Nobody knows much of anything about Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa these days, and it is a real shame: toward the end of his life, almost as an afterthought, he produced one masterpiece: a novel entitled The Leopard that not only captures the decay of a form of life – the trappings and habits of an ancient aristocratic family of which Tomasi was the last – but also announces the birth of modern Sicily.
Giuseppe Tomasi, the childless son of a family that liked to think of itself more properly Greek in origin than Sicilian, appeared to be on the verge of concluding a perfectly unproductive life of leisure but, late in day, decided to commit to writing the final word (“I remember!”) on the world into which he was born. It was to be Tomasi’s last chance to see to bear witness to the articulated, fully functioning universe of his youth.
The story The Leopard tells is led along on the undertow of a subtle irony that is held immobile by the magnification of sensations and rituals (of hunt, ball, church service), the lived pantomime of the author’s coming-to-be now accessed by pushing aside the clutter of the intervening years.
Tomasi’s re-vision of his upbringing burns clear through any lingering sentimentality, any initializing cultivation that had kept him one remove from the facts on the ground and forces a confrontation with legacy and lineage by putting his latter self in view of a line of sight encompassing the destruction of the old power structure (for which the American occupation served as catalyst) on the island and its return, which can be traced to the growing influence of the mafia.
Much the same as these interlocking zones of power lie unremarked and unseen but are nevertheless pervasive in Sicilian society, so too is The Leopard an understated yet extended meditation on permanence and transformation unique to Tomasi and delivered through his peculiar diffidence. Tomasi’s great secondary theme describes the ineluctable return of the status quo vouchsafed through a relentless co-optation of new realities, hence The Leopard’s famous dictum “everything has to change so that everything can remain the same.”
Inasmuch as The Leopard is a work of memory or, more properly, a terrific effort to unfold a tale wound tightly into a storehouse of memories spanning one singular life, the three short stories brought together in The Professor and the Siren continue this deepening plunge into the well of memory, especially the titular fable.
Again, in The Professor and the Siren, Tomasi sets the stage for a sort of battle of wills between two versions of himself: the young narrator, Paolo Corbera, is the last offspring of an old aristocratic family now fallen on hard times, and the famed yet aged Hellenist (Rosario La Ciura) serves as a mouthpiece for an overpoweringly cynical yet prescient view of modern life. After accidentally meeting in a coffeehouse, Corbera discovers La Ciura’s identity and, La Ciura, in turn, appears oddly contented to learn that Corbera’s father would likely have been his landlord back on the old island (both, it turns out, are displaced Sicilians). La Ciura still holds in high regard Corbera’s noble lineage – as if he expected Corbera to possess an antiquated reserve – and bursts into rages at what he perceives as Corbera’s frittering away his young life chasing after women, going to the picture house and other such nonsense.
On the face of it The Professor and the Siren is yet one more iteration of the age-old clash between youth and experience but, close up, it emerges that the author uses this conflict as a way station that clears a path to another story. Corbera’s unthinking openness to experience, his as yet unbroken astonishment before the world and all the things in it animates an ancient memory in the older man. La Ciura through Corbera is once again possessed by distant events that spanned only a Summer many years earlier. It is at this point that we enter a kind of fable in which the world of La Ciura’s youth is conveyed in terms that give the impression of an archaic experience of lived reality pitted against, or joining forces with, an infernal Sicilian summer:
The heat was violent in Augusta too, but, no longer reflected back by walls, it produced not dreadful prostration but a sort of submissive euphoria; the sun, shedding its executioner’s grimace, was content to be a smiling if brutal giver of energy.
The young La Ciura, retreating from the torrid interior, finds respite at a friend’s seaside cottage. Early one morning a mermaid overhears La Ciura reciting Greek to himself as he fishes and instantly they are drawn to each other through an overwhelming magnetism. Tomasi’s language here brilliantly evokes Corbera’s visceral response to an experience that seems to us moderns impossibly foreign yet is, we are led to believe, kept at arm’s length only through the sublimation of animal instinct. That this encounter is in some sense intended as a stand-in for a prototypical Sicily long since chased out of the world yet still remembered in everything that is coming to its end is pounded home in alternating tones as the affair comes to its conclusion:
…a few isolated blood-warm drops of rain fell. The nights brought to the distant horizon slow mute flashes of lightning, deduced one from the other like the cogitations of a god. Mornings the dove-gray sea suffered for its restlessness; evenings it rippled without any perceptible breeze, in gradations from smoke gray to steel gray to pearl gray.
Reading back over La Ciura’s tale we notice that the language moves in a series of alternating pairs (to – from, light – dark, seen – hidden, presence – absence). In this back-and-forth we can see the shape of Tomasi’s tremendous effort in his final years to literally re-member his life, drawing on every last scrap of strength in an attempt to set the events of La Ciura’s Summer long ago in front of his eyes and see them unfold again and for the first time: La Ciura’s tale transforms in Tomasi’s hands into an effort to program the game and play it at the same time. We can understand this maneuver as the result of a fatalism peculiar to Tomasi – a fatalism shot through with a raging against the dying of ancient light: Tomasi and La Ciura both condemn modern Sicily as profoundly degenerate and yet also discern in the latter an unchanging aspect, a stubborn reticence before modernity and progress. The Professor and the Siren concludes Tomasi’s effort to move one step past The Leopard but, much like the extinct wildcat to which the latter somewhat ironically refers, remains enigmatic to the end.
