The Roman Tales. Susan Ashe
have worried. After her father’s humiliating reprimand Giulio never came to Albano by day except, out of duty, to Sunday Mass. Elena’s mother, who adored her and refused her nothing, went out with her three times that day. But it was no use. Elena saw no sign of Giulio. She was desperate.
What can she have felt when that evening, going to inspect her father’s weapons, she saw that two arquebuses had been loaded and that most of the daggers and swords had been handled. She was only distracted from her deathly anguish by the extreme care she took to seem to suspect nothing. When she retired to bed at ten o’clock that night she locked the door of her room, which opened into her mother’s antechamber. She stayed close to the window, lying on the floor in such a way that she couldn’t be seen from outside. We can well imagine the anxiety with which she heard each hour strike. She no longer felt that her impetuous attachment to Giulio might in his eyes make her less worthy of love. That single day advanced the young man’s courtship further than six months of constancy and avowals of love.
‘What’s the use of lying?’ Elena asked herself. ‘Do I not love him with all my soul?’
At half-past eleven she clearly saw her father and brother stationing themselves for an ambush on the balcony below her window. Two minutes after midnight sounded at the Capuchin monastery, she also heard her lover’s footsteps halting beneath the large oak. She noticed with relief that her father and brother seemed to have heard nothing. Only love’s heedfulness could make out such a soft rustle.
‘They’re going to kill me,’ she thought, ‘but they must not find tonights’s letter. They will hunt down poor Giulio for ever.’ She made the sign of the cross and, with one hand gripping the iron railing of her window, she leaned out as far as possible. Before a quarter of a minute had passed, the posy, attached as usual to the long rod, brushed against her arm. She reached for the bouquet but in snatching the rod she accidentally knocked it against the balcony below. Instantly, two shots rang out followed by complete silence. Fabio, thinking in the dark that what had grazed the balcony might be a rope by which Giulio was climbing down from his sister’s room, had fired at her balcony. The next day, she found the mark of the ball, which had smashed against the iron railing. Signor de’ Campireali had fired into the road below, as Giulio had made a slight sound while trying to prevent the rod from falling.
Hearing noises overhead, Giulio had guessed what was to follow and had taken refuge under the overhang of the balcony.
Fabio quickly reloaded his arquebus and, against his father’s orders, ran into the garden, opened a little door which led to the street, and stealthily scrutinized the people who were strolling under the palazzo balcony. At that point, Giulio, who was not alone that evening, clung to a tree twenty paces from Fabio. Elena, leaning against the parapet of her balcony and trembling for her lover, launched into a loud conversation with her brother, asking if he had killed the thieves.
‘Don’t think you can fool me with your tricks, you slut,’ he cried out from the road, where he was prowling about. ‘Start weeping, as I’m going to kill the scoundrel who dares approach your window.’
He had hardly spoken when Elena heard her mother knocking on her bedroom door. The girl rushed to open it, saying she had no idea how the door came to be locked.
‘Don’t play the fool with me, my love,’ said her mother. ‘Your father is furious and may well kill you. Come and get into my bed with me and if you have a letter let me have it. I’ll hide it.’
‘Here’s the bunch of flowers,’ Elena told her. ‘The letter is hidden inside it.’
No sooner were mother and daughter in bed when Signor de’ Campireali burst into his wife’s room. He was on the way back from his oratory, where he had turned everything upside-down. It struck Elena that her father was as pale as a ghost and that he moved like a man who had learned his part perfectly. ‘I’m doomed,’ the girl told herself.
Approaching his wife’s bed on his way to his daughter’s room, shaking with fury but pretending to be completely calm, he said, ‘We rejoice in our children but we should weep tears of blood when those children are girls. Good God, is it possible their silliness can wipe out the honour of a man who for sixty years has not had the least taint upon him?’
With these words, he went to his daughter’s room.
‘He’s bound to find the letters,’ said Elena to her mother. ‘They are under the pedestal of the crucifix by the window.’
At once her mother leapt from the bed and ran after her husband. Crying out the worst things she could think of, she sent him into a rage. Blinded by fury, the old man tore his daughter’s room apart, but her mother was able to remove the letters without his seeing. An hour later, when Signor de’ Campireali had gone back to his own room, the house grew quiet again.
‘Here are your letters,’ Elena’s mother said. ‘I don’t want to read them. See what they nearly caused us. If I were you I’d burn them. Goodnight. Give me a kiss.’
Elena returned to her room in floods of tears. After what her mother had said, it seemed to the girl that she no longer cared for Giulio. She was about to burn the letters, but she could not stop herself rereading them first. So often and so closely did she study them that the sun was already high in the sky when at last she decided to follow her mother’s sensible advice.
The next day, a Sunday, Elena set off with her mother to the parish church. Luckily, her father did not accompany them. The first person she saw in the church was Giulio Branciforte. One look sufficed to see that he was unhurt. Her happiness knew no bounds, and the night’s events fled from her memory. She had prepared five or six little notes, jotted on scraps of dirty old paper picked up from the floor of the church. They all had the same message. ‘They know everything except his name. Let him not be seen in the road again. We will come here often.’
Elena dropped one of these scraps. A glance told Giulio, who picked it up and left. On her way home an hour later, another scrap of paper caught her attention on the steps of the palazzo. It looked exactly like the one she had used that morning. She took it without her mother seeing and read it. ‘In three days he’ll be back from Rome. At about ten o’clock on market days amidst the hubbub someone will start to sing.’
This journey to Rome seemed strange to Elena. ‘Is he afraid of my brother’s gun?’ she wondered. Love forgives all except voluntary absence, which is the worst of tortures. Instead of going by in sweet reverie, counting the reasons for loving a lover, life is beset with cruel suspicions. ‘But am I really to believe he no longer loves me?’ Elena wondered over the three long days of Branciforte’s absence. Her sorrow gave way to great joy when on the third day she saw him at midday coming along the road past her father’s palazzo. Giulio’s clothes were new, almost sumptuous. Never had his noble bearing and the brave carefree candour of his face appeared to greater advantage. Before now everyone in Albano had talked about Giulio’s poverty. It was the young men in particular who spoke of it most often, while the women, especially the girls, never stopped praising his handsome face.
Giulio spent the whole day strolling about the town. He seemed to be making up for the months of solitude his poverty had condemned him to. As befits a man in love, he was well armed beneath his new tunic. Besides his dirk and dagger, he wore a giacca, a mail waistcoat, which was uncomfortable but which cured Italian hearts of a woeful sickness to whose sharp attacks a man was ceaselessly prone in those days. This was the fear of being killed at every bend in the road by one of his enemies.
That day Giulio was hoping to catch a glimpse of Elena and, furthermore, he did not relish the idea of being alone in his isolated house. This is why.
Ranuccio, one his father’s former soldiers, who had served with him in ten campaigns in various condottieri regiments – most recently under Marco Sciarra – had followed his captain until his wounds forced him to retire. Captain Branciforte had reasons for not living in Rome. There he ran the risk of meeting the sons of men he had killed. Even in Albano he took care to steer clear of the legal authorities. Rather than buy or rent a house in town, he chose to build one in a spot where he could see anyone who approached. He found an ideal site