Beati Paoli

by Luigi Natoli

part four, chapter 6

Donna Gabriella left shortly afterwards and to Emanuele, who had approached to offer to accompany her, replied:

"Thank you, Duke, but I had already prayed to Mr. Don Blasco - (and here he changed his tone, lowering his voice) your brother."

Emanuele braised and looked at Blasco with a biech and jealous fury, who approached him and offered his arm, smiling finely at Emanuele's gaze.

"If you prefer the company of Mr. Duke," he said to woman Gabriella, "do not have any regard for me..."

"Thank you, sir," replied Emanuele haughtily.

"Lord?" looked amazed Gabriella woman looking at the two brothers. "How? Do you call yourself a "sir"?"

"I wouldn't know what to call him differently," said Emanuele in the same tone that betrayed spite.

Blasco, who became pale, raised his shoulders with a gesture of carelessness and merely warned the Duchess.

"Whenever you want, Gabriella woman..."

She put her hand on Blasco's arm and crossed the hall, while Emanuel followed her with burning eyes and biting her lips. As she went down the stairs, Gabriella observed:

"But do you know that your brother Emanuele really surprised me?"

"Why, ma'am? He has no reason to love me, as I do not really know why we should consider ourselves as brothers, rather than as strangers..."

The lackey opened the large door and lowered the predellino, and Gabriella was quickly and visibly happy, saying not without a certain fatuity:

"That guy really doesn't have a good brain."

Blasco did not answer, kissed the hand of woman Gabriella, and closed the door of the carriage, wishing her good night.

She said to him: "Won't you come visit me? Are you always angry with me? Now you certainly have no reason to be... And I've suffered so much... so much. We'll talk about many things..."

"Thanks for your invitation, but in a few days I'm leaving..."

"Do you leave? Again? Why?..."

"Didn't I tell you, then, that I am a dragon in the first Numanzia?... I'm going to the siege of Termini..."

"Oh God!... to war?... But so much better then."

He kept his voice down and said to him quickly:

"Go wait for me at the corner of the Church of the Chain, I'll put the carriage in the pass. I have a lot to tell you... Go..."

Blasco grabbed himself somewhat, but rejecting himself would be a real rudeness; he bowed down and rushed out of the palace, while Gabriella's flyers lit the torches outside the door. The carriage actually stepped up and drove along the Alloro road, resonating the pavement under the ferrata legs of the two horses and the roll of the wheels. At the church of S. Maria della Catena - precious jewel of Sicilian art of the fifteenth century - he reached Blasco and stopped. The road was deserted, the houses locked, the shadow was just interrupted by the torches of the two flyers; except for the servants, no one could see Blasco riding in a carriage at a call of the Duchess. Appearances were so safe; this pressed Gabriella into her widowhood. The servants were, as the masters ordinarily believe, discreet people and the Duchess did not dream of anything going beyond the threshold of the door of her palace: the way to it was not short, and it could freely and for a long time.

So Blasco stood beside her in a carriage, and for a moment they remained silent. Donna Gabriella had sat back in a corner in the shadows, but, at the glimmer of the torches of the steering wheels, she saw her eyes shining. If the noise of the wheels on the pavement of the Cassaro (then it was not paved) had almost hidden Blasco's ears, he might have heard the tumultuous pulse of that female heart beside him; but he saw those eyes shining and intuitive all the things that that silence expressed.

She seemed to wait for a word, but he also waited for Gabriella to tell him some of the things she had to say to him. After a while she sighed, and murmured:

"How long has it been!..."

And a minute later:

"We broke up in anger... and I always feared that I was hated by you... Tell me first of all if I deceive myself..."

"Yes, you are deceived," said Blasco; "I have perhaps also been wronged by you and I have been able to let myself be carried away by resentment... but it has been a long time! You said it yourself... So I am not angry with you... nor do I hate you. I'll prove it to you, I think..."

"Thank you, it's true... But let's not talk about wrongs... I had so much more... I've always thought about it, you know? But... I was so blind from pain... from jealousy! We don't talk about it anymore. If you knew how I lived in these four years! Widow, yes, in a rigorous widowhood, which almost all interpret as a persistence of fidelity and respect for the memory of Don Raimondo... but it was and is, instead, the widowhood of my dreams, of my hopes...."

His voice trembled with emotion and his moist eyes shone more in the shadows. Blasco kept quiet: He thought about Circe... Donna Gabriella was feeling burning on the tongue a question, and he did not dare to ask it; he let a moment of silence flow and said with apparent indifference:

"And have you seen your cousin?"

Blasco translated and the maiden's name appeared on his lips, but he did not change into sound. He answered with an altered voice:

"No; I didn't see her..."

"Do you want to see her?" Gabriella insisted; and in this question her soul trepidated.

"No," Blasco replied once more.

"You're right... Do you know she's engaged?"

"Yes; it was my wish."

"Do you know that the wedding will take place towards the end of next January?"

"No," Blasco said with emotion just dominated, "I didn't know..."

Donna Gabriella studied it; she felt in the bottom of that word a three myth of pain and passion, which woke up in her heart torments, jealousies, hates, sleepy but not extinguished. He was silent again, wasting the magnificent lace of his sleeves, with a short and nervous gesture. Didn't she have more charms then? Did he no longer have any power over his beauty that he had so triumphed? He approached a little and asked with a softly insinuating voice:

"Do you suffer?..."

"No; why should I suffer? Of what? You wanted to suppose what had never happened, you created a novel of pure invention, and you believed it to be real history and you upset an innocent puberty, you poisoned three existences, you took away from you those who would be your best and sincere friends... Oh! when I think of everything you have done, Gabriella woman, I feel overwhelmed by a pain so deep and alive that I should almost hate you..."

"And do you hate me?"

"No, I do not hate you, because I was not born to hate; my father really had to generate me in a moment of great goodness and love, to give me this heart so made!... I do not hate you; but of course, Gabriella, you have broken something in here, and it is insane!." She let herself fall on her knees on the carpet in front of the seat, murmuring with infinite expression of pain:

"Forgive me!...forgive me!..."

And he took his hands, and kissed them with shyness. Blasco portrayed them, confused, messy, saying:

"What are you doing? No, no... get up, please... I do." As she did not move, he sat as she was, took her for life and forced her to stand up and sit down, but Gabriella was so moved and out of herself that she shook herself against his chest and he felt her shaking and shaking in the rush of that emotion.

Blasco felt lost:

"Woman Gabriella" murmured; "I beg you... do it also for your own sake..."

She shook her head as a sign of rejection, she had her eyes full of tears that, going down, between a hiccup and the other, fell on Blasco's hands. Those blazes seemed to penetrate his blood, multiply, become a wave, from his veins to his heart and drown him in an indefinable emotion. Mercy, tenderness, sweet memories, youth, and above all that vague and ineffable desire to confuse one's heart with another, made him languid; the wax of which Ulysses had believed stopped his ears was liquefying and retrieving all the vibrations of that love.

She continued to shake her head with her eyes shining in tears, like two stars seen in the rain, and found fiery words:

"It has been five years since I met you that my heart has closed and has never been open to a feeling, as if you had taken away the key; it has closed strictly... and in these four years of widowhood none of those who have threatened me had even a smile from me, because inside my heart there was the pain, the pain of having lost you, perhaps forever: a hopeless pain... I have heard above me your hatred, as a curse, and I would have liked to know where you were, to flee from this land full of distressing memories, to come and visit you, to throw me into your arms, to say to you: "Look, I'm free now, and I always love you. Take me!" And snatch a word from you, a sweet word of which my soul is brimming!... And now I have you here, Blasco, right next to me, I hear you: I have your hands in mine, I have your mouth here, near mine, so..."

She had gripped herself against his chest, while speaking, with a low voice, but vibrant of passion and similar to a caress and, as the words gushed out in that vertigo of desire, she pushed her face towards Blasco's face, with her eyes in her eyes, until in a mad rush her frantic lips sought Blasco's lips...

He felt the temples burst.

"Woman Gabriella!... woman Gabriella!..." begged, without escaping, abandoning herself to triumphant youth, almost happy to have been won.

Meanwhile, the carriage, past the Four Songs, and along the New Road, bent along the flag road. By order of woman Gabriella, she had made a long tour, precisely so that she could have Blasco in her company as long as possible: Now, getting close to home, she thought she was trembling that Blasco would leave her. And in the anxiety of this fear and in the full drunkenness that spread to her blood, she recovered more sweet, insinuating, almost with a virginal modesty:

"In these four years I have kept myself to you, without waiting for you, for a vow; for I have not yet met a man who resembles you and is worthy to be with you... I wanted to vote for my life, my youth, my solitude to you, who I never hoped to see, to you, unique and true love of my life... Now I look at you, I hear you, I hear your kisses, and I feel like I'm dreaming... Dream?... Do not stir me up, I beg you... let me dream, here in your mouth!..."

He drew it to himself; their narrow bodies seemed to be one body; and blessed were the pebbles that, in the little wide road, made the wheels so roaring, that they covered and dominated the sound of kisses.

The slowing down of the horses loosened woman Gabriella from that narrow. She whispered quickly:

"I'll wait for you... But don't come now. No one has to see you come in. Come back in half an hour, this way, from this alley..."

He pointed it out to him: It was a narrow street, closed between his palace and that of the prince of Pantelleria, and he added:

"Now pretend to leave."

The carriage had arrived and entered the vestibule; one of the lackeys opened the door; Blasco jumped to the ground, put his hand to a woman Gabriella, and accompanied her at the foot of the staircase, where she galantly kissed, but not without desire, the beautiful hand that gave him the lady, wished her good night and went away immediately around the corner of the road that descends to St. James the Navy: But as soon as he heard the door shut, he went back and drove himself into the alley and was so full of that adventure that he was risking, he grazed him with roses at night, that he did not notice some shadows that from the corner of the road of the Crucifixors, - today said of the Children seemed to spy on him. Instead, he heard a balcony open after a while, and a voice quietly called: "Blasco!..."

And almost at the same time something passed before his eyes and knocked on his knees, swinging; it was a rope. He grabbed it, wised it, felt it was solidly tied up, and then he jumped and grabbed it.

Not for nothing had he spent a few years on board; he climbed the rope in a moment, climbed over the balcony railing and found his arms almost naked of a woman Gabriella who was waiting for him to quiver.