Arturo's Island

by Elsa Morante

  Uncertain, I looked at him, still without understanding clearly what conclusion he was aiming at with this speech. “It doesn’t matter at all to me!” I answered randomly, childishly. He let out another laugh, foolish, insolent. “Oh, it doesn’t matter to you . . .” he said, looking down at me from above, frowning, “and yet I formed a different opinion, sorry, O my fine Spanish grandee . . . Do you want me to tell you what my opinion was? Don’t worry, I’ll tell only you, I won’t talk about it to anyone. My opinion was that YOU ARE JEALOUS . . . you’re jealous of her, of Nunziatella, because before, here on the island, you could keep me all for yourself, and now she replaces you! Well, what do you think of that, moro?”

  I blushed as if he had discovered a terrible secret. “It’s not true!” I exclaimed angrily. At that point, she came in, and I made as if to leave. But he, grabbing me by the wrist with a hostile, fierce quickness as if we were play-fighting, ordered me through his teeth: “Where are you going? Where are you going? Stay here!” And, keeping his hold on my wrist, while encircling the bride with his free hand, he began playing ostentatiously with her curls.“What beautiful curls,” he said, while she looked at us seriously, not understanding the meaning of this scene, “too bad Arturo doesn’t have such fine curls!” As he spoke, he glanced at me and laughed to himself, for the pleasure of provoking my jealousy; but finally, seeing the violence with which I was trying to get away from him, he said, bored, “Well, go on.” And I left the room without even looking him in the face, in the grip of a furious anger.

  That word of his, jealous, had offended me extremely. I didn’t want to know about such a slur; and it didn’t even occur to me to ask myself whether it might be true or not—whether that feeling which since my father’s marriage had caused me to live like a hunted animal might perhaps be called jealousy! At that time, although I was good at thinking about ancient history, fate, and Absolute Certainties, I wasn’t used to looking into the depths of myself. Some problems were strangers to my imagination. I knew that I was offended, and that was all. And I resented the offense so much that, at the moment, I thought of getting on a ship, leaving the island forever, and never seeing my father or stepmother again. But I had scarcely considered that plan when, at the instant chill and fury of revolt that possessed me, I realized that I wouldn’t really be able to carry it out. In fact, the thought that the two of them would remain alone on the island, together, without me was unbearable!

  My fury, having no outlet, then became so painful that I began to moan angrily, like a wounded person. And certainly I thought that that bitter rage was provoked by the insult, not by something else; but it may be that, in my ignorance, I was already lamenting the impossible demands of my heart. And the opposing and intertwined jealousies, the many-sided passions, that were to mark my destiny.

  Pasta

  As far as I can assume, my father kept his word: he didn’t let anyone know his opinion (that I was jealous). Besides, as far as my stepmother was concerned, it’s plausible that he would never have deigned to confide in her something so serious and important, and about a Gerace! With me, then, his malicious talk of that day had no consequence; he returned immediately to his habitual carelessness, no longer concerning himself with my affairs. And so the memory of the insult was soon buried.

  My antipathy toward my stepmother, meanwhile, didn’t diminish but became fiercer every day. And as a result the life she led with me during my father’s absences from the island was certainly not very happy. I never spoke to her except to give her orders. If I was outside and wanted to summon her to the window to give her some command, or warn her of my arrival, I used to simply whistle. Similarly, even in the house, when I had to call her, I whistled, or at most, if we were in the same room, I would say to her: “Hey, you, listen!” When I spoke to her, I looked in another direction with a show of insult, as if to signify that she was a contemptible object, and unworthy of a glance. And when I passed the little room I turned my eyes away from that half-open door, as if a ghost lived there, or a monster.

  I hated that woman so much that, even when I was out of the house, knowing that she was there, in our rooms, which had become her dwelling, was often torture, and I made an effort to forget her existence, to pretend to myself that she was nothing, less than a shadow. The time before she came to the island now seemed to me, thinking back, a kind of blessed limbo. Ah, why had she come? Why had my father brought her here?

  The days were lengthening, and starting to get warm. Those beautiful starry evenings were no longer too cold, and often, between the sea, the streets, and the widow’s squalid café, I let the dinner hour go by without appearing at the Casa dei Guaglioni. But, however late I came home, I always saw, from the road below, the light on in the kitchen window, and I knew I would find her there, having not yet had dinner and waiting for me before she cooked the pasta. I was already very late and was very hungry; but still, sometimes, seeing that lighted window, I was seized by the cruel wish to prolong her wait. Such cruelty was new to my character. I advanced noiselessly, like a thief, as far as the glass door of the kitchen; and outside, unseen by her, I delayed as long as I liked. Positioned in a dark corner, I could see her, through the panes of glass, falling asleep; at the slightest rustling from outside, she cast a hopeful glance at the door, and every so often she yawned, the way cats yawn (opening their mouth to the jaws, so that they look like tigers and make you laugh), or her chest rose slightly in a sigh. Finally, I would enter in a rush, like a beast hurtling into its den, so that I made her start with fear. And immediately I took my book from the sideboard and waited, with a dark face, for her to serve me.

  Once, arriving, I saw through the windows that she was writing on a piece of paper, with a profoundly meditative and inspired expression, like a writer. After dinner, she went upstairs before me, leaving the page on the sideboard, where my eyes fell on it. It was a letter to her mother, and said, more or less:

  Dearest Mother

  I’m writing you this Leter. With Hope for your good health. And of my beeloved sister Rosa as for me I can give you newss that here we are all well and pleaze send greetings to my dearest Godmother and if she thinks of me and also helo to my dearest freind Irma and Carulina and beloved Angiulina and if they think of me and please give my greetings to Father Severino and Mother Conzilia and if dearest San Giuvani still has that feever but that must be old age and please also dearest mother say helo to my friend Maria and Filumena and to my dearest Aurora you can tel her that the dress is good and my other beloved companyons if they think of me who maybe have already forgoten Nunziata who doesn’t forget them either day or night and so too Sufia and the other Nunziata, Ferdinando’s daughter, if she thinks of me. And I can say to you dearest Mother! Here on Procida we eat without paying because the land brings everything even oil potatoes and greens and at the shops we pay the acount at the end of the year. And now dearest mother receive a thousand dear kisses from your dearest daughter Nunziatella and also for Rosa a thousand kisses from her sister Nunziatella and I urge you also to my beloved Godmother with a thousand kisses and pleaze many kisses to my other friends who I’ve already named who for me my Heart thinks of always and I end the Leter.

  Nunziatella

  Another evening, coming home around ten, I found her asleep, sitting at the kitchen table waiting for me. One arm was folded on the table, and her cheek rested on her hand as if on a little pillow; the harsh shadow of the curls on her forehead protected her from the light of the lamp, and this time, in sleep, her face had a strange, grave, and mysterious expression. I began to pound on the glass, and sing in a loud voice, to give her an immediate, brutal awakening.

  Two or three times, arriving home later than usual, I happened to run into her waiting for me outside the gate. “What are you doing out here, at the gate?” I said rudely. And she answered that she was there to get some air.

  Besides, she couldn’t reproach me. I certainly hadn’t asked her to wait. But evidently, in comparison to her
dull and solitary days, those dinners in the company of a mute must have seemed to her a kind of important event or evening celebration, something like going dancing or to the movies for ladies. Every morning with great energy she started the preparations for the pasta, which she made fresh every day, and which, just rolled out, she spread to dry on some beams in front of the doorway, like a flag. One morning early, when I had come down to the kitchen feeling irritable and saw her intent on the usual preparations, I announced brusquely that if she was making that pasta every day for me, it was a mistake: in fact, I didn’t like pasta and never had.

  I said that to humiliate her, not because it was true; in reality, I liked pasta, no less than any other food. It might be said that I ate with equal pleasure all foods that were edible for humans: the only thing I cared about was the quantity, because I always had a ravenous appetite.

  “What!” she said in a faint voice, as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You don’t like pasta!”

  “No.”

  “What do you like?”

  I sought in my mind the worst answer, which could most upset her. And, remembering the disdain she had once shown toward goat’s milk, on the spot I invented:

  “Goat meat!”

  “GOAT meat!” she exclaimed, astonished. But, still, a moment later, a kind of pleased and yielding fervor emerged from that first astonishment: as if, just to satisfy my tastes, she were already pondering how she would get goat parts, and prepare goat-meat dishes . . .

  At this scene, I was seized by an irresistible desire to laugh and quickly hid my face in my hands. But instantly I had the thought: “If I let her see me laughing now, she’ll assume we’re friends again . . . like . . . that afternoon . . .” and, shuddering, I rejected that possibility. But although I tried to suffocate my laughter, I felt it bursting out of my chest; and, finding no other remedy at the moment for hiding my mirth, I fell to the floor on my knees, with my face in my arms, and pretended to cry and sob.

  I realized then that if I wanted to I could become a great actor! She approached, hesitant, solicitous; from under the arm with which I hid my forehead, I saw her small, short feet, in their house slippers . . . And since the very play that I was performing naturally increased my hilarity, my fake sobs became more desperate, lacerating. They were a perfect imitation. She murmured, disconcerted: “Artú . . . ?” And a moment later she again repeated: “Artú . . .” I felt her breath on me, tender, almost animal. Then, no longer resisting, her voice, moved, came out with these words:

  “Artú! . . . Something is upsetting you! . . . What’s wrong? Tell Nunziata!”

  Along with compassion, there was a kind of mature presumption in her voice as she uttered that sentence; one could hear, almost, the importance of the older sister, who has held all her younger siblings in her arms . . . Hearing her speak to me like that, I was immediately gripped by revolt and contempt. How could she dare? I jumped to my feet, furious:

  “I’m not crying, I’m laughing!” I exclaimed. She stared at my hard face, my dry, burning eyes, filled with dismay, as if she had seen a dragon rise from the earth. “I’m not someone who cries!” I continued, in a tone of threatening pride. “And you, you mustn’t ever dare speak to me in that manner! You’re not my relative, you understand? You’re nothing to me, nothing, I’m not related to you or friends with you, understand?”

  She lowered her eyes onto her pasta, proud and angry; and her lips pouted, as if they were preparing some bitter response. But she remained silent and resumed piling up the dough and working it with fierce movements, as if she meant to abuse it. Then unwillingly she began to spread it; and at the last moment, as I started toward the door, still chewing my breakfast, she gave me an uncertain, clouded look:

  “So?” she asked. “If you don’t want pasta . . . what do you want to eat tonight for dinner?”

  I half turned, and with a grimace of indifference on my lips, I said, as rudely as possible:

  “I? Come on, who cares what you make for dinner! You could seriously believe what I told you about pasta! You have to learn that I don’t care about eating one thing or another, I can live on biscuits and salted meat, for instance! And even if you cooked, say, ostrich wings, shark fins, or hippopotamus tongues, I wouldn’t even notice, because the food you make always has the same taste! For me, you can go on making pasta every day, or whatever you like! I really couldn’t care less. And besides, my tastes don’t concern you!”

  The fact was that I didn’t want care or attention from her. I gave her orders for the satisfaction of humiliating her, treating her like an automaton, an object; but her gentle attentions (as if she really presumed herself a relative of mine, my mother!) were intolerable to me. On more than one occasion I repeated to her: “Between us there is no relationship. You are nothing to me,” until, once, turning slightly pale, and throwing back her hair, she responded:

  “It’s not true that I am nothing to you. I am your stepmother and you are my stepson!” And she said it in an arrogant and impassioned manner, as if claiming a kind of ownership!

  I laughed in her face with contemptuous fury. “Stepmother!” I exclaimed. “Stepmother is less than nothing! Anyone who says stepmother is uttering the most hateful word.” And after that dialogue, that very evening, I informed her harshly that I didn’t want her to wait for me, for dinner. If I was late, she should eat at the usual time, on her own, and then leave the kitchen, putting aside my food. In fact, I said to her, those dinners in her company bored me; seeing her every evening irritated me; and in short I was the master of eating alone!

  Solitary Song

  She was upset by this speech, even more offended and dejected than I had expected; but she made no response and didn’t oppose my will. From then on, I got in the habit of coming home very late every night, purposely in order not to be with her. If when I arrived I saw the kitchen light still on, I kept walking around outside the gate (I no longer peeked in through the French door; in fact, I kept my distance) until the lamp was turned off, announcing, like a signal, that my stepmother had gone upstairs. Then, finally, I made up my mind to enter the kitchen. And the dinner she had left for me, kept warm on the coals, I ate alone.

  My stepmother did not protest or complain to me, although in those days I represented her entire family and society. Still a foreigner among our distrustful population, she had neither acquaintances nor friendships: and she spent the hours shut up in the kitchen, or in her room, with no one even to converse with. Often, from my boat, seeing up there the walls of our castle, which appeared uninhabited, I would begin to suspect that she was only a dream of mine, and that, in reality, no one, besides me, lived between those walls. But then, at whatever hour of the day I might stop by the house, I soon heard again, on the stairs or in the hallways, the known sound of her famous slippers.

  Toward me she had assumed a sullen, confused, and fierce attitude; and, proud, she didn’t beg for my friendship, which I so cruelly refused her. Still, when our gazes met, there emerged in the depths of her stormy eyes always, like a star, that eternal, irremediable question: Artú, what did I do to you? What did I do?

  Sometimes from a window I saw her, in her solitude and need for friendship, embrace the bitter-orange tree in the garden, or maybe a pillar of the gate, as if those inanimate objects had been replaced by a sister, a dear companion. Or she began to cuddle one of those mean, mangy cats that came by in search of leftovers, hugging it to her heart and covering it with kisses. I also heard her, occasionally, express to herself, in joyful or rapt phrases, her voice sweet with humming, some thought that was addressed to no one. For example, looking out into the yard one moonlit night she observed: “Waxing moon: boats on the sea, fishing for squid . . .” Or, alone on the doorstep, tasting some sea urchins from a basket, she repeated: “Oh, how good this sea urchin is: like a pomegranate . . .” Or, combing her hair, she got mad at the tangles, and insulted the hair, amid violent tugs of the comb, grumbling: “Oh, you vile things, oh, d
readfuls!”

  By her nature she preferred the enclosed space of the rooms to open places and streets: like a canary that loves the cage more than the free air. And although the Casa dei Guaglioni was so inhospitable to her, she rarely left it. At times, early in the morning, I saw her go to Mass, quickly, all wrapped in her black shawl, as if she were escaping secretly; and other times I happened to meet her down among the alleys, with the shopping basket on her arm, her curls pushed back under a kerchief, and a worn wallet clutched in her fist. When I saw her bustling among the shops, with her awkward gait, and negotiating for her purchases with those unfriendly merchants, she seemed a poor gypsy girl, in the service of some mysterious abbess or bewitched lady. She had, in fact, a forlorn and somber but also belligerent expression: like someone who shares the secrets of a fascinating master disliked by all. (She must somehow have learned of the malicious stories and gossip that circulated about the Gerace house.)

  In that isolation, it seemed to me, I saw her fading more every day. Sometimes I heard her singing in the rooms: she always repeated the songs she’d learned in Naples from the neighbor’s radio, that one about the apache, or one whose refrain went, Tango, you’re like a lasso around my heart, and she also often repeated a church hymn that went: Let us adore you, divine Host, let us adore you, Host of love. Her coarse, strident notes were drawn out and full of melancholy, as if all the songs she sang had a sad subject. But I don’t think she had thoughts, or was even aware of not being happy. A chrysanthemum or a rosebush, even if its lot is to be in a corner of the window, in a pot, rather than in a garden, doesn’t start thinking: I could have another fate. And that’s what she was like, equally simple.

  When I heard her sing, I remembered those famous Neapolitan verses that I had learned as a child, and that I often heard sung by some musician, down at the port: You’re the canary . . . you’re sick and you sing . . . you alone, alone die . . . In truth, seeing her suffering face, with those big black eyes that seemed to burn it, one might suppose that she was about to get sick; I almost began to suspect that the fatal curse of the Amalfitano was a reality, and would cause her to die.