Beati Paoli

by Luigi Natoli

part one, chapter 1

The road of Mezzomonreale, which for more than three miles runs straight from the slopes of the Caputo hill to the Porta Nuova in Palermo, was in the eighteenth century for a good stretch, from the Porta to the Capuchin monastery, flanked by large and shady trees, let yourself be planted by Marcantonio Colonna during his viceroy. Some fountains, some of which still advance, adorned the wide avenue, and some of the seats offered comfortable rest in the shade. From here and there, beyond the walls that flanked the road, beyond the rare houses, there were gardens, meadows and citrus groves, there were magnificent villas, some church threw over the green its bell tower, the old and grey palace of Cuba towered, sad and solitary surviving of a disappeared greatness, reduced to cavalry barracks.

This road was in those times one of the favourite walks by the citizens of Palermo, especially in the vespertine hours and in the early night hours, in which the shadows enveloped the meetings of the lovers of mystery. In the afternoon the road was crossed by bourgeois and people, who could not afford the luxury of being transported from the feet of others, were pleased to recognize and admire the crews, who thunderously went and came between Porta Nuova and the Fountain of the Capuchins. The young gentlemen preferred to ride a horse, caracolando between the carriages and the pedestals, to show off their skill and show off the richness of their clothing.

The carriages of that time were quite different from those of today so fast and light; they were heavy cars, supported by leather straps over rough and massive wheels, real walking monuments; nevertheless they had something magnificent and imposing. They were pulled by four, six, sometimes even eight horses, all of a coat, attached to two by two, with very rich trims and finishes, with plumes with bright colors on the head. The quality and means of the lord were revealed in the richness of the sculptures, in the goodness of the painting decorations, often entrusted to screaming artists, in the profusion of gold. One, four or five plumes surmounted the dome; silk tendons with golden fringes hung inside, covered with leather or velvet. The coachman ruled and indeed the box on which he sat, covered by a velvet ravine, with the weapons of the house in silver and solid chiselled gold, seemed a throne, or an altar; and he a number, in his rich livery, and in the solemn gesture with which he held the reins. Two or three lackeys, in liveries no less rich, stood behind the dome of the carriage, holding hands; and before the horses, and at the side of the carriage the wheels went, trotting, in hand, the torches, which they would light up at the Hail to light up the road to the master, forced to compete with the step of the horses, to avoid a hundred times the impact of other flyers and other carriages or the legs of the caracollant horses.

Nor were the pedestals less rich: pretty trinkets, compared to carriages, of silk, of gold, of paintings, carried by servants in magnificent liveries, surrounded also by flyers. Some of them were simpler, rather sober; either it was for hire, or it belonged to some doctor or priest.

The walk in that early century had therefore an aspect of magnificence and wealth, and a variety of colors and sparkles, of which we can hardly imagine today.

In the midst of this magnificence there were sometimes some carts, or some "redine" of mules loaded with sacks of wheat or of wineskins, which engulfed themselves in the street, arrived in Palermo at sunset and stopped in front of a tavern. The flyers, insolent and overwhelmed, threw back on one side chariots and mules, when they were not in time to let go of the pace; nor were they thinking if any sack went to the ground and the grain was spreading.

Precisely in the hour of the walk, and when more shone the luxuriant pump of the lords, in an afternoon of September 1713 came down from the road of Monreale, towards Palermo, a young knight, whose arrangement was cursed with that apparatus of wealth, and more with the expression of the face.

It was not possible to imagine anything more grotesque and more characteristic. A peasant's horse, with its agro-neck, its noble legs, its thin and boney hips, its mane, its bare and steep mane, had the honour of a war saddle, with its high arches, its broad brackets, the holsters of its guns, with its colored leather, stopped over a gully of dark red velvet embroidered and fringed; but the poor beast did not seem to be understood by the touch of honor, and went with a sombre step, shaking its humble and resigned head. On this horse towered a sturdy young man, of beautiful and proud appearance, dressed in a kind of coat, whose cut perhaps remembered his ancestors, with leather boots up to the thigh, and on his head a peasant chaplain, adorned with an unlikely feather. The dark blue cloth cloak, rolled and folded, lay down through the arch and on it rested an old bow and a bag. An ancient sword, long, wide and perforated, hung from his side, beating on the saddle rhythmically; and the bags for dust and bullets hung behind his kidneys. He did not have a wig with long curly rings, but a thick brown hair sloping with swinging and uncultivated strands on the temples and shoulders. Between the poverty and the strangeness of clothing and the nobility of features there was a contrast no less violent and comical than between the apocalyptic pettiness of the horse and the lordly and warlike harnessing.

Entering in the midst of the luxury of the crews, among the beautiful caracollante horses, ridden by young unleavened, fragrant, unappuntablable lords, the young rider did not seem to be ashamed, but trying with long spurs and with certain streaks of the reins to infuse a bit of vivacity to his weary, muddy head erected with bravado air and almost of challenge, without taking care of the curious and mocking glances and of the motions, salacious, with which he was welcomed his passage. He had passed the Convent of Victory, passing, or by chance or by purpose, every impact, when he saw himself coming in front, with a good trot, two knights, who seemed to go to the door of a magnificent carriage pulled by six white horses. One of the riders, sometimes leaning on the horse's neck and turning his face, seemed to talk to someone inside the carriage.

The campagnolo knight also this time tried to pull aside, but his roughness did not have a care proportionate to the noble fury with which the two knights came upon him, so that one of the two elegant, crawling to the side of the rough, bumped with the ankle against the massive bracket of the young man, with the side against the football of the bow and took a tear to the layer of the dress, entangled in the metallic tip of the soccer.

The elegant knight turned inflamed with indignation, without holding back the horse, shouting, at the same time that the young man, in turn, stopping the vacillating roughness, turned also him: the two shouts crossed like two blades: "Villano!"

"You rascal!"

In the noise of the cocks and the horses and in the fury with which they passed, the accident passed almost unnoticed; the six white horses continued their trot, and the two knights, who, perhaps, were bumping and picking frequently, continued to caracol next to the carriage. But the strange traveler didn't seem to take it so lightly. He turned back the buzzer, and chased the long spurs into his hips, furiously, pushed him to chase the carriage and the knights.

It was not necessary for him to go too far; because the carriage, which reached the Fountain of the Capuchins, went back, so that the beautiful grotesque knight soon found himself in front of the two elegant.

This time he stole their step, planting himself on their way, with his fist on their side, the erect head, and the chapel trodden over an eye: "Lord!" he cried, forcing them to stop, and turning to what had hit him "little ago I gave you rascal. I realize I've made a mistake, and I apologize for that..."

"It's okay... get out of my way now..."

"Wait a minute; I beg your pardon, and I beg your pardon: you are an idiot."

At this exit the gentleman blushed with anger, and pushed the horse, cried out, "Uncreated villain! I will teach you by my servants the respect that is due to my peers..."

"Goodbye, sir!... Do you therefore have servants for guardians of your dignity and courage?."

The other gentleman then intervened, kicking his horse in the middle, with visible impatience: "Let's go, prince! it seems worthy of your part to come down to you with a scumbag, who would just look at it to laugh at it?... Come on!..."

"Caperi, sir; here is one thing that differentiates us: you laugh for insignificant things, as the cences would be: I laugh at many other miseries of a higher ridicule; for example, I laugh at you! And because I have told you what I wanted to say to you, I am most humble and most devoted to you, and I leave you free."

He took off the chapel with comical gravity, scorching his thick hair in two burlesque bows, and turned the bridle aside, between the spite and the amazement that were badly cealing under the disdainful and haughty mask of the two lords.

Then, suddenly, as something came up again, he added: "By the way, if they had anything to let me know, I am Blasco from Castiglione, and I am going to stay in the inn of Messinese. "

But the two gentlemen looked at him with haughty disdain, and pushed the horses to reach the carriage that had stopped and from whose door a pretty woman's head leaned, they said to him, "We will send you people worthy of you."

The young man followed them with his eye, smiling ironically, and trotting his fist at the hat on his forehead, he resumed the road, saying to himself, "Beautifully, these gentlemen seem to have a sword of silver wood... Meanwhile, my Blasco, here is a first adventure at the gates of the capital: "first semes, corona regis et regni caput," as Father Don Giovanni my teacher said... Poor Father Don Giovanni!... where will he be now?"

He spurred the buzzer as he searched his pocket, as if to reassure himself that something was still there.

"There is," he said to himself; "this is the only thread to trace my family... Let's see, then: I will go down to the inn of the Messinese, near the theatre of the Musicians. Where will the theater of the Musicians be? Then I will go to S. Francesco dei Chiovari to look for Father Bonaventura, and I will give him the letter... if Father Bonaventura is still alive! It's been... six... ten... fifteen years!... 15 years!... It doesn't seem true! And we've done it, or rather, they've made us do it crazy; now, Blasco, it's time to judge."

He entered from Porta Nuova, where the gabeliers wanted to search the bag, if there was anything to charge. What the hell could he hide in that bag, where there was just a shirt, a farset, two pairs of socks and a very fine handkerchief adorned with magnificent lace? And there couldn't have been tobacco? He let it go, puffing: it seemed that the cabinetmen were driving him around. He felt his hands pinched, and perhaps his eyes had to light up with such a left light that the gabeliers let him go.

He travelled the Cassaro, surprised at the sight of the palaces, the Duomo, the great and magnificent buildings that flanked the noble road: but when he arrived at the Quattro Canti he stopped unresolved, not knowing which way to bend.

Those four perspectives, equal in size, architecture, decorated with tanks, statues, emblems, as well as embodiment of amazement, embarrassed him. He asked for the road, and thus led a bit 'by the indications, a bit 'by his own initiative, finally reached the inn of the Messinese, which was in a small square, which still retains the name with a slight mutation of the genre, in a street adjacent to the theatre of the Musicians or of Santa Cecilia.

A small sign, similar to a flag, on which was painted a bottle with two glasses in white and red, showed him the door that even without that sign, perhaps, would have been equally recognizable by two benches located here and across the street, and by the appearance of the host, fat, shiny, with an apron in front, in which the hands were dry and hairy.

The chirping of the horse on the pebbles He had perhaps drawn his attention, but the appearance of the horse and the rider did not appear to him to deserve more than a greeting of convenience.

The young man did not look after him. He was in a good mood and was hungry; two things that do not give way to the realization of the rudeness of others.

Throwing his reins at the stable's hub, he cried to him, "Beware, son, that this is a horse of great value: I commend it to you, do not steal me on the oat..."

The host and the hub looked at the rough with mocking air, but the young man added with great seriousness: "the same horse that rode Count Ruggero when he took Palermo from the Saracens."

A few minutes later, sitting at a table in the tavern, while he nibbled a pork chops, he was instructed by the host on the road to go to St. Francis, and if at that time he would find Father Bonaventura.

The convent was two or three minutes away.

Blasco from Castiglione, now refurbished, hastened to go there; so much he needed to stretch his legs. He came out of the tavern, loudly, greeting the hub with a scapello, in front of the door, and accompanied by an observation of the host: "He has to be a crazy man!"