by Elsa Morante
Once, my heart had a kind of shock: I discovered that she had met Algerian Dagger! In fact—I don’t know in what connection—she named a certain Marco, from whom my father had received as a gift the watch he always wore on his wrist; the day she and my father left Naples, he had hurried to say goodbye to my father at the steamer, a moment before the gangplank was raised . . .
I thus discovered that she had seen him! Irresistibly, a question escaped my lips: “What was he like?” “Who?” “That person,” I exclaimed brusquely, “what sort of person was he?” “Marco?” she said then. “Really . . . I saw him only for a minute, from the steamer . . . I seem to remember that he was around the age of Vilèlm, but maybe a little younger . . . Slender, small, with freckles on his face . . . light, elongated eyes . . . and an unhappy smile . . . and small teeth, widely spaced . . .” I realized suddenly that that was how, or almost, I had always pictured him! I asked her another peremptory question: “Was he dark or fair?” “I think,” she answered uncertainly, “he had black hair . . .” That answer gave me pleasure, almost comfort. So now I had learned his name: Marco! I would have liked to find out still if he was Italian or foreign; if maybe he was a native of Arabia, or, rather, a Jew. (I don’t know why, I had always attributed to him an Oriental character, and in particular I liked having him belong to the persecuted wandering race.) . . . And still I yearned to hear many other things about this character, who had inhabited the last happy period of my childhood, more magical and shining than Aladdin! But I wouldn’t let myself ask my stepmother other questions. And I shut myself up in my cloudy solitude.
Foreign Lands
As the evenings got longer, I resumed the habit of reading and studying in the kitchen, to pass the time as I waited for dinner. My preferred book in those days was a large atlas, with a lavish written commentary. The volume contained immense, folded-up colored maps, which I spread out in front of me every evening, kneeling on the floor or on a chair near the table. And it was these maps which excited my stepmother’s interest. For several evenings she considered them, baffled, as if they were puzzles; until she dared to ask me, in a shy voice:
“What are you studying there, Artú?”
Without raising my head from the outspread map, on which I was tracing some marks with a piece of charcoal, I answered that I was studying my routes; since, I said with conviction, the time when I would explore the world was now approaching: I intended to leave, at the latest, next year, either with my father or, otherwise, alone!
My stepmother looked at the map without saying anything else, for that evening. But from then on, there was no evening when she did not return to the subject. Whenever I began to study my routes again, I would hear her approach, with her labored, heavy, animal-like steps; for a while she kept silent, gazing at the map spread out in front of me; finally, amid many hesitations, she would make up her mind and, indicating with her hand the points marked with charcoal, ask in a vaguely anxious tone: “Is this very far from Procida? How far is it?” Rudely, I would throw out an approximate number. “And where does it say,” she then resumed, while her eyes wandered uncertainly over the whole page, “the island of Procida?” “What!” she repeated, almost an echo, at my answer. “You can’t see it from here! It’s in the other hemisphere!”
And she tried to get from me other, more precise details about the abstruse shapes on that map, in a voice that, in overcoming timidity, became harsh. I barely offered curt, impatient answers, always using that sullen, unfriendly tone which now seemed the only one natural when I spoke to her. However, in naming the most desirable and fascinating places on the earth—continents, cities, mountains, seas—my tone had a hint of arrogance and triumph, as if they were all my domains! Sometimes, with an irresistible instinct for affirmation, I also reported on certain undertakings that were to immortalize, at every stage, the passage of Arturo Gerace . . . but I quickly sealed myself off again in my scornful reserve.
My stepmother didn’t make many comments on my words; often, in fact, on hearing them she became silent, while her face appeared suddenly aged, strangely wild. I had noticed on other occasions that she nurtured a distrust and antipathy toward foreign places; but now those old feelings of hers seemed to have developed into a fearful aversion, which, with the increase in her geographic knowledge, became more serious instead of diminishing. All towns and cities that weren’t Naples and its surroundings were unreal and inhuman, like moons; and if you mentioned even a medium distance, of two or three thousand kilometers, the whites of her eyes became waxen, as if she were facing a dizzy spell, or a ghost. “And so,” she resumed, “you’ll really go all that distance, alone!” Alone in her language meant without my father, without any relative. She looked at the Arctic Circle and observed: “And you want to travel alone through those icy lands!” She looked at the dark reliefs of heights and commented: “And a year from now, you’d like to be traveling all by yourself in the middle of those mountains!”
If you heard her tone, it would seem that journeys were not, as they are, a celebration, a marvelous pleasure, but a bitter, unnatural thing. Thus (to give an example) a swan grows sad far from its lakes, and an Asiatic tiger feels no ambition to visit Europe; and a cat would weep at the idea of leaving its balcony to go on a cruise.
I have the idea, then, that the opinion of foreign lands she got from my information was not very reassuring. My word for her was gospel, it seems; and I could have driven from her mind every disastrous vision and convinced her, maybe, that all foreign lands were a beautiful tranquil garden, but I didn’t take the trouble. Rather, I wanted to let her believe the opposite. And I suppose that, through those awkward dialogues of ours, she pictured the earthly globe, outside the confines of Naples, as a series of pampas, steppes, and shadowy forests, traversed by wild beasts, redskins, and cannibals, places that only the bold dared to explore. Every so often she would interrupt my silent, enthralling meditations on maps, asking, for example, with that new roughness: “Over in the equatorial zones can you send mail to Procida?” Or, having sought in vain, with her eyes, the island of Procida in the middle of the Pacific or the Indian Ocean, she objected in a tired voice: “You say you’re going, and you’ll take command of a ship, that in those countries in Africa it’s a thing you can do immediately . . . and doesn’t even cost much . . . But then will they be good people? To go out alone with them in a boat! And when you find yourself isolated there in the high seas, with all those older sailors . . . if someday, let’s say, they revolt? Claiming you’re still not old enough to be the commander? Who will defend you? With no one in the family nearby!”
Finally one night I said to her: “Do me a favor, don’t distract me anymore with your talk, when I’m studying,” and she became mute. Like a commander in his camp tent, I traced some lines through oceans and continents with the charcoal: from Mozambique to Sumatra, to the Philippines, to the Coral Sea . . . and around this work reigned a great suspended silence. I called it work, and maybe it was a game, but for me it was better than writing a poem; since, unlike poems (which have their end in themselves), it was preparation for action, and nothing is more beautiful than that! Those charcoal lines represented for me the sparkling wake of the ship Arturo: the certainty of action awaited me, as, after the wonderful dreams of night, day lights up, which is perfect beauty. Prince Tristan was truly mad when he said that night is more beautiful than day! Ever since I was born, I’ve been waiting for full daylight, the perfection of life: I’ve always known that the island and my early happiness were only an imperfect night; even the enchanting years with my father—and those evenings there with her!—were still the night of life; in my heart I’ve known that. And now I know it more than ever; and I’m always waiting for my day to come, like a marvelous brother in whose embrace you can recount the long period of boredom . . .
The Iridescent Spider Web
But let’s return to that evening (when I had said to my stepmother: “Please don’t bother me”). She said no more, but
sat resting with her hands in her lap, half a step away. Her gaze went back continually to my big blue maps; and her soul, which in those days seemed to me ill and almost brutalized, emerged in her eyes, full of childish questions and ignorant suffering.
Every time I happened to look at them, those eloquent eyes said something different. Once, in a language that seemed to echo the cries of Cassandra, they stared, enlarged, dry, and solitary, at my place, as if already they saw it empty. Another time, they rested here and there on my maps with a playful and, at the same time, desolate fantasy, as if saying: “It would be wonderful for me not to have this body! Not to be a woman but to be a boy like you, and run all around the world with you!”
At a certain point she said aloud: “But I . . . if I were your mother, I wouldn’t let you leave!”
I looked up and saw that she had unexpectedly assumed a dark, sly expression. Two aggressive little flames lighted her cheekbones, and her ears became colored vividly pink. Turning away from me sullen and hostile eyes, she repeated: “I wouldn’t let you leave! I would chain the door, I would stand in front of it and say to you: ‘You’re not even twenty-one—to leave the house without permission. If you want to leave, first you have to get past here!’ ”
“Oh, why don’t you be quiet? What are you talking about? When I hear what you’re saying, I laugh. Permission, come on, really . . . in my opinion, your head is a big muddle. Go make your speeches to some poor devil, because if you talk to me like that you’re really ignorant. Twenty-one! I’m older than a twenty-one-year-old. And who cares about your opinion! For me when you talk it might as well be a Chinese talking.”
I’d gone from a tone of mockery to a surly ill humor. “And you should know that if I feel like it I can command twenty-one-year-olds as if they were boys. And also men of twenty-five and thirty. If you think that I’m not as good as they are because of my age, you’re ignorant and you should shut up!”
The old perpetual bitterness (of being still considered a boy) that for the past twelve months had so upset me made me resent her bite, and excited revolts and suspicions. “You,” I resumed, scowling, “mustn’t concern yourself with my business. You’ve got to stop bothering me with your nonsense, every time I study the atlas: And you’ll go traveling so far alone! And you’ll really go so far, alone! As if I were still a kid, who didn’t know how to defend myself alone, and even without weapons! What’s your idea? Others go off alone and travel alone, and you don’t make a fuss, the way you do for me! What are you thinking? That others, because they’re older than I am, are braver? Is that your idea?”
She hadn’t understood my allusion or grasped that my pride expected an answer. Her silent face was shaken by her agitation at having offended me, which made her forgive every insult; but still between her lashes a ray of strange ferocity persisted, which had earlier driven her to provoke me. And meanwhile inexpressible questions, of which her own mind was ignorant, crossed her anxious gaze, with their varied shadows. They resembled clouds that pass in front of a star, and seem to go very close to it, while the star, instead, moves unaware in another space, clear as a mirror . . .
“Is that your idea?” I repeated in a peremptory tone. Then, facing her, with a determined expression, I decided to speak clearly. “My father,” I explained, “always travels alone, and you don’t reproach him the way you do me. WHY? Answer!”
She raised to me eyes now devoid of any fierceness, in which only a childish wonder laughed. “Your father!” she murmured. “He’s different . . .” And a graceful sweetness arrived to remove every shadow from her face: like a beloved sister who had come to caress her and kiss her, interceding with me.
“Oh, he’s different! . . . Why?” I insisted darkly. But luckily she didn’t see my fiendish expression. She had lowered her eyes, in a sweet, simple smile. “Because . . .” she said, just shaking her shoulders, “because he’s not like you. No, I don’t worry about him; his journeys aren’t big ones! He, he’s like the goldfinches . . .”
I didn’t immediately understand the meaning of that comment, and so she explained that finches, even when they go away, never go far from their dwelling; they may fly to a neighboring cornice, the roof, another windowsill, but they always stay in the neighborhood.
This unprecedented assertion about my father seemed to me a new, extraordinary confirmation of how slow my stepmother’s intellect was . . . When, then, a doubt crept in: that she didn’t really believe what she was saying but had, on the spot, invented that unlikely and ridiculous answer in order not to give me her sincere, offensive opinion: and that is, that she considered my father a great man and me a child.
That suspicion was enough to make me uncontrollable, worse than a wild animal. I looked at that mysterious smile, like a saint’s . . . I burst out suddenly: “You’re not my mother, or relative: you’re nothing to me. And you’d better not interfere in my affairs again!”
From then on, in the evenings, she stopped concerning herself with what I did. She no longer came over to ask me questions when I unfolded the atlas, but it was clear that that book had become for her an object of aversion, of distrust, and, at the same time, of hated fascination: she avoided touching it, and, if she merely looked at it from a distance, her eyes became agitated, as if it were the book of the Fates, or a treatise on black magic.
If, for some reason or other, I happened to utter the words next year, I would see her pupils staring: like two frightened guests, motionless before a threshold they do not want to cross.
And meanwhile, from day to day, I thought about going away immediately, not waiting for next year. So I would show her without delay if I was a child or if I could depart by myself, and what I was capable of! As I was on the point of leaving the island, however, a desperate spell held me there, as it had done since childhood. The marvelous diversities of continents and oceans that, every night, in the atlas, my imagination worshipped suddenly seemed to await me, beyond the sea of Procida, as an immense landscape of chilling indifference. The same that, as evening fell, drove me out of alien places, the harbor, the streets, calling me back to the Casa dei Guaglioni.
And the thought of going away without first seeing my father, at least once more, was intolerable to me. Still, at certain moments, I seemed almost to hate Wilhelm Gerace; but as soon as I resolved to escape from Procida the memory of him invaded the whole island like an insidious, fascinating multitude. I recognized him in the taste of the seawater, of the fruit; the cry of an owl, or a seagull passed by, and it seemed to be he who was calling: “Hey, moro!” The autumn wind tossed spray at me, or gusts of sand; and it seemed that he was provoking me, in fun. Sometimes, going down to the shore, I seemed to have a shadow behind me; and I imagined, almost flattered: “It’s a private spy, who follows my steps for him.” Then, amid these strange illusions, I would hate him more than ever, because, like an invader, he took possession in this way of my island; but still I knew that I wouldn’t have liked the island so much if it hadn’t been his, indivisible from his person. The new mysteries I glimpsed, the disquieting, indecipherable messages and the mirages, the farewells of childhood and of my little mother, dead, rejected, returned to be reassembled into the ancient many-sided chimera that enthralled me. That chimera now laughed at me with other eyes, held out other arms, and had different prayers, voices, sighs; but it didn’t change its enchanted veil—ambiguity, which imprisoned me on the island like an iridescent spider web.
Murdered?
It was mid-autumn, and my father still hadn’t shown up. My stepmother kept hoping that he would return home for the period when the child was to be born. During the first week of November, she said to me every night: Who knows, maybe your father will arrive tomorrow? Then, as the days passed, she stopped saying anything. But at the hour when the steamer from Naples docked down at the port, she went to sit almost furtively at the window, to see if the well-known carriage would appear at the end of the street.
According to her calculations and those of her
friends, my stepbrother was to be born in early December. Instead, it was, unexpectedly, the night of November twenty-second.
The neighbor women, who in those days came more frequently than usual to our house, had left toward evening, as always; and after dinner my stepmother and I had gone upstairs to sleep, with no thought. But late at night (it must have been around one) from Nunz’s room a dark moan woke me, more animal than human, broken by cries of such unprecedented anguish that, still half asleep, I rushed to the little room and opened the door. The light was on; and Nunz, all disheveled and half dressed, was lying across the bed. She had thrown off the covers, but, on seeing me, she gathered them convulsively and drew them over herself; then immediately she fell back overwhelmed, with a cry similar to those I’d heard before, in a voice that was unrecognizable. And she began to writhe wildly and wretchedly, while her eyes every so often stared at me without even asking for help, but as if driving me out of the room. “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” I shouted at her brutally. Not having a precise idea of the necessary sufferings of women, I stood before that scene as before a mysterious tragedy; and my first sentiment was an impulse of hatred toward that aggressive mystery that was torturing Nunz. She at that point had a moment of respite, and turned to me a small smile full of shame but at the same time of importance. “It’s nothing,” she tried to explain, “but you . . . you mustn’t stay in this room . . . you should . . . call someone . . . call Fortunata . . .” (Fortunata was the midwife of Procida.) Her words broke off in a new cry; and the pain forced the sweet smile from her face, giving it an inhuman severity. In her frenzy of suffering, she tore with her fingers at a woolen shawl, fastened by a safety pin, which she wore over her shoulders at night, and, seeing that gesture at the very moment that I left the room to go in search of help, I had a sudden memory: poor Immacolatella, who, during the ordeal of her death, every so often made the motion of tearing at her body with her teeth . . . Almost two years had passed since that bitter day when Immacolatella was buried; but the sight of her end was impressed in my memory in every detail; and because I had never yet seen any human creature die, it remained my only experience of death. Now, as I rushed down the stairs, I was pierced by a suspicion, in fact by a horrible certainty: it seemed to me that I saw, in my stepmother, many signs of that same extreme anguish that had led Immacolatella to end up underground, near the carob tree; and I believed I understood that the same illness my mother had died of, and Immacolatella, would tonight kill this other woman, too.