In his smaller library he kept a broken white rock, like a twist of coral, taken by a sugar merchant from the natural harbour at Lampedusa. In the afternoons he would hold that rock to the sunlight feeling the sharp heavy truth of it. He was that island’s prince but like all its princes had never seen its shores nor set foot upon it. To visitors he would say, wryly: It is an island of fire, at the edge of the world; who could live there? He would not add: A great family’s bitterness is always lived in. He would not hold that rock out and say: This is a dead thing and yet it will outlive me. He was the last of his line and after him came only extinction.
As a boy he had listened to his governess tell him the dust of Sicily came from the Sahara and this he had repeated all his life though he did not know if it was true. He imagined it blown across the sea in shimmering red curtains of heat, the hot winds of the sirocco billowing it north, raking the island of Lampedusa in its path. Each morning he would rise and walk his terrace at Via Butera, his steps traced in the sand blown in overnight, leading to the low stone wall over the Foro Itàlico and there ceasing, like the footprints of a ghost, and he would stand peering out at the rising day with his back to Sicily and the southern sea beyond it and beyond that the fiery island of his blood.
He did not love Palermo, its dusty stone streets, its wreckage from the last war. Though he knew he would die in this city of his birth what he felt for it was not love but a fierce desolation that took the place of love. There were greater passions than love. Love was petty, brief, impossibly human. He had loved England, loved Paris, had loved in a doomed way his suffering in the Austrian prisoner camps during the first war, had journeyed by railway and coach north to Latvia loving the vast dark northern forests that scrolled past. Yet he returned always here, to an unloved city, to his mother the dowager princess when she was alive, to the ancient streets of his family name after she was dead. Even as a child in his father’s palazzo the city had seemed to him demonic, low-lying and red-hot. Its dust would boil up out of the sea while the ferries from Naples cut sluggishly near, the souls on board drugged by the heat. That alone had not changed. Now, already old, finding himself in the middle of a new century, living in a decrepit palazzo at the edge of the sea, he would stand high above the harbour and scan their white decks in the offloading as if seeking someone he had lost.
And in this way, still in his slippers and morning robe, brushing crumbs of sand from the top of the wall and rubbing his fingers absently together, he would try to banish the night’s unhappiness and find his way into the day.
In the years since the Americans had swept the island, he had lived with his wife Alessandra in one half of a small palazzo in the medieval quarter of Palermo, on the narrow Via Butera, their windows glazed and facing the sea. If asked he would admit it was his house, but not his home. His true home stood behind thick walls several streets away, in a slump of cracked stone and wind-rotted masonry from a bomb borne across the Atlantic, a bomb whose sole purpose was the obliteration of the world as it had been. That bomb fell in April 1943 and his wife’s estate at Stomersee far to the north in Latvia had been overrun by the Russians in the same month. They had found themselves homeless and orphaned as one. He walked now the streets of his city a different man, a man burdened by his losses, not freed by them. For he had been born on a mahogany table in that lost palazzo on Via di Lampedusa and had slept alone in a small bed in the very room of his birth all throughout his childhood and into his adulthood and for ten years even after he was married and he did not know who he might be without that room to return to.
The war had taken everything. There was no running water in their half of the palazzo and the ceiling of its ballroom had collapsed in the bombing twelve years earlier. He had filled what was left of that with the furniture salvaged from his destroyed palace. And each morning he would wash using a bowl of scummy water left out from the night before in a bathroom that leaked when it rained. A most extraordinary room, he would joke bitterly; no water in the taps, and yet water running all the same.
He thought of that often now, in the early light, when he would rise alone and wrap a blanket around his shoulders and tread softly past his wife’s bedchamber. His dying mother had returned to the Lampedusa palazzo after the armistice and lived out her last year in its ruins. His wife held no such attachments to the old world of Palermo. Alessandra Wolff entered a room like a door closing, blocking out the light. She was a linguist and reader of literature and the only female psychoanalyst in Italy and she worked into the night with her patients in their historical library and he loved her for her mind and for the solitude they shared. She was the daughter of the singer Alice Barbi, last muse of the composer Brahms, and when her mother remarried she became stepdaughter to his uncle Pietro in London. Upon meeting her he had been, he recalled, unable to speak. You will call me Licy, she had said from the first. He had liked her black hair and blacker eyes and her broad strong shoulders with the power of a stage soprano in them. From his first glimpse of her in London, thirty years ago, when she was still married to her first husband, he had thought her handsome and remote. It amazed him that so much time had passed. He saw in her now the same woman he had seen then, a woman older than he, more worldly, a woman who strode always some feet ahead of him in the street and spoke to him over one shoulder, without turning, and whose stern grace could be mistaken for arrogance. But there was such tenderness in her. And because she was intelligent and not classically beautiful her opinions had often made her company unbearable to men, and he liked that about her too.
It was on a morning in late January that he was called back to his doctor’s offices, for the results of a spirometer test. He had risen in pain and twisted his bedsheets into a knot and swung his soft white feet out onto the floor, startled by a new dizziness, a shortness of breath, as if his body had decided at last to begin its betrayal.
That sensation had passed; but then, at the turn of the high marble staircase on his way out to breakfast, the pain had struck him again and he had gripped the banister white-knuckled, the paintings of his ancestors above hanging in the gloom, and had gasped and wrestled at the knot of his tie. He did not know if he was being fanciful. He had pressed two fingers to his heart and breathed. It was true that a newfound anxiety was in him which he did not recognize. At dinner the night before he had not mentioned his medical appointment to his wife but only smiled calmly and asked Licy when he had gotten so old.
Trees are old, she had said, stone-faced. Princes are ancient.
At the little table in the foyer he adjusted his hat, peering at his face in the mirror, puzzled. A pain rose in his chest, receded.
Ah, he thought.
And he smoothed the wrinkles at his eyes with a rueful finger.
He was a man who had left middle age the way other men will exit a room, without a thought, as if he might go back at any moment. He was fifty-eight years old. He had smoked every hour of his waking life since the armistice of the first war. A sadness crinkled his eyes, a shyness, evident even in boyhood photographs. He had felt foolish in the company of adults then, he remembered, and that feeling had not left him. Soft-spoken, ironic, he had been mistaken for a good listener all his life though the quality of the light had always interested him more than any confided disgrace. He was a man of solitude and appetites and had got fat since his return from England in the 1930s and then fatter still on sweet pastries in Palermo. He did not like motorcars and walked through his neighbourhood with a cane, heavy, stooped, in the ailing body of a man two decades his senior, always a book or two folded under an elbow. He wore a small dapper moustache as he had since his youth and oiled his grey hair straight back and he dressed each morning in a fine blue suit long out of fashion. He read voraciously, in Italian, French, English, and had done so for more than half a century. Il Mostro, his cousins called him, for the way he could devour a book. The Monster.
He arrived promptly at ten o’clock for his appointment and Dr. Coniglio saw him at once. There was something odd in the doctor’s manner, stiff, which worried him and alerted him to the seriousness of the news. He had known Coniglio for years. They were of an age. A graceful man, with athletic shoulders, a clean stiff collar and shirtsleeves invariably rolled. He liked him, the cordiality in his speech, the clarity in his face like sunlight on flagstones. Coniglio had treated his mother at the end of her life, when she was dying in the ruins of Casa Lampedusa, had made the long drive from Capo d’Orlando to Palermo each week. Until the war, he had been the family physician for his cousins, the Piccolos, attending them at Vina, their villa, and it was only in the last five years that the doctor had opened an office in Palermo. He remembered now, seeing the man’s new consulting rooms, how his mother had used to look at Coniglio, the narrow cold assessment in her eyes. She too had thought him a fine gentleman. She too had not wanted to observe him standing next to her son.
He did not think of himself as shy but a certain shyness took hold in him when he found himself in the company of men such as this, men with a deference for his own station in life, men who had set out and achieved success, men of purpose, men of the world. Their easy manners left him uneasy, their confidence made him falter. He felt himself slow down, grow watchful, hesitant, until he had lost the moment for the quick retort or dry joke that came always to mind. Instead he would blink his lugubrious eyelids, and smile faintly, and meet the other’s gaze helpless.
He waited for the doctor to gesture to a chair before he unbuttoned his winter coat and sat. He took off his hat and folded his gloves in its upended crown and rested his walking stick across his knees. He set his leather bag carefully to one side, half unbuckled, the little frosted cakes in their paper wrappers from his breakfast at the Massimo visible, the spine of the book he had brought for later, The Pickwick Papers, shining up at him. He reached at once for the cigarettes in his pocket but caught the doctor’s eye.
No?
Ah, Don Giuseppe—Coniglio smiled, tsking—not all that is pleasurable in life is forbidden. But some things are, or should be. You look tired, my friend.
Giuseppe withdrew his hand and crossed his legs, the bulleted purple upholstery crackling. The other had settled himself at the edge of his desk, one leg hitched up, his hands folded lightly over his thigh, those hands which turned and weighed and cut into the skin of other beings and sought out the secrets in their flesh. Calmly he met the doctor’s gaze.
Well? he said.
It is as I feared. The doctor’s voice was slow now, deliberate. Emphysema. It can be checked perhaps, but not stopped. I am sorry.
Giuseppe smiled faintly. He could not think what to say.
The spirometer is not always conclusive, of course. We could examine you again. Would you advise it?
Coniglio held his eye a moment. I would not, he said at last, gently. Are you here alone? I had hoped the princess would accompany you.
He shook his head, calm.
You should not be alone, the doctor said. He rose and went behind his desk and opened a drawer and unscrewed the lid of a fountain pen. I shall write you out a prescription to help with the pain. But the only true medicine, you understand, is for you to cut out tobacco.
The winter morning was grey and diffuse in the curtains. Giuseppe closed his eyes, opened them.
And will that reverse the effects? he asked.
It is a chronic disease, Don Giuseppe—there is no reversing its effects. It will progress regardless. But it can be managed. You must change the way you have been living. You must exercise regularly. Walk. Eat rather less. Avoid stress and worry as you can.
There is no other treatment?
Well. Let us try this first.
But the disease will kill me? he pressed.
Coniglio regarded him quietly from behind his desk. Any number of things could kill you first, he said.
Giuseppe, despite himself, smiled.
I will give you this for the pain, and to help you sleep. The doctor took some minutes to write out the prescription. He then untied a red folder and withdrew two typed pages and perused them and then slipped them back into the folder. We are getting old, Don Giuseppe, he said. That is the substance of it. We may not feel it, but it is so.
Yes.
Our bodies will not let us forget it.
Indeed.
Coniglio steepled his fingers before him. It was clear he was struggling with what to say next. After a moment, to Giuseppe’s surprise, he began to speak, in a casual way, of his wife. He had a French wife who was known to treat him badly. He said: Jeanette has returned to Marseilles. Her sister is ill. She wishes to be with her family. She has written me to tell me she would like me to join her. Permanently.
Ah.
You and the princess lived apart a long while, did you not?
Yes. In the thirties.
I remember your mother spoke of it. Princess Alessandra was in Latvia?
Giuseppe nodded. He did not like to think what his mother might have said about it.
Coniglio was tapping his fountain pen against his wedding ring, click, click. Otherwise his face was calm, his hair smooth, his coral shirt unwrinkled and immaculate. Yes, he said, yes yours was an arrangement that succeeded. So I tell myself, it is the modern world, Coniglio. Be strong. You have telephones, aeroplanes.
Giuseppe did not enlighten the man. Licy had always gone where she chose to go, as she chose it. She had fled to Sicily only when the Soviets neared her estate in Latvia, burning the great homes as they advanced. He did not deceive himself by imagining she had bowed to his desires.
Jeanette tells me there is work for a doctor in any city, Coniglio said. Even for a Sicilian doctor, she says. I expect there is some truth in that.
What will you do?
Coniglio looked out the window, smiled vaguely. I will imagine the very worst of fates and settle for a lesser one, he said. But my patients, I would worry for them, Don Giuseppe. It would mean, of course, many farewells.
It is always better to be the one leaving than the one left behind, said Giuseppe.
Yes. And some journeys cannot be delayed.
Giuseppe inclined his head.
Coniglio pinched the bridge of his nose and there was a sudden anguish and bafflement in the gesture. He removed his spectacles, blinked his watery blue eyes. The man’s strong emotion surprised Giuseppe, left him uncomfortable. Do you know, said the doctor, for years now, whenever I am faced with a difficult decision, I think of something your mother said to me. She said, Always take the easier path, Dr. Coniglio. And yet I have never done so. I wonder what is the matter with me.
It was as though a coin flared in the cold sunlight between them.
Your mother was a powerful personality, Coniglio continued. She had strong opinions. I remember she used to talk to me about Mussolini.
She was rather confused, near the end.
She used to complain about his spats. Too many spats, she would say. Coniglio smiled, shook his head. I remember she held my hand one morning and said Mussolini had changed nothing and yet because of him everything had changed.
She was thinking of her house, Giuseppe said quietly.
A beautiful palazzo, the doctor agreed. The Americans did not need to bomb us as they did.
I did not know you knew it, Doctor.
Coniglio gave him a puzzled look. I visited your mother there. Several times.
It was hardly beautiful then.
Well.
It was a fine house once, before its ruin.
And a fine house after, Don Giuseppe. When I was a child I would pass by it every Sunday morning. My father worked a fish stall in the Vucciria. It was not the fastest route. But then I was not always in such a hurry to join him.
He said this without shame or embarrassment at his low origins and Giuseppe could only nod vaguely. It seemed all at once of supreme insignificance. His mother, he remembered now, had distrusted this doctor by the end, had coughed and grimaced and called him her good doctor Mafioso. He opened his mouth to speak, closed it. Do not gawp like a fish, his mother used to tell him. He got abruptly to his feet.
You must forgive me, he said.
Coniglio half rose from behind his desk. Of course.
I have lost track of the hour.
Certainly. We shall speak again soon, of that I am certain, Don Giuseppe. Remember me to Don Casimiro and Don Lucio, if you will. And of course to the princess.
He suddenly heard in the doctor’s old-fashioned phrasing the syntax of an English novel, as if it were a sentence translated aloud from Meredith or Eliot, and he glanced at the doctor from beneath heavy eyelids. More than most this man had witnessed the tension and soured love directed by his mother towards himself as she ailed, had witnessed her bitterness, the muttered imprecations, the veiled insults. It left him, Giuseppe felt with a quick sharpness, vulnerable and foolish. But then the feeling was gone and he wanted only to absent himself from the small office with its smells of lemon gauze and varnish and camphor, smells that would forever remind him of his own death.
And so Giuseppe Tomasi, last Prince of Lampedusa, put on his hat with care, worked his fingers into his dead father’s kid-skin 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.
It was strange, he thought, for Lucio to have come.
The Mazzara occupied the ground floor of a drab modern building off Via Ruggiero Settimo, very near Flaccovio’s, and inside the glass doors Giuseppe stopped and unbuttoned his coat and scanned the gloom. He liked the café for its isolation and the fact that here he could work on his evening’s lectures unmolested. He spied his cousin at a table in the corner, bent over a small notebook, scribbling. Several wrapped parcels tied with brown twine were stacked beside him. Giuseppe approached slowly.
Lucio, he said, his voice soft, and he set down his leather bag with an unexpected thud. The table rocked, the spoon in his cousin’s coffee rattled.
Lucio lifted a finger; finished writing; raised his face.
So the Monster appears, he said, and it was as if his cousin had been expecting him. He was chewing on a toothpick like a bohemian from Paris. I have been waiting here two hours at least, Giuseppe. But I see you have been feeding. And he folded one leg over another and lifted The Pickwick Papers out from under the cakes in their paper wrappers and he scanned its spine.
What are you writing? Giuseppe asked. Not a poem, I hope?
Not a poem, Lucio said grandly. No.
But Giuseppe had been teasing and he sat now in silence embarrassed at his cousin’s failure to realize this. When the waiter approached he ordered a black coffee, a plate of sweet pastries. Lucio had always been one to take himself too seriously. Though his cousin read Persian directly, and Sanskrit, and ancient Greek, and though he excelled in mathematics, astronomy, and musical composition, still he seemed a kind of child to Giuseppe, easily wounded and therefore, in his way, dangerous. It did not matter that he had been celebrated as a poet. When he and Lucio and Casimiro had been boys, Giuseppe remembered, it was always Lucio who suggested the games they play, the naval warships they try to build out of toothpicks, who should sit where at their hillside lunches. He had changed little. Whereas Giuseppe had become like the great bombed-out houses of old Palermo: rubbled by history, an embarrassing reminder, best left boarded up and walked past. He smiled sadly, thinking this. But now he would have to go on, as he had always done, struggling not to disappoint those who would look to him to be, still, what he had always been: unchanging, steadfast, mild.
Not a poem, Lucio said again, with a calculated shrug. I am merely recording impressions.
Impressions, echoed Giuseppe.
Mm. Notes towards a poem, perhaps. Which is what living is, for a poet, I suppose. Lucio turned the spoon in his coffee, tapped it with a click twice on the edge of his cup. He said: I shall scrutinize them later, Cousin. For now, I simply write. In the end we must all be responsible for our words, no?
In the end, said Giuseppe, yes.
He knew that for Lucio the world was not a sensual thing, not something that overwhelmed with powerful scents and eddies of beauty. His cousin struggled just to see its surfaces and did not trust his own heart and because of this his poetry required tremendous effort and concentration. But he had received an award from the poet Montale last summer and as a result his privately published collection of poems was to be republished by Mondadori in Milan later in the year and Giuseppe supposed, in the end, his cousin’s limitations did not matter. He rubbed his slow hands together as the waiter set down a tray of pastries and a coffee.
Lucio was wearing a small pink tie and a grey jacket and his hair when he took off his hat fell carelessly across his forehead. He had been a sickly boy and had grown into a small-shouldered, large-headed man. Giuseppe observed his little eyes, his long nose, his high eyebrows, like a man perpetually surprised at the mournfulness of the world. His brother Casimiro had by contrast the flair of a gentleman. The Piccolos lived in the east, at Capo d’Orlando, and had not lost their villa above the sea in the war. Giuseppe loved them like brothers despite their idiosyncrasies. They believed not only in spirits and communion with the dead but conducted themselves with an artistic passion in their faith, walking by candlelight to private seances held in shrouded rooms, draping their mirrors in sheets to draw forth the dead. All this Giuseppe admired for the magnificent foolishness of it. He felt their supreme innocence derived from their isolation, that Lucio and Casimiro and even their reclusive sister Agata Giovanna all believed that after death they would continue to live in their beautiful villa above the sea, and continue to walk among the citrus groves, the buzzards, the agapanthus, and that their servants and labourers would die with them and continue to serve their interests in the next life.
The hour deepened, the plate lightened, Giuseppe’s coffee was refilled. His appointment with Coniglio receded, like a dream.
I am always surprised to see you in Palermo, Cousin, he said.
Well. I grow lonely in the east, I pine for the city.
You do not.
Lucio smiled. Casimiro is in need of paint. Where are your young friends? Gioacchino said he would be returning with you. That boy is somewhat unpredictable, is he not?
We Tomasi understand fanatics of all kinds, Lucio. Especially those who share our blood. You will stay for dinner?
Lucio’s eyelids flickered. Licy is cooking?
She will insist. She will cancel with her phobics and neurotics and insist.
Then I regret I cannot, Lucio said quickly. I must return to Capo d’Orlando this afternoon. Casimiro will be wondering after his supplies.
And if Licy were not cooking?
You are from a family of ascetics and mystics, Cousin, Lucio said. We Piccolos are ruled by our appetites. Why do you smile? I am younger than you, I require nourishment.
Ah. The stones are younger than me.
He saw Lucio study him then with a softening eye. A silence fell between them.
All at once uncomfortable, and without meaning to, Giuseppe said: I was asked by Dr. Coniglio to remember him to you. I am to tell you he is well. His wife is in Marseilles again.
Coniglio?
Yes.
When did you see Coniglio?
Giuseppe stirred his coffee. It occurred to him now, since he had not told Licy of his appointment, that she would be at once suspicious when he did mention it; she would think something very wrong, and would not accept his reassurances. She would insist on becoming involved. He looked up and saw in Lucio’s face the dark joy of a rumour taking shape and he wished he had said nothing of it.
I saw him this morning, he said reluctantly. Only briefly. In passing, really.
Something is the matter?
What would be the matter?
Lucio peered at him. You do not look well, Cousin.
Thank you.
Nothing is the matter?
Giuseppe shook his head. He let his gaze drift across the crowded tables to the brass railing of the bar. Time was a cascade of rooms, opening out like the drawing rooms of his childhood, a succession of shafts of light and dust and quiet. That is what no novel seemed able to express. Sometimes it seemed to him the world would not have had him, even had he wanted it. He tried to explain this to Lucio but it did not come out right. He frowned into the silence and studied the coffee spoon and then he asked if his cousin ever wondered what would remain of him after his death.
You mean on this side, said Lucio.
Yes.
No. I do not wonder about it.
Giuseppe studied his cousin’s little black eyes and realized it must be a gift to be so untroubled. That is what faith gives one, he thought.
I do not wonder about it, Lucio said again. The poetry will remain.
He reached into the bag beside him and withdrew a slender volume and held it delicately in his long thin fingers.
You have brought your poems with you, said Giuseppe.
Lucio ignored this. Our memories, Cousin, are unusual. We are from a world that no longer exists. If I do not write that world, write it down, then what will become of it? He waved a languid hand and shrugged. An entire way of life will vanish with us. Signor Montale once said to me that I had preserved a Sicily that was already fading.
There was something composed, theatrical, in Lucio’s words that made Giuseppe wonder if he had rehearsed them. It was true the world would know little of what had been lost. It pained him to think of the long decline of the princes of Lampedusa, the waste, how easily a line of historical beauty could be strangled.
He ran a finger over his upper lip, drying the coffee in his moustache. I always thought I would write a novel, he said vaguely.
Yes. Your Sicilian Ulysses.
He was surprised his cousin remembered.
What I remember, Lucio clarified, is you writing us from England about it. Of course that was twenty years ago. Twenty-four hours in the life of your astronomer great-grandfather, wasn’t it, during Garibaldi’s landing at Marsala? Lucio crossed his legs, his expression unreadable. I should always have thought his receiving of the award from the Sorbonne more fitting material. What had your great-grandfather to do with the redshirts?
Not enough, it would seem, said Giuseppe.
You are not thinking about writing it now, surely?
Giuseppe smiled. I am old, Lucio. Impossibly old.
His cousin seemed to relax. Nonsense. You shall live forever, Cousin, so long as you do not write a book. It is no way to live, I assure you. Publishing is a cruel affair.
And he shook his head, leafing delicately through the verses of his collection as he did so.
In the late-afternoon darkness he caught a bus from the Mazzara to the Quattro Canti and then trudged slowly back to Via Butera, leaning into the freezing wind, a stout shabby dignified figure, his leather bag bulky in one fist, his face carefully composed, his eyes turned away from the souls he passed. He was thinking of the day, his sickness, Licy at home preparing, no doubt, for the evening’s patients. As the afternoon had deepened, after Lucio had bid farewell, a brooding melancholy had come up in him, so that he could only read fitfully while his mind drifted and did not settle. He unlocked the streetside door and crossed the stone courtyard and climbed the steps and went inside. Upstairs in the library he kissed his wife on the top of her head where she sat reading a case study on childhood depression. She paused with the book open in her lap and raised her face. A web of lines at her eyes, the steady dark inscrutable smile at her lips, her black hair with its grey drawn carefully back from her forehead. She held an opera-length cigarette holder to one side, and now she smoked and regarded Giuseppe and he felt himself start to blush, as if he had done something wrong.
You are back early, she said softly. My first patient has not arrived yet.
Giuseppe poured himself a glass of water from a carafe on the side table. This is the one with the fear of bees?
Signor Mireau. The violinist. Aggressive narcissist, history of childhood psychoneurosis.
Ah. Yes.
She watched as he settled in the armchair. What is that look? she asked.
It is nothing. There is no look.
Hm.
I saw Dr. Coniglio today.
Licy smiled. Not on purpose, I trust.
Giuseppe held out his hands in a show of resignation. Alas.
Reluctantly Licy closed the book on one knuckle, to keep her page. Did you not see him last month?
I did.
You are seeing rather much of him. What did he have to say? How grave is it?
Most grave, I am afraid. It seems I am dying.
Licy laughed. Meanwhile Coniglio tells me I will live to be one hundred. Do we suppose he knows anything at all?
Giuseppe gave her a quiet smile. Perhaps he is not even a doctor, he said.
As he said this he smoothed out the wrinkles in his trousers, crossed his legs, withdrew a cigarette from the little silver case he kept in his jacket pocket. He did not light it. He understood now was the moment to tell her about his emphysema but for some reason he did not, and then the moment had passed.
What he was thinking was how much he liked the gentleness, the ease of the conversation. All that would change. Everything would change between them when he told her. The ordinary pleasurable fact of their lives, sitting together, smoking, their faces turned away from their own deaths as if they were twenty years younger still, all of it would be different. And he saw that he was not prepared for this, not prepared to live as a man with an illness, a man who carried his own death in his pocket.
I was thinking, he said softly, about children.
The light caught on the pearls at his wife’s throat as she leaned forward, tapped her cigarette into the ashtray. Children, she said. What about them?
He shrugged. The consolation that they are, he said. The future that they are.
You do not mean children of our own?
He gave her a smile.
I think we are somewhat past the age, Giuseppe.
Ah, he said, and lowered his voice. But we are not too old to try.
But she did not laugh at this and instead turned her face aside, exhaled a long plume of smoke, turned back. Her face was suddenly serious. What would we have done with a child? she said quietly. Would you have lived with us in Riga? Would your mother have permitted that?
He frowned. I thought you had wanted one.
It does not matter. It did not happen.
No.
We have Giò and Mirella now. They come and go as they please, they borrow our books, they eat our food.
It is not the same.
But he could see Alessandra resisting the unhappiness in his voice and for this he was suddenly grateful. Among her qualities that he most loved was a strong Baltic steadiness and a sensitivity to his moods and he knew she would not allow him to sink further.
I do not know what is going on in that head of yours, she said now, with a careful composure. But I do not like it.
What I need, he said, is someone to talk to.
Yes. A professional.
But who?
Who indeed.
He picked a piece of tobacco from his lips. Lucio was at the Mazzara today, he said.
Lucio!
I was surprised too.
Is he coming here tonight, then?
Ah. Well. I told him you were preparing dinner.
Licy laughed. You are wicked, my love.
Just then the buzzer rang at the front door and Giuseppe crushed out his cigarette and got to his feet and Licy too rose, smoothing out her blue dress.
Your narcissist is here, murmured Giuseppe.
My other one, she said, waving him away with her fingers.
He went downstairs to the smaller library and closed the doors behind him and stood with his back to them and breathed, his smile fading slowly. He felt suddenly tired, disappointed at himself for having failed to speak of the emphysema. It would only be the more awkward now. He loosened his tie and took off his jacket and draped it over a chair, grateful at least that Orlando would not be coming for his lectures. Let us pray, Coniglio had said. Prayer, he thought wearily. Nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen. An image came to him, the stone church he had passed that morning in the narrow piazza, and he thought how that church had survived so many hundreds of years, how ninety-five years earlier on that same morning the same low soothing tidal drone of voices could have been heard, before Italy was Italy, before Garibaldi had begun his conquest and the Lampedusas their decline.
He sat down, opened his notebook, unscrewed the lid of his blue Biro. From his shirt pocket he withdrew his reading glasses and unfolded them and put them on. Earlier that morning, while talking to Lucio, he had found something in his mind, vivid, like a memory, though it was no memory. This had not happened to him before. It was a man, poised and reticent and powerful, a man vulnerable to sudden beauty, overwhelmed by his own sensuous nature. He would locate this man on the afternoon of Garibaldi’s landing, away from the heat and clatter of rifles, and submerge him instead in the quietude and gloom of a family prayer. He had always supposed his great-grandfather to be a man who could not bear to grow old and for whom dying meant extinction but what he had not realized was that sensuousness and ruin were inseparable, and that to live overwhelmed by the past was its own kind of extinction. It seemed to him now that the man he saw, gruff, dignified, autocratic, who both was and was not his great-grandfather, this man’s very passion for life must be the cause of his decline.
He was surprised at how easily the sentences came, one upon another, once he began, and he wrote with a kind of anguish, afraid he would lose the thread or that the sentences would twist back upon themselves. He had not written before with the rigorous imagination needed of art and he had always supposed a guiding intelligence necessary on the part of any artist but here the story came almost ready-made, as if certain of itself, as if he were both writing it and being written by it. His astronomer prince would stand immaculate at the edge of his sunlit terrace and stare out at the shifting world and understand that what seemed to be passing had in truth already passed. Dust and heat in a cyclone at his thighs in the golden light.
When he paused, the pen hovering an inch above the paper, his hand was aching. He was surprised to see he had written several pages. He rose and crossed to the window, an old fat rumpled figure reflected there, sleeves bunched above his wrists, and he worked through the next sentence in his mind finding the right expression and then he returned to his desk and sat and read back what he had written. He crossed out the word lilting and then he wrote it back in. He could hear Licy calling to her black spaniel in the hall, the scrape of claws on the hardwood, the hinges of the terrace door squeaking like the faint sounds in a dream. The evening dark was silvery and still. He worked with a sober clarity, some part of himself stripped away, a concentration rising in him that he had not felt since his youth, a thing liquid and powerful and cold and immersive and when the words slowed he slowed and waited, calm, until the words came again and his hand began to move, deliberate, steady, soft across the soft paper, his fingertips afire in the late and furious hour.