The Council of Egypt Read online

  Don Giuseppe started with surprise, and came up to the two men’s table. “I am not an abbot,” he said.

  “No, but you will be, my friend, you will be,” Don Saverio said.

  “Thank you... I was hoping to find Monsignor Airoldi.”

  “He hasn’t come yet,” Don Saverio said, “but you’ll find him turning up any moment. Sit down with us in the meantime. We were talking about passion, human passion. What are your ideas about that?”

  “I would not know,” said Don Giuseppe.

  “Well, what about you, are you a passionate man? Do you feel anything inside you that resembles the passion our Abbot Meli here plays with in his fashionable poems?”

  “I am no abbot either,” Meli said.

  “You’re doing your very best to become one,” Don Saverio said, and he turned again to Vella. “Do you feel the winds of passion sweep over you, yes or no?”

  “I don’t feel anything,” Vella said.

  “Look, let us take an example. Does a beautiful woman arouse some – let’s say emotion, in you or...” The “or” hung suspended among them like a malicious sunbeam. He laughed.

  “But I—” Don Giuseppe began, in confusion.

  “I know. You’re a priest. But you are a man too, no? I am talking to the man now. You cannot help but know what will soon be going on here on this moonless night, under these trees, among these pines of the Villa Flora. What will all these ladies and gentlemen be doing? At the moment, they are sipping iced drinks and chattering about clothes and hair styles. But you know, don’t you, what will be happening here very soon?”

  “What?” Francesco Di Blasi was standing behind Don Saverio. He had arrived in company with Baron Porcari and Don Gaetano Jannello. Don Saverio invited them to sit down.

  “What will be happening here?” Di Blasi asked again.

  “I was talking about what will take place presently, as soon as it is dark, here in the park of the Villa Flora.”

  “A kiss for you, a kiss for me, a kiss for whoever you may be,” Baron Porcari said.

  “Much worse than that,” said Jannello.

  Meli corrected him, “Much better.”

  “I’ll tell you something that happened to me three nights ago,” Don Saverio said. “I was passing by the Villa on my way – well, I was going about my own business, and whom do I see – I have excellent sight, you know – whom do I see? Well, after all, better not name names. I see a beautiful lady. She is standing among the boxwood, and she is leaning over a pile of fresh cuttings as if looking for something she’d dropped. I stop. ‘Have you lost something?’ I ask. And she answers, cool as you please, ‘Thank you, I’ve found it.’ So I go on. But you know how that kind of thing is. After a few steps, I turn around. The lady hasn’t moved, and right behind her is the Duke – I’m not mentioning his name either, because then you could identify the lady too easily.”

  Everyone but Don Giuseppe laughed. His attention was wandering, free and observant and amused, under the trees of the Flora. When his imagination was quickened by some scrap of conversation or anecdote or image, it took wing and he could no longer follow the talk going on around him; the others believed that he retreated voluntarily, out of modesty, and now Don Saverio said, “We must stop talking about such things. Abbot Vella finds them distasteful. Let’s go back to where we started – passion, we were talking about passion,” and he slapped his knee.

  “What? – Oh, yes.”

  “Are you a passionate man?”

  “Now that I think about it, I believe I am,” Don Giuseppe said.

  “I’m disappointed in you,” Don Saverio said.

  “Why?” Di Blasi interrupted. “Aside from the fact that all men are—”

  “All men! That’s what I cannot abide!” Don Saverio exploded.

  “What difference is there between you and them?” Di Blasi gestured toward some fishermen who were mending their nets, holding them with outspread toes.

  “You don’t see the difference yourself?”

  “No, I do not. I see equality. Only here are we, well dressed, well groomed, enjoying the cool, while they work.”

  “And you call that nothing?”

  “Nothing at all. Unless you want to relate it to justice: then I agree that between them and us there are grave and shameful differences. Shameful for us, I mean... But thinking of them simply as men and of ourselves as men, then I see no difference. They are men like you and like me. Eh, will those dreadful words ‘yours’ and ‘mine’ never disappear!”

  “What would I be without the ‘mine’?”

  “A man. Isn’t that enough for you?”

  “But I am the more a man with my acres and my houses – as are you with an income you receive from your father and mother.”

  “We are the more men in the sense that, thanks to some wealth, we sit here discussing the fact of our being men and talking about the books we have read and enjoying beauty. But if you consider that our ‘more’ is paid for by others, we are actually ‘less’—”

  “This conversation is becoming a trifle complicated,” Don Saverio interrupted, and to change the subject he said, “I can grant you that there is no difference between me and those fishermen, but don’t tell me there is no difference between me and that man.” He pointed to Don Giuseppe Vassallo, who was strolling by, his young wife on his arm; the picture they presented suggested a crab clinging to a branch of bright coral.

  “He’s got a beautiful wife, all the same,” Jannello said.

  “Through no merit of his... Poor thing, she hadn’t a scrap of dowry, while that old frog is rich, rich,” Meli said; Meli was well informed about everything.

  “Poor but pure. I’ve yet to hear it said – and this is after four years of marriage, mind you – that she has decided to cuckold him,” Baron Porcari said.

  “How could she? Don’t you see there’s nothing there to cuckold?” Meli asked.

  “Is there no end to this kind of talk?” Don Saverio said. “I was discussing with our Abbot Vella... What were we discussing, Abbot?”

  “Passion.”

  “Passion... And you, if I am not mistaken, had said that you are a passionate man?”

  “I think so.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “I am not sure what you mean by the word. If you are referring to something fashionable, to a combination of things that, taken together, create a vogue – the man who affects passion because it is the stylish thing to do and becomes the cynosure of all the ladies or, in another way, one of Meli’s shepherds – then I say I most definitely am not. But if by passion you mean a sense of human equality, of which the present fashion is an unknowing fruit, then I can say to you that I do in some manner share in that.”

  “What, what?” Don Saverio exclaimed, obtusely surprised. Indeed, Don Giuseppe was a bit surprised himself by the quick intelligence of his reply, and to find his mind assenting to an idea in which not his destiny and his happiness but the destiny and happiness of all men were mirrored. Honed by a radical contempt, his mind was ordinarily quite alien to any such concern. He felt a sudden unease, a surge of complication and conflict. “Watch your step,” he said to himself; he did not mean in speech, for at the moment one could express any idea in Palermo freely and without risk; he meant in thought. “Thoughts that attract ideas are like tumors. They grow inside you, blind you, strangle you.”

  “You are talking like a closed book.” Meli was stung by the reference to his shepherds.

  “Not at all,” Di Blasi said. “Don Giuseppe expressed his opinion in a remarkably lucid way. Because below the surface of fashionable pose you find real passion, passion for equality, for revolution—”

  “What revolution? You smell revolution in the air?” Meli raised his head and sniffed like a dog.

  “You haven’t got the nose for it,” Jannello said.

  “But I smell it,” Don Saverio said. “What’s more, I see it. I can see an incensed populace accompanying the Marquis Caracci
olo to the port with whistles and grimaces and showers of garbage... The very same thing that happened to Viceroy Fogliani, the very same.”

  “I don’t deny that such a thing may happen: our commoners are accustomed to lick the hand that whips them and bite the hand that tries to help them. It could happen. Although the Marquis Caracciolo is a different kind of man; he is no Fogliani, and his authority would be flaunted over his dead body. But that would not be revolution; it would be just the opposite,” Di Blasi said.

  “From my point of view, that would be revolution,” Don Saverio said. “Even though, as you know, I like Caracciolo as a man.”

  “He is an extraordinary man,” said Baron Porcari.

  “Even if the Marquis Caracciolo were not the man he is,” said Di Blasi, with mounting fervor, “every time I am near him, every time he speaks to me, I feel – moved, that’s it, moved. I say to myself, ‘This man has spoken with Voltaire, with Diderot, with D’Alembert.’... By the way, Diderot died, did you know? On the thirty-first of last month.”

  Don Saverio rose. “My condolences to the Viceroy,” he said.

  Chapter VIII

  The Council of Sicily was already finished: with great skill and art, the Arabic Codex of San Martino had been entirely corrupted; the Italian translation was ready, although a final revision was still needed to resolve numerous incongruities and equivocations. This, however, would be the task of Monsignor Airoldi, who by this time had also been put on his mettle by Gregorio and those who sided with Gregorio or simply followed the work’s progress as amused onlookers.

  Don Giuseppe was now entirely dedicated to the fabrication of the Council of Egypt; like a small tradesman who leaves his shop to venture on broader winds of chance, he had had Giuseppe Cammilleri , a monk and a trusted friend, come on from Malta to help him with the physical labor. Cammilleri was a man of the same stuff as himself, but niggardly and slow of mind, with primitive, urgent appetites. In the matter of keeping a secret, he was a tomb; it was necessary, however, to deposit in that tomb the obol that the ancients used to place in the tombs of their dear departed ones; and as the money Don Giuseppe gave him disappeared, never to be seen again, one might have supposed that it also was destined to be an antiquarian or, in today’s parlance, an archaeological discovery. He’s burying the money in the kitchen garden, Don Giuseppe thought, for from time to time he took the precaution of inspecting the monk’s effects, and he never found any trace of money; nor was there any sign or hint that the man might be spending it; for one thing, he never went out of the house. Actually, he was burying his silver in the pocket of a streetwalker who came to visit him between the Ave and two in the morning, when the master of the house was out: a generous fee in the monk’s view, a most miserly one in the view of the lady. Thus it happened that under Don Giuseppe Vella’s roof, in the house where his Bishop had kindly lodged him, her every visit was marked by an altercation in which certain physical characteristics, members, and vices were called by their crudest names.

  Luckily Don Giuseppe suspected nothing of all this, for it would have been a worry and a trial to him: he could not have dispatched the monk back to Malta now that the man was the guardian of a dangerous secret, nor could he have countenanced the continuance of such a shameful performance. In any event, the house was out of the way and, when the first shadows of evening fell, was immersed in almost frightening solitude.

  Oblivious of the gross passion the monk was comfortably indulging behind his back, Don Giuseppe enjoyed the man’s company and his help, especially his company, after years of solitude – a solitude like that of an artist who might find himself alone on a desert island laboring on a creation that no other man would ever see. Don Giuseppe was aware that his work, his real work, had elements of imagination and artistry; when, in a few centuries or, in any event, after his death, the historical fraud would be discovered, the romance he had created would still remain, the extraordinary romance of the Moslems of Sicily; posterity would enshrine his name with the golden aureole of a Fénelon or a Lesage, far different from the ominous glory surrounding the name of Giuseppe Balsamo, a Palermitan known throughout Europe as Count Alessandro di Cagliostro. His artist’s despair fused with the vanity common to all men who stand beyond the pale: he needed someone, a witness, an accomplice, who in the course of the day’s toil might admire in him the original creator of a literary work and the no less original and daring impostor.

  The monk was not the ideal man for the purpose: he paid the sum total of his anxious admiration to the imposture, but he was unable truly to appreciate the literary work; he could do no better than limp along in the role of the marveling observer that Don Giuseppe had assigned him. He was, nevertheless, an alito, as Sicilians say, a breath of life, a human presence that serves to soften loneliness and despair, a light rustling of air in a burning drought. In the mechanical work, the copying and the coinage, his assistance was invaluable: he was patient, attentive, meticulous.

  During the hours of work, both men were silent; they seemed deaf-mutes. But at table and while resting in the garden, they grew loquacious as they reminisced about Malta, their childhood, and their families and friends, of whom the monk had the fresher memories and more recent news. Or they reviewed their life, what it had been, how it was changing, and also touched on things of this world of which the monk was almost entirely ignorant. When it came to worldly things, he positively seemed to be a character out of the Fioretti; also, with regard to women, of whom he had a concealed, unconfessed, but most practical knowledge, the more deeply he became mired down in that subject, the more he floundered among vague, half-fearful fantasy and the desire and emotion that Don Giuseppe Vella relished more slyly.

  “Don’t you believe, really, that the Devil made them?” the monk asked.

  “Why, no.” Don Giuseppe smiled. “They are also God’s handiwork. What merit would there be, otherwise, in our abstaining from women? To abstain from works of the Devil is easy; the difficult thing is to abstain from what God Himself has made and asks us, out of love for Him, not to touch.”

  “You may be right,” the monk said. “No doubt you are right, you have dogma at your fingertips, but I don’t see much sense in any of it. It strikes me like denying praise to God for one whole part of His creation—”

  “We praise God for every part of His creation, woman included. We praise woman for her beauty, her harmony, and we exalt her as a mother. But we also make her the object of our renunciation, our sacrifice, in order to be only priests of God, entirely and exclusively His ministers.”

  “But can you do that? I don’t mean can you do without women, but are you able not to think about them, not to dream about them, not to draw them up over you in a dream like a quilt of pleasure?...”

  “That I cannot,” Don Giuseppe said, closing his eyes.

  And the monk was comforted. And because he had a slack memory and was subject to recurring bouts of repentance and remorse, he often brought the subject up again. In the darkness of his mind and heart, shards of superstition littered his faith; Don Giuseppe knew this very well, and therefore found the words best calculated to reassure him. Sometimes the monk even felt pangs of guilt over his work as amanuensis and foundryman.

  “Am I not doing something wrong?” he would ask.

  “And I?” Don Giuseppe would retort.

  “Well, you too,” the monk would reply timidly, not daring to raise his eyes.

  At that point, Don Giuseppe would explain to him at length how the work of the historian is all deception, all fraud; how there was more merit in inventing history than in transcribing it from old maps and tablets and ancient tombs; how, therefore, in all honesty, their efforts deserved an immensely larger compensation than the work of a real historian, a historiographer who enjoyed the benefits of salary and status. “It’s all fraud. History does not exist. Perhaps you think the generations of leaves that have dropped from that tree autumn after autumn still exist? The tree exists; its new leaves exist; but t
hese leaves will also fall; in time, the tree itself will disappear – in smoke, in ashes. A history of those leaves? A history of that tree? Nonsense! If every leaf were to write its history, if the tree were to write its history, then we would say, ‘Ah yes, this is history.’... Your grandfather, did he write his history? Or your father? Or mine? Or our great-grandfathers or our great-great-grandfathers? They went down into the earth to rot, no more and no less, like the leaves, and they left no history of themselves... The tree is still there, yes, and we are its new leaves. And we will fall, too... The tree that will remain, if it does remain, can also be sawed down, limb by limb: kings, viceroys, popes, generals, the great ones, that is... What we are making, you and I, is a little fire, a little smoke with these limbs, in order to beguile people, whole nations – every living human being... History! What about my father? What about your father? And the rumbling of their empty bellies, the voice of their hunger? Do you believe this will be heard in history? That there will be a historian with an ear keen enough to hear?” Don Giuseppe spoke with the vehemence of a preacher, and the monk felt mortified and ill at ease. Then the preacher gave way to the impostor, the accomplice. “But perhaps the fact of being well off, as you are here, pricks your conscience? If that is so, you have only to tell me. I will pay your fare back to Malta, and that will be the end of it.” And for the monk this was, all told, the most persuasive argument.

  Chapter IX

  “See?... So...” the Countess said.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she could see herself in the tall mirror; before her on the writing desk she could also see, reduced to a vivid miniature and set in the lid of a snuffbox, the painting by François Boucher that the Casanovites claim is a portrait of Mlle O’Murphy.

  Tableaux were then in vogue. In the charming little paneled pavilion where, pleading a headache to her husband, the Countess loved to retire for an intimate rendezvous, she was now creating a remarkable tableau – a perfect copy of the Boucher painting, the tenuous light helping to equate her years to the youth of Mlle O’Murphy. She used only two elements: the dormeuse and her own nakedness. One could not have wished for a more glowing tableau, a more faithful imitation.