"Don Fabrizio grew calm again; his nephew was looking at him with the affectionate irony which youth accords to age. 'They can allow themselves to be a bit nice to us, as they're so sure to be free of us the day of our funerals.' He went with Tancredi to look at the 'foreign peaches.' The graft with German cuttings, made two years ago, had succeeded perfectly; there was not much fruit, a dozen or so, on the two grafted trees, but it was big, velvety, luscious-looking; yellowish, with a faint flush of rosy pink on the cheeks, like those of Chinese girls. The Prince gave them a gentle squeeze with his delicate fleshy fingers."
Lampedusa's book is like those peaches: ripe, heavy, soaked in the Sicilian sun. Each scene is densely sensual, as if you can almost touch the baroque drawing rooms he describes, the strawberry lips of a raven-haired beauty, the gleaming knobs of a golden telescope, the white cakes studded with green pistachios. It is a past world brought richly, almost decadently, to life; but it is also a world that is everywhere tinged with an impending sense of loss.
The Leopard begins in May 1860 during the Risorgimento, a movement that sought to unify the states of Italy in a single nation. The plot focuses on the Salinas, an aristocratic family led by Don Fabrizio. He is described as being "very large and strong; in houses inhabited by common mortals his head would touch the lowest rosette on the chandeliers; his fingers could twist a ducat coin as if it were mere paper; and there was a constant coming and going between Villa Salina and a silversmith's for the mending of forks and spoons which, in some fit of controlled rage at table, he had coiled into a hoop."
Don Fabrizio is the unchallenged master of his domain, but knows that his power is ebbing with the sweeping changes unleashed by the Risorgimento. He sees it most keenly in the engagement of his nephew, Tancredi, the scion of a prestigious yet bankrupt noble clan, to a woman whose father, Don Calogero, has used the new levers of power to become a wealthy landowner. The engagement is one of the many compromises Don Fabrizio makes to ensure the survival of his way of life, even while acknowledging that this steady dilution will also seal its doom. As Tancredi says to him, "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."
Don Calogero is emblematic of the new world order: crass, unsophisticated, obsessed with money. He cannot appreciate an old ballroom the way only a consummate noble like Don Fabrizio can: "It was not the flashy gilding which decorators slap on nowadays, but a faded gold, pale as the hair of Nordic children, determinedly hiding its value under a muted use of precious material intended to let beauty be seen and cost forgotten."
When The Leopard was first published (posthumously; it was famously rejected by several publishers during Lampedusa's lifetime) in 1958, it apparently caused a great stir in Italian political circles. One can easily see why this paean to aristocracy would rile more democratic-minded folk, especially those whose ancestors shed blood to shepherd Italy into the modern era. This might be a case in which an outsider's perspective proves valuable. With no emotional attachment to Italian history, we can see that The Leopard is not so much about politics or class warfare; it is an elegy for a world that, for all its imperfections, is now extinct, and a recognition that our own world would be the poorer if we forgot it once existed.
No comments:
Post a Comment