Beati Paoli

by Luigi Natoli

part three, chapter 11

The next day at that untried reception among the Beati Paoli, Blasco got out of bed with a great and oppressive sadness. Coriolano's reassuring words were not worth removing his apprehension: He did not doubt that the two women would be respected, but who could prevent the fear of those poor women, of Violante? Ah, Violante! Violant! His heart was desperately screaming that name, within itself, in the powerlessness of being able to run to his help. Where was he? Where did they take her? As much as he tried to know the place for the two women, he could not get a syllable out of his mouth in Coriolano.

"Why do you want to know?" said the knight of Floresta. "You will not be able to do anything; moreover, in due time, I will not only tell you, but - (and here he smiled) you will arrive as a liberator, and you will increase your novel from another page."

Blasco, therefore, had to bring back pain and desires, but he could not prevent his brain from thinking. What would he do? How would he have spent those days of painful expectation? To go out could not, for that ban that weighed on his head: It would be the same as getting arrested and thrown into some dungeon and now more than ever he was anxious to be free and master of his person. Even the one to whom he was forced was a prisoner, but the night was free and could go out without awe, because justice was not vigilant nor so solicitous as to make it dangerous to go at night, except to have spies around. Blasco relied on this security, to be able to take four steps, until, freed Violante, placed her in conditions that were no longer exposed to danger, smoothed out every difficulty, she could start from the kingdom, to escape the ban and to seek luck.

The next night, before the bell of the dead, Blasco went to the convent of San Francesco to look for Father Serafino da Montemaggiore. He had a great curiosity to know what the friar would give him, on the part of the good Brother Bonaventura. Money maybe: He needed it, and they would come by the way. Anyway, it would have been a new and sweet memory for his spirit. He waited at the concierge, where Fr Serafino came to visit him, strutting his feet. He was very old and had white hair and bad legs. Blasco kissed his hand and told him:

"I've been to Caccamo, I've closed the eyes of my good father Bonaventura, and here I am from her... Your fatherhood has something to take care of. He said to me, Fra Bonaventura..."

"Yes... in fact. And if you hadn't rushed, who knows if I could have done the job of Brother Bonaventura? I am eighty-seven years old, my son, and death has already reached the threshold... Yes, I have something to tell you!... Poor Brother Bonaventura... he was my penitent. A holy man, a holy man! Requiescat in peace. Wait for me a while, my son; I'm going up to the cell: I didn't expect your visit... Poor father Bonaventura! It was a blow to him... He was so attached to the convent!... it was a blow! But..."

He left the concierge repeating those words, with the insistence of the old. Blasco crossed his hands on his chest and sank into his memories. When he was a child, and in the evening he caught him in the concierge or church, lost in the shadows, surrounded by images that stood out gloomy from the paintings he felt a kind of religious terror, a sense of infinity. Now he saw almost the same paintings, the same stuffed chairs, the same lamp and thought of his childhood, which seemed so far away, so different, something that had never existed. Then he did not know what sadness was, because he had never questioned the intimate lathebres of his heart; he was bold, reckless, noisy, ready to fight; he always returned to the convent with some tear on the braches or on the vest. John rebuked him and he laughed at him. Where were his friends from then on? Where was your dog, the good lightning that saved him from the wolf? Where was the tender Elizabeth, who had offered her breasts in the flight from Tunis to save him from the blows of the Saracens? All dead, all dead!... Memories, names and nothing else. Anything else? Oh, no; they still lived in the painful regret that puffed up his heart.

He heard the strangled passage of Fra Serafino returning to the concierge with a bag in his hand.

"Money!" thought Blasco bitterly. Perhaps he would have desired something more spiritual and more expensive.

Father Serafino sat down, put the bag on his knees and drew a letter a little equal, carefully sealed.

"This is a letter for you," he said, "and there are forty onzes in here, that I have the order to put you back. Here they are, they're all doubles... Twenty pieces of gold."

I blaze more than money looked at the letter, with a dark feeling that it contained something that greatly interested him. He took and kept everything, and discharged himself from his father, and returned home, to read the letter with ease. When he was locked in his room by the light of a two-beaked lamp, he broke the seals with a trepidating hand, but as soon as he completed the sheet, another piece of paper yellowed and folded fell on the table. He took it, opened it, read it, and sent a cry of astonishment. The note said in the Latin parish barbarian:

I. M. I.

Fidem facio, die vigesimo mensis novembris a D. MDCLXXXVIII in hac ecclesia metropolitana bapiizzatum esse in fiantum, cui positum nomen Blascus, filius ill'mi magnifici domini Emanuelis Albimontis ducis Mottae, et Cristinae Giurlandae. Padrini m. Agostinus et Maria Magdalena Russus, coniuges.

D. Joseph Cutellius parochus.

Next to the signature there was the mark of the parish, imprinted dry on a piece of paper glued with a host on the sheet.

Blasco stayed a little 'with that piece of paper in his hands, motionless like a statue, under the weight of that revelation. An Albamonte!... He was an Albamont! He was the bastard son of Don Emanuele della Motta; and the little Emanuele who lay in the dungeons of Castellamare was his half brother, and Violante was his cousin!... It seemed to him something that came out of the ordinary: a revolution of ideas, of feelings put his soul in the background.

"I!..." he exclaimed shortly after "I!"

He couldn't find another word. He placed that parish faith on the table and took a look at the signature of the letter: "Fra Bonaventura da Licodia" was signed. It was not long; after the formula of invocation, consisting of the three initials I. M. J. i.e. Iesus, Mary, Joseph, the friar wrote:

"My dear son in Jesus Christ, Blasco, Before leaving this convent, by the will of God, I leave your birth faith to Father Serafino from Montemaggiore, so that he may deliver it to you at my death, which I hope is near. I do not want to go down to the sepulchre with a secret, which I have kept so far, in respect of powerful people whom you know; but that it is not right to bury with me. I don't know if it will help you; I hope so, and I pray and pray to God to keep his holy hands on you.

Father Serafino will also give you some money: That's all I have. I have no relatives; I leave it to you that I have kept as a son, though for a short time. Pray to the Lord for me, and always be a good Christian, according to the precepts of Our Holy Mother Church. I bless you in the name of Jesus blessed."

Blasco's eyes were filled with tears; a heap of memories, feelings, affections, descended into his soul and was moved by it. His dead mother with broken legs, in a house not his own, gathered by the mercy of two friars, on the ruins of a city; between John, the convent of Catania, his childhood, his escape to the mountains. Oh, Mother, poor Mother...

Then appeared to him the portrait seen in the house of Don Raimondo; the portrait of Don Emanuele, before whom he had stood, struck by the resemblance with him. So he was the living portrait of his father, bearing his origin on his face; for the law did not recognize him the right to bear the name of the Albamontes, nature had sealed it on his face in uncancellable traits. And not only in the features he resembled his father; also the adventurous disposition, courage, boldness, playfulness, value came from him; but from his mother, from that poor sweet creature he had taken that bottom of piety, that vague desire of serene affections, of sweet abandons, that sense of modesty almost, and of kindness that gave a special tone and flavor to his love.

And he thought of Emanuel, who was his brother; he was his younger brother, and according to the law, he was, or should have been, the head of the house, because on birth the shame of the bastard did not weigh. But he was his brother, and the nequity of an unholy man tormented him in the dark bottom of a prison, and this scumbag was his uncle: the man with a thin and pale appearance, with a thin mouth like a cut, with an impenetrable, ungodly, cruel mask, capable of every crime, and at the same time vile and despicable: This man was the brother of that duke, who didn't count his adversaries and faced them with an open face: and was the father of the sweetest and mildest creature that he had known!...

"What am I going to do now?" he asked. "What am I going to do now that I know who I am?"

And what could and could he do? Her life was already traced, and she wouldn't have been different from what she was. He would always remain Blascus from Castiglione; a man who came from the shadows, without home, without relatives, beginning and end of himself. An ironic rice stood on his mouth: Oh, it was worth that revelation so useless!... What did he do with it? What had good father Bonaventura hoped for?

He stood in these dispositions of heart when he heard knocking at his door, and the voice of Coriolan say:

"Are you in bed? Can I come in?..."

He went to open it.

"I'm not in bed," he said with that special timbre that has the voice, when the soul is lit by some passion. "Enter: You can't know what happens to me... I went to Father Serafino and returned with a sum and a name. Do you understand? I have a name that I don't need and a sum that doesn't come from my father, but from the charity of a friar..."

Coriolano looked at him with astonishment.

"Do you wonder?" continued Blasco with a slight exaltation. "Well, I'll make you wonder!... Do you know who I am? I am an Albamonte; I am the firstborn son, so I suppose, as natural as it may be, of Don Emanuele Albamonte, Duke of Motta!... Oh, for fuck's sake... Now that I know, now that I know the name of who took a young lady in the modest shadow of the house, to make her his lover, and to make her the mother of a son without a legal name, don't you believe, eh I added another golden plot to my life?... You who are so right, say a little: Do you think a king's bastard has something more or less than a mule tracker's bastard? Do you think that the shame that weighs on the birth of one is different from that which weighs on the birth of the other; that the anguish of the two mothers before the unnamed cradle is different?.. Ah! I am an Albamonte! Take a look, if in my condition you can feel a greater happiness than this discovery!... From now on I will be able to paint on my carriage, when I have it, the shield of green and red with alternating bands green and black;... but with the sign of the bastards!..."

Coriolano kept quiet. Blasco walked a bit through the room, and fell his eyes on the parish faith that he had laid on the table, pointing it to his friend filmed:

"Here is the piece of paper that consecrates my origin, Coriolano; here is my diploma of nobility, which did not save my mother, I say not from death, but at least from poverty. The castle of Motta opened to bring in the abducted educator, welcomed my first voyage, but kicked out his mother and son, when he knew that Francesco Giorlanda had died of heartbreak.

Look at the singular destiny that unites the two sons of Don Emanuele della Motta, the natural and the legal; both were gathered out of charity from the womb of their dying mothers, and did not have smiles and maternal care, and did not know the paternal house, and grew ignorant of their origin; both persecuted by the same hatred, victims of the arbitrary; both pushed, without knowing each other, on the same road... One fate! Oh, actually, that's what I recognize for an Albamonte. This, Coriolano, is the legacy handed down to us by our father, in equal parts and without trust!..."

He sat down, pale and frantic, though his mouth smiled: but of a bitter and painful smile and after a minute of silence, he murmured:

"Too bad Mr. Duke, my procreator, is dead!... But perhaps he was already punished; is not what happened to the Duchess woman Aloisia and to little Emanuel the vengeance of what suffered Cristina Giorlanda and her creature?"

Again it fell into silence: Coriolano also kept silent, as oppressed by that revelation, and more by the deep pain he read in Blasco's words. He got up, shook the beautiful and proud head with a motorbike that caused the long curls of his hair to sway, and gave in a laugh:

"Bitch!... I think I took it tragically; a silly thing, my friend!... Life is not something you deserve to be taken so seriously... Look a little; I remember your magnificent speech last night, which was the glorification of your work! Poetry! My dear, poetry: Do you want to correct abuses, bring down injustices, do justice to all?... Do you also want to put your protection on top of me?... Poetry! Poetry!... Come on, correct this which makes me, the first-born son of Don Emanuele Albamonte Duke of Motta, a stranger at home to whom I belong by blood, an almost ignoble being, marked with a mark of infamy committed by another!... Life? That's funny. Justice? It's a tragic mask on the face of a clown."

"And why, then, are you so solicitous and bold, when it seems to you that you want to commit violence against someone?... Why do you rebel against those who seem to you to be overwhelmed and unjust to the detriment of the weak?" asked Coriolano seriously. "You have beaten the servants of the Duke of Motta... your uncle, because they were about to kill Emanuele; you have compromised your freedom, so as not to have Jerome admired arrested; you have exposed your life to return to Matthew the Old Man the saddlebags stolen from the comrades of arms; finally, you have freed, and you know how, Violant from our hands, because you believed that violence was being used... See, then, that your generous heart beats for the defense of justice, or for what seems to you justice!..."

"I'm an idiot, Coriolano!... I'm an imbecile who gets carried away by impulses... Ah! Violent, poor innocent creature!... Well, rather look, you, Coriolano: Your righteousness does not exist without injustice; and Violant is the example of it... What are we talking about? You stir thoughts and pains that I have thrown back to the bottom of my soul and it's not the time... it's time to laugh, my dear, laugh at this long songing that is life. Let's go. What's the matter with your hands? Do you have any business to do? Is there a chance of getting gutted? Here I am. I need to do something, break my head or get my head smashed... Laugh! I am not for nothing the son of Don Emanuele of Motta!..."

He took the sword and the hat; Coriolano got up and followed him. It was perhaps three hours at night and the streets were deserted, except for the usual groups of miserables who slept behind the doors and steps of the churches.

They came out into Via Toledo and descended towards Porta Felice. From time to time, a lordly watch passed loudly, preceded by the steering wheels, which shattered the torches in the wind: It seemed like the chariot of thunder surrounded by lightnings: Then, the last glow and the last echo turned off, the road fell into silence and darkness.

Blasco and Coriolanus did not speak; each seemed to follow his own course of thoughts.

Ronde at that hour they hardly saw each other and they did not stop the gentlemen or, if they stopped them, it was enough for them to pronounce their name so that the caporonda would humbly swerve. They arrived at Piazza Marina in the middle of which, in the shadow, the gloomy gallows drew its black arms. They saw with a creep a human form hanging from a snare, turning on itself, at the breath of the wind. In the afternoon a thief had been hanged and left on the gallows as an example. It wouldn't have been taken away until the next morning.

At the end of the square stood dark and severe the palace of the Sant'Offizio, the ancient and truly royal residence of the Chiaramonte, no longer home of magnificence and courtesies, but gloomy antro of torments and pains.

While Blasco and Coriolano crossed the square, the clock, with which the friars defaced the beautiful palace, played the hours and, in silence and among those sad things; the blows seemed desperate with anguish.

"Come, let's go this way," said Coriolano.

They entered into the dark alley that is along the palace; Coriolano raised his index finger, showing the top of the building, and said:

"You see those windows? On that side are the Philippines. You ignore what they are, don't you? They are the narrowest and most horrible prisons of the Holy Office and were built in the days of Philip III, to close the enemies of Fellonia. It is now made to languish those over whom most the cruelty of the court... and there is closed a woman, rea of having carried out an act of charity. What would you say and what would you do, Blasco, if they had taken between Giovanni da Randazzo and Fra Bonaventura da Licodia and had thrown them in here, to die of hardships, rigors, tortures, for saving you from death?"

Blasco raised his horrified eyes and shook his fists: That hypothesis gathered in his soul all the collars and all the revenge.

"Let's go," said Coriolano. "Sometimes, in the middle of the silent night, they come out of those long windows groaned by people who make you a thousand dead."

They walked the alley, went out before the church of St. Nicholas of Kalsa and as Porta Felice was open, they went out. Coriolano turned left up along the Cala, the old port defended by Garita and Castello, full of galleys and small tonnage vessels, whose bright lights reflected in long and red zigzag furniture in the bosom of the waters. They crossed the entire curve of the Cala, up to the foot of the Church of Piedigrotta. The castle stretched out, full of cannons, whose mouths appeared in the stands. The sea was beating on the old Saracen walls, entering the moats around, passing under the bridge. Some soldier was walking on the embankments with the bow on his shoulder. Coriolano stopped, and even here spread his finger towards the door, closed by the drawbridge pulled up.

"And there, in a dungeon, is your brother Emanuele! Come on, Blasco."

He dragged him almost down the street of St. Sebastian. Blasco said:

"Why didn't you try to break these prisoners out?"

"Because their cells don't have external windows."

"And yet," Blasco said, "you should try... Perhaps that would be the quickest solution."

"But it's not safe anymore. Instead, it is necessary to hasten the day of righteousness."

Blasco thought of those two prisons so frightening and felt a shiver of creep and at the same time a feeling of shame. What did he feel sorry for? What was his misfortune, in the face of the greatest one of his brother Emanuel? He, after all, had neither any right to encamp before society; Emanuel did, and yet they were taken away from him and denied him. He was alone and no one was pitiful for him; but Emanuele had a family of dispersed adoption, tortured for his sake... They were three victims. Three? And perhaps Violante and a bit 'also woman Gabriella did not subjugate to the same fatality that struck others?

"Ah, Don Raimondo! Don Raimondo!..."

He felt his chest, as if to reassure himself that the famous plico was still there and touched him, under his shirt. He thought that perhaps the passages of the Beati Paoli had been stopped by the loss of those cards and that such loss had forced them to take possession of Violante and woman Gabriella; perhaps he could have agreed, that is, to deliver the cards in exchange for the freedom and life of Violante. This idea seemed to him at that moment so good, that he was really about to draw the cards and give them to Coriolano, saying: "Take it, here's your trial: serve you to deliver Emanuele and the wife of the admirer, and give me Violante!..."

But the hand remained in the shot of the shirt, stopped by a doubt:

"What if Violante still remains prisoner as a pledge, despite the return of these documents?"

And then another thought: "What if Coriolano delivers these documents to the Viceroy?"

Coriolano's voice picked it up. As if he had intuited that inner battle, the knight of Floresta said seriously:

"Think, Blasco, that although you are "natural," you are also Emanuele's older brother, and you owe him protection and assistance."

Big brother! Yeah, that was true. But he had not seen that boy but twice, and the first time he had seen him rise up against him like a threatening rooster; and the second had seen him haughty and almost disrespectful for his intervention. Now on second thought he seemed to guess in that attitude one of those instinctive and indomitable antipathies. As for himself, interrogating his heart, he could not find the shadow of a fraternal feeling, that boy pityed him and aroused his generous impulses neither more nor less than another boy, not bound to him by blood ties. Blasco did not know these constraints; they were for him names of feelings, not actual feelings, but all this did not diminish this obligation; the common misfortune, indeed, made him appear even more serious and looming.

He reminded Coriolano that he would force Don Raimondo to give the two prisoners freedom. When Fr Raimondo made this promise, he was a stranger to him, but now he was his uncle, but this discovery instead of encouraging him dismayed him. As an uncle, Don Raimondo gave him an invincible revolt, like a filthy reptile.

Thus, going from one idea to another, Blasco went silently next to Coriolano. They went back to Cassaro, and they went up. Coriolano, as if he had answered a thought, said:

"It is necessary that Emanuele not only be released soon, but also reinstated in his rank and in his heritage; he must think of you, he must recognize you and provide for your state."

"Me? Ah, no, Coriolano, you are deceived. He has no duty to me, and I would never accept from the house Albamonte alms..."

"How? Why do you say so!" exclaimed the knight of Floresta with astonishment.

"Each one has his pride; I have mine. My father made me poor and "no one," nor did he ever remember having abandoned a poor pregnant woman. If you say my parish faith, I will remain poor and "no one" as I have been for twenty-six years. Emanuele will never know that I am his brother, at least from my mouth he will not know; when I have done my duty helping you to do justice, I will leave, I will go far, I will take back my life as a late knight, until a ball will send me to the other world."

Coriolano looked at him smiling and, jokingly, but with intention, asked him:

"And Violante?"

"Violante?" answered Blasco with a voice that betrayed a bitter concussion. "Eh!... when I'm calm about his future, what do you want me to do? What do you want me to be for her? A memory, that a man's kisses will erase from his heart."

And they didn't say anything to each other all the way home.