The Silent Duchess by Dacia Maraini Read Free Book Online

heads were not shaped like lions as the myth has it, but instead had the faces and necks of women. When she saw them for the second time, she was aware that in some strange way they resembled her, and she found this quite disquieting. How had he come to draw her in those weird mythical beasts when he had only seen her once, on the day of her wedding, when she was barely thirteen years old?
    Beneath those blonde heads with large blue eyes stretches the body of a lion. It is covered with bizarre curls, its back waving with crests, feathers, mane. Its paws are spiky, with claws shaped like a parrot's beak; its long tail makes rings that spiral backwards and forwards with forked tips, like the dogs that so terrified her mother. Some carry half-way down their backs the small head of a goat that juts out, sharp-eyed and cheeky. Others do not, but they all look through their long eyelashes with an expression of foolish astonishment.
    The painter cast admiring glances at her, not at all embarrassed by her dumbness. Indeed he had immediately begun to talk to her with his eyes, without reaching out to the small sheets of paper she kept sewn to her waist together with a wallet for pens and ink. The bright eyes of this small hirsute painter from Reggio Calabria were telling her that he was all ready to knead with his dark chubby hands the milk-white body of the young Duchess as if she were dough placed there to rise for him.
    She had regarded him with contempt. His bold, arrogant way of presenting himself displeased her--for Heaven's sake, what was he? A simple painter, an obscure nobody come up from some Calabrian hovel, brought into the world by parents who were probably cowmen or goatherds.
    But later she laughed at herself in the darkness of her bedroom, for she recognised that her social disdain was a lie, that there had risen in her an agitation she had never before experienced, an unexpected fear that almost throttled her. Up
    till now no one had revealed in her presence such a visible and unrestrained desire for her body, and this seemed to her quite unheard of, but at the same time it filled her with curiosity.
    The next day she had the painter informed that she did not want him, and the day after she wrote him a note to begin work. She put two boys at his disposal to mix the colours for him and clean his brushes. She would remain shut away in the library, reading.
    And so it was. But twice she went out on to the landing to watch him while, perched on the scaffolding, he busied himself drawing with charcoal on the white walls. It excited her to watch the movements of his small hairy hands. His draughtsmanship was confident and graceful, demonstrating a skill so profound and delicate that it could not fail to arouse admiration.
    His hands daubed with colour, he rubbed his nose, smearing it with yellow and green, grabbed a slice of bread and tripe, and lifted it to his mouth, scattering crumbs of bread and fragments of offal.
     
     
    VIII
     
    No one expected that the third child, or rather the third daughter, would be born so quickly, almost a month early, with feet foremost like a calf in a hurry. The midwife had sweated so much that her hair stuck to her head as if she'd had a bucket of water emptied over her.
    Marianna had followed the movements of the midwife's hands as if she had never seen them before: put to soak in a basin of hot water, softened in lard, making the sign of the cross on her chest and then once again being immersed in water. Meanwhile Innocenza kept putting handkerchiefs soaked in essence of bergamot over her mouth and on her belly, stretched taut with pregnancy.
     
    Come out, come out, you little sod
    With help from our Almighty God.
     
    Marianna knew the lines and read them on the lips of the midwife. She knew that the midwife's thoughts were on the point of reaching out to her and that she had done nothing to fend them off. Perhaps they would alleviate the pain, she said
    to herself, and concentrated