Beati Paoli

by Luigi Natoli

part three, chapter 12

Donna Gabriella and Violante spent the days in the expectation of an unknown event, which never came. They had asked the name of the place where they had been led, but the old maid had answered in a dry tone and protruding her lip in a characteristic way:

"What do I know?..."

And no one knew. It was clear that a strict order had been given, so that the two women would ignore where they were. Donna Gabriella, however, had tried to realize the surroundings, trying to recognize at least that mountain top and to have an idea of the surrounding countryside.

She was in a castle, whose high walls did not seem to be surmountable and which also stood on a fortress, which looked from certain windows dizzy, so high and steep. Down there were thickets, among which there was a silver strip. From here and there hills happened to hills and beyond the hills they painted chains of mountains, as in a scenery, one behind the other of a more waxy and softer color.

There was no trace of a nearby village: Also, when the air was serene and the wind was blowing, the echo of a bell came far into the castle. So, in the surroundings some villages had to rise, some baronial land hidden in the woods.

She had been able to see that part of the castle was not habitable; some rooms had the roof uncovered, some towers had the blackbird and some part of the diruti summit; here and there the curtains had cracks. The part where they were housed was formed by the mast, that is, by the main tower, solid quadrangular fortress that dominated the whole building, and that stood at the end of the court still well preserved.

Crossing the court and entering the other wings of the castle was not possible. The doors were locked and unlocked, some even walled; evidently it was intended to prevent the woman Gabriella or whoever strayed beyond the court and the tower. In the court were the stables, but they welcomed only the two mules and three horses. There were no other servants except the old lady, a manor house, a kind of castle, two peasants who tried to carry out the offices of valets, staffieri and paggi. Every night one of them would go to sleep behind the door of the women's room, with a rifle between his legs.

Outside of these limitations woman Gabriella and Violante could not feel the way they were treated and served. Their toilet room was nothing short of what a lady might need; and it revealed the previsional and wise hand of a person accustomed to the comforts and refinements of noble clothing. Violante was amazed to see a whole battery of needles for smelling, ringing, curling the hair; scissors, combs, pots of ointments, saplings for dyes, powders and odorous waters: things he had no idea about in the monastery.

The wardrobe was equipped with embroidered robes, bathrobes and slippers; the two beds and the table had fine linen; the cutlery and the tableware were silver. Donna Gabriella could really believe that she was in a holiday among her vassals.

The first dismay, that sense of terror, from which she and Violante had been taken, gradually vanished; they wondered now when their imprisonment that isolated them from the world would end. The solitude and dumbness of the servants had forced Gabriella woman to look for a company in her stepdaughter, but they had not suggested feelings of benevolence or compassion: Indeed, every time the thoughtful maiden was surprised and with her eyes wandering through the countryside, an idea, a name ran to her brain, and her eyes became dark and corrupted. She was sure Violante thought of Blasco. And it was true.

Ever since her stepmother's words had made light in her heart, Violante had lost that dear one in conscience, which made her spend happy the dawns of her youth. But this light, penetrating the world still dormant of sensations and instincts, had aroused them and they agitated confusedly, disturbing it with indefinite desires, which sometimes caused it to tears.

Blasco's image stood before her eyes and she felt a sense of enjoyment she could not express, but sometimes sudden flames climbed her face and felt her eyes burning. She knew now that she loved Blasco. She believed that love was all in that constant thought, in that I know nothing but mysterious, that made her desire to see him, to hear him, to be with him; and this seemed so bold, that she was moved and ashamed of him.

"Oh, yes, it's true; - he often thought - I love her; I love her."

But suddenly it took a sense of fear. She saw Gabriella's angry gaze upon herself, and she felt faint.

"Why?" he thought, "why does she look at me like that? What harm do I do to her?"

One day Gabriella, a woman who was very nervous, told her: "Do you think about him?"

On her lips she ran a lie, she wanted to answer: No, but she was not accustomed to lying and silent, except that the purple of her face and embarrassment answered for her, and this revelation filled the heart of a woman Gabriella with a bitterness full of deaf anger, and renewed against her stepdaughter that bitterness and that craving of reprisals and torture, which the emotions of the rat had endured.

And from that day he began to be more bitter, more tormenting, in all those moments when it was indispensable to be in contact with Violante, feeling a fierce satisfaction to prick and denigrate Blasco.

"What do you hope for?" she once said to her; "What do you hope for? Marry him? It will never be, as long as I'm alive, and if I die soon, your father won't be foolish enough to consent, I swear."

It was another idea, an idea not yet seen that Gabriella woman threw into the heart of the maiden and added new disturbances. Getting married? Always with Blasco, alone in another house, without suspicion?

This idea confused her, dismayed her and filled her heart with joy at the same time. Before that time she had never thought of marriage; now she felt the most natural way she should have followed, since she loved Blasco. But she also trepidated her, because of that instinctive fear of an unknown mysterious and terrible, of which she felt like distant vibrations.

Another time, Gabriella said to her:

"Shame! at your age think of these filthy things!..."

Which ones? What kind of filth was that? So, loving a man, getting married, was that unworthy? Why? Many of her classmates had come out of the monastery to marry, and she had heard several times about the great wedding feasts that celebrated the families of her companions; feasts that were fountains of triumph also for the city, for which they even printed sonnets; and never by anyone, not even by Sister Maria Cristina, who had a formidable hatred for the world, Violant had heard that so gruesome judgment.

"Beautiful wedding with an adventurer, escaped from the gallows! Do you not know, then, that he is wanted by justice because he is a bandit? You don't know he killed some guards, and he killed even three royal guards in Messina? Who knows how many murderers and robberies he's committed!... Who is it? Did Donde come?... Nobody knows. He is not of our class;... he will be some son of villains, run away! The gallows is waiting for him. After they hang him, they'll cut him in quarters and hang him in the Sperone. Then I'll take you to see Mr. Blasco's quarters from Castiglione!..."

Violante paled and closed his eyes with a cry of horror and pain, to the vision of the bloody leftovers, hung on the gallows of the Sperone: a spectacle of cruelty, rebuke, terror, not infrequent in those days. Then she wondered if it was true what her stepmother said and her heart said no, repudiating her belief that such a beautiful man, so generous, so loyal, so strong, could be an adventurer, a bandit, worthy of dying on the forks.

But meanwhile the suspicion, doubt, fear had entered her soul.

So the poor girl spent those days grieving, and Gabriella woman raging inside, and becoming also pale and sad; and the days happened without any newness, always the same, between the same stings, the same asts. Sometimes, when the nerves carried it, the Duchess invented it. against Don Raimondo and against Violante.

"All because of your father!... Your father is an evildoer, and I suffer because of him. What do I have to do with the shit he's done? Why don't they solve them with him and you?... Oh, how I would like revenge! how I would like revenge!..."

Violant rebelled; he could not hear his father swear, of whom she did not suspect and who believed that he was deliberate.

"Why, madam, does it offend my father too? What did you do to her? He is also her husband!..."

"Shut up, you don't have the right to talk. You're of the same race. You little vipers! Your father? I know what it's worth!..."

Her invectives against Blasco, against Don Raimondo, against Violante, became more acres and harsh, when her imprisonment, preventing her some whim or desire, seemed more rigorous and unbearable. What made her even more unbearable was not knowing, nor being able to know, when it would be finished, nor exactly what you wanted from her. She had interviewed the old lady several times, but she couldn't get an explanation out of her mouth.

She had asked her name, and she had answered with reverence:

"Nora, to serve you; I am Aunt Nora, the mother of Baldassare the stuccoer..."

"Are you here to serve?..."

"To serve your Excellency."

The answer was ambiguous.

"Who is your master?..."

"But your Excellency; who wants me to be my master?..."

Donna Gabriella couldn't get anything else out of her mouth. Another time she asked her: "Who's expecting?"

He wanted at least to know if someone in that castle expected to have the key to the mystery that enveloped not so much his capture, as the dwelling in that unknown, isolated place, cut off from the world. But Aunt Nora evasively replied:

"The grace of God!"

"Will we stay here a long time?..."

"How much God wants!..."

They were answers that would make even the quietest soul despair. Donna Gabriella heard it burst: the closed, impenetrable appearance of that old lady, who seemed shaped by the secret god, lit her with a thousand collars, and sometimes put in her hands a craving of striking.

So about forty days had passed; winter was coming, and on that hill cold winds were blowing; in the chambers, in the evening, he was woeful. The prospect of spending the winter in that bicocca was really frightening. Donna Gabriella could not help but think that that was the season of the receptions, of the dances in which the other ladies had fun, surrounded by courtiers, ruling in those little Olympics, which were the halls of the great noble palaces, shining with mirrors and lights; and then her eyes were filled with tears of pain and anger and in an irrepressible rush she shook her stepdaughter by her hair shouting:

"I'd like to see you dead, you and your father!..."

His dismay grew when one morning he saw one of the peasants coming in with a chest, from which Aunt Nora drew heavy blankets and capes. This seemed to her to be a sure indication that imprisonment would not cease so soon, and she had such a burning impression that she was beating her temples desperately. Violent, however, did not seem so desperate, indeed a certain joy enlightened her face.

Entering her bedroom to put the blankets on her bed, Aunt Nora said to her:

"I have an embassy for your Excellency."

"For me?"

"Yes... that's something no one needs to know..."

Violent blushed and looked at her with curious expectation.

"Mr. Blasco sends a greeting and says that in days... Shut up!..."

Violant can neither thank her nor express any word of promise. At the mere hearing of the young man's name, her heart began to beat them with such violence and so much violence, that her breath and her face lacked the arses of that flame, which seemed to dry her eyes. Blasco! Blasco knew where she was, Blasco would come to see her. Maybe free her.

Blasco, then, thought of her... wasn't it because he loved her too? From her heart, from what she felt and felt, intuited and judged what the young man's feelings could be, and this idea, while burning her face, gave her an extraordinary joy never experienced, a consolation full of sweetness. She felt like she wasn't alone anymore, she felt like she had a protector, she felt safe. Blasco would have taken her from that prison and would have taken her away from her stepmother's harassment. He now proudly rejected all Gabriella's insinuations against the young man: They were slanders. She would ask Blasco if it was true what the Duchess had said. Didn't he already invent you that Blasco was murdered? Why did he make that up? And why that livor? Why that persistence? All these because they were crowded in the mind of the maiden, they insisted on it: She would turn them, stop, try to penetrate their inner reason. Was it hate? Maybe. But that hate that equally enveloped her and Blasco, who had committed no fault against the Duchess, had to be born of something that still escaped the girl, inexperienced of the world and unaware that there could be unconfessible loves, indeed unaware of the great mystery of love.

However, a kind of suspicious fear entered her heart, coloring her stepmother with a dark light. She shook; her instincts suggested that she hide her joy: for the first time Violante pretended and this fiction that protected her joy gave her a pleasure, as if she had carried out a reprisal or returned a win on her stepmother.

But Gabriella had the detective and keen eye of jealousy; under the fiction she discovered that something new had penetrated the heart of Violante. He started punching her to find out:

"How many days have it been that in the grace of your father we are closed here?"

"And perhaps my father who ordered it?"

"Do not make remarks; it is not lawful for you... I know what I'm saying. If your father hadn't done some bad things, I wouldn't be here..."

She returned to this subject that she knew not to care for Violante, but the maiden kept silent. He had decided not to respond to any provocations and understood that the Duchess wanted to start over. Donna Gabriella expected an act of rebellion and was amazed at the girl's silence.

"Are you not answering?" she said.

"I don't know what to say, madam."

"Eh! I know you don't know what to say: You have the same blood... But I don't want to put up with this life, you mean? They keep you here, who are his daughter, I don't care; you'll end badly. But let me go!..."

Violent silenced; an imperceptible smile stood at the corners of her mouth. Keep her!... But instead, she was the one who had the confidence to get out of that prison early. Donna Gabriella began to find the girl's silence provocative, and her nerves began to vibrate, to tend, to obscure her brain. She felt some deaf fury that gave her a great desire to cry, to tear her hair: Her mouth was filled with bitterness. She had a crisis, she really burst into hiccups that seemed to break her chest. Violante was dismayed and moved at the same time. He had never seen the Duchess weep, and those desperate hiccups shuffled his mercy.

His hands came screaming:

"Mrs. Mother! Madam Mother! What is it?..."

He approached her and asked her:

"Is it because of me that weeps? Did I make her cry?... If I ever ask for forgiveness!..."

She shyly tried to take her hand, but when she felt touched, Gabriella threw a cry, as if a snake had bit her.

"Get out of the way!... Get out of the way! Don't touch me! I don't want to be touched by you! by you!... You hate me!..."

Violante stepped back, looking at her with a painful amazement.

"But what have I done to her, to be hateful?" she asked gently again under the impulse of emotion.

"Are you asking me this?" the Duchess retorted with impetuousness. "Do you ask?..."

His voice squealed like rusty metal: his whole appearance had an expression of violence and pain in which it seemed that a thousand different and chilling feelings were reflected. There was a ferocious sarcasm in your eyes that made Violant shudder. That's all he said to her, except:

"Go away! Leave me alone!"

Violante went out in silence and withdrew to her bedroom; Aunt Nora, who seemed to be waiting for her in the hallway, accompanied her to the bedroom and, at the point of closing the door, said to the maiden:

"Do not be afraid, Your Excellency!... Don't be afraid. We're here."

Violante looked at her amazed. Had he seen and heard the old lady? And what did he know or understood, to chase her down like that?