Beati Paoli

by Luigi Natoli

part one, chapter 13

Donna Gabriella La Grua-Albamonte, Duchess of Motta, was twenty years old; brunette, with very black hair, her eyes even blacker, deep, shaded by long velvet lashes, her lips tumid with the corners marked by a slight down of peach; she had in the mobility of her face all the expressions of charm: liveliness, naughty malice, tenderness, languor, passion, which alternated, confused, sometimes faithful mirror of the various states for which her soul passed. She was small, thin, but not thin, and despite the stiffness of her clothes, wanted by fashion, she had feline seductions in her movements. It seemed that desire and desire had shaped it, and they were delighted to leave their mark on his body, out of torment of men.

At the age of eighteen she had left the monastery to marry Don Raimondo who had never known, and who did not raise her feelings, and became Duchess of Motta at the will of her relatives, who saw all the advantage that came to the family from that marriage.

Not feeling any feelings for Don Raimondo, he felt no joy of marriage. Of which only the nuns were happy, who for it freed themselves of a restless, curious, daring, and often embarrassing education with his questions and his investigations.

Don Raimondo did not marry her out of love: at her age and with her temperament love was shown to him under the guise of a notary, and she had no other voice except that of the sacramental formulas of contracts. Donna Gabriella was an only daughter and Don Raimondo had seen in those weddings an excellent deal to join her huge heritage of woman Gabriella.

The two natures were completely different, indeed irreconcilable, and the antithesis was soon revealed, from the first days of marriage, but it did not grieve either of them; it seemed that both were satisfied that they had not discovered the least intimate bond between their spirits, as if this made them independent and free. On the other hand, Don Raimondo's occupations were such that he did not see his wife except in the hours of desining and supper and night: so that Gabriella remained alone and self-master, and did not realize that she was married only in these hours.

And they weren't the best for her.

She spent the day dressing up, going to visit her friends, going for a walk and having conversation in her house, and not neglecting any show, no fun. When he had nowhere to go, he read the novels of Madame de Scudery, which passed through masterpieces.

Once a week she went to the monastery of Montevergini to visit her stepdaughter, a ten-year-old girl, blonde and fine, who seemed waxy, and who did not bother her.

We may add that her sensual beauty, full of promises, had soon surrounded her with worshipers, like a deer among a mute of dogs; but either anger, or pleasure of reigning over all those souls, or coldness of feelings, or all these things together, prevented her from choosing; no one could boast of having obtained the slightest favor, that it was not compatible with marital fidelity; so that she was formed in return, though so flirty and greedy of pleasure, a desperate fame of honesty, which disanimated the most daring.

Among them, and he was also the most insistent, the prince of Iraki, who still did not intend to confess defeated, perhaps because he believed that the beautiful lady used some preference for him. And he followed her everywhere like a shadow, subdued, sighing in love, but pertinacious and almost prickly. His wealth, the ancient nobility of Norman origin, the power had certainly tickled the mind of woman Gabriella, to whom the servitude of that man could boldly, to that of all others.

Except that the incidents in Blasco had somewhat diminished in his eyes the greatness of the priority was in the audacity and contemptuous carelessness of that young man, rained by those who know where, a new flavor; or something violent that contrasted with the soft and frivolous preciousness of the society of that time; an affirmation of life among the disgustingness of such fiction regulated by labels and conveniences, which could not fail to impress the very mobile and eclipsible soul of woman Gabriella. She seemed to be a romance character and when she learned that, against all her expectations Blasco was welcomed and hosted in the "tower of Montalbano," she took a great joy, like a secret desire suddenly fulfilled.

Blasco became his knight, the unknown and poor mountain knight had the sweet and coveted preferences of the beautiful lady, above the noble and powerful and illustrious gentlemen who in vain had urged the favor of a particular smile.

Angelica, disdaining the flower of the paladins, did not become infatuated with the dark Medoro soldier?

That evening, for the first time, they were alone in a carriage. Alone, despite the noise of thousands of voices and the bursting of popular rejoicing.

The accident of the lackey was a parenthesis that rushed to oblivion, to resume the course of their silent thoughts: for, except for a few vague and frivolous words and foreign to their occult thought, their souls seemed to seek and enjoy that inner solitude, so full of sweet and eloquent silences.

For the first time again Gabriella felt confusedly that in addition to the pleasures of that innocent civetteria that satisfied her vanity as a seductive woman, there were other deeper and more serious feelings, which upset her and gave her some confusion, but filled her with a more intense joy, in which it seemed that her life grew and completed.

Often on the way, when Blasco seemed to look elsewhere, she turned back a little, and turned her head to look at him; and she looked at him long, fixedly, feeling the eyes of a strange languor invaded, and the blood running in a sweet flute, and the limbs taken from an indefinable desire. But as soon as Blasco moved, she blushed and resumed her rigid and almost indifferent position. But once she was surprised in that contemplation from Blasco: their looks met: they cheated, and for the first time woman Gabriella lowered her eyes before a man.

Going down from the carriage, and leaning her hand on Blasco's arm, she trembled: she said nothing until the main door of the Duomo, but before the magnificent portal seemed to be taken by a fear from a left at the sight of the crowd that crowded the church, and murmured: "Let's go back in the carriage, there are too many people..."

They went back on the road in silence. They felt there was something between them that embarrassed them.

"Do you want us to wait for the king to come out?" asked Blasco, helping her to mount in a carriage.

She hesitated for a moment and replied: "No, take me home. This crowd suffocates me."

Blasco gave the order to the coachman, adding: "Go on the road outside the walls of Porta d'Ossuna..."

Donna Gabriella didn't hear; but when she saw that the carriage was heading towards Porta Nuova, she asked: "Where are you going?"

"At home; just to avoid the crowd that bothers you, I ordered him a lonely road. Would you be afraid?"

"With you... no."

The shadow that surrounded them hid the emotion that spread on her face to those words suddenly bloomed on her mouth.

Then the streets were not illuminated; here and there, before the sacred newsstands a lamp shone, like a small open eye in the shadows, which barely threw a slight glow into a small circle. The two lackeys, proceeding from trot with the torches to wind in hand, illuminated the step to the horses, but the carriage remained buried in the shade.

Blasco saw Gabriella's eyes shine in that shadow. What did he read to you? or what did he feel like reading to him?

His hand, feeling in the seat, found that of a woman Gabriella, and sat on her shyly: she felt that she was freezing and trembling: "God!" murmured "how are you cold... why?"

She didn't answer. Blasco took that little frozen hand in her hand, holding it gently, and suddenly she felt it inflamed, she felt that even those tender fingers responded with a shy grip. He was dizzy.

"And I dream? And illusion?" he murmured.

He sighed.

He drew his hand to himself, pressing it against his chest, and felt that the shoulder of a woman Gabriella leaned on hers. Then he lifted up his hand to his mouth and kissed her passionately. He heard like a dull groan, and heard Gabriella's woman's head bow down and abandon himself over his shoulder.

Her lips searched for her lips, found them lukewarm, frightful, in a sudden awakening of senses and desires...

From the Duomo the bells rang and populated the night air of rhythms: it seemed that they celebrated the opening of that heart, still virgin and empty, to the triumphant love. She loved for the first time, and was ardent and trepidating with her lips the first joy.

Two idylles so, in the same night, almost at the same time took place among those characters, that a fleeting accident had placed in front: and on one and on the other love stirred two different torches.