14.5. The Pardon of Father Cristoforo
The solemn scene of the pardon in Chapter 4 is symbolic and liturgical in its staging. Given the solemn comportment of the actors, the time and place of the meeting, and the elaborately theatrical orchestration of the action, as well as the costumes and poses of the figures who are to decide upon the life or death of the penitent, words become irrelevant.
The duel itself had already occurred because there were rules of behavior and precedence to be observed, in which left and right, frowns and tones of voice counted. Ludovico/Cristoforo’s repentance and his conversion were a consequence of his revulsion from the offense he had committed. “Though murder was so common in those days that everyone was used to the news of violent death and the sight of blood, the impression made on him by the spectacle of the man who had died for him, and the man who had died at his hands, was something novel and indescribable—a revelation of feelings he had never known before. To see his enemy fall to the ground, to see the change in his face, as it passed in a moment from fury and menace to the vanquished, solemn peace of death, was an experience which transformed the soul of the killer” (p. 83). But let us come to the scene of the pardon.
Blood will have blood: the fact that Cristoforo has repented, that he is seeking forgiveness, that he has gone so far as to renounce the world and take the habit of a Franciscan friar, cannot wash away the offense. It is washed away by a magnificently mounted scenario that articulates, in terms of a strict code of etiquette, what words cannot say—a seventeenth-century idea if ever there was one, which Manzoni captures with a fine pictorial sense. Hence the gathering of all the deceased’s relatives in the great reception hall, with capes, plumes, ceremonial swords, starched and pleated ruffs, flowing simars—a secular aristocratic liturgy.
The two friars process ritually between the two wings of the crowd, and already at that point “Brother Cristoforo’s face and manner proclaimed unmistakably to the assembled company” (p. 88) that he had truly repented. Whether Cristoforo is sincere or not is unimportant: he behaves in a sincere way, with the tone of a sincere man, which he somehow instinctively theatricalizes, true son of his century that he is, and cannot help theatricalizing, since he must stay within the parameters that have been carefully preordained. After which Cristoforo sticks to his script. He kneels, crosses his hands over his chest, bows his shaved head. At that point he speaks and pronounces words of forgiveness, but it is clear from the narrative that it is not those words that convince the dead man’s brother and the crowd of nobles. Their conviction has already taken place. The dead man’s brother’s “stance was meant to suggest strained condescension and suppressed wrath” (he strikes a pose, like a character in an opera), but the gestures of the penitent (his ritual posturings) make it clear that the bearing of the offended party may now be modified. This is the context, liturgical and clearly ecclesiastical in nature, for the embrace and the kiss of peace, the petition for and the bestowing of the bread of forgiveness.
Cristoforo is fully aware that this bread is something more than part of the paraphernalia of the ceremony, that, rather than being mere evidence of his forgiveness, it has performatively created that forgiveness and will continue to keep it alive as long as the bread itself lasts. He will carry a morsel of that bread with him for the rest of his life. In the plague hospital, after reminding Renzo that in thirty years he has still not found peace for what he did, he entrusts the bread to the two betrothed as inheritance, warning, pledge, and viaticum. Cristoforo does not feel blasphemous using that bread as a relic, because he knows that it has been consecrated in the course of a ritual.
14.6. Further Examples
We could continue, and heaven help us if we couldn’t. In the meeting between Don Rodrigo and Father Cristoforo, the courteous words Don Rodrigo pronounces at the start of their conversation are belied by “his way of uttering them” (p. 108). Don Rodrigo asks in what way can he be of service, but his tone plainly says: remember whom you are speaking to. And Cristoforo indulges in a little stage business himself when, in order to strike terror into the heart of the villain, given the patent inadequacy of verbal threats of divine retribution, he has recourse (or Manzoni has recourse for him, which amounts to the same thing) to striking another theatrical pose, this time more nineteenth-century than baroque: “stepping back a couple of paces, poised boldly on his right foot, with his right hand on his hip, he raised the other hand with his forefinger outstretched towards Don Rodrigo and looked him straight in the eye with a furious glare” (pp. 110–111).
Before the reader has learned about her terrible life, the Signora of Monza is introduced, in a passage that owes much to the Gothic novel, behind the convent grille, condemned by her physiognomic ambiguities, by her gaze, by the not unworldly way her waist is laced and a curl of black hair allowed to emerge from the band on her forehead, against every rule of the cloister (p. 171). As yet we know nothing about Gertrude, and already we can guess a great deal. The only ones who cannot guess are Lucia, she too as yet a novice when it comes to the codes of natural semiosis, and the Father Superior, who has given up trying to read behavior for political reasons.
Moreover, Gertrude’s entire education consists of visual signs more than words, from the religious dolls given to her as a child down to her segregation as a consequence of her rebellion, a segregation that takes the form of a play of absences, evasive glances, silences, reticence: “The days went by, without her father or anyone else talking to her about her application, or her change of mind, and without any course of action whatever being urged upon her, either with caresses or with threats. Her parents’ behavior to her was unsmiling, gloomy and harsh, but they never told her why” (p. 182). The opportunity to speak, and at some length, is restored to her only after she has surrendered, because by now what she was expected to understand she has understood without words.
On the other hand Gertrude, in the end, sentences herself to burial in the cloister precisely because words are extorted from her that she would have preferred not to utter, that do not express what she feels, but, since they are ritual gestures with a performative value, no sooner have they been said than they can no longer be taken back.
In the course of his visit to the Unnamed in chapter 20, the way Don Rodrigo offers his respects is through a complex liturgy of greetings and gifts to the bravoes of his host, while the latter—whose profession is announced by room after room whose walls are covered with muskets, sabers, and halberds—at once, even before speaking, scrutinizes Don Rodrigo’s hands and his face.
In chapter 33, when Don Rodrigo experiences the first signs of the plague, he becomes aware of unequivocal internal symptoms, about which he cannot be deceived, and Griso immediately grasps his master’s state by observing his face. In a universe in which, as Manzoni has told us in the foregoing pages, the whole of society has vied with one another in ignoring or not comprehending the symptoms of the sickness—and was able to do so by translating the visual evidence into verbal reports—Don Rodrigo’s symptoms can only be interpreted in the correct way, because they cannot be verbally mediated. We are faced with the natural evidence of “a filthy bubonic swelling, of a livid purplish color” (p. 608). Language, however, immediately steps in to cover up the reality. Don Rodrigo lies, saying he feels well. Griso lies, encouraging him, with words, and professing his obedience, and all the while he is preparing to hand him over to the scavenging monatti. Don Rodrigo and Griso understand each other with looks and deceive each other with words.
14.7. Public Madness and Public Folly
But if so far we have tried to extrapolate from various episodes an implicit semiotics, Manzoni is far more explicit in the chapters on the plague (31 and 32).
When he recounts how the contagion spread, while the whole of society repressed the idea, and how, when the reality of the disease became undeniable, a human agent was invented and the figure of the “anointer” (untore) was constructed (in the sense in which
