I had not known there was a letter, you see, Gioacchino explained gently. He ran a hand through his hair.
The interviewer, an American woman from a film company in New York, nodded. She seemed impossibly young to him, though she could not have been younger than thirty, and the easy confidence of her gestures might have been from another world. As, of course, it was. Not only a world an ocean away but also a world separated by time, which is the greater ocean. All this he thought in silence and did not say. He remembered his first wife Mirella and how they were in those early years together, and how she did not live to see such a world as this, a world of diminished distances and digital files and computers on every desk. Could not have even dreamed it.
They were walking slowly through a garden near the Teatro di San Carlo in Naples where he was superintendent. The heat was green in the leaves and he raised his face, closed his eyes, listening. He had become a composer and a music scholar and oversaw for a time the Italian Cultural Institute at New York University. Over the years he had spoken publicly about his memories of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, and in the last decade had written prefaces for the novel when it was reissued in English, and French, and in the critical editions used in the Italian universities. In this way he had come to be considered one of the last witnesses to its creation. He had resisted such a role while Mirella was alive, the two of them wishing not to contradict Alessandra’s recollections, which were not his own. For a long time now there had been no one left to contradict. Now he was being asked to speak on the making of Luchino Visconti’s monumental movie of The Leopard, which would be remastered and rereleased by this woman’s company in New York, though he did not know what to say.
I was only a kind of translator, you see, he said.
A translator?
Of Lampedusa’s novel, his writing. Of what he had intended. Visconti was very interested in finding the right houses, the right light for the film. It was 1961 and there was no infrastructure in place but he insisted on filming in Sicily all the same.
You admired him.
I admired him, yes. He was an artist.
She flashed him a dazzling smile, direct, American, unabashed, and reached out and touched his arm. I will want to ask you all about this on camera, again, if you don’t mind.
Gioacchino lowered his slow head, unsurprised. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped at his forehead. He did not mind. Though they had not begun, already he was tired. He gestured to a stone bench and when the young woman had smoothed out her skirt and sat, he sat also. He supposed the cameraman and lighting technician must be nearly ready. The enthusiasms of Americans had always astonished him. Across the sweltering courtyard, a small fountain stood in the sunlight and the falling water caught and flared and turned upon itself, all movement and light, like time itself.
Time is the one true clarity, he said softly, as if to himself.
The woman did not hear.
Tell me about the letter, she said instead. It was found three years ago, in his old library?
Three years ago, yes, he said.
Later, in his air-conditioned office, Gioacchino found himself shrugging, one elbow high up on the wall of an ancient green sofa, studying the interviewer where she sat beside the camera.
Many have asked me whether Lampedusa was betrayed by Visconti, he said. He paused, as if considering how to proceed. Which is a typically malicious question, he added. Why do I say that? When people pose that question, they think it will please me, meaning: Of course, what could Visconti know about Lampedusa? That’s what people think. I’ve always disappointed them, inasmuch as I’ve made it—and I take the liberty of saying this—a question of class. Movies and other points of view regarding the Risorgimento are widely divergent. The Risorgimento is seen by Lampedusa through the eyes of those who lost, and by Luchino through the eyes of those who won. That’s the truth. Luchino, in his heart, was one of the students willing to die at Curtatone and Montanara, and Lampedusa wasn’t.
The interviewer was holding her notebook closed on one knee, nodding. Would they have liked each other, do you think?
Visconti and Lampedusa? Gioacchino smiled at that. I like to think so. They were both of a dying world, both of them could see the flaw in the glass, so to speak. They were critical of what had made them, of how it had destroyed itself.
They were both of them devoted to their art, she suggested.
Gioacchino nodded, crossed his legs, smoothed out his trousers. What was extraordinary about Visconti was his ability, while working with a script or an opera, to come onto the set knowing exactly what he wanted. Visconti would repeat something that he had envisioned perfectly, and he never made corrections.
The young woman flashed her smile. Whereas Lampedusa was more tentative?
Yes.
Perhaps it is the difference between the writer and the director.
Gioacchino thought about this, unsure. Then he said, cautiously: Luchino’s contribution is tied to his idea that he was, as we would say today, a virtual student of Stanislavski. In other words, the starting point is always total authenticity. He used real objects, real situations, which were then reinterpreted. But authenticity was crucial. They were to use only real flowers, even when they were in the background and out of focus. There was a fresco artist who painted eighteenth-century decorations, little landscapes, those typical ceiling decorations with perspective. The mouldings were plaster, and the terrace was decorated with majolica made by De Simone and transported on site.
Such an exacting process, she said. But its effects can be felt in every frame.
The Americans did not think so.
No.
I remember when the movie was released there. It was not a success.
She gave him a quick sympathetic frown then, as if to say that her company intended to redress that. Would Lampedusa have recognized his novel in it, do you think?
Gioacchino hesitated, trying to clarify something, but not quite certain what. At last he shook his head, gave a brief exasperated smile. I’ve always considered the book a projection of the author’s desire, he said. This man had had a gilded childhood, after which his life had all been downhill, until he reached a condition just short of misery, let’s say. I’m talking about the years immediately following the war, 1944 to 1945. I can’t say I understood him as a young man, but in later years, reading the lessons in The Leopard, the author’s intentions are the same. He says, My life as a Sicilian didn’t go well. You youngsters try not to repeat my errors. There’s the need to know the world at large, to lose all traces of provincialism, and mostly this idea that the outside world is very different, and who knows who will ever bring it to Sicily. The desire not to die like a mouse in a hole, which was pretty much how he ended up.
But it is not an autobiographical novel. It is not about Lampedusa’s own life.
No.
What I mean is, he was not the leopard.
That is correct.
And Tancredi was not you.
At this Gioacchino smiled. Tancredi was a rake and an opportunist.
Mm.
He glanced at the camera, then away. Lampedusa left a brief disclaimer on his views regarding the characters, he said. As for Tancredi, he clearly states that his features, his mannerisms, his appearance, a certain way of talking, remind me of Gioitto, as he used to call me. As for Tancredi’s moral character?
A long pause; then Gioacchino gave a quick sharp ironic laugh.
That, he smiled, was modelled on other people entirely.
Lampedusa’s farewell letter, discovered three years earlier by a literature scholar, had been folded into the endpapers of The Voyages of Captain Cook in the historical library at the Via Butera palazzo where Gioacchino and his second wife, Nicoletta, lived. The letter had gone unnoticed for forty years. There was nothing strange in this. The library’s books were preserved rather than read. And both Lampedusa and Alessandra had often hidden papers away in their books. The letter had been addressed to him. My dearest Gioitto, I am anxious that, even with the curtain down, my voice should reach you. How moving it was, hearing that voice cross the threshold again. Gioacchino sat now at his desk and brushed at his lips with an open handkerchief as the shadows deepened in his office. The American woman was gone, the summer sky over Naples hazy and nearly brown. He thought of those days before Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s death, how the old man had suffered as he made his weary slow way through the world. The yellow gravel in the path below shimmered in the heat and a great silence overtook him. I am anxious that my voice should reach you, to tell you how grateful I am for the comfort your presence has brought me. He folded the handkerchief into a clean diamond, folded it again, a tiny white square of light, his fingers busy. These last two or three years of my life, which have been so painful and sombre but which, had it not been for you and darling Mirella, would have been an utter tragedy.
In the end the novel had been a success. It had outsold every other Italian novel in the twentieth century, had been debated and attacked and celebrated for forty years. Gioacchino had lived alongside it his entire life, had been a part of it. He remembered in those first months after Lampedusa’s death, when Bassani had come to Palermo and spoken with Alessandra in her grief, determined to hunt down the lost chapters. How fateful that seemed now. Our lives, Licy’s and mine, were on the point of running into the sands, what with worries and age, but your affection, your constant presence, the gracious way in which you lived shed a little light in our darkness. Bassani’s imprint at Feltrinelli had wanted the book, and the man would not be put off.
After Lampedusa’s death, Alessandra had aged overnight. He recalled how she had not liked to get up from her chair by the window, would rub at her aching wrists, her back bent, a small pillow laid out across her knees. Her grief had surprised Gioacchino, the intensity of it, and he had felt at times as he sat with her that they were creeping down an unlighted staircase, very steep, fumbling with their toes for each step. Her psychoanalysis had been too stark to bring her any comfort and he and Mirella had watched her with fear in their hearts. Gradually she sharpened in her solitude, into a woman too intelligent to bear her infirmities, and too lonely to be patient with anyone else’s. She would speak to journalists and critics with a savage tongue, then complain of their portraits of her. He remembered how she would lace her red fingers together at her belly, and stand with her feet apart, her head jutting forward, like a wrestler sizing up an opponent. In those early years she had gone through Lampedusa’s private papers and removed any passage that she feared indelicate and had published the edited works as complete. Gioacchino knew this was an effort on her part to preserve his reputation but he did not think, now, forty years later, that it was the right thing to have done.
How long ago all that seemed. He had not thought much of it in recent years, except when it could not be avoided. Mostly his life had been his own. He had been invited to speak in Iceland at a conference on opera in the new year but he did not know if he would attend. There were several unanswered letters needing his attention. He owed a telephone call to a publisher in New York, a man he had come to respect, about an essay on melody and meaning in Puccini. And Nicoletta was expecting him back in Palermo in a fortnight.
He put one arm through his sleeve, turned at the door, walked back to his desk with the linen jacket trailing and sat again. He opened the drawers one by one until he found the cigarettes he had been seeking and then he paused and picked up a twisted white rock, a paperweight, which he had taken from Lampedusa’s desk in the months after the poor man’s death. This he held a moment in his hand, then slipped into his coat pocket.
Failure, he thought to himself, suddenly realizing. That is what the American woman had been interested in. He smoothed the papers on his desk, turned off the light, but did not get up immediately. He had dedicated his own life to music, to echoes of the infinite that were forever vanishing. What has failure to do with that? But in his heart he knew the answer. In the glass, the afternoon was darkening. He had been so young when he had known Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, too young. He had understood almost nothing of the older man’s moods. He thought of Lampedusa’s sad eyes, the way his craggy face used to fall into an ironic smile, the heaviness and disappointment in his thin dry lips. Every sound we make travels, he had read once, is in constant motion, is forever leaving us behind. And, too, forever arriving. There are sounds, millions of years old, only just reaching us now from the edges of the universe, and these also are a kind of music. The last time he had seen Lampedusa was in Rome three weeks before he died and the old man had looked thin, defeated. What was that line in the letter? I have been enormously fond of you, Gioitto; I have never had a son, but I do think I could never have loved one more than I have loved you.
The silence of that, its stillness. He had stood at the ballroom window in Palermo, in a familiar slant of light, among the heavy draperies and furnishings that Nicoletta had preserved, and read and read again that letter, the music reaching him as if from a long way off.
At the harbour, he walked a long time alone thinking about those days. His life had come and passed and come again and Lampedusa had known none of it. How strange, he thought, that our lives should overlap, and some of us go on after others have ceased. He felt the twist of rock from his desk, the weight and rough scrape of it in his pocket, tugging heavily at the side of his jacket. Alessandra had said once, years after Giuseppe’s death, that it had come from the sharp white cliffs of Lampedusa, that Giuseppe had kept it as a bitter reminder. When a thing is taken from a place, some part of that place goes with it, she had said.
And she had raised her hand to Gioacchino’s cheek and held it there, dry and light as paper.
He did not know if that was so. The sea now was black and charred and the hot sky above the horizon was a very deep rich blue. He stood with his hands in the pockets of his suit jacket, feeling the late sunlight on his face. He was older now than Lampedusa had been when he died. He watched a boy carrying a red ball pull away from his mother, run to the seawall. He wondered what that child would see, peering in his direction, man or ghost. Gulls were wheeling out over the black water, flashing white, cutting sharply in the summer air. He was tired and was not thinking clearly. Time is the one true clarity, Gioacchino. Lampedusa had said that to him, fifty years ago, under the garden trellis at Capo d’Orlando. Lampedusa had felt close to a world long vanished, distant from the one before him. Had he been more alive for the past that moved within him, or less so? He had grown old without noticing. The boy with the red ball turned away from the seawall, stepping through the body of his self to who he would become. Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi felt the warm air on his face like a lingering hand. Our bodies are all doors, he thought to himself, and whether they are opening or closing is not for us to say.