The Silent Duchess

XXXVI

XXXVI Hurried breathing, the smell of camphor and cabbage-leaf poultices: every time she comes into the room it seems to her as if she were reliving her son Signoretto's illness, the distress of laboured breathing, the foetid smell of sweat sticking to the skin, restless sleep, bitter tastes and mouths dry with fever. Events have happened so quickly that she has not had time to think about them. Peppinedda was delivered of a little boy, round as a ball and covered with black hair. Fila helped the midwife to cut the cord, to clean the new-born baby with soap and water, and dry him with warm towels. She seemed pleased with this nephew fortune had presented to her. Then one night while the mother slept with the baby in her arms, Fila dressed herself up as if she were going to mass, went down into the kitchen, armed herself with the knife used for gutting fish and in the half-light approached the bed and began to stab the two bodies lying there, that of the mother and that of the baby. She did not realise that Saro was with them, his head on Peppinedda's shoulder. He suffered the fiercest blows, one on his thigh, one on his chest and one on his ear. The baby died. No one knows if he was crushed beneath his father or his mother; what is certain is that he died of suffocation, without any marks from the knife. Peppinedda came out of it with one cut on her arm and a few surface scratches on her neck. By the time Marianna came down to the ground floor, propelled along on Innocenza's arm, it was already morning and four men from the Vicaria were taking Fila away bound like a sausage. After a trial lasting three days she was sentenced to be hanged. And Marianna, not knowing who else to turn to, went to Giacomo Camaleo, the city Praetor and first among the senators, in the hope of interceding for her. The child was dead, but not from his aunt's stabs. Saro had survived and so had Peppinedda. 'A wrong that goes unpunished only breeds further crime', Camaleo wrote on the small piece of paper she held out for him. 'She will be punished anyway if she is sent to prison', she replied, trying to control the trembling of her fingers. She was longing to run home to Saro. She had left him in the hands of the leech Pozzolungo, in whom she had little trust. At the same time she 195 was desperate to save Fila from the gallows. But Don Camaleo was in no hurry, he watched her with glistening eyes that occasionally lit up with a flash of interest. And she had written again, steadying her wrist, recalling Hippocrates, quoting Saint Augustine. After half an hour he softened a little and offered her a glass of Cyprus wine, which he kept on a chest of drawers. And she, hiding her anxiety, made an effort to drink it, smiling graciously, humbly. In his turn Don Camaleo quoted at length from Saint-Simon and Pascal, filling sheets of paper with a queer handwriting full of dots and flourishes, stopping every three words to blow on his goose quill dripping with ink. 'Each life is a microcosm, my dear Duchess, a living thought that is struggling to emerge from its own shadowy regions.' Playing the same game, she answered him demurely, perfectly in control. The Praetor assumed a pompous look, entertained and amused by this exchange of erudition. A woman who has read Saint Augustine and Socrates, Saint-Simon and Pascal is not an everyday occurrence, his eyes were saying, and he must make the most of it. With her he could marry gallantry with scholarship, he could display all his learning without arousing boredom and uneasiness as was usually the case with the women he paid court to. Marianna was obliged to swallow her haste, to forget it. She remained there discussing philosophy and drinking Cyprus wine in the hope that in the end she would extract a promise from him. The Praetor did not seem in the least worried by the disablement of his lady interlocutor. He even seemed pleased that she was unable to talk, since it allowed him to show off his knowledge in writing, omitting the usual intervals of chit-chat that obviously bored him. By the end he had made her a...