Arturo's Island

by Elsa Morante

  And without looking at me she again turned her face, now unrecognizable, toward me: furrowed, dull, with the thick black eyebrows joined on her forehead, it seemed the image of some obscure, soulless barbarian goddess, of a truly wicked stepmother.

  “Artú,” she said in a small, toneless voice, which could have belonged to a woman of forty. “First I loved you . . . like a son. But now . . . I don’t love you anymore.”

  Here her voice had a kind of suffocated convulsion; and then she resumed blindly, with a more acute, jarring, and almost hysterical sound:

  “And so the less we see each other, and the less you talk to me, the better it will be. Imagine that I had always remained a stranger to you; because our kinship is forever dead. And I ask you to stay away from me, because when you’re near me I feel disgust!”

  I suppose that in my place someone more experienced than I would not have doubted that she was lying. And maybe he would have said: “Shame on you, you wicked liar, or at least learn to pretend with more skill! Because you don’t have the heart for the outrageous lies you’re telling, and you have to lean against the wall, as if you expected to be struck by lightning. And you’re shivering so much that I can see, at this distance, how even the skin on your arms is shuddering!”

  Instead, listening to her, I had not exactly the certainty but the suspicion that her words were a true representation of her feelings! And this suspicion was enough to hurl me into an icy sadness, as if I’d been condemned to end my existence in a polar night. I was tempted, impulsively, to say, “If what you say is true, swear to it!” but I didn’t dare: I was too afraid that she really would swear, thus giving me a conclusive certainty. What hurt me most was that word disgust: and I imagined that the palpable shiver, which had made her skin pucker as she spoke, was, precisely, a natural effect of horror toward me. Now I was almost driven to persuade myself that Assuntina wasn’t wrong, attributing to a moral contempt the scene she had made! And to think that I’d almost flattered myself at having been present at a scene of jealousy: even feeling a secret satisfaction at the idea that two women had risked fighting for me, right before my eyes! Nothing was sadder than having to give up such sweet, enchanted foolishness for the ugliness of a cold, serious reality.

  The Indian Slave

  So painfully did she wound me with those words that, silenced, I didn’t reply. It was at that point that, perhaps, Carmine woke up or my father arrived: I no longer remember; certainly our dialogue ended on those words of hers.

  And from then on her attitude toward me remained the same, fixed. Never, as the days passed, did she show me any expression except that sort of inanimate, barbarian image, eyes opaque, eyebrows joined to form a dark cross with the line on her forehead. Oh, I would have much preferred if she had treated me like the wickedest stepmother of novels. I would have preferred to see her transformed into a murderous wolf rather than that statue.

  Among other things, in the hope of being forgiven, I formed a plan for abandoning Assuntina in a spectacular way (assuming that for N. we shared the same moral failing!). But immediately it occurred to me that, in reality, her hatred for me had begun before I’d been with Assunta: it had begun the morning of that fatal kiss. No, even leaving Assuntina would be of no use to me. There was no remedy: N. abhorred me, without forgiveness.

  I felt such a need to open myself to someone, to be consoled, that sometimes I was tempted to confide everything to Assunta: my secret love for N., my despair, and so on. But I always held back in time, mainly out of this fear: that Assunta, sooner or later, would report my confidences to N. Certainly, N.’s horror of me would reach the limits if she learned that I loved her! Such a revelation would confirm the idea that she perhaps already had: and that is that I was a tremendous monster of evil, a true incarnation of Satan. That thought was enough to stifle any desire to confide. And so, luckily, Assunta never learned certain truths.

  Following these events, my lover appeared less charming to me: even her lame leg, which before had seemed something so sweet, now sometimes bothered me. The wish to boast about this woman no longer tempted me; and I felt less pleasure in being with her. Yet I continued to see her every day, since that cottage, one might say, was the only refuge that remained to me. Assunta in fact said, with satisfaction, that I had become more passionate than before! Maybe because the desperate flames that I hid in my heart in the end flared up wherever they could.

  Besides, even though I didn’t love Assunta, sometimes a feeling of pity was kindled toward her that burned almost like love. The mere thought that I didn’t love her, and that she wasn’t attractive to me, or even that I was bored with her, inspired pity! So small and naked on the corn mattress, with her olive-colored breasts and their geranium-colored nipples, slightly slack and elongated, to make one think of a goat, and with that loose, smooth hair, she seemed to me, at times, a being from another land, maybe an Indian slave. And I was her leader and did with her what I wanted! Then N., up in the Casa dei Guaglioni, appeared to me in the guise of a great white mistress, shining with contempt; and to chase away that captivating, painful image I exploded with Assuntina, practically abusing her with my sudden ardor.

  Kisses, however, I never gave Assuntina; my kisses seemed forever consecrated to N. by a kind of holy decree, which couldn’t be violated without offending that love.

  Later, around sunset, when I left the cottage, I was ashamed of having been with a wretched slave, as of a new indignity toward N. I delayed, solitary, in the nearby fields, over which loomed the massive, crumbling pink-colored walls of the Casa dei Guaglioni, and I no longer looked up at that famous window, knowing already that I would see it deserted. There, behind those walls, amid her grim prohibitions, my chatelaine N. lived, sublime and inaccessible. In the distance her height became greater than it really was; and it seemed to me that all the male and female angels of her imagination, like flocks of shining owls, storks, and seagulls, flew around her, urging her day and night to abhor me.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Terra Murata

  O flots abracadabrantesques

  (O abracadabra-like waves)

  —ARTHUR RIMBAUD, “THE STOLEN HEART”

  Dearer than the Sun

  While I lived under the same roof as N. with the thoughts of a criminal at a heavenly court, another castle had begun to dominate my mind as well, with perhaps an even more fantastic authority. Suddenly that summer the island’s penitentiary, which had always been to my eyes the sad dwelling of shadows (scarcely less odious than death), was lit up with a sparkling brightness: as in the metamorphoses of alchemy, where everything is transmuted from black to gold.

  The summer, that year, seemed to shine in vain for Wilhelm Gerace. We witnessed an absolutely new event in our history: and that is that my father, at the height of the summer season, dragged out the most luminous hours of the day in the closed space of the rooms, as if time, for him, remained fixed in a perennial winter night. He persistently fled all the pleasurable occupations of the season, which had always been our greatest shared happiness; and the paleness of his skin, in the months of July and August, gave me a mournful and unnatural sensation, as if I were witnessing some sick upheaval of the cosmos.

  Especially in the beginning, I often showed up before him, his expression grim and scowling, to insist that he come down to the beach or go out in the boat with me. These invitations were met by scornful rejections, tinged with anguish and drama. His responses seemed to say that this year he had vowed a disgusted, vengeful hatred toward the sun, the sea, and the burning open air, so beloved by him! But that at the same time he intended, with the renunciation of those things, to offer a kind of holy or propitiatory sacrifice. Not unlike a worshipper who mortifies himself to become worthy of a deity.

  Finally, although he acted mysterious, he couldn’t help betraying himself. (Here I recognized yet again the unearthly grace of his heart, which, even in its most desperate plights, was always somewhat pleased by its own mysteries!) And from cer
tain of his allusions I understood, in the end, without any doubts, his arcane motivation (it was the same, anyway, that I already suspected):

  Someone, whose friendship was dearer to him than any other, was spending his days enclosed in those four cursed walls. And therefore how could he enjoy a summer, which to him was denied? No, he longed to imitate, hour by hour, the suffering of his friend; and in fact he would have liked, in some way, to deserve, as an honor, an equal sentence, if it were not that, deprived of freedom, he would have lost every last means of communicating with him! Only for this unique thing was his freedom useful to him; and the earth, with summer and the sea, and the sky, with the sun and all the planets, seemed to him skeletons, and inspired in him revulsion.

  Conventional Pearls and Roses

  At these exclamations from my father I was tempted to answer that I knew perfectly well to whom he alluded. That I had seen on the dock, at the distance of a few meters, that famous person: and I despised him with all my soul, considering him a foul killer, unworthy not only of friendship but even of being looked at, so odious was his ugliness! But I didn’t speak: I glared proudly and turned my back on my father, as if I hadn’t even listened to his words, setting off for the beach alone, as always.

  After that encounter at the landing, I had avoided returning in my thoughts to the image of the young stranger I had seen passing with the two guards on the dock. The scene of that afternoon, overwhelmed by my other bitter feelings of that time, had been pushed down into the depths of my mind, in the same way that he had been relegated to his prison up there. He was inauspicious for me; and just as I hadn’t wanted to observe his features clearly then, so I didn’t want to pause to remember him now. If, in spite of myself, my thoughts happened to fall on that criminal, they discerned not a precise human figure but a kind of formless, muddy gray clay, marked by ugliness.

  But, at the same time, the insolent, innocent pace at which he set off toward his fate flared before me again, with winged elegance . . . That graceful reappearance, like a sword flashing against my contempt, bit my heart with anguish, startling me. Suddenly, in place of a cursed shade buried in a jail, I saw a fabulous delinquent, distinguished by such marvelous charms that perhaps even the police and the guards were his servants.

  Unexpectedly, too, certain romantic prejudices returned from my childhood to adorn him. I mean that the category of prisoner was worth as much as a coat of arms according to those boyhood prejudices. And similarly, I would add, according to those of the adult Wilhelm Gerace!

  In fact (I now realize), the primitive spark of a conventional seduction was needed to ignite Wilhelm Gerace’s faith: and the character of the Prisoner well suited his yearnings, which were eternally childish, like those of the universe! In the same way the audience in the theater demands conventional heroines (the Fallen One, the Slave, the Queen) to ignite its faith . . . And so unto eternity every pearl in the sea copies the first pearl, and every rose copies the first rose.

  Metamorphosis

  So although I didn’t think about it, in reality I had known for some time now toward whom the unusual devotions and sufferings that since the previous autumn had tortured the existence of Wilhelm Gerace were directed; but during the days of that febrile summer that shadowy knowledge had unfolded and ramified hidden beneath my thoughts.

  The few allusions I’ve cited were the only mentions of the subject between my father and me. I stopped inviting him to the beach or elsewhere; and we spoke no more of his secrets. That stubborn and tortuous silence was due not so much to his will as, rather, to mine. The silence was a kind of pledge, made to myself, of contempt for that unnamed man of the dock; and perhaps I thus deluded myself that I was truly crushing his existence under a tombstone, denying his mysterious power. I reached the point where once, with my father, by chance naming the penitentiary, I don’t know why, I blushed, disgusted and ashamed of myself.

  Every day at a certain hour (usually late afternoon), my father interrupted his tedious seclusion and went out, refusing any company. By now I certainly didn’t need to spy on him to know where he was heading; and the towering neighborhood of the fortress, which in the past, owing to a kind of sacred modesty, I had always avoided on my walks, was enclosed by a new, strange, and monstrous ban. It’s difficult for me even today to describe that feeling, which, besides, I refused to examine at the time. Perhaps it could be compared to what the tribes of Moses must have felt for the Temple of Baal in Babylon, or something like that!

  My father’s occasional allusions had confirmed to me that he and the condemned man of the dock already knew each other and were friends before that notorious day when I had seen them disembark on Procida from the same ship. And the obscure favor (it couldn’t be chance) that had brought him to the land dear to my father was for me evidence of a sort of magical complicity that existed between the two. The flamboyant behavior of that youth at the dock was not enough to make me think that he didn’t return my father’s friendship—since insolence seemed a natural habit, like the spotted skin of the leopard.

  I didn’t know the crime committed by our prisoner. But I had reason to attribute to him a serious crime, because the pentitentiary of Procida rarely housed petty delinquents; and according to my vision, the sentence that seemed most likely was life imprisonment, and so in my thoughts I almost always ended up giving him the title of Lifer.

  The idea that he was shut up for life might also be of some consolation; but it was a consolation as poor as it was cruel. I felt, in fact, that the category of lifer, if on the one hand it limited his mastery over my father, on the other magnified him more proudly in his eyes, no less than in mine!

  Meanwhile, my childish and superstitious faith in my father’s authority (an authority more than human, capable of every miracle) began to operate again. I knew that, by law, the inmates of the penal colony could receive visitors from outsiders only at rare intervals, and for the duration of a few minutes, and always in the presence of the guards. But also, in some unexplored depth of my mind, the opinion was taking root that every day when my father went out he was going to a meeting with the prisoner. Thanks to who knows what obscure powers or devious corruption, in secret subterranean corridors they met and talked together every day. Now, in the usually dormant region of my imagination, as in an opaque fog, those meetings assumed an imprecise but mysteriously horrible shape. The strange image of clay, as murky and fluid as lava, that in my mind inexplicably represented the young convict was transformed, by a foul spell, into the person of my father, softening and being molded into a shapeless, changing, and fantastic statue. And this indecipherable metamorphosis had the occult value of certain dreams that when we wake up appear meaningless but while we’re dreaming seem like evil oracles.

  In the confusion of horror, that flame of peremptory, incomparable grace was blazing up again, more intense than anything else, returning to transfigure the apparition of the dock. It was as if the young prisoner had tossed me a mocking greeting as he changed again, from a formless monster into a handsome noble character, who cried fraud at my scorn. Relentlessly, my childish prejudices returned to adorn him . . . And in a flash the house of punishment was revealed to be similar to the Castle of the Knights of Syria: legendary noble adventurers, dedicated to a bloody vow, crowded that walled palace, in which only my father was welcomed. They dominated the island with their tragic spell: on their gaunt faces slavery and their various crimes became a trick of seduction, like makeup on the faces of women. And they all circled around, protecting with their code of honor that vague underground point where my father met the apparition of the dock.

  Although the neighborhood of the fortress was so close, it was now situated for me in an implacable dimension, outside the human, a kind of deathly Olympus. I had reached the point of excluding it not only from my usual routes but, as much as possible, from my sight. In the boat, I avoided rounding the North Point close up, for behind it the castle, at the top of a foundation of rocks, loomed sharply ov
er the shoreless sea. And when I passed wide of there I always turned my eyes to the open water and away from that irregular massive form that, from a distance, resembled an eroded mountain of volcanic rock. In that expanse of sea, superstition roused in me impressions that I knew were false but that still became almost hallucinatory. I seemed to hear, from the shape of rock behind me, some strangely melodious echoes, clamoring in unison. And I was unnerved by the bizarre suspicion that I could distinguish, suddenly, in the chorus, the voice of my father, unreal, like that of a fetish or a dead man. He was wandering there, in funerary pomp, with his white emaciated face.

  The End of Summer

  It was now the end of September. One day, I delayed so long on the sea in my boat that without noticing I let the time pass when I usually went to see Assuntina. When I landed, I judged, from the position of the sun, that it must be around four in the afternoon; and in fact a little later I heard quarter after four sound from the bell tower. I decided it was too late for Assuntina, and I gave her up for that day. After pulling the boat onshore, I took my ragged shirt and rope-soled shoes from under the rock where I always left them in the morning and began to climb, without a precise goal, taking shortcuts through the countryside that led to the town.

  The shadows of trunks and stalks were already long, and the colors faded and cool. Two months earlier, at the same hour of the afternoon, the island was still all on fire. The days had shortened since then. Soon summer would be over.

  The other days, with Assuntina, I had never paused to consider that reality. It was as if today, taking advantage of my solitude, a sad pale genie, with half-closed eyes, had appeared to me; and he greeted me, running over the grass with an autumnal rustling. His greeting signified farewell: as if here today I knew, conclusively, that this was my last summer on the island.