CHAPTER 4
Love At Donnafugata – NOVEMBER, 1860

 

…[but it was the arrival of two young men in love which really awoke the instincts lying dormant in the house; and these now showed themselves everywhere, like ants wakened by the sun, no longer poisonous, but livelier than ever. Even the architecture, the rococo decoration itself, evoked thoughts of fleshly curves and taut erect breasts; and every opening door seemed like a curtain rustling in a bed-alcove. Cavriaghl was in love with Concetta; but boy that he was, not only in appearance like Tancredi but deep within, his love found expression in the easy rhymes of poets such ,as Prati and Aleardi, and in dreaming of moonlight elopements whose logical sequence he did not dare contemplate -and which Concetta’s “deafness” obviated from the start anyway. One cannot know if in the seclusion of that green room of his he did not abandon himself to more definite hopesi certain it is that to the love-scenery of that autumn in Donnafugata his only contribution was the sketching in of clouds and evanescent horizons and not the creation of architectural masses. The two girls Carolina and Caterina, however, played their parts excellently in the symphony of desires traversing the whole palace that November and mingling with the murmur of the fountains, the pawing of the horses in heat in the stables, and the tenacious burrowing of nuptial nests by woodworms in the old furniture. The two girls were young and attractive and, though with no particular loves of their own, found themselves immersed in the currents emanating from the others; often the kiss which Concetta denied to Cavriaghi, the embrace from Angelica which left Tancredi unsatisfied, would reverberate around the girls and graze their untouched bodies; and they too would find themselves dreaming about locks of hair damp with sweat, about whimpers of pleasure. Even poor Mademoiselle Dombreuil, by dint of functioning as lightning conductor,was drawn into the turbid and laughing vortex, just as psychiatrists become infected and succumb to the frenzies of their patients. When after a day of hide-and- seek and moralizing ambushes she lay down on her lonely bed, her own withered breasts would quiver as she muttered indiscriminate invocations to Tancredi, to Carlo, to Fabrizio. . . . Center and motor of this sensual agitation were, of course, one couple, Tancredi and Angelica. Their certain marriage, though not very close, extended its reassuring shadow in anticipation on the parched soil of their mutual desires. Difference of class made Don Calogero consider their long periods alone together as quite normal with the nobility, and made Princess Maria Stella think habitual to those of the Seffiras’ rank the frequency of Angelica’s visits and a freedom of bearing which she would certainly not have found proper in her own daughters. And so Angelica’s visits to the palace became more and more frequent until they were almost constant, and she ended by being only accompanied there formally by her father, who would return at once to his office and to the finding or weaving of hidden plots, or by a maid who would vanish into the servants’ quarters to drink coffee and bore the unfortunate palace domestics. Tancredi wanted Angelica to know the whole palace with its inextricable complex of guest rooms, state rooms, kitchens, chapels, theaters, picture galleries, odorous tack rooms, stables, stuffy conservatories, passages, stairs, terraces and porticoes, and particularly a series of abandoned and uninhabited apartments which had not been used for many years and formed a mysterious and intricate labyrinth of their own. Tancredi did not realize (or he realized perfectly well) that he was drawing the girl into the hidden center of the sensual cyclone; and Angelica at that time wanted whatever Tancredi did. Their wanderings through the almost limitless building were interminable; they would set off as if for some unknown land, and unknown indeed it was because in many of those apartments and corners not even Don Fabrizio had ever set foot (a cause of great satisfaction to him, for he used to say that a palace of which one knew every room wasn’t worth living in). The two lovers embarked for Cythera on a ship made of dark and sunny rooms, of apartments sumptuous or squalid, empty or crammed with remains of heterogeneous furniture. They would set off accompanied by Cavriaghi or by Mademoiselle Dombreuil (Father Pirrone, with the wisdorn of his Order, had always refused his company), sometimes by both; outer decency was saved. But in the palace of Donnafugata it was not difficult to mislead anyone wanting to follow; this just meant slipping into a passage (these were very long, narrow, and tortuous, with grilled windows which could not be passed without a sense of anguish), turning through a gallery, going up some handy stairs, and the two young people were far away, invisible, alone as if on a desert island. All that remained to survey them was some faded pastoral portrait made unseeing by the painter’s inexperience, or a shepherdess glancing down consenting from some obliterated fresco. Cavriaghi anyway would soon tire, and when he found his route leading through a room he knew or some staircase down into the garden he would slip off, both to please his friend and to go and sigh over Concetta’s ice-cold hands. The governess would hang on longer, but not indefinitely; for some time her unanswered calls could be heard fading farther and farther away: “(Tancrede, Angelica, ou etes-vous?” Then silence would fall again, except for the scuffle of rats in the ceilings above, or the rustle of some centuries-old and forgotten letter sent wandering by the wind over the floor: excuses for pleasant frights, for the reassuring contact of flesh with flesh. And with them always was Eros, malicious and tenacious, drawing the young couple into a game full of risk and fun. Both of them were still very near childhood, and they enjoyed the game in itself, enjoyed being followed, being lost, being found again; but when they touched each other their sharp ened senses would overwhelm them, and his five fingers entwined in hers with that gesture dear to uncertain sensualists, the gentle rub of fingertips on the pale veins of the back of the hand, confusing their whole being, preluding more insinuating caresses. Once she had hidden behind an enormous picture propped on the floor, and for a short time Arturo Corbera at the Siege of Antioch formed a protection for the girl’s hopeful anxiety; but when she was found, with her smile veined in cobwebs and her hands veiled in dust, she was clasped tight, and though she kept on saying again and again, “No, Tancredi, no,” her denial was in fact an invitation, for all he was doing was staring with his blue eyes into her green ones. One luminous cold morning she was trembling in a dress that was still summery; he squeezed her to him, to warm her, on a sofa covered in tattered silki her odorous breath moved the hair on his forehead; they were moments ecstatic and painful, during which desire became torment, restraints upon it a delight. The rooms in the abandoned apartments had neither a definite layout nor a name, and like the explorers of the New World, they would baptize the rooms they crossed with the names of their joint discoveries. A vast bedroom in whose alcove stood the ghost of a bed adorned with a canopy hung with skeleton ostrich feathers was remembered afterward as “the feather room”; a staircase with steps of smooth crumbling slate was called by Tancredi “the staircase of the lucky slip.” A number of times they really did not know where they were; all this twisting and turning, backing and following, and pauses full of murmuring contact, made them lose their way so that they had to lean out of some paneless window to gather from an angle of the courtyard or a view of the garden which wing of the palace they were in. But sometimes they could not find their way even so, as the window did not give on to one of the great courts but on to some inner yard, anonymous itself and never entered, marked only by the corpse of some cat or the usual little heap of spaghetti and tomato sauce either vomited or flung there; and from another window they would find themselves looking into the eyes of some pensioned-off old maidservant. One afternoon inside a cupboard they found four chimes, that music which delighted the affected simplicity of the eighteenth century. Three of these, buried in dust and cobwebs, remained mute; but the last, which was more recent and shut tighter into its dark wooden box, started up its cylinder of bristling copper and the little tongues of raised steel suddenly produced a delicate tune, all in clear, silvery tones: the famous Carnival of Venice; they rhymed their kisses with those notes of disillusioned gaiety; and when their embrace loosened they were surprised to notice that the notes had ceased for some time and that their action had left no other trace than a memory of ghostly music. Once the surprise was of a different kind. In one of the rooms in the old guest wing they noticed a door hidden by a cupboard; the centuries-old lock soon gave way to fingers pleasantly entwined in forcing it: behind it a long narrow staircase wound up in gentle curves of pink marble steps. At the top was another door, open, and covered with thick but tattered padding; then came a charming but odd little apartment, of six small rooms gathered around a mediumsized drawing room, all, including the drawing room, with floors of whitest marble, sloping away slightly toward a small lateral gutter. On the low ceilings were some very unusual reliefs in colored stucco, fortunately made almost indecipherable by damp; on the walls were big surprisedlooking mirrors, hung too low, one shattered by a blow almost in the middle, and each fitted with contorted rococo candle brackets. The windows gave on to a segregated court, a kind of blind and deaf well, which let in a gray light and had no other openings. In every room and even in the drawing room were wide, too wide sofas, showing nails with traces of silk that had been torn away; spotty armrests; on the fireplaces were delicate intricate little marble intaglios, naked figures in paroxysms but mutilated by so’ me furious hammer. The damp had marked the walls high up and also low down at a man’s height, where it had assumed strange shapes, an odd thickness, dark tints. Tancredi, disturbed, would not let Angelica touch a cupboard on the wall of the drawing room, which he shut up himself. It was deep but empty, except for a roll of dirty stuff standing upright in a corner; inside was a bundle of small whips, switches of bull’s muscle, some with silver handles, others wrapped halfway up in a charming old silk, white with little blue stripes, on which could be seen three rows of blackish marksi and metal instruments for inexplicable purposes. Tancredi was afraid of himself too. “Let’s go, my dear, there’s nothing interesting here.” They shut the door carefully, went down the stairs again in silence, and put the cupboard back where it was before; and all the rest of that day Tancredi’s kisses were very light, as if given in a dream and in expiation.]…