The Roman Tales. Susan Ashe
Prince Fabrizio Colonna.
Captain Branciforte did not much care about his son’s future. When he retired from service at only fifty, but riddled with wounds, he calculated he could live for another ten years, spending each year a tenth of what he had earned in the looting of towns and villages at which he’d had the honour to partake.
He purchased for his son a vineyard that brought in thirty scudi. This was in response to a bad joke by one of Albano’s leading citizens, who had once told him when they were arguing over the interests and the honour of the town that in fact it was the business of a rich landowner like Branciforte to give advice to the elders of Albano. The captain bought the vineyard and announced that he would buy many more when, coming across the wag in a lonely place, he shot him dead.
After eight years of this kind of life, the captain died. His aide-de-camp Ranuccio adored Giulio but, growing tired of idleness, the older man returned to Prince Colonna’s service. He often came to visit ‘his son Giulio’, as he called him, and on the eve of a dangerous assault on the prince’s castle of La Petrella, Ranuccio had taken Giulio to fight alongside him.
Noting the boy’s prowess, the old soldier said, ‘You must be a great simpleton to live near Albano as the lowest and poorest inhabitant of the place when, with your father’s name and what I could do for you, you could be one of our leading soldiers of fortune and make yourself a pile of money.’
Giulio was tormented by these his words. He’d learned some Latin from a priest, but as his father had always scoffed at everything the priest said, apart from Latin Giulio had received no education. Despised for his poverty, isolated in his lonely house, he had nevertheless developed a certain degree of good sense whose boldness would have astonished learned men. For instance, before he fell in love with Elena, and without knowing why, he adored fighting but loathed looting and pillage, which, in his father and Ranuccio’s eyes, was akin to the short farce that follows the high tragedy. Since Giulio had fallen in love with Elena, the good sense he had acquired through his lonely ponderings tormented him. This soul, once so carefree but now full of passion and misery, dared confide in no one. What would Signor de’ Campireali say if he knew Giulio to be a soldier of fortune? Any accusation he could now level against Giulio would be justifiable.
Giulio had always relied on soldiering as a sure means of earning his way when he’d spent what he could get for the gold chains and other trinkets he’d discovered in his father’s strongbox. If, poor as he was, Giulio had no scruples about carrying off the daughter of the wealthy Signor de’ Campireali, it was because in those days fathers disposed of their possessions as they thought fit, and Signor de’ Campireali might well leave his daughter a mere thousand scudi. Giulio was preoccupied with a different problem. First, where would he settle with young Elena once he had carried her off and married her? Second, what would they live on?
After Signor de’ Campireali’s cutting insult, which so wounded Giulio, he spent two days in a wild state of fury and despair. He had nearly decided to kill the insolent old man and spent night after night in tears, until at last he determined to consult Ranuccio, his only friend in the whole world. But would his friend understand?
Scouring the Faggiola forest in vain, Giulio finally found the old soldier on the Naples road beyond Velletri, where Ranuccio was setting up an ambush. He was lying in wait with a considerable force for Ruiz d’Avalos, the Spanish general, who was on his way to Rome by an inland route, forgetful that just before, in a large gathering, he had spoken scornfully of Prince Colonna’s soldiers of fortune. His chaplain reminded the general in no uncertain terms of this little matter. Ruiz d’Avalos decided to arm a ship and proceed to Rome by sea.
As soon as Captain Ranuccio heard Giulio’s tale, he said, ‘Give me an exact description of this Signor de’ Campireali before his rashness costs the life of some worthy citizen of Albano. As soon as we’ve finished our business here, whatever the outcome, you’ll go to Rome and make yourself conspicuous in all the inns and public places. You must not be suspected because of your love for the girl.’
After struggling to calm his father’s old friend, Giulio was forced to get angry with him. ‘Do you think I’m asking for your sword?’ he said. ‘I assure you, I have a sword of my own. It’s your advice I’m asking for.’
As always, Ranuccio concluded with these words. ‘You are young; you’ve never been wounded. It was a public insult. A man whose honour has been besmirched is despised even by women.’
Giulio told him he wanted to give more thought to what his heart desired. Despite Ranuccio’s insistence that he take part in the ambush on the Spanish general’s escort, where, he said, there was honour to be won, not to mention doubloons, Giulio returned to his little house. It was there that, on the eve of the day Signor de’ Campireali fired on him with his arquebus, Giulio had received Ranuccio and his corporal on their return from Velletri. Ranuccio forced open the little strongbox in which Captain Branciforte used to keep the gold chains and other jewels which he thought it unwise to sell immediately after a raid. Ranuccio found two scudi.
‘I advise you to become a monk,’ he said to Giulio. ‘You have all the qualifications. Love of poverty – here’s the proof. And humility. You let yourself be vilified in the middle of the street in full view of everyone by a wealthy citizen of Albano. All you lack is hypocrisy and greed.’
Ranuccio insisted on putting fifty doubloons into the strongbox. ‘I give you my word,’ he said to Giulio, ‘that if in a month’s time Signor de’ Campireali is not buried with all the honour due his nobility and wealth, my corporal here will come with thirty men and raze your house and burn your miserable furniture. Captain Branciforte’s son must not on the excuse of love cut a sorry figure in this world.’
That evening, when Signor de’ Campireali and his son fired twice, Ranuccio and his corporal had taken up positions under the stone balcony. Giulio had with difficulty restrained them from killing Fabio or abducting him when he rashly came into the garden. To calm Ranuccio, Giulio reasoned that a young man like Fabio might make something useful of himself, while a guilty old sinner like his father was no good for anything but to be buried.
The day after this exploit Ranuccio hid deep in the forest, and Giulio left for Rome. His pleasure in buying fine clothes with Ranuccio’s doubloons was cruelly offset by a very unusual idea for those days and one which led to the success he ultimately achieved. ‘Elena must know me for who I am,’ he thought. Any other man of his day would simply have revelled in the game of love and carried Elena off, not caring what she might have thought of him or what became of her six months later.
On the afternoon that Giulio displayed the fine clothes he’d bought in Rome, he discovered from his friend old Scotti that Fabio had left town on horseback for a property of his father’s down on the plain. Giulio later saw Signor de’ Campireali, accompanied by two priests, setting off along the magnificent avenue of green oaks that crowns the rim of the crater in which the lake of Albano lies. Ten minutes later an old woman came marching into the Palazzo Campireali, pretending to be selling fruit.
The first person she met was Elena’s maid and confidante Marietta. The girl blushed to the roots of her hair when she was presented with a beautiful bouquet. The letter hidden in it was unusually long. Giulio recounted what had happened to him since the night of the gunshots. But, owing to his unusual modesty, he did not dare admit what any other young man of his time would have been proud to reveal – that he was the son of a captain renowned for his exploits and that he himself had already shown his courage in more than one battle. Giulio could imagine what old Campireali would say about this. Sixteenth-century girls, in sympathy with republican ideas, admired a man much more for what he had made of himself than for the fortune amassed by his forebears or for their famous exploits. That is, girls from the common people thought this way. Daughters of the wealthy or noble classes were afraid of bandits, and, quite naturally, held nobility and wealth in great esteem.
Giulio finished his letter with these words:
I do not know if the fashionable clothes I bought in Rome will banish from your memory the cruel affront someone close to you made about my repulsive appearance. I could have taken revenge; I should have. My honour demanded