Week 7: An enigma of history
The Leopard chapter III part I
Hey Leopard gang! This week we read halfway through chapter three, up to the line “By eight o’clock all was over, and nothing remained except darkness as on any other night, always” on page 82 of the Vintage Classics paperback edition. This is one of my favorite chapters, with stunning nature descriptions and some delicious, witty humor. Let me know if you’re enjoying it, and whether or not you’re liking the book overall. It’s a meditative slow book and that’s not everyone’s cup of tea!
Knight of Swords
October 1860; Fabrizio, still on his endless vacation, gets ready for a day of shooting in the country. As he leaves the house at the break of dawn he makes eye contact with a Knight of Swords (turned into a Jack of Spades in English) left on a table the night before, and they exchange a manly greeting. Back in the day tarots were still used as playing cards – cartomancy had just been invented.
In modern tarot reading, the Knight of Swords symbolizes a smart, brave, ambitious young man. Upside down, the man becomes superficial, impulsive, too analytical. Reminds you of anyone?
By now Garibaldi’s army has successfully chased away the Bourbon King and conquered Naples. Tancredi and his battalion are currently camping out at the Royal Palace of Caserta, in those same rooms where Fabrizio used to meet with Ferdinand II. The letter carrying Tancredi’s marriage proposal to the beautiful Angelica Sedàra has just been delivered, full of sappy Romantic rhetoric that clashes with the young man’s libertine tendencies and his political and financial goals.
Fabrizio is —surprise, surprise— torn. On the one hand, he’s happy for his nephew’s (temporary) marital bliss and (lasting) financial gain. On the other, he dislikes acting as Tancredi’s middleman, mincing words so he doesn’t come out either as spoilsport or pimp. Fabrizio is like the constitutional October sun described at the beginning of the chapter, once upon a time a god with absolute power, he now has to comply to a whole new set of rules imposed by his own subjects; as a result, his pride is wounded and his fundamentally lazy nature is weary.
Future past
With Tancredi’s letter still burning in his mind, Fabrizio goes shooting like he’s been doing every day, attempting to escape his woes. He follows his daily ritual seeking the familiar sights that should bring him peace: shiny planet Venus with the sun already roaring on the horizon, placid sheep guided by stone-throwing shepherds, dogs stretching lazily as their prey bleeds out, hunters eating their simple lunch swarmed by ever-present ants. He came to Donnafugata to relax and forget but found that the real world, persistent and ravenous like an army of ants, won’t leave him alone.
Sicilian countryside, isolated, rocky, uncaring, seems like the perfect place to sublimate one’s worries. Unchanged since the days of the first colonizers, it makes you feel like an early Phoenician or Greek exploring hills and valleys; time, rushing madly even in the remote streets of Donnafugata, finally seems to stop. The future, a concept so terrifying to Fabrizio, is exorcised with a nature that is timeless and idyllic precisely because it’s unfeeling, unbothered by the problems of ants and men. Like astronomy. Like Bendicò.
[Donnafugata’s] troubles and splendours appeared even more insignificant than if they belonged to the past, for compared to this remote unchangeable landscape they seemed part of the future, made not of stone and flesh but of the substance of some dream of things to come, extracts from a Utopia thought up by a rustic Plato and apt to change any second into quite different forms or even not to exist at all; deprived thus of that charge of energy which everything in the past continues to possess, they could no longer be a worry.
By the powers of literature, one of the very few forms of time travel man was able to invent, we, the readers, are privy to that future Fabrizio can only imagine. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (almost) lives in that 1961 evoked by the mayor with a Freudian slip, and won’t let us forget it. He drops images that are jarring next to a bucolic 19th century setting, like Super Jets or hospital bloodwork, breaking our suspension of disbelief, inviting us to read the events using modern sensibilities. Like Fabrizio in his Utopia, we’re meant to use the past —by studying and understanding it— to make our own present and future a little less frightening.
The rabbit
The killing of the rabbit is described with quick, brutal brushstrokes; it’s beautifully written, and I personally loathe every time I have to go back to it.
Horrible wounds lacerated snout and chest. Don Fabrizio found himself stared at by big black eyes soon overlaid by a glaucous veil; they were looking at him with no reproval, but full of tortured amazement at the whole ordering of things; the velvety ears were already cold, the vigorous paws contracting in rhythm, still-living symbol of useless flight; the animal had died tortured by anxious hopes of salvation, imagining it could still escape when it was already caught, just like so many human beings. While sympathetic fingers were still stroking that poor snout, the animal gave a last quiver and died; Don Fabrizio and Don Ciccio had had their bit of fun, the former not only the pleasure of killing but also the comfort of compassion.
When the gutted soldier was found in the garden, Fabrizio silently reproached his family for not caring enough. When his shepherds brought him slaughtered lambs, he was upset at having to see blood. Now he feels bad for the creature he himself killed for sport. Feeling bad makes him a better person, morally superior to his fellow man – or so he believes. Can Fabrizio feel empathy, or is he actually only sorry for himself? Will he ever regret his lust and violence long enough to make an active change? Will he ever be able to love someone he doesn’t see himself in? Is he upset about the rabbit only because he’s picturing his own death?
And aren’t we all like that, aren’t all humans fundamentally selfish?
The wind of change
Nature is always present and always alive in Fabrizio’s mind, venerated like his pagan ancestors would. Nature smells like herbs and like dung, nature exalts the spirit and punishes unnamed sins, nature gives birth and nature kills, fertile like mud and barren like the sea. A man can only look in awe, and pray. Even a day of lazy shooting becomes a prayer to Artemis.
The wind is the true protagonist of this chapter. It blows from the sea, carrying its salty scent. It sweeps the valleys, dangles the dead rabbit and dries its blood, unmoved by its plight. The wind is a gossip by definition. The wind ruffles Garibaldi’s hair, blinds frantic Bourbon soldiers. It snuffs out Mayor Sedàra’s candles. It swirls all the glory and the filth of Revolution, round and round and round.
“And he remarked to Father Pirrone that though the air would have been like a putrid pool without the wind, yet health-giving gusts did seem to drag up a lot of dirt with them.”
Plebiscite Day
On October 21st, 1860 the people of the former Kingdom of the two Sicilies, now under Garibaldi’s dictatorship, voted in a historical referendum. The question on the ballot was: “Do the people want Italy one and indivisible with Victor Emmanuel as Constitutional King, and his lawful descendants?” Ballots weren’t secret, each individual had to deliver his vote in the hands of the election committee; it was then dropped either in the “yes” or “no” boxes for everyone to see.
In Naples, the yes vote won with an overwhelming 99,21%. In Sicily, it won with an even more incredible 99,85%.
Reports of electoral fraud and voter suppression were systematically ignored to push the narrative of the democratic birth of a nation. Sadly, extreme nationalism and fascism were a direct result of those years of unchecked patriotic propaganda. Next week, we’ll look more closely at the effects the vote of annexation had on Sicily.
Fabrizio isn’t among the few who dared to vote “no”. He’s a toothless, clawless Leopard, with enough fight left in him only to shoot rabbits and pretend to yell at his wife. The day of the plebiscite he takes notice of all the filth the wind is blowing in, bows his head and complies.
Votes for women
Whenever I think about the women in this book—Concetta, angry and alone; Angelica, sexualized by everyone; Stella, dominated by a despotic husband; Mariannina, just a piece of meat under the Prince’s hands—I remember Licy, the author’s wife, free, accomplished, successful, setting a bright example among conservative Sicilians. Remember, we are meant to judge this book from our modern point of view. The women in The Leopard are struggling to get their voice heard above all the male drama and violence and self-pity. The daughters of the three or four easy girls of Donnafugata who dared to protest among general ilarity (and showing way more guts than Fabrizio) will vote for the first time 86 years later, on March 10th, 1946.
Next week we read until page 101 and finish chapter three. Chapter four is set in November, so far our timeline has matched almost perfectly, hasn’t it?
Till next time!
Tancredi is probably in love with upward mobility and surviving in times, rather than in love with Angelica. A bonus that she is beautiful, or not.
Loving this book. The environment artfully reflects what is happening to Don Fabrizio. Hope we read more of Concetta.
Thank you for the article. It's very helpful when reading, the text is very dense.
I briefly read about the history of Rome during those years, it's a very confusing story with the Pope, the French... History is complicated. But I find it interesting that the Kingdom of Italy in 1860 was without Rome. It's not surprising that they wanted to unite.
In this part, Fabrizio's wife seemed very unpleasant to me. I can't understand how one can want to marry off their daughter to their own nephew and then get upset and say that "a nephew is not a son," it immediately made me think that she wouldn't be against marrying her own children to each other. This was common in aristocracy, of course, but it seems they should have always understood that it wasn't very healthy. And she should have been happy for her daughter that her husband might not be a relative now. But then I felt sorry for her and her fate, living with such a despot. At least she was able to speak her mind.
And what about the new dogs? Where is our beloved dog Bendico? I hope he's alright.