The Silent Duchess

VI

watery-eyed and toothless, his gaze fixed in a state of inescapable trance, still attempting spasmodically to raise his shoulder to free a hand with which to wipe his running nose. Marianna falls backwards like a dead weight, hitting her head on the hard bare ground of the courtyard. Everyone turns. Agata runs towards her followed by Carlo, who leans over his sister and bursts into tears. Cannarota's wife fans her with her apron while a servant rushes off to call the Duchess. The puppet master emerges from beneath the black curtain, with the puppet in his hand, head downwards, while Nardo remains hanging aloft on the gallows. VI An hour later, Marianna wakes up in her parents' bed with a wet handkerchief pressing heavily on her forehead. Vinegar runs down through her eyelashes and stings her eyes. Her mother the Duchess bends over her. Even before she opens her eyes she recognises her from the strong smell of honey-scented snuff. The daughter gazes up at her mother: the outline of her full lips slightly veiled by blonde down, her nostrils shadowed by the constant taking of snuff, her large dark eyes. Marianna finds it impossible to make up her mind whether she is beautiful or not, because there is something about her that is off-putting. But what is it? Perhaps it is her unshakable calm, the way she always gives in to the slightest push, the way she abandons herself to the cloying fumes of snuff, indifferent to everything else. Marianna has always suspected that her lady mother, in the far-off past, when she was very young and full of imagination, deliberately chose to become lifeless so that she would never have to die. From there must come her remarkable ability to accept every irritation with complete resignation and a minimum of effort. Before her death, Marianna's grandmother Giuseppa wrote to her several times about her mother in an exercise book with a fleur-de-lys on the cover. 'Your mother was a beauty. Everybody loved her. But she didn't love anyone. She was obstinate as a goat, like her mother Giulia, who came from around Granada. She did not want to marry her 27 cousin, your father Signoretto. Everyone said, "But he's a lovely young man, he really is." Not just because he was my son, the very sight of him would dazzle your eyes. Your mother married him grudgingly, she looked as if she were going to a funeral. Then after a month of marriage she fell in love with him and she loved him so much she started taking snuff, then at night she could no longer sleep so she took laudanum as well.' When the Duchess sees that her daughter is coming round, she goes to the writing-desk, takes a sheet of paper and writes on it. She dries the ink with ashes and hands the sheet to the young girl. 'How are you, my little one?' As she sits up, Marianna spits out the vinegar that is still sticking to her teeth. Her lady mother laughs and removes the soaking rag from her face. Then she goes to the writing-desk again, scribbles something more and comes back to the bedside with the piece of paper. 'Now you are thurteen it's time I told you you have to get married. We have found a bridgroom for you. So there's no need for you to be a nun like Fiammetta.' The girl reads and rereads her mother's hurried note, written regardless of spelling, mixing Sicilian dialect with Italian, her handwriting hesitant and shaky. A husband? Why on earth? She had imagined that because of her disability, marriage would be unthinkable. And, anyway, she is barely thirteen. Her mother is waiting for a reply. She gives her an affectionate smile - but there is something a little forced about it. For her, having a deaf and dumb daughter weighs her down with unbearable pain and embarrassment that make her freeze. She's at a loss how to behave towards her or how to make herself understood. She has never much liked writing, and to have to read other people's handwriting is a real torture. But with motherly self-sacrifice she goes to the writing-desk, snatches another sheet of paper, picks up the goose quill and the little bottle of ink and takes it all to her daughter as she lies stretched out on the...