The Viceroys (63 page)

‘What d'you mean? Ill-gotten gains? I paid for the “Cavaliere” land and for that house with good money down, didn't I? I'm quite above board, d'you understand? Was I given them or did I steal them, that they can be taken back?'

‘You shouldn't have bought them, knowing where they came from! The day will come for making up accounts, for the
Dies irae;
don't doubt that!'

‘Eh? Who? What must come?' shouted the monk then. ‘I don't care a fig!'

‘The hand of God reaches everywhere. The ways of Providence are infinite!'

Quarrels would start again every afternoon. The Bourbonists and clericals received broadsheets giving the revolution's end as certain and imminent. These articles, read out aloud, listened to as if they were Gospel truth, applauded at every phrase, would make the Benedictine furious. One day when the group, after one of these readings, was criticising him more sharply than usual, Don Blasco got up, made a very expressive gesture, shouted, ‘Go and get …' and left, never again to set foot in that chemist's shop. When passing by it in the afternoons he hurried his step, looking straight in front of him, and if people were sitting outside, crossed the street on to the opposite pavement. He did not even set foot in the palace, where that moneylender of a sister of his was also inveighing against the purchasers of Church property as if they were so many thieves, and where that other Jesuit, Giacomo, was making up to him now that he knew him rich, though without disagreeing with Donna Ferdinanda.

‘He'd like me to leave him the “Cavaliere”,' he would shout to the Cigar-woman, to Garino and his daughters. ‘He'd have no scruples in taking it from me at second-hand! All I'll leave him is thirty-seven bundles of cauliflowers, the Jesuitical thief!'

The Cigar-woman, Garino and the girls approved, and laced the dose by running down all his relations to the monk, so that he should leave everything to them. And they served him like a god, rushed to his slightest sign, walked on tiptoe when he was resting, sat up with him late at night if he was not sleepy, accompanied him to the ‘Cavaliere' land, praised the viticulture, the buildings, the success of all his speculations.

One of these, however, went slightly amiss. The ‘Cavaliere' land bordered to the east on another property, in the hands of the Public Trustee and still unsold, whose boundary consisted of an old hedge of prickly pears with big gaps in it. Don Blasco was having a fine high wall built covered with flints and broken bottles, and he appropriated a number of little pieces of land; in a corner where there were no traces of hedge he annexed to the ‘Cavaliere' a fair-sized slice of this other land. This had now been discovered by the Intendancy of Finance, who poured out summonses, which set the monk baying and yelling against Italian thieves, as in the old days. He almost got to the point of reconciliation with the reactionaries at the chemist's.

‘Accuse me of encroachment? Surely the San Nicola property stretched as far as the vineyards? Are they trying to teach me what the monastery property is, those thieves who've stripped a kingdom?'

Garino added the rest. But as no talk could return summonses by the Public Lands Department, and an enquiry on the spot would prove them right, the ex-police informer, seeing the monk so worked up, suggested one day:

‘Why doesn't Your Excellency say a word to your brother the Deputy?'

Don Blasco did not reply. He had already been to the duke.

For years he had not spoken a word to his brother, for even longer he had been abusing him in public and private. So Don Gaspare was astounded at seeing him appear. The monk entered his brother's study with his hat on his head as if in his own home, said ‘Morning to you' in the tone of one seeing a person from the day before, and sat down. The duke, after the first moment of amazement, smiled subtly and answered in the same tone, ‘Well, what's up?'

The monk at once plunged into his subject.

‘You know I've bought the “Cavaliere” land of San Nicola? There's no boundary line and I had a wall put up. Now the Public Lands people are accusing me of encroachment …'

The duke went on smiling from ear to ear, enjoying it all. Then the monk was silent, thinking there was no need to add more, but his brother wanted the satisfaction of hearing this man by whom he had always been reviled asking for help and said:

‘Well?…'

‘Well?… Can't you talk to someone?'

It was not exactly what he had hoped, but the duke was a good old man at heart, not of the same stuff as the prince and the Prior, and he contented himself with that.

‘All right. Come back with the papers tomorrow.'

So, to the amazement of all their relations, the two brothers were seen going together up and down the steps of the Intendancy, the Prefecture, the Civil Engineers and the Public Lands Department.

In a few days things looked like being arranged, but the duke now suggested a more radical solution to the monk.

‘Why don't you just buy the other estate?'

‘Where'll I get the money?'

‘Oh, we'll find the money!'

He got it from the banks on whose board he was. With it he speculated in public lands, redeemed properties taken from mortmain and purchased some of them anew. Now to be under his own roof as well he was building a fine new house in the Via Plebiscito. Through him, Don Blasco was allowed a discount at the
Bank of Credit and Deposits
, and signed an I.O.U. for twenty-five thousand lire. The ‘Cavaliere' land, increased by almost double, thus became a good-sized property, ‘a real feudal estate', as it was called by Garino, who was now for ever exalting the duke, his talents, the position and power he had reached through his own abilities. But the gossips at the pro-Bourbon pharmacy were harder at it than ever prophesying the day, now imminent, when Don Blasco and other committers of sacrilege would have to restore their ill-gotten goods. The monk let them be and no longer even passed the street around the pharmacy, a glimpse of which even from a distance made him want to retch.
But as time went by, lack of conversation began weighing on him, and one Sunday, meeting his tenant, the teacher, on the stairs, he invited him in.

The teacher said he had been a Garibaldino, described the Aspromonte affair, talked of nothing but conspiracies and threatened the end of the world too, but only if Italy did not occupy Rome.

‘So you think this Government will last?' asked Don Blasco in trepidation.

‘If it does its duty! Otherwise we'll kick it out as we have the others! We aren't frightened by police! We've seen firing! We know all about revolutions!'

‘Some people, though, think we might return …'

‘Return? We must go forward! Integrate national unity! Smash the last stronghold of theocracy, the last bulwark of obscurantism … Humanity never returns! We've buried the Middle Ages! The State must be lay, and the Church return to its origins; as that great man Jesus Christ said, “My Kingdom is not of this world”!'

His tenant's conversation, though from time to time it did make a quiver run down his spine, pleased Don Blasco a good deal, and one day, as he was passing in front of Cardarella's pharmacy, old meeting-place of Liberals, the teacher, who was inside deep in discussion, called him in. They were talking about the suppressed religious orders, and the teacher refused to believe that some years the income of San Nicola had been beyond a million lire.

‘Yes, sir,' confirmed Don Blasco. ‘It was the richest in Sicily, maybe in the whole former kingdom.'

Then the teacher burst out against monks, priests, parasites of a society ‘which, thank heavens, was finally being organised on different basis'.

From that day Don Blasco got into the habit of frequenting the new chemist's. To this shop came rabid Liberals, shouting as much as those other retrogrades against the Government but for a different reason: because it was a government of rabbits, of France's lackeys, of Napoleon Ill's boot-lickers; because it persecuted true patriots and played the Jesuit in the Roman question. Aspromonte and Mentana would come up, but Rome must be
Italian at all costs, or they would go down into the streets and begin shooting again. ‘Rome or death!' shouted the teacher, who always had news of wars and revolutionary movements ready to break out, and Don Blasco, among the others' shouts, would boom:

‘The Holy Father should think it over quietly, while there's yet time and remember '48. If he hadn't listened to the reactionaries then, now he'd be respected President of the Italian Confederation!'

‘Quietly?' cried the teacher. ‘Holy cannons is what they need! The blood of Monti and Tognetti is still steaming! It takes guns to break down the stronghold of fanaticism.'

One day he entered his landlord's apartments with an air of glory and triumph.

‘This is it, at last! War!'

Don Blasco, disturbed by the news, as he feared a war might threaten the Italian state, was reassured when his tenant told him that the election of a German Prince to the throne of Spain had been considered by France as a
casus belli
. ‘Our duty …' But as he was explaining what Italy's duty was a servant appeared from the Uzeda palace. The prince asked for news of his uncle and at the same time warned him that Ferdinando was very ill and they ought to pay him a visit. Don Blasco, longing above all else to hear the words of his new friend, answered:

‘All right, all right; I'll be up tomorrow …'

F
ERDINANDO
had been failing for a year. His haggard face, yellow eyes, white lips had long been signs of hidden illness, inner suffering; but while when perfectly well he thought he had every disease under the sun, now that something was really decaying in him, if people asked what was wrong he replied irritably:

‘Nothing! Why should anything be wrong? D'you want me to fall ill to please you?'

And he gave the prince a rude reply when the latter one day advised him to go up to Pietra dell'Ovo for a time and breathe healthy country air. He no longer wanted to hear his country house even named. The books which had cost so much were gathering dust and moth on the shelves, implements were rusting and breaking, but the estate was prospering now that he no longer experimented with novelties. Stubbornly he denied his sufferings, his stomach pains, his intestinal disturbances, and attributed them to fantastic causes: undercooked bread, sirocco, evening chill. But he was falling into deep funereal hypochondria. For long, long days he never said a word, never saw a living soul. Shut up in his room, flung on the bed, he lay motionless, following the flight of flies. When the crisis passed, he gobbled indigestible food. One summer night his manservant, terrified by black vomit and blood-speckled diarrhoea, sent a son over to the palace to warn the family.

At the prince's arrival and suggestion of sending for a doctor, the sick man cried that he wanted no-one and had quite recovered. But now all realised that his condition was serious. Lucrezia, his childhood companion, tried vainly to convince him
that he must see a doctor; he threatened to lock himself in his room and see no one at all. But his pulse showed that fever was raging. To conquer this obstinacy, they had recourse to a trick, as if he were a child or madman; by pretending that a surveyor had to come to draw the plan of the house they got a doctor into his room. The doctor shook his head; the patient's condition was much more serious than they thought. At the age of thirty-nine he was dying. The old and impoverished blood of the Viceroys was festering inside him, no longer nourishing the flaccid fibres. To try to combat his blood-condition a most severe diet and cure were necessary. But the maniac would listen to no-one, least of all his relations. If they insisted he shouted, ‘Oh, stop it, won't you?' As he was convinced that he was perfectly well, their suggestions that he was ill could only mean they wanted his death, were expecting it. Why? To get his inheritance! He confided this to his servants, and when the Uzeda left, said:

‘D'you think those come here for love of me? They're after my money! Another time tell 'em I'm not here.'

But actually his money had gone already. First in wild experiments ruining the soil, then in mad expense on books and implements, later in cheating by the factor when he had refused to set eyes on his property even from a distance and begun to incur debts. Without surprise or wondering why, he found himself surrounded by people offering to lend money, within reason of course. And he signed I.O.U. after I.O.U., all of which ended up in the hands of the prince, who with his eyes on the property at Pietra dell'Ovo, and realising this madman would never make a Will, was getting a hold on it that way. The maniac, incapable of totting up money borrowed and thinking himself still master of his own property, was convinced that his relations were waiting round him for his death. As soon as they appeared he turned his back on them all, except his nephew Consalvo.