimpse of him through contemporary eyes, out on his stroll at
l'ora del gelato
(‘ice-cream-time') in Via Etnea; Cavaliere Roberto, he was known as, one of the city's major personalities; a spry figure, with a quizzical look behind his eye-glass and above a high stiff collar and white waistcoat. He passes among the parading carriages, the jostling carts, the barrel-organs playing
Casta Diva
, under the all-seeing eye of Etna. If it were the Feast of St Agata there would be tall constructions of gilt and baroque quivering down Via Etnea among squibs and shouts and fervour, as they do every year. Even now, feudalism has its trappings and some descendants of the old Spanish viceroys flourish, for during the feast the image is still greeted by a flow of splendid liveries in the palace on Via Etnea of the Prince of Roccaromana (Paternò Castello). As the afternoon light fades great balloon figures, floating spread against the sky, diffuse an odd sense of timelessness, so that De Roberto and the carriages might still be there. On one such afternoon he must have scribbled the lines found on his desk after his death: ‘Among all human constructions the only ones that avoid the dissolving hands of time are castles in the air.'

A
RCHIBALD
C
OLQUHOUN

Allington, Kent.

July, 1961.

T
HE
first publication of
I vicerè
was in 1894, and its earliest translation, into Polish, in 1905. In 1954 it was translated into French by Henriette Valot, with an introduction by Marcel Brion (Club Bibliophile de France), and in 1959 into German (Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, Munich). This is the first book by Federico De Roberto to appear in English.

The Italian prose flows very fast, as if under pressure, and is full of racy idiom, Sicilian and otherwise. Without the numerous, meticulous and very valuable suggestions of Mr John D. Christie, Lecturer in Humanity at Glasgow University, I should often have gone astray. I am also grateful to Mr Anthony Pensabene for translating the verses, to Signora Natalia Baldini (Natalia Ginzburg) for drafting some difficult pages, to Professor Ermanno Scudèri of Catania for many informative and agreeable conversations about De Roberto, and to Dott. Andrea Cavadi and the staffs of the Biblioteca Universitaria, Catania, and of The Italian Institute, London, particularly Signor Camillo Pennati, for invaluable help. The author's niece, Donna Marianna Paola De Roberto of Catania, owner of most of his manuscripts and letters, among other kindnesses, showed me her uncle's library and the original manuscript of
I vicerè.

This text is complete, and based on the Garzanti edition of 1959, edited by Luigi Russo. In the same edition are to be found the other works by De Roberto now in print,
La Messa di Nozze, Il Rosario
, and
La Paura.

A.C.

PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS
 

The Uzeda family

The late Donna Teresa Uzeda and Risà, Princess of Francalanza

Her children