Arturo's Island

by Elsa Morante

  My father in those days was traveling; and I went up to his room, knowing that I would find what I needed there. He had been suffering from insomnia, and often used sleeping pills, and when he departed he had left on his dresser an almost untouched package. I knew the powers of those pills from conversations I’d happened to overhear: in the dose used by my father (one, or two at most) they were a mild remedy, but if you increased the dose they would become a poison. If you took, for example, twenty, they could even cause death.

  I dumped the pills from the package into my palm and counted them: there were nine, just the number I needed, according to my calculations. In fact, as far as I knew, that couldn’t kill a man but would certainly be enough to cause a collapse that appeared tragic. What sort of collapse it would be I couldn’t, in my ignorance, predict, except imprecisely; but I trusted in a fairly spectacular effect.

  And, taking all the pills, I went to the kitchen and wrote the following message on a piece of paper, which I left unfolded and in plain sight on the table:

  MY LAST WILL

  I WANT MY REMAINS TO BE BURIED AT SEA

  FAREWELL

  ARTURO GERACE

  N.B. DESTROY THIS PAGE AFTER READING

  SECRECY! SILENCE!!!

  ARTURO

  Then I poured some wine in a glass, thinking that the wretched drug might have a bad taste and the wine would improve it. And I went out into the yard, since the kitchen didn’t seem a fitting place for a suicide.

  The yard seemed the ideal setting: since N., on her return from shopping, always came home from this direction. I wondered what she would feel when, soon, passing through here, she came upon my body; and I deplored the action of the sleeping pill, which, in all probability, would prevent me from judging my success. I would have liked to have a double, to be present at the scene; and I was tempted for a moment to throw out the poison and pretend to be a corpse, trusting uniquely to my theatrical talent. But in that case I saw that at the critical point of the tragedy I would be unable to keep from laughing, and would ruin everything; and so I discarded that idea.

  The Pillars of Hercules

  I placed the glass on the doorstep and sat nearby on the grass, holding the pills in my fist. On the point of carrying out this strange act, I hesitated, between the decision made and an instinctive dismay. I considered it certain, it’s true, that my imminent suicide would not in fact be mortal: what I knew, regarding the specific dose of this poison, had been affirmed by my father, too. It was science, and left no doubts. But still I looked at the pills in my hand as if they were barbarian coins, a toll to be paid for crossing a final, obscure border.

  The fact was that I had no experience of drugs, of illnesses, or of poisons, and the laws of science, which I had never studied, seemed to me full of almost religious mysteries, like the laws of magic to a savage. In my imagination, the line that separated the evil sleep of this poison from death was confused. What I was about to confront I pictured as a kind of foray into the territory of death. Then, like an explorer, I would turn back. But death had always been so odious to me that the suspicion that I was advancing even within the compass of its shadow horrified me.

  A sentimental weakness surprised me: a longing that some friend, at least, should be nearby, to say goodbye to me at this false suicide. A male friend, not a woman, since women are a faithless race, and I would never be in love with one. The only woman I would have liked to have near was my mother. A living mother, however, not the old one, who was once conveyed through the air of the island in her Oriental tent. Today I felt sympathy for my old illusion: I had since learned that death has a harsh will, never merciful. That beautiful childhood countryside was not suitable to the harshness of the dead.

  The first Signora Gerace, like poor Immacolatella, shunned this shining morning. The March equinox, which on Procida practically announces summer, had passed several days earlier. And the air and the water were both so clear that the shape of Ischia, vivid there across the water with its cottages and the lighthouse, was doubled in its own marine reflection. Everything appeared sharp, precise, and isolated in itself, but the countless points of things also mingled in a divine, joyous color, green, blue, and gold. In a moment, that color will be different: imperceptible variations, like a whirl of marvelous insects, spin without pause in the light. Even the grim prison, up at the top of the hill, is a rainbow of a thousand changeable colors from morning to night. Now from the bay the screech of a waterbird is heard, from the harbor behind it the whistle of a ship, then from the town a pealing of bells . . . Even the enclosed spaces in the prison hear these notes, even the owls who don’t see by day, even the dumb anchovies dying in the net . . . The happy sounds and iridescences of reality are an enchanted theater that captivates every last living heart.

  I was curious to know if the sleeping pill would give me dreams. And do the dead, too, have dreams? So that clown Hamlet supposed; but I’m not a clown like him and I understand the truth clearly: that in death there is nothing. Neither repose nor wakefulness, nor air space, nor sea, nor any voice. I closed my eyes, and tried for a moment to imagine myself deaf and blind, contained in my body and unable to move, cut off from every thought . . . But no, it’s not enough: life remains, there in the background, like a point of light, multiplied by a thousand mirrors! My imagination will never be able to conceive the restriction of death. Compared to this lowest measure, not just the existence of a wretched prisoner in a cell but even that of a sea urchin attached to a rock, even that of a moth, becomes a boundless domain. Death is a senseless unreality, which signifies nothing and would muddy the marvelous clarity of reality.

  And it seemed to me, as it must have to the sailors of antiquity at the Pillars of Hercules, that I would soon be sailing on a murky current that would drag me away from my beloved countryside toward some shadowy grave.

  I wondered, meanwhile, will that poison have a very bitter taste? You would think so, from the expression of annoyance that my father always has when he drinks it; but he confines himself to the prescribed dose, while today I intend to go far beyond the boundary of the forbidden! My superiority filled me with pride. Suddenly the mastery I would demonstrate, the infraction, and the pleasure of the attempt became the most important motivations for this willful act, almost canceling out my original purpose and even the memory of N.! Like King Ulysses, when he rounded the Sirens’ cliff, I felt free and alone before a choice: either the attempt or the surrender! And I was invaded by a mysterious and unprecedented taste for play, for an audacious challenge: as if I were a bold officer who, after the fires have gone out, and while the sentinels sleep, makes a raid into the enemy camp, alone, with no escort, trusting in the safety of a moonless night!

  I still have the taste of the first of those pills on my tongue: it was faint, a little salty, and very slightly bitter. I swallowed it, with a sip of wine, and everything around remained the same: it seemed to me only that as far as the line of the horizon a fascinated silence had fallen, as at the circus, when the valiant trapeze artist hurls himself into the double somersault. I continued, impatient and careless, swallowing with the wine two or three pills at a time; I think the action of the wine preceded that of the sleeping pills, since I quickly felt drunk. I began to hear a distant buzz, and I supposed that thousands of sawfish were sawing the island at its root. I expected that the entire landscape would be ruined, and such an event seemed to me almost quieting. In fact, the beautiful morning, which pleased me before, now had become repulsive and tedious. The immense dust cloud of the sun, sluggish and sulfurous as a plague, hurt my nerves. I had the desire to throw up there on the grass the wine and all the rest; but I restrained myself; and with the absurd idea of going to rest in the shade, I managed to get to my feet. I think I took a few steps; but I felt a helmet of heavy metal on my head, pushed down over my eyebrows, which could never be taken off, its brim darkening my sight. This was the last thing I was conscious of. I didn’t even notice that I fell; and from that moment
the universe disappeared. I no longer was aware of anything, I didn’t remember, or think, or feel anything else!

  From the Other World

  I learned later that my total absence lasted around eighteen hours; but for me it could have lasted five hundred years: it would have been the same. Although I searched my mind subsequently, too, for some trace of those eighteen hours (packed with movements, voices, and noises, of which I was the center!), I could find nothing. That interval isn’t even a dream, or a confused shadow: it’s zero. And from the point when I tried to move out of the sun in the yard until I came to at dawn the following morning, less than an instant passed for me.

  The first impression I had, after what appeared to me an instant, was not that I had returned to life, as I had in reality; but, on the contrary, that I had fainted and died. I didn’t know where I was, or the circumstances of my end: I had no consciousness of anything but that end. I felt a terrible nausea, all my senses were spent, in silence and in blindness; and I felt only the agony of my breaths, which separated painfully from my heart, gradually losing the strength to get to my mouth. I said to myself: “I would never have believed that my fate was to die today, and yet here’s death, now I’m ending, I’m dying,” and, in that feeling, I became inanimate again for another long period. Of this second period, however, a semblance of memory remained, as of a wire along which my consciousness advanced, wavering, like a tightrope walker. I realized that I was lying with my eyes closed, and that seemed natural, since I considered myself dead. Snatches of voices, lost in a monotonous din, perhaps of the sea, reached me. “See, I’m no longer in life,” I thought dreamily, “and yet I hear. So one doesn’t end, with death,” and even within the illness that gripped me, I felt, deep down, a tremulous, very faint sense of adventure: “Let’s see now what there is in death. I wonder if you really do meet the others again? Maybe I’ll see my mother, Immacolatella, Romeo . . .” Among the other vague voices, a high small woman’s voice could be distinguished, which cried, sobbing, “Artú, what have you done?” and I understood lucidly that I answered aloud: “Is that you, Ma?”

  Every so often I fell back into a dull torpor; and then I heard that tearful voice again. A confused notion formed in my mind: maybe the eternal struggle of the dead was to go around groping for one another, without being able to meet. Every means of orientation has been taken away from them. My beloved mother heard that I was nearby, and called me, and I answered her; but our voices resounded in vain, like mindless echoes, without direction.

  More than once it seemed to me that I cried, “Oh, Ma, oh, Maa!” when, unexpectedly, the well-known voice that continued to repeat, “Artú, what have you done?” sounded clear and concrete, next to my ear. “Finally, look, she’s here,” I said to myself, and reopened my eyes. Then I had again, for a moment, the consciousness of present reality. I was alive, that woman who was invoking “Artú” was not my mother but my stepmother. And the supreme motivation of my existence was: to kiss her.

  A rapid and decisive impulse said to me secretly: Now or never! And although I still felt almost lifeless I raised my arms and hugged her. I felt, on my face, her curls, her tears, a soft and marvelous springlike freshness. And, like a deep breath, a profound joy went through me: “Now,” I said to myself, “even if I were to die from this suicide, I could die happy.”

  And I stuck out my lips; but, too weak, in that gesture I fell back half fainting on the pillow, without having kissed her.

  Silly Little Kisses

  My illness lasted a few more days; as far as I understood later, it seems that the dose of sleeping pills I had ingested, insufficient, according to the information I had, to kill a man, might very well have been enough to kill someone of my age—that is, still more a boy, in spite of my claim. So, without intending to, I really had risked death; and I had been saved thanks to my good physical constitution. I was sick in bed, however, for almost half a week, something that had never happened to me before, as far as I could remember. I suffered from a headache, from a weary sleepiness, and every so often from dizziness and nausea, because of which my bed seemed to roll like the hull of a ship. If I wanted to get up and walk, an absolutely new phenomenon surprised me: my body no longer obeyed me. My knees buckled, I swayed, and my heart pounded. I no longer seemed to be Arturo Gerace, with an armor of muscles at his command, but like a girl, wan and indolent, with joints as delicate as stems.

  From time to time, I felt my strength return; but, although I had always considered being sick a huge bore, I almost would have liked to prolong this illness. Because N. was always near me, watching over me, and attended to nothing else. To say that she was an exemplary nurse would be a lie, as far as I can understand these things: by her nature, in fact, she didn’t possess the special gifts (even the practical) required of a nurse; it wasn’t her fault. But the intention was there; and, besides (here is the most important fact), it was clear, from her looks and her behavior toward me, that in those days her entire soul, with a kind of sublime intensity, aimed at a single purpose: the beloved, precious existence of her stepson Arturo! To safeguard my cure, she had taken care to hang one of her Madonnas at the head of my bed: in fact the most magical, the infallible: the Madonna di Piedigrotta. And sometimes I could surprise her looking at me, while she thought I was asleep, in the act of whispering, hands clasped, to that famous Virgin, her suppliant eyes wet with tears and made luminous by heavenly superstition. And for whom was she praying? For me! When she wasn’t praying, she spent hours sitting on the couch opposite my bed, watching over my breathing and waiting for every sign of life with the same holy expectation with which savage tribes await the rising of the sun. I will always see the angelic grace of her disheveled, bundled-up figure, in the disorder of those days, sitting across from me, her hands lying in her lap in faithful and passionate idleness. Beside her was a big basket containing Carminiello, fast asleep: afraid that his rowdiness would disturb me, she tried as hard as possible when he wasn’t sleeping to keep him quiet, in some other room far from us, alone or in the company of those Procidan women. He didn’t hesitate, of course, to cry for her, but if just then she happened to be busy caring for and ministering to me, she let him cry without paying attention, even for five or six minutes in a row!

  Sometimes, through my drowsiness, I glimpsed her as, unable to leave him, she wandered around me barefoot, carrying him in her arms; or, sitting on the sofa, she held him on her lap and nursed him, or, in a low voice, sang persuasive lullabies to make him sleep. But if he didn’t want to hear of it, and uttered his usual funny little cries and laughs, she warned him severely: “Hush, baby, hush, Arturo is ill!” On one of those occasions, she even gave him two little raps on the fingers. She had hit Carmine for me! This, truly, was the greatest of the greatest proofs I could have expected, even in my most ambitious hopes.

  Now, when I think back, being jealous of that little boy seems a ridiculous dream. While I lay there quietly in the half-light, I heard every so often the gentle sound of her kissing him, and I wondered if such a fact really had happened in the world: that someone of my age could envy those little kisses. It would be the same as envying a child its toys, its piggybank, its teething ring, and so on. The jealousy that had suggested this false suicide now seemed to me like a final March storm, after which high spring begins, with its wonderful days. And, coming slowly out of my lethal sleep, I felt—as if new senses had been born in me—that the true taste of life must be much more serious and sumptuous than those childish kisses!

  Atlantis

  On the fourth day of my illness, the irritating nausea disappeared completely, leaving only an indolent weakness, and I realized immediately, early in the morning, that I felt much better. But I wanted to take advantage of my suicide for at least one more day, and when she asked, “How do you feel, Artú?” I murmured between my teeth, in response: “I’m at the limit . . . Damn! I’m done for!”

  And all morning I continued to pretend that I was sunk in an anguished s
leep, whereas in fact I was awake; every so often, in a sepulchral voice, I asked, Water . . . drink . . . or, raising my head for an instant and then falling back, I pretended to faint, my eyelids half open, for the pleasure of seeing those large eyes bent over my face in alarm.

  But around midday I began to get tired of playing the role of a dying man, and, for the first time since the suicide, feeling the return of hunger, I willingly let myself be nourished. (I was so weak and dazed in those days she had to feed me.)

  Then I fell asleep, this time in a real sleep, and opened my eyes, in early afternoon, with a delightful feeling of surprise and freshness. Immediately N. came over and, seeing my clear gaze, trembled with gratitude: “You feel better, do you, Artú? Do you need something?” she asked me, in a voice that almost sang.

  I answered, stretching, that I felt better, and didn’t need anything, I wanted only to rest. Then, in order not to disturb me, she went back to her usual place on the couch, without saying anything else.

  Carmine was sleeping in his basket, the shutters were closed so that the light wouldn’t bother me, and the afternoon silence was absolute, without voices or church bells. Never, except in my house in Procida, have I enjoyed such fantastic silences. It was as if, outside, the town with its inhabitants no longer existed but only a great deserted estuary on a calm sea, at an hour when even the seagulls and the other water and land animals rest, and no ship passes. Between the shutters, outside the north-facing window (the same where I had once seen an eagle-owl perch), a tiny cloud could be glimpsed that, moving over the deep blue of the sky, in a few seconds took the shape of a shell, then of a small balloon, then of an ice-cream cone, then of an old man’s beard, then of a dancer. And in that last shape, stretching and lengthening like a real ballerina, it grew distant. At the passage of that cloud, everything I’d thought and done the morning of my suicide, until the moment I fell down on the grass, returned with precision to my mind. And, without even looking at N., I said suddenly: