Week 8: Non olet
The Leopard chapter III part II
Hello Leopard gang! This week we’re reading up to page 101 of the Vintage Classics paperback edition, thus finishing chapter three. I’ve updated the reading schedule, and if everything goes according to plan we should reach the end of the book by December 14th. Or rather, all entries should be available on that date for you to consult at your own leisure.
Let’s pick up from where we left. After a big referndum, Sicily has officially joined the Kingdom of Italy. There’s one small problem, though: the vote was rigged.
The aftermath
Late 1800s. Italy had been unified into a single kingdom, swiftly, efficiently. Maybe too quickly, considering how different were the people now tasked to live under the same metaphorical roof; there had simply been no time to cultivate any sense of national awareness.
The difference between northern Italy, liberal, rich, industrialized, and the southern territories was astronomical. The economy in southern Italy was feudal in all but name, with multitudes of tenants farming the fields of a few aristocratic landowners. Southern fields produced massive quantities of wheat, as most landowners were uninterested in diversifying or modernizing their crops. Industries and railroads were almost nonexistent, regular roads were in a state of neglect. 80% of the population consisted of illiterate peasants living in isolated villages and farmsteads.
The new Italian government started implementing a series of laws and regulations that caused outrage and open revolt among the people in the south. Taxes were raised, municipalities were reorganized, men were drafted in the new national army, children were plucked from farm duties and sent to school, churches were stripped of wealth. Rules were implemented by northern officials speaking Italian, a language most southerns didn’t understand, brandishing official documents they would never be able to read.
The new system changed exactly nothing. None of it helped, nothing was fixed. Church wealth and raised taxes were used to modernize the already thriving north; representatives called to join the new parliament, aristocrats like Tancredi and capitalists like Sedàra, mostly enriched themselves rather than fighting for peasant welfare. Southern economy collapsed when Europe was flooded with American wheat (cheaper thanks to slave labor) and people had no choice but to immigrate en masse to the US, to South America, to Australia. Those who stayed turned to banditism and mafia. 100 years later, when Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was writing The Leopard, the gap between north and south was still catastrophic.
The ghost of democracy
“I, Excellency, voted ‘no’. ‘No’, a hundred times ‘no.’ I know what you told me: necessity, unity, expediency. You may be right; I know nothing of politics. Such things I leave to others. But Ciccio Tumeo is honest, poor though he may be, with his trousers in holes” (and he slapped the carefully mended patches on the buttocks of his shooting breeches) “and I don’t forget favours done me! Those swine in the Town Hall just swallowed up my opinion, chewed it and then spat it out transformed as they wanted. I said black and they made me say white! The one time when I could say what I thought that bloodsucker Sedàra went and annulled it, behaved as if I’d never existed, as if I never meant a thing!”
Lampedusa travels back in time to point at that first dishonest act, the rigging of the plebiscite, as the emblematic beginning of modern Italy: a country sometimes great, sometimes criminal, more often than not disappointing (I’m Italian, I’m allowed to say that!)
Why did they do it? Why were southerners not allowed to express their honest opinion? As Fabrizio points out, the ‘yes’ vote would have won anyway, and people like Ciccio Tumeo would have known their voice amounted to something.
The answer is depressingly simple: because people in the south were poor. Because they were illiterate. Because they never saw a town other than their own. Because they were too religious. Because they didn’t wash. Because they were uncivilized. Northern politicians, patriotic rhetoric aside, were never going to let those savages interfere with all the work they put into building a nation. They annexed them to the country and called them Italians, but the general attitude toward them was what today we’d call xenophobic. What was the difference then between Italy and any of the other colonial states that came before? How could a Sicilian tell them apart?
Take don Ciccio here. He’s fiercely loyal (or snob, as Fabrizio affably puts it) to the old regime, and why? Because the Bourbon King was nice to him and his family. Then he goes and admits that mayor Sedàra occasionally gives money to friends in need, not realizing it’s just the same as the king occasionally giving money to him. Don Ciccio, more educated than most Sicilians of the time, doesn’t see the irony in hating the new regime for silencing him and then meekly letting his buddy the Prince literally silence him, locking him in a dark closet for hours because he doesn’t trust him enough.
Ciccio Tumeo is not as smart as he thinks. Does that mean we shouldn’t let him vote? I ask you honestly, because nowadays we get exposed to a lot of truly stupid opinions on social media and, especially around elections, I’m sometimes guilty of thinking, people like that should not be allowed to vote. Are debate, dialogue, democracy even worth the effort? Lampedusa, nihilist and depressed as he is, doesn’t preach a definitive answer. He simply tells us about a group of people who where systematically denied a voice in their own government, and the historical consequences of that.
Crude mothers and faecal grandfathers
“Non olet”, he repeated, “non olet; in fact optime foeminam ac contuberninum olet.”
After learning the nickname of Angelica’s grandfather, “Peppe Mmerda” or Shitty Pete, Fabrizio thinks, “She doesn’t stink, she doesn’t, in fact she smells of gorgeous bridal female,” expressing the exact same sentiment as don Ciccio later saying, “Uuh! No stink of manure there! Her sheets must smell like paradise!” But Fabrizio said it in Latin, so that makes it better, right?
Manure, I’m afraid, is a recurring theme in The Leopard; it’s everywhere, it’s fly droppings in food and drinks, animal dung in the streets, latrines too close for comfort. It’s an intrinsic part of Sicilian landscape, as pervasive as rocky valleys and gorgeous beaches. Sicily, the world, humanity, are a garden that cannot live without fertilizing. Angelica is only the latest rose born from a lot of decay.
We readers are stuck with the point of view of Fabrizio, hidden away in his palaces, fleeing from the ugly rot that occasionally bleeds through with a dead rabbit, bombs exploding in the distance or, indeed, poop in his drink. We’re only allowed glimpses of the squalor most Sicilians lived in: extreme poverty brought all sorts of consequences, from crime to malnutrition, from prostitution to malaria. Fabrizio shudders at the mention of Peppe Mmerda, but only because he’s wondering (of course) how does it affect him? Will associating with the family of such a man wound too much of his pride?
We get pages and pages dedicated to Fabrizio’s feelings and only about fifty words on Angelica’s mother, one of the many women in this book whose silent tragedy we can only guess. Fifty words are more than enough to paint a ghastly, merciless picture.
“It seems Donna Bastiana is a kind of animal: she can’t read or write or tell the time by a clock, can scarcely talk; just a beautiful mare, voluptuous and uncouth; she’s incapable even of affection for her own daughter! Good for bed and that’s all.”
Never taught how to read or write, scarcely taught how to talk. Only allowed to go out of the house to hear mass, hidden by a veil and in the dead of night. An object to her father, an object to her husband. A mare for men to sleep with, and notice how Angelica was introduced with the same words, a mare, a sexual animal. Incapable of loving her daughter, too wounded even for that. Try to imagine for a moment what that meant for Angelica. We will get a blink-and-you-miss-it mention of her meek and slighted youth in the last chapter, and that’s it. Angelica’s relationship to her mother is unimportant. Let’s get back to how Fabrizio wants to bed her, and Tancredi wants her money, and her father Calogero wants to sell her for a title.
Swallowing the toad
The great moment has arrived, Fabrizio is about to ask for Angelica’s hand in marriage! Alas, only to her father, and only as a proxy for Tancredi. And boy oh boy is he thrilled. He dons his fancy lilac jacket and imagines he’s a big strong Leopard about to maul a little jackal, instead of an old dead carcass that said jackal is already sniffing. In other words, he’s ready to swallow the toad, an Italian turn of phrase usually translated with a much less gnarly ‘biting the bullet’.
The meeting with mayor Sedàra is a duel disguised as a farce disguised as a big romantic event, when there is not one ounce of romanticism inside the room. There is no romance in Fabrizio, who doesn’t have the guts to stand by his principles like don Ciccio (currently locked in a closet) did. There is no romance whatsoever in Sedàra, who is looking forward to a son-in-law as ruthless as he is. And there is certainly no romance in Father Pirrone, officially there to give his christian blessing to the union, unofficially eager to eavesdrop. The one man show Pirrone puts on to pretend he doesn’t care at all is simply delightful.
Sedàra, who has totally not read Tancredi’s letter, goes to the attack. Fabrizio parries, masking his annoyance with the help of Courtesy, that old pagan deity all aristocrats worship. He counterattacks with a sappy declaration of (proxy) love. Sedàra easily sidesteps, revealing that he knew already, he spied the kids kissing from behind a bush (I wish I was kidding). Fabrizio is losing his footing. He goes for the big punch, the marriage proposal! Sedàra doesn’t falter, lands a quick, masterful blow dropping the “excellency” and consummating the union on the spot. They hug, one looking like a lilac posy, the other a hairy insect. Fabrizio, chewing on that disgusting toad, has to retreat and admit exactly how poor Tancredi is. Sedàra goes for the mortal blow: he crudely, efficiently lists all the money and property in Angelica’s dowry, and that does it. Fabrizio is defeated. Father Pirrone, watching from the sidelines, is caught in the fury of combat and clucks his tongue. Might as well have whistled in admiration.
The little jackal, ill-mannered, shrewd, badly shaved, has won again. Like he won at dinner, like he won during the revolution and the plebiscite. And he will keep winning, gnawing and gnawing at leopard bones.
If the passionate love between prince and mayor wasn’t enough, things will grow even steamier next week as we read halfway through chapter four, up to the line “we’ve been bears here for long enough” on page 128.
Till next time!
I fell behind and finally caught up! I am enjoying the book. Lampedusa’s writing is so rich and vivid and full of metaphor and satire. I am repeating myself here, but it continues to delight me. I also appreciate your weekly write ups and all the work and time you put into it. They are enlightening and helpful in having a greater understanding of the text.
Like Paula and Cindy, my grandfather immigrated to NYC from Bari in 1920. He then sent for a bride in 1922, my grandmother. I never met my maternal grandparents or heard any stories. I can only imagine. My grandfather went back to Italy in 1961 and my mom married my dad there and they came to America.
Outside of my own interests, with the upcoming elections in USA the wind is yelling about election tampering, it seems today, just sowing the seeds of contempt and distrust on people who are neither illiterate or very poor can throw democracy into the dung. I also thought of Puerto Rico which was recently called a floating island of garbage. It was colonized in the late 1800s and English was declared the language de jure - a language the people could neither speak nor write. Puerto Ricans fought hard for their rights and became US citizens and schools and courts are now in Spanish, but they are stuck in limbo on whether it would be better to become a state, keep the status quo, or fight for independence. Neither of the options seem to lead to positive results.
Similar to Paula, my maternal grandparents immigrated to the United States. They were from a small town outside of Lucca, and came to Chicago, then San Francisco where my mother and her sisters were born. And yes--I understand better why they left and the stories I heard growing up in the 60s and 70s.