Professor Tomasi di Lampedusa. The Leopard’s workshop told by Francesco Orlando
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The writer and the pupil. Henry Beyle publishes “Memory of Lampedusa”. The writer’s red pen, the secrets of the first copy typed in a closet. Here is the casket of the “Prince”
He feared it was “filthy”. It was 1957 and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa had finished writing the Leopard. He had written it with a red ballpoint pen and a good part of it on the bar tables. In Palermo, in Palazzo Butera, his home, a typewriter was missing. A year earlier, a listless boy rang at his door. His name was Francesco Orlando, he was nineteen years old, and was destined for a very sad legal career. His father, Camillo, a lawyer, owned a small office in one of the central streets of the city. It is in that study, in a “small room”, on even days, the closing days, that Orlando typed the first copy of the novel. When Orlando and Lampedusa meet it was summer.
Orlando is nothing more than a university freshman who smears verses and with the myth of Don Giovanni. Lampedusa is already an “exceptional old man”, the husband of a singular psychoanalyst. Noble, decayed, fat, with olive skin, a forehead as broad as a watermelon, he lives in a building with no heating and only a “noisy and tear gas” gas stove. His terrace has a view of the port of Palermo. He spends his days alternating stops in cafes. He’s greedy. He stops first at the Pasticceria del Massimo, then at the Mazzara bar. He always walks with a leather bag full of books. It’s a kind of treasure bag that he buys at the Flaccovio bookstore. It is there that he raids Pléiade, the most illustrated European series of classics published by Gallimard. He has studied English and knows it perhaps better than Italian.
Orlando does not speak English. Lampedusa offers himself as a master, or rather, almost embarrassedly specifies: “I impanco a master.” He tells Orlando, the pupil who will recount those unforgettable years, there are three in all, in his “Memory of Lampedusa” (a Byzantine golden book, which is republished by the Henry Beyle publishing house) that lucky is he who reads for Hamlet for the first time in English: “The first, dear Orlando, is a date”. The greatest luck that can instead happen to a twenty-year-old is to find a model, one who “plans like a master”. Orlando thanks to Lampedusa finds the courage to abandon Law and enroll in the Faculty of Letters. He will become our best-known French scholar and his texts masterpieces of comparative literature. Lampedusa explains to him that true privilege is “knowing how to get bored” and that Italians use the word “heart” too many times. He advises him to drop them even in his verses (“Here, dear Orlando, another heart has fallen”) and not to go too far in sentimentality.
It would be wrong to call him a father (the risk that all masters run) just as Orlando was not a son (remaining the son of a master is the greatest misfortune that can happen). Both agree to meet every afternoon at half past five and study English grammar. They exchange books, opinions. Lampedusa had separated her palace into literary floors. The first was the novels, the second the historical essays. The “non-master” loved Stendhal, just as Leonardo Sciascia loved him, and complained about the French who had not assigned him (after having promised) the consulate in Palermo: “Just imagine, Orlando, what a pity! We would have had Chartreuse from Palermo, and just imagine what stories”. Lampedusa deeply detested Sicily, which he called “Peru” and made fun of the island, of Palermo, of ostentatious eroticism: “There is no city in which to screw less”.
In The Leopard one of the most complex figures is in fact that of the prince’s son who leaves Sicily for London. It was the “prince’s” dream. He wanted to be a boy again, like Orlando, and travel around Europe, he who had visited it during the years of fascism. Of the French he said they were “stingy”. One day, to please him, Orlando spoke ill of France, provoking the wrath of Lampedusa: “They are the greatest people in the world!”. He could even admire the guillotine that had finally beheaded his social class, the nobility. With Orlando he had invented a special subdivision. He separated the writers into “fat and thin”. Fat people are those who hide nothing from the reader. The thin are those who write succinctly: “In them the unsaid is juicier than the said. Grassi are Montaigne, Balzac, Mann. Thin are Racine, Stendhal. Gide. Lampedusa was undoubtedly a pessimist. In 1957 he moved away from Orlando. Orlando begins to think that he “now he always repeats the same things”.
He will no longer be the one to beat the last chapters of The Leopard because he is too busy “preparing three exams”. That was their last summer. Prince Lampedusa falls ill and leaves Sicily. Orlando will write a letter which, however, will never be opened by Lampedusa. He had actually defeated the “non-master”, the Leopard himself. I had squashed it. Instead of the monopoly of memory, Orlando preferred to lose his memory. He concentrated it in these few pages, convinced that gratitude for those three unforgettable summers was nothing more than an eternal debt that the memory of him would “extinguish only minimally”.
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