Week 10: We were the leopards and lions
The Leopard chapter IV part II
Hey gang! We have a shorter section this week, I chose to give it its own entry because it’s a truly emblematic one. Every Italian student has run across Fabrizio’s speech in their high school literature books and had to sit through what, to a 17-year-old, is essentially a long two pages of tedious gibberish. Let’s see if we can make sense of it together, shall we?
Contrary worries
Have you guys ever been to Turin? It’s often overlooked by tourists in favor of showier cities like Rome, Venice or Florence, but I find it delightful: they call it ‘Little Paris’ because it was modeled after the French capital. The region of Piedmont, Italy shares a border with Savoy, France, and you can imagine how much history there is between the two. Before it became the first capital of Italy in 1861, Turin was capital of the Duchy of Savoy, one of the most liberal and modern states in the area. The Savoys rebuilt the city to look like Paris with its passages couverts, boulevards and jardins, embracing French cutting-edge ideas on politics, economics, society, art etc.
Our newly arrived guest, the Cavaliere (knight) Aimone Chevalley of Monterzuolo, hails from Piedmont and indeed has a French name. Imagine the poor fellow going from the icy Alps and tree-lined avenues of Turin to, well, Sicily. The cultural shock alone is almost too much! And not just because all the food is fried in olive oil (the French, alas, are doggedly faithful to butter). Chevalley has been touring Sicily for a month and has seen the destitution and miserable living conditions of its inhabitants first-hand.
“In front of every house the refuse of squalid meals accumulated along leprous walls; trembling dogs were routing about with a greed that was always disappointed. An occasional door was already open and the cumulative stench of sleep spread out into the street; by glimmering wicks mothers scrutinised the lids of their children for trachoma; almost all were in mourning and many had been the wives of those carcasses one stumbles over on the turns of mountain tracks.”
Arriving one dark evening in Donnafugata, Chevalley can hardly believe he’s stepping foot on Italian soil and that the people around him, ragged peasants that can’t even speak his language, are to be considered his fellow citizens. He’s in for another, opposite shock when he’s welcomed inside the Donnafugata palace and sees the luxury the Salinas live in. Chevalley owns a rather modest estate in Piedmont and finds himself in the paradoxical position of being too grand a character for the peasants outside and too humble for the princes inside the palace.
Tales of brigands
“‘That, my dear Chevalley, is the home of Baron Mútolo; now it’s closed and empty as the family live in Girgenti since the baron’s son was captured by brigands ten years ago.’
The Piedmontese began to tremble. ‘Poor things, I wonder how much they paid to free him.’
‘No, no, they didn’t pay a thing; they were in financial straits already and had no ready money, like everybody else here. But they got the boy back all the same; by instalments, though.’
‘What do you mean, Prince?’
‘By instalments, I said, by instalments; bit by bit. First arrived the index finger of his right hand. A week later his left foot; and finally in a great big basket, under a layer of figs (it was August), the head; its eyes were staring and there was congealed blood on the corner of the lips.”
By the 1860s banditism was already endemic in southern Italy. You can find more or less romanticized depictions of Italian brigands and bandits in many books of the time (The Count of Monte Cristo, for example), similarly to the often simplistic way mafia is depicted in today’s movies. Bandits at the time were merely armed gangs of outlaws roaming the countryside and engaging in killings, robberies, racketeering, rape, livestock theft etc.
After the annexation to the Kingdom of Italy and for about five years banditism in the south suddenly became political: thousands of former soldiers and starving farmers were joining in gangs to fight against the newly installed Italian army. All the frustration born from foreign control, raised taxes and lack of religious freedom (the north had developed a sort of atheism in opposition to the Pope) was translated into waves and waves of armed violence with no precise plan or ideology – these weren’t thinkers, they were normal people fed up with the new status quo. The former Bourbon administration, the Pope and even Napoleon III started secretly providing weapons and resources to the brigands, hoping to weaken the newborn Kingdom of Italy from the inside.
The response from Turin was both merciless and shortsighted. Exactly like King Bomba did twenty years prior, they sent a large amount of troops and repressed every opposition with extreme violence. Those five years in Sicily and the rest of the south were similar to the American Old West, with sheriffs in every town, wanted posters, public executions of outlaws. Despite their brutal methods brigands became folk heroes, still remembered and sung about today.
Many historians describe those five years of extreme banditism as an actual civil war between north and south and one of the main reasons why many Sicilians and southerners today still don’t feel like they truly belong to Italy. It’s likely that, no matter where you live, similar episodes took place in your country at some point (the American Civil War and the Fenian Rising in Ireland even happened in those same years) and are still causing unrest and discontent today.
Michelina Di Cesare’s story has always haunted me. Born in extreme poverty, widowed at 20 years old, at 21 she fell in love with a brigand and joined him. In the years that followed she became one of the leaders of his gang, carried two rifles and a pistol and often lead guerrilla operations. At 27, she was killed by the Italian army. Her naked and tortured body was displayed in a public square and close-up photographs of it were distributed all over the south, in a sort of sick propaganda against banditism. (She’s one of the characters in a recent Netflix show, I haven’t watched it though so I can’t tell you if it’s any good.)
This ornate catafalque
Chevalley has come to Donnafugata with an official invitation for Fabrizio to join the newly-formed Italian Senate. He is incredulous at Fabrizio’s refusal and gives him an honest plea that moves something inside the Prince, makes him open up about his desperation like he has never done before. Observe what Bendicò does: you know by now that he’s an external projection of Fabrizio’s inner life. He demands to be let inside the room, sniffs Chevalley all over, investigates him with suspicion and then, satisfied, he lays down. Chevalley has passed the test, there is an honesty, an eagerness about him that prompts Fabrizio to concede what he, the consummate cynic, rarely gives: his confidence and his respect.
With a passion that is rare for him Fabrizio tries to explain why there is nothing he can do to help Sicily. He tells Chevalley about the unforgiving, apocalyptic climate, the endless summers that are as cruel as Russian winters. The floods that follow summer droughts. The years of colonization, all the temples and churches and palaces that no Sicilian ever built or understood. Even the Prince’s very Victorian racism (We’re as white as you are, Chevalley, and as the Queen of England; and yet for two thousand five hundred years we’ve been a colony) speaks of how universal the plight of humanity is.
(People keep being oppressed because of their race even though the systematically abused will grown traumatized all the same. Human beings have the same potential for greatness and horror, for joy and despair. Race is important because us, us stupid people insist of making it important. As if bodies kicked down bleed because they’re brown and not because they’re human. This is not a “we shouldn’t see race” discourse. We should understand the historical and societal reasons why we see race and do something about it. But sorry, I digress.)
Fabrizio and Lampedusa don’t pull any punches and are not kind to Sicilians and Sicily, despite their immense love for the island. The Leopard is considered too conservative a book by liberals, too liberal by conservatives, too patriotic by southerners, not patriotic enough by northerners, too elite by the masses, too humiliating by aristocrats. It’s a book for everyone and no one. It’s, ultimately, a book by a man with a terminal illness and a tragically bleak look on life. Fabrizio’s pessimism and Sicily’s horrors become one and the same, one is the microcosm of the other.
We are all Chevalley trying to shake Fabrizio out of his torpor. Why are you sleeping? Why aren’t you doing something, you that have the material and intellectual means to make a real change? But Fabrizio is dead already, he is only a miniature in the constellation of dead portraits in his studio. Sicilians are ancients souls living among the nostalgia of ghosts past, isolated, beaten down, and yet, paradoxically, too proud to ever want to seek out something better. They are coming to teach us good manners! But they won’t succeed, because we are gods. (This was in English in the original text, so there, Lampedusa wrote it just for you.)
Why are Sicilians so proud? Why are all Italians above the law? Why do people, especially poor people, vote against their best interests, why do they punch down instead of up, why are they cruel and selfish, why can’t they see the bigger picture? It’s not just ignorance, Lampedusa tells us. It’s the suffering of your ancestors piling up, telling you that you should save yourself. In a world full of ghosts and death, hope is an illusion, a choice that never existed in the first place.
I disagree, of course. Or rather, I think that we, the privileged few that don’t live in war zones, are not starving and are free to learn and discuss as much as we choose, have a moral responsibility to at least try and make positive changes. But who knows, maybe I’m just like Chevalley, pleading for an idea of democracy that was never going to work.
That last part really got away from me. What do you think, too political? Should I just stick to the book?
Next week we are reading the whole of chapter five, from page 144 to 161. It’s a shorter and slightly sillier one, and we finally get away from Fabrizio and his doom and gloom, if only for a little while.
Till next time!
Lots to think about here. Perhaps too political any other time, but not now. America is fractured and everyone is siloed in their own delusional misery. I don’t know if this is the same as Sicily, being subsumed into a newly formed nation other than not understanding what government is - wanting things to change but stay the same too because that’s what you know. It’s a volatile time where ambitious men like Sedara can find a place for themselves and rise up. While others haven’t a clue what is happening or turn away from being any part of it like the Prince out of pride and lack of foresight. I related very much to Chevalley and feeling in the middle and not fitting in with either group.
In the US, I think it is more a lack of trust or a distrust and turning to the ridiculous false prophet who is a conduit for all your grievances, a flimflam confidence man who promises you he’ll fix it whatever it is and he’s so unconventional (I say crazy) that maybe he could? At least he let’s you release your anger and find a scapegoat so that you are not the problem. I don’t know I’m still in shock and feel like I’m in bizarro world.
As for Turin, I’ve never been. I’ve mostly been to Rome as that is where my family live. I’m watching The Law According to Lidia Poet on Netflix which takes place in Turin in the late 1800s. I was wondering why they sometimes speak French words. Lidia also said she was Waldenstein and not catholic. I never heard of that, I googled it but I still don’t quite understand. It’s a pretty good show loosely based on a true story and reminds me of Sherlock Holmes. I’ll add Brigands to my list to watch thanks for that!
“….we ourselves call it pride but in reality it is blindness.” I finally found a reason that the US election ended up the way it did. But we are all blind to something in ourselves. “And we will always hate someone who tries to wake us.” How humans hate to be told the truth about who they are. It so easier to remain static and not try to change. Buddhist call the road to enlightenment a process of awakening. I have often listened to friends complain about their life or attitudes or something. When I ask them what they are going to do about it, most say, “Nothing.”