The Leopard

It is July 1888. For the past 12 years or more, the Prince has felt life ebbing out of him slowly, like grains of sand slowly falling down an hourglass. The awareness is constantly with him. At first, it doesn’t bother him; it feels like his personality is slowly fading away in order to be rebuilt elsewhere. The Prince even feels contempt for others who don’t seem aware of their decline. His daughters imagine an afterlife just like this one, and Maria Stella clung to the present life even while suffering from diabetes.

Once, Tancredi wryly told the Prince that his uncle was “courting death.” The Prince believes the courtship is over and that death has said “yes”—it’s just a question of when their elopement will take place. Now, his body is catching up to what he has known for years. He can feel life flowing out of him in waves, like a great waterfall. Presently, the Prince is sitting on the balcony of a hotel, overlooking the sea of Palermo. He had arrived that morning, after traveling to Naples to see a specialist; the homeward journey had been slow, with 40-year-old Concetta and his grandson Fabrizietto accompanying him. The railway journey was been slow, dreary, and humiliating. The Prince forced to ask his grandson for help with basic necessities.

When the Prince sees the forced, cheerful faces of his family on the arrival platform, he suddenly realizes what the doctor’s diagnosis had really been—and at that moment he hears the crashing of the waterfall. When he returns to consciousness, he is lying in the carriage with Tancredi, who smiles at him tenderly; the family is consulting outside. Tancredi explains that they’re going to the Trinacria hotel instead of making the long journey to the villa.

At the hotel, a haggard-looking doctor prescribes camphor drops, and soon the Prince feels a little stronger. He gazes at himself in the mirror: he looks withered and unkempt, with three days’ beard growth—“a Leopard in very bad trim.” He wonders why God never lets anyone die looking like oneself. The Prince thinks of that soldier in the Salina garden, and even Paolo, after being thrown from his horse. The roar of the waterfall must have been much louder for those young men.

A servant comes in and undresses and bathes the Prince, washing off layers of railway soot. Bothered by the stale smells of the hotel room, the Prince orders that a chair be brought onto the balcony and is laboriously helped into it. He is tired, but taking a nap right before death seems silly, a waste. He smiles at this thought. The Prince slowly takes in the view of Sicily’s hills, beyond which lies his home, with its observatory, its paintings, and the bed in which Stella had died. Thinking about the loss of his beloved possessions, the Prince forgets about his own death.

The Prince thinks of his sons. Giovanni is the only one who resembles him; he sends occasional greetings from London, where he works in the diamond industry. His absence from the family has been a kind of living death. Meanwhile, there’s young Fabrizietto: he is handsome and loveable, but the Prince also finds him “odious,” with middle-class tastes. The Prince realizes that he is really the last of the Salinas. That’s because a noble family’s survival lies in its traditions and memories; none of his offspring have memories that aren’t typical and bland, the same as their peers’. The Prince’s Salina name will become emptier and emptier—he was wrong to think it would endure. Garibaldi, he thinks, has won after all.

The Prince hears Concetta talking in the next room; she’s fussing about sending for a priest. Fleetingly, he thinks of refusing, but realizes that the Prince of Salina must die with a priest by his side. Why should he resist the comfort that most dying people seek? Soon, he hears the familiar tinkle of the bell accompanying the priest as he carries the sacrament from the church across the street. Tancredi and Fabrizietto help the Prince back into the hotel room, and he gestures his kneeling family members away so that he can confess. But when he tries to speak, his sins seem both too petty and too overwhelming to say aloud—his whole life has been sinful. Seeing the contrite look on the Prince’s face, the priest absolves him and gives him the sacrament.

Tancredi and Fabrizietto come back into the room and hold the Prince’s hands. His grandson looks at him with frank curiosity; Tancredi chats gaily about work and politics. The Prince is grateful for the noise of gossip, although he doesn’t listen to it. While his nephew talks, the Prince is busy making a balance sheet of his life. He tries to pick out the truly happy moments: the weeks just before and after his marriage; Paolo’s birth; talks with Giovanni before he left; hours spent in the observatory. As Tancredi shoos off a noisy organ grinder who’s playing on the street, the Prince adds Tancredi to the list of his joys, as well as the dogs he has loved throughout his life.

The Prince thinks of other bits of satisfaction in his life, which are just “grains of gold mixed with earth.” He remembers realizing that Concetta is the true Salina in looks and character. The Prince also thinks of a few moments of passion and of receiving a public award for his astronomy work. The beauty of women also brought him joy, of course—including a woman in a brown dress and suede gloves whom the Prince had seen at the train station yesterday. She’d seemed to be looking for him through the crowd. The Prince tries to calculate how much time he has truly lived. The calculation, difficult for him now, comes out to no more than a year or two, out of more than 70.

The Prince realizes that Tancredi has hurried from the room; the waterfall noise has given way to an ocean roar. He must have suffered another stroke. The Prince sees the reflection of the sea and hears a death rattle, not realizing it’s his own. His frightened family gathers around him; they are all weeping, even Tancredi. Then, among them, he sees the young woman in the brown dress—she’s wearing a hat with a veil, through which he glimpses her charming face. She works her way gently through the crowd of mourners, and the Prince realizes that she is the person he’s always yearned for. When she reaches his side, she lifts her veil, and her modest yet lovely face surpasses his expectations; she is more beautiful than she had looked among the stars. The crashing waves subside.