Lampedusa Page 2

  And so Giuseppe Tomasi, last Prince of Lampedusa, put on his hat with care, worked his fingers into his dead father’s kidskin gloves, and took up his walking stick and his worn leather bag. At the door he paused.

  How much time do I have, Doctor?

  Coniglio’s hands were clasped carefully on the desk before him and as he tilted his head his spectacles filled with light, obscuring his eyes. That will depend on you, he said. Let us pray it is many years yet.

  In which case, said Giuseppe, it will not depend on me at all.

  The doctor smiled, but there was a sadness in it, and Giuseppe went out, the frosted glass on the streetside door rattling softly as it closed, and he shuffled out into the cold bright air leaning on his cane as if it were still the same morning as before, and he the same man.

  * * *

  Outside in the roar he stood amazed, watching the cars and motor scooters creep through the crowds in a haze of exhaust and brake lights and shouting. It was the sudden clear knowledge of his own death that filled him. He thought of Licy asleep at Via Butera, her drapes drawn against the day, and although he knew Coniglio was right, and that he must go to her, and tell her, he did not do so. A kind of slowness had taken hold in him, so that he did not want to go anywhere, think of anything, he wanted just to stay where he was as the crowds poured around him and the drivers stood up on their Lambrettas shouting and the sellers at their tables called out their wares. The doctor’s office loomed behind, shadowy, dreamlike. He told himself that to allow Licy her sleep was a kindness. He would see her in the evening.

  But the evening is now, for you, always. This thought came to him unbidden and he drew his chin down to his chest and took a sharp pained breath. So. He would die before his wife. This was the true meaning of his meeting with Coniglio, he saw: the certainty that she would go on, alone in the world, after him. And he felt for a moment a kind of bitterness that he must die first; and then he leaned into his walking stick, his thick wool coat buttoned tight across his hips, and felt suddenly ashamed at the thought.

  They had never had a child. What of himself would be left behind for Licy? His estate had eroded until he could no longer be counted among Palermo’s first families; he had descended into a genteel poverty; the war had taken what little was left until his presence now at the Bellini Club attracted, it seemed to him, only sidelong glances and whispers. The great palaces had been sold or reduced to rubble. His mother had been the last powerful Lampedusa, the last true Lampedusa, and she had disapproved of Licy from the first.

  Giuseppe lifted his face in the cold air. His mother. It was true what Coniglio said, she had believed in Mussolini. Many had. He remembered her standing on the terrace of the Casa Lampedusa in the wind reading aloud from a crackling newspaper as the dictator marched on Rome, the sharp brittle pleasure in her voice. Her maiden name was Cutò and she had been a beauty in her youth and a formidable aristocrat in age. Underneath her savage confidence, her quickness, her intelligence, lay a sadness that he understood was in him also. She had been one of five sisters, three of whom had died in quick succession and whose deaths had haunted his mother all her life to come. Her sister Lina had starved to death under the rubble after the Messina earthquake in 1908 and three years later her favourite sister Giulia was murdered by a lover in a shabby hotel in Rome, and later yet the public scandal of it led to her youngest sister’s suicide. Maria had been buried apart from the family and Giuseppe could remember the cold empty church, the absence of his father, the priest’s unkind prayers rustling like pigeons in the dim arches overhead. He thought of those years and of his mother’s little blue bottles of laudanum and the drifting through Europe and of his own year in Naples and how when at last they returned to Palermo it was a changed city, at least to him, a city with unfriendly faces, a city of closed curtains and locked doors, only the dark leatherbound stillness of his palazzo’s library remaining. Yes she had believed in Mussolini but when his government declared war in 1940 and imagined an empire in Africa she had crumpled up the newspaper in disgust and removed the little Fascist pin from her coat.

  But it was her elegance, the smooth soft whiteness of her throat and her arms that he wished to keep in his memory. Her left arm extended in long sweeping strokes as she brushed her hair at night in front of a mirror, the gold hairbrush hissing at each pull. She had a long thin throat and a tiny waist and wore her hair high and her neckline low in the manner of the belle époque. He could remember walking with his governess Anna in the gardens of Santa Margherita di Belice, his mother and Aunt Giulia some twenty paces ahead, the grace and drift of their pale skirts over the white gravel under the blazing sky. Her laugh, like a silver spoon ringing against cut glass. He loved her for the great violent powerful love she demanded, and received, a creature both beloved and feared by all who knew her, himself most of all.

  One memory above all others would come to him, when he thought of her. He must have been four years old. He and his mother were guests of the wealthy and powerful Florios on the island of Favignana. He would hear later the rumours of his mother and the patriarch Don Ignazio. Early one Saturday morning his Sienese governess had torn back the curtains and dragged him from sleep and combed his hair, scrubbed at his face and neck with a rough cloth, wrestled him into his finest clothes. Then she had led him outside and along the sea-stairs above the garden to the formal terrace facing the harbour. He remembered the gust and billow of orange curtains set up to cut the wind, how in the shadow of the white cliffs the light was different, the interlocking of sunlight and black water. Seated on a plush chair brought out from the gallery was an ancient Frenchwoman, her stark black widow’s dress rippling around her in the wind, her black veil lifted back from her face and her startled blue eyes squinting. He would learn years later that she was the ex-empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III, a guest also of the Florios and soon to depart on her yacht. He kneeled before her and felt the rasp of her dry lips on his forehead, and then she set a hand light-boned and papery on the top of his head and said, Quel joli petit. He remembered peering across at his mother, he remembered the massive shaggy figure seated beside her, his arm loose on the back of her chair, his strong white teeth as he smiled. That was Ignazio Florio, their host, lord and magnate. Then the man stood powerfully and clapped two monstrous hands and little Giuseppe was dismissed.

  That was what he would hold in his heart, somehow, always: a sense of apprehension, of windswept sunlight, a vague uncertainty as to the meaning of what he had witnessed, while great events unfolded around him and he kneeled dazed in the honeycombed light of Sicily, a child.

  * * *

  As he made his slow way across the old quarter, to Flaccovio’s Bookshop, what he wanted was to lose himself in the aisles, unmolested, to forget Coniglio and his diagnosis and the bloom of sickness in his lungs, if only for a brief hour. Along the narrow streets he drifted, past merchants in their winter coats setting up their stalls, past the smoky Fiats with boxes tied to their roofs, their drivers standing in the half-opened doors trying to clear a path, past the blinkered cart horses creeping by, and the women in kerchiefs coming sleepily out onto their balconies to lower buckets with bills in them to the vendors on Vespas below, then draw up the morning’s bread and fish. The winter light was flat, shadowless. Somewhere a radio was blaring rock ’n’ roll. He felt an unaccountable strangeness in his chest, a lightness, as if he had never before seen Palermo in all its seething life. It is a beautiful city, he thought, despite all.

  When he rounded the corner and crossed Via Ruggiero Settimo he caught sight of the boys, but it was too late to turn aside.

  They were waiting for him in the cold. Languid and ropy with youth, leaning into the warpled glass of the bookstore windows, clapping their hands together, swinging their arms. Gioacchino and Orlando, his student friends: young, irreverent, grinning as he approached.

  He and Licy had met them two years earlier at the salon of an antiquarian bookseller. Giuseppe had liked their humour, their amusing, quarrelsome, vibrant talk, the way his wife had studied their faces, nodding in approval. To his own surprise, he had invited them to visit at Via Butera, to discuss Stendhal, and Shakespeare, and Chaucer, and then last spring he had found himself preparing conversation notes about English literature and those conversations had developed into a kind of informal lecture series. Giuseppe had prepared over a thousand pages already. The boys were louche and elegant by turns, in ways he could not have imagined when he was their age. And though literature, and music, and film had first drawn them into Giuseppe’s orbit, for him there was something else about them, some impossibly modern thing, which he wanted near. Alessandra had understood it before he did: they were a part of a world that had already abandoned him, a world in which there would no longer be a place for people like him.

  He had told neither of them of his morning’s appointment with Coniglio and for that he was suddenly relieved. The taller of the two pushed himself upright with his foot and unfolded his arms and waved. That was Gioacchino: barely twenty, irrepressible, teasing, the son of a distant second cousin. Despite the chill the boy’s coat sleeves were shoved to the elbows, his long fingers smooth, his narrow tie askew like a young photographer down from Milan. Giuseppe stared at him in the brightness of the street as if he would devour the boy whole, his energy, his rawness. For Gioacchino had become very dear to him and to Licy, and he felt a sudden gratitude to the boy simply for being there, on that morning.

  Uncle! Giò was calling, needlessly loud. He waved both arms. A lady weighed down with shopping glanced up in alarm, hurried past.

  We thought you might be here, said the other boy, coming up to walk alongside Giuseppe. His voice rasped, roughened as if by wine. We went by the Mazzara, but you weren’t there.


  So we just followed the dust, grinned Giò. I warned Orlando everything old ends up here.

  Francesco Orlando shifted the heavy satchel at his shoulder, shrugging.

  Now Gioacchino stepped forward, plucked a small cake from Giuseppe’s leather bag, took a messy bite. You are like an English doctor, Uncle, he said, his mouth full. Carrying everything you need in your little bag.

  Giò, Giuseppe said sharply. That is enough.

  But he was not really angry. He was not the boy’s uncle, but he accepted the title in affection. Irreverent though he was, Giò could do no wrong in his eye. The fault lay with the modern world, he felt, which bred so little solemnity into its youth.

  Your cousin was there, Orlando said now. At the Mazzara. We said we would find you for him.

  Casimiro is in Palermo?

  Not Casimiro. Lucio.

  Giuseppe cleared his throat, opened his coat, fumbled for a cigarette. Too late, he thought of Coniglio’s warning, but the boys were watching him, and so he lit the cigarette and breathed in deeply. He studied Francesco Orlando: stocky, his spectacles askew, his wide round skull and pitted forehead, a student of literature with professorial ambitions. The boy was growing a thin black moustache and he kept running a finger across it as if to reassure himself it was still there. One corner of the collar of his heavy coat was bent upward, a button was missing.

  Giò licked at his fingers, crumpled the paper wrapper. Tell Orlando he must come with me to the Marina, Uncle, he said. Orlando listens to you.

  Because he has respect.

  Gioacchino glanced up, his dark eyes sly and smiling.

  What is at the Marina? Giuseppe asked.

  English poker. We can still sit in, if we hurry. You are not in a gambling mood, are you, Uncle?

  The grey light shifted. A decommissioned military truck rattled past in a cloud of exhaust and Giuseppe squinted, lowered his cigarette, held a handkerchief to his mouth. He feared a coughing fit and he did not reply but the youths took no notice.

  I must study, Orlando was protesting. I cannot sit in, Giò.

  There’s plenty of time for studying. Tell him, Uncle. We are young. We should be studying the ways of the world. Didn’t Stendhal say something like that?

  Hardly.

  No?

  No.

  Giò smiled, his cheeks red with the chill. Well. Usually I read an author first, before I misquote him. What is it, Uncle? Why do you look like that?

  Giuseppe blinked and blinked. He was drinking in the sight of the boys with a desperation that shamed him. There was a coarse muscularity in Orlando that would always betray his middle-class origins, nothing could be done about it. He was too concentrated, too serious. But Giò was all leanness and grace, like a racing hound, his hair mussed, his eyes squinting, his teeth sharp. He thought of Licy at Via Butera, he tried to imagine how she would sit, stiffly, without interrupting, as he told her about Coniglio’s diagnosis.

  You always take the easier path, Gioitto, he said at last, but there was no admonishment in it. He glanced in through the clouded glass of Flaccovio’s. Will you not come inside?

  Giò laughed. Oh, Uncle. Even now a countess swoons somewhere and needs rescuing. If you change your mind, Orlando, you will find me at Count Alfonso’s. I will be the one beside the stove with the stacks of American dollars at his elbow.

  As he left, Francesco Orlando shook his head. Gioacchino is not serious, he said. He does not want to learn, he does not know what it is to have an empty pocket. He thinks the world will wait for him.

  Because the world will, said Giuseppe. No greatness was ever achieved because of an empty pocket, Orlando.

  The boy paused at his tone. Don Giuseppe—

  Yes?

  I cannot come to the lecture tonight. I must study. I have an examination in the morning.

  Giuseppe had forgotten that they had moved the week’s lecture to that evening. His appointment with Coniglio had chased it from his mind, and he understood now he would need the evening to sit with Licy and talk through the diagnosis. He would have had to cancel regardless. But to conceal his own embarrassment he said, gruffly: Only you can decide your priorities, Orlando.

  The boy flushed. You have already prepared. Forgive me.

  Well.

  It is not that I do not value your lessons, Don Giuseppe. It is not that.

  All at once Giuseppe regretted speaking so sharply. He patted the boy’s sleeve. Go, he said, study your books, do not mind about the lessons. We will resume next week.

  I will not miss another lecture. I promise.

  It is all right.

  Thank you, Don Giuseppe.

  Go.

  Orlando lingered, then went.

  Giuseppe, alone now, stood in the cold shadow of the bookshop windows watching the dark shapes of the traffic ripple past. He had not wanted company but now with the boys departed he felt strangely exposed, as if his coat were unbuttoned, as if his private affairs were on display for anyone to see. He had his head down as if deciding something and then he dropped his cigarette and ground it under the toe of his shoe and started to cross the street towards the Mazzara, towards Lucio. He did not feel like his cousin’s company but then Lucio with his reticence and dry self-regard was in some ways not company at all. Yet rather than crossing Via Ruggiero Settimo he did something strange, something he had not done in all the time he had walked these streets: he turned instead down Via Cerda, and after a half mile or so he turned into a warren of narrow side streets. At once the noise and exhaust of the city faded. There were puddles in the alley, garbage and newspapers blown into the doorways. Here the balconies rose up on either side and he craned his head, peered at the white sliver of sky. How elusive the world was. He noticed iron cages hanging on the balconies, empty in the cold, and on several railings were folded bright carpets, yellow, red, as if set out to dry. Was this the truer Palermo? He passed a knot of schoolboys with their hair slicked down, their shirttails untucked, kicking a football against a door, the hollow banging of each strike like the hammering of a coffin. He walked on.

  Water-stained walls, rust bleeding from the hinges of streetside windows. He passed a bombed-out tenement, its plaster crumbling, the collapsed ruins visible through the shell of its door. The buildings on each side stood untouched. The alley opened into a narrow piazza and at the steps of its shabby church he paused. He could hear through the carved doors the low rumble of prayer. Across the square an old man sat on a bench, his grizzled head bowed, his hat propped on one knee, and Giuseppe shifted his walking stick and satchel to his left hand and climbed the steps, holding to the railing as he went. What he was thinking as he crossed the threshold and stood blinking in the sudden gloom was that he had arrived at his own decline.

  The church was warm. He stood listening to the low drone of voices. There were figures kneeling in the shadowed pews, and he could make out the haunting rise and fall of the Ave Maria. What had he come for? He could not be counted among the faithful and had not attended mass in thirty years. His eyes adjusted slowly. The horror of the crucifixion above the altar, the twist of grief and agony in the face of its ugly wooden Christ. What troubled him was how little would stand in his place, once he was gone. How little he would leave behind. He did not believe there was life beyond the grave and when he prayed to his mother he knew the words were just that, words. She was nowhere. He watched the humble backs of the faithful in prayer and his thoughts turned to the lecture he was to have given to Orlando that evening. It was to have touched on Rousseau, and Proust, and Stendhal whom he admired above all others. Had Stendhal believed in eternity? He had written that a person, no matter how insignificant, ought to leave behind some chronicle of their time on this earth, some accretion of their collected memory and experience. That was the only eternity. He, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, had created nothing. All that he had known, the grand houses of his childhood, his memories, his fears, the passing blossoms in the trees of St. James’s Park in London in the spring, all of that would vanish with him; there would be no more Giuseppe, no boy in short pants running with a hoop, no old man fat and melancholic staring puzzled at the carved suffering of a Christ, no trace of his being in the world. The regret he felt surprised him. It did not matter how one spent one’s days, time was running out for everyone. Gioitto and Orlando would not understand this. They were still so young. He, Giuseppe, was not only himself, he knew, feeling a sudden bitterness, but all he remembered, all he had done and known. And all of that would be obliterated with him.