The Duke
About this book
The Duke lives outside Vallorgana in a villa filled with the records of the Cimamonte line. Villagers tolerate and gently mock his anachronistic status, while he prefers ancestral documents and the management of his property to contemporary social life.
Discovering that the village’s dominant man is removing timber presents an insult that can be ignored as trivial or answered as a challenge to the family name. Once the Duke acts, a dispute over land expands into a feud involving privilege, pride, and the natural world.
Matteo Melchiorre gives the narrative the sweep and reversals of a nineteenth-century novel while keeping its questions contemporary. Inherited authority appears both absurd and materially consequential when land, memory, and local dependence meet.
The Duke is translated by Antonella Lettieri. It is a portrait of an idiosyncratic man forced to decide whether ancestry is a private refuge or a public obligation.
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From the opening
First Chapter
There were perhaps ten crows. Clattering. Cawing. Careening. Blind with fury. They were whirling in a frantic fray, striking each other again and again. Then, all of a sudden, they scattered, darting in opposite directions and, in the newly cleared sky, only a knot of wings remained, an entangled tussle which twisted and swirled and eventually, as if struck by shot, plummeted through the air.
But as soon as the tangle hit the ground, right in the courtyard of the house, I discerned a buzzard instead: open beak, frightful eyes, low wings. The buzzard was pinning a young black crow to the ground, trapping it with its talons, and the crow was flapping its wings, and twisting its head, and wriggling, searching for some prospect of salvation.
I deemed it right to intervene. I grabbed a handful of gravel and threw it, making it hail down on that mortal contest, thus hoping to see it come to a bloodless resolution. The buzzard was hardly troubled. It flapped twice, then took off, carrying away the crow and tracing half a circle above the houses of Vallorgàna, and before long it disappeared into the distance, fading into the bare woods of the Mountain.
The whole affair struck me as unusual, or rather prodigious. Quite dissimilar indeed are the outcomes of these far from rare skirmishes between buzzards and crows in the skies of Vallorgàna, these ferocious frictions impossible to mediate which might also be, as far as I know, the perpetuation of some most ancient grudge. The crows need only hear the screech of the buzzard in the sky that they all fly up, as if unleashed. They surround the buzzard, shrieking and veering. They attack it with their beaks, in turn, relentless. The buzzard, taken by surprise, incredulous, having lost for an instant its line of flight, flutters about, uncertain, its wings clumsy. But, finally, the moment arrives when the buzzard, having found a gap, quickly gains elevation: up there, in fact, in the empty sky, is a threshold which the buzzard can cross but the crows dare not brush. So, having reached that boundary, the buzzard climbs still higher, its wings outstretched, almost floating, whilst the crows scatter about below. They draw circles of victory and alight again slowly, satisfied, onto their usual roosts.
In the skies above the house, the meadows around Vallorgàna, and the woods which plague the whole of Val Fonda and climb up the Mountain, this is the rule, since the crows are beyond count. And, what is more, they are impudent and overbearing. They tyrannise everything. They cross the sky in vast numbers. They dart around low, skimming the meadows or dodging the corners of houses. They glide wherever they please. They graze in the fields. They line up on the fences. They call out to each other. They rummage beneath the hedges. They post sentries at the rooftops and the tallest trees. They keep watch over the entire territory, mercilessly avenging any interference.
Given that the context is such, I imagined that the exquisite indifference of the buzzard must that day have been transformed into such a spectacular act of rebellion because they too, the buzzards, were clearly fed up with the crows’ tyrannies. Such insubordination is plausible, I said to myself, but a buzzard snatching a crow in flight, hurling it down through the air, pinning it to the ground, and finally carrying it away remains an unwonted event, never before seen or heard.
Consequently, I felt that such an event, and one so rare, might also be something of a premonition; but of course I attached no importance to it. I grabbed an armful of kindling and logs from the woodshed and went back inside the house to stock the kitchen fireplace, which is indeed the most ancient of all the ancient fireplaces in the house, and wait for the flames to come to life.
However, as often happens during the uncertain weeks straddling autumn and winter, that fire of mine proved to be weak and wavering, the comforting domestic inferno of full winter failing to rise in the black mouth of the fireplace. Instead, it quivered with a breath of melancholy.
It was then that I heard a knocking on the windowpane. And there, behind the glass, stood Nelso Tabióna. He was looking at me in silence, in keeping with his most personal principle of discretion. As a matter of fact, he deems it proper to announce himself in this manner. He arrives in the courtyard, methodically peeps through each window of the ground floor, and, when he finally sees me, stops there and waits in silence. If I notice him, fine. Otherwise, he actually raps his knuckles on the glass. Once, with all due respect, I told Nelso that this behaviour of his was perhaps a touch questionable. He took offence: according to him, it most certainly was not an impertinence but rather showed commendable consideration, a most distinguished discretion.
Nelso is not the kind of man to countenance the possibility of being wrong or to second-guess himself, his own thoughts, or his own actions, and here in Vallorgàna local wisdom has it that this is the natural inclination of a Tabióna. Therefore, he is prone both to carrying out great feats and to telling sensational tales about said feats; and this too, in the village, is ascribed to the instinctive, hereditary character of the Tabiónas. Nelso might tell the story of how he spotted a deer, but this deer will have the grandest antlers one ever did see. He might have felled a tree, but this tree will be so enormous that no one else but he, who is the prince of woodcutters, would have ever dreamt of notching it. Nelso might have driven up the Mountain in his four-by-four with no need for chains despite the heavy snowfall. He might have manoeuvred his trailer overloaded with logs in a space where not even a wheelbarrow could turn around.
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Faced with a man like this – who is, by the way, the person to whom I am closest in the village and who has on his side not only his aptitude for great feats but also such an age that, as he loves to repeat, he might be my father – faced with a man like this, as I was saying, one can only prepare oneself to listen and to admit to one’s own insignificance. This is certainly true, but at the same time one must give him demonstrations of resoluteness, decisiveness, and practicality, since a man who is not resolute, decisive, or practical is regarded by Nelso’s system of ethics as beyond shameful.
Therefore, on that day, after Nelso knocked upon the glass, I motioned to him to come inside, showing a certain imperious resolve. He pointed to his muddy boots, his woolly hat, his army jacket, the cigarette in his hand. He shook his head. “Get in!” I said. So he extinguished the cigarette on the sole of his boot, put the stub into his breast pocket, and came in.
In his eyes was a certain surliness and irritation. He was clearly expecting me to ask, all meek and fearful, whatever might be bothering him. But I chose to defy him. As soon as he sat at the table, I told him that I, and no one else but I, however unworthy I might be to stand in his presence, had just that minute seen something which he, perhaps, had not only never seen before but also never even imagined. Since this kind of provocation makes Nelso’s blood boil like nothing else in the world, he closed his eyes, shook his head, and said, “Come off it!”
I told him about the tangle of crows up in the sky, how a buzzard and a crow had come out of that jumble grappling; and then how the buzzard had hurled the crow down into the courtyard, I had thrown a handful of gravel, and the buzzard had flown away pulling the crow aloft.
Could Nelso Tabióna let me have even the smallest of satisfactions? Of course not. He said that it was impossible: with ten crows against a single buzzard, the crows have it; and even if, by some sort of fluke, the buzzard has it for once, it is impossible for a buzzard, though it is a strong bird, to pull up a crow, which is, after all, a heavy bird, and carry it off as if it were a mouse.
But I insisted, saying to Nelso that I was certain that I had seen what I had seen, and adding my explanation: the buzzard had rightfully rebelled against the crows tyrannising our skies.
Nelso then said, surprising me, that if there is one type of bird around here which could rebel against the crows, it must be the buzzard, and he admitted also that I was not wrong when I said that the crows were tyrants, since the increase in their numbers was most evident. And this was, according to Nelso, a recent development of the last few years, one of the many consequences, of course all known to him in great detail, of the ghastly times in which we live. “Even you must have noticed,” he said, “that Vallorgàna has become one long funeral. We’re on our way out. The crows move in. That’s about the gist of it.”
He added that, in these ghastly times, we also have to deal with crows which, on top of it all, are quite different from the crows of yore. Our crows are braver, shrewder, bolder: their black eyes sparkle with the blaze of arrogant intelligence and their flitting about radiates a new malice. This is why, according to Nelso, we should do as “our grandfathers” used to do.
So I asked him what it was that our grandfathers used to do. “They’d keep well hidden with their rifles,” he said, “and then, when the moment came, they’d blast any old crow out of the sky, or they’d catch one using some traps of theirs, cages with a decoy pigeon inside.” Nelso’s account of the subject was extremely detailed. He explained that, after they had eventually killed it, these grandfathers of ours would take the crow and hang it from a noose or, more often, crucify it, wings open. Then they would raise these banners of death upon branches or poles, in the middle of the fields or amongst the vines. So, these crows were crucified like thieves and adorned with scrolls made of tinfoil which wavered in the wind, reflecting the sunlight.
When I said to him that these were intolerable atrocities, abominations, brutalities, Nelso commented that, on the one hand, they at least kept the crows away from the fields and the vines and that, on the other, to survive in a world like the world used to be, one needed to have a strong stomach or else starve.
Having pronounced this statement, Nelso looked at his watch and threw his hat onto the table. “You have me here talking rubbish,” he said, “when I have something serious to tell you instead. Let’s get to the point. You’ve been had, Duke. Up in the Mountain, in your woods. You’ve been had.”
Second Chapter
I had been living up here in Vallorgàna for ten years now, alone, in my ancestors’ house, spending the best part of my days engrossed in the kinds of occupations which a fairly substantial estate always requires, an estate whose management, at any rate, never had to be especially prudent or frugal on my part. As a matter of fact, through no merit of my own, I have more than sufficient resources at my disposal, resources which have cascaded into my hands thanks to the extraordinary riches accrued by my ancestors over the centuries.
On the now far-off day when I first entered this cold, deserted abode with the determination to stay, I took it upon myself to study the fresco in a downstairs hall depicting the Cimamonte coat of arms, Cimamonte being the elevated name of my lineage. I reckoned that there was something irremissibly jarring between the fury of the rampant griffin represented on the escutcheon – the very same fury by which my ancestors had become what they had been – and my own condition of a stray survivor. And no less jarring than the predatory fury of the griffin were the mantled helm and, atop, the crest of a double-headed eagle.
This eagled crest is indeed a source of prime prestige, a title of indisputable nobility of which my ancestors have been able to boast ever since the day when they received Emperor Sigismund’s benevolence. This is all narrated in an authentic patent passed down the generations by my line which recites that, on 21 May 1412, in the city of Buda, the “rex Romanorum” Sigismund of Hungary conferred the title of count upon my ancestor “Iohannes Antonius Cimamontius” in exchange for services, the nature of which is not further qualified, rendered in Bohemia to the sovereign himself by that most remote Cimamonte. And so, thanks to Sigismund’s patent, my ancestors could bear the title of count.
But the people of Vallorgàna do not call me “The Count”, a title which, at a push, could even be deemed appropriate if one were to follow the letter of Sigismund’s by now most redundant patent. Instead, just like Nelso, everyone here in the village prefers to call me “The Duke”, thus bestowing upon me a title inaccurate in every way.
The merit of such superior investiture, if it can indeed be called so, is with my grandfather Ausilio Cimamonte. He was a man of extraordinary gentility who, during his stays at the house here in Vallorgàna, had been in the habit of carrying on with the bearing and demands of a grand prince. He spoke to the villagers with the same ceremony he might use with his peers in the city of Berua. He managed the estate surrounding the house with feudal severity. He disallowed the tenants any kind of familiarity when addressing him. He kept ancient rituals and meaningless ceremonials alive with a pertinacity already anachronistic in his time.
At any rate, with age, my grandfather Ausilio had become eccentric and garrulous. He took to wearing mismatched shoes as an affectation. He started frequenting the osterias, and there he played games of briscola and scopa with the villagers. Local wisdom has it that he also grew impertinent with young women. On the anniversary of our family’s elevation to the title of count, he came up with the custom of wearing an exceedingly archaic three-piece court suit, which I still have and which experts have assured me is typical of late-baroque fashion. Thus, every year on 21 May, my grandfather would spend that most sacrosanct memorial day of his attired in precisely that manner: breeches, long coat, and embroidered waistcoat.
Given my grandfather Ausilio’s princely eccentricity, the people of Vallorgàna had decided that the title of count was no longer sufficient as it did not do justice to his grand nobility. If marquis was too little and prince perhaps too much, duke seemed just right. And so it came to be that my grandfather Ausilio became known to the villagers as “The Duke”.
Such mockery had become possible only because the world of my grandfather was slowly facing extinction, and of course it was kept most secret. However, the moniker spread by word of mouth throughout the yards of Vallorgàna, in the osterias, and amongst our tenants, and eventually reached, God only knows how, my grandfather’s ear. Upon hearing it, he severed all his relations with the villagers and further still wrote to the Curia invoking certain articles of canon law which gave him licence to relinquish his right of patronage over the altar of San Pietro in the church, thus cancelling at a stroke his yearly donation to the parish itself.
When my grandfather had died, his only son, my father Achille, would set foot in Vallorgàna once or twice a year, if that, for a quick, uninterested inspection of the house. The truth is that my father never cared in the least about being a Cimamonte. The investments and the income from the estate were more than enough for him to lead a most respectable life in the city of Berua and to support my mother’s research liberally. On her part, my mother, whose name was Anna Brunner, was an Austrian bourgeois who, both by character and philosophy, was not particularly concerned with the affectations of nobility and had no interest whatsoever in the Cimamontes. All she ever cared about were her own velleities as an ethnographer, certain African tribes about which she even wrote something, and long study trips in Kenya.
Fifteen years ago, my father and mother both boarded that plane which later came crashing down in Kenya. As the last of the Cimamontes in the direct male line, I found myself in the position of becoming, aged not even twenty-five, the master of a more than sizeable inheritance and the lord of a line close to drying up.
I was young, I did not know how to find my bearings, and so, as is often the case with the indecisive, I resolved to test my mettle by forcing myself to make a clean break. Firstly, I chose to get rid of Palazzo Cimamonte, our city residence in Berua. I sold that magnificent, sumptuous, enormous yet oppressing and ungovernable abode for an extraordinary sum. My only scruple was to keep a small pied-à-terre in it.
Then, I carried out the rest of my plan: I left Berua and settled up here, at the foot of the Mountain, in my ancestors’ house, which had been completely uninhabited for over thirty years. I deemed it the ideal place to remain as if in suspension and slowly let myself fall in with the many everyday occupations required by the land and the house itself.
I had no other plan than to wake up every morning and do what needed doing, day after day. I got my estate back in hand. I cut down the scrub which had grown around the courtyard. I tried, though with no exceptional results, to return a certain vineyard of my ancestors’ to fruitfulness. I found someone to mow my meadows. As is natural, I invested the necessary sums into the upkeep of the house, adapting it to my needs as much as possible.
After some early, legitimate suspicions, the villagers did not rebuff me, perhaps also because I immediately got into the habit of asking them how to do this task, what was the best season to carry out that job, and so on. In short, I was trying to learn something from everyone. When one day, perhaps a year after my arrival, someone remarked that my hands were now all scratched-up and my nails hardened, I finally felt like I belonged here. It was then that the villagers – having read me, I suppose, as an odd type of decayed but affable nobleman – revived the title once chosen for my grandfather Ausilio, and I became The Duke.
But, in Vallorgàna, a nickname is both an attestation of citizenship and the ironic précis of the opinion which the community itself has formed of the individual. And when, as was my case, the nickname is the same as an ancestor’s, the implication is also that the community does not forget and that one cannot escape one’s past.
So, by calling me The Duke, the villagers were either implying that I was as eccentric as my grandfather, though inevitably of a quite different sort of eccentricity, or they were mocking the decline of my lineage. A decline which, after all, was most evident, and by virtue of which they could finally enjoy the sight of a Cimamonte with no servants and no tenants and with scratched-up hands and hardened nails.
In any case, I did not care what the village said or thought about me. I was certain that I was already living out the best fate I could possibly desire. Nothing important ever happened during the course my days. Nothing complex ever perplexed my gaze. No exception to my routine. No decision blocking my way. I lived in the best condition to which a man of my nature could aspire – the perfect, ideal condition.
But now, on an afternoon like any other, Nelso Tabióna had come to rap on my windowpane to tell me that, up in the Mountain, in my woods, I had been had.
Third Chapter
Almost at the top of the Mountain which looms over the house and the village of Vallorgàna, there are several hectares of woods which have belonged to the House of Cimamonte since time immemorial. The last ever to look after and sporadically extract some profit from them was my grandfather Ausilio. However, during his old age and after his death, the woods had lain abandoned to themselves, and so they would have stayed if, a short while after I moved into the house, Nelso Tabióna had not promptly set his eyes on them.
He had calculated how many hundredweight of firewood could be taken from that expanse of beech, he had spotted some fir and larch ready for the sawmill, and he had argued that the old trees were suffocating the younger ones, thus compromising the future of the woods. In short, Nelso had realised that there was a great deal to be made. Hence, we had agreed that the woods could use a proper thinning-out. Over some ten years, Nelso would cart down from the Mountain eighteen thousand hundredweight of firewood and several larch and fir for the sawmill. In return, I would receive an agreed-upon share of his proceeds and all the firewood I might need.
With regards to this business, things had gone smoothly until, one day several weeks earlier, an Albanian woodcutter who occasionally works under Nelso had made a schoolboy error. Whilst Nelso was securing a large fir to the skidder to drag it to the landing for loading, the worker had turned on the winch before receiving the signal. The conifer had jolted forward, breaking loose from the steel wire, spinning out of control, and slashing at Nelso’s shin. The resulting wound had been so deep that the bone was forever chipped.
Fully intending to show me the evidence of his accident, Nelso pulled up his trouser leg to the knee and said that the hole in his shin was still quite discernible to the touch. He also invited me to appreciate his scar so that I would be satisfied that the wound was already completely healed. He would be left with the hole, but never mind. All of this was to say that he was not to be blamed for not having been able to go up the Mountain for three weeks in a row and, consequently, for not having been aware of what was happening in his absence.
I asked Nelso to come to the point and he finally managed to spit it out. That morning, he had at last felt able to go back to work, so he had gone up the Mountain to pick up the logging where he had left off. He arrives at the woods, unloads his gear from his four-by-four, and immediately hears chainsaws singing beyond a rocky crest past which my woods extend for a few more hectares.
At first, Nelso had not heeded the matter because, he said, such hallucinations are fairly common on the Mountain: one might think that a chainsaw is singing only next door, but it could actually be quite a lot farther away instead, what with the air swirls, the echoes, and the vast silences. Besides, Nelso added, he had heard that several other landowners had agreed that the Cimín brothers’ logging business would carry out substantial logging of beech beyond the boundaries of my woods.
Except that, as soon as Nelso had turned on his own chainsaw, the chainsaws of the Cimín brothers had fallen silent. Nelso had waited half an hour, during which he had not heard a peep, and then, eventually made suspicious by the sudden silence, had gone to have a look. He had climbed over the rocky crest and there it was, an entire belt of trees clear-felled, gone.
But something did not add up. So Nelso had looked for his cadastral map and confirmed that, as far as he could see, the Cimín brothers had pushed into my land by over one hundred metres along a front of at least four hundred metres. According to Nelso’s reckonings, there was at least one thousand hundredweight of timber already stacked up and ready to be loaded.
Though up until that time I had not been particularly attentive about the management of those remote, most inconvenient possessions of mine, the news upset me exceedingly. It indeed upset me so that, feeling the landowner within me rise up, I told Nelso to go up the Mountain and bring down here, to the courtyard, all the one thousand hundredweight of which I was about to be robbed.
Nelso laughed at me. “No, Duke,” he said. “No. What on earth is going on in that head of yours? You wouldn’t achieve a thing, nothing at all, apart from starting a war. And whoever starts a war is always wrong, mark my words.”
“So what should I do?” I asked.
“They’re stealing from you, not from me,” said Nelso. “I’ve just come down here to warn you. You’ll know what to do, won’t you? I know what I’d do if these here woods belonged to me. But since they don’t, I’ll keep my mouth shut.”
Before offering his opinion, Nelso Tabióna had to be wooed, flattered, I almost want to say seduced. So I indeed wooed him with sweet words, flattered him with admissions of my own inexperience, and seduced him by blandishing his pride. After some more protestations, Nelso finally gave his instructions. “If these here woods belonged to me?” he said. “I’d go and talk to the Cimín brothers to set the record straight. I’d say to them that not a single hundredweight is leaving the woods. And if that doesn’t suit them, then they can bring in their appraisers, surveyors, foresters, or whoever else they please. If they don’t know how to read the boundaries, then they should find someone to teach them. That’s what I’d do.”
So I told Nelso that I would do exactly as he suggested: I would go to see the Cimín brothers the following day and give them an earful. But the word “tomorrow” sounded impious and sacrilegious to Nelso. He said that tomorrow would already be too late and that I needed to act fast. To set the record straight right away. Directly. That very minute.
And so, on that same afternoon, feeling somewhat reluctant, somewhat resolved, I went to the storehouse of the Cimín logging business, which is situated in a village just outside of the mouth of Val Fonda. I parked by a fence and walked in, circumnavigating stacks of timber, heaps of loppings, congealed tarpaulins, and clumps of dislodged soil. Scattered in the greatest disarray and following no apparent logic whatsoever, there were a couple of old containers, tractors, log splitters from different epochs, and circular saws strewn all around a ghastly shack with a smoking chimney.
As soon as I was spotted, two men emerged from this shack. They were in their thirties, dishevelled, olive-skinned, taciturn, and suspicious: the Cimín brothers. Upon stepping out, they were immediately followed by a small dog which appeared to be quite jovial and even smiling. She must have been the one creature onto which the two brothers poured all the sweetness of their hearts since, throughout our conversation, they kept taking turns to stroke her head, now crouching down, now summoning her up onto their laps.
I introduced myself. I pretended to have seen with my own eyes that they had been logging up on the Mountain. I complained about their trespassing. I professed myself sure that it had been an honest mistake. Nevertheless, it needed remedying. The two brothers seemed genuinely surprised. They apologised. They made a point of saying that they were always scrupulous with their work and were certainly not used to stepping into other people’s land. Be that as it may, I retorted, they had indeed stepped into, and felled, what was mine.
The brothers looked at each other. Then, the more angular of the two said that I was not speaking the truth. They were certain that they were in the right. They had not trespassed. However, since they had no intention of “quarrelling” over so little, the angular Cimín continued, they would leave all the disputed timber where it was: if I was adamant about my version of the facts, I was welcome to bring in a surveyor so that the exact boundaries could be drawn out.
I got worked up. I would certainly call a surveyor, I said. At this, the other brother, the more taciturn and lost in thought of the two, scooped up the small dog, mumbled in a falsetto some sweet nothings to her as he stared into her eyes, and finally gave her a little kiss on the head. And it was indeed him, the brother capable of so much tenderness, who then conquered the peak of the last word: as he kept clucking over his Nina, since Nina must have been the small dog’s name, and calling her his “sweetheart”, his “darling”, his “little star”, he finally chimed in to say that I had no reason whatsoever to complain.