Lampedusa's The Leopard

Beauty, decline, and the laments of Great Men

Detachment

I must not, cannot, do not dare
insanely yield to passion's pains;
I guard my inner calm with care
and keep my sober heart in chains.
Though done with love, am I not free
to dream a passing dream at times,
when accidentally I see
a pure, angelic girl go by
and disappear?... And can’t I then,
admiring her with longing gaze,
pursue her with my eyes and send
a prayer to bless her all her days,
and wish her goodness from above,
and happiness and peace in life —
yes, even joy for him she’ll love,
who’ll call the charming girl his wife?

— Alexander Pushkin, translated by James Falen

The people of Palermo are Italians after all, and so particularly responsive to the appeal of beauty and the prestige of money…

— The Leopard

This is how we are introduced to the author of The Leopard:

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was a Sicilian nobleman, Duke of Parma and Prince of Lampedusa. He was born in Palermo in 1896 and died in Rome in 1957. He lived the life of a literary dilettante, was familiar with the great literatures of the world, and was widely travelled. He published nothing during his lifetime, but bequeathed, in addition to his great novel, a memoir, some short stories, an incomplete novel and some fascinating appraisals of English and French Literature.

What more could an author wish for? A flaneur prince who left us a masterpiece.

This masterpiece is set in the nineteenth century twilight of the Italian states. Revolutionary fervour sweeps the peninsula to unite them for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire.

This world is everywhere in transition and decline: ancient sun-blasted fields are weary, violent revolution replaces aristocracies with new republican elites, stately homes are overcast with “tenacious memories of stale and varied urine”, heirlooms are traded in for can-can girls or foie gras, old dynasties give way to new money, the young take the mantle from the old, and our protagonist Prince Fabrizio — head of the Salina family, the Leopard, and last true Salina — dies, and with him the Italian aristocracy.

But before he dies, we follow his intrigues and reminiscences, his sufferance of the tumult of his times, and the pricks in his paws as they press on the fates of his family and interests. His time is ending: his era, his lineage, and ultimately, his life. And through his nostalgia and pride we see what made his life worth living, what was so central to it, what was life itself: youth and beauty, and his proximity to and conquest of it. As his time passes, along with his power and status, so does his grasp over youth and beauty. Playfulness, promise, charisma, even real power belong to the young; the old are beset by boredom (boring the youth), by disappointment, by blunted sorrows. In the end they’re left with “an immense ash-heap of liabilities” specked with “golden flecks of happy moments.”

We can’t help but imagine Lampedusa himself in the twilight of his years penning this work with a similar gaze — and a smile — on his past.

[The] weather luminous and blue, oasis of mildness in the harsh progression of the seasons, inveigling and leading on the senses with its sweetness, luring to secret nudities by its warmth.

Even the architecture, the rococo decoration itself, evoked thoughts of fleshly curves and taut erect breasts; and every opening door seemed like a curtain rustling in a bed-alcove.

In this world of decadence and decay, memories of past glories and sexual escapades rot in the undergrowth. Youth is the currency of life, and life flowers in the verve of early manhood and feminine charm. The bed of a young woman is the most powerful force in the universe. The afternoon heat is a lure to passions, the architecture suggestive; youth is sex and sex is everywhere, flowering, languid or decaying:

The Paul Neyron roses, whose cuttings he had himself bought in Paris, had degenerated; first stimulated and then enfeebled by the strong if languid pull of Sicilian earth, burned by apocalyptic Julies, they had changed into things like flesh-colored cabbages, obscene and distilling a dense, almost indecent, scent which no French horticulturist would have dared hope for. The Prince put one under his nose and seemed to be sniffing the thigh of a dancer from the Opera.

Italy during this time is a nation with its best days behind it, leaning on its Bellinis and Verdis as “perennial curative unctions for national wounds” like an old man remembers a sweet breast or gasp from more virile days.

Yet age can erode even past pleasures:

The women at the ball did not please him either. Two or three among the older ones had been his mistresses, and, seeing them now grown heavy with years and childbearing, it was an effort to imagine them as they were twenty years before, and he was annoyed at the thought of having thrown away his best years in chasing (and catching) such slatterns.

It is not just the women who are unrecognisable, but so is every part of this fading world built by past men:

…these monuments, even, of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing around like lovely mute ghosts…

Lust is not for old men. And even as the world burbles in lustful exuberance, young men — to whom such things belong — gently close the curtain on their older counterparts:

An hour later [the Prince] awoke refreshed and went down into the garden. The sun was already low, and its rays, no longer overwhelming, were lighting amiably on the araucarias, the pines, the lusty plane trees which were the glory of the place. From the end of the main alley, sloping gently down between high laurel hedges framing anonymous busts of broken-nosed goddesses, could be heard the gentle drizzle of spray falling into the fountain of Amphitrite. He moved swiftly toward it, eager to see it again. The waters came spurting in minute jets, blown from shells of Tritons and Naiads, from noses of marine monsters, spluttering and pattering on greenish verges, bouncing and bubbling, wavering and quivering, dissolving into laughing. Little gurgles; from the whole fountain, the tepid water, the stones covered with velvety moss, emanated a promise of pleasure that would never turn to pain. Perched on an islet in the middle of the round basin, modelled by a crude but sensual sculptor, a vigorous smiling Neptune was embracing a willing Amphitrite; her navel, wet with spray and gleaming in the sun, would be the nest, shortly, for hidden kisses in subaqueous shade. Don Fabrizio paused, gazed, remembered, regretted. He stood there a long while.

"Uncle, come and look at the foreign peaches. They've turned out fine. And leave these indecencies, which are not for men of your age."

Tony Soprano and the Leopard

Soprano and Salina are both the centres of their worlds. For Salina, “the whole world would vanish with his death”, as The Sopranos universe fades to black with Tony’s.

So central is a young woman’s beauty to Salina’s sense for life that one emerges in his final moments to claim him for death. For Tony too, in his last moments, his final mistress is a kind of fantasy. She’s unusual — not only is she his most beautiful goomah, she’s also just into him. He’s her type, it seems less of a power thing. She is no manic depressive suicide, no one-legged lover, nor desperate Russian mistress. She’s just a stunning young woman he connects with in Vegas (ok she’s Chris’s ex and stripping her way through college — but still). Could she be a deathly fantasy herself, like the Prince’s? Tony’s weed and peyote guide through self-knowledge is a lusty college age naiad. This is the stuff of life.

Don Fabrizio is the Last Salina just as Tony is the Last Soprano. Their sons are no heirs, and their daughters — endowed with fine characters worthy of their houses — are, well, daughters. The Prince and Tony are the last giants, the last of the Nephilim. Like Succession’s Logan Roy:

America… I don’t know. When I arrived there were these gentle giants smelling of fucking gold and milk. They could do anything. Now look at them. Fat as fuck, scrawny on meth or yoga. They pissed it all away.

For Tony and the Prince marriage is necessary, inconvenient, and boring. The Prince on love: “Flames for a year, ashes for thirty.” Echoed again at the end of the novel by an unhelpful senator: “love’s eternity lasts but a year or two, not fifty.”

The Prince is open in his philandering, and cruel and dismissive to his wife Stella, a woman diminished — always only in the background — by his inattention. As the Prince departs to see a mistress in the middle of the night with hardly an excuse, “the Princess was having one of her fits of hysteria.”

The Prince is not immune to guilt, but his power of self-rationalisation is exquisite:

I'm a sinner, I know, doubly a sinner, by Divine Law and by Stella's human love. There's no doubt of that, and tomorrow I'll go and confess to Father Pirrone." He smiled to himself at the thought that it might be superfluous, so certain must the Jesuit be of his sins of today. And then a spirit of quibble came over him again. "I'm sinning, it's true, but I'm sinning so as not to sin worse, to stop this sensual nagging, to tear this thorn out of my flesh and avoid worse trouble. That the Lord knows." Suddenly he was swept by a gust of tenderness toward himself. "I'm just a poor, weak creature," he thought as his heavy steps crunched the dirty gravel. "I'm weak and without support. Stella! Oh well, the Lord knows how much I've loved her; but I was married at twenty. And now she's too bossy, as well as too old." His moment of weakness passed. "But I've still got my vigor I and how can I find satisfaction with a woman who makes the sign of the Cross in bed before every embrace and then at the crucial moment just cries, 'Gesummaria!' When we married and she was sixteen I found that rather exalting; but now . . . seven children I've had with her, seven; and never once have I seen her navel. Is that right?" Now, whipped by this odd anguish, he was almost shouting, "Is it right? I ask you all!" And he turned to the portico of the Catena. "Why, she's the real sinner!"

In this superb moment — one that casts his sin from himself to his wife in the span of a paragraph — one sees not only Tony Soprano’s self-pity and rationalisation, but that of many a Great Man. “Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for my children,” says Logan Roy. "What I do, I do for my family," says Breaking Bad’s Walter White. Or you might hear the exact same Princely transition from guilt to gloat in the pivotal song of the Pumpkin King in The Nightmare Before Christmas:

What have I done?
How could I be so blind?
…

But I never intended all this madness, never
And nobody really understood, well how could they?
That all I ever wanted was to bring them something great
Why does nothing ever turn out like it should?

Well, what the heck, I went and did my best
And, by God, I really tasted something swell, that's right
And for a moment, why, I even touched the sky
And at least I left some stories they can tell, I did

…

And I, Jack, the Pumpkin King
That's right, I am the Pumpkin King

And I just can't wait until next Halloween
'Cause I've got some new ideas
That will really make them scream
…

Old is grotesque, corrupting the vitality and beauty of youth. His love for his nephew comes from his “riotous zest for life” (a love of women and cards). Moments of self-knowledge are tinged with disgust:

But how sad, too: that manhandled, youthful flesh, that resigned lubricity; and what about him, what was he? A pig, just a pig!”

And a line from a poem in a dusty old French book he had glanced comes to him:

“. . . donnez-moi la force et le courage de contempler mon coeur et mon corps sans degout”

[. . . give me the strength and courage to contemplate my heart and my body without disgust]

But self-doubt is momentary; self-delusion is forever:

Then he glanced in a mirror; no doubt about it, he was still a fine-looking man.

Age creeps on a man:

A man of forty-five can consider himself still young till the moment comes when he realizes that he has children old enough to fall in love.

One minute he is delighting in the splendour of youth, the next such pleasures are denied to him, taken up by younger men (in this case Tancredi, his favourite nephew and proxy son — like Chris Moltisanti to Tony Soprano):

Don Fabrizio felt as if he were assailed by numbers of stinging hornets. First, as is proper to every man not yet decrepit, that of carnal jealousy. So Tancredi had tasted that flavor of strawberries and cream which to him would always be unknown!

[Angelica] flung herself into the arms of Don Fabrizio; on his whiskers she implanted two big kisses which were returned with genuine affection; the Prince paused perhaps just a second longer than necessary to breathe in the scent of gardenia on adolescent cheeks. After this Angelica blushed, took half a step back: "I'm so, so happy…"

Women: Violence and Agency

Like in The Sopranos, women in The Leopard have no agency. They are temples, to be worshipped or defiled, shrines to man’s true god: beauty.

The two girls were young and attractive and, though with no particular loves of their own, found themselves immersed in the currents emanating from the others…

Another’s wife is just “a beautiful mare, voluptuous and uncouth”. The compliance of the Prince’s mistress is a virtue:

The Prince scarcely listened. He was immersed in sated ease tinged with disgust. Mariannina had looked at him with her big opaque peasant's eyes, had refused him nothing, and had been humble and compliant in every way. A kind of Bendico in a silk petticoat. [Bendico is the Prince’s Great Dane.]

And like in The Sopranos, violence is often paired with love. In the violent and turgid underbelly of youth’s passions, love is forceful, violence nearby and exciting, thrust together by the male will:

"No, Tancredi, no," her denial was in fact an invitation…

The joke seemed most piquant to her; that hint of rape perturbed her; her lovely throat quivered.

Seduction of a woman is conquest; betrothal is “unconditional surrender”.

The violence of lust doesn’t manifest itself only in the threat of rape, but resides in the souls of men, a sacred flagellation in the face of beauty. In the same room where one long dead Duke of Salina “had scourged himself alone,” where his very blood rained down on the land to redeem it, Tancredi finds redemption through beauty and through his lover, just as the old Salina found it through religious self-flagellation and blood:

"There," said Tancredi, "you're like that whip there, you're used for the same ends." And he showed her the whip; and because Angelica did not understand and raised her smiling head, lovely but vacuous, he bent down and as she knelt gave her a rough kiss which made her moan, for it bruised her lip and rasped her palate.

In this kiss where blood and pain and beauty and loveliness are united, so he consumes her, consumes her beauty as much as beauty can be consumed, and performs the holy sacrament of youth: the bloody love of beauty.

But such consumption is in vain. It is temporary, wistful. So Lucretius wrote about lovers’ attempts to become one:

In vain: they only cruise about the coast,

For bodies cannot pierce, nor be in bodies lost . . .

Yet that such moments bloom to only wilt and rot does not deny them. Such moments live under rare conditions of restraint and anticipation, of naivete and youthful sensuality. And so even in the shadow of future failures, of future sorrows, of the hollowness of their future marriage, of the weight of time and inevitable decrepitude — these moments gain eternal glory, to reside in some other world where such glories live eternal. And so it is in one such climax that Lampedusa gives us one of his most poignant portraits of lovely and fleeting youth:

Those were the best days in the life of Tancredi and Angelica, lives later to be so variegated, so erring, against the inevitable background of sorrow. But that they did not know then; and they were pursuing a future which they deemed more concrete than it turned out to be, made of nothing but smoke and wind. When they were old and uselessly wise their thoughts would go back to those days with insistent regret; they had been days when desire was always present because it was always overcome, when many beds had been offered and refused, when the sensual urge, because restrained, had for one second been sublimated in renunciation, that is into real love. Those days were the preparation for a marriage which, even erotically, was no success; a preparation which, however, was in a way sufficient to itself, exquisite and brief, like those melodies which outlive the forgotten works they belong to and hint in their delicate and veiled gaiety at themes which later in the finished work were to be developed without skill, and fail.

These delicate dances belong in the realm of the young. Young lovers inhabit their own universe with their own movements and language:

And with them always was Eros, malicious and tenacious, drawing the young couple into a game full of risk and fun. Both of them were still very near childhood, and they enjoyed the game in itself, enjoyed being followed, being lost, being found again; but when they touched each other their sharpened senses would overwhelm them, and his five fingers entwined in hers with that gesture dear to uncertain sensualists, the gentle rub of fingertips on the pale veins of the back of the hand, confusing their whole being, preluding more insinuating caresses.

Lovers want to be alone, or at least with strangers; never with older people, or worst of all with relatives.

In The Leopard only the beautiful are protagonists and everyone else an ugly prop:

They were sitting around in huddles, letting out an occasional hoot at an alarmed young man, and destined, apparently, to act only as background to three or four lovely creatures such as fair-haired Maria Palma, the exquisite Eleonora. Giardinelli, who glided by like swans over a frog-filled pool.

The glamours of youth are blunted with age into tedium:

The girls, incomprehensible beings for whom a ball was fun and not a tedious worldly duty, were chatting away gaily in low voices…

Young tenderness is paramount: it obliterates even death. It is not important that it fades. It is only important that it lived and it was magnificent:

[They were] unknowing actors made to play the parts of Juliet and Romeo by a director who had concealed the fact that tomb and poison were already in the script. Neither of them was good, each full of self-interest, swollen with secret aims; yet there was something sweet and touching about them both; those murky but ingenuous ambitions of theirs were obliterated by the words of jesting tenderness he was murmuring in her car, by the scent of her hair, by the mutual clasp of those bodies of theirs destined to die.

Decline

In Cavafy’s poem Candles, he compares a bright future to lit candles ahead and the past to “a mournful line of extinguished candles” behind. With time, one fears to look back.

I do not want to turn back, lest I see and shudder
at how fast the dark line lengthens,
at how fast the extinguished candles multiply.

And it is such regrets and reminisces that poison a vainglorious man like the Prince.

…he had found himself comparing this ghastly journey with his own life, which had first moved over smiling level ground, then clambered up rocky mountains, slid over threatening passes, to emerge eventually into a landscape of interminable undulations, all of the same color, all bare as despair. These early morning fantasies were the very worst that could happen to a man of middle age; and although the Prince knew that they would vanish with the day's activities, he suffered acutely all the same, as he was used enough to them by now to realize that deep inside him they left a sediment of grief which, accumulating day by day, would in the end be the real cause of his death.

And as with men, so do grand places, estates and empires — the accumulations of men — wilt and eventually evaporate:

The wealth of many centuries had been transmitted into, ornament, luxury, pleasure; no more; the abolition of feudal rights had swept away duties as well as privileges; wealth, like an old wine, had let the dregs of greed, even of care and prudence, fall to the bottom of the barrel, leaving only verve and color. And thus eventually it cancelled itself out; this wealth which had achieved its object was composed now only of essential oils-and, like essential oils, it soon evaporated.

The Prince notes that Sicily, long ago was “that America of antiquity”, a place disembarked upon in turn by Phoenicians, Dorians, and lonians.

America may or may not be the America of the today. But where or what will be the America of tomorrow?

Remember, Body...

Body, remember not only how much you were loved,
not only the beds on which you lay,
but also those desires which for you
plainly glowed in the eyes,
and trembled in the voice -- and some
chance obstacle made them futile.
Now that all belongs to the past,
it is almost as if you had yielded
to those desires too -- remember,
how they glowed, in the eyes looking at you;
how they trembled in the voice, for you, remember, body.

— C.P Cavafy