The Council of Egypt Read online

  “I have big ones, too. The complete works of M. Diderot – since his Bijoux Indiscrets pleased you so – are at your disposal.”

  “You have more? Truly?... Does Monsieur always write about such things?”

  “Diderot... No, not always.”

  “Ah, but Les Bijoux Indiscrets – extraordinary, really. I found myself imagining – can you guess?”

  “What would happen if suddenly the jewels of your friends were to talk.”

  “How did you ever guess? That is exactly what I was imagining – and with pleasure, believe me, with what pleasure!”

  “And this, I wager, is what you were thinking: If the jewels of a certain lady had talked in front of her future husband, she would have been spared having her disabused spouse lock her out to spend her wedding night on the balcony.”

  “Because there would have been no wedding!” the Countess laughed. Tears of amusement sparkled in her eyes, her fine bosom swelled, and her fluttering fan chased the rosy flush from her cheeks. “But you are extraordinary, you know. You really do know what I am thinking.”

  “I should like to know everything about you.”

  “Do try – but choose a better moment.” Her voice was crisp with annoyance, for bearing down on them was the Duchess Leofanti, a lady of exasperating virtue. Greeting Di Blasi with a nod, she said in her rough masculine voice, “You’ve heard the dreadful news, I’m sure? That man! Now he’s making mischief with the saints, with our Rosalia, our own most miraculous Rosalia... But he’ll come to no good end. You’ll see, this the good people of Palermo will not swallow.”

  Di Blasi took his leave with a little bow and rejoined the group he had left; it was rather fluid, flowing around Monsignor Airoldi, the Marquis di Villabianca, and Vella, who preferred to sit quietly in their chairs.

  The conversation now concerned a service, a small service Caracciolo had done the city of Palermo: he had used funds from the suppressed Inquisition to establish several professorships at the Academy of Higher Studies, and intended to create others, among them one in Arabic. This chair was destined, naturally, for Chaplain Vella; Monsignor Airoldi was much pleased, indubitably more pleased than Vella himself, who was aiming not at an academic post but at an affluent prelacy, at an ecclesiastical benefice from among the wealthiest and most secure in the Kingdom. Nonetheless, he relished the idea of enlarging and complicating his game, of being able to act out his role in a less perilous plot by setting up a school, an entire school, devoted to the study of an Arabic tongue that he had founded, indeed virtually created. Thus, one daring feat successfully executed, the acrobat passes to another more daring, more difficult still.

  Chapter VI

  The festival of Santa Rosalia lasted five days in spite of Caracciolo and with great jubilation on the part of both nobles and commoners, united for once in the name of the Saint. The blasphemous tongues of certain people who guzzled regularly at the trough of that infamous Voltaire claimed the festival had been a source of humiliation, however, to Santa Cristina; it was to Cristina that the city of Palermo had offered homage and devotion before the time when a terrible plague had raged through the town and Rosalia had appeared before a soapmaker, authenticating certain bones found on Monte Pellegrino as her own, and informing him that three days later the plague would surely, albeit holily, carry him off. An anonymous chronicler relates how this last intelligence, far from causing the soapmaker to touch iron or indulge in other exorcisms, was for reasons of his own welcomed by him; the three days remaining to him he dedicated to going from house to house bearing the joyful news of the Saint’s apparition and of the prophecy that concerned him. The chief physician of the city, Marco Antonio Alaimo, more conversant with pestilential than with celestial matters, was quite reasonably concerned about the case as an infraction of public-health regulations. Santa Cristina, on the other hand, viewed it as a matter of disloyalty: Rosalia had taken advantage of the already evident decline of the plague to present herself – her with her virginal airs and rosy blond head – as the savior of the city. After biding her time for a century and a half, Cristina had seen in Caracciolo’s maneuver a momentary greening of her hopes for revenge.

  These same malicious tongues had it further that when her hopes of the Festival’s being curtailed were blasted, Santa Cristina turned her hand to the business of famine, an activity of hers that was detrimental to the city of Palermo and to all Sicily and with which she never failed to busy herself whenever in a moment of absent-mindedness the protectress-in-office allowed an opportunity to come her way.

  As this little anecdote made the rounds, it came to the ear of Caracciolo, who was vastly amused. The famine, on the contrary, worried him greatly, and he set to studying its causes and possible cures.

  In Palermo, bread was in good supply and was protected by an official price list; as a consequence, all the hungry mouths of the Kingdom invaded the city. It was piteous to see citizens born-and-bred huddling in the city squares night and day, their eyes fairly shouting their hunger, their thin arms outstretched to beg for charity.

  Charity the nobles did dispense: every Friday, to every poor man who presented himself outside the gate, a nauseated liveried servant distributed a small chunk of bread, whence the expression “Friday’s loaf,” which became the proverbial phrase to denote niggardly assistance or compensation. During public calamities, the nobles made exceptional donations, as they also did in the event of family bereavement, securing the paid prayers of the poor to refrigerate the soul of a departed relative on its way to the fires of Purgatory, for no Sicilian family, be it noble or plebeian, has ever questioned that Purgatory is the destination of its dead.

  It may be said that Don Giuseppe Vella did not even notice the famine. He was working furiously from dawn to dusk, and he spent his evenings in gilded drawing rooms where not even the echo of famine penetrated. By now, all scholarly Europe knew of his work, and was eagerly awaiting its publication. Nonetheless a kind of dissatisfaction had begun to gnaw at him.

  He was one of those men for whom to be respected, honored, and made much of is not enough; such men want to arouse fear, in some way to quicken a spasm of fear in those around them. The nobles now held him in very high regard; why should they not have also to fear him? What was to prevent ingenuity such as his from embellishing fraud with a nuance of blackmail?

  The truth is that in his dissatisfaction, in his restiveness, he had at first thought to enliven the swindle and enhance his own fame with the announcement that he had discovered the books of Titus Livius in an Arabic translation – that is, the eighteen books by Livy, sixty through seventy-seven, that were lost to the world of scholarship. When he found himself unappeased by the excitement and trustful expectancy that surrounded his current work, he postponed the fabrication of Livy to a future date and gave himself to the study of a project better suited to his talents, to circumstances, the times, and history.

  The idea came to him from a maneuver by Caracciolo which had caused the nobles a certain alarm over and above their usual irritation: the Viceroy ordered the marble busts of Mongitore and De Napoli, two illustrious defenders of baronial privilege, to be removed from the senatorial palace; further, he ordered that two treatises by De Gregorio, De judiciis causarum feudalium and De concessione feudi, be publicly burned under the direction of the public executioner. Like a hound dog that sniffs the scent in a puff of wind, Don Giuseppe sprang to attention at the smell of burning paper. Caracciolo was endeavoring to reduce the entire body of feudal jurisprudence to ashes, to destroy a whole complex of tenets that Sicilian civilization had elaborated with much ingenuity and skill over the centuries to defend the barons’ privileges, a juxtaposition of historical facts artfully isolated, defined, interpreted, out of which had come a juridical corpus that had been unassailable until that moment. Now, in the eyes of a reforming viceroy and a greedy monarch, that massive body of legal opinion was coming to assume the aspect of an imposture; Don Giuseppe, who understood a thing or two ab
out imposture, was beginning to understand the workings of this one. It would not require too much to reverse the terms, surreptitiously to deal Viceroy and Crown the cards of a reversed fraud; surely they would willingly accept the cards and discharge their debt by the conferral of a rich prelacy or abbacy. They – nobles and jurists – affirmed that in the Norman conquest of Sicily, King Ruggero and his barons had been rather like associates in a commercial enterprise, the King functioning somewhat like the president of a corporation; by extension, this meant that vassals owed the barons the same allegiance they owed the King, and so forth. Don Giuseppe would bring to light an Arab codex in which the affairs of Norman Sicily would be shown in a quite different light by the firsthand, disinterested testimony of the Arabs and by documents of these same Norman kings; that is, his codex would establish the fact that everything belongs to the Crown and nothing to the barons.

  Don Giuseppe knew that this would not displease Monsignor Airoldi: the Bishop nourished mixed feelings for Caracciolo: he approved the Viceroy’s attacks against the barons, his encouragement of education, his plans for reform, but was distressed by the disrespect for religion and its related interests that the Viceroy exhibited at every opportunity. However, Don Giuseppe proposed to talk to Monsignor on the basis of a codex already fabricated; never again would he be so imprudent as to chatter about it first, no matter how vaguely, for then the whole matter could end like Livy’s eighteen books, which he was quite sure he would never bring himself to produce. He found the Romans tedious. The Arabs, on the contrary, he delighted in, and even as he labored, he relished a pristine indolence, an unpredictable fantasy that emanated from their world.

  He would not speak of it, then. He would need several years – first to develop the work in Italian, then to translate it into his particular Arabic – in a word, to make it a codex with every semblance of authenticity. A revelation, that is what it would have to be. Meanwhile, fortified by this secret, by the private knowledge of the blow he was readying against them, he moved easily among those nobles who had at first intimidated him; he became a good, even a brilliant, conversationalist. Seeing him thus altered, Monsignor Airoldi was swept by waves of apprehension that were quickly stilled by Vella’s steadily unaltered submissiveness and by his feigned innocence of history and antiquities.

  To inform himself about Sicilian constitutionalism without arousing suspicion, as if acting from a sudden, disinterested enthusiasm, Vella had taken to frequenting the Di Blasis – young Francesco Paolo, who at the behest of the Viceroy was researching and preparing a commentary on early customs and traditions, and who had already published a study of Sicilian legislation; and the uncles Giovanni Evangelista and Salvatore, Benedictines both, and both students of Sicilian history. They used to meet in the Airoldi home and at the clubs, on the promenade of the Piazza Marina, or at the Ze Sciaveria, on the Marina di Romagnola, one of those places that are taken up by people who wish to avoid crowds and noise and so end up becoming crowded and noisy; or in the house of Francesco Paolo, which almost all the dialect poets of Palermo, Giovanni Meli first among them, regularly visited, and where the meetings almost always ended in discussions of poetry and dialect. These topics were of the most meager interest to Vella, but he derived a certain enjoyment from the recitation of poetry celebrating the beauty of women and from the flashing, rapier-like epigrams. Poems like those of Meli which sang of the brows, the eyes, the lips, the breasts, the tiny moles of Palermo’s loveliest women gave him almost more pleasure than the sight of the ladies; the epigrams aimed at people known or unknown to him he enjoyed as the small coin of the contempt for others which encased him like a suit of armor. Only two persons escaped his scorn: one, young Di Blasi, whom he liked because he was young and so different from, so unlike himself – he recognized a generous passion, honesty, and clarity in this young man, who represented to him some remote, unrealized potential of his own life; and two, Canon Rosario Gregorio, whom he could not despise and therefore profoundly hated.

  A rather unsympathetic man, Canon Gregorio; personal characteristics apart, he was physically unsympathetic: slim, but with the face of a fat man; a moist lower lip; a wart on the left cheek; sparse hair that fell over his forehead and at the back reached to his shoulders; round, unblinking eyes; and a coldness, a stillness, from which he emerged only rarely, with an incisive gesture of his short, fat hands. He exuded self-confidence, severity, discipline, and pedantry. Unbearable. Yet everyone stood in awe of him.

  The one time, the only time, they had spoken, Gregorio had been particularly mordant. “I congratulate you,” he had said, with an ironic smile. “They should dub you bishop in partibus infidelium.”

  “Why?” someone asked.

  “Because he has, I know, made great progress in converting the Moslems of Sicily and making them behave like Christians.”

  Indeed, in early passages of the codex that Monsignor Airoldi had already divulged, Don Giuseppe had not been too mindful to give his Moslems a deportment consistent with the rules and prescriptions of the Koran governing prayers, ablutions, the division of spoils, and the like. But from that moment, the Arabs in the Council of Sicily prayed, bathed, and divided their spoils with even excessive orthodoxy, for Monsignor Airoldi stood by, Koran in hand, to challenge any lapse of faith that might spring up in the codex like a weed; he called for a stern accounting, exactly as he would have taken one of his own confessants to task for meat eaten on Friday or a fast day unobserved. It was laughable. But this Gregorio was a hair shirt. He had actually set to studying Arabic by himself. Purely for the pleasure of unmasking Don Giuseppe. “Why? What is it to you?” the Chaplain asked him silently. “Am I taking bread from your mouth? Meet me squarely, talk to me privately and plainly. Say to me, ‘You are playing tricks that will reap a pretty penny, and I want a share.’... And I will say to you, ‘Very well, let us play together, divide half and half!’... But no, not you. You, sir, do not want to live and let live. You are a cur, a mangy, pest-ridden, slavering cur.”

  Chapter VII

  All Palermo, from the fisherman in the Kalsa to the Prince di Trabia, was muttering over the scandal, the indignity, the outrage of the Marquis Caracciolo’s having elected the singer Marina Balducci to grace his bed and table.

  “Are noblewomen in such short supply?” Don Saverio Zarbo asked ironically, and his hand described a large circle that embraced the Marina promenade and the Villa Flora, which at that hour of the day was atwitter with fashionable ladies.

  Every man in the group who had a wife or sister pretended not to hear or ostentatiously turned his back and walked off. Don Saverio snickered.

  “A little more of such talk and you’ll have a duel on your hands,” Giovanni Meli said in a low voice.

  “Did I mention any names? Did I call any man cuckold?”

  “Worse than that. You included them all.”

  “And what about you? You keep putting all of them into your poems, don’t you?”

  “Well, with poetry it’s different—”

  “Prose or poetry, horns are horns.”

  “You really are old-fashioned, if I may say so. You still think that horns matter.”

  “You don’t?”

  “But we’re not married, you and I,” Meli said.

  “Ho, that’s capital!” Don Saverio laughed.

  They had remained alone in a corner of the open area on the Marina where the nobles’ Conversation Club met informally. Don Saverio’s malicious gibes had a way of frequently turning it into a desert.

  “Yes, no doubt about it. It’s simply because we do not have wives of our own,” Meli retorted.

  “And our moralistic itch is hypocrisy at bottom, isn’t it?” Don Saverio asked caustically. “If the others are cuckolds, they are cuckolds because of our sport... But perhaps you do not indulge in sport?”

  “Not exactly in what you mean by sport.”

  “There are no two ways of meaning it. Either you get a woman into bed or you do not look at her. I
f I had to believe that the lips you are always praising in your poems were not lips that you also suck, that you don’t squeeze this breast or that breast as you please – Well, let me tell you, you’re a poor sort of man.”

  Meli sighed.

  “No, no, I’m not asking for confidences,” Don Saverio continued. “If I can believe that you have sound teeth and a good appetite, and can take advantage of the flesh and fruit Providence provides, that’s enough. To believe that is enough for me to admire you as a poet and respect you as a man.”

  “Your notion of a poet smacks slightly of a grocer.”

  “To tell you the truth, my notion of a poet is quite different, but knowing you—” He burst out laughing, and Meli laughed too.

  “I’m joking,” Don Saverio said.

  “I know,” Meli said, who knew quite well that he was not.

  The evening, all roseate and gold, began to cast off gentle veils of sea air. From the bandstand the musicians gave voice to the mood of the hour.

  “Ah, yes, passion, passion, passion!” Don Saverio said banteringly; he did not realize that the word had come to him spontaneously and that only after turning it over in his mind had he voiced it ironically. “Passion we have with us always, do we not? Prostitutes are passionate, and so are cuckolds, the police, the public hangman, the Marquis di Santa Croce, the bandits in our mountains, and let’s not forget our peasants – they’ve so much passion it runs out of their noses – and shepherds and fishermen, riffraff of every—”

  “And you?”

  “What do you mean, ‘you’?” Don Saverio was outraged. “You what? You are asking me whether I am a man of passion? I am not. I have not a crumb, not an atom of passion in me... Passion! A business for beggars,” and as Don Giuseppe Vella was passing by just then, Don Saverio accosted him brusquely: “What about you, Abbot Vella, are you a passionate man?”