The Silent Duchess by Dacia Maraini Page B

light-blue paper scented with violets. Then she uncovered the baby's feet and bit them gently. "With feet like this he'll make a dancer", she wrote. Unlike her usual self, she has really enjoyed writing.
    She has been laughing, she's been eating, she's even abstained from taking snuff for a few hours, and at the end of the day she withdraws to the guest room together with the Duke and they sleep till after eleven next morning.
    All the dependants of the villa have wanted to hold this long-awaited baby in their arms: the cowman Ciccio Cal@o held him gently in his hands furrowed with cuts and black with dirt. Lina and Lena kissed the baby on his mouth and his feet with surprising tenderness. And there was Raffaele Cuffa, who put on a new redingote of damask decorated with arabesques in the Ucr@ia colours, and his wife Severina, who never leaves the house because she gets headaches that almost blind her; Don Peppino Geraci the gardener, accompanied by his wife Maria and their five children, all with red hair and eyebrows, all unable to utter a word through shyness; and Peppino Cannarota the footman, with his big son who works as a gardener in the Palagonia household.
    They pass the new-born baby from hand to hand as if he were the Infant Jesus, smiling like proud fathers, hindered by the long trailing folds of the lace dress, sniffing blissfully the scents that emanate from the small princely body.
    Meanwhile Manina crawls round the room on all fours with only Innocenza to take care of her. She pushes herself forward on hands and knees underneath the tables, while the guests come and go, trampling over the precious rugs from Erice, spitting in the vases from Caltagirone, and fishing with both hands in the dish piled with nougat from Catania that Marianna keeps by her bed.
    One morning her father the Duke came in with a surprise--an entire writing outfit for his dumb daughter: a reticule made of silver mesh, and inside it a small bottle with a screw stopper for the ink, a glass case for the pens, a little leather bag for the ash, as well as a notebook held on by a ribbon fastened with a little chain to the silver reticule. But the biggest surprise of all was a small portable table, in the lightest of wood, made so that it could hang from her belt by two gold chains.
    "In honour of Maria Louisa di Savoia Orl@eans, the youngest and most intelligent queen of Spain ever. Let her be an example to you. Amen." With these words her father the Duke had inaugurated the new writing outfit.
    At the insistence of his daughter he was inspired to write a brief history of this unforgettable queen, who died in 1714:
     
    A young girl of no great beauty, but full of life. Daughter of King Victor Amadeus, our king from 1713, and Princess Anna of Orl@eans, niece of Louis XIV. She became the wife of Philip Very of Spain at the age of sixteen. Soon afterwards her husband was sent to Italy to fight and she, at the suggestion of King Louis of France, was made Regent. There was much grumbling that a girl of sixteen should be made head of state. However, it was subsequently acknowledged that it had been a choice that was fully justified. The young Maria Louisa had a talent for politics. She used to spend many hours in the Council of State, listening to everything and everyone, intervening with brief and well-aimed observations. When an orator went on speechifying for too long, the Queen would pull out her embroidery from beneath the table and concentrate on it. The message was understood! As soon as a speaker saw her reaching for her embroidery he made haste to cut short his speech. In this way the sittings of the Council were much shorter and more to the point.
    She kept up a correspondence with her uncle the Sun King and listened discerningly to his advice, but when she had to say no she said it--and how forthrightly too! The elder statesmen were nonplussed in the face of her political intelligence; the people adored her.
    When the defeat of the Spanish