Free The Silent Duchess by Dacia Maraini Page B

unstoppable avalanche and had set the dressmakers all of a twitter. He had even confessed to her his love for a lace-maker called Esther, who worked in a house on his estate at Papireto. "I gave her a room that overlooked the street--you should see how delighted she is."
    Yet this man, who is her father and who loves her tenderly, caused her to experience the greatest horror of her life. But he does not know that. He did it for her benefit: a renowned doctor of the school of Salerno had advised that his daughter's deafness had arisen from some experience of great fear and that to cure it an even greater fear was needed. Timor fecit vitium timor recuperabit salutam. It was not his fault that the experiment failed.
    The last time he came to stay with her, he had brought her a present: a child of twelve, the daughter of a man sentenced to death, whom he had accompanied to the gallows. "Her mother died of the smallpox, her father was hanged, and he entrusted her to me when he was on the point of death. The White Brothers wanted to shut her away in a convent for orphans but I thought it would be better for
    her to be with you, so I give her to you as a present. But love her well, she's all alone in the world. They say she has a brother but no one knows where he has hidden himself. For all I know he's dead. Her father told me he had not seen the baby since he had given him to a country woman. Promise me that you'll look after her."
    So Filomena, usually known as Fila, has come to live in the villa. She has been clothed, provided for, and cherished, but she is still very distru/l. She talks very little or not at all; most of the time she hides behind doors, and she's unable to hold a plate in her hands without letting it drop. Whenever she can she escapes to the stables and sits down on the straw beside the cows so that when she comes back she brings with her a stench of manure that can be smelled at least ten feet away.
    It is a waste of time to scold her. In her terrified gaze, always on the alert, Marianna recognises something of her own childhood moods, so she lets her alone, much to the anger of Innocenza and Raffaele Cuffa, and even of her uncle husband, who endures the newcomer with great difficulty and only out of respect for his cousin and brother-in-law and his dumb wife.
     
    XI
     
    Marianna wakes with a start and a sensation of freezing cold. She peers into the darkness to see if her husband's back is in its customary place beneath the sheets, but however much she tries she cannot make out the usual bulge. The pillows seem untouched and the sheets flat. She is on the point of lighting a candle when she notices that the room is flooded with a pale-blue light: the moon hangs low on the horizon and scatters drops of milky white on to the black waters of the sea.
    Evidently, uncle husband has stayed in Palermo for the night, which he has been doing lately more and more often. This does not worry her-- indeed she looks on it with relief. Tomorrow she will at last pluck up courage to ask him to have his bed made up in another room, perhaps in the study beneath the picture of the Blessed Signoretto, between the books on heraldry and history. Recently he has taken to thrashing about in bed like a tarantula and these unexpected earthquakes keep waking her
    up.
    When this happens she would like to get up and go out but she does not do it for fear of waking him. If she were to sleep alone she would not have to keep asking herself whether she dare light a candle; she would be able to read a book or go downstairs into the kitchen to get a glass of water.
    Since her mother's death, followed a few weeks later by the sudden deaths of Lina and Lena, both of them victims of quartan fever,
    Marianna often wakes up with sad, disturbing thoughts, and is troubled by nightmares. Half-sleeping and half-awake, she is haunted by memories of her mother, to which she has never before paid much attention, as if she were seeing her for the first