The Silent Duchess

XLII

other, expecting death at any moment. They are so tired that they are overtaken by sleep without realising it, while the salt water pounds their backs with pieces of wood, shoes, sardines, uncoiled ropes and bits of cork. When the two women wake up it is already morning and they are still in each other's arms, stretched out on the deck right beneath the ladder. An inquisitive seagull watches them from the opening that leads on to the bridge. XLII A pilgrim? Perhaps, but pilgrims travel towards a destination. Her feet travel only for the joy of travelling; they do not ever want to stop. Escaping from the silence of her own house to other houses, other silences. A nomad wrestling with fleas, heat, dust. But never really tired, never satiated with seeing new places, new people. Fila at her side, her small bald head always covered by a bonnet of immaculately clean cotton that is washed every evening and put to dry at the window. Sometimes they do not find a window, and between Naples and Benevento they slept on straw next to a cow who sniffed them with curiosity. They stopped by the recent excavations at Stabia and Herculaneum. They have eaten water-melon cut in slices by a little boy, on a portable table like the one Marianna uses to write on. They have drunk honey and water sitting in wonder before a large Roman wall-painting in which red and pink mix deliciously together. They have rested in the shade of a gigantic maritime pine after having walked for five hours in the heat. They have ridden mules along the slopes of Vesuvius, their noses peeling in the sun in spite of wearing the straw hats they had bought from a haberdasher in Naples. They have slept in stinking rooms with rotting windows, with a candle end on the floor beside the mattress, on which fleas hopped as if they were on a merry-go-round. Every now and then, a peasant, a shopkeeper or a squire would 224 follow them, full of curiosity that they were travelling all by themselves. But Marianna's silence and Fila's angry looks soon put them to flight. Once they were robbed on the road to Caserta. They had to abandon to the brigands two heavy bags with brass locks, a silver-mesh chain purse of money, and fifty escudos. But they were not too distressed; the bags had been an encumbrance, and contained dresses they would never wear. The escudos were only part of their money. Fila had hidden the rest of it so well, sewn underneath her petticoat, that the bandits had not found it; and then they had taken pity on the dumb woman and had not even searched her, although she also had money in a pocket of her mantle. At Capua they made friends with a company of actors travelling to Rome. A comedienne, a young actor, a stage manager, two castrati singers, four servants with a mountain of luggage, and two mongrel dogs. Easy-going and friendly, they spent a great deal of their time eating and playing cards. They were not in the least disconcerted by the Duchess's deafness, and immediately began to talk to her with their hands and their bodies, easily making her understand them and raising peals of laughter from Fila. Naturally it fell to Marianna to pay for supper for everybody, but the acrors knew how to return the favour, making everyone laugh by miming their thoughts, whether at the supper table or the card table, in the stage-coaches, or the inns where they stopped the night. At Gaeta there was a rumour that the road was infested with brigands; a mischievous note warned them that 'for everyone hanged a hundred would spring out to replace him, that they had a hide-out in the Ciociaria mountains and were particularly looking for duchesses'. So they decided to embark on a felucca, which took them for only a few escudos. On the boat they played the card games faraone and biribissi all day long. The manager of the company, Giuseppe Gallo, was the dealer and always lost. To balance this, the two castrati always won. And the comedienne Gilberta Amadio never wanted to go to bed. In Rome they stayed at the same inn in the Via del Grillo, a small steep street which carriages refused to go up so that they had to make their...