Arturo's Island

by Elsa Morante

  The Attack

  Now that she had Carmine, she was so happy that she was singing and laughing from morning to night; when her mouth didn’t laugh, her eyes laughed.

  In a few weeks she had flowered into an unexpected beauty, which seemed a miracle of happiness. Her old, indoor pallor had disappeared: and yet she lived no less than before inside the rooms. Her skin had assumed a happy, healthy pink coloring; and in her body what had been thin had filled out into a delicate female shapeliness. At the same time, though, she had become taller and more slender than in our first days; and she walked with more grace, light on her small feet.

  The humiliation that (perhaps since her impoverished birth) had hindered her movements suddenly disappeared: soft as a cat, she hurried to Carmine’s voice. And when she carried him in her arms, she didn’t seem to resent that weight; rather, the more he weighed, as he grew, the greater the honor for her. In her proud bearing, her head was thrown back slightly, exulting in the contrast with those other curls, of gold.

  She still wore her hair in coils, in the style I had taught her; but they’d come half undone, because of Carmine, who played constantly with her curls. He played with her curls and with her face, with her chain and with her body; and she laughed, with an impulsive, fresh, wild freedom. From early morning, I heard them from my room as, barely awake, they began to play, mingling games and laughter, conversing in their manner. I listened to the words that, better than a poet, she invented to praise him; and as I listened, bitterness ran through my veins. Sometimes that bitterness was so intense that I almost wished not to have been born.

  It was the injustice, more than anything else, that upset me: for in all my life I had never had the satisfaction of feeling so adored by someone. And yet—although I was dark, and not fair like him—I wasn’t ugly. My father himself had said so more than once, for example, on that distant evening when he had said, in her presence: He’s a good-looking boy—not for nothing is he my son! And similarly on several other occasions in the past. At most, however, his remarks had been: Eh, come on, you know perfectly well you’re not ugly, or, Let’s see how handsome you’ve grown in my absence. Well, not bad, and that was all. Nothing comparable to the fabulous praise that she showered on my stepbrother, and which even if it sounded incoherent seemed, maybe for that reason, even sweeter. Now more than ever I understood what pleasure it is, for a man, to have a mother.

  Not only was she constantly praising and caressing him; but, very often, she talked to him seriously, as if he, who understood nothing, could understand her, and his tiny inarticulate responses were enough for her. Now she had this new company, and needed no other. Content to be with him, she forgot about any other person. Ever since the weather had begun to get warmer, she carried him in her arms wherever she went, even in the morning when she did the shopping, although she already had the burden of the shopping bag; and he was delighted as if he were traveling in a carriage amid exciting unknown marvels: maybe realms or ports along the seacoasts, bazaars of jewels and gold!

  Sometimes, talking to him in the usual way, she pretended purposely to scorn him. “You’re so ugly and toothless,” she would say to him, “what am I going to do with you? You know what I’ll do? I’ll carry you down to the square and sell you.” Then I tried to imagine, like a dream, the impossible case that she really didn’t want anything more to do with him, and sold him like goods, threw him away, handed him over to a pirate ship! Merely picturing this dream in my mind I felt some satisfaction, and some semblance of relief.

  I thought back to how offended I was the day she had proposed that I call her Ma; and I still recognized that I was right to be offended. And it didn’t seem just to me that, while I didn’t have a mother, she had a son. But I haven’t yet named my most intolerable source of envy. It was this: That she gave him kisses. Too many kisses.

  I didn’t know there could be so many kisses in the world: and to think that I had never given or received any! I looked at those two kissing each other as someone on a solitary boat at sea might look at an unapproachable, mysterious, and enchanting land, bursting with leaves and flowers. At times she gave in to the same mad games that small animals play with their siblings: grabbing him, squeezing him, tumbling him over, without ever doing him the least harm; and it all ended in innumerable kisses. She said to him, “I’m hungry! I’m going to eat you!” pretending the ferocity of a tiger, and instead she kissed him. And, seeing her pretty mouth stick out in those pure, blessed little kisses, I repeated to myself that this world is an abomination where one has so much, and another, nothing; and I was filled with envy, raptures, and melancholy.

  I went out, and it seemed to me that everyone on earth was doing nothing but kissing. The boats, tied up next to one another along the edge of the beach, were kissing. The movement of the sea, flowing toward the island, was a kiss; the grazing sheep kissed the earth; the air amid the leaves and grass was a lament of kisses. Even the clouds in the sky were kissing each other! Among the people out on the streets there was no one who did not know that taste: women, fishermen, beggars, children. I alone did not; and I had such a yearning to feel it that night and day I thought of almost nothing else. I started kissing, as a test, maybe my boat; or an orange I was eating, or the mattress I was lying on. I kissed the trunks of trees, the water coming up from the sea, I kissed the cats I met on the street. And I realized that, though no one had taught me, I could give very sweet, really lovely kisses. But when I felt against my lips nothing but cold vegetable pulp, or rough bark, or a salty bitterness; or saw myself next to the protruding muzzle of an animal, which purred and then suddenly took off, on a whim, unable to say anything to me—then I was more and more embittered by the comparison with that holy, laughing mouth, which, besides kissing, could say the gentlest human words!

  I said to myself: “Some day or other, I, too, will kiss a human being. But who will it be? When? Who will I choose, the first time?” And I began to think of various women I’d seen on the island, or of my father, or of some ideal future friend. But when I imagined such kisses they all seemed to me insipid, worthless. To the point that, as a kind of good-luck charm, though I hoped for the best, I rejected them all, even in my thoughts. It seemed to me that one could never know the true happiness of kisses if the first, most gracious, heavenly kisses were missing: the mother’s. And then, to find some consolation and repose, I pictured in my mind the scene of a mother kissing a child with almost divine affection. And that child was me. But the mother, even without my willing it, did not look like my real mother, the dead woman of the portrait: she looked like N. That impossible scene repeated many times in my imagination, as if in a marvelous theater that belonged to me. I delighted in it, almost to the point of deluding myself; and when, in reality, I saw N. again kissing my stepbrother, he seemed to me an intruder, who had taken my place, and she a traitor. I felt an angry instinct to insult them, to brutally interrupt their idyll; and only pride prevented me, while in vain my reason repeated: “What right would you have?” Out of pride I appeared indifferent, I made an effort not to look at them, I kept away from them; but soon a mysterious will called me back. Along with jealousy, I felt a bitter curiosity to look again at the grace of her kisses. And at the sight of those kisses, I imagined, until I felt it on my lips, a strange and delightful taste, which was like no other taste on earth but was miraculously like N. Not only her mouth but also her habits, her character, her whole person.

  One day, entering her room when she wasn’t there, I was tempted to kiss one of her garments. The usual pride prevented me: as if she were a lady and I a poor boy who received alms from her! Another day, however, overcome by a new temptation, I took from the kitchen table a piece of bread she had bitten, and ate it secretly. I had a taste of stolen sweetness and, at the same time, of many wounds: as when one plunders a beehive.

  If that other boy, who got so many envied kisses, had at least been ugly, defective, I could have been somehow comforted, comparing him to myself. Ins
tead I felt more and more discouraged by that comparison, because the more he grew, the more beautiful he became. He had taken, one might say, not only all the handsome features of my father but also those few of his mother; and as for ugly features, although you might wish to find some, he had none. The particular beauties of the two of them, then, were not reproduced in him as in a copy; but combined in an unexpected way, which seemed a new, original, imaginative invention. To be sincere, as far as I could see then and later, even in Naples and in all the other places I traveled, I never saw a boy who was handsomer than my brother.

  And his beauty was my persecution: even when I was alone, during all the hours of my day, I thought I saw him waving before my eyes, like a flag, white and blue, blue and gold, whose intention was to provoke me. One day (while N. was upstairs, and he was sleeping in his basket in the kitchen), I felt such a thirst for revenge that I was tempted to kill him. Among the few mementos of past epochs that remained in the house was, in the great room, an antiquated pistol, now useless and rusty, of the type you load with wadding. I got the idea of using the heavy butt of that weapon to strike my enemy in the middle of his forehead, precisely and violently, taking away his life with a single blow; and with the pistol under my arm I approached the basket where he was sleeping. But it didn’t seem fair to kill him unaware, as he slept; and so I decided to wake him first, and I lightly tickled the palm of his hand. He, at this tickle, moved his lips into a funny expression, which made me laugh; so that the wish to play with him overcame the wish to kill him. And as I tickled him on the palm of his hand, in his ears, and on his neck, I imitated with my voice the sound of some exotic feline animal; until, perhaps hoping to find a small leopard or some such creature in the kitchen when he awoke, he began to laugh in his sleep. So it all ended in fun, and my murder went up in smoke.

  Now these facts seem so ridiculous that I can’t even be serious while I’m recounting them, as if I were telling some extraordinary jokes, and not realities. But think: how angry I was at the time.

  The Great Jealousy

  It was torture to see how his simplest actions—for example, offering a bread crumb to a rooster, or shaking a rattle enthusiastically—to her seemed splendid feats. And whenever he, who had never seen or known anything, discovered something new, like the existence of rabbits or that fire burns, she honored him like a great pioneer. If there was something beautiful to see, she became impatient to show it to him; the moon rose and immediately she rushed to pick him up and carry him to the window, saying, “Carminiè, look! Look at the moon!” A boat went by on the sea and immediately she rejoiced, knowing that he liked to see the boats move. And as soon as it seemed (according to her, at least, and those other female adorers) that, in his way, he had learned to distinguish an object by name, for example a chair, the chorus of all those women, along with her, began exclaiming, “Good for you, the chair, yes! Beautiful, the chair! Beautiful! Beautiful!” in a bombastic and obsequious tone. As if that chair, owing to the fact (presumed by them, however!) that he recognized it by name, had suddenly become a distinguished lady. But if, let’s suppose, he happened to bump into that same chair and hurt himself, it descended to a low category of delinquent, and was proclaimed ugly, and ill treated and beaten without mercy.

  I began to turn up more often in the kitchen, where N. spent with Carmine the greater part of her days. I’d arrive, and to force her to notice me I’d walk up and down with an almost threatening air, or collapse on the floor, yawning, or sit close to her for long periods, dark and proud like a living reproof. Yet one might have said that for her I had become an invisible body, or less. Many times, on those evenings, I made a show of unfolding on the table the famous maps from the atlas, drawing firm pencil lines on them, far and wide; but to no effect. She sat near Carmine’s basket, singing softly to him, without concern for my affairs. Often, I picked up the book of Great Leaders again, pretending to read it (since I wasn’t really in the mood for reading). Every so often, I purposely chose some surprising passage, and read it aloud, commenting with noisy, emphatic exclamations! But she, distracted, barely asked, “What are you studying, Artú?” and returned to Carmine, to observe him anxiously, thinking she’d heard him cry in his sleep.

  One day, seizing a moment when her eyes had come to rest on me, I made up my mind and ran at the bars of the window, doing a flag and other exercises; and the result was that she exclaimed, “Carmine! Look how wonderful! Look what Arturo is doing!” as if I were an acrobat for Carmine’s enjoyment! So I immediately jumped down and left the kitchen, trembling with hidden rage.

  This time, I almost swore to leave that wretched woman with her Carmine, and to consider her, too, an invisible being, absolutely forgotten. But, unfortunately, I couldn’t resign myself to such an idea: if for no other reason than that I had to punish her. Inside, I accused her of being vile, just like the typical stepmother, who, as soon as she has her own children, throws her stepchildren aside. And I would have liked to imitate the rejected stepchildren of novels, leaving the inhuman stepmother, and trusting to luck. But alas, how could I? Now that I knew she was faithless, I was sure that if I left I would be canceled from her memory: I would no longer be even a stepchild for her, or even a distant relative. To that I couldn’t adjust; and so I planned to carry out some grandiose action, so that even from a distance she would be forced to admire me, take an interest in me. For example, join an aerial expedition leaving for the Pole . . . or write a poem so sublime that I became famous as far away as America, and the Neapolitans would decide to erect a monument to me in the harbor square . . . When, at the peak of my triumph, I saw her on her knees before me in admiration, I vowed I would say to her, “Go to your Carmine now. Farewell.”

  But such plans were too uncertain and remote to console me, in the impatience of my daily disappointments. Besides, those very disappointments, and their cruelty, kept me chained to the island. Because she was on the island, and I couldn’t help staying near her, if only to bear witness, by my presence, to our betrayed past and her unfaithfulness.

  Now I learned that many poets speak the truth when they affirm the inconstancy of women. And they don’t lie about the beauty of women, either; but among all the famous women celebrated by poets none appeared to me worthy of competing, in beauty, with N. In fact, I thought, it doesn’t take much to appear beautiful when, like those women, you not only are endowed by nature with locks of gold, and eyes of periwinkle, and a statuesque body but also have garments of brocade, garlands, and diadems! To have, instead, a body with no beautiful aspect, in fact ill-proportioned, with meager, shapeless features, and black hair and eyes; to have broken shoes on your feet and ragged clothes—and, with all that, to be as beautiful as a goddess, as a rose! That is a supreme boast of true beauty! And such beauty can’t be described in a poem, because words are inadequate; or painted in a portrait, because it’s not a thing that holds still. Maybe music would serve better; and I wonder if, instead of a great commander or a poet, I wouldn’t prefer to become a musician. Unfortunately, I’ve never studied notes, and although I have a good singing voice, all I know are a few Neapolitan songs . . .

  Even her irredeemably ugly features now appeared to me unique, incomparable charms; in fact, I was convinced that if by a future miracle those ugly features were to be replaced by perfect ones, her beauty wouldn’t gain from it: but the opposite—and I would always regret her the way she looked now. I considered her so beautiful! And it didn’t seem possible that all others didn’t share my opinion: since even the simplest greeting, the most common words addressed to her, seemed to me reverent tributes, signs of adoration!

  And if I thought back even a few months earlier, when that beautiful mother had treated me as one of her dearest relations, considering my orders an honor, sighing for my company—I rebelled at the vile reversals of fate! I felt I could never have peace if she didn’t return to being, toward me, at least, the same as she had been before the fatal arrival of my stepbrother; and yet at no
cost did I want to betray that longing to her. So I looked desperately for a means that, without wounding my pride, would force her to be concerned with me, or to manifest, once and for all, her irremediable indifference toward Arturo Gerace.

  Suicide

  One morning, coming up from the harbor, I met her running down the hill with Carmine held tight in her arms, to give him a thrill. Running, she sang the Neapolitan refrain Vola vola palummella mia (Fly, fly my little dove), in a loud voice, like the gypsies. And though she passed close by, she didn’t even notice me.

  I arrived at home alone and so despondent that my heart was aching. I felt that I could no longer endure this abject state of abandonment she’d left me in. And at the idea of seeing her return, as if nothing were the matter, happy with her Carmine and as usual indifferent to me, my will rebelled, almost exulting in the desire to break this bitter monotony. I decided that I had at all costs to punish that woman and, at the same time, force her to be interested in me, instead of in my stepbrother, for at least a day, an hour! And I suddenly decided on an extreme stratagem, which had flashed through my mind many times during these miserable days.

  It now seemed my last remaining recourse, and consisted in this: my death! Maybe the sight of my lifeless body could still make an impression on her. Naturally I didn’t intend to actually die but to feign death, planning a scene of terrible verisimilitude, so that she would surely fall for the deception.

  I thought again of that time when I was laughing but had pretended to be crying; and she (who until a moment before had been resentful) had become suddenly alarmed and moved, saying in a voice of compassion: “Artú! Why are you crying? What’s wrong? Tell Nunziata!” At the memory of that success, the present, and quite different, performance seemed more tempting than ever. And with supreme determination, estimating that because of her errands she would be down in the town for about an hour, I quickly prepared to carry out my plan before her return.