Free The Silent Duchess by Dacia Maraini

gossip about the important families of Palermo. When
    Aunt Teresa is there it is more difficult for the lawyer to hold his own, because she takes the words out of his mouth, and as far as town gossip is concerned she is far better informed than he is.
    Of all his relations, Marianna's aunt Teresa, sister of her father the Duke, is the one Duke Pietro likes best. With her he sometimes even talks with enthusiasm. They exchange news of the family. They exchange presents: reliquaries, rosaries that have been blessed, and family heirlooms. From the convent she brings little pastries filled with ricotta mixed with sugar and fennel seeds, which are a great delicacy. Duke Pietro guzzles them ten at a time, twitching his nose like a greedy mole.
    Marianna watches him chewing and thinks to herself that uncle husband's brain is in many ways not unlike the contents of his mouth: mixed up, chewed up, minced up, ground up, gobbled up. But he retains almost nothing of the food he gulps down, which may account for why he is so skinny. He puts so much concentration into chewing up his thoughts that nothing remains in his body but hot air. As soon as he swallows them he is consumed with haste to eliminate the dross which it seems to him is too worthless to remain in the body of a nobleman.
    For many of the noblemen of his age, who grew up and lived in the previous century, logical thought has something ignoble, even vulgar about it. To confront other minds, other ideas, is considered in principle an act of perfidy. The common people, with their crowd mentality, behave like flocks of sheep; only the nobleman stands alone, and out of this aloofness come his glory and his daring.
    Marianna knows he does not think of her as an equal, although he respects her as a wife. For him, his wife is the child of a new century, incomprehensible, with something trivial in her passion for change, for action, for building. All action is an aberration--dangerous, futile, false: so declare his melancholy eyes as they watch her going busily about the courtyard, still littered with bricks and bags of lime. Action is choice and choice arises out of necessity. To give shape to the unknown, to render it familiar, known, means leaving less to the freedom of chance, to the divine principle of idleness that only a
    true nobleman can allow himself, in imitation of the Heavenly Father.
    Even though she has never heard his voice Marianna knows exactly what is fermenting inside that sullen throat: a proud, attentive passion for the infinite possibilities of day-dreaming, of aimless aspirations and unattainable desires. A persistent voice, piercing the tedium and yet fully controlled, belonging to someone who never lets himself go. There's no doubt that is what he's thinking; she can tell from the breath that reaches her, hot and sour, whenever she is close to him.
    Among other things Duke Pietro considers this mania of his wife for staying at Bagheria even in the cold winter months quite idiotic when they have a large comfortable house in Palermo. And it also annoys him to have to give up his evenings at the Casino dei Nobile, where he can play whist for hours, drinking glasses of aniseed-flavoured water and listening in a bored way to the desultory conversations of his contemporaries.
    For her, on the other hand, the house in the Via Alloro is too dark, too cluttered with ancestral portraits and too frequented by unwelcome visitors. As for the journey from Bagheria to Palermo, she just cannot bear all the dust and the roads so full of potholes. And too often as she passes through the village of Acqua dei Corsari she has found herself face to face with the heads of bandits impaled on pikestaffs as a warning to the populace. Heads dried by the sun, infested by flies, often with chunks of arms and legs with blackened blood sticking to the skin.
    Useless to turn her head away or shut her eyes. A small whirlwind sweeps through her mind. She knows that shortly she will be passing