The Lost Father by Marina Warner

Author:Marina Warner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448104161
Publisher: Random House

This was the family legend, on our side of the Atlantic; my Italian grandfather, amateur singer (baritone), wearer of waxed moustaches and kid gloves in the marriage photograph taken against a backdrop of a playing dolphin, died of a wound he got defending the honour of his sister. (The years between, the lapse of nineteen years contracted into a single instant in the telling.) In my teenage eye, my duelling grandfather levelled his pistol, narrowed his smouldering eyes over the sights and pressed; the hammer fell, the powder sparked and the bullet sped fiery and deadly down the polished bore, smoking out of the end of the gun, but too late, askew, for he was already falling, mortally hit, as the Scarpia of your story, the villain, unloaded his pistol too but with more deadly aim, a hair’s breadth readier in response, cold and prompt as consciencelessness itself. Davide would appear to me dressed in frock coat and high collar, with the nipped waist of the Regency buck, standing sideways, poised, his shooting hand flung outwards like a single arm of the crucified Christ, the other on his hip to steady his stance; or else I saw him in ribbed and finned and damascened armour, like the St Georges of Carpaccio and Uccello, who look as if they’ve flayed a predecessor of the dragon and given its hide to an armourer to tailor into a suit. Oh, the duellist in the chivalrous literature the young are given has become the heir of the scienza cavalleresca, he continues the practice of knight errantry, shielding damsels and offering all varmints – and infernal monsters – just vengeance. To me, the calcareous landscape of the south, gaping with the cave lairs of dragons, was the natural backdrop of the avenger’s exploits. I saw your father against it, tilting with the beast, while the sister he was fighting for stood by, her peaky profile outlined over her hands joined in prayer, surveying unmoved the drama of her vindication. For the princess in the richly diapered full-skirted dress at the side of the duel is far too maidenly to cheer when the lance pierces her defamer and stitches his tongue to the floor of his fiery gullet and thence twists through to his blackguard’s heart.

The Lombards brought trial by combat to Italy along with the pigeon-breasted sirens and harpies that spout rainwater from the eaves of the basilicas in Riba and Dolmetta and Tirrani, and the straining slaves who bear the episcopal throne of Riba on their shoulders, and the solemn lions couchant at church doorways throughout Ninfania. But somewhere down the years the outcome of the duel no longer proved the innocence of the victor or the wrongdoing of the loser. Duelling became an end in itself, the only way to expiate a wrong in honour, and set aside the consequence. When my grandfather heard that clamouring and understood, sickeningly, what he had to do, he also knew he had only to fight with Tommaso to clear the name of his family.

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